AI War:1.010 Release

-The game now remembers the screen position and zoom level on each planet for the local player, so when the player is switching around between planets, the zoom level will be changed. This is not kept between saving and loading of the game.

-The ship selections are now remembered when players switch between one planet and then back.

-Mark II Engineers now have infinite engine health, like all the other teleporting ships.

-All of the ship selection shortcuts (comma, period, B, S, etc) now support Ctrl+<key> to select all ships of that type.

-Right-clicking an icon in the planetary summary now cycles through the ships with that icon, rather than selecting them all. Ctrl+right-clicking them selects them all.

-Space tugs and etherjet tractors can now be able to move ships with shot-out engines.

-The selection rectangle counts now only show up for 10x10px selection boxes and up. This prevents a flicker of the text when ships are just being left-clicked.

-There is a new "Show Minimap Box On Top Of Ship Blips" option in the Misc Interface Options section of the settings.

-Double-clicking items in the listboxes for joining a multiplayer game, listing profiles, and listing tutorials now automatically does the default action, rather than requiring a single-click and then a button press.

-There was previously an inaccuracy with the hostile wormholes count on planets not adjacent to human planets. Fixed. Before it was counting all warp gates as a hostile wormhole, but now it will just count exo-galaxy wormholes as it should be.

-Previously, changing a number of advanced options in the lobby was causing the chat history to be cleared. Fixed.

-If a ship is on a different planet from the tractor beam that is holding it, it will now be forced through to the other planet. This should never happen anyway, unless the held ship fails to follow the tractor ship through the wormhole.

-Space Tugs, Mines, Missiles, Fortresses (super and regular), Force Fields, and Cutlasses all can now have a health regen rate of some variety. In many cases it takes several hours to full heal one of these ships, but the general idea is that all non-repairable ships now have some capacity for self-healing.

-Thanks to recent changes to AI tactics when going through wormholes, the Special Forces Captain is a lot more difficult now. It has been promoted to now be a HARDER AI type instead of a MODERATE one.

-Laser Turrets now require Mark II Turrets to be unlocked first, instead of Mark III.

-The cost of Mark III standard turrets is now half its prior value, and its health is now 4x higher. The health of Mark II standard turrets is now 2x its prior value.

-Energy Reactor efficiency (mark I and II) now goes down by 20%/40% for each additional reactor beyond the first built on the same planet. This will encourage players to not cluster their reactors on their home planet, which will also make them harder (more interesting) to defend. Most existing savegames are likely to suddenly have a negative energy balance when loading this new version. These never drop below a floor of 10% efficiency.

-The range of munitions boosters has been doubled. However, munitions boosters now only work when they are not moving.

-The starting tech level of AI planets was being calculated too late in the prior map generation logic. That has been fixed, which will change the scenarios from what they previously were. For one thing, this will make AI players use lower-level force fields on lower-level planets, like they should have been doing all along.

-The protection radii of all of the force fields has been increased. The size of the Mark I force field has been doubled, and the increases to the Mark II and II force fields are much smaller. This makes the lower-level force fields significantly more useful for players and AIs, even though they are still way weaker than the higher-level force fields.

-Teleporting ships are no longer restricted from going through wormholes. This limitation was too restrictive in practice, and now that the AI has wormhole defenses, this is no longer really needed, anyway.

-There is now a new settings option under Zoom/Pan settings: Restore Zoom When Activating Control Group. This restores the prior-saved zoom level at the other planet when switch planets during control group activation.

-The AI now uses group-move when attacking players from a guard position. This helps to maintain the power of the guarding ships, rather than letting them get so easily strung out and weakened.

-Fighters are now 75% more resistant to cruiser shots, which makes homogeneous cruiser fleets less powerful.

-Electric shots are now grouped into two categories -- major and minor. All of the current electric shots are minor except for the big lightning explosions (missiles, electric shuttles, and lightning turrets), which are major.

-The following ships are now immune to minor electric shots: warp gates, ion cannons, data centers, AI Troop Accelerators, Counter Spies, Planetary Cloakers, Attrition Emitters.

-Teleport raiders now have an electric shot. Spiders now have a basic shot (which the tele-raiders used to have).

-There was a small bug early in the game where ships come out of a dock could "stack" in some cases, and then be stuck and immobile. This was mostly with electric shuttles. Fixed.

-There was previously a bug wherein the space tugs would go off in the wrong directions instead of going to their repair stations. This was because they were still "chasing" the target ship, trying to get closer but pushing it away with their tractor beams. Fixed.

-Ships held in tractor beams are now "reeled in" slightly if they are out of the base range of the tractor beam that is holding them. Thus if a ship slides out of range before it is fully grappled, it gets pulled back appropriately.

-Mobile Repair Stations can no longer be repaired, but now instead have a regen rate.

-Mobile Repair Stations are now immune to tractor beams.

-Cloaked enemy ships can no longer be cycled through with the planetary summary sidebar.

-When there is not a local repair station to go to, and space tugs are trying to carry a ship to a repair station, they will now drop their load and stop dead.

-Giving a movement order to a space tug now causes it to drop its load, making techniques such as the adjusted space snake impossible.

-Space Tugs are now better at catching moving ships to drag.

-Ships being dragged by a tractor beam ship now count as moving even though they are not moving of their own volition. This is relevant for ships such as the munitions boosters, which only give their boosting while stopped.

-It is now possible for a single player to control more than one home planet. This gives the player massively more resources at the start, but also causes the AI to be stronger and send more waves (as if there were the equivalent number of actual human players in the game). Additionally, if the player loses one home planet command station, then all of the home planet command stations that player controls are lost.

-When loading older savegames, the game now automatically bestows extra Mark II energy reactors if the efficiency changes in this version would cause the energy balance to go negative.

-Pressing the enter/return key in the planet name edit textbox now submits the change.

-New ship: MLRS Turret III.

-Scout Starships will no longer trigger the AI to build anti-starship arachnids. In general, there will also now be fewer anti-starship arachnids built at AI command posts, too.

-When shift is being held and multiple move or attack orders are being queued, previously the game would lose the entire queue if a different kind of order was accidentally issued (a move in the middle of a bunch of attacks, or vice-versa). Now the game just ignores those extra commands while the shift key is being held down, protecting the queue.

-The End key now issues a "stop units" command, which causes the units to stop dead where they are and collision-detect.

-Holding Ctrl+Shift while left-clicking and dragging now selects all ship types, not just the military ones.

-New ship selection filters (N+0-5, N+8, N+9) have been added. The first batch filters based on the ship level to be selected, the last two select based on ship health remaining (33% or less and 66% or less, respectively). See the control document for more details.

-The collision raidus (the bounding circle) was previously twice as large as it needed to be on special forces command posts. Fixed.

-The AIUnitData is now passed to the AI thread as a class, instead of as a struct, in an attempt to minimize the potential for out of memory exceptions when the game is left in an idle state for many hours.

-The following player ships are now immune to minor electric shots: constructors, engineers, missiles, colony and transport ships, all resource producers.

-Mark III engineers now have teleportation in addition to their other abilities.

-Making adjustments to the build queue in multiple constructors at once, via clicking the current-queue-item buttons, now works on all of the selected constructors instead of just the first.

-Previously, ships with shot-out engines could not be given movement orders at all. Fixed.

-Ships that are reloading would previously not seek new targets. This would cause them to react slowly when in free-roaming defender mode, and also to stop too slowly in attack-move mode sometimes. Fixed.

-Space Tugs will now pick up ships with engine damage like they would ships with hull damage.

-It is now possible to put up to 16 ship types in a single constructor's build queue (the old limit was 8).

-It is now possible to manually give space tugs orders to go pick up a specific ship.

-Engineers and mine layers that were in attack-move mode would previously cover the entire planet. This was an older design decision that is now confusing with the addition of free-roaming defender mode. Now engineers and mine layers will only cover the whole planet if they are put in free-roaming defender mode.

-Previously, scouts were not being insta-killed by counter-spies, but scout starships were. Fixed. Scouts are no longer immune to being insta-killed, although the shots from ion cannons have little hope of hitting them before they re-cloak.

-The attack range of spiders has changed to match that of cruisers, making them vastly more formidable.

-Anti-starship arachnids no longer deal engine damage, and their regular attack strength has been halved against all ships except starships.

-The Backdoor Hacker AI type has been demoted from being a HARDER AI type to being a MODERATE.

-Lightning Turrets and Electric Shuttles now emit lightning that hits ships under force fields.

-The warning sound for command stations being attacked was playing too frequently. Fixed.

-The metal/crystal cost and ship cap of the missile silo is now identical to that of the starship constructor. This lets players build up to five missile silos instead of always being limited to one.

-The metal and crystal cost of nukes has been cut in half.

-Setting off EMPs and Lightning Missiles now causes an increase of 2 to the AI Progress, but their costs have been reduced to 15k each of metal and crystal.

-The metal and crystal costs of armored missiles have been thirded, but they now cause an increase of 40 to the AI Progress when detonated.

-A very few missile silos (about a third the number of starship constructors) are now seeded around the maps for players to find and capture. This should help encourage players to discover and use missiles.

-New ship: A relatively inexpensive tachyon missile is now available in the missile silo. Setting these off reveals all of the cloaked ships on the current planet for 30 seconds (allied and enemy alike). This also causes the AI progress to go up by 1, but that is a comparably little amount for getting great insight onto where all of the cloaked enemy ships are on the current planet.

-In very rare circumstances, it was previously possible for latent AI-requested commands to be executed in a new or saved game directly after quitting the prior game. Fixed.

SPECIAL THANKS

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Thanks to ZarahNeander for suggesting the per-planet remembering of zoom and position, for suggesting that ship selections get remembered when switching between planets, for suggesting the change to the right-click functionality of the planetary summary, for suggesting the "Show Minimap Box On Top Of Ship Blips" option, for reporting the issue with the count of hostile wormholes, for suggesting the Restore Zoom When Activating Control Group option, for suggesting group-move for AI guards, for suggesting that engineers in attack-move mode not cover the entire planet.

Thanks to darke for suggesting that Mark II Engineers need inifite engine health, for reporting the issue with zoom changes when changing planets, for reporting the issue with the ship selection shortcuts, for suggesting the promotion of special forces captains, for suggesting the re-parenting of the Laser Turret tech, for suggesting the buffing of the mark II/III standard turrets, for inspiring the change to let teleporting ships go through wormholes, for suggesting key ships have immunity to minor electric shots, for suggesting MLRS Turret IIIs, for suggesting that more player ships have minor electic immunity, for suggesting the demotion of backdoor hackers, for suggesting tachyon missiles.

Thanks to PhilROI for reporting the issue with space tugs being unable to move ships with disabled engines.

Thanks to Pandemic for reporting the issue with the chat history getting cleared in the lobby, for suggesting that space tugs should value engine health and not just hull health when choosing targets, for suggesting that space tugs should be able to be issued manual commands.

Thanks to Reventantus for reporting the issue with the ships on a different planet from the tractor beams holding them, for suggesting the regen on force fields, for suggesting the energy reactor per-planet efficiency reductions, for suggesting the changes to munitions boosters, for suggesting that mobile repair stations be immune to tractor beams, for suggesting the improved behavior for space tugs when the repair station dies or leaves the planet, for inspiring the change to how space tugs act when given an order, for reporting the counterspies not firing on scouts.

Thanks to glyptar for suggesting the mobile repair stations not be repairable, for reporting the issue with the position of cloaked enemy ships being revealed by cycling through enemy ships on the planetary summary, for reporting the issue with multiple build queue item adjustment, for reporting the space tugs holding some ships out of range of repair.

Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the issue with the negative energy balances on load.

Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the enter key submit the planet name changes, for suggesting that scout starships not trigger anti-starship arachnids, for suggesting the queue protection, for suggesting the "stop units" key, for suggesting the ship selection filters, for suggesting that Mark III engineers have teleportation, for suggesting the increase in the number of ship types per build queue, for reporting the counterspies firing on scout starships.

Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting the Ctrl+Shift selection shortcut for all ship types, for suggesting that ships with shot-out engines be able to recieve movement orders, for suggesting that reloading ships be able to select new targets, for reporting the issue with the command station attacked warning sounds playing too frequently, for reporting the latent AI commands bug.

Thanks to PhilRoi, glyptar, and MorphingJar for reporting the issue with space tugs going off in odd directions, and providing savegames and other details with which to track it down.

Thanks to Monilas for reporting the bug with multiple home planets being selected for one player, and thanks to Admiral for suggesting that this be developed out into a fully-functional feature.

AI_War:Fleet_Command