Difference between revisions of "AI War:3.000 Release"
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Revision as of 12:40, 1 February 2015
NEW ART -All of the new art is by Philippe Chabot except where here noted.
-The Leech Starship has all-new graphics, and the Raid Starship graphics have been much improved. -All of the ship graphics have been updated so that they look better around their edges when slightly zoomed out. -The graphics for the colony ships and transports have been majorly updated, and those units are also now larger than before. -The Advanced Factory and Space Dock have been updated and are now much larger and more visually impressive. Space docks and advanced factories also now have more health. -All of the command stations except for the AI home planet command station now have new, larger graphics and icons. This includes the command station cores. This makes them more attractive, but also easier to see and select when zoomed very far out (including locating them on enemy planets). -Omega Drive, Resistance Fighter Bomber, Resistance Frigate, Marauder DaggerFrigate, Marauder Buzz Bomb are by Daniel Cook / Chris Park. -New planets by I-KP: IKP_RockyDarkMoon, IKP_VulcanDiamond, IKP_RockyIcy, IKP_ForestCracked, IKP_GasClouds, IKP_ExplodedState, IKP_Cloaked -New colorized planetary summary panel graphics and new explosion graphics by Hans-Martin Portmann. -New ship graphics by I-KP: Orbital Mass Driver (and related shot), Distribution Node, Gravity Drill Station, AI Co-Processor, replacement SuperFortress and SuperFortress -Updated Fortress and SuperFortress graphics by I-KP.
NEW SOUND EFFECTS
-All of the new sounds are by Pablo Vega except where here noted. ShotArtillery ShotMassDriver, by I-KP AlarmPost ShotAcid ShotImpulseReactive New ShotBasicLaser New ShotDoubleLaser, ShotDoubleLaser2
Various Notable New Features
-A new expansions tab has been added to the Settings window, with a way to enable/disable expansions, and/or unlock them for full rather than trial use. All of the other logic relating to having expansions that are unlockable (but first in trial mode) has also been added.
-It is now possible to enable or disable expansions for a given savegame, and the high scores and galaxy map totals now include information about which expansions were enabled for their play.
-It is now possible to select which expansions will be used in a game during the lobby. The game won't start unless all players have the selected expansions. Additionally, players loading a savegame or joining a game-in-progress won't be able to load/join if they don't have the expansions in use by the existing game. Existing savegames cannot be upgraded to the expansion or downgraded from having the expansion (since the expansion content has a large effect on the entire game).
-The map population logic for capturables and AI special weapons has been revamped. This both fixes some bugs that tended to make maps more generic than they should have been, and paves the way for a large influx of new special weapon types, which will individually be more common in this expansion and the future. The algorithm now supports randomizing the order in which they are added, and insuring that too many bad things or good things are not bunched on the same planet—issues that were never a problem before, but would have become a problem over time with the old algorithm.
-Previously, when ships had queued waypoints for movement, they would decelerate and re-accelerate at each waypoint. Now they don't lose speed when turning.
-A new set of Core Fabricators has been added for both the base game and the expansion. These are new capturables that are scattered around the galaxy map, a count of which can be seen in the Mission Summary in each campaign. Generally there are 2 per human starting planet, same as advanced factories. Each of these core fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Core ship (which otherwise normally only the AI can build). The ship caps for core ships are quite low (and can be seen in the planetary summary by hitting F1 a few times), and the core ships are also very expensive, but they also cost no knowledge to unlock and are quite powerful.
Players can see what kind of core ship will be produced at a core fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text. In the base game, all 9 of the core ships from the base ship classes can be found as core fabricators. In the expansion, those 9 plus an additional 11 core ships from the expansion can be found. Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.
-A new set of Experimental Starship Fabricators has been added for both the base game and the expansion. These are new capturables that are scattered around the galaxy map, a count of which can be seen in the Mission Summary in each campaign. Generally there are 1 per human starting planet. Each of these experimental starship fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Experimental Starship (which otherwise normally are not built at all, or the AI only builds, depending). These experimental starships are fairly expensive, but cost no knowledge to unlock and are quite powerful.
Players can see what kind of experimental starship will be produced at a experimental starship fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text. In the base game, currently the only experimental starship is the Bomber Starship Mark I. In the expansion, a new Beam Starship and Warbird Starship can also be found. Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.
-A new updater has been put in place for the game. This new updater does not use MSI patches, and so does not require that the game have been installed via our MSI installer—this lets the updater work with the game regardless of what source it was pulled from (Impulse, Steam, anything).
The updater is no longer simply for official updates—it now lets users check for official updates, beta updates, and updates to content for any expansions to the game (right now just The Zenith Remnant). The updater automatically checks for updates in the background when the application is started, so players always know when there is something new (this can be turned off in the settings interface). Players can also manually check for updates to download via the updater, or they can manually load an update into the updater from their file system (useful for computers without a direct connection to the Internet).
Co-Op Improvements
-Previously, when a desync was encountered it would alert the host with a beeping noise and a bunch of text, but would let the game continue. Now it halts the game immediately, instead.
-Major new co-op mechanic: In a multiplayer game, when a human player loses his/her home command station(s), they now will get a new "Orbital Command Station Home Core." which produces more energy and resources than the original orbital command station. These ships are also mobile and can move between planets, and don't have any bearing on capturing planets unlike regular full command stations.
There are three different levels of orbital command station home core, and each produces more resources and has more health. The higher-level cores are granted when the AI tech level is higher (the core that is granted is equal to the highest current tech level of the AIs). If the core of a player is lost, there is an AI Progress hit that is also larger than the hit from losing the original home command station, but a replacement core is immediately granted. Cores are always created on the safest allied home planet possible.
-Major new co-op mechanic: When a new player is added to an existing co-op game, they will be given an orbital command station home core" right from the start, since they do not have a home planet command station. This gives late-added players a significant resource income right from the start, and makes them no longer completely dependent on gifts of ships from allied players. This gets newly-added players up and running more quickly, and also avoids having the game slow down too much for the short time right after their addition.
-Players are no longer able to gift home command stations between each other. With the addition of home command station cores, this is no longer neccessary, and it also prevents an exploit.-Players are no longer able to gift home command stations between each other. With the addition of home command station cores, this is no longer neccessary, and it also prevents an exploit.
-Previously, if engineers from Player A assisted in the construction of a unit belonging to Player B, then this would add to Player B's cost and not cost Player A anything. This was highly unintuitive, and has now been switched so that the controller of the engineers now always pays the cost. Additionally, the expense associated with the engineer is now reported as part of the engineer itself rather than as part of the constructor/building-unit in the Expenses By Player tab (even when both units are controlled by the same player. The same applies to ships that are being built through queues.
-It is now possible to gift ships to disabled players.
-A new "Networking Help" section has been added to the Game tab of the settings window to aid new users in setting up multiplayer games of AI War. Covers port forwarding, finding a public IP, and so on.
AI Updates
-New AI Type: Random Harder Non-Technologist. A random AI type that includes only the higher-difficulty types, but none of the "technologist" types.
-New AI Type: Random All Non-Technologist. A random AI type that includes all types except the technologist types.
-New AI Modifier: Reveal Random AI Types. When a random AI type is chosen, the name of the randomly-selected will be visible to players (normally it would be obscured).
-Previously, the threshold for player ships to trigger an Alert on AI planets was 50 units. Starships and Golems were not weighted any more highly in the past, but now Starships will count for 25, and the Golems and other "major weapons" (the heavy defense category in general) will trigger the alert all by themselves.
-The internal logic for AI reinforcements has seen a number of internal shifts to make them more intelligent in caes of over-full planets in particular.
-The internal logic for how AI players handle having many starships, and how they handle starships being disabled, is now much improved.
-On difficulty 7 and up, the AI is now smarter about taking out key targets when it is outnumbered; now sometimes managing suicide runs instead of always falling back in this situation.
-The logic for cross-planet attacks has been majorly updated so that it is more consistent between single-player and multiplayer. Also, all AI types now do cross-planet attacks, whereas previously the turtle types would not—since CPAs are from more than one AI type at a time, this only makes sense. Lastly, cross-planet attacks are more than three times less frequent than before.
-The AI is no longer able to issue movement or attack orders to its ships if they are stuck in tractor beams. This lets low-level autotargeting make better short-term decisions.
-Starships and golems and will now patrol around at random if they are AI-controlled and without any targets to attack. This makes them less predictable, and keeps them from "clumping" and thus becoming easy targets for area damage attacks.
Performance Improvements
-There is now a new unified command queue for attack, move, go-through-wormhole, get-in-transport, and assist/repair commands. Previously, there were separate queues for attack, move, and go-through-wormhole commands, but they could not be comingled with one another or with the queue-less commands. Now they can all be comingled as needed, so that a player can (for instance) queue up a series of attacks and then also the escape, without having to micromanage the entire process as it goes to pull something like that off.
-Added some minor performance improvements to the target chasing logic and targeting in general, and to speed calculations.
-The MTU of the application networking is now 1400 instead of 1459, which should provide better network performance across some internet connections, and no change to those that were already fine.
-Several optimizations have been made to RAM usage when saving huge games.
-The internal logic for ship targeting and a number of other subsystems relating to combat and ship automatic interactions have been heavily revamped, leading to both better performance and better functionality/maintainability/extensibility.
-A new performance improvement has been introduced for when players are attacking enemy planets with lots of guarding ships.
-All remaining usages of LINQ have been replaced with raw list sorts instead, which are faster.
-Game performance is no longer severely affected when localization files are missing.
-Some internal performance improvements have been made to the simulation logic in a variety of areas.
-A new method is now being used for line/circle intersection tests. This method is a bit more of an approximation, but it runs very much faster and also isn't prone to overflow errors. This fixes errors that had previously been in place with beam weapons (making them hit many targets they should not have been hitting), as well as making the galaxy maps generate more quickly.
-Improved the timeliness of scout data being returned on planets after loading a savegame and waiting for multiple players (sometimes it was fine before, but sometimes not).
-Several efficiency improvements have been made with regard to ship aggregations on the main simulation thread.
-A new "cold storage" backend ship code technique is now implemented, leading to massive performance gains with high ship counts. In benchmarks with a 202k unit game the performance boost was 500%, while in a benchmark with a 104k unit game the performance boost was right at 1000%. The performance increase will vary by the scenario, and scenarios with very few ships will see no gain at all, but in general maps with more than even just 20k units should see some gain, both in simulation speed and (at times) in targeting performance. This performance boost does not really help in large battles, except insofar as it leaves the CPU freer to process said large battles—but battle performance itself is not directly improved by these changes. In games with very many ships, the performance will be the same as it was previously for approximately 1 second per 4k ships in the game—then it will jump greatly upwards. The special forces captain AI Type, it should be noted, sees particularly little gain from this n ew technique.
-Ships that are in cold storage were previously not being drawn at all when the players were looking at them with hidden scouts or with complete visibility turned on. Now these ships are shown with a black border.
-Error handling for corrupt game images is now better. It now says specifically which image is corrupt, and doesn't crash the game.
-Previously, the "protection ranges" were being drawn for all ships whenever the player was in build mode. This could cause some performance problems, however—now the game will only draw those ranges if the player holds Z, whether in build mode or not.
Interface / Other Graphical Improvements
-The splash screen now shows status messages for the progress of loading the game. This also prevents windows 7 and vista from thinking the program is nonresponsive on startup.
-An icon is now shown for wormholes at far zoom, making them far easier to click (previously players had to zoom all the way in to effectively click them). Holding the Ctrl key now pops the far zoom icon to the front, as well as the text.
-Human home planet command stations now have "Home" written on their icon, making them easier to identify at a glance compared to other kinds of command stations.
-Holding shift while clicking a ship to sub-select in the "Selected ship types" popup listbox now sub-selects the entire ship class (e.g., all fighters), rather than just the individual ship type clicked (e.g., fighters mark II).
-Munitions boosting lines are now drawn much more faintly.
-Enemy ships that are cloaked were previously invisible on the planetary summary sidebar. Now they show up as a generic cloaking bubble, with a count of how many are present, though with no details on what types of cloaked ships there are. This is similar to what players are able to see through the galaxy map intel summary.
-The Counter-Shooter ranges now get drawn below everything else, including resources and wormholes, to aid visibility.
-The resource display has been adjusted a bit with how the unused metal/crystal harvester spots and the exhausted science labs show. These should now be easier to see at a glance.
-Planets that are cloaked via a planetary cloaking device now have a special cloaked graphic for the planet itself.
-There are now two different destroyed planet graphics that are used for various destroyed planets.
-Three new general-use planet graphics have been added to the game.
-A wide variety of new player colors have been added. Some of them are a bit too close together to be comfortably used in the same game as one another (depending on player monitor settings and vision in general), but having more options will allow players to get a setup more like they want, color-wise, in general.
-The version number of the game is now shown on the splash screen as the game is loading; this should make it more obvious to players what version they are running when questions come up.
-The planetary summary has once again been updated, to an even-more-readable colorized layout that makes finding ships easier than ever.
-Perma-cloaked enemy ships now show up as "Perma-Cloaked" on the galaxy map intel summaries. The only ship that is this way for AIs presently is Wormhole Guard Posts, which will be enabled even when cloaking is disabled in the lobby (perma-cloaked ships don't really function like other cloaked ships, and so don't count for purposes of that feature).
-The insta-kill message no longer appears until ships are actually being hit and killed, rather than appearing when they are being fired upon.
-Hovering over the AI Progress meter in the resource bar at the top of the screen now shows a breakdown of Total AI Progress, AI Progress Reduction, AI Progress Floor, and finally the Effective AI Progress (which is all that is normally shown). (For those who are interested, Effective = Total - Reduction, unless Total - Reduction < Floor, in which case Effective = Floor. Floor increases as Total goes up.) This should hopefully make AI Progress value calculations more clear for advanced players.
-Since there are so many secondary mission objectives now (often 10 or more instead of the previous 4), they are now grouped into several categories: Technology, AI Progress, and Economic.
-There is a new category under command stations and mobile builders: CTRL. In this category, various "control nodes" can be built. These are basically very cheap control options that are perma-cloaked and which can be built by players in order to change how the current campaign works. In many respects, these are simply like per-player lobby options, except that they can be set at any time during the game's play. These are distinct from the overall settings options in that they are per-player, and a per-campaign. Most settings will continue to be accessed via the lobby or the settings screens, but certain gameplay-centric options that need to be per-player per-campaign will be available via the new CTRL category at the command stations. These options will typically center around ship behavior.
-New Control Node: Allow Team Control Of Ships. Allows all teammates to share control of your ships on any planet. This is useful when players wish to share control of their empires with allies, but doesn't require that all players in a multiplayer game share control of their empires at once. Player A can share control of their empire, while Players B and C keep control of their own ships to themselves, for example.
-New Control Node: Auto-Build Engineers Mark II. Each command station you control will automatically maintain one Mark II Engineer at each planet you control. Building multiple of this control node causes multiple engineers to be maintained at each planet. Replacement engineers will only be built if there are fewer than 100 mobile enemy ships on the planet.
-New Control Node: Auto-Build Engineers Mark III. Each command station you control will automatically maintain one Mark III Engineer at each planet you control. Building multiple of this control node causes multiple engineers to be maintained at each planet. Replacement engineers will only be built if there are fewer than 100 mobile enemy ships on the planet.
-New Control Node: Auto-FRD Engineers. Automatically places all of your engineers (including secondary engineers such as remains rebuilders) into Free-Roaming Defender mode if they are on planets you control.
-New Control Node: Auto-FRD Mobile Military. Automatically places all of your mobile military ships into Free-Roaming Defender mode if they are on planets you control.
-New Control Node: Auto-Build Remains Rebuilders. Each command station you control will automatically maintain one Remains Rebuilder at each planet you control. Building multiple of this control node causes multiple rebuilders to be maintained at each planet. Replacement rebuilders will only be built if there are fewer than 100 mobile enemy ships on the planet.
-New Control Node: Engineers To Not Auto-Assist Queues. Prevents your engineers from automatically assisting build queues (keeping them on repair duty only, unless they are given explicit orders to accelerate a queue).
-New Control Node: Engineers To Not Auto-Assist Allies. Prevents your engineers from automatically assisting any allied ships (though you can still manually assign them to assist specific allied ships).
-The intel summaries on the galaxy map now include labels for all of their icons to make it easier to tell what planets might deserve more investigation without having to use the help palettes in the planetary summary.
-The list of scouts in the scouts button now only includes the specific scout ships (Scout I-IV) and the Scout Starship. Other units that provide scout intel, such as eyebots or command stations, are not included in this list.
-Instead of showing a percent full, transports now show how many ships are inside them out of how many they can hold in total.
-The Auto AI Progress and AI Modifiers settings have moved from the Game Options tab of the lobby to a new AI Options tab in the lobby.
-A new "Minor Factions To Include" setting has been added to the AI Options tab of the lobby, allowing players to select one or more minor factions to use.
-Larger selection circles are now drawn for oversized ships such as fortresses and golems.
-The new colors on the planetary summary were making it easier to see categories of ships, but harder to see ship shapes themselves, and particularly hard to see local versus ally versus enemy colors. The old type of color scheme has been returned to for the default, but now when the planetary summary is moused-over, it switches to the new color scheme to provide the best of both worlds: easy category visibility as well as easy icon/team visibility, depending on the context.
-Previously, only AI ships were showing up in the icon row on the intel summary. This has now been changed so that it also displays ships belonging to minor factions and human players. This makes it far easier for players to inventory their own planets as well as inventorying enemy planets.
-The gridviews used on the high scores, achievemetns, and in-game stats windows have been completely recoded from scratch to replace the stock Microsoft versions that were being used before. This fixes a number of bugs with the old ones. The new gridviews also use color to make the data more readable.
-Advanced Factories and starship constructors now use different icons from space docks.
-The savegame and loadgame windows have once again been made wider.
-It is now possible to simultaneously select multiple savegames at once in the save and load windows for purposes of deleting multiple saves simultaneously.
-The colors for wormhole text now show properly for allied and local-controlled planets.
-The names of planets in the galaxy map are now color-coded in the same manner that wormhole text is colorized for planets.
-A checkbox has been added to the updates window that allows for updates to optionally be applied without invoking admin rights. This only works on pre-Vista machines, or when the game is installed somewhere other than Program Files.
-There is now a Close button on the game sync window to let players cancel out of syncs that have failed due to network conditions or host cancelation or similar.
-A new "Use Simple Render For Far Zoom Icons (Slower, But Prevents Invisible Icons On Some Graphics Card Drivers)" option has been added to Settings, Graphics. A very few graphics card driver / directx combinations have trouble with the way that icons are normally written in memory before they are drawn, which in those instances leads to invisible icons. This new option lets players bypass the invisible icons issue (which can also usually be solved with a graphics card driver update), but at some performance penalty (the in-memory writing is present specifically to be a speed improvement).
-The minimap is now more accurate.
New Ships
-A new ship has been added to the defensive tab: Rally Post. Allied ships that are sent to this planet will gather at this rally post. If there are multiple allied rally posts on a single planet, entering ships will pick one of them at random.
-New ship: Cleanup Drone. Removes exploded enemy mines and turrets, to prevent them from being rebuilt by enemy mine/turret layers. Previously this was accomplished with engineers (once those engineers had finished with anything else that they considered a higher priority, which caused some challenges), or via manual targeted. Now, having a specialized unit dedicated to cleanup makes it much simpler to clear exploded enemy mines without any micromanagement.
-New Minor Faction: Human Marauders. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space and will occasionally raid human or AI planets via traditional propulsion methods. Unlike pretty much any hostile threat, these don't always come through wormholes, in other words.
-New Minor Faction: Human Resistance Fighters. Pockets of human allies still live in deep space around AI planets; when they see you attacking the AI, sometimes they will reveal themselves and join you.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Marauder Buzz Bomb. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space will occasionally send these automated bombs at human and AI settlements to destroy what they can so that they can escape with the resulting scrap. The buzz bomb explodes on contact with its target, dealing area damage. If the planet is cleared of enemy forces, the marauders will remain in place as guards against all comers. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Marauder Dagger Frigate. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space will occasionally send these extremely long-range frigates at human and AI settlements to destroy what they can so that they can escape with the resulting scrap. If the planet is cleared of enemy forces, the marauders will remain in place as guards against all comers. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Resistance Fighter/Bomber. Pockets of human allies who still live in deep space around AI planets will occasionally send these versatile fighter/bomber hybrids to aid you in the fight against the AI at their local planet. If the planet is cleared of AI forces, the resistance fighters will remain as guards against future AI incursions. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Resistance Frigate. Pockets of human allies who still live in deep space around AI planets will occasionally send these very long-range frigates to aid you in the fight against the AI at their local planet. If the planet is cleared of AI forces, the resistance fighters will remain as guards against future AI incursions. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction: Human Colony Rebellions. Most human settlements have been destroyed or completely subdued, but every five or so hours one will rise against the machines. However, these civilians are always outmatched despite their enthusiasm. If you do not help them take back their planet, they will die and the AI Progress will go up. Save them, and their unique ship production facilities are yours to use. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Rebelling Human Colony. A formerly captive city filled with living humans. AI progress will skyrocket by 100 if this is destroyed. These civilians have decided to rebel, and have erected a temporary invisibility cloak while they call for aid. When the cloak dissipates, they'll be vulnerable to attacks from the AI, and surely won't last long. When the rebels have supply, your entire team can use their facilities to build rebel ships. While you hold the planet on which they are located, their invisibility cloak will remain at full power.
Ship Logic Updates
-Colony Ships now have mine avoidance, are immune to sniper shots, and are immune to tractor beams. This should make colonizing certain planets more feasible, since Mobile Builders now require supply and so can't always be used to build a colony ship on site.
-The following ships can now be transported by transports, in addition to all of the general mobile military ships: engineers i-iii, mine layers, mobile builders, space tugs (all kinds), colony ships, science labs i and ii, decloakers, and tachyon drones.
-All of the tachyon beam emitters, including the tachyon drone and the decloaker, now have mine avoidance to make them a bit more useful and require less micro.
-Harvester Exo-Shields can no longer be paused, as previously this encouraged too much micromanagement.
-Attrition emitters are now capturable.
-Ships that damage engines should now do a better job of preferring to target ships whose engines can actually be damaged.
-Ships are now more intelligent about how they will try to autotarget enemy ships that are paralyzed (and thus which temporarily can't shoot back).
-Ships now prefer to autotarget enemy ships that do not reflect attacks (that are not mirrors).
-Ships now do a bit better autotargeting in general if they are chosing secondary targets.
-The free-roaming defender logic is now much improved for all ships, as is autotargeting in general. The targeting intelligence of multi-shot ships is also particularly improved.
-Tractor Beams now have their own separate targeting cycle from weapon attacks and other similar, making them much more effective at quickly catching incoming ships.
-When ships go through a wormhole into a planet, if they don't have other orders they tend to just sit at the wormhole and wait for more orders, fighting with whatever is there. That is great for most ships, but disastrous for scouts. Scouts in that situation will now flee to the outer border of the planetary area, where they are almost sure to be out of range of tachyon beams and thus can wait for further player orders in relative safety.
-It is now possible to put a single ship in multiple control groups.
-The following ships now drop remains on their destruction in the same manner that mines always have: advanced warp sensors, tachyon beam emitters and stealth tachyon beam emitters, and all turrets. Consequently, all of these ship types are also now immune to reclamation.
-Improvements have been made to the targeting behavior of groups of melee ships.
-Ships such as rebuilders and engineers would previously go all the way to their free-roaming point when given a free-roaming move order before they would do any target seeking. Now they will properly start target seeking immediately, as with all other ships, and only go to their destination if their destination is not accessible.
-If rebuilders cannot rebuild a ship from remains due to that ship already being at cap, the remains will instead be scrapped and a chat message will be sent to the player controlling the remains that were removed.
-Ships that are rebuilt from remains now start out with 50% health when they are starting to be rebuilt. This both makes them half as expensive as they were to build the first time, as well as making them take half as long to rebuild. This makes it much cheaper to maintain well-designed defenses.
-Fortresses now provide scout data on the planet they are on if that planet changes control from the player with the fortress.
-Transports now use the scout-style logic at their last wormhole and move away from the wormhole to avoid taking so much direct fire.
-In the spirit of minimizing micromanagement, when transports are destroyed they now safely eject their cargo, rather than losing all of it.
-The Leech and Raid Starship lines have now been split, so that there are three in each of two lines, rather than them being a shared line. The Raid Starships are now much faster and hard-hitting against single targets, while the leech starships are now much weaker but strike many more ships, tagging them all for reclamation as soon as any ships finishes them off. The caps for all of these starships has also been cut in half, as they are individually now far more useful than they previously were.
-The health of parasites and core leeches has significantly increased.
-Astro Train stations are now only attacked by player ships when given a direct order.
-Mobile builders now count as constructors instead of engineers.
Ship Balance Updates
-Laser Gatlings are now weaker against cruisers and Zenith Bombard Ships, and Cruisers now have a bonus against laser gatlings.
-The attack power of space planes has been increased 5x. They still die extremely quickly, but they now also do a ton more damage to their opponents.
-Laser gatlings have had their attack power reduced by 1/4, as they were previously more than a bit overpowered.
-Vampires have had their health increased 3x, making them much more formidable and able to maintain their attack longer. They are also now immune to sniper shots and missiles, making them able to close distance on most units more effectively.
-Autocannon Minipods are now a bit more expensive, and they now have an even lower base attack strength, but they now have a 2% cluster attack bonus, which makes them extremely much more powerful in large swarms. Their internal ship bonuses have also been adjusted.
-The shield rating and health of advanced research stations have both been reduced to 1/4 their prior values. This makes them far less invincible as targets to hit, and lets enemy ships target them more sensibly (it makes them a more interesting target for the AI to attack, and for the players to have to defend).
-Turrets can no longer have their munitions boosted or their shields boosted, but they are now immune to minor electric shots and blades.
-Teleport Raiders, Anti-Starship Arachnids, and Teleport Battle Stations are now immune to tractor beams, since they can no longer shoot them.
-The health of all the ships in the raid starship line have been reduced. Additionally, their general-purpose attack power has been vastly reduced, but their specialist attack power against force fields, turrets, and heavy defense has been doubled. Additionally, they no longer have a penalty against resources, constructors, or heavy defenses. The net effect of this is a nerf for how humans are able to use Raid starships (though keeping them very useful in many specialist roles), while boosting what the AI is likely to be able to do with them by a small amount (as the AI was previously not all that effective with them).
-The attack range and power of dreadnoughts have been doubled.
-The metal and crystal costs of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have now been reversed. This makes them cost much more metal than crystal, rather than the other way around. This provides an excellent counterpoint to many of the other starships and provides a good use for metal if it is too abundant compared to crystal in a campaign.
-The range of spire starships has been increased from 3000 to 7000. The speed of the spire starships has also been increased from 18 to 24.
-Player-held Attrition Emitters no longer give a bonus to incoming AI waves.
-Higher-level autocannons now get more of a clustering damage multiplier than the lower marks.
-The effectiveness of melee ships is no longer decreased by their being under protecting force fields.
-Previously, the metal/crystal costs of core ships was irrelevant, because players could never build them. Now the cost of core ships is normalized to 3x the cost of the mark iv version of its ship type.
-Deflector Drones now fire a new Energy Burst ammo type, instead of using minor electric ammo.
-Ships that absorb lasers or dark matter now also attract the absorbed type of shots to themselves. This works similarly to how counter-missiles and related provide a protection radius, but instead of firing a counter-shot, these shots are drawn to the protecting ship and heal it.
-Shot effective damage is now capped at the max health of the target being shot at. This prevents mirrors from being nearly so deadly against ships with very high attack values.
-All ships that have at least 1 million health are now immune to blades. This prevents some exploits with the Zenith Viral Shredders, and makes for more sensible attack logic with Cutlasses.
-Ion Cannons no longer require supply.
-Warheads are now Mark V instead of Mark 0, and they are no longer immune to being insta-killed.
-Anti-starship arachnids have been on the weak side of things in recent times, and so have been given a significant boost (around 3x) against starships.
-Remains Rebuilders now have cloaking, making them easier for players to keep alive (and more devious for when the AI has them, incidentally). They also now have 100k more health. They also no longer require unlocking, and thus no longer have any associated knowledge cost now that they are more of a general-purpose ship. Their ship cap has also been raised about 3x.
-Ships that are self-building are no longer cloaked while under construction (if they have the cloaking ability, previously that would be engaged while they were still under construction, which was erroneous).
-Since remains and their cleanup and rebuilding are now so important, when Cloaking is disabled in the lobby options there is now a non-cloaked version of the Remains Rebuilder that players and AIs will use, and a non-cloaked version of the Cleanup Drone that players can use.
-All ships that are immune to reclamation now have a strong attack penalty against the Raid Starship line, and Parasites.
-The movement speed of all parasites has been nearly doubled.
-Infiltrators no longer absorb dark matter (and that ability has now been entirely removed as redundant with the counter-dark-matter flares).
-When lasers are fired into the area around a deflector drone, their power is now reduced to 1/4 of normal, but otherwise they are no longer redirected or absorbed or anything of that nature. That also means that deflector drones are no longer immune to lasers, though they are quite resistant to them.
-The health of advanced factories has been increased 4x to make them not quite so brittle and hard to defend.
-The health of bombers have been doubled.
-The core Figher -> Cruiser -> Bomber -> Figher relationship has been redefined to Figher -> Bomber -> Cruiser -> Figher.
-Space Tanks now have 30x more shields than before, making them much harder to hit at range.
-Fortresses and SuperFortresses now have fewer shots, but do much more damage and have a very long range. They also now have a big bonus against all starships, a sizeable bonus against raiders and teleporting ships, and a pretty big bonus against most cloaked ships. Fortresses also now have 500 transport capacity, making them able to protect ships until they are ready to be ejected.
-Bombers now have a 50% penalty against bombers.
-Frigates now have a 10x bonus against space planes and etherjets.
-EtherJets now have a better bonus against fighters and bombers and armor ships.
-Raptors now have a better bonus against fighters and frigtes, and a penalty against bombers.
-Teleport battle stations now have a better bonus against fighters, raiders, tele-raiders, and tanks.
-The knowledge and crystal costs of decloakers have been halved, and their ship cap has been doubled.
-The attack power of mark IV and V bombers has been increased.
-Force fields now provide protection from tractor beams and tachyon beams.
-Human ships are now 40% faster than their stated values, in fast & dangerous and normal modes (this amplifies whatever the effective speed was from these two modes). This also causes the human ships to accelerate that much faster. This gives player ships an edge over the AI ships, to make chasing down incoming AI incursions easier with free-roaming defender mode. This also speeds up the game a bit without making it any more difficult (in fact, making it easier, because it is then easier to react to things while the AI is still the same speed as before).
-Fortresses and superfortresses now act as allied rally posts and mobile repair stations.
-Colony ships and transports both now have a ship cap of 60. However, they also now each take 4,000 energy to run instead of 50 in order to discourage having large numbers of these ships just sitting around as free decoys against the AI.
-Mobile Repair Stations now move at speed 12 instead of 8, have about 4x more health than before, and regenerate their own health about twice as fast. The AI also now cares much less about these now.
-PermaMines now have 2 billion health instead of being truly invincible. This makes it so that they can die in nuclear blasts and such.
-Decloakers are now immune to being insta-killed.
-The radii of force fields have been greatly increased to accomodate the larger space docks, and make them a bit more useful in general.
-Mark I Engineers, Cleanup Drones, and Remains Rebuilders all now have teleportation.
-Engineers and other economic ships that have teleportation are no longer disabled when teleportation is disabled. Instead, they simply switch to regular propulsion.
-Teleporting engineers now ignore the range to their targets (assuming that the target is within their effective range), instead preferring to repair ships that are most damaged.
-All golems and astro trains are now immune to black hole machines.
-Dreadnought Starships no longer have multiple shots per attack, but now have a stronger attack. They also do much more engine damage now. They also will try to disable the engines of all ships before trying to finish ships off.
-The cost of all the lightning turret techs have been reduced by 1500 each.
-Shots that are incoming from longer than 20,000 distance are now not used in short-range overkill prevention, which leads to quicker kills in most cases. Previously it had to be a sniper shot.
-All of the attack bonuses of fortresses and superfortresses have been removed, as their shots are so powerful on baseline that is no longer needed. This is particularly relevant for when they are facing starships. Note that their penalties against tanks and bombers remain.
-Command stations now automatically rebuild metal and crystal harvesters on all planets you control. Replacement harvesters will only be built if there are fewer than 100 mobile enemy ships on the planet.
-Ships that stuck in tractor beams now always have at least a 25% chance of hitting the tractor beam that is holding them if they would normally be able to hit the tractor beam from closer range. This makes tractor beams no longer so instantly fatal to bombers and other shorter-ranged ships.
-Ship bonuses against turrets no longer ocunt against tractor beams or ion cannons. This levels the playing field a bit for all ships with these, without making some ships absolutely useless against them and others ridiculously overpowered against them.
-Engineers Mark I and III, and cleanup drones and remains rebuilders, all now have longer ranges for doing their repairs.
-Engineers now will not to auto-assist constructor queues that have only maxed-out ships in them, or that are otherwise un-assistable, unless the player has explicitly assigned them to that constructor.
-The health of Mark I engineers have been reduced by about 60% to reduce their power when in the hands of the AI.
-Astro Train Stations no longer provide a force field effect.
-The effective ranges of all the gravitation turrets have been increased by 2000 each.
-The actual attack range of both electric shuttles and lightning turrets was far less than they were showing as their range circle. Fixed.
-The effective range of armored missiles has been doubled, making them more effective.
-The attack range of electric shuttles has been tripled, making them more useful in general as massive-but-weak-powered area damage.
New Cheats
-Two new cheats have been added: "advanced fat" adds an advanced factory, and "core of the star" adds a core starship.
-New cheat: "activate the omega" creates a new "Omega Drive" unit. This omega drive generates incredible amounts of resources (+1000/s metal and crystal, and +1 million energy), but will cause a boost of 1,000 AI progress if detroyed. This new unit will only ever appear in the game through the use of this cheat. It's useful for testing, and for players who want a certain style of deathmatch play.
-Six new cheats have been added for spawning broken or fully-functional versions of the new golems: busted teensy, teensy, busted ohm, busted shinra, shinra. These only work when the first expansion is enabled for the current game.
-There is now a much more severe penalty to the ranked/weighted scores for using cheats. And, there is also now a 100,000 points score cap for ranked/weighted scores during the first hour of the game, to prevent extremely low gametimes from being able to create astronomically high scores.
-Entering the chat text "cmd:activate expansion 1" (without quotes) now allows for the first expansion to be enabled for a campaign that did not already have the expansion enabled. This includes enabling the expansion ship classes, as well as enabling golems and other new capturables, although the population of those capturables is likely to be different from what it would have been if the expansion had been turned on from the start of the campaign given the same seed and other settings.
-A new cheat has been added for spawning armored missiles: armor em.
-There is now a command line argument "steam" that can be used to force the game to launch in steamworks-enabled mode. This is useful for Steam players who want to use the game in full steamworks-enabled mode.
-Three new cheats have been added to the base game to trigger the three new minor factions in the base game: Spawn Angry Colonists, Spawn Vagabonds, Spawn The Conners.
-Added a new "cmd:toggle hud" command that allows the game hud to be turned off and on (useful for screenshots and videos).
Misc Changes
-Trial mode now allows players to use all ship types, not just the simple ones. This is particularly useful for people who want to test the expansion ships without buying them.
-The descriptions of dreadnoughts have been updated to reflect the fact that they are no longer good against force fields. Additionally, dreadnoughts have gotten a boost in general, with new bonuses against munitions boosters, zenith bombardment ships, teleport battle stations, fighters of all sorts, zenith autobombs, raiders, and tele-raiders. This makes dreadnoughts a much more versatile and interesting ship in general, especially against the power of massed AI zenith bombardment ships.
-The time limit on campaigns in the trial of the game and expansion is now 3 hours instead of 1 hour. This is something that has been requested by players as a way to really get a better feel for the game than can be had in a single hour. It's still not enough time to finish even a short campaign, however, so it's not "giving away the farm."
-There were previously two spelling errors on the network sync popup tooltip. Fixed.
-On the technology unlock, "Zenith Starships" were still referred to as "Zinth." Fixed.
-The blue force fields used by players are no longer damaged by shots being fired out from under them. Instead, outgoing shots from under the force field are now reduced by 75% in power.
-It is now possible to run the AI War simulation from the command line by using the "runsim" command line argument. When running it this way, it splits up the work into multiple processes for multi-core machines, and it runs faster than the in-game simulation in general.
-The Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 is now used instead of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. This should ease installation woes for those who have trouble installing the bulkier .NET 3.5, and it should also provide better compatibility with Linux and Mac-based systems under WINE and/or Mono. Players who previously had .NET 3.5 installed but not .NET 2.0 will be inconvenienced by having to install .NET 2.0, but in general this should be a positive change for the playerbase, especially over time.
-There is now a FontSizesInPixels.xml file in the Fonts folder. This lets people manually adjust the font sizes (in pixels) used by the game. This is particularly useful when players may wish to use an alternate font beyond the default.
-A number of updates have been made to the localization text files to reduce redundant entries and thus both file size and the number of words needing to be translated by around 4,500 in the base game alone.
-The function of F1 has been altered somewhat to account for the large amount of new ships in the game: F1: Cycle through pages of planetary summary help icons. Shift+F1: Jump back to the non-help view of the planetary summary.
-Several new hotkeys have been added relating to control groups: Ctrl+X+0-9: Set control group and remove unit from its other control groups. Ctrl+Alt+0-9: Remove units from control group. Shift+Alt+0-9 Deselected control group ships.
-Mine remains are now practically invincible to conventional attacks, since those were far too micromangement-intensive in the past to be a valid way to play. Additionally, this prevents remains from accidentally being destroyed by area attacks or other means.
-Mine Layers have been renamed to Remains Rebuilders, and now are a general purpose rebuilder for any ship types that leave remains. They also now only will rebuild ships that were owned by the player who controls the rebuilder, rather than also working on allied ships. These have been moved to the Economy tab, instead of the Defensive tab, along with Cleanup Drones.
-Ship Remains that belong to AI players, but which are not on AI planets, now automatically explode—thus saving players the trouble of creating cleanup drones to clean them up manually.
-The savegame format has been drastically updated to a format that is now more compact. Average size savings are between 14% to 42%, with the average being around 20%. This not only makes savegames smaller, but also makes it that much faster to connect/sync multiplayer games. This new format will be even more advantageous as the game continues to develop, preventing the savegames from getting ever larger.
-Invincible ships and ships with 2 billion health or more are now omitted from the strong/weak data, as there is no useful data collected for them, anyway.
-There is now a chat message sent every time a player unlocks a tech, which is particularly helpful for coordination in co-op.
-There is now a chat message sent when a player finishes rebuilding a golem. This is helpful in co-op and in solo.
-The way that the names of technologies are loaded is now more efficient for localization, and also prevents a redudancy in the notification-of-unlock message text that is now shown.
-The count of the number of enemy ships at enemy and neutral planets are now calculated the same way that the counts on local player planets are: only including "dangerous" enemy ships (not non-attacking ships, astro trains, mines, or remains, etc).
-The Ctrl+Alt+F8 output now also creates a new AIProgressIncreases.txt file, which lists all of the possible sources of AI Progress increase and decrease.
-New ShotAcid sound effect.
-New ShotImpulseReactive sound effect.
-There is now a sound effect that plays when alarm posts are set off.
-A new numbering system has been put in place for versions, which is all-numeric and more compatible with general windows updater software packages.
-The official game manual can now be launched via the tutorial screen—its omission was an oversight previously.
-The game now buzzes if players try to gift a ship that cannot be gifted, to give some feedback rather than silently failing.
-Previously, the game would silently fail to unpause ships if there was not enough energy to unpause them. Now the game plays the buzz sound effect. Hovering over the ship shows how much energy it takes to unpause it, which should make the source of the issue much clearer to players having a trouble with it.
-The prereleases are now able to autodetect when Steamworks is supposed to be turned on, rather than requiring the "steam" command line argument to force them on. The command line argument is being left in place in case users need to force it on, however.
-Steam achievements will now automatically resubmit on game start if they were previously logged locally, but failed to get to Steam for whatever reason. This should both resolve this particular issue, and should also allow players to play the game offline, get some achievements, and then have those achievements actually be logged when they next play the game online via Steam.
-If AI War was launched with command-line arguments, and then the updater is run, the game will be restarted with the same command line arguments after the update is complete.
-The new updater now runs in UAC mode, to allow updating the game when it is installed in the Program Files folder or other OS-protected folders.
-3 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new minor factions.
-4 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new expansion minor factions.
-42 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new expansion AI types factions.
-The game now uses an averaging process for determining the "center of mass" of units on which the camera is to be centered. This affects centering the camera on a group of selected units, centering the camera on all friendly units when switching to a new planet, and similar. Before it was a literal center of a bounding box of all the units in question, which could lead to a camera view in the middle of nowhere if units were spread very far apart. Now it will trend the camera toward the largest concentrations of units.
-Now the game will autosave as Autosave_AfterGameOver.sav after a game over has been reached, rather than overwriting Autosave.sav. This lets players continue past a game over if they wish, without risk of losing their prior autosaves.
-The simulation that generates the strong/weak data now starts the ships off at about 16,000 range, making it so that range is now properly valued in the strong/weak calculations.
-Attrition emitters now have to be explicitly targeted by player ships, like ion cannons, warp gates, etc.
-The internals of the wave name logic have been revamped so that they are more consistent and accurate, and so that they are now fully localization-friendly. Additionally, waves now show what tech level they are, since now with the new Raid Engines the tech level of waves can vary by planet. Waves that are incoming to non-visible planets now still show up in the list of incoming warps, but with a destination of "???" Previously, those waves showed up in the wave count, but not in the list of incoming waves.
EXPANSION-ONLY CHANGES
Expansion-Only New Ships & Ship Classes
-New expansion-only Ship: Raid Engine. Launches brutal waves against its own planet or any adjacent planets, if those planets are not controlled by AI players, or if the human players have a significant fleet there. If human players don't have warp sensors on these planets, the waves may well arrive unanncounced. These waves arrive around every four minutes, contain a broad mix of AI ships, and use the tech level of the planet if that is higher than the current wave level for the controlling AI player.
-New expansion-only Ship: Alarm Post. When an AI Command Station is destroyed on the alarm post's planet, or an adjacent planet, all of the guards at the current planet will desert their posts and go on the attack. If the alarm post itself is attacked and destroyed, there is only a 50% chance of it alerting the guards.
-New expansion-only Ship: Special Forces Alarm Post. When an AI Command Station is destroyed on the alarm post's planet, or an adjacent planet, all of the "special forces" ships in the entire galaxy will turn aggressive and attack the humans. If the alarm post itself is attacked and destroyed, there is only a 50% chance of it alerting the special forces ships.
-Three new expansion-only ships have been added (difficulty 5 and up only): Astro Speed Booster Trains I-III. Nearly-indestructible robotic courier. Slightly damages nearby ships. More importantly, they provide a massive speed boost to all AI ships in the system and reveal any cloaked ships that come near. Destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them.
-Three new expansion-only ships have been added (difficulty 6 and up only): Astro Regenerator Trains I-III. Nearly-indestructible robotic courier. Slightly damages nearby ships. More importantly, is able to use its own health to resurrect AI mobile ships that are killed on the current planet. Resurrected ships are teleported to another AI planet at full health at no cost beyond the health of the train. They also reveal any cloaked ships that come near. Destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them.
-5 new expansion-only ships: Zenith Reserve Ships Mark I-V. Destroy to capture a large cache of Zenith vessels for your own use (at some AI Progress cost).Given the large number of ships that come online at once, be sure to have between 400k and 1 million energy available to support them.
-New expansion-only ship: Distribution Node. Destroy to capture a sizable cache of metal and crystal for the player destroying it (at some AI Progress cost). Be warned, however: around 1/5 of all nodes are actually Trojan Distribution Nodes, which are empty save for a malicious electronic payload that actually cause you to lose a sizable chunk of resources before automated recovery systems can purge the malicious infection.
-New expansion-only ship: AI Co-Processor. Destroying a co-processor normally increases the AI Progress by 20. However, when you destroy the last co-processor, the AI Progress takes a massive drop of 120. Check your Mission Summary (right side of the screen) to see how many co-processors remain; hitting all of them simultaneously is ideal. Co-Processors also interfere with supply on their planet.
-New expansion-only ship: AI SuperTerminal. When humans capture the planet on which this resides, they gain direct access to the core network of the AI network, where they can greatly damage the AI's processing capabilities. Every 30 seconds, this simultaneously increases the total AI Progress by one and reduces the AI Progress by two. This leads to a net reduction in AI Progress, although if left going long enough it will increase the AI Progress Floor in an undesirable manner (see the hover text over the AI Progress meter at the top of the screen for more info). While this reduction is occurring, AI ships will spew out of the SuperTerminal at a rate proportional to the total current AI Progress Reduction.
-New expansion-only ship: EMP Mine. Enemy ships coming too close to these invisible traps will incur heavy damage. If the ship triggering the mine survives, it will also be paralyzed for 60 seconds. The mine is also destroyed in the process. These are particularly useful for stalling out large incoming vesseles that don't have mine avoidance.
-New expansion-only ship: Area Mine. Enemy ships coming too close to these invisible traps will incur heavy damage. The explosions from these mines also effect other enemy ships that are close by. The mine is also destroyed in the process. These are obviously useful for taking out groups of ships, but they are also useful for hitting ships that have Mine Avoidance—those ships can still get caught in the blasts of area mines that are triggered by another ship.
-Three new expansion-only Starships: Cloaker Starship I-III. Very fast starship that cloaks other ships near it, even if those ships normally do not have cloaking.
-Three new expansion-only ships have been added: Astro Turret Trains I-III. Tough but not nearly-indestructible robotic courier. Has heavier turrets than normal astro trains, and so poses much more of a threat. More importantly, they reveal any cloaked ships that come near, and they tend to disrupt player minefields. Build Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets to protect against them, destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them, or attack them head-on. If destroyed, an individual astro turret train is gone forever, but its destruction comes at an AI Progress cost.
-New Starship (expansion only): Warbird Starship. Extremely fast starship with cloaking and a huge multi-targeting energy burst system. Great for clearing out hordes of enemy ships.
-New Starship (expansion only): Beam Starship. Fires very powerful high-range beam weapons that strike all enemy ships in a line.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Bombardment Ship (and core). Fires very powerful, very long-range energy bombs, but is expensive and has a very slow reload time.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith AutoBomb. Suicidal unit destroys itself when attacking in order to deal focused area damage to enemies.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Grenade Launcher (and core). Launches mid-power grenades over medium distance. Grenades explode on contact and deal area damage to enemies.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Electric Bomber (and core). Expensive bomber that delivers a tremendous payload, but loses attack power due to interference when too many are on the same planet. Most efficient in groups of 5 or less.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Sentinel Frigate (and core). Very powerful and expensive frigate with sniper-style shots, that loses attack power due to interference when too many are on the same planet. Most efficient in groups of 2 or less. Also includes an onboard advanced warp sensor.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Mirror (and core). Extraordinarily weak main attack, but has the unique ability to reflect all incoming shots against its attackers. With its shielding, can often deal out significantly more damage that it actually receives in this way. Mirrors are very weak to area-of-effect or melee attacks, however, since those cannot be reflected.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Paralyzer (and core). Very weak-but-fast attack, but inflicts temporary paralysis against targets it hits. Great when combined with other ship types.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Shield Booster. Strong fighter in its own right, it also gives a 2x shielding bonus to nearby ships on your team.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Polarizer. Fires straight through shields, and does higher damage to shields with more shielding.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Beam Frigate. Fires powerful high-range beam weapons that strike all enemy ships in a line.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Chameleon. Midrange bomber that takes on the appearance of junk, and is unassailable, when not moving.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Viral Shredder. Melee ship that generates build points as it attacks, spawning a free copy of itself when enough are accumulated.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Impulse Reaction Emitter. Attacks with ammo that reacts with enemy energy sources, doing much higher damage to ships with higher energy use.
-New Ship Class (expansion only): Acid Sprayer. Fires an acid shot at close range. Excellent at dissolving organic components found in all Zenith ships.
-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Decoy Drone. Tough, armored vessel with no significant guns. Attracts all fire from enemy ships to itself in place of ships within its protection area.
-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Speed Booster. Mobile ship that increases the speed of all friendly ships in the current system by a small amount. This effect is cumulative when multiple speed boosters are present.
-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Translocator. Mid-power teleporting fighter that fires shots that cause enemy targets to be teleported far across the current planet when they are hit.
-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): MicroParasite. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator). Very weak alone, but becomes significantly stronger when many are at the same planet.
-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Experimental Engineer Drone. Advanced prototype model that can regenerate itself as well as repairing other ships very quickly.
-New Defensive Ship (expansion only): Zenith SpaceTime Manipulator. Stationary alien ship that increases the speed of all friendly ships in the current system by a large amount. This effect is cumulative when multiple spacetime manipulators are present. Beware the minor AI Progress increase if this is destroyed.
-New AI Ship (expansion only): Core Warhead Interceptor. Advanced weapon insta-kills warheads (which explode without doing any damage or incurring any AI Progress increase).
-More about wasps: Very fast and nasty melee ship—loses health over a 3 minute period, then self-destructs. Created inside Hive Golems, when these are unloaded they are uncontrollable but will viciously attack the enemy on the current planet. Players cannot give direct orders to the wasps.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction: Zenith Devourer. The nigh-indestructible Devourer Golem makes its way slowly around the galaxy, absorbing all of the non-core mobile military ships on planets it visits in order to power and repair itself. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction Ship: Devourer Golem. This nigh-indestructible Golem makes its way slowly around the galaxy, absorbing all of the non-core mobile military ships on planets it visits in order to power and repair itself. It's attack power is so high that it will insta-kill most ships, but it will only attack non-core ships that are both mobile and which have attack power. The only way for those ships to survive is for them to flee to another planet until the devourer has moved on.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction: Zenith Miners. Every five hours or so, a Mining Golem will appear from deep space, and will spend time consuming a planet unless it is destroyed before it complete its task. The destruction of this planet may prove advantageous or not, depending on where it lies, but the usual AI Progress increases do apply if it is an AI planet. If one Mining Golem is destroyed, the Zenith miners will simply send another one at the next allotted time. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction Ship: Mining Golem. This golem is sent from deep space for one purpose: to consume the planet it is heading toward. It will fire on human ships that approach it, but it emits a signal that tricks AI ships into ignoring it as harmless. It takes it quite a while to reach the planet, but as soon as it does, it causes a blast the same as if a nuclear weapon had been set off—destroying all the resources and most ships, and making the planet unable to sustain supply.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction: Zenith Traders. These alien traders are happy to do business with anyone who can pay. They travel around the galaxy, providing special ships (for a hefty fee) to both human and AI players alike. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New expansion-only Minor Faction Ship: Zenith Trade Ship. These neutral traders are happy to trade with humans or AIs, although they charge quite a lot in return—and their wares are a bit different for AIs versus humans. The trade ship travels slowly around the galaxy, and when it has supply from your team, your entire team can use it to build very expensive and powerful ships that you can't directly build any other way. The AI will use it to build such things as even new Warp Gates or Astro Train Stations—but they only make purchases about 1% of the time when the trader exits a system belonging to them.
Expansion-Only New Golems
-New Regenerator Golem (expansion only): Very little in the way of weapons, but is able to use its own health to resurrect allied mobile ships that are killed on the current planet. Resurrected ships are teleported back to the golem at full health at no cost beyond the health of the golem.
-New Cursed Golem (expansion only): Cursed Golems continuously take passive damage and cannot be repaired by traditional means. The only way for this golem to survive is to attack enemy ships, which recovers its health through vampirism.
-New Armored Golem (expansion only): Incredibly highly armored, this golem fires 30x powerful flame waves in quick succession, letting it really chew through groups of enemies. Each shot also damages itself, however.
-New Artillery Golem (expansion only): Must be manually assigned targets, but fires extremely, extremely powerful artillery shots over long ranges. Is very slow, and heavily damages itself when firing, though. Great for taking out very heavily defended targets.
-New Black Widow Golem (expansion only): Relatively low health for a golem, but doesn't damage itself when firing. Fires 50x fairly powerful shots at a time, dealing extreme engine damage with each volley. Excellent for immobilizing or outright destroying large fleets.
-New Hive Golem (expansion only): Large, slow transport that automatically fills over time with up to 500 small wasp ships. When the wasps are unloaded, they will automatically spread out and attack enemy ships on the current planet; they cannot be directly controlled, cannot leave the current planet, and lose health slowly over 3 minutes.
-New Botnet Golem (expansion only): Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = full damage inflicted by reclamator). Reclaimed ships come back as Zombie Bots, which cannot be controlled but which will attack enemy ships mercilessly until they die. Zombie bots will travel to enemy planets if no enemies present. This golem damages itself with zombie-creating shots, and cannot attack ships that are immobile, have no attack, or are immune to reclamation.
Expansion-Only New Capturables
-New Capturable Ship (expansion only): Orbital Mass Driver. Advanced weapon sends projectiles stripped from an iron asteroid to deal heavy damage to starships and golems.
-A new expansion-only capturable, the Zenith Power Generator, has been added: Advanced Zenith power generator that produces a massive amount of energy at a very tiny cost. AI progress goes up by 20 if this is destroyed, and while your team holds it, the AIs will send 2x stronger waves against this planet.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Radar Jammer. Causes all ships on the planet to have extreme trouble targeting at ranges greater than 1000.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Radar Jammer II. Causes enemy ships on the planet to have extreme trouble targeting at ranges greater than 1000.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Gravity Drill Station. A large station that bores a hole into the fabric of spacetime. So brutal is the rending of normal space that the effects radiated from this rupture dramatically interfere with most known forms of propulsion thus rendering any teleportation within the system impossible and reducing the speed of all vessels to 8. Generates free energy, metal, and crystal for the player holding it.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Black Hole Machine. Prevents all enemy ships (except scouts) from escaping from this planet through wormholes, though enemy ships can still enter through wormholes as normal.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Interplanetary Munitions Booster. Triples the attack of all allied ship in its planet, as well as adjacent planets.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Planetary Shield Booster. Triples the shield strength of all allied ships on the current planet, making them far harder to hit.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Planetary Shield Inhibitor. Disables the shields of all enemy ships on the current planet, making them much easier to hit. Also disables enemy force fields.
Expansion-Only Ship Logic Updates
-Regarding all golems: Golems are extremely powerful ships, and thus are very concerning to the AI. Golems cause the AI to send larger waves and reinforcements to the planets the golems are on, as well as causing the AI Progress to increase when they are repaired. All golems start out in a broken state when captured by players, with 25% of their health remaining, and must be repaired to full health before they will become operational. This initial repair generally increases AI Progress by 100, but the power of the golem itself is a match for that.
-Golems are now immune to sniper shots and minor electric shots, and can no longer be boosted by munitions boosters.
Expansion-Only AI Types
-New expansion-only AI type: Raid Engine. Uses Raid Engines on a huge number of their planets. Makes for very frequent, short-term brutal waves in addition to the normal waves unless players carefully kill these engines.
-New expansion-only AI type: Alarmist. Uses alarm posts (special forces or regular) on all of their planets. Makes for massive cross-planet attacks unless players carefully kill these alarms.
-New expansion-only AI type: Camouflager. All of its mobile ships look like harmless pieces of junk when stationary and not firing.
-New expansion-only AI type: Zenith Descendant. Aggressive AI that uses only Zenith fleet ships.
-New expansion-only AI type: One-Way Doormaster. Employs black hole machines on all of its planets, which makes each raid into its territory a one-way trip if the black hole machine is not destroyed.
-New expansion-only AI type: Peacemaker. Uses anti-golem, anti-starship, anti-warhead, etc, ships on all its planets.
-New expansion-only AI type: Experimentalist. Aggressive AI that uses a heavy mix of experimental ships along with its normal fleets.
-New expansion-only AI type: Golemite. Has fully-functioning golems on a great many of its planets. Since the AI Progress goes up greatly when these are repaired, care must be taken to destroy these all in one wave to avoid any such penalty.
-New expansion-only AI type: Radar Jammer. Employs radar jammers on all of its planets, which makes long-range ships very ineffective against it.
-New expansion-only AI type: Speed Racer. All of its mobile ships have been upgraded to move extremely fast.
-New expansion-only AI type: Starfleet Commander. Aggressive AI that uses starships heavily in place of normal fleet ships.
-New expansion-only AI type: Tag Teamer. A defensive AI whose guards are extra speedy and don't stay near their posts. This makes them more challenging to attack.
-New expansion-only AI type: Shield Ninny. Planets are all heavily defended, often with special boosters for allied shields or inhibitors for enemy shields, but this AI never launches waves at the players.
-New expansion-only AI type: Grav Driller. Aggressive AI with many gravity drill stations on its planets. Gravity Drills nullify teleporting units and majorly slow down all other units, but when captured provide free resources and energy.
Expansion-Only Misc
-When the expansion is installed and available or in trial mode (not disabled), it now shows a new expansion-specific logo and splash screen.
-Two new map styles are now available (expansion only): Tree and Spokes. Tree tends to have lots of little branches and long corridors, with very long numbers of hops between the sides of the map (but not always). Spokes tends to have certain hub planets that have super-high numbers of connections (10 to 14 or even more), and usually any part of the map is a bit closer (but again, not always).
-The expansion-related text has been moved into a more final format that will be easier to handle with localization partners.
-In the expansion only, the "energize" cheat now creates 10 Zenith Power Generators instead of 10 mark II energy reactors.
-Four new cheats have been added for spawning broken or fully-functional versions of the new golems: busted curse me, curse me, busted its a troll, its a troll. These only work when the first expansion is enabled for the current game.
-In the expansion on difficulty 7 and up, the AI home planets and core planets (those next to the home planets) will now always include both an orbital mass driver and a core warhead interceptor.
-Two new cheats have been added for spawning broken or fully-functional versions of the new hive golem: busted and the hegemon, and the hegemon. These only work when the first expansion is enabled for the current game.
-Two new cheats have been added for spawning broken or fully-functional versions of the new botnet golem: busted zombie bots, zombie bots. These only work when the first expansion is enabled for the current game.
-Four new cheats have been added to the expansion to trigger the four new minor factions in the expansion: Go Go Trade Pact, Spawn Miners, Calling Mr Miles, Invoke Unicron.
-Spokes maps are particularly vulnerable to supply, so all AI players now get a core force field covering all of their command stations in that map style—this adds some challenge back, and essentially deepens the scenario as a counterpoint to how you can take advantage of them with supply denial.
-A warning message is now shown whenever a devourer is on one of your team's planets, or on an adjacent planet to your team.
-Three new expansion-only map styles have been added to the game: Snake, Vines, and Grid. They provide somewhat more orderly alternatives to Tree and Spokes, with explorations in different sorts of connection-patterns between planets, providing more variety in terms of planet adjacency, numbers of hops, and so on.
Bugfixes
-The game will no longer crash when it is missing images, but instead will log the error and will display a pink square instead.
-Previously, there was a problem with lightning missiles not always detonating immediately upon reaching a player-set target. Fixed.
-Fixed a network multiplayer glitch that could occur in the 2.0 version when Skip Batch Network Sending was not enabled.
-In recent releases, AI Parasites were not taking over human ships. Fixed.
-Previously, there was an issue where multiplayer connections would fail the first time, but succeed the second time, for some players. This should now be fixed.
-Previously, there was still a minimum range set on the raptor mark II, which caused it to act strangely. Fixed.
-Since version 2.0, it was possible to select ships that were not your own (and not belonging to a disabled player) by single-clicking them. Fixed.
-The display of strong/weak data had some glitches in it previously for turrets and starships. Fixed. Starships were still giving nonuseful data, however, so the algorithm for checking those has been changed to a good degree. Future exports of data for starships, heavy defense, golems, and force fields should be more informative.
-In previous versions of the game, there was an exceptionally rare bug where players who were fast-clickers in above-averge-lag situations could cause invalid planetary travel paths for ships. Fixed.
-Previously, the counter-shooting ranges of ships was being shown for enemy ships—even cloaked enemies. Fixed.
-Previously, moving force fields could push even enemies that are immune to force fields. Fixed.
-Previously, the Expenses By Player tab of the stats window was omitting any outflows for ships that were try to spending resources, but temporarily unable to actually spend them because of a resource shortage. Fixed.
-Previously, there was an error with the time taken for conflicts to resolve in the simulation data (it was showing about half the time it really took). Fixed.
-Previously, damage smoke could give away the position of large damaged ships on planets that a player did not have visibility to. Fixed.
-In the past release, the starting color of players was not being shown correctly in the lobby. Fixed.
-Previously, non-combat ships were drawing an attack range. Fixed.
-In recent releases, when players connected to a host with a different version of the game, they would erroneously go into an empty lobby. Now it properly kicks them back out to the "find lan games" window with a message about what version they need to run in order to connect.
-The StrongWeak.xml export now only includes the actual main ship types and bonus ship types once again, as it was always supposed to.
-Previously, AIs would often build far too many counter-snipers when threatened with any snipers. Fixed.
-Kills made by electric shuttles and lightning turrets were not previously being correctly logged. Fixed.
-Niche text overlays were not previously being positioned properly on 64x64 icons. Fixed.
-Previously it was possible for Remains Rebuilders to send a player into negative energy through their rebuilding. In recent prereleases, they were also doing their rebuilding for free. All fixed, and now they are not instantly rebuilt, either, but rather are kicked off so that they then construct themselves over time for an ongoing resource cost as with every other aspect of the new economy. For the first time ever, this also applies to the AI when it is rebuilding ships—thus the AI Remains Rebuilders are not nearly so threatening as mine builders used to be, since they can't just instantly respawn large numbers of ships.
-Several bugs with the strong/weak export have now been fixed.
-Previously, large numbers of mines and remains (as in, 50,000+) in the game could cause significant slowdown. This has now been fixed so that they cause almost no performance impact whatsoever, except right after the game is loaded (since there are extra messages being sent to the AI, and the save files themselves are larger).
-The Stealth Tachyon Beam Emitter was supposed to have regular Tachyon Beam Emitters as a prerequisite technology, but did not. Fixed.
-Fixed a bug where ships could be built on non-controlled planets using a control group exploit.
-Previously, there were several bugs with engineers assisting objects under construction and how the costs were calculated and reported. All fixed.
-Previously there was a bug that would sometimes cause AI ships—most notably bombers—to act indecisive when they are generally outnumbered but also still have a target of value that they can kill. This is now fixed.
-Previously, if the low-energy count was shown over a ship that had a countdown timer or a transport text, the text was all overlapping. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a bug where reclaimed ships always came back with 50% health no matter how much damage had been dealt to them by reclamators. Fixed.
-Previously, the tooltips in the lobby were often jittery at the edge of the screen. Fixed.
-Previously, the up and down arrows were not working correctly on the custom scrollbars used by the game. They have now simply been removed.
-Previously, ships could be manually targeted onto ships that they could not hit at all (due to shot immunities, mainly), which was problematic. Fixed.
-Previously, sometimes just-created ships would flash fully-visible and red while still fading in. Fixed.
-Previously, if players had energy less than zero, then various services would shut off. Occasionally it seems that builders will let energy accidentally go to -50 or so, and other minor events can also cause this very temporarily, which would cause (essentially) brownouts. In order to smooth this out (and because this new logic makes more sense in terms of a power grid anyway), the threshold for "negative energy" has now been changed to -30,000. The only way players would ever get energy that is this negative is if they lost an energy reactor. Having a zero or less balance of will still prevent new ship construction as before, but it won't cause brownouts until this more extreme threshold is passed. This retains the general character of the risk of losing reactors, without having small events cause such major fluctuations.
-Previously there were a few situations where it was possible for players starting a game, or joining a game late, to not get their starting allotment of metal, crystal, and knowledge. All fixed.
-Previously, via gifting ships it was possible to send yourself or allies into negative energy balances. Fixed.
-Previously, when switching to a new planet the camera would center on enemy command stations (even if the enemy command station was not visible). Fixed so that it never centers on enemy command stations.
-Previously, structures larger than 120 radius did not show a circle around themselves when cloaked or under force fields; players could only tell if they were protected when looking at them very zoomed out. Fixed.
-Previously, when selecting both science labs and advanced research stations together, the tech menu would not show. Fixed.
-Previously, when an etherjet was trying to move and got stuck on the edge of a force field, its tractored cargo would keep moving. Fixed.
-Previously, sometimes the planetary summary would show a blank space instead of a zero for a ships that was no longer present. Fixed.
-Previously, group-move commands would not function with any ships with move speed less than 6. Fixed.
-Previously, the selection hotkeys (B, D, S, O, etc) were working on both ships belonging to the local player, as well as the ships of disabled players. This was confusing and could lead to input errors, so it has changed to just cylcing through ships belonging to the local player.
-Previously, the planetary summary would often start as one long row and then jump to its correct size when loading a game. In a super-rare case, this could even cause it to overlap the score. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a bug in the second tutorial where if the science labs were sent to another planet and actually made it there before the player hit enter, the tutorial would get stuck. Fixed.
-Previously, it was possible for some game input to erroneously reach the game when the game did not have input focus, or when the game loading window was showing. Fixed.
-Previously, hosting a multiplayer and then immediately switching to being a client of another game could cause a crash. Fixed.
-Previously, ships heading for a transport or a wormhole would collision-detect in advance (as is appropriate with a move order) and select new destinations adjacent to their true target. This caused some slowdown with wormholes and a ton of slowdown with transports, and was undesirable in the first place because the collision detection is not even needed or correct. Fixed.
-Previously, command stations that are attacked on planets that used to be the AI's home planet were giving the wrong warning message. Fixed.
-The tooltip on the tachyon warheads was indicating that their effect only lasts for 30 seconds, when the effect really lasts for 5 minutes. Fixed.
-Previously, when the host of a multiplayer game quit back to the main menu, it was not completely shutting down the server process—this would leave "phantom" games in play that could cause issues. Fixed.
-Previously, it was possible for clicking through a wormhole to cause unintentional ship selections on the far side of the wormhole. Fixed.
-Previously, scrapping in-progress ships would give back too many resources. Fixed so that it simply gives back 10% of the resources equivalent to the current health of the self-bulder being scrapped, as with any other ship.
-Previously, there was a bug with manufactories not working when the resource they would produce is at zero. Fixed.
-The game now saves a settings.bak file before saving to settings.dat, just to make sure that if the write is interrupted before completing, data is not lost.
SPECIAL THANKS
-Thanks to kjara for reporting the issue with AI parasites note taking over human ships, for reporting exploits to the adjusted score calculation, for suggesting the new bonuses for higher-mark autocannons, for reporting that in prior versions expansion ships could show up in the lobby when the expansion was disabled or not installed, for suggesting that attrition emitters must be directly attacked by player ships, for suggesting the improvements to when the AI goes on alert, for reporting the issue with the colors not showing correctly in multiplayer lobbies, for suggesting some of the new player colors, for suggesting the Speed Boosters, for suggesting eyebots not show up in the scouts tab, for reporting that under-construction units were not receiving any protections in the prereleases.
-Thanks to Nibelung44 for reporting the issue with the raptor IIs still having a minimum range.
-Thanks to twobitshift for suggesting the colony ship improvements.
-Thanks to etgfrogs for suggesting that golems be immune to minor electric shots, for reporting that Beam Frigates were unable to hit must-be-directly-targeted ships in 2.001L, for suggesting the AI SuperTerminal.
-Thanks to RCIX for suggesting the Artillery Golem, for suggesting the Black Widow Golem, for suggesting the Armored Golem, for doing original sketches for the Grenade Launcher and the Zenith Polarizer, for suggesting the Zenith Chameleons, for suggesting the Acid Sprayers, for suggesting that players be able to set font sizes for replacement fonts, for reporting balance issues with the beam frigates, for suggesting the Zenith Power Generator, for suggesting the Core Warhead Interceptor, for suggesting the Zenith Reserve Ships, for suggesting EMP Mines, for suggesting that the strong/weak simulations be run at range, for suggesting that any ships that can fire through force fields can also fire through decoy protection radii, for reporting the exploit with control groups and building on non-controlled planets, for suggesting the Mining Golem, for reporting the visual issue with ships fading in, for suggesting the Dyson Golem, for reporting the rotating mark iii force fields, for suggesting the lightning turret rebalance, for suggesting that grenade launchers be moved to normal complexity in the lobby, for reporting the new shot outrunning problem, for reporting the issue with units collision-detecting while on the way to get into a transport, for reporting the sleeping alarm posts in 2600, for reporting the issue with blinking protecting from exo-forcefields.
-Thanks to Ktoff for suggesting the buffs to the spire starships.
-Thanks to Joshua Yu for suggesting that tachyon emitters have mine avoidance, for reporting the grenade launcher IV range error, for reporting the issue with the game version mismatch throwing players into an empty lobby, for reporting the exploit with viral shredders, for reporting that the description of teleporting units in the lobby was out of date, for suggesting Cursed Golems, for suggesting the Black Hole Machine, for reporting the missing wave names in some prereleases, for suggesting the rebalance of beam starships, for suggesting that tanks get a buff, for reporting the exploit with gifting home command stations, for suggesting that control nodes not be giftable, for suggesting the AI Superterminals not interfere with supply, for suggesting that decloaker be immune to being insta-killed, for reporting the errors in the mrls and mlrs turret descriptions, for suggesting the knowledge cost reduction in cloaker starships, for reporting the issue with speed boosters acting while under construction.
-Thanks to Calvin Southwood for suggesting that laser gatlings be weak against cruisers, for suggesting that harvester exo-shields not be pausable, for reporting the bug with the simulation data in the 2.001F, for suggesting the Stealth Leech Starships, for reporting the issue with ships forgetting queued attacks, for coding out the change to make ships able to be in multiple control groups at once, for identifying the overflow error in the line-circle intersection tests, for reporting that you could gift allies into negative energy, for suggesting the change to cold storage ships being blacked out.
-Thanks to Vaos for reporting the crash bug in 2.001C, for reporting the ucc wormhole additive bug in 2.001E, for suggesting that mirror ships should have a stronger primary attack, for reporting that paralyzers were not properly prioritizing ships in 2.001H.
-Thanks to Velox for reporting the fact that attrition emitters were not capturable, but should have been, for suggesting the Sentinel Frigates, for suggesting the Zenith Virtal Shredder, for reporting the confusing way that turrets interacted with most ships that fire minor electric shots, for suggesting the Core Fabricator, for suggesting the Zenith SpaceTime Manipulator, for suggesting the Experimental Fabricator and Experimental Starship Fabricators, for suggesting Regenerator Golems, for suggesting Hive Golems, for suggesting Devourer Golems, for reporting the description of fleet and alien starships being off, for reporting the gather points bug in 2200, for reporting the raid engine adjaceny issue, for reporting the issue with ship selection when clicking through wormholes.
-Thanks to Nailer for suggesting that wormholes should have a clickable icon in far zoom.
-Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the two bugs with the unified command queue in 2.001F, for reporting two spelling errors on the network sync popup text, for reporting the error with FRD ships and rally posts, for reporting the crash when converting some savegames to the expansion, for reporting the issue with paralyzed self-builders, for reporting the incorrect "your income" line items in the intel summary.
-Thanks to Desmond Kaplan for suggesting the orbital command station home cores.
-Thanks to inchoate for suggesting the altered MTU as a way to solve the transmission problems that a few players were having over certain network setups.
-Thanks to keith.lamothe for suggesting that ships prefer not to autotarget mirrors when possible.
-Thanks to Vade for reporting the Zenith Starship misspelling on the technology button.
-Thanks to laxrulz777 for suggesting the Zenith Polarizers, for suggesting the Interplanetary Munitions Booster.
-Thanks to Oewyn for suggesting Shield Boosters, for reporting the issue with counter-shooter ranges appearing for enemy ships, for reporting the issue with non-combat ships showing attack ranges, for reporting a misspelling in the Raid Starship descriptin text, for suggesting the hard counter to impulse reaction emitters, for reporting a crash bug in ZF, for reporting the issue with transport percents, for suggesting that turret trains not be auto-attacked, for reporting the clipping in the stats window, for suggesting the cost reduction for EMP mines, for reporting the temporary issue with colony ships requiring supply, for reporting the temporary mixup with permamine health, for suggesting that mirrors not reflect starship attacks, for suggesting that astro train stations only be attacked via direct orders, for suggesting that fortresses not have such a huge bonus against starships, for suggesting the buzzbomb rebalance, for reporting the issue with the incorrect message being shown when player ships flew into enemy minefields, for suggesting the increase in engineer ranges, for suggesting the better range for rebel/mining spawns, for suggesting that the range of gravitational turrets be increased, for reporting that resistance fighters were not spawning, for suggesting the warning when devourers are on or next to player planets, for reporting the harvesters rebuilding too frequently, for reporting another issue with FRD ships chasing teleporters, for reporting the issue with devourer positions being revealed by some galaxy map counts, for reporting the cold storage issue with waves to unknown planets, for reporting the issues with SuperTerminals.
-Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting the separate target search cycle for tractor beams, for reporting the issue with exo-galaxy wormholes in certain prereleases, for pointing out that the new cloaked planets could be used to circumvent scouting, for suggesting that Zenith ships have a different color of explosion, for suggesting the improved rally post attributes, for suggesting that mobile builders count as constructors instead of engineers, for reporting the issue with energy going minorly negative, for reporting that you could gift yourself into negative energy, for suggesting the change to cold storage ships being blacked out, for suggesting the widening of the minor faction listbox, for suggesting that the view never center on enemy command stations by default, for reporting the issues with acceleration and group move, for reporting the visual issue with zeroed ship counts on the planetary summary, for suggesting the change to autosave after game over, for suggesting that building hotkeys not include ships of disabled players, for reporting the issue with engineers improperly charging allies for dock acceleration, for reporting the crash when joining a multiplayer game after hosting, for reporting that group-moving into transports was not working, for reporting the miscolorization of planet names on wormholes, for reporting that cloaked ships were being shown during game syncs.
-Thanks to Kiro for reporting the exploit with command station cores.
-Thanks to Draxis for reporting the issue with force fields being able to push cutlasses.
-Thanks to I-KP for suggesting that the "Always display wormhole names in front of ships" setting no longer affect the wormhole far zoom icon, for contributing a variety of graphics noted above, for suggesting the Orbital Mass Driver, for suggesting the Gravity Drill Station, for suggesting the Distribution Node, for suggesting the AI Co-Processor, for suggesting that force fields provide protection from tractor beams, for suggesting the method for making ships borders look better at partial zoom, for reporting the issue with etherjets stuck against force fields, for suggesting the improvements to the electric shuttles and reporting the issue with their stated-vs-actual ranges, for suggesting the colorized planet names in the galaxy map.
-Thanks to Minty for reporting the bug with incoming fire going through forcefields in the 2.001L prerelease, for suggesting that trade ships be immune to force fields.
-Thanks to sparkler for reporting the bug in prerelease M that would allow unbounded ship reinforcements.
-Thanks to StealthArcher for suggesting the Impulse Reaction Emitter.
-Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann for reporting balance issues with the beam frigates, for suggesting adjustments to the font sizes from prereleases O and P, for creating the new colorized planetary summary panel graphics, for suggesting the Planetary Shield Booster and Planetary Shield Inhibitor, for providing the new explosion graphics (red, green, and blue), for suggesting the buff of forts, for suggesting that astro train stations no longer create a force field, for suggesting that the rebel human colony event be a bit easier, for reporting the issue with ships firing too early on radar jammer planets, for suggesting that minor factions be blind for allied humans, for reporting the issue with clicking minor faction ships in the planetary summary, for suggesting that command stations never shift on game load.
-Thanks to damador for reporting the issue with the font size loading being problematic in version P.
-Thanks to freeofme for suggesting the translocator.
-Thanks to OniRyo for suggesting the decoy drone.
-Thanks to CogDissident for suggesting that golems be immune to paralysis attacks, for reporting the issue with beam frigate targeting.
-Thanks to Cintia for reporting a bug in the prereleases where munitions boosting was still working with turrets.
-Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting the bug in a few prereleases with regen abilities incorrectly being applied during the 3-seconds-after-being hit period, for reporting that Stealth Tachyon Beam Emitters did not have a proper prerequistie, for suggesting that forts be mrses and rally posts, for suggesting the rebalance of dreadnoughts, for reporting the issue with FRD ships and teleporters in 2.600, for reporting that enemy force fields were visible in enemy territory with fog of war on again.
-Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting that turrets leave remains in the same manner of mines, for reporting the disappearing fonts, for reporting the clipping of the header text in the stats window, for suggesting the simple render option for far zoom icons.
-Thanks to darke for suggesting that advanced factories should get a health boost, for suggesting that bombers should get a health boost.
-Thanks to Darloth for reporting the missing EMP Mine buy icon, for reporting the issue with the reload speed of sentinel frigates, for reporting the crash bug in ZD.
-Thanks to raptor331 for suggesting that fortresses be able to store units as a transport to keep them safe until they are ready to be ejected, for suggesting the option to not require admin rights to install updates.
-Thanks to JfpOne23 for suggesting the rebalance of sentinel frigates.
-Thanks to FFLaguna for reporting the issue with rebuilders not working correctly when ships were at cap, for reporting the issue with rebuilders going all the way to their FRD destination before actually target searching, for suggesting teleporting remains rebuilders and cleanup drones.
-Thanks to HellishFiend for suggesting the improvements to the mobile repair stations, for reporting the desyn in 2201, for reporting the missing dangerous ship counts on the command station button list, for reporting the issue with under-construction ships forgetting their orders on completion.
-Thanks to Volatar for suggesting the botnet golem, for reporting that too many bonuses were being shown in the strong/weak data for ships.
-Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the issues with the scrollbar arrows, for reporting the issue with silent failure of unpausing low-power ships when not enough energy, for reporting that the tooltip on the tachyon warhead was out of date, for reporting the issue with old server sessions not always being cleaned up correctly, for reporting the issue with AIs growing out of control in 2801.
-Thanks to Epsilon Plus for suggesting that golems and astro trains be immune to black hole machines, for suggesting the alert when traders are visiting a player planet, for suggesting the FRD range limiting control node.
-Thanks to Haagenti for reporting the out of date description of raptors, for suggesting the extra AI force fields on spokes maps.
-Thanks to Marisa Park for her work in maximizing the readability of the new font.
-Thanks to TheWordWillSetYouFree for suggeting the rebalance of light starships.
-Thanks to Dere011 for reporting the issue with fortresses not properly accting as an MRS in some prereleases.
-Thanks to NahtanoJ88 for reporting the issue with FRD mode in 2200.
-Thanks to tombom for reporting the map seed textbox being too small in prereleases.
-Thanks to Guardia for reporting the issue with engineers teleporting agains astro train stations in 2201.
-Thanks to Cubittus for reporting issues with engineers assisting queues that were fully empty.
-Thanks to maritime for reporting the issues with marauders getting stranded by engine damage.
-Thanks to aspo for suggesting the reduction of Mark I Engineer health.
-Thanks to Shardz for reporting the counts of ships being off in cold storage planets, for reporting the enemy counts being off in the global summary button, for reporting the planetary summary sizing issue, for reporting the costs overlap issue.
-Thanks to quickstix for reporting the issue with rally posts not properly setting the FRD target of ships to themselves, for reporting the broken cross-planet attacks, for reporting the issue with clicking enemies on the planetary summary when they were in cold storage, for reporting the issue with attack-move mode working like FRD mode in 2.600.
-Thanks to Thiima for reporting the AI being laconic about its command stations being under attack, for reporting the issue with the wrong message being shown when a command station on the AI's old home planet was attacked.
-Thanks to Kaptein for reporting that engineers could repair ships even when in low power mode.
-Thanks to orzelek for reporting several targeting issues, for reporting that marauders were kiling traders, for reporting the targeting issues with turrets and mining golems in 2600.
-Thanks to Pandemic for reporting the issue with science labs and ARSes not being able to use the tech menu when selected together.
-Thanks to JoeFosterX for reporting the issue with group moving with non-military ships.
-Thanks to Rifleman for inspiring the change to make marauders and such patrol when idle.
-Thanks to dragoniv for reporting the bug in tutorial 2.
-Thanks to SingleMalt for reporting the issue with scrapping returning too many resources for in-progress ships.
-Thanks to kjara, Pantera, Dr_Mario, Calvin Southwood, and Lars Bull for reporting and helping to diagnose the multiplayer connection issue relating the batch network sending.
-Thanks to Admiral and freeofme for suggesting the ability to reveal the random AI types, for suggesting the Cloaker Starships.
-Thanks to Lars Bull and Calvin Southwood for originally suggesting the unified command queue, and Nibelung44 for bringing the issue back up more recently, as well as the dozen or more other forum members who commented on this feature, for reporting the issue with the keyboard input sometimes registering when there is no focus.
-Thanks to kjara and Haagenti for suggesting the reduced penalty for holding an attrition emitter.
-Thanks to HellishFiend and RCIX for reporting the crash bug when upgrading an existing savegame to include the expansion.
-Thanks to Cintia and TheWordWillSetYouFree for reporting the bug where player ships were unable to hit must-be-directly-targeted ships sometimes in 2.001L.
-Thanks to Lars Bull, Calvin Southwood, dumpsterKEEPER, RCIX, kjara, and eRe4s3r for reporting the queued wormhole command issue in the unified command queue prereleases.
-Thanks to Velox, Joshua Yu, I-KP, Hans-Martin Portmann, and Vaos for their input on how to rebalance the regenerator trains.
-Thanks to Lancefigher and Oewyn for suggesting the buffs to decloakers.
-Thanks to I-KP, HellishFiend, CogDissident, Velox, and quickstix for reporting the issues with the FRD mode.
-Thanks to PineappleSam and Hobbit for reporting the missing control node technologies.
-Thanks to Oewyn and I-KP for reporting the jumbled galaxy map text in some prereleases.
-Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann and maritime for reporting the issues with the Zenith Trade Ship balance.
-Thanks to Pandemic and PineappleSam for reporting the issues with starting resources not being properly granted in some cases.
-Thanks to aspo and quickstix for reporting the missing strong/weak data in 2201.
-Thanks to Harry and LanceFighter for reporting the issue with command stations counting as scouts.
