AI War:6.000 Release

Statistics For The Curious

AI War 5.0 - 6.0 spanned from Feb. 15th, 2011 through Oct. 18th, 2012 and it was full of some HUGE changes! 895 distinct changes were made as part of 97 different releases over the course of 611 days. One does not simply stroll through AI War patch notes, indeed.

Even though this was during the period that A Valley Without Wind was developed and released, we managed to keep up an average of 1 release every six days (though some periods were very light with releases and others were very dense with them, if you look at the actual dates; the average makes it sound more regular than it was). Given the length of time between 5.0 and 6.0, it's essentially the same length of time that was between 1.0 and 5.0. So that's certainly a good reason to have such huge patch notes and so many changes!

A full 149 Players are thanked in this series.

This document is the abbreviated, organized version of the full release notes (here).

Highlights

Huge

• Ancient Shadows, an entire new (paid) expansion, has been added to the game! Briefly summarizing the additions:
  • Champions! Optional hero units that can be added at the beginning of the game or midway through, these have the unique ability to fly through special wormholes into the new nebulae. In those new areas, champions encounter both friendly and hostile human, zenith, neinzul, and spire splinter factions. As your champion gains experience and recovers artifacts, you can guide its progression from a super-starship to a truly awesome powerhouse.
  • 9 New Bonus Ship Types, including the hilarious Tackle Drone Launcher and the first-ever bonus starship.
  • A New Minor Faction: the Dark Spire. These only awaken when many ships die near their spawners, but once they really get going neither the AI nor player will find them easy to stop.
  • Modular Fortresses, a long requested addition to the player's heavy defensive lineup.
  • 2 New AI Types: The tough-as-nails Heroic AI that throws champions at you, and the modular-fortress-happy Fortress King AI.
  • 2 New Map Types: The long-requested "Clusters" map type and a more advanced "Microcosm Clusters" variant.
  • 3 _Nasty_ new Core Guard Post types for the AI to defend its homeworlds with.
  • Over 90 minutes of new music from Pablo Vega.

• Hacking! We finally found a solution to knowledge-raiding that's both balanceable and fun:
  • Knowledge raiding and Superterminal hacking now both increase the same "hacking antagonism" value on the AI, and as that value gets higher the AI's response to any hacking activity gets increasingly powerful and erratic.
  • On top of this, we added a new "Ship Design Hacking" mechanic whereby you can hack an AI-controlled Advanced Research Station so that when you later capture it you can select from one of three randomly-chosen bonus ship types to unlock, instead of just being given one of them. This shares in the hacking-antagonism mechanic used by knowledge hacking and superterminal hacking.

• Completely redid the AI's Special Forces to make them an extremely important defensive mechanic that adapts to the player's offensive deployments and tries to thwart them where it counts.

• Added a new AI mechanic: the Strategic Reserve. The AI gradually adds strength to this reserve and deploys ships from it to critical defense actions, especially homeworld defenses. It also uses the reserve to contribute to Cross Planet Attacks, taking some of the burden off local defense forces.

• Added another new AI mechanic: the Threat Fleet. "Freed" AI ships will still do their normal stalk and attack behavior for about half an hour, but after that the AI figures that they've probably been stymied by strong human defenses and pulls them into a cohesive offensive fleet that waits for an opportunity to strike the human where it hurts.

• Massively reworked the energy system to cut out the "trivial to compute, time-consuming to do" micromanagement that the previous system encouraged:
  • There's no such thing as an inefficient reactor anymore: you can have one free-to-run energy-collector on each planet, and as many high-but-constant-cost matter-converters as you want anywhere.
  • Putting units in low-power-mode no longer reduces their energy cost (or ongoing m+c cost, for the energy-producers), so there's no motive to micro them up and down to pay the minimum m+c for the minimum energy necessary.
  • The free-energy collectors scale up with the number of homeworlds so that a multi-HW player doesn't have such an energy disadvantage compared to multiple single-HW players.

• Several minor factions and AI plots now have variable intensity that allows more game variety: want to play a game with TONS of human resistance fighters? Or where the Dyson Sphere has a dominant impact? Want just a few human marauders? Or hybrids on, but in much lower numbers? Or hybrids on, and massively amplified? It's all there.

• Totally revamped AI Carriers:
  • When there's too many AI ships on the planet for them to fully deploy (without unduly hurting game performance), they're no longer invincible but if you pop them they combine their contents into nasty mkV ships and mkV guardians.
  • Can no longer shoot through forcefields (but can still fly through them).
  • Now get more shots-per-salvo based on the ships being carried, so they're not so much less a threat when not-yet-deployed (previously high-carrier waves tended to be like several waves in series, which is much easier than intended).
  • There's now a toggle on the CTRLS window to tell your ships whether to auto-target carriers or not.

• Cross-Planet Attacks have been substantially reworked to be a much more serious threat.

• Each AI planet now picks 3 ship types to focus its reinforcements on, making each planet feel more distinct.

Big

• Re-implemented custom galaxy layouts for each player, so you can move planets around the map to get the strategic view looking the way you want.

• Substantially rebalanced waves, particularly on the higher difficulties.
  • Notably, 10/10 used to be totally lethal... unless you somehow pulled out some massive cheese and survived the first couple waves to get a foothold. Now the early 10/10 challenge is a much better "advertisement" for the kind of challenge that lies beyond the initial period. Accordingly, 10/10 has been massively rebalanced to be harder in those later parts of the game, as certain players have displayed the temerity to _win_ on that difficulty.
  • Also smoothed out several "difficulty cliffs" along the 7-to-10 range where one difficulty step was massively more significant than either the one just below or just above.

• The Botnet Golem has been split off into an entirely separate minor faction with its own costs/risks because it was so powerful. We could have just nerfed it down near the other golems, but this way is much more fun.

• The starfield backgrounds have been completely redone with something much more interesting.

• Rebalanced... honestly, it might be easier to list the units that were _not_ rebalanced during the 5.0-to-6.0 run than those that were.
  • Thanks to all the participants who contributed nominations, discussion, and votes to our "what's the worst unit?" (and other) community polls!

• Added a devious super-hybrid plot to Advanced Hybrids (on high enough intensity). That's a nice Dyson Sphere you've got there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it.

• Finally found a way to detect loss-of-focus from within the Unity engine, allowing us to auto-pause the game when this happens (there's a toggle to suppress the auto-pause, if you like).
  • Note: this doesn't work on the Mac in windowed mode, but it does work on the Mac in full-screen mode and on Windows in either mode.

Important

• AI War engine upgraded to Unity 3.3 from Unity 3.1.

• The Siege Starship (formerly known as the Dreadnaught) was too effective as "park at extreme range and pick off the enemy" ship so it was nerfed into the Antimatter Starship. That couldn't really hit anything, so it was re-imagined again into the Plasma-Siege Starship, which is much shorter ranged than the old siege starship but fires special ammo that does aoe damage, engine damage, and causes extra splash damage to targets under any forcefield it hits.

• The MkIII Riot Control Starship was given some new exclusive module possibilities (grav tazer, etc) to better set them apart from the MkI and MkII.

• Added Hardened Forcefields: an alternate form of human-tech forcefield that relies on reducing incoming damage more than absorbing it.

• Added the ability to switch your UI to display what another human player sees, making team control significantly more convenient and paving the way for other features.

• Added the "Helper" player role which is much like the "observer" or "spectator" role from other RTS games but they can also control the units of any human player allowing team control.

• Added a new Ultra-Low unit-cap-scale with 1/8th the caps of High, for folks on low-end hardware or wanting to play something crazy like a 16-homeworld game.

• Added a scripting language for generating lobby game-setups within a set of desired parameters, and a number of default scripts that ship with the game (including a few "Beginner Game" scripts, a few scripts for randomized minor factions, and a few scripts for randomized _and undisclosed_ minor factions).

• Added short-lived "Drones" that the player's Neinzul Enclave Starships can build. These are based on unlocked turret technology and provide more of a "carrier with fighters" feel.

• Made defending multiple planets much more viable (relative to the viability of defending one planet) by changes to wave interval (which impacts wave size), re-imagining the Military Command Station's weaponry, and adding the new per-planet-cap'd Minifortress.

• AI Eyes now have 3 varieties: Sentry Eyes (the old behavior), Ion Eyes, and Parasite Eyes. Each is pretty lethal against no-thought-blob attacks, in a different way.

• The ramp-up from one AI tech level to the next is now much more gradual, with waves containing a percentage of the next-higher tech level that increases as you approach the threshold.

• Reclamation damage is now much more likely to have a consistent impact because any reclamator nanites unable to reclaim their host when it dies "hop" to another nearby eligible target.

• Exogalactic strikeforces can now contain Hunter/Killers. Be afraid. And throw the rotten fruit at chemical_art for suggesting it.

• Exogalactic strikeforces are now more wily about picking targets. Get used to defending your outlying assets if you play with any exo sources.

• Several golems have been substantially buffed, to provide an appropriate reward for the costs/risks of playing on Golems-Medium or Golems-Hard. Enjoy your new "has tractors that paralyze!" Black Widow Golem and "that thing can kill anything, once every 8 seconds!" Artillery Golem.

• The game's RAM usage has been substantially reduced in many cases, leading to far fewer out-of-memory errors in remotely-sane scenarios (and even some clearly-insane scenarios, we've noted).

• Massively reworked the way the AI determines how many ships it gets in a reinforcement, so that it properly pays attention to how much a ship should "cost" relative to others (based on relative ship cap, mainly). This makes it much less likely that the AI will pile up huge amounts of low-cap ships on a planet, and if it does create such a pile up at least the proper price (in terms of fewer other ships elsewhere) was paid.

• Fixed all remaining desync bugs; haven't had a reported desync in months.

• Now when a forcefield is damaged, every other overlapping allied forcefield also takes a minimal amount of damage, preventing the old far-too-effective-to-be-balanceable tactic of having engineers repair inner forcefields while the outer ones tanked the damage. It was fun, but properly micro'd it was effectively invincible before.

• AI Homeworld structure seeding now distinguishes between normal and "brutal" structures: the core raid engine, core CPA guard post, and AI Eye were far more significant than the other structures being considered, and the difference between an AI HW with none of them and an AI HW with 5 core raid engines could be the difference between "pushover" and "impossible".

• Made fortresses, forcefield generators, and command stations drop rebuildable remains when they die, greatly reducing the need for micro when rebuilding after a significant AI breakthrough.

• Added the first per-control-group control options so you have finer control over auto-Free-Roaming-Defender and auto-kiting behavior.

AI Updates

• Fixed a relatively longstanding bug where AIPerPlanetShipCap and AIPerGuardPostShipCap were generally not being enforced when loading a game (either just-starting or loading later).

• Fixed a bug where hybrids were... basically completely broken. Sigh. The "don't let hybrids rebuild modules if they've recently been damaged" code was inverted in such a way that they could never build modules. And because they could never get modules, they were never satisfied that they were ready to go attack or defend or whatever.

Interface Improvements

• Ship Design Window: changed the positioning of the list of available modules for the selected slot so that it's always the same horizontal distance from the right edge of the window. Previously the "floating" behavior sometimes made sense but more recently it's just made it look buggy in some cases.

• Added a note to the Dark Spire description indicating it's intentional chaoticity (by way of warning the player).

• Fixed a textual error in the captive human settlement description.

• Fixed a typo in the kill-second-AI-homeworld objective text that made it nonsensical. It had said you had to destroy the CSG network Second instead of first... real cute; obviously the AI shouldn't have been assigned to proofread that part.

• Previously, when your ships exploded anywhere in the galaxy it played the same audio cue. Now if they are on a different planet from your view, it plays a much more muted, distant-sounding, quieter explosion sound effect.

• Updated tooltips for:
  • Armored Golem.
  • Artillery Golem.
  • Black Widow Golem.
  • Cursed Golem.
  • Regenerator Golem.
  • Hive Golem.
  • Botnet Golem.
  • Military Command Stations.
  • Captive Human Settlements.
  • Fallen Spire lobby tooltip

• Fixed a bug where the special-move context menu's catch-right-clicks option was basically failing to do anything. Now when it is toggled on it properly re-interprets right clicks outside the menu as "set destination to clicked point and then execute"

• Made it possible to bind Mouse2, Mouse3, Mouse4, Mouse5, or Mouse6 to the primary key of a KeyBinding. For reference, Mouse2 is the middle mouse button. Mouse0 is left-click, Mouse1 is right-click, and both are excluded from this due to being used in many other ways by the main input code. Mouse3-6 don't exist on most mice, but are available for those who have them.
  • One example use of this is to bind OpenDefaultContextMenu to Mouse2 (middle mouse)

• Fixed several minor issues with the tutorials, in preparation for 6.0.

• Added a welcome message (referencing the tutorial and the "Beginner Game" setup script) to the lobby for the first time it is opened under a given profile (this is suppressed if the game detects that the profile has already started playing a real game at least once).

Ship Logic Updates

• Dark Spire minor faction ships will no longer kill warp gates.
  • Note: the rationale with these is that they're supposed to have a chaotic and uncontrollable effect on the game if included and triggered. If you want minor factions that don't cause AIP or other badness, those factions already exist :) But the DS still won't kill command stations or warp gates because those: 1) Increase AIP substantially. AND 2) Are very common (i.e. on every planet). There's no strategy in avoiding DS spawns near those, because they're everywhere.
    • So something that is merely common, but does not increase AIP much (Special Forces Guard Post, +1 AIP) is fair game.
    • And something that substantially increases AIP, but is rare (Black Hole Generator) is fair game.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where attack-move units with no other orders would auto-target stuff that should not be auto-targeted (wormhole guard posts, AIP-on-death structures, etc) if the unit in question shot them first.

• Fixed a bug where Spire Blades, Spire Minirams, and Spire Rams would not actually automatically die (but just self-damage by some amount) when attacking.

Balance Updates

• The AI Core Grav Reactor Post now no longer receives protection from the Core Shield Generator network, to avoid generating maps (mainly snake ones) that were literally impossible due the homeworld having an invincible black-hole-generator-effect unit.

• To provide a counterbalance against the player's ability to build up a powerful champion (and nebula-ally fleet) without increasing AIP much (if at all, depending on map layout and tolerance for deepstrikes), each AI homeworld now gets "nemesis" champions in proportion to the number of human champions, the highest champion hull size unlocked for human players, and that AI's difficulty.
  • Critically, the "population cap" of these nemesis spawns actually goes _down_ as AIP increases (bottoming out at 150 AIP) to simulate the AI having less to invest into its nemesis spawns as AIP increases and waves, special forces, strategic reserve, and other responses are being given more and more resources. More importantly, this allows the nemesis spawns to counter an "early AIP" champion rush without making a more "normal AIP" approach massively harder to the point of stalemate.
  • Nemesis spawns are not immediately replaced up to the population cap (takes a little over 10 minutes to go from zero to the cap), and spawns remain even if the cap drops below the current population (but once you kill them off the extras don't come back).
  • Nemesis spawns never go through wormholes, so they won't ever leave the homeworld they're defending. This is good and bad for the player, but good all around for their intended purpose.

• The tech level of the AI is now only inflated by 1 artificially when playing on greater than difficulty 9, rather than greater than difficulty 8.

• Handicap now has the following effects, all of which is new unless otherwise noted:
  • AI
    • Previously it affected the speed at which the AI reinforced. It no longer does.
    • Increases the number of ships in each wave and reinforcement, and decreases when negative.
    • Roaming Enclaves and Preservation Wardens are spawned sooner or later into the game.
    • Scrap waves are scaled accordingly.
    • Specifically "forced waves" are scaled accordingly.
    • Cross planet atacks are scaled accordingly.
    • Saboteur and deep strike reactions are scaled accordingly.
    • For now, event attacks are NOT affected by this.
    • Initial seeding of AI planets are intentionally not affected by this -- same as human players get no starting benefit from handicaps.
  • Player
    • Increases the amount of resources gathered from producers (using a new formula), and decreases when negative (also using the new formula).

• Some triangle rebalancing:
  • The rationale here is that bombers have been having their way with forcefields a bit too much, and having fighters be so much more "general-dps" than the other two has made them much less a natural predator of the Bomber. Also, the Missile Frigate is still being reported as the least desirable by a significant margin.
  • Fighters (including the tachyon and bulletproof variants) :
    • Bonus vs Polycrystal from 2.4 => 5.
  • Bombers:
    • Bonus vs UltraHeavy from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Structural from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Heavy from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Artillery from 10 => 6.
    • Base Attack Power from 1900*mk => 2400*mk.
  • Missile Frigates:
    • Bonus vs Light from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs UltraLight from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Swarmer from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Neutron from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Composite from 10 => 6.
    • Bonus vs Refractive from 10 => 6.
    • Base Attack Power from 1600*mk => 2400*mk.
    • Base Crystal Cost from 700 => 500.

• Tractor Beam Turrets:
  • Base Health from 210k/840k/1680k => 560k*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 450*mk.

• Beam Guardians:
  • Bonus Vs Turret from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus Vs UltraLight from 8 => 1.
  • Bonus Vs Artillery from 2 => 1.
  • Base Attack Power from 4000*mk => 4500*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 600*mk => 300*mk.

• Laser Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Health from 1.4*(standard guardian health) to 1.1*(standard).
  • Shots Per Salvo from 3 => 15.
  • Seconds Per Salvo from 4 => 2.
  • Base Attack Power from 17k*mk => 1700*mk.
  • Base Armor Piercing from 500*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 7000 => 5000.

• Raider Guardians:
  • Now Have Radar Dampening Range of 8000.

• Lightning Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 800*mk => 600*mk.
  • Now use the same "can hit up to 200 targets max, but can do max damage to as few as 40 by hiting each target up to 5 times" logic as Electric Shuttles.
  • Base Attack Power from 1600*mk => 2400*mk (for reference, Electric shuttles on low caps have 1600*mk, albeit somewhat slower reloading).

• Tractor Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 450*mk.

• Spider Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Sniper Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1000 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Tachyon Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 400 (flat) => 150*mk.

• Gravity Guardians:
  • Max Target Base Speed from 10/8/6/4/2 => 11/10/9/8/7.
  • Grav Beam Base Range from 8k/10k/12k/14k/16k => 7k/8k/9k/10k/11k.
  • Base Armor Rating from 100*mk => 300*mk.

• Zombie Guardians:
  • Shots Per Salvo from 2/3/4/5/6 => flat 2.
  • Base Armor Rating from 5000*mk => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Range from 9000 => 7000.

• EMP Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 300*mk.

• Carrier Guardians:
  • Base Armor Rating from 1200 (flat) => 300*mk.

• Fixed a bug with the electric shuttle "chain lightning" mechanic where it could hit a single forcefield way more times than intended. Used to be as many as 200 per shot, but now down to 5 (anything can be hit 5 times per shot).

• Fixed bug where electric shuttles were able to chain-hit the same target 10 times in one blast (thus getting maximum efficiency against groups 20 or larger) instead of 5 (thus needing to hit at least 40 to get full damage).

• Reclamators (excluding zombie-reclamators) :
  • Replaced the "cannot do reclamation damage to ships more than one mk level higher" rule: the reclamation effect of the actual damage done is multiplied as follows:
    • If the reclamator is 4 mks higher than the target (mkV shooting mkI), multiply by 64.
    • If the reclamator is 3 mks higher than the target, 48.
    • If the reclamator is 2 mks higher than the target, 32.
    • If the reclamator is 1 mk higher than the target, 16.
    • If the reclamator is the same mk as the target, 8.
    • If the reclamator is 1 mk lower than the target, 4.
    • If the reclamator is 2 mks lower than the target, 2.
    • If the reclamator is 3 mks lower than the target, 1.
    • There is no 4-mk-lower case because mkV are not reclaimable.
  • Leech Starship base attack power from 120k*mk => 30k*mk.
  • Parasite base attack power from 4000*mk => 1000*mk.
  • Nanoswarms inherent 16x-reclamation property down to 2x, but no reduction in actual damage.
  • Spire Teleporting Leech base attack power also not reduced, because the general feeling is that these are pretty underpowered already. Might nerf these later if this proves to be too much.

• Parasites:
  • Effective range from 3700 => 6000.
  • Armor piercing from 0 => 750*mk.
  • Base Health from 7200*mk => 14400*mk.

Misc Changes

• Added 25 champion-related achievements.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where the Dark Spire minor faction could kill AI command stations indirectly through plasma-siege splash damage.

• Military Command Stations:
  • Fixed a bug where the mkII and mkIII versions no longer had a unit cap (leaving it that way was entertained, but ultimately would require more sweeping changes to command stations than is a good idea right now, if it would be a good idea at all).
  • Fixed a bug where the mkII and mkIII were still showing the mkI descriptive text, despite that now not being the same.
  • The knockback logic now launches stuff 2000 range units outside the station's effective range rather than 2000 range units inside, to help the autotargeting not get stuck on a few targets when its main use is best served by spreading shots out.

• AI Strategic Reserves:
  • Fixed a bug where the spawns were only considering the first player's available ship types (so if the second player's core planet was under attack, nothing would spawn).
  • Fixed a bug where non-homeworld spawns were not trying to leave the correct percent-of-max-reserve remaining.

• Fixed a bug where the fallen spire campaign could spawn two of the same shard-signal.

• Fixed a fairly longstanding bug where disabling an expansion from within the lobby would not properly remove several expansion-specific options (map types, setup scripts, minor factions, etc), which could lead to very odd behavior.

• Fixed a couple longstanding bugs that would cause very old saves to not load properly.

• Fixed a bug where hybrids, exo ships, and the like could switch to threat-fleet behavior.