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.

This document is the abbreviated, organized version of the full release notes (here).

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.

AI Updates

• Reworked the CPA formula to be more aggressive on higher difficulties, since it's been sadly anemic lately.
  • Also added cpa-size calculations to the wave logs, when advanced logging is enabled.

• Removed a "go for the command station over everything else when AI" behavior from a number of units, including:
  • Leech Starships.
  • Flagships.
  • Zenith Starships.
  • Spire Starships.
  • Riot Starships.

• Barracks are now seeded on some AI planets at the start of the game (and retroactively into old saves):
  • The higher the difficulty, the more planets get them.
  • The higher the difficulty, the more ships in them.
  • None are placed closer than 3 hops from a human homeworld, to not be too cruel.
  • These serve two purposes:
    • Making it far less likely that the AI will simply not have enough ships for a CPA, while still letting players whittle away at "the reserve" if they want to.
    • Making the AI's defensive response to the loss of a planet (with a barracks on it) something more of an event.

• AI planets now pick a primary, secondary, and tertiary type of ship to focus their reinforcements on.
  • It's not purely random, sometimes it picks ships that fit certain roles.
  • When picking a new reinforcement ship for the central pulse or a non-special-forces guard-post-pulse, it has a 10% chance to pick any available ship like usual, and a 90% chance to pick one of its focus types. When picking a focus type, it has 3 times as much chance to pick the primary as the secondary, and 3 times as much chance to pick the secondary as the tertiary. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry about it.
  • Whenever the AIs unlock new ship types due to AI progress, all AI planets "reroll" their focus types.

• The AI now has a "strategic reserve" it can deploy to defend critical planets (the homeworld, the core worlds, and the superterminal world; though it still holds onto most of it when defending the latter two) and pulls back up (off the board) if the attack goes away.
  • Reserve ships are basically just normal mkV fleet ships, but they are not allowed to leave the planet so they can't be easily baited to their doom.
  • The reserve starts at zero and increases periodically, so it can be whittled away.
  • The max size of the reserve and its increase rate are proportional to the difficulty of the AI player in question (each AI has its own reserve) and AIP. On Diff 7 with non-insane AIP it's pretty tame. Higher up, it gets more intense.
  • If you're curious about the numbers, with advanced logging on they go into the special forces log (since the concept is somewhat similar, and didn't seem to need a separate log; might change that).
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic and others who voted on this poll for inspiring this change (more coming eventually in response to that, for that matter).

• AI Special Forces:
  • Now get periodic extra spawns (in addition to the usual trickle from reinforcements) if under a "special forces population cap" determined by difficulty, AIP, etc.
    • The spawns are spread out among all special forces posts (and special forces guardians) in the galaxy, except those in non-AI territory. Each post in non-AI territory instead increases the special-forces-population-cap by about 5%. So there's a reason to kill them, in tension with the +1 AIP from killing them.
    • If you're curious about the math, etc, turn on Advanced Logging and check SpecialForcesLogicLog.txt in your RuntimeData directory after the game has run for a bit. There's some minor spoilers in there about what ships each AI has, but nothing you probably won't find out looking at a few AI planets anyway.
  • Will now rally to defend an AI planet that is under significant attack and at least mildly important (AI Homeworld, core world, or a planet with a CSG, ARS, Advanced Factory, Super Terminal, or Broken Golem on it, giving priority to HWs/core-worlds).
  • Now keep the special-forces flag even when they have encountered the enemy, so that rallying to a planet does not just dump all the special forces there as normal threat.
  • When not rallying to defend a planet, will select a staging planet about 3 hops deep into AI territory and rally there until an eligible AI planet is attacked.
  • To prevent a player's first attack from running into several hundred AI ships out for blood, as entertaining as it was during testing, special forces ships are no longer seeded during the initial map seeding.

• Since "make the threatballs fish or cut bait" was #1 on the second round of the 6.0 poll:
  • Threat ships behave as they used to for about 30 minutes after being freed, but after that they are switched to an alternate "Threat Fleet" behavior that is somewhat similar to the new Special Forces mechanic.
    • Note: this only happens on Difficulty 6+, as it's not the AI getting anything extra, it's just behaving more intelligently (in theory) with what it has.
  • If an AI homeworld or core world is under attack, the threat fleet will rally to defend it.
  • Otherwise, if it sees an accessible non-AI planet with a significant human presence that it thinks it can take out, it goes to attack that (it will still pool up at the entry wormhole in some cases, until enough of them are there to pass the threshold, so they don't march in to the grinder one-by-one).
  • Otherwise, it picks a planet in AI territory to hang out at until either of the two above conditions are met.
  • If a carrier is spontaneously formed from ships that have a significant threat-fleet population, the carrier (and anything it spawns) is also considered threat-fleet.
  • When a special forces alarm post is triggered it converts all special forces in the galaxy directly into threat-fleet, and then blows up the alarm post (not causing AIP, unless it was triggered because it was shot to death).
  • For the curious who have advanced logging on, the target-planet selection process is logged in the special forces log file.

• Fixed a relatively longstanding bug where AIPerPlanetShipCap and AIPerGuardPostShipCap were generally not being enforced when loading a game (either just-starting or loading later).

• Fixed a bug where hybrids were... basically completely broken. Sigh. The "don't let hybrids rebuild modules if they've recently been damaged" code was inverted in such a way that they could never build modules. And because they could never get modules, they were never satisfied that they were ready to go attack or defend or whatever.

General Large Gameplay Additions

Energy System Rework

• The motivation here:
  • The previous energy system was settled on after a series of different models were tried, and has been around for over 2 years, and has served pretty well.
  • But there were a number of problems pointed out by players over the years, the most bothersome being:
    • There's significant motive to maintain as close-to-zero positive net energy balance because energy costs metal+crystal per second and a positive net energy balance provides no real benefit.
      • A positive balance did protect against having your forcefields shut off in case of losing a reactor, but that could be easily protected against by a big pile of low-powered reactors that you can bring up as needed; or you can go low-power a hundred spider turrets, or whatever.
    • And maintaining that low-wasted-energy state involved _tons_ of micro. A couple of "automated energy hamster" hotkeys were added to greatly reduce that micro (by making the "low-power least efficient 'on' reactor" and "power-on most efficient 'off' reactor" operations a single keystroke instead of minutes of scrolling and clicking), but that was really just a bandaid.
  • Many people have requested automated energy management as a solution to all this, but whenever the game is simulating something that it then turns around and plays optimally without your involvement... that means something is wrong. In this genre, anyhow.
  • Thanks to Cyborg and other players for making this point, and being patient as we tried to find a better model.

• The overall result is that the energy/econ game should actually be easier, unless you were relying on low-efficiency reactors or low-powering tons of stuff to make ends meet. In those cases it shouldn't be much harder.
  • But please let us know if the new model really messes you up in some way, or if you have other feedback. It's not like this model can't be changed, it just seemed a definite step in the right direction from where we were.
  • If you're curious about the comparison math, check out this post: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,11031.msg110117.html#msg110117
  • Anyway, on to the specific changes:

• Removed the Energy Reactors (all of them, MkI, MkII, MkIII).

• Added the "Energy Collector", which is like the energy reactors were except:
  • Produces 150,000 energy.
    • For reference, in the previous model an EnergyI+EnergyII+EnergyIII produced 125,000.
  • No ongoing m+c cost.
    • For reference, in the previous model an EnergyI+EnergyII+EnergyIII cost 57m+57c per second to run.
  • Can only build one per planet per player.
  • Output scales up with that player's number of homeworlds (to scale up for the extra stuff multi-HW players can build, similar to how reactors used to do it but without spamming lots of them).
  • Cannot be low-powered (there'd be no point).

• Added the "Matter Converter", which is like the energy reactors were except:
  • Produces 50,000 energy.
  • Costs 100m+100c per second to run.
  • No construction cap, and also no efficiency penalty for stacking.
    • Yes, this does mean that for now it's best to just pile these all up in a defensible place (much like manufactories); that will probably change in the future but probably not through an efficiency penalty.
  • Cannot be low-powered, since the main point of this rework is to avoid "player-time-tax" micro.
    • This can still result in mid-battle micro if you just lost a collector or whatever and need to build another converter, but that's real in-game costs at a critical moment rather than the only difference between optimal and sloppy play being how much wall-clock-time you personally want to spend "making change for a dollar" throughout the game.
  • In general, these are very inefficient compared to the old reactors, but more efficient than deeply-stacked low-efficiency reactors. The idea is that the collectors replace the output you used to get from normal-efficiency reactors, and the converters fill the role of the low-efficiency reactor piles.

• Putting units in low-power mode now no longer reduces their energy use.
  • Again: removing the motive to micro stuff for energy purposes is one of the driving motivations here.
  • Renamed "Low Power mode" to "Stand Down mode", since it's no longer for the purpose of reducing energy.
  • The mechanic for reducing energy use in stand-down mode is still there, just unused. It may be used for golems or stuff like that later, we'll see.

• Removed energy costs from Human Home Settlement and Cryogenic Pod structures, since you can't low-power the settlements anymore (and 8000e a pop isn't much fun in a tight early-game situation).

• Removed the auto-build-energy-reactors controls, and added toggles at the galaxy-level and planet-level for autobuilding collectors, and sliders at the galaxy-level and planet-level for autobuilding converters.

• Added new slider to galaxy-wide per-player-controls screen: Energy Buffer To Maintain
  • If this is set above zero, the game will try to maintain that amount of "buffer" energy above zero. A few examples:
    • Docks will not build ships that would take you below the buffer amount.
    • Ships will not be reclaimed if it would take you below the buffer amount.
    • Broken Golems will not be activated if it would take you below the buffer amount.
  • This can be restrictive, but it can also help if you're deliberately trying to keep all your defenses operational in the event of the AI destroying one or more of your energy producing units.
  • Note that this will not stop you from scrapping energy producing units (however low that may take your net energy), so be careful.
    • This is because going negative energy never stopped scrapping before, so that part wasn't changed.
  • Thanks to chemical_art for the suggestion.

• When upgrading saves from 5.039 and earlier:
  • For all EnergyI, EnergyII, and EnergyIII units:
    • If that player already has an Energy Collector on that planet, the reactor is replaced by a Matter Converter.
    • Otherwise, the reactor is replaced by an Energy Collector.
  • After that, while the player has > 60,000 spare energy and any remaining Matter Converters:
    • Scrap a Matter Converter on the planet with the most remaining Matter Converters controlled by that player.
  • The result should be that:
    • If you had a positive energy balance before this version, you will have a positive energy balance when you load the save in 5.040+.
    • It won't give you a lot of Matter Converters you don't need.
    • You'll still want to look at your energy situation and make adjustments for the new model. Particularly if this version-upgrade logic somehow messes up in your case ;)

• The automated energy hamsters have taken off without giving notice, but we suspect they're on vacation in Bermuda.

• In case you were wondering, all the tooltips and relevant tutorial components have been updated for the new model, but please let us know if we missed something.

Performance Improvements

• Backported the draw order sorting from AVWW after all. This should help with the performance of lots of shots, lines, forcefields, or similar being on the screen at the same time. Or far zoom icons for ships, for that matter. It won't help for the ships themselves when you are very zoomed in, but that's comparably rarer.

• Removed the usage of Graphics.DrawMesh (which helped performance in AVWW, but seemed to harm performance in AI War for some people) in favor of Graphics.DrawMeshNow (which is what we've been using in AI War up until the last couple of releases). If you were seeing performance problems in the last few versions, please let us know if you continue to do so.

• Added a memory optimization to the aggregate-targeting system to only initialize the data structures as it needs them rather than all up front. This may cause some slowdown when fighting on a planet for the first time or with a bunch of new ship types at once, etc, but in general that shouldn't be too bad and will "work itself out" during the early phase of a battle.
  • Memory had been pretty ok, but every time we add new ship types that's more memory footprint all around so it was good to counterbalance that a bit.

• Removed the sprite pooling, including the sprite pooling option in the settings menu, and greatly improved both RAM use and CPU load with this and related underlying functions.

• In particular, improved the batching of things like destination lines, ship-to-ship beams, and so forth. These should now perform better than they did before we even started the backporting (which then caused a performance hit on these operations).

• Fixed a longstanding (since March 2011) bug where several per-unit computations were being done every frame instead of every 6 or so frames as designed.

Interface Improvements

• Added "Line Place" context menu option for when you open the context menu (defaults to alt+right-click) while you have the build menu open and an item selected for direct placement.
  • From the line-place menu instructions:
    • Step 1: Click where you want one end of the line segment to be. This line segment doesn't actually set the final location of anything, Instead it tells the game the length and angle of the segment.
    • Step 2: Click where you want the other end of the line segment to be.
    • Step 3: Specify the maximum number of units you want to place below (left click the number to increase, right click to decrease, and the usual keys for multiplying by 5, 10, or 50), pick whether you want a packed line (good for mines), and then left-click where you want to place the units.
  • The main use case in mind for this was efficient use of mines, but can also be helpful for many defensive emplacements, or simply for aesthetic appeal. The interface could be cleaner but this is what we had time for right now.

• Added "Reserved" slot type in the lobby; just makes it so that that player is in the game at the start even if there's no human to fill the spot. Doesn't really do anything right now, though possibly it would allow creating singleplayer Multi-HW games that play like normal MP games, but the other player names would probably be "???".

• Invincible modules now don't show some of the irrelevant data about them (health, armor, certain immunities, etc).

• The textbox improvements from AVWW have been backported to AI War.
  • Note that since we can't backport the entire AVWW GUI at this time (AI War has some controls that are simply not compatible with the AVWW-style GUI at the moment), there may still be some wonkiness with the textboxes in some cases. If you see any that are reproducible, please do let us know.
  • However, in the most-annoying-cases of things like the chat box losing focus, the hope is that these changes have fixed that issue. Knock on wood!

• Backported the ability to do hue shifts via shader from AVWW.

• Updated the description of the Counter Dark Matter Turrets to be more clear about how they actually work.

• Added a "Nebula Intensity" slider to the graphics tab of the settings window, that controls how faded-out the background nebulae are.
  • The default is about 80% of the intensity in the previous version; if you want it back there you can turn it all the way up.

• Fixed several issues where units with "infinite engine health" were not being handled consistently.
  • For example, a neinzul enclave starship had an internal engine health value high enough to be listed as "infinite" but not high enough to actually refuse to set engine damage to a value > 0. This could lead to protracted (and expensive, in previous versions) periods of trying to repair engine damage.

• When human ships are told to go through a wormhole and they aren't able to because of a black hole machine, it will now tell the owner in a chat line that this happened (the chat window isn't visible on the galaxy map, but it's a step in the right direction

• The Z+X keybind combo now shows NPC/minor-faction ranges as well as enemy ranges.

• Reduced the distance-into-AI-territory super-hybrids try to plant dyson antagonizers by 1, hopefully making them less excruciating to find.

• Fixed a bug where super-hybrid logic for determining which planets were the right distance into AI territory for a dyson antagonizer was considering nebulae to be non-AI territory.

• The following units are now omitted from control group selection since control groups for them are just part of getting newly constructed ships assigned to the right control group and moved to the right spot:
  • All human intragalactic warp gates.
  • Human Rebel Colony (base game).
  • Spire Refugee Colony (Fallen Spire).
  • Spire Shipyard (Fallen Spire).
  • All splinter-faction construction facilities (Ancient Shadows)

• Spirecraft Rams, Martyrs, Siege Towers, Ion Blaster, and Implosion Artillery can now be placed into stand-down mode to keep them from firing (or, in the case of a ram, blowing itself up; thankfully martyrs already didn't try to do that automatically).

• Spirecraft Ram far-zoom icons now rotate according to their facing.

• Added new toggle to the Galaxy-Wide tab of the CTRLS window: Brave Cloaker Starships.
  • If this toggle is checked, your Cloaker Starships will suppress their normal self-preservation instincts to avoid being included in a selection with military ships.
  • Note: this applies to the cloaker starships of the player who's brave-cloaker-starships toggle is checked, regardless of who is trying to control them in a multiplayer game with Allow Team Control on. Allied Cloaker Starships will still be wimps unless their owners check this toggle too.

• Removed the wave-calc rule that was preventing more than 1 of a specific starship type from being added; normally it wouldn't make much difference but it was impairing the Spire Hammer, Heroic, Starfleet Commander, and Extreme Raider AIs from scaling up their extra wave components.

• Made the wave alert-text logic better handle mixed-tech waves: if it's 100 mkI fighters and 100 mkII fighters, it will now stay "Fighters" instead of just enemy ships as if it were truly a mixed wave.

• Fixed military tutorial to expect you to build half your mark I cap of the ARS-granted unit, instead of 20, since 20 could be higher than the cap.

• The Galaxy-Wide, Per-Planet, and Per-Control-Group tabs of the CTRLS window now notify you if you're about to discard unsaved changes when you try to close the window, switch to another tab, or switch to a different target for the same tab (for the per-planet and per-control-group ones).

• Added a "Control-Group-Specific" tab to the CTRLS window, similar to the "Planet-Specific" tab:
  • Instead of selecting a planet on this tab, you select one of your 10 control groups from a dropdown.
  • Currently the tab has:
    • Auto-FRD Military
      • When this is set to "On", all your military units in this control group will be set to Free-Roaming Defender. Note: certain ship types (like fortresses that multi-repair, and zenith siege engines) never auto-FRD.
      • When this is set to "Default", the global Auto-FRD toggle will govern.
      • When this is "Off", this behavior will not happen for ships in this control group even if the global Auto-FRD toggle is on.
      • If a ship is in multiple control groups with conflicting settings for this, the priority order is as follows: Off, On, Default.
    • Auto-FRD Engineers
      • When this is set to "On", all your engineer/rebuilder units in this control group will be set to Free-Roaming Defender.
      • When this is set to "Default", the global Auto-FRD toggle will govern.
      • When this is "Off", this behavior will not happen for ships in this control group even if the global Auto-FRD toggle is on.
      • If a ship is in multiple control groups with conflicting settings for this, the priority order is as follows: Off, On, Default.
    • Auto Kite
      • When this is set to "On", all your non-melee, non-sniper ships in this control group will automatically pull away from their target so that they are (effective range - 500) range units away. Note: certain ship types (like fortresses that multi-repair, and zenith siege engines) never kite, and certain other ship types (like raptors) always kite.
      • When this is set to "Default", the global Auto-Kite threshold will govern.
      • When this is "Off", this behavior will not happen for ships in this control group even if the global Auto-Kite threshold would apply to them.
      • If a ship is in multiple control groups with conflicting settings for this, the priority order is as follows: Off, On, Default.

• Added a mouseover tooltip to the game clock in the upper-left corner that displays:
  • "Game Time", the clock that's already there, which speeds up or slows down with the simulation and stops while the game is paused.
  • "Local Time", as in real-world, according to your computer.
  • "Real Time Spent In Game", which is the amount of real time you've spent playing that particular game (i.e. that particular savegame), and ignores simulation speed and pausing, etc.

• Command station remains can now be rebuilt even when energy is negative, to avoid the "you need power to get power" catch-22.

• Removed the initial prompt to import settings from 3.x, since that hasn't been current in over two years.

• Now when you give a group-movement movement command to a group containing only teleporting units, it ignores the group-movement part so that the teleporters do not use their normal engines.

• Ship Design Window: changed the positioning of the list of available modules for the selected slot so that it's always the same horizontal distance from the right edge of the window. Previously the "floating" behavior sometimes made sense but more recently it's just made it look buggy in some cases.

• Fixed a textual error in the captive human settlement description.

• Fixed a typo in the kill-second-AI-homeworld objective text that made it nonsensical. It had said you had to destroy the CSG network Second instead of first... real cute; obviously the AI shouldn't have been assigned to proofread that part.

• Previously, when your ships exploded anywhere in the galaxy it played the same audio cue. Now if they are on a different planet from your view, it plays a much more muted, distant-sounding, quieter explosion sound effect.

• Updated tooltips for:
  • Armored Golem.
  • Artillery Golem.
  • Black Widow Golem.
  • Cursed Golem.
  • Regenerator Golem.
  • Hive Golem.
  • Botnet Golem.
  • Military Command Stations.
  • Captive Human Settlements.
  • Fallen Spire lobby tooltip

• Fixed a bug where the special-move context menu's catch-right-clicks option was basically failing to do anything. Now when it is toggled on it properly re-interprets right clicks outside the menu as "set destination to clicked point and then execute"

• Made it possible to bind Mouse2, Mouse3, Mouse4, Mouse5, or Mouse6 to the primary key of a KeyBinding. For reference, Mouse2 is the middle mouse button. Mouse0 is left-click, Mouse1 is right-click, and both are excluded from this due to being used in many other ways by the main input code. Mouse3-6 don't exist on most mice, but are available for those who have them.
  • One example use of this is to bind OpenDefaultContextMenu to Mouse2 (middle mouse)

• Fixed several minor issues with the tutorials, in preparation for 6.0.

• Added a welcome message (referencing the tutorial and the "Beginner Game" setup script) to the lobby for the first time it is opened under a given profile (this is suppressed if the game detects that the profile has already started playing a real game at least once).

Graphical Improvements

• Non-square images are now supported by the game (more backporting from AVWW).

• Sprite dictionaries are now supported by the game (again more backporting from AVWW).

• All of the explosion effects in the game now use sprite dictionaries, which makes the initial game load quite a bit faster as it has to load 140ish fewer files (though the amount of data is roughly the same, it's still faster).

• Fixed the close-zoom image for the AI Core Neinzul Spawner Guard Post having a height that wasn't a power of 2.
  • This would only impacted you if you were all the way zoomed in on one of these, and would have led to it looking stretched or (on older graphics card) looking gibberish-like.
  • But in the recent backporting we added some extra sanity checks that catch this when the player tries to look at it.

• An all-new, much higher-quality starfield/nebulae background effect is now drawn behind planets. These are vastly more varied and interesting, and require a similar amount of CPU/GPU processing to render as the old ones did.

• The game no longer scrolls the nebulae at the start of the game, instead giving you a really good static look at a really interesting nebulae background.

• A completely new method for rendering the planets has been put in place, and they are now more a part of the background starfield/nebula than anything else.
  • As part of this, 14 of the pre-existing planets have been kept although scaled down, and 40 new planet graphics by Eldon Harris have been added to the game. It makes quite a difference when combined with the new nebulae!

• The graphics of planets 3, 8, 11, and 16 have been substantially improved so that they have better borders and look more convincing as planets.

• Fixed a graphical bug with the border drawn around barracks icons in some contexts.

New Ships

• Added new type of AI Eye: the Parasite Eye.
  • Has same trigger conditions.
  • Instead of spawning ships it powers on (it's in stand-down except when actively triggered) and starts firing. You really don't want that to happen. Multiple hyper-powerful railcannons that reclaim what they hit.
    • Standard "what can be reclaimed" rules apply.
    • Has the extra flag to prevent it from firing on non-reclaimable targets thanks to a test where multiple starships were dying every two seconds.
    • Note that this has a kill rate about 1/2 that of the Ion Eye, so the overall rate of "evening the field" should be similar.
    • In case you're curious, the results are not zombies and can be re-reclaimed if you're so inclined.

• Added new type of AI Eye: the Ion Eye.
  • Has same trigger conditions.
  • When seeding an eye, the game has an equal chance of seeding each type of eye, and only one eye is seeded per planet that's supposed to get one.
  • But when triggered, instead of spawning ships it powers on (it's in stand-down except when actively triggered) and starts firing. You don't want that to happen. It has the firepower of four MkV Ion Cannons.

• A new Ancient Shadows bonus ship class has been added: Neinzul Scapegoat (Mark I-V).
  • Mature Neinzul organism without the short lifespan of a Youngling. Capable combatant in its own right, but also sacrifices itself to regenerate military fleet ships on the same planet when they take critical damage.

• Another new Ancient Shadows bonus ship class has been added: Spire Railcluster (Mark I-V).
  • Large Spire fleet ship mounting multiple short-range railcannons. Highly effective against very small ships.

• New Ancient Shadows Bonus Ship Type: Zenith Reprocessor:
  • A larger, specialized version of the Acid Sprayer, this ship's shots actually "metabolize" the enemy target. When the target dies, a percentage of the target's metal+crystal construction cost will be granted to the player that did the most reprocessing damage to it. The more reprocessing damage the ship has taken, the larger the percentage of resources reprocessed.

• New Ancient Shadows Bonus Ship Type: Zenith Siege Engine:
  • Moderately large vessel built around an outsized plasma siege cannon. The ship does not have enough power to both move and keep the weapon online, so it must remain immobile for a full reload cycle before it can fire. When it fires, however, the enemy will feel it.

• Added new Ancient Shadows bonus ship: Spire Corvette.
  • A starship-sized vessel developed by retrofitting the smallest Imperial Spire combat design with human technology. Has a moderately powerful photon lance, but can also mount a small number of modules.
  • Built from the SCRV tab of the Starship Constructor.

• Added new Ancient Shadows bonus ship: Saboteur.
  • Fires hostile nanites at enemy ships. Unlike reclamation nanites, these focus on overloading the target's power systems with the goal of causing it to explode violently. This target does not go critical until its health is reduced to zero normally, but once that happens it will explode and damage up to 40 nearby friendly (to the exploding ship) units. The damage done to each victim of the explosion is based on how much damage the exploding ship took from overload-nanites, and generally cannot exceed one-tenth the maximum health of the exploding ship.

• Added new Ancient Shadows bonus ship type: Youngling Firefly.
  • Small, shortlived ship that builds up a charge as it successfully attacks other units. When it dies it explodes violently to damage up to 20 nearby enemy units. The explosion damge done to each victim starts at about the same strength as the Firefly's normal shot, but increases with the charge the ship has accumulated, up to a maximum of 20 times that.

• Added a new "Mini-Fortress" unit to the SUP tab of the command-station/mobile-builder buy menu (this is a base-game unit, not tied to an expansion).
  • These are basically a MkI fortress on a 1/10th scale (stat-wise), and you can only build 2 per planet (per player, also scales with multiple homeworlds), but there's no galaxy-wide cap so putting them on your satellite worlds does not take away any cap your main defenses could be using.
  • Unlocking these costs 1000 knowledge (for reference, MkI forts cost 3000 knowledge to unlock, and provide 25x as much firepower at cap for your main line but not the per-planet-cap flexibility of these).
  • These don't have the penalty vs polycrystal (or scout) hulls, making them actually able to deal with bombers.

Ship Logic Updates

• Ships with engine damage now automatically repair their own engines, such that it takes a bit over four minutes to go from 0% engine-health to 100% engine-health.
  • Basically, until now it's been too easy to long-term-disable AI ships via engine damage. Not many players abused this thoroughly, but some definitely did, to hilarious (and disappointing, from a challenge perspective) results.
  • But tactical usage should still be very viable for kiting around a planet, spreading out an incoming attack, etc.

• The logic for when a carrier is popped early now tries a lot harder to produce something similar to what's actually in the carrier, and tries to avoid exo-like spawning logic.
  • Regardless of what it winds up spawning, it no longer scales up with difficulty level (since the ship numbers that led to the generation of the carrier were already a result of difficulty level).
  • If its contents fit under a certain threshold (under 150 if there are < 2000 AI ships on the planet, under 50 if there are < 3000 AI ships on the planet, etc), it just spawns whatever is in the carrier.
  • Else, it promotes all triangle/bonus fleetships in the carrier to max mark (mark 5 for most types, mark 4 for some) and scales down the quantity accordingly (mkI to mkV divides quantity by 5, etc).
  • If that's still not enough to get the quantity under the threshold, it divides the quantities in the carrier by some number (determined by how badly over-count it still is) and uses that extra strength to add mkV guardians to the carrier instead. Since a single mkV guardian is worth about the same as ~2.2 full caps of mkI fighters, that's pretty good compression.
  • If that's somehow still not enough, it falls back on the exo-like population it's used in the past, but without the extra multiplier from difficulty.
  • For the curious, having advanced logging on when a carrier does early-pop logic like this will generate a log entry in the corresponding log file in your RuntimeData directory, explaining the computation.

• Engineers have had a "what to assist" logic overhaul such that:
  • If is Prefer-Non-Military toggle is on, and one is military and the other is not, prefer the non-military one.
  • If one has more currently assisting engineers than the other, prefer the one with less.
  • If the repairer is not a teleporter and the difference in distance to each unit is larger than about 4000 range units, prefer the nearer.
    • Also, distance is now considered zero if the target is already within range, which helps a lot because previously it was masking other considerations.
  • If one object is a damaged irreplaceable unit and the other is not, prefer the damaged irreplaceable.
  • If one object is in stand-down and the other is not, prefer the one not in stand-down.
  • If one object's remaining-health-percent is less than half the other's, prefer the lower-health one.
    • This was being considered before (it always went for the lowest percent-health), but only by teleporting repairers.
  • If one object has taken more than 25% engine damage and the other has not, prefer the engine-damaged one.
  • If one object's metal+crystal cost is more than twice the other's, prefer the more expensive one.
  • Thanks to Wanderer and the other voters for inspiring these changes.

• Human-player teleporting units now use normal engines when group-moving.
  • Along with this, increased the normal-engine speed of all teleporting units to the speed of a fighter, for those lower than that

• Advanced Fabricators and Fabricators now use the same "don't put this near a wormhole" logic as human home command stations.

• Removed energy cost from Logistics and Military command stations, since the cost was pretty minor and the units certainly aren't in danger of overshadowing the econ station at this point, and the costs were interfering with the logic for rebuilding their remains in some cases.
  • Also removed it from warp-jammer stations, but since that wasn't so minor also increased that station's direct per-second m+c cost.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where attack-move units with no other orders would auto-target stuff that should not be auto-targeted (wormhole guard posts, AIP-on-death structures, etc) if the unit in question shot them first.

• Fixed a bug where Spire Blades, Spire Minirams, and Spire Rams would not actually automatically die (but just self-damage by some amount) when attacking.

Balance Updates

• Grenade Launcher grenade explosion radius from 200/300/400/500/600 => flat 500.

• Flak grenade (from guardians and turrets) radius from 300/350/400/450/500 => flat 500

• AI Guardians energy cost from 500*mk => 1250*mk; this is basically irrelevant (AI players don't have an energy model, really), but does help Impulse Reaction Emitters hurt them, giving the IRE another situation in which they are useful that isn't dependent on superweapons or something like that being enabled.

• Shield Bearers (the normal ones; this was already true of the spirecraft ones) are now immune to insta-kill.

• All non-shield modules are now immune to armor boosting (they're invincible, it'd be a waste).

• AI Carriers:
  • Effective range from 6000 => 3000.
  • Base Health from 3M*mk => 2M*mk.
  • Thanks to Wanderer for inspiring these changes.

• MkII+ Basic, Laser, MLRS, and Heavy Beam Cannon turrets now have radar dampening equal to their range minus 1000 to prevent them being inevitably alpha-striked by really substantial waves.

• The Zenith Trader has finally yielded to the threat of sanctions and now only sells no-AIP-on-death versions of structures to the AI. The toys will still annoy you when the AI gets them (indeed, a new toy has been added to the AI-only list to maintain annoyance equilibrium) but the Trader will no longer be an indirect source of AIP.

• In honor of it winning the latest worst-unit poll, Zenith Reserves:
  • AIP cost on death from 5*mk => 1*mk.
  • Amount of ships granted increased roughly 33%.

• In honor of coming in second in the most recent worst-unit poll, the Decloaker:
  • In general, moving this from a mobile tachyon unit with outdated stats to a mobile tachyon unit with roughly mkI-starship stats.
    • Note the tachyon range of 20k was already huge, no buff seemed necessary there.
    • Also note that it isn't really a starship from the perspective of starship disassemblers, etc, it's just beefed up because it has a ship cap of 4.
  • No longer has the IsBlind flag.
  • Now has cloaking.
  • Base Damage-per-shot from 36k => 50k.
  • Seconds-per-salvo from 10 => 2.
  • Effective Attack Range from 18k => 8k (the only reason they had such a long range was that we hadn't revisited this one since the last major range changes).
  • Base Health from 40k => 2M (again, in the general range of mkI starships).
  • Base Energy Use from 100 => 1000.
  • Base Metal Cost from 5000 => 10000.
  • Base Crystal Cost from 7500 => 20000.
  • Now has most common-to-starship immunities.

• Captive Human Settlement, in honor of coming in third in the "worst unit" poll: AIP-on-death from 100 => 15.
  • As was understood in the discussion in the nomination/poll threads, these are supposed to be a "penalty" unit, but players had a very good point that 100 AIP was just gameshattering for something like that (rebel colonies have the same AIP-on-death, for instance).

• Spire Armor Rotter, in honor of coming in fourth in the latest "worst unit" poll:
  • The general idea is to make these pretty good combat ships in their own right, at least until armor matters more in the general case and armor rot thus means more.
  • Base Health from 14,500*mk => 23k*mk (this gives them a similar cap-health as fighters).
  • Multiplier vs UltraHeavy from 2 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs Heavy from 2 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs Polycrystal from 1 => 3.

• Microparasite, because it (like other experimentals we need to get back to) had really outdated stats:
  • In general, rebalancing these to be something like the MkV Parasite while maintaining their distinguishing characteristics (like having twice the cap and firing 4 times as fast).
  • Metal Cost from 1800 => 1400.
  • Crystal Cost from 240 => 3400.
  • Base Health from 7200 => 36k.
  • Base Armor Rating from 500 => 1500.
  • Base Damage-per-shot from 8000 => 2000.
    • Previously they had 6.4x the dps of a mkV parasite, even though they were considered mkIII! This is still 1.6x the dps of a mkV parasite.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 0 => 3000.
  • Effective Attack Range from 4600 => 6000.
  • Multiplier vs Polycrystal from 20 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Artillery from 1 => 4.

• Special Forces Guard Posts no longer count as reinforcement-warp-gates and are no longer autotargeted (by player or player-ally-minor-faction ships).
  • They still get reinforcements when their planet is reinforced, and those reinforcements use the special forces behavior, but they can no longer make a planet eligible for reinforcement all by themselves.
  • This removes the "cheese" that was possible by keeping them alive to trick the AI into reinforcing a planet with nothing but a special forces guard post on it (generally a waste).
  • With the cheese gone, there's no longer a need to make it hard to keep these alive, so the autotargeting could go away.
  • Which in turn removes the annoyance of getting +1 AIP from actions over which you did not have direct control (particularly with minor faction allies).
  • We may do something more clever with the special forces ships themselves in the future, we'll see. In the meantime these two changes seem to be a net improvement.

Core Guard Post Rebalance

• All Core Guard Posts:
  • Base Energy Cost from 500 => 10000 (doesn't matter except for IRE fire).

• Core Heavy Beam Guard Post:
  • Total base attack power (this is divided amongst all its beams) from 8M => 4M.
  • Multiplier vs Swarmer from 4 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs Refractive from 3.5 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs UltraLight from 3.25 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs Medium from 2.5 => 3.
  • Multiplier vs Heavy from 1.75 => 3.

• Core Electric Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a cap of theoretical-mark-V electric shuttles, but still only about half that power with less than a quarter of the health.
  • Can now hit a maximum of 200 units per shot
    • This is the same mechanic as the electric shuttle and it can multi-hit targets up to 5 times each if hits are left over from the first pass. So it gets more-or-less optimal DPS as long as 40 ships are in range.
  • Base Health from 6M => 12M.
  • Multiplier vs Artillery from 4 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Neutron from 2 => 1.
  • Seconds Per Salvo from 13 => 20.
  • Damage Per Shot from 3k => 50k.
  • Base Attack Range from 13k => 8k.

• Core Missile Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a cap of MkV missile frigates, but with way less durability.
  • Base Health from 6M => 18M.
  • Multiplier vs UltraLight from 8 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Medium from 6 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Light from 1 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Swarmer from 1 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Neutron from 1 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Composite from 1 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Refractive from 1 => 4.
  • Effective Attack Range from 36000 => 12000.
  • Seconds Per Salvo from 5 => 1.
  • Damage Per Shot from 80k => 200k.

• Core Sentinel Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a cap of MkV Zenith Beam Frigates, but with maybe half the power and way less durability.
  • Can now hit a maximum of 20 targets per shot.
    • Using the same mechanic as the Zenith Beam Frigate: the line attack does full damage to each target hit, but gets no compensation for not hitting the full number of targets.
  • Base Health from 3M => 18M.
  • Damage Per Shot from 4k => 100k.
  • Effective Attack Range from 9000 => 8000.
  • Multiplier vs Light from 16 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Swarmer from 8 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Neutron from 4 => 1.

• Core Leech Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a cap of MkV Parasites, but with way less durability.
    • Interestingly, the attack power was basically already spot-on.
  • Base Health from 6M => 12M.
  • Multiplier vs Medium from 3 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Neutron from 1 => 4.
  • Effective Attack Range from 5000 => 6000 (slightly further out than its radar dampening range).

• Core Zenith Bombard Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a cap of MkV Zenith Bombards, but with way less durability and about half the attack power.
  • Base Health from 6M => 12M.
  • Damage Per Shot from 60k => 900k.
  • Effective Attack Range from 53k => 34k.
  • Multiplier vs Heavy from 1.75 => 2.
  • Multiplier vs UltraHeavy from 1 => 2.
  • Multiplier vs Structural from 1 => 2.
  • Multiplier vs Swarmer from 4 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Refractive from 3.5 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs UltraLight from 3.25 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Medium from 2.5 => 1.

• Core Zenith Fortress Guard Post:
  • Was going to balance this against a cap of MkV Fighters (but without the hull-type-bonuses), but with way less durability and maybe 1/2 to 2/3rds the attack power... but it's actually already there.
  • Shot type from (default? it doesn't appear to be set?) => Flamewave.

• Core Spire Shield Guard Post:
  • Base Health from 392M => 200M.

• Core Neinzul Melee Guard Post:
  • Basically balancing this against a theoretical cap of MkV cutlasses, but with way less durability.
  • Base Health from 6M => 36M (it's a self-damaging melee unit, it needs it).
  • Base Move Speed from 30 => 44.
  • Damage Per Hit from 106k => 300k.
  • Multiplier vs Neutron from 3 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Light from 3 => 4.
  • Multiplier vs Scout from 2 => 1.
  • Multiplier vs Composite from 1 => 4.

• Core Booster Guard Post:
  • Base Health from 6M => 18M.
  • Munitions Boost and Armor Boost range from 8k => 16k.
  • Intentionally leaving the attack alone here: that's not really the point of the unit.

• Buffed reinforcements a bit in general. Judging by CPA size and other indicators since the major rework of reinforcements this has been lower than it was by a significant margin.

• When an AI gets 2 "brutal" picks for its homeworld (only happens on high difficulty), it now cannot pick 2 AI Eyes, since that's too nice.

• Previously it was very easy to keep an AI from ever reinforcing its homeworld until the very end during the assault upon it. This is generally desirable as part of the game is not stirring up that hornets nest until you've got the extermination squad in position. But the complete lack of reinforcements there may be letting that end-challenge get a little too tame against careful players. So now there's a 0.25%/0.50%/1% chance on Diffs 7+/8+/9+ (respectively) of a homeworld receiving high reinforcement priority per reinforcement pulse.

• AIP floor minimum is now 10 instead of 1.

• Data Center AIP-reduction-on-death is now reduced by 25% on Diff 8+, and by 50% on Diff 9+ (so 15 and 10, respectively). If the two AIs are different difficulties, the higher is used in this case (tried using the difficulty of the AI player that owns the data center but that leads to some display inaccuracy problems as the game is pretty used to units not having stats that vary between players).
  • Along with this, Took out the change that reduced the number of Data Centers seeded on Diff 9+ (as pointed out, this did reduce total AIP reduction available but also reduced the challenge of getting it).

• Net AIP reduction for killing all the coprocessors is now reduced by 25% on Diff 8+ and by 50% on Diff 9+ (so 45 and 30, respectively; that's 105 and 90 total reduction but killing all the coprocessors costs +60 AIP). If the two AIs are different difficulties, the higher is used in this case.

• AIP floor no longer has a cap of 300 (not that this should impact games where you were caring about AIP anyway, that requires really high total AIP to reach).

• AIP floor was previously total-AIP-gained / 5. Under Diff 8 that's still true. Now on Diff 8+ it is TotalAIP / 4, and on Diff 9+ it is TotalAIP / 3. If the two AIs are different difficulties, the higher is used in this case.
  • This effectively reduces the return on superterminal hacking since it does +1 and -2 AIP per trigger.

• Zenith Electric Bomber is now immune to insta kill, like other low-cap fleet ships.

• Spire Archives, in honor of winning our seventh "Worst Unit" poll:
  • Now try to seed on a non-home, non-core planet adjacent to an AI core planet. So taking one doesn't mean taking or alerting a homeworld, and doesn't mean taking a core world, but does mean alerting a core world (unless you claim the archive planet with a warp jammer, at least).
  • Knowledge gain rate from 1/sec => 5/sec.
    • So to get the full 9000 knowledge takes 1800 seconds = 30 minutes; can cut that down a bit by having science ships help on the first 3000 (theoretical minimum total time of 20 minutes because the science ships can't help you on the last 6000 knowledge).
  • When their planet is exhausted of all 9000 knowledge, they automatically die without causing AIP.
  • In short: instead of being literally "during the homeworld assualts" plays for knowlegde these are a mid/late-game high-risk-for-knowledge plays, but if you pull them off (holding the planet for 20-30 minutes to get all the knowledge) you get 3 planets worth of knowledge for only one planet's worth of AIP and without a permanent possible +80 AIP hanging over your head if something slips through. If you were going to take that planet anyway, all the better.

• Warheads killed by warhead interceptors no longer cause AIP-on-death.

• Spire Shield Guard Posts (the normal ones, not the Core ones), in honor of tying for second in our first "Aim The Nerfbat (AI-Side)" poll, have had their health changed from 56M*mk => 28M*mk.
  • Galactic Sandpaper Incorporated has already filed for bankruptcy.

• Spire Stealth Battleship, in honor of tying for second in our first "Aim The Nerfbat (AI-Side)" poll:
  • Radar Dampening from 8000 => 10000.
  • Base Move Speed from 18 => 16. (for reference, a fighter's is 28, this is before a variety of other calculation steps)

• The Player Home Forcefield Generator:
  • Now projects a grav well of 6600 radius (3 times its forcefield radius, 1600 more than the MkI Grav turret's radius) that allows a max speed of 8 (same as the MkI Grav turret).
  • Now projects tachyon coverage of 6600 radius (3 times its forcefield radius, 600 more than a MkIII Scout Starship).

• Since the Botnet Golem won (by a landslide) our first "aim the nerf bat" poll, a plan was set in motion. The Botnet, however, saw it coming. Pulling a koolaid-man, it busted out of its former niche into a whole new minor faction, to wit: Botnet Golem.
  • This is basically like the Broken Golems faction except:
    • It only seeds the Broken Botnet, and it only seeds one of them (Broken Golems no longer seeds any botnets, needless to say).
      • It tries to seed on a planet 4 or 5 hops from the human homeworld(s); if it can't it tries 3, 2, and then 1. This is a far more controlled distance than normal golems (which is just 3+ from human homeworlds) because it's best that the challenge of having this faction on not vary so widely as a simple 3+ distance seeding would.
    • The botnet's energy cost on Moderate went from 400k => 800k.
    • The broken-botnet's AIP-on-metamorphsis on Moderate went from 40 => 100.
    • The exo response on Hard is the same as Broken Golems, but it's separate from that so you're really getting all that pain just for the one unit.
  • Also increased the Botnet's health from 36M to 100M (still 1/5th of an Armored Golem) to make it less likely you'll lose the sole advantage granted by this faction to a silly mistake.
    • Note: the golemite AI's version of the Botnet's health is still what it was.
  • We're still very open to further balance changes; the main thing this move enabled was balancing the botnet separately from the other golems: we could have brought it down to the level of the other ones, but where's the fun in that?
    • Note: none of this affects the old saves except the change in base energy from 40k to 80k (and potentially the Moderate numbers for the Botnet will automatically go up, not sure).

• The exos from BrokenGolemsHard and SpirecraftHard are now more aggressive:
  • The threshold for the first exo of each has been doubled, which means (all else being equal) it would take twice as long to happen and be twice as powerful.
  • The accumulation (which is AIP-based, unlike Fallen Spire exos) now acts as if effective AIP is always at least 50 + (game_second/360). In other words, the minimum starts at 50 and goes up by 10 each hour (1 every six minutes).
    • This minimum stops going up at 250 (20 hours). (thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting that)
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic, Kahuna, rabican, and others for playtesting examples where even on high difficulties these exos were fairly underwhelming, at least early on.

• Golem construction costs adjusted due to the recent fix in repair cost computation (bear in mind that golems are never built, only repaired, so these numbers only impact the cost of repairing one, which jumped about 6 fold due to that fix) :
  • Armored golem from 30M+30M m+c => 10M+10M.
    • Combined with the halving of base repair costs in this release, this means that the armored golem now costs the same to repair as it used to take with engie 1s since those used to have a 6x repair multiplier. The difference is now it doesn't matter if you use MRS's or EngieIIIs except in terms of how fast it happens.
  • Artilery golem from 10M+10M => 8M+8M (lots of feedback that these are OP lately).
  • Black Widow golem from 25M+25M => 10M+10M (ditto).
  • Regenerator golem from 60M+60M => 20M+20M (note that the regenerator's post-reactivation repair cost is 10% of what it would normally be, due to an earlier change).
  • Cursed golem from 10M+10M => 3M+3M (a slight buff, but these aren't all that popular in general).
  • Hive golem from 20M+20M => 7M+7M (a slight nerf, but these are quite strong).
  • Botnet golem from 40M+40M => 20M+20M (in keeping with last version's changes, trying to make the cost of these more closely equal the benefit; let us know if this is still off)

• MkI Engineer repair multiplier from 6 => 2; this isn't because it needs a nerf but because with the repair fix people need time to adjust to how much stuff costs to repair when the math isn't bugged and it's easier to do that when the repair happens over more than a couple seconds. If this is a problem an alternate approach can be found, but our understanding is that repair _time_ (as opposed to repair cost) hasn't really been a problem for folks, but vanishing economies have been.
  • MkII Engineer still has a multiplier of 9 and MkIII still has a multiplier of 12, the idea being that if you're unlocking those you specifically want them to do things quickly

• Repair cost in general is now based off half the construction cost instead of the full construction cost.

• Repairing engines now does not cost m+c (if health is also being repaired at the same time that costs m+c).

• Spire Refugee Ship (the starship recovered in the second stage of Fallen Spire) can no longer be put in a transport, since the chase logic doesn't work right with stuff in transports and jumpships make it pretty trivial.

• The game now tries to seed human home command stations further away from wormholes and tries harder to find such a spot. This should help prevent "AI says: I have a plasma siege starship, gg" situations.

• Heroic AI type balance changes:
  • Is now considered a technologist type for the purposes of lobby logic and display (specifically, being displayed in RED), though it does not get higher tech levels than usual.
  • Its non-wave champion spawns now start at Frigate-level at tech-level 1, not Destroyer-level.

• Neinzul champion hulls are now immune to black hole machines.

• Plasma Siege Starship ship cap from 5 => 4. Most of the others here were at 4 already, and it's been pretty widely considered the best of the combat starships lately.

• Leech Starship:
  • Ship cap from 3 => 4.
  • Seconds Per Salvo from 4 => 2.
  • Shots Per Salvo from 3= > 6.
  • Base Attack Power from 30k => 2k (24k base-cap-dps, parasite has 12.25k)
    • Previously Leech Starships had nearly _five times_ the base-cap-dps of the equivalent fleet ship type (the Parasite). That parasite has 4x multipliers where the leech has none, so they don't need to be all that close, but the leech having a higher base dps than the parasite's bonus dps... no.
      • This change was done rather than buffing the parasites because the parasites seem to be reclaiming at a good rate already; further feedback on this is quite welcome.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 0 => 750*mk (same as parasite).

• Knowledge costs:
  • Flagship was 0/2000/5000.
  • Zenith Starship was 1000/2500/6000.
  • Starship Starship was 1000/2500/6000.
  • Bomber Starship was 0/5000/7000.
  • Plasma Siege Starship was 0/5000/7000.
  • Leech Starship was 0/5000/6000.
  • MkI costs (or lack thereof) unchanged.
  • MkII costs are now all 2500.
  • MkIII costs are now all 4000.
  • The idea being that you're paying for 1x/2x/3x the raw stats, with a 0/500/1000 "surcharge" for the fact that 2x health and 2x attack power is more than 2x as useful, etc.

• Health:
  • "Normal" cap-hp for a fleet ship type is about 15M (ranging from 10M to 30M), Normal for a starship type is about 22.5M (but normal cap-dps is lower).
  • Flagship from 3.75M*mk => 5M*mk (20M cap-hp).
  • Zenith from 4.5M*mk => 6M*mk (24M cap-hp).
  • Spire from 3M*mk => 4M*mk (16M cap-hp).
  • Bomber from 4.7M*mk => 7M*mk (28M cap-hp)
  • Plasma Siege unchanged at 5M*mk.
  • Leech from 3.2M*mk => 4M*mk (16M cap-hp).

• Metal+Crystal/Energy costs:
  • Cap-m+c for fleet ship types varies widely, from about 40k for fighters to about 160k for bombers even just within the triangle. Starships are supposed to be substantially more expensive than fleet ships in exchange for being easier to keep alive. Also, the econ part of the game has been a lot easier since changes to the energy system and harvesters. So targeting about 400k m+c for a mkI cap here.
  • Cap-e is more consistent for fleet ships, typically about 20k (halved for mkI types). So targeting about 40k for a mkI cap here.
  • The m+c costs listed are for mkI, mkII are 2x, mkIII are 4x. E costs do not change with mark.
  • Flagship from 40k+24k / 4k e => 60k+40k / 10k.
  • Zenith from 24k+40k / 4k e => 40k+60k / 10k.
  • Spire from 30k+34k / 4k e => 45k+55k / 10k.
  • Bomber from 80k+8k / 2k e => 85k+15k / 10k.
  • Plasma Siege from 8k+80k / 2k e => 15k+85k / 10k.
  • Leech from 60k+40k / 5k e => 60k+40k / 10k.

• Fighter (including tachyon-micro and bulletproof variants):
  • Base Move Speed from 28 => 32.
  • Multiplier vs Polycrystal from 5 => 6.
  • Multiplier vs CloseCombat from 2.4 => 6.
  • Multiplier vs Medium from 2.4 => 6.
  • Base Attack Power from 1200 => 1000 (similar for the variants).

• Bomber Base Move Speed from 28 => 26.

• The following guardians now have the medium hull type:
  • EMP (was Neutron)
  • Heavy Beam (was Heavy)
  • Laser (was Swarmer)
  • Lightning (was Composite)
  • Special Forces Rally (was Heavy)
  • Spire Implosion (was Artillery)
  • Starship Disassembler (was UltraHeavy)
  • Tachyon (was Refractive)
  • Tractor (was Neutron)
  • Vampire (was Artillery)

• Spire Starship:
  • Hull type from Neutron => Medium.
  • Base Attack Power from 120k*mk => 600k*mk.
    • The previous number was the result of multiple math errors during the balancing process. Specifically: its dps was computed using a seconds-per-salvo of 8 when it's actually 10 due to the photon lance's firing time, and its base dps was balanced as if it had 4x bonuses despite not having any bonuses.

• All fleet ship caps have been adjusted to be multiples of 8 (generally by rounding down, unless something was 1 away from the next higher multiple, in some cases), except for those fleet ships which don't change caps at different unit cap scales.
  • This involved about 5 metric tons of relatively minor changes to health, attack power, metal cost, crystal cost and energy cost. Mostly cap-health and cap-dps didn't change by more than 1% in either direction; cap-m,c,e costs vary a bit more but nothing earthshaking. The numbers are internally arranged in a much better fashion now which should help with other changes going forward.
  • The main immediate benefit of this is that the ultra-low-caps setting no longer impacts the balance of fleet ship types whose caps are not multiples of 8, because, well, they are now.

• Previously on Diff 9+ if you were part of the way from one AI-tech-level to the next, each wave would have a proportionate percentage of its ships "promoted" to the next tech level to make the transition in difficulty feel smoother. Now this happens on difficulty 5+
  • Mathematically speaking this makes the game somewhat more difficult and that's why it was restricted to 9+. In practice it seems to make the game easier because you're testing your defenses against waves more like the ones you're going to get at the next tech level, rather than getting the jump all at once.
  • The main motivation for changing this now is that since the double-application of the mark-level downwards-multiplier on wave sizes has been changed to only applying it once (as mentioned above), the higher-mark waves will be larger and the feeling of a "challenge cliff" between AI tech levels greater. This really helps avoid those cliffs.

• Zenith Siege Engine:
  • MkI-cap-health from 16.8M => 10M.
  • Corrected an... interesting balance-math error where it had 720k mkI-cap-dps AND 10x multipliers (against structural, heavy, ultraheavy, and turret):
    • Multipliers from 10x => 5x.
    • MkI-cap-dps from 720k => 360k (which is still really, really high for a base-dps even with no multipliers, but the must-reload-after-move mechanic is still really new, etc).
  • Reload time from 15 => 10.
    • Damage adjusted to maintain dps.
  • Now pay no attention to auto-FRD or auto-kite.
  • Thanks to Faulty Logic for inspiring these changes, as little consolation as that may be to the many ships (including spire capital ships)
• All modular forts now pay no attention to auto-kite (previously some did, and some didn't).

• Zenith Reprocessor:
  • MkI-cap-health from 8.4M => 15M (now in the neighborhood of fighters).
  • MkI-cap-dps from 17.2k => 30k (has 8x multipliers).

• The Shards in the Fallen Spire campaign now move 4x as fast (still immune to all forms of speed-boosting, combat style, etc) and the response "chase spawns" now happen about 4x as often.

• AI Type reinforcement/wave multipliers, since some of these are really old and the reinforcement ones in particular can have a disproportionately large impact on the feel of the game (to the extent that picking a particular AI type can make reinforcements look "broken", as in barely happening) :
  • Mad Bomber reinforcement multiplier from "you get one ship" on non-core-worlds (and 0.25 on core worlds) => 0.7, on all worlds.
  • Neinzul Youngster reinforcement multiplier from 0.25 => 0.8.
  • Vicious Raider, Extreme Raider, and Technologist Raider multiplier from 0.3 => 0.8.
  • Attritioner, Zenith Descendant, Spireling, Starfleet Commander, Experimentalist, and Grav Driller reinforcement multiplier from 0.4 => 0.9.
  • The Tank reinforcement multiplier from 0.3 => 0.9, and wave multiplier from 1.0 => 1.25 (same as the attritioner, zd, etc group above).
  • Feeding Parasite, Thief, Technologist Parasite, Bully, Assassin, and Speed Racer reinforcement multiplier from 1.0 => 0.9 (since they already had a 1.25 wave multiplier).
  • The Core reinforcement multiplier from 0.3 => 0.5 (same as its wave multiplier).

• Corrected a balance-math problem where the game was counting the 14 "secondary hits" of siege plasma without considering the fact that they only hit for 1/16th of normal strength. This means that the zenith siege engine's mkI-cap-base-dps is 45k instead of 360k.
  • The actual attack power of the unit is unchanged, this is just fixing a bug in the internal balancing model.
  • But since it's now clear that the numbers are more reasonable than previously thought, the siege engine's multipliers have been increased from 5 back up to 10.

• Human Cryo Pods and Home Settlements (the buildings that start next to a human home command station) are now immune to aoe (but not to beam weapons, i.e. not immune to linear-aoe), to avoid excessive-frustration issues with units like the firefly.

• Spire Corvette shield modules now cost 2000*mk each of metal, instead of 1m+1c to avoid the ship being effectively invincible due to immediately rebuilding its own shield. As it is a mkI shield can be "brought back online" in less than 20 seconds, but as normal engineers cannot assist if the ship has taken damage in the past few seconds.

• Zenith Reprocessor:
  • MkI-base-cap-dps from 30k => 45k (for reference, Acid Sprayers have 58.8k, and the same bonuses).
  • Now immune to tractors.
  • Now have cloaking (and thus will not be included in future games with cloaking turned off, but will still be present in games already created with cloaking turned off).

• Military Command Stations:
  • Base Health from 500k/1.5M/3M => 1M/4M/9M. (puts it on the low end of a fleet ship or starship with a cap of 10, but with the mkII/mkIII versions much stronger to help justify knowledge cost)
  • Metal,Crystal production from 16,16/32,32/64,64 => 24,24/48,48/96,96 (the same as logistics stations).
  • Now do not suffer damage reduction when firing from under a normal human-tech forcefield.
    • Yes, it's now just an obvious move to put a shield on these; presumably that was already true if you cared about keeping the planet. And it still costs shield cap, so not 100% obvious.
  • Base Damage per shot from 3200*mk => 5k*mk. (puts it on par with a fleet ship or starship with a cap of 10, but since shots-per-salvo is also mark-based this makes mkII/mkIII versions much stronger to help justify knowledge cost)
  • Is now immune to radar dampening.
  • Shot type changed from translocating lightning to a new "knockback railgun" mechanic. So the shots are now insta-hit, and actually still do the translocation code path but instead of sending the target to a random angle and random distance from the planet center they send the target directly away from the military station out to a distance about 2000 units short of the station's maximum firing range (assuming it wasn't further out than that already).
  • MkII and MkIII versions now do 200 engine damage per shot.
  • MkIII versions now apply 5 seconds of paralysis per shot.

• In honor of basically winning the "what most needs attention for 6.0?" poll, the remains rebuilders have received a logic overhaul and now:
  • Try not to target the same thing as another remains rebuilder. If there are fewer rebuild targets than rebuilders on the planet they'll generally spread out pretty evenly across the targets.
  • If in FRD, they now are much less likely to "yoyo" back to the FRD-point between rebuilds until all the targets are rebuilt.
  • Recharge time from 10 seconds => 1 second. The recharge time wasn't particularly easy to notice before because rebuilders would all pile up on the same target and while the ones not actually doing the rebuild would not incur the 10 second recharge time they would have to wait about 1 second to retarget. With a pile of 20 rebuilders it was hard to notice the one that did the initial rebuild took 10 seconds before it could actually rebuild something.
    • This is actually a fairly significant buff to the unit, but it's probably not a big balance impact to start the rebuilding faster.

• Spire Tractor Platform:
  • MkI-Cap-Health from 10.5M => 8M.
  • Base move speed from 18 => 15.

• The AI Core Grav Reactor Post now no longer receives protection from the Core Shield Generator network, to avoid generating maps (mainly snake ones) that were literally impossible due the homeworld having an invincible black-hole-generator-effect unit.

• To provide a counterbalance against the player's ability to build up a powerful champion (and nebula-ally fleet) without increasing AIP much (if at all, depending on map layout and tolerance for deepstrikes), each AI homeworld now gets "nemesis" champions in proportion to the number of human champions, the highest champion hull size unlocked for human players, and that AI's difficulty.
  • Critically, the "population cap" of these nemesis spawns actually goes _down_ as AIP increases (bottoming out at 150 AIP) to simulate the AI having less to invest into its nemesis spawns as AIP increases and waves, special forces, strategic reserve, and other responses are being given more and more resources. More importantly, this allows the nemesis spawns to counter an "early AIP" champion rush without making a more "normal AIP" approach massively harder to the point of stalemate.
  • Nemesis spawns are not immediately replaced up to the population cap (takes a little over 10 minutes to go from zero to the cap), and spawns remain even if the cap drops below the current population (but once you kill them off the extras don't come back).
  • Nemesis spawns never go through wormholes, so they won't ever leave the homeworld they're defending. This is good and bad for the player, but good all around for their intended purpose.

• The tech level of the AI is now only inflated by 1 artificially when playing on greater than difficulty 9, rather than greater than difficulty 8.

• Handicap now has the following effects, all of which is new unless otherwise noted:
  • AI
    • Previously it affected the speed at which the AI reinforced. It no longer does.
    • Increases the number of ships in each wave and reinforcement, and decreases when negative.
    • Roaming Enclaves and Preservation Wardens are spawned sooner or later into the game.
    • Scrap waves are scaled accordingly.
    • Specifically "forced waves" are scaled accordingly.
    • Cross planet atacks are scaled accordingly.
    • Saboteur and deep strike reactions are scaled accordingly.
    • For now, event attacks are NOT affected by this.
    • Initial seeding of AI planets are intentionally not affected by this -- same as human players get no starting benefit from handicaps.
  • Player
    • Increases the amount of resources gathered from producers (using a new formula), and decreases when negative (also using the new formula).

• Some triangle rebalancing:
  • The rationale here is that bombers have been having their way with forcefields a bit too much, and having fighters be so much more "general-dps" than the other two has made them much less a natural predator of the Bomber. Also, the Missile Frigate is still being reported as the least desirable by a significant margin.
  • Fighters (including the tachyon and bulletproof variants) :
    • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 2.4 => 5.
  • Bombers:
    • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Structural from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Heavy from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Artillery from 10 => 6.
    • Base Attack Power from 1900*mk => 2400*mk.
  • Missile Frigates:
    • Bonus vs Light from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Swarmer from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Neutron from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Composite from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Refractive from 10 => 6.
    • Base Attack Power from 1600*mk => 2400*mk.
    • Base Crystal Cost from 700 => 500.

• Tractor Beam Turrets:
  • Base Health from 210k/840k/1680k => 560k*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 450*mk.

• Beam Guardians:
  • Bonus Vs Turret from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus Vs UltraLight from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus Vs Artillery from 2 => 1.
  • Base Attack Power from 4000*mk => 4500*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 600*mk => 300*mk.

• Laser Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Health from 1.4*(standard guardian health) to 1.1*(standard).
  • Shots Per Salvo from 3 => 15.
  • Seconds Per Salvo from 4 => 2.
  • Base Attack Power from 17k*mk => 1700*mk.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 500*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 7000 => 5000.

• Raider Guardians:
  • Now Have Radar Dampening Range of 8000.

• Lightning Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 800*mk => 600*mk.
  • Now use the same "can hit up to 200 targets max, but can do max damage to as few as 40 by hiting each target up to 5 times" logic as Electric Shuttles.
  • Base Attack Power from 1600*mk => 2400*mk (for reference, Electric shuttles on low caps have 1600*mk, albeit somewhat slower reloading).

• Tractor Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 450*mk.

• Spider Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Sniper Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Tachyon Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 400 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Gravity Guardians:
  • Max Target Base Speed from 10/8/6/4/2 => 11/10/9/8/7.
  • Grav Beam Base Range from 8k/10k/12k/14k/16k => 7k/8k/9k/10k/11k.
  • Base Armor Rating from 100*mk => 300*mk.

• Zombie Guardians:
  • Shots Per Salvo from 2/3/4/5/6 => flat 2.
  • Base Armor Rating from 5000*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 9000 => 7000.

• EMP Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 300*mk.

• Carrier Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 300*mk.

• Fixed a bug with the electric shuttle "chain lightning" mechanic where it could hit a single forcefield way more times than intended. Used to be as many as 200 per shot, but now down to 5 (anything can be hit 5 times per shot).

• Fixed bug where electric shuttles were able to chain-hit the same target 10 times in one blast (thus getting maximum efficiency against groups 20 or larger) instead of 5 (thus needing to hit at least 40 to get full damage).

• Reclamators (excluding zombie-reclamators) :
  • Replaced the "cannot do reclamation damage to ships more than one mk level higher" rule: the reclamation effect of the actual damage done is multiplied as follows:
    • If the reclamator is 4 mks higher than the target (mkV shooting mkI), multiply by 64.
    • If the reclamator is 3 mks higher than the target, 48.
    • If the reclamator is 2 mks higher than the target, 32.
    • If the reclamator is 1 mk higher than the target, 16.
    • If the reclamator is the same mk as the target, 8.
    • If the reclamator is 1 mk lower than the target, 4.
    • If the reclamator is 2 mks lower than the target, 2.
    • If the reclamator is 3 mks lower than the target, 1.
    • There is no 4-mk-lower case because mkV are not reclaimable.
  • Leech Starship base attack power from 120k*mk => 30k*mk.
  • Parasite base attack power from 4000*mk => 1000*mk.
  • Nanoswarms inherent 16x-reclamation property down to 2x, but no reduction in actual damage.
  • Spire Teleporting Leech base attack power also not reduced, because the general feeling is that these are pretty underpowered already. Might nerf these later if this proves to be too much.

• Parasites:
  • Effective range from 3700 => 6000.
  • Armor piercing from 0 => 750*mk.
  • Base Health from 7200*mk => 14400*mk.

• Changed Engineer II and Engineer III caps from 0.75 and 0.5 of the Engineer I cap to 1.5 and 2.0 of the Engineer I cap, respectively.
  • Gives a bit more motivation to unlock the higher engineer marks, if you're having trouble getting enough assistance/repair out.

Misc Changes

• Renamed the AI Eye to the Sentry Eye.

• Bomber Starship renamed to Heavy Bomber Starship.

• Added 25 champion-related achievements.

• The shard seeding in Fallen Spire now only cares about how far from the human homeworlds a planet is, rather than the current border of AI territory. This can make it easier depending on how much territory you've taken (particularly on something like a snake map, but that's something of an edge case), but in light of various recent changes this may not be a bad thing, and the seeding being relative to what you'd conquered was pretty annoying and encouraged some strange playstyles.
  • The last shard is an exception: it still doesn't pay attention to what you've conquered, but it always tries to seed on an AI core planet (so bordering a homeworld, but never on a homeworld).

Bugfixes

• Fixed a longstanding bug where Decloakers in waves (only possible by having 1 wave-sending AI and 1 support-corps AI) were not having their ship cap multiplier applied and thus were appearing in vastly larger numbers than they should have been. Wasn't a big deal before, but would have been devestating with their new stats.

• Fixed some bugs with the Spire Archive gain-knowledge logic producing erratic display results (and not displaying how much it had gathered out of the total 9000, etc).

• Fixed a longstanding bug where repairing units with a repair boost (which is most of the ones that can repair) were repairing units faster but still "spending" metal and crystal at the rate they would have if they had no repair boost. The cost difference between repairing with an MRS and with an EngieIII was pretty big. No longer.

• Fixed a bug where multiple human homeworlds (in SP or MP) were not increasing the guard post part of reinforcements.

• Fixed a longstanding (back to the unity port) bug where the buy/tech menus would also draw the buttons from the menus above them, commonly resulting in "ghosts" of build queue buttons, etc.

• Fixed a longstanding but very intermittent null-exception in tech-menu-button rendering.

• Fixed bug where core/starship/experimental fabricators were not being considered by the D keybind.

• Fixed a bug where remains currently in the process of rebuilding could get "stuck" at 1 hp despite being under very heavy fire until its actual stored resources were exhausted.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where buy menu buttons were showing up red outside supply even when the ship doing the building can build fine outside supply.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the AI would only produce carriers if the target planet already had 2 barracks, instead of 1.

• Fixed a bug where Fallen Spire events would spawn the recoverable objects (and thus anything they go on to build) as belonging to the first player even when the first player was champion-only. Now it gives them to the first normal or normal+champion player.

• Fixed omission in the new CPA-size logic that was making it not consider one of the later parts of the wave-size calculations (making it a bit too high on lower difficulties and not as high as intended on higher difficulties).

• Fixed a longstanding bug in FRD target sorting that was sometimes being overly sensitive to differences in how far away two targets were.

• Fixed a bug where it was possible to start placement of an item (like an engineer or turret) and switch to another planet via control-group-selection and still be in the middle of placing that item (and if you had supply, actually be able to place it).

• Fixed a bug where a bunch of science ships on auto-knowledge-gather but with no eligible targets could "clog" the auto-explore throttle such that auto-explore for scouts would stop working. Now auto-knowledge-gather has its own separate throttle.

• Made "what can I autotarget?" logic more consistent so that player-ally minor factions don't pop AI carriers.

• Fixed a bug where viewing a Core Spire Corvette Fabricator could cause unhandled exceptions (and the queue buttons to not show).

• Fixed a really longstanding bug where giving a ship an attack order against something already in range would cause it to move towards the target a little bit before stopping again. This was mildly annoying with most units but very troublesome with units like fortresses and zenith siege engines that have to recharge (either their ability or their weapon) after moving at all.

• Fixed a bug where minor faction and zombie ships could be affected by the player auto-kite controls.

• Fixed a bug where a cpa deploying could cause unhandled errors.

• Military Command Stations:
  • Fixed a bug where the mkII and mkIII versions no longer had a unit cap (leaving it that way was entertained, but ultimately would require more sweeping changes to command stations than is a good idea right now, if it would be a good idea at all).
  • Fixed a bug where the mkII and mkIII were still showing the mkI descriptive text, despite that now not being the same.
  • The knockback logic now launches stuff 2000 range units outside the station's effective range rather than 2000 range units inside, to help the autotargeting not get stuck on a few targets when its main use is best served by spreading shots out.

• Fixed a bug where the fallen spire campaign could spawn two of the same shard-signal.

• Fixed a fairly longstanding bug where disabling an expansion from within the lobby would not properly remove several expansion-specific options (map types, setup scripts, minor factions, etc), which could lead to very odd behavior.

• Fixed a couple longstanding bugs that would cause very old saves to not load properly.

• Fixed a bug where hybrids, exo ships, and the like could switch to threat-fleet behavior.

• Fixed some bugs where special forces and strategic reserve spawns could result in an AI player controlling a type of ship only available to the other AI.
  • And a related bug where some of the special forces spawn logic could only access the special ship types of the first AI player.

• Overhauled how line-place determines space between points to be closer to how the game will actually accept or reject a given placement. Hopefully this will avoid "skipping every other one" bugs without adding excessive padding between points on a packed-line pattern.

• Fixed a bug where changing per-planet settings on one planet, then opening the CTRLS window from another planet would do the confirm-discard-changes check, which led to various other tomfoolery.

• Fixed a bug where MkV Spider fabricators were still considered experimental fabricators instead of core fabricators, which incidentally handles an issue where there was a very high chance of there being 2 of these per map.

• Fixed a moderately longstanding bug where if while starting a new game you select a planet as a homeworld, then deselect it (in favor of some other homeworld(s) ) before actually starting the game, and that planet happens to have the superterminal on it, the superterminal would start the game in "active mode". Needless to say, that would be a short game.

• Fixed a really longstanding bug where shots on a planet were sometimes visible even through the fog of war.