AI War:6.000 Release

Statistics For The Curious

AI War 5.0 - 6.0 spanned from Feb. 15th, 2011 through Oct. 18th, 2012 and it was full of some HUGE changes! 895 distinct changes were made as part of 97 different releases over the course of 611 days. One does not simply stroll through AI War patch notes, indeed.

Even though this was during the period that A Valley Without Wind was developed and released, we managed to keep up an average of 1 release every six days (though some periods were very light with releases and others were very dense with them, if you look at the actual dates; the average makes it sound more regular than it was). Given the length of time between 5.0 and 6.0, it's essentially the same length of time that was between 1.0 and 5.0. So that's certainly a good reason to have such huge patch notes and so many changes!

A full 149 Players are thanked in this series.

Highlights

Huge

• Ancient Shadows, an entire new (paid) expansion, has been added to the game! Briefly summarizing the additions:
  • Champions! Optional hero units that can be added at the beginning of the game or midway through, these have the unique ability to fly through special wormholes into the new nebulae. In those new areas, champions encounter both friendly and hostile human, zenith, neinzul, and spire splinter factions. As your champion gains experience and recovers artifacts, you can guide its progression from a super-starship to a truly awesome powerhouse.
  • 9 New Bonus Ship Types, including the hilarious Tackle Drone Launcher and the first-ever bonus starship.
  • A New Minor Faction: the Dark Spire. These only awaken when many ships die near their spawners, but once they really get going neither the AI nor player will find them easy to stop.
  • Modular Fortresses, a long requested addition to the player's heavy defensive lineup.
  • 2 New AI Types: The tough-as-nails Heroic AI that throws champions at you, and the modular-fortress-happy Fortress King AI.
  • 2 New Map Types: The long-requested "Clusters" map type and a more advanced "Microcosm Clusters" variant.
  • 3 _Nasty_ new Core Guard Post types for the AI to defend its homeworlds with.
  • Over 90 minutes of new music from Pablo Vega.

• Hacking! We finally found a solution to knowledge-raiding that's both balanceable and fun:
  • Knowledge raiding and Superterminal hacking now both increase the same "hacking antagonism" value on the AI, and as that value gets higher the AI's response to any hacking activity gets increasingly powerful and erratic.
  • On top of this, we added a new "Ship Design Hacking" mechanic whereby you can hack an AI-controlled Advanced Research Station so that when you later capture it you can select from one of three randomly-chosen bonus ship types to unlock, instead of just being given one of them. This shares in the hacking-antagonism mechanic used by knowledge hacking and superterminal hacking.

• Completely redid the AI's Special Forces to make them an extremely important defensive mechanic that adapts to the player's offensive deployments and tries to thwart them where it counts.

• Added a new AI mechanic: the Strategic Reserve. The AI gradually adds strength to this reserve and deploys ships from it to critical defense actions, especially homeworld defenses. It also uses the reserve to contribute to Cross Planet Attacks, taking some of the burden off local defense forces.

• Added another new AI mechanic: the Threat Fleet. "Freed" AI ships will still do their normal stalk and attack behavior for about half an hour, but after that the AI figures that they've probably been stymied by strong human defenses and pulls them into a cohesive offensive fleet that waits for an opportunity to strike the human where it hurts.

• Massively reworked the energy system to cut out the "trivial to compute, time-consuming to do" micromanagement that the previous system encouraged:
  • There's no such thing as an inefficient reactor anymore: you can have one free-to-run energy-collector on each planet, and as many high-but-constant-cost matter-converters as you want anywhere.
  • Putting units in low-power-mode no longer reduces their energy cost (or ongoing m+c cost, for the energy-producers), so there's no motive to micro them up and down to pay the minimum m+c for the minimum energy necessary.
  • The free-energy collectors scale up with the number of homeworlds so that a multi-HW player doesn't have such an energy disadvantage compared to multiple single-HW players.

• Several minor factions and AI plots now have variable intensity that allows more game variety: want to play a game with TONS of human resistance fighters? Or where the Dyson Sphere has a dominant impact? Want just a few human marauders? Or hybrids on, but in much lower numbers? Or hybrids on, and massively amplified? It's all there.

• Totally revamped AI Carriers:
  • When there's too many AI ships on the planet for them to fully deploy (without unduly hurting game performance), they're no longer invincible but if you pop them they combine their contents into nasty mkV ships and mkV guardians.
  • Can no longer shoot through forcefields (but can still fly through them).
  • Now get more shots-per-salvo based on the ships being carried, so they're not so much less a threat when not-yet-deployed (previously high-carrier waves tended to be like several waves in series, which is much easier than intended).
  • There's now a toggle on the CTRLS window to tell your ships whether to auto-target carriers or not.

• Cross-Planet Attacks have been substantially reworked to be a much more serious threat.

• Each AI planet now picks 3 ship types to focus its reinforcements on, making each planet feel more distinct.

Big

• Re-implemented custom galaxy layouts for each player, so you can move planets around the map to get the strategic view looking the way you want.

• Substantially rebalanced waves, particularly on the higher difficulties.
  • Notably, 10/10 used to be totally lethal... unless you somehow pulled out some massive cheese and survived the first couple waves to get a foothold. Now the early 10/10 challenge is a much better "advertisement" for the kind of challenge that lies beyond the initial period. Accordingly, 10/10 has been massively rebalanced to be harder in those later parts of the game, as certain players have displayed the temerity to _win_ on that difficulty.
  • Also smoothed out several "difficulty cliffs" along the 7-to-10 range where one difficulty step was massively more significant than either the one just below or just above.

• The Botnet Golem has been split off into an entirely separate minor faction with its own costs/risks because it was so powerful. We could have just nerfed it down near the other golems, but this way is much more fun.

• The starfield backgrounds have been completely redone with something much more interesting.

• Rebalanced... honestly, it might be easier to list the units that were _not_ rebalanced during the 5.0-to-6.0 run than those that were.
  • Thanks to all the participants who contributed nominations, discussion, and votes to our "what's the worst unit?" (and other) community polls!

• Added a devious super-hybrid plot to Advanced Hybrids (on high enough intensity). That's a nice Dyson Sphere you've got there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it.

• Finally found a way to detect loss-of-focus from within the Unity engine, allowing us to auto-pause the game when this happens (there's a toggle to suppress the auto-pause, if you like).
  • Note: this doesn't work on the Mac in windowed mode, but it does work on the Mac in full-screen mode and on Windows in either mode.

Important

• AI War engine upgraded to Unity 3.3 from Unity 3.1.

• The Siege Starship (formerly known as the Dreadnaught) was too effective as "park at extreme range and pick off the enemy" ship so it was nerfed into the Antimatter Starship. That couldn't really hit anything, so it was re-imagined again into the Plasma-Siege Starship, which is much shorter ranged than the old siege starship but fires special ammo that does aoe damage, engine damage, and causes extra splash damage to targets under any forcefield it hits.

• The MkIII Riot Control Starship was given some new exclusive module possibilities (grav tazer, etc) to better set them apart from the MkI and MkII.

• Added Hardened Forcefields: an alternate form of human-tech forcefield that relies on reducing incoming damage more than absorbing it.

• Added the ability to switch your UI to display what another human player sees, making team control significantly more convenient and paving the way for other features.

• Added the "Helper" player role which is much like the "observer" or "spectator" role from other RTS games but they can also control the units of any human player allowing team control.

• Added a new Ultra-Low unit-cap-scale with 1/8th the caps of High, for folks on low-end hardware or wanting to play something crazy like a 16-homeworld game.

• Added a scripting language for generating lobby game-setups within a set of desired parameters, and a number of default scripts that ship with the game (including a few "Beginner Game" scripts, a few scripts for randomized minor factions, and a few scripts for randomized _and undisclosed_ minor factions).

• Added short-lived "Drones" that the player's Neinzul Enclave Starships can build. These are based on unlocked turret technology and provide more of a "carrier with fighters" feel.

• Made defending multiple planets much more viable (relative to the viability of defending one planet) by changes to wave interval (which impacts wave size), re-imagining the Military Command Station's weaponry, and adding the new per-planet-cap'd Minifortress.

• AI Eyes now have 3 varieties: Sentry Eyes (the old behavior), Ion Eyes, and Parasite Eyes. Each is pretty lethal against no-thought-blob attacks, in a different way.

• The ramp-up from one AI tech level to the next is now much more gradual, with waves containing a percentage of the next-higher tech level that increases as you approach the threshold.

• Reclamation damage is now much more likely to have a consistent impact because any reclamator nanites unable to reclaim their host when it dies "hop" to another nearby eligible target.

• Exogalactic strikeforces can now contain Hunter/Killers. Be afraid. And throw the rotten fruit at chemical_art for suggesting it.

• Exogalactic strikeforces are now more wily about picking targets. Get used to defending your outlying assets if you play with any exo sources.

• Several golems have been substantially buffed, to provide an appropriate reward for the costs/risks of playing on Golems-Medium or Golems-Hard. Enjoy your new "has tractors that paralyze!" Black Widow Golem and "that thing can kill anything, once every 8 seconds!" Artillery Golem.

• The game's RAM usage has been substantially reduced in many cases, leading to far fewer out-of-memory errors in remotely-sane scenarios (and even some clearly-insane scenarios, we've noted).

• Massively reworked the way the AI determines how many ships it gets in a reinforcement, so that it properly pays attention to how much a ship should "cost" relative to others (based on relative ship cap, mainly). This makes it much less likely that the AI will pile up huge amounts of low-cap ships on a planet, and if it does create such a pile up at least the proper price (in terms of fewer other ships elsewhere) was paid.

• Fixed all remaining desync bugs; haven't had a reported desync in months.

• Now when a forcefield is damaged, every other overlapping allied forcefield also takes a minimal amount of damage, preventing the old far-too-effective-to-be-balanceable tactic of having engineers repair inner forcefields while the outer ones tanked the damage. It was fun, but properly micro'd it was effectively invincible before.

• AI Homeworld structure seeding now distinguishes between normal and "brutal" structures: the core raid engine, core CPA guard post, and AI Eye were far more significant than the other structures being considered, and the difference between an AI HW with none of them and an AI HW with 5 core raid engines could be the difference between "pushover" and "impossible".

• Made fortresses, forcefield generators, and command stations drop rebuildable remains when they die, greatly reducing the need for micro when rebuilding after a significant AI breakthrough.

• Added the first per-control-group control options so you have finer control over auto-Free-Roaming-Defender and auto-kiting behavior.