AI War:Current Post-4.000 Beta

Prerelease 4.031

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added 3rd "episode" of the progression.
  • Dangerous fallen-spire events (like when you discover an artifact and the AI starts spawning ships to go after it) now automatically pause the game and display the corresponding journal entry so that you don't miss the fact that you're about to be torn to ribbons (or not, if you're on your toes).
    • Thank to Lancefighter for the suggestion.
    • Added "Disable Dangerous Event Auto-Pause" toggle to a new "Advanced" tab of the settings window to disable this behavior. Note that in a multiplayer game if anyone hasn't disabled the auto-pause, it will still happen, though those with it disabled will not have the journal entry pop up automatically.
  • Added LotS-only cheat "i do not have time for this" that toggles the fallen-spire UseTestTimingValues flag on and off (it defaults to off). When the flag is on, all time-to-perform-survey (not time-before-signal-disappears) times are divided by 60. Note that this is indeed a cheat and will massively mess with the overall balance, but is provided as a courtesy to those players who are so helpfully assisting in the testing of these features. It can be toggled back and forth, though the behavior may not work quite as expected in all cases. One suggestion for balance testing is to use it to shorten the "remote" (from your homeworld) surveys and turn it off before beginning the "local" (on the AI planet) surveys.
    • Thanks to themachineissentient for suggesting a way to short-circuit the waits for testing.
• Increased Avenger hull hp to be somewhat greater than a superfortress, again in line with recent hp changes to fortresses.

• Added a new tab to the Controls screen called "Ship Design", for defining custom templates for modular ships (i.e. the three marks of Riot Control Starship).

(Note: this prerelease is not publicly available yet, we're still working on it)

Prerelease 4.030

• Fixed a null-exception bug in hybrid-hive logic that was killing the ai thread when it was unable to pathfind to certain objects.
  • Thanks to KToff for reporting.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Unset a testing flag that was making the survey times in seconds instead of minutes.
  • Survey-marker time-to-disappear no longer counts down while the marker is being actively surveyed (this is important in cases where you have 2 hours before it disappears and it takes 45 minutes to go from start-to-finish; this way you have 2 hours to start, rather than just 1 hour and 15 minutes).
  • Made event-attack composition logic significantly more robust (more interesting compositions, at least in the developer's opinion, now properly scales with unit caps for scaled units, point-cost and tier-associations now kept with the rest of the unit data, etc).
  • Chase ships will now no longer wait at wormholes for an accumulation of force (which is the normal behavior).
  • Shard is now immune to engine damage.
  • Shard will now be consumed by construction of receiver.
  • Receiver construction notice now happens at time of completion, not beginning.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.
  • Added next "episode".

• Special difficulty factor (currently only used for hybrids and fallen-spire stuff) now scales more granular-ly with difficulty. For example, it used to be that 7, 7.3, and 7.6 all multiplied the factor by 1 (i.e. no change), and 8 multiplied it by 1.5. now 7 = 1, 7.3 = 1.15, 7.6 = 1.3, and 8 = 1.5. And so on with the other partial difficulties.

• In recent versions the MkIV heavy beam cannon's metal+crystal cost was lower than intended, increased to 2x of what it was, to be in the general neighborhood of 4x what the mkIIIs cost.

• FF Bearers (Shield Bearers):
  • Health increased from 88000*Mk to 100000*Mk.
  • Armor decreased from 4000 to 200.
  • FF coverage radius increased by 50%.

• Armor ship:
  • Reload Time from 4 seconds to 3 seconds.
  • Armor from 15,000 to 3,000/3,200/3,400/3,600/4,000 for I/II/III/IV/V.

• Superfortress health from 90,000,000 to 150,00,000 to be more in line with the recent AI fort hp bonuses.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting the new inconsistency.

• Fixed a bug that's probably been around since unit scaling and armor where the game was frequently using the normal-cap base-attack-value instead of low, when playing on low. With this fixed, it is likely that stuff will die faster on low now.

• Laser Guardian
  • Bonus against polycrystal 45x => 5x.
  • Bonus against light 45x => 5x.
  • Bonus against refractive 15x => 5x.
  • Bonus against turrets 3x => 1x.
  • Base attack power 1800*Mk => 4800*Mk.

• Raider Guardian
  • Bonus against heavy 18x => 5x.
  • Bonus against artillery 12x => 3x.
  • Bonus against turrets 3x => 2x.
  • Bonus against swarmer 4x => 3x.
  • Base attack power 1200*Mk => 1800*Mk.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version with the AIs only using basic ships.
  • Unfortunately, this will only work for new savegames -- campaigns started in the last prerelease will still be too easy, because this was part of the initial seeding of those savegames.
  • Thanks to DakaSha for reporting.

• When a "pthread_getschedparam" error is logged, the game now also logs information about the total number of texture, music, web service, update, and sound WWWs (and errors) that have been started. Hopefully this would provide some clues as to the nature of the pthread_getschedparam error.

• The ship cap for colony ships has been dropped from 60 to 5, to prevent people from just storing up so many extra colony ships now that there is no energy cost per colony ship.
• Command stations must now be built within 2000 pixels of a colony ship.
  • Thanks to Malibu Stacey, Moonshine Fox, orzelek, and KToff for various suggestions relating to this.

• A new graphic for the Shard is now in place.

• In prior versions, the AI was actually still creating barracks instead of carriers (d'oh). Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• The images for the AI Carrier, Raider Guardian, and Laser Guardian have once again been included in this beta release since the 4.021 update on Steam for some reason still didn't include them.

(Released November 8th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.029

• Added a new "Fallen Spire" Minor Faction for LotS. Details secret for now :) The special stuff starts right at the beginning of a game with them, though, so self-discovery is possible. Only about 10% of what's intended is actually done.

• Fixed some inconsistencies in AI "can I give another order to this unit yet?" logic.

• Fixed some bugs skewing the overall "special difficulty" modifier (based on homeworld/player count and AI difficulty); it was only used for hybrids, so the problems may not have been apparent.

• Fixed some rare null-exception bugs in the lobby when coming in with a messed up settings.dat.

• Turret rebalance:
  • Basic, MLRS, Flak, Laser health to 5/3x of what it was.
  • Lightning Turrets health to 5x what it was.
  • Missile Turrets health to 1/3x of what it was.
  • Laser Turret base range from 6000 to 9000.

• Various major-electric ships now have the corresponding extreme-armor-piercing (core electric guard post, tazer, all warheads, electric shuttle,

• Following guardians now have 1.4x as much health as before: Tractor, Lightning, Flak, Beam, Laser.

• Bomber starship rebalance:
  • Attack power 1/3x what it was.
  • Reload time 1/9x what it was.
  • Attack range from 5000 => 2500.
  • Health to 2x what it was.

• Fixed bug where if you had the game in non-trial mode and your last-started-game's available ships setting was something other than "Simple", and then switched to trial mode (by adding an expansion without a key), and then tried to start a new game it would fail.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing there to be no higher-mark AI planets in Conquest mode except for the homeworlds and the worlds next to them.
  • Thanks to DakaSha for reporting.

• Achievements for victories against AI types, minor factions, AI plots, on various planet counts, for controlling various planet counts, winning and losing in general or against certain difficulties, and so forth are all now Conquest-only. Other achievements, based on things such as points, time, resources, kills/losses, and reclaimining/scrap are still able to be won in Defender mode.
  • Thanks to nachomahn for suggesting.

• Fixed a couple of bugs with how bonus ships were assigned on game start in the last version.

• Previously, the "Attack Recharge" was also being used as an "Ability recharge" for a growing number of ships (raid engines, cleanup drones, rebuilders, etc). That led to a number of bugs so subtle that no-one has ever reported them (mostly with the raid engine), but now we've split these apart and the various bugs are thus resolved.

• The logic for when raid engines trigger is now a lot tougher (it happens when there are ANY human military ships, whereas in the past it took a military fleet of size 100 to trigger them (which was basically a free pass to starships -- no longer).

• Four new AI Core Guard Posts have been added for LotS: Booster, Cross Planet Attack, Heavy Beam, and Raid Engine.
  • All four of these basically add variety to the end-of-game scenarios (most specifically the CPA guard post is wildly different), which has been a long-term goal for the game for a while now. Because of the comparative rarity of AI Core Guard Posts (they only show up on the AI homeworlds), we won't be adding too many of these in this expansion, though -- more focus will be going into the regular Guard Posts (mark I-V) that show up on all the AI planets randomly, as variety is even more critical there (in one sense).

(Released November 5th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.028

• Fixed a bug that caused any non-Defender-mode campaigns to result in an instant loss in the prior version. Whoops!
  • Thanks to Varone and ghoti221 for reporting.

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.027

• Auto-created manufactories are always now disabled at the start of the game.

• The first set of waves now comes sooner from the AIs, more like it used to in the 2.0 era of the game. It's been a longstanding bug since 3.0 or thereabouts where the first set of waves always fizzled.

• The remaining trial time is now shown as a countdown timer in the alerts box in the upper left of the screen while playing. This should make it a lot more obvious when players accidentally start a trial game, as well as making it more clear how much time remains for players who did intend to start a trial game.

• The first release of Light of the Spire's beta is in this one. Defender mode, as well as the Vanilla and Everything AI types make their debut. As a warning, Defender mode is extremely preliminary, so will probably need a lot of tweaking to be in balance. But it's pretty fun already, if you like getting beat up. ;)
  • Also bear in mind that we do still need to teach the AI a few new tricks for this mode. It's not used to working on a timer, it's used to thoroughly crushing you. When it's on the clock, it needs to do a better job of prioritizing your quick defeat, rather than obliterating every last trace of you.
  • In short, if you play with too few planets the AI will crush you; too many, on too short a time schedule, and it won't have time to crush you so you'll likely win despite the thousands of high-level ships slowly scouring you from the galaxy. We'll be working on that in future releases, but for now we suggest you use maybe 4-5 planets as perhaps a sweet spot. Or, feedback on what seems to work best (and what doesn't) is also welcome. Part of the point of the beta, after all!

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.025

• Fixed mark I scouts to not have guns, unlike the prior release.
  • Thanks to Epsilon Plus for reporting.

• Raid Starships now have 100x more armor than before, and now have 100k armor piercing. They also now have 10x lower health. In general, this transforms them into a ship specializing in killing highly-armored targets, including fleet ships such as armor ships, which is a unique role for them amongst starships. The extra armor that they have, in turn, makes them better suited than ever for doing long-range raids except when they run up against raw-damage-dealing ships such as siege starships and so forth.

• Neinzul Cockroaches no longer fire translocation shots, as this was overpowered and made offense a lot tougher with them around.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Fixed what may have been a small memory leak in the GZip compression. More likely, an extra handle declared and never released. Related to the crash on OSX?

(Released November 3rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.024

• Colony ships no longer have any energy cost.

• Cutlasses now have a heavy penalty against command grade hulls, and their attack power (and health) have also been significantly reduced.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for reporting the imbalance.

• All of the fleet ships, starships, and turrets (and a few other types of ships) now have a completely revamped cost structure. In the case of their mark I variants, the costs have been tweaked somewhat, often reduced slightly or even significantly in cases of ships that were exceedingly expensive before. In the case of their mark II, III, IV, and V variants, they are now based on multipliers from the mark I version.
  • Those multipliers are x2, x4, x8, and x16, respectively. This makes the mark V variants enormously more expensive than the mark I variants, which accomplishes two things: first it once again increases the utility of those lower-level ships, and secondly it makes it so that the economy becomes more strained the further into the game players go. This makes the early game simpler (as it has been lately), while not making the late-game too easy in terms of the decisions regarding territory, economic unlocks, and so forth.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for inspiring this change.

• The health of all the AI force fields has been increased by 5x, in light of all the new ultra-damaging starships and such that the humans have.

• Home planet command stations for the human players now have 2 million health instead of 300k.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• The AI now has a separate fortress line with 10x more health and without the ability to be repaired. Player fortresses can now be directly repaired, but those fortresses now take 10x longer to build and repair.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• At long last, due to popular demand, there are now Mark V Fighters in the game. What's more, there are also now Mark V Bulletproof Fighters and MicroFighters.
  • There are also now core fabricators for all three of these ship types.

• Spire Starships are now considered Mark IV, instead of Mark III.

(Released November 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.023

• Removed AI Progress cost for killing any Neinzul cluster (Neinzul Nests still cost 10 AIP to kill).

• Previously the save window, load window, and stats window would not functionally fit on a 1024x600 screen (1024x768 is the lowest resolution supported, but we try to make 1024x600 work at least minimally functional), fixed the sizing of controls so this works now.
  • Thanks to datom for reporting.

• Also fixed the settings window to fit (albeit barely) on 1024x600.

• Also fixed the lobby window for 1024x600, though this one is a bit more intrusive: when the lobby window first initializes, if the height of the current resolution is less than 768, it omits the logo at the top of the right window, so there's room for the start game button at the bottom. This looks a bit weird but it's at least functional.

• Added explicit logic for preventing most non-ai-ally minor faction ships from being able to hit anything that can cause freeing of ai ships (namely command stations and guard posts); this had been handled properly before but after the switch to hull-type-based bonuses some gaps opened up, and may be responsible for some of the inexplicable early-game attacks people have been seeing.

• Fixed an (apparently) rare crash bug in the tutorial that happens right after capturing the ARS. If the underlying bug happens it may cause problems, but at least shouldn't crash.

• Fixed bug in last version where it would fail to write to an error log due to path confusion.

• Added 2 new planet-specific controls:
  • Alert When # Enemy Units Present
  • Alert When # Aggressive Units Present
  • If set to something higher than zero, the alert window will note when the planet has >= the specified number of enemy or threat (respectively) units. This only works if you have scout intel on the planet (command station or scout drone provide that, among others).

• Augmented the tooltip of the "Threat" section of the resource bar to display a list of all planets with known threat units, and the count thereof. Only displays planets you have scout intel on.

• Lightning Guardians now have 100000 armor-piercing (like lightning turrets), 4x previous attack power, and 1/2x previous base range (actual range differs from base range due to some post-processing on stats).

• Since the introduction of armor, the different unit scales have provided pretty radically different balance between scaled-types (like a bomber) and non-scaled-types (like a flak guardian). This is due to the fact that 2x as many bombers each with 1/2 as much armor (high caps) are going to die way more than 2x faster against a flak guardian. Similarly, 1/2x as many bombers each with 2x as much armor (low caps) are going to have a much easier time surviving against the same unscaled flak guardian (even leaving aside the aoe aspect of that). We've now put in a fix that will make scaled ships always have the same effective armor against non-scaled ships, while maintaining their scaled armor ratings versus each other (since if we just stopped scaling armor at all then scaled ships would take a _lot_ longer to kill each other on some settings).
  • PLEASE NOTE: this is going to put the effective armor roughly between where it was on High and where it was on Normal. Low will probably be a step harder in this respect, but it was never intended to be easier than Normal or High. We'll be listening closely to player feedback and will continue to make adjustments as necessary. Your patience is appreciated :)

• Fixed bug preventing the mercenary space dock from building a ship whose base type was prohibited by the Available Ships lobby setting (so if you had it on "simple" you couldn't build ether jets or beam frigates from the mercenary space dock, but now you'll be able to).
  • Thanks to several users for reporting and providing saves.

• Fixed bug occasionally causing a null exception in GameButton.SelfRender early in the game. This was being caught, logged, and ignored so it probably wasn't hurting anything, but definitely good to have it fixed.

• Fixed a bug preventing player from buying ships from a human rebel colony.
  • Thanks to Collic for reporting.

• Heavy Beam Cannon health increased by 5x, to make them not insta-die so readily.

• Further balancing of the guardians, specifically:
  • Most of the offensive types had their number of shots multiplied by their mark level; since their attack power was already being multiplied by their mark level each level was a much larger increase in dps than might be expected. For now, all those types now have the same number of shots that the mkIII versions used to have.
  • Those types with bonuses against turrets have had those bonuses reduced; Flak guardians in particular will do much less damage against turrets as they're supposed to be the bane of mobile lightly-armored stuff, not everything that has the audacity to exist. Guardians are still very effective vs turrets (particularly mkI turrets) and are intended to be so.
  • The artillery guardian's base range reduced from 25000 + 4000*mk to 30000 + 1000*mk.
  • Laser guardian reload time from 2sec => 4sec, shots-per-salvo from 19 = > 11, attack power from 400*mk => 1600*mk. This makes them even more effective against armored targets (already having 500*mk armor-piercing).

• Fortress balancing to deal with ineffectiveness vs. armored targets and stuff with high bonuses vs UltraHeavy:
  • Reload time from 3sec => 6sec.
  • Shots-per-salvo from 60/80/100 => 30/40/50.
  • Attack power from 2000/3500/5000 => 8000/14000/20000.
  • Health from 2,800,000/4,800,000/8,800,000 => 4,000,000/8,000,000/12,000,000.

• Fixed a bug preventing the galaxy-map helper-window from switching out of displaying the last find-mode target. Also changed the find-mode text to reflect that left clicking empty space ends it, rather than right-clicking empty space.

• Decreased the difficulty of the player-adjacent Mark IV planet in the intermediate tutorial.

• Fixed a bug where Youngling Commando MkIIIs were not scaling with the unit cap.
  • Thanks to cpunch for the report.

• The license keys, logo, and general programming hooks for the upcoming expansion pack AI War: Light of the Spire are now in place.

• Various AI types are now disabled based on the current options in the lobby.
  • If an AI belongs to a specific expansion, it is now disabled if that expansion is disabled in the LOBBY, not just in the overall License Keys / Expansions setting for the game itself.
  • If Mines are disabled, so is the Mine Enthusist.
  • If Starships are disabled, so is the Starfleet Commander.
  • If Heavy Defense is disabled, so is the Fortress Baron.
  • If Teleporting is disabled, so is the Teleporter Turtle.
  • If Parasites are disabled, so are the Technologist Parasite and Feeding Parasite.
  • If Cloaking is disabled, so are the Camoflager, the Counter Spy, the Shadow Master, and the Stealth Master.
  • If the Astro Trains AI Plot is disabled for either player, then those players cannot be a Train Master.
  • Thanks to Folket for suggesting.

• When the AI Type that would be selected is unavailable (due to options being changed as above, for instance), it now defaults to Random Moderate/Easier instead.

• When the player or AI colors would be set to nothing in the lobby based on their old values not being available, it now sets them to the first entry in the list instead.

• Two new expansion-3-only AI types have been added: Vanilla and Everything.
  • Vanilla is just a basic AI with no special abilities or extra ship unlocks, whil Everything has ALL of the fleet ships unlocked.
  • There are also the attendant six achievements associated with these, also.
  • Note that as preorders haven't quite yet started for the third expansion, these are currently inaccessible in the game.

• Fixed a rare bug that could cause the lobby to draw without the planets actually showing, while throwing a lot of exceptions, upon the second or third run of the program (but not always!). This seems to only have happened if the players were viewing the galaxy map when they exited out of the game, and possibly only if they were hovering over a plant at the time.
  • Thanks to unclean, vonkolberg, and Spikey00 for reporting.

• Hopefully fixed a rare AI Assertions bug that could be caused by a "race condition" of sorts when starting a new game or restarting the AI thread.
  • Thanks to NickAragua for reporting the last batch of them.

• If the dreaded pthread_getschedparam error is encountered on OSX, normally this means a crash is imminent within 30 seconds or so if the player does not disable their sound first.
  • We've been attempting many things to solve this problem, and still will be hunting for it, but as a temporary salve we've now made it so that when this error is encountered it will AUTOMATICALLY disable the sound for the player and shows them a message advising them to save their game and restart the program asap.
  • It also now logs some extra information about the state of their program to hopefully aid in actually fixing the root cause of this.
  • It also stops further images, music, and similar from being loaded, as they could also trigger the same crash and the player really needs to restart, anyway.

• Since the 4.0 switch, the "Automatically Check for Updates" settings option was doing nothing. Now it properly disabled automatic update checks.

(Released November 1st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.022

• Put in some more sanity checks that would hopefully prevent missing image or sound files from impacting game stability on OSX (if that is what was happening).

• The error file writing has now been centralized, so that if error files can't be written it no longer crashes the game.
  • Additionally, if any error file is larger than 2MB before the new error occurs, it now deletes the entire old error file and starts again (if it can). This keeps the game from generating gargantuan error files in the case of a serial error that might occur.
  • Additionally, if the error file is unable to be written, it now logs itself to the console log instead.
  • And finally, when errors are encountered in-game they are now rendered as local text messages to the player (not their contents, just their error name). Thus players actually know when errors happen, rather than them being a bit too silent.
  • They also now ALL include the game version number as part of their error, which a few previously did not do.

• All of the Unity GUI texture-drawing methods are now wrappered in a much more robust error-avoiding central call. If this was the cause of any instability on the OSX side, it should now be resolved.

• Added a new "Left Mouse <=> Right Mouse" AnyTime KeyBind (defualts to None on windows, defaults to LeftApple on a mac), for people who were having problems getting the normal ctrl+left = right logic on a mac one-button mouse.

(Released October 29th, 2010)