This one is almost the last polish for the upcoming 7.0/VotM official release. Notable changes include:
1) Updated the tutorial. I went through them all in the process, but if some of you could do a run through the four tutorials in 6.047 (or whatever the current version is at the time) as a sanity check and let me know how it goes, I’d appreciate it.
2) Told the mapgen initial seeding logic to take it a bit easier on the planets that start next to a human homeworld. Traditionally our position has been that you get what the RNG gives you with those (aside from a -1 tech level rule and a no-guardians rule, etc) but with the since-6.0 buffs to guard posts, guardians, starships, etc, etc… well, honestly, “the very first time I step out my front door” is not generally when people want to die horribly in AI War. They prefer to die horribly a couple planets away. We aim to annihilateplease! And the RNG still gets quite a bit of free rein with them.
3) Fixed Line Place. It was being pretty amusingly broken before because I had forgotten some rather important differences between “value” and “absolute value” in a particular code branch.
4) Answered the recent buff polls. Interestingly it was all base-game and TZR ships. Some of those ships hurt a lot more now, I suspect.
5) Added a “Batch Auto-Explore” per-control-group toggle. No one asked for this (recently, at least), but while working on point 1 above I remembered how incredibly lazy I can be about manually telling a full batch of scouts “I don’t care where you go but if you’re still on this planet in 5 seconds you’re target practice!”.
There’s several other bugfix/balance-related things in there as well.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you’ll see the notice of the update having been found if you’re connected to the Internet at the time. If you don’t have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
