================================================================== Version 2.000 ================================================================== NEW ART - Philippe Chabot -------------- All remaining shot effects. ExplosionSmall (shot hit) Updated CrystalHarvester Updated CrystalManufactory Updated Gather Point Flag Updated Energy Capsule (Metal Harvester Build Point) Updated MetalHarvester Updated MetalManufactory Updated ScienceLab, ScienceLabII, Advanced Research Station Achievements Icons Updated Game Icon Explosion Embers Explosion Damage Smoke Explosion Debris Flare Updated Electric Shuttle I, II, III, IV Updated Raider I, II, III, IV Updated Space Dock Updated Game Logo Updated Command Station Home, I, II, III Updated Force Field Generator I, II, III Updated Deflector Drone I, II, III, IV Updated Engineer Drone I, II, III Updated Infiltrator I, II, III, IV Updated Missile Silo Updated Starship Constructor Updated Orbital Command Station - Warp Jammer Updated Bomber I, II, III, IV, Core Updated Cruiser I, II, III, IV, Core Updated Fighter I, II, III, IV Various Notable New Features ---------------------------- -The game now has a local high scores list. Whenever a game is saved or closed, it updates itself. Only the highest Player Score Over Time is logged for an individual map seed (variants of that map seed, based on position, available ships, or other factors all count as the same). Each player profile has a separate high scores list, so changing the profile also changes the high scores list. A new way of calculating an "adjusted score" for purposes of the high scoreboards has now been arrived at. This formula takes into account the difficulty level of both AIs, whether the player has a positive handicap relative to the AIs, the AI modifiers, and all the other relevant start-game factors, multiplied times the Score Over Time. This allows for consolidated, meaningful online leaderboards. -Achievements have now been added to the game! 129 of them, in fact (43 bronze, 40 silver, and 46 gold). Many achievements are not unlocked until the end of a campaign, but others are unlocked as the game progresses. The achievements that are checked in-game are checked right after autosaves, every two minutes, and right on load of a savegame. -Ships now remember the last ship type that they were assigned by a player (human or AI) to kill. They will then adjust their targeting accordingly, preferring ships of that specific type, or if a ship of that type is not available, then any ships of that class. For example, if a group of fighters is targeted on a Raid Starship, then those specific fighters will forever more prefer to kill Raid Starships, or if those are not available, then Starships in general, or else whatever else they would normally kill. The preferred targets are shown in the hover text when hovering over a ship. If it doesn't have a line for the preferred target, then it was never explicitly ordered to attack a certain ship type. Ships will still only attack targets within their normal ranging rules. In other words, they will only attack ships that are within range if they are in normal mode or attack-move mode, or they will attack preferred ships anywhere on the planet in free-roaming defender mode. In general, this new mechanic allows for a lot more automation of ship battles, without as much micromanagement. Ships that are not auto-targeted by player ships will no longer become preferred targets when players give orders to attack them. The "Stop Units" hotkey (end) now also clears the preferred target type. -There is now an altplanetnames.txt file in the main directory of the application. Players can add their preferred names to this file, and when they host planets will take on names from this list once the game has started. This does not affect the lobby at all (since players may have differing values in their txt files), and once the game has started everyone is synced to the values from the host player. If there are too few entries in the txt file for the size of map that was selected, it will instead use the autogenerated style of planet names for any remaining planets. -AI War now integrates with Steamworks (optionally, for an upcoming public release for people who have Steamworks). As part of this, the following features have been added: -AI War now logs achievements to Steam as well as locally. -There is now a high scoreboard on Steam, that logs the best adjusted score of each player, and another that logs the raw scores. -The GDI windows of AI War, which normally block DirectX-based overlays like Steam, now are moved out of the way when the Steam client is activated, allowing for a full and normal use of the Steam client at any point in the game. Co-Op Improvements -------------- -The confirmation message for gifting ships between players has been updated to reflect why ships can sometimes not be gifted. -Each entry in the Give button's popup listing now includes a "Can Be Given" count, which shows how many of the selected ships can be given to each allied player (based on the rules of prior unlocks, ship caps, etc). This will help prevent confusion in multiplayer games when players want to gift ships but cannot. -When a player is disabled, their ships are removed from Pause All mode if they were previously in that mode. -The metal, crystal, knowledge, and energy HUD data is now visible for all allies (active or disabled) in the tooltip when hovering over the HUD indicators for the local player. This lets players more effectively manage disabled players' economies, and keep up with how each other's economies are doing without having to ask. AI Updates -------------- -On difficulty 6 and up, AI home planets are now much less responsive to neutering. This gives a more realistic, more dramatic, final-battle feel to these planets. -The AI will no longer abandon its command posts to pursue tachyon warheads. -AI players will now make more of an effort to kill advanced research stations. -The AI no longer taunts players after tactical retreats, or after players scrap units. Performance Improvements -------------- -The algorithm for nebula generation has been updated so that it now has a more even distribution (which is nicer to integrated/older graphics cards). -Several performance improvements have been made to the collision detection algorithm, which really improves performance when a large group of ships are moving to near a large group of existing ships. -Engineer target acquisition has been made more efficient. -A new keyboard shortcut has been added: Shift+F3 now shows network debug info, including dropped/resent packets, etc. This is crucial for debugging poor network performance. -Previously, on some connections the performance when loading a savegame across the network was really poor (and in a few edge cases, ridiculously extremely poor). This was due to packet loss rates, and partly due to the network adapter incorrectly being flooded by the network library we use. Fixed. -A new Network Sync Performance Settings section has been added to the General tab of the Settings window. Generally players will not need to touch these settings, but it provides some advanced configuration problems to improve game sync transfer rates for those players who have performance issues with the default settings. Interface / Other Graphical Improvements -------------- -The totals screen in the galaxy map now shows the available ship types (from the dropdown), as well as the selected map style. Maps created with an older version of the game will show "Unknown" for the map style. -It is now possible to select more than one AI modifier at a time in the lobby. -The selected AI modifiers and Disabled Ships are now shown in the Totals button on the galaxy map in each game. Now, all of the chosen lobby settings are basically shown in some fashion or other in-game. -The old Strong Vs and Weak Vs text was misinterpreted by the vast majority of players (who thought it was a bonus, when it is actually performance data). The notation and data shown for these categories has therefore been updated to be more clear. These are actually showing performance stats from after simulated encounters. It now shows the name of the ship, the % health remaining of the victor, and the time taken for the victorious ships to kill all of the losing ships in the simulation. This is NOT the time it takes a single ship of one type to kill a single ship of the other type, but it should be good enough as a rough guide to see which ship classes will kill the target class most quickly. -Midsize ships and upwards that explode now throw off chunks of debris and embers. Before they explode, they also now start smoking when they are damaged down to 66% health, and smoking more heavily and shooting off embers when they are damaged down to 33% or more. Mobile military ships do not emit damage smoke even if they are large (this helps performance). -A new Expenses By Player tab has been added to the Stats window. This new tab shows a sorted list of all the current resource outflows, making it possible for players to diagnose higher-than-it-should-be expenses of metal and crystal (which are usually due to errant engineers or some ships that were under construction but which were forgotten about by the players). New Ships -------------- -New Ship: Core AI Force Fields are immune to nuclear blasts, don't require supply, have even more health, and a protection radius 2x larger than any other force field. These are used on core/home AI planets only. AI Force fields once again have a very slow regen (but still can't be repaired). The Mark III and Core AI Force Fields are mobile. Ship Logic Updates -------------- -It now costs resources to repair all ships. This cost is pretty low for most ships, and is listed in amongst the other abilities for ships that can be repaired. -Starships now have higher repair costs, depending on their ship level and the type of starship. This fixes the exploit of players using starships and then repairing them as a way to have "free" offensive forces. -Ships that are disabled due to lack of supply are now the lowest priority out of all ships for autotargeting. -Ships now accelerate and decelerate when moving, which makes their movement look a lot more natural. -Attacking ships with multi-shot capability now do a much better job of concentrating their fire on (human or AI) player-selected targets. This makes Starships in particular much more effective against tough targets, or even each other, when there are other smaller ships in the vicinity. -The color of a planet no longer changes until it is fully captured (until the command station is complete). This affects supply, and various other unit behaviors, in a more sensible way. -Shots now accelerate to match their target in these sorts of cases. The benefit of ships moving fast is meant to be useful in other ways, not for dodging bullets. This adjustment should help with raptors and autocannons and etherjets dodging bullets. -When ships are entering or exiting wormholes or being first created from a dock (and thus fading in/out), the following changes have now been made. They cannot fire at enemy ships or use any of their active special abilities -- including teleportation -- and enemy ships cannot fire at them (including Area Of Effect attacks) or use tractor beams on them. All ships also now come out of wormhole at a constant move rate of 12, regardless of normal or free-roaming defender mode and regardless of their normal movement abilities or even if their engines have been disabled. -This also fixes the very rare occasional "superships" issue. -This also fixes the issue with teleporting ships seeming to appear at any place on a planet, rather than emerging from a wormhole and then moving to their destination. -Collision priorities have been added. When a higher-priority ship would collide with a lower-priority ship of the same team, the lower-priority ship moves out of the way instead of the higher-priority ship looking for a new location. This can make it easier to place immobile ships into a group of mobile ships, or to position something with a booster ability in the middle of a group of ships to boost. This also makes it much easier to put fixed-position ships (resources, mines, turrets, etc) in the midst of a group of mobile allied defenders. Current priorities (numeric values are irrelevant, just relative values matter): 10000: Immobile ships 10000: Heavy Defense (Forts, mainly) 10000: Force Fields 10000: Movable Command Stations 1000: Mobile Repair Station 800: Transports 500: Starships 200: Munitions Boosters 100: Engineers 50: Warheads 50: Resource ships (science lab, etc) 50: Sensors (tachyon drones, etc) 50: Colony Ships -Guard posts (not command stations) of the AI will now start trending to being more specialized than before. Whenever they get reinforcements, around half of the reinforcements they recieve will be of the same type as whatever their most predominant type is. So there will still be a good variety at each one, but they will be much less homogenous. Ship Balance Updates -------------- -Tachyon Drones now have much greater speed, cloaking, and a 50% larger tachyon beam coverage area. -Sniper and Ion Cannon shots are now twice as fast as before. -Ion cannons are now immune to nuclear blasts. -The energy cost of autocannon minipods has been reduced from 100 to 25. -The metal/crystal costs of mark II and III laser turrets have been increased. -Core turrets no longer require supply. -The detonation from tachyon warheads now reveals cloaked ships for 5 minutes instead of 30 seconds. This makes tachyon warheads a lot more useful. -The energy cost of tachyon warheads and EMPs has been reduced from 5,000 to 2,000. The move speed of these two warheads has also been upped 3x. -Scouts and Scout Starships have a new "Unaffected By Negative Energy" ability, which makes them remain cloaked even when their controller's energy balance drops below zero. -The regen rate of mobile military ships (most notably cutlasses) was previously far too low when present. Fixed. -All warheads have a new "blind" ability, which makes them unable to provide visibility into enemy systems. If non-blind local/allied ships are present, they will be able to function as normal, but this basically prevents armored missiles from being used as scouts on distant enemy planets without support. Blind ships no longer collision-detect with ships they cannot see. This allows for lightning warheads to easily pop out of a wormhole and not move at all from the target location. -The cost of unlocking Mark III command stations has been dropped from 8,000 to 5,000 knowledge. Its metal and crystal production has been dropped from 48/sto 32/s. It's health has been increased from 99,999 to 599,999. The ship cap has been reduced from 8 to 6. They are also now immune to sniper shots. -The metal and crystal output of Mark II command stations has been dropped from 32/s to 24/s. It's unlock cost has been dropped from 5,000 to 4,000 knowledge. It's health has been increased from 99,999 to 299,999. The ship cap has been reduced from 8 to 6. -Warheads, Vampire Claws, and Vorticular Cutlasses no longer decelerate when reaching their targets, though they do still have to accelerate up to their maximum speed. -The following ships now have 2X acceleration rate: Fighters, Bombers, Bulletproof, MicroFighter, Engineer I, Laser Gatling. -The following ships now have 3X acceleration rate: Raiders, Vampires, Raptors, Scouts (except Mark IV), Space Tug, Electric Shuttle, Cutlass, EyeBot, Autocannon, Space Plane, EtherJet. -Raptors are now the fastest ship in the game, with 148 move speed. They also now have a large attack range of 9,000. They also now cost significantly more metal and crystal than before. -Raiders now cost far more than they previously did, to hopefully bring them back into balance with other ships. Their bonus against bombers has also been removed. -Starships and Turrets now all do 1/5 their normal damage to warheads. -Sniper and Spider Turrets now do 3x more damage, but also cost 3x more. -Snipers I-IV now do 3x more damage, and have costs that are increased by 3x (or more, in the case of the higher-level snipers. -Ion cannons now do a better job of not overkilling enemy ships. They also now do engine damage, but only fire a single shot at a time, rather than four shots at a time. Lastly, they are now able to hit ships higher than their level, now that they do engine damage. This basically makes them like a supercharged spider turret against higher-level ships, and their usual insta-killing selves against equal or lower levels. -The attack bonuses of snipers and sniper turrets have been reduced by around 1/3, to make it so that they are not so overwhelmingly more effective against bombers and other similar ships. -Snipers now have a .2 penalty against resource structures, and a .3 penalty against engineers. -Tractor Beams are now considered their own ship class, rather than being part of the general turret ship class. This makes them show up separately in the galaxy map intel summary counts, and also makes it so that setting target preferences of tractor beams will secondarily prefer all tractor beams of all levels, rather than all turrets of all levels. -Turrets now do half damage against other turrets and against tractor beams. -Laser Turrets now cost far less knowledge to unlock, and have major bonuses against cutlass, vampire, armored, tank, figher, raptor, raider, space plane, and parasite, while having a lower attack in general, and a major penalty against bomber, cruiser, anti-armor, laser gatling, and autocannon. -Missile Turrets now have a penalty instead of a bonus against fighters, and now have a bonus against bombers, infiltrators, infiltrators, raptors, scouts, anti-armor, teleport stations, snipers, and spiders, and a penalty against cruisers. -MLRS Turrets now have a bonus against Cutlasses, Fighters, Raiders, Tanks, Parasites, Raptors, Laser Gatlings, and Autocannons. They now have a penalty instead of a bonus agains armored and anti-armor ships. They also now have a penalty against autocannons, deflectors, and space planes. -Non-starship space tugs no longer pick up starships, since this often resulted in starships being prematurely yanked from battle. -All of the different starship and turret types are now broken out into various subclasses now. This makes for more informative intel summaries, for one thing, as well as more possible specialization of attack bonuses, as well as MUCH more informative data on the strong against / weak against lists. -Mobile Repair Tugs are no longer able to pick up force fields, fortresses, mobile repair stations, command stations, or other large-yet-mobile ships. -Transports are now their own ship type, rather than being lumped into the colony ship ship type, which makes them show up independently on the intel summary. -When players don't have enough energy to support capturing a ship via parasites, the ship will not be captured. Previously it would send the player into negative energy, which was far more dangerous. -The knowledge costs of tachyon beam emitters and stealth tachyon beam emitters have been halved. Additionally, their tachyon beam ranges have been increased from 750 and 1000 to 4000 and 8000, respectively. -Cutlasses and vampire now have a 5,000 target seek range instead of 10,000, which gives players greater control over them (this doesn't affect the AI). Previously, these melee ships would often run off too early and die. Misc Changes -------------- -The game now keeps track of the exact second at which a victory/loss was achieved, and the timer stops counting at that second even though the game keeps going. -Tachyon Beam emitters (the two fixed-position variants) have been moved to the Turret tab, off of the DEF tab, so that they are better grouped with the other ships that would be being built around the same time (and so that more players notice them and remember to build them). -The "Negative Energy" shot type has been renamed to "Dark Matter" to make it more clearly distinct from discussions of "negative energy" as it refers to the energy balance of players. -The Zinth race has been renamed to Zenith for the sake of clarity. -Shield Bearers have been renamed to Force Field Bearers, as this is more befitting to their revamped (as of 1.013 or so) abilities: mini force fields in place of their older superhigh shields. This also makes their short-name text now "FF Bearer" instead of "Shield," which is much less confusing for players who might think this refers to force fields, etc. -Scrolling the game window is now disabled when the in-game menu is visible. -The starting rotation of black holes in the galaxy map is now randomized (as it always was in the lobby), so that they don't all look synchronized if there are multiple. -The planetary summary now indicates if "last seen" ships were enemy, allied, or local player's ships. -The color of the abilities text is now brighter and thus more noticeable/readable. -When Complete Visibility is turned on, the "last scouted" time is always now 0 seconds ago, which gives complete intel summary info. -There are now settings options under Graphics, Special Effects, for disabling explosion debris/embers, damaged ship smoke, and force field rotation. -Exo-Shields have been renamed to Exo-Force-Fields to be more consistent with other uses of the word "shield" (which is distinct from force fields). -When mine layers rebuild mines, it no longer makes the mine placement sound. -The "NOT YET COMPILED" strong/weak text has been changed to "INFORMATION UNAVAILABLE IN PRERELEASE VERSION." -The excel exports now include ship acceleration rates, and also the internal damage multipliers used for each ship type. -The engine damage of ships now shows just as a number, without an x in front of the number. Previously it looked like a multiplier, which it is not. -The countdown timer on incoming waves is now shown in a more brief format. -The client now gets a popup message when unable to connect to a host. -The hostile wormhole counts were previously slightly off when Exo-Galaxy wormholes were present. Fixed. -The outdated installer slideshow images of the game have now been updated. -When ships are under construction, their far zoom icon border flashes green. This is now a lot more obvious of a green, rather than being very low-contrast as before, so it is much easier to find ships that are being built. -Short-range turrets have been renamed to Basic turrets, which is now a more appropriate name for them. -The population algorithm for ARSes is now better -- before it was only ever seeding them on planets belonging to the first AI, but now it will seed them on the planets of both AIs. This will affect the layout of existing map seeds, but not existing savegames. -The initial population algorithm for Advanced Factories is now better -- this really only affects very tiny maps with large numbers of starting planets. All AFs are placed in enemy territory, but this could now include home planets of the AIs, and multiple AFs per planet if needed. The number of AFs will normally be 2x the number of starting player home planets, but it will also now never exceed 2x the number of starting AI home planets. The changes to this algorithm will not affect existing savegames. -More vertical size has been added to the Save and Load windows. -The "You Have," "Enemies Have," "Allies Have," and "Last Seen" text line items from the planetary summary sidebar have now been combined with the line stating the name of each ship, in order to conserve vertical space as well as make these data items a bit more prominent. -The AI Forcefields and Player Forcefields are now shown in different icons in the F1 planetary summary display, so that they all fit on the screen at once properly (and because they belong in two different categories: fixed nonmilitary and mobile nonmilitary, respectively). -When items in build queues are reordered, they now keep the count of how many they have already built, rather than resetting to zero. This makes reordering queues less disruptive to the relative unit makeup. -Starship Constructors now use the same icon as space docks in far zoom, rather than the icon used by mobile builders. Starship Constructors have a "Star" label under themselves, and now show up separately on the planetary summary sidebar, which makes selecting groups of mobile builders or starship construcotrs much simpler. -Zooming in on the graphs now only zooms the X-axis, rather than the Y-axis. This lets players then see full data for a selection of time when switching between the graph segments. -"Team Income" on the galaxy map intel summaries has now been replaced with "Your Income," and now includes energy production as well as metal/crystal income. "Your Income" is much more actionable than the income of the entire team when playing multiplayer. -The "Resources" section of the galaxy map intel summary now includes counts of how many Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III energy reactors have ben built by the local player at that planet. This makes energy distribution planning much easier to do. -Previously, selecting a mix of ships in low and normal power modes and hitting K would invert each ship individually, whereas clicking the pause button in the interface would toggle them all to either on or off. Now the K key works more like the interface button, thought not exactly. If any of the ships are in low-power mode, then it tries to put them in high-power mode. Otherwise, it puts them all into low-power mode. -Harvester exo-force-fields can now be auto-placed by ctrl-clicking, same as with the harvesters themselves. -Melee ships now show their target seek range as an attack range when the attack ranges are shown (Z key). -The counter-shot ranges, tractor/gravitational ranges, and force field ranges for incomplete/disabled force fields are now shown while the player is in placement mode for placing new ships. This makes it much easier to place ships under a forcefield or a counter-shooter, for instance. -The bounding circles of to-be-placed ships are now shown in white during placement mode, which makes it far easier for players to tightly pack groups of ships. -There were a number of menus that were using the MS Sans Serif Font. Those have all been switched to using Arial. -The spacing of some of the lobby options has been improved, so that users with larger fonts won't see any overlap. -Mine Layers now have 4x as much health as before, so hopefully they will not die so frequently. They also now have regen so that they don't take so much micromanagement to keep healed. -Engineers and repair stations will no longer try to heal damaged mine remains. -Previously, there was a ship cap on mine remains, which was lower than the ship cap for mines themselves, which caused mine remains to not always appear for players. Fixed so that there is no longer any ship cap on mine remains, which makes mine remains always appear when a mine dies. Bugfixes -------------- -Previously, the text on allied planets was showing up as red for players, instead of white. This made it harder to see hostile wormholes at a glance. Fixed. -In the last release, snipers, infiltrators, and other ships that are supposed to be able to fire through force fields (lightning missiles aside) were instead damaging the force fields like normal. Fixed. -There was previously a rare crash bug that could occur when assigning ships to a control group. Fixed. -In recent releases, it was difficult or impossible to give cutlasses move orders if they were already chasing a target ship. Fixed. -In 1.301, there was a bug where ships under the mouse cursor were selected when a planet was clicked in the galaxy map. Fixed. -Fixed several glitches with the scrollbars in the high scores and scores windows. -Previously, Force-Field Bearers were damaged by shots being fired out from under them. Fixed. -Previously, cutlasses would ignore wormhole move orders in favor of attacking more ships. Fixed. -In recent versions of the game, the "Killed With" column in the stats was not working right. Now it works correctly, and it has been renamed to "Kills Made By." -Previously, when force fields were disabled, shots would still disappear at the edge of it as if it were enabled if ships shot directly at it. Fixed. -Previously, pausing or unpausing the game would cancel placement mode for ships, and would cancel the selection box area. This was counter to being TBS-friendly. Fixed. -The collision raidus (and thus also the exo-forcefield radius) was much too small on crystal harvesters. Fixed. -The tooltip text for command stations was out of date regarding destroyed planets and supply. Fixed. -On some computers, previously some of the settings options could show as cut off. Fixed. -With 10 planet maps, there was still a very rare chance of having a disconnected planet. Fixed. -In recent releases deselecting ships using the selected objects button required two clicks. Fixed. -Fixed a super rare crash bug when changing music tracks. -Previously, using the N+2 or N+3 or N+1 filters would cause non-military ships to be selected when they otherwise would not be. Fixed. -Fixed a minor localization error in part of the intermediate tutorial. -Fixed a bug with loading certain player stats data. -Fixed a bug with loading ships that are heading to a transport but which are not yet in the transport. -There was previously a bug where certain very old savegames were not rembmering the players' home planets correctly, especially for when their game was first loaded and for AI decision making purposes. Fixed. -Since the addition of Supply, all ships that require supply have had incorrect strong/weak data. This most notably applies to turrets. Fixed. -In recent releases (since 1.201 or so, most likely), on maps smaller than 80 planets there were often too few Advanced Research Stations. This was initially by design, but it made the smaller maps harder than expected. There are now always 5 ARSes on every map, and existing savegames will be updated on their next load to include the correct number of ARSes. -On very tiny maps, especially 10 planet maps that have 8 planets starting out belonging to players, this can lead to duplicate ARSes on individual AI planets. -Previously it was possible to use a mobile builder to Ctrl+click and build harvesters on planets not owned by you. Fixed. -Previously, cloaked ships that were revealed by tachyon beams (yet were not completely visible) were not able to be caught in tractor beams. Fixed. -In recent releases, the game has not been recovering properly from a lost graphics device. This affected computers that locked after going to screensaver, or Vista/Windows 7 machines where Ctrl+Alt+Delete was pressed while the game was active. Fixed. -Previously, ships that were directly placed would sometimes jump to the side. Fixed. -Fortresses were incorrectly noting that they were a fixed structure in their tooltips. Fixed. -Previously, the health of many directly-placed ships was counting upwards too slowly, and then jumping to full at the end. Fixed. -In recent releases, the estimated build times for ships was always off from the actual build time when higher-tier engineers were used. Fixed. -Corrected several parts of the in-game credits. -Previously, forcefield auras and a few other calculations were not being adjusted properly when the game state was paused and the ships were paused/unpaused or otherwise altered. Fixed. -Previously, if cutlasses/vampires were locked onto a target, it could be very difficult to get them to give them wormhole commands and actually have them carry those commands out. Fixed. -There was previously an annoying issue where the tooltip from the main menu might still be visible (and in the way) when clicking into sub-menus. Fixed. -Previously, warheads that were targeted on an enemy were not always exploding right when they hit the enemy. Fixed. -Previously, engineers would not automatically repair ships that were in low-power mode. Additionally, they would often do nothing at all if there were damaged ships in low power mode nearby. Fixed so that now they prefer to repair ships that are not in low power mode, but the other two issues are resolved. -Previously, mobile repair stations were unable to repair ships in low-power mode. Fixed. -Previously, mobile repair stations could erroneously be used to accelerate build queues. Fixed. -Some improvements to how the game over state is calculated have been made. This allows for the game to continue for a team if the only player with a home command station is disabled. -Previously, teleport battle stations and teleport raiders were not properly being disabled as ship types when those options were turned off in the lobby. Similarly, eyebots were not being disabled when cloaking was disabled. -Previously, disabling cloaked or teleporting ships in the lobby was not disabling all the appropriate types for the AIs. Fixed. -Previously, the warning message for still-constructing command stations that were under attack was incorrect. Fixed. -Unsupplied command stations were previously flashing and giving warning messages that were incorrect. Fixed. -There was previously a bug when tugs had tractored a ship that escaped to a new planet just as the other ship was being tractored. Fixed. -Previously, enemy force fields were visible through the fog of war. Fixed. -Previously, AI waves coming from core/home planets were always a Mark IV/V mix. Fixed. -Previously, space tugs that were set in attack-move or free-roaming defender mode would dance around in a very unhelpful way while waiting at the repair station for the repair station to do its work. Fixed. -Previously, the mouseovers on the resource bar were not working properly in galaxy view. Fixed. -Previously, sometimes the hover text would be for a different unit than what was selected when the mouse button was clicked. Fixed. -Previously, sometimes the splash screen could get in the way of the license key entry data screen. Fixed. -Previously, groups of low-power ships would form superships when ordered to move to a destination together. Fixed. -Previously, it was possible for players to accidentally send themselves into negative energy by building groups of ships simultaneously. Fixed. -Previously, multiple exo-force-fields could be placed on one harvester, which then caused various problems. Fixed. -Attack-moving or Free-Roaming ships that were moving back to their base position in a group would also be very indecisive about their pathing. Fixed. -Paused energy reactors were showing some outdated and confusing messages about their status. Fixed. -Previously, when ships were destroyed while in low power mode, they were not being properly removed from the list of low-power units. They ceased showing up in the list, but kept showing up in the count. Fixed. -Previously, when part of the Arial font was missing on the user's computer, but part of it was present, the game would crash (if the entire font was missing, the game would use another Sans-Serif font and move on). This is a basic behavior of .NET Windows Forms and cannot be overridden for designer-created files. However, the game will now popup a better error message, with easy instructions for how to resolve this issue when it occurs (just look in the Fonts subfolder in the AI War folder, and install them from there). -Previously, there was a slight difference in the clickable area of the planetary summary icons, compared to the area in which the icon would highlight. Fixed. -Fixed another very rare crash when changing music tracks. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- -A HUGE thanks to Lars Bull for his awesome work in making the game localization-enabled. This was an enormous task, and not having to devote my own time to it has helped accelerate 1.301 and 2.0. -Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issue with snipers attacking force fields, for suggesting the enhancements to the Totals button in the galaxy map, for reporting the bug with ships being selected when planets are clicked on the galaxy map, for reporting the sizing issue of exo-forcefields on crystal harvesters, for reporting the issue with removing units from the selected group, for reporting the minor localization error in part of the intermediate tutorial, for reporting the minor glitches with the in-game credits, for sugesting that parasites be unable to capture ships that the player's current energy cannot support, for reporting the issues with engineers that try to repair low-power ships, for suggesting that mark iii AI force fields become mobile again, for reporting the issue with force fields being visible through the fog of war, for suggesting that vampire/cutlass target seek range be lowered, and that melee ship ranges be shown as attack ranges, for suggesting that the bounding circles be shown for to-be-placed ships, for reporting hte issue with Attack-moving or Free-Roaming ships that were moving back to their base position in a group. -Thanks to ldlework for suggesting that scrolling be disabled when the in-game menu is visible, for suggesting the Player # Kills column on the high scores list. -Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting that the black holes have a random starting rotation in the galaxy map, for reporting the issue with building ships smoking as if damaged, for suggesting that ships not prefer targets that are not autotargeted, for reporting a spelling mistake in a prerelease, for reporting the display issue with the backgroung box behind incoming wave warnings, for reporting the inaccuracy of the hover text on command stations regarding destroyed planets, for reporting the misordering of a number of achievements, for suggesting the improvements to the Team Income display. -Thanks to darke for suggesting the tachyon drone buffs, for inspiring the changes to how the AI home planet reinforcements are handled, for suggesting the reduction in energy cost of autocannon minipods, for suggesting that ion cannons be immune to nuclear blasts, for suggesting that laser turrets have a scaling cost, for suggesting moving tachyon beams to the turrets tab, for suggesting that core turrets no longer require supply, for suggesting the rebalancing of many of the warheads, for suggesting the command station II and III balance updates, for suggesting the reprioritization of targeting ships without supply, for suggesting that starships do less damage to warheads, for suggesting the strong/weak not yet compiled text change, for suggesting that ships have differening acceleration rates, for reporting the issue with shots targeting disabled force fields, for reporting another broken map seed, for suggesting the changes to AF population on the smallest maps, for suggesting that guard post makeup be less homogenous, for reporting the issue with cheats causing achievements to award repeatedly, for reporting the issue with pausing forcefields while paused not showing the aura updated, for reporting the outdated messages on paused energy reactors, for reporting the second rare crash when switching music tracks. -Thanks to Shadow Hornet for reportig the crash bug with the control group assignment. -Thanks to quickstix for reporting the performance issues with the old nebula algorithm on some planets on some GPUs. -Thanks to Kalzarius for suggesting the enhancements to the "Last Seen" entry on the planetary summary, for suggesting the nerf of turrets damaging warheads, for suggesting the improvements to the concentration of fire of multi-shot ships, for reporting the issue with pausing/unpausing affecting placement mode, for reporting the super rare crash bug when changing music tracks, for reporting the visibility issue with ships that are under construction and flashing in far zoom, for reporting the bug with home planets not being remembered correctly from very old savegames, for reporting the incorrect tooltip for fortresses, for reporting the build time inacuraccies, for reporting the issue with warheads not always detonating when hitting their targets, for reporting the mouseover/click selection discrepancy. -Thanks to liq3 for reporting the issue with the cutlass regen being too low, for reporting the issue with engineers being unable to assist docks, for suggesting the Blind ability for warheads, for suggesting that when mine layers rebuild mines it no longer make the mine placement sound, for reporting the issue with cutlasses ignoring wormhole move orders in favor of attacking more ships, for reporting the issue with the repair rates, for suggesting the sniper buffs, for reporting the issue with tugs picking up force fields, for reporting the issue with cutlasses going through wormholes. -Thanks to RCIX for reporting the confusion with the old short name of shield bearers, for suggesting the Player Most Built column on the high scores list, for reporting the issue with shield bearers being damaged by allied shots from under themselves, for reporting the flipped bomber buy/tech buttons, for reporting the fortress collision priority mismatch, for reporting the issue with the new core bomber graphic rotation, for reporting the bug with multiple exo-ffs being assigned to a single harvester. -Thanks to Rogue for suggesting the settings option for disabling force field rotation. -Thanks to Valarauka for suggesting that Exo-Shields be renamed to Exo-Force-Fields, for suggesting a clear preferred targets button, for suggesting the ctrl-click placement of harvester exo-force-fields. -Thanks to Echo35 for reporting the naming error with Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets in the prereleases in the tech menu, for suggesting the improvement to the countdown timer on incoming waves, for reporting the issues with cut off text in the settings screen, for reporting the outdated installer slideshow images, for reporting the naming error with Basic Turrets in the prereleases in the tech menu, for reporting the issue with metal harvester health counting upwards incorrectly while they were being built. -Thanks to kjara for suggeting the buff to spider turret engine damage once their cost was increased, for suggesting the improvement to the engine damage text, for reporting the extra debug messages, for suggesting the penalties to snipers against resources, for suggesting several additions to the collision priority chain, for suggesting that turrets do half damage against other turrets and against tractor beams, for reporting the bug in a prerelease with being able to build too many harvesters, for reporting the issues with the F1 display on 768-high monitors, for reporting the issue with mobile repair stations being able to assist queues, for reporting the issue with the warning message for still-constructing command stations that were under attack, for reporting the bug when tugs had tractored a ship that escaped to a new planet just as the other ship was being tractored. -Thanks to irongamer for suggesting the message to clients unable to connect to a host. -Thanks to Ashery for reporting the ion cannon overkill. -Thanks to Oewyn for reporting the raptors circle-strafing exploit, and for reporting the raptor minimum-range bugs, for suggesting the reduction of the sniper turret bonuses, for reporting the bugs with loading certain stats and with loading savegames with ships heading for transports but not in them, for suggesting that tractor beams be their own class separate from turrets, for reporting the issue with building harvesters on planets you don't own, for reporting the issue with the expenses by player tab not refreshing correctly in tandem with the players dropdown, for reporting the ships wandering issue in some prereleases, for reporting the exo-shield insta-death in some prereleases, for reporting the issue with tugs picking up force fields, for reporting the imbalance with tractor beams in the prereleases, for reporting that in prereleases the exo-force-fields were not showing their protection aura over their protected ships, even though they were properly protecting the ships, for suggesting the buff to tachyon beam emitters, for suggesting the improvement to zooming in the graphs, for reporting the inconsistency in the clickable/hover area in the planetary summary. -Thanks to Desmond Kaplan for reporting the issue with non-military ships being selected with the N+2 or N+3 or N+1 filters. -Thanks to Calvin Southwood for suggesting the ship positioning priorities, for reporting the issues with unsupplied command stations constructing, for reporting the issue with low-power ships forming superships when moving together. -Thanks to Velox for reporting the drifting repair stations, for reporting the issue with buildings getting created at the wrong location when placed, for reporting that repair stations could not repair ships that were in low-power mode, for reporting the dancing ship collision, for reporting the issues with tugs in attack-move or FRD modes, for reporting the issue with CTRL-building harvesters potentially causing the energy to go negative, for suggesting that the counter-shooter ranges be shown in placement mode, for suggesting the buff to minelayer durability, for reporting the issue with mines not always leaving remains. -Thanks to fibio for reporting the issue with there being too few ARSes on 40-planet maps. -Thanks to keith.lamothe for reporting the issue with tractor beams not being able to capture tachyon-revealed cloaked ships. -Thanks to Bumster for suggesting that transports be their own ship type, for reporting the issue with holding shift and placing ships for disabled allies. -Thanks to Andrew Leach for reporting the issues with the cloaked and teleporting options in the lobby. -Thanks to Haagenti for suggesting the improvement to the K key functionality. -Thanks to Coded One for reporting the game crash when the system copy of the Arial font was corrupt. -Thanks to Calvin Southwood and Lars Bull for reporting the issue with the Killed With column. -Thanks to liq3 and darke for suggesting that scouts no longer be affected by negative energy balances. -Thanks to liq3 and Haagenti for suggesting the nerf to raiders. -Thanks to Admiral, Volatar, and kjara for suggesting the addition of the altplanetnames.txt functionality. -Thanks to Atesc, spelk, Revenantus, eRe4s3r, Tankor Smash, and RCIX for contributing ideas for achievements. -Thanks to Idlework, Volatar, and darke for contributing ideas to the new style of wormhole egress. -Thanks to Magitek, darke, Revenantus, Oewyn, Haagenti, RCIX, and Gankenstein for reporting the crash bug with lost graphics devices. -Thanks to Oewyn and Revenantus for suggesting that build queues retain their built counts for items that are reordered. -Thanks to darke and kjara for suggesting the change to how the starship constructor icon is handled. -Thanks to NewName, Revenantus, Fiskbit, and Michael Park for reporting and helping to diagnose the poor savegame transfer performance. -Thanks to darke and RCIX for reporting the wrong wave level problem. -Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER and Admiral for suggesting the addition of the energy section to the resoures display on galaxy map intel summaries. -Thanks to Echo35 and Lars Bull for reporting the low power mode counts getting incorrect. ================================================================== Version 1.301 ================================================================== NEW ART - Philippe Chabot -------------- Updated Planetary Summary Box Button - Minimap Display Mode Minimap (In Three Sizes) New Build Button Style New Tech Button Style Combat Style Buttons Polished Galaxy Map Buttons Ready/NotReady in the Lobby New Animated Cursor Splash Screen Image New Menu Button/Background/Tooltip images ButtonPanelConnector New Galaxy Map Background and Border images Updated Asteroid Belt Images New Small Asteroid Images Updated Galaxy Map Planet Icons New Icons For Metal/Crystal Harvesters Updated Icons For Metal/Crystal Updated Icons For Most Ships Updated Control Group Icons For Planetary Summary Updated Player/Enemy/Ally Icons ShotLightning ShotSniperLazer ShotMissile SmokeTrail ShotElectric UPDATED SOUND EFFECTS - Pablo Vega -------------- ShotDoubleLazer ShotMissile ShotMissile2 ShotMissile3 ShipExplode Co-Op Improvements -------------- -There is now a Manage Players button in the in-game menu for the host in all non-tutorial games. This new panel allows the host to rename players, add/remove players, and change player colors. A full sync is required after the contents of this panel are saved. When a new player is added to an in-progress game, they start out with the basic starting resources, and a random bonus ship type (which may or may not be the same as any other player's bonus ship type), but no ships. They do not get a home planet command station, and they are dependent on whatever the existing game players choose to give them in order to get started. Players that are never given any ships can simply watch in a basic spectator mode. When an existing player is disabled, nothing much happens. All of their ships remain, and are simply controllerless. However, as noted below, the remaining players can interact with those left-behind ships in a variety of useful ways. -Home command stations can now be gifted between players. It is also now possible to give away your last controlled command station. -Now that it is possible for home command stations to be gifted between players, the HOME LOST message is now dynamically set based on whether the player controls and home planet command stations at the time or not. -The Give button is now shown even in single-player games, and allows players to give ships to themselves. -It is now possible for any player to select ships that are not owned by active players, and to then give them to other players, or scrap them. It is also possible to give a number of other commands to these sorts of ships, just mainly as a sort of quick ability to manage them in the case that a player has had to leave the game for a while but will later return. Also, the normal rules of gifting ships still apply, so if the recipient player has not unlocked the gifted ship, the gifted ship will not make the transition. Thus if the remaining players want to control the ungiftable ships, they will need to do it via issuing orders to the ungiftable ships while they still belong to the original player. This is simpler in practice than it sounds, and simply lets the human players control all of the needed ships on the map without allowing for exploits that would let them take advantage of these new mechanics to get around ship caps or ship unlock requirements. To quickly gift all of the ships from a planet from one player to another, just zoom way out, hold Ctrl, and select all the ships. Or select fewer numbers of ships to divide the ships up more precisely. This makes dividing up control of the ships of an absent player extremely flexible and straightforward. -When an active player name is blank or "???" in the Manage Players interface, players with any name can connect into that slot and the name will become whatever the connecting player's name is. New Game Mechanic - Supply -------------- -Engineers, Mobile Repair Stations, Mobile Builders, Space Docks and other Constructors, Resource Ships, Force Fields, and Turrets, all now require supply. This means that they will only function if they are within 1 hop of a player-controlled planet. Thus players can still act as raiders, but they do so without the aid of supply-type ships to keep their raiding self sustainable without reinforcements (in other words, without being able to seed docks and engineers all around the galaxy). Thus an important new addendum to existing offensive strategies is picking planets that will grant tactical advantages such as supply for offensive turrets or engineers. Supply is also needed for science labs and energy reactors, so this also means that players will need to take well-connected planets in many cases to do knowledge raiding. Knowledge raiding is still an important part of gameplay, as is raiding, but the strategy required for both is now a bit more complex. -Previously, if a planet had been destroyed (nuked), it was not allowed to have a command station build on it. Now command stations can be built on these planets as normal, which is necessary for capturing any structures that might remain on those planets. -Planets that have been nuked no longer give or receive supply. So other structures beyond the command station can no longer be built on these planets, engineers do not function on them, etc. -Advanced Factories no longer require Supply to function (this makes them work better with nuked planets, and other similar situations). -Non-home command stations now require supply to function. Since command stations create their own supply, normally this has absolutely no effect. But on destroyed/nuked planets, this means that a non-home command station is unable to provide its own supply, and is thus able to be built, but unable to build anything else. -Plum-colored supply lines are now drawn in the galaxy map between planets that have supply. The intel summary in the galaxy map also now notes whether or not each planet has supply. AI Updates -------------- -When the AI has overwhelming odds against the human players, it will now attack more vigorously than before. -The placement logic for AI home planets is now much better, so that they are rarely going to be at all near one another in new games. This gives them much more of a chance to regroup and defeat the human players after one of the AI players is destroyed. -The AI is now vastly much more intelligent with how it deals with exo-shields. Previously exo-shields could be used to distract the AI, but no longer. Performance -------------- -The Lidgren Network library is now used for networking; this makes the game use UDP rather than TCP, and vastly improves network performance for players in high latency/ high packet loss areas. -A slight change has been made to the internal game timing -- there are now 50ms instead of 45ms per internal game cycle. This makes for a more even number of cycles per second, and also provides a bit of a load reduction for lower network/gpu/cpu specs. -Some more internal performance tweaks have been made. -The AI is now throttled to 200 commands per game turn, which prevents it from flooding the game with commands and thus causing it to hang. -Full game syncs are now sent in smaller chunks, making it so that a progress percentage can now be shown on the client. On the server, a number is now shown by the "WAIT" messages, indicating the count of messages that have not yet been sent to the client. The connecting clients also reports their status percentage to the server, and the server shows that percentage by each client. For other clients that have already connected, that status percentage is also now shown so that they know what is going on with other players connecting in. -A new system of render caching is now used for far zoom icons, which reduces the load on the GPU by 1/2 to 2/3 in large battles when zoomed out. This is particularly notable with 3,000+ onscreen ship icons at once, but it also has an effect on smaller groups of ships, too. Interface / Other Graphical/Auditory Improvements -------------- -The quick-buttons at the bottom of the screen are now shown in the galaxy map. -The count of enemy ships (as seen on the galaxy map) is now shown for the current planet on top of the command stations quick-button at the bottom of the screen. -There is now a splash screen that gets shown while the game is loading. -Several improvements have been made to the tab appearance in the lobby and settings windows. -All of the in-game menus have been redone in a much more attractive and visible style. -Control groups are now the first item shown in the planetary summary, and then the current player's ships, allied ships, and finally enemy ships. -The planetary summary is now grouped into multiple sections (mobile military, fixed military, mobile nonmilitary, and fixed nonmilitary), each with a different color pattern to make the section type clear. -The scrolling nebula effect at the start of the game is now faster and smoother, and the background stars don't scroll at all. This makes for a nicer look in general there. -The in-game menu has been condensed slightly, and has been given some color updates to make some of the buttons more at-a-glance visible. -Ships are now back to having selection circles in far zoom instead of having their icon color get lighter. However, now the selection circle is white instead of the color of the player, and is layered on top of any indicators for force field protection, cloaking, etc. -The mixing of sound effects during battles is now much better scaled, so that the game now sound significantly different when there is a small battle versus a big battle versus a giant battle. -A gray box is now shown behind the incoming waves warning to make it easier to read against bright planet backgrounds. -The scores and incoming waves box now have a thin border around them to make their contrast better against dark backgrounds. Galaxy Map Updates -------------- -A huge number of updates have been made to the look of the galaxy map, both in-game and in the lobby. It is much more maplike now, like a starmap monitor on an actual spaceship. -The galaxy map now has a scattering of extra stars and asteroids in it (these are for visual effect only). Minimap Updates -------------- -There are now three levels of zoom to the minimap. The bigger levels are usually going to be unsuitable for small monitors, but are a godsend for players with larger resolutions. -Dragging is now supported on the minimap. This is mostly useful when very zoomed out, or when using one of the larger minimap sizes. -Zooming while the mouse cursor is over the minimap now causes the window to center on the minimap location under the cursor. This makes it easy to zoom in on a minimap location, for instance. New Ships -------------- -A new ship, the Decloaker, has been added. It is like a super Tachyon Drone, with an attack like a Mark II Short Range turret, fast movement, and a really massive coverage area for its tachyon beams. -Three new Gravitational Turrets have been added. They greatly slow the move rate of all ships in their radius. This makes them particularly effective against melee ships, or other ships that are immune to tractor beams. Ship Logic Updates -------------- -Ships will no longer accidentally move too far into range of their target if they are already in range of their target when they are given an order to attack that target. -The way that the ship caps work in multi-home-planet-command station situations is now better. Instead of multiplying the ship cap of all players, the effect is localized to players with more than one home planet command station. -Sniper Shots are now gold, and have a more muted sound effect to make them less annoying on sniper-filled planets. -Ships that are firing out from under allied force fields (which are protecting them), now damage all the protecting force fields by 2x the amount of damage they are dealing to the enemy ships. Thus it becomes much better to place the turrets and other stronger ships outside of force fields unless you want to hurriedly repair them after an assault, while leaving weaker ships and defenseless ships under the force fields for maximum protection. This also acts as a serious nerf to the player practice of clustering hundreds of turrets under a force field to make an unstoppable force. -Previously, whether a shot hit a ship or a forcefield was precalculated when the shot was fired and then never reevaluated. Now it checks to see which it should hit when the shot actually impacts. -When a ship protected by an exoshield is destroyed, the exoshield is also now destroyed. That was always previously the intent, but in recent releases that was not happening. Ship Balance Updates -------------- -Raiders, which were supposed to be immune to tractor beams (as their unit description text says), were not. Fixed. -The attack range of raiders and teleport raiders has been made much more midlevel, to help differentiate them from your standard fighters and similar ships. -The range of core turrets has been increased from 7500 to 8500. -Engineers Mark III now have infinite engine health. -Scout starships no longer have the ability to attack, but they now have 80,000 health instead of 50,000 and move at a rate of 28 instead of 25. -Dreadnoughts are now immune to tractor beams. -Previously, harvester exoshields had a mild attack. With the increase in turret strengths, that is no longer neccessary. The attack has been removed. -The balance of cutlasses has been changed significantly. They now have more health and do much more damage, but their base attack now has damage equal to their health. So if they are going up against high-health targets, they will kill themselves in one hit;if they are going up against multiple weaker targets, they will be able to kill several of the smaller targets before they themselves are killed. Additionally, cutlasses are now much less effective against resources, constructors, and command stations/posts, but are much more effective against turrets. This prevents them from being the scourge of human players when the AI is using them, but should make them a lot more useful for players and AIS to use on the battlefield. -The regen rate of cutlasses has been doubled. Now it takes 7.5 minutes for them to fully heal themselves from 0% health, rather than 15 minutes. -Regular fortresses are now mobile, but are unable to go through wormholes the same as their superfortress cousins. This makes the fortress a lot more distinct from just building a bunch of turrets, and should make it more useful in general for players. -The Mark I and II force fields are now mobile, but are slower than the already-mobile Mark III force fields. This will help players correct for bad forcefield placement, and also make for more consistency with this line of ships; in the past, often new players did not realize that any of the forcefield levels were mobile. -Force fields and fortresses are now immune to tractor beams. Force fields also no longer have regen, but now can be repaired by engineers. -Bomber starships are no longer strong against turrets, instead now having a minor penalty against them. -No starships other than bomber starships are now strong against forcefields. -Cutlasses and teleport raiders are now weak against turrets instead of strong against them. -Fighters are now 12x stronger against cutlasses, and bombers and cruisers are now 50% weaker against them. -The force fields used by the AI are now different from those used by the human players. They now have a gold hue to them, and they work as forcefields previously did -- they are not repairable, and they are not damaged by ships shooting out from under them. They are otherwise identical to their player-controlled counterparts. -All starships except the scout starship are no longer immune to snipers (This makes spider turrets effective against them, for example). -The AI will no longer abandon its guard posts in order to chase armored missiles. -Starships, Fortresses and SuperFortresses, and Armor Ships now fire through shields. This does NOT refer to forcefields, which are different despite the fact that many players mistakenly call them shields, but rather to the shield rating on individual ships. Thus the ships above become much more effective against highly-shielded ships such as high-level bombers. Misc Changes -------------- -Bombers are now called Heavy Bombers to be more descriptive about their true nature for new players in particular. -Handicaps no longer affect energy production. -It is now possible to have negative handicaps that go as low as -300%. For AI players, handicaps in general do not affect the starting number of ships on each planet, but they have a major effect on the size of waves and reinforcements at planets. -There is now a header to the AI War intro story text, and the story text appears more quickly. -The message about player's home planet command statiosn being under attack is now a lot more specific, noting the exact planet(s). This is invaluable for when a single player controls more than one home planet. -The in-game ALSO SPECIAL THANKS TO part of the credits are now alphabetized so as to not give the appearance of favoritism amongst the players there. Previously it was ordered by the order in which they were added to the list. -When multiple waves of AI ships are coming at the same time, those waves are now ordered by planet name. -Docks/Constructors that are unable to finish building a ship because of lack of resources or lack of energy now flash red. -There is now a better error message for when sound files are missing. -The health of each command station is now shown in the tooltip text of the command stations quick button. -When generating the UnitRelativeChart.xml, which is used for player information and the wiki, the game now also generates the UnitRelative.dat file (even when not in debug mode), which is what the developers need to compile into the application in order to update the unit stats. This lets staff other than the developers compile these .dat stats files and send them to the developer for inclusion in the compiled game. -The Paused text in the galaxy map has been moved down to a more pleasing location (where it does not overlap the game timer). -There is now a confirmation message when the combat style button is clicked, to prevent accidental clicks on it from causing players to need to save and reload. -The reactors quick-button now shows which reactors have poor efficiency. -The images for metal and crystal have been made a bit more distinct in shape. Additionally, the icons for the metal and crystal harvesters now match the actual resource icons. -There is now a "Needed Energy To Reenable" notice on ships in low-power mode, which will help inform players why they sometimes can't reenable a ship at a specific time. Bugfixes -------------- -Previously, when taking ships out of low-power mode, the ship could not come out of low power mode unless there was energy free equal to the total full energy use of the ship. When in reality, the needed free energy is only equal to the full energy use minus the low-power energy use. Fixed. -There was previously a bug in the settings screen where on some computers the notices at the very bottom could overlap each other and the quit button. Fixed. -Previously, force fields were disappearing if the generator was offscreen and not selected. Fixed. -The lobby tooltip text was a bit out of date for the visibility options. Fixed. -The buildpoint display text on the hover menu of space docks was way off. Fixed. -There was previously an issue with the timing of the game on very fast CPUs in very low-load situations. It was running the game at too fast of a speed if the game simulation was able to get more than 30ms ahead of itself (something only made possible by very fast CPUs and recent performance improvements). This 30ms cap was previously in place as something of a safety valve, but it is no longer needed and has thus been taken out, thus fixing the timing issue in the process. -The find mode instructions were not displaying recent versions. Fixed. -Previously, it was possible to click into "obstacle" planets such as black holes and asteroid belts. This was in error, and has now been corrected. -Drag selection now works properly when the cursor is over clickable objects like the scores list and the buttons and minimap. Drag selection also now works better when dragging and scrolling the screen. -Fixed a minor issue with the sound effects for the home planet command stations being hit. -Previously, when ships were just being created for a player, they would use double their actual needed energy. Fixed. -Previously, if parasites/leeches did more than 100% damage to a ship, they could reclaim it with more than 50% starting health. Fixed. -The description text for metal/crystal harvesters was still referring to them losing efficiency as more are built, which is no longer correct. Fixed. -Some minor inacurracies were fixed in the first tutorial. -Partial fog of war was previously called by the wrong name in the dropdown in the lobby. Fixed. -There was previously a game freeze bug in very rare circumstances when cross-planet attacks were initiated against players. Fixed. -In recent releases, a bug was preventing AI players from reinforcing their own home planets. This was making the endgame WAY too easy for players. Fixed! -The word "reinforcements" was misspelled on all the guard posts in the game. -Previously, sometimes ships that were being pushed or displaced by force fields would become invisible. Fixed. -Previously, after clearing a cross-planet gather point for a constructor, ships would still travel to the first planet on the old queue. Fixed. -Previously, lightning shots that were mostly offscreen would disappear incorrectly. Fixed. -Previously, the menus were not centering correctly in the game when the window titlebar was shown. Fixed. -Previously, some of the menus and windows (like the View Controls window) could sometimes show up too tall when the window titlebar was shown. Fixed. -There were previously some issues with the "ready checkbox" state being able to get out of sync in the lobby. Fixed. -There were a few issues with mouse cursor position calculations when the window titlebar was shown and/or the window was moved around. Fixed. -Previously, all ship icons were flashing for the first two seconds of a new game. Fixed. -Previously, the windows "error" sound effect would play when players hit enter in the in-game chat textbox. Fixed. -There was previously some textual overlap in the control group hover text when the tooltip font size was increased. Fixed. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- -Thanks to Tankor Smash for suggesting the quick-buttons remain available in the galaxy map, for providing initial concept mockups of the new iconic combat style buttons, for suggesting that the low energy message be moved down, for suggesting a special in-game cursor, for reporting the issue with force fields not rendering when their generator was offscreen, for reporting a minor typography error, for suggesting the paused text be moved in the galaxy map. -Thanks to Huw for reporting the issue with raiders not being immune to tractor beams. -Thanks to liq3 for reporting the bug with the crash in 1.202A, for reporting the issue with the ship caps when one player leaves a game, for reporting the issues with gravitational turrets in low power mode, for reporting the issue with exoshields not working in some of the prereleases, for suggesting the balance changes to cutlasses, for suggesting the improved regen for cutlasses, for suggesting that starships do better against highly-shielded targets. -Thanks to eRe4s3r for reporting the extra peice of panel behind the minimap display button, for reporting the issue with the buildpoint display on space docks, for suggesting negative handicaps, for suggesting improvements to how capturing nuked planets works, for suggesting that the AI home planet logic be improved, for reporting the issue with damaged ship icon blinking, for reporting the issue with AI home planet reinforcements not working. -Thanks for darke for suggesting the improvements to the build button overlaps, for suggesting that engineers III have infinite engine health, for suggesting there be added detail on the HOME command station under attack warning, for reporting the textual overlap in the control group hover text with increased font sizes, for reporting the issue with tooltip overlap and the mission summary. -Thanks to Haagenti for suggesting that the range of core turrets be increased, for suggesting that the AI be more vigorous when it has overwhelming odds, for reporting the issue with the harvester text being out of date, for reporting the issue with unsupplied science labs, for reporting the spelling error with reinforcements. -Thanks to Narmio for suggesting the renaming of bombers to heavy bombers, for reporting the misspelling of Laser as Lazer in a few spots. -Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting that the count of enemy ships on the current planet be visible without switching to the galaxy map, for suggesting the improvements to drag selection, for reporting the issue with the home planet command station, for reporting the issue with home planet command stations exploding incorrectly in the prereleases, for reporting the issue with ships using double their needed energy on creation, for reporting the parasite overkill issue, for suggesting the improvements to wave order, for suggesting the docks flash red when unable to build ships because of lack of energy, for suggesting the gray box behind incoming wave warning text, for suggesting the new minimap interactions for zoom, for reporting the issue with clearing cross-planet gather points, for reporting the issue with lightning shots that were mostly offscreen, for reporting the issue with ship icons flashing during the first two seconds of a new game. -Thanks to MorphingJar for reporting the issue with ships in low-power mode having trouble coming out, for suggesting the "Needed energy to reenable" notice. -Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the overlap of text in the settings screen, for reporting several minor glitches in the first tutorial, for suggesting that the reactors quick-button show which ones have poor efficiency. -Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the tooltip text being out of date for visibility options in the lobby, for suggesting that starships no longer be immune to snipers, for reporting the issue with the primary mission objectives, for suggesting that the command stations quick button include the health of each command station, for reporting the issue with tooltip overlap and the mission summary. -Thanks to Velox for pointing out the problems with scout starships revealing their positions by firing. -Thanks to Warnstaff for suggesting that scout starships get speed/health boosts in exchange for losing the ability to attack. -Thanks to theDirefulMachine for reporting the issue with the timing of the game running a bit too fast at times. -Thanks to Larry Park for reporting that the find mode instructions were not displaying, for reporting the issue with the View Controls window size when window titlebars were enabled. -Thanks to etgfrogs for reporting the issue with unthrottled AI command queues. -Thanks to Valarauka for suggesting the sectioning and colorizing of the planetary summary, for suggesting the clients report their connection progress to the server and the other clients, for reporting the issues with the Autocannon naming. -Thanks to Thasero for suggesting that dreadnoughts should be immune to tractor beams. -Thanks to Tals for suggesting the ability to add new players to an in-progress game, for suggesting the progress indicator during full syncs, for reporting the issues with the chat messages being shown under the bottom buttons in the galaxy map, for reporting the issue with ships being made invisible when pushed by force fields, for suggesting that players with any name should be able to connect to player slots with ??? as the name. -Thanks to RCIX for reporting the issue with shots sometimes hitting ships that are under force fields but were not when the shot was fired, for reporting the naming issue with the partial fog of war issue in the menu. -Thanks to Oewyn for reporting the issue with space tugs and other tractor-beam type ships picking up mobile force fields. -Thanks to tional for suggesting that the AI home planet logic be improved. -Thanks to CautiousChaos for suggesting buttons to grow/shrink the minimap incrementally. -Thanks to Idlework for suggesting scrolling on the minimap. -Thanks to Sprouto for reporting the game freeze bug with cross-planet attacks. -Thanks to Pandemic for reporting the ready state sync issues in the lobby. -Thanks to Echo35 for reporting the issue with supply lines between supplied non-player planets. -Thanks to Volatar for suggesting a solution to the problem of the windows error sound effect playing when enter is pressed on the in-game chat window. -Thanks to Lars Bull, Echo35, Idlework, darke, Tals, Volatar, Calvin Southwood, dumpsterKEEPER, Tankor Smash, Admiral, and Ashery for all contributing ideas for the major new co-op dropin/dropout functionality. -Thanks to KibbeZero, ldlework, and Volatar for reporting the issues with the mouse cursor position getting off when in windowed mode and moved around. ================================================================== Version 1.201 ================================================================== 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. ================================================================== Version 1.013 ================================================================== -Scout starships no longer have the munitions boosting ability. -Fixed some logic oversights with the AI trying to make its ships attack targets that are immune to the attacking ship's shots. -When in placement mode, the entire text of the ship info is no longer shown. Now it just shows the name of the ship, any special tips, and the costs and time to build. This makes it much easier to see past it when building. -The amount of starting crystal and metal updated to 20,000 each for players (up from 10,000 and 5,000 respectively), to help rebalance the start of the game since the AI is now so much more fearsome at the start. This also helps to give players a faster start, reducing the amount of time spent in the initial fortification and defense of their single planet. -The amount of starting knowledge has been increased to 10,000 per player from 1,000. This lets players further customize their civilizations right from the start, and with all the many added techs that have been added to the game, this also lets them experience a bit more per game. Plus, for some of the really expensive techs (like Fortresses), this provides an easier way to get access to those without players necessarily feeling like they are waiting too long between tech upgrades. Think of this like picking starting abilities for a character in a western-style PC RPG. -These additions of metal, knowledge, and crystal are retroactively applied to existing savegames. -The attack range of fortresses has been quadrupled, their shield rating has been halved, their health has been increased by 2 million, and they now have a min hit percent chance of 80%. They now also have a 90% attack penalty against bombers, in addition to space tanks. -The range of Mark II-IV electric shuttles was being displayed as 900 less than it actually was in-game. Fixed. -All force fields, exoshields, and the fortress now have infinite engine health. -Explosions are now much more impressive, and are clearly differentiated from shot impacts. -Metal harvesters now produce 6 metal each instead of 5. This makes them consistent with crystal harvesters, and should reduce the too-common need for metal manufactories. -Explosions are now additive-blended instead of alpha-blended, which makes them look even more vastly better. -Star backgrounds for the game are now procedurally generated. This makes them look much better, and especially vastly better on any resolution other than 1024x768. They also use much less RAM than before. Still more visual upgrades to come with this in the future. -The various ship-to-ship lines are now drawn wiht a much more impressive visual style using additive blending. This also lets the game render half as many component lines for each compound line, which increases the overall draw efficiency. -All of the shot special effects have been greatly improved using additive blending and other related techniques. Missiles now have a smoke trail, and all shots are larger (large enough that they can actually be seen from a lot of the far zoom distances). -The method for rendering the planets has been completely changed, and now supports rotation. All of the planets now have a rotation speed of some degree. This paves the way for the other planet graphics improvements that are planned (for now, many of them still don't look all that wonderful). -There is no longer an outer boundary to the planetary area. This makes the game feel a bit less bounded (and prevents snipers from being trapped against the edge of the planetary area), and also allows for several performance improvements on the CPU and the GPU. Ships that are built via direct placement can still not be built too far from the planet area's center, though, so this prevents the issues of players going way off in the distance to build their defenses away from any wormholes. -The overzoom feature has been removed as it is now redundant -- the "very far zoom" now works like overzoom in general. The black bars that were shown are no longer shown. -There is now an arrow that gets shown at the edge of the minimap when the viewport window goes too far off the minimap's bounds. -The game now shows a message explaining why a placement mode ship cannot be placed at whatever location it is blocked from being placed at. -Cloaked enemy ships no longer cause placement mode ships to be unplaceable. This prevents players from being able to sweep for enemy ships by attempting to place a turret or other ship in locations that they think have cloaked ships. -Junk and rock objects are now skipped from being drawn if they are to be drawn as less than 5px in size. This lowers the load on the GPU somewhat when viewing a large planet at very far zoom. -Shots are now skipped from being drawn if they are to be drawn as less than 2px in size. This lowers the load on the GPU somewhat when viewing a big battle at very far zoom (and those shots would be barely perceptible anyway at that range). -There was previously a bug wherein a very few rare map seeds (such as 1315917969) could cause the game to lock up when the map was generated. Fixed. -Individual ships may not queue more than 15 attack targets. Also, targets beyond the first that are queued by the AI are no longer kept in savegames. Additionally, the AI will no longer attempt to queue targets as this was only a minor adjustment and caused more problems than it solved. AI ships now use a different technique to make sure they are better able to chase groups of player ships. -The relative priorities of force fields and countershooters has been reversed. This makes it possible for counter-shooters to protect force fields. -Fixed a bug that could cause the game to lag extremely severely when many MLRS ships had their missiles targeted on ships inside the protection radius of something that fires counter-missiles. -AI Core Command Stations are now immune to missiles and sniper shots, in addition to firing counter-shots for these types. The only practical difference this makes is to make impossible the autotargeting or manual targeting of missile/sniper type ships onto the AI Core Command Stations. -Ships now do a better job of not firing on ships that they have 0% chance of hitting, even if the player told them to do so (in situations where the target is immune to the firing ship's shots, etc). -Ion cannons now fire 4X faster, and have 4 simultaneous shots instead of just one, which makes flooding them with low-level ships vastly much harder. -Shots should now more quickly die when their target leaves the current planet. -The sound effect files are now all stored in the ogg format, which saves space and paves the way for doing more improvements to the sound effects without making huge updates for players. -The background nebula images are now blended even better than before, and a few more images are used in order to make the effects even more dramatic. -The background stars/nebulas are now rendered in a larger area that scrolls slightly as the camera pans around. This gives a much better impression of movement for players. There is also now a slight zoom factor to the background stars/nebulas, to make the whole appearance look more dynamic. -Several fixes to the third basic tutorial. -The intermediate tutorial has been improved: wormholes are now guarded as they are in the real game, which makes scouting as hard as it should be; both group-move and the auto-building of harvesters are now mentioned in this tutorial. -There is now a visual zoom indicator in the form of black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. These black bars get larger as the player gets further zoomed-out, thus giving an easy indicator of exactly how far out the players are zoomed. This black bar overlays the background starfield but nothing else, so it does not restrict visibility in any way (and it also is mostly behind what would typically be interface elements, anyway). This has the added effect of a nice-looking letterbox effect when very zoomed out. -The overkill model has now been updated so that ships will still fire at enemy ships if the incoming shots will do less overkill than 2x the strength of the firing ship. This will cause 1 or 2 wasted overkill shots in a lot of battles, but will also solve a lot of the other overkill-related problems. -Colony ships are now immune to being insta-killed, which makes capturing planets with an ion cannon on it a lot easier. -Space docks that have a large number of "unbuildable" ships that have already hit their cap will now cycle through all of the unbuildable ship types very quickly, thus making it only around 0.5seconds less efficient than if there were no unbuildable ships in the queue at all. -There was previously a bug that was causing planets that were destroyed to not let their ownership be later changed to nothing (this would happen if a player nuked an AI home planet and then later killed the AI). This could actually prevent players from winning. Fixed. -The AI thread will no longer recieve "turn starting" messages when the game is paused, which will prevent it from issuing a bunch of orders while the game is paused and nothing is going on. -There is now zero chance that shots will hit ships that have just moved to another planet. -A prior bug was still preventing shots from disappearing if their targets went out of range. Fixed. -A bug could cause excess shots to be fired and performance to go severely downward when MLRS ships were brought near counter-missile sources and fired on nearby ships. Fixed. -All mobile-military teleporting ships (so, tele-raiders and tele-battle stations) are now briefly paralyzed (unable to move, shoot, etc) when they come out of a teleportation. The severity of the paralysis is based on the distance they moved. This helps make them not quite so all-powerful as they have been in recent releases, although the specific values of this balance may be tweaked more in the future. -The "No Warning On Waves" logic was incorrectly being triggered for one of the AIs, but not the other, because they AIs were mistakenly only warping into human planets from planets that the AI player individually controlled (not by planets that the AI team as a whole controls). So in situations where the players have only one warp gate adjacent to their planets, one of the AIs would start coming in with no warning from their other planets on the higher difficulties (and on lower difficulties, they would just reinforce instead). Fixed. -Ion cannon mark levels have been renamed to Mark I and Mark II, instead of Mark II and Mark III. The functionality of them has not changed, but the naming will hopefully be more clear to most players. -The way that overkill is handled is now separate for snipers versus for other ships. That way incoming long-range sniper shots won't impede the ability of closer-range turrets to kill the ships more quickly. -Ion cannons will no longer be placed on planets directly adjacent to player home planets. -AI ships that would sometimes act indecisive should now be decisive. -Harvesters now do a better job of snapping to the appropriate nearest harvest point, especially when there are several harvest points very close together. Also, issues with harvesters not being able to be placed on a point that is too near to other large fixed-position ships is now fixed. Also, issues with harvester auto-placement sometimes being unable to place a harvester that could be manually placed, is now fixed. -The shields of shield bearers are no longer infinite, and shield bearers now have 1,000x more health. This lets their force fields work a bit more predictably, and solve the various issues that they were causing with ship targeting in battle. The size of their force fields has also thus been increased a lot. CHANGES FROM PAST PRERELEASES -------------- NEW ART - Philippe Chabot -------------- Planet - Iapetus Planet - Dione Planet - Europa NEW ART - eRe4s3r -------------- MiniMap MiniMapBlip (contributed) MiniMapBlipCrystal (contributed) MiniMapBlipMetal (contributed) MiniMapFlare MiniMapFlareBorder MiniMapWormhole MiniMapWormholeActive Explosion ExplosionSmall UPDATED SOUND EFFECTS - Pablo Vega -------------- ShotBasic ShotBasicEnemy ShotBasicLaser ShotBasicLaserEnemy SPECIAL THANKS -------------- -Thanks to Revenantus for suggesting that scout starships not have munitions boosting, for reporting the display bug with electric shuttles, for reporting the map lockup issue. -Thanks to Lars Bull for reporting the issue with AI ships targeting immune targets, for reporting the issue with the new title screen showing hover text for ships, for suggesting that shots no longer disappear when the player is very zoomed out, for suggesting that there be a visual zoom indicator, for suggesting that colony ships not be insta-killable, for reporting the various issues with harvester placement. -Thanks to Marisa Park for suggesting the placement mode text reduction. -Thanks to darke for suggesting the buffing of fortresses, for suggesting that ion cannons be made more formidable. -Thanks to eRe4s3r for yet more art-mods-that-turned-official, for suggesting additive blending for explosion, for reporting the issue with MLRS firing at core command stations, for suggesting that munitions booster lines be more subtle, for reporting the bug with the destroyed planets being un-loseable, for reporting the second issue with MLRS ships firing near counter-missile sources. -Thanks to Pandemic for suggesting that force fields have infinite engine health, for suggesting the specific way to rebalance the teleport battle stations. -Thanks to bssybeep for reporting the issue with queued attack targets causing savegames to get extremely slow. -Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the issue with the galaxy map background changing inappropriately, for reporting the issue with shots being able to hit ships that just moved to a new planet, for reporting the bug with shots chasing ships for too far, for reporting the "No Warning On Waves" bug. -Thanks to gstelmack for suggesting that the tutorials mention the auto-building of harvesters more prominently. -Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for suggesting that the intermediate tutorial be updated to make scouting more realistic. -Thanks to Haagenti for suggesting the improvement to how unbuildable ship types in a queue are handled, for suggesting the rebalancing of the teleport battle stations, for suggesting that ion cannons no longer be placed on planets adjacent to player home planets. -Thanks to CautiousChaos for reporting the issue with turrets still being delayed by sniper shots even after other overkill improvements were in place. ================================================================== Version 1.012 ================================================================== -Fixed a bug with AI ships not properly guarding the command posts they are supposed to reinforce, instead attacking player planets too much. -AI was getting too many engineer drones in some reinforcements. -Planets that are on alert now appear with a yellow border instead of a crimson one. -Planets that have incoming waves now flash their borders black and red. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- -Thanks to PhilROI for initially reporting the bug with AI ships not guarding properly. -Thanks to eRe4s3r and Haagenti for suggesting the brighter on-alert borders. -Thanks to Revenantus for suggesting the incoming waves show a fulltime visual cue on the galaxy map. ================================================================== Version 1.011 ================================================================== -Electric Shuttle attack strengths have been doubled, and their health has been increased by almost double, too. -Force fields are now a new category of their own, separate from the general "heavy defense" category. -Light starships now have a small bonus against force fields. -Raid and Leech starships now are immune to force fields, and are thus able to shoot ships under them. They also have the same small bonus against force fields. -Flagships, Zinth Starships, and Spire Starships now have much greater bonuses against force fields. -Core starships now have a huge bonus against force fields. -The number of simultaneous shots each starship is able to fire has been doubled. -All starships now have some level of munitions boost ability. -Starships and other heavy defense items can no longer have their attacks boosted. This prevents an impulse to strengthen starships by clustering them all together. They are meant to be an anchor for other smaller groups of ships. -Shots are now required to stay within their attack range of the target they are being fired at. This solves several problems, for one allowing the really fast ships to outrun very slow shots, and for two allowing for teleporting ships to escape the range of incoming shorter-range shots without those shots trailing them indefinitely. -All of the bigger AI ships, like advanced research stations, are now immune to tractor beams and thus EtherJets and Space Tugs. -Missiles no longer gather scout intel. -AI ships will now abandon their posts when they target a missile or a starship, which can either help them to kill the target or it can create a backwash of enemy ships flowing to the player planets after a missile/starship has passed through AI planets. -It is now possible to view any planet at any time, but only the wormholes are visible if you have never scouted the planet and don't have ships there, and an extra fog of war is shown. If you have scouted the planet before, but you don't have ships currently at that planet, then the resource spots are also shown in addition to the wormholes, but nothing else and the fog of war is still there. -The way that waves are sent from the AI has been heavily revamped. Wave timing has been adjusted, and the size of the wave that is sent is now based completely on how long was spent being created. So sometimes you might get hit with several smaller waves in quicker succession, and other times you might have a long wait between waves but then a really huge influx. -The AI now builds up periodic cross-planet attacks on difficulties 5 and greater. These just basically "set free" a certain number of ships above a max threshold at an AI planet, dispersing them into the galaxy to wreak whatever havoc they can. Depending on how the older game was going, this may turn a lot of old save files into losses if players do not carefully defend themselves. At difficulty 7, these waves range in strength between 875 and 1680 ships -- of whatever tech level the planet has that built these up. -The health of all turrets has been doubled at the least, and in some cases increased more than that. -The entire GameCommand architecture has been redone, so that in many cases it should put 1/5 the load on the network compared to past releases, and when ordering big masses of ships around it should put even less load. This also paves the way for some bulk-orders down the line. -The number of collisions run per cycle has been increased 50X, which will cause extra load on lower-level machines in some certain circumstances (such as a lot of ships going through a wormhole all at once) but a much better game experience overall, especially when there are lots of ships moving around. -Previously, if ships were fading in they could not shoot but they could be shot at. Also, they would not start becoming visible until their collision detection was run, which meant that in extreme cases they could be moving around the planet before becoming visible. Both fixed. -Only multi-core computers, the AI thread will no longer pause for 1/5 of a second between iterations. This logic is only now applied on single-core hosts, to help keep the CPU load lower while at the same time making the AI mildly slower to react. -The message queue to the AI thread now processes 20x as many messages as before when there are more than 500 items in the queue. On below-specs CPUs this should actually help performance, since a key degradation factor for performance was actually having the command queue getting too backed up. -Cloaked enemy ships that teleport no longer make a sound. -The teleport sound effect also now only plays for ships that are selected, or which are teleporting to a location onscreen. -The "wait points" of AI players are now cleared when they are being shot at or are shooting at another target, which makes them more responsive and less sitting ducks. -A number of new planet name syllables have been added, which will provide millions (or more) possible new planet names. -Ion cannons are now able to hit ships under force fields. Transports will need to be used to sneak past ion cannons, not mobile force fields. -All of the ships that are captured on planet ownership change are now immune to force fields, which means that they will stay immobile under enemy force fields. Same thing with all of the resource producers (including harvesters). This makes it possible to build metal/crystal harvesters under enemy force fields, but if they have ships there then you are likely to have those harvesters get killed pretty quickly. -The scouts have all been renamed to Scout I, II, III, and IV instead of the older names that are no longer appropriate. -The Anti-Armor ships now have a min hit percent chance of 90% (so if a ship is at all in range, they have a 90% chance of hitting it -- cruisers have an 80% chance of that). Their range has also all been increased to 5000, which is lower than a cruiser but higher than most other ships. This makes them something of a secondary cruiser, which should make them a lot more popular in general. -Eyebots are now immune to being insta-killed by ion cannons, etc. They are also now immune to snipers. -Shield bearers now have small, weak force fields, which let them protect nearby allied ships but which doesn't let them push enemy ships around. -The range of deflector drones has been increased 10x, making them the longest-ranged non-sniper ships in the game. They are still a weak ship, but this makes them useful in a lot more situations rather than just against masses of laser gatlings, etc. -Tractor beams are no longer able to be sent out by cloaked ships. Any tractor beams that exist will remain if a ship then re-cloaks, but no new ones can be sent out except when the ship is at least partly visible. -The way that the button rows along the bottom of the screen are handled has been revamped to allow for some more flexibility. -The build buttons in a number of the menus are now drawn in two dimensions. This makes the lineages of turrets, force fields, starships and the like a lot more easy to read, and also paves the way for having vastly more lineages being introduced over time. -Space Docks now show all of the Mark I through III ships on a single tab, with multiple rows, which makes it a lot easier to see where your upgrades have been applied without having to do a lot of clicking around. -The tech buttons have been updated to match the new display of the build buttons. -Raid and Leech Starships now have a small bonus against turrets and heavy defenses, rather than a moderate penalty. They now have a severe penalty against resource producers, constructors, and command stations. -Missiles, like scouts and non-military ships, are now a lower-priority selection when drag-selecting. They won't be selected unless there are no unselected military ships being selected in the same action. -The colored borders on ships (showing attack-move, group move, etc) no longer show for enemy ships. -The AI will no longer launch cross-planet attacks from their home planets. -Previously, the game would crash on start in systems without an active sound card driver installed. Fixed. -When loading a saved game but waiting for other players to connect, previously the game would show zeroes for the income rates and energy balance (and thus also a warning of a low energy balance). Now the game omits the income rates, skips the warning, and shows "???" for the energy balance until the game is actually resumed. -(Player and AI) ships that are chasing a teleporting ship will now break off the chase if the teleporting ship goes out of attack range, if there are any non-teleporting ships present that can be chased instead. This prevents ships from being sent on wild goose chases after teleporting ships. -Teleporting ships are now the lowest priority for chasing when the ship doing the chasing does not have teleportation. -There are now protections in place that prevent an accumulation of too many queued messages on the AI thread. -Previously, if all of the preferred planets were filled up to the point where the AI would not do any more reinforcements, the AI thread would hang and the AI would stall, eventually potentially causing an out of memory exception. Fixed so that it now properly tries to reinforce to a non-preferred planet, and so that it then just doesn't do reinforcements if that also fails. -The AI now better handles massive numbers of ships all queuing at the same wormhole. It no longer causes the ships to fly back and forth if there are too many of them. -The way that collision detection is determined to be needed is now handled completely differently, and this now results in significant efficiency gains with what should be no difference in how the collisions are determined. -A couple of new efficiency improvements have been added to the collision logic, which makes the performance even better when there are vast numbers of ships all colliding at once. -Previously, sending thousands of ships through a wormhole all at one time could cause a significant hitch in the game on the computer on which the command was issued. Fixed. -AI ships now send three little Mark I fighters through wormholes immediately prior to the emergence of every wave. This prevents things like electric shuttles and lightning turrets from doing quite so much damage in the first blast (and is a tactic that human players use to great effect, too). -AI melee ships under force fields won't lurk, but will attack as normal. -Several efficiency improvements have been made to the AI thread, and the AI tactics have had a few tweaks to make them a bit faster and more accurate also. This is mostly relevant for single-processor CPUs. -The AI now queues up multiple potential targets on each targeting pass, which means there is much less stopping and starting when it is chasing player ships from a long distance when player ships are commonly being killed. -The targeting algorithm on the main thread has been made more efficient for planets with large numbers (4,000+) of enemy ships. The efficiency gain is around 10%-20%, depending on the type of ships in use. -The collision detection algorithm has been made much more efficient for batches of ships that are thousands or more in size. This also makes the blob of ships more "spiky," but the efficiency gain is worth it for the really large fleets. -A new "Zoom-In Hotkeys Center On Cursor" option has been added to the Zoom/Pan section of the settings window. -Space tugs will no longer try to bring ships back to still-under-construction mobile repair stations. -Space tugs will no longer randomly push ships around when there is no local mobile repair station to bring them to. -Space tugs will no longer pick up ships that are in the middle of assisting another ship (like engineers assigned to repair/accelerate). -The AI now views starships and ion cannons as higher-priority targets to take out, since they are expensive (and in the case of ion cannons irreplaceable). -The knowledge counts over science labs now only appear over ships of the same team as the local player. -The message log between players now keeps the last 40 messages instead of the last 15. -The range of tachyon beams emitted by astro trains and the scout starship has been increased. -It is no longer possible to issue move orders that would try to send ships outside the valid area of a planet. -The basic size of force fields have been increased, but force fields now shrink in size as they take damage, protecting fewer and fewer ships as they shrink. -The way the per-AI-player per-planet ship cap is calculated is now different. Previously it was always just a flat 2000 per player. Now it is 250 x the number of command posts and stations, with a minimum cap of 250 and a maximum cap of 2500. This makes clearing command posts a lot more effective a way of limiting AI growth in planets (it already was effective, but now it is even more so). -It is now possible to use the ship level limiters (N+0-5) in conjunction with one another. So N+1+2 limits to all tech 1 and 2 ships, for instance. -There is now a ship selection limiter of N+7, which selects only ships with damaged engines. Also there is now Space+N+7, which selects only ships with perfectly healthy engines. -All of the difficulty levels now have descriptive names, ranging from "sandbox" to "doom." -Due to all the many performance improvements in this and past releases, the minimum system requirements have been dropped from 2.4Ghz to 1.6Ghz. 2.4Ghz or more is still recommended for the most ideal experience on large maps or heavy battles, but on average a 2.4Ghz can run the game at triple speed with no problem, so the system requirements were clearly set a bit too high given all the enhancements. -New difficulty levels have now been added: 7.3, 7.6, 8.3, 8.6, 9.3, 9.6, and 9.8. This allows for greater flexibility for players that prefer something between the upper difficulty levels, but not exactly on one of them. -Weak force fields can no longer push other ships around. -Strong force fields can no longer be pushed around by other force fields (so Mark III force fields can no longer be pushed, basically). -Electric shuttles, and lightning turrets are no longer immune to force fields. -There is now a message on force fields that tells players that Snipers, Sniper Turrets, Raid/Leech Starships, Infiltrators, EyeBots, Ion Cannons, and Counter-Spies can all move and fire through force fields as if they are not there. -Ships now de-clump while traveling when all heading the the same destination. -A slight efficiency improvement has been made to the render logic for drawing many destination lines at once. -Engineers that don't have anything better to do (repairs) will now automatically accelerate queue-based constructors. -A slight flicker in rotating turrets and other ships has now been fixed. -Cloaked ships can no longer be boosted by munitions boosters except when they are partially/fully visible. This prevents munitions boosters from giving away the location of cloaked ships, and also makes the boosters pick targets that can actually fire. -The way that the game timer is shown is now a bit different. If a game lasts for more than 24 hours, it will now just keep counting up the hours instead of adding a day counter component to the text. This makes it considerably easier to read. -AI Reinforcements to planets now have an additional bit to them. A "minimum number of posts/stations" is calculated as the AI Progress / 10, within a range of 3 to 11. When a planet being reinforced has fewer posts/stations than the calculated minimum, it will then do extra reinforcements to the central command station (or one of the command posts, if that is gone) equal to the minimum minus the actual posts count. This prevents players from "neutering" AI planets in such a way that causes the total volume of AI reinforcements to get too low. This way, if players do neuter an AI planet, it will fill up more quickly, hit or pass the ship cap for the AI at that planet, and will then reinforce elsewhere in the future. Neutering thus still remains a valid and effective tactic, but not an overpowerful one. -There was previously a bug wherein human players could be placed on opposite teams if the host started a multiplayer game after having just come from a tutorial without restarting the program first. Fixed. -Munitions boosters are once again able to boost ships while on the move. The de-clumping logic has removed the need for this restriction. NEW ART (by Philippe Chabot, Arcen's new artist) -------------- -Resource icons. -Minimap wormhole icons. -Minimap background (also with additions by eRe4s3r) -Mode button (Fast & Dangerous or Normal) -Timer background box. -Mission background box. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to CautiousChaos for suggesting that electric shuttles and starships needed to be buffed, for suggesting the revamp to the way that wave calculations are run. Thanks to Kalzarius for suggesting that shots be limited to their attack range when following teleporting ships, for reporting the incorrect resource rates display and warning when connecting to a multiplayer game, for reporting the desync with cross-planet attacks and force fields. Thanks to Haagenti for reporting the exploit with advanced research stations and tractor beams, for suggesting the balance improvements to anti-armor, eyebots, shield bearers, and defletor drones, for suggesting that etherjets be nerfed a bit, for inspiring the change to how AI Waves emerge from wormholes, for suggesting the names for the difficulty levels, for suggesting the added difficulty levels. Thanks to Revenantus for suggesting that AI ships pursue missiles, for suggesting that missile not give scout intel, for suggesting the improvements to when the teleporting sound effect is played, for reporting the issue with harvesters popping out from under enemy force fields, for suggesting the scout drone renames, for suggesting that missiles be lower-priority selections like scouts, for suggesting that the colored borders on ships be same-team only, for sugesting that ships not chase teleportating ships if there is a better option, for reporting the lag in sending wormhole commands, for reporting the bug with waypoints, for suggesting that ion cannons be given a higher priority by the AI, for suggesting that melee ships not hide under force fields if they are being shot, for suggesting that knowledge counts only be shown over ships of the same team, for reporting the issue with ships being able to be issued orders outside the planetary map, for suggesting that force fields shrink as they take damage, for suggesting the new per-AI-player per-planet ship cap method, for suggesting the N+7 modifier, for suggestig that munitions boosters not work on cloaked ships. Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the ability to click into any planet at any time, for suggesting that the ship level limiters be able to work in conjunction with one another, for suggesting that idle engineers should assist queue-based constructors. Thanks to Pandemic for reporting the exception with setting control groups, for suggesting the Space+N+7 modifier, for suggesting that Mark III force fields not be pushable, for suggesting that electric shuttles and lightning turrets not be immune to force fields, for suggesting the note on force fields alerting players as to which ship types are immune to force fields. Thanks to darke for suggesting the improvements to how AI ships act while at a wait point, for suggesting the nerfing of the raid and leech starships against certain targets, for suggesting the increase to the range of tachyon beams from scout starships. Thanks to Rushyo for reporting the crash with missing sound drivers. Thanks to Wacky Willy for suggesting the "zoom-in" settings option. Thanks to MorphingJar for suggesting that space tugs not pick up ships that are actively assisting another ship. Thanks to seonder for suggesting the increase in the number of messages shown in the message log. Thanks to eRe4s3r for reporting the crash bug with N+5, for reporting the "blob exploit," for reporting the "pies" of ships, for reporting the issue with autosaves, for providing art for the new "high visibility" minimap. Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting the fix to the rotation flicker. Thanks to bbcisdabomb for reporting the bug with human players being enemies. Thanks to Kalzarius and darke for reporting the rare AI stalling bug, and helping to track it down. Thanks to MorphingJar and Pandemic for reporting the issues with space tugs without repair stations. ================================================================== Version 1.010 ================================================================== -The game now remembers the screen position and zoom level on each planet for the local player, so when the player is switching around between planets, the zoom level will be changed. This is not kept between saving and loading of the game. -The ship selections are now remembered when players switch between one planet and then back. -Mark II Engineers now have infinite engine health, like all the other teleporting ships. -All of the ship selection shortcuts (comma, period, B, S, etc) now support Ctrl+ to select all ships of that type. -Right-clicking an icon in the planetary summary now cycles through the ships with that icon, rather than selecting them all. Ctrl+right-clicking them selects them all. -Space tugs and etherjet tractors can now be able to move ships with shot-out engines. -The selection rectangle counts now only show up for 10x10px selection boxes and up. This prevents a flicker of the text when ships are just being left-clicked. -There is a new "Show Minimap Box On Top Of Ship Blips" option in the Misc Interface Options section of the settings. -Double-clicking items in the listboxes for joining a multiplayer game, listing profiles, and listing tutorials now automatically does the default action, rather than requiring a single-click and then a button press. -There was previously an inaccuracy with the hostile wormholes count on planets not adjacent to human planets. Fixed. Before it was counting all warp gates as a hostile wormhole, but now it will just count exo-galaxy wormholes as it should be. -Previously, changing a number of advanced options in the lobby was causing the chat history to be cleared. Fixed. -If a ship is on a different planet from the tractor beam that is holding it, it will now be forced through to the other planet. This should never happen anyway, unless the held ship fails to follow the tractor ship through the wormhole. -Space Tugs, Mines, Missiles, Fortresses (super and regular), Force Fields, and Cutlasses all can now have a health regen rate of some variety. In many cases it takes several hours to full heal one of these ships, but the general idea is that all non-repairable ships now have some capacity for self-healing. -Thanks to recent changes to AI tactics when going through wormholes, the Special Forces Captain is a lot more difficult now. It has been promoted to now be a HARDER AI type instead of a MODERATE one. -Laser Turrets now require Mark II Turrets to be unlocked first, instead of Mark III. -The cost of Mark III standard turrets is now half its prior value, and its health is now 4x higher. The health of Mark II standard turrets is now 2x its prior value. -Energy Reactor efficiency (mark I and II) now goes down by 20%/40% for each additional reactor beyond the first built on the same planet. This will encourage players to not cluster their reactors on their home planet, which will also make them harder (more interesting) to defend. Most existing savegames are likely to suddenly have a negative energy balance when loading this new version. These never drop below a floor of 10% efficiency. -The range of munitions boosters has been doubled. However, munitions boosters now only work when they are not moving. -The starting tech level of AI planets was being calculated too late in the prior map generation logic. That has been fixed, which will change the scenarios from what they previously were. For one thing, this will make AI players use lower-level force fields on lower-level planets, like they should have been doing all along. -The protection radii of all of the force fields has been increased. The size of the Mark I force field has been doubled, and the increases to the Mark II and II force fields are much smaller. This makes the lower-level force fields significantly more useful for players and AIs, even though they are still way weaker than the higher-level force fields. -Teleporting ships are no longer restricted from going through wormholes. This limitation was too restrictive in practice, and now that the AI has wormhole defenses, this is no longer really needed, anyway. -There is now a new settings option under Zoom/Pan settings: Restore Zoom When Activating Control Group. This restores the prior-saved zoom level at the other planet when switch planets during control group activation. -The AI now uses group-move when attacking players from a guard position. This helps to maintain the power of the guarding ships, rather than letting them get so easily strung out and weakened. -Fighters are now 75% more resistant to cruiser shots, which makes homogeneous cruiser fleets less powerful. -Electric shots are now grouped into two categories -- major and minor. All of the current electric shots are minor except for the big lightning explosions (missiles, electric shuttles, and lightning turrets), which are major. -The following ships are now immune to minor electric shots: warp gates, ion cannons, data centers, AI Troop Accelerators, Counter Spies, Planetary Cloakers, Attrition Emitters. -Teleport raiders now have an electric shot. Spiders now have a basic shot (which the tele-raiders used to have). -There was a small bug early in the game where ships come out of a dock could "stack" in some cases, and then be stuck and immobile. This was mostly with electric shuttles. Fixed. -There was previously a bug wherein the space tugs would go off in the wrong directions instead of going to their repair stations. This was because they were still "chasing" the target ship, trying to get closer but pushing it away with their tractor beams. Fixed. -Ships held in tractor beams are now "reeled in" slightly if they are out of the base range of the tractor beam that is holding them. Thus if a ship slides out of range before it is fully grappled, it gets pulled back appropriately. -Mobile Repair Stations can no longer be repaired, but now instead have a regen rate. -Mobile Repair Stations are now immune to tractor beams. -Cloaked enemy ships can no longer be cycled through with the planetary summary sidebar. -When there is not a local repair station to go to, and space tugs are trying to carry a ship to a repair station, they will now drop their load and stop dead. -Giving a movement order to a space tug now causes it to drop its load, making techniques such as the adjusted space snake impossible. -Space Tugs are now better at catching moving ships to drag. -Ships being dragged by a tractor beam ship now count as moving even though they are not moving of their own volition. This is relevant for ships such as the munitions boosters, which only give their boosting while stopped. -It is now possible for a single player to control more than one home planet. This gives the player massively more resources at the start, but also causes the AI to be stronger and send more waves (as if there were the equivalent number of actual human players in the game). Additionally, if the player loses one home planet command station, then all of the home planet command stations that player controls are lost. -When loading older savegames, the game now automatically bestows extra Mark II energy reactors if the efficiency changes in this version would cause the energy balance to go negative. -Pressing the enter/return key in the planet name edit textbox now submits the change. -New ship: MLRS Turret III. -Scout Starships will no longer trigger the AI to build anti-starship arachnids. In general, there will also now be fewer anti-starship arachnids built at AI command posts, too. -When shift is being held and multiple move or attack orders are being queued, previously the game would lose the entire queue if a different kind of order was accidentally issued (a move in the middle of a bunch of attacks, or vice-versa). Now the game just ignores those extra commands while the shift key is being held down, protecting the queue. -The End key now issues a "stop units" command, which causes the units to stop dead where they are and collision-detect. -Holding Ctrl+Shift while left-clicking and dragging now selects all ship types, not just the military ones. -New ship selection filters (N+0-5, N+8, N+9) have been added. The first batch filters based on the ship level to be selected, the last two select based on ship health remaining (33% or less and 66% or less, respectively). See the control document for more details. -The collision raidus (the bounding circle) was previously twice as large as it needed to be on special forces command posts. Fixed. -The AIUnitData is now passed to the AI thread as a class, instead of as a struct, in an attempt to minimize the potential for out of memory exceptions when the game is left in an idle state for many hours. -The following player ships are now immune to minor electric shots: constructors, engineers, missiles, colony and transport ships, all resource producers. -Mark III engineers now have teleportation in addition to their other abilities. -Making adjustments to the build queue in multiple constructors at once, via clicking the current-queue-item buttons, now works on all of the selected constructors instead of just the first. -Previously, ships with shot-out engines could not be given movement orders at all. Fixed. -Ships that are reloading would previously not seek new targets. This would cause them to react slowly when in free-roaming defender mode, and also to stop too slowly in attack-move mode sometimes. Fixed. -Space Tugs will now pick up ships with engine damage like they would ships with hull damage. -It is now possible to put up to 16 ship types in a single constructor's build queue (the old limit was 8). -It is now possible to manually give space tugs orders to go pick up a specific ship. -Engineers and mine layers that were in attack-move mode would previously cover the entire planet. This was an older design decision that is now confusing with the addition of free-roaming defender mode. Now engineers and mine layers will only cover the whole planet if they are put in free-roaming defender mode. -Previously, scouts were not being insta-killed by counter-spies, but scout starships were. Fixed. Scouts are no longer immune to being insta-killed, although the shots from ion cannons have little hope of hitting them before they re-cloak. -The attack range of spiders has changed to match that of cruisers, making them vastly more formidable. -Anti-starship arachnids no longer deal engine damage, and their regular attack strength has been halved against all ships except starships. -The Backdoor Hacker AI type has been demoted from being a HARDER AI type to being a MODERATE. -Lightning Turrets and Electric Shuttles now emit lightning that hits ships under force fields. -The warning sound for command stations being attacked was playing too frequently. Fixed. -The metal/crystal cost and ship cap of the missile silo is now identical to that of the starship constructor. This lets players build up to five missile silos instead of always being limited to one. -The metal and crystal cost of nukes has been cut in half. -Setting off EMPs and Lightning Missiles now causes an increase of 2 to the AI Progress, but their costs have been reduced to 15k each of metal and crystal. -The metal and crystal costs of armored missiles have been thirded, but they now cause an increase of 40 to the AI Progress when detonated. -A very few missile silos (about a third the number of starship constructors) are now seeded around the maps for players to find and capture. This should help encourage players to discover and use missiles. -New ship: A relatively inexpensive tachyon missile is now available in the missile silo. Setting these off reveals all of the cloaked ships on the current planet for 30 seconds (allied and enemy alike). This also causes the AI progress to go up by 1, but that is a comparably little amount for getting great insight onto where all of the cloaked enemy ships are on the current planet. -In very rare circumstances, it was previously possible for latent AI-requested commands to be executed in a new or saved game directly after quitting the prior game. Fixed. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to ZarahNeander for suggesting the per-planet remembering of zoom and position, for suggesting that ship selections get remembered when switching between planets, for suggesting the change to the right-click functionality of the planetary summary, for suggesting the "Show Minimap Box On Top Of Ship Blips" option, for reporting the issue with the count of hostile wormholes, for suggesting the Restore Zoom When Activating Control Group option, for suggesting group-move for AI guards, for suggesting that engineers in attack-move mode not cover the entire planet. Thanks to darke for suggesting that Mark II Engineers need inifite engine health, for reporting the issue with zoom changes when changing planets, for reporting the issue with the ship selection shortcuts, for suggesting the promotion of special forces captains, for suggesting the re-parenting of the Laser Turret tech, for suggesting the buffing of the mark II/III standard turrets, for inspiring the change to let teleporting ships go through wormholes, for suggesting key ships have immunity to minor electric shots, for suggesting MLRS Turret IIIs, for suggesting that more player ships have minor electic immunity, for suggesting the demotion of backdoor hackers, for suggesting tachyon missiles. Thanks to PhilROI for reporting the issue with space tugs being unable to move ships with disabled engines. Thanks to Pandemic for reporting the issue with the chat history getting cleared in the lobby, for suggesting that space tugs should value engine health and not just hull health when choosing targets, for suggesting that space tugs should be able to be issued manual commands. Thanks to Reventantus for reporting the issue with the ships on a different planet from the tractor beams holding them, for suggesting the regen on force fields, for suggesting the energy reactor per-planet efficiency reductions, for suggesting the changes to munitions boosters, for suggesting that mobile repair stations be immune to tractor beams, for suggesting the improved behavior for space tugs when the repair station dies or leaves the planet, for inspiring the change to how space tugs act when given an order, for reporting the counterspies not firing on scouts. Thanks to glyptar for suggesting the mobile repair stations not be repairable, for reporting the issue with the position of cloaked enemy ships being revealed by cycling through enemy ships on the planetary summary, for reporting the issue with multiple build queue item adjustment, for reporting the space tugs holding some ships out of range of repair. Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting the issue with the negative energy balances on load. Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the enter key submit the planet name changes, for suggesting that scout starships not trigger anti-starship arachnids, for suggesting the queue protection, for suggesting the "stop units" key, for suggesting the ship selection filters, for suggesting that Mark III engineers have teleportation, for suggesting the increase in the number of ship types per build queue, for reporting the counterspies firing on scout starships. Thanks to Lars Bull for suggesting the Ctrl+Shift selection shortcut for all ship types, for suggesting that ships with shot-out engines be able to recieve movement orders, for suggesting that reloading ships be able to select new targets, for reporting the issue with the command station attacked warning sounds playing too frequently, for reporting the latent AI commands bug. Thanks to PhilRoi, glyptar, and MorphingJar for reporting the issue with space tugs going off in odd directions, and providing savegames and other details with which to track it down. Thanks to Monilas for reporting the bug with multiple home planets being selected for one player, and thanks to Admiral for suggesting that this be developed out into a fully-functional feature. ================================================================== Version 1.009 ================================================================== -In recent releases, long-range shots (such as cruisers) that were targeting a ship under a force field would fail to hit that force field. They would only succeed if the shot was short-range enough, if the shot was directed straight at the force field itself, or sometimes if the mode was Fast & Dangerous. Fixed. -In recent releases, the CounterSpy ship was unable to actually hit cloaked ships. Fixed. -Previously, if there was no command station present at an AI planet receivingreinforcements, then some of the ships would just appear at the center of the planetary area. Now those ships will appear at one of the command posts, or the ship that is providing the reinforce ability. -When players are dragging the selection rectangle, there are now little counts of how many ships belonging to the local player, to allies, and to enemies are present on the planet. This makes it much easier to determine the size of forces at part of a planet instead of at the planet as a whole. -Previously, if a ship caught by a tractor beam cloaked, it would disconnect from the tractor beam but it would also become immobile until the game was saved and reloaded. Fixed. -There is now a "Team Income" line in the intel summary view for planets owned by the human team. It shows the aggregate amount of metal and crystal being produced per planet, taking into account the efficiency reductions and other negative/positive effects, but NOT taking into consideration metal/crystal manufactories, since those are really a secondary conversion control and not a primary source of income. -In recent releases, the count of wormholes on each starting planet was not showing in the lobby. Fixed. -The wormhole reinforcements of the turtle and fortress baron AI types have been toned down somewhat. Also, wormhole reinforcements in general have been toned down a bit until AI difficulty 8. -There was a very, very rare crash bug with calculating Sin/Cos. Fixed. -On planets on which players would normally not be able to see enemies on the planetary summary sidebar, the players now also can't see a count of the enemy ships in their selection range (instead just seeing ???). Also, cloaked enemies are no longer included in this count. -When AI players still have a ship (or an Exo-Galaxy Wormhole) on a player's planet, that shows up as a hostile wormhole in the hostile wormholes count in the galaxy map. -The Z+X attack range circles will no longer include cloaked enemy ships. -A new Z+A key combination has been added. Holding this allows the player to see the range of all their selected ships with the center at the cursor position rather than the ship positions. This is very useful for moving ships into a specific range of a target. -Vampires and Cutlasses now have infinite engine health, since they are completely useless without engines (and since cutlasses cannot be repaired). Mobile Force Fields (Mark III force fields) also now have infinite engine health. -All command posts and command stations are now immune to being insta-killed. -Pressing F1 will now make the planetary summary show entries for every ship type in the game, rather than just the ship types that are at the local planet. This is useful as a lookup tool for enemy ship types that are incoming but not yet present, or as an "icon key" for deciphering the icons in the galaxy map intel summary. -The sound effect for when home planet command stations are under attack is now better. -There is now a visual warning in the upper left when command stations are under attack or are destroyed. There is also a new auditory warning, low in pitch, that goes along with this. -Engineers are not allowed to repair other engineers that are making repairs, but now engineers are allowed to repair other engineers that are simply assisting space docks or other constructors. This makes it possible for a free-roaming engineer to repair engineers attached to a dock. -Previously, it was possible for the lines between ships (tachyon, cloaking boost, munitions boost, tractor, etc) to keep displaying for a fraction of a second between the ships when one of the ships pass between planets. Fixed. -The cloaking booster ability now has more of an affinity for scouts, and then higher-level ships, instead of just going for the highest-costing ships. This prevents scouts from boosting the cloaking of mines if there are better targets around. Additionally, scouts will no longer boost the cloak of any ship that is immobile, which prevents them from wasting their boosters on mines in general. -In recent releases, mobile repair stations were forgetting to stop repairing ships that were fully repaired, and they were also not doing a very good job of finding all the new targets around themselves unless the players manually moved the repair station. Fixed. -Previously, engineers that were assisting another ship but were in attack-move mode, would oscillate back and forth between the two tasks. Fixed. -Engineers once again collision detect properly when moving to assist a target. -If the music stream gets corrupted, it should no longer crash the game. -Previously, pressing comma when not in-game could sometimes cause a crash. Fixed. -All of the checkboxes in the lobby now have their tooltips show up on the right of themselves. In recent releases, the left-most column was sometimes not visible under their own tooltips. -The tooltip font size in the lobby no longer scales up with the "Extra Tooltip Font Size" setting. That settings is now for in-game tooltips only. -The four different ship type abilities that are AI-only now only show "AI ONLY" in parentheses behind them to be more clear. -Ion cannon shots are no longer blocked by counter-sniper turrets. -The guard radius for AI ships has been increased slightly, and the radius into which they retreat has been increased as well. This should stop the large bunches of ships from not being able to find a place to stop. -The AI Progress now goes up by 30 points when a human player's home planet command station is destroyed. This is only relevant for multiplayer. -A new "Show Icons at" slider has been added to the settings screen. This allows players to tweak the threshold of zoom at which the "far zoom" icons are shown instead of the actual ship graphics. -A new "Always Show Selected Unit Hover Text" option has been added. There is also now a background for this, and the columns for the selected units now show up evenly. -The tooltip text for some of the checkboxes in the lobby was confusing in regard to whether the checkbox needed to be checked or unchecked to enable the type (they are all checked = enabled, unchecked = disabled). This wording has been fixed. -The lobby now has an option for enabling cheats. The first fifteen cheats are also now available (see ArcenWiki for details: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Cheats). -Metal and crystal harvesters that are being manually placed now "snap" to their final placement locations even before they are placed. Thus if there is a problem at the final location, it is found; no more cases where automatic placement would fail, but manual placement would erroneously work. -Previously, engineers could not assist another engineer that was under construction if the under-construction engineer was already given a repair order. Fixed. -The AI is now MUCH more intelligent about how it sends batches of ships through wormholes to player planets. It will try to batch its ships together instead of letting them trickle through, which lets them be much more damaging and surprising with just the same number of ships as they previously had. A new "wait point" mechanism has been added to the underlying AI capabilities in order to support this, in addition to some other AI data structure extensions. This is all handled on the AI thread, so it doesn't slow down the main simulation. -The game no longer tries to sync planet rotations, and now silently skips bad syncs of foreground object rotation. This allows for greater compatibility with non-English-language OSes playing with one another. -The planetary summary should never now overlap the scores display when it is just at the threshold of being too long for being two columns instead of one. -The Planet Notes editor in the galaxy map now also allows for the names of the planets to be changed. -The green bubbles for ships under force fields were not showing in recent releases until the ships were shot at. Fixed. -All of the resource and constructor ships are now immune to reclamation by parasites/leeches. -The recharge bar on ships (formerly red) is now white instead. -The health bars of ships now show up as yellow when less than 66% health is remaining, and red when less than 33% health is remaining, and the usual green otherwise. -Performance-affecting entries in the Game Settings are now shown in either green (for items that can improve performance) or red (for items that can reduce performance). -There is now a settings option for turning off the recharge bar display on ships. -There is now a settings option for always showing the ship bars (health and/or recharge) in far zoom icon view. -It is now possible for any player to export the unit relative chart by using Ctrl+Shift+F5 (partial), or Ctrl+Shift+F6 (full), when the F3 debug info is visible. See the controls document for more information. -The way that blades hit their targets are now consistent with other shot types, which means that they will now properly trigger the command station warning sounds, etc. -Cutlasses and Vampires are now immune to tractor beams, since they are completely helpless when held in that fashion. -Previously, ships that had cloaking would never fire unless in attack-move or free-roaming modes, or unless they were explicitly given an attack order. This was very problematic when they were hit by tachyon beam emitters, since they would then not defend themselves. Now they will automatically fire at targets as long as they are decloaked, but they still won't break cloaking of their own accord to attack unless in attack-move or free-roaming modes. -Previously, it was sometimes possible for maps to have fewer than 8 available starting positions for players. Fixed. -The cost of Mark II engineers has been increased by 400 each of metal and crystal, and they now take 10 seconds longer to build. -New ship: Mark III Engineers can now be unlocked at the ECON tab of command stations. These engineers have an even larger repair radius, a very fast movement speed (but no teleportation), cloaking, and a high hull strength. They have to decloak in order to perform repairs/acceleration, but they recloak quite quickly after stopping. -The AI now uses more Mark III engineers on its core, home, and upgraded planets. Most AIs still use the regular Mark I engineers everywhere else, but the Teleporter Turtle AI type uses Mark II (teleporting) engineers instead. -The Mobile Repair Station is now immune to being insta-killed. -Missiles can no longer be repaired. -New Ships: The mobile repair station can now build five different variants of space tug, which are very fast ships with tractor beams that can automatically bring ships back to the nearest mobile repair station for healing, then send the ships back into the fray. -Shot and explosion objects are once again reused, since it is now clear that they were not causing the prior desyncs. This should help to keep memory usage as low as possible. -The way that unit data is sent to the AI thread now requires no string concatenation, which should prevent the rare OutOfMemory exceptions that a few players with extra-high amounts of RAM were getting. -When the scores or graph displays are shown, the game now immediately goes into non-input-focus mode. Mouse scrolling and zooming also no longer works at all when the game does not have input focus, to prevent confusion. -The game timer is now positioned such that it will slide over and still be fully visible for games that last longer than one day. -Previously, dead players could not capture planets. That was very old logic. Now they are allowed to. -Previously, the game would completely stop when a gameover was reached, and gameover games could not be saved. Now the game will let players continue playing as normal once a gameover is reached, saving included, but scores will not increase for any players once a gameover is reached. Also, previously the defeat or victory music would play on a game over, and then there would just be silence. Now it will start playing regular game music again after the victory/defeat music is finished. -The AI is now more responsive with combat with large numbers of ships, giving them orders more quickly than before. Previously, really large AI armies tended to get a bit sluggish. -Pressing Ctrl+Alt+F8 now exports the Excel Secondaries: StrongWeak.xml, AgainstBasic.xml, ShipDataFull.xml, ShipDataStatsOnly.xml, TechData.xml, KnowledgeBreakdown.xml. Unlike the unit relative export this does not require a lengthy simulation to be run, so it executes in just a couple of seconds. -The AI will now taunt the players (with audio as well as text) when the human players lose a big battle, or when the AI destroys the command station of a human player. -All of the remaining zoom/rotation/scale related uses of floating point math have been converted to use fixed-point math instead. This should prevent any potential related multiplayer desyncs based on different machine architectures. -Previously, when the client in a TBS-friendly pause game hit pause, it would sometimes just hang on Pausing... and never actually go to full pause. Fixed. -A shift has been made to the way the planetary summary items are aggregated, that should prevent the issue of duplicate entries (one white, one red/yellow/blue). -There was previously a desync that could be introduced when loading a saved game from an older version with the 1.009 versions for the first time. Simply saving the desynced game again and loading it would fix it, but now the root issue is also fixed. -The science lab I and II no longer show the I and II text on the planetary summary, nor do they show as separate entries any longer. -There is now a direct link to the community wiki from the tutorials screen in the game. -Previously there was a very rare bug where less knowledge might be gathered from a planet than was actually available at the planet (the example is having 3 too few). Fixed. -Fixed a bug with too many higher-level engineers being added to AI Planets. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to Revenantus for reporting the issue with the long range shots hitting force fields, for reporting the issue with counter spy ships, for suggesting the selection rectangle counts, for reporting the issue with the tractor beams and cloaked ships, for suggesting the updates to the selection rectangle counts, for suggesting the Z+A functionality, for reporting the minor graphical issue with the lines between ships, for reporting the engineer oscillation in attack-move mode, for reporting the issue with engineer collision detection, for reporting the comma crash bug, for reporting that counter-sniper turrets were blocking ion cannon shots, for inspiring the change to "snap" metal and crystal harvester placement, for suggesting that anyone be able to export the unit relative export xml files, for reuquesting the excel export secondaries. Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the Team Income display in the intel summary, for suggesting the icon key (F1), for suggesting the Always Show Selected Unit Hover Text setting. Thanks to darke for reporting the missing wormhole counts in the lobby, for reporting the Sin/Cos crash bug, for reporting that z+x was showing cloaked enemy ships, for suggesting that cutlasses have infinite engine health, for inspiring the change to have all command posts/stations be immune to being insta-killed, foir suggesting the warning when command stations are under attack or destroyed, for suggesting that engineers be able to assist other engineers that are assisting docks, for suggesting that cloaking booster ignore mines, for reporting the issues with the mobile repair stations, for reporting the issue with under-construction engineers, for suggesting that harvesters not be reclaimable, for reporting the issue with blades not triggering command station warnings, for suggesting the addition of Mark III engineers with cloaking, for suggesting the teleporter turtle AI type use teleporting engineers, for suggesting some more improvements to how the AI groups ships to send them through player wormholes, for reporting the issue with the knowledge gathering, for reporting the bug with too many higher-level engineers being added to AI planets. Thanks to JSiegrist for reporting the issue with music stream corruption causing a crash. Thanks for Kalzarius for suggesting that AI-Only abilities be marked as such, for suggesting the increase in the guard retreat radius, for reporting the issue with no-input-focus mode of the game and mouse zooming, for reporting the issue with the timer being cut off on games longer than one day. Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the "Show Icons at" slider, for reporting the issue wiht the planetary summary sometimes overlapping the scores display, for suggesting that the names of planets be editable, for suggesting that the health bars should change color based on how damaged they are, for suggesting the ability to turn off the recharge bar display, for suggesting the ability to show ship bars in far zoom, for suggesting that the game remain playable/saveable after a victory, for suggesting green instead of yellow for settings items that improve performance, for reporting the issue with floating-point math, for reporting the issue with the pausing... text on client machines in tbs-friendly pause, for reporting the issue with the duplicate ship type icons in the planetary summary. Thanks to PhilRoi for reporting the unclear wording in the tooltip text for some of the lobby checkboxes, for reporting the issues with space tugs going to the wrong location. Thanks to Ozu08865 for suggesting the addition of cheats. Thanks to fuchu and Revenantus for reporting the issue with checkbox tooltips in the lobby. ================================================================== Version 1.008 ================================================================== -Capturable ships do not come under player control until a command station is finished being built (previously they came under control as soon as it started being built, which is when planet control changes). -When a command station is finished being built, there is now a 50% chance that any local enemy guards might desert their posts. This is in addition to the existing 50% chance when the enemy command station is lost. -"Unknown Path" no longer flashes next to each planet on the galaxy map before the actual number of hops are calculated. -The metal, crystal, and energy costs of parasites have been doubled. This is to compensate for all the "free" ships that parasites capture. For the similar reasons of balance the range of parasites has also been cut in half. They are still deadly, but this takes the edge off of them so that they are not too overpowered. -Queuing up any waypoint or attack commands no longer clears the wormhole travel path for ships. Any queued commands will be executed, and then the ships will go on their wormhole travel path. This also had the side effect of finally fixing the movement bug reported by Quitch. -Two new hotkeys: F9 and F10. They let players toggle off or on the "far zoom" icons. -The selection radius for the Advanced Research Station was too small. Fixed. -Previously, sometimes the Auto-placement of harvesters would fail in situations where the manual placement would succeed. Fixed. -It is now possible for ships to stay in attack-move mode or free-roaming-defender mode when moving between planets. If there is an allied command station on the destination side, they will move there, otherwise they will move just inside the wormhole. These new kinds of move commands work from the galaxy map or the main planetary view. This also works with setting constructors in attack-move or FRD mode, and setting their gather point on another planet (produced ships will emerge in the target mode, and go to the destination planet while staying in that mode). -The options to force software sound/music mixing have been removed, as they are not actually needed. -The settings screen now has options for setting specific zoom and pan speeds. -There is a new "Extra Tooltip Font Size" option in the settings screen, which allows some of the font sizes in the game to be increased or decreased. More may be done with this in the future. -A new "Omit Numerals From Mark I Ship Icons" option has been added to the settings screen. -There is a new "Show Intel Summary By Cursor" option in the settings screen. -The overzoom border is now displayed better on large/wide monitors, or those monitors with an unusual resolution. -There is now a "Show Details" option in the Save and Load menus, which lets players see the dates of each savegame. The Details view also has sortable columns, and the game remembers whether the user last used Details or normal view. -The backslash key now selects the first idle ship from the current selection. -Fixed a very rare bug where blocked shots could cause enemy ships to become unshootable because of how their total damage was too high. -The amount of collected knowledge at the current planet is now shown over top of all science labs (like Exhausted shows), and in the popup menu for quick-selection of science labs. This makes science labs quicker and easier to check the status of. -The filter for Mobile Military in the galaxy map was incorrectly calculating the values for Allies and Team. Fixed. -A bug with astro trains commonly just hanging out at their train stations should now be fixed. -The hover-tips now work while waiting for players in a multiplayer game. -Minor fixes to the tutorial text. -When a tractor beam grabs a ship that is already fading out through a wormhole, the graphics no longer briefly glitch on the far side of the wormhole. -Mark II engineers now have 10x the range for doing repairs, which makes them able to repair ships at the center of larger groups. -The status messages regarding engineers (in the hover-text of the engineers quick button) are now more informative about what the engineers are up to). -EtherJet Tractors will now approach their target until they have grappled it (if it can be grappled), rather than just until they are in firing distance. -Stealth command posts no longer fire on enemy ships (since that would reveal them). -A new ship, Wormhole Command Posts, has been added for the AI. This ship is completely invisible and cannot be revealed, like the Mark IV scout for the human players. These command posts let the AI do reinforcements right at their wormholes, like a player would. The command posts are destroyed only when the central command station for the planet is destroyed. These are automatically inserted into older savegames. -The AI will now send some of its reinforcements to wormhole command posts on planets at which it otherwise would not reinforce. This should make sustained deep raids into enemy territory a lot more difficult. -The AI will no longer use Scout Starships against the players. -Scouts have been rebalanced in response to the AIs now protecting wormholes better. Mark I and Mark II now have cloaking (so that all scouts now have cloaking), and they also thus no longer have any shields (no cloaking ships have shields). The health of the armored scout has thus been quadrupled, and the health of the Mark III scout has been doubled. Mark I and II scouts also no longer have any weapons (Mark III and IV already did not), so they will never accidentally decloak themselves in order to attack an enemy ship. -The AI will now intentionally route its special forces ships to any core or home planets that are under attack. -If the AI players have different tech levels, they will now both be shown in the AI Progress section, rather than just showing one of them. -Since the new style of AI Progress was introduced, the AI players were getting new ship types at much too fast a rate. Fixed. -Items in the build queue that are delayed for being finished will no longer show negative time estimates. -Cloaked ships (controlled by players or the AI) will no longer auto-attack targets unless they are in attack-move mode or free-roaming defender mode. Instead they will only attack the targets that they are issued by the player. This helps to preserve their cloaked state, and gives them a combat edge in many situations (such as raids into enemy territory). -When initially loading a savegame, sometimes the AI tech levels would be slightly off until the player did something new to affect the overall AI progress. -Engineers and Mine Layers would previously stop to perform other duties when given a wormhole command by players. Fixed. -When issuing an assist order to an engineer, or a "get in transport" command to any ships, if the free-roaming defender mode or attack-move mode buttons were held, the ships would not get into that mode. Fixed. -Previously, science labs would not display as exhausted until they were finished being constructed. Fixed. -The planetary summary now includes icons for the control groups the player has set. The icon shows up as blue if any ships from that control group are at the current planet, or as white if not. Hovering over the icon allows players to see exactly what and how many ships are in the control group, and how many of each are on the current planet vs elsewhere. Left and right clicking this icon works just like the other buttons in the planetary summary, simply selecting or selecting and centering on all ships of the clicked control group (on the local planet only). -Previously, if a selected mobile builder was killed, players could keep building turrets if they were already building them. Fixed. -In recent releases (1.007 and on), maps that are 80 planets or larger were creating far too many data centers and advanced research stations on each map, making the game much easier than it otherwise would be. Fixed. -When a munitions booster's object goes out of range, dies, or switches planets, the munitions booster now reacts to this more quickly and removes the link. -Ships that are unable to hurt shield bearers will no longer auto-attack them as targets. This makes shield bearers less of a targeting distraction in battles. -Previously, the AI would just stop dead and not know what to do if the only enemy ships on a planet were fully cloaked. Now the AI will ignore them as if they were not even there, instead of waiting around for them to decloak. -Since version 1.006, the Astro Trains were sometimes stopping permanently at train stations. Now they might stop for a little while, but they will quickly resume travel like they used to before some of the waypoint shifts. -When ships controlled by the human team are only partially-cloaked, they now no longer show the cloaking graphic under them. This makes it clear when ships are at least visible enough to be shot, versus being fully cloaked and unshootable (before the difference between fully cloaked and partially cloaked for your own team's ships was imperceptible -- now the difference between partially-cloaked and decloaked is imperceptible, but when it is a ship you control there is no gameplay difference between these two states, anyway). -Engineers now only clear mines when there is nothing else for them to do inside their search range. -A total count has been added to the new Control Group icon tooltips. -Mines are now immune to blade-based ships (vampire and cutlass), which will prevent those ships from attacking mines (and dying) when the mines are visible. -There was previously a desync that could be caused in multiplayer if one player was looking at a force field when new ships were added or the force field went down, and other players were not. Fixed. -Wormhole Command Posts are now positioned on the wormhole they are guarding, rather than to the side. -Non-mobile enemy ships are no longer displaced by mobile force fields' movement. -The metal/crystal cost of Mark II Science Labs has been much reduced, and their shields have been reduced from 2500 to 1500. -The range of all the tachyon beam emitter variants have been increased. -Both the counter-shooter range and the attack range is now shown during ship placement mode for ships that have both (like Fortresses). -The position of the attack ranges during ship placement mode was drawn slightly off. This was only notable for very large ships, like Fortresses. Fixed. -Until now, the AI was not properly limiting its reinforcements based on the tech level of each reinforcement. Now it is, which means that the hugely vast numbers of ships on the final planets are somewhat less likely to occur, making things a bit more equivalent for players when they get there (given equal AI progress). On the other hand, the AI will now build Mark V ships on the home and core planet command posts during reinforcements, whereas before it only build Mark IV ships there. The overall balance shift should be a bit in favor of the human players, which is good given the other behavior changes in this release in favor of the AI. -Previously, when a constructor had a cross-planet gather point, resetting the gather point to the current planet would not work. Fixed. -The AI alert level is now shown in the intel summary of enemy planets. This shows if the AI is likely to reinforce or not at a given planet, based on how aware it is of your presence. The border color of the enemy ship icons and planet icons on the galaxy map will also turn crimson when the AI is on alert and prepared to reinforce at a given planet. -When players have a negative crystal or metal income rate, they are now still allowed to build more ships. Previously, it stopped them from doing so. -Previously, when players had a negative crystal or metal rate, it would show +- in the top of the hud, rather than just -. Fixed. -Mark I through III scouts now have a "cloaking booster" ability, which lets them work better in groups. When scouts are traveling in groups, some of them will boost the cloaks of the others, which protects the boosted scouts from being revealed by tachyon beam emitters. The scouts doing the boosting cannot themselves be boosted, which means that some of the scouts are likely to be picked off or at least damaged at every tachyon beam emitter that is passed. Higher-level scouts can boost multiple ships at once, and also have a bigger boost range. -The cost of the Missile Silo has been reduced from 100k metal and crystal to only 25k metal and crystal. The missiles are still just as expensive, but having the silo be less expensive creates less of a barrier for players to at least try out missiles. -The range of mobile repair stations is now 10x its prior value, for similar reasons as to the Mark II engineer. -Scout Starships are now treated like other scouts and are not selected when the selection box includes military ships. -EyeBots now have cloaking and the cloaking booster ability. -The health of lightning missiles has been doubled, and they are now immune to missiles, blades, and can pass under force fields. Armored missiles did not get a health bonus, but got all the other improvements. -The MLRS Turret II technology no longer depends on the Missile Turret tech having been unlocked. -When ships fully recloak, any incoming shots don't hit them. FIXES FROM PAST PRERELEASES -------------- Took out the following, since it was just overpowered and unexpected: "-Ships guarding "core" AI planets will now come to the aid of a core AI command station that is under attack, attempting to prevent the AI player from going out of the game. If they succeed in killing the ships on the AI home planet, they will then turn on the human players, so this can be extremely dangerous and even game-ending if not handled carefully. This behavior is so potentially deadly that it will only be used by AIs of difficulty 7 or higher." SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to Revenantus for suggesting the improvement to when capturable ships are captured, for reporting the issue with mobile builder death, for inspiring the "cloaking booster" feature. Thanks to darke for suggesting a rebalancing of parasites, for reporting the issue with the advanced research station selection radius, for reporting the issue with the auto-placement of harvesters, for reporting the AI's new difficulty with harvester attacks, for suggesting the update to Mark II Engineers, for suggesting the increases in tachyon range, for suggesting the improvement to mobile repair stations, for suggesting that scout starships not be selected with other mobile military ships, for suggesting the improvements to lightning missiles, for suggesting the change to the prerequisite for MLRS Turret II. Thanks to yllamana for inspiring the improvements to how commands are queued before wormhole movement commands. Thanks to Admiral for suggesting the F9 and F10 toggles, for suggesting the Omit Numerals option, for suggesting the new Show Intel Summary By Cursor option. Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the zoom/pan speed sliders, for suggesting the Details view on Save/Load menus, for reporting the graphical issue with tractor beams and wormholes, for suggesting the engineers quick button text improvement, for suggesting full row select on the details view of save/load, for inspiring the Wormhole Command Posts, for inspiring the change to the AI progress display, for reporting the issue with the build queue estimated times going negative, for reporting the issue with the AI progress being a bit off at load, for reporting the issues with engineers and mine layers disobeying wormhole move orders, for reporting the issue with engineers and free-roam/attack-move modes when given assist orders, for reporting the issue with science labs not showing as exhausted until fully constructed, for suggesting the change to engineer mine remain cleaning, for suggesting the total count in the control group icon tooltips, for reporting the issue with vampires attacking visible mines, for reporting the issue with the attack ranges being off with fortresses, for reporting the issue with cross-planet gather points. Thanks to keith.lamothe for suggesting the backslash functionality. Thanks to vendolis for reporting the minor issues with the tutorial text. Thanks to Admiral and darke for suggesting the tooltip size option. ================================================================== Version 1.007 ================================================================== -A true Directsound-based streaming approach is now used for music. This makes music load much faster, and saves between 70 and 140 MB of RAM compared to previous versions of the game. This in turn makes the saved games load faster, as well. -The game's suggested paths between planets on the galaxy map are now much better, preferring to stay with neutral/allied planets before venturing into enemy territory. This will therefore suggest paths that are longer, but that don't go through enemy planets, when possible. This makes players have to less frequently provide their own manual interplanetary travel paths. -The AI (at all levels) has learned some new tricks. Guards will now temporarily leave their posts to help with the defense of certain large structures (currently command stations and superfortresses) on the same planet as them. They will also leave their posts for a bit to join in the attack on a command station if they are guarding something on a human planet. -Harvester ExoShields are now a bit cheaper to build, and no longer have a build cap. However, they now also use -1/s of both metal and crystal, making them essentially reduce the net benefit from the harvester they are protecting. They also now cost 1,000 energy, which increases your energy needs rather dramatically if overused. These changes will make this ship more useful for general play, but also increases the cost of its use so as to not make it suddenly overpowerful. -The AI scores are now trended over time as part of the Score, Ships Killed, Ships Lost, and Planets Held graphs, letting players compare their performance against the AIs in these ways. There is also now an "Include AIs In Extra Graphs" option in the graph window that allows for the Total Ships, Ships by level, and ships built graphs to also include the AIs (although these comparisons are usually apples to oranges and of little relevance). -The Graphs screen now includes new graphs for Scouted Planets and AI Progress, which just shows those single metrics over time (these are not per-player). -When the game's zoom gets too large for the window clipping area, it no longer jumps back and forth. It also now has a larger clipping area, to allow for overzoom. -There is now a settings option called "Allow Overzoom." When paired with the "Allow Far Zoom" option, this allows players to zoom and pan beyond the edge of the planetary map, which is helpful for seeing absolutely the entire planet at once, or for easing zooming in on ships at the edge of the galaxy map from far zoom. -Drawing hundreds or thousands of simultaneous ship ranges now not only looks better, but it also will perform vastly better, especially on older graphics cards. -It is now possible to select multiple constructors of the same type (docks, factories, etc) and issue build queue orders to them all at once. If their build queues differ, a Reset button will be shown in place of the actual queue icon. The queues can still be managed in these cases, but you won't be able to see your changes without clicking to an individual constructor. You can use the Reset button to clear all the queues, and then any commands that are issued will cause the queues to be in sync and thus shown as if only one constructor was selected. Lack of resources, ships hitting their ship caps, or engineers being unevenly distributed could cause the the queues to later get out of sync again. These changes are meant as a first pass for the players who wanted them, but we may add some more improvements in this area once we have more playtest data. -Constructors with queues are now shown as grayed out when paused, same as how it works for manufactories that are paused. -It is now possible to give most commands to ships that are still being built. You can basically set everything up at docks and other queue-based constructors, you can give attack targets, assistance targets, wormhole commands, or movement targets. The main thing you can't do is issue build commands from placement-mode ships (command stations, mobile builders, etc), and you can't research technologies until a science lab is completed building. The in-progress ships still won't act on any of the above until they are finished building, but you can set them up in advance. -The AI will now build counter-sniper turrets and sniper turrets in place of whatever turrets it would normally build during reinforcements when there are enemy sniper-type ships in its presence. -Special Forces Command Posts now allow for AI reinforcements to be made against their host planet. -The game now supports downright tiny galaxy maps: 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 planets. -The game now scales downward better for maps smaller than 80 planets. The difficulty should now be more on par with what the 80-planet maps provide. More appropriate numbers of data centers, special forces command posts, and advanced research stations are seeded into these maps. -There is a new setting (configured through two dropdowns) in the lobby that can really change the pacing of games. Auto AI Progress lets you choose an interval (in minutes, ranging from as few as 5 to as many as 240) and an amount of AI Progress to increase by (from 1 to 250). When this feature is enabled (it can be turned off by setting either the interval or the increase amount to 0), it automatically increases the AI Progress on the interval of your choosing. The new default is that the AI Progress will go up by 1 every 30 minutes, which is a very, very mild amount of increase on the recently-increased AI Progress scale. Preexisting savegames will also now use this default. This new setting should be particularly valuable for shorter games on smaller maps, where you might want to have a more vicious and fast-paced arms race with the AI. -On tiny maps with larger numbers of players, it was previously sometimes possible to hang the game when starting from the lobby. This was simply an artifact of the game not originally being designed for really small maps. Fixed. -The Colony Ship icon in far zoom has now been updated to match the actual look of the colony ship itself, making it much easier to find from far zoom. -Transport Ships are now an unlockable ship in the DEF tab of command stations. Each of these have significant armor and are immune to things like tractor beams, ion cannons, minefields, etc. Each one can carry 100 ships from Space Docks or Advanced Factories inside it. If the transport is destroyed while carrying other ships, all of the ships inside it will be destroyed. -In the Scout quick-button at the bottom of the screen, scouts now show their end destination planet if they have movement orders. -When multiple constructors are selected, there are now buttons for each one. Each button shows the percent complete of the current item, the total number of items in the queue, and a mouseover tip with details on the full queue. Clicking these queue buttons selects just the constructor whose button was click, or in the case of a left-click, it deselects just that constructor. -There is now a "Mobile Military" option in the Find list, which allows players to search for all mobile military ships of a certain type (e.g., bombers or fighters) regardless of ship level. This has the same functionality as the normal find, insofar as allowing the ships to be routed, etc. -There is now a notes button in the galaxy map which allows players to set some text at each planet. Planets with notes show their notes in the Intel Summary, and they also show a little yellow/orange flashing star next to the planet in the galaxy map. -There were previously some issues with the very large and active games (80,000+ ships) causing some lag issues on the host after a time. This was because the AI message queue was getting clogged up, causing a degradation in performance. This would also cause the AI to get really unresponsive in these situations. It is now fixed so that even with these vast numbers of ships, the performance is fine and the AI stays as responsive as usual. -In games with more than 60,000 ships, the AI will now swap out pairs of its lower-level ships on non-contested planets for singles of higher-level ships. This keeps the unit counts to around 60,000 when at all possible, without giving the AI any advantage (the trades are roughly equivalent, if anything a little bit unfavorable to the AI). This, in turn, keeps the game huge but not overwhelming for lower-end CPUs with lots of players or really long games in large galaxies. -There used to be a slight delay in clearing the tachyon beam and munitions booster objects when the host craft switched planets. This could sometimes cause some long and incorrect lines across the new planet's map, usually for under a second or two. Fixed. -Ships in attack-move or free-roaming defender mode will no longer "dance" between their focal point and their current attack target as their attack targets die and thus change. The ships will now only go to their focal point when they search for a target and don't find one, rather than going there as soon as they are finished with their current target. -Previously, electric shuttles did not choose targets while in attack-move mode or free roaming defender mode. Fixed. -Zooming in while holding spacebar is no longer jumpy, but rather just focuses straight down in on the selected units (or the center of the screen if nothing is selected). -Previously, when TBS-Friendly pause was enabled, it could cause desyncs in multiplayer when the game was actually paused. Fixed. -Fixed a couple of minor typos in the tutorials text. Also fixed the tooltip text for the number of planets dropdown to make that more up to date. -Previously it was possible to detect cloaked enemy ships with mouseover. Fixed. -Previously, in TBS-Friendly Pause mode, any existing shots were not being paused. Fixed. -Previously, trial-mode players could not play with retail players (this is like pretty much all other RTS games). Now they can play together for the duration of the trial time limit (1 hour), with whatever features the host enables. This is intended to make it easier for players to cooperatively try a game together, when a subset of them have already purchased the game. Games that have an expired time limit can be saved and resumed with retail copies of the game. -The Paused text no longer shows underneath text messages from other players, or that are part of the tutorial text. -The darker player colors are now significantly easier to read when used in in-game text. -In recent prereleases of 1.007, ships were not always returning to their free-roaming target. Fixed. -The S hotkey was not properly selecting Science Lab IIs or Advanced Research Stations. Fixed. -The way that waypoints (on a single planet) work has been recoded to a heavy degree. The waypoints now work slightly more gracefully in certain cases, and now are not lost when ships are in attack-move mode and choose a new target. This now lets you send attack-moving ships on a queued path through a planet, and they will stop and chase ships on the way as needed. -There are now multiple map styles that can be selected in the lobby. The single prior style is now called Realistic, and there are now Simple, Simple Hubs, and Realistic Hubs in addition. The new default is Simple, since that should be less intimidating for new players. -The game now always pauses the music when minimized. Previously it only did it on the title screen. -The AI priorities have been made a little bit more deep for ships like bombers in particular, but also for one of the code branches for all ships. This should make the AI less distracted by metal harvesters, and better at precision-striking valued targets. -It is now possible to set gather points in other planets for constructors. This done by simply giving them a wormhole-travel order like any other ships, and then any ships that come out of the constructor will follow that same path. -The tooltips over dropdown controls in the lobby now work a little bit more gracefully. Before, they sometimes would cause a lot of blipping and blinking if the conditions were just wrong. -The main menu now includes helpful tooltips, same as the lobby always has. -A new Mobile Military option (Shift+Comma) has been added to the Galaxy Map Filter options. This new option allows for just mobile military ships (and starships) to be shown in the My Ships, Allied Ships, and My and Allied Ships filters (Q, A, and E). This is useful because it doesn't include things like turrets, mines, or economic structures, so it lets you find your actual fleet ships at a glance. -Fighters have been rebalanced so that they are more useful. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the ability to compare the AIs' numbers with the players' numbers in a few key graphs, for suggesting that constructors have editable queues and such during construction, for suggesting the improvement to how AIs deal with snipers on their planets, for suggesting the Auto AI Progress feature, for suggesting the Mobile Military addition to the find, for reporting the issue with the shots in TBS-Friendly Pause, for reporting the issue with free-roaming defender targets, for reporting the issue with the S key, for suggesting the target selection improvements. Thanks to netWilk and Lars Bull for suggesting the overzoom feature. Thanks to Zulgaines for suggesting the improvement to the attack range drawing, for suggesting the even smaller maps, for pointing out the updates needed to the planet count selection dropdown. Thanks to netWilk for suggesting the improvements to allow management of multiple constructor queues at once. Thanks to Bridger for suggesting transports. Thanks to Larry Parker for pointing out the minor typos in the tutorials, for pointing out the issues with the Paused text appearing under the tutorial text, for suggesting that the game always pause the music when minimized. Thanks to Hyfrydle for suggesting the ability for trial and regular players to play together. Thanks to Black for suggesting the better readability for darker player color text, and for inspiring the multiple map styles. Thanks to Zulgaines and Quitch for suggesting the ability to have notes at planets. Thanks to Admiral and Hyfrydle for suggesting the cross-planet gather points for constructors. ================================================================== Version 1.006 ================================================================== -The in-game scores screens now have interactive graphs of ship counts, income rates and resource totals, and things of that sort. These graphs are only relevant for human players, so AI players are not included on them. Additional metrics may be added for tracking in future releases. The metrics are currently only captured every 5 minutes (given the extended length of the game, this prevents save files from getting too huge). Existing savegames will work with the graphs that are currently here, but will have no data prior to the time the savegame was loaded into the new version of the program. -The tutorials and in-game hover text have been updated to make it clearer that bombers have a substantial bonus against force fields and other hardened targets. -The online Mini Strategy Guide has been changed into an easier-to-read, more comprehensive Wiki. In the game, the link to this has been updated and now reads "Online: Manual / FAQ Wiki (Game Knowledgebase)." The Tutorials button on the main menu now also says "Tutorials / Manual" to be more clear. -The enemy player in the tutorials is now red, while the local player is now yellow. -The end of the economic tutorial now touches on the issues of harvester efficiency. -It is now possible to reorder items in the build queues. Hold down Alt and left click to send an item to the front, or hold down alt and right-click to send an item to the rear. -The "Game Does Not Have Input Focus..." message is now more accurate, telling you when the scroll wheel and keyboard inputs will not function (such as while you are in the controls subwindow, things like that). -Closing the "View Controls" window now properly returns focus to the main game. There were a few other windows (graphs, for one) that also had this problem. All fixed. -The buttons for metal and crystal harvesters now show up as red when being shown on a planet that the human team does not control (since those cannot be built except on team planets). -Scouts are now excluded from the comma and ctrl+comma selections. -The sorting of ship icons in the planetary summary palette is now better. -In recent releases, the player color selection dialog in the lobby, and in the profile screen, was showing all of the colors twice. Fixed. -The dark gray player color was too hard to read, and so has been swapped out for bright orange. -There are now options in the settings which makes the default pan and/or zoom speeds fast (holding shift will then make the panning/zooming slow to the usual speed). -There is now an option in the settings to always show the planet names in the galaxy map (holding Ctrl then hides them, rather than showing them). -Previously it was sometimes possible for the names of planets in the galaxy map (lobby and in-game) to get cut off at the right side of the screen. Fixed. -Holding the Ctrl key now shows the name of a wormhole in front of any ships or icons that are on top of it. There is also now an option in the settings to make it so that this always shows on top by default (and holding Ctrl then hides the name). -The text size in the scores screen has been reduced to be more consistent with the other fonts in the game, and to reduce the amount of horizontal scrolling needed. The scores screen is also now wider, even on 4:3 monitors, to make for as much visibility and as little horizontal scrolling as possible. -The economy tab of the scores screen now includes values for the number of producers and the efficiency loss per player. This is to help players balance their incomes in multiplayer, for those players who are inclined to do so. -The graphs screen now uses a listbox along the left, instead of using a dropdown at the top, so that it is easier to find and select the various graphs there. -There is now a minimize button in the lobby, which makes it easier to go out of the game and look up your ip address. -When in the lobby, it is now possible to click a planet and switch directly to it from another chosen planet, rather than having to deselect the old planet first. -The priority buttons in the galaxy map are now activated with Alt+0-9 instead of just 0-9. Control groups are now fully functional in the galaxy map. -The circle around the current planet in the galaxy map is now shown as filled instead of just a bare outline, which makes it much easier to see. -There is now a "selected ships" button on the galaxy map, same as there is in the main planetary view. It has all of the same functionality, allowing sub-selection, ship removal, etc. -The planetary summary now shows a yellow border around the icons of all ship types that have any ships selected (in other words, all of the ships of that type don't have to be selected in order for it to show yellow, just some of them do). -Only the game host can now click the the combat style button during a game. -When space docks, starship constructors, missile silos, or advanced factories are put into a control group, activating the control group no longer selects these constructor-type ships. However, any ships that are produced by the constructor will automatically be in the control group of the constructor. -Engineer IIs can now be unlocked for 3,000 knowledge. They are identical to regular engineers, except that they have teleportation, which is a huge advantage. -Astro Train Stations are now immune to reclamation by parasites. -AI Home planets now show up as Tech V in the galaxy map. -Holding the I key now shows the Hit Percent and Damage for all selected ships, or ships that you have the mouse over. This only works for ships that are on the same team as you (enemy targeting data is of course not available to you). The text here is colorized, which makes for easy at-a-glance viewing of how good the targets are. It is also relatively easy to spot ships without targets selected, since they have no targeting info in this view. -There was previously a crash bug if players tried to Ctrl-click an exo-galaxy wormhole. Fixed. -SuperFortresses and AI Troop Accelerators no longer appear as secondary objectives, since that didn't really make sense. -Mine Layers are now a part of the Mobile Builders quick button list. -The number of hostile wormholes count on the galaxy map was previously not taking into account destroyed warp gates. Fixed. -The text for enemy wormholes now shows up as light salmon in the main planetary view, or it shows up as bright red if the enemy wormhole is hostile (in the sense of being able to produce waves through a warp gate). -Previously, no resource-type ships could be built on planets not belonging to the local team. Now, only harvesters are restricted in this way. -Scout Starships are now selected via the O shortcut key. -The way that resource producer efficiency reductions are calculated is now more friendly to the player, and is no longer dependent at all on build order of producers (it was unintended that this was previously the case to a degree). -Mark II and Mark III versions of the Command Stations can now be unlocked. They each produce 6 more metal/crystal than their prior tech level, but also use much more energy and take longer to build. Only 8 of each of the new types can be built, as well. The two types cost 5,000 and 8,000 knowledge respectively to unlock (and are then available as choices at any colony ship). To "upgrade" a command station, the old one must first be deleted and then the new one added. -A "Warp Jammer" command station can now be unlocked for 5,000 knowledge. Only 5 of these can be built, and they use 30,000 energy as well as -8 metal and crystal per second. However, they prevent the AI from warping any waves into the planet that has this command station present. -In prior versions, there was a bug wherein the junk/rock clusters and wormholes would sometimes get scrambled in a savegame after one player had lost a home planet, but the game was not yet over. Fixed. -Lesser compression is now used in saving games (as opposed to what is used for state transfers), which much improves save performance. Also sav.dmp files are no longer saved along with actual savegames, which slightly improves save performance over even the compression change. The way that bools are saved into the savegames is now more storage-efficient for large games, which also makes these easier to compress. In total, the performance of saving games with many ships (60,000+) has about tripled from these changes. -During saves, the game now pops up a message showing what it is doing, rather than just silently hanging the game during the save. -The scale of the AI Progress meter has now been multiplied by 10. This makes it possible for the game to now support smaller increases and decreases in the scale. -The AI Progress now goes up by 10x as much as before when an AI player loses their home planet. -the AI Progress now goes up by 2 when core command posts are destroyed (this is on the new scale, so it is relatively a very small amount). This, plus the prior change noted above, are intended to make the very end of the game more intense. -The AI Progress now goes up by 1 when special forces command posts and Astro Train Stations are destroyed (this is a very tiny amount on the new scale). This is intended to make a mild disincentive to destroying key routing points for the AI, even though most of the time it is not expected that this will be a deterrent. -There was previously a bug wherein ships in Free-Roaming Defender mode who were on a planet with hostile ships would just freeze when given a wormhole command instead of going through the wormhole. Fixed. -There is now a sound effect when a new incoming enemy wave is added. -There was previously a bug with loading saved games after a certain point in the third basic tutorial. Fixed. -The way that ships, especially teleporting ships, collide with the sides of the planetary areas is now much better. -Mine Layers were not covering their entire planet in Free Roaming Defender mode. Fixed. -The "Find Multiplayer LAN Games" button is now called "Join Multiplayer Game." It now includes links to the AI War Meeting Grounds forum, and the AI War IRC channel, in addition to the existing LAN game detection and direct IP connect ability. -The occasional "ships forgetting their orders while in attack-move mode and given a wormhole command" bug is hopefully now fixed. -The home hit sound is now played less frequently. -The tech level of the technologist waves was one tech level too high compared to its reinforcements. Fixed. -There was previously a bug wherein if the computer was put into suspend right as text was being written during a tutorial, the game would crash. Fixed. -In recent releases, there was a bug where the resources and wormholes would get shuffled around when loading a saved tutorial. This would only happen after the first saved version, and then it would be fine after that. -There are new settings options for forcing software mixing of sound and/or music. -In recent releases, it was possible for ships to sometimes stop on top of one another if they were chasing a target that later destroyed. Now they will always properly collision-detect, and will de-clump in this situation. -Ships that are currently protected by a force field now show up with a green circle underneath them (similar to the purple circle under ships that are cloaked). -It is no longer possible to maximize the game when it is running in windowed mode. Maximization was causing click detection and graphics scaling issues in most cases, and if you want to play maximized then simply not using windowed mode would be the simplest solution. -Apparently in the most recent versions of the game, there was a super-rare bug wherein some ships might become un-shootable. This should now be fixed. -The game no longer allows players to load a savegame from a newer version of the game into an older version of the game. This can cause all sorts of non-bug crashes and issues simply due to the version mismatch. The players are now shown a message asking them to upgrade to at least the appropriate version of the game to load the save. To be clear, savegames as still completely forward-compatible and always will be, but backwards compatibility won't be possible simply because the game changes and expands over time. -If the shift key is not held during priority-setting mode, the game now goes back to normal input mode. -The AI will now try to steer its superfortresses and electric shuttles into strongly-defended areas since their area attacks will do the most damage there as opposed to outlying areas. -AI starships and superfortresses now have a special affinity for striking player command stations, making them even more dangerous than before. -The AI will now do a better job of retargeting when it has a nonideal target. -The AI is now even smarter with its target selection, and will thus avoid having ineffective ships beat on force fields, etc, unless there is just nothing else for it to do. -The AI will now keep its idle engineers under force fields or at command posts for protection, rather than just leaving them idle wherever they currently are. -The autosave message is now in the form of a brief message in the upper right. The autosave frequency is now based purely on the host, with all of the players in the game doing their autosaves in sync with one another. -A display filter button has been added to the galaxy map under the display modes button. This lets players filter to All (default), My, Allied, or My And Allied for the relevant counts in the display modes button. -There should now be no chance of the game using hotkeys while the in-game text chat window is up. -The harvester build buttons now show up as red when no more harvesters of that type can be built at the current planet. -X+0-9 now works as a shortcut for selecting the constructors in a control group (which are not selected by the normal 0-9 presses). This also works with double and triple taps of 0-9. -Ships that have been firing at the same target for more than 15 seconds will now look around for a better target every 15 seconds, just in case smaller stuff has snuck up on them. This generally only comes up when attacking large targets like force fields or fortresses. Ships that have been explicitly given a target will not use this logic, only ships that auto-chose a large target. -The "Play Music While Paused" option in the settings screen has now become "Play Music And Don't Dim Screen While Paused," and is part of a new "Turn-Based Strategy Style Settings" section of the pause menu. -There is a new "Use TBS-Friendly Pause" option (default to on) in the settings window. With this new mode, the game keeps processing turns and animations while paused, making for full ability to issue and reissue any commands. However, the timer, resources, ship movement, and ship attacks are all paused as normal. This should be helpful for all players, but especially those who want a TBS-style of play. This mode will need to be turned off when sending data for desyncs. -Flares have been recoded under the hood to better work with TBS-friendly pauses. -The game now shows the pause message in the upper left for galaxy view, so that it is not obstructing any of the planets. -The in-game graphs now include values for score, the number of technologies unlocked, number of planets held, and mark v ships. -Vampire Claws and Core Demon Hands now move around 4x faster than before, thus greatly increasing their combat value (which has still been too low until now). -Sniper turrets are now able to fire through force fields. -ExoShields were still drawing their lines to their protected units after being scrapped. Fixed. -Previously it was possible that, when the toolbar for the window was shown, the bottom of tooltips in the lobby could be cut off. Fixed. -The color of the icons in the intel summary are now handled more accurately. -When the game window does not have focus, the tip windows are no longer shown, since that was commonly causing a high degree of flicker. The display of tooltips is also now a bit more efficient when moving the mouse a lot, hopefully reducing flicker in general. -Contextual information is now popped up about each ship type that is hovered over in the lobby's galaxy map. -Snipers should now have a stronger preference to not fire at ships under force fields. Ships in general should also now generally pick ships that aren't under force fields whenever possible to do so. -The actual underlying types of random AIs are now revealed when the players lose or win (the name of the AI players change to reflect their underlying types). -The Score button now flashes when the game is over, to remind players that they can look at their final stats and graphs. -With parasites, it is possible to go over your ship cap for a certain ship. In those situations, previously the build buttons for that ship would show a negative number, which was confusing. Now it will just stop at 0 (the "Number In Service" on the hover menu will still reflect the overflow as you would expect). -Previously, when the music was enabled while the game was in progress, the music would take quite a while to actually start. Now it starts immediately, though this means that it pauses execution of the game for a second or two while it loads the first track. -Previously, the names of planets in the galaxy view were incorrectly shown above hover menus and tips from the buttons on the left. Fixed. -Previously, the names of planets in the galaxy view would disappear when the popup menus were opened from the buttons on the left. Fixed. -The priority indicator for planets is now included at the end of the name of wormholes in the main planetary view. SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to Quitch for suggesting the graphs be added to the scores screens, for suggesting that the bomber bonuses against hardened targets be clarified, for suggesting that the tutorial player colors be made lighter, for suggesting the queue reordering, for reporting the issues with the input focus in the View Controls window, for suggesting the metal and crystal harvester button interface improvement, for suggesting the scout exclusion from ctrl+comma, for suggesting improvements to the planetary summary sort, for suggesting that the dark gray player color be replaced, for suggesting the settings options for reversing pan/zoom speed, for suggesting the settings option for always showing planet names, for suggesting the improvements to the wormhole name display, for suggesting that control groups continue to work in the galaxy map, for suggesting that AI home planets show up as tech 5, for making a suggestion that led to the new I key functionality, for suggesting that Superfortresses were not really a secondary objective, for suggesting that mine layers be added to the mobile builders list, for suggesting the enemy wormhole text colorization, for pointing out the old restriction logic for non-harvester resource construction, for pointing out that Scout Starships were not selected with the O key, for suggesting the sound effect for incoming enemy waves, for pointing out the issues with teleportation at the edge of the planetary area, for pointing out the error with mine layers in FRD mode, for suggesting the improvement to the play/pause buttons, for suggesting that the priority-setting mode use shift the same as other placement modes do, for suggesting that the autosave message be less obtrusive, for suggesting the display filter, for suggesting the speed increase for vampires, for pointing out the issue with the exoshield lines, for suggesting the improvement to the icon colors in the intel summary view, for suggesting changes to how snipers target ships under force fields, for suggesting that AI types get revealed after games are over, for reporting the issues with the planet names and the buttons on the left in galaxy view. Thanks to netwilk for reporting the bug with the planet names sometimes being cut off in the galaxy map, for suggesting the harvester buttons be shown in red when fully used, for suggesting the X+0-9 key combo, for suggesting the auto-retargeting after 15 seconds, for reporting the bug with the tooltips being cut off, for reporting the tip window flicker, for suggesting the hover tips over ship types in the lobby, for suggesting the priority number be included at the end of wormhole names. Thanks to Bridger for suggestion the Minimize button in the lobby. Thanks to Quitch and netwilk for suggesting the improvement to planet selection on the lobby map. Thanks to Blam Stokel for suggesting the Alt+0-9 functionality for priority buttons in the galaxy map, and for suggesting the teleporting Engineer IIs. Thanks to Sowelu for suggesting the selection border around ships in the planetary summary. Thanks to keith.lamothe for inspiring the changes to the AI Progress, and for inspiring Mark II and III command stations. Thanks to Zulgaines for suggesting the in-game links to the Meeting Grounds forum and IRC channel, for reporting an issue with hotkeys being activated while in the in-game text window. Thanks to Cougar_DK for reporting the issue with the tutorial savegames scrambling the resources. Thanks to Larry Parker for reporting the issue with the game crashing in tutorials when the computer was coming out of suspend mode, for reporting the issue with loading savegames from basic tutorial 3 after a certain point in the tutorial, for suggesting the TBS-friendly improvements to pause for reporting the issue with enabling the music in-game. Thanks to TheWesDude for inspiring the options to force software mixing of sound and music. Thanks to KibbeZero for reporting the issue with maximization of the game in windowed mode. Thanks to Ekkosangen and Zulgaines for reporting the "unshootable ship" bug. Thanks to netwilk and keith.lamothe for suggesting the revisions to how control groups work with space docks and advanced factories. ================================================================== Version 1.005 ================================================================== -The game now supports maps with 40, 50, 60, or 70 planets in them. -It is now possible to put constructors (space docks and advanced factories) into attack-move mode or free-roaming defender mode when setting their gather point. -Ships that are produced from a constructor in attack-move or free roaming defender mode will now emerge in the same mode. -Explanation of the AI Progress in Basic Tutorial 3 has been updated to note that AI Progress DOES affect AI Tech levels as well as the number of ships they build. -The zoom is now smoother, and in general works a bit better. The zoom also now has a more constant speed, rather than accelerating as it gets further zoomed out. -Holding the Shift key is now zooms in/out at double speed. -There is now an "Allow Very Far Zoom" option in the settings window that allows players to zoom out much further than before. -It is now easier to place ExoShields when in far zoom. -There are now distinctly different blips on the minimap for metal and crystal deposits/harveters. -The system tray icon has not been needed for a while, and has now been removed. -The new "very far zoom" should no longer have issues on widescreen monitors. -The zoom 2 button (E key) now scales outward appropriately when "very far zoom" is enabled. -The speed of zooming, especially on very far zoom, has been much improved so that it is quicker to use. -There is now a "Last Scouted" display option for the galaxy map. Hitting S will automatically switch to it. -The "Last Scouted" text in the intel summary has been improved. The colors are a bit more helpful (green/orange gradation before flashing red), and it now shows hours/minutes/seconds timespan format instead of just showing raw seconds. -When a ship takes damage, its border now flashes for two seconds in far zoom. -A new "Minimap Display Mode" button has been added to the left of the minimap, complete with F5-F7 hotkeys that can be held to temporarily switch between the three non-normal modes. -Certain ships (special forces command posts, astro train stations, ion cannons, force fields, fortresses, warp gates, and all of the specialized/capturable ships like advanced factories and research stations) now appear as icons in the intel summary on the galaxy map. -When the game is minimized, it no longer plays music unless the game is in progress/paused. This prevents the game from continuing to play music when it is sending players to the videos screen. -Holding Ctrl while left-clicking the button for either metal or crystal harveters now builds all harvesters of that type at the current planet. That makes it two clicks to build (or rebuild) all of your metal/crystal harvesters at any planet, as opposed to the longer manual process that it previously was. -Ships now take into consideration the shots that are incoming against a target when they fire at it, so that they stop firing at a target that is already on its way to death (this prevents the issue of overkill that could previously occur, especially with cruisers. -AI ships at guard posts will now retreat when they have been drawn out, but can't find a target. -Cruisers now have a 50% penalty against themselves, which means that cruisers quickly killing off all the opposing cruisers in a battle will be less of a common occurrence. -In recent releases, neither vampires nor cutlasses have been dealing any damage to enemies, making them utterly worthless. This was a bug introduced late in beta, apparently, and it wasn't caught until a player noticed it this week. Fixed. -The dark gray is no longer a default color for AI players, since it is harder to see. -A time-left-to-build count is now shown on the current item being built in every queue, in addition to the little progress bar. This is particularly useful with Starship Constructors and Missile Silos. -When the energy balance for the local player was low or negative, the message was overlapping the knowelege income rate text. Fixed. -Attack ranges are now drawn as un-filled circles unless your mouse cursor is over the ship. This makes it much easier to see the ranges in effect when there are large numbers of selected ships. -Holding Z+X now shows all the enemy ranges in addition to the local player's ranges. -Sniper ranges are never shown any more since they cause slowdown on older graphics cards and they always just hit everything, anyway. -Metal and Crystal overflows now automatically go to the other players on a team, rather than just having them be wasted. -There is now an option in the game settings that allows the music to keep playing while the game is paused. -Flares now have a border on the minimap, and so are much easier to see when in the middle of a bunch of other like-colored minimap blips. -The auto-targeting logic for the ships has been changed so that they will now concentrate fire appropriately, still without causing overkills. -The Resources display mode of the Galaxy Map now includes a single count in dark red on the scouted planets not controlled by human players. This makes it easy to see where there are lots of resources amonst scouted planets, without reducing the ease of finding where there are unused harvester spots on the planets you do control. -In the last prerelease version, the Last Scouted view of the Galaxy Map was not working correctly in the tutorials. Fixed. -Free-Roaming Defender Mode now has ships return to the location you clicked when putting them into that mode after all the enemy ships on the planet are gone. This makes it work more like attack-move mode, and makes staging defenses on a planet even easier to oversee. -Keyboard handling has been recoded to now use windows messages instead of DiretInput. This should allow for alternate keybindings such as software dvorak keyboard solutions to now function. -Ship autotargeting now gives preference to targets that are closer and that can attack the ship, and targets that can shoot back over those that can't, all else being equal. -Ship types that were on a planet, but no longer are, now show up as white in the planetary summary for 60 seconds (you can hover over them to find the last time they were seen on the current planet). This is useful for knowing what ships popped in and then out of a planet if they were destroyed very quickly, and it is also useful for keeping the planetary summary items from bouncing around too much when there is a lot of traffic in and out. -Previously, hover tips did not function when the game was paused. Fixed. -On larger screen resolutions, the planetary summary now gets taller. -In past versions, non-resource ships were sometimes incorrectly being shown as resource-type blips on the minimap. Fixed. -Pressing the hotkeys to switch between Galaxy Display Modes was not updating the "Current Mode" text in the hovertip for the Galaxy Display button. Fixed. -The Score screen now expands to make use of widescreen monitors. -Counter-Negative-Energy Turrets have been added as a new turret at command stations. These protect against the shots from Astro Trains and Munitions boosters (the former of which may be absolutely vital in some games on higher difficulties if you want to have self-sustaining defenses at highly traveled wormholes). -Engineers now use 400 knowledge instead of 50. -Mobile Repair stations are a new unlockable ship type under the DEF tab of your command stations. These heal any ships that come within their range simultaneously. Later releases will likely see extensions to this base ability. -Ships will now avoid firing at targets under force fields unless there are no better targets outside force fields (except for ships like infiltrators, which can fire through force fields anyway, and so disregard this). -The way that cutlasses and vampires react to being shot while pursuing another target should now be a bit better (they should no longer have a chance of just stopping dead). -Science Labs have been moved to the right in the ECON menu of command stations. -Science Lab II has been added to the ECON menu of command stations. These gather knowledge half as fast as a regular science lab, and cost 8x as much, but they are heavily armored for taking into high-level enemy planets. -In recent prereleases, ships were sometimes closing their distance too far when attacking an enemy ship. Fixed. -The keyboard shortcuts for three of the galaxy map display buttons have been remapped. We will endeavor never to change existing keyboard shortcuts, but in this case we felt it was worth it so that some of the new display keyboard shortcuts (see below) would be consistent with similar shortcuts in the main view. -There are now galaxy display modes for showing the individual counts of crystal and metal on planets, as opposed to just showing all the resources combined. A small letter (M, C, or R) now identifies which of these modes is currently in use. -There are now galaxy display modes for locating scouts, starships, starship constructors, and all constructors. All of these show totals from your entire team. -There is now a galaxy display mode for showing incoming wave counts. -There is now a galaxy display mode for showing how many hostile wormholes each planet has (enemy planets with a warp gate). This is invaluable for planning and managing your defenses. -The game settings now support setting specific window width/heights (instead of always fullscreen), and it now supports having the cursor not snap to the window or having the toolbar be shown on the window. -A message is now shown at the top of the screen when the game does not have input focus (so that players can see why their mouse wheel and keyboard inputs are not being registered). -If the main game form does not have input focus for whatever reason, it will refocus itself the next time a player clicks it. This should prevent most issues with Alt-tabbing in and out with the new windows-messages-based keyboard input, and it should also prevent sub-fields (textboxes, mostly) in the application from inadvertently deciding to steal input focus. -The message in the lobby about how to select a starting position also explains that this is how to select a ship type, and it also flashes so that new players will see to do this. -In recent prereleases, the backspace key was not functioning in textboxes (but the delete key was). Fixed. -The game no longer scales incorrectly when in windowed mode (that was causing slight graphics degradation, as well as slightly-off mouse click detection). -The game now includes an "are you sure?" popup when being killed by Alt-F4 or clicking the window X in windowed mode. This prevents players from accidentally closing their game and losing their progress through a stray click or keypress. -There is now a display mode in the Galaxy Map for finding "My Science Labs." SPECIAL THANKS -------------- Thanks to Janster for suggesting the smaller galaxy maps as an option, for the idea to make constructors be able to directly produce ships in attack-move or free roaming defender modes, for alerting us to the issue of overkill (particularly with ships like cruisers), and for suggesting the improvement to the AI logic at guard posts. Thanks for Quitch for pointing out the error in the AI Progress explanation, suggesting the zoom be made more smooth, suggesting the improvement for Harvester ExoShields,suggesting that metal and crystal deposits have different icons on the minimap, pointing out that they system tray icon is no longer needed, alerting us to the issue with very far zoom on widescreen monitors, suggesting the adjustment to the E key, suggesting adjustment to the zoom speed, the idea for having ships flash in far zoom when they are damaged, suggesting that the music be paused while exiting to the videos, suggesting the improvement to the resources display mode of the galaxy view, suggesting that the Free-Roaming Defender mode cause ships to return to a base location, for suggesting that the score screen be updated for widescreen, and for suggesting the "My Science Labs" mode in the galaxy map. Thanks to Spelk for suggesting the minimap display modes, the idea to add icons to the intel summary on the galaxy map, the idea to make the flares more visible on the minimap, and the idea that spawned Mobile Repair Stations. Thanks to Sowelu for suggesting that the dark gray not be a default AI color since it is harder to see, suggesting that the attack ranges be drawn as borders instead of filled, that there be a key for showing all enemy ranges, and for suggesting almost all of the planetary summary changes. Thanks to keith.lamothe for suggesting the option to keep the game music playing while the game is paused, for several suggested improvements regarding ship autotargeting, and for suggeting the many new Galaxy Map display modes. Thanks to freykin for reporting the bug with vampires. Thanks to Black for reporting the issue with dvorak keyboards. -Thanks to Blam Stokel for suggesting the improved targeting around force fields, and suggesting the Science Lab II. -Thanks to Blam Stokel and netWilk for their suggestions about how to support an improved windowed-mode experience. Thanks to multiple players for suggesting the enhancement for quickly building metal and crystal harvesters. ================================================================== Version 1.004 ================================================================== -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. ================================================================== Version 1.003 ================================================================== -New Lightning Missiles have been added at Missile Silos. -It is now possible for a player to build up to four EMPs at one time. -All missiles now are immune to mines, and have scout abilities (and thus also show up in the list of scouts). -The scouts quick-button at the bottom of the screen is now labeled "Scouts & Missiles." -All missiles and starships are now immune to sniper shots. -In recent releases, the numeric range in the hover text for ships was being shown as 1,000 too much on all ships (though the range indicator in the game itself -- hold Z to see -- was fine). -New Armored Missles have been added at Missile Silos. -In the last release, there was a crash bug that could be encountered when starting a game on some maps. Fixed. -The AI is no longer allowed to cluster reinforcements in quite the same way as before, which means that they will tend to be more evenly spread apart. -Four player games and up now get even more of a resource bonus than before. -The AI is back to only building a single ion cannon on planets on difficulties 7 and 8. -There is now more variance in a minority of galaxy maps, providing more variance overall. -The map random seed is now shown on totals button hover text on the galaxy map. ================================================================== Version 1.002 ================================================================== -The metal/crystal produced by ships now scales upward with increased numbers of players. -The "ship level" text that is shown with the far zoom image of ships is now prerendered and always sorted by texture, putting significantly less load on older graphics cards when vast numbers of ships are onscreen at once. -The color of the "core" ship level is now a bright red instead of the soft purple that it was before. -The rendering of control group numbers (when Ctrl is held down) is now prerendered, putting significantly less load on older graphics cards when vast numbers of control-grouped ships are onscreen at once while Ctrl is held down. -The loading of music tracks has been revamped rather heavily, to allow for more efficient streaming off of slower/burdened hard drives. -The F3 text now shows what percent complete playback is of the current track, and it also shows what the next music track will be and how far along it is. -The far zoom icons for ships now fade out when they are going through wormholes, same as their zoomed-in counterparts do, thus making it easier to tell when a ship is going through a wormhole on far zoom. -Previously, when right-clicking a full-health ship with an engineer that was in attack-move mode, the engineer would stay in attack-move mode. This was different from right-clicking a ship that was in need of repairs, and is now fixed. -Advanced Research Stations now show up in the button that lists Science Labs. -The abbreviated names for Fighters, Bombers, Cruisers, Snipers, and a few other minor ship types are now more readable. -When ships are moving towards an enemy ship that dies, previously they would continue inwards even after the enemy ship was removed. Now they instead stop where they are, to avoid mistakenly taking them into danger for no reason. -Ctrl+Comma and Shift+Comma no longer center the view on the selected ships. -CounterSpies and Ion Cannons are now better at automatically choosing their targets, and they also now switch targets more quickly after insta-killing each target ship. -Ion cannons and counterspies now ONLY fire at lower-level ships and cloaked ships respectively. This makes it so that the ion cannon noise is much more meaningful, in the sense that it means it is insta-killing ships if it is firing at all. -Anti-Starship Arachnids now properly show their strength against starships in their Strong Vs. list. -Previously, after the application was loaded or refocused, the screen would blip the first time that Alt or F10 was pressed. Fixed. -A new "Totals" button on the galaxy map shows stats for how many planets and ships are held by the local player, allies, and enemies across all planets. This information is of little strategic value, but it does provide an interesting indicator of the overall progress of a given campaign. -Missle Silos have been added as a new type of constructor for players to build. -Nuclear Missiles and EMPs have been added as very expensive missiles that can be built at the missile silos. -Deflector Drones and Shield Bearers now absorb EMPs (it does not paralyze them, and in fact it heals them instead). -Shield Bearers are now immune to nuclear explosions. -All Starships and core ships are now immune to nuclear explosions and absorb emps. -It is now less likely for starships to be included in any given reinforcement that an AI does. In recent releases, the AI has been having way too many starships at the highest-level planets. -The crystal cost of vampires has been quartered, since they were previously too expensive to be useful. -The sound effect for nuclear explosions has been improved somewhat -- there is now a third component to it, a dying grumble that lasts until the whiteout is gone. -The way that dangerous ships are calculated for player planets is now much more sensible. Pretty much everything but mines and astro trains is now counted. -In a change from the prior release, the metal and crystal costs of mark iii and iv ships no longer scale up so much as they previously did. Basically, those costs are back to how they previously were. -EMPs now (temporarily) disable mines as well as force fields. -Engineers, Mine Layers, and Mobile Builders now have mine avoidance. -Engineers are now able to remove enemy mine remains in an automated fashion. -The AI now handles cloaked ships better, only de-cloaking them when it is at the target it wishes to shoot. -Cloaked ships now re-cloak twice as fast after decloaking. -Advanced Research Stations can now be used to unlock technologies, and they also are now (very, very slowly) mobile. -On AI Difficulty 5 and up, the AI now uses smarter targeting. -Previously, the AI Tech level would never go down after it was increased, even if the AI Progress was later reduced. The AI Tech level is now able to go down if the AI Progress is reduced. -The AI Tech level now increases more slowly for AI players, giving the human players a little more breathing room. -Up to 2 billion license keys are now supported, increased from the previous cap. ================================================================== Version 1.001 ================================================================== -New logo. -For some users, downloading the prior patch did not update the main game executable. ================================================================== Version 1.000 ================================================================== -The game now minimizes and then goes back to its normal size on startup. This should prevent Windows XP from sometimes leaving the taskbar in front of the game window on start. It also ensures that Windows XP includes an entry in the taskbar for the game, which wasn't always happening before. -The knowledge cost of raid starships has been increased from 4,000 to 6,000. -The metal and crystal costs of all starships have been switched (now crystal is now emphasized over metal). -A new Leech Starship has been added, unlockable for 8,000 knowledge after raid starships are unlocked. These starships are huge parasites. -The ratio of metal/crystal costs on MLRS turrets have been shifted so that more crystal is now required from them, but less metal. -Counter-Missile turrets have had some of their metal cost shifted to crystal. -New AI Troop Accelerator has been added, and will appear at random on a few planets in some campaigns. -In recent releases, the names of the AI players were mistakenly not including the AI number (1 or 2) or the difficulty level. Fixed. -Clicking items in the in-game save menu was not immediately populating the textbox at the bottom of that window. Fixed. -New in game music tracks: Warp, Marisa -New Anti-Starship Arachnid unit for AI. -AI now sometimes deploys Anti-Starship Arachnids when being attacked by starships on its planets (AI level 5 and up only). It is quite good at deflecting careless starships attacks with this tactic. -Force Fields, Fortresses, SuperFortresses, Astro Trains, Train Stations, and all of the specialized capturable ships are now immune to being insta-killed. -The game now has and plays Victory and Defeat music. -When there are a lot of metal or crystal producers, the efficiency of the later producers is now reduced, thus making super-high incomes harder to achieve in single player games. This puts the single player late game more in line with multiplayer games (many of which will hardly even have this new efficiency reduction because of how resources are divided among players). Previously, the single-player experience was often a bit too easy compared to its multiplayer counterpart, and this should balance that out. -Mark III and Mark IV ships are all now 1.5x more expensive than before, except for starships and heavy defense. -The AI is now a bit smarter about reinforcing planets that are adjacent to planets that no one controls and the human players have no presence on. -The old cap of 10 reinforcements per reinforcement event (based on the number of planets the AIs don't control) has been raised to 30. The number of reinforcements has also been increased from 1 per 3 noncontrolled planets to 1 per 2 noncontrolled planets. ================================================================== Version 0.940 ================================================================== -Starships are no longer immune to sniper shots and missiles. -All core ships now have a 4x bonus against starships. -Mark III starships now take 60 minutes to build instead of 18. -Mark II starships now take 20 minutes to build instead of 9. -Mark I starships now take 10 minutes to build instead of 5. -The energy use of Mark II starships has been multiplied 5x. -The energy use of Mark III starships has been multiplied 10x. -Scouts, starships, and snipers now have unlimited engine health. -The attack bonuses of all starships have been removed except their penalty against turrets. They also now have a penalty against heavy defenses. -The health of all starships has been reduced to 75% of its former value. -The AI is now smarter about how it tactically handles its ships on difficulty 5 and up. It now evaluates the strength of the enemy forces and the desirability of the enemy targets at the current planet, and if there isn't much there then it goes to another enemy planet. Previously the AI would stay and fight at the current planet if there were any ships left at all, which wasn't always as effective. -When AI ships route to enemy planets, they don't always necessarily pick the nearest one to go to anymore. Now they have a chance of picking on that is more distant, which makes them less predictable. -In previous versions, if someone tried to play an ogg track that was longer than 6-7 minutes, the game would crash. Now it will just truncate the file during playback. -A EULA has been added for the game. This EULA should be quite friendly to end users, but prohibts disassmbly or derivative works, etc. -In the Score screens, the old "# Sold" column now reads "# Scrap," which is better wording. -The name of the current music track is now shown in the F3 debug text. -The installer now includes the EULA. -There was previously a bug with how some ships would go through wormholes, which would make them show up in the wrong location on ther other side. Fixed. -Previously, if you selected an engineer and then told it to attack-move to its current location, that would not work. Fixed. -Clicking an existing savegame in the save interface now prepopulates the name of the existing savegame into the textbox at the bottom of the screen. -Issuing an attack order to ships that were already traveling on a wormhole path would not properly switch the ships to the attack order unless the attack order was issued twice or a move order was first issued. Fixed. -The cost of tachyon beam emitters has been increased rather sharply. -Tachyon Drones have been added. -The new in-game music tracks Variation 1, Thor Variation, Metal, and Smooth have been added. -The game now supports multiple vendor modes. ================================================================== Version 0.939 ================================================================== -On a minority of Vista machines, the Save directory was not created properly, and thus saving was not possible. -On some machines, click selection was a little bit sluggish. Fixed. -Previously, there was a rare bug where ships would sometimes appear off the planet area instead of at a wormhole. This should now be fixed.