AI War:Current Post-3.120 Beta

Prerelease 3.147

• Auto-explore is now non-random and much more even in deciding between equidistant planets of the same level of "I need to scout this". So if you have 5 unexplored (or unscouted, in an everything-starts-explored game) planets connected to your home world and build 10 scouts there and put them on auto-explore, 2 each will go to each of those 5 planets. At least, that's the idea.

• Fixed bug in paint-attack implementations that was preventing the attack-target-set sound from playing in previous prereleases.

• Added "Give Resources" item to X+right-click context menu:
  • Check the players you want to give to (you can give to more than one player at once, but it gives the designated amount to each, not the total split amongst them).
  • Left-click and Right-click the metal/crystal amounts to increase/decrease them (left = increase, right = decrease). Normal clicks are units of 1,000, ctrl-clicks are units of 10,000, alt-clicks are units of 100,000.
  • Left-click "Execute" to send the resources. It will add a note in the chat log of the amounts actually given (you can't give more than you have, etc).

• Fixed divide-by-zero bug (which manifested as an arithmetic overflow) in CustomScrollbarVertical and CustomScrollbarHorizontal.

• Added "Use non-Cleartype Fonts" checkbox to the graphics tab of the settings menu.

(note: the above changes reflect our work-in-progress build that has not yet been released)

Prerelease 3.146

• Fixed an overflow exception when ships with more than 2 billion combined health were selected together.

• Tugs are now blind, to prevent uberscouting.

• Fixed a couple of potential overflow exceptions related to focus firing (these may have contributed to desyncs in prior versions).

(Released 2010-05-18)

Prerelease 3.145

• Some internal networking changes have been made as the start of phasing in a new, more memory-efficient network/savegame format over time. These first changes add a very slight bit of memory/CPU efficiency on the game host, including in single-player games, but mostly they are laying the groundwork for more extensive future changes.

• Added "Create Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a selection including a unit eligible for construction templates (basically anything that can be direct-built by a command station; note that this includes engineers so be careful when box-selecting turret balls that have engineers assisting or repairing):
  • Click "Set Title" to bring up the text entry box, enter a title, and click "OK".
  • Click "Execute" to actually create the template and add it to your list (note that these are stored per-player, on the local machine, not in the save file).

• Added "Build From Construction Template" context menu item for when you have a command station or mobile builder selected:
  • Assuming you have defined construction templates, it will list each one (it will note which ones you lack tech for, or which ones require a different sort of builder though that should not happen in the current setup), and you can click one to "load" it into normal ship-placement-mode, then move your mouse around and place it like you would place an individual direct-build unit.
  • If you want to delete a template, click "Go To Template-Deletion Menu", then click the desired template (note that you will not be prompted for confirmation here; the confirmation is the fact that you went to the menu, so be careful).

• Existing "counter-shot radius" drawing logic (which also draws tractor range, tachyon range, etc) will now draw engineering range if the ship has one and does not have a counter-shot or other auxiliary range.

• Multi-place mode (arc-place or template-place) will now use the non-filled dotted-line circle for counter-shot/tractor/etc ranges (only on sets greater than 1, same as with attack range drawing in these cases).

• Fixed two internal overflow exceptions that previously could potentially have caused desyncs.
  • Both of these also lead to some small speed boost, especially for games that are already running very fast.

• At least for now, arithmetic overflow checking is now enabled.
  • This may cause a tiny performance hit, but in our testing it has been all but unnoticeable.
  • More importantly, this will cause the game to crash whenever an arithmetic overflow is encountered.
    • This is annoying if it happens, but far less annoying than having the game do something really wrong (like eat all your metal) and/or desync if such an overflow is encountered.
    • These sorts of overflows should be super rare, if you run into them at all, and the reason for our having enabled this is so that we can clean out any that might be hiding in the code causing issues.
    • If you run into this sort of crash, simply posting your UnhandledExceptions.txt file will let us fix the issue with comparable ease compared to if the overflow went silently as part of the simulation, as in the past.

(Released 2010-05-17)

Prerelease 3.144

• Added "Arc Place" item to context menu when you do the x+right-click while in ship-placement-mode (example: hit B to bring up the build menu, click the turret tab, click the mark I basic turret, you are now in ship-placement-mode, hit x+right-click).
  • "Draw Radius Length" lets you draw the radius line in a similar manner to arc-move; note that in this case you are not determining the position of the center of the arc, just the length of the radius of the arc (a bit unwieldy, but allows the finest level of control and works well with the range-display of ship-placement-mode).
  • "Degrees Of Arc", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the size of the arc; minimum is 30, maximum is 360 (so 180 for a half circle, etc).
  • "Ships To Place", left-click or right-click to increase or decrease (respectively) the number of units to place at once, minimum is 1, maximum is 9999 (so effectively ship cap); ctrl+click uses increment of 5, alt+click uses increment of 10, normal click increment of 1.
  • "Filled Arc", if checked, places points that won't fit on the primary arc in succesively smaller inner arcs.
  • "Set Points", sets the current ship-placement-mode target points according to the parameters you have specified. To then execute the build, click on the play area normally (it will use the clicked point as the center, not the origin defined by Draw Radius Length, so you can place multiple such arcs with successive shift-clicks).
  • "Back", moves back to the main context menu, without doing anything else (or undoing anything done) on the arc place menu.

• MRS Tugs speed from 72 to 140.
• MRS Tugs health from 8000 to 200000.
• MRS Tugs now have the same ai-low-priority flag as transports to prevent the AI from chasing them all over the place in a tactically-unsound fashion.

• Doubled Flak Turret attack against the units it's not particularly good against.

• Fixed bug in the fix for the bug preventing players from shift-right-click-queuing move orders on the galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where the local player could not place a construction using an ally's builder if the local player had exhasuted the ship cap of that unit (even if the ally still had ship cap left).

• Overhauled context menu code, visible changes:
  • Paint Attack's first item is now "Set Areas", to use:
    • Left-click "Set Areas".
    • Left-click-drag-and-release a rectangle over the first group of targets you want to destroy.
    • Repeat the left-click-drag-and-release over each group you want to destroy, in the order desired.
    • When all have been defined (and the other options like Group Move are the way you want), left-click "Execute". To check if it did what you want, hold shift to show currently queued orders.
  • Arc Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the origin of the desired arc; you now:
    • Left-click "Draw Radius Line".
    • Left-click the desired origin point.
    • Left-click the desired point-on-the-circle (which sets the radius, and the central point of arc for arcs of fewer than 360 degrees).
    • When the radius line and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".
  • Special Move now no longer assumes that the clicked point of the X+right-click used to open the menu is the desired destination point; you now:
    • Left-click "Set Destination".
    • Left-click the desired destination.
    • When the destination and other toggles are correct, left-click "Execute".

• Fixed bug where right-click while holding Z+X was not issuing orders (since X was pressed and it thought it was opening a context menu).

(Released 2010-05-15)

Prerelease 3.143

• Added "Split Selection Across Control Groups" item to "Selection" context menu.
  • Check the Control Groups you want to split the selection across.
  • Check "Should Remove Units From Current Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear existing control group associations before adding the new associations.
  • Check "Should Pre-Clear Target Control Groups" if you want "Execute" to clear out the "target" control groups before adding the ships from your selection to them.
  • Click "Execute" when you're ready to perform the split; the split is done evenly by ship type, the same as L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type".
  • In some cases this can be more useful than L/Shift+L/"Select Percentage By Type" because you don't have to manually reselect the other parts of the now-split-up group, but can use control group numbers instead.

• In the previous version, Paint Attack was not restricting targets to enemy ships, fixed.

• Paint Attack no longer changes preferred target type.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.142

• Fixed bug where shift-right-click in alternate galaxy layout view was moving the planet (which is supposed to just be shift-left-click).

• Removed duplicate menu item from galaxy layout context menu.

• Fixed conflict when holding z+x and right-clicking to issue other orders (previously this would open the context menu); now if z is being held, x+right-click does not open the context menu.

• Fixed hang bug that happened when generating a 120-planet spokes (or potentially tree) map with some seeds. In those cases it will now fail to place all 120 planets, but not by much, and the game won't hang.

• Added "Paint Attack" item to ships-selected context menu, it brings up a secondary menu:
  • "Set Area", click this, then click and drag on the play area to draw a rectangle around the targets you want to attack.
  • "Group Move", if you want your ships to use group move (in case you don't know, this means "move at speed of slowest unit in group").
  • "Fire While Moving/Stop To Engage(Attack Move)/Chase Enemies (Free Roaming Defender)", if you wish, click this to toggle between "normal" move, attack move, and frd.
  • "Queued Move", if you want the paint attack order to be queued up after existing commands already queued.
  • "Execute" executes the order (only does something if the area was set, of course); note that this does not close the context menu, so you can use it with the Queued Move toggle to, for example, issue successive paint-attack orders for the area around each guard post on an AI planet, and just let the ships go about their business if they're not likely to encounter effective resistance.
  • "Back" goes back to the parent context menu without issuing any additional orders (any ones already issued via "Execute" have already been issued and will not be canceled by this).
  • FYI, this command will never result in an attack order against a target that requires a direct right-click attack (command station, warp gate, that sort of thing)
  • FYI, when you're using this you're basically saying "kill these targets, I don't care what order", but each ship sorts the target list separately according to normal autotargeting rules and thus is fairly efficient about shooting things it's good against first (the focus fire control nodes also apply here).

• Moved Auto Explore command from A+E+X key combination to the x+right-click context menu (only when you have selected ships and at least one is a scout).

• Auto Explore now functions in the absence of unexplored planets (either you've explored them all or you started with all explored), and applies similar auto-pathing logic to unscouted or not-scouted-recently planets (preferring the unscouted, then the not-scouted-for-5-hours, then the not-scouted-for-1-hour, etc).

• Auto Exploring scouts no longer try to evade after exiting a wormhole, instead they should shortly pick a new exploration/scouting destination and get moving that way.

• Difficulties 8, 9, and 10 were supposed to be getting 1 extra wave per difficulty level, but were only getting 1 extra wave overall. This was a longstanding bug, and was a big contributor to why waves seemed undersized in difficulties 9 and 10 compared to other parts of the game. Fixed.

• Moved "Select Modules" context menu item into new "Selection" Submenu.

• Added "Select Percentage By Type" item to "Selection" context menu:
  • Use left and right click to increase and decrease (respectively) the "Percent To Retain" (note that the max is 90% and the min is 10%)
  • Click "Execute" to actually apply the narrowing, and your selection will = (Percent To Retain) * (current number of each ship type).
  • This basically substitutes for the "L" and "Shift+L" key combinations, but those have not (yet) been removed from usage.

• The AIs will now actually build the new Flak Turrets.

• Fixed a couple of potential desyncs.

(Released 2010-05-13)

Prerelease 3.141

• Balancing changes to Flak Turret: doubled explosion radius, reduced range by 1500 across the board, reduced metal/crystal cost to about 1/3rd of what it was, much more effective against fighters, has roughly 2x as much health and about 3x higher dps in general.

• First implementation of x+right-click context menu.

• Moved arc-move from shift-Q-right-click to an "Arc Move" item in the X+right-click context menu when you have selected ships. This new implementation of the arc move interface allows setting:
  • The radius (which is just the length of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • The number of degrees of arc (so 360 for a circle, 180 for a half circle, 90 for a quarter-circle, etc); for this one left click the line to increase the angle by 30 degrees, right click the line to decrease by 30 degrees.
  • The central point of the arc on the circle (which is just the endpoint of the center-to-point-on-circle line).
  • Whether the arc is filled in.
  • Whether the move is group/attack/frd and/or queued.

• Moved Switch-galaxy-layout-being-viewed controls from Alt+A+# to X+right-click context menu on galaxy map.

• Fixed bug where floating displays from a previous game were showing after loading/starting another game.

• Added "Select Ship Modules" item to X+right-click context menu when your selection contains modules or ships with modules. Note that the game does not indicate module selection if you are in far-zoom, this will be revisited later now that there is a reliable way of selecting them in far-zoom.

• Added "Special Move" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that acts as a "normal" (non-arc) move order, allowing setting of group/formation/attack/frd/queued flags via mouse rather than the various (and sometimes obscure) key combinations. Please note that the old key combinations for these DO still work (unlike other functions which are no longer on the keyboard at all).

• Added "Stop" item to X+right-click context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that emulates the "end" key command that cancels all standing commands, formation (if you're on sticky formations, those don't clear with normal moves), etc. Again, the keyboard key still works for this one.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout alt-click logic now uses a base radius of 40 instead of 20, to reduce planet info overlap.

• Alternate Galaxy Layout which-layout-you-are-viewing info line moved from bottom left to top right.

• Added support for use of "any" as the second parameter of the spawn-immediate-wave cheat, so "warp in the clowns,any,1" will send in a wave of any, but will use the 1 size modifier instead of whatever the AI Progress would dictate at the time. Note that the impact of the size parameter is very different in the "any" case than if you specify an actual ship type; generally it results in much larger numbers (so you probably want to start with using "1" as the size parameter, and work up from there).

(Released 2010-05-11)

Prerelease 3.140

• Updated the in-game credits to reflect recent player contributions.

• Orbital Command Station upgrades now provide more metal/crystal income, in order to make those upgrades more worthwhile. If you consider that an individual harvester produces 12 of metal or crystal, and if you consider how many harvesters can be built on most planets versus how much knowledge is required to get the command station upgrades, the upgrades were previously of lesser value than they should have been.
  • Mark II now provides 40 of each instead of 28 of each.
  • Mark III now provides 64 of each instead of 40 of each.
  • For the sake of comparison, the Mark I still produces 16 of each, and the Home command station still produces 80 of each.

• Guard Posts now show on the top row of the planet intel summary.

• New Hotkeys for galaxy map (likely to be changed to something else):
  • Alt+A+9 : switch to your alternate galaxy layout
  • Alt+A+(1-8) : switch to alternate galaxy layout of player 1-8 (respectively)
  • Alt+A+0 : switch to official galaxy layout
  • Please note that all alternate layouts start exactly the same as the official layout, but there's a flashing note in the bottom left of the screen if you're viewing an alternate layout.

• While viewing your alternate galaxy layout you may:
  • Shift-left-click-drag planets around
  • Alt-left-click a planet to perform a basic automatic "pull in chains" operation that relocates subsidiary chains (defined as link cardinality <= 2) into a cluster near the clicked planet. On higher-connections-per-planet map types this may not help you at all; on snakes and spokes and such it can be a huge time-saver.

• Added Flak Turrets: mkI, mkII, and mkIII. Graphics donated by HitmanN (with preliminary work and idea by superking, many thanks to both). The Flak Turrets have only received preliminary balancing, intended to be good against zenith viral shredders, cutlasses, and vampires, and mediocre against other very light ships, and only minorly effective against anything much bigger)

• Extended "warp in the clowns" cheat to take 2 additional parameters (separated by commas), the first is a case-insensitive ForegroundObjectType name, the second is the base wave size (which is multiplied up down and sideways, but allows relative control)

• Updated icon for Heavy Beam Cannons to a new graphic donated by HitmanN.

(Released 2010-05-10)

Special Thanks

• Thanks to HitmanN for providing graphics for the new Flak Turret line, for providing a far-zoom-icon for the Heavy Beam Cannon line (he had already provided the main graphics for that line during the last dev cycle), for balance feedback on the flak turrets.

• Thanks to superking for the idea behind the new Flak Turret line, for longsuffering during the balance process for those.

• Thanks to RCIX for the idea behind the alternate galaxy layouts, for his patience as that languished on the "we really don't think this is feasible" pile, for suggesting that the "which layout am I looking at" info line be moved to another corner, for suggesting the Paint Attack feature.

• Thanks to wyvern83 for suggesting that guard posts show on the top line of the planetary intel summary on the galaxy map, for reporting a conflict between the alternate galaxy layout controls and the planet-priority setting keys.

• Thanks to orzelek for suggesting that the alt-click function on alternate galaxy layout use a larger base separation between planets, for reporting that Paint Attack could cause Friendly Fire incidents.

• Thanks to Fleet for reporting a conflict between x+right-click and a common usage of z+x, for reporting some desync problems, for reporting that the epilogue display was not clearing on a new game.

• Thanks to platinawolf for reporting that generating a 120-planet spokes map was hanging on some seeds.

• Thanks to Winter Born for reporting that alternate galaxy layout mode was processing both right click and left click for planet-moving commands, not just left-click, for reporting that the attack-target-set sound was no longer playing.

• Thanks to rubikscube for pointing out that the now nearly-invincible super-fast tugs were a bit too good at scouting.

• Thanks to Black for the original proposal of the construction template feature.

• Thanks to Lancefighter for reporting that arc-placing tractors in large numbers was resulting in unhelpful opaque walls of color.

• Thanks to Rustayne for proposing a means to directly give metal and/or crystal, in addition to the existing mechanism of gifting resource harvesters.

AI_War:Fleet_Command