AI War:Current Post-3.120 Beta

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.

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

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

AI_War:Fleet_Command