AI War:Current Post-6.000 Beta

Prerelease 6.006 The Pain Train

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prerelease 6.005 Burning The Candle At Both Ends

(Released October 31st, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prerelease 6.004

(Released October 29th, 2012)

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

Prerelease 6.003 Fortress-size It

(Released October 29th, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prerelease 6.002 Better Than A Stick In The Eye

(Released October 25th, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prerelease 6.001 There's Always At Least One

(Released October 22nd, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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