AI War 2:0.850 Raw Chris Changelog

(Note: this will be reverted to its full form after Chris finishes parsing out what should go in the main release notes from it. Being able to delete and save here has been handy.)

• The Remains Rebuilder has been removed, and the RebuildingRemains metal_flow has now been granted to all of the player command stations and the player mobile builders. It's no longer something that is assist-line-distance-based, nor is it something that requires a dedicated unit to run around doing things with.
  • This is one of those streamlining bits that people have requested for a while, but Chris in particular was noting that engineers and rebuilders need to be two separate functions (and they do). But making this instead essentially work like claimables and "just happen" solves the issue that people were complaining about without getting into territory of making the AI for the engineers likely to be bonkers.
  • Later we will need for all of our Battlestation types to have this, most likely, or things will get funky at times. This last is a note for Puffin.

• The various types of "ships rally to X location after construction" are now gone, with instead all the ships from docks rallying to their fleet centerpiece, whereever that may be.
  • This is highly automated and much more the default thing we want to have happen.

• The gameplay settings for automatically building remains rebuilders and setting them to auto-FRD are both now gone, since so are remains rebuilders.

• The gameplay settings for "brave scouts" is also now gone, since scouts are also being removed and rejiggered.

• Design Template Servers have been removed. They were not exactly exciting, and they don't make sense in the new method of AIs working with unlocked ships/

• ship_lines_to_start_with and ship_lines_forbidden have been removed, as we're going to handle that aspect of AIs a bit differently, too.

• Schematic Servers (formerly ARSes) have been removed. Those also no longer make sense in the brave new world that is the new setup for fleets, etc.

• The idea of CorruptedAIDesigns has been removed, as that was something that people weren't really using and it doesn't fit well with the new approach to AIs and fleets.

• The Mobile Builder is now the Basic Battlestation.
  • Puffin: This is something that we'll want to actually make copies of and have 4-5 variants that actually have unique qualities, and ditch the basic version.

• The Mobile Factory is now the CombatFactory.
  • Puffin: We may want a couple of variants of this, up to you. One that is more heavy on the factory-ish nature of itself, and one that is more about spawning a metric ton of combat engineers, for instance?

• The Fortress is now a form of Battlestation.
  • Puffin: this is only kinda-sorta set up in the xml, and needs more work.

• The ship_cap_multiplier actually works now in the new system. It won't increase the caps for anything with a cap of 1, though, just FYI. It also can't be used to reduce the cap.
  • Puffin: We need a better name for AdvancedFactory, and should adjust the code and xml accordingly to have the new name. It's confusing now in general because of our nomenclature changes and because it's the same name as something from the first game but works differently.

• AIs no longer have any concept of "unlock points," and they don't unlock new ship types over the course of the game.
  • This was a neat concept in AI War Classic, kinda-sorta, but in a long campaign it just meant more chaos, honestly.
  • The original intent was to make it so that there was a feeling of progression and the AI doing new things with new tools as you go through the game, and that is now handled far better via the ship groups instead, and the planets being more unique, etc.

• When the budget for a wave is over 3k, the AI no longer randomly gets guardians added in as a thing they can buy for the wave. Instead things are more hand-designed than that.

• Each planet belonging to an AI now seeds a single entity from SingularFreakySurprisesAIShipGroup on each of their planets at the start.
  • Note that this includes a fair bit of blank space, and that if it chooses blank space that is considered A-OK. So it won't really be every planet, and the frequency is actually determined in the xml rather than the code.
  • This lets things like the Golemite be set up a lot more directly, and without using tags.
  • The ONE downside of this is that the frequency can no longer be based around things like what the AI difficulty level is. But frankly, that's something that makes the AIs feel less unique and not just easier; if the game is meant to be easier, the player should still be facing the unique foes of that AI nonetheless.
    • As part of this, the explicit seeding code for the Golemite to seed its golems has been removed, and it now uses the new central xml-based function.
    • Note that, if we want to, there's nothing stopping us from using both the old method and the new one at the same time. The new one is mainly a convenience that makes for some powerful new xml-only modding capabilities that don't need to touch C# to add cool stuff to an AI.

• required_aip_level_in_planets_worth has been removed from the MarkLevel definition, and the whole RequiredAIPLevel bit has been removed from ships in general.
  • This again was to unlock things over time for the AI, but now that is so much more contextual that this makes no sense anymore.

• Planets now remember what specific ShipGroup out of a ShipGroupCategory they are using for a given faction. This is where the theming comes in for these planets.
  • For the wormhole sentinels, it's actually only seeded at the start of the game, and each wormhole is unique rather than being homogeneous per planet. So those don't get remembered.

• The entire way that AIs choose their "draw bags" for how to populate a planet's guard posts, strikecraft, turrets, or whatever, has been redone; but also the same is redone for waves and CPAs and the like. It's all using the new AIShipGroups and AIShipGroupCategories.

• balance_planet_seconds_of_metal_to_claim has been removed, and is now just metal_to_claim.

• A bunch of stuff relating to Golems the way they used to be, including the entire Broken Golems faction, has been removed.
  • Golems are now another form of Ark, basically, and are capturable in that fashion.

• Fixed a minor bug where the HRF Raiders were never spawning because of a typo in their tag.

• Metal harvesters are now markless, rather than being upgradeable. This solves an issue with them being funky upgrade levels on enemy planets, and in general the ability to upgrade them is something that I was iffy about in the current system anyway. It was likely to be too powerful.

• Rather than having one AIKingUnit special type, that has been split into AIKingCommandStation -- which takes planet ownerships, and is the phase 1 -- and AIKingMobile, which is not allowed to take planet ownership and is phase 2.
  • There was a legitimate paradox before in that these two phases work differently and the special type rules could not work for one without breaking the other. Now we have two different types to handle the cases.
  • Thanks to Puffin for finding this.

• The home forcefield generator, which has existed since the first game as a last-ditch tool that you have until you lose it, is now something that you can rebuild.
  • It's also now markless and has its stats more directly set, so that you definitely never get more than one. It was kinda funky having it be mark 2 in this game from the start, and it also led you to having a cap of 2 instead of 1.
  • The whole purpose of this is so that you can rebuild it if it dies, since you don't otherwise inherently have access to any forcefield generators on your home planet at all, now. You have to put a battlestation or a citadel there in order to get a forcefield beyond the first, and depending on your playstyle you might choose not to do that.

• The old quickstarts have all been moved to QuickStartsOld, since they no longer function with the new system in general.
  • Because of the way Steam updates work, the QuickStarts from now on will be loaded from QuickStarts2 instead, which is presently empty and needs to be for the next little while. But at least it won't be throwing errors when players try to start quickstarts in the new build.

• A new Station-Keeping Assault Frigate has been added to the loadout of military and home command stations (2x each), and logistical command stations (1x each).
  • As with the pike turrets that all the command stations now have, this gives you some more defensive options without having a fleet or a battlestation around.
  • Unlike the turrets, these don't require any placement planning, since they are mobile and able to roam around and hit enemies. Seemed like this would get around a variety of frustrating situations that even having turrets would not solve.

• The warden special forces hideouts were previously always seeding 4, but now it's sometimes more based on the size of the galaxy being larger.

• The game is now able to seed multiple entities on certain planets if we so desire, during mapgen.
  • As the sole use of this so far, we're now seeding two battlestations/citadels on any planets that have those, to make those a lot more attractive as targets and also thus provide more firepower for defensive purposes for players without them having to capture QUITE so many planets for each of these that they get.

• Did a fair bit of rework on some of the mapgen logic where it is trying to seed things close to the player homeworlds.
  • A while back we had some problems where things were frequently seeding too close, so we put in code to counter that. That was in turn preventing us from intentionally putting stuff there more recently.
  • Now there's a healthy balance between us being able to do that while still avoiding the old bug, and in general things seem to be working well.

• There was some other funkiness with it being really unlikely to seed certain things very near to you.
  • That has been fixed, to start with, but then beyond that it also now tries to seed half the flagships and battlestations kind of in the middle-distance for you on the map.
  • In general this now gives you way more options for middle-game goals for making yourself stronger.

• Fixed that issue with the fullscreen resolution not being settable in recent internal builds.
  • Note that there is still some issue that may make you need to alt-f4 the program after changing between fullscreen resolutions or fullscreen to not-fullscreen, but it then shows up properly after that. I expect an upgrade to the unity engine, due in the next month or so, will probably fix that one part. And that one part probably isn't new. But the new part that was broken is now fixed.

• Added back a new Hackers EntityRollupType that just gives command stations and mobile fleet flagships, since those do the hacking. It's a more efficient way to loop over potential hackers.

• Fixed a bug that was causing blank-ish notifications to appear at the top of the screen in internal builds for every mobile fleet flagship and command station you control, because they might be working on a hack but likely were not.

• The Battlestation special entity type has been split into two: BattlestationBasic and BattlestationCitadel.

• The MobileFleetFlagships special entity type has been split into three: MobileCombatFleetFlagship, MobileSupportFleetFlagship, and MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship.
  • The third in this category is for the things that don't have a fleet with them, namely right now the spire frigates.

• The seeding for battlestations and mobile fleet flagships has been updated, as you might guess.
  • The existing logic for mobile fleet flagships now applies to MobileCombatFleetFlagships, and MobileSupportFleetFlagships still also work the same.
  • The existing logic for battlestations now applies to BattlestationBasic.
  • MobileLoneWolfFleetFlagship is now seeded "kinda wherever" and is both rarer but also no longer counts against the normal combat fleet flagships.
  • BattlestationCitadel is following the general pattern of the basic battlestations, but with the following differences:
    • It only ever seeds one on a planet, not two at a time.
    • It seeds one within 2 hops of a player starting planet if possible.
    • It then seeds a smaller number of citadels out in the galaxy, mixed between the middle-distance and far out. These are in addition to the basic battlestations, not in place of them.
  • With all this, there's a better sense of control of what exactly the player can look forward to out there, but also in general there are yet more capturables out there, and they can continue to be balanced in their niches: we can add more lone wolf stuff without swamping the main mobile flagships, and we can add more citadels or regular battlestations without affecting their relative mixes.

• The way that fleets are named has been improved a bit, so that they are more consistent and interesting and descriptive now.
  • This only affects new savegames.

• Added a whole bunch of ways to calculate the strength and health percentages of fleets based on their type, which is more complicated than you might think.
  • For command station fleets, or the battlestation ones, it's based around the total power out of what you've DECIDED to build (and what has died to remains or is hurt or whatever).
  • For drones and mobile fleets, it's out of the total things that would be auto-built, since you get no decision-making in whether to fully stock those fleets or not (aside from keeping them away from docks).
  • This is surprisingly complex when it comes to things like the ships being transported in fleets, or undeployed drones, etc, etc.

• The docks tab is gone, and a new fleets tab has taken its place.
  • The fleets tab has a bunch of sections which show first your fleets at the current planet, and then all of your fleets in the entire galaxy, by category, after that.
  • The categories, in order, are:
    • Current Planet
      • A quick view of all your fleets at the current planet.
    • Mobile Combat
      • The most versatile of your fighting forces: generally intended for offense, but quite able to come and defend your own planets as need be.
    • Mobile Support
      • Unusual supporting fleets that are able to either act as a force multiplier for your offensive or defensive fleets, provide remote supply on deep strikes, or perform surprising other secondary duties.
    • Lone
      • Unusual single 'lone wolf' massive ships that forego having attending ships in exchange for a simply awe-inspiring amount of direct power. Use them offensively or defensively, as you see fit.
    • Battlestations
      • General battlestations that are useful for either defending your planets or for setting up offensive beachheads on enemy planets.
    • Citadels
      • Citadels that are much stronger versions of your general battlestations, packing a huge punch in their own right as well as providing access to defenses for your planets or for offensive beachheads on enemy planets.
    • Planet Cmd Stations
      • Each command station you have on a planet has a small force of mostly basic, utility, or economic nature. However, if you've made purchases from the Zenith Trader or found other unique capturables throughout the galaxy, you might have some fixed-position weapons of surprising power here, too.
  • For the time being, the tooltips over the actual fleets just shows the tooltip for their centerpiece. This won't always be the case; they'll later have their own unique tooltips that are more informative.
  • For the time being as well, clicking these does nothing but show you a message saying that the fleet management interface is coming soon.
  • The individual fleet entries show the name of the fleets, their health percentage, their total ships out of their EFFECTIVE ship cap (for the stationary things, that's out of what you've deployed), their planet name, and their total effective strength if they were fully powered at the level that is chosen for them.

• A new destroys_self_until_not_over_ship_cap_if_planetary_command xml tag has been added.
  • This is used only in a really narrow set of circumstances: it was a planet that a human player controlled with one kind of command station, and they now have a different kind of command station there.
  • Basically, different types of command stations give you different numbers of engineers, basic turrets, energy collectors, etc. This prevents you from having too many left over after you switch from a military to an economic command station, for instance; there were all sorts of games you could play with that to exploit things.
  • What this does NOT do is destroy units after your command station has died on a planet; in those circumstances, whatever is there continues to live on until you build a new command station. Presuming you rebuild as the same type, nothing gets destroyed.
  • This flag is also explicitly NOT on certain units like the human home forcefields and the various things you get from the Zenith Trader. They will frequently be over-cap (since their command station type doesn't always include it but you might have bought it separately), and so these are always assumed to be valid.
  • Confusing? Basically this just shuts down an exploit and doesn't affect much else.