AI War:1.201 Release
NEW ART - Philippe Chabot
Planet - GasGiant Planet - Neptune Planet - Exploded Planet - Pluto Planet - Rings Planet - TethysRings Cloaking Circles Selection/Range circles Ships - Energy Reactor I, II, and III Ship - Spider Turret Wormholes Galaxy Map - Black Hole Background Starfield - GrayPatterns Background Nebulae Ship - Decloaker Force Fields Button - Galaxy Map Button - Flare Button - Chat New Quick Buttons & Bar
NEW ART - eRe4s3r
Background Starfield - Colored
NEW MUSIC - Pablo Vega
Energy Storm (replacing the prior Thor track, which was often unpopular)
UPDATED SOUND EFFECTS - Pablo Vega
ShotBomb ShotBomb2 ShotBlades ShotFlare
Economic Updates
-Ships being built through queues now have their costs deducted over time, as each ship is gradually constructed.
-The way that build queues work has been completely revamped; the time required to build queue-based ships is now based on their metal/crystal cost.
-The build process for ships in queues is now a lot more streamlined. There are no longer big pauses at the start and end of building each ship.
-The displayed income rates for metal and crystal now are shown as a net value of the difference between the total income and the total per-second expense from current construction.
-Metal/crystal harvesters each now produce 12 of their resources instead of 6.
-The amounts that metal and crystal manufactories produce has also been doubled.
-The metal/crystal production of command stations (all varieties) has been very significantly increased, making those all quite worthwhile.
-The ongoing metal/crystal costs of warp jammer command stations have been increased a corresponding amount to the production of the other command stations.
-There is no longer a limit of 3 ships assisting any given constructor. This lets players pile lots of engineers onto starship constructors, docks, etc, if they want to (and can afford the resource outflow).
-The resource cap has now been doubled, so that players can now store 600,000 metal and crystal instead of the previous limit of 300,000.
-Directly-placed ships are no longer paid for up front, but rather are now paid for over time as they are constructed.
-The bonuses to metal/crystal production in mutliplayer, and the harvester efficiency penalties for holding too many harvesters in any game, have both now been removed in light of the new ongoing metal/crystal costs of energy reactors.
-The AI will no longer have capturable energy reactors on its planets. This can now throw the player's economy off balance, and it's something that was a minor point of confusion for many players, anyway.
-Faster Starts: Players now start out with an Mark II Energy Rector, two Mark II Engineers, a mark I force field, and all of their metal/crystal harvester points on their home planet assigned at the start of the game. This cuts down on the repetitive opening-game actions that players always take, and lets players get right to the actual real game much more quickly.
-The second tutorial, covering the economy, has been completely revamped so that it is now up to date with the new economy.
AI Updates
-Tactical retreats have been added for the AI on difficulty 5 and up. If the AI finds itself sorely outnumbered on a planet, it will now retreat to somewhere else in the galaxy (or press forward on the attack to a different player planet, depending), thus introducing more uncertainty for the human players and the possibility of those retreating ships returning somewhere more deadly a bit later.
-The tactical intelligence of the AI on neutral systems has been improved; the AI now prefers to save its ships for other battles rather than wasting time with human forces in uncontested areas.
-When the AI has overwhelming odds against the player, it now acts a lot more vicious on difficulty 5 and up.
-The logic for ships waiting to go through wormholes on non-AI planets has been revamped so that AI ships behave more like expected in that situation.
-The logic for how starships fit into the waiting-for-wormhole logic has been revamped so that they will also act better.
-The weighting of warheads, turrets, and the like have been discounted in the internal firepower ratings so that the AI acts a bit better around them.
-The AI is now even more aggressive against command stations, and will do a better job of clearing out outlying structures when it has a small force, versus smashing through all the player planets when it has a large force. This all applies only to difficulty 5 and up.
-The AI will now act a bit more aggressively with special forces ships that have encountered (and fired upon) player ships.
-Cross-Planet Attacks have been revamped so that their size now varies with the AI Progress level. They are also now more diffuse (coming from more potential directions at once), and also non-specific about where the attack is forming (though planets with more ships are more likely to originate them). Cross-planet attacks also may now come from several different planets all at once.
-Cross-planet attacks have been adjusted significantly. For AI 8 and up, they continue to work as before. For AI 7 up to but not including 8, the tech level of ships that can be in waves will be 2 at a minimum, or otherwise the current tech level of the AI player controlling the ships included in the attack. For difficulties under 7, the cross-planet attacks will now never include ships of a tech level higher than 2 -- if there are not enough AI ships to fill out the complete attack, that attack will just have fewer ships. This should help even out the difficulty on levels below 7.
-The AI now does a much better job of dealing with player force fields, knowing when to avoid them and when to strike them with a concerted force.
-On difficulty 5 and up, the AI is now much better about destroying player irreplaceable structures: advanced factories, captive human settlements, etc.
-Melee ships controlled by the AI no longer use group move when attacking.
-The AI is now limited in how many mines it will build at a planet, so that it will be effective with the mines but won't take up all its ship cap with mines alone.
-AI engineers will now act more intelligently when their target dies, stopping dead instead of keeping on coming into range of the player ships.
-The AI is now better at dealing with player ships that are still under construction.
-The incoming AI Waves on difficulty 8 and up are now 4X larger, which will make them more interesting as well as offsetting some of the increase in the amount of player resources. The goal here is to continue to make the player feel powerful, but also to make the AI seem a lot more formidable on offense. Additionally the AI waves on difficulty 7 up to but not including 8 are now 3x larger, and the AI waves on difficulty 6 up to but not including 7 are 2x larger.
-There is now a 60-second grace period at the start of new games where the AI won't do anything, giving the players a minute to get settled and get a few defenses up.
Performance
-A whole bunch of more performance improvements have been made to the simulation logic, once again relating to how range checks are performed (this time it's regarding relative range checks), so the simulation performs ever-better with vast numbers of ships in combat on a single planet.
-A large number of new options have been added to the graphics tab of the settings screen, with the ability to disable many of the new graphical effects (and older effects that are not new), to ensure the game can still run at a reasonable speed on (much) older graphics cards.
-A number of performance improvements to ship targeting, etc, have been added. Massive battles perform better than ever, now.
-It is now possible to adjust the network latency for high-bad-packet or high-lag networks. Simply use Ctrl plus +/- to adjust this up and down. A network setting of +4 is double the normal value. Basically, when the network setting is increased it reduces the load on the network and gives the network more time to make each transmission, but it also causes more "command lag," which is the amount of time between your command to a ship and the time it takes that ship to actually take action. Each increment of the network setting adds around 45ms of command lag -- anything up to +7 should still be reasonably comfortable (under 500ms command lag), according to studies done in the past by other game developers.
-The way the lobby renders is now completely different. Before it was using a method that displayed wrong in some other non-windows environments or in virtual machines, but now it should be compatible everywhere. This also makes it work properly with XFire.
Interface / Other Graphical Improvements
-The settings and lobby pages are now tab-based, which allows for more options but at the same time making them seem simpler for new players (less overall to look at at once).
-The backgroud nebula algorithm has been completely reworked, and the images used for the nebula parts are now half the size (and twice the clarity) of before, with twice as many of them used, which makes for better nebula shapes than before.
-5-layer parallax scrolling is now used in the background nebulas to give the illusion of volumetric nebulas. They also use a different sort of additive blending that gives a better visual look to them.
-Instead of a confusing multiplier value being shown on incoming waves, the actual number of ships included is now shown. This allows players to prepare to a much better degree.
-The controls window now shows a vastly nicer image set rather than loading the strictly-textual document it had been using.
-The planetary summary palette has been much improved. It now shows a seperate entry for icons belonging to allies, enemies, and the local player -- rather than combining them. It also shows a count of how many ships belong with each icon. Both of these can be turned off through the Interface tab of the settings. The counts can be toggled on/off by holding the Alt key.
-Instead of showing a selection circle when in far zoom, the game now lightens the icons. This makes it easier to see which ships are selected, and also lowers GPU load when there are lots of selected ships onscreen at once.
-It is now possible to drag-build all ships that work with placement mode. From controls.txt:
Ship Placement Mode Controls:
Left click: place new ship Shift + Left click: place new ship and stay in mode Shift + Left click + drag: place a series of ships Ctrl + Left click: place 5x of ship Alt + Left click: place 10x of ship Ctrl + Shift + Left click: keep placing batches of 5x of ship until released Right click: exit ship placement mode
-There is a new Threat Level display in the top right corner of the screen (or to the right of the AI Progress, anyway, for those with widescreen monitors). From left to right, this shows: Total Planets Under Attack out of Total Planets held (which makes it easy to see when planets are lost); Total Number of AI ships attacking player planets; Total Number of all AI ships that are "free" and threatening the human players, but which are not on player planets are present; Total number of all AI ships in upcoming waves and cross-planet attacks.
-With all of these new additions -- which are visible on the galaxy map as well as the planetary view -- it is easy for players to get a quick overview of how much the AI is threatening them or damaging them.
-These numbers are color-coded as follows: for the big planet numbers, it shows green if no ships or brown if any ships are attacking; for all the others they show green if 0, they show brown if less than 200, they show red if less than 1000, and they show flashing red if more than 1000.
-In multiplayer, these numbers are for the entire team, not just the local player.
-It is now possible to select a nebula style on the Graphics tab of the settings screen.
-There are now multiple starfield styles that players can choose from in the Graphics tab of the settings window.
-When net energy is below 2000, the game now automatically shows the amount of energy currently being drawn by each ship that is drawing 500 or more energy as a popup over the ships. This makes it easy for players to decide what ships to turn off.
-The audio tab of the settings window has been completely revamped, now supporting separate volume levels for music, weapons, explosions, voice, interface, ship sounds, and alerts.
New Ships
-A mark III energy reactor has been added. It produces double the amount of energy of a mark II energy reactor, but at 3x the cost. The efficiency of these goes down by 80% for each one built beyond the first on a planet.
-A new spider turret has been added. It is an upgraded version of the sniper turret that does the same amount of damage as the base sniper turret, but which also inflicts engine damage.
-Three new starships have been added for players and the AI: Dreadnoughts I through III. These starships are very slow, and only have a moderate attack strength against most ships, but they have a huge range and a high strength against heavy defenses, command stations, force fields, and especially other starships.
-A new Tractor Beam Mark III turret has been added.
-New Missile Turret Mark II and III has been added. The Missile Turret Mark I has had its strength reduced somewhat to compensate.
-New Laser Turret Mark II and III has been added. The Laser Turret Mark I has had its strength reduced somewhat to compensate.
-New Lightning Turret Mark II and III has been added. The Lightning Turret Mark I has had its strength reduced somewhat to compensate. Lightning Turrets are also now their own class of turrets, no longer requiring laser turrets to be built first.
-New Mercenary Space Docks have been added, which can produce mercenary fighters, bombers, and cruisers. These mercenary ships are much more expensive than their normal counterparts, but they have no ship caps. These will effectively balance out the new economy, providing players with a new way to spend their excess funds -- as well as a way to get larger fleets when the ship cap is reached, although this is not as cost-effective a route as increasing the ship cap via new technologies or new ship types.
Ship Logic Updates
-Missiles no longer detonate until they are right on top of their target, rather than as soon as they are withing minimum striking range. This makes lightning turrets way more effective against groups of starships or other ships.
-Ships in free-roaming defender mode will now ignore immobile targets unless there are no other targets left in the current system (this prevents ships from getting stuck up against train stations, etc).
-Ships that damage engines will now prefer to auto-target those ships that are presently mobile.
-Ships that damage engines will now switch targets they are autotargeting once they target's engines are disabled. This makes spider turrets (and spiders in general) much more effective at disabling the movement of enemy ships.
-Engineers that are assigned to a constructor will now stay with it permanently until reassigned, even if the constructor's queue is presently empty. This is consistent with older releases, but an improvement on recent releases.
-Engineer division of labor is now much better -- engineers now prefer to repair/assist targets that are being repaired/assisted by as few other engineers as possible.
-Regen will no longer function on ships that have been damaged within the last 3 seconds, which makes it much easier for non-bombers to finish off forcefields and other heavy defenses.
-Mobile repair stations can no longer heal/assist ships that are under construction.
-Force fields and other non-repairable ships can now have their construction accelerated, even though they cannot then be repaired after the fact.
-Area-of-effect shots will no longer hit mine remains, which will prevent AI electric shuttles from messing up player minefields with a mine layer present.
-Ship autotargeting has been mildly improved.
-Spiders and spider turrets now make an effort to attack ships with damage-able engines, rather than just going for the kill.
-Ships in Free-Roaming Defender mode will now do a better job of dividing up the possible targets.
-All of the mobile military, starship, turret, reactors, heavy defense, engineers, and force field ships can now be put into low power mode. Low-power ships can still move, and if they have cloaking they will stay cloaked, but otherwise none of their special abilities will function and they will not be able to attack.
-Putting ships into low power mode now makes them take only 10% of their normal energy costs to run. Also, putting ships inside transports makes them no longer require energy until they are ejected from the transport.
-Now that the low power ability has been added for ships, cloaked player ships will once again auto-attack enemy ships. To do a stealth raid with cloaked ships, simply pause them before taking them into enemy territory, and then unpause them when they are closing in on their target.
-It is now possible to pause the construction of any ship that is being built through placement mode (by putting them into low-power mode). Thus if too much is in the process of being built, some of it can be temporarily halted and then later resumed.
-It is no longer put ships that are producing energy into low power mode that would make the energy balance negative (or more negative).
-It is no longer possible to bring ships out of low-power mode if their energy use would make the energy balance negative (or more negative).
-When an self-building ship is damaged, its progress towards being built is also now damaged. This makes it so that self-building ships that are damaged cost more, and also so that when they finally are finished they will always do so with 100% health. This also has various internal calculation benefits.
-When there is not enough energy to build a ship from a queue, construction will now continue right up until the end, where it will wait.
-When ships are created in free-roaming defender mode or attack-move mode, they will now have a gather point that is the same as their constructor. They will also inherit the move destination and waypoints from mobile ships (particularly useful for space tugs being constructed by a moving mobile repair station).
-Space tugs will no longer pick up ships that are self-building, since repair stations can only repair, not accelerate construction.
-Previously, on lower difficulties it was possible for Astro Trains to get trapped on player planets because they are normally not supposed to route through player planets. Fixed so that they will now route through player planets if they have no other option.
-Normally engineers will not try to repair moving targets because they cannot keep up. However, the new teleporting engineers are able to keep up, so they will now repair moving targets.
-Giving the "Stop" command to ships that are free-roaming or attack-moving will now remove those modes.
Ship Balance Updates
-Laser gatlings now cost a lot more than before, but also have 2x as much health and 4x as much attack strength as before.
-The cost of raiders has been doubled, but they also now have 4x as much health as before.
-The cost of fighters has been doubled, but they also now have 4x as much health as before.
-The costs of light starships and scout starships have been dramatically reduced.
-The bonuses of eyebots against heavy defenses and force fields were previously too high. Fixed.
-The attack strength of lightning turrets has been heavily nerfed.
-Armor Ships now have a strong bonus against turrets.
-The health of all non-scout starships been increased significantly, as has their firepower.
-The health of scout starships has been reduced, as has their speed, and their cost has been increased. Their primary bonus over other scouts is the fact that they are immune to counterspies and cost no knowledge to unlock, but otherwise they are a lesser value for the metal/crystal.
-The move speed of spire starships has been reduced to 18 from 30, and the move speed of the core starship has been reduced to 22 from 30. This more reflects their role as the huge aggressors rather than smaller raiders.
-The attack power of spire starships has been doubled, and their attack range has been changed from 3000 to 7000 (to match that of other cruisers, which these are supposedly the apex of). Their number of attacks has been reduced from 9 to 6, however.
-The attack range of zinth starships has been increased from 1000 to 3000. Additionally, their number of shots have increased from 9 to 14.
-The attack range of flagships has been increased from 1800 to 4800. Their attack power has been increased from 7600 to 12000.
-Raid and leech starship attack power has been doubled.
-The metal/crystal cost of light starships has been doubled, as has their attack power. This makes them a bit more inline with the other starships, though still much cheaper and lighter.
-Starships now all have 100,000 engine health instead of infinite.
-Parasites are no longer able to reclaim ships that would cause them to exceed the ship cap of the type to be captured. It still does not matter whether or not the other type has been unlocked yet (or whether they can be unlocked at all, as in the case of core ships), but the ships cannot exceed the would-be cap.
-The range of all the offensive turrets has been increased very significantly -- to cruiser level or greater in all cases. This makes turrets a lot more useful for both the AI and human players, and will greatly increase the utility of bombers another other ships that are strong against turrets in these sorts of combat situations.
-The range of tractor beam turrets and tractor beam turret IIs has also been greatly increased. This will be a particular help with wormhole defense, and the greater increase in range on mark II tractor beams is an even bigger help.
-The knowledge costs of all turrets have been reduced to a fair-to-significant degree.
-The knowledge costs of all starships have been halved.
-The knowledge costs of the defensive techs have been reduced quite significantly in most cases.
-Deflector Drones now have a heavy attack penalty against turrets.
-Tractor Beam turrets now have vastly more health each and capture twice as many ships as before. They also now cost twice as much as before, and take much more time to build.
-All of the turrets now take much longer to build.
-All of the resource producers now take much longer to build. Harvesters in particular take 10x as long to build and cost twice as much. This is offset by the much larger amount of resources that they and other producers produce, and it helps to create more of a penalty for losing harvesters.
-Mines and colony ships now take 10x as long to build.
-It is now possible for players to build 3x as many mines as before.
-The costs of the engineer techs has been reduced somewhat.
-The different engineer types and the mobile repair station now have varying engineering rates (rates of repair and boosting).
-Engineers are no longer affected by negative energy balances, which makes it easier to rebuild destroyed reactors, and it makes force fields on right from the start when loading a savegame.
-The energy costs of the following ship types has been mildly-to-greatly increased: force field generators, fortresses, tractor beam turrets, counter-turrets, lightning turrets, engineers, mine layers, mobile builders, cruisers, all of the docks and constructors, science labs, metal/crystal manufactories and harvesters. This helps to create the imperative to take more planets to thus have more available energy.
-The amount of energy generated by home planet command stations has been tripled.
-Captive Human Settlements now produce 45 metal and crystal, rather than 15, bringing them inline with the new economy.
-The command stations now produce a small bit of energy (instead of taking energy), but now also produce a bit less metal and crystal.
-The metal and crystal production of Mark III command stations have been severely reduced (from 80 each to 48), as they were imbalancing in the new economy.
-Bombers now have a better bonus against fighters, because they were killing fighters far too slowly before.
-Harvester Exo-Shields now use -2 metal and crystal per second, rather than -1, to be more consistent with the new economy.
-Force fields that are cloaked no longer create a force field effect.
-Ships that are still in the process of being built can no longer be reclaimed by parasites.
-Astro Trains are now immune to force fields, because otherwise they have a tendency to get stuck against them.
-The ship caps of infiltrators and laser gatlings have both been reduced to bring them back into more normal balance.
-Players are now able to build 20 mark II scouts instead of 10, and 30 mark III scouts instead of 10.
-Mark IV scouts are now immune to being insta-killed, which makes them able to function when counterspies are present.
-Players can now build twice as many of all of the various turrets.
-Astro trains now have 1/4 of their prior strength against turrets.
Misc Changes
-The default Auto AI Progress increase is now 1 per 5 minutes of gameplay, rather than 1 per 30 minutes.
-When players get too short on energy to finish building items in their queue, and then pause all constructors, the "short on energy" message now goes away.
-The "Starship Constructors" quick button has been combined into the new "build queues" quick button, which uses the graphic of the old space docks button.
-The names of planets are now shown first in the quick button listings, which makes it easier to to parse when there are lots of addendums, etc.
-The metal, crystal, knowledge, and energy costs have been adjusted slightly for better readability. There is also now a black background strip behind them, ensuring readability when there are really light starfields or ships behind them.
-The metal and crystal costs of anti-armor ships, infiltrators, space planes, teleport raiders have been largely equalized, resulting in similar total costs to before but much faster build times for them.
-The descriptions of the following ships were out of date and have now been improved: counter-missile turrets, scouts II and III, permamines, eyebots, shield bearers, anti-armor.
-The handicap and color dropdowns no longer show for empty player slots in the lobby, thus slightly reducing the visual clutter on this screen.
-The time box has been removed, and the timer has been moved to the left of the screen directly under the planet name.
-Planets are now better centered in the planetary area, rather than drifing northwest.
-The old settings option for caching starfield backgrounds has been removed, as it is no longer relevant now that starfield backgrounds are being dynamically built.
-The graphics for the energy reactors have been made more energy-like, to make it more obvious what their function is.
-There is now a lower bound under which the AI will never combine its ships. This prevents early combining of ships on very small maps.
-The game now supports multiple sound effects for a single shot type, to be played at random, to add greater variety to the soundscape of battles.
-Mark V ships now have a proper ship cap set, which will make them act more correctly both with the relative strengths analysis, and with the new parasite limitation.
-A couple of tweaks to the text in the intermediate tutorial.
-Ships that are under construction but are unable to keep building because of lack of resources now flash red.
-When engineers are assisting the construction of directly-placed ships, the remaining time estimation on that ship is now decreased by the appropriate amount (as the build queue amounts have been for quite some time).
-There is now an all new visual look to when planets have been destroyed.
-Missiles have been renamed to Warheads to help make these clearly more distinct from the missile ammo type (and the associated counter-missiles, which block the missile ammo type not the warhead unit type).
-Command Posts have been renamed to Guard Posts to make them more clearly distinct from Command Stations.
-Immobile ships now all have infinite engine health displayed (this makes no difference either way.
-SuperFortresses now have infinite engine health.
-The METL and CRYS messages on the ship build buttons have been removed. The amount of stored metal/crystal is now irrelevant in the new flow-based economy.
-Force fields are now drawn with greater transparency.
-The ship caps are now always shown in the second line of the hover tooltip.
-The AI Progress and energy displays are now shown in two lines instead of one for the sake of horizontal compactness, and the minimap has been moved down a few pixels. This makes room for a new Threat Level display.
-The game no longer starts off with players in negative energy mode.
-A new way of internally storing the lobby-based options has been added to the game, so that this will be easier to update in the future.
-A new cheat has been added: "more more more" This cheat lets players ignore the ship build cap for all their ship types.
-A new cheat has been added: "parasite this" This cheat lets players ignore the ship build cap with ships that are being reclaimed by parasites.
-Players can now only build 20 space docks instead of 30 (to make room for the new mercenary space docks).
-When players have a higher-than-normal number of starting planets, the ship cap for all players is increased proportionately to the number of extra starting locations.
-There are now tooltips for the resources and other HUD elements along the top of the screen (including the new threat level display).
-The energy use of ships is now shown in their tooltips.
-There is now a scrolling effect on the title menu with the star background.
-The K key can now be used to toggle low-power mode for selected ships.
-The low power mode energy usage is now shown in the hover info for the units that are in that mode.
-Force field blending is now vastly better, so they do not get more opaque as multiple of them are stacked on top of one another. This makes shield bearers no longer obstruct the view.
-New hotkey: Shift+L now selects a third of the currently selected units.
-When the debug output (F3) is on, each in-game chat message being displayed now shows an addendum for how many more seconds it is supposed to display, as well as if the "time to display" has been set yet.
-Time stamps are now included at the end of the in-game chat messages.
-Right-clicking the messages button now marks all of the messages as seen (and thus not visible except on hover of that button).
-Instead of showing "ERROR" when ship strengths/weaknesses are not yet compiled, it now says "NOT YET COMPILED" to hopefully cut down on the number of queries about this when players are looking at beta versions of the game.
-The game now allows 1024x600 as a minimum resolution (the netbook resolution), although it is still not recommended as a resolution and the lobby has some issues with that size. But at least it opens the possibility of playability with netbooks.
-There is no longer a restriction on screen size enforced at startup.
-The incoming waves count now shows the number of units, rather than the number of waves.
-The rows of background starfield images are now offset at random so that the end effect is a lot less gridlike.
-The dropdowns in the lobby and elsewhere now use a gray background instead of a black background, to make it easier to see the text in them when they are expanded.
-Some tweaks have been made to the AI alert level to make it more accurate -- before, if the AI had lost a planet but still had a warp gate, AI troop accelerator, or special forces command post at the planet, it was not showing that the AI alert level was still high. This is fixed so that it now shows it properly in those cases.
-When metal or crystal stores are extremely low (below 1,000), they will now flash at the top of the HUD to alert players who might not otherwise notice that their economy is failing.
-Holding Alt plus the A key now either shows the energy display (if player net energy is positive), or hides the energy display (if player net energy is negative), for all ships that draw 500 or more energy.
-The four zoom buttons by the minimap have been removed, since they added clutter but no significant functionality.
-The galaxy map button has been redone and moved to near the minimap.
-The Selected Units and Give buttons have been moved to the right of the bottom buttons, and the bottom buttons have been slid to the left in general. The colored strip behind those buttons has been removed.
-The Attacked Command Stations button has been removed, as it was redundant with the threat meter at the top of the screen.
-Two new quick-buttons have been added at the bottom of the screen: reactors, and low power. The reactors lists all of the reactors controlled by the player, and their status. The low power button lists all of the ships that are in low-power mode (except for constructors, reactors, and manufactories, which are managed through the other buttons).
-Ships that have queues paused by "Pause All" now show the text "Pause All" above them to make it clear why they are not doing anything.
-The command stations quick-button at the bottom of the screen now identifies how many hostile enemy ships are on each planet, same as the old flashing command-stations-under-attack quick button used to.
-The hover text on Astro Trains is now much more helpful, explaining what to do about them.
-The scores list has been made into a clickable scores panel that replaces the Score button that was on the left of the screen. It has also been made more attractive in general (though more is still coming for this panel).
-The background color of the planetary summary has been improved (more coming with that).
-The way that the energy reactor efficiency reductions are calculated have been updated so that the numbers are now more round.
-The ship selection filter "Select all ships regardless of military/non-military status." has been changed from Ctrl+Shift to just Ctrl.
-The AI War logo has been updated in the game, and the logo is now loaded from outside the executable so that it can be altered via mods and other non-compiled changes.
-The selected ships button has been updated to show a progress bar, and the count of ships much larger. Additionally, it now shows its popup to the far left of the screen when it is set to be always-on, to keep long lists of selected ships out of the way of the main view.
-The game now writes the last startup path into a LastRunLocation registry value at the Software\ArcenGames\AIWar registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_USER. This is useful for allowing other programs such as XFire to hook into the game no matter where it is installed.
-The "Very Far Zoom" option is now defaulted to on. There is a replacement option in the settings screen to optionally disable it, but that's not something that most players would need to do at this stage with all of the other efficiency improvements that have been put in place in recent releases.
-Error reports now include the version of the game in themselves.
Bugfixes
-Previously, the placement-mode window was not showing for build buttons above the lowest build button row. Fixed.
-In recent releases, cutlasses and vampires have been utterly braindead and unable to attack. Fixed.
-The ship caps in the tutorials are now equal to that of a regular 1 player game (default 170 instead of 100).
-Previously, AI ships would set their group move speed to 1 in cases when teleporter ships were present in their guard group. Fixed.
-Previously, ships under force fields that were still building would have protection from the force field but would not show the green circle indicating their protection. Fixed.
-Fixed several issues with lobby tooltip display when alt-tabbing out of the application and related.
-Force fields were not properly displacing enemies. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a bug when gifting command stations between players, where the planet ownership would go to blank instead of the recipient player. Fixed.
-The Arial font is now included with the game, since before in rare cases where the player's computer did not already have the arial font installed, this would cause the game to crash until the font was installed.
-The planet notes textbox has been increased in size, and no longer has scrollbars. The use of the scrollbars would cause a "waiting for players" message in multiplayer games.
-The scrollbars in the View Controls window would previously hang the game while being dragged. Replaced with new scrollbars that fix this.
-Self-building science labs no longer show the knowledge income or exhausted messages above themselves, since that was misleading (they are not actually doing anything until they finish construction).
-Previously, if a planet was not controlled by the player or the AI, but it had been scouted, and there were no enemy ships present, then it act like scout data was not present for enemies. Now it says "None" for enemy ships, as it should.
-Previously, cutlasses and vampires were having a hard time hitting moving targets. Fixed.
-Previously, cutlasses, vampires, and space tugs were not listening to player commands and instead were just doing their own target selection. Fixed.
-Previously, cutlasses and vampires would have a lot of trouble around force fields, and would just end up dying. Now they are immune to force fields, and fly and attack through them like infiltrators do.
-Fixed yet another cause for "indecisive" AI ships.
-The scrollbars in the score/stats window have been updated so that they no longer cause the "waiting for players" message to appear when clicked in a multiplayer game.
-Fixed a bug that could cause the game to freeze when music was disabled while the game was paused. This same bug could also cause the game to freeze when returning to the main menu from a paused game.
-The tooltips in the lobby and main menu are now scheduled, which makes it so that they can't flip around crazily when windows does something unexpected with the dropdowns. Additionally, a bug that could cause the tooltips to flip around crazily sometimes with the dropdowns has at last been resolved.
-Previously it was possible to get an unhandled exception if control group assignment hotkeys were pressed at the main menu. Fixed.
-The stated ship caps could get inconsistent between AI players and human players. This had no bearing on gameplay, but was confusing. Fixed.
-Previously, a number of the 10 planet maps with Simple map style were nonfunctioning. Fixed.
-Previously the chat log in the galaxy map was cut off at the bottom if it was too long. Fixed.
-Previously, if the player had units selected on a planet with a control group and selected the control group while looking at a different planet, the view would switch back to that planet with the control group AND their previously selected units all selected at once. Fixed.
-Previously, when the game was paused and a cross-planet move order was given, the red lines of the selected units would not show up until after the game was unpaused. Fixed.
-Previously, if a player tried to connect to a co-op game and could not because of a version mismatch the entry for the player would hang around in the lobby list. Fixed.
-Previously, newly-created ships were sometimes not showing up correctly in the planetary summary. Fixed.
SPECIAL THANKS
-Thanks to Haagenti for suggesting the Auto AI Progress rate be increased, for suggesting the nerfing of lightning turrets and the improved description of eyebots, for pointing out the futility of the shorter-range turrets when not used at wormholes, for suggesting the AI do a better job of latching onto command stations, for suggesting that players have forcefields at the start of the game.
-Thanks to Kalzarius for suggesting that missiles detonate when they reach their target, rather than as soon as they come into range, for suggesting that all ships, for suggesting that turrets not have engine health, for suggesting the renaming of launched missiles, for suggesting the change to visual selection in far zoom, for reporting the selection bug with the planetary summary.
-Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issue with the short on energy message with constructors paused, for reporting the issue with the group move of AI ships sometimes being set too low, for suggesting the new wormhole graphic be better centered, for sugesting that black holes rotate more slowly, for raising the issue of the outflow unevenness and contributing to the solution, for reporting the issue with self-building ships under force fields, for reporting the issues with the lobby tooltips, for suggesting the better FRD targeting, for reporting the issue with the placement mode ship up-front costs, for reporting the issue with mines being placeable behind the build buttons, for suggesting that the ship cap be visible in the hover tip, for reporting the manufactory display total error, for suggesting that force fields be on right from the start with loaded savegames, for suggesting the ability to pause self-building ships, for suggesting that the captive human settlement resources be increased, for suggesting many improvements to the new low power mode, for suggesting the better bonus of bombers against fighters, for suggesting the change to the incoming waves, for suggesting improvements to AI aggression, for reporting the issue with starship fade-in, for reporting the issues with the visibility selection in the lobby, for reporting the issues with cutlasses not being able to hit moving targets, for reporting the issues with cutlasses and force fields, reporting the disobedient cutlasses and space tugs, for suggesting the change to the Ctrl+Shift ship selection shortcut, for reporting the issues with tooltips and the lobby dropdowns, for reporting the ship cap inconsistency issue, for reporting the issue with pausing/unpausing reactors while the game itself is paused, for reporting the issue with cross-planet control group activation, for reporting the issue with the version mismatches in the lobby, for suggesting the changes to free-roamng defender ships created by docks, for reporting the issue with ships being created when there is not enough energy right after the load of a savegame.
-Thanks to eRe4s3r for suggesting the rework of the queue-based constructors in a fashion that can show net outflows, for suggesting the faster fire rate to dreadnoughts and reporting the glitch with dreadnought III having too low of attack power, for contributing to the outflow granularity solution, for suggesting drag-build of mines and other structures, for suggesting the higher mine build limits, for suggesting that paused ships not take energy to run, for suggesting that cloaked ships be able to auto-attack like normal, for suggesting the offsetting of the background starfield rows, for suggesting the logo be moddable.
-Thanks to MorphingJar for reporting the issue with cutlasses.
-Thanks to Calvin Southwood for suggesting the removal of the energy symbol from the new energy reactors, for suggesting the addition of spider turrets, for reporting the issue with the ship caps of core ships not being right, for creating the new controls info graphics, for suggesting the use of the actual resource outflows in place of the maximum, for reporting the issue with engineers trying to assist paused docks, for suggesting the granularity solution for the outflow problem, for reporting the manufactory display total er, for reporting the issue with indecisive engineer autoassistance, for suggesting that mercenary ships not need to be unlocked, for suggesting that the background starfields remain consistent when moving through the various menus, for suggesting that metal and crystal rates not be able to go negative, for reporting the control group assignment crash at the main menu, for reporting the issue with the outflow rates on the constructors quick button, for suggesting that space tugs inherit the move orders from their creating repair station.
-Thanks to Darkreaver1980 for suggesting the starship strength adjustments, for suggesting changes to the resource balance, for suggesting the removal of the limit on the number of engineers assisting starship constructors.
-Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting the increase in size in the top resource backgroundband, for reporting the issue with engineers not staying at docks they were assigned to, for reporting a misspelling on the lobby screen, for suggesting that the references to the removed zoom buttons be removed from the tutorial, for suggesting the updates to the Auto AI Progress tooltips, for reporting the game hang when pausing a game and exiting to the main menu.
-Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the better engineer division of labor, for suggesting the three second damage rule be applied to regen, for suggesting the "more more more" cheat, for suggesting the "parasite this" cheat, for suggesting that teleporting engineers be able to repair moving targets, for suggesting that ships that are issued a stop command be taken out of attack-move and free-roaming modes, for reporting the issue with the cross-planet move lines when the game was paused, for reporting the two issues with the planetary summary display.
-Thanks to shang for reporting the issue with the ship cap being too low in the tutorials.
-Thanks to Oewyn for reporting the issue with finishing off the force fields with cruisers, for suggesting the better blending of force fields, for suggesting that space tugs not pick up self-building ships.
-Thanks to Huw for suggeting several tweaks to the intermediate tutorial.
-Thanks to Tom Chick for suggesting the planetary summary improvements.
-Thanks to Warnstaff for reporting a crash bug in prerelease L.
-Thanks to liq3 for reporting the bug with the construction still occurring in prerelease L when in TBS pause mode, for reporting the bug with regen, for suggesting the spiders focus more on maximizing engine damage, for reporting the issue with the AI attacking its own command stations in prerelease N, for suggesting the return to the larger waves, for suggesting the doubling of the energy provided by the home planet command stations, for suggesting improvements to how the AI deals with force fields, for reporting the bug with the game hanging when music is disabled while paused.
-Thanks to darke for suggesting the higher ship cap when starting with multiple home planets, for suggesting that force fields not work when cloaked, for suggesting that AI melee ships not use group move, for suggesting that self-building turrets not be reclaimed by parasites, for reporting the various minor issues with multi-planet starts.
-Thanks to Echo35 for suggesting the hotkey for toggling low-power mode on ships, for reporting the issue with the scrollbars in the stats screen, for reporting the issue with some of the 10-planet map seeds.
-Thanks to Zitterbacke for suggesting the Shift+L hotkey.
-Thanks to Bitbrit for reporting the issues with the chat messages display on Parallels, for reporting the issues with the lobby rendering on parallels.
-Thanks to tional for reporting the issue with the scout data on uncontrolled planets with no enemies.
-Thanks to Ragnar for suggesting the better dropdown background color.
-Thanks to ckessel for suggesting that Pause All not affect self-building ships, for reporting the issue that Astro Trains could get stuck on player planets on lower difficulty levels.
-Thanks to Nessic for reporting the balance issues for cross-planet attacks on lower difficulties.
-Thanks to tals for reporting the issue with the chat log in the galaxy map getting cut off at the bottom.
-Thanks to Haagenti, Fiskbit, Reventantus, and Admiral for all contributing to the solution to the parasite ship cap balance issue.
-Thanks to Oewyn and Kalzarius for reporting the issue with force field collisions.
-Thanks to darke, liq3, and dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the issue with the too-slow loading of the lobby in version O.
-Thanks to Rogue and Reventantus for reporting the issues with metal consumption at queues.
-Thanks to Zitterbacke and tional for reporting the issues with tugs not properly picking up ships to bring back.
