AI War:Current Post-3.120 Beta

Prerelease 3.177

• In the previous version the player handicap was defaulting to -10%, fixed to default to 0% again.

• There is now 3,000 knowledge that can be gathered per planet instead of 2,500.

• The dreadnought starship line, as well as flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships, have all been made more 1000 knowledge more expensive.

• Mark II fleet ships now only cost 2,500 knowledge to unlock instead of 3,000 knowledge.

• Mark III/IV fleet ships now cost 5,000 knowledge to unlock instead of 4,000 knowledge.

• Previously it was possible in rare cases for the CPA-like Waves option to result in the AI wave ships being spawned way, way, waaaaay out in the middle of nowhere. Added some preventative measures to wave positioning to ensure a certain minimal sanity of the initial position.

• Previously it was possible to add an item to a production queue that was not allowed by the technology of the constructor's owner (by multi-selecting that constructor with constructors owned by a player that did have the technology), fixed to check tech prereqs for each builder in the multi-select case.

• Further fixes to missing texture problem for Hybrids and Hybrid Facilities. Hopefully it will actually be fixed this time.

• Added Control Node: Engineers Do Not Auto-Assist Low Power Ships; it doesn't interfere with directly targeted repairs and can be useful in preventing your engineers from spending your entire economy on repairing a golem that's been damaged in battle.

• Previously it was possible to attempt to save a game with an invalid filename ("CON" is not a valid windows filename, it is a reserved device name), fixed to disallow this and to give the user a clear error message as to why.

(note: the above changes reflect our work-in-progress build that has not yet been released)

Prerelease 3.176

• X-shaped and Concentric-Circle maps now have a roughly 1/3rd chance of putting the eligible starting planets in the center, instead of always on the outer parts.

• Some rebalancing of Hybrid Hives:
  • Reduced Hybrid Hive move speed from 50 to 30.
  • Reduced Hybrid Hive hull strength from 2 million to 1.5 million.
  • Changed Hybrid Hive main gun, machine gun module, and laser cannon module damage against forcefields and heavy-defense from 100% to 20%, and against command stations from 20% to 10%.

• Added support for more selectivity (including Hybrid-class-based selectivity) on which ships are generated as drones. Notably, melee ships and autobombs will no longer be chosen, and stuff like Sentinel Frigates will be chosen much less often.

• Added 2 galaxy map display overlays: detected hybrids and detected hybrid facilities. Only displays info on planets that you current have visibility.

• Added the "builder" Hybrid classes, some of which build defensive structures on AI planets, some of which build Hybrid-supporting facilities. Roughly 5% of neophytes will become builders instead of attackers or defenders.

• Concentric Circles maps with fewer than the maximum number of rings (7-8) will have the rings spaced out a bit more to make use of the extra space.

• Added "Advanced Hybrids" AI Plot; if the base Hybrids plot is enabled and the Advanced one is not, then the highest tier of Hybrid classes will be disabled (including stuff like the re-coloinzer, which is not quite implemented yet). Also slightly influences the tech level of equipment available to the lower classes, for instance the first Attacker type will only be able to get a mkI forcefield (instead of mkII) if Advanced Hybrids is off. If you select Advanced Hybrids and not the base Hybrids plot for an AI player, once you start the game it will act as if you had checked both.

• Hybrid Hive spawn time changed from 15 to 20 minutes.

• Hybrid Hive maturity times increased slightly (Neophyte -> level 2 takes 35 instead of 30 minutes, etc).

• Fixed missing texture for Hybrids in far-zoom (apparently last time only the close-zoom texture was added).

• Fixed a bug that was causing move orders of thousands of ships to take more processing time than necessary.

• The lobby will now display the actual number of planets in the generated map, which can be less than the player-designated number on spokes, tree, and grid maps (and perhaps others). Those types sometimes run out of places to put planets according to their logic, so this indicator is provided to notify the player of the difference and let them decide whether they want to play the map or generate another one.

• Fixed ambiguity in unexplored planets option description.

• Gifting multiple units at once now combines into one game command, preventing hangs when gifting rather large amounts of units at once.

• Fixed bug where the Zenith Trader's buy menu would display "X of Y in service" numbers for one of the AI players instead of the local player.

• Regenerator golems now no longer regenerate ships if they are in low-power mode or are out of supply.

• Gravitation turrets no longer have any effect if out of supply.

• All tractor-beam generating units are now immune to paralysis.

• Previously, ship modules would still show up via the still-show-stationary-ships-if-scouted logic if the player did not have ships on that planet. Fixed.

• Shield hit effects were showing up as visually offset in recent prereleases. Fixed.

• A bug in the last prereleases were causing regeneration chambers to actually kill the ships put inside them, instead of healing them. Fixed.

• Previously, any ships taking attrition (even self-attrition) would stop at 1 hp, rather than dying outright. That logic made sense for the cursed golem, but for most other ships (especially the new Neinzul ships, but also Dyson Gatlings), it's mainly annoying. Now ships actually fully die from attrition, except for Cursed Golems (and even they can be killed via an attrition emitter -- this only applies to their self-attrition).

• Units out of supply (that require supply) will no longer try to attack, chase, etc.

• Fixed bug where loading a game with inbound schizo waves would display the wave alerts like a non-schizo wave.

• A substantial new performance improvement has been made to units on "cold storage" planets with no enemies present: basically, the entire processing of the planet is skipped except every other turn (even for things like special forces or free units on those planets, if other ships on that same planet are in cold storage), which reduces background simulation processing (in other words, not human player ships or battles) to a pretty enormous degree.
  • To clarify, a turn is 200ms long.
  • The "statistics" for things like the number of attacking ships, threatening ships, etc, are also now only recalculated every other turn, which also helps with load to a much more minor degree.
  • Any ships that are moving on planets of this sort now move twice as fast, since they are artificially only moving half as often. This keeps it from actually altering gameplay in meaningful ways (though players will likely still find something!).

• Warhead silos now only cost 10,000 energy to maintain rather than 80,000.

• Fixed bug where Zenith Autobomb could aoe-damage secondary targets that normally are not auto-targeted (because they cause AIP on death, or whatever). Will still damage the target if directly targeted at it. Also did a sweep to ensure this behavior for other forms of aoe.

• Fixed bug where auto-explore (and auto-gather-knowledge) would sometimes stop working when playing a second game within a given run of the application.

• Added missing -100% value to handicap dropdown.

• Fixed obsolete Munitions Booster tooltip.

• Previously there was a bug in auto-knowledge-gather that would lead to the science stations bouncing endlessly against the command station in a rather amusing fashion. Fixed to be less amusing.

• Previously superfortresses were inconsistent with normal fortresses in that they would box-select with other military ships while the fortresses would not. This was due to the fortresses having the IsScout flag, which has now been added to super-forts as well.

• Removed some extra padding at the bottom of the mouseover text for buy and tech buttons.

• The graphics for the Mercenary Space dock have been overhauled so that it now looks like an evil version of the regular space dock.

• The Mercenary Space Dock now costs 0 energy to use (this is a mercenary outpost, after all), but the players are now limited to having two of them.

• There are new Mercenary Parasites and Mercenary EtherJets which allow for new strategic options in any game, but with the usual overly-high costs of mercenary ships.

• In Zenith-Remnant-Enabled games, there are now Mercenary Beam Frigates.

• In Children-Of-Neinzul-Enabled games, there are now Mercenary Neinzul Enclave Starships (mark I). That lets you always build Mark I ships anywhere if you're willing to pay 300k metal/crystal for one of these. Of course, a much cheaper alternative is to spend the knowledge to get some actual regular Enclave Starships from the main Starship Constructor.

• Players now get a Starship Constructor, Warhead Silo, and Mercenary Space Dock at the start of every game, to encourage experimentation and use of these other buildings.

• Fixed bug where ship caps would display in the lobby as if there were always 8 human homeworlds. Changed to display the cap according to the actual selected number of homeworlds (or 1, if none selected) and to multiply the result by the number of homeworlds currently selected by the local player (or 1, if none selected). This may still result in some misleading cases, but may be the best that can be done for now.

• The strong/weak vs data shown in-game has been recalculated to show for the new ships through this point.

• The ship cap of lightning warheads has been reduced from 8 to 6.

• The ship cap of EMP warheads has been reduced from 4 to 2.

• The old lightning warheads are now lightning warheads mark II. New lightning warheads mark I and III have been added. The lightning warhead mark I does much less damage but in a larger area, and for one less AI Progress point. The lightning warhead mark III does much more damage but in a much smaller area, and for only one more AI Progress point.

• EMP warheads mark II and III have been added. For extra AI Progress points, they will paralyze enemy ships for longer intervals. The higher-mark EMPs are more AI-Progress-cost-effective than using multiple of the existing mark I EMPs.

• Warhead silos and starship constructors were seeded onto enemy planets as a capturable for human players to take over in the past, mainly so that players would be sure to eventually discover these constructors if the players were not diligent in exploring the build menus. However, now that these constructors are seeded at the start, this is no longer needed, and it was sometimes confusing to players anyway (some thought that the silos or starship constructors would be used against them, which was not the case). These will no longer be seeded into new games on AI planets.

• Previously, there were only 4 types of command stations that could be built by players. Now there are 10, providing vastly more functionality and branches for varying strategies.
  • The previously-existing warp jammer command stations have not been touched.
  • The prior Mark I-III command stations have been renamed to Economic command stations, but their functionality is unchanged.
  • There are now Mark I-III Military command stations.
    • Military Command Stations provide very little in the way of economic gain, but have much more health and the ability to shoot at enemy ships.
  • There are now Mark I-III Logistical command stations.
    • Logistical Command Stations provide very little in the way of economic gain, and can't shoot at enemy ships, but they vastly increase the speed of all allied ships in the current system. They also have middling armor and a smallish force field.
  • Mark I of the Military, Economic, and Logistical command stations are all available at any time, and have no ship cap. Marks II and III have to be individually unlocked per branch, and each branch has a ship cap of 6 per mark II/III command station.

(Released 2010-08-09)

Prerelease 3.175

• Previously, both eyebots and commandos were being selected like scouts because they have the scout ability. Now they are instead selected like regular mobile military ships.

• A new Neinzul Youngling Vulture I-V has been added for the expansion:
  • This low-powered ship does damage equal to (full damage * ( (101 - target health percentage) * 10 ) ). This makes it very effective at finishing off high-health targets when mixed into a regular fleet, but it's barely able to hurt enemy ships that aren't wounded.

• Because they are so short-lived and so inexpensive to build, all Neinzul Younglings are now worth 10x less in terms of build and kill score.

• All Neinzul Younglings now have health has been tweaked downward a bit, to make them easier to one-shot kill. They also now take more damage from all incoming shots.
  • These changes put more emphasis on using them in a disposable, repeated-construction fashion (given their low cost and the new mobile space docks, this makes sense).

• A new Neinzul Youngling Weasel I-V has been added for the expansion:
  • This inexpensive, low-powered ship attracts all incoming missiles to itself from the nearby area.

• Neinzul Regeneration Chambers now work 10x more quickly than before.

• When Neinzul Youngling ships are included in waves, 10x more of them are now included than normal.

• Ships that have a negative regen rate now show up as having a Self Attrition ability to make it clear what is happening. Before, nothing was being shown at all.

(Released 2010-08-06)

Prerelease 3.174

• Fixed a bug where Zenith SpaceTime Manipulators previously did not have a proper metal/crystal/energy cost set.

• Fixed a bug with 3.173, that was causing the new expansion to be installed into the wrong folder.

• Fixed a bug with 3.173 where the Hybrid Hive ship graphics were missing.

• Previously loading a game where the total AI Progress was over a tech threshold but combined with the negative modifier would be under the tech threshold would result in it acting like it was above the threshold. Fixed to properly factor the negative modifier.

• Previously, the addition of new expansions that a player did not have enabled in the lobby at a given time would still affect the seeding of the ship types placed on the possible starting planets in the lobby. This has been changed so that new expansions won't affect the random seeding in this fashion when they are turned off.
  • This may change the seeded values for some prior maps that were incorrect if players had only the base game and not the first expansion, for example.

• Previously, not all cloaked ships were guaranteed to be turned off when cloaking was disabled, though most were. The code for this has been changed around a lot now to make it more automatic that all cloaking ship classes are definitely turned off when the lobby option for that is selected. Same goes for things such as tractor beams, etc.

• Neinzul Youngling ships are no longer used on AI planets as reinforcements. They are only used offensively in waves, and during attacks, etc, because of their short lifespan.

• A new Neinzul Regeneration Chamber has been added for the expansion.
  • Stationary structure with the capacity to contain 500 Neinzul Youngling ships inside itself. The player cannot manually load the regeneration chamber, but Neinzul Younglings will automatically seek shelter inside the Regeneration Chamber when their health drops below 30% if they have no other orders. While inside, Neinzul ships are regenerated at the inverse of their normal self-attrition rate, and then are automatically ejected when their health is fully restored.

(Released 2010-08-06)

Prerelease 3.173

• All of the fabricators now use only 5000 energy instead of 10000.

• Fixed bug where units approaching an enemy strong forcefield from the left would pass through and wind up on the right side (and sometimes stop in the middle). The forcefield still stopped their shots, but it was disconcerting.

• The game now randomly selects from all the possible title music tracks (from the base game and any installed expansions) when deciding which title music track to use.

• The first beta of the Children of Neinzul micro-expansion is included in this version.
  • The following expansion-only features are included:
    • Starship Class: Neinzul Enclave Starships Mark I-IV.
    • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Commandos Mark I-V.
    • Bonus Ship Type: Neinzul Youngling Tigers Mark I-V.
    • Map Type: X
    • Map Type: Concentric Circles
    • AI Plot: Hybrid Hives
  • If you just want the beta update and do not wish to have the expansion features turned on, simply go into the Expansions tab of the Settings screen and disable the expansion. The game will run in demo mode until you've either disabled the new expansion or until you've purchased it, so you can easily demo these new features at no charge if you'd like to do so.

• Fixed a bug where a CPA could quietly not happen at a specific AI tech level and difficulty level.

(Released 2010-08-05)

Prerelease 3.172

• Fixed bug where ai tech level was not always properly recalculated when setting the negative AIP offset (like when loading the game).

• Fixed typo in the Zenith Starship description.

• Fixed bug where flak turrets mk II and III were rebuilding into mk I.

• Fixed bug where fully repaired but not activated Golems (not activated because you don't have enough energy) would revert to 25% health after save and load.

(Released 2010-06-22)

Prerelease 3.171

• Fixed arithmetic overflow exception crash that could occur if the AI tried to launch a wave against a planet with an inordinately high total wave multiplier (multiple golems and zenith-power-generators, etc).

• In previous prereleases the new no-more-than-6000-ai-ships-per-planet cap was preventing the Avenger and its modules from spawning. Fixed. Be afraid.

• Previously it was possible for the automatic AI engineer retreat logic to place an undue load on the CPU, fixed to pace these calculations.

• Since some folks were seeing inordinate delays in ships gaining protection from counter-shooters that they've just moved under, made TryProtections throttle more intelligent about how much a given check really cost.

• Ion Cannons, Orbital Mass Drivers, Counter-Spies, and Core Warhead Interceptors all now have only 120,000 attack range. This covers pretty much all of a planet anyway, but is no longer so large as to be considered a sniper shot. Thus, ships with immunity to sniper shots are no longer immune to these weapons.

(Released 2010-06-16)

Prerelease 3.170

• TryFindAssistTarget throttle made more sensitive to the cost of the actual target searches, so that engineers on planets with smaller allied unit counts will be able to get through faster.

• Fixed bug in previous versions where ship modules were being positioned incorrectly.

• Scouts are now immune to sniper shots.

• For a long time, shots have sped up to 10 more than the speed of the target they are chasing if the target they were chasing is faster than them. However, now shots speed up to 40 more than the speed of the target if 40 more than the speed of the target is greater than the speed of the shot. This makes it a bit more possible for slower shots to hit faster targets, hopefully without making it too overpowering of a change.

(Released 2010-06-09)

Prerelease 3.169

• The repair speed of golems has been slowed down 8x to account for the new, faster engineers.

• The attack rate and amount of engine damage done by spider turrets has been adjusted so that they once again fire more lower-power shots. It's still a bit slower and more powerful than it one was, but nothing like it has been recently.

• Immobile AI ships that were at a planet the last time the planet was scouted are now visible through the fog of war (as in many other RTS games).

• Shots and explosions are no longer visible through the fog of war.

• Fixed a rare overflow exception with wormhole guard posts being repaired.

• Snipers and sniper/spider turrets now use a new Railgun ammo type that strikes its target instantly, leaving a faint white line flashing in its wake as it does so. This fixes the issues with overkill and wasting incoming sniper shots, as well as simultaneously making it easier to see where sniper shots are originating from.

• There is a new internal format for storing player data inside savegames, which makes it easier to find issues and desyncs relating to player data.

• Fixed a desync relating to loading multiplayer savegames with AI ships caught in player tractor beams.

• Fixed a longstanding bug that was causing all player planets to be treated as out of supply right upon loading the game. This was causing force fields to blink off for a second right after load, as well as tractor beams to lose the ships they were holding for an instant, etc.

(Released 2010-06-07)

Prerelease 3.168

• There is now a sizable cluster penalty on fortresses, making them not very useful when clumped together too much on one planet.
  • Of course, with multiple players or multiple levels of fort this can be gotten around, same mechanic as with sentinel frigates.

• Golems no longer require supply.
  • This change was unpopular with players, and given the prevalence of Orbital Mass Drivers probably not needed, anyway.
  • Golems do still require the proximity of AI warp gates, however, as that is important for avoiding the most exploitable aspects of golems.
    • Any ship (including the AI exo-galaxy wormhole) with the "Warp Gate (Wave) or Warp Gate (Full)" abilities will work just fine for this proximity requirement, as a note.

• Sniper attack values have been increased 10x, and their reload speed has also been increased 10x. This makes them more of a "volley" type of unit, good at dealing a lot of damage right when ships enter their field of view, but then taking quite some time before they can do it again (about 60 seconds of reload in most cases).
  • The above applies to both snipers-the-unit and sniper turrets.
  • In the case of Spider Turrets, their values were only increased 5x since that made more sense for their engine-damage-focused abilities.

• Sniper turrets no longer have the reclamation ability, as that was definitely overpowered.

• Fixed a longstanding bug with the Zombie reclamation ability (botnet golem) that was causing ships it reclaimed as zombies to come in at half health at most.

(Released 2010-06-06)

Prerelease 3.167

• Normally AI engineers should not try to repair broken golems (as of the last release), and the last release had a safety check that prevented broken golems from activating even if the AI did repair them. However, in some cases the AI was already in the process of repairing them, or would otherwise do so; in that event, the players could get a massive cost savings on metal/crystal by capturing the already-fully-repaired broken golem and simply activating it.
  • Now when a player captures any unit from a planet ownership change, if that unit had a lower-than-full-health starting health value, that unit is reverted to the starting health value assuming that it's current health is higher than that (if current health is already lower, it keeps the lower value).
  • This fix prevents the exploit even among edge cases where the AI does something unexpected.

(Released 2010-06-06)

Prerelease 3.166

• Fixed a bug in the prior release that was causing the AI to repair and use broken golems on its own.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.165

• Fixed a bug that was causing the wrong tooltip to be displayed when in ship-placement mode.

• The Avenger no longer repairs nearby ships.

• Previously there was just a single "engineering rate" for ships that could assist construction or do repairs. Now there are separate repair rates and construction rates for engineers.
  • This lets them do construction at the same rate as always, while doing repairs much faster than in the past, which in turn makes them more viable once again as an alternative to Mobile Repair Stations.
  • This also makes a clearer delineation on not allowing Mobile Repair Stations to assist the construction of units.

• Acid Sprayers have been completely rebalanced.
  • They have 10x more base damage, and 10x less bonus against Zenith ships.
  • They now have 50% of Zenith bonuses against starships and resources, 40% of Zenith bonuses against engineers, and 25% of Zenith bonuses against turrets.
  • They now have 10x lower shields.

• The ship cap of sniper turrets has been doubled, and their cost has been halved.
  • The cost of spider turrets has also been halved, but the cap of spider turrets is the same.
  • These changes don't affect the AI, but make the sniper turrets more useful for human players.

• Sniper turrets now have the reclamation ability, which lets them work like very weak, slow parasites. They're unlikely to capture a ton of units with this, but the reclamation ability does provide some minor more incentive to use them. This ability also applies to the AI, unlike the cost shifts.

• Golems have been majorly rebalanced, to create a new strategic landscape for them -- they have long been the most underused units in the game.
  • There is no longer and AI Progress cost associated with golems in any way, from repairing them or otherwise.
  • Golems now have significantly higher repair costs after being initially repaired to be operational.
  • Golems now require supply, which means that they are useless for long-range raiding.
    • This encourages a (sort of) new school of strategic thought relating to adjacency to keep the golems relevant on offense. Certainly no other units emphasize this to the same degree, anyway.
  • Golems now require proximity to AI warp gates in order to function -- they have to be within one hop of an AI warp gate in order to attack, etc.
    • This prevents players from using golems to play "goalie" on their home plants, which could have created impossible-to-lose scenarios for players.
    • Thematically speaking, this is related to the golems being reliant on exo-galaxy signals echoing from the ancient Zenith civilization. These signals are normally not able to be picked up at all, but AI warp gates cause them to be amplified to the point where they are faintly available.
  • The cumulative effect of these changes is that golems are no longer such a strategic risk, and they provide some new excitement on the front lines, but are not useful at deep defense or on long-range raiding.

• The attrition rate of transports is now shown via an ability in their tooltip list of abilities.

• There are now AI-specific versions of the following golems that are used by the Golemite: Armored, Artillery, Black Widow, Regenerator, Botnet.
  • Those versions don't have some of the restrictions that the human-controlled versions do, but neither do they buff reinforcements or waves, and they have 1/2 the normal health for golems of those sorts.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.164

• Flak turret shots now can only damage a finite number of ships (currently 5, 6, and 7 per shot for mk I, II, and III respectively), to prevent it from destroying arbitrarily large numbers of ships (basically it's a fragmentation bomb, not an energized-field-of-kill-all). Specifically, the actual targeted ship is always struck, and then the game randomly picks the secondary targets from eligible targets within the explosion radius, this is intentionally not using any kind of autotargeting logic to prioritize the secondary targets because, again, it's a frag bomb.
  • To compensate, Flak turret attack power increased from 300, 600, and 900 to 3000, 6000, and 9000; also changed the attack penalty against heavy-ish fleet ships to make it much more possible to actually kill space tanks and the like with heavy sustained flak fire (though the tanks will still have the advantage, pound for pound, as they should). Other attack bonuses adjusted to make it so flaks in numbers should be fairly effective against all fleet ships, as that no longer means that they will be able to kill almost infinite numbers of them at once.
  • Flak turret shot explosion radiuses for mk II and mk III increased (300 -> 350 and 300 -> 400).
  • Flak shot travel speed from 1000 to 200 (doesn't affect their combat properties, really, just helps actually see something move).

• Changed normal wormhole exit behavior to automatically set destination to a point on a (filled) circle around the wormhole. Previously ships would sit directly on the wormhole and wait for a collision check; many versions ago this just meant the game slowed to a crawl while the collision checks ran, and in more recent versions the collision-checks-allowed-per-cycle throttle meant that ships just sat on the wormhole forever and got eaten by AOE. Now they should immediately fan out a bit and check for collisions when they stop.

• Fixed a number of bugs relating to the strong/weak simulation not being able to be run in the last few versions, and updated the simulation to include all the data for the recent new ship additions.

• The "Number of Simultaneous Shots" is no longer treated as a special ability for display purposes. Instead, when a ship has multiple simultaneous shots, there is now simply an "x2" (or whatever number) notation next to the main attack power.
  • This makes it quicker to gauge the real attack power of a ship without having to dive into the abilities, and also takes up less visual space. The actual functionality it describes is unchanged.

• In the tooltips for ships, AI Progress increase/decrease conditions are now shown in highlighted yellow on the same line with resource production, to emphasize this more since AI Progress is essentially a very important resource.

• In the tooltips for ships, the immunities are now split out from the other normal abilities to make it so that they don't crowd out the rest of the abilities for things such as golems, etc. Now the immunities are shown in a slightly more concise notation, on a separate line, in a different color.

• The tooltips for multiple control nodes or space tugs are now shown much more concisely in the plantary summary hover lists, as was already the case with things such as fabricators.

• The text for the control nodes now wraps better.

• The health of booster trains and regenerator trains have both now been reduced 10x, to 20 million instead of 200 million. The regular astro trains still have 200 million health, while turret trains still have only around 10 million health.
  • Turret Trains are now autotargeted by player ships like any other ships would be.
  • The three types of Turret Trains have now had their attack increased by a linear 1000 points.

• Warheads, Fortresses, Golems, Starships, and Mark V ships now all no longer absorb EMPs, but now only are immune to them instead.

• Only a very few ships (a couple of Golems) had differing metal and crystal repair costs. These have been adjusted so that metal and crystal costs are always the same, and the tooltip is now more concise with simply specifying the repair rate as something that is always applying equally to metal and crystal.

• Hovering over the net energy display at the top of the screen now shows the positive and negative energy amounts that factor into that, for the local player and any teammates.

• Previously, "experimental" ships could not get into transports. Fixed.

• The ship costs (complete with icons and coloring, etc) are now always shown in the ship tooltips, rather than only in the buy menus. This makes it so that players don't have to go to the buy menus in order to make construction decisions.
  • Additionally, this gets rid of the need to have energy use on the line with the ship caps, etc.
  • And lastly, it now lets the repair cost move out of the abilities section and into the costs line.

• The lobby tooltips now show the costs for each of the starting ship classes (mark I only, but still).

• In the last prerelease, there was a bug with the starting ship icons in the lobby being displayed offcenter. Fixed.

• When ships take damaged from internal attrition (a negative regen rate, as with the cursed golem) that was previously tripping their "last damaged time" so that engineers could never repair them. Fixed so that now the "last damaged time" is not affected by this, which allows engineers to repair these sorts of ships.
  • This now also applies to ships in attrition-emitter territory, which makes engineers a necessity in those zones, rather than pointless.

• The repair cost of the cursed golem was previously set abnormally low. Now that has been fixed to be the same as the broken cursed golem.

• Previously, when ships that were taking internal or external attrition hit zero from attrition, they would die. Now, instead the attrition will not take them below 1.
  • Thus if an attrition-ed ship gets all the way down to 1, it's at death's door and can easily be killed by an enemy, but at the same time if no enemies are around, engineers can repair it back up to higher health. This removes some of the fiddly time-based aspects of things like the cursed golem if it's not on the front lines.

• Previously it was possible for a multiplayer savegame that was upgraded from an older version to a new version to cause a desync. Fixed.
  • Even in the past, it should be noted that if the host saved immediately after the desync, and then reloaded that save, this issue would be bypassed. This fix simply removes the need to do that on savegames that are upgraded.

(Released 2010-06-05)

Prerelease 3.163

• More internal optimizations that make loading savegames faster than ever, reduces RAM use a bit more, and somewhat lowers the overhead of having a lot of ships moving around in the galaxy. Also makes rendering lots of ships on the screen slightly more efficient, and corrects a few display-related bugs.

• With these latest changes, the positions of harvesters loaded from past savegames will unavoidably be off by a small amount (this has little effect other than visual), but new harvesters that are placed will be in the proper locations. Other ships may also be off by a tiny amount, but same thing with them.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.162

• Fixed bug in recent versions where the try-protection throttle was letting the wrong ships through and never having room left for some units (so they didn't get protections from forcefields, etc).

• Fixed bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them.

• Fixed a bug in the last version where lightning turret (and similar) explosions were being drawn offset from where they should have been.

• Ships belonging to allied minor factions no longer are picked up by tugs.

• Fixed a bug that was causing engineers to bunch up on ships in an ineffectual manner.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.161

• Fixed a bug in how the AI was calculating threat assessments in the last release.

• Some more efficiency improvements to the AI thread.

• A new, Unity-friendly way of handling version numbers has been implemented.

• A major refactoring in the internal codebase has taken place, fixing a number of bugs and also leading to some performance gains (mainly RAM more than CPU, but also some CPU).

• In recent prereleases, sometimes the resource nodes were moving from some savegames. Fixed.

(Released 2010-06-04)

Prerelease 3.160

• Fixed potential crash bug in previous versions if you loaded a game with a cloaker starship in a transport.

• Some small performance improvements in overall main loop code and AI determination of "how much strength is protecting ship X".

• Fixed problem in new movement optimizations that would make some really-low-speed units (like trains and superforts) move extremely slowly.

• Added a separate throttle category for ships that have only overkill targets, so that those ships are more likely to update their target lists in a timely fashion when non-overkill targets show up.

• A minor performance improvement to CheckForTargetListUpdate.

• The code has now been set up so that internal development on the Children of Neinzul expansion can start at any time.

(Released 2010-06-03)

Prerelease 3.159

• In the previous version loading a save with a unit that has modules could lead to it constantly hitting collision checks with its modules. Fixed to correctly never collide with modules.

• Minor change to RunCollisionDetection to prevent unnecessary calls to the random generator.

• Changed movement angle-of-rotation calculation to a simpler slope-to-angle conversion lookup-table-based approach rather than the fairly cpu-intensive ATan2 method.

• Fixed a major and subtle desync based on floating-point precision. A bit of floating point math recently slipped into part of the simulation based on some of the changes to our FInt struct, and this may have been the cause of the elusive desyncs that a tiny minority of players have been recently seeing. This fix may also have some minor performance improvement implications.

(Released 2010-06-02)

Prerelease 3.158

• Fixed a bug with loading some savegames, related to TryProtections when the CurrentRollup is null.

(Released 2010-06-02)

Prerelease 3.157

• TryFindAssistTarget (engineers looking for something to repair or assist) is now separate from the TryFindOtherTargets throttle, and has been cranked down since those searches can take so long.

• TryFindTachyonTargets (tachyon emitters checking for cloaked ships in rage) is now separate from the TryFindOtherTargets throttle, and is fairly generous since even a partial second's delay can make a difference between your turrets eating the raptors for lunch and the raptors eating your command station for theirs.

• Some performance improvements to collision checking, target list filtering and sorting, and the generic basic range checking function.

• Some performance improvements to the "move ship" logic that handles a lot of every-cycle logic for non-cold-storage ships.

• Dyson Gatlings are now immune to black hole machines. Removed the logic added in previous version that removes black hole machines from planets with a dyson sphere (as this could be disconcerting to the joker who builds one via Zenith Trader and sees it disappear when loading the game).

• Units now check for protections (e.g. forcefields) and supply after loading and before the first simulation cycle, to prevent some of the significant combat differences when reloading in the middle of a fight.

• Cloaking starships now check for ships to cloak after loading and before the first sim cycle, to prevent embarassing moments when you park in the wrong lot.

• Flak turrets were not properly being considered a turret for the purposes of standard ability flags and attack bonuses. Fixed.

• Flak turret attack power moderately decreased against ships outside its specialty.

• AI turret proclivities adjusted; notably it should build fewer flak turrets now, but will now build them as part of higher level turret sets.

• A number of small performance improvements all throughout the application, moving away from the System.Drawing structs to custom ArcenPoint, ArcenRectangle, and ArcenSize structs. These structs are more efficient in terms of RAM and CPU, and are Unity-compatible, which the others were not.

• The seek CPU efficiency of teleporting engineers has been increased significantly.

• Fixed a bug where using Manage Players to open a new Active slot with blank name or name of "???" and then having someone join in that slot would lead to an immediate desync.

• The DEF build category was really a misnomer at this point, and has been renamed to SUP instead (Support instead of Defense, which more accurately describes those ships).

• The Avenger graphics have been updated to be at least a little more unique.

• The existing Fortress is now renamed to Fortress Mark III, and has had its stats (and costs) increased somewhat.

• Two new units have been added: Fortress, and Fortress Mark II, which are scaled down (and cheaper) versions of the Fortress Mark III.

• The SuperFortress has been buffed again, and the Fortress line has been tweaked in general. Fortresses now have very long range, longer than any non-sniper turrets or units, but a bit weaker attack on average than before.

• There are now three separate levels of basic AI command stations, same as the basic human command stations have three levels.
  • The AI command station variants have 5X more health than their human counterparts, and no longer have the human-specific abilities such as resource/energy production, warp detection, build menus, etc.
  • The AI command stations are now the only ones that cause AI Progress to increase. That was previously already the case (the AI Progress went up only when a command station controlled by the AI was destroyed), but now that these are two separate units the tooltips are substantially briefer and clearer.
  • Existing savegames and new games now use only AI command station variants for the AIs, as follows:
    • On the AI home planets, they use AI Core Command Stations (same as always).
    • On Mark I and II planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark I.
    • On Mark III planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark II.
    • On Mark IV planets, they use AI Command Stations Mark III.

• Command Stations are now shown on the Planetary Summary icon lists on the galaxy map.

• The human-controlled Command Station Home Cores, and the AI-controlled Core Command Station, did not have their internal mark levels correctly set. Fixed.

(Released 2010-06-01)

Prerelease 3.156

• Fixed a potential desync.

• Minorly improved the performance of a few central parts of the code.

• Fixed a rare arithmetic overflow exception.

• Black hole machines will no longer appear on planets with dyson spheres, as this was causing a huge build-up of non-decaying dyson gatlings that didn't want to destroy the black hole machine (since that would cause AI progress, etc) and were thus more dangerous than intended when "freed".

• Some performance increases, notably for cases where there are a ton of human ships on a planet with no AI ships. These changes may result in it taking a little longer for a ship's protections (being under a forcefield, counter-shooter, etc) to update, and for engineers to find something to auto-assist when idle.

(Released 2010-05-30)

Prerelease 3.155

• Fixed a very longstanding subtle bug (from the 2.0 days) with net energy fluctuating when ships are passing through wormholes. This was extremely tough to track down, and in the end we completely rewrote the net energy handling to fix it.

• Ships in transports now still cost the normal energy they would cost outside the transport.
  • Previously, transports could be used to too great of effect in terms of minimizing energy needs simply by loading ships into them.

• When the energy count is being shown for ships (either by pressing Alt+A, or via the net energy being low for you), transports now show their own energy plus that of all the ships inside themselves.

(Released 2010-05-28)

Prerelease 3.154

• Fixed an overflow error in the adjusted score calculations which sometimes was resulting in players with invalid reported scores.
  • Note: in the process, this also makes some subtle changes to how adjusted scores are calculated, but the effects should be minor overall.

• Fixed an obscure crash bug relating to ship movement.

• In the last version, Mark II engineers were still using 3000 energy instead of 500. Fixed.

• In the last version, any time a shot hit its destination it was causing an explosion sound effect. Fixed.

• A significant new early-out performance improvement has been made for range checks. Especially when there are a lot of ships that are out of range of a battle on a planet (such as those at other guard posts), this now has a notable boost to performance.

• In the last version, munitions boosters and shield boosters were a couple of orders of magnitude too strong. Fixed.

• Scouts and Cloaker Starships now have a much-increased cloaking booster range. This does not affect how many other ships these units can boost, however, as there was already a finite cap on that.

• Cloaker Starships also now provide both counter-sniper and counter-dark-matter protection, in addition to their cloaking duties.

• The energy use of Zenith Electric Bombers has been reduced from 10k to 1k (except for the Core variant, which is now 2k).

• Remains Rebuilders and Cleanup Drones now use 25 energy each instead of 0. Mobile Builders now use 100 instead of 0.

• Attrition Emitters can no longer be paused, and now only use 10k energy instead of 18k.

(Released 2010-05-28)

Prerelease 3.153

• added parameterized version of knowledge cheat: "Give Me K,x" (where x is an integer >= -50000 and <= 50000) changes using player's knowledge by x.
• added parameterized version of ai progress cheat: "Get Angry,x" (where x is an integer >= -2000 and <= 2000) changes AIP by x.

• Previously engine-damage-focused units would not sustain fire properly on engine-dead targets if there were only engine-dead targets left. Fixed so that they should keep firing in that case.

• Previously holding shift to place multiple copies of the same construction template did not work well with the snap-to-wormhole feature. Fixed.

• Fixed a bug where the predicted path of ships on the galaxy map (shown when hovering the mouse over another planet) was different from the path actually executed by issuing a move order via right-clicking the target planet.

• Fixed some potential desyncs for cases where a player played a game, quit it without quitting the application, and joined a multiplayer game.

• The amount of available knowledge per planet has been increased from 2,000 to 2,500 to account for the influx of all the cool new technologies that people are able to play with. This also rebalances the game a bit in light of recent difficulty increases, and further marginalizes the need for knowledge raiding on any sort of regular basis.

• Science Lab MkIII AI reinforcement bonuses no longer stack.

• Fixed a bug in game-loading code that was confusing the values of CloakingPartialCount and CloakingRechargeCount.

• Made a rather notable performance improvement to ship explosions (which are just visual, not part of the simulation itself):
  • Explosions on other planets or otherwise out of your view no longer actually happen, thus saving a goodly amount of sim CPU load when taken in aggregate.
  • When in far zoom, the little debris is too small to see with explosions anyway, so it now doesn't render that, either. That only happens on larger ships anyway, but this saves the GPU and CPU load of both generating and then rendering this. A much more minor update than the first, but still notable.

• Transports are now such a core part of the game that they are something to always unlock. Thus that was simply a penalty of 1000 knowledge that always had to be incurred. Transports no longer have to be unlocked.

• Mobile Repair Stations are far more powerful than they once were; their knowledge cost has been increased from 2,000 to 4,000. Their metal and crystal costs have also been tripled, to 18,000 and 9,000, respectively. Their health has also been reduced from 390k to 300k. This encourages players to not lose them, and keep them near but not right on top of the front lines, which thus makes them not so overpowered.

• The knowledge costs of engineer drones mark II and III have now been reduced by 1,000 each.

• Mobile builders now use 0 energy instead of 1500. Cleanup Drones now use 0 energy instead of 150, and Remains Rebuilders now use 0 energy instead of 1500. Engineer drones now use 1000, 500, and 250 energy for marks I-III instead of 4000, 2000, and 1000. The experimental engineer now uses 4000 energy instead of 12000.
  • These changes all make it more effective to keep a larger fleet of the various sorts of engineers around, whereas before there was too much incentive to need to micro them when energy was low.

• The energy cost of the missile silo has been increased from 40k to 80k.

• The energy cost of all the starship lines has been doubled, except for the raid and leech starship lines.

• The attack power of the fortress has been halved, but the number of shots it gets has been quadrupled.

• The number of shots that the superfortress gets has been doubled.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the flagship has been reduced from 2000 to 1000.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the spire starship has been increased from 4000 to 6000.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the Mark I dreadnought has been increased from 1000 to 1500.

• The knowledge cost of unlocking the Riot Control Starships have been increased from 1500, 2250, and 3250 for Marks I-III to 2500, 3500, a 4500.

• The knowledge costs of Tractor Beam II and III turrets have been increased from 1000 and 2000 respectively to 2000 and 4000.

• The knowledge costs of Gravitational Turrets III and III have been reduced from 4000 and 6000 to 3000 and 4000.

• The knowledge costs of Laser Turret II and III have been increased from 2000 and 3000 to 2500 and 3500.

• The knowledge costs of MLRS Turrets II and III have been reduced from 2500 and 3500 to 2000 and 3000.

• The knowledge cost of the Counter-Missile Turret has been increased from 2250 to 4000. The effective range of counter-missile turrets has been increased from 1400 to 6000.

• The effective range of Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets has been increased from 1400 to 8000, and the effective range of Counter-Sniper Turrets has been increased from 1400 to 4000.

• The metal/crystal costs of all the Counter turrets has been quadrupled, and the energy use of them has all been doubled.

• The health of Mark II Leech Starships has been increased from 160k to 320k, and the health of Mark III Leech Starships has been increased from 160k to 480k.

• The following munitions boosting range changes have been made:
  • Light Starship from 900 to 3000.
  • Flagship from 1100 to 4000.
  • Zenith Starship from 1200 to 5000.
  • Spire Starship from 1400 to 6000.
  • Core Starship from 1600 to 8000.
  • Mark I Munitions Boosters from 1200 to 5000.
  • Mark II Munitions Boosters from 1400 to 6000.
  • Mark III Munitions Boosters from 1600 to 7000.
  • Mark IV Munitions Boosters from 1800 to 8000.

• The munitions boosters are only able to boost a certain number of ships based on the "circular area" of those ships compared to the range of the munitions booster. By increasing the ranges so much, that would therefore have made munitions boosters vastly more powerful.
  • Instead, the circular area that is actually allowed has now been divided by 6.
  • This actually weakens the lower-end munitions boosters by a bit (in terms of how many ships they can boost), but at the same time their vastly increased range makes it so that (such) precision placement of them is no longer needed for the optimal effect on a fleet, and the highest-tier munitions boosters are actually stronger than they were before.
  • The overall effect is thus to make these far easier to use effectively, and to create more of a power gradation between the lower-tier ones and the higher-tier ones.

• The following shield boosting range changes have been made:
  • Mark I Shield Boosters from 600 to 3000.
  • Mark II Shield Boosters from 800 to 4000.
  • Mark III Shield Boosters from 1000 to 5000.
  • Mark IV Shield Boosters from 1200 to 6000.

• Previously, shield boosters did not have any limits on how many shields they could boost; they were simply limited by their incredibly small boosting ranges. Now they follow a "circular area" limitation that is exactly like that of the munitions boosters.

(Released 2010-05-27)

Prerelease 3.152

• Fixed a crash bug in the last version.

(Released 2010-05-25)

Prerelease 3.151

• Science Lab AIP-on-death from last version removed.

• Science Lab, Science Lab Mk II,and Advanced Research Station can no longer gather knowledge from AI-held planets.

• Added Stationary Science Lab (Mk III) that can gather knowledge from AI-held planets, but costs nearly 4x as much as a MkII lab and normal construction takes half an hour.
  • Also, it doubles the reinforcements of the AI at that planet, and enrages all of their ships so that they'll attack the lab. You really need a solid beachhead and a lot of incentive (or to have neutered the planet already) to do a knowledge raid now.

• Science Lab Mk II move speed from 16 to 20, knowledge gather rate from 2 to 3.

(Released 2010-05-25)

Prerelease 3.150

• Fixed bug where crystal harvesters were not properly auto-rebuilding if there were no _metal_ harvest points eligible for auto-rebuilding.

• Added "Auto Gather Knowledge (Science Only)" to the context menu. When executed, selected science ships will be automatically issued the following orders:
  • if not on friendly planet, no orders
  • else if on friendly planet but there's knowledge left to get, and not under a strong forcefield:
    • if command station is under strong forcefield, set destination to that forcefield
    • else if there are allied forcefields on the planet, set destination for the one nearest to the command station
    • else set destination for the command station
  • else if there's a planet I can reach through a friendly-planet-only path that has knowledge left to get, set destination to the nearest one (if there are more than one equidistant it picks the first one in the list every time, no random, so groups on one planet will all go to the same other planet).
  • else no orders (but periodically check again)
  • (note: friendly planet is defined as a planet with an orbital command station owned by a player on the same team as the science ship's owner)

• Added "Snap To Wormhole" toggle to the "Build From Construction Template" context menu.
  • If this on while you are placing a construction template it will snap the cursor to the closest wormhole within 2000 range units (if any).

• Science Lab MkI, MkII and Advanced Research Stations now all cause 1 AIP on death.

(Released 2010-05-24)

Prerelease 3.149

• Some of the internal calculations for how ships wait at wormholes have been reworked, in hopes of making them never get accidentally stuck in cold storage or stuck just waiting permanently at a wormhole.
  • For super-high AI Progress games there was a check in particular that was causing issues here.
  • Freed AI ships are now vastly more effective at traveling between their own planets in fluid groups now.

• AI players are no longer allowed to reinforce their planets if there are more than 175,000 ships currently in the game.

• A semi-major new "Scrap Wave" mechanic has been added for the AIs. Any time there are more than 150,000 ships currently in the game, and comparably little is going on in terms of threat/attack/wave counters, the AI will scrap a large number of its ships and then send a wave that is half the size of the number of ships scrapped.
  • The AI is prejudiced toward scrapping and sending the lowest-tech mobile military it has, but that will really vary based on what it has available. If all the AI has is Mark V stuff, this will be a much worse event than if the AI still has a lot of lower-tech stuff.
  • In general, the size of these waves is 1,000 ships multiplied times the difficulty of the first AI player. The number of scrapped ships will be about twice that.
  • Generally if there are more than about 1,000 threat/attack/wave ships already out in the galaxy, then the AI won't do a scrap wave. Otherwise it will do continuously scrap waves, one after the next, until it is back down to fewer than 150,000 ships.
  • In the end, if you're like most AI War players you'll never-ever see this mechanic at all. But if you've got a beast of a machine and love playing 30+ hour-long games on the largest maps, then this will help keep things from bogging down completely.

(Released 2010-05-20)

Prerelease 3.148

• MkIV scout now no longer evades after exiting a wormhole.

• Fixed arithmetic overflow relating to the devourer golem's auto-target logic.

(Released 2010-05-19)

Prerelease 3.147

• Auto-explore is now non-random and much more even in deciding between equidistant planets of the same level of "I need to scout this". So if you have 5 unexplored (or unscouted, in an everything-starts-explored game) planets connected to your home world and build 10 scouts there and put them on auto-explore, 2 each will go to each of those 5 planets. At least, that's the idea.

• Fixed bug in paint-attack implementations that was preventing the attack-target-set sound from playing in previous prereleases.

• Added "Give Resources" item to X+right-click context menu:
  • Check the players you want to give to (you can give to more than one player at once, but it gives the designated amount to each, not the total split amongst them).
  • Left-click and Right-click the metal/crystal amounts to increase/decrease them (left = increase, right = decrease). Normal clicks are units of 1,000, ctrl-clicks are units of 10,000, alt-clicks are units of 100,000.
  • Left-click "Execute" to send the resources. It will add a note in the chat log of the amounts actually given (you can't give more than you have, etc).

• Fixed divide-by-zero bug (which manifested as an arithmetic overflow) in CustomScrollbarVertical and CustomScrollbarHorizontal.

• Added "Use non-Cleartype Fonts" checkbox to the graphics tab of the settings menu.

(Released 2010-05-19)

Prerelease 3.146

• Fixed an overflow exception when ships with more than 2 billion combined health were selected together.

• Tugs are now blind, to prevent uberscouting.

• Fixed a couple of potential overflow exceptions related to focus firing (these may have contributed to desyncs in prior versions).

(Released 2010-05-18)

Prerelease 3.145

• Some internal networking changes have been made as the start of phasing in a new, more memory-efficient network/savegame format over time. These first changes add a very slight bit of memory/CPU efficiency on the game host, including in single-player games, but mostly they are laying the groundwork for more extensive future changes.

• Added "Create Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a selection including a unit eligible for construction templates (basically anything that can be direct-built by a command station; note that this includes engineers so be careful when box-selecting turret balls that have engineers assisting or repairing):
  • Click "Set Title" to bring up the text entry box, enter a title, and click "OK".
  • Click "Execute" to actually create the template and add it to your list (note that these are stored per-player, on the local machine, not in the save file).

• Added "Build From Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a command station or mobile builder selected:
  • Assuming you have defined construction templates, it will list each one (it will note which ones you lack tech for, or which ones require a different sort of builder though that should not happen in the current setup), and you can click one to "load" it into normal ship-placement-mode, then move your mouse around and place it like you would place an individual direct-build unit.
  • If you want to delete a template, click "Go To Template-Deletion Menu", then click the desired template (note that you will not be prompted for confirmation here; the confirmation is the fact that you went to the menu, so be careful).

• Existing "counter-shot radius" drawing logic (which also draws tractor range, tachyon range, etc) will now draw engineering range if the ship has one and does not have a counter-shot or other auxiliary range.

• Multi-place mode (arc-place or template-place) will now use the non-filled dotted-line circle for counter-shot/tractor/etc ranges (only on sets greater than 1, same as with attack range drawing in these cases).

• Fixed two internal overflow exceptions that previously could potentially have caused desyncs.
  • Both of these also lead to some small speed boost, especially for games that are already running very fast.

• At least for now, arithmetic overflow checking is now enabled.
  • This may cause a tiny performance hit, but in our testing it has been all but unnoticeable.
  • More importantly, this will cause the game to crash whenever an arithmetic overflow is encountered.
    • This is annoying if it happens, but far less annoying than having the game do something really wrong (like eat all your metal) and/or desync if such an overflow is encountered.
    • These sorts of overflows should be super rare, if you run into them at all, and the reason for our having enabled this is so that we can clean out any that might be hiding in the code causing issues.
    • If you run into this sort of crash, simply posting your UnhandledExceptions.txt file will let us fix the issue with comparable ease compared to if the overflow went silently as part of the simulation, as in the past.

(Released 2010-05-17)

Prerelease 3.144

• Added "Arc Place" item to context menu when you do the x+right-click while in ship-placement-mode (example: hit B to bring up the build menu, click the turret tab, click the mark I basic turret, you are now in ship-placement-mode, hit x+right-click).
  • "Draw Radius Length" lets you draw the radius line in a similar manner to arc-move; note that in this case you are not determining the position of the center of the arc, just the length of the radius of the arc (a bit unwieldy, but allows the finest level of control and works well with the range-display of ship-placement-mode).
  • "Degrees Of Arc", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the size of the arc; minimum is 30, maximum is 360 (so 180 for a half circle, etc).
  • "Ships To Place", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the number of units to place at once, minimum is 1, maximum is 9999 (so effectively ship cap); ctrl+click uses increment of 5, alt+click uses increment of 10, normal click increment of 1.
  • "Filled Arc", if checked, places points that won't fit on the primary arc in succesively smaller inner arcs.
  • "Set Points", sets the current ship-placement-mode target points according to the parameters you have specified. To then execute the build, click on the play area normally (it will use the clicked point as the center, not the origin defined by Draw Radius Length, so you can place multiple such arcs with successive shift-clicks).
  • "Back", moves back to the main context menu, without doing anything else (or undoing anything done) on the arc place menu.

• MRS Tugs speed from 72 to 140.
• MRS Tugs health from 8000 to 200000.
• MRS Tugs now have the same ai-low-priority flag as transports to prevent the AI from chasing them all over the place in a tactically-unsound fashion.

• Doubled Flak Turret attack against the units it's not particularly good against.

• Fixed bug in the fix for the bug preventing players from shift-right-click-queuing move orders on the galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where the local player could not place a construction using an ally's builder if the local player had exhasuted the ship cap of that unit (even if the ally still had ship cap left).

• Overhauled context menu code, visible changes:
  • Paint Attack's first item is now "Set Areas", to use:
    • Left-click "Set Areas".
    • Left-click-drag-and-release a rectangle over the first group of targets you want to destroy.
    • Repeat the left-click-drag-and-release over each group you want to destroy, in the order desired.
    • When all have been defined (and the other options like Group Move are the way you want), left-click "Execute". To check if it did what you want, hold shift to show currently queued orders.
  • Arc Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the origin of the desired arc; you now:
    • Left-click "Draw Radius Line".
    • Left-click the desired origin point.
    • Left-click the desired point-on-the-circle (which sets the radius, and the central point of arc for arcs of fewer than 360 degrees).
    • When the radius line and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".
  • Special Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the desired destination point; you now:
    • Left-click "Set Destination".
    • Left-click the desired destination.
    • When the destination and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".

• Fixed bug where right-click while holding Z+X was not issuing orders (since X was pressed and it thought it was opening a context menu).

(Released 2010-05-15)

Prerelease 3.143

• Added "Split Selection Across Control Groups" item to "Selection" context menu.
  • Check the Control Groups you want to split the selection across.
  • Check "Should Remove Units From Current Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear existing control group associations before adding the new associations.
  • Check "Should Pre-Clear Target Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear out the "target" control groups before adding the ships from your selection to them.
  • Click "Execute" when you're ready to perform the split; the split is done evenly by ship type, the same as L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type".
  • In some cases this can be more useful than L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type" because you don't have to manually reselect the other parts of the now-split-up group, but can use control group numbers instead.

• In the previous version, Paint Attack was not restricting targets to enemy ships, fixed.

• Paint Attack no longer changes preferred target type.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.142

• Fixed bug where shift-right-click in alternate galaxy layout view was moving the planet (which is supposed to just be shift-left-click).

• Removed duplicate menu item from galaxy layout context menu.

• Fixed conflict when holding z+x and right-clicking to issue other orders (previously this would open the context menu); now if z is being held, x+right-click does not open the context menu.

• Fixed hang bug that happened when generating a 120-planet spokes (or potentially tree) map with some seeds. In those cases it will now fail to place all 120 planets, but not by much, and the game won't hang.

• Added "Paint Attack" item to ships-selected context menu, it brings up a secondary menu:
  • "Set Area", click this, then click and drag on the play area to draw a rectangle around the targets you want to attack.
  • "Group Move", if you want your ships to use group move (in case you don't know, this means "move at speed of slowest unit in group").
  • "Fire While Moving/Stop To Engage(Attack Move)/Chase Enemies (Free Roaming Defender)", if you wish, click this to toggle between "normal" move, attack move, and frd.
  • "Queued Move", if you want the paint attack order to be queued up after existing commands already queued.
  • "Execute" executes the order (only does something if the area was set, of course); note that this does not close the context menu, so you can use it with the Queued Move toggle to, for example, issue successive paint-attack orders for the area around each guard post on an AI planet, and just let the ships go about their business if they're not likely to encounter effective resistance.
  • "Back" goes back to the parent context menu without issuing any additional orders (any ones already issued via "Execute" have already been issued and will not be canceled by this).
  • FYI, this command will never result in an attack order against a target that requires a direct right-click attack (command station, warp gate, that sort of thing)
  • FYI, when you're using this you're basically saying "kill these targets, I don't care what order", but each ship sorts the target list separately according to normal autotargeting rules and thus is fairly efficient about shooting things it's good against first (the focus fire control nodes also apply here).

• Moved Auto Explore command from A+E+X key combination to the x+right-click context menu (only when you have selected ships and at least one is a scout).

• Auto Explore now functions in the absence of unexplored planets (either you've explored them all or you started with all explored), and applies similar auto-pathing logic to unscouted or not-scouted-recently planets (preferring the unscouted, then the not-scouted-for-5-hours, then the not-scouted-for-1-hour, etc).

• Auto Exploring scouts no longer try to evade after exiting a wormhole, instead they should shortly pick a new exploration/scouting destination and get moving that way.

• Difficulties 8, 9, and 10 were supposed to be getting 1 extra wave per difficulty level, but were only getting 1 extra wave overall. This was a longstanding bug, and was a big contributor to why waves seemed undersized in difficulties 9 and 10 compared to other parts of the game. Fixed.

• Moved "Select Modules" context menu item into new "Selection" Submenu.

• Added "Select Percentage By Type" item to "Selection" context menu:
  • Use left and right click to increase and decrease (respectively) the "Percent To Retain" (note that the max is 90% and the min is 10%)
  • Click "Execute" to actually apply the narrowing, and your selection will = (Percent To Retain) * (current number of each ship type).
  • This basically substitutes for the "L" and "Shift+L" key combinations, but those have not (yet) been removed from usage.

• The AIs will now actually build the new Flak Turrets.

• Fixed a couple of potential desyncs.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.141

• Balancing changes to Flak Turret: doubled explosion radius, reduced range by 1500 across the board, reduced metal/crystal cost to about 1/3rd of what it was, much more effective against fighters, has roughly 2x as much health and about 3x higher dps in general.

• First implementation of x+right-click context menu.

• Moved arc-move from shift-Q-right-click to an "Arc Move" item in the X+right-click context menu when you have selected ships. This new implementation of the arc move interface allows setting:
  • The radius (which is just the length of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • The number of degrees of arc (so 360 for a circle, 180 for a half circle, 90 for a quarter-circle, etc); for this one left click the line to increase the angle by 30 degrees, right click the line to decrease by 30 degrees.
  • The central point of the arc on the circle (which is just the endpoint of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • Whether the arc is filled in.
  • Whether the move is group/attack/frd and/or queued.

• Moved Switch-galaxy-layout-being-viewed controls from Alt+A+# to X+right-click context menu on galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where floating displays from a previous game were showing after loading/starting another game.

• Added "Select Ship Modules" item to X+right-click context menu when your selection contains modules or ships with modules. Note that the game does not indicate module selection if you are in far-zoom, this will be revisited later now that there is a reliable way of selecting them in far-zoom.

• Added "Special Move" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that acts as a "normal" (non-arc) move order, allowing setting of group/formation/attack/frd/queued flags via mouse rather than the various (and sometimes obscure) key combinations. Please note that the old key combinations for these DO still work (unlike other functions which are no longer on the keyboard at all).

• Added "Stop" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that emulates the "end" key command that cancels all standing commands, formation (if you're on sticky formations, those don't clear with normal moves), etc. Again, the keyboard key still works for this one.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout alt-click logic now uses a base radius of 40 instead of 20, to reduce planet info overlap.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout which-layout-you-are-viewing info line moved from bottom left to top right.

• Added support for use of "any" as the second parameter of the spawn-immediate-wave cheat, so "warp in the clowns,any,1" will send in a wave of any, but will use the 1 size modifier instead of whatever the AI Progress would dictate at the time. Note that the impact of the size parameter is very different in the "any" case than if you specify an actual ship type; generally it results in much larger numbers (so you probably want to start with using "1" as the size parameter, and work up from there).

(Released 2010-05-11)

Prerelease 3.140

• Updated the in-game credits to reflect recent player contributions.

• Orbital Command Station upgrades now provide more metal/crystal income, in order to make those upgrades more worthwhile. If you consider that an individual harvester produces 12 of metal or crystal, and if you consider how many harvesters can be built on most planets versus how much knowledge is required to get the command station upgrades, the upgrades were previously of lesser value than they should have been.
  • Mark II now provides 40 of each instead of 28 of each.
  • Mark III now provides 64 of each instead of 40 of each.
  • For the sake of comparison, the Mark I still produces 16 of each, and the Home command station still produces 80 of each.

• Guard Posts now show on the top row of the planet intel summary.

• New Hotkeys for galaxy map (likely to be changed to something else):
  • Alt+A+9 : switch to your alternate galaxy layout
  • Alt+A+(1-8) : switch to alternate galaxy layout of player 1-8 (respectively)
  • Alt+A+0 : switch to official galaxy layout
  • Please note that all alternate layouts start exactly the same as the official layout, but there's a flashing note in the bottom left of the screen if you're viewing an alternate layout.

• While viewing your alternate galaxy layout you may:
  • Shift-left-click-drag planets around
  • Alt-left-click a planet to perform a basic automatic "pull in chains" operation that relocates subsidiary chains (defined as link cardinality <= 2) into a cluster near the clicked planet. On higher-connections-per-planet map types this may not help you at all; on snakes and spokes and such it can be a huge time-saver.

• Added Flak Turrets: mkI, mkII, and mkIII. Graphics donated by HitmanN (with preliminary work and idea by superking, many thanks to both). The Flak Turrets have only received preliminary balancing, intended to be good against zenith viral shredders, cutlasses, and vampires, and mediocre against other very light ships, and only minorly effective against anything much bigger)

• Extended "warp in the clowns" cheat to take 2 additional parameters (separated by commas), the first is a case-insensitive ForegroundObjectType name, the second is the base wave size (which is multiplied up down and sideways, but allows relative control)

• Updated icon for Heavy Beam Cannons to a new graphic donated by HitmanN.

(Released 2010-05-10)

Special Thanks

• Thanks to HitmanN for providing graphics for the new Flak Turret line, for providing a far-zoom-icon for the Heavy Beam Cannon line (he had already provided the main graphics for that line during the last dev cycle), for balance feedback on the flak turrets.

• Thanks to superking for the idea behind the new Flak Turret line, for longsuffering during the balance process for those, for reporting an arithmetic overflow crash in the custom scrollbars, for suggesting that zenith electric bomber use go down, for suggesting that the energy on the niche engineer units not be so low as 0, for reporting that flak turrets were lacking many of the flags normal for turrets, for suggesting the reduction in energy use of fabricators, for reporting that tractor turrets were still working when paralyzed, for suggesting the changes to allowing attrition to kill ships completely rather than leaving them at 1 hitpoint.

• Thanks to RCIX for the idea behind the alternate galaxy layouts, for his patience as that languished on the "we really don't think this is feasible" pile, for suggesting that the "which layout am I looking at" info line be moved to another corner, for suggesting the Paint Attack feature.

• Thanks to wyvern83 for suggesting that guard posts show on the top line of the planetary intel summary on the galaxy map, for reporting a conflict between the alternate galaxy layout controls and the planet-priority setting keys, for reporting the overflow exception with adjusted scores, for providing a save to demonstrate the out-of-supply-AI-turrets-firing-once-after-load issue.

• Thanks to orzelek for suggesting that the alt-click function on alternate galaxy layout use a larger base separation between planets, for reporting that Paint Attack could cause Friendly Fire incidents.

• Thanks to Fleet for reporting a conflict between x+right-click and a common usage of z+x, for reporting some desync problems, for reporting that the epilogue display was not clearing on a new game, for suggesting that MkIV scouts not evade after exiting a wormhole, for reporting the problem with the move code optimization where slow ships were becoming much slower, for reporting the moving resource nodes, for reporting the issue with scouts being immune to counter-spies, for reporting a bug where loading a game with inbound schizo waves would display the wave alerts like a non-schizo wave, for pointing out that autobombs could sometimes aoe-damage things that would not normally be auto-targeted, for reporting a bug where multi-selecting constructors owned by different players could lead to queues containing items that the owner lacked the tech to build.

• Thanks to platinawolf for reporting that generating a 120-planet spokes map was hanging on some seeds.

• Thanks to Winter Born for reporting that alternate galaxy layout mode was processing both right click and left click for planet-moving commands, not just left-click, for reporting that the attack-target-set sound was no longer playing, for reporting the crash bug related to movement in 3.153.

• Thanks to rubikscube for pointing out that the now nearly-invincible super-fast tugs were a bit too good at scouting.

• Thanks to Black for the original proposal of the construction template feature.

• Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting that arc-placing tractors in large numbers was resulting in unhelpful opaque walls of color, for pointing out that Science Lab Mark III AI reinforcement bonuses should probably not stack.

• Thanks to Rustayne for proposing a means to directly give metal and/or crystal, in addition to the existing mechanism of gifting resource harvesters, for reporting a bug where the AI Tech Level was being incorrectly computed after loading a game, for suggesting that x-shaped and concentric-circle maps allow central starts, for reporting that some map seed/type combinations were yielding significantly fewer planets than they claimed to, for reporting the issue with regeneration chambers actually killing ships instead of regenerating them, for reporting an inconsistency in box-select behavior between forts and superforts.

• Thanks to RobbySpry for suggesting an option to disable cleartype.

• Thanks to Adetia for reporting an arithmetic overflow relating to the devourer golem's auto-target logic.

• Thanks to Buttons840 for reporting that crystal harvesters were not properly auto-rebuilding, for reporting the issue in 3.153 with all shot hits making explosion sound effects, for suggesting the changes to attrition emitters, for suggesting making Dyson Gatlings immune to black hole machines instead of having dyson spheres automatically remove black hole machines on their planet, for reporting that Riot Control Starships had AntsInThePants set to true, for providing a save to help fix the problem with the move code optimization where slow ships were becoming much slower, for reporting a bug where heavy beam cannons could shoot at astro trains but would never actually hit them, for reporting an arithmetic overflow exception crash that could occur if the AI tried to launch a wave against a planet with an inordinately high total wave multiplier, for reporting a bug where where ship modules were being positioned incorrectly.

• Thanks to triggerman602 for detonating a tachyon warhead to make sure the problem in Buttons840's report wasn't a cloaked ship, for reporting that engine-damage-focused units would not sustain fire properly on engine-dead targets if there were only engine-dead targets left, for reporting a bug where the predicted path of ships on the galaxy map (shown when hovering the mouse over another planet) was different from the path actually executed by issuing a move order via right-clicking the target planet, for reporting that the fix to make engine-damage-focused units sustain fire on engine-dead targets was interfering with their switching to non-engine-dead units that appeared later, for reporting a bug where fully repaired but not activated Golems (not activated because you don't have enough energy) would revert to 25% health after save and load, for reporting the bug with the shield hit effects being visually offset, for reporting that the player handicap was defaulting to -10% in 3.176.

• Thanks to vonkolberg for reporting a crash in 3.151, for reporting a bug where auto-explore (and auto-gather-knowledge) would sometimes stop working when playing a second game within a given run of the application.

• Thanks to TDATL for reporting the engineer mark II energy use being incorrect in 3.153.

• Thanks to Junuxx for suggesting the range increase for cloaker starships.

• Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the bug with erratic energy consumption with ships going through wormholes.

• Thanks to mastapsi for reporting some odd (and unintended) consequences from a dyson sphere and a black hole machine being on the same planet.

• Thanks to Spymine for reporting that out-of-supply AI turrets would fire once right after loading, for reporting that there was a small break in cloaking starship coverage right after load and that this sometimes led to some tension with the neighbors, for reporting a crash bug in the cloaking-boost-checking code, for reporting a bug where flak turrets mk II and III were rebuilding into mk I, for reporting a bug where the Avenger was not spawning when it should, for reporting an arithmetic overflow crash.

• Thanks to Signata for reporting the issue with loading certain savegames in 3.157.

• Thanks to SNAFU for reporting an issue where ships were not getting protection from forcefields.

• Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the offsetting issue with the lightning attacks in 3.161, for reporting that the Zenith Trader buy menu was displaying the wrong X of Y in service numbers.

• Thanks to Weapon Master for reporting the issue with engineers clumping in a way they should not, for reporting a typo in the Zenith Starship description.

• Thanks to sebcw1204 for suggesting the spider turrets be faster again.

• Thanks to AlexV for reporting the overflow exception with wormhole guard posts being repaired.

• Thanks to RogueThunder for reporting the desync with player ships caught in tractor beams, for suggesting that scouts be immune to sniper shots.

• Thanks to Dazio for reporting a bug where ai tech level was not always properly recalculated when setting the negative AIP offset (like when loading the game), for reporting some inordinate delays in ships gaining protection from counter-shooters that they've just moved under.

• Thanks to Vinraith for reporting and providing a save-with-reproducible-case of a disappearing CPA.

• Thanks to RedrumJackle for reporting the issue with disabled expansion affecting starting ship position seeding.

• Thanks to Ixiohm reporting the missing texture in 3.173.

• Thanks to Epsilon Plus for suggesting that smaller concentric maps have more space between the rings.

• Thanks to Awod for reporting that there were still missing texture problems with Hybrids in 3.175.

• Thanks to Dragon for reporting a hang related to gifting large numbers of units at once, for reporting that grav turrets were still working out of supply.

• Thanks to Draco18s for pointing out that regenerator golems were still working out of supply and in low-power mode, for pointing out that AI fortresses out of supply would ineffectually charge after targets, for pointing out that the munitions booster tooltip was out of date.

• Thanks to Tssbackus for reporting that the lobby handicap dropdowns were missing -100% as an option between -90 and -110.

• Thanks to Sizzle for reporting that auto-knowledge-gather was making science stations bounce around a lot.

• Thanks to quickstix for pointing out some extra padding at the bottom of the mouseover text for buy and tech buttons.

• Thanks to Doddler for reporting some inconsistencies between the ship caps reported in the lobby and in the game.

• Thanks to Burnstreet for reporting the issue with ship modules and the still-show-stationary-ships-if-scouted logic.

• Thanks to voiddarkness for reporting AI ships being spawned way out in the middle of nowhere.

• Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting that there be a way to prevent engineers from auto-assisting units that are in low-power mode (notably golems).

• Thanks to zebramatt and Spikey00 for reporting an ambiguity in the unexplored planets option description.

• Thanks to Buttons840 and Dazio for reporting the issue with the ship icons being offset in the lobby in 3.163.

• Thanks to RCIX and superking for suggesting the Acid Sprayer rebalance.

• Thanks to Signata and Trezamere for suggesting the railgun shots for snipers.

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