AI War:Current Post-4.000 Beta

Prerelease 4.025

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

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

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

Prerelease 4.024

• Colony ships no longer have any energy cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 1st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.022

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

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

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

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

(Released October 29th, 2010)