AI War:1.004 Release
-Core Starships have now been added. These terrifying ships are only available to the Harder AI Types, and only show up on core and home AI planets, but they are quite a force to be reckoned with.
-All missiles in the game are now immune to being insta-killed (by ion cannons or what have you).
-The installer should no longer have false-positives of SlimDX detection on Vista machines (this only happened occasionally to begin with).
-For versions of the game that are installed via our installer, the start menu folder for the game now includes entires for the System Requirements, Credits, Controls, and License documents.
-PermaMines have been added. These mines don't have cloaking, but also don't get destroyed when they damage enemy ships. Higher-difficulty AIs have a better chance of having more minefields made of these.
-The background of the Pause All button is now green instead of teal.
-A new "Ship Movement Style" button has been added next to the Pause All button. It allows for ship movement commands to cause all ships to move at the slower speed, or not.
-Previously there was a minor graphical bug wherein the yellow "extra text" line on ship hover info could extend outside the background panel. Fixed.
-The G key can now be held in order to put ships into group movement mode.
-Ships that are currently in group movement mode now show up with a teal border in far zoom, to make them easier to identify.
-There is now a "Free Roaming Defender" mode that can be set on ships, which means that they will attack anything at the current planet, regardless of range. Ships in this mode show up with a pink border in far zoom mode. Hold down the V button while issuing a move order to put ships into this mode.
-Pressing the L key now selects half of the currently selected ships.
-Tachyon MicroFighters, Autocannon Minipods, and Parasites now have twice the attack power and health, but only half as many get created at once.
-Infiltrators now have 4x the attack power and health, but only half as many get created at once. The amount of engine damage dealt by infiltrators is also now markedly lower, making them less effective at dealing engine damage than spiders.
-A huge improvement to processing large numbers of ships has been made. This makes it possible to have 80,000 or more ships in a game with no lag—and really the number could get as high as 160,000 ships at the upper end, under optimal circumstances on a 2.4Ghz dual core machine. Basically, the game no longer does any processing for ships that are immobile or guarding when the ships are on a planet where there are no enemies.
-Trial saved games were unable to be loaded. Fixed.
-The G key now just inverts the ship movement mode—before it always made it grouped mode, but now if it is already grouped mode it will make it work as lone mode.
-The game no longer scales itself up by default on larger monitors, though there is an option to turn this on in the settings (it caused issues with display quality).
-The Starfield images now scale up properly whether the rest of the game is being scaled or not.
-Added a new "No Enemy Waves" AI Modifier.
SPECIAL THANKS
Thanks to Maxim Kuschpel for his excellent suggestions that were used in this release. The Group Move, Free-Roaming Defender mode, and new L key functionality were all his idea.
Thanks also to Sorceresss for inspiring the "No Enemy WaveS" AI Modifier.
