AI War:Current Post-6.000 Beta

Prerelease 6.011

(not yet released; we're still working on it!)

• MkI-MkIV carriers are no longer immune to nuclear explosions (mkV still are, but you basically have to have an AI at tech level V for them to show up, and that's not easy to do in a game you plan to win).
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring this change.

Congratulating The Winners Of The 9th Worst-Unit Poll

• Decoy drones, in honor of tying for first in the latest what-needs-a-buff poll:
  • Ship cap from 9 => 40 (but the AI pays about the same for them as it used to, since these were already strong enough for the AI).
  • Base energy cost from 1000 => 250.
  • Base speed from 14 => 26 (so now same as bombers).
  • Base health from 200k => 1M.
  • Thanks to Dichotomy, Faulty Logic, LintMan, Vacuity, Diazo, and the voters for inspiring these changes.

• AI Guard Posts (not the core ones, the normal ones), in honor of tying for first in the latest what-needs-a-buff poll (after many months of feedback that these were not threatening enough) :
  • Short Range Guard Post:
    • Renamed To Needler Guard Post.
    • Hull Type from Medium => Light.
    • Base Health from 700k*mk => 3M*mk (about 1/5th a cap of fighters).
    • Base Attack Range from 6000 => 7500 (same as needler turret).
    • Shots-per-salvo from 1 => 5.
    • Base DPS from 1267*mk => 50k*mk (right around a cap of fighters).
    • Vs-Hull-Type bonus list from "Heavy (2x), Artillery (3x)" => "Heavy, UltraHeavy, Structural, Artillery (all 6x)" (same types as needler turret, same multiplier as fighter).
  • MLRS Guard Post:
    • Hull Type from Heavy => Medium.
    • Base Health from 700k*mk => 3M*mk.
    • Base Attack Range from 7000 => 12000 (same as MLRS turret).
    • Shots-per-salvo from 11/21/31/41/51 => 30.
    • Base DPS from 1700*mk => 50k*mk.
    • Vs-Hull-Type bonus list from "Light (16x), Swarmer (8x), Neutron (4x)" => "Light, Swarmer, Neutron, UltraLight, CloseCombat (all 6x)" (same types as MLRS turret).
  • Missile Guard Post:
    • Base Health from 700k*mk => 3M*mk.
    • Seconds-per-salvo from 7/6/5/4/3 => 3.
    • Base Attack Range from 17k/27k/37k/47k/57k => 27k (same as Missile turret).
    • Base DPS from 13k*mk => 50k*mk.
    • Vs-Hull-Type bonus list from "UltraLight (8x), Medium (6x)" => "UltraLight, Medium, Polycrystal, Neutron, Composite (all 6x)" (same types as Missile turret).
  • Passive Guard Post:
    • Renamed To Laser Guard Post (hey, at least it's not now the Passive-Aggressive Guard Post).
    • Hull Type from Structural => Heavy.
    • Base Health from 1.4M*mk => 3M*mk.
    • Shot type from flare => laser.
    • Base Attack Range from 8000 => 9000 (same as Laser turret).
    • Shots-per-salvo from 1 => 4.
    • Base DPS from (negligible) => 50k*mk.
    • Vs-Hull-Type bonus list from (well, nothing) => "Refractive, UltraHeavy, Polycrystal, Heavy (all 6x)" (same types as Laser turret).
  • Anti-Starship Arachnid Guard Post:
    • Hull Type from Light => Polycrystal.
    • Base Health from 1.4M*mk => 3M*mk.
    • Base Attack Range from 10k/12k/14k/16k/18k => 14k.
    • Seconds-per-salvo from 15 => 5.
    • Base DPS from 10k*mk => 2M (bear in mind these cannot target small stuff, it's an anti-starship sort of thing).
    • Vs-Hull-Type bonus list still empty, but now has 0x multiplier vs Scout hull so it doesn't just gank your transports.
    • Shot type from laser => energy wave (so now like a sentinel frigate shot; just aesthetic for the most part, makes it stand out better).
  • Stealth Guard Post: didn't actually need a buff, but:
    • Renamed to Cloaker Guard Post.
    • Are now un-cloakable; they still cloak stuff near them but will always be revealed themselves.
  • Special Forces Guard Post: also didn't need a buff (the SF ships are the important part of SF, really), but these no longer count for purposes of the "if no AI guard posts are present, an AI Eye self-destructs" rule.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic, LaughingThesaurus, Vacuity, TechSY730, Diazo, Hearteater, chemical_art, and the voters for inspiring these changes.

Reworking The AI's Counterbalance To Champions

• Now, when the humans have champions, the AI gets some offensive nemesis champions.
  • It doesn't check for this until 60 minutes into the game.
  • After that, it checks roughly every minute.
  • The target quantity is = (number of human champions * highest human champion hull size * (AI Difficulty / 7)) / 2, with a minimum of 1 for the first AI player (there must be at least one human champion to trigger this, though).
  • If the current number of offensive nemesis units is less than the target, it randomly picks one of the four champion frigate hulls and does a spawn of those on that AI's homeworld.
    • The count spawned is 1/10th the target number of champions or 1, whichever is greater.
    • The spawned nemesis champions start in Threatfleet behavior (and there's no rule that can take it out of that).
  • Overall this is a bit more similar to the Heroic AI type's special feature than we're entirely comfortable with, but that AI type is still the only way you'll see enemy champions larger that frigate-size, etc.
  • Thanks to Wingflier, Histidine, Faulty Logic, Dichotomy, Confirmation_Bias, and others for inspiring this change.

• Now when there are human controlled champions, the AI is gradually given a supply of points to spend on responses. Right now that's just "special forces nemesis unit" and "threatfleet nemesis unit" (above and beyond the perpetually respawning ones mentioned above). More responses were planned but time for working on this release (this week at least) is running out.
  • Thanks to Wingflier, Histidine, Faulty Logic, Dichotomy, Confirmation_Bias, and others for inspiring this change.

• Now that the above two counter-balances are in place the previous 20%/8%/4%-of-a-normal-player increase that each champion was adding to pretty much all other threats (20% for waves and 4% for exos, etc) has been removed. The overall effect may be too kind to the player, but the above counter-balances can be augmented and adjusted accordingly.
  • Thanks to Toranth and others for inspiring this change.

Prerelease 6.010 Back From The Valley

(Released February 22nd, 2013)

• Fixed a bug where allied roaming enclaves would sometimes launch all their squadrons in the first sim cycle after the game was loaded, even if there was no reason whatsoever for them to launch.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for the report and save.

• The main special forces population logic now tracks its "strength debt" from buying more than its budget on a particular spawn. The overspending happens due to random selections picking high-strength individual ships, and previously was simply ignored but will now count against the budget of the following spawn(s).
  • The result is that it still tends to overspend on every pulse (every pulse that actually happens, anyway) but the actual total spawn over time is effectively controlled by total strength spent, ending the low-cap-ship loophole.
  • Thanks to Minotaar, TechSY730, Hearteater, Kahuna, and others for anecdotal and log-based evidence of the problem.

• Friendly roaming enclaves (the normal-space ones; not the ones temporarily in a nebula scenario) now have a population cap based on the number of non-AI-controlled planets (i.e. planets you've killed the AI command station on) and the intensity of the roaming enclave faction.
  • So there's not a hard-cap per se, in that you can increase it by taking more territory. And who wouldn't like to get more AIP, right?
  • Mainly this is to prevent lag, but also helps bring the friendly enclaves a bit down from their previous overpowered-ness.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring this change.

• The individual ships in the friendly enclave launched-squadrons now have 4x the health and 4x the dps, but the enclaves produce them 1/4th as fast and can hold a maximum load 1/4th as numerous.
  • Just trying to keep the CPU impact of these down in the more extreme situations.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring this change.

• Rebalance of the Ancient Shadows "brutal pick" core posts:
  • Teuthida
    • Drone lifetime from 240 seconds => 60 seconds.
    • Spawner health halved.
  • Wrath Lance
    • Rotation speed halved.
    • Health halved.
  • Grav Reactor
    • Drone lifetime from 240 seconds => 60 seconds.
    • Spawner health halved.
  • Thanks to Diazo, TechSY730, and others for inspiring these changes.

• AI Strategic Reserves:
  • Replenishment rate down to about 2/3rds what it was.
  • Now homeworld-defense spawns only happen if the reserve is at least 25% full, so the follow-up reserve spawns will be much more spaced out.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for inspiring these changes.

Prerelease 6.009

(Released November 21st, 2012)

• Fixed a longstanding but rare bug that could "eat" a carrier during the loading of the game if the conditions were such that a carrier was eligible for deploying its contents _immediately_.
  • Further, this would happen on the host and then again on the client when the client received the game data, leading to a desync-on-load.
  • Thanks to Zebreu for the report and save.

Prerelease 6.008

(Released November 21st, 2012)

• Fixed a null exception bug that could happen in some cases in the ally-enclave logic.
  • Thanks to ussdefiant for the report and save.

• Fixed the logic generating the LogicLog_AIMechanic_CounterHacking.txt file when Advanced Logging is on to use the proper platform-specific newline instead of just \n (which makes it look like all one line on windows).
  • Thanks to ussdefiant for the report.

Prerelease 6.007 Burying The Hatchet

(Released November 20th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where the Armor Booster Astro Trains were not actually having the armor boost effect.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for the report.

• Fixed longstanding bug where it was possible to tractor a hostile ship through a wormhole, even if it was a cannot-go-through-wormholes unit type.

• Fixed a bug where AI threatfleet ships could get stuck on a planet with human-controlled remains on it because it made the AI think there were still enemies to kill there.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for the report and save.

• Over time the number of files generated by Advanced Logging under various circumstances has grown a fair bit and it could be difficult as a player to know what to delete when you wanted to clean out old logs, etc. To cut down on this we started combining some related logs (the SF-like mechanics into the SF log file) but this just caused confusion. The naming conventions were also pretty variable and frequently one half of the wave log would get submitted and not the other, etc. These logs are obviously not something players need to worry about, but it's very helpful when players submit them in cases where logic problems are suspected, so it'd be nice if they were easier to find. So the names of the generated files are being changed to something that's much easier to make sense of in your file system:
  • (listed as "new name" <= "old name")
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_CarrierEarlyPopCombination.txt <= CarrierEarlyPopComputationLog.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_CounterHacking.txt <= CounterSaboteurSpawns.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_Reinforcements_AIThread.txt <= ReinforcementsLog_AIThread.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_Reinforcements_MainThread.txt <= ReinforcementsLog_MainThread.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_SpecialForces.txt <= SpecialForcesLogicLog.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_StrategicReserve.txt <= SpecialForcesLogicLog.txt (so it's no longer combined with the SF log)
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_ThreatFleet.txt <= SpecialForcesLogicLog.txt (so it's no longer combined with the SF log)
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_Waves_AIThread.txt <= AIThreadWaveComputationLog.txt
  • LogicLog_AIMechanic_Waves_MainThread.txt <= MainThreadWaveComputationLog.txt
  • LogicLog_AIPlot_AstroTrains.txt <= AstroTrainLogicLog.txt
  • LogicLog_AIPlot_HybridHives_AIThread.txt <= HybridHyjinksLog_AIThread.txt
  • LogicLog_AIPlot_HybridHives_MainThread.txt <= HybridHyjinksLog_MainThread.txt
  • LogicLog_EventAttackPopulation.txt <= EventAttackCompositionInfoLog.txt
  • LogicLog_MinorFaction_DarkSpire.txt <= DarkSpireMinorFactionLogicLog.txt
  • LogicLog_OffroadScenarios.txt <= OffroadScenarioLog.txt
  • The old files are not being deleted (the game doesn't know if there's anything in there you still want), but you can use the above list as a reference to find and remove them if desired.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for inspiring this change.

• Command Station rebuilding behavior:
  • Now when the stall timer is running because the previous human station on the planet was destroyed, the remains rebuilders cannot do anything with the command station remains until the stall timer is up.
  • Once the stall timer is over, Remains Rebuilders looking for something new to rebuild will give command station remains absolute priority.
  • The stall timer on non-military command stations from 4 minutes => 2 minutes (military ones still get 1 minute).
  • Thanks to Sunshine, DrTall, TechSY730, Varone, Hearteater, Lancefighter, KDR_11k, and Astilious for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the modules of the imperial spire minor faction ships were not minor faction (and simply owned by the first player). Not much impact gameplay-wise, but it was weird.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter and others for the report.

• In response to ongoing occasional reports that the imperial spire fleet still sometimes stalemates vs the AI at the end of FS on 10/10, the non-player-controlled ships and modules have been substantially buffed again (the biggest ships are approaching 32-bit arithmetic limits here, folks) and if things drag on it starts sending in more ships each spawn.
  • Thanks to Eternaly_Lost for the report.

• Logistics Stations:
  • Enemy Speed Reduction from 50% at all marks => 18.75% / 37.5% / 50%.
  • Ally Speed Increase from 100% (which all command stations give) to 200%.
    • They also all still give the +40/60/80 to ally speed, which other command stations don't give.
  • Thanks to... well, I think a bunch of people suggested something like this to give a reason to unlock the higher marks, but I can't find records of it right now.

• Spire Railcluster hull type from Polycrystal => Composite.
  • The previous setting was an experiment to see what happened if a unit was a counter to the triangle ship (fighter, in this case) that counters it. What happened is that the ship is a lot harder to kill under normal circumstances than we'd intended for something that does that much damage that quickly.
  • So now the triangle counter for these is the missile frigate, which may survive long enough to kill it.
  • Thanks to Chris_Stalis, TechSY730, and others for inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug where the new dropdown-with-text-filter controls were not triggering the "a textbox is active, don't handle most key-binds normally" logic, so pressing the P key while typing into the text-filter would pause or unpause the game, etc.
  • Thanks to contingencyplan for the report.

Human-Ally Roaming Enclaves Return

• Long ago the Roaming Enclaves minor faction could spawn human-ally variants in addition to the currently-possible AI-ally and enemy-to-all variants. But they weren't very bright, and tended to get killed a lot despite many changes to make them survive better. Eventually they listened to the human players saying that the enclaves were stupidly suicidal and made a very wise decision for their own survival: they left the galaxy.
  • But since then there have been many requests for the return of the human-ally enclaves, and in recent months we've added some logic to the game for other reasons that happens to make this kind of AI much easier to accomplish.
  • So, while these were re-enabled (in their dumb state) in a particular champion-related case, they've now been re-enabled generally, so you'll see them eventually if you have the Roaming Enclaves minor faction enabled.
    • Thanks to Cyborg, Spikey00, TechSY730, Sunshine, Faulty Logic, and others for inspiring these changes.

• The Control logic for these human-ally ones has been completely redone so that all human-ally roaming enclaves in the game act as a coherent fleet. This greatly enhances survivabiltiy and coolness.
  • They also pay careful attention to how much firepower they have, the enemy firepower on potential target planets, and the enemy firepower on planets they're thinking of pathing through to get to the target.
  • There are five basic types of behavior the coherent-fleet logic can do:
    • Priority-defense of human homeworlds.
      • If a human homeworld comes under any not-completely-trivial attack (for reference, this means "more than about 50 mkI triangle ships on high caps" or the equivalent), the next fleet-logic check will drop whatever is being done and send them all back to that homeworld.
      • This takes priority over any other behavior.
      • You may tell the enclaves to not consider this behavior by sending "cmd:disallow enclaves prioritize homeworld" through chat, and tell them to start considering it again by sending "cmd:allow enclaves prioritize homeworld" through chat.
    • Defend human planets.
      • Considers moving to any planet with a human command station and an AI presence.
      • You may tell the enclaves to not consider this behavior by sending "cmd:disallow enclaves defend planets" through chat, and tell them to start considering it again by sending "cmd:allow enclaves defend planets" through chat.
    • Assist human attacks.
      • Considers moving to any planet without a command station or with an AI command station, if both the humans and AI have a presence there and the humans have a fighting chance (at least half the AI firepower).
      • This behavior is OFF by default but you may tell the enclaves to consider it by sending "cmd:allow enclaves assist attacks" through chat, and tell them to stop considering it again by sending "cmd:disallow enclaves assist attacks" through chat.
    • Attack independently.
      • Considers moving to any planet without a command station or with an AI command station, and an AI presence.
      • This behavior is OFF by default but you may tell the enclaves to consider it by sending "cmd:allow enclaves attack independently" through chat, and tell them to stop considering it again by sending "cmd:disallow enclaves attack independently" through chat.
    • Idle rally
      • If there's nothing else to do, rallies the enclave fleet to the human planet furthest from the human homeworlds that still prevents all pathing from an AI planet to a human homeworld. If no such solid chokepoint exists, it falls back on a human homeworld (if one of the homeworlds is such a chokepoint for all the others, it picks that one).
      • This behavior is always available, you can't tell them to not do nothing if there's nothing to do.
  • When considering behaviors other than the emergency homeworld defense and the "nothing else to do" rally:
    • It won't pick a planet if the AI firepower is way lower than the enclave-fleet's, or if it's high enough to be too much of a threat to it.
    • It won't consider a planet if it can't get from the human homeworlds to there without moving through a planet with enough AI firepower to threaten the enclave fleet.
    • If more than one planet is found eligible by the enabled behaviors, it picks randomly between the ones nearer the human homeworlds.
    • Once a planet is chosen it sticks with it as long as it remains eligible, or gets the emergency-defend-homeworld override.
  • A note on these enclave-related chat commands:
    • They're experimental: historically we haven't done direct-human-control of minor factions for a lot of reasons and that's not really what we're doing here (it's pretty indirect and general). But we wanted something a bit more meaty with this faction's behavior in the sense of it feeling like an ally that's fighting alongside you rather than directly under your control (we've already done that with most of the Fallen Spire stuff, and to some parts of the nebula faction stuff) or only participating in a very simple fashion (we've already done that with the human resistance and dyson spawns, etc).
      • That said, it's very hard and perhaps impossible to get these enclaves to do something even moderately complex without it clashing with what some players want them to do. So we're experimenting with these "chat directives" to see if that kind of very high-level influence is sufficient to give these a general appeal to the various kinds of player who want a "computer-controlled sidekick" in the game.
      • So these commands, and potentially the new behaviors as a whole, may just go away if things are found to just not work out. Or potentially some kind of new interface will be needed for them, in which case it would probably need to be part of an expansion if we do another one of those. For now it's a lot like text-chatting with a human ally in multiplayer.
    • These commands are not cheats (so they do not require "enable cheats", and do not flag the game as having had cheats done).

• An enclave will not deploy its squadrons until on the target planet determined by the fleet-logic, or it falls below half health. When just idle-rallying it won't launch squadrons even on the target planet unless that planet comes under significant AI attack.

• The spawning logic has also been changed:
  • Time between spawns was previously based on both faction intensity and AI Difficulty, but is now based on just the intensity. The difficulty-based factors have been changed to always use the higher-end values so that spawns will happen more frequently on lower difficulties than they used to.
    • For reference: on faction intensity 4 you'll generally see the first spawn at 73 to 88 minutes into the game, and new spawns every 31 to 46 minutes after that. Intensity 1 is about 1/4 as often (with a longer initial delay), and intensity 10 is about 4x as often (with minimal initial delay).
  • When spawning, instead of randomly picking between spawning enemy-to-all, ai-ally, or human-ally enclaves it does a spawn of all three (in different places).

• Stats-wise these have been left alone (although that's pretty buff right now, possibly OP) except for a few changes to cut down on hair-pulling:
  • Now have Radar Dampening 20000, so it does't protect them from much but does help against really long-range strikes from superforts, bombards, etc.
    • For reference, human-built enclave starships have radar dampening of 8000 or lower, so this particular change may actually be too weak.
  • Are now immune to Orbital Mass Drivers, since the alternative was letting them kill the OMDs in self defense, which didn't seem desirable since those are not autotargeted.
  • May now fly through enemy forcefields, but still can't directly shoot things under them.
  • The launched squadrons can no longer traverse wormholes, to keep them from buzzing off and annoying all kinds of AI stuff. The enclaves will have new ones to launch before long anyway.
  • Both the enclaves and their squadrons are now allowed to kill (autotargetable) guard posts and do other behaviors that free threat. since their deployment is now more regulated and they tend to clean up what they free.
    • They're still scrupulous about never killing anything that causes AIP on death, or is otherwise not autotargeted (ion cannons, SF guard posts, distro nodes, etc).

• If you're curious about the spawning and high-level control logic, advanced logging will generate a LogicLog_MinorFaction_RoamingEnclaves.txt file in your AIW installation's RuntimeData directory (when any of that logic happens, of course).

Prerelease 6.006 The Pain Train

(Released November 13th, 2012)

• Rebel Human Colony health from 400k => 5M.
  • Thanks to Don Carsto for reporting a situation where AOE apparently killed one of these as an afterthought.

• Fixed some longstanding GUI issues with the handling of mouse-down (where it should have been mouse-up) with textboxes.

• On the Stats Window, Reference Tab, changed the "Target Ship" dropdown such that when you click on it, the main button (just above the dropdown list) converts into a textbox; if you type something into that the dropdown list is filtered to only contain items which which contain what you typed.
  • The dropdown has been really bad for a while due to the sheer number of items, but more recently it's become even worse to the point that some items simply couldn't be selected because "one pixel down" on the scroll bar was more than one "page" of options.
  • Thanks to Nypyren and chemical_art for inspiring this change.

• In response to the then-#2 item on the mantis voting list: Added two new options to the Galaxy Display dropdown on the galaxy map:
  • Custom Search (Narrow)
    • Allows you to pick a specific type of object (example: MkII fighter, MkIII Hardened Forcefield Generator), and displays the count of detected units of the specific type on each planet.
  • Custom Search (Broad)
    • Allows you to pick a category of object (example: fighter, forcefield), and displays the count of detected units of types in that category on each planet.
  • Both of these use the "text filtering" mechanism just implemented for the reference dropdown, so you you can get to the desired selection faster.
  • Both of these can be keybound like all the other galaxy display options, but default is unbound.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for the suggestion and a whole ton of other players for supporting it on mantis.

• In response to a longstanding request from many players to make Astro Trains interesting:
  • The plot is now like the other variable-intensity plots, with settings from 0 to 10 (can be set differently per AI player).
  • The intensity controls the number of stations seeded during mapgen.
  • Trains no longer spawn during mapgen, but about every 20 minutes the game will check to see if the number of trains in the game is less than the "supplied population" of trains (which is based on plot intensity and whether the AI in question is a Train Master), and if there's room it spawns a group of trains at a randomly selected station.
    • This group will move together through the rest of the game.
    • The size of the group is based on plot intensity and whether the AI is a Train Master.
    • All told, the result is that an AI with Astro Trains on will build up to 10 groups, with the size of each group being bigger on higher intensities.
  • The vanilla "Astro Train" and "Turret Astro Train" no longer get spawned into the game. The Regenerator and Speed-Boosting trains still exist, but no longer have guns.
    • None of the new types have guns either. The danger posed by these is based on other mechanics.
  • Each new train's type is picked randomly from the set of eligible types, which is based on plot intensity and weighted to favor the less dangerous trains (so the more dangerous ones still happen but are rarer). Do note that the really nasty trains don't show up at all unless the plot intensity is fairly high.
  • The following new train varieties have been added (brace yourself, this isn't going to be pretty) :
    • Cargo
      • Harmless in itself, but each "delivery" contributes towards a counter for that player, and when that fills up (you'll see an alert once it's past 50%) it spawns some surprises. The spawns are unpleasant but not massively so (unless you're on intensity 8 or higher, where you're asking for it).
    • Tachyon Jammer
      • Prevents human tachyon emitters from working on the planet it's on.
    • Gravity Jammer
      • Prevents human gravity emitters from working on the planet it's on (the limited-range stuff, not planet-wide stuff like logistics stations or grav drills).
    • Tractor Jammer
      • Prevents human tractor beams from working on the planet it's on.
    • Forcefield Jammer
      • Prevents human forcefields/shields from working on the planet it's on.
    • Radar Jammer
      • Acts like the unit of the same name: halves attack range of everything on the planet. There's also a MkII variant that only halves enemy (to the AI) ranges.
    • Armor Booster
      • Acts like the unit of the same name: boosts armor of all AI ships on the planet.
    • Armor Inhibitor
      • Acts like the unit of the same name: negates armor of all enemy-to-AI ships on the planet (also disables shields, like that unit does, though that may be changed in the future for both; it's a holdover from when the armor inhibitor was the shield inhibitor).
    • Attack Booster
      • Boosts the attack of all AI ships on the planet.
    • Tachyon
      • Provides planetary-wide tachyon coverage for the AI.
    • Gravity
      • Halves the speed of all enemy-to-AI ships on the planet.
    • Tractor
      • Has a bunch of tractor beams.
    • Widow
      • Has a bunch of paralyzing tractor beams.
    • Shield
      • Basically a shieldbearer (the shield does not push enemy units). Has a lot less health than most of the other trains and is thus somewhat feasible to kill.
    • Repair
      • Basically a super-MRS.
    • EMP
      • Basically an EMP-guardian in train form. This is another one of the train types that's got way less hp and thus more feasible to destroy than others. If you have scouting on a planet with one of these, it shows up in the alert box.
    • Nuclear
      • Kinda like an EMP guardian, but only triggers on non-destroyed planets with a human command station present. Oh, and it's a nuke instead of an EMP. Destroys itself when it goes off. This is one of the train types that's got way less hp and thus more feasible to destroy than others. If you have scouting on a planet with one of these, it shows up in the alert box.
    • Note: several other train varieties are under consideration, including others submitted by players in the past, but this seemed like a good set to start the mauling.
  • Astro Train Station AIP-on-death from 1 => 3 to make "just blow up all the stations" less of an obvious choice to train-troubled players.
  • Any old save with trains in them will have all trains removed (they're the wrong types of trains and wouldn't fit into the new logic due to how they spawned); the stations will spawn new ones over time until the train cap is reached.
  • Thanks to Sunshine, Toranth, Draco18s, TechSY730, Kahuna, Hearteater, and others for inspiring this change. They probably wish they hadn't said anything.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where gravity turrets (and other finite-gravity-well generators like Spire Gravity Drains) would continue to function even if in stand-down, paralyzed/EMP'd, or out of supply (for the turret; the fleet ship doesn't need supply).

• Fixed a bug where a couple icons for the Spire Shadow Frigate were missing; they'd not been used for a long time but recently we started using them, but not everyone has them. This patch should fix that.
  • Thanks to Deus Draco for the report.

• Fixed a bug with carrier early-pop unit combination that could cause desyncs in MP, and for carriers to simply not produce any units in SP.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter, Night, Lord Of Nothing, and Drin for reports and saves.

• Special Forces now combines ships into carriers if SF non-carrier'd population gets over 3000 (aims to bring it down to 1500 or so).
  • These carriers, and any ships they deploy, will all be Special Forces and follow that logic.
  • Thanks to Dressari and Bruteforce123 for reporting a case where there were so many SF ships flying around it was causing massive lag just from that.

• Fixed a bug where raid eyes could be triggered by enemy presence on adjacent planets.
  • There seemed to be reports of raid eyes going off on the presence of 1 enemy ship, but upon review we couldn't find a clear report of this, or a save of it happening, nor did our tests reproduce any such behavior. If you have one, please mantis :)
  • Thanks to Lancefighter and contingencyplan for reporting.

• Spire Corvette main-gun range from 3500 => 8500.
  • This is still shorter range than its shortest-range module, last we checked, so it should still work fine there.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the suggestion.

• Superfortress build time increased to 2.5x of what it was; still costs the same and with engie assistance you can still build one basically as fast, but now the per-second costs of unassisted construction are not quite so bleak.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for the suggestion.

• Core Eyes, as a group, are now roughly as likely to be picked as each of the other brutal-pick AI HW structures. Each core eye is still equally likely to be picked, compared to other eyes.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for the suggestion.

Prerelease 6.005 Burning The Candle At Both Ends

(Released October 31st, 2012)

• Since it was the sole winner (that beat the "none of the above" option) of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: Player-side (II)" poll, Tackle Drone Launcher:
  • Drone's self-attrition now happens on a per-frame basis rather than per-second, so that the distance it can travel after engaging tractors is much more consistent (for a given amount of health-left-when-starting-tractors).
  • This deals with the tendency since the attritions-faster-when-tractoring change was made for drones to pick up their loads just after the second ticked over and thus get nearly a full second of additional flight time and go way further than intended. Overall it's a fairly big nerf, though it also makes the results look cooler in general.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Improved the rendering of the planetary summary sidebar to use the same approach for drawing the ship icons and borders as the game normally does for far-zoom ships. Previously that sidebar was blurring the icons a fair bit due to using a different method.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for bringing this to our attention and helping us figure out what was happening.

• Since threat now behaves more intelligently when "stonewalled", removed the /10 modifier that turret firepower was given when evaluating whether a threatball should attack. Before it was better that they just get it over with, but now it's better that they regroup with other threat and look for an opening.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 and many other players for suggesting.

• In honor of being one of the winners of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (II)" poll, the autobomb-like colony ship in the nebula scenarios has received moderate nerfs to speed, health, and damage. Combined, those three moderate nerfs are fairly severe. Surely if we overdid it someone will let us know (yea right, not with that scenario).
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Fixed a bug in the past couple versions where the Spire's Frigate-level champion was using the wrong icon in the planetary summary.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the report.

• Redid the far-zoom icons for the 9 LotS bonus ships:
  • Spire Armor Rotter
  • Spire Blade Spawner (and Spire Blade)
  • Spire Gravity Drain
  • Spire Gravity Ripper
  • Spire Maw
  • Spire MiniRam
  • Spire Stealth Battleship
  • Spire Teleporting Leech
  • Spire Tractor Platform
  • Thanks to HitmanN for more excellent pixelart.

• Also in honor of being one of the winners of the "Aim the Nerfbat of Damocles: AI-side (II)" poll, the Zenith Bombard:
  • Now "costs" the AI 150% as much to spawn in all contexts (or nearly all of them, at least; hybrids wouldn't pay attention to this when picking up their escorts, they just pick zombards less often).
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• In honor of being one of the winners of the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Teleport Raider:
  • Ship Cap from 488 => 320. (those are high-cap-scale numbers)
    • Health, Attack, M+C cost, and E cost automatically adjusted accordingly, before the further changes below.
    • This just cuts down a bit on the inevitable disadvantages of being so high-cap in terms of damage loss to armor, etc.
  • Cap Health from 5.145M*mk => 10M*mk.
  • Cap Base DPS from 49k*mk => 70k*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 300*mk => 750*mk.
  • Effective Range from 7k => 8k.
  • Cap Energy cost from 25k => 20k.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Also in honor of being one of the winners of the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Infiltrator:
  • Ship Cap from 544 => 320. (those are high-cap-scale numbers)
    • Health, Attack, M+C cost, and E cost automatically adjusted accordingly, before the further changes below.
    • This just cuts down a bit on the inevitable disadvantages of being so high-cap in terms of damage loss to armor, etc.
  • Cap Health from 11,124,400*mk => 15M*mk.
  • Cap Base DPS from 49320*mk => 70k*mk.
  • Now has bonus vs medium (of 4x, like its other bonuses).
  • Base Move Speed from 26 => 32.
  • Now has cloaking (between the name and the role, it just doesn't make sense not to).
  • Ammo type from Flare => Dark Matter, to prevent excessive nightmare generation.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• And in honor of being third place in the winners of the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Superfortress:
  • Now being balanced as a MkV version of the MkI fort, but with a ship cap of 1 instead of that type's 5. So roughly 25x as nasty as a FortI. You can go hide now.
  • At the same time, removing the AI version's 3x health multiplier. It seems unnecessary now.
  • Base Armor from 5k => 500k.
    • This basically means it has 5x the listed health, and puts the effective cap-health at about 50% higher than a cap of theoretical MkV forts. To compensate, it's about 3 times easier to take down than those would be if you're hitting it with stuff that ignores armor, strips it away, or somehow overpowers half a million of it.
  • Seconds per salvo from 3 => 2.
  • Shots per salvo from 120 => 250. (I said you could hide)
  • Base move speed from 3 => 12 (same as forts)
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where the Doom Accelerator Cannon modules were largely confused into thinking they were Impulse Reaction Cannon modules.
  • Thanks to Bognor and chemical_art for the report.

• Honorable mention from the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Zenith Power Generator:
  • Build cost (from trader) from 7.2M total m+c => 5M.
  • Base Max Health from 100k => 2M.
  • Ongoing metal+crystal cost (10 each per second) removed.
  • Energy production from 400k => 600k (equivalent to 4 planets' worth of energy collectors).
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

• Another honorable mention from the "Worst Unit Of The (time interval) Award (VIII)" poll, the Champion Drone Bays:
  • Bomber Drone base movement speed increased from 70 => 84.
  • Slicer Drone base movement speed increased from 140 => 168.
  • Interceptor Drone base movement speed increased from 90 => 110.
  • Champion Drone bays production:
    • Interval between "batches" from 2 => 5.
    • Batch size from 1 => 3.
  • Thanks to the players who provided feedback and votes on this.

Prerelease 6.004

(Released October 29th, 2012)

• Fixed a bug in the last version that had changed the colors of your ships in the planetary summary.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report.

Prerelease 6.003 Fortress-size It

(Released October 29th, 2012)

• Fixed a longstanding (forever, basically) bug where non-wave AIs (Turtle, Support Corps, etc) would not launch waves even in a Defender-campaign game.
  • Thanks to Gith, Cinth, and others for reporting this.

• AI Home Command Stations have been taught a new self-preservation technique for dealing with a very specific threat.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for inspiring its new sense of humor.

• Removed the range-check when deciding whether a champion should gain experience from a kill on a planet. Now if it's on the same planet as the thing dying, it gets XP.
  • Note that the majority of champion XP normally comes from winning nebula scenarios, which already give XP to all champions in the game.
  • Thanks to contingencyplan, Moonshine Fox, Wingflier, and Cinth for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where AI spire corvettes were always spawning with MkI modules when they should have been using (corvette mark)+1 (max 5, of course).
  • This will not impact AI spire corvettes that already exist in savegames prior to this version; just newly-spawned ones.
  • Thanks to ussdefiant for the report and save.

• Adjusted Fallen Spire shard speeds again, since the increased intensities necessary to match the increased speed were a bit much early on. Now the first shard is back at the original (1/4 of recent) speed, the first city shard is 1/2 of recent, the second city shard is 3/4 of recent, the last shard is actually 5/4 of recent, and the others are unchanged. The intervals between chase spawns have been adjusted accordingly.
  • Thanks to the participants of this poll and for their feedback on this issue.

• Added modular-fort versions of the following champion modules:
  • Acid Jet.
  • Paralyzer.
  • Polarizer.
  • Impulse-Reaction.
  • Heat Beam.
  • Nanosubverter.
  • Insanity Inducer.
  • Translocator.
  • Doom Accelerator.
  • Photon Lance.
  • Rail Cluster.
  • Rail Cannon.
  • Plasma Siege Cannon.
  • Flak.
  • Bomber Bay.
  • Interceptor Bay.
  • Slicer Bay.
  • So that's all of them. They follow the same racial affinities as the champion modules (spire doesn't get drones but gets the absurdly big energy weapons, etc).
  • Each is available to any human player's modular fortresses if any human champion has them. Fortress modules only go up to MkIII, though (champion modules go all the way to MkV).
  • Thanks to Cinth for reminding us to make this happen.

• Redid the far-zoom-icons for all the Ancient Shadows bonus ship types:
  • Neinzul Scapegoat.
  • Youngling Firefly.
  • Saboteur.
  • Spire Corvette.
  • Spire Railcluster.
  • Tackle Drone Launcher.
  • Zenith Medic Frigate.
  • Zenith Reprocessor.
  • Zenith Siege Turret.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for the excellent pixelart.

• Redid the far-zoom icon for the Spire champions (the others had a fair bit of internal contrast, but this one looked pretty washed out.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for this one too.

• Added two new cheat codes (entered during the game via the chatline, if cheats are enabled) :
  • running with scissors
    • Removes all AI Eyes (sentry/ion/parasite/nuclear/etc) from the game.
  • revenge is best not served
    • Removes all Counterattack Guard Posts from the game.
      • Note, this will result in the ships guarding those posts being freed as threat. Not generally a big deal if done early in the game after you have some defenses, however.
  • Thanks to triggerman602, LaughingThesaurus, and Lancefighter for inspiring these.

• AI special forces growth rate is now about 0.5x what it used to be, but max strength is now about 1.5x what it used to be. An overall nerf, in general; we'll see where we need to go from here.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for the suggestion.

• Corrected an obsolete description for the counterattack guard post saying the resulting waves were low-warning.
  • Thanks to Lord of Nothing for the report.

Prerelease 6.002 Better Than A Stick In The Eye

(Released October 25th, 2012)

• Fixed a really longstanding bug where human rebel colony rebellions couldn't happen if the player had not conquered any mkII AI planets.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and others for reporting.

• Amended the tooltip that the lobby shows when you mouse over the button that disables cloaking ships to note that it does in fact disable scouts and this makes for a fairly different game.

• Tackle Drones now self-attrition much faster once their tractors have engaged, which drastically reduces how far out of the fight they can throw enemy ships while not reducing their effective "get to the enemy at all" range.
  • In fact, their overall base time-to-live has been increased from 7 to 9, to make sure they can reach the enemy in most cases.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic, Kahuna, Hearteater, and others for inspiring this change.

• The AI now has some more tricks to use when responding to knowledge hacking, only used fairly rarely except when dealing with certain recently exploited player cheeses.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for sealing the fate of many.

• Deepstrike threat:
  • Now triggers 1/20th as often, but each spawn is 20 times as big.
  • Now respects relative unit strength (so 1 blade spawner != 1 fighter, cost-wise).
  • Now spawns on a random AI planet instead of always on an AI homeworld.
  • Now spawns with the ThreatFleet behavior instead of just normal threat.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring these changes.

• Fixed bug where champion-only players could try to build units from the zenith trader. Not really succeed, lacking resources, but try.
  • Thanks to bonreu and Coppermantis for reporting.

• Respawning champions owned by a Normal+Champion player now respawn at that player's home command station (if alive) rather than using the "respawning command core" logic (which Champion-Only player champions still do).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Finally got around to finishing the AI Eye changes from the poll it won some months ago.
  • Added the following new eye types:
    • Raid Eye (like a raid engine if it's triggered too long)
    • Nuclear Eye (nukes the planet, and itself, if it's triggered too long, really hurts on AIP)
    • Threatening Eye (spawns threatfleet ships elsewhere in the galaxy every 5 seconds or so of being triggered)
    • Translocating Eye (powered-up version of the mkIII military command station's new weapon, only fires when eye is triggered)
    • Plasma Eye (massively-higher-Rate-of-Fire version of the mkIII plasma siege starship's weapon, only fires when eye is triggered).
  • Added "Core" variants of the Sentry, Raid, Threatening, Translocating, and Plasma eyes.
    • These are only seeded on AI homeworlds, and are now the only eyes eligible for seeding on AI homeworlds (so Ion and Parasite eyes are now only seeded on non-homeworld planets).
    • They are immune to nukes and a few other things normal eyes aren't.
    • They emit planet-wide tachyon coverage (even when powered down, for those types that can power down).
  • Thanks to the many players who voted for the Eye in that poll, and to Hearteater, Faulty Logic, madcow, and others for suggesting some of the specific changes made here.

Prerelease 6.001 There's Always At Least One

(Released October 22nd, 2012)

• Fixed a bug where if player 1 had the "Engineers do not assist allies" toggle checked, the allied large starbases in nebulae would not repair champions controlled by players 2-8.
  • Thanks to Kronic and menzel72 for the reports and save.

• Fixed a bug where unlocking the MkI champion missile module would count as MkV for the purpose of the Specialist achievement.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the suggestion.

• Fixed a localization-missing error that could happen on the high scores window.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report.

• The "Reduce Visual Stimulation" now suppresses the "whiteout" effect of warhead detonations, etc.
  • Thanks to Jeffersn for the suggestion.

• Fixed several potential unhandled-errors and desync situations that could happen with the scrap-wave mechanic.
  • Thankfully scrapwaves basically never happen due to other AI-population-compression mechanics, so this wasn't actually a big deal. Good to have fixed anyway.
  • Thanks to Cinth for the report.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the Stats window -> Military tab -> "# Built" column values ended in a % sign.
  • Thanks to Volatar for the report.

• Fixed a bug in the CTRLS window -> Ship Design tab where changing a design and then switching templates or unit types before saving (and confirming when it asks if you're sure you want to discard the changes) would leave the display in a very confused state.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and chemical_art for the report.

• Fixed a bug where a scapegoat could regen _any number_ of allied ships that died in exactly the same frame, rather than just one.
  • Generally this wouldn't be a big deal due to the number of ships dying during a particular frame being fairly low, but when a Spirecraft Martyr goes up... let's just say that the Abominable Intelligence found a counter to the martyr. But it's been fixed now.
  • Thanks to Switch for the report and save.

• Changed Ravenous Shadow speed to not vary with combat style (it's now always what it used to be on Normal combat style), since the champion's speed doesn't vary there.
  • Thanks to Cinth and Coppermants for the suggestion.

• The game no longer seeds wormhole guard posts on wormholes that lead to nebulae, since this was confusing in games without champions (the wormholes are still seeded in that case, because champions can be added midway).
  • Note: this won't affect saves from previous versions, because the posts are already seeded there.
  • Thanks to Volatar and other for reporting the confusion.

• Brightened the "Shields" display that shows on the resource bar when using a champion.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for the suggestion.