AI War:Current Post-4.000 Beta

Prerelease 4.070

• The AI-ships-stay-under-ff rule no longer applies to ships under a module-based forcefield, to ships either coordinating or coordinated (i.e. hybrids and their drones, and exogalactic strikeforces), or to ships on galaxy-wide chases (i.e. exogalactic strikeforces).
  • Thanks to Rainbow for the report.

• Redid Parasite and Leech Starship tooltips to reflect recent changes to the reclamation mechanic.
  • Thanks to Ymihere for the report.

• AI ships that create forcefields will now never be put into low-power mode by the AI.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for inspiring this change.

• All spire blade spawners are now immune to being cloaked by a cloaker starship or an AI planetary cloaker.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting this change.

• Spire blade spawners also no longer have direct guns.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting this change.

• Fixed a desync that would occur whenever the harvesters were reset in a multiplayer game.

• All cross planet attacks are now twice as large as they used to be. In essence, this puts them back to where they were on Normal before the prior version, as that seemed like a good level what with the new, larger wave sizes and such. On Low ship caps they will still be 1/2 what they were a couple of releases back, based on being quartered and now doubled. And for High ship caps, it's just now twice as large as it's ever been.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Zenith Awesomebomb (oops, I mean Autobomb)
  • Base Health from 10k/20k/30k/40k => 11k*mk.
  • Can now hit a maximum of 10 units.
  • Base Attack Power from 4k/6k/8k/10k => 4k*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 10k.
    • We've gotten a lot of reports of these being overpowered, and we think that's primarily due to the fact that it could hit any number of targets within their radius. The actual "what's an acceptable dps?" question is a lot more complicated.
    • Their previous cap-dps for mkI was about 784k. And that's when hitting only one target. But that also assumes that you're hitting a target with a full cap of autobombs every second, which isn't realistic. Assuming that you're producing 2 autobombs per second that's about 1/100th of a cap, multiplied by 10 targets per hit, we could say that it's ok for the standard cap-dps calculation to be 10x what it is for a standard fleet ship type. That means on the 30-100 scale that autobombs are about 78k.
    • So, rather than tweak it around more, we'll just leave the mkI damage as-is and make the other marks linear with it. The allowed bonus in that range is roughly 2.
  • Bonus vs. Polycrystal from 5 => 2.
  • "Bonus" vs. CloseCombat from 0.5 => 1.
  • "Bonus" vs. Artillery from 0.5 => 1.

• Youngling Nanoswarm
  • Base Health from 500 + 50*mk => 3400*mk (not that health matters terribly much for these).
  • Base Armor Rating from 75 + 25*mk => 0.
  • Base Attack Power intentionally left at 400*mk.
    • In parallel to the comments on the Zenith Autobomb, the "cap-dps" (oddly computed as it is) for nanoswarms is about 313k. But it has an attribute that makes that count 16x times as much for reclamation purposes, putting it in roughly the 5-million category for that. Also, Nanoswarms can only hit 3/5/7/9/11 targets, which shifts it a bit downward from the autobomb (except for the higher marks... may need to make the target-count thing a flat 5 or so). But the main thing is that the nanoswarm is intentionally not about the damage, it's just supposed to do _some_, and to be an effective reclamator, and apply a variety of other debuffs (armor damage, engine damage, paralysis) just for the fun of it.

• Electric Shuttle
  • Base Energy Cost from 100 => 400 (MkIs, as usual, have half energy cost).
  • Metal Cost from 100 => 300.
  • Crystal Cost from 500 => 1500 (the main reason for the resource cost increase is that these are a 1/4 cap ship, so the build-to-cap expenses were way lower than is normal).
  • Base Health from 7200/10000/14000/20000 => 30k*mk (this brings their cap health up to 10m, average is 15m).
  • Base Armor Rating from 100 => 150*mk.
  • Seconds-Per-Salvo from 20/19/18/17 => flat 20.
  • Base Attack Power from 200/600/1000/1500 => 400*mk.
    • Previously these had a mkI cap-dps of... 490. That's against one target, obviously. Against 100 targets that's 49000, which is inside the 30-100 scale, but against 1000 targets or 2000 targets, etc, it gets really high. It's not too insanely high but in order to maintain that the more "normal" cases have to have a much lower than average dps.
    • So we're introducing a new form of "aoe-capping" to avoid the truly asymptotic cases and also avoid the ship being too ineffective against a small number of targets, and removing the normal bonuses; basically it has a "bonus" against larger groups.
  • Can hit a maximum of 200 targets in one blast, but if there are fewer than that many eligible targets in range it will keep hitting them until it has done 200 hits or until it has hit all of them 5 times.
    • This means that the cap-dps vs groups of 40 or more is about 196k, and the cap-dps against a single target is only 4900 (which is reallllly low, but still 10x what it used to be and basically they're not supposed to be good against single targets).
  • The "staggering" mechanic is still in place to prevent alpha strikes (which has both positive and negative impacts on the unit's effectiveness, actually), we can look at reducing the stagger post-5.0.
  • None of these various "number of targets" value scale with unit caps; we may change that later but in general it's not a priority to maintain exactly the same balance across different caps, so long as each has a reasonable balance of its own.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 4 => 1.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 4 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 4 => 1.
  • Bonus vs CommandGrade from 4 => 1.
  • "Bonus" vs Medium from 0.75 => 1.

• Since Hybrids are no longer (for now) constructed during the game, the Hybrid Facilities galaxy map filter will now display data for all planets you've ever scouted.
  • Thanks to Prezombie for the suggestion.

• AI ships will now come out of low-power mode (but not free, as a result of just this) when a shot targeting them is in the air; this will tend to also wake up the rest of their guard group.

• Spire Mini-Ram
  • Base Health from 20k/30k/40k/50k/60k => 30k*mk.
  • Metal Cost from 6000 => 1500.
  • Leaving attack power at 200k*mk.
    • We've had reports of these being underpowered, but we'd like to see how the recently added 2x bonus vs structural (i.e. forcefields) affects things. Currently a full cap of mkI rams has a base dps of just under _10 million_. Or 20 million against forcefields. Or 40 million against forcefields on normal or blitz combat style. An AI forcefield mkI has 52 million hitpoints. So we'll boost the bonus a bit so a full cap of mkI rams can take down a mkI AI ff.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 2 => 3.

• Spire Blade Spawner
  • Base Health from 30k*mk => 150k*mk (these have a really low ship cap).
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 1000 (mkI costs half, as usual).
  • Leaving Blade attack power at 60k*mk.
    • It spawns 1 blade every 2 seconds, so that's roughly 30k dps per spawner or 270k dps at a cap of 9 spawners (on high caps). That's pretty high, actually, but most feedback has seemed to indicate a feeling that these are underpowered. We'll see.

• Spire Maw
  • Base Health from 200k*mk => 300k*mk (very, very low ship cap).
  • Base Attack Power from 1100*mk => 1400*mk
    • This brings the base cap-dps up to 30k, the very low end for direct dps, but normally has 10x bonuses. No bonuses in this case, instead that's accounted for by the swallow-and-attrition behavior.
  • Shots-per-salvo from 8/10/12/14/16 => flat 8.
  • Energy Use from 100 => 2000 (mkI costs half).

• Sniper base attack power from 7500*mk => 6000*mk.

• Sentinel Frigate base attack power from 20k*mk => 14k*mk.

• Teleport Raider:
  • Base Attack Power from 600*mk => 800*mk.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 150*mk => 300*mk.

• Teleport Battlestation Base Attack Power from 310*mk => 400*mk.

• Teleporting Leech Base Attack Power from 440*mk => 550*mk.

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

Prerelease 4.069

• Fixed a bug in the last version where the ship filters in the lobby (Heavy Defense, Teleporting, etc) were all doubled. This was just testing data that accidentally got left in.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where pre-4.068 saves were defaulting the new "enable/disable swallower-type ships" option to disable instead of enable. This is another one of thsoe where if you keep the pre-4.068 save it will load fine (with swallowers enabled) in 4.069 but if you save it in 4.068 and then load it in 4.069 it will have them disabled (because it won't be able to tell that you didn't explicitly disable them in the lobby).
  • Thanks to hullu for the report.

• Vorticular Cutlass:
  • Base Speed from 16/16/16/17 => flat 16.
  • Base Health from 7k/12k/18k/24k => 7k*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 2500/2600/2600/2700 => 750*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 3600/6200/9200/12200 => 360*mk.
    • That's a pretty big change, here's the rationale:
    • Generally we let mkI fleet ship types have between 30k and 100k cap-dps (on epic/high) vs non-bonus targets, and scale the bonuses between them (so something with 100k has no bonuses, something with 30k can have a bonus of up to 10x).
    • Previously, the mkI cutlass had a cap-dps of approximately 1.4 _million_ (392 ships * 3600 damage-per-shot / 1 second-per-shot).
    • Provisionally, we're figuring that a melee ship can have 1.5x as much dps, to compensate for the difficulty of actually getting that close, etc.
    • Also, we're figuring that the self-damaging attribute of cutlasses should allow for an additional 2x factor to the dps, for a total factor of 3.
    • So, starting with a div-by-10 nerf, that brings it down to 141k, and accounting for the 3-factor (for melee and self-damaging) that's 47k on the 30-100 scale, so it's actually in the allowed range. On the sliding-scale of allowed bonuses that comes to about 4.
    • Bear in mind that cutlasses have 10k armor piercing, so they'll basically always get the full damage per shot.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 6 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 3 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Light from 2 => 4.

• Vampire Claw:
  • Base Speed from 44/44/44/44/54 => flat 44.
  • Base Health from 4400/7800/10500/19200/20400 => 5k*mk.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 0 => 10k.
  • Base Attack Power from 600/1200/2400/4800/9600 => 650*mk.
    • We're considering the heals-by-damaging attribute to allow 0.75x as much dps as normal, which combines with the 1.5x melee factor into 1.125x.
    • Previous mkI cap-dps was about 70k, or 62k on the 30-100 scale, which allows a bonus of about 3, which is exactly what it already had, interestingly; there was room for a minor buff too.

• Zenith Viral Shredder:
  • Base Speed from 16/16/16/17 => flat 16.
  • Base Health from 9600/14200/18200/24200 => 11k*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 500/600/600/700 => 450*mk.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 0 => 10k.
  • Base Attack Power from 500/1000/1750/2625 => 575*mk.
    • We're counting the self-replicating capability as allowing 0.75x as much dps as normal, so 1.125x combined with the melee attribute.
    • Previous mkI cap-dps was about 98k, or 87k on the 30-100 scale, and we decided to go with no-bonuses since the replication depends on actual damage done rather so replication rate was highly dependent on whether bonus targets were available and while that's not the end of the world we'd like to try things without that factor involved, so a cap-dps of about 112k is acceptable (and is about what they have now).
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 3 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 2 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 2 => 1.

• Marauder spawn-chance-and-size logic now the same for diffs 1-4 as for diffs 5-8.6; previously the 1-4 diffs would get much smaller but much more frequent marauder spanws that could lead to significant player-annoyance without actually increasing the challenge much.
  • Thanks to chmjs for the report.

• All of the far zoom icons for the Light of the Spire expansion have now been significantly updated to look nicer and be more clear. Additionally, the various mobile ships from the Fallen Spire part of the game now have unique far zoom icons rather than just using those from the light starship.

• The engineers-looking-for-targets-while-in-motion change was causing problems, and has been reverted back. They will still continue to not ignore moving targets, though, they just won't try to repair while they themselves are moving.

• Re-implemented the dump button (when debug mode is on) on the save-game screen; the load-game screen version's one is still not implemented.

• When players are being waited on or have desynced, a message to that effect now goes out from the game host.

• There are now separate messages for "Waiting for Players..." and "DESYNC..." to help remove any confusion on those points.

• Previously CPA size was not scaled with unit caps. Odd that it's taken so long to notice. Anyway, fixed.
  • Thanks to matyasbot for the report.

• AI Eyes are no longer auto-targeted.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• In the last version, almost all ships were saying "Guard Posts Keeping This Alive" for no reason. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Vornicus for reporting.

• In the prior version, reclamator text was still saying "reclaimed units have health = half damage." Fixed to be the new "reclaimed units have health =damage."
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was letting minor factions get speed boosted in recent versions, when they never should have been.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting.

• When desyncs are encountered, a new DesyncErrors.txt is logged on the host. I'm not sure why we never did this before.
  • It also shows individual chat messages to all players saying who desynced. This is a bit redundant with the other chat message that gets sent, but it's from a different branch of code and thus even though probably both will fire, at least we can be sure one of them will definitely do so in all cases.

• Added a new base game cheat: Gimme Absolutely Positively Everything, which gives the player one of every type of ship. Even AI ships, etc.

• Two new Light of the Spire cheats have been added:
  • Spirecraft To The Rescue (+1 Of Each Spirecraft Type On The Current Planet)
  • Fallen Friends Arise (+1 Of Each Fallen Spire Military Vessel Type On The Current Planet)

• Since the port to unity, the cloaked enemy ships indicator was never showing on the planetary summary sidebar. This was a pretty handy indicator, especially for helping with confusion for newer players, and it has finally been brought back.

• The "Must be built close to a colony ship." text has been removed from the command station descriptions.
  • Thanks to c4sc4 for reporting.

• Previously there was a bug where the ship icons on the galaxy view intel summary would appear even when the proper scouting had not been done. Fixed.
  • Thanks to matyasbot for reporting.

• Allied minor faction ships (including asteroids) are no longer able to be seen in the planetary summary sidebar on planets where the player does not have a scout.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Advanced Warp Sensors now have a ship cap of 50, and no longer act as scouts.
  • Thanks to Prezombie for suggesting the cap be increased.

• All Spirecraft are now immune to tractor beams.
  • Thanks to Draco Cretel for suggesting.

• The Implosion Artillery Guardians now have a reload time of 1 second instead of 4, to be more consistent with the spirecraft variants.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• The "active" wormholes shown when an advanced warp sensor is present are now shown in a bright yellow instead of the dull red, to avoid issues for red/green colorblind players.
  • Thanks to Vornicus for suggesting.

• Some of the older AI types now have new unlocks (assuming the appropriate expansions and enabled ships, etc):
  • Teleporter Turtles now get Spire Teleporting Leeeches.
  • Mad Bombers now get Zenith Electric Bombers, Zenith Chameleons, and Zenith Bombards.
  • The Tank now gets Youngling Tigers.
  • Shadow Master and Stealth Master now get the Spire Stealth Battleships.
  • The Feeding Parasite and Technologist Parasite now get the Spire Teleporting Leeches and Youngling Nanoswarms.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• Spire Blades (from Spire Blade Spawners) now move at speed 1200 instead of speed 140, and they are now immune to speed boosting. This gives them a longer effective range, makes them less likely to miss their target, and so on.
  • Thanks to lyravega for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions that was causing groups of unlike ships that were all immune to speed boosting (such as multiple mark levels of scout) to not properly group move together.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Spire Mini Rams now have a 2x bonus against structural ship types, and are now immune to force fields (they can still hit forcefields, of course). They also now have a 0.001 penalty against command grade hulls.
  • Spirecraft Rams also now have the same new bonuses.
  • Thanks to Spikey00, Lancefighter, and TechSY730 for suggesting.

(Released January 16th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.068

• Fixed a typo in the tooltips for the destroy-core-shield-generator objectives where C, D, and E referred to B.
  • Thanks to matyasbot for the report.

• The way that the planet resources/wormholes are populated has now been moved exclusively back to the old method. This means that savegames from 4.067 will show up different temporarily, and then will go back to normal with this new version onwards.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Fixed a bug where exoshields were not being factored into the attack-power computation against a harvester, so we were still seeing things like siege starships firing on an exoshielded harvester.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report and save.

• Swallower ships (Starship Disassembler Guardians and Spire Maws) can now be disabled in the lobby on the ships tab, much as cloaking, parasite, etc ships can be disabled.

• Fixed bug where objectives would report a destroy-ai-home-command-station objective as complete when the station had been scouted but could not be destroyed due to the core shield network.
  • Thanks to Vornicus for reporting.

• The standard galaxy-map number-under-planet display of "how many dangerous AI ships are on this planet" will now also display the total number of ships in AI barracks and carriers in parenthesis next to the main number (if that's zero, it doesn't display anything extra).
  • Thanks to SNAFU for the suggestion.

• Engineers will now try to repair while they themselves are moving (though starting a new move order will interrupt repairs temporarily), and will no longer ignore moving ships when searching for targets to repair.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for the report/suggestion.

• Corrected Siege Starship tooltip to reflect the new antimatter bomb ammo and the things immune to it.
  • Thanks to Vornicus for the report.

• Corrected Sniper/Sniper-Turret/Spider-Turret tooltips that still said they fired through forcefields.
  • Thanks to KPJZKC for the report.

• Fixed various bugs with the textboxes in the in-game chat-popup and planet-notes-window not responding well when the mouse was inside the popup window itself. We can't get those to misbehave anymore, so if you see them doing so please let us know. There are still some issues with the lobby map-seed-textbox and stats-screen-messages-tab-chat-texbox (and probably some with the lobby-chat-textbox), though, those are more complex situations.

• AI Eyes always now seed next to the command stations of the AI, rather than next to guard posts, to prevent them from being under spire shield spheres.
  • This won't help existing saves, but it will affect all new campaigns.
  • Thanks to Penguin21 for suggesting.

• Wormhole guard posts and AI Eyes now have command-grade hulls instead of ultra heavy.
  • Thanks to Vornicus for inspiring.

• All of the close-up images for the spirecraft, including those in the base game (spire shield spheres, etc) have now been updated to have the same fancier glow-effect for both themselves and in particular for their colormasks. The increase in apparent quality in-game on a black background (and with diffuse-colored colormasks) is pretty huge, even though the underlying graphics themselves haven't changed. The beauty of post-processing!
  • Someone, possibly HitmanN, suggested this a long while back when the new spire graphic style was introduced. A belated thanks; we didn't listen at the time, but came around in the end.

• Fixed bug where auto-knowledge-gather ships would "give up" after a few planets, even if more eligible ones were available.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for the report and save.

• The health of all the AI forcefields are now only 3x that of the human counterparts, rather than 5x. This makes them not take so incredibly long to kill with bombers, etc.
  • The health of the spire shield spheres (core and regular) have also been correspondingly reduced in the vague neighborhood of the same amount.

• All of the AI forcefields, and the AI spire shield spheres (except the core ones on the AI home planets) now automatically die if they are protecting no ships and not on an AI planet.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Missile Turrets now have armor piercing of a flat 90,0000. This gives players one more recourse against raid starships in the hands of the AI (along with sniper turrets, fighters, and a couple of other turrets).
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for suggesting.

• AI Special Forces Rally Post Guardians now have zero extra armor and zero extra health compared to the basic guardian template. Their attack is now 10k * shiplevel rather than just a token shiplevel value. They no longer have cloaking, they no longer have self-attrition, they no longer hunt the human homeworlds, and they are no longer direct-only targeted.
  • However, they now have a new ability: not only do they draw the AI special forces ships to them in the way they always have, but the AI also gets special forces reinforcements added at this guardian during each reinforcement event at the guardian's planet (they don't count as a guard post in any other fashion, though - not for ship counts or anything like that).
  • Thanks to many players for complaining about the old design of the special forces rally post guardians, thus prompting us to completely redesign them.

• Previously, only mark V guard posts were immune to being insta-killed. Now they all are.
  • Thanks to Varone for suggesting.

• Previously, the AI could still get gravitational turrets from the Zenith Trader. Fixed.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

• Minor Faction ships are no longer barred from shooting at low-power AI ships. This fixes some issues with the devourer not doing its job, as well as the dyson gatlings not doing their thing always, too.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

• The AI will now more properly react to cloaked ships on its planet; much the same as a human player, it now knows how many ships are there and the general threat at that planet, just not specifically which ships are there or where they are. Actually, in some cases the AI has long known this (same as the AI), but in some critical decision-making logic it was incorrectly barred from that data.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

• When a zombie ship damages an enemy, that enemy will no longer be angered/antagonized into abandoning its guard posts. This was a major problem for the botnet golems and similar.
  • Thanks to ShdNx and BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Zombie ships are no longer prevented from being created based on insufficient energy or ship caps. Neither energy nor ship caps are affected by zombies, anyway.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting.

• There is now a "Guard Posts Keeping This Alive" count on AI eyes, to prevent confusion about what they are getting protection from, or if they should have died. In particular, sometimes if there is a cloaked guard post still at the planet, the player might not realize without seeing this.

• All astro trains now have command grade hulls rather than ultra heavy. This acts like a massive boost to their health.
  • Thanks to LordSloth for suggesting the buff.

• The Zenith Reserve Mark I-V AIP previously was 10*ShipLevel, which got really non-worthwhile by the upper end of that scale. Now it is 5*shiplevel for AIP.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The tooltips for mark II-V zenith reserves was still out of date, referring to older energy costs. Fixed.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The AI Eyes now only produce ships that don't have a per-planet or per-guard post special cap (so not most of the spire ships, zenith bombers, sentinel frigates, etc).
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• Anti-Starship Arachnids are now completely unable to hit any other sort of ship other than starships, but they retain their very powerful nature against starships specifically.
  • Thanks to Prezombie for suggesting.

• Enclave Starships no longer have attack bonuses, since they no longer have an attack.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• Dyson Gatlings are all now immune to being insta-killed, and immune to sniper attacks.
  • Thanks to lyravega and Sunshine for suggesting.

• The AI is now completely disallowed from using mobile repair stations. They didn't use them correctly, and it was just a hassle in general with them. They will be automatically removed from existing savegames where the AI has them.
  • Thanks to Toll and Vinraith for inspiring this change.

• The Support Corps AI Type will no longer seed its ships in a guard capacity, and instead will have vastly more of them seeded with its ally's waves. The support corps AI type also no longer includes engineer drone IIs.

• The decoy drone attack power has gone up 10x.

• Previously, the "sabotage" message would erroneously show on non-AI planets. Fixed.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

• Added a new tip of the day by TechSY730.

• Fixed a typo about "reclamming" enemy ships.
  • Thanks to KPJZKC for reporting.

• Fixed some clarity issues with the descriptions of the spirecraft/golem minor factions.
  • Thanks to Dazio for reporting.

• Given the low percentage of damage dealt per shot, the spirecraft implosion artillery recharge time has dropped from 6 seconds to 1 second, making them a lot more powerful and attractive.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Siege Towers now have 15 second reload times instead of 10, once again relegating them to more of an artillery role instead of being quite so powerful. Their radar dampening has also dropped from 6000 to 9000.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• When ships are regenerated by a regenerator golem, they are now revived with full engine and armor health.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting.

(Released January 15th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.067

• Added galaxy-wide and per-planet integer-textbox controls for "Engineers Do Not Assist Large Projects".
  • If this is not zero, your engineers will not auto-assist a self-building structure or repair a structure with a per-second metal or crystal cost that is equal to or greater than the specified value.
  • This ONLY applies to assisting self-building units and repairing units, it does not apply to assisting build queues (of a Space Dock, for example).
  • It only triggers on the higher of the metal or crystal cost-per-second values, not the sum of them.
  • If you've defined a value for this at the per-planet level and at the galaxy-wide level, the game will use the per-planet value and ignore the galaxy-wide value for that planet.
  • The galaxy-wide version defaults to 400. There aren't very many things you can normally build that are that high, even on low caps. But Sniper Turrets and Fortresses and whatnot are certainly up there. The per-planet versions default to 0, meaning disabled.

• Zenith Beam Frigate base range from 5500+(500*mk) => 7500+(100*mk).

• Human Resistance Fighter spawn rebalance:
  • Instead of incrementing the counter every 80 seconds by 1 + (AIP / 50), it now increments by 1 + (AI Tech Level - 1) (or, more simply, by AI Tech Level), but capped at 3.
  • All difficulties below 8 now have capLow and capHigh of 10 and 40 (previously difficulties < 5 got 2 and 8). Difficulties >= 8 still have 20 and 80. For reference, after the increment it generates a random number between capLow and capHigh, and if the current value of the resistance fighter counter is greater than the random number it tries to generate a resistance fighter spawn.
  • Now uses the same absoluteCap rule (equal to capHigh*2) as maruaders, to prevent really massive spawns.
  • Re-did the logic of "is planet XYZ eligible for a resistance fighter spawn":
    • It now considers all planets, not just AI-controlled ones.
    • It requires the presence of at least 400 human ships (on high caps, 200 on normal, 100 on low).
    • It requires the presence of at least 300 AI ships (on high caps, 150 on normal, 75 on low).
    • It requires that the number of AI ships be greater than the number of human ships.
    • It requires that (AIShipCount-HumanShipCount) be less than or equal to 8x the number of resistance fighters it's planning to spawn (on high caps, 4x on normal, 2x on low).

• Resistance Frigate rebalanced to be more like the Marauder Dagger Frigate (not that they're the same ship, but it's easier to balance them together than separately). FYI, the maruader frigate is balanced roughly as a .2 ship-cap mkIV/mkV bonus-type ship.
  • Base Move Speed from 48 => 60.
  • Base Attack Power from 150k => 48k.
  • Base Attack Range from 20k => 15k.
  • Base Health from 1.5m => 2.2m.
  • Base Armor Rating from 3000 => 600.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 1 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Light from 1 => 2.4.
  • Energy Use from 3000 => 1000.

• Resistance Fighter Bomber:
  • Base Move Speed from 48 => 60.
  • Base Attack Power from 180k => 100k.
  • Base Attack Range from 3400 => 4000.
  • Base Health from 1.8m => 2.4m.
  • Base Armor Rating from 3000 => 1800.
  • Engine Health from 200 => Infinite (oddly, the unit def had both a line setting it to infinite, and a line setting it to 200, but the second was later and thus took precedence).
  • Base Armor Piercing from 1000 => 1800.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 4 => 1.4.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 2 => 1.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 2 => 1.4.
  • Energy Use from 3000 => 1000.

• The mobile-builder-command-station-foldouts in multiplayer will now process per-planet auto-build controls (for engineer mkI,II,III, remains rebuilder, and energy reactor I,II,III) set by the owner of the foldout (not the owner of the planet).

• The logic processing auto-build energy reactor controls now considers the remains of energy reactors to be equivalent to the non-destroyed structure from which it came, and so will not try to build a new one. You'll want remains rebuilders for that.

• Fallen Spire Shards now have a new, much better graphic.

• Fixed a bug that may have been causing AI ships to aggro when firing on a minor-faction ship.

• Defender mode rebalance:
  • Now AI no longer can warp to any human planet (unless it's a warp jumper AI type, naturally).
  • Attacking AI ships on a planet with no human command station now move at 1400 speed, to cut down on humans being able to win (as easily) by simply picking so many planets that it takes the AI too long to _move_ through all of them on lower time-limit games (also helps make cpa-like waves not be very different time-wise). It would still not be balanced if you picked 25+ planets on a 15-minute game, for example.
  • Halved the initial AIP increase.
  • The total AIP increase from waves during the game from 2000 => 1100 (so on Diff 7 you'll probably get mkIII waves the last 10-15% of the timer).

• Remains rebuilders will now try to rebuild energy reactors even when net energy is negative (previously rebuilders would just shut down in negative energy).
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Added new command: "cmd:copy game setup to lobby", that tries to populate your "LastMapStyle" and whatnot settings from the game currently loaded (it has to kinda guess at planet count in some cases). Mostly useful for the developers to debug mapgen situations from a save, but some players may have use of it.

• Fixed some bugs that were inflating AI Eye seeding by roughly 2x.
  • Thanks to Goekhan for the report and save.

• AI ships without attack power will no longer stick under forcefields.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• Manufactory input/output from 12-gives-8 => 20-gives-14 (since 20 is the amount produced by a mkI harvester).

• Fixed a surprisingly longstanding (but heretofore unrecognized) bug that was making the random number generator sometimes be highly non-random. This was leading to things like a very odd default pattern of collision offsetting.
  • Really, this changes EVERYTHING about the seeding in the game. Map seeds now will give completely different (and much more varied) results, there will be less "false statistical clustering" going on, and even the patterns of where guard posts are seeded in planets looks pretty different. This bug dates back to March 6, 2009, before the game was even released -- one of the longest-standing bugs we've seen, especially of this magnitude.
  • This also seems to fix the "all new ships seed in a line" bug that has been around for a while.

• A whole host of internal logic changes have been made to forcefields. Most of them are a bit difficult to explain, but the upshot is that now instead of caring about "strong" and "Weak" forcefields in most cases (aside from collision with forcefields), the game just tracks a single protecting forcefield for all the ships, and tracks an additional "firepower-reducing forcefield" for the human ships only. The only firepower-reducing forcefields for the humans at the moment are those three basic ones and the player home planet ones. In the past, there was a lot of logic that was incorrectly only looking at "Strong" forcefields for decision making purposes, and now all of that just looks at the generic forcefield protector, which should lead to a lot of subtle ship targeting improvements. It may also lead to some new issues, go figure, but that's kind of unavoidable as a risk.

• When determining firepower against a ship under a forcefield (and thus also hit chance, etc), ships now use the firepower they would have against the forcefield, rather than the ship itself (assuming the attacker isn't immune to force fields). Given that's the firepower that would hit the forcefield, that's more accurate for decision-making in general, but this is particularly critical as of late because of how some ships are now unable to hit some forcefields (ie, the anitmatter bombs). This change should prevent things like siege starships from trying to fire against ships that are under a forcefield that just nullifies out all their damage.

• Reclamation:
  • Fixed bug where non-zombie reclamation actually required 100% reclaim damage instead of 50% (this made it seem like a reclamator had to get the actual killshot, which wasn't strictly speaking the case, but in practice felt like it).
  • Reclaimed ships now have health equal to the reclamation damage done to them (or max health, whichever is less) regardless of whether a zombie reclamator was involved (previously non-zombie reclamations got half that amount of health).
  • The reclamation amount for determining "is this reclaimed" and "how much health does it get when reclaimed" is now the sum of what various players have done, though the reclaimed ship still goes to the player with the highest individual reclamation amount against that target.
  • Minor faction ships killing a target can no longer trigger reclamation (this was an edge case, but it could have led to a damaged-long-ago AI ship wandering back into AI territory, getting killed by the devourer, and transforming into a human ship on a planet the humans had never been to, etc).

• Youngling Nanoswarm:
  • This is not actually the full rebalance, just patching a few things up while we're looking at reclamation.
  • Base Attack Power from 200+(200*mk) => 400*mk.
  • Armor piercing from 500 => 100k.
  • For the purposes of reclamation, nanoswarm damage is now multiplied by 16.

• Put in a fix to prevent older savegames and the tutorials from having their resource points and wormholes all rearranged because of the new random stuff. This was tougher than perhaps it sounds, actually. The placement of stuff in the tutorials (not wormholes or resource points) is still going to be a bit different than it used to be, though -- so any feedback folks care to give us on how that's working and if there's anything amiss in the tutorials, would be much appreciated!

• In the past, for the AI to be allowed to retreat from a planet it had to have had at least half of its ships on the planet for at least 30 seconds. That prevented a number of back-and-forth behaviors that are now prevented by other means, and this behavior was now leading to some "gap in the wall" type exploits. The limit has now been changed to 3 seconds instead.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• When random AI types are assigned, the game now explicitly tries to avoid assigning the same AI type to both players.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Fixed another couple of bugs where the game's random number generator was recently not as random as one might have hoped. These were much more recent, in the main, as issues.

• Fixed a bug where asteroids being seeded could collide with forcefields and thus wind up stacking on top of other another. This won't fix existing saves, but should fix the issue in any new saves; do let us know if you see the issue again, of course.

(Released January 14th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.066

• The move speed of all the player force fields have dropped to a flat 4 (the amount of the mark I forcefields), and they are now immune to speed boosting, and no longer scale up their speeds with faster combat styles. This reflects that the movement of the forcefields are just for small adjustments, and not any sort of larger tactical engagements, which would be glacially, ridiculously, slow.

• Some Fallen Spire rebalancing:
  • To compensate for no longer being able to cover a shard with a normal forcefield generator, Shard hp has been increased from 200 million to 300 million (also, the first shard previously only had 20 million, now it's the same as the others).
  • Shard speed now locked at 22, regardless of combat style, speed boosting, gravitational effects, etc.
    • Also removed the rule that changed the frequency of chase-force spawning based on combat style.
  • Spire Capital Ship shield generators:
    • Radius from 300/500/500/500 => 600/1200/1200/1200.
    • Base health from 1.2m/2.4m/7.2m/9.6m => 5m/10m/20m/40m.
  • Spire Destroyer (hull) base health from 20m => 10m (for reference, DDs can use mkI or mkII shield generators).
  • Spire Cruiser (hull) base health from 50m => 20m (for reference, CAs can use mkI-III shield generators).
  • Spire Battleship (hull) base health from 100m => 40m (for reference, BBs can use mkI-IV shield generators).
  • Spire Dreadnought (hull) base health from 200m => 80m (for reference, DNs can use mkI-IV shield generators and can mount 2 of them).

• Riot Shield I/II radius from 300/500 => 600*mk.

• The Objectives tab now lists find/destroy objectives for the five core shield networks, if they exist.

• Siege Starship mkII and mkIII didn't get the intended hp boost last version, fixed from 1.2m/1.4m => 3m/3.5m.
  • Thanks to lyravega for the report.

• Raider:
  • Ship cap multiplier from 2.5 => 2.
  • Base health from 3000*mk => 5500*mk (so, compensating for ship cap change and an additional x1.5 on top of that).
  • Base attack from 200*mk => 250*mk (just compensating for ship cap change).
  • Bonus vs Turrets from 4 => 1.
  • Thanks to Sunshine and Suzera for inspiring these changes.

• When drawing in-game, the Settings window now snaps to the top of the screen rather than the bottom of the resource bar when the resolution is not tall enough to accomodate both.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for the report.

• The "don't move if under a strong forcefield" logic for AI units now no longer applies to minor-faction or zombie units that happen to have the same player number as AI units.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for the report.

• Put in some changes to the per-second logic for command stations to make it much less likely that the auto-construction controls would "double-build", by making a command station wait about 3 seconds after being constructed to start looking at auto-build stuff, and also wait at least 1 whole second (and potentially 2) between checking the logic instead of potentially checking it at the end of one second and again at the beginning of another.
  • Thanks to many players for reporting this.

• The command station foldouts in multiplayer now process the auto-frd-engineers and auto-frd-military controls in the same way as a command station.

• The Bonus-ship-type-detail-window used on lobby mouseovers now snaps to the bottom of the screen rather than displaying from the same top-left as the options window if it's too tall for that to fit on the screen.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for the report.

• Fixed textual bug that was making the "abilities" line in ship data always reflect high-cap numbers (notably, for armor piercing), now refreshes the abilities line if the cap has changed since the last time.
  • Thanks to Suzera for the report.

• Military Command Stations no longer focus-fire with their secondary shots, since the translocation effect favors spreading it out.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for the suggestion.

• The tooltips for the various random ai type options in the lobby now refresh properly when expansion-enabledness is changed, etc.
  • Thanks to Dyers_Eve for the report.

• Fixed a bug where scouts were not immune to reclamation.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for the report.

• Zenith Beam Frigate:
  • Base Health from 22k/26k/32k/38k/54k => 22k*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 200/250/300/350/500 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 500/1000/1500/2000/3000 => 4000*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 8k/9k/10k/12k/12k => 6k/6.5k/7k/7.5k/8k.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 2 => 1.
  • Can now hit a maximum of 10 targets with one shot; there is no particular logic (closest, etc) for selecting which 10 if there are more than that on the line, nor is it desired that there be.
  • Beams now always go the full range, rather than stopping at the primary target.

• The Resource Flows tab of the stats screen now uses LastEnergyProduced instead of UnitData.EnergyProduction for reporting positive energy flows, thus fixing the bug where it was inacurrately reporting the energy contribution of poor-efficiency reactors.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for the report.

• Fixed a bug in the summary mode of the Resource Flows tab of the stats screen where if you had more than 2 of a specific unit type it would only report the sum-impact of 2 of them. This display is now much more useful.

• Fixed a bug with various beam weapons where the firing ship would stay slightly out of range and the beam wouldn't hit anything. Will now always fire such that the beam will reach the primary target (unless stopped by some other object, in the case of human and spire beam weapons).
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Fixed a couple bugs with the logic for freeing ai ships firing on a target within 11,000 range, one of which was making it not happen a lot of the time, one of which was making it happen against minor-faction/zombie ships.

• Fixed bugs with ship coordination where ships left behind on a planet by the coordinator could get _really_ confused about whether to go to the appropriate wormhole to catch up or to go to the coordinator's coordinates.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for the report and save.

• Added non-placeholder description for the Fallen Spire "minor" faction.

• Lowered the AIPerGuardPostShipCap for Spire Blade Spawners, Spire Maws, Spire Stealth Battleships, and Spire Tractor Platforms from 4 to 2.

• When command stations are scrapped, the colony ships on that planet are now destroyed the same as if the command station was killed by enemies.
  • Thanks to numerous players for pointing out the possible exploit here, and the fact that since there is now in-place upgrading of command stations, this is not really a hassle, anyway.

• Fixed a bug that was causing AI ships to incorrectly stack up under force fields that were protecting them: now they won't stop moving until they have "settled" into a position under said forcefield.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

(Released January 12th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.065

• Snipers and sniper turrets are no longer immune (able to fire through) force fields.

• All of the player mark I-III force fields are no longer able to go through wormholes (the AI ones are immobile, so that would be redundant). Actually, mark III AI force fields were mobile before, but are no longer.

• Zenith Bombard Guard posts, AI Core booster guard posts, siege starships, starship disassemblers, and zenith bombards now all fire a new "Antimatter bomb" ammo type instead of their former energy bomb type. Antimatter bombs move about 50% faster than the older shots of these types used to, and most importantly some ships now will be able to have immunity to antimatter bombs (no ships are immune to energy bombs).
  • Note that, importantly, bomber starships and bombers in general still have the regular energy bomb ammo type.

• The following ships now have immunities to antimatter bombs, shifting the balance around some in a way intended to prevent too-easy sniping on both sides in a way that was formerly not interesting because of bombards and siege starships:
  • Counter-missile, counter-sniper, and counter-dark-matter turrets, as well as sniper and spider turrets, and harvester exo-shields (a benefit to the humans).
  • All of the standalone force fields for both players and AIs (a benefit for both the humans and the AI).
  • The AI fortresses and superfortress for the AI (a benefit for the AI only).
  • The human home command stations, as well as the human military command stations mark I-III, home cores, and the warp jammer command stations (a benefit for the humans only).
  • All AI command stations, special forces guard posts, and warp gates (a benefit for the AI only).

• Non-melee AI ships that are under a protecting strong force field now will no longer move until they are out from under the force field (from it dying or whatever), though they will still receive orders from the AI as normal. This makes the AI-ships-under-AI-forcefield case really a lot more back like how it used to be in the 2.0 days, where those were interesting and tricky nests of AI ships to take out.

• Ships that are immune to being scrapped now show that in their immunities list.
  • Thanks to lyravega for suggesting.

• In the prior version, gravity drills were not preventing teleportation of allied ships. Fixed.
  • Thanks to lyravega for reporting.

• Fixed the description of the spirecraft shield bearers to reflect the fact that they no longer have guns.
  • Thanks to Lightbulb for reporting.

• Added Plasma Siege Cannon Module MkI-III for use on Spire capital ships and city defense platforms. The first mark is unlocked by researching the MkII Siege Starship, the second mark by researching the MkIII Siege Starship, and the third mark by an advanced tech at the Spire Galactic Capitol. The smallest mobile ship capable of mounting one (a mkI) is a Spire Cruiser.
  • Many thanks to HitmanN for the graphics used for these modules.

• Added Rail Cannon Module MkI-IV for use on Spire capital ships and city defense platforms. The first mark doesn't need to be unlocked, the second and third marks are unlocked by researching the Spider Turret, and the fourth mark by an advanced tech at the Spire Galactic Capitol.
  • Many thanks to HitmanN for the graphics used for these modules.

• The graphics for shield modules have been changed to much, much nicer ones provided by HitmanN, thanks!

• Spire Tractor Platform base energy use from 100 => 2000 (it was a bug, 100 is what a ship gets if we forget to define it).
  • Thanks to superking for reporting.

• Spire Armor Rotter:
  • Base Move Speed from 44 => 26.
  • Base Attack Range from 8k/9k/10k/11k/12k => flat 4k.
  • Thanks to superking for the suggestion.

• Since Spirecraft Shieldbearers are no longer military ships, they are now also no longer eligible for event attacks.

• Spirecraft scouts are now immune to area of effect damage, artillery, sniper shots, minefields, black hole machines, missiles, mass drivers, translocation, and tractor beams.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor and hullu for suggesting.

• Siege Starship:
  • Base Range from 35000 => 16000 (meaning that actual range from 38000 => 19000).
  • Base Health from 1,000,000 => 2,500,000.

• AI Beam Guardian Base Range from 10k/12k/14k/16k/18k => flat 7k.
• AI Artillery Guardian Base Range from 31k/32k/33k/34k/35k => flat 15k (so slightly less than a siege starship).
• AI Laser Guardian Base Range from 7k/8k/9k/10k/11k/12k => flat 7k.
• AI Vampire Guardian Base Range from 13k/16k/19k/22k/25k => flat 7k.

• Spire Starship Base Range from 17k => 10k.

• Laser Cannon Module (including variants used by Hybrids, Spire Capital Ships, and Spire city defenses) base range from 20k => 10k.

• Spire Frigate Base Range from 13k => 10k.

• All AI guard posts (except wormhole guard posts and special forces guard posts) now have radar dampening of 7500/7000/6500/6000/5500.

• AI Eyes now have 400 million health (same as wormhole guard posts) instead of 6 million, and are now destroyed when the last non-wormhole guard post of the AI on that planet is destroyed.
  • In general, many fewer AI Eyes are now seeded, but the exact amount fewer is hard to express because it involves a divisor, the number of planets, a floor value of 2 per galaxy, and differences by AI type.
    • In general, with the defensive-type AIs that had extreme numbers of Eyes in the past (just tons and tons of them, they now have about 3x fewer than before. In terms of the other AI types that had more moderate numbers already, they now have maybe 10% fewer, or thereabouts.
    • Unfortunately, due to the nature of the seeding, the number of AI Eyes will only be reduced in future savegames, not in existing ones.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug where clicking in a GUI window while in ship-placement mode could place a ship at the point in world space that happened to be under that part of the GUI window.
  • Thanks to Red Spot for the report.

• AI ships will now be angered (rather than just alerted) when firing upon human ships within roughly 11,000 range, which will make them (and their guard posts and fellow guards) fall under normal targeting rules, thus hopefully fixing the situations where human ships were being shot at by a relatively nearby AI ship but not retaliating (they shouldn't retaliate if the AI ship is way far away, as otherwise this can cause long range human ships to aggro the entire planet pretty quick).
  • Thanks to Suzera for the report.

• A pretty sweeping internal change has been made for how group move is tracked and applied. This should hopefully resolve all the problems with the mixtures of group moving and speed boosting and speed-boost-immune ships, but we'll see (we said this a few releases back, too). The difference is that this time the solution is clearer and more architecturally-dstructive, rather than being clever and yet architecture-saving.
  • This may cause some accidental bugs if we typed something wrong (that's the architecturally-dstructive part, and why we avoided doing that before), but it should also fix the actual bugs it's meant to fix.
  • The core of this change is basically tracking two group move speeds, rather than one: slowest boostable speed, and slowest non-boostable speed.
  • Ships in savegames that are already group-moving might be still acting briefly wrong. Simply giving them another group-move order will straighten them out, if so. By "briefly wrong," we mean that they might be moving too fast or too slow compared to what they really should be, the same as they were already moving in the old savegame.
  • This should also fix the "player ships are always moving too slowly" bug that was in the last version (it was really just a group-move thing).
  • Thanks to Suzera and Moonshine Fox for reporting.

• A message is now sent to the human players in the chat log if a warp gate guardian is added on a planet adjacent to one of their planets (or next to a neutral planet), stating what type of warp gate guardian was added and on which AI planet.
  • In exchange, warp gate guardians, which are pretty nasty, are now twice as likely to occur. This is still incredibly unlikely however, something like a 2 in 400 chance at the moment -- and it will only get less likely as more guardians are added over time (as happens with the dispersal of all guardians).
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for suggesting the warning.

• Okay, so that command-stations-must-be-built-within-proximity-to-the-colony-ship thing wasn't a hit. It was tedious and fiddly, and didn't really accomplish its core goal, anyway. So, the following changes have been made:
  • The proximity thing has been removed completely, so as far as how colony ships go, they are back to working like they used to.
  • However, whenever a human command station is blown up (NOT when it is scrapped), any colony ships OR mobile builders on that planet are also blown up. Even if they are currently inside a transport on that planet.
    • These sorts of ships can exist in planets not controlled by a human player, obviously -- they have to. So in their case, it's just a matter of their being on the planet at the exact instant that the command station dies. If they are, then that's when they are killed.
    • This meets the original goal a lot better, which was to prevent players from too-easily just instantly rebuilding outlying command stations that were lost, with no real delay in the ability to rebuild.
      • With planets near other planets it will still be fast to rebuild -- of course -- but this provides some incentive to keep planets clustered where possible. This incentive of clustering planets which is obviously at odds with the goal of keeping AI Progress low, which is the idea: competing incentives, tough choices, etc. Best if you don't lose the planet at all in the first place, of course. But now it will feel like you do if that planet was a more distant waypoint between multiple of your planets on an important transport route, for instance.
  • Thanks to many players for complaining about the proximity thing for colony ships.

• Previously, there was a AIDifficulty percent chance, per AI player, of a mark I or II fortress being added on each planet in the galaxy (for all difficulties 4 and up).
  • Now there is a flat ( AIDifficulty / 2 ) * ( totalPlanets < 80 ? totalPlanets / 80 : 1.0 ) fortresses per AI player on the map, rounded up.
    • For difficulty 7.3 on a 40 planet map, that would be ( 7.3 / 2 ) * ( 40 / 80 ) = 3.65 * .5 = 1.825 = 2 fortresses per AI player.
    • For difficulty 8 on an 80+ planet map, that would be ( 8 / 2 ) * 1.0 = 4 fortresses per AI player.
  • Fortress Barons, in addition to the other fortresses (superfortresses and mark III fortresses) that they already get, now get 8x the normal number of mark I and II fortresses in addition (not to exceed the total number of planets controlled by the fortress baron player).
  • Mad Bombers now get absolutely no additional fortresses.
  • Vicious raiders, technologist raiders, speed racers, special forces captains, radar jammers, and extreme raiders now all get half the normal number of extra fortresses, not to be less than 1 fortress.
  • Whether or not the seeded fortress is mark I or II depends on the mark level of the planet. Mark I and II planets get a mark I fortress, everything higher gets a mark II fortress.
  • Thanks to Sunshine! for suggesting that the prior fortress algorithm was leading to undesirable frequency in some cases.

• Normally there are a number of "extra forcefields" that are seeded around the AI planets, per AI. There are normally AIDifficulty * 2 planets with each having either 1 or 2 extra forcefields added per planet. The following frequency changes for these have been made:
  • Shield Ninnies now get 4x the normal number of planets with extra forcefields, as well as 3x the normal number of extra forcefields per planet.
  • Turtles, technologist turtles, and teleporter turtles now get 3x the normal number of planets with extra forcefields, as well as 2x the normal number of extra forcefields per planet.
  • Peacemakers and alarmists now have 2x the normal number of extra forcefields per planet, but on the normal number of planets.
  • Mad Bombers now get absolutely no extra forcefields.
  • Vicious raiders, technologist raiders, speed racers, special forces captains, radar jammers, and extreme raiders now all get half the normal number of planets with extra forcefields, not to be less than 1 planet.

• Spire blades and spire blade spawners are now immune to camouflaging.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Jumpships now have immunity to minefields and to tractor beams.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Penetrators now have 33k range instead of 6k, and also have 80 million health * mark level instead of 8 million. This makes them a lot easier to survive, and thus more interesting as one-amazing-shot-per-30-minute wonders.
  • Thanks to Suzera, BobTheJanitor, and PineappleSam for suggesting.

• Ships no longer decelerate to enter into wormholes. They now just fly right in at whatever speed they are at when they arrive. Additionally, when ships are closing in on a wormhole, they now do their movement-recalculation checks a lot more frequently, which uses a bit more CPU, but which also will prevent them from overshooting their goal as they have been doing at times in the last version or two.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox, kingisaaclinksr and lyravega for reporting the "bouncy" ships.

• Military Orbital Command Stations all now have translocation lightning as their attack type instead of missiles.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for suggesting.

• AI Carriers now have 6000 attack range, so they should no longer be trying to get right on top of the human home command station to attack them.
  • Thanks to Draco Cretel for suggesting.

• The counts of scouts on the galaxy display mode now just displays literal scouts, rather than everything that has scouting ability (like commandos).
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• When an EMP goes off, it is now assured to hit AI ships that were in cold storage; apparently in some rare circumstances previously it was able to miss ships in cold storage. Since this bug could possibly also happen with tachyon warheads, a safety check was put in place to make sure that was prevented, too. Nukes were already assured of not having this problem.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.

• Dyson gatling attack has been doubled, and health has also been doubled. Fear these.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for suggesting.

• Gravitational turrets now cost about 30% more, but have twice the health they used to have.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• Ships with tractor beams on them are no longer eligible for auto-kite behavior, as that leads to some very wrong behavior.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting.

• AI Fortresses and superfortresses no longer show the countdown timer, as they no longer use it.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for reporting.

• Scouts, spirecraft scouts, and spirecraft jumpships are now immune to being swallowed. Scout starships already were.
  • Thanks to KPJZKC for reporting.

• Previously, spire maws and similar were only hurting the health of enemy ships if they were powered on, which caused low-power AI ships to permanently hold onto some player ships. Fixed so that the full-power/low-power thing doesn't matter for these for the human or the AI players.
  • Thanks to KPJZKC for reporting.

• In defender mode, the waves from the AIs can now come in anywhere, rather than always having to come in at a planet adjacent to an AI planet. This makes the extreme-numbers-of-planets variants almost impossible to play, but makes the 4-10 (or so) planets a lot more interesting, as the 1-3 already were.

• When in the lobby, if players Ctrl+click a planet that is a valid starting point, they will automatically claim all the planets that have not yet been claimed. Similarly, ctrl+right-clicking deselects all planets that player had previously selected. This shows up in the keybindings window under the Anytime controls.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for inspiring.

• Fixed a missing localization at the start of new defender mode campaigns.

• Previously, the total number of allowed lines in the alerts window was 16. That meant that if there were a ton of waves plus other messages, some messages could be invisible. Fixed.

• The first wave in defender mode now comes after 20 seconds, rather than after 70 seconds, since there's not really much to do in a multi-planet defender session until the first wave is announced. Additionally, the AI loop now starts on the host in defender mode after 10 seconds, rather than after 60.

• The wave timers in defender mode have been made far shorter -- this makes the AI Progress skyrocket all that much faster, and keeps the influx of AI ships that much higher, too.

• In defender mode, 200% is now automatically added for free to the player's effective handicap, for free (in terms of score) and behind the scenes. In other words, all the ships "just happen to" produce a bunch more metal, crystal, and knowledge than normal. This makes it easier to have rather constant action (the idea of defender mode), without player funds constantly disappearing.

(Released January 10th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.064

• Fixed bug in last versions icon-combination fixes that was causing AI ships in cold-storage to basically never be drawn in far zoom (unless icon-combining was turned off).
  • Thanks to Sunshine, BobTheJanitor, and Burnstreet for the report.

• All of the spirecraft have had their speed doubled, to account for no longer getting any speed boosting from human planets.
  • The spirecraft scouts actually have had their speed incredibly increased, to 240 * mark level, rather than just a flat 24.
  • Spirecraft Ions have had their speed tripled.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The health of both mark II and mark III tractor beam turrets have been doubled.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• AI fortresses of all marks now have 6x the health of their human counterparts (instead of 5x), but now have 3x lower range than the human versions. They also are now immobile.

• AI Superfortresses now have simply been adjusted to be immobile, but have the same range and health as before.

• Spirecraft shield bearers are no longer eligible for auto-kiting behavior.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Ships with more than 60k range are no longer able to auto-kite, because this leads them to trying to keep more than a planet's distance between them and the enemy.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• A number of speed-boost/gravity related fixes:
  • Gravity boosts also now prevent speed-halving by enemy logistics command stations and similar.
  • Previously, group movement could override the effects of gravity beams and drills. Fixed.
  • There was also some logic that was previously causing ships to be capped at 2x their normal movement speed from some but not all kinds of speed boosters. That was some old logic that hung around too long, apparently. Fixed.
• Previously, there was a bug that was causing ships that were immune to gravity effects to not be able to be speed-boosted when group moving. Fixed.
  • Previously, the gravity effect of spire gravity drains wasn't working at all. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Suzera, Sunshine, Draco Cretel, and Reality for reporting various issues related to this.

• The damage output of the spider turret now properly matches that of the sniper turret.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Spirecraft shield bearers no longer have an attack, to make them easier to control and position, etc.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for suggesting.

• Zenith Mirrors are once again immune to blades, to prevent cutlasses from one-shotting themselves against the mirrors.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions that was causing melee ships to be pretty ineffective at targeting enemy ships that were moving.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.
• Fixed a number of text wrapping and overlap issues in the ship hover window.
• Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER, Toll, Prezombie, and BobTheJanitor for reporting.

• Hive Golem Wasps now have 10x more health and attack power.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting that they were underpowered.

• AI Carriers are now able to be hit by the various types of ships that can't hit fleet ships (siege starships, etc).

• Additionally, AI Carriers can now be hit by orbital mass drivers.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting.

• Previously, when a ship that was actively tractoring other ships was loaded into a transport, it was still tractoring those ships. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Garthor for reporting.

• Previously, when maws of the same team were too close together, they would block each other so that only one could eat enemy ships at a time. Fixed. Also increased their range by 1000.
  • All ships that have zero move speed are now explicitly immune to being swallowed, to be more clear.
  • Thanks to Draco Cretel for reporting that maws were not eating in some circumstances.

• All of the spire fleet ships now have properly sized selection and force field circles, etc, in far zoom.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• Put in place the fancy new forcefield-hit effects by Hans-Martin Portmann, which he'd originally created as a mod.
  • Thanks to Hans-Martin Portmann, of course!

• Cursed Golems are now immune to snipers, like all the other golems already were.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Previously, AI ships would remain in cold storage if there were only cloaked player ships on a planet, which was problematic with things like spire penetrators. Fixed so that it only does this for ships that are cloaked AND which have no attack power (aka, scouts).
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting.

• Spirecraft Penetrators also now have a flame wave attack type instead of mass driver so that they can actually hit guardians.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting.

• When a planet is being viewed by a human player, the AI ships will no longer be in cold storage. This prevents issues with things like planetary cloakers, camouflager AI types, etc.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for reporting.

• The Raptor retreat radius has been increased from 5k to 9k.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• Devourer Golems and Zenith Trade ships are both now immune to gravity and speed boosting.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

(Released January 8th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.063

• Windowing system reworked from using GUI.Window to the more primitive GUI.Box, handling the various other windowing stuff in our own code. GUI.Window did a pretty good job but we were butting up against several limitations and thus decided to just "roll our own". Thankfully, the engine is flexible enough to allow this. Note that this is a pretty wide-reaching change and may cause all kinds of odd problems. For what it's worth, in our tests we were able to play just fine.

• Zenith Mirror health increased by 10x to compensate for the 10x bonus everything gets against it (when they were rebalanced, it was without respect to that bonus, thus effective health was pretty pitiful).
  • Thanks to superking for pointing this out.

• A lot of internal changes have been made to make the code for referencing the art more efficient and compact. If you seen any oddness in ship graphics because of this, please let us know.

• Science Labs Mark III now count as "sabotage" units that stirs up the AI into creating threat/free ships from its command station sort of like how an AI Eye would work. This replaces the old way of stirring up the existing ships sitting on the planet, which didn't work too well for a lot of reasons.
  • Science Labs Mark III also no longer cause the AI to get a reinforcement bonus, and they now generate 6/s knowledge instead of 2/s. This makes them a lot more attractive to actually use, but also substantially more risky.

• Previously, it was still possible to unlock command station techs in defender mode, even though you couldn't build them. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Previously, it was possible for the wave timers in defender mode to actually extend beyond when the game would already be won by timer. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• It is now clearer in the tooltip popups that each AI player's waves causes separate AIP increases (the tooltips note which AI player it came from).
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting the lack of clarity there.

• The Zenith Trader previously flipped back and forth between visiting one player planet and one AI planet. This led to the trader always showing up very early in the game, and returning pretty frequently. Now the trader only moves between AI planets, never intentionally going to a human planet. This means that the human players need to place themselves in the path between two AI planets that the trader will go between in order for the trader to visit them. This in turn will make Trader visits comparably more rare, and something that is more interesting as a way to capitalize on (as often you won't get as good of positioning for the stuff they will sell you).
  • Thanks to Red Spot and TechSY730 for unintentionally inspiring this change with an innocent query they now regret ("what have I done?" was the exact wording).

• The Zenith Trader now has a 20% chance of leaving goodies for the AI players on each planet, rather than a 10% chance.

• All of the spire "fleet ships" now have 100k engine health or better, rather than just the flat 100 engine health.
  • Thanks to amonchakad for suggesting.

• Riot Control Starships now show up with a ship type of Riot Starship rather than Fleet Starship, to avoid confusion.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for reporting.

• Ship modules now automatically take on the cloaking status of their parent ship.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting.

• Starship constructors now have a health of 300k instead of 48k, in keeping with the other constructors.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• Fixed inaccuracy in Riot Tazer tooltip.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for the report.

• Split tech "groups" out like buy groups so that different units can have different tech menus and have their own tracking of which tab was open last. This allows the Spire Galactic Capitol to properly open it's tech tab by default without messing with human science station menus.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Auto-explore/Auto-gather-knowledge orders were previously not being persisted through save/load, but now are.
  • Thanks to hyramgraff for the report.

• Auto-explore/Auto-gather-knowledge orders were previously not clearing when a ship was given another direct order, but only when given the "stop" order; they now clear whenever the ship clears all its commands (generally when given an order to do something else without the shift key held).

• Previously it was possible for using the "quick buttons" at the bottom to select ships in such a way that ships from multiple distinct planets were in your selection, leading to various problems like unintended orders. Now when using the quick buttons the selection will be completely cleared first.
  • Thanks to Sigma7 for the report.

• Removed the Map Button context menu from the list on the input-bindings screen, since it didn't actually have any bindings and would cause an error if you tried to open it.

• Added a couple missing localization strings for the edit-binding screen.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for the report and screenshot.

• Fixed a bug where very high-sensitivity mice could actually have their inputs periodically rounded down to zero when edge scrolling, or where having a very high performance profile could cause this even with normal mice.
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r for reporting.

• Put in a change that should make the AI react better when saboteur-type ships, or player immobile structures, are on an AI planet.

• The lobby Map Type, Campaign Type, Minor Faction, and AI Plot lists now properly update when an expansion is enabled or disabled in the lobby expansion list.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for the report.

• The objectives window will no longer act like nuked planets can be knowledge-gathered.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report.

• Heavily adjusted the way that AI ships that are "stalking" a wormhole will behave. Previously they would just wait there until they saw an opportunity to attack the planet on the other side, ignoring everything at their own planet. Now they act as if in FRD mode on their own planet, and only will break away from the action if they decide that it's better now to attack the other planet. If no enemy ships are around, then of course they will wait by the wormhole as they used to do.
  • The above might have been confusing, so the bottom line summary is this: when ships are stalking another planet, they will now still behave sensibly on the planet they are on, unlike before.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting the issue.

• Fixed a bug that could cause very large numbers of AI ships that were stalking a wormhole to undervalue their attack prowesss and keep waiting longer than they should have.

• Force fields no longer have a firepower rating, as that was confusing the firepower calculations and making the AI too tentative to attack in way too many circumstances.

• The health of ships no longer affects their firepower rating. That was causing a lot of the spire ships to be way over-weighted. The only time that would be relevant was if a ship had a low attack power but tons of health, which isn't something that needs to be accounted for in the fashion we were previously doing (and we're not really having many ships of that sort that would be of concern to the AI, which is the chief consideration here).
  • The net effect of this is that the AI will be more daring during fallen spire campaigns in general, and it also won't overestimate spirecraft and golems to the degree it used to.

• The AI is a lot more savvy now with some of its internal firepower weightings, using different kinds of weights for different situations. Overall this makes it feel a lot smarter when it comes to how it decides to do stuff with its free/threat ships.

• Previously, the Neinzul Enclave Starship mercenaries used the old graphics for the actual ship, but the new graphic for the icon. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Previously, the description text for the carriers and barracks said they could contain 200-1200 units, but that was only correct for High ship counts. Now it just says "up to 1200."
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting.

• Previously, the fortress tooltip was still saying that fortresses could transport ships. Fixed.
  • Thanks to BigJake for reporting.

• Converted away all internal references from Time.smoothDeltaTime to our own Game.Instance.GameDeltaTime, which prevents occasional skipping and lag in certain animations and scrolling the background stars as players pan the view, etc.

• Previously, using very high or low speed modifiers would cause explosions and similar to have the inverse amount of animation speed from what they should have. Fixed.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for finally helping us figure this one out!

• When Advanced Hybrids are on for their player, Defensive Hybrids will now switch to an offensive role to add pressure to certain other major AI offensives. This can make them more of a danger in the mid/late game. When this happens an alert message ("Defensive Hybrids Are Mobilizing") will be displayed for about 2 minutes after the "switch".

• Previously, the gravity ripper mark II image was missing in the tech upgrades window. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions of the game that was causing the game to hang in some savegames when a superterminal planet was captured. It depended on which ships the AI had unlocked as to whether the freeze would happen.
  • Thanks to northcornice for reporting.

• Hybrids looking for attack missions are now more likely to heavily prefer a "main target" planet.

• Eyebots now have missile ammo, and so it's much easier for the player to protect their command stations and whatnot by simply building counter-missile turrets (which have a tech cost, of course -- but note that any counter-whatever turret can be unlocked directly, they are not part of a tech line with prerequisites).
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting changing the ammo type.

• Fixed bug where previously the Spire advanced laser cannon module, heavy beam cannon module, and shield module technologies did not have any prerequisites. They now require the Laser Turret III, Heavy Beam Cannon IV, and Forcefield Generator III technologies, respectively.

• Fixed bug where most of the advanced Spire technologies did not have icons.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing waves in the intermediate tutorial to come into play not belonging to the AI player (and thus be unhittable by the human player, as well as treated as allies -- so they would attack AI ships automatically, etc).
  • Also made it so that existing saves with those "Allied ships" in them would convert those ships over to the AI appropriately.
  • Thanks to whiskeypriest for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding issue that affected a very small number of players (but more recently was suddenly more widespread... actually a good thing in terms of finding and fixing it) where the mouse edge scrolling did not work properly in some circumstances, most notably in windowed mode. The explanation on this one is long and convoluted: http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=937#c7847
  • Thanks to eRe4s3r for reporting, and for his patience as we hunted for this one for so long!

• Marauder rebalancing.
  • The rough target is to balance each like a MkIV fleet ship type with a 0.2x ship cap (i.e. a ship type that would have a mkI cap of 40 ships on high caps), since on difficulties less than 9 it's generally unlikely that more than 40 total marauders will spawn unless it's been a long time since there were any eligible cases for a marauder spawn.
  • The marauder spawning code will now not spawn more than twice the "high cap", regardless of how long it's been since a marauder spawn. On difficulties greater than 5 and lower than 9, the high cap is 40, so this new absolute cap will be 80 (which generally means 40 dagger frigates and 40 buzz bombs) on those difficulties.
  • Marauder Dagger Frigate:
    • Base Health from 3,300,000 => 2,200,000.
    • Armor Rating from 3,000 => 600.
    • Base Attack Range from 30,000 => 15,000.
    • Bonus vs Structural from 30 => 2.4.
    • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 8 => 2.4.
    • Bonus vs Turret from 8 => 2.4.
    • Bonus vs Light from 6 => 2.4.
    • Bonus vs CommandGrade from 4 => 2.4.
  • Marauder Buzz Bomb:
    • Base Health from 3,000,000 => 2,000,000.
    • Base Attack Power from 15,000 => 12,000 (note that these shots can hit 14 targets at once).
    • In many ways this is now a condensed version of the MkIV Grenade Launcher, rather than the Autobomb, so it's been renamed the Marauder Buzz Bomb Launcher.

• Grenade Launcher rebalancing:
  • Base Move Speed from 28/25/22/18/28 => flat 28.
  • Base Health from 15,000/25,000/45,000/65,000/95,000 => 15,000*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 4000 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 900/1800/3600/7200/14400 => 1000*mk (note that these shots hit 8/10/12/14/16 targets each).
  • Seconds-Per-Salvo from 15/15/10/8/7 => flat 15.

• Previously, crystal harvesters had 10x too much armor. Fixed.
  • Thanks to cathexis for reporting.

• All spirecraft, guardians, and hunter/killers are now immune to camouflaging.
  • Thanks to Burnstreet for suggesting.

• Apparently all guardians had a 10x bonus against the scout hull type recently. This has been removed. Artillery guardians additionally now have a 0.1 penalty against the scout hull type. This was hugely hurting both transports and scouts.
  • Thanks to ColdPrototype and TechSY730 for reporting.

• The fortress bonus against the scout hull type has been further reduced from 0.1 to 0.05.
  • Thanks to RogueThunder for reporting.

• The movement speed of all the scouts has been doubled once again, to bring them back to the equivalent of what they were two releases ago on Normal speed.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for inspiring this change.

• Laser Gatling:
  • Base health from 1400*mk => 2800*mk (a cap of Laser Gatlings MkIs used to have roughly 1/3rd as much totaly hp as a cap of Fighter MkIs, now it will be 2/3rds).
  • Base MkI Metal/Crystal from 80/80 => 50/50 (so now is half of fighters per-individual, and about 1.4x comparing cap to cap).
  • Thanks to Sunshine for the suggestion.

• The "Result" column on the reference tab of the stats screen now displays a percent next to each Win or Loss value, representing the margin of win or loss.
  • So Win(80%) on a row in the table means that the type selected in the dropbox above the table will beat that row's type and still have 80% health/ships left (if it's one vs one it roughly corresponds to how much health the individual will have left, if it's cap vs cap it roughly corresponds to how much total health the ships will have left).
  • A Loss(80%) means that row's type will beat the dropdown's type with 80% left.
  • Sorting by the Result column will now sort from Win(100%) to Win(1%) to Draw to Loss(1%) to Loss(100%) and vice versa.

• Some melee ship changes, at last:
  • Vorticular Cutlasses, Hive Golem Wasps, and Spire Blades are now the only ships with the Blade ammo type at the moment.
  • Vampires and Zenith Viral Shredders and Neinzul Viral Swarmers now all have a new Fusion Cutter ammo type (with a creepy new sound effect).
  • Previously, all ships with health larger than 1 million were immune to blades. Now they are immune to fusion cutters instead.
  • Previoulsy, all turrets were immune to blades. Now they are immune to fusion cutters instead.
    • The counter-whatever turrets and sniper/spider turrets remain immune to both blades and fusion cutters.
  • Military orbital command stations mark I-III, home command station cores I-III, experimental engineers, home human settlements, human cyro pods, mines of all sorts, raid starships I-III, lightning and armored warheads, fallen spire shards and survey markers, spire civilian outposts, and spire archives remain immune to both blade attacks and fusion cutters.
  • Self-Destruction Guardians, leech starships, riot control starships, impulse reaction emitters, and acid sprayers are now immune to fusion cutters instead of blades.
  • Home Command Stations and fortresses for both the player and the AI are now immune to blades again -- in the past they were simply because of those "greater than 1 million health" rule that got moved to fusion cutters.
  • Thanks to many players for helping out with suggestions here, and to Sunshine in particular for the suggestion of fusion cutters.

• Fixed longstanding bugs with icon-grouping that would cause ships and health bars to be drawn in spurious places.
  • Thanks to a long line of players, reporting this as early as the mesozoic era and never letting up. Well, maybe not that long ago.

• Fixed bug that was having multiplied-by-square-root-of-target-armor (zenith polarizer) and multiplied-by-100-minus-percent-of-target-health-remaining (youngling vulture) attack power calculations use the minimum and maximum multipliers of the _target_ rather than the attacker. Now uses the attacker's min/max. FYI, the polarizer is supposed to have a min/max of 4x/100x and the vulture is supposed to have a min/max of 10x/90x (the defaults both was getting most of the time were 1x/100x).

• Spire Frigates and capital ships previously had double the LoneUnitRadius values they should have had, which made them way bigger than intended for collision purposes. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report.

• Previously, the metal/crystal costs for the mark II-IV scouts was identical to that of the mark I. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Fixed a bug from the last few weeks where selecting military and nonmilitary ships together was way messed up; that in turn was a result from a fix to where it was too easy to accidentally select nonmilitary stuff. It should now be back to the way it was pre-Unity-port, but please let us know if something still seems up.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro, Ozymandiaz, Burnstreet.

• Spirecraft Attritioners no longer have guns because before they were "considered a military unit, so if you FRD them they will go around, possibly getting themselves destroyed in the process. Additionally, if you want them cloaked, they will uncloak to fire which obviously creates problems."
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Intra-galactic warp gates will no longer warp ships to themselves that were already spawned in their same system.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• Previously, the low-power hotkey (K) would not toggle ships with build queues. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• The Spire Shield Sphere guard posts (core and regular) now have vastly more health, in keeping with other force fields (but a bit stronger).
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• Added a new base game achievement.

• Since they are no longer "military" units, Spirecraft Attritioners are no longer eligible to be picked for an event-attack.

• The gravity drill now generates 90/s metal and crystal for players, rather than 30/s, in keeping with the new, larger economies.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• Previously, the "Can't use wormholes" tag was uselessly applied to mark II/III command stations. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting.

• En-dashes and Em-dashes are now automatically converted to hyphens when checking license key validity. This prevents issues with players typing the wrong kind of dash and it saying their license key is not valid.

• The spire civilian leaders now have 600k health instead of 200k.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• When AI ships are EMP'd or paralyzed or tractored, they are now both angered and -- this last only if they are an AI ship -- taken out of low power mode. This makes them autotargetable, and also means they probably just became free-threat.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for suggesting.

• The gravitational turret mark II/III was unintentionally lower than mark I. Fixed.
  • Thanks to BlackCobra for reporting.

(Released January 7th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.062

• The movement speed of transport ships has been doubled, from 128 to 248. They are also now immune to speed boosting.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• The movement speed of colony ships has been doubled, from 36 to 72. They are also now immune to speed boosting.
  • Thanks to BobTheJanitor for suggesting.

• All of the scout ships are now immune to speed boosting, as are eyebots.

• SuperFortresses and all regular fortresses are now immune to speed boosting, munitions boosting, and shield boosting.

• All AI guardians are now immune to speed boosting.

• Fixed a bug in prior versions that was causing the gravity immunity to not work.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting.

• Fixed a typo that said "Halves Allied Move Speed" instead of "Doubles Allied Move Speed."
  • Thanks to KPJZKC for reporting.

• The global "speed limit" was previously 150, including various speed boosts, etc. However, the "silent doubling" for player ships was applied after that. This meant that in the last version, the speed of player ships was now capping out at 150 instead of 300. Worse, because the combat style speed bonuses were previously after-the-speed-limit as with the silent doubling, those were also getting capped at 150... rather than 1200 in terms of blitz for player-controlled ships. Yikes. The new speed cap is now 1400, to account for the cumulative old cap plus a little extra wiggle room to account for even-speedier ships.

• The speed floor for Speed Racer and tag teamer ships wasn't working correctly with the new way that the combat style speeds are applied (as in, it was correct only on Epic). Fixed.

• In the prior version, ship acceleration was incorrect except on epic speed. This made the relative movement speeds of ships on Blitz in particular almost irrelevant, because by the time they finished accelerating, they were to their destination! Fixed.

(Released January 6th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.061

• Fixed several typos in the tutorial.
  • Thanks to roy7 for reporting.

• The Core Missile Guard posts have had their attack increased about 4.4x, and their range increased about 2x.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• Various "short name" changes have been made for consistency:
  • Z Elec Bomber is now Electric Bomber.
  • Frigate is now Missile Frigate.
  • MicroFight is now MicroFighter.
  • Shuttle is now Elec Shuttle.
  • Infil is now Infiltrator.
  • Laser is now Laser Gat.
  • Autocan is now Autocannon.
  • Deflect is now Deflector.
  • Grenade is now Grenade Launch.
  • Z Mirror is now Mirror.
  • Z Paralyzer is now Paralyzer.
  • Z Beam Frigate is now Beam Frigate.
  • Z Chameleon is now Chameleon.
  • Z Polarizer is now Polarizer.
  • Z Shredder is now Viral Shredder.
  • Commando is now Yng Commando.
  • Tiger is now Yng Tiger.
  • Vulture is now Yng Vulture.
  • Weasel is now Yng Weasel.
  • Nanoswarm is now Yng Nanoswarm.
  • S Armor Rotter is now Armor Rotter.
  • S Blade Spawner is now Blade Spawner.
  • S Gravity Drain is now Gravity Drain.
  • S Gravity Ripper is now Gravity Ripper.
  • S Maw is now Maw.
  • S Mini Ram is now Mini Ram.
  • S Stealth Battleship is now Stealth Battleship.
  • S Teleporting Leech is now Teleporting Leech.
  • S Tractor Platform is now Tractor Platform.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• Various "wave name" changes have been made for consistency:
  • Frigates are now Missile Frigates.
  • Tanks are now Space Tanks.
  • Cutlasses are now Vorticular Cutlasses.
  • Spiders are now Spider Bots.
  • Autocannons are now Autocannon Minipods.
  • Planes are now Space Planes.
  • EtherJets are now EtherJet Tractors.
  • Force Field Bearers are now Shield Bearers.
  • Armors are now Armor Ships.
  • Anti-Armors are now Anti-Armor Ships.
  • Bombards are now Zenith Bombards.
  • AutoBombs are now Zenith AutoBombs.
  • Commandos are now Neinzul Youngling Commandos.
  • Tigers are now Neinzul Youngling Tigers.
  • Vultures are now Neinzul Youngling Vultures.
  • Weasels are now Neinzul Youngling Weasels.
  • Nanoswarms are now Neinzul Youngling Nanoswarms.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• Various "full name" changes have been made for consistency:
  • Heavy Bombers are now Bombers.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• Various "ship type name" changes have been made for consistency/clarity:
  • Z Elec Bomber is now Elec Bomber.
  • Z Mirror is now Mirror.
  • Z Paralyzer is now Paralyzer.
  • Z Beam Frigate is now Beam Frigate.
  • Z Chameleon is now Chameleon.
  • Z Polarizer is now Polarizer.
  • Z Shredder is now Shredder.
  • Z AutoBomb is now AutoBomb.
  • Z Bombardment is now Bombard.
  • Spire Armor Rotter is now Armor Rotter.
  • Spire Blade Spawner is now Blade Spawner.
  • Spire Gravity Drain is now Gravity Drain.
  • Spire Gravity Ripper is now Gravity Ripper.
  • Spire Stealth Battleship is now Stealth Battleship.
  • Spire Teleporting Leech is now Teleporting Leech.
  • Spire Tractor Platform is now Tractor Platform.
  • Spire Maw is now Maw.
  • Spire Mini Ram is now Mini Ram.
  • These changes also affecet the sort order of the ship icons in the planetary summary.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• The incorrect part of the description about spirecraft has now been removed, so it isn't saying they are all non-repairable when in fact that varies based on the selected minor faction.
  • Thanks to Nightchill and Spikey00 for reminding us of this.

• The health of spirecraft shield bearers has been doubled as an incentive to make them more attractive, as a compromise since we won't add passive regen.
  • Thanks to Fleet for reporting.

• Ships that metamorphose (like Golems), that replicate (like viral shredders), which get rebuilt by rebuilders, and which get created via things like the mining enclosures (like spirecraft) now properly count as being built.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting.

• Large ships that are colliding with one another, like starships or golems or spirecraft, now do a better job of hanging close together in a group rather than spreading quite so far out.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Some notable performance improvements have been made to the ship collision-avoidance movement algorithms, which are some of the most expensive in the game.

• Spirecraft all now have infinite engine health.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for suggesting.

• Spirecraft are all now immune to munitions, shield, and speed boosting.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• In the past, the combat styles would just invisibly affect the attack powers and movement speeds of ships. Now it actually shows the real values in the interface, to be clearer what is happening there.

• Scouts and scout starships have had their base movement speed doubled. However, their speed also no longer increases like other ships when the combat style is increased. This prevents scouting from being too easy/hard on the various combat styles.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Similarly, human transports and AI carriers no longer scale up in speed with the faster combat styles, but have had their base speed doubled.

• The colorization of the alerts was not actually working in the last version. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Fleet for reporting.

• In the last few versions, Parasites were accidentally stacked on top of the other units in the advanced factory. Fixed.
  • Thanks to leb0fh for reporting.

• Removed/merged/etc a few fields in the core ForegroundObject class; probably more to come here as all the fields have been cataloged now.

• Made ships much more likely to clear their autotargeting lists and release the memory used for them in a timely fashion when no longer in combat.

• Pulled various ForegroundObject fields used only during the load-game process into a sub-object that is released after that process, to cut down on the memory footprint of ships.

• Fixed loooooongstanding bug where a completed game would not show up on the high scores list if another record was already there with the same map seed and a higher score. It will now prefer a record with the IsGameOver flag, even if the score is equal or lower. Also made it log the game result more promptly after IsGameOver is set.
  • Thanks to many, many players for reporting this many, many times.

• Okay, wow. We majorly restructured the way that "other objects" (basically, everything that is not a ship: explosions, shots, junk, rocks, shield hits, etc) is stored and initialized in memory. A lot of this was very old code that hadn't been reimagined significantly since early alpha, way before 1.0.
  • Not only did our restructuring result in lower overall RAM use for these objects (both ongoing and transient), it also resulted in lower CPU for creating new copies of them -- this helps a small bit during very large battles, but it also has extremely reduced the amount of time it requires to load a savegame. For a savegame that previously took 16 seconds, it now takes 10 seconds, etc. The effect of this is larger on maps with more planets.
  • Also fixed a rather obscure potential desync related to shot movement as part of this. Nobody had reported it, but it could have randomly struck in fairly uncommon circumstances.
  • Note that this is an enormous change, so could lead to some new crashes or other instability for a little while, but hopefully we caught all of the various cases that were crashing already (fingers crossed).

• A bunch of more optimizations internal to the foreground objects (ships, structures, etc) has been made. The general effect of these changes is once again to reduce the memory footprint a bit, but in this case also to help reduce the CPU overhead of creating new foreground objects. This should help savegame loading speed a small bit, but in our testing it doesn't seem to have been much help so far.
  • All in all, these changes plus the other ones earlier in this same release version account for about 205 bytes of RAM saved per ship in the game: that's about 2MB per 10k ships. Even just in a 70k ship game, that's fairly notable that we could save 14mb there in this fashion. A lot of these also boost CPU efficiency to a minor degree, which is also cool.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing units not to be able to attack enemies in the tutorials.
  • The issue was actually that in older saves (anything created up through 4.060), the AI player in the tutorials was in the wrong slot. The new version converts the AI players to the appropriate slot.
  • Amusingly, the hardest part of getting this working with older saves was that the AIs wanted to tear themselves apart.
  • The tutorials could definitely use some testing now, though, if anyone doesn't mind and has some time. These changes were hard on the tutorials, in terms of creating situations like instantly-winning, or ships belonging to the wrong player, etc. The efficieny gains to the game in general are well worth it, but this just means extra checking on the tutorials is needed.
  • Thanks to skunktail for reporting.

• The yellow color of players in the tutorials is now brighter (on new savegames only) to be easier to see.

• The silent doubling of player ship speed has been removed.
  • In its place, all of the human command stations now have an ability that doubles the speed of all allied ships on that planet. This gives the players their same home-field advantage as always, while not letting them run in circles around the AIs on the AI planets. Also, it really gives a tactical penalty when a command station is lost for the players.
  • The AI home planet command stations also now have this new doubles-allied-ship-speed ability, too. This is new, and makes it so that the AI home planets always have a home-field speed advantage similar to what your ships do on all your planets.
  • Thanks to superking and TechSY730 for inspiring this change.

(Released January 6th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.060

• Since it did more than we thought it would for the memory efficiency of planet serialization, converted player serialization from string.concat to StringBuilder.Append. We may have made some mistake in the process and that would cause problems, please let us know if you find something.

• Player ships that are in low power mode no longer are able to recharge their weapons. Note that when this happens, the recharge bar will automatically be shown for the ship, no matter what the context, to let the player know what is happening. This prevents the incentive to use some micro-intensive tactics.
  • Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting.

• The different kinds of alerts in the upper left are now colorized by type, to make telling them apart easier to do.
  • Thanks to Fleet for suggesting.

• In recent versions, crystal harvesters had 10x too low of health.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.

• Neinzul Youngling Commandos now have armor piercing of 750*mk (same as fighters).
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting.

• Added in a couple of "safety garbage collections" into the load savegame process to attempt to prevent the game from grabbing any more memory than it has to when loading large savegames.

• Put in more exception-preventing code in the single-select dropdowns to prevent a rare issue.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Scout starships have received some rebalancement:
  • Mark I now have 120k health instead of 80k.
  • Mark II now have 4x the health of mark I instead of 2x.
  • Mark III now have 8x the health of mark I instead of 4x.
  • Mark IV now have 10x the health of mark I instead of 6x.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• Put in a new CPU-efficiency-improving shift in the targeting logic for ships in FRD mode: while in FRD mode (and always for ships that are snipers), a much-less-accurate but much-faster-to-calculate range value is now used. Normally accurate ranges are important in battle, because ships have to know if they are in range to hit their target, etc. However, for ships in FRD mode, they can move to hit their target, so they only need to get a rougher idea of which ships are vaguely closest.
  • The main side effect of this change, aside from the speed boost, is that ships in FRD mode will choose more poorly between targets that are close together and also at a diagonal from the targeting ship. There may be some other unintended side effects, though, so we'll have to keep an eye on that.
  • Thanks to Penguin21 for inspiring this change.

• The "are we on the same team" logic, which gets called a lot, is now more efficient in the general all-ais-versus-all-humans cases.

• An even more enormous change has been made to how the rollups are calculated, basically making huge chunks of them per-team. This is a notable speed and RAM boost for large games and especially for multiplayer games. It particularly makes it more efficient for ships to change planets, and for savegames to be loaded.

• The following bonus types are now eligible to be picked when composing an event-attack (the AI has to actually have the type in question, of course, and the different types and mark levels have different point values) :
  • Raiders
  • Parasites
  • Snipers
  • Spiders
  • Laser Gatlings
  • Autocannon Minipods
  • Deflector Drones
  • Shield Bearers
  • Armor Ships
  • Anti Armors
  • MLRSs
  • Munitions Boosters
  • Zenith Bombards
  • Zenith Electric Bombers
  • Sentinel Frigates
  • Zenith Mirrors
  • Zenith Paralyzers
  • Zenith Chameleons
  • Zenith Polarizers
  • Impulse Reaction Emitters
  • Spire Armor Rotters
  • Spire Gravity Rippers
  • Spire Maws
  • Spire Tractor Platforms

• The following spirecraft are now eligible to be picked when composing an event-attack (though these won't show up in a Broken-Golems-Hard game if LotS is disabled, just as Golems cannot be picked for event attacks if TZR is disabled) :
  • Spirecraft Shield Bearers
  • Spirecraft Attritioners
  • Implosion Spirecraft
  • Spirecraft Siege Towers

• Scouts I-IV, Scout Starships I-IV, (non-AI) Remains Rebuilders, and Engineers II-III and Experimental (Engineer mkIs _not_ included) are now immune to attrition.

• The AI thread now thinks almost entirely in terms of team-based tactics, but especially in terms of things like warp gates, etc. Thus there really should never again be any situations where one AI player is unable to find a planet to warp into just because there is only one warp gate bordering human planets and that warp gate belongs to the other AI player.

• Previously, when a bully or assassin AI type could not find a valid planet to attack belonging to the weakest/strongest player (respectively), they would warp in to ???. Now they will warp in against other players if their favorite target is not available.
  • Thanks to Draco Cretel for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing the Warp Jumper AI type to not always be able to attack any human planet that wasn't warp jammed.

• Put in a number of internal efficiency improvements with regard to properly clearing internal rollup lists and releasing their memory.

• Put in a number of internal transient-RAM-reductions related to converting some AI thread dictionaries to int arrays.

• AI mobile military ship combining is no longer player-specific. This means that AI ships will be condensed further than they once were when needed (when both AIs have ships at a planet), and it also means that this process requires less CPU to calculate.
  • The same is also now true for the creation of AI Carriers out of mobile AI ships, which will result in fewer, more-appropriately-filled-to-capacity carriers in most cases.

• The AI players now coordinate as a team when deciding whether or not they should attack a player planet with their ships that are waiting on the other side of a wormhole. Previously, it was per-AI-player which led to incorrect cases where the AI players would wait too long. When determining what sort of firepower they should bring, the difficulty of the highest AI type is what is used.

• The AI players should now properly value the per-planet ship caps for creating experimental and support-corps ships, and in general will flood them into planets a whole lot less.

• The experimentalist and support corps ships are now more likely to send their specialty ships along with waves.

• Massively refactored the AI-thread rollups in general, so that way fewer object references are required (somewhere around 1/3 as many references as before in single player, and an even lower percentage in multiplayer). These shifts in general will improve RAM and CPU use on the host computer, amongst the gameplay benefits already noted above.

• Further Teleport Raider rebalancing:
  • Base Attack Power from 120*mk => 600*mk.
  • Seconds-Per-Salvo from 2 => 8.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 2 => 4.
  • Thanks to superking for pointing out that they weren't doing well against pretty much anything, particularly if it had armor.

• A revised savegame format has now been put in place, with an emphasis on using less RAM to create it.
  • One happy side effect of this is that that savegame files are now about 7/8 to 4/5 of their former size. They still load in about the same amount of time, though.
  • Another side effect is that the new savegames actually show their loading process as they load, now, rather than just sitting there silently on parsing data.
  • At any rate, the chief purpose of this is to make the creation of savegames as well as the syncing of multiplayer network state into a lower-RAM-using process to avoid GC heap errors when players are already running near the RAM redline. The new format is vastly superior in that regard, possibly using as little as half as much RAM as before, depending on the exact circumstances of the save.
  • HANG ON TO YOUR OLD SAVES! There's no risk of corrupting any old saves with this new system, but new saves might indeed turn out to be corrupt. Our testing has resulted in no corruption, but with anything this large and new, it's good to hang onto your old saves for a bit, just in case.

• The old mission summary was still in the game, taking up time getting periodically recalculated, but invisible. This was just a porting artifact, and it has now been removed.

• Previously, the Zenith Power Generator did not show up in the reactors quick-button lists. Fixed.

• A number of rollup lists on the Player object that were really human-only (but which were bloated by lots of AI ships on the AI versions of the objects have been made human-only. A few have been removed. This lets the functionality remain the same while having a bit less ram usage and a bit faster loading of savegames.

• A message is now shown in the alerts window when an enemy black hole machine is at the current planet being viewed.
  • Thanks to jcarvajal for suggesting.

• When one resource is at the resource cap and the other is not, the manufactories now start turning on to minimize the wasted overflow.
  • Thanks to Heavens, ShadowOTE, and Echo35 for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in recent versions where if something had zero crystal cost, it would start out at full health instead of whatever percentage of metal had been collected.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.

• If a handicap was previously set on a player, then it wouldn't get reset properly when a new game or tutorial was started. This is a bug going all the way back to 1.0 or before, apparently. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nil Einne and Someone.r.c.tm for reporting.

(Released January 4th, 2011)

Prerelease 4.059

• Fixed bug where a ship with over 50% parasite damage being killed inside a Spire Maw would cause an Unhandled Error due to the reclamation code assuming that a dying ship had a CurrentPlanet set (ships inside transport-like structures do not). The fix prevents the reclamation from happening, which isn't ideal but is the best way to avoid simulation-destabalizing errors like this one in this very rare case.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the report and easily-reproducing savegame.

• Fixed a crash-on-game-start bug that could happen if the players selected more than 8 homeworlds in the lobby with some combination of fairly high difficulty and an AI type that has high defensive multipliers on some or all of its planets. The bug was in the "randomly promote tech level of AI planet" code, because the old algorithm was now returning a more than 100% chance of promoting the tech level and our random number generator is not amused by requests to generate a random number with a low-bound higher than the high-bound. The game will now just treat that case as a 100% chance to promote tech level, which means a mkIV AI planet.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for the report.

• Fixed a crash-on-creating-game bug with the Crafty Spire AI Type.
  • Thanks to love kawa for the report.

• Improved memory/cpu performance of sending/saving planet state (string.concat -> StringBuilder.Append). Not done terribly commonly, but every bit helps. This could cause some problems if a mistake was made, so please let us know if something bad happens.

• Fixed a bug where Neinzul Youngling Vultures were scaling damage up from a minimum at 100% target health to a maximum at 90% (or lower) target health, they were intended to (and will now) scale from a minimum at 100%-90% target health to a maximum at 10%-0% target health.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.

(Released December 30th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.058

• New Moderate AI Type: Spireling
  • Fairly aggressive AI that uses only Spire fleet ships.
  • Extra Ships: All Spire fleet ships.

• New Moderate AI Type: Thief
  • Fairly aggressive AI that uses ships with tractor beams and leech capabilities. This can lead to a distinct disregard for player property rights.
  • Extra Ships: Etherjet tractors, Spire Tractor Platforms, Parasites
  • Thanks to Kemeno for the suggestion.

• New Hard AI Type: Retaliatory
  • Starts with Counterattack Guard Posts on most planets, and can actually have more than one on a planet (if that planet would have gotten one normally). This can lead to devastating counter attacks particularly when taking a mkIV planet.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.

• New Hard AI Type: Crafty Spire
  • Starts with various Spirecraft (which are generally bigger than starships and smaller than golems) on its planets.
  • Extra Ships: Spirecraft.

• New Hard AI Type: Extreme Raider
  • Very nasty AI that uses raid-oriented fleet ships and really likes sending Raid Starships along with normal waves.
  • Extra Ships: Raider, Spire Stealth Battleship, Cutlass, Vampire, Teleport Raider
  • Thanks to ShadowOTE for the suggestion.

• New Hard AI Type: Spire Hammer
  • Generally solid AI that also adds a powerful Spire ship to each wave (in addition to the normal starship). At higher tech levels it will even send Capital-ship level vessels.
  • Extra Ships: Spire Frigates and Capital Ships.

• Added 24 new achievements (1 base-game, 23 LotS).

• Fixed bug since the first Unity versions where disabling a trial-mode expansion would not fully bring the game out of trial mode (even if it was the only trial-mode piece left) until you restarted the application. This also fixes the same bug for when a valid license key was actually entered and previously the game had to be restarted before that key fully "took."
  • Thanks to many players for reporting this, including winthrowe, vonduus, Ozymandiaz, Sizzle, and Ymihere.

• A new special ability, "Self Attrition Only When Not Low-Power," is now applied to most units with self-attrition (the spirecraft scouts and jumpships, and the AI special forces guard posts, being the exceptions). This ability makes it so that things like golems, Neinzul Younglings, etc, can be put into low-power mode whenever they are not actually attacking.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting.

• The default for the galaxy map display filter is now Mobile Military Units instead of Mobile Military Firepower. All existing settings files have been adjusted to the new default.

• Previously, the "Show Ship Recharge Bars" setting was not properly being read out of the settings file into the settings visual display, causing it to reset to the default if players closed the application and later restarted it and opened the settings screen again. Fixed.
  • Thanks to TechSY730, Toll, and Echo35 for reporting.

(Released December 27th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.057

• Spire Blades and Hive Golem Wasps are now immune to being insta-killed so that they don't distract ion cannons.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the last version that was causing all AI ships to be anemically slow. This also fixed a few other way-too-slow cases.
  • Thanks to Retzinsky and Woggle for reporting.

(Released December 24th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.056

• Scout health is now 3/5 of its prior value.
  • Thanks for Vinraith for continuing to report on scout effectiveness.

• Group move is fixed (in the last version it was only working if one of the ships in the group was unable to be speed-boosted.
  • Thanks to BigJake for reporting.

• Fortresses and superfortresses now only do 10% damage to scout hulls (which includes transports).
  • Thanks to TechSY730 and Suzera for reporting.

(Released December 24th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.055

• Ion cannons, core warhead interceptors, orbital mass drivers, and counterspies are all now immune to radar dampening.
  • This is another nerf to scouts, as well as a general buff back to all these ships.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox and Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Spider turrets are no longer immune to sniper attacks.

• Both spider and sniper turrets are now immune to radar dampening, which makes them a lot more interesting and powerful against AI raid starships again (recall that only the humans get these turrets).

• Ships will no longer auto-kite or otherwise retreat if they are already beyond the max distance at which ships can be built on the planet.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for suggesting.

• Ships with movement that causes abilities to be reset (like fortresses) are no longer eligible for auto-kiting, or for auto-FRD mode.
  • Thanks to Sigma7 and matyasbot for suggesting.

• Fortresses no longer have the ability to transport ships. That was somewhat useless, and the counter for the transport overlapped with the repair-ability counter. Any fortresses transporting ships in existing saves will eject them.
  • Thanks to ShadowOTE and shugyosha for reporting.

• Fortresses have been significantly buffed:
  • Fortresses mark I-III now fire flame waves rather than missiles (superfortresses already did). This lets them now hit ships that are immune to missiles, obviously, but it also increases the movement speed of their shots from 54 to 178: a tremendous boost to their ability to wreak a lot of havoc on ships that are fast and/or distant.
  • Fortresses mark I-III now have 5x more health (superfortresses already had way more), making them much more substantial in terms of their own survivability.
    • The AI versions of fortresses now only have 5x the health of their human counterparts, not 10x.
  • The attack power of fortresses and superfortresses have all been increased 10x, making them a lot more formidable again.
  • Superfortresses are now 2.5x more expensive than they were before.
  • Regular fortresses are now 10x more expensive than they were before.
  • Fortresses mark I-III now cost 3x more energy than before, and cannot be put in low-power mode.
  • Superfortresses now cost 15x more energy than before, and cannot be put in low-power mode.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for suggesting.

• To be consistent with the other fortresses, there is now an AI superfortress with 5x more health than the human counterpart.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for inspiring this change.

• Previously, very old games were not having their AI units upgraded to their new counterparts properly. Fixed.

• Armored Warhead attack powers have been increased 40x, making them significantly more awesome and perhaps actually strategically viable for once.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• Lightning Warhead attack powers have been increased 2x to make them a lot more strategically tempting again, too.

• Barracks checks were previously always 200 only occurring if there were an excess 200 units at the planet, even though the barracks capacity amounts were scaled with the different unit cap scales. This meant that barracks/carriers were rarely being seeded into normal and low ship cap scale games, except for older savegames that had these.
  • This has been fixed so that the check floor is now 200/100/50 at high/normal/low ship caps, which means that barracks and carriers are WAY likelier to show up in those kinds of games. Correspondingly, now border aggression is less of a thing there, as it already was on high (still a thing, just not so much of one).
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• The tachyon drone's range has been doubled from 750 to 1500, and the decloaker's range has been increased from 15k to 20k.
  • Thanks to Sigma7 for suggesting.

• The ship cap of fortresses has been moved to 5/4/3 for marks I/II/III.
  • Thanks to Suzera for suggesting.

• Fixed an issue that previously existed where when ships were group-moving and speed-boosted, but some of the ships were immune to speed boosting, and those ships would then get left behind. This was a fairly substantial change to the group move logic, so please let us know if you run into any issues.
  • Thanks to PineappleSam for reporting.

• The Starfleet Commander AI type has been completely reinvented. Now it gets no extra starships in reinforcements, and its per-planet starship caps are just as normal. On defense, it's just essentially a lightly-defended AI. However, on offense it now gets 4x the normal starships with every wave, making it a pretty interesting and dangerous offensive raider-type AI. It was already offensive-oriented, but now it is much more so.
  • This makes this AI type significantly easier, as before it could collect dozens of starships at its planets.
  • Thanks to Dyers_Eve for reporting the recent imbalance.

• Lightning and Armored Warheads now scale with the ship caps, so that their damage output is higher on the lower cap scale settings, retaining their value appropriately.
  • Thanks to Suzera for suggesting.

• Previously, EMP detonations were causing force fields to blink on and off rather than disabling them completely. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• All ships with force fields on them are now immune to paralysis attacks (since having the paralysis attacks disable the force fields would make the paralyzers way overpowered).

• Fixed a bug in the resource flows that could previously cause self-building ships to stall out, most notably force fields under some various circumstances (such as being shot, but not just limited to that).
  • Thanks to Vinraith for providing an awesome save that could demonstrate this.

• Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause the health of a self-building ship to be artificially too-high. This could cause all sorts of problems, such as engineers ceasing helping to repair it, etc.

• Fixed a related bug that could sometimes cause the remaining time-to-build to be massively incorrectly reported.

• The bonus that guardians have against scouts has been changed from 0 to 0.01, again to prevent scouting from being too easy.

• Normally tractor beams will not latch onto ships with an effective speed of 0 (from engine damage or whatever), but now that logic is only for IMMOBILE tractor beam sources. Mobile ships like martyrs, etherjets, etc, can now pick up ships with zero current move speed that would normally have move speed.
  • Thanks to Nightchill and Draco18s for reporting.

• The range circles no longer draw with partially-transparent colors for the lines, thus reducing their GPU overhead quite a bit, more or less depending on the GPU in question.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting.

• EtherJet Tractors now have significantly boosted tractor beam ranges (about 500 less than their attack range), so that their likelihood of actually tractoring any enemies goes way up. And, so that they do a better job of holding enemies at arms' length (though enemies can hit them anyway, they don't have the same luck with whatever is near the etherjets). In the past, the range of etherjets was short enough that sometimes it seemed like their tractors weren't even working.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• Mobile ships with tractors now make an effort to move into tractor range as well as attack range if they are chasing a target. Again, this way etherjet tractors are a lot more likely to actually capture targets (in the past that was less of an issue because of the old shielding model, but now it's a definite concern).
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• When Spire Civilian Leader outposts are captured, they now reduce the AI Progress by 3 every hour, rather than the former value of 1. Until captured, they still keep increasing the AI Progress by 1.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for noting they were always a pretty raw deal before.

• Okay, this one is super exciting. Six new kinds of Intra-galactic warp gates have been added for players under the CONST tab -- no knowledge required to unlock, as these are essentially logistical tools that people would find to be must-unlock techs (like the transports and rally posts had turned out to be -- we learned our lesson with that sort of thing). Here's a description of perhaps the most exciting one of the six:
  • Intra-Galactic Warp Gate - Advanced Factories
    • When this gate is not in low power mode, all ships produced by the controlling player at any advanced factories will emerge at this gate. When there are multiple gates of this type, ships emerge from one at random. Ships that emerge are paralyzed for 60 seconds on account of their ordeal of warping. If this gate is on an enemy or neutral planet, they are paralyzed for 2 minutes instead. A gather point, ship stance (FRD, attack move, etc), and so forth can be set on the gate just like on a normal constructor, and the created ships will obey those orders.
  • However, there are six in all, one type each for space docks, starship constructors, advanced factories, mercenary space docks, fabricators, and missile silos.
  • There is a cap of five per type. Given that these can be paused and re-enabled, that's pretty useful.
  • The short description of this feature basically that the logistical challenges of unit production and delivery are a thing of the past.
    • Before anyone complains about the game "playing itself," note that this is of no help with units that have already been placed. As has always been the case, you still need to make sure and build your ships in a sensible place for defense or offense, or you can get caught unawares.
    • In terms of space docks, what this new mechanic saves is time of tearing down the docks and rebuilding them somewhere else (at the cost of temporary paralysis, of course, which means that it's not always the best choice for space docks. But it can save a lot of time when you don't want to be having to repeatedly set up queues as you move your docks around, though.
    • In terms of fabricators and advanced factories, the benefit is absolutely enormous: those are immobile and you don't get to choose where to put them, so in many games that could make them of marginal use simply because of the hassle factor. Now you can deliver ships to or near to the front lines for the very minor setback of the temporary paralysis on arrival -- quite a fair trade.
      • One of the reasons for advanced factories and fabricators being immobile and set in specific positions, however, is that this can lead to interesting situations where you have to defend a planet you might not otherwise want to. The beauty of this solution is that that dynamic is unharmed, because you still have to defend those distant planets. All it removes is the logistical challenge of moving the goods from that planet out into the rest of the galaxy.
  • In the end, given the AI's exo-galaxy warps for unit creation, it only makes sense that the humans would get something similar for intra-galaxy warps with unit creation. The symmetry there is actually pretty cool, and at any rate the goal here is savings in micromanagement, which it delivers in spades.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for inspiring this feature.

• When human ships have been swallowed by enemy ships (such as the spire maw or starship disassembler guardian), an alert now appears in the upper left saying how many ships are currently swallowed, and what their total remaining health is. This way players have some indication of where their ship cap went to (not on specific planets, just in general that they were swallowed -- the Find function can be used to find specific ships swallowed on enemy planets), and when they will get it back (usually under 5 minutes).
  • Thanks to Invelios for inspiring this change.

• Scout starships can no longer be swallowed, which makes them a lot more useful again. Regular scouts can still be swallowed.
  • Thanks to Invelios for inspiring this change.

• Previously, when ships had been swallowed, they would in fact get properly consumed, but they would not actually give back their ship cap upon death until the game was saved and reloaded, which was obviously a huge hassle.
  • Thanks to Invelios for reporting.

• It is now possible to replace an existing command station that belongs to you all in one action: simply build the new command station on an planet and it will replace the existing one.
  • Additionally, when this action is taken, it no longer triggers the when-command-station-dies logic for other ships on the planet; they don't notice the swap. This is extremely useful for reactors and harvesters, which otherwise would be unavoidably destroyed when the command station was scrapped before the replacement was built.
  • This also causes the planet to not leave control of the player, even while the command station replacement is self-building, whereas before it would normally have been neutral in color for a while.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in the last couple of versions that was making the buy and tech button backgrounds not dimming or redding when the foreground was, which really made them hard to interpret.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for reporting.

• Much improved the colors of the control group labels on the planetary summary, so that they are actually legible again (first time these have been legible since the port to unity).
  • Thanks to Kalzarius and themachineissentient for reporting.

(Released December 23rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.054

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Armored Golem description text.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting.

• Clarified the description text on Zenith SpaceTime Manipulators and Speed Boosters to note that they affect all friendly ships EXCEPT minor faction ships (in other words, your ships and allied human ships).
  • Thanks to Toll and Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Previously, speed boosters and similar could override the cap of things like gravity drills, which made combos like gravity drills plus logistics command stations ridiculously overpowered. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll and PineappleSam for reporting.

• The effects of gravity drills, gravitational turrets, etc, are now calculated approximately 3x more frequently, and thus increase CPU load a bit but at the same time make the gravity turrets in particular more effective.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• When there are extra metal or crystal harvesters on a planet (typically from old and semi-messed-up-saves), all of the harvesters of the type-in-excess are now removed (and presumably are then rebuilt afterward). This prevents some situations of essentially accidental-cheating. A message is sent when the harvesters of a planet are reset in this way.

• All metal and crystal harvesters and all energy reactors are now destroyed on a planet when the command station is lost. The main goal of this is making the loss of a command station more meaningful again, as it used to be for other reasons, but it happily also means that energy reactors can no longer be constructed on neutral/enemy planets (thus preventing circumvention of the AI Progress needed for energy via that sort of strategy).

• The various resource-gathering-type ships are no longer including the "captured on planet ownership" flag, as that was pointless given that the AI no longer has them.

• Fixed an extremely longstanding bug (since pre-1.0) where in certain rare circumstances, specific harvesters could not be built.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting the most recent case of this.

• The way that exo-shields work has now been completely re-done. Rather than providing a single-ship forcefield, the exo-shield now just adds its health to that of the original ship. For purposes of the AI thread, the AI is now WAY better at deciding when to attack ships under exo-shields (in the past it would pretty much just ignore them). Additionally, the way that exo-shields work is a lot more RAM-efficient. Also, a ship can now be protected by both a regular force field and an exo-shield at the same time, unlike before. The visuals of exo-shields also now show up like the "ship based force fields" of riot starships and similar.

• Exo-shields no longer die when their target protected object dies, they simply become unlinked and will later link with anything valid that is within range of them.

• The regen rate of exo-shields has now been dropped considerably, to regenerating over 20 minutes instead of a ludicrous 30 seconds. They also now drop remains, however, so that rebuilders can come along and put them back up.
  • Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting.

• Rather than having exo-shields cost a simple -2 metal and crystal per second, they simply halve the amount of resources generated by whatever ship it is they are protecting. They also now cos 750 knowledge to unlock instead of 500.

• Improved the AI thread's information about guarding objects and exo-shields. This should fix some of the issues relating to units dancing, etc.

• Energy reactors now drop remains when they die, so that remains rebuilders can rebuild them automatically.

• Metal and crystal harvesters mark II now each cost 3250 knowledge rather than 3000.

• Tachyon beam emitters now cost 250 knowledge to unlock instead of 500. The stealth tachyon emitters now cost 1500 knowledge instead of 1000 to unlock.

• Ships that are still under construction are now immune to all forms of paralysis -- paralysis shots, EMPs, whatever. This prevents a number of little issues.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• The exo-shield and energy reactor remains now can't be rebuilt when on a planet that doesn't have a player command station (the exo shields because those are linked to nonexistent harvesters, so those are pointless).
  • Thanks to techsy730 for suggesting.

• A couple of force field rebalancements:
  • The health of mark I and player home force fields has gone up from 9 million to 14 million (and thus the AI force fields mark I have gone up from 45 million to 70 million).
  • The health of mark II force fields has gone up from 18 million to 30 million (and thus the AI force fields mark II have gone up from 90 million to 150 million).
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox, Vinraith, and techsy730 for suggesting.

• A change has been put in place to make ships immediately re-check for new forcefield protection as soon as they lose protection from a prior force field. This was previously the case for command stations only. This will have some performance impact, but will greatly help correctness in the case of multi-stacked force fields. And in most cases, the performance impact will hopefully be negligible, but we look forward to your feedback on that.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting the issue that spawned this.

• All guardians are now immune to paralysis attacks, as are carriers now.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for suggesting.

• All spire bonus ship types, and the zenith electric bombers and sentinel frigates, are all now immune to paralysis attacks.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Penetrators are now immune to force fields.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Spire Mining Ships now appear under the Mobile Builders quick buttons at the bottom of the screen.
  • Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting.

• The max health of advanced research stations has been reduced by 1/5th.

• Some tweaks to the resource bar display:
  • The parentheses around the unused resource gatherers label on the resource bar has been removed to prevent wrapping issues.
  • The total income display on the resources bar next to the current net income for metal and crystal has been removed. Those are both accessible through the tooltip for those items, and it was both cluttering and causing-of-wrapping-issues to have it included.
  • Both the metal and crystal resource sections of the resource bar are now 10px narrower each. On 1024px-wide screen resolutions, this should prevent threat, etc, from ever going off the right side of the screen, while still not having any wrapping like we used to have here (thanks to the above change).

• The AI now only has a 8% chance of swarming after "irreplaceable" units like ion cannons, ARSes, etc, rather than a 70% chance.
  • The AI already has logic in place for valuing targets even beyond this, but much more flexible and less gap-in-the-wall type logic, so having this be very infrequent is good. However, still having it present is also good, so that occasionally the AI will mass their ships on a frontal assault on something valuable, always a good thing.
  • Thanks to Kemeno and others for reporting various cases.

• Two new ammo-type immunities have been added: mass driver and artillery (artillery referring to mainly the artillery golem, but other mega-artillery cases as well).

• Hunter/Killers are now immune to both artillery and mass drivers. As are all mark V guardians. As are core shield generators. As are all of the AI core guard posts, and the AI home command station.

• The recent hunter/killer spawn logic has been (nearly) completely removed. Instead of scrapping ships to try to create an "equivalent" Hunter/Killer in circumstances of extreme threat, it now just redeploys them into carriers to meet the same goal while not affecting difficulty in the same way (for good or for ill) as had been happening with the hunter/killers).

• Distribution nodes previously granted players between 20k and 200k of metal and crystal each on being burst. With all the recent economic changes, that's in no way worth even 1 AIP. Now they give between 300k and 400k of metal and crystal each on being burst (except the trojan ones, obviously, which take away half that).
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting the imbalance here.

• The "shots instantly hit targets leaving their planet" logic was not previously working. It should be fixed now, though, but could use more testing. Consider this a pretty major nerf to scouts, FYI.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where modules would not always draw on top of their parent ship.

• The alerts box now remembers its widths from the last 12 seconds, and doesn't shrink below whatever the max size was during that period (it keeps track of the sizes once per second). This prevents the alerts box from jittering around in size as numbers count down on the wave timers, for instance.
  • Thanks to Kalzarius for badgering us about this a lot. ;) It does look much cleaner.

• The spirecraft mining enclosures should now have the properly raised ship caps to match their actual spirecraft that they construct.
  • Thanks to Invelios for reporting.

(Released December 22nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.053

• Fixed a bug where the Fallen-Spire per-game-second logic was not always being called on all appropriate ships (so some chases were not being triggered at all).

• Spire City Shield Generators now use the same mechanic as the Riot Shield modules (that is, they cannot be flown through, and they do not apply the 75% damage reduction to objects protected by them).
  • This may make things a wee bit too easy, we'll see, but it was confusing people to have things fly through those shields.

• Spire Capital Ships larger than a Frigate main gun base range from 4000 => 7000 (this was kept short because the main gun has to be shorter range than any module gun that can be mounted on the ship, but 7000 should be safe for that even with the other modules that are planned).

• Fixed bug that was making the planet-specific auto-build-energy-reactor-mark-(I/II/III) toggles simply not work at all.

• Still working on how to balance the melee/aoe/kamikaze ship types, but went ahead and did a balance pass on the simpler turrets:

• MLRS Turret:
  • Base Health from 58,000/74,000/130,000 => 100,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 600/800/800 => 450*mk.
  • Base Range from 7000 => 12000.
  • Build time from 70/120/170 => 60*mk.
  • The dps of this thing was simply _out there_, even at mkI, so with great regret:
  • Shots-per-salvo from 12/24/48 => flat 12.
  • Seconds-per-salvo from 4 => 8.
  • Base Attack Power from 1240/1600/2000 => 700*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 16 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 8 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 1 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 1 => 2.4.

• Flak Turret:
  • Ship cap multiplier from 1.2 => 0.5.
  • Base Health from 110,000*mk => 250,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 100+100*mk => 750*mk.
  • Energy Use from 150 => 300.
  • Base Metal Cost from 1150 => 2000.
  • Base Crystal Cost from 225 => 400.
  • Build time from 70 => 120*mk.
  • Base Range from -1000+750*mk => 1000*mk (Translation: the real in-game range is going from 2250/3000/3750 => 4000/5000/6000).
  • Seconds-Per-Salvo from 8-mk => 7 flat.
  • Base Attack Power from 3000*mk => 6,000*mk.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 8 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 8 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 1 => 2.4.

• Basic Turret:
  • Base Health from 46,000/92,000/400,000 => 75,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 600 => 300*mk.
  • Build Time from 60/90/120 => 60*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1800/3600/7200 => 4000*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 150*mk.
  • Base Crystal Cost from 0 => 400.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 2 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 1 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 1 => 2.4.

• Missile Turret:
  • Base Health from 56,000/86,000/130,000 => 50,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 1200 => 150*mk.
  • Base Range from 27,000/27,000/33,000 => 27,000 flat.
  • Base Attack Power from 3600/5600/7600 => 5400*mk.
  • Base Metal Cost from 300 => 800.
  • Base Crystal Cost from 1200 => 300.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 8 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 6 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 1 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 1 => 2.4.

• Lazer Turret
  • Base Health from 200,000/300,000/400,000 =>150,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 800 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 600/2000/3000 => 1500*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 500/1500/3500 => 750*mk.
  • Build Time from 130/210/250 => 60*mk.
  • Base Metal Cost from 600 => 200.
  • Base Crystal Cost from 1800 => 900.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 15 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 8 => 2.4
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 1 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 1 => 2.4.

• Now that Mining Golems spawn so close to the human planets, there is only a 30-minute countdown timer on them, rather than 90 minutes.
  • Thanks for Vinraith for suggesting.

• Translocator health has been increased 7x. It was a mistake that it was previously set so low (since 4.0 or so).
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Removed recently added rule that increased the rate of marauder spawns as AIP increased (specifically it would be 2x normal at 100-199 AIP, 3x normal at 200-299, etc); this was intentional but with the recent buffs to the marauder ships themselves it is not necessary and indeed fairly overwhelming.

• Ships with modules can no longer be camouflaged.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Tachyon Guardian description.
  • Thanks to Nightchill for reporting.

• Hybrids now cannot rebuild modules if they have been angered (fired upon by human player ships) within the last 30 seconds.

• AI ships that are immune to force fields will never now prioritize attacking them over ships under it (this makes raid starships way more dangerous than before in the hands of the AI, incidentally). It was previously simply a property being mis-applied on some ships that later got ff immunity belatedly. Now it automatically removes that flag for anything with the immunity.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient and MaxAstro for reporting.

• All guardians are now immune to being insta-killed.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Zenith Reserve tooltip.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the decoy drone description.
  • Thanks to Salamander for reporting.

• Previously, using 0 as the seed on some map types could cause the game to lock up. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Sora-Chan for reporting.

• All Warheads (except armored) now have 5x more health. It's been a post-4.0 bug that they have so little.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for reporting.

• The attack power of all the lightning warheads have been increased by 3x due to recent game rebalances. Additionally, their ranges have been increased by 0/250/250.
  • Thanks to Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

• The "Can't Go Through Wormholes" ability has been removed from any ships that are unable to move, thus preventing useless text in their descriptions.
  • Thanks to Heavens for reporting.

• Bomber Starships now use the energy wave shot type, rather than energy burst, so that their attack is visually and aurally more impressive.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Metal and crystal manufactories now have 5x more health.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• In multiplayer games, all player-controlled command stations now automatically fold out into mobile builders for allied players. This saves time and hassle with sending mobile builders around and keeping them alive, making the actual mobile builders now simply a matter for use in enemy/neutral territory.

• If either of the two icon rows on the intel summary in the galaxy map need to get wider than they can, they now will wrap down to the next line.

• The icons on the intel summary in the galaxy map now are colorized by player and include the niche icons.

• Carriers and Hunter-Killers can now be targeted by siege and bomber starships. Carriers still have their invincible-if-more-than-2000-ai-ships-here property, so this should be ok.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting that HKs were not already like this.

• Explicitly set the following flags for Hunter-Killers (some may already have been set implicitly):
  • Immune to Black Hole Machines.
  • Immune to Nuclear Explosions.
  • Immune to Tractor Beams.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for pointing out that HKs were not tractor immune.

• Fixed bug where neinzul clusters were only checking for non-mine military enemy units to see if they should spawn their internal squadrons. Now checks all enemy units. Will still not trigger on scouts unless it's a privacy cluster (though it will trigger in that case, it hasn't been for a while).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report and save.

• Reworked the AutoCreateUnitOutside behavior used by Neinzul Clusters and Hybrid Hive Spawners to not require that the source ship still exist when the command is processed, and to be triggered on death, so that taking out a cluster in one shot does not bypass its spawning of its internal squadrons.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the report.

• Modules can no longer be assigned to a control group, since that was really buggy and unintended anyway.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for the report.

• The logic used for most minor faction and zombie ships for deciding to move on to a different planet should now ignore the presence of any enemy target that they are incapable of actully hitting (so neutral and player-ally Dyson Gatlings won't get stuck because of mk5 ships on the planet, etc).
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for the report.

• Fixed a bug where playing a game without Fallen-Spire on could lead to ClientReceivingData errors when loading the game because it would try to deserialize the galaxy-wide state string (which was added for the FS serialization) and not realize it was empty.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for the report and save.

• Player-Ally Dyson Gatlings no longer self-attrition on human-controlled planets. This shouldn't be too unbalancing because the humans would have to capture a contiguous line of planets, the spawns only come so fast, etc.

• Fixed a bug that could cause "ghosting" of old graphics (and thus both incorrect drawing as well as performance degradation) in certain circumstances. We never actually saw evidence of this occurring in AI War -- we found it via Tidalis -- but it's something that definitely could have been happening, especially temporarily as images were being loaded in to the game.

• When ships such as viral shredders replicate, they now are automatically added to any control groups that their source ship was in.
  • Thanks to SInflux for suggesting.

• When ships such as viral shredders replicate, if the original was selected, the new ship will also be selected.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.

• Advanced Factories, Fabricators, and Captive Human Settlements are now immune to nukes.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.

• Fixed bug that could result in resistance fighter ships built by a human player at a resistance colony being produced as minor faction units and thus not costing energy (until the game was saved and reloaded, apparently, potentially resulting in a nasty shock).
  • Thanks to Vinraith and Master Cylinder Pants for the report.

• Fixed some bugs with the Resource Flows tab of the Stats window where it wouldn't include everything that was causing an impact on metal or crystal (notably self-building turrets, etc).

• Added a toggle to the Resource Flows tab of the Stats window, defaulting to un-toggled, that:
  • If unchecked, the grid is in "detail" mode and displays one row per ship with a non-zero metal or crystal impact (units with only an energy impact are omitted due to sheer volume).
  • If checked, the grid is in "summary" mode and displays one row for each distinct type of ship with a non-zero metal, crystal, or energy impact. This can be very helpful for figuring out where all your energy is going.

• Filenames for savegames are now fully validated, avoiding characters that are not allowed, filenames that are not allowed on windows (CON, LPT1, etc), and things like directory path separators that would cause the file to get saved into a subdirectory by accident.
  • Thanks to ciaran, rhinosaurus, and jsterrett for reporting.

• When placing ships via far-zoom, their niche images now show if they have them. This makes it a lot clearer what's going on there.

• The buy buttons in ship menus now include the niche images if they have them. This makes it a lot easier to tell apart the various types of command stations, and things of that nature.

• The tech buttons in the science menu now also includes the niche images, rather than including hard-to-read overlay text.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for suggesting.

• The attack recharge speed of hunter/killers has been changed from 1s to 3s.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting.

(Released December 21st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.052

• The Hard versions of the Broken Golems and Spirecraft minor factions now have their "challenge" side implemented:
  • PLEASE NOTE that the balance of this is very preliminary, please try it out and give us feedback!
  • Roughly every minute, the current AIP (or AIP * 0.8 for the golems one) is added to an event-attack accumulation counter that works similar to the Spire-City-provoked event attacks in the Fallen Spire progression, but is considerably more tame than that one just due to the lower magnitude.
  • Assuming an average AIP of 100, the first attack (of 12,000 points, base) will come a bit before the 2.5 hour mark. If your average AIP is 200, the first attack will come about an hour and 15 minutes into the game.
  • Each attack's base point value is 25% larger than the previous, and thus takes 25% more time to accumulate (if AIP stays constant).
  • The base point value cannot increase beyond 100,000 (this is somewhat less than the ceiling on FS event attacks when you have 2 cities).
  • The three sources of event attacks (Fallen Spire, Broken Golems - Hard, Spirecraft - Hard) are computed entirely separately from each other, so you can have three of these counting up at once if all three minor factions are on.

• Event-Attack coordinated ships (as opposed to Hybrid coordinated ships) are now reflected in the threat counts.

• Event-Attack "buildup" is now roughly indicated in the Alert box: when an event-attack is at least 50% "charged" the buildup will be detected and displayed with the current percent progress towards the the attack actually being spawned. The minor faction responsible for the buildup is also listed (which is helpful when multiple such factions are in play).

• Put in some error-trapping code to help with diagnosing the occasional nullreferencexception in gamebutton rendering. This will both provide us with more info (which row/col button it was with the error), as well as providing a safeguard to definitely avoid any interruption to the game execution.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for inspiring this change.

• "Weak" force fields that protect their allied ships as normal but which do not collide with enemy ships (such as those by shield bearers, etc) now have their own special graphic to denote this.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for inspiring this.

• Fixed a "ghost line" in the spire teleporting leech graphic.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting!

• Mining Golem attack power has been increased 10x, armor has been decreased 3x. Health of the mining golem has been increased from 40m to 120m.
  • When mining golems explode, they now destroy the planet and all the resource points, but no ships. This means that there is no risk of AI Progress increase from them, they just cut off access to resources.
  • Mining golems are now only seeded on planets in player territory, or within one hop of player territory.
  • Instead of a single mining golem per planet, it is now one per human player in multiplayer games.
  • Instead of a single planet getting a mining golem at once, three planets all get them at the same time, now.
  • Mining golems are now spawned every four hours (or so), rather than every 8ish hours.
  • The net effect here is that with this minor faction on, you'll have planets exploding and sometimes you'll just need to let them explode. This can put crimps in your and/or AI supply, and can also put the pressure on in terms of resource availability.
  • Thanks to Vinraith and unclean for suggesting that mining golems needed a boost.

• When a planet is destroyed, all of the new advanced resources asteroids are also destroyed in addition to the regular resources.

• Mining Golems also now have 10k radar dampening.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Hunter Killers now have 5x more health, and 10x more attack power. They also now fire 10x as many shots at once as before.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• There is now a new "Show Firepower Instead Of Ship Counts In Resource Bar" option in the interface tab of the settings window. Firepower was just too abstract to be the default thing displayed. The chief problem here was just with a few mega-sized ships in free mode, anyhow, so those can be handled through alerts.
  • Thanks to Red Spot for inspiring this change.

• Firepower for under-construction units is now considered to be zero, for display and AI purposes.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Spirecraft, golems, hunter/killers, and avengers all now count as "massive" ships that give the player a warning in the alerts box onscreen while the AI has these ships in free/threat mode. This way players are still warned about oversized ships that are a particular threat to them, without needing to make the actual Attack and Threat displays into something confusing (aka firepower-based).

• Marauder Buzzbombs have had their attack power halved.
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting.

• Fixed a bug in the firepower calculations that was causing ships with incredibly high firepowers (like armored golems) to actually have an overflow and wind up with a firepower of 1. Now they instead are calculated as Int64s temporarily, and then capped at Int32.MaxValue. This mostly only applies to the new version of Mark V hunter/killers, and armored golems, and a few others.
  • This may have also been causing some performance issues in the prior version, which are now fixed.

(Released December 18th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.051

• Fixed a bug in prior logic that was not causing constructor foldouts to appear for disabled players.

• All fabricators now have foldouts (like advanced factories), so that when one player captures a core fabricator in a multiplayer game, all the players on his/her team now also gain access to use the fabricator. This prevents the incentivization of players to gift fabricators back and forth between one another, while also raising the usefulness of fabricators in multiplayer games by a substantial margin.

• Fixed a hang-causing bug in processing the removal of a ship with coordinated underlings (like a Hybrid).
  • Thanks to orzelek for the report and reproducing save.

• Previously the CanBeSwallowed UnitData flag was not actually being honored. Fixed.

• Ships with module attachment points are now inherently immune to being swallowed, to avoid dealing with really weird edge cases.

• Previously it was possible for spire maws to swallow starships and starship disassemblers to swallow fleet ships, fixed.

• All AI Guardians are now immune to being swallowed.
  • Thanks to orzelek for the suggestion.

• Previously, there was no "Event flare" for rebelling human colonies on the galaxy map. Now there is, when they are still in the hands of the AI.
  • Thanks to Draco Cretel for suggesting.

• It is now possible for ships to be captured from a minor faction by the humans on planet ownership change, something that was previously not allowed.

• The way that rebelling human colonies work has now been completely revamped in terms of what happens once you capture them:
  • They now provide foldouts in multiplayer.
  • They cannot be used to create ships while the minor faction still controls them (previously, when the rebel colony was in supply, they could).
  • The ships they create are now created through a queue as you would expect, rather than through direct placement.
  • The colonies are captured on planet ownership change, rather than continuing to belong to a minor faction.
  • This fixes a number of prior bugs and logical issues with the rebelling human colonies:
    • Previously, the colonies gave no economic benefit to players, despite claiming to, because they were controlled by a minor faction.
      • Interestingly, no-one ever reported this one.
    • Recently, it was impossible to build any ships using the colonies.
      • Thanks to Vinraith, Collic, shortstar, and Malibu Stacey for reporting this.

• The attack power of the resistance fighter/bombers and resistance frigates has gone up 10x, and their bonuses against hull types has gone down 10x. Their health has also gone up 10x, and they are also both now including warp detection and blind in their abilities list. Speed up from 18 to 48, also. Their ships caps have been reduced to 1/3 of what it was before, and their metal/crystal cost has gone up 3x.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting they were underpowered.

• Marauders have been overhauled:
  • Marauder BuzzBombs have had their speed decreased from 82 to 60. Health increased 100x. Their armor rating and EMP-absorption have been removed, and they no longer explode themselves to deal area damage. They now fire area-of-effect grenades, instead. This is much, much scarier and more effective, as their firepower remains the same as before -- but is now something they can do over and over again.
  • Marauder Dagger Frigates have had their speed increased from 20 to 60. Health increased 100x (it was very low in recent times, unintentionall so).
    • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting that marauders have become underpowered.

• All marauders and resistance fighters are now immune to Attrition, being insta-killed, camouflaging, EMPs, gravity effects, shield boosting, munitions boosting, paralysis attacks, nuclear explosions, tractor beams, translocation, and black hole machines. They all also now include a radar dampening range of 4000.

• Beachheads can no longer be used by the AI against any planets that were ever a home planet.
  • Thanks to colonyan, Draco18s, KDR_11k, Varone, Winter Born, amonchakad, and wyvern83 for weighing in on this one.

• The spawning logic for human marauders previously was that there had to be at least 100 enemy-to-AI and AI-allied ships on the planet, unless the difficulty was set to 8 or higher, in which case it was just completely random.
  • The spawning logic has been changed so that on AI planets or neutral planets, there must be at least 100 human military ships present (so that marauders are more likely to show up during big attacks); and so that on human planets there must be at least 10 AI-allied military ships on the planet. The AI difficulty level no longer has any impact on this.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out some inconsistencies in the old logic.

• Zombie and Minor Faction ships are no longer allowed to be regenerated.
  • Thanks to ShdNx for reporting that marauders could be regenerated by human regenerators.

• Previously, the logic for human resistance fighters to spawn was a bit fiddly and wasn't always working as intended. It's been overhauled so that on AI planets, resistance fighters have a chance of joining in when there are at least 300 human-allied military ships, and the AI still outnumbers the humans in terms of ship count; while on human or neutral planets, there must be at least 400 human-enemy military ships, and the resistance fighters may join in.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting that resistance fighters were previously almost never appearing.

• The AI home command station has had it's health increased 20x. It was previously actually 10x lower than expected, but it could have used a boost even above that in light of all the recent changes to the game.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Zombified ships are all now immune to reclamation (it doesn't say this in their tooltip, as these are regular ships that have been reclaimed as zombies, and they are only reclamation-immune in their zombified state).

• Both SuperTerminals and AI Eyes now spawn ships as zombie bots, so that they are extra aggressive as well as being non-reclaimable. This is a nerf from them being reclamator farms.

• When players have scouted a planet, forever after it will include counts in the upper-left alerts window whenever there are enemy warp gates (reinforce or warp) at a planet. This should greatly help with player confusion on a number of fronts, the most frequent of which is the AI Eyes in recent times.
  • Thanks to Toll, Moonshine Fox, and TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• When alarm posts are triggered, there is now a chat message sent saying what kind of alarm post was triggered and on what planet.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient and TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• When AI Eyes or SuperTerminals are spewing out ships, a warning message (like the "you have flown into a minefield" message) is now shown. This is helpful particularly with the AI Eye for making sure that players (especially new players) aren't accidentally setting them off.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• The way that gravity guardians scale up their range is now much lower. Before it was 8k * mk. Now it's 6k + ( 2k * mk).
  • Thanks to shugyosha for suggesting.

• The way that the spawn planet for deepstrike-spawned-ships is chosen is now handled more correctly.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that was causing per-guard-post AI ship caps on AI types to not be set properly in recent versions.

• The old way of having per-planet ship caps for AI starships has been completely replaced. That was some OLD logic, dating back to pre-1.0, and it's not been updated as much as we'd have preferred. Now the AI starships use a variant of the new per-planet logic, which has recently been updated to work better, anyhow. This results in per-type-of-starship kinds of ship caps, rather than per-"starship" ship caps. That actually works a lot better in general, or should.

• Added a new cheat: We Like Carriers, which spawns in a MASSIVE wave with 1 second left on the timer. (As you may guess from many of our cheats, this was added for testing, even though it's interesting outside of that context).

• When AI carriers or barracks are on a planet with more than 2000 allied-to-the-carrier ships, the carriers are now temporarily invincible. This is a CPU/RAM safety measure, to prevent player ships from autotargeting their way to a crash in huge-numbers-of-carriers situations, but with still letting ships autotarget the carriers. There's still some risk in that a player could destroy a bunch of carriers at a single time, but that's a lot less likely even inside this already-very-unusual circumstance.
  • My obviously-cheat-induced test case was with 30 armored golems facing off against a wave of 156,000 enemy ships, and thus some 154 carriers. Notably, the battle was able to be carried out in a completely automated fashion while never dropping the game execution speed below about 98% and without causing any crazy RAM spikes. That's the goal!

(Released December 15th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.050

• Marauder and Human Resistance ship counter-accumulation-rate now scales somewhat with AIP (not that they have any connection to the AI, but it's a decent index for "how big should this be").

• Space Tank:
  • MkI Metal Cost from 1540 => 1000.

• Spire Gravity Drain:
  • Base Health from 5000+5000*mk => 7,300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 46,000*mk => 8,200*mk (it was way, way out there).
  • Armor Piercing from 50,000 => 100,000.
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 400.
  • MkI Crystal Cost from 5000 => 3000.

• Spire Gravity Ripper:
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 300.
  • MkI Metal Cost from 3000 => 1800.
  • MkI Crystal Cost from 2000 => 1200.
  • Base Health from 15,000+15,000*mk => 30,000*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 4000*mk => 1000*mk.

• Spire Teleporting Leech:
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 400.
  • MkI Metal Cost from 3200 => 2200.
  • MkI Crystal Cost from 1200 => 800.
  • Base Health from 10000*mk => 8,200*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 750*mk => 150*mk.
  • Attack Power from 1600*mk => 440*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 1500 => 750*mk.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 6 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 6 => 3.2.

• Teleport Battlestation:
  • Base Attack Power from 400/700/1000/1300 => 310*mk.
  • Shots-per-salvo from 8/12/16/20 => flat 8.
  • Base Health from 2800/3800/4800/5800 => 14,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 600/800/1000/1000 => 450*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 600*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 10 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 10 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 2 => 2.4.

• Shield Bearer:
  • Base Move Speed from 22/23/24/25 => flat 22.
  • Base Attack Power from 240/480/840/1220 => 3000*mk.
  • Base Health from 150,000*mk => 90,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 200 => 0.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 10 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 10 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 10 => 2.

• Teleport Raider:
  • Base Attack Power from 100/300/500/700 => 120*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 150*mk.
  • Base Health from 400/800/1400/2000 => 1500*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 150/225/300/375 => 0.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 30 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 4 => 2.

• Deflector Drone:
  • Base Move Speed from 26/27/28/29 => flat 26.
  • Base Attack Power from 900/1500/2100/2700 => 1400*mk.
  • Base Health from 300/500/700/1200 => 1900*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 320/420/520/620 => 300*mk.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 20 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 2 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 2 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 2 => 2.4.

• The Unit Formerly Known As Shield Booster:
  • Base Health from 11200/15200/19200/23200 => 37,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 3200/3400/3800/4400 => 750*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 200 => 500.
  • Base Attack Power from 300/600/1200/2400 => 1000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 5 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 5 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 2 => 6.

• Zenith Polarizer:
  • Base Health from 11600/15600/19600/23600/28600 => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 500 => 450*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 24/48/72/96/180 => 48*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 10,000 => 100,000.
  • The multiply-damage-by-square-root-of-target-armor mechanic now gives a minimum attack multiplier of 4 even against targets with less than 16 armor, and a maximum attack multiplier of 100 even against targets with more than 10,000 armor.

• Munitions Booster:
  • Base Move Speed from 18/19/19/20 => flat 18.
  • Base Health from 2800/3800/4800/5800 => 37,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 600/800/1000/1000 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 300/600/1200/2400 => 1000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 2 => 6.

• Parasite:
  • Base Health from 6600*mk => 7200*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 400+100*mk => 450*mk.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 3 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 2 => 4.

• Impulse Reaction Emitter:
  • Base Health from 11600/15600/19600/23600/31600 => 11,000*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 150/300/450/600/720 => 150*mk.
  • Damage/energy scaling changed from multiplying by sqrt(energy)/10 to multiplying by 1 + (energy/1024), with a maximum multiplier of 30. Note that partial units of 1024 are counted, so something with an energy use of 200 will take roughly 1.2x damage.

• Spire Armor Rotter:
  • Base Health from 11000*mk => 14500*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 700*mk = 1200*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 250.
  • (MkI) Metal Cost from 1000 => 800.
  • (MkI) Crystal Cost from 2400 => 1900.

• Spider (MkI-IV):
  • Base Health from 3600/4200/6200/8200 => 3600*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 60 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 100/300/450/700 => 1000*mk.
  • Engine Damage from 15/30/50/90 => 15*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 8 => 6.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 2 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 1 => 6.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 1 => 6.

• Etherjet:
  • Base Health from 2400/3600/5400/7800 => 2400*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 100/300/700/1100 => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 1000/1500/1750/2000 => 1000+(250*mk).
  • Tractor Range from 400/450/500/600 => 400+(50*mk).
  • Bonus vs Light from 20 => 4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 3 => 4.

• Zenith Mirror:
  • Base Health from 10,000/25,000/45,000/75,000/95,000 => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 500/1000/2000/4000/8000 => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 100/200/400/800/1600 => 500*mk.

• Spire Tractor Platform:
  • Base Health from 60,000*mk => 300,000*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 200*mk => 3,500*mk.
  • Shots per salvo from 21/24/27/30/33 => flat 21.
  • Armor Piercing from 3000*mk => 750*mk.
  • Removed penalty vs Polycrystal.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Light from 1 => 2.

• Zenith Paralyzer:
  • Base Health from 3500*mk => 3600*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 350 => 450*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1/2/4/8/16 => 625*mk (this still gives them a really low dps-at-cap, but it's not completely useless).
  • Paralysis seconds per shot from 8/10/12/14/18 => 6+(2*mk).

• Colony ships are now immune to reclamation.
  • Thanks to Varone for reporting that they weren't already immune.

• Changed number-of-enclaves spawned for a roaming enclave spawn-event from 1 + (AIP / 50) to 1 + (AIP / 75).

• When multiple roaming enclaves are spawned as part of a single spawn-event, they now each spawn on a randomly selected planet (of the eligible planets). This can still result in multiple spawns on a single planet, but it's much less likely.

• Doubled number of precomputed circular offset points for pre-displacement stuff like large-number-of-unit moves and exiting wormholes, etc.

• Mobile Builders are now immune to reclamation.
  • Thanks to Spikey for reporting that they weren't.

• Continuous beam weapons no longer get overkill reload-refund.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out that they were.

• Youngling Tiger:
  • Base Health from 10,000/15,000/20,000/25,000/30,000 => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 400 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 2400/3000/3600/4200/5000 => 2800*mk.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 40 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 20 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 20 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 8 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 4 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 1 => 2.4.

• Youngling Commando:
  • Base Health from 10,000/15,000/20,000/25,000/30,000 => 6,600*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 120/220/320/320/460 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 270/540/810/1080/2250 => 1000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 15 => 1.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 10 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 8 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Light from 8 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 1 => 2.

• Youngling Vulture:
  • Base Health from 12,000/16,000/20,000/24,000/28,000 => 15,400*mk
  • Armor Rating from 400 => 450*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1/3/6/8/10 => 77*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 100000.
  • Attack multiplier (from enemy health) now has a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 90.
  • Penalty against UltraHeavy removed.

• Youngling Weasel:
  • Base Health from 4000/6000/10000/16000/24000 => 15,400*mk
  • Armor Rating from 120/220/320/320/460 => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 900/1200/1500/1800/2500 => 2250*mk.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 20 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 2 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 1 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 1 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 1 => 4.

• To compensate for the pretty significant buffing of mkIII younglings (by virtue of the new base values for mkI and the linearization of stats by mk) and thus the minor-faction versions, Roaming Enclave and Preservation Warden "hangar size" has been reduced to half of what it was (300 => 150 for roaming, 500 => 250 for wardens), and the time-to-"build"-one-internal-ship has been doubled. Similar changes made to Neinzul Clusters and Neinzul Privacy Clusters (not to bomber or viral clusters yet, since the neinzul bomber and neinzul viral swarmer haven't been changed yet).

• Added some measures to make the game less likely to hang onto memory it no longer needs (excess rollup list space, dead ships still linked to other objects, etc).
  • Note that this could introduce some instability, but our tests worked fine.

• Changed a few ship types (like the blade spawner) that were using AIPerPlanetShipCap to use a new AIPerGuardPostShipCap flag that will allow us to prevent massive concentrations of larger fleet ships on AI planets but also not interfere with their inclusion in waves.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting that the previously limited ship types were not being added in proper quantity to waves.

• Spire Blade Spawners are now not eligible to be used as a homogenous wave, though they can still be used in schizo waves.

• Zenith Electric Bombers and Sentinel Frigates now use AIPerGuardPostShipCap (of 4/2/1 on high/normal/low caps, respectively) to avoid big concentrations on AI planets, and to make it easier to engage them a few at a time when attacking AI planets (since planets with many guard posts may still have a pretty scary number of them but they won't generally all dogpile you).
  • Thanks to Sunshine for pointing out that AI reinforcements of zelecs and sentinels could pile up to be pretty brutal after their rebalancing.

• The experimental anti-bottleneck/anti-giant-fleet from the last version was problematic and on shaky logical ground to begin with. It was an interesting brief experiment, and thanks to everyone for bearing with us and sharing your thoughts whether you loved it or hated it. But this is one mechanic where trying to fix it is likely to just spiral out of control, and we'd rather devote our time and attention to more promising avenues.

• Fixed a bug that could cause uv textures to become accidentally flipped.

• Neinzul Nesters, Raid Engines, and Alarmist AI types now have 2x the normal number of data centers seeded to offset their AI-Progress-increasing weapons to some extent. Special Forces captains now have 1.4x the normal number of data centers because of all their special forces guard posts.
  • Note that this will not affect existing savegames, since the data center seeding there is already past.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Spirecraft ship caps have been changed around from being a flat 2 as in the last release.
  • The following spirecraft now have ship caps of 5/4/3/2/1 (mark I through V): Shield Bearer, Attritioner
  • The following spirecraft now have ship caps of 8/6/4/2/1 (mark I through V): Ion, Penetrator, Implosion, Siege Tower
  • The following spirecraft now have ship caps of 16/12/8/4/2 (mark I through V): Ram, Martyr, Scout, Jumpship
  • Thanks to MaxAstro for suggesting a sliding scale of this sort.

• Fixed a number of issues with per-planet AI ship count limiters kicking in when they should not have been. This is most notable for things like AI starships that are included in a wave to an AI planet, or just included to a planet in general, for instance. Now only guarding or planetary roamer ships are even included in the ship caps -- free/threat ships, special forces ships, etc, don't count, since they are all transient, anyhow.
  • This also includes some performance improvements associated with it, including making savegames open a hair faster.

• Fixed a since-the-port-to-Unity bug with ships being selected, where if you drag-selected once it would select military-only, and then on the second time over the same group it would select all.

(Released December 15th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.049

• Added new Galaxy Display Mode: "Detected Threat"; only displays data from planets with current scout intel.

• Added new Galaxy Display Mode: "Detected Threat Firepower"; only displays data from planets with current scout intel. This displays the total rough firepower of the threat ships (the raw value is divided by 1000 to make it a bit easier to read; it's a relative value anyway).

• Added new Galaxy Display Mode: "Detected Core Shield Generators"; works like the previously-existing single-type modes, displays all 5 types of core shield generator each with a different color.
  • The old single-type modes have been removed.
  • Thanks to cathexis for the suggestion.

• As more variable ship sizes have been introduced to the game, the utility of simply counting ships has been dropping sharply: is one threatening ship a big deal, or not? Most players would agree not. But what if that sole ship is an avenger or a golem? Then, certainly, that's as dangerous as hundreds or thousands of ships and demands immediate attention.
  • For this reason, the overall threat and attack counters at the top of the screen have been changed to now show total firepower rather than ship counts. This is a bit more abstract, but it's far more useful for actually gauging danger in the current builds of the game, and is only going to be becoming more critical soon.
  • Players can still see the count of ships making up this threat or attack value by looking in the tooltip that is shown when hovering over these items in the resource bar.
  • Note that the wave notices still show ship counts (and thus don't have an "F:" in front of them), since those are talking about theoretical ships and not literal existing firepower.

• The Attacking ships tooltip has been updated to show the same kind of sorted per-planet info that the threatening ships tooltip does.

• In the last few versions, capturable ships were switching to player control as soon as a command station was started into construction. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Vinraith and Toll for reporting.

• The small buttons on the left of the galaxy map for the display mode and display filter have been removed, as they were redundant with the much better dropdowns at the bottom of the screen since 4.0.

• The firepower for ships inside transports or barracks/carriers are now properly included in the firepower totals.

• All of the various galaxy map filters now have both Units and Firepower variants.

• The AI now considers munitions boosting when deciding whether or not to fleet the planet it is on.

• The way that the AI does threat assessments has been improved a ton in general on the AI thread. Specific areas of improvement include transports, carriers, barracks, and munitions boosting, but also it's just been much improved in general.

• The AI now is waiting only until it has equal force to the enemy human player, rather than waiting until it has overwhelming force, except on lower difficulties where it attacks sooner (less than 6 attacks with half-forces, less than 5 attacks with third forces).

• The scale of displayed firepower has been reduced 5x, to result in smaller, more manageable numbers that are less likely to go to six figures.

• Previously, AI ships that were being "coordinated" by other AI ships (such as hybrid hives) were counting as threat. Fixed.

• A new command has been added to the game: "cmd:enable cheats" turns on cheats for the current campaign, but does not itself count as a cheat.
  • Note: Having cheats enabled does not affect score or the game's outcome at all, until players actually use the cheats. Disabling cheats is simply a "safety net" mechanism so that players don't accidentally use cheats, and so that players can't grief by suddenly cheating out of the blue.
  • Further note that this command cannot be used when there is more than one active player (in other words, if you use "manage players" to disable all the players but the host, you can use this command). This is another anti-griefing safety measure.
  • Lastly, this specific alteration to the savegame does not require a full sync and so does not create a conversion save file, etc. It just makes the changes right in memory, as it's a comparably simple change to the save.

• Two new cheats have been added to the game:
  • Fog This! (Change Fog of War To "Complete Visibility")
  • Better Than Trelawney (Reveal Random AI Types)

• Revisited several recently rebalanced types since we now have a better feel for the balance we're going for:

• Sniper:
  • Base Health from 30,000*mk => 18,750*mk.
  • Armor rating from 800+100*mk => 0.
  • Base Attack Power from 8100*mk => 7500*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 8 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 5 => 1.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 5 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Medium from 3 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 2 => 6.
  • Energy use from 100 => 250 (mkI has half energy cost, as usual).
  • Metal cost from 1200 => 1500.

• Eyebot:
  • Base Health from 1000*mk => 7200*mk.
  • Armor rating from 500 => 0.
  • Attack Power from 1800*mk => 2000*mk.
  • Metal cost from 60 => 100.
  • Crystal cost from 60 => 100.
  • Energy cost from 10 => 100.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 6 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 10 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 5 => 3.2.

• Stealth Battleship:
  • Base Health from 250,000*mk => 275,000*mk.
  • Energy Use from 800 => 2000.
  • Base Attack Power from 4,500*mk => 4,000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 2 => 1.4.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 2 => 1.4.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 2 => 1.4.

• Tachyon Microfighter:
  • Base Health from 10,440*0.9*mk => 7,000*mk.
  • Armor rating from 75 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 975*mk => 700*mk.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 3.2 => 2.4.

• Bulletproof Fighter:
  • Base Health from 20300*mk => 16000*mk.
  • Armor rating from 150 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1625*mk => 1400*mk.
  • Metal Cost from 200 => 400.
  • Armor piercing from 1000*mk => 750*mk.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 3.2 => 2.4.

• Fighter:
  • Armor rating from 100 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1300*mk => 1200*mk.
  • Armor piercing from 1000*mk => 750*mk.
  • Bonus vs CloseCombat from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 3.2 => 2.4.

• Autocannon Minipod:
  • Base Attack Power from 160*mk => 140*mk.
  • Base Health from 6000*mk => 3900*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 3 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 3 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 3 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 3 => 3.2.

• Raptor:
  • Base Health from 3500*mk => 3600*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1200*mk => 1000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 3 => 1.8.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 1.5 => 1.8.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 2 => 1.8.

• Sentinel Frigate:
  • Base Health from 90,000*mk => 75,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 800 => 300*mk.

• Anti-Armor:
  • Base Attack Power from 900*mk => 950*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 100*mk => 150*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 100 => 50.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 5 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 5 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 5 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 4 => 2.4.

• Space Plane:
  • Base Health from 1500*mk => 2100*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 150 => 100.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Light from 5 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 4 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 4 => 2.4.

• Acid Sprayer:
  • (fixed bug where it wasn't actually multiplying attack power, health, or armor piercing by mark level)
  • Base Health from 11,600*mk => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 500*mk => 450*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 1000 => 450*mk.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 9 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 9 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 7 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 7 => 6.

• Zenith Chameleon:
  • Base Health from 13,000*mk => 14,500*mk.
  • Energy Use from 100 => 50.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 3 => 2.4.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 2 => 2.4.

• Infiltrator:
  • Base Health from 2000*mk => 2900*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 500 => 150*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 200+200*mk => 300*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 6 => 4.

• Zenith Electric Bomber:
  • (fixed bug where health was not multiplied by mark)
  • Base Health from 60,000*mk => 75,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 1000+200*mk => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 32,000*mk => 38,000*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 1000 => 500.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 10 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 2 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 2 => 3.2.
  • Removed 0.5 penalty against CloseCombat.

• Lazer Gatling:
  • (fixed bug where health was not multiplied by mark)
  • Base Health from 1,750*mk => 1,400*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 120*mk => 150*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 500*mk => 600*mk.
  • Energy Cost from 50 => 20.
  • Metal Cost from 150 => 80.
  • Crystal Cost from 150 => 80.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 3 => 1.8.
  • Bonus vs Light from 3 => 1.8.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 3 => 1.8.

• Bomber:
  • Base Health from 9000*mk => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 200+300*mk => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1500*mk => 1900*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 6 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 6 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 3 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 4 => 10.

• Space Tank:
  • Base Health from 7200*mk => 7300*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 200+300*mk => 750*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 1800*mk => 2600*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 6 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 6 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 6 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 3 => 3.2.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 4 => 3.2.

• Missile Frigate:
  • Base Health from 9000*mk => 11,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 150 => 150*mk.
  • Attack Reload Time from 10/9/8/7/6 => flat 10.
  • Base Attack Power from 1000*mk => 1600*mk.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 5 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 5 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 5 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 5 => 10.

• Zenith Bombardment:
  • Base Health from 20,000*mk => 27,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 150 => 150*mk.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 1 => 2.
  • Removed penalties against Artillery, CloseCombat, and Light.

• And rebalanced a few types that haven't been touched recently:

• Armored:
  • Base Health from 40,000/60,000/80,000/100,000/140,000 => 25,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 3,000/3,200/3,400/3,600/4,000 => 750*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 400/1,200/2,000/3,000/6,000 => 800*mk.
  • Base Range from 200/500/600/800/900 => 300+100*mk.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 9 => 4.
  • Bonus vs CommandGrade from 6 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 6 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Light from 6 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 6 => 4.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 6 => 4.

• Raider:
  • Base Move Speed from 36/38/40/42/45 => flat 36.
  • Base Health from 1600/3200/5200/10000/13600 => 3000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 150/225/300/375/500 => 150*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 200/400/600/800/1200 => 200*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 3000/4000/5000/6000/7000 => 10000.
  • Base Attack Range from 4000/4000/5000/6000/7000 => 4000+100*mk.
  • Metal Cost from 100 => 40.
  • Crystal Cost from 300 => 120.
  • Energy Cost from 50 => 20.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 8 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 12 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 5 => 4.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 1 => 4.

• MLRS:
  • Base Attack Power from 240/600/960/1120 => 800*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 2800/3200/3800/3800 => 2800+200*mk.
  • Shots-Per-Salvo from 4/6/8/12 => flat 8.
  • Reload Time from 6 => 12.
  • Base Health from 16800/24800/30800/36800 => 14,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 600/800/1000/1000 => 600*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 16 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 8 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 4 => 2.

• Roaming enclaves now only hold 30% as many ships, but when the game spawns new roaming enclaves it spawns an additional enclave (of the same alignment) for every 50 AIP. So at 0-49 AIP it spawns 1 enclave, at 50-99 AIP it spawns 2, etc.

• In a recent version, ships that were in low power mode would ignore commands from the AI. Now, instead ships will be woken up from low power mode when given commands from the AI. This may or may not cause some strange issues, but more likely it should resolve some of the "AI ships keep staying in low power mode!" issues when players are attacking planets.

• Additionally, AI ships that have active commands from the AI will no longer be automatically put back into low-power mode even if they otherwise would be.

• Fixed up some age-old nonsensical code from the AI thread, the unclarity of which had been the cause of some recent bugs with threat accumulating.

• Fixed a major longstanding typo in the AI loop dating back to sometime pre-3.120, wherein huge numbers of the AI's planets often would not be evaluated for AI logic, attacking, etc. Actually, depending on the circumstances of the savegame, it could affect no planets or it could affect virtually all of them. In one example save from Spikey00, for instance, it was only processing 4 planets out of 120 for the AI... with the result that over 17,000 ships accumulated in threat.
  • This one took forever to track down, but was super worth it. A lot of the "why didn't the CPA ships actually attack" issues probably trace back to this. Not sure why exactly this issue has been seeming more prevalent in the last week (perhaps related to the other, more recent issues reported in the line item above), but it's very clearly some code that dates all the way back to the initial import to Unity and before.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for providing the save that finally helped us track this down.

• The logic for "excess starship removal" on AI planets is now significantly better, and will never clean up starships because of an excess of free/threat starships, which might just have clustered on a planet. Only "planetary roamer" starships will be kept to a specific cap, now.

• AI Hunter/Killers have been coded into the game for some while now (you could see them in the planetary summary indexes), but they were never actually spawned or used by the AI. As players will know, they were truly fearsome in the stats screen. Their stats have been adjusted a bit (mostly downward) for this release.

• When there are more than 4,000 ships in Threat for the AI players, they will convert some portion of that to the equivalent firepower of Hunter/Killers. Generally this will then leave between 1,000 and 2,400 AI ships behind as individual threat, while creating 1-2 hunter killers.
  • Typically a single hunter/killer ranging from mark I-V will be created, and then if there is any remainder that will go to a second mark I hunter/killer. So, this can actually bump the threat up slightly because of that remainder effect, but generally speaking it's not an enormous effect (and, hey, the hunter/killers are meant to be scary (and they are).
  • When these are spawned, huge numbers of the AI's other ships are scrapped. The numbers vary based on firepower ratings, but in a lot of cases it's upwards of 12,000 mark III/IV ships that are packed into one single Hunter/Killer Mark V, for example. It's significant compacting, and so you should expect the hunter/killers to present more trouble than... well, pretty much anything other than the avenger, or the biggest golems, or similar.
    • Right now their attack strength and health are preliminary. They may be too fearsome, or they may be too easy. Feedback very much welcomed on this, but just keep in mind how many other ships they are supposed to be representing. Our best guess is that they will be a bit too easy compared to what we want.
  • When spawned, these appear on one of the AI homeworlds whenever possible. When that isn't possible (if both homeworlds are missing), they will instead appear on a random AI planet.
  • The primary reason for this is to keep games running smoothly and not getting bogged down on the CPU (or worse, getting out-of-RAM-errors) in extreme-threat situations such as extended sieges. This is very similar to a big part of the function of carriers and barracks, which address ships in waves or guarding ships. This is the first time that existing free/threat AI ships has been addressed in this way, but it's a very important function.
  • The secondary function, of course, is to make the massive-threat events even slightly more challenging/intense.
  • In short: you will fear these on the battlefield, but will absolutely love what they do for you in the performance department. And these are a prime example of why the threat meter now shows firepower instead of ship counts as of this release.

• All ships that can be captured on planet ownership change, or which swallow enemy ships, are now immune to camouflaging.
  • Thanks to Vinraith for reporting.

• Spirecraft are now internally treated as "major weapons" by the game, in the same way that golems and anything of the type heavy defense is.

• All major weapons are now immune to camouflaging, EMPs/paralysis, munitions boosting, shield boosting, and gravity effects. This partially buffs them and partially nerfs them, but underscores their epic nature, at least.

• Forcefields now have a firepower rating, even though they typically don't have a direct attack. This helps for overall strength-of-forces analysis, both for the humans and the AI.

• The AI now has an anti-extreme-blobbing/bottlenecking mechanic built in very similar to the one for anti-deepstriking. For every 10,000 firepower or more on a planet, the AI home planets will spew out ships equivalent to that which is spewed out with the deep striking. If a player thus has 310,000 firepower on a single planet, that's as bad as doing 62 deepstrikes at once, for instance.
  • This applies to both AI planets and player planets. So if the players try to make an absolutely-impenetrable defense, the AI notices and gets pissed, and the same thing is true if the AI tries to make a crazy attack force.
  • This may make the fallen spire minor faction extremely difficult at the moment, thanks to the crazy-high firepower on the spire city buildings. We'll have to address that as we continue to evaluate the balance of this feature. However, for the moment the firepower of the fallen spire city buildings are all being undervalued by 2x, which should help a tremendous amount.

• Spirecraft are now limited to a ship cap of two per type of spirecraft. Given that there are 50 different types of spirecraft, this is not a huge restriction (that's 100 different ships right there), but it does prevent some of the worst excesses of the spirecraft lifestyle, so to speak.

• Spirecraft Rams, Shield Bearers, Jumpships, and Martyrs are now never repairable. These were all made to be single-use, and are simply massively unbalanced without it.

• The Firepower calculation has been switched around so that high-health ships aren't so highly valued as before. The firepower calculation still needs a fair bit of work to be truly accurate for the main range of situations (ignoring things like special abilities, etc), but it's getting there.

(Released December 11th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.048

• Sniper Turrets:
  • Base Health from 24,000 => 100,000.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 1 => 6.
  • This is to compensate for the Raid Starship getting the 8000 radar dampener range, because now you'll need to plant snipers close to where you expect to face the Raid starships. Doing so should maintain the sniper turret's use as a counter to the raid starship, however.

• Spider Turrets now have the same attack power, bonuses, and health as sniper turrets.

• In the prior version, all ships were immune to attrition. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Toll and Fleet for reporting.

• Fixed an error that could sometimes strike on the AI thread in the last version with upgrading ship types.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting.

• Without trying to get too complex and factor in everything into the firepower rating, the firepower ratings now value the overall health of their ships. Thus if there are some really high-health ships, like golems, those are considered to have notably higher overall firepower, since their survivability determines how much damage they'll have a chance to dish out before they die.

• Border Aggression has always had a mechanism whereby it would get more severe the longer players played: the cap of total attacking units plus threat would increase by 20 per hour of play. The cap would basically not release any ships to border aggression if the total number of enemies attacking and/or threatening exceeds that cap.
  • However, there was a catch: the cap was capped at 1/4 the total size of the player's current military. This cap on the cap has now been removed, so very long games now get ever-increasing border aggression caps.
  • Note that this doesn't mean that border aggression will definitely increase linearly over an entire long game, but it won't be artificially kept low if it would have been high late in a 60-hour game or whatever.

• Border Aggression is now keyed based on firepower. The caps for BA now go up by the equivalent of 20 mark III bombers per hour.

• The Starfields have been adjusted to no longer try and draw if they failed to initialize, thus preventing flooding of a ton of issues into a single log file.
  • Thanks to glassairports, nl1dnv, and snelg for reporting.

• The prior version would throw tons of errors if the player had an expansion installed but not unlocked. Fixed.
  • Thanks to glassairports, nl1dnv, and snelg for reporting.

(Released December 9th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.047

• Both the Gravity Driller and One Way Doormaster types now have 2x as many data centers as normal (in the prior release, one way doormasters had 3x the norm, but that was a miscalculation on my part).
  • Thanks to Vinraith for suggesting.

• Fixed bug in last version where Tachyon Microfighters had no tech prerequisites.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting.

• Zenith Bombardment:
  • Base Attack Power from 8,000*mk => 45,000*mk (note, this unit has no bonuses).
  • Base Health from 10,000*mk => 20,000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 0.5 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Close Combat from 0.5 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Light from 0.25 => 1.

• Zenith Electric Bomber:
  • Base Attack Power from 8,000/27,000/56,000/80,000/120,000 to 32,000*mk.
  • Base Health from 30,000*mk => 60,000*mk.
  • Armor rating from 1500/2500/4500/4500/4500 to (1000 + 200*mk).

• Added "Experimental Auto-Kite Behavior" textbox to the galaxy controls window.
  • This is an experimental control, use at your own risk.
  • Valid values are 0 through 50,000 (no commas in the textbox, please). If this is not zero, all your non-melee, non-sniper ships with greater than the specified range will automatically pull away from their target so that they are (effectiveRange - 500) range units away.
  • We're working with some players to see if this results in desirable behavior.
  • Thanks to Suzera for inspiring this control.

• Fixed a crash bug when a ship with the DamageMultiplierOnEnemyPlanets flag (like engineers) was hit by a shot from an enemy that no longer had a CurrentPlanet (because it had been sucked into a Maw, or gone into cold-storage, etc).
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Trying to make parasites not slaughter everything with their newfound dps:
  • Base Attack power from 40,000*mk => 4,000*mk.
  • Ship Cap Multiplier from 1.5 => 0.5.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for reporting the... terrifying capabilities of 4.046 parasites.

• To make them more reasonable as fighter+ types:
  • Bulletproof fighter hull type from Medium => Light.
  • Tachyon microfighter hull type from Swarmer => Light.
  • Thanks to Toll for pointing out that having a Medium hull with shell immunity is serious business.

• Bomber:
  • Base Move Speed from 28/25/22/18/30 => a flat 28 (same as a fighter).
  • Base Attack Power from 600/2700/4200/9000/15000 => 1500*mk.
  • Base Range from 1000/1300/3000/3400/3000 => 800 + (200*mk).
  • Attack Reload Time from 12/12/12/12/8 => a flat 12.
  • Base Health from 8,000/20,000/36,000/60,000/65,000 => 9,000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 500/1500/3500/3500/5500 => 200 + (300*mk).
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs CommandGrade from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 10 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Artillery 7 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 2 => 3 (Yes, increased).
  • Note that Space Tank stats are based off Bomber stats with several multipliers and changes.

• Space Tank:
  • Move Speed from 0.5 * Bomber's => a flat 12 (same as a missile frigate).
  • Metal Cost from 1.2 * Bomber's => 2.2 * Bomber's (note that it has no crystal cost).
  • Same bonus changes as the Bomber, except Tanks have a bonus against Polycrystal instead of CommandGrade (and it went from 10 => 6).

• Sentinel Frigate:
  • Base Health from 120,000/160,000/220,000/280,000/330,000 => 90,000*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 2,000*mk => 20,000*mk (note, this unit has no bonuses).

• Acid Sprayer:
  • Base Attack Power from 40*mk => 450*mk.
  • Bonus vs. Composite from 50 => 9.
  • Bonus vs. Neutron from 50 => 9.
  • Bonus vs. Polycrystal from 38 => 7.
  • Bonus vs. Refractive from 38 => 7.
  • Base Health from 11,600/15,600/19,600/23,600/31,600 => 12,000*mk.

• Sniper:
  • Base Health from 6000/8000/10000/12000 => 30,000*mk.

• The balance export added last version now includes hull type for each ship.

• Raptor:
  • Base Attack Power from 300/550/800/1050/1800 => 1200*mk.
  • Base Health from 1600/2600/3800/6200/9800 => 3500*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 500*mk.
  • Bonus against Light from 8 => 3.
  • Bonus against UltraLight from 4 => 1.5.
  • Bonus against Swarmer from 2 => 1.
  • Bonus against Refractive from 1 => 2.

• Infiltrator:
  • Base Attack Power from 120*mk => 270*mk.
  • Base Health from 1440/1680/2480/3280 => 2000*mk.
  • Bonus against Turret from 10 => 1.
  • Bonus against Heavy from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus against UltrayHeavy from 4 => 6.
  • Bonus against Scout from 2 => 1.

• Eye Bot:
  • Base Attack Power from 2000*mk => 1800*mk.
  • Base Health from 360/420/620/820 => 1000*mk.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 4 => 6.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 20 => 10.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 20 => 5.
  • Bonus vs Scout from 2 => 1.

• Space Plane:
  • Base Move Speed from 44/45/46/48/50 => flat 44.
  • Base Attack Power from 500/1500/3500/5500/10000 => 600*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 2000/3000/3500/4000/4000 => 2000 + (500*mk).
  • Base Health from 600/900/1400/2000/2000 => 1500*mk.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 2 => 4.
  • Bonus vs Light from 10 => 5.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 3 => 4.

• Stealth Battleship:
  • Base Attack Power from 8800*mk => 4500*mk.
  • Shots-Per-Salvo from 8/10/12/14/16 => flat 8.
  • Energy use from 100 => 800
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 0.5 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Artillery from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Composite from 1 => 2.

• Laser Gatling:
  • Base Move Speed from 24/25/26/27/28 => flat 24.
  • Base Attack Power from 180*mk => 150*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 0 => 500*mk.
  • Base Health from 1300/1900/2900/3700/3600 => 1750*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 120/220/320/320/460 => 120*mk.
  • Bonus vs PolyCrystal from 15 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Light from 15 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Refractive from 5 => 3.

• Anti-Armor:
  • Base Attack Power from 1200/2000/3200/6000 => 900*mk.
  • Armor Piercing from 10000/14000/18000/22000 => 10000*mk.
  • Base Health from 1600/3600/5600/7600 => 2000*mk.
  • Armor Rating from 100/150/200/250 = 100*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 14 => 5.
  • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 10 => 5.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 6 => 5.

• Fighter and Tachyon Microfighter base attack power from 1500 => 1300*mk (Bulletproof Fighter staying roughly the same).

• Decoy Drones and AI Carriers can now be targeted and damaged by siege starships and bomber starships.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and Lancefighter for the reports.

• AI Carriers can now be targetted and damaged by Orbital Mass Drivers.
  • Thanks to LintMan for the report.

• Previously the Spire Penetrator's shots could be attracted by a Decoy Drone. Decoy Drones now know better than to get in the way of that.
  • Thanks to LintMan for the report.

• Added Galaxy-Wide and Planet-Specific versions of three new toggle controls: Auto Build MkI Energy Reactor, Auto Build MkII Energy Reactor, Auto Build MkIII Energy Reactor.
  • Thanks to Suzera for the suggestion.

• All ships that are not directly autotargeted by human players are now immune to the effects of attrition. This prevents things like spirecraft attritioners from harming enemy-held fabricators, ARSes, etc.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and Nihilus for reporting.

• Ships that are immune to speed boosting now actually have that shown in their list of immunities.

• Added a new tip of the day about ctrl+dragging to select all ships regardless of military status.
  • Thanks to shortstar for suggesting.

• Planets that have been destroyed, or which don't have supply for the local player, now won't be included in pathing that should be limited to planets that have knowledge left (those planets are considered as having no knowledge left).

• An ENORMOUS number of memory-static-ness updates have been made, primarily centering around converting some very central generic dictionaries to arrays. This also serves as a performance boost, and makes savegames load a little faster, as well as the game itself.
  • However, this changed several thousand disparate lines, so the risk of random new bugs is pretty high. We've still got a month or so before the next official release, so it seemed a good time to try something like this; and the benefits are certainly well worth it in the long run.

• When players unlock higher-mark metal or crystal harvesters, all existing lower-mark harvesters are immediately upgraded to the new higher-mark versions at full health, at no metal/crystal cost.
  • However, any lower-mark harvesters that are still under construction won't upgrade until after they finish constructing.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for suggesting.

• Put in a fix that should make it harder for AI ships to be brought out of low-power-mode when the player attacks and then drop back into low-power during the battle.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting that this was still happening.

• Fixed odd bug with the code that sends updates on planets (specifically on the wormholes, in this case) to the AI thread.
  • Thanks to Elukka for the report leading to the discovery.

• Ion Cannons, Mass Drivers, and Counter Spies now scrap for 0.1% of their cost rather than 10%, to bring the usefulness of melting captured ones down closer to the usefulness of keeping them.
  • We won't point any fingers on this one.

• Scouts, Scout Starships, Raptors, and Spire Starships are now immune to "gravity effects," which includes the gravity drill, gravity ripper, gravity drains, gravity turret, and similar effects.
  • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting.

• Cursed Golems are now immune to both snipers and gravity effects.

• Ships that swallow enemy ships can now NEVER be put into cold storage, to avoid any potential issues there.

• The various galaxy-map-based counts (including the find count) now include parenthetical counts for any ships that have been swallowed by enemy ships.
  • Thanks to Invelios for inspiring this change.

• Fixed the City Hub tooltip to include all the rules of where it can be built.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Imunities are now shown for ships that can't be swallowed or can't be transported.

• Ships that can swallow or transport other ships are now unable to be swallowed.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Raid Starships and Raptors are both now immune to being swallowed.

• The reclaim ability no longer shows any higher than mark IV, since there are no mark VI ships and mark V ships are immune to reclamation across the board.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting.

• Spire Teleporting Leechs now have a 90% penalty against command stations.
  • Thanks to bonesbro for suggesting.

• The ship caps and other stats in the planetary summary are now always synced with the local player's stats. Previously they often used global defauts that weren't correct for the current game.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Raid Starships now have radar dampening of 8000, helping to protect them from the likes of artillery guardians.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Mark I-III Scout Starships now have radar dampening like the mark I-III regular scouts do.
  • Thanks to amonchakad for suggesting.

• When a ship is having its radar jammed by a global planetary effect (this does NOT refer to radar dampening against a single ship), the drawn attack range of the ship is shown as halved.
  • Thanks to Ymihere for suggesting.

• Reclamators were, in the prior release, only reclaiming stuff of a higher mark level than themselves. Whoops. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and MaxAstro for reporting.

(Released December 9th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.046

• Distribution nodes and zenith reserves will no longer be targeted or damaged by AI ships.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Distribution nodes and zenith reserves that are scrapped will now give their proper benefit.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting.

• Added new top-level context menu that opens when you alt+right-click (that's the default binding) empty space when you have no ships selected (if you have ships selected it still opens the with-selection top-level menu). The only thing on this new menu is the now-re-implemented Give Resources menu.

• Reimplmented "Give Resources" context menu.
  • Keybind: OpenGiveResourcesContextMenu can open this menu any time in the game (unless a nearer-scope active context has the same key bound, of course), no default binding.
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_TopLevel_OpenGiveResourcesContextMenu can open this menu from the top-level context menu (which is also new in this version).
  • Keybinds: ContextMenu_GiveResources_ToggleGivingToPlayer1 (and 7 other ones for player 2, 3, ... , 8) works on the give-resources menu and toggles whether the specified player will receive the resources when given. Defaults to Alpha1 through Alpha8 (top-of-keyboard number keys). Note that giving to multiple players gives the full amount to each, not splitting it or anything complicated like that.
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_IncreaseMetal works on the give-resources menu and increases the metal-to-give by 1,000. Defaults to Alpha9.
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_IncreaseCrystal works on the give-resources menu and increases the crystal-to-give by 1,000. Defaults to Alpha0.
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_DecreaseMetal works on the give-resources menu and decreases the metal-to-give by 1,000. Defaults to Minus (next to Alpha0 on many keyboards).
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_DecreaseCrystal works on the give-resources menu and decreases the crystal-to-give by 1,000. Defaults to Equals (next to Minus on many keyboards).
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_MakeAmount10000 works on the give-resources menu; while it is held the amount of the increase/decrease metal/crystal keybinds is 10,000 instead of 1,000. Defaults to LeftControl (and on default settings RightControl is an alias to LeftControl).
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_MakeAmount100000 works on the give-resources menu; while it is held the amount of the increase/decrease metal/crystal keybinds is 100,000 instead of 1,000. Defaults to LeftAlt.
  • Keybind: ContextMenu_GiveResources_ExecuteGive works on the give-resources menu, it executes the give operation configured using the other buttons. Defaults to Backspace (which may prove to be ill-advised, dunno, but it's next to Equals on many keyboards and you can change the bind and a lot of people just use the mouse anyway). Note that this will also close the context menu unless you're holding the SuppressContextMenuAutoClose keybind that's been around for a while (it defaults to LeftShift).

• Fixed a fairly longstanding bug that was totally messing up the detection of whether one input context was "narrower" than another, and thus should have precedence when one if its keybinds conflicted with another active context's keybinds.
  • Note that this won't fix the "K causes low power and knowledge filter when ships selected while viewing galaxy map" thing, that will require the low-power bind being assigned to a different context than WithSelection which is supposed to work on the galaxy map.
    • This was also resolved, see below.

• Fixed bug where a Spire City Hub could be given a gather point that could result in the structures it produced being sent through a wormhole upon completion. Cute, but wrong.

• Added "Export Balance Stats" button to reference tab; its tooltip explains how it functions but basically it's just for use in our new effort to systematically establish a rough-baseline balance of the fleet ship types. That's still very much a work in progress, of course.

• A new "maintenance commands" section has been added to the wiki with some previously-not-all-public commands you can use for altering existing savegames. This is generally to turn on new features that were added after your existing savegame was created, so you don't have to start over from scratch to see the new features.

• Core Shield Generators can now be disabled in the lobby, like Turrets or Heavy Defense or Cloaking various other ships. This can be done under the Ships tab of the lobby, for players who simply don't like the new mechanic; but the default is to have these on, since the mechanic provides helpful intermediate goals for new players, and is something we consider a useful new core part of the game. The turn-off option is simply for those players who can't stand the feeling that their choices are being reduced by it (after much forum discussion we don't really agree with that view, but consented for the ability to disable the feature).
  • Existing savegames will all have this as false. This will also remove existing Core Shield Generators from existing games.
  • A new command, "cmd:activate core shield generators" has been added for turning on CSGs in any savegame that doesn't have them on. This will seed them fresh, so if you had already had CSGs on, then captured E group, then upgraded to this version and re-enable CSGs, you will have to capture E group again, unfortunately. We apologize for any annoyance this might cause, but long-term this seemed like the least-destructive-to-existing-saves path.
  • Thanks to the dozens and dozens of players who weighed in one way or the other on this issue!

• The WithSelection context is now only active in planet-view, never in galaxy-view. It now also overrides any conflicting PlanetView binds. These two changes should resolve some really confusing input-causing-multiple-unrelated-things-to-happen issues we've been seeing (including the K causing both low-power-mode and knowledge-display-filter thing).

• The current game version is now shown in the galaxy stats window, so that players have a way of checking the game version from within the game itself.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for suggesting

• When a player uses a command, it now shows "CMD" instead of "CHEAT" for the sake of clarity.

• There is now a "Has Cheated" option shown in the Galaxy Stats window, since that's the internal value that score-modifiers go on rather than Cheats Enabled. It doesn't care if you have cheats enabled, it just cares if you used any. Now that's more clear when that's the case and when it's not. Commands don't count as cheats, of course.

• Warbird Starships no longer eligible for inclusion in an event attack since the speed-inflation of one being picked as a battle-group command ship has a pretty dramatic impact on difficulty that can basically require the unlocking of grav turrets in an unintended way. This quite obviously could have nothing to do with one of the developers getting roflstomped by a warbird-led battlegroup in a recent test game.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• There are now buttons for both the high scores and achievements in the in-game menu, so that players don't have to go out to the main menu to see those.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• Zenith Chameleon rebalance:
  • Move Speed from 28/25/22/18/28 to simply 28 across the board.
  • Base Attack Power from 400/1800/2800/4000/8000 to 4000*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 2600/3600/4000/4000 to 4000 across the board.
  • Health from 10,000/18,000/30,000/28,000 to 13,000*mk.
  • Armor from 500/1000/1500/2000/2500 to 150*mk.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 18 => 3.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 10 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Neutron from 1 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Heavy from 1 => 2.
  • Bonus vs CommandGrade from 5 => 1.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 4 => 1.
  • The goal here is a moderately durable, moderately cheap ship providing solid dps (particularly vs big stuff) plus it's little bonus of the stationary-camo.

• The metal/crystal costs of ships by mark level has been reduced from 1x/2x/4x/8x/16x to 1x/2x/4x/6x/8x.
  • Thanks to Suzera and KDR_11k for suggesting.

• When the game is unable to unlock a bonus ship type for human players/home-planets that is unique for their team (usually due to playing with a lot of players on the simple ship types with no or few expansions), it now unlocks something that is unique for each player instead of for the team as a whole. The only time players would get nothing is if they already had all the ship types available.

• Previously, the game had a chance to sometimes hang if it was unable to unlock a new bonus ship for a player at various junctures. Fixed.

• Now when an Advanced Research Station is captured, it unlocks not only a new bonus ship type, but also the mark II technology of that ship type.
  • This helps to allow players to experiment with more bonus ship types without fear, since normally if you are getting a mark I bonus ship type late in the game, that's not very useful and it's hard to tell if the higher-mark ships would be useful. Those extra ships wind up just being put on guard duty. This way, players also get mark II ships that are a lot more useful later in the game, and they can make a better decision about whether or not they want mark III/IV variants.
  • Of course, it also sweetens the deal for capturing Advanced Research Stations.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for suggesting.

• The knowledge cost of mark III fleet ships has been raised from 5000 to 6000. This is partly to counterbalance the change above, but also to better account for the fact that you get mark III AND IV ships out of the deal of just unlocking III (assuming you have and hold an advanced factory).

• All mkI fleet ships (triangle and bonus types) cost 1/2 as much energy as they used to, to ease the early game energy economy somewhat and to make them more attractive for garrison/support roles later in the game.
  • Thanks to Suzera for inspiring this change.

• Bulletproof fighter tweaks
  • Base range changed to fighter's base range +2000.
  • Attack power * 1.1.
  • Health changed from fighter's health * 1.1 => 1.75.
  • Armor Rating changed from fighter's armor * 0.8 => 1.5 (the 0.8 was from when they were called shields).

• Tachyon Microfighter rebalanced in a similar fashion as the Bulletproof Fighter to basically be a fighter, but with the following modifiers:
  • Obviously, the tachyon range, and the mine immunity that they've always had.
  • Half metal cost.
  • Double crystal cost.
  • Reload time from 4 seconds to 3.
  • Base range +1000.
  • Attack power * 0.75.
  • Armor piercing * 0.75.
  • Armor rating * 0.75.
  • Health * 0.75.
  • Ship cap multiplier from 1 => 1.5.

• Autocannon Minipod rebalance:
  • Base Move Speed from 84/85/86/88 to 84 across the board.
  • Given 3*mk armor damage per shot, to help counteract their very low power-per-shot and total lack of armor piercing when used in larger groups.
  • Base Attack Power from 4/8/16/32 to 160*mk.
  • Base Health from 3300/5900/8900/14100 to 6000*mk.
  • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 45 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Structural from 45 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Turret from 35 => 3.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 28 => 3.
  • The goal here is a cloaked ship that does pretty good "ambush" dps against lightly armored stuff but has a "spin up" time versus more heavily armored targets. In general they may need more than this to get up to the desired level of usefulness, but this should help bring them out of the bottom-of-the-bin.

• One-way doormasters now seed with 3x as many data centers as normal, to make up for the AI Progress cost of all those black hole machines (30 each). It's still a harder AI than normal, but now not so egregiously so.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Zenith viral Shredders are now immune to reclamation, as they unintentionally could multiply from 1 captured by a player to hundreds or thousands.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• The parasite line of ships has had their stats rebalanced in general, and linearized. They now have a lower attack speed, but massively higher attack values (which they now need).
  • Thanks to lovekawakawaii for suggesting.

• Leech Starships now cost 2x as much energy to run, and their stats have been linearized also. They also now have 10x fewer shots, and do 10x more damage than before.
  • Thanks to lovekawakawaii for suggesting.

• All mark V ships are now immune to reclamation (this was always the intent, but a few slipped through before).
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting some of the lapses.

• Ships with the reclamation ability are now only able to reclaim ships that are, at most, one mark level above their current level. So mark I ships can reclaim mark II ships, and so on.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for suggesting.

• When reclamators damage an enemy ship, it will only be reclaimed if at least 50% of the damage to that ship was done by the parasites of the current player.
  • Thanks to superking for suggesting.

• Neinzul Cockroaches can no longer be regenerated.
  • Thanks to True-Chaos for reporting.

• Attrition Emitters can no longer be reclaimed.
  • Thanks to Malibu Stacey for reporting.

• Attrition emitters now have teeth: they now do 400 damage per second, rather than 20.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• The Exo-Galactic Wormholes now spawn way further out than beofre when in the hands of a Backdoor Hacker. This prevents bombers and similar from being in immediate range of the home forcefields with these.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting.

• Rather than there being three cloaking states -- full, partial, and none -- there are now only two -- full and none. Now there is never a case where players can shoot at an enemy ship without being able to see what it is. Ships are either cloaked or they are not.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Any ship that can't be repaired now automatically has infinite engine health.

• Ships with shot-out engines are no longer completely unable to move. Now they just have the infuriatingly-slow move speed of 1. This prevents such situations as wormhole guard posts permanently trapping player ships. Now ships can always at least move away, albeit extremely slowly, to then be later repaired. This also helps to reduce the micro needed with engineers related to engine health.

• AI MRS and Fortresses were still repairing broken golems preemptively. Fixed.
  • Thanks to ArcDM, Toll, and Vinraith for reporting.

• Engineers mark I-III now take 4x as much damage when on enemy planets. This makes them still just as useful while on beachheads or in other protected circumstances where they are under forcefields or whatever and thus not taking fire while in enemy territory. But it makes them vastly less effective in actual combat situations, so that they don't work well mixed in with your main fleet WHILE it is attacking. However, on defense and on player planets they are just as effective as ever, which is also important.

• The multi-repair-range of superfortresses has been doubled, although it's still much smaller than that of the other fortresses. That's simply not its primary function.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• SuperFortresses, Fortresses, and Mobile Repair Stations now have to remain stationary to do their multi-repairs. After moving, they must recharge for 60 seconds before they can start doing repairs again: it's best to find a good position for them and leave them there until you're ready to deploy them in a new locale. In the case of fortresses/superfortresses, this doesn't affect their ability to attack while stationary or moving.
  • The intent here is to keep mobile repair stations from being used as mobile heal-instantly fleet-life extenders.

• Further Parasite/Leech rebalance:
  • The Parasites now have a further 10x added to their attack power, but now always have an 8-second recharge time rather than one that diminishes with their mark level. Their bonus against medium hulls has thus been cut from 6 to 3.
  • The MicroParasite attack recharge has been put back to 2s instead of 8, and now has an attack power of 8000 instead of 800. Their health has also been doubled.
  • The Leech Starship has had their attack buffed a further 40x, giving them a pretty sizble DPS. Their number of shots has been further reduced from 4x to 1x, helping to make them a lot more likely to convert enemy ships.
  • The overall goal is to make Parasites rather slow-firing so that they are not converting everything in sight, but with a high enough DPS that they have a reasonable chance of success in mixed fleets, or with allies, or on their own (in order from least to most successful, there). These changes are a start, at least, and we'll see how these feel.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for reporting.

• Apparently Starship Dissasembler guardians weren't actually attriting the starships that they ate. This meant that the starships would be stuck in permanent limbo until the guardians were killed, which was obviously a problem.
  • Additionally, starships in particular were eaten very slowly, but a lot of high-health ships would be. This was very problematic, as players can't rebuild those ships until they are returned to them. Now all ships are eaten at a speed that will ensure they are dead and can be rebuilt 4 minutes later. 4 minutes is long enough to kill the maw/disassembler if you have ships present, and otherwise the ship is just lost and can be rebuilt without so much hassle.
  • Previously, Starship Disassemblers didn't even have the ability to properly capture starships, because they had no transport capacity set. Now they can eat one starship per mark level.
  • Thanks to Fleet for reporting.

• Spirecraft Attritioners now do 300 x ShipLevel damage per second.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting they get a buff.

• Previously, shot damage was only being reduced by 75% at the time of attack, not when the shot damage was actually being calculated for things like estimated damage display. Fixed.

• Previously, shot damage was being capped at the maximum health of the target at the time of firing. Fixed.

• Previously, if overkill damage was being dealt to an enemy ship, it would self-heal, self-damage, or help-with-replication at the overkill amount rather than the actual amount of damage needed to kill the ship. Fixed.

• Previously, shots that self-heal, self-damage, or help-with-replication, were taking effect when they were shot, rather than when they hit. This was particularly troublesome with self-damaging shots, which could cause a ship to massively over-damage itself for very little gain. Fixed.

• Wasps and Spire Blades no longer make an explosion sound when they die.
  • Thanks to Dazio and PineappleSam for reporting.

• Wasps and Spire Blades no longer effect the counts of number of ships lost or built, and no longer effect score.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and Draco18s for reporting.

• Ships with the reclamator ability now all do their best to target ships they can actually reclaim. This is particularly important because of the new ship-level restrictions that reclamators have, but it's also important new logic that they never had in general (previously hitting stuff that was immune to reclamation just as commonly).
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting.

• Ships that have regen or vampirism now are automatically overkilled by a corresponding amount by enemy ships; this makes automated fleets of ships (and AI fleets of ships in general) able to actually take care of ships with high regen or high vampirism.
  • Thanks to shugyosha and Toll for reporting.

• New hybrids will no longer mature into builder classes, since they were responsible with numerous crimes against humanity including "the ai is still building turrets", "good grief that's a lot of forcefields", and "why won't my fleet autotarget those 200 neinzul clusters".
  • Builders will be back when we have appropriate things for them to build in moderation.

• New behavior for the AI! When the player goes on distant deepstrike runs -- defined as having any human military ships more than four hops away from any human or neutral planet -- the AIs both goes on high alert and starts spewing out ships from their home planets (or a random planet if their home planets are destroyed).
  • The tech level of the spawned ships will be whatever the AI's current tech level is, plus one (obviously between 1-5). Unless it's an AI home planet that is being deepstruck, or a planet adjacent to an AI home planet (we call these core planets), in which case the tech level is always 5. Watch out for that: you'll want some sort of launch pad within 4 hops of the AI home planet in order to take it without massive pain.
  • The spawned ships will be random fleet ships that the AI is allowed to use in waves, and each AI player will spawn a certain number of ships ship per event-second.
  • The event-second interval is defined as ( 11 - Floor(AIDifficultyLevel) ). So, for difficulty 7 or 7.6, that would be 11 - 7 = 4 seconds per interval.
  • The number of ships is defined as Floor(AIDifficultyLevel/2). So for difficulty 7, it would be 3 ships every 4 seconds, per AI player. On difficulty 8, it would be 4 ships every 3 seconds, per AI player.
  • These spawned ships are in free/threat mode, and will eventually attack the human players in whatever way they think will be most disruptive. They may engage the deep strikers, but more likely they will try to kill the planets of the players instead.
  • Note that all of these numbers are PER PLANET that has a deepstrike on it. So if you are deepstriking four planets, multiply those numbers by four. It's best to keep your forces together, and make the deepstrike raids as brief and effective as possible to avoid too strong a retaliation against your forces.
  • Thanks to many players for contributing ideas that ultimately led to this.

(Released December 7th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.045

• Reverted change from 4.043 for recalculating world-point even on frames where screen point did not change, because it was seriously interfering with middle-mouse scrolling.
  • Thanks to Toll for the report.

• Other mouse-move and middle-mouse-scrolling handling changes and another way of updating the world-point each frame, in hopes that it won't break something else.

• Distribution nodes and Zenith reserves are now captured on planet ownership change. It allows them to be scrapped when needed instead of having to send ships to already secured planets on the other side of the galaxy.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• New galaxy map filters have been added for detected AI Progress reducers (combined counts of co-processors, data centers, and superterminals). The default keybindings are unbound.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• The "runsim" command line argument was previously crashing the game when used. As it's no longer supported, it's now been removed.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for reporting.

• The way that the seeding for asteroids was previously done in the maps, it was random-chance-per-planet for each group of rarities. Now it's percentage-of-galaxy based, which makes sure that it's way more likely that the rarer asteroid types will show up in the game. It's still possible you might not have some titanite and adamantite, but you'll definitely have at least two planets with at least one or the other.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for partially inspiring this change.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version where the filters for adamantite and titanite had missing localization errors.
  • Thanks to Kemeno for reporting.

• Added a new cheat: Military Takeover
  • Spawn Military Command Station, Thus Capturing The Planet Even If The AI Held It

• Added a new cheat: Like Dynamiting Fish In A Bucket
  • Spawn an Advanced Research Station under the control of the first AI.

• When an AI ship that is captured upon planet ownership change is on a player planet, that AI ship now changes hands automatically to the player who controls the planet.

• Science Labs are no longer seeded on AI planets, or able to be captured on planet ownership change. It was just clutter, was slightly confusing, and was slightly problematic with the new logic.

• The external invincibility counts on core guard posts were previously flickering all over the place. Fixed.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

• Processing order was causing core shield generators to sometimes not properly cascade in their destruction, but other times to do so properly. A two-stage processing order has now been implemented to fix this.
  • Thanks to Mithror for reporting.

• The AI Wave level modifiers from tech levels have been adjusted to the following:
  • Thanks to Suzera for suggesting.

Mark Level	Multiplier
1	1.5
2	0.9
3	0.7
4	0.6
5	0.5

• Data Centers were previously seeded on the core planets (those next to the AI home planets) in great abundance. Often it would be five or six of them, a huge treasure trove and between the two AI planets constituting often nearly half of the total data centers in the galaxy. On higher-linked AI home planets, the effect of this could be multiplicative, making them even more crazily overpowered. These have now been removed, but the seeding of other data centers throughout the galaxy has been unchanged.
  • This obviously makes for way fewer data centers in general (on average perhaps 1/3 the prior numbers), and it also means there tends to be a max of usually 1 per planet, rather than huge clusters of them.
  • This will also strip out the extra data centers on the core planets from existing saves.
  • Thanks to Suzera for suggesting -- though don't blame her entirely, I've been thinking this direction for a while, myself. ;)

• Neinzul Cockroaches are now immune to reclamation.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for suggesting.

• All Neinzul ships in general are now immune to reclamation. This makes them excellent against botnet golems in particular now.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting.

• Wasps and Spire Blades are now immune to reclamation.
  • Thanks to Draco18s for suggesting.

• Shield Bearers have been changed to Heavy on their ship type. Thus more ships (including turrets) actually get bonuses against them. The max health of shield bearers has also been halved.
  • Thanks to Fleet and Suzera for suggesting.

• AI Stealth Guard Posts now have the cloaking super boost ability.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for suggesting.

• Guardians are now immune to the effect of the camouflager.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Home Cores are now immune to blade attacks.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Previously, it was possible for Core Shield Generators to spawn on AI home planets on very small maps, which would make the game unwinnable. Fixed. Also, this will fix existing savegames.
  • Thanks to Sunshine for reporting.

(Released December 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.044

• The armor rating on metal and crystal harvesters has been reduced 10x.
  • Thanks to superking for suggesting.

• The Unity resolution configuration screen is no longer allowed to be opened. It was pointless, anyway, as the game overrides it.

• The core guard posts all now have descriptions that explain that all the core shield generators in the galaxy must be destroyed before they can be destroyed.

• Core Shield Generators are no longer acting as warp gates.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• The seeding of the core shield generators is now much improved. It no longer has trouble with cold storage units, or with units that are seeded as part of the second AI's generation, or with not seeding when one AI is lower-level than 4 while the other is not.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

• New galaxy map filters have been added for each of the asteroid types. The default keybindings are unbound.
  • Thanks to LintMan for suggesting.

• The galaxy map filter for detection of hybrid hives and hybrid hive facilities now works properly when fog of war is off.

• New galaxy map filters have been added for advanced research stations, advanced factories, core fabricators, experimental fabricators, experimental starship fabricators, and broken golems. The default keybindings are all unbound.

• New galaxy map filters have been added for all of the various detected core shield generators. This makes it way easier to plot an attack with them. The default keybindings are all unbound.

• The actual hull of ships no longer show up as pink or green while being munitions-boosted or shield-boosted. This looked rather odd, was unneeded, and especially made the spire ships bubble-gum pink, heh.

• Previously, Spire Archives were only appearing in existing savegames, not in new campaigns. Fixed.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting.

(Released December 3rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.043

• Raid Starships:
  • Multiplier against command-grade hull type (primarily command stations) from 4 => 1. This should help make them less insta-homeworld-death against the human, but still quick-homeworld-death.
  • Multiplier against ultra-heavy hull type from 2 => 4.
  • No longer immune to snipers.

• Snipers, Sniper Turrets, and Sniper Guardians all now have 100,000 armor piercing.

• Sniper base damage was way out of line (MkII did 900 damage every 9 seconds with a 0.2 ship cap multiplier, Sniper Turret did 3600 damage every 6 seconds with a 1.2 ship cap multiplier, a ratio of 1:36), so base damage from 450*mk => 8100*mk. making the mkIV Sniper have a roughly equivalent dps-for-cap as the sniper turret, and the mkI sniper have roughly 1/4 of that, etc.

• Sniper Turrets now get a 5x vs Close-Combat hulls (Snipers already had this).

• Fixed bug preventing ships from leaving cold storage if they were on a planet with > 4000 attack+threat ships (this led to capturables not being captured, zero-health ships not going away, ai ships sitting there and not firing and not fireable-upon, etc).
  • Thanks to BlackCobra for reporting and providing a save.

• Added both a global and a per-planet "Non Military Do Not Rally" control to the controls window.
  • If this toggle is checked, all your non-military ships will ignore all rally posts.
  • Please note that if the "Reclaimed Ships Rally To Rally Post" global control is enabled, a non-military ship that has just been reclaimed will still try to rally.
  • Thanks to Wingflier for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug with the suppress-rally garrison controls where it would suppress the rally of a non-military ship (which don't count toward garrisons anyway).

• Armor maximum percent damage blocked from 95% => 80%. Health of some high-armor units increased to offset this somewhat:
  • Vorticular Cutlass health a bit less than doubled.
  • Armor Ship health a bit more than doubled.
  • Grenade Launcher had _really_ low health so it's been increased 10x.
  • Zenith Electric Bomber health increased somewhat and made more linear with mark level: 20k/40k/80k/160k/320k => 30k/60k/120k/150k/180k.
  • Raid Starship health from 800,000*mk => 1,600,000*mk.

• Fixed unintended inflation of schizo waves where each distinct type would have a minimum of its effective ship-cap; now ignores that rule for waves containing at least two non-starship types.
  • Thanks to Master Cylinder Pants for the logs demonstrating the bug.

• Fixed bug causing the "minimum wave size for difficulty" logic to be twice as high as intended.

• Raid Engines now no longer trigger on zombie ships since the human player has no way of controlling where they go.
  • Thanks to Ymihere for the suggestion.

• Raid Engines used to be capable of triggering multiple times at once if multiple adjacent planets and/or the engine's own planet satisfied the conditions at once. Changed to only trigger at most once per "reload".

• Fixed a bug where we thought Spire Maws were slacking off on the job by inexplicably ceasing to swallow more ships. The truth is far more sinister: the Maws were not only failing to swallow the ship, they were _altering the fundamental rules of the universe_ such that all ships of the target type ever produced would be unable to be loaded into any transport ever again (well, until you reloaded the save). Thankfully we've put an end to their dastardly plans to... we're not sure, actually.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for the report and save.

• Since vampires are refractive, flak turrets and flak guardians now have an 8x bonus against refractive (that's what they've had against close-combat for a while).
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where the game was not recomputing the coordinate in "world space" under the mouse cursor if the game was moving under the cursor without the cursor actually moving (panning, zooming, switching planets, etc).

• Warheads produced by the Neinzul Rocketry Corps will now actually do something. Their behavior was probably disabled a while ago when a wholesale revision was made to how the AI thread issued commands for minor faction ships (or, more precisely, how it does not).
  • Be afraid.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the report.

• Fixed bug where one of the module slots on the Spire Habitation Center could take a normal heavy-beam-cannon-module instead of the city-variant it's supposed to use.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Hybrids can no longer get the starship-esque Spire bonus ships (Blade Spawner, Maw, Stealth Battleship, Tractor Platform) as drones, since its "drone cap" doesn't differentiate by ship power and it would be painfully unbalanced to get hit by a bunch of hybrids escorted by a horde of such ships.

• Random wave sizing factor changed from a number between 1.0 and 1.3 to a number between 0.8 and 1.1. Wiki updated to reflect the new number.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting that the wiki mismatched the actual calculation to begin with.

• Rather than having Counterattack Guard Posts die (and launch a counterattack wave) when the command station on their planet is now killed, instead they now provide protection to their command station until they are killed. Thus the same net effect is in place for players -- players can't kill the command station without also killing the counterattack guard post -- but it is no longer possible for players to ACCIDENTALLY trigger the counterattack guard post, which is a big improvement.
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for suggesting, and to Winter Born for inspiring this change.

• Five new types of Core Shield Generators have been added to the game: These must be destroyed before the AI Core Guard Posts and AI Home Command Station can be damaged. The planet on which this shield generator sits must be controlled by the humans before it can be damaged. These only get seeded on difficulty 4 and up.
  • Group A-Prime
    • One of these is seeded on every planet with an advanced research station.
    • The A-Prime shield generators are linked into a very strong network. All but one of them must be destroyed before the last generator in the group will self-destruct.
  • Group B-Secondary
    • One of these is seeded on every planet with an advanced factory.
    • The B-Secondary shield generators are linked into a weak network. Destroy any one of the generators in the group, and the rest will self-destruct.
  • Group C-Secondary
    • One of these is seeded on every planet with a fabricator and without an advanced factory.
    • The C-Secondary shield generators are linked into a weak network. Destroy any one of the generators in the group, and the rest will self-destruct.
  • Group D-Secondary
    • One of these is seeded on every planet with a counterattack guard post, but with no other core shield generators already in place.
    • The D-Secondary shield generators are linked into a weak network. Destroy any one of the generators in the group, and the rest will self-destruct.
  • Group E-Secondary
    • These are scattered on some random planets that do not already have an existing shield generator.
    • The E-Secondary shield generators are linked into a weak network. Destroy any one of the generators in the group, and the rest will self-destruct.
  • Thanks to Suzera for inspiring this new feature.
    • This new mechanic is designed to require players capture at least a certain small baseline number of planets before they can even attack the AI homeworlds. This ensures that ultra-conservative low-planets-held strategies simply aren't valid, and the alternative is somewhere the game been before: having the AI homeworlds be so beefy that they are incredibly grindy in the late game, which also isn't good. That had led to most players "declaring they had won" and stopping before they actually had won. The logical solution, then, is a multi-stage AI takedown procedure that requires you to take certain planets that it was expected you were required to take, anyway.
    • To those that would complain about how this will prevent certain playstyles: yes, it will. But only the ones that don't allow for a natural progression of AI difficulty, and so short-circuit (and thus drastically break) the game. Deep striking and raiding are still a great thing to do, and in fact may be more important than every in some circumstances now, but you can't use that in a preemptive "the enemy's gate is down" sort of fashion to win the game. If you'll recall, even the battle school teachers changed the rules after Ender used that tactic once, and for good reason: it's fun once, but leads to a broken game after that.
    • Note that achieving the alternate victory in the Fallen Spire progression will take care of this shield network for you, since that victory condition already involves taking plenty of territory, etc.

• Fixed a bug that would allow the selection of a non-available bonus ship type in the lobby, but not actually allow the construction of that type in the game. Fixed to not allow the choice in the first place.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• Neinzul Roaming Enclaves:
  • Now are much prompter about retreating when under heavy fire.
  • Move Speed from 34 => 51, effective range from 5,000 => 10,000, and removed the x0.2 penalties against Light and Ultra Heavy (apples to preservation wardens too).
  • HumanAlly variant now has 30x the base health instead of 10x.
  • HumanAlly variant can no longer be repaired (this could hurt your economy before, and it's got plenty of self-regen by itself).
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for inspiring these changes.

• Fabricators will now be listed under the "Build Queues" quick button at the bottom of the screen.
  • Thanks to wyvern83 for reporting that they were not.

• The Fallen-Spire progression now requires (during the build-five-cities phase) that all cities be level 2 (have a hab center and no adjacent AI planets) before the next signal marker will spawn. This was the intent all along, but the original implementation didn't enforce this properly.

• The "Mobile Military" filter option on the galaxy map has been renamed to "Mobile Military (Units)." A new option, called "Mobile Military (Firepower)" has been added, which shows the My, Allied, and Team values in terms of the firepower rating of their ships (divided by 10,000) instead of by the raw number of ships.
  • When enabled, this also effects the display of the enemy ship counts on the galaxy map.
  • This option makes it a lot easier to tell the relative strengths of planets, since ship counts are all but meaningless now: what with spirecraft, golems, guardians, and other large ships making it so that one or two ships can take on hundreds or thousands of smaller ships. This also helps to account for the relative mark levels of ships, too.

• The game now requires that the human players leave at least two planets unclaimed in the lobby (for the AIs to use).
  • Thanks to PineappleSam and ArcDM for reporting.

• In recent versions, the frequency of asteroids was unintentionally way lowered. Fixed.
  • Thanks to snrub_guy, LintMan, and wyvern83 for reporting.

• Fixed bug where continuous beam weapons were actually hitting twice per frame instead of once when targeting stuff that didn't require direct targeting (incidentally, most of the is-the-damage-correct testing was done on wormhole guard posts, go figure). Since the balance of the beams is as desired, numeric attack power doubled to maintain current balance.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting.

• There were still some cases of commands being issued to AI ships that were in low-power mode, so we've added a much more aggressive check that makes it essentially impossible for a low-power-mode AI ship to receive a UnitCommand. In our testing this has worked out fine, but it's such a sweeping change that there may be some really weird consequences. Note also that if any low-power-mode AI ships in your saves that were out doing something because they erroneously had a command will pretty much just sit still wherever they happen to be (other than collisions with other stuff), which may look odd until they're woken up by something.
  • Thanks to ShadowOTE for reporting a case where this was still happening.

• There is now only a 25% chance that AI ships will prioritize the destruction of an "irreplaceable" unit (like an ion cannon) at any given time. This makes them still likely to hit important targets, but a lot less predictable. It also makes it a lot harder to use those other ships as a damage sponge.

• When AI ships are fleeing from a planet, they will now tend to scatter a lot more than they used to, and have a much greater chance of circling around to an undefended or unexpected part of player territory. Paired with other recent changes that make the AIs more smart about when to attack a planet they are "stalking," this will make them a lot less predictable and a lot more dangerous.
  • Thanks to Suzera for inspiring this change.

• Special Forces ships that arrive on player planets now go into "free" mode instead of just passing through while on special forces mode. Similarly, whenever special forces ships find themselves on a planet with a human-controlled non-scout/scout-starship unit, they will also go into "free" mode. This is how it used to be, but sometime since 4.0 it's changed, likely because minor factions were accidentally stirring up special forces units. That will no longer happen. Also, Zombie units will be ignored for these purposes.
  • Thanks to Toll for reporting that this was amiss.

• Raid Engines are no longer triggered by zombie ships.
  • Thanks to Ymihere for reporting.

• On difficulty 7 and up, when the AI forces on a planet are more than 2x outgunned in terms of firepower, the guards will be freed and will either engage the player forces en masse or will escape to fight another day, as appropriate.
  • Thanks to Suzera for suggesting.

• When players have exhausted the ship cap for a type of ship, that now takes precedence over the ENER error message on the buttons when players are in low-energy situations.
  • Thanks to ShadowOTE and Toll for suggesting.

• The raid engine description was previously out of date, talking about a "significant fleet" instead of "any military units" to trigger it. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Weteor for reporting.

• Previously when players selected more than 8 home planets to start with, they would get oddly low available ship counts. Fixed.
  • Thanks to orzelek and ArcDM for reporting.

(Released December 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.042

• Added new control to the Planet-Specific tab of the Controls window: "Redirection Tries To Maintain Garrison Of".
  • When this is greater than zero, and the number of allied mobile military ships on the planet is less than the specified number, redirection rally posts won't actually redirect ships entering the planet.
  • Functionally this allows you to tell the planet to hold onto a "garrison" of X ships, filling up from the redirection-post patrols you've set up.
  • Note that you have relatively little control over the composition of the garrison, since faster ships will tend to fill empty slots unless you've got your patrol groups on group-move. Nonetheless, this can be useful for making sure a planet has some kind of defensive force without having to nanny it.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the suggestion.

• Added new control to the Planet-Specific tab of the Controls window: "Stop Building Military If Have Garrison Of".
  • When this is greater than zero, and the number of allied mobile military ships on the planet is greater than or equal to the specified number, build queues on the planet will be suspended (not actually paused, per se, but similar to that).
  • This also allows establishing a garrison, and gives you more control over composition but requires that you build a space dock (or whatever) on the planet and set up the queue, etc. Anyway, you can set up a looping queue of, say, 5 fighters, 1 bomber, and 1 missile frigate and a garrison threshold of 50 and it will produce ships until it hits 50 ships and then stop until some of the ships die or leave; it will then replace those (though not necessarily with the same type, of course).
  • Does not impact self-building units like turrets, or the construction of modules on modular ships.
  • Thanks to Fleet for the suggestion.

• Enclave Starship collision priority from 9000 => 875, putting it below rally posts (and standard ff-gens and command station cores) but above just about everything else that's mobile.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Shield Bearers and Spirecraft Shield Bearers now have collision priority of 566, making them less likely to be bounced out to the edges of a group and more likely to cover more units.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.

• All other Spirecraft, and the "starship-esque" Spire bonus ship classes (Blade Spawner, Maw, Stealth Battleship, Tractor Platform) now have collision priority, the default for all starships.
  • Thanks to zebramatt for the suggestion.

• The Spire Blade Spawner, Maw, Stealth Battleship, and Tractor Platform:
  • No longer use the ship cap scaling since there are so few of them even on high. This means that their stats (attack power, health, etc) will no longer be higher on low and normal caps than on high caps, but the ship cap will not decrease either.
  • Now have AIPerPlanetShipCap set to 4. This is supposed to cull existing populations and apply to almost all forms of reinforcement and spawning, and will help with situations like the AI having 100 blade spawners on a single planet slaying your CPU.
    • Note that this functions more like a cap of 5 and is per-mark-level, so it is possible to still get fearsome clusters of these, just nothing like 100.
    • Thanks to Spikey00 for reporting the AI blade spawner CPU-slaying menace.

• Fixed some mixed-wave messages showing up as homogenous and thus misleading the player as to the content of the wave (now just says Enemy Ships in those cases).
  • Thanks to SNAFU for the report and save.

• Fixed unintended inflation of counter-attack-wave size. May still be some issues but this should fix the biggest of them.
  • Thanks to many, many... many players, for reporting.

• Previously Raid Engines and Core Raid Engine Posts could lead to runaway wave sizes (particularly the core one), this has been set to a more constant multiplier. Still might have some runaway-ness, we'll see.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting being attacked by almost seven. hundred. thousand. ships.

• Fixed bug that was preventing the spawning of certain objects in the fallen-spire progression if there were simply no more planets far enough away from human territory; now they'll spawn as far away as they can in those cases.
  • Thanks to mavorspam for the report and the save.

• Fixed some discrepancies in applying AI-Type-specific modifiers to wave sizes between mixed-wave and homogenous-wave branches.

• Fixed a bug where the WaveSize multiplicative factor was being applied twice (once on the AI thread, once on the main thread), leading to factors < 1 causing smaller-than-intended waves and factors > 1 causing larger-than-intended waves. In some cases the factors were >= 10, and you can imagine how bad that got.

• The Enable Advanced Logging setting now also causes two new logs to be written: MainThreadWaveComputationLog and AIThreadWaveComputationLog (which is only written on the host's machine in an mp game). These will have a lot of details in how a wave's size was computed, which is helpful in diagnosing exactly what's going on if we continue to have unexpectedly-sized (generally unexpectedly-large) waves.

• Fixed a bug in the enforcement of the IsEligibleForHomogenousWave flag that was leading to a wave that would be composed entirely of a non-eligible type simply being a nearly-empty wave (basically it would just have the starship(s)). Now the wave will only be empty if it somehow does not have any eligible types, but that should be impossible.

• Shield Bearers hull type from Heavy => Structural.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Fixed a bug where multiple science lab mkIIIs on one planet were reporting as if multi-stacking the reinforcement multipliers, even though they were not actually multiplying them.
  • Thanks to Suzera for reporting.

• The game now makes it clear when a wave or CPA that is incoming was triggered by a ship -- guard post, raid engine, scrap wave, or otherwise. This should substantially help reduce confusion about the deep raids into player territory.

(Released November 30th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.041

• All map seeds now give twice as many possible starting positions (16 instead of 8), to allow for players to have greater variety with less clicking through map seeds to find the ships they want (especially with all the new ship types lately).
  • If there are fewer than the allotted number of ship types available given the current expansions and ship complexity, then the number of valid starting positions will be reduced as appropriate.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for inspiring this change.

• Zenith Electric Bomber hull type changed from Heavy to Neutron.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Zenith Autobombs and Neinzul Youngling Nanoswarms now do a better job of splitting up rather than focusing on a small set of targets.

• Missile Frigate Rebalance:
  • Reload Time from 20/15/10/8/7 => 11 - ShipLevel (10/9/8/7/6).
  • Base Range from 7000 for all marks => 6500 + 500*mk (7000/7500/8000/8500/9000).
  • Health from 4,800/16,000/22,000/28,000/33,000 => 9000*mk (9,000/18,000/27,000/36,000/45,000).
  • Armor from 150/150/300/600/300 => 150 for all marks.
  • Attack Power for MkV from 8000 => 5000.
  • Bonus against Neutron from 3x => 5x.
  • Added 5x bonuses against Composite and Refractive (previously, no triangle ship had a bonus against either of those).

• Youngling Nanoswarm Rebalance:
  • Removed all damage bonuses (trying to avoid their autotargeting prioritizing damage over other stuff).
  • Maximum targets affected from 1/3/5/7/9 => 3/5/7/9/11.
  • Now does 100*mk armor damage (i.e. "armor rotter" damage) to each affected target.
  • Now adds 1*mk seconds of paralysis to each affected target.
  • Now does 2*mk engine damage to each affected target.
  • Note that the nanoswarm cannot directly target stuff that is immune to reclamation, and may have similar difficulties with ships immune to its new debuffs, but that often other ships caught in the blast may be affected by those debuffs they are not immune to. Nanoswarms will pay house calls to individuals found filing mantis reports resulting from not reading this release note.

• Nanoswarm now considered to use non-shell ammo, so bulletproof stuff should no longer be immune to them.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• The way that unit data is synced to the AI thread is now better for purposes of cold storage and similar in particular.

• The AI now has some new logic for cleaning up certain old ships on its thread, to hopefully avoid issues with "ghost" warp gates and such that would lead to waves that shouldn't happen. That may or may not have been happening before, but we suspect it might have been and this adds on some safety checks to hopefully prevent it.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on low-power AI ships, though they do still put them in their targeting lists as normal (so that as soon as the AI ship comes out of low-power mode, they are able to fire on them just as quickly as before). This prevents long-range human ships from accidentally stirring up the guards of AI guard posts unless the player specifically orders them to. In general this will make the AI guards bumrush the player ships a lot less frequently than they were recently doing, while not losing the first-mover advantage of the human ships against the low-power AI ships.
  • Thanks to CogDissident for inspiring this change.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on guard posts of the AI if those guard posts have not already been "angered." This means that long-range human ships won't just snipe them without being told to do so, but as soon as the guard posts have entered the battle at all, they will fire at will. Like the other change about low-power ships, this also doesn't impact the putting of guard posts into the targeting lists, so it doesn't hurt the first-mover advantage of the player ships. Generally when players get at all in the vicinity of the guard posts the guard post gets angered, so this just prevents snipers and similar from alerting the entire planet without the player desiring for that to happen, for instance.

• Human ships no longer automatically open fire on guardians of the AI if those guardians have not already been "angered" AND they are on active guard duty. This works basically on the same principles as the above change to the guard posts, except for guardians that are already freely moving around it ignores them.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Fixed another bug with the minor faction stuff costing the player energy.
    • Thanks to orzelek for reporting that the bug was still happening.
  • Improved the defense-assistance fleet logic, and improved the coverage from the initial spawns.
  • Fixed a bug where still-in-construction shipyards and city hubs counted towards their respective ship caps (for the capital ships and the galactic capitol, respectively).
    • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for the report.
  • Due to the golem buffs, the event-attack logic point-costs for golems have been increased by roughly 2.5x (from "Medium Battleship" to "Light Dreadnought", for those keeping score). Note that the balance may be off now, it's hard to say ahead of time, but the AI-variants used in these attacks are still relatively easy to destroy by concentrated beam & photon cannon fire, they're just more dangerous offensively.

• On difficulty 7 and up, AI ships now spread out 2x as much as before. AI ships that are waiting before going through a wormhole to a human planet now spread out 4x more diffusely to make them even harder for players to hit.

• The AI now uses the intel data it has about the relative strengths of planets (as human players do), when determining whether or not to send its ships through a wormhole they are waiting on. This is different from the prior method, which was partly randomized, partly based on an accumulated number of 200 ships, and partly based on having a lot of ships incoming.
  • This is a far-reaching change to the emergent behavior, which will have many effects on the gameplay, some of which are likely to be unanticipated at this time. The general expected result is that the AI will not attack players with "trickles" of ships very often anymore, and will instead choose to build up before breaching. The other expected result is the AI acting more sensibly when its command station has been prematuraly destroyed or when ships are freed from a guard post.
  • On lower difficulties (<5), the AI actually overestimates its strength 5x, leading it to make dumber decisions. On difficulties less than 6, it overestimates its strength by half, leading it to make occasional stupid decisions there. Both of these are examples of the intentionally-sometimes-off decisions that make the lower-level AIs easier while also making reasonable mistakes a human might.
  • On difficulty 9 and up, the AI actually underestimates its strength by half, leading to it to have a greater tendency to wait to strike with overwhelming force.
  • These changes should also make the AI more effective in defender mode.

• The number of shots of the raider guardians have been cut about 10x, and the attack power of their shots has bee increased about 20x. Their bonuses have also been changed to specialize against commandgrade, structural, and ultraheavy, with a penalty against turrets.

• The speed of raid starships has been increased about 50%, and their attack power has gone up 5x. They also have gained a hefty bonus against command grade ships, while losing their bonus against turrets and instead having a penalty. The armor rating of raid starships has also been increased 3x.

• Enclave starships mark II-IV still had guns in previous versions. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• Armored Golem health has once again gone up 10x (to 500m). The base attack power of armored golems has gone up 100x. The number of shots of armored golems has gone down to 1/6th of its prior value. The armor piercing of armored golems has increased from 10k to 999k.

• Artillery Golem health has been increased 20x (to 100m). The base attack power of them has gone up to 50m per shot. The armor piercing of armored golems has increased from 100k to 999k.

• Black Widow Golems now have 70m health instead of 30m. The attack range of black widow golems has been increased 4k, and their tractor range has also gone up 4k. The armor piercing of 1k has been removed from black widow golems, and their attack power has increased from 3k to 60k.

• Regenerator Golem attack power has been increased 100x.

• Cursed Golem range has been increased 100x, and health up by 3x (to 60m). The number of shots has also increased from 3 to 20.

• The AI Wave and reinforcement bonuses of all golems have been removed. Golems also no longer require the proximity of AI Warp Gates.

• The repair costs of golems were ludicrously low in recent releases -- fixed.

• Added new "Auto Load" command.
  • Can be issued via Unit Commmand context menu (either click the button or via context-menu-specific keybind, which has no default binding) or the Auto Load keybind (which also has no default binding).
  • When issued:
    • Tells all can-be-transported units in the selection to try to load themselves into a transport on their planet. If insufficient transport space is available, those that can find room will try to load while the others may do nothing.
    • If any transports are currently in the selection, only those transports are eligible for the auto-load operation. If no transports are in the selection, all allied transports on the planet are eligible.
    • Each ship to be loaded will prefer nearby transports, but if multiple transports are within roughly 5000 range units of one another, ships will generally prefer to fill one transport before beginning to fill the next.

• Hive Golem health has been increased 3x (to 48m). Hive Golem attack has been increased 50x, but their attack range has been reduced by 3k. Hive Golems also now have a radar dampening range of 10000. The speed of creation of wasps has been increased 4x.

• The health of the botnet golem has been increased 10x. Armor Piercing on the Botnet Golem has gone up 10x. The number of secondary shots fired by the botnet golem has been doubled.

• The previous concept of AI Wave Bonuses (the crazy multipliers that could lead to waves of 700,000 ships, for example) have been removed entirely. This buffs a number of structures for human use, including captive human settlements, zenith power generators, gravity drill stations, zenith spacetime manipulators, and ion cannons.

• The cost of all ion cannons has gone up 3x. The cost of the higher-mark ion cannons now go up even more exponentially than before.

• The ability "AI Reinforces When This Enters AI Planet" has been removed from the game, as only golems used it and now they do not.

• The ability "Requires Proximity Of AI Warp Gate" has been removed from the game, as only golems used it and now they do not.

• Broken Golems are no longer seeded as a part of the base Zenith Remnant campaigns (it used to seed 3 in every TZR campaign) -- however, any preexisting seeded golems will remain in existing saves.

• Three new minor factions have been added to The Zenith Remnant (nearly a year after the expansion's release -- crazy, right?). The purpose of these is to provide a more satisfactory range of experiences with golems to match player tastes, rather than the old "there are always three there" method. The three minor factions are:
  • Broken Golems (Easy)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the golems with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.
  • Broken Golems (Moderate)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the golems at a moderate energy cost and with a small AI Progress increase upon repairing them from their broken states. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.
    • Using the moderate version will automatically disable the easy version if the easy version is also selected.
  • Broken Golems (Hard)
    • Massive broken golems can be found around the galaxy, ready for humanity to capture and repair them. Once repaired, they represent enormous power to use against the AI.
    • The HARD version of this minor faction simply gives you the golems with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. However, whether or not you choose to capture any golems, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with golems of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some golems in order to survive.
    • Using the hard version will automatically disable the easy and moderate versions if either of them is also selected.
    • Important: So far the hard version just works like Easy, it doesn't actually spawn the waves yet. That will come in a future version.

• All of the human-controlled golems now have a self-attrition that makes them require ongoing maintenance from player engineers. The attrition is slow, however, taking the golems from full health to the brink of death over a two hour span (except for the cursed golem, which takes a mere 40 minutes -- still up from the prior 20 minutes there).
  • This creates an optional non-energy-related ongoing cost for golems that players can choose to pay or not pay; if they don't wish to repair golems, they can simply be placed out of service somewhere safe. This also seems fitting with the status of golems as uber-powereful, extremely ancient weapons in poor repair. And boy are they powerful, they do need something to counteract them a bit even on the Hard golem minor faction.
  • AI-controlled golems don't have the self-attrition, but instead have 10x lower health and an inability to be repaired.

• Spirecraft Rams now do 10x more attack damage, and now have 999k piercing damage, have a ton more health, and are now much faster. This makes them brutally effective against force fields and other large structures that the martyr can't really touch. Now there's a reason to sometimes choose these over the martyr.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 for suggesting.

• Spirecraft Shield Bearers now have a much larger radius, making them a lot more useful.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• A new "positive AI Progress on Metamorphosis" ability has been added for golems on the Broken Golems (Moderate) minor faction only. Also on that moderate minor faction, the cost of the golems in terms of energy is 10x higher.

• Previously, only three broken golems were seeded into almost all games. Now 3x the number of human home planets are seeded, not to be less than 9 or more than 14.
  • Existing savegames that already had their broken golems seeded won't get any extras, unfortunately.

• Asteroids are no longer seeded as a part of the base Light of the Spire campaigns (and Spire Mining Ships also thus don't appear) -- however, any preexisting seeded asteroids/mining ships will remain in existing saves, though the mining ships won't be constructible new and no spirecraft will be constructible with existing mining ships.

• Three new minor factions have been added to Light of the Spire. The purpose of these is to provide a more satisfactory range of experiences with spirecraft to match player tastes. The three minor factions are:
  • Spirecraft (Easy)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The EASY version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. Consequently, your adjusted score is also halved.
  • Spirecraft (Moderate)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The MODERATE version of this minor faction gives you the spirecraft with a vastly higher energy cost, and without the ability to repair them. Consequently, your adjusted score is also reduced by 1/3.
    • Using the moderate version will automatically disable the easy version if the easy version is also selected.
  • Spirecraft (Hard)
    • Six different kinds of asteroids are seeded around the various planets of the galaxy, waiting for you to use your Spire Mining Ships (CONST tab) to build mining enclosures on them. From these mining enclosures, you can produce the rare and deadly Spirecraft ships, which cannot be procured any other way. These massive ships can be an enormous asset against the AI.
    • The HARD version of this minor faction simply gives you the spirecraft with nothing in the way of benefit to the AI. However, whether or not you choose to capture any spirecraft, the AI will be launching periodic large waves with spirecraft of their own -- so you're highly advised to get some spirecraft in order to survive.
    • Using the hard version will automatically disable the easy and moderate versions if either of them is also selected.
    • Important: So far the hard version just works like Easy, it doesn't actually spawn the waves yet. That will come in a future version.

• When asteroids are seeded into a campaign, they are now seeded onto all non-homeworld worlds. This makes them work in a much more friendly fashion with long-running existing savegames.

• Three new commands have been added to The Zenith Remnant for enabling the new minor factions in existing savegames (but ONLY if none of the three is already on -- you can't use this to switch back and forth between them):
  • cmd:activate broken golems easy
  • cmd:activate broken golems moderate
  • cmd:activate broken golems hard

• Three new commands have been added to Light of the Spire for enabling the new minor factions in existing savegames (but ONLY if none of the three is already on -- you can't use this to switch back and forth between them):
  • cmd:activate spirecraft easy
  • cmd:activate spirecraft moderate
  • cmd:activate spirecraft hard

• There was a missing localization error on the Spirecraft Martyr short name. Martyr is hard to type. ;)
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spirecraft can now be repaired, except when playing with the Spirecraft Moderate minor faction. On that one minor faction, spirecraft aren't repairable and their energy costs are 5x as high as they otherwise would be.

• Previously, self-attrition was impairing engineers from being able to repair ships with self-attrition. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Salamander for reporting.

• The "View Ship Modules" context menu item now works on groups of more than one of the same designable type. If more than one distinct designable type is in the selection, the option is not available. Please note that it will only actually display the modules for one of the selected ships, but changes applied to the ships will be applied to them all (meaning that they will all wind up with the same design if you apply anything to the ships).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for the suggestion.

• Previously, the graphics for the Implosion Guardian was missing from in the game. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

(Released November 24th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.040

• Heavy Beam Cannons buffed:
  • MkI beam count 1 => 3
  • MkII beam count 3 => 6
  • MkIII beam count 7 => 12
  • All Marks armor piercing from 2000*mk => 8000 (flat, not multiplied by mark)

• Fallen Spire Stuff:
  • Spire Shard Reactors, Habitation Centers, Shipyards, and the Galactic Capitol now have a primary armament; the Capitol's is similar to a Spire Dreadnought, the others' are between a Spire Destroyer and a Spire Cruiser. For all of them, the base range is roughly double that of the capital ships.
  • Spire city laser-cannon and heavy-beam-cannon modules are now significantly more expensive and much more powerful.
  • Spire city shield generator mkII health doubled to put it more in line with the mkI and mkIII (the ship-based versions used by Spire capital ships and Hybrids are intended to have a big jump from mkII to mkIII).
  • Combined with the 4.039 changes, this probably actually makes things too easy on defense, but not trying to correct for that (possibly non-existent) problem yet.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Gravity
  • Enormous gravity distortion effect slows enemy ships over a wide area. Middling firepower specially geared towards starships and other large targets.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Starship Disassembler
  • Huge alien guardian that swallows enemy starships and gradually attritions them. If the guardian is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.

• Added a new LotS AI Guardian: Implosion
  • Mid-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• The radius of all the human force fields (but not AI force fields) have been increased substantially.

• The radius of the spirecraft shield bearer force fields have been increased substantially.

• The ship cap of the shield bearer ship class has been cut in half, but their individual force field sizes have been doubled, their health has been tripled, and their attack power has been doubled. Their costs have also been doubled.

• Fixed bug where minor faction ships were consuming player energy.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• Previously, rally posts were able to be damaged by mines. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Sigma7 for reporting.

• If a rally post is in FRD mode or attack-move mode, it will now set those modes on any ships that are directed to/through that rally post.

• The old rally posts are now called "Mobile Rally Posts," since their key feature is that they are mobile.

• New "Redirector Rally Posts" have been added to the base game. These are NOT mobile, but which can have gather points set like that of a space dock. You can use this to give cross-planet move orders, and even to set up cross-planet roving patrols of ships if you set up a looping pattern of redirectors.
  • Thanks to Toll for suggesting.

• Cross-planet gather points (for docks and otherwise) now visually show movement lines on the planet itself, thus making it far more clear what's going on.

• Previously, holding Ctrl could allow players to build extra mining enclosures on a single asteroid. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• "Ally to all" minor faction ships were previously being affected by attrition. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• All ships that are unable to be repaired now automatically get infinite engine health (to prevent them from being permanently stranded).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter and TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spire Blades (from a Spire Blade Spawner) and Wasps (from a Hive Golem) no longer get regenerated by Regenerator Golems/Trains.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• The fighter hull attack bonuses have been doubled to compensate for the recent cutting-in-half of their base attack.

• Previously, when an AI ship contained other ships (carriers, etc) that was not reflected in the threat/attack meters properly. Now it is.

• Previously, when AI waves got too large (more than about 2000 ships), the extra ships of the AI would simply not be included in the wave, leading to very inflexible wave caps. Now waves are free to get infinitely large, but any ships over the wave caps get added inside carriers instead of as roaming ships. There is a separate cap for starships in waves (always was), and now the excess starships also go into carriers rather than being cropped out. The net effect of this change is to make the danger from high AI Progress levels continue to rise linearly, rather than capping out at some certain value. However, the reason for the wave caps in the first place was to protect performance, and the use of carriers still accomplishes that while not reducing difficulty overmuch.

• The Armor Rotter, Blade Spawner, Tractor Platform, and Maw ships are now considered complex ship types. The rest are all considered Normal, as before.

• The Special Forces Rally Guardians are now direct-only targeted by the human players. The attack power of these guardians has been reduced to practically nothing, and they now have self-attrition that kicks in ONLY on human worlds, and which kills the guardian after 30 minutes of time. Thus the special forces rally post guardian winds up redirecting special forces ships for quite a long while, but isn't the same hassle as before to players.
  • Thanks to LintMan and TheDeadlyShoe for reporting the previous difficulties.

• Unique far-zoom icons have now been created for the following ships: AI Beachhead, SC Attritioner, SC Implosion, SC Ion, SC Jumpship, SC Martyr, SC Penetrator, SC Ram, SC Scout, SC Siege Tower, Spire Archive.

(Released November 23rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.039

• Previously a ship design with empty slots would actually try to add "None" to the ship's queue. Hilarity ensued. Fixed to not do this.
  • Thanks to Ham for reporting.

• When Spirecraft Martyrs die, they now deal damage even to those ships that are immune to normal AOE damage.

• In the prior version, spire civilian leaders were helping out the humans even when under AI control. Oops. :) Fixed.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• A new capturable ship type has been added for LotS: Spire Archive.
  • These powerful science vessels can be found nearby or on the AI homeworlds. Capturing them will provide +1/s knowledge income on the archive's planet for all human players while the archive lives, up to a cap that is 3x that of the normal per-planet cap. If the archive is destroyed, however, there is a hefty AI Progress cost.

• Fallen Spire rebalancing:
  • City-Hub provoked event-attacks now cannot exceed 60,000 points per city hub (so 5 city hubs = max of 300,000). Having a capitol counts as one extra city hub for purposes of event-attack calculations.
    • Thanks to orzelek for suggesting some kind of cap.
  • Event-attack counter increment rate from 1300 per hub to 1000 per hub.
  • City Hubs are now perma-cloaked and thus exceedingly unlikely to ever be destroyed, but now requires supply to actually build anything. Other city facilities can be destroyed normally, as before. This change mostly removes the possibility of being kicked out of the "quest line" by losing a city during the build-five-cities phase, and makes it much easier to use cities as major defensive bulwarks on the way to your home command stations.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out why people didn't want to use cities as heavy defense.
    • Event attacks used to send one battlegroup after each city hub, now it picks a random non-hub city facility from those existing in the galaxy.
  • Spire Habitation centers now produce 300/s of both metal and crystal. Generally the player wants as many shipyards as possible so there isn't a huge motivation to spam hab centers, but it does somewhat help compensate for the increased amount of fleet rebuilding required by the special attacks.
  • Leech starships no longer show up in event attacks.
  • Fixed bug where the signal to be scanned by a subspace receiver or refugee outpost was being spawned on the first homeworld their respective shards arrived on, rather than the homeworld they were constructed on. The game will also try to correct this retroactively in old saves by removing and respawning signals on incorrect planets.
    • Thanks to UberJumper for reporting.
  • Spire capital ship caps weren't scaling with multiple homeworlds since they used the entirely separate shipyard-count-based calculation, fixed to also scale with multiple homeworlds.
  • Previously event-attack battlegroups using the ship-coordination logic (same as the Hybrids use) were effectively immune to engine damage except for the "lead" ship (and the player is not told and should not need to know which ship is the lead ship). Fixed so that engine-damaged "underlings" can have an effective speed below coordinator.EffectiveMoveSpeed+5 (which is their normal speed while coordinated).
    • Thanks to orzelek for pointing out that engine damage was really ineffective against these.

• The force field size of the spirecraft shield bearers has been greatly increased.

• Previously, the metal and crystal costs to actually build spirecraft via the mining enclosures were swapped. Whoops, fixed.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Attritioner (Mark I-V)
  • This massive ship has weak direct guns, but does high attrition damage to all enemy ships once per second (on the order of multiple fixed-position attrition emitters). Enemy ships on the current planet will notice that they are damaged by attrition and will turn aggressive, however, so be careful of stirring up enemy planets with the attritioners.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Scout (Mark I-V)
  • These scouts are all perma-cloaked, but move pretty slowly and rapidly lose health if they are on an enemy planet of a higher mark level than the scout itself. Most of these except for the Mark IV or V spirecraft scouts make for better long-term sentries (thus freeing up your normal scouts to do mobile scouting) rather than as literal scouts that explore.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• Minimum ship cap multiplier for wave size from 0.3 => 0.03. This should help with the killer waves of zenith electric bombers, spire stealth battleships, etc.

• AI Reinforce-guard-post logic now stops prioritizing the "majority" type at that guard post when a certain cap is reached, that cap is related to the human ship cap, this should help avoid massive piles of z-bombers and stealth battleships, though it won't completely prevent them.

• Added "priority" values to each of the hardpoints on the Spire capital ships, and newly completed modules fill the lowest-priority slot that is open. This helps prevent the case where, say, the shield generator and one of the heavy-beam-cannon modules are shot off of a cruiser, and it happens to rebuild the HBC first, and it gets put in the shield generator's slot.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Spire Tractor Platform shots-per-salvo from 1+(20*mk) => 18+(3*mk).

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Ion Blaster (Mark I-V)
  • Advanced weapon insta-kills most ships with a mark level equal to or lower than its mark value. Cannot fire upon ships immune to insta-kill. Unlike the fixed-position ion cannons, these ion ships are both mobile and much shorter-ranged, but they are still extremely deadly.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz and love kawa for suggesting.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Penetrator (Mark I-V)
  • Perma-cloaked ship that cannot hit most smaller fleet ships and which must be manually targeted to fire. It does absolutely astronomical damage, and then is uncloaked and unable to fire for the next half hour. This ship is Blind, and thus requires the support of scouts or other similar ships to see its target, but otherwise it works best as a lone wolf sort of ship, delivering its payload and then returning to friendly space to rest and recuperate.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to LintMan for suggesting.

• Ion cannons, orbital mass drivers, and core warhead interceptors are no longer immune to minor electric shots.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Implosion Artillery (Mark I-V)
  • Large, high-range, middling-health artillery weapon that does damage based on a percentage of the enemy ship's remaining health (not to be less than 1 damage). This is most effective when enemy ships have very high remaining health.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Siege Tower (Mark I-V)
  • Huge, slow, low-range, high-piercing, highly-armored, radar-dampened battlestation with multiple shots excellent for taking out large swathes of enemy ships while repelling a beating in return.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Jumpship (Mark I-V)
  • Expensive, tiny-capacity transport with advanced teleportation and no self-attrition-per-wormhole. The advanced teleportation lets the jumpship pass through wormholes and across planets without the normal few-second delays that regular teleporting ships face. On planets with a higher mark than the jumpship, the jumpship expires in about twenty seconds, however.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Xampite to Titanite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for suggesting.

• Added a new LotS AI Plot: Beachheads
  • Each wave that the AI sends has a 10% chance of being half-size, but including a Beachhead structure that interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing player ships from retreating. Counterattack waves, event waves, raid engine waves, and other specialized forms of waves won't ever include a beachhead.
  • Five marks of AI Beachhead have also been added:
    • Tough, armored, immobile long-range AI ship that gets sent along with some waves. Interferes with supply on the planet being attacked (thus knocking out everything from turrets to forcefields until the beachhead is destroyed), as well as preventing its enemies' ships from retreating.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

(Released November 22nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.038

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Fixed bug where it was possible to order the new higher-tech modules for spire city defenses and capital ships through the ship design window, but not through the normal buy menu. Added to the buy menu now.
  • Added episodes 9 & 10, which are the end of the progression. They're actually also entirely optional, actually.
  • Fixed bug where the "must have all neighboring planets clear of AI" requirement of expanding a city was looking for units with WarpGateWave, instead of just checking for an AI command station.
    • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Laser Cannon Modules (for the Riot Control Starships, Hybrids, and Spire capital ships) now use new laser shot graphics generously donated by HitmanN, the Hybrid and Spire lasers use different colors for the different power levels (mkI = red, mkII = orange, mkIII = green, mkIV = blue) and the Riot laser mkI and mkII also use different colors.

• Fixed a bug that was causing Gravity Rippers to permanently strand enemy ships.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Added a new cheat for Light of the Spire: Impact Is Imminent (+1 Of Each Asteroid Type On The Current Planet)

• The far zoom icon for the asteroids has been greatly improved.

• Guardians and guard posts no longer try to load colormasks off the disk (which were all blank, anyway) to save a bit of RAM use and disk access time.

• Spire Mining Ships have been added to the game for the LotS expansion.
  • This ship allows the construction of mining enclosures on asteroids. Each tab in its build menu corresponds to a type of asteroid on which specific mining enclosures can be built.

• The attack range on the spire maw has been shrunk by 1000 to make extra sure that it's always in swallowing range of enemy ships.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for suggesting.

• The cloaking and selection circles on the spire stealth battleship have been increased in far zoom so that they are actually visible.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for reporting.

• The Spire Blade Spawners accidentally had tractor beams in the prior version. Fixed.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for reporting.

• The Core Neinzul Melee Guard Posts and all the spire Mini Rams now have a shot type of Ram instead of Blades. The Ram is also a melee type, but ships aren't immune to it.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting the confusion with mini rams not being able to attack many of their intended targets.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Shield Bearer (Mark I-V)
  • Does relatively low damage, but has very high health and provides a sizable force field to protect allied ships. Its force field does not reduce the attack power of protected ships.
  • These each get created as 1 ship from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Titanite, Mark I-V ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for suggesting.

• A system for spirecraft mining enclosures is now in place, so that the spire mining ships build mining enclosures which consume asteroids and which then actually turn into one or more spirecraft when completed. Whew. Now we can get on with the business of actually creating the rest of the spirecraft themselves!

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Ram (Mark I-V)
  • This massive battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for extreme damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to HitmanN and RCIX for suggesting.

• The far zoom icons for the spire bonus ships have had their contrast and sharpness improved.

• A new LotS Spirecraft ship class (built on the new asteroids) has been added: Martyr (Mark I-V)
  • This massive ship has no guns, but is bristling with tractor beams. When it dies, it explodes for extreme damage to enemy ships within its tractor range.
  • These each get created as 2 ships from one asteroid ranging from Reptite to Adamantite, Mark I-V ships, or as 4 ships from one asteroid ranging from Pysite to Adamantite, Mark I-IV ships.
  • Spirecraft are massive ships using advanced materials that mean they can't be repaired by any known technology. Use them wisely, or find a new asteroid belt to build encampments and replace them.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• All ships that have tractor beams on them are now immune to the tractor beams of other ships.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting the issue that led to this change.

• The health of armored and artillery golems has been increased 10x.

• In the prior version, the Civilian Leaders outposts were not working properly -- they could not be captured by taking their planet. Now they are properly captured, and they also give positive AI progress even when the AI command station has been destroyed but the humans have not yet colonized the planet.
  • Thanks to DonCarsto for reporting.

• The awesome modified version of the beam guardian that was created by HitmanN as a mod has now been integrated into the main game.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for creating!

• The way AI/minor-faction ships with module templates are created fixed to be much less fiddly (this was leading to avengers and AI-controlled Riots spawning with no modules).
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Spire ships now have a new blue explosion animation, like the Zenith ships have a green explosion.

• Fixed bug in recent versions preventing the ai eye and superterminal from functioning.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for reporting.

• Bulletproof fighter changed from Heavy hull type to Medium hull type.

(Released November 20th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.037

• The awesome modified version of the short range guard post, missile guard post, and MLRS guard post that were created by HitmanN as a mod have now been integrated into the main game.
  • Thanks to HitmanN, of course!

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Maw (Mark I-V)
  • Huge alien vessel that swallows transportable enemy ships and gradually attritions them. If the maw is destroyed, they are ejected with whatever health they have left. External guns also fire at targets at short range while it chews on the swallowed ships.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Blade Spawner (Mark I-V)
  • Large central ship has weak guns, but continously spawns smaller independent blades that crash into enemy ships.
  • This also adds mark I-V of Spire Blades.
    • Extremely fast melee ship -- loses health over a 10-second period, then self-destructs. Created inside Spire Blade Spawners, these are uncontrollable but will viciously attack the enemy on the current planet. Players cannot give direct orders to the blades.
  • Thanks to soMe_RandoM for suggesting.

• Fallen Spire stuff:
  • Added Episode 8.
  • Fixed bug where secondary unlocks (like the higher laser cannon modules unlocked by researching laser turret II and laser turret III) were being used for the parent tech description.
  • Shard planets are now chosen more forgivingly; it still insists on X planets deep in AI territory (X=2 or 3 for early missions, 4 for city-shard-recovery missions) but it will choose between those meeting that criteria that are closest to the human homeworld(s), rather than potentially choosing something waaaaaay far away from the human homeworld if the human has expanded fairly far in a particular direction. If the human expands in all directions from their homeworld they may still face a rather long "shard run".
  • Recovery mission chase-spawn interval now scales with combat style; on Normal it's unchanged, on epic it's 2x as long, on blitz it's 1/2x as long. This is just to compensate for differences in actual shard speed.
  • Hab centers and Shard reactors can now mount a few higher tech modules if you have them unlocked. Note that we intend to add more variety of modules for both the city defenses and spire capital ships (particularly the really big ones).
  • Fixed a freeze bug in ship-coordination code
  • Building a Spire Colony Ship from a shard no longer requires the refugee outpost, just a home command station. This makes it possible to continue during the city-building phase if you lose your refugee outpost.

• Fixed bug where AI players were having no wave-eligible core ship types unlocked, and in some cases no core ship types unlocked at all. This caused various problems. Now all AI players will have the core fighter, core bomber, and core missile frigate unlocked. This will be applied retroactively to savegames as they are loaded.

• The last of the new LotS bonus ship classes has been added: Spire Armor Rotter (Mark I-V)
  • Shots do fairly little damage, but eat away at the armor of ships they hit with each shot. Ship armor gradually regenerates over time (it takes up to 10 minutes to fully regenerate, depending on how much armor the target has), but cannot be directly repaired. Thus the armor rotters can create a window of opportunity for other ships to strike high-armor ships.
  • Thanks to Salamander for suggesting.

• There was previously a cap on wave timers that was preventing counterattack waves from taking as long as they should have been taking. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for reporting.

• The "Grid" map type from The Zenith Remnant has been renamed to "Lattice" instead, as it really was not a true grid.

• Two new grid-like maps have been added for Light of the Spire:
  • Grid
    • Planets are organized into an orderly grid.
  • Crosshatch
    • Planets are organized into an orderly grid with the angles also filled in.

• The spire tractor platforms were previously ridiculously fearsome. Fixed.
  • Thanks to UberJumper for reporting.

• Six new maze-like maps have been added for Light of the Spire:
  • Maze A
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze.
  • Maze A Easy
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a grid to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.
  • Maze B
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.
  • Maze B Easy
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Recursive Backtracker algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze, but with random extra links added in various spots.
  • Maze C
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a grid to create the maze.
  • Maze D
    • Planets are organized into a maze-like grid that uses the Prims algorithm on a crosshatch to create the maze.

• The armor piercing and armor rating on the stealth battleship have both been removed. The radar dampening range on these has also been doubled (making it half as effective).
  • Thanks to Nypyren for suggesting.

• A new Minor Faction has been added for Light of the Spire: Spire Civilian Leaders
  • Up to 10 Spire Civilian Leader Outposts are scattered throughout the galaxy in the control of the AI. Against their will, every hour each outpost increases the AI Progress by 1. You have the choice of either destroying these outposts for colloduing with the AI, or freeing the outposts by capturing the planet from the AI. When freed, each of these outposts will gratefully decrease the AI Progress by one every hour.

• The attack power of all the fighters have been reduced by half from the prior release, but also now have twice as much armor piercing in general.

• Guns have been removed from the Neinzul Enclave Starships, at the request of players to have these work more like space docks (not selecting with military ships, etc).
  • Thanks to Foogsert for suggesting.

(Released November 18th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.036

• Fixed some bugs where logic was not properly checking for AssociatedExpansion = -1; notably this pretty much prevented all Fallen-Spire event-attacks.
  • Thanks to orzelek for reporting.

• The game is no longer able to use multiple copies of the same starfield background to draw the starfield effect (that was able to make it look blurry when that happened).
  • Thanks to Toll and Kejal for reporting.

• Previously, Defender mode would result in different AI Progress for the host and the clients on game start. Fixed.
  • Thanks to Fleet for reporting.

(Released November 17th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.035

• The wave sizes of the aggressive AI types have been toned down quite a bit, from being 2x or 3x larger than normal, to being 1.25x or 1.5x larger in general, or 2x for the mad bomber (which was previously the sole 3x-larger one).

• For clarity, the rarity descriptions of asteroids have been changed from "Low, "Medium," and "High" to "Common", "Rare", and "Very Rare."
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• Fighters and bulletproof fighters have been rebalanced a fair bit.
  • Their attack power and health, etc, scales up more linearly by mark level, making the higher-level ships much more powerful than before.
  • Their attack power in general has increased 10x, while their hull attack multipliers have been dropped 10x. Any hull multipliers that were less than 10 have simply been removed.
  • This is essentially a preview of something we hope to do next week for all the fleet ship types.

• Fallen-Spire Stuff
  • Added episode 7.
  • The in-hostile-space surveys now takes 2 minutes instead of 5.
  • The event-attack counter now won't count up at all until the first city hub is constructed. Any saves from before the first city hub construction will have their event-attack counter zero'd out on load.
  • All event-attack-counter incrementing now comes from the city hubs, to avoid players feeling like they're being penalized for building the structures and ships that come from the hubs. This also avoids problems where multi-homeworld games using the expanded caps for the Spire capital ships was resulting in the event attack counter increasing faster AND causing bigger attacks, when it should have been maintaining the same frequency as a single-homeworld game while using bigger attacks.
  • Fixed a bug where saves made after construction of the subspace receiver or refugee outpost in versions where those were the last implemented stage of the progression were failing to progress when loaded in recent versions.
    • Thanks to themachineissentient, Lancefighter, and Dazio for reporting this from their mp game.
  • City Hub IncrementsEventWaveCounterByThisPerMinute from 1500 => 1300 (the 1500 is from the aforementioned combination of other factors into the hub, the decrease is to compensate in part for the build-up time from hub construction to full deployment if its structures and capital ships).
  • Event attacks will now use roughly 1/3rd as many fleet ships, if it is unable to spend the points they will be shuffled up to buy more escorts.
  • When loading games from 4.034 or earlier, the game will compute the event-attack-counter contribution from the existing city hubs and set NextRawEventWaveSize and AccumulatedEventWaveCounter to what it would have been with the new numbers. It is also very forgiving of city hubs that have been in existence for over 3 hours, though in general having several hubs for several hours is going to lead to tremendously dangerous event attacks.
  • Frequency of chase-spawns during recovery of city shards increased so that the actual "points per second" stays constant with the first city-shard-recovery, but the power of each spawn is larger on the later missions.
  • Event attacks can now choose from a much wider selection of starships and golems.

• Warbird Starship health 300,000 => 3,000,000.
• Beam Starship health 900,000 => 4,500,000.

• The way that AI fixed-position ships, most notably things like guard posts, respond to radar jamming and similar is now much improved.

• Space planes now have a new "Radar Dampening" ability that makes them impossible to hit beyond a certain distance. This even affects snipers, ion cannons, and the like -- they can't target the space planes until the planes get close enough to them.
  • Thanks to TheDeadlyShoe for suggesting.

• Scout drones 1-3 now also have the radar dampening ability, to counteract the recent nerf to scouts based on making them unable to outrun shots through wormholes.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Stealth Battleship (Mark I-V)
  • Powerful battleship with onboard cloaking options as well as a portable radar dampener that makes enemy ships have to be in very close range to hit it at all (radar dampening does not affect the ability of enemy ships to hit other ships, just this one).
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• The Attack Power of the Zenith Starship has been increased 3x, as it was actually lower than the flagship (though with more shots) lately.

• The Spire Starship has had its range increased by 10k, it's attack power roughly tripled, and its number of shots cut by half.

• Continuous beam weapon endpoints now maintain position to the firing ship rather than maintaining an absolute position.
• Fixed bug where continuous beams were not properly "punching through" when the current target was destroyed and no other targets were behind it.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Teleporting Leech (Mark I-V)
  • Large teleporting ship fires lightning shots. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator).

• Yet... another... wildly different sound subsystem method in an attempt to get rid of the psched issue on osx. I'll be really surprised if this one doesn't work, and it also has the side benefit of having to do fewer calls to the disk. It possibly has a drawback of limiting how many sound effect files can be used by the game (to around 200), but AI War is presently under that number, anyway.

• Fixed bug where superterminal would stop generating ships once it tried to cross from MkIV to MkV ships. For now it will just stick with MkIV.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient, Lancefighter, and Dazio for reporting.

• Gravity turrets and other ships with gravitational effects now only affect enemy ships, rather than all ships. This makes them significantly more valuable and less annoying to use.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Gravity Drain (Mark I-V)
  • Large, slow ship slows the movement of enemy ships near to it. Also has powerful short-range lasers.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Gravity Ripper (Mark I-V)
  • Large, high-health, slow ship temporarily halts the movement of enemy ships with every hit of its weak, short-range, rapid-fire energy bursts. Best used in combination with other ships to keep fast targets from escaping.
  • Thanks to KDR_11k for suggesting.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Mini Ram (Mark I-V)
  • This miniature battering ram specializes in high-health targets, crashing into them for high damage and destroying itself in the process. Unable to hit smaller ships.
  • Thanks to RCIX for suggesting.

• A new LotS bonus ship class has been added: Spire Tractor Platform (Mark I-V)
  • Large, slow alien vessel is bristling with small guns but most importantly many tractor beams. This has obvious defensive uses, but can also be used to hold enemy ships at bay while longer range allied ships take them out.

(Released November 17th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.034

• Sniper, Tractor, Tachyon, Artillery, and Laser guardian shots-per-salvo significantly reduced, damage-per-shot increased to maintain same raw dps. Should shred fleet ships somewhat less. Flak, Lightning, and Raider guardians a bit more distinctively-against-large-groups now.

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added episode 6.
  • The 2-hour time limits on the survey missions have been removed. The main point of them was to encourage the player to be planning to move forward in the near future, rather than waiting until significantly later in the game (when it might no longer be possible due to sheer AIP, buildup, etc), but the psychological impact was more of "feeling rushed", which was not intended. The limits may be re-introduced later in another form if this is found desirable.
  • Spire frigate, destroyer, and cruiser main weapons changed from Heavy Beam Cannons to a new beam mechanic (currently called "Photon Bombardment Cannon", though not all tooltips may indicate this).
    • These look pretty similar to a single-beam HBC, but instead of applying all their damage in one frame they apply it over about 2 game seconds, doing damage every frame, but the beam endpoint cannot change during firing. This makes it much easier to apply full damage at a longer range than the fan-of-beams based HBCs, but it is also possible for the target to move out of the beam during those 2 seconds. It behaves similar to an HBC in that it hits whatever is along the actual line of fire, and closest to the firing ship, and continues through any targets destroyed by the damage.
    • Note that the heavy beam cannon modules mounted by Spire ships are still HBCs, only the main guns are now PBCs. There may be some PBC modules for the higher capital ships later on.
  • Along with the mechanic change, the Spire capital ship main-guns now have a firing cycle time of about 10 seconds instead of 5 seconds, and do about 4x as much damage as they used to (2x to compensate for the reload time change, 2x to compensate for the mechanic change that makes it very much more anti-big-target).
  • The AI's Event-attack composition logic now uses a somewhat different system for assigning point-values to eligible ship types, so there may be some differences in sizes and when certain ships start showing up in these.
  • Core Starships are no longer immune to missiles (this is a base game unit, but in practice is only encountered via cheats or the Fallen Spire progression).
  • Survey Ships can now fit in a transport, though they will not be able to scan from inside them.
  • Spire capital ships will no longer add more to the event-attack counter when on an AI planet, removing the penalty from using them offensively.
    • Thanks to orzelek for reporting the unseemly difficulty of having 1 Spire City on Diff 7, due to offensive use of the Spire fleet.
  • Added "Enable Advanced Logging" toggle to the advanced tab of the settings window. The only thing this does right now is add entries to a new "EventAttackCompositionInfoLog.txt" log file in the RuntimeData directory, each time a Fallen-Spire event attack is launched, with details on the composition that is useful for balance and debugging. The option is off by default since disk i/o is related to some of the recent instability issues on OSX, etc, but really it should be safe since these attacks are not triggered frequently.
    • If you are playing a Fallen-Spire game, we would appreciate your turning this option on in case you run into some oddness or just sheer brutality from the event attacks, it makes it much easier for us to get the necessary details to make informed decisions.
  • For 4.033 the IncrementsEventWaveCounterByThisPerMinute values for each of the relevant Spire unit types were about 35% of what they were in 4.032. For 4.034 they will be roughly 25% of the 4.032 values.

• Transport unload radius changed from 50,000 to 60,000.

• Put in a fix that prevents a semi-rare exception from killing the AI thread.
  • Thanks to Kejal and Ymihere for reporting.

• The method for randomizing lists has been made generic rather than object-based, so that lots of boxing and casting no longer occurs with it, saving a bit of CPU and more transient memory usage.

• Previously, there was an extra wave per wave event for difficulty 8, two extra waves for difficulty 9, and three extra waves for difficulty 10. This made the game WAY harder for solo play on those difficulties, but much easier the more players you have (since this didn't scale per the number of players).
  • Now it has been changed so that there are no extra waves per wave event on difficulties 8 and 9 (as the more recent changes to wave sizing make this unneeded, anyway), and the number of waves per wave event is simply doubled on difficulty 10 (so that way it scales appropriately with the number of players). Normally there is one wave per home planet of the players per wave event.
  • Thanks to Dazio for reporting.

• Warp Jammer Command Stations now block counterattack waves.
  • Thanks to Winter Born for suggesting.

• Counterattack waves are now 4x larger than normal, but take a full 14 minutes to arrive. This makes them more of an event than they used to be, even, but also makes them much easier to prepare for and deal with.
  • Thanks to Spikey00 and others for inspiring this change.

• Previously, SuperTerminals and AI Eyes were not limited in what they spawned based on the types that the controlling AI had unlocked. Fixed.
  • Thanks to HitmanN for reporting.

• When a target ship gets into a transport or goes through a wormhole, shots that are incoming to that ship will now hit the the ship immediately. This prevents players or the AI from being able to use wormholes or transports to fire pot-shots and then disappear.

• Shot damage is now recalculated right when a ship is hit, so that if targets were changed (was the forcefield, now the ship, or vice-versa) the appropriate damage is now done rather than an inflated or reduced amount.

• Multi-shot ships no longer are able to get any "freebie" shots if their target dies while their shots are incoming against it. This nerfs the mutli-shot ships to a minor degree, but more significantly it is a CPU-cheap way of solving a huge bug that was recently leading to multi-shot ships sometimes getting loads and loads of freebie shots that they weren't supposed to -- leading to things like the "rapid fire artillery guardian," for instance.
  • Thanks to mr_lolz for reporting.

• Yet more changes have been made to sound (and, actually, this time also music) playback to hopefully further reduce the psched issue on OSX. Additionally, this should fix the nonresponsiveness and cutting-off-too-early issues with sound effects on windows in the last version.

• Raid Starships are no longer immune to missiles.

• FF Bearers are no longer immune to or absorb EMPs (to make it possible to disable their ff coverage via emp).
  • Thanks to lanstro for the suggestion.

• The health of all the scout starships have been doubled.

• The health and other stats of the scouts have been improved a bit.

• Fleet, Bomber, Siege, Raid, Leech, and Riot Starships all now cost 2x more metal and crystal than before, and thus also take 2x longer to build. This should hopefully bring their cost-to-benefit ratios more inline with the fleet ships.

• Dyson Gatling Health increased by factor of 10. Also, they now take 1000 seconds to auto-decay instead of 200 seconds (it had been 1000 before the removal of a standard 5x health multiplier). Also can now hit UltraHeavy and Structural hulltypes again, but should still be unable to hit all guard posts to avoid freeing stuff.
• Marauder Buzz Bomb and Marauder Dagger Frigate health and attack power increased by factor of 10.
• Resistance FighterBomber and Frigate health and attack power increased by factor of 3.
• Player-Ally and Enemy-To-All Neinzul Roaming Enclaves health increased by factor of 10; AI-ally ones left as-is since those are painful enough.
• Neinzul Preservation Wardens health and move speed increased up to same as AI-Ally Roaming Enclaves.

(Released November 15th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.033

• A completely new formula for wave sizes has now been put in place, and it puts a much more linear weight on AI Progress and difficulty when determining wave size. This attempts to go back to some of the earlier 2.0-and-before feel of the AI Progress increases while staying away from extreme early game difficulty with the first waves.

• Impulse Reaction Emitter damage is now multiplied by (sqrt(targetEnergyUse)/10) instead of (targetEnergyUse/100) (the root is computed when the energy use is set, not each time it is needed, of course), much like the zenith polarizer now multiplies by the square root of armor rating instead of armor rating. Also using the lower divisor to make it more granular. Base damage is half what it used to be (except the core version which had a much higher base, down to like 1/4 of what it was).

• AI Carriers engine health from 100 => infinity.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• AI-only Black Widow golems 1/2 health modifier (it used to have less than a core starship, and not much more than an old spire starship).
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out the oddity.

• Fallen-Spire stuff:
  • Added "episode 5".
  • Spire Heavy Beam Frigate now fires 1 250,000 damage beam instead of 5 50,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Destroyer's main gun now fires 1 375,000 damage beam instead of 5 75,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Cruiser's main gun now fires 1 750,000 damage beam instead of 3 250,000 damage beams.
  • Spire Heavy Beams now have no bonuses against anything (they had a few bonuses against small-ish stuff, which is not their intent; the existing heavy beam cannon turrets and modules are unchanged).
  • Coordinator ships now release their minions if the coordinator's engines are shot out.
    • Thanks to Lancefighter for admitting to the use of this tactic.
  • The rolling special attacks that start midway through episode 4 have been cranked down to happen about 35% as often as before. The actual attack sizes will be about the same. This will be retroactively applied to 4.032 saves so that future attacks won't be as large. Any attacks already spawned will not be affected, however.
    • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting this in mantis.
• Hybrids will now launch an attack if at least 7/8ths of the hybrids that are coming are ready, and will not intentionally wait for the last 1/8th.

• Modules firing will now apply the same "cannot be cloaked for x seconds" logic to their parent ships as to themselves.
  • Thanks to themachineissentient for reporting.

• Fixed a bug in the prior version that was causing special forces ships and astro trains to not patrol properly.
  • Thanks to Ozymandiaz for reporting.

• Fixed index out of bounds exception in reference tab.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting.

• Fixed a sizing issue that was causing an error message and for the special forces guardian to not appear in far zoom.
  • Thanks to orzelek and themachineissentient for reporting.

• System.IO.File.AppendAllText is no longer used, in favor of a wrappered System.IO.StreamWriter. It is apparently possibly the case that the AppendAllText does not close properly, or uses a secondary thread, in Mono on OSX. That's not 100% certain, but as a matter of safety at this stage we're trying to eliminate extra held handles that might exist.

• A wildly different sort of sound playback system has been put in place. It's now using PlayOneShot off a single audiosource, for those keeping score. The hope is, once again, to fix the OSX psched issue with either this change or the File.AppendAllText change.

(Released November 13th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.032

• Several things with HullType.UltraHeavy changed to HullType.Heavy, since they just didn't have the hp to play in that league.
• Most bonuses vs HullType.Heavy reduced to 20-25% of what they were, since they were much more in line with bonuses vs. HullType.UltraHeavy, leading to alarmingly rapid destruction.
  • Thanks to Lancefighter for pointing out some of the more egregious cases.

• All Fabricators from base health of 60,000 to 1,000,000, since they are lost forever if destroyed and previously a player could lose one before they even realized there were hostiles near it.

• Fixed swapping of text between two keybinds on the controls window.
  • Thanks to Nypyren for the report.

• Added context menu item for when you have a single ship selected that is modular, for opening the ship design window with that ship's modules prepopulated into the slots so that you can save the design. You can also change the modules manually or select another defined custom design and apply it to the ship you used to get to the window.

• Spire Starship given 16000 armor piercing, because it strangely had none despite both the Zenith and the Core starship having it.

• Core Starship rebalance:
  • Armor from 5000 => 2500.
  • Health from 65,000,000 => 25,350,000 (twice the Spire Starship's).
  • Attack Power from 40,000 => 60,000.

• Fallen-spire stuff:
  • Art added for actual zoomed-in graphics and buy icons of fallen-spire-related stuff; buy icons and far-zoom-icons still what they were.
  • Added "episode 4".
  • Added an Achievement for completing "episode 1" of the fallen spire progression on difficulty 10 with 8 human homeworlds (it takes the number of human homeworlds or the number of human players, whichever is greater). If this causes you grievous harm, blame the guys on irc.
  • Fixed a bug where the AI would scrap some of the starships spawned an event attack.
  • The "from homeworld" scans now only take 5 minutes instead of 45.
  • Spire Heavy Beam Frigates:
    • Actually have an engine health now.
    • Shots-per-salvo from 7 to 5.
    • Now properly immune to insta-kill, tractors, reclamation, emps, and paralysis (some of these had been missing).
  • Non-chase event attacks now try to be a bit more coherent.

• The way that the AI thread keeps track of Astro Train Stations and Special Forces Rally Points (of all sorts) is now significantly more efficient and effective, resulting in somewhat lower RAM and CPU use on the AI thread in general.

• The EMP on death ability now shows how many seconds the EMP is for.

• The way that expansion enabled status is checked and set in code is now more efficient on RAM and CPU use.

• 35 new guardians have been added to LotS (5 marks each of 7 new guardian types): Carrier, EMP, Self Destruction, Special Forces Rally, Vampire, Warp Gate, and Zombie.
  • EMP guardians only appear on difficulty 7 and up.
  • Self-destruction guardians only appear on difficulty 8 and up.
  • Warp gate guardians only appear on difficulty 7 and up.
  • The rest of the guardians have a more normal difficulty spread, and thus appear at all difficulty levels.

• Thanks to HitmanN for providing module-scale versions of the Heavy Beam Cannon graphics (the turret versions of which he also provided).

• Six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite.
  • Build a mining enclosure (not available yet in the beta) around this asteroid to consume it and use its advanced materials to create advanced ships not accessible any other way.
  • Note these are utterly useless at the moment, but won't be for long. ;)

• The way that the text wrapping is handled on the intel summary is now better, appropriate to its new taller-but-narrower appearance.

• Transports can now not unload further than 50,000 range units from planet-center (for reference, the maximum distance anything can be built at is 60,000), to avoid some of the more exploitative usages.

• In yet another attempt to find that sound-related resource issue on OSX, the sound system has been hugely restructured to be more bulletproof and to hopefully remove any possibility that Arcen's code is dropping any clip references that were keeping files open.

• A new version of the Unity Engine, 3.1, is now in use (updating from prior version 3.0).

(Released November 12th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.031

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

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

• Updated Zenith Polarizer tooltip to no longer specify the exact relationship between attack power and target-armor, since it's more complex now and there isn't space to explain it all.
  • Thanks to liq3 for pointing out the inaccuracy.

• Re-implemented the small window that used to draw when placing a ship, that tells you why the icon is red if the proposed location is not valid.

• Fixed bug where the minor-faction-shots-never-anger-AI logic was causing it to not even apply the repair-cooldown from the damage. Changed to handle LastDamaged separately from LastAngered.

• GZip compression is now used instead of Zip compression for savegames. This has the advantages of: 1) resulting in significantly smaller save files, especially for large savegames -- as much as 30% savings at the upper end; 2) resulting in the correspondingly smaller full sync network requirements for multiplayer; 3) hopefully solving the "pthread_getschedparam" issue on OSX, which seems to quite likely have been related to unintentionally-multithreaded zip processing in the autosave process.
  • Huge thanks to dumpsterKEEPER, resistor, and Vampyre for helping to track this one down.

• A message is now shown when a savegame is saved, to provide visual feedback that the save actually did occur. It's only been since SlimDX that this message was missing, incidentally, but it's fixed now.
  • Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting.

• Raid Starships now have only 1/2 the health reduction that was previously made a few releases back (it's about 5x more health than in the last version, or thereabouts).
  • Thanks to Toll, orzelek, Winter Born, and Moonshine Fox for suggesting.

(Released November 9th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.030

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 8th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.029

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 5th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.028

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

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.027

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

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

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

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

(Released November 4th, 2010)

Prerelease 4.025

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

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

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

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

(Released November 3rd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.024

• Colony ships no longer have any energy cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 2nd, 2010)

Prerelease 4.023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Released November 1st, 2010)

Prerelease 4.022

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

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

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

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

(Released October 29th, 2010)