AI War:5.000 Release

Statistics For The Curious

• Between 4.021 and 5.000, we pushed out 53 distinct public beta releases over 91 days. That's an average of one release every 41 hours.

• Community contributors assisted us with over 680 distinct bugs and suggestions-that-were-implemented (counting 133 distinct contributors).

• The combined release notes for those 53 betas total over 360 kilobytes of text.

• This document (which is over 41,000 words long) is the abbreviated, organized version of the full release notes (here).

Highlights

• In general, if version 4.0 was a re-imagining of the game, version 5.0 is a refinement of the game to a mirror-like gloss. It takes the best of all the past versions, and blends them into what we feel is the definitive AI War experience. The game will continue to evolve, but 5.0 is the new rock-solid foundation upon which all future work will rest.

• Nearly every combat ship in the game has been rebalanced. These things drift with time, and with the recent introduction of so many ships in the last two expansions and AI War 4.0, a sweeping overhaul was in order. The hardcore players have been really pleased with how the new balance is, and collaborated on it with us in depth. At an advanced level, this alone makes it like a whole new game.

• The AI has gotten some major intelligence upgrades. It has a new "stalking" mechanic where it bides its time and attacks when you are most vulnerable and least expect it. It also is more proactive about retreats, better handles play deep strikes, has a network of core shield generators, uses carriers more effectively, and has other effectiveness upgrades.

• The difficulty of the game in general hit a low point in the 3.x era, which a lot of players complained about. The game allows for any skill level, but at the upper end of play it was becoming too easy, and players were having to shift their difficulty level up to the point that it was getting grindy. Version 4.0 addressed this a bit, but there were so many balance changes there with the introductions of the new guard posts and guardians, not to mention the new player economy in that version, that it still wasn't everything we wanted. Now, with version 5.0, the old difficulty of the 2.x days returns with a vengeance. For those players playing on an inflated difficulty based on 3.x or 4.x, they should be prepared to get crushed.

• The early game is now faster, and the game now "gets to the good part" a lot faster. Consequently, players playing on too high of a difficulty have even been finding themselves losing in the first ten or fifteen minutes of play. This is very helpful, as then you don't have to play for an hour or two to find out you're outclassed. On the flip side, the players are able to get going and start taking territory from the AI faster than ever when they are playing on their proper difficulty.

• Lots and lots of internal performance and particularly memory improvements. The shift from the .NET platform to Unity/Mono was not without its drawbacks, and some things required a protracted amount of changing in order to get running super-smooth on the Mono runtime.

• A complete revamp for Golems (from the TZR Expansion): they're now full-blown superweapons without tons of restrictions. The player can now choose from the "easy", "medium", and "hard" version of the new "Broken Golems" minor faction to determine what kind of challenge (if any) should balance out the advantage provided by the ultra-powerful Golems.

• A whole new (paid) expansion has also been added to the game! Light of the Spire becomes available along with this updated release of the base game. Briefly summarizing the additions:
  • 3 New Minor Factions, including:
    • Larger-than-starships, smaller-than-golems "Spirecraft" superweapons the player can build by mining a variety of finite (and quite rare on the upper end) asteroids.
    • The "Fallen Spire" scripted-campaign (with an optional alternate path to victory!). Gratuitous plug: Has player-controllable modular capital ships LARGER than Golems.
  • Defender Mode, where your only goal is to hold off the AI until the timer runs out. Allows games as short as 15 minutes or as long as 4 hours (45 minutes is a good place to start).
  • 9 New Bonus Ship Types.
  • 8 New AI Types.
  • 8 New Map Types.
  • Over 40 minutes of new music from Pablo Vega.
  • And quite a bit more!

AI Updates

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

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

• 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".

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

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• When looking for ships to add as part of a CPA, the AI now also looks inside barracks and pulls ships out to use in the CPA. Some (but definitely not all) of the smaller-than-they-should-have-been CPAs were relate to lots of ships being stuck in barracks.

• When there are simply too few ships in the galaxy for the desired tech level of CPA, in the past it always has counted downwards.
  • So, for example, if you were supposed to get 5000 mark II ships in a CPA but it could only find 1000, then it would look to mark I ships to see if it could find any more.
  • However, there were many common cases where there would even still be too few ships in the galaxy of the correct or lower levels. Now the game will loop back around and start including higher mark ships.
    • So, to continue the example from above, if it had found 1000 mark II ships and, say, 500 mark I ships, then it would start adding mark III ships to the CPA as well. Odds are very good that it would find the remaining 3500 ships in even just one mark higher, so that would fulfill the order for 5000 ships.
    • Of course, in the event that it doesn't find enough ships directly in the level above, it just keeps counting up, all the way to mark V.
  • Bear in mind that certain ships are specifically excluded from CPAs: immobile ships, ships under force fields, ships in carriers, ships that are already free/threat, ships that are minor factions or zombies, ships that are being coordinated by a hybrid hive or similar, ships that aren't counted as "extended mobile military," starships, and guardians. These restrictions aren't new, but bear mentioning.

• Made some various internal improvements to how the AI decides to stay at a planet to defend itself against enemy threats (most notably cloaked enemy threats, but in general). The specific rules are difficult to really explain as it's all internal math, but in general the result should be for it to more properly weight threats and react more like what a human would do.

General Large Gameplay Additions

• (LotS-only) New Campaign Type: Defender Mode.

• (LotS-only) New Minor Faction: Fallen Spire.

• (LotS-only) New Minor Factions: Spirecraft Easy, Spirecraft Medium, Spirecraft Hard.

• 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 exogalactic strikeforces against you—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.

• (LotS-only) New AI types: Vanilla and Everything.

• 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 3 every hour.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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 32 new achievements (2 base-game, 30 LotS).

Co-Op Improvements

• 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.

• 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.

• Rebelling Human Colonies now have ship-production foldouts for other players when controlled by the human team.

• Re-implemented the Give Resources context menu.

Performance Improvements

• 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.

• 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 way that expansion enabled status is checked and set in code is now more efficient on RAM and CPU use.

• 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.

• 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.

• The way that unit data is synced to the AI thread is now better for purposes of cold storage and similar in particular.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• Improved memory/cpu performance of sending/saving planet state (string.concat -> StringBuilder.Append). Not done terribly commonly, but every bit helps.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• A lot of internal changes have been made to make the code for referencing the art more efficient and compact.

Interface Improvements

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 "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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fabricators will now be listed under the "Build Queues" quick button at the bottom of the screen.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• When cross planet attacks arrive, they now state (via chat messages) how many ships of each mark level were just freed.

• 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.

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

• 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.

Graphical Improvements

• 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).

• 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.

• Spire ships now have a new blue explosion animation, like the Zenith ships have a green explosion.

• The awesome modified version of the beam guardian that was created by HitmanN as a mod has now been integrated into the main game.

• 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.

• 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.

• "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.

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

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

• 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.

New Ships

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
  • The old rally posts are now called "Mobile Rally Posts," since their key feature is that they are mobile.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
    • 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.
  • These are not seeded into old savegames, but do default to "on" for new games. They can be turned off on the ships tab of the lobby when setting up a game.

• 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.

Ship Logic Updates

• 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.

• Previously, zombie ships and all the other minor faction ships would really wander far and wide, much moreso than they should have. Fixed so that they'll now wander only to adjacent planets near to the planet they are currently on each time they decide to go a-wandering.

• Engineers will no longer ignore moving ships when searching for targets to repair.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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).

• Zenith Autobombs and Neinzul Youngling Nanoswarms now do a better job of splitting up rather than focusing on a small set of targets.

• 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.

• 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.

Balance Updates

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• Removed AI Progress cost for killing any Neinzul cluster (Neinzul Nests still cost 10 AIP to kill).

• 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.

• 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, x6, and x8, 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.

• The health of all the AI force fields has been increased by 3x, 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.

• 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.

• Raid Starships now have 100x more armor than before, and now have 100k armor piercing. They also now have 5x 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.

• 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 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).

• 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 shuttles).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Increased Avenger hull hp to be somewhat greater than a superfortress, again in line with recent hp changes to fortresses.

• Transports can now not unload further than 60,000 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.

• 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.

• Spire Starship given 16000 armor piercing, because it strangely had none despite both the Zenith and the Core starship having it.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• Warp Jammer Command Stations now block counterattack waves.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The Spire Starship has had its range increased by 10k, it's attack power roughly tripled, and its number of shots cut by half.

• The Attack Power of the Zenith Starship has been increased 3x, as it was actually lower than the flagship (though with more shots) lately.

• 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.

• 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.

• Warbird Starship health 300,000 => 3,000,000.
• Beam Starship health 900,000 => 4,500,000.

• 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 5x, while their hull attack multipliers have been dropped 5x. Any hull multipliers that were less than 5 have simply been removed.

• 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).

• Bulletproof fighter changed from Heavy hull type to Medium hull type.

• The health of armored and artillery golems has been increased 10x.

• 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.

• Ion cannons, orbital mass drivers, and core warhead interceptors are no longer immune to minor electric shots.

• 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 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.

• The radius of all the human force fields (but not AI force fields) have been increased substantially.

• 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)

• 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.

• 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 AI Wave and reinforcement bonuses of all golems have been removed. Golems also no longer require the proximity of AI Warp Gates.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• Zenith Electric Bomber hull type changed from Heavy to Neutron.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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).

• The armor rating on metal and crystal harvesters has been reduced 10x.

• Home Cores are now immune to blade attacks.

• 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.

• The War:Why_Do_Enemy_Waves_Get_So_Large%3F#Step_7: AI Wave level modifiers from tech levels have been adjusted to the following:

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Attrition emitters now have teeth: they now do 400 damage per second, rather than 20.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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).

• 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.

• All mark V ships are now immune to reclamation (this was always the intent, but a few slipped through before).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• Mark I-III Scout Starships now have radar dampening like the mark I-III regular scouts do.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• Decoy Drones and AI Carriers can now be targeted and damaged by siege starships and bomber starships.

• 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.

• To make them more reasonable as fighter+ types:
  • Bulletproof fighter hull type from Medium => Light.
  • Tachyon microfighter hull type from Swarmer => Light.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 75 AIP.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• 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).

• 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").

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• Metal and crystal manufactories now have 5x more health.

• All Warheads (except armored) now have 5x more health.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• Translocator health has been increased 7x.

• 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).

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

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

• All guardians are now immune to paralysis attacks, as are carriers now.

• 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.
  • The health of mark II force fields has gone up from 18 million to 30 million.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

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

• To be consistent with the other fortresses, there is now an AI superfortress with 5x more health than the human counterpart.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• Scout health is now 3/5 of its prior value.

• Fortresses and superfortresses now only do 10% damage to scout hulls (which includes transports).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Neinzul Youngling Commandos now have armor piercing of 750*mk (same as fighters).

• 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.

• The Core Missile Guard posts have had their attack increased about 4.4x, and their range increased about 2x.

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

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

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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).

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• Starship constructors now have a health of 300k instead of 48k, in keeping with the other constructors.

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

• 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).

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

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

• Hive Golem Wasps now have 10x more health and attack power.

• The damage output of the spider turret now properly matches that of the sniper turret.

• 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.

• The health of both mark II and mark III tractor beam turrets have been doubled.

• Gravitational turrets now cost about 30% more, but have twice the health they used to have.

• Dyson gatling attack has been doubled, and health has also been doubled. Fear these.

• Military Orbital Command Stations all now have translocation lightning as their attack type instead of missiles.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

• 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).

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

• 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).

• Snipers and sniper turrets are no longer immune to (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 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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:
  • 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.

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

• 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 decoy drone attack power has gone up 10x.

• Dyson Gatlings are all now immune to being insta-killed, and immune to sniper attacks.

• 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.

• 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.

• All astro trains now have command grade hulls rather than ultra heavy. This acts like a massive boost to their health.

• 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).

• Wormhole guard posts and AI Eyes now have command-grade hulls instead of ultra heavy.

• 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.

• Advanced Warp Sensors now have a ship cap of 50, and no longer act as scouts.

• 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.

• Zenith Traders now path randomly between any planets, not just AI planets. That still means they will be a lot less likely to visit you in the start of the game, but it also means that they have a chance of visiting even your homeworld again (even if it's in a dead end), though the chance is way smaller. The longer the game goes on, of course, the better the chance. And if you wind up controlling most of the planets in the galaxy, the trader will spend most of their time on your planets.

• Various astro train changes:
  • Attack range increased 10x.
  • Max health up from 200m to 800m.
  • Turret trains:
    • Attack range increased 10x.
    • Max health changed from 1m/2m/200m to 30m/50m/70m.
  • Booster trains:
    • Attack range increased 10x.
    • Max health up from 20m to 600m.
  • Regenerator trains:
    • Attack range increased 10x.
    • Max health up from 20m to 600m.

• Bomber Starship:
  • Base Move Speed from 45/44/43/42 => flat 45.
  • Base Health from 4m/6m/16m/20m => 4.7m*mk (to a cap health of about 20m).
  • Base Armor Rating from 3000/3700/4400/5100 => 1500*mk (2x max fleet-ship armor).
  • Base Attack Power from 93k/120k/143k/173k => 70k*mk.
    • Our approach to balancing starships is still a work in progress, but the previous mkI cap-dps was 186k. This change brings it below 150k which is still pretty high but between the high cost (compared to fleet ships, anyway), short range, and can't-hit-small-stuff attributes we figure that's worth a 1.5 factor. The linearization of the attack power is going to make the higher mark versions pretty intimidating, in any event.

• Siege Starship:
  • Energy Use from 2000/2000/2400 => flat 2k.
  • Base Health from 2.5m/3m/3.5m => 2.5m*mk.
  • Base Armor Rating from 200 => 300*mk.
  • Base Attack Power from 192k/330k/450k => 200k*mk.
    • This is a slight buff from the existing 120k mkI cap-dps. If anything this is a bit low with the restrictions on antimatter-bomb ammo but these are already so strong that we don't want to buff them too much on this pass.
  • Engine Damage from 5000/7500/10000 => 5k*mk.

• Leech Starship:
  • Base Armor Rating from 300 => 300*mk.
  • Bonus vs Light from 4 => 2.
  • Bonus vs UltraLight from 4 => 2.
  • Bonus vs Swarmer from 4 => 2.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Zenith Beam Frigate:
  • Base Attack Power from 4000*mk => 3200*mk.
  • Max targets hit per shot from 10 => 9.

• Spire Blade Spawner:
  • Seconds-per-blade-spawn from 2 => 3.
  • Blade health from 60k*mk => 30k*mk.
  • Blade damage from 60k*mk => 50k*mk.
  • Blade lifetime from 10 seconds => 15 seconds.

• Bomber Starship armor from 1500*mk => 600*mk (now the same as bombers).

• Marauders:
  • Spawns now only happen when the marauder counter is "fully charged" (40 for diffs < 9, 80 otherwise) instead of having a random chance of triggering early.
  • The counter is now capped at the "fully charged" level instead of 2x that, to avoid "stockpiling" resulting in multiple spawns over a short interval.
  • The "number of marauders to spawn" was computed by roughly "number of human military ships here" minus "number of AI military ships here" (and capped at the value of the marauder counter). It now takes simply either "number of human military ships here" or "number of AI military ships here", whichever is larger (though capped at 4x the smaller value) and divides it by 8. This number is then doubled on normal unit caps, and quadrupled on low caps. Anyway, the upshot should be less chance of small marauder spawns that cause the marauder counter to stay "stockpiled".

Misc Changes

• 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.

• Decreased the difficulty of the player-adjacent Mark IV planet in the intermediate tutorial.

• 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.

• Spire Starships are now considered Mark IV, instead of Mark III.

• 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.

• Auto-created manufactories are always now disabled at the start of the game.

• 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.

• 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.

• A new version of the Unity Engine, 3.1, is now in use (updating from prior version 3.0).

• The way that the text wrapping is handled on the intel summary is now better, appropriate to its new taller-but-narrower appearance.

• The EMP on death ability now shows how many seconds the EMP is for.

• 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).

• The "Grid" map type from The Zenith Remnant has been renamed to "Lattice" instead, as it really was not a true grid.

• All ships that have tractor beams on them are now immune to the tractor beams of other ships.

• Added a new cheat for Light of the Spire: Impact Is Imminent (+1 Of Each Asteroid Type On The Current Planet)

• 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.

• 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.

• Spire Blades (from a Spire Blade Spawner) and Wasps (from a Hive Golem) no longer get regenerated by Regenerator Golems/Trains.

• All ships that are unable to be repaired now automatically get infinite engine health (to prevent them from being permanently stranded).

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Guardians are now immune to the effect of the camouflager.

• AI Stealth Guard Posts now have the cloaking super boost ability.

• Neinzul Cockroaches are now immune to reclamation.

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

• Wasps and Spire Blades are now immune to reclamation.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Wasps and Spire Blades no longer make an explosion sound when they die.

• Wasps and Spire Blades no longer effect the counts of number of ships lost or built, and no longer effect score.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Neinzul Cockroaches can no longer be regenerated.

• Attrition Emitters can no longer be reclaimed.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

• 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.

• 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.

• Mobile Builders are now immune to reclamation.

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

• Colony ships are now immune to reclamation.

• 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).

• 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.

• Zombie and Minor Faction ships are no longer allowed to be regenerated.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.
  • Mining Golems also now have 10k radar dampening.
  • 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.

• Advanced Factories, Fabricators, and Captive Human Settlements are now immune to nukes.

• 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.

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

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

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

• Ships with modules can no longer be camouflaged.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

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

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

• 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 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

• When one resource is at the resource cap and the other is not, the manufactories now start turning on to minimize the wasted overflow.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• The Raptor retreat radius has been increased from 5k to 9k.

• 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.

• 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.

• Ships that are immune to being scrapped now show that in their immunities list.

• 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.

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

• 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!

• 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.

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

• 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 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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)

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

• 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.

• AI Eyes are no longer auto-targeted.

• 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.

• 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.

• Since Hybrid facilities 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.

• AI ships that create forcefields will now never be put into low-power mode by the AI.

• The "template abbreviation" drawn on top of each template option in the buy menu for riot control starships and spire capital ships was previously always drawn in one color (black); that displayed fine for the spire ships but not well for the riot ships. Now it will use white for the riot ships and black for the spire ships.

• Resistance Fighter Bombers and Resistance Frigates now have the "HasWarpEngineMufflers" flag, which prevents the warp-in and warp-out sounds from playing when they go through a wormhole (kinda nice when they're patrolling your planets at a rapid pace).

• Changed the relationship between AI difficulty and wave size to a new algorithm that hopefully provides a more useful/granular range of difficulty while also compensating for the difficulty-spike (on low-caps particularly) introduced in 4.072. Details omitted since they're somewhat complex and are likely to change significantly in the next release.

Bugfixes

• Resolved various issues (related sound, GUI textures, error logging, etc) causing instability on OSX. This involved multiple sweeping rewrites of the sound subsystem, but hey, whatever it takes.

• 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.

• 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.

• Since the 4.0 switch, the "Automatically Check for Updates" settings option was doing nothing. Now it properly disabled automatic update checks.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fixed a bug where Youngling Commando MkIIIs were not scaling with the unit cap.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fixed a null-exception bug in hybrid-hive logic that was killing the ai thread when it was unable to pathfind to certain objects.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fixed swapping of text between two keybinds on the controls window.

• 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.

• Fixed index out of bounds exception in reference tab.

• Fixed a sizing issue that was causing an error message and for the special forces guardian to not appear in far zoom.

• Modules firing will now apply the same "cannot be cloaked for x seconds" logic to their parent ships as to themselves.

• AI Carriers engine health from 100 => infinity.

• 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.

• 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.

• Previously, SuperTerminals and AI Eyes were not limited in what they spawned based on the types that the controlling AI had unlocked. Fixed.

• Put in a fix that prevents a semi-rare exception from killing the AI thread.

• 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.

• 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 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).

• Previously, when an AI ship contained other ships (carriers, etc) that was not reflected in the threat/attack meters properly. Now it is.

• "Ally to all" minor faction ships were previously being affected by attrition. Fixed.

• Previously, rally posts were able to be damaged by mines. Fixed.

• Fixed bug where minor faction ships were consuming player energy.

• Previously, self-attrition was impairing engineers from being able to repair ships with self-attrition. Fixed.

• 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.

• Nanoswarm now considered to use non-shell ammo, so bulletproof stuff should no longer be immune to them.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• Fixed unintended inflation of counter-attack-wave size. May still be some issues but this should fix the biggest of them.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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).

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

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

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

• 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.

• AI MRS and Fortresses were still repairing broken golems preemptively. Fixed.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• Distribution nodes and zenith reserves will no longer be targeted or damaged by AI ships.

• Distribution nodes and zenith reserves that are scrapped will now give their proper benefit.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• Fixed a hang-causing bug in processing the removal of a ship with coordinated underlings (like a Hybrid).

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

• 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).

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

• All guardians are now immune to being insta-killed.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Zenith Reserve tooltip.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the decoy drone description.

• Previously, using 0 as the seed on some map types could cause the game to lock up. Fixed.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Tachyon Guardian description.

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

• Fixed an extremely longstanding bug (since pre-1.0) where in certain rare circumstances, specific harvesters could not be built.

• Fixed an inaccuracy in the Armored Golem description text.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

• Fixed several typos in the tutorial.

• 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.

• 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 gravitational turret mark II/III health was unintentionally lower than mark I. Fixed.

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

• 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.

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

• Fixed longstanding bugs with icon-grouping that would cause ships and health bars to be drawn in spurious places.

• 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).

• 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

• 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.

• 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, the Neinzul Enclave Starship mercenaries used the old graphics for the actual ship, but the new graphic for the icon. Fixed.

• The objectives window will no longer act like nuked planets can be knowledge-gathered.

• 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.

• Auto-explore/Auto-gather-knowledge orders were previously not being persisted through save/load, but now are.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Fixed inaccuracy in Riot Tazer tooltip.

• Ship modules now automatically take on the cloaking status of their parent ship.

• 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).

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

• Fixed a number of text wrapping and overlap issues in the ship hover window.

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

• 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 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.
  • 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).

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 some bugs that were inflating AI Eye seeding by roughly 2x.

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

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

• Previously, the AI could still get gravitational turrets from the Zenith Trader. Fixed.

• 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.

• Fixed bug where auto-knowledge-gather ships would "give up" after a few planets, even if more eligible ones were available.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

• The game will now check Enter and Return together, like it does leftalt/rightalt, etc. This should help clear up some confusion with the chat textbox on certain OSX keyboards.

• Fixed a couple of murky pieces of code that could have been desyncs, but probably were not. At least they are clearer as to being correct, now.

• Fixed another really obscure desync that no one had actually run into yet. It would only occur if one player had their UI turned off and the other didn't, and a grenade went off.

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

• Previously, enemy-to-all minor faction units (like marauders and some roaming enclaves) could get protection from human forcefields, counter-sniper turrets and the like. Fixed so that these particular units cannot get those protections from any source at all (none of them have such inherently, and being an enemy-to-all precludes getting them from anyone else).

• Fixed a potential desync bug related to objects tracking which ships they've shot so far in a cycle.

• Ships that emit attrition effects are now immune to cloaking and camouflaging.

• Fixed a relatively longstanding error (since unit cap scale was introduced) in wave size computation: previously the wave size would be multiplied by the unit-cap-scale-multiplier (high = 1, normal = 0.5, low = 0.25) and then later by the ship-type-specific ship cap multiplier (e.g. on high fighter = 1, sentinel-frigate = 0.1, zenith-bombard = 0.25); the problem is that thte ship-type-specific cap was _already_ multiplied by the overall unit-cap-scale multiplier. So waves on high had the correct size, normal waves were 1/2 the correct size, and low waves were 1/4 the correct size.
  • Since the balance of wave sizes has been generally acceptable lately, we don't want to just totally shatter that to fix this math mistake on our part. Instead we are fixing that but also dividing the base size of waves by 2. So waves on normal will continue to be the same size as before, waves on high will actually be half the previous size, and waves on low will be double the previous size.

• Fixed a longstanding bug where the lobby bonus-type tooltips would always display ship caps as if the base cap were 100 instead of 196.

Community Contributors

• We wish to express our gratitude to our community for its tremendous help in testing, bug reporting, suggestions, patience, good humor, and encouragement. In particular, the following members have helped us with at least one bug or suggestion (the number in parenthesis is a rough count of the number of distinct cases they helped with) :
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  • ArcDM (3)
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