AI War:4.000 Release

Statistics For The Curious

• Between 3.120 and 4.000, we pushed out 81 distinct public beta releases over 170 days. That's an average of one release every 50 hours. This is with a major chunk of Tidalis's development happening in the middle (it was released July 16th), AND a signficant period with no public releases while we ported AI War from .NET/SlimDX to Unity3D.

• The combined release notes for those 81 betas total over 300 kilobytes of text.

Highlights

• Added a context menu which provides easy access to the various special move modes, the new micromanagement-saving Auto-Explore and Auto-Gather-Knowledge, and the new special unloading menu for transports.

AI Updates

• A semi-major new "Scrap Wave" mechanic has been added for the AIs. Any time there are more than 150,000 ships currently in the game, and comparably little is going on in terms of threat/attack/wave counters, the AI will scrap a large number of its ships and then send a wave that is half the size of the number of ships scrapped.
  • The AI is prejudiced toward scrapping and sending the lowest-tech mobile military it has, but that will really vary based on what it has available. If all the AI has is Mark V stuff, this will be a much worse event than if the AI still has a lot of lower-tech stuff.
  • In general, the size of these waves is 1,000 ships multiplied times the difficulty of the first AI player. The number of scrapped ships will be about twice that.
  • Generally if there are more than about 1,000 threat/attack/wave ships already out in the galaxy, then the AI won't do a scrap wave. Otherwise it will do continuously scrap waves, one after the next, until it is back down to fewer than 150,000 ships.
  • In the end, if you're like most AI War players you'll never-ever see this mechanic at all. But if you've got a beast of a machine and love playing 30+ hour-long games on the largest maps, then this will help keep things from bogging down completely.

• AI players are no longer allowed to reinforce their planets if there are more than 175,000 ships currently in the game.

Performance Improvements

• Some internal networking changes have been made as the start of phasing in a new, more memory-efficient network/savegame format over time. These first changes add a very slight bit of memory/CPU efficiency on the game host, including in single-player games, but mostly they are laying the groundwork for more extensive future changes.

Interface Improvements

• Added context menu; the default context menu for your current context can be opened via Alt+Right-click. There is also a keyboard-only bind that you can set if you want to be able to open it at one keypress.

• Added "Special Move" item to context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that allows setting of group/formation/attack/frd/queued flags via mouse rather than the various (and sometimes obscure) key combinations.

• Added "Stop" item to context menu (when you have ships selected, on planet view) that emulates the "end" key command that cancels all standing commands, formation (if you're on sticky formations, those don't clear with normal moves), etc.

• Moved Auto Explore command from the A+E+X key combination to the context menu (only when you have selected ships and at least one is a scout).

• Auto Explore now functions in the absence of unexplored planets (either you've explored them all or you started with all explored), and applies similar auto-pathing logic to unscouted or not-scouted-recently planets (preferring the unscouted, then the not-scouted-for-5-hours, then the not-scouted-for-1-hour, etc).

• Auto Exploring scouts no longer try to evade after exiting a wormhole, instead they should shortly pick a new exploration/scouting destination and get moving that way.

• Auto-explore is now non-random and much more even in deciding between equidistant planets of the same level of "I need to scout this". So if you have 5 unexplored (or unscouted, in an everything-starts-explored game) planets connected to your home world and build 10 scouts there and put them on auto-explore, 2 each will go to each of those 5 planets. At least, that's the idea.

• Existing "counter-shot radius" drawing logic (which also draws tractor range, tachyon range, etc) will now draw engineering range if the ship has one and does not have a counter-shot or other auxiliary range.

• Added "Auto Gather Knowledge (Science Only)" to the context menu. When executed, selected science ships will be automatically issued the following orders:
  • if not on friendly planet, no orders
  • else if on friendly planet but there's knowledge left to get, and not under a strong forcefield:
    • if command station is under strong forcefield, set destination to that forcefield
    • else if there are allied forcefields on the planet, set destination for the one nearest to the command station
    • else set destination for the command station
  • else if there's a planet I can reach through a friendly-planet-only path that has knowledge left to get, set destination to the nearest one (if there are more than one equidistant it picks the first one in the list every time, no random, so groups on one planet will all go to the same other planet).
  • else no orders (but periodically check again)
  • (note: friendly planet is defined as a planet with an orbital command station owned by a player on the same team as the science ship's owner)

Graphical Improvements

• Updated icon for Heavy Beam Cannons to a new graphic donated by HitmanN.

New Ships

• Added Flak Turrets: mkI, mkII, and mkIII. Graphics donated by HitmanN (with preliminary work and idea by superking, many thanks to both). The Flak Turrets have only received preliminary balancing, intended to be good against zenith viral shredders, cutlasses, and vampires, and mediocre against other very light ships, and only minorly effective against anything much bigger)

Balance Updates

• Orbital Command Station upgrades now provide more metal/crystal income, in order to make those upgrades more worthwhile. If you consider that an individual harvester produces 12 of metal or crystal, and if you consider how many harvesters can be built on most planets versus how much knowledge is required to get the command station upgrades, the upgrades were previously of lesser value than they should have been.
  • Mark II now provides 40 of each instead of 28 of each.
  • Mark III now provides 64 of each instead of 40 of each.
  • For the sake of comparison, the Mark I still produces 16 of each, and the Home command station still produces 80 of each.

Misc Changes

• Extended "warp in the clowns" cheat to take 2 additional parameters (separated by commas), the first is a case-insensitive ForegroundObjectType name, the second is the base wave size (which is multiplied up down and sideways, but allows relative control).

• Added support for use of "any" as the second parameter of the spawn-immediate-wave cheat, so "warp in the clowns,any,1" will send in a wave of any, but will use the 1 size modifier instead of whatever the AI Progress would dictate at the time. Note that the impact of the size parameter is very different in the "any" case than if you specify an actual ship type; generally it results in much larger numbers (so you probably want to start with using "1" as the size parameter, and work up from there).

• MkIV scout now no longer evades after exiting a wormhole.

Not Sure If These Are Still In

• Guard Posts now show on the top row of the planet intel summary.

• Fixed a couple of potential desyncs.

• Difficulties 8, 9, and 10 were supposed to be getting 1 extra wave per difficulty level, but were only getting 1 extra wave overall. This was a longstanding bug, and was a big contributor to why waves seemed undersized in difficulties 9 and 10 compared to other parts of the game. Fixed.

• Fixed hang bug that happened when generating a 120-planet spokes (or potentially tree) map with some seeds. In those cases it will now fail to place all 120 planets, but not by much, and the game won't hang.

• Fixed bug where the local player could not place a construction using an ally's builder if the local player had exhasuted the ship cap of that unit (even if the ally still had ship cap left).

• Fixed two internal overflow exceptions that previously could potentially have caused desyncs.
  • Both of these also lead to some small speed boost, especially for games that are already running very fast.

• Fixed an overflow exception when ships with more than 2 billion combined health were selected together.

• Fixed a couple of potential overflow exceptions related to focus firing (these may have contributed to desyncs in prior versions).

• Fixed arithmetic overflow relating to the devourer golem's auto-target logic.

• Some of the internal calculations for how ships wait at wormholes have been reworked, in hopes of making them never get accidentally stuck in cold storage or stuck just waiting permanently at a wormhole.
  • For super-high AI Progress games there was a check in particular that was causing issues here.
  • Freed AI ships are now vastly more effective at traveling between their own planets in fluid groups now.