AI War:3.120 Release
Contents
AI Updates
-added support for AI plots, which are enabled in the new "AI Plots" tab in the new game lobby.
-added first AI plot: the avenger space station that spawns on the death of the core command station of the AI with the avenger plot. The Avenger is incredibly powerful, and will go straight for human home command stations.
-added two commands for enabling the new AI plot in existing games, "cmd:add plot ai1 avenger" for ai player 1, and "cmd:add plot ai2 avenger" for ai player 2. These are not cheats and will work on cheats-not-enabled games; the chat message will say "CHEAT" but it doesn't actually flag your game as a cheat game. Note that the command will not appear to do anything, the plot doesn't trigger until the respective ai core command station is destroyed. If the core command station has already been destroyed, the plot cannot be triggered for that ai player.
-AI planets no longer get extra reinforcement ship cap from wormhole guard posts. This makes the practice of "neutering" AI planets once again effective for players.
-Previously, AI home planets always had a ship cap of 2500 no matter what players did to try to neuter those home planets, etc. That is now still true for difficulty 9 and higher, but the min ship cap has been reduced for other difficulties. It is now: 1800 for diff 8+, 1400 for diff 7+, 1000 for diff 6+, 500 for diff 4+. This should make the end of the game less of a grind.
-"Planetary roamer" type ships are now able to be special forces like normal. This includes most melee ships, starships, and similar. This means that you can now see them randomly roaming around and joining battles, or randomly popping into your planets, as with the other special forces ships.
-Major new "border aggression" AI Mechanic: AI planets with more than X number of units in cold storage (basically, sitting idle as guards) will now set the excess units above X to be free. Usually planets would be capped around 4000ish in the first place, but on the lower difficulties this provides incentive for players to at least partially neuter really high-guard-post-containing planets that are near to the player's area. On the higher difficulties, it makes neutering way more important, and also gives the AI more latitude for interesting attack vectors. The number "X" varies by difficulty level in the following way: Difficulty >= 10 = 3300 - ( AI Progress ) Difficulty >= 9 = 3600 - ( AI Progress ) Difficulty >= 8 = 3900 - ( AI Progress ) Difficulty >= 7 = 4100 - ( AI Progress / 2 ) Difficulty >= 6 = 4400 - ( AI Progress / 2 ) Difficulty >= 5 = 4600 - ( AI Progress / 2 ) Difficulty < 5 = 5500 - ( AI Progress / 2 ) More info on this here: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI War:Border_Aggression
-AI ships trapped by a black hole machine will now try to destroy that device rather than just sitting there doing nothing (will sometimes attack other targets in the system first, if available).
General Large Gameplay Additions
-Added new AI modifier: No Wave Warnings, which simply causes the normal wave timers to not be shown. The total number of ships in incoming waves is still shown. This can greatly increase the challenge of the game and should be used with caution.
-Added new AI modifier: Cross Planet Waves, which causes all AI waves to spawn on an AI planet and travel across normal space rather than spawning at one of your wormholes. This is the logic normally used when there are no warp gates adjacent to a human-controlled planet. This can greatly increase the challenge of the game and should be used with caution.
-Added option checkbox in lobby for "Show Unexplored Planets" (defaults to true, which is the previous behavior), if unchecked, planets will not be shown on either the lobby or the in-game galaxy map until the human team has visited it. Non-visible wormhole links will not be used by any auto-pathing, so the first time to a new planet you'll need to explicitly send ships via ctrl-right-clicking the wormhole. An "auto explore unexplored wormhole" order is planned, but not yet implemented.
-Added "unexplored wormholes" galaxy display mode similar to "hostile wormholes" but instead displays the number of wormholes with non-visited planets on the other end (doesn't count exo-wormholes). Only displays a number if the "source" planet has been visited, of course. This display mode can be triggered via the "X" key.
-Implemented an auto-explore mode, mapped to the A+E+X key combination (can cancel the mode via the END key, like other modes). This mode is only relevant when the show-unexplored-planets option is off, and causes the ship to randomly pick one of the shortest paths to an unexplored planet and try to go there.
-In unexplored games, only scouts can go through a wormhole to an unexplored planet; and only scouts can be given the auto-explore command
Co-Op Improvements
-On multiplayer games with three players and up, there are now slightly more resources seeded into game maps (including existing savegames, and increasing as the number of players increases) to make the experience more consistent with that of the 1-2 playr games.
Performance Improvements
-Added system for aggregate targeting, if a ship is near enough to a ship of the same type that is owned by the same player and has already computed its target list, it just uses that list instead of computing its own. Currently this is used mainly to speed up the rate at which large groups of ships get their target lists (particularly noticeable on loading a game), but we could shift this to a cpu savings if it seems necessary.
-The game no longer preloads sounds, and now loads sounds in a more efficient way in general, which makes the game load vastly faster.
-Somewhat reduced memory footprint of foreground objects (including shots, ships, junk, etc, though shots are already pooled): - "list of ships assisting me" and "list of ships guarding me" and "which control groups am I in" are now initialized only when needed, rather than for every foreground object - removed a code structure that allowed runtime flexibility of which auto-targeting target-prioritization function was used, since it wasn't being used anymore and added some memory overhead
- Modified a calculation in the AIThread that was causing the allocation of a very large number of temporary fixed-point-math variables during heavy combat.
- Implemented a cap on the number of "reusable objects" maintained for each non-ship type of foreground object (includes shots, junk, explosion pieces, smoke particles, etc), to prevent a memory-leak like behavior due to the size of the objects and the fact that being in the reusable pool excludes them from garbage collection.
-Several improvements relating to the efficiency of fixed-int math.
-converted comma delimited string building from string to stringbuilder in making object number lists in move, formation-move, arc-move, wormhole, and attack commands; this drastically reduces the memory and time requirements of giving those orders to large groups of ships.
-Implemented default filled-circle move for move sets over 300 ships to avoid large performance hits due to collision-check-based pre-emptive destination displacement (between this and the previous change, a 10,000 ship move order that used to cause a 20+ second delay now causes less than a second of delay).
-reworked autotargeting and collision throttling so that throttles exhausted in a cycle now remember the last planet and ship allowed through, and on the next cycle won't pass ships before (or equal to) the last-allowed-ship at all, so the game will eventually "work through" everyone even if the load is very heavy.
-reduced the amount of collision checking the game is allowed to do per player per cycle, which may result in some odd visuals, but significantly increases performance in some situations (like a large player fleet emerging from a wormhole).
-The speed at which the program loads, and the speed at which savegames link FG Objects together, have both been notably increased.
-minor performance improvements to check-retreat-to-guard-post and ships-with-minimum-range "anti-chase" logic.
Interface / Other Graphical Improvements
-Added "Sniper Focus Fire" control node that makes units with infinite range (sniper turrets, snipers, etc) use an alternate autotargetting behavior to focus on maximizing rapid enemy casualties.
-Added "Non-Sniper Focus Fire" control node that makes non-sniper units use an alternate autotargetting behavior to focus on maximizing rapid enemy casualties. This behavior was developed for sniper units, so use with caution.
-If you have no command stations or mobile builders on a planet, the "b" key will now rotate through your colony ships on the planet.
-Preliminary journal window implemented along with journal entries for prologue (beginning of game), destruction of first AI home station, and victory (epilogue).
-The game now uses ClearTypeNatural text, which should make it look vastly better, though the font sizes had to be redone to a fair degree to make this work.
-now if you left-click or right-click on an alert (wave alerts, mining golem, rebel colony invisibility timer, command station under attack, etc) you will be taken to the applicable planet (if any, a ??? wave warning or cpa warning won't take you anywhere).
-now if you hold alt+A on the galaxy map screen it will show the alert box like normal.
-The number of my/allied ships inside transports is now shown on the counts at each planet on the galaxy map view, same as it already was being shown when searching for ships using the Find tool.
-Regular mark I-III engineers now have "En" as text hovering over them. This makes them far easier to pick out of a crowd, and easier to find on the planetary summary to the right of the screen.
-Increments and reductions to AI Progress now show up in the chat log listing the time, amount, and cause of the increment/reduction.
-Added single-planet versions of the auto-build-engineerI|II|III|remains-rebuilder nodes.
-Added new Control Node: No Rallying to allied Rally Posts.
-Added new Control Node: Reclaimed Units Rally to Rally Posts.
New Ships
-Heavy Beam Cannon Mark I-IV.
Ship Logic Updates
-When a ship is reclaimed, it looks for a friendly MRS on the same planet, and if it finds any it automatically moves toward the closest one.
-Ships are now much more likely to shoot at overkilled targets when no non-overkill targets are available.
-When a shot disappears because its target was already destroyed by something else (common in overkill cases), and it was fired within its firing ship's current reload cycle, and the firing ship has more than 1 second left on its reload timer, its reload timer is set to 1 second.
-When player ships (not AI or minor faction ships) go too far from the a planet's center, they now start slowing down. This happens when the ships get beyond the range of their energy sources by too far, and prevents them leading AI ships on wild goose chases by too far, whcih was exploitative especially with transports. Speed is down to 16 at 80k, 8 at 100k, 1 at 160k, rather than the prior 16 at 60k, 8 at 80k, and 1 at 160k.
-The ship caps are now slightly higher for all single player ship classes, and scale down by slightly more than before for each added human player, back to the prior existing base number of ships for 8 player games (typically the base ship cap in 1 player was 180, but is now 190, and for 8 player was and still is 100).
-The frequency of the mining golems appearing has been reduced to around 8 hours instead of 5 hours, but there is more variance in exactly on what frequency they might appear.
-The frequency of the rebel colonies appearing has been reduced to around 10 hours instead of 5 hours, but there is more variance in exactly on what frequency they might appear.
-The AIs are now severely constrained in how many anti starship arachnids they are able to build on a planet -- about one arachnid per every guard post (including wormhole guard posts) on the planet, per AI player. This plus the last change makes them more interesting as a capturable fabricator for human players, without making them ridiculously overpowered in the hands of the AI. Older savegames that happen to have a huge ton of arachnids already in play for the AIs may seem a bit overpowered until those are killed off.
-Paralysis time now capped at 2 minutes, to prevent emp minefields and the like from getting too extreme.
Balance Updates
-SuperFortress energy cost changed from 100 to 20000 (100 was a holdover from it's AI-only days).
-Further rebalancing of Riot Tazer: --Recharge time from 6 seconds to 3.5 seconds --Paralyze time from 1 second to 0.75 seconds --Engine damage from 0 to 2 --Attack power from 400 to 300
-Minor buffs to riot machine gun and riot laser engine damage.
-Ion Cannons now prioritize higher-tech/more-valuable targets.
-Ion Cannons now do a better job of disabling the engines of ships when no insta-kill targets are available, rather than trying to kill ships with normal damage.
-Astro trains now no longer have an attack bonus against constructors.
-To prevent the Dyson from winning the game for the player, normal and player-ally dyson gatlings now gradually lose health outside the dyson sphere's system, such that they should automatically expire after 1000 seconds (16-17 minutes). This attrition does not apply to ai-ally gatlings.
-MLRS rate-of-fire doubled, attack bonus against fighters reduced from 10x to 4x.
-MLRS turret bonus against fighters reduced from 10x to 8x.
-Transports: Capacity from 100 to 200 Energy cost from 5000 to 10000 Metal/Crystal cost from 5000/3000 to 10000/6000 Now unloads a maximum of 10 ships per game second if out of supply, still unloads all if in supply or scrapped/destroyed. Now loses 35% of max health when traversing a wormhole to a planet that is out-of-supply. Now regens health very quickly (30 seconds from 1hp to full) when on a planet controlled by its team that is in supply.
-Riot Control Starship Riot Shield modules now automatically regenerate (fairly quickly, once the regen kicks in, which is unlikely while in actual combat).
-Zenith Viral Shredder cost scaling changed from exponential to linear with percent-over-cap-on-planet.
-Unlock cost for Counter Dark Matter Turret reduced from 1125 to 1000 and for Lightning Turret MkIII reduced from 2200 to 2000. Since no other unlock cost was not a multiple of 250, these had an artificially inflated opportunity cost.
-To prevent unintentional difficulty against cloak-heavy AI types that also have Zenith Mirrors, Decloakers are now immune to shot reflection.
-Core Warhead Interceptor health dropped from 150 million to 75 million, and now dies with the command station.
-AntiArmor MkIII health was low compared to other anti armor ships, raised to compensate.
-all command stations (I, II, III, Warp Jammer, Home, Home Core, and AI Core) now immediately retry the "am I protected by a forcefield" logic after losing protection from a forcefield. This prevents issues where the brief window between losing protection and recalculating protections allows enough firepower through to destroy the station. For performance reasons this immediate-retry logic is not applied to non-command-stations.
-turrets can now be munitions boosted, but only to 40% (for 140% damage).
-starships can now be munitions boosted, but only to 20% (for 120% damage).
-modules are now immune to area of effect damage.
-Dyson gatlings now cannot be repaired, to prevent the auto-attrition from clogging up all allied MRS's in the system.
- AI should now obey rough per-planet ship caps for heavy beam cannons, so concentrated clumps of them should be pretty rare (but still possible).
-Golems no longer cause an AI Progress increase upon their death. This makes golems a lot easier and more economical to use, making them more useful in general.
-Cursed Golems now have 8x more health, but lose health at the same equivalent speed as before (meaning more health lost per second. Their +1 AIP per X health value has also been increased by 8x.
-Botnet Golems now have 4x more health. Their +1 AIP per X health value has also been increased by 4x.
-Hive Golems now have 2x more health. Their +1 AIP per X health value has also been increased by 2x.
-Regenerator Golems now have 2x more health. Their +1 AIP per X health value has also been increased by 2x.
-Black Widow Golems now have 2x more health. Their +1 AIP per X health value has also been increased by 2x.
-Broken Golems still require AI Progress to repair the same as before, but now regular Golems no longer require AI Progress for repairs.
-Broken/Regular Armored and Artillery Golems now require more metal than crystal to repair, but still the equivalent of both.
-Armored Golems now cost 2x as much to repair as Broken Armored Golems.
-Artillery Golems now cost 4x as much to repair as Broken Artillery Golems.
-Regenerator Golems now cost 5x as much to repair as Broken Regenerator Golems.
-Cursed Golems are now repairable, but no longer have vampirism.
-Hive Golems now cost 10x as much to repair as Broken Hive Golems (there is very little reason for these guys to get hurt).
-Botnet Golems now cost 2x as much to repair as Broken Botnet Golems.
-Black Widow Golems still cost the same to repair as Broken Black Widow Golems, for those wondering.
-Armored Golems and Artillery Golems now require 600,000 energy to use.
-Black Widow Golems now only require 300,000 energy to use. Their health has also been dropped from 60 million to 30 million.
-Cursed Golems now only require 200,000 energy to use. Their health has also been dropped from 80 million to 20 million.
-Botnet Golems now only require 300,000 energy to use.
-The move speed of mobile repair stations has been doubled from 12 to 24. The repair range of mobile repair stations has been increased from 3,000 to 15,000.
-changed health of mk II, III, and IV forcefield bearers to make a greater distinction between mark levels.
- on the "every 80 game seconds" check for spawning a resistance wave, it will cap the spawn-size counter to 2000 regardless of what it might be
- the 80-second-check-resistance-fighter-spawn will now not greatly exceed the 1500/1500 cap (the spawn-cheat can still break that, though if you save and load after that it'll prune again).
- Golems and Broken Golems can now be paused to temporarily conserve energy.
- Electric Shuttles again have a bonus against teleport raiders.
- Hostile Dyson Gatlings (the ones that spawn while you hold the dyson golem planet) are now much more aggressive about trying to hurt the human, and have a somewhat easier time doing so.
- Sentinel Frigate energy cost from 10000 to 1000 (Scout starships and Light starships are 1000, for reference)
- Sentinel Frigates now have tachyon beams, range 1000 * ship level
-Starships can now be carried in transports like any other ship.
-Snipers and sniper turrets now have a bonus against turrets, cutlasses, vampires, and zenith autobombs.
-Scout Starships now fire counter-sniper flares, making them instantly something that should go with on many raids.
-Players are now able to build twice as many vorticular cutlasses, and three times as many vampire claws/demon hands.
-Vampire claws and demon hands now cost 1/3 the crystal that they previously did.
-Mobile Repair Stations can now be transported inside transports.
-Leech starships are now all immune to tractor beams, like other starships.
-Transports can no longer be repaired directly, but only have their regen on friendly planets.
-Vampires and Cutlasses both now have regen that fully heals them in 90 seconds.
-The metal and crystal costs of cutlasses have both been halved.
-Cleanup Drones now have about twice the health that they previously did.
-The balance of anti-armor ships has been completely reworked. Their costs have been reduced a bit, they now have bonuses against force fields, starships, and heavy defense, their attack power has been doubled, their attack speed has been reduced by about 1/5, and their ship cap has been increased substantially. They are still quite fragile, but they are easier to churn out now, they do more damage before they die, and with their middling range they are less likely to die so fast.
-The balance of MLRS ships has been majorly reworked. Their attack speed has been halved, their health has been increased 6x, their attack power has been increased 4x, and their ship cap has been reduced slightly.
-The assistance boost rate of Mark II engineers is now 2.0 instead of 1.5. The assistance boost rate of Mark III engineers is now 3.0 instead of 2.0
-The energy costs of the higher-level engineers now goes down instead of up, the shield rating of the mark II tier is now doubled, and the metal/crystal costs and time to build the higher-mark engineers is now reduced instead of increased versus the lower-level engineers.
-The metal and crystal costs of Zenith Autobombs have been halved.
-Raid Starships and Leech Starships are now immune to dark matter, to blades, to missiles, and to snipers.
-Sniper and Spider Turrets, and all the Counter-Whatever Turrets, are now immune to dark matter, to blades, and to snipers.
-Armored Warheads now only cost 20 AI Progress instead of 40.
-Orbital Command Stations Mark II now produce 28 metal/crystal instead of 24.
-Orbital Command Stations Mark III now produce 40 metal/crystal instead of 32.
-Zenith Power Generators now only produce 200k energy instead of 300k (for the same metal/crystal cost as before), but also now only cause 10 AI Progression on loss instead of 20.
-Buying a Zenith Power Generator from the Zenith Trader now only requires 1.2 million metal/crystal instead of 1.6.
-Colony ships no longer have an elevated priority for the AI targeting, now take 1/3 as long as before to build, and now move 3x as fast as before. They are also now immune to dark matter attacks.
-Transports are now a low priority target for the AI (which means the AI will never even bother attacking them directly), and are now immune to reclamation.
-Turret Trains no longer cause an AI Progress cost increase when destroyed.
-Mark II science labs now cost 24k metal instead of 20k, and 2.4k crystal instead of 2k, but they also now produce 2/s knowledge instead of 1/s.
-Mark I and II scince labs now move at speed 16 instead of 12/8, and they both are now immune to dark matter (and thus astro trains), and their build times have been halved.
-Advanced Research stations now require supply, but have a move speed of 12 instead of 6. Their rate of knowledge production is also now 6/s instead of 4/s.
-Anti Starship Arachnids now have about 3x as much health, almost doubled attack power, a bit more range, and now have middling bonuses against bombers and tanks in addition to their larger bonuses against starships.
-Frigates now have a 3x bonus against teleport battle stations.
-Bombers now have a 12x instead of a 6x bonus against MLRS.
-MLRS now have an 80% penalty against all starships and turrets.
-Missile Turrets now have a 6x bonus against MLRS ships.
-All mines now have 35,000 health instead of 20,000, which means they also do the same amount more damage.
-The paralysis effect (but not damage) of EMP mines now effects ships in an area of effect radius. The damage of them is still applied to the target that hit them only.
-Metal and Crystal manufactories no longer cost energy to run.
-Golems and Avengers are now immune to EMPs, rather than absorbing them
-fortress multi-repair range increased from 1000 to 5000 (for comparison, MRS's earlier-amended range is 15000).
Misc Changes
-All forcefield creating units are now listed as immune to tractor beams (anything under a forcefield is already immune to tractors, but it doesn't show in the tooltip).
-AI self-building units now temporarily suspend construction if damaged, to make it less likely that overkill-prevention will result in the AI ship not being destroyed. This construction-suspension rule does not currently apply to non-AI ships.
-Changed "AI Progress If Killed" ability text to "AI Progress If Killed Or Scrapped"
-"Engine Shredder" targeting logic used by Riot modules, Spiders, and Spider turrets somewhat improved to further avoid engine-overkill.
-Core Warhead Interceptors are now non-capturable.
-The game now pops open the unhandled errors text file if it crashes, making it so players don't have to hunt that down in the rare cash of a crash.
-Zenith Viral Shredders now display effective build points required to build (this exceeds the "normal" requirement when the number of shredders of that mark on that planet exceeds the ship cap) and a note if they lack sufficient health to replicate. The unit type description has also been updated to reflect the more complex replication rules implemented some time ago.
-Units placed because of auto-build control nodes (engr I,II,III and remains rebuilder nodes) now are more aggressively pushed away from potential collision with the command station or other objects nearby (notably, to prevent displacing a forcefield generator).
-The MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) network parameter is now configurable via the settings screen, right below the UDP port number.
-The game no longer clears out the various error txt files in the game directory when starting up, to help prevent cases where testers were losing the info because they restarted the game before opening the file.
-A newer version of the Lidgren Network Library is now used.
-The default difficulty of the AI is now 6, rather than 1.
-added info from the central throttle to the standard F3 debug info, so players/developers can see what sorts of processing the game is defering to later cycles and roughly how fast it is working through the "pile".
-made Stay-At-MRS node not affect ships of the official force-field-generator line, to avoid untimely loss of home command stations
- on loading the game, any minor faction planet-population of either resistance fighter ship type will be trimmed to 1500 if in excess of that (so 3000 max between the two); does not apply to human-controlled populations of these ships.
- Data Centers are now not autotargetted, but can be attacked by a simple right-click (X+Right-Click is not necessary)
-Added the following cheats: "send in the clowns" - spawns a normal CPA with 1 second left on the timer. "warp in the clowns" - spawns a normal wave with 1 second left on the timer. "pull the lever" - spawns a MASSIVE CPA with 1 second left on the timer (use with caution, particularly on difficulty >= 8 this will probably kill your framerate)
-Positive handicaps now affect negative metal and crystal resource costs for manufactories.
-Simply using Manage Players to give a name to a Disabled player slot in a game now adds a new (but disabled) player to the game that can be controlled by the other human players. The other methods for connecting new players who wish to "drop in" all still work as they previously did, but this allows for a group of players to add "allies" that are completely controlled by the rest of the team.
-Removed ClosesAttackDistanceTo value from fortresses and superfortresses since they were causing very non-optimal closing behavior, particularly against engine-dead bombers.
-Rally posts now have a 900 collision priority (only below immobiles and ShipTypes Force_Field, Command_Station, Command_Station_Core)
-ShipType Heavy_Defense moved down to same collision priority as transports and golems (was up with Command_Station, etc), since the only non-immobile ships in that type are the fortress, superfortress, and astro train, which fit more in the transport tier. Immobile Heavy_Defense ships still have the normal 10000 immobile CollisionPriority.
-devourer golem made non-auto-targeted, like astro trains, to cut back a bit on FRD mass suicide.
-removed quip in tutorial about building using a mobile builder after hopping a planet, since that is no longer possible due to supply rules.
Bugfixes
-Fixed some inaccuracies/omissions in Riot module descriptions.
-Fixed bug where shots with an engine-damage-floor (most riot module shots) were setting the target's engine health to the floor rather than doing normal engine damage capped by the floor.
-Various minor interface bugs fixed.
-Previously non-ff-immune ships emerging into a wormhole completely covered by multiple collidable forcefields would pop out at the same coordinates as they had on their previous planet (which had no meaningful relation to coordinates on the new planet). Fixed to displace those ships to some location outside the set of covering forcefields.
-Previously it was possible for a unit held in a tractor beam to displace a forcefield generator (or other object) regardless of other collision priorities. Forcefield generators now share the same level of non-displaceability as objects held in tractors and immobile objects.
-Previously tractored ships were often "fighting" the tractor by moving the opposite direction if the tractoring ship moved. This was particularly odd for ships towed by friendly tugs. Fixed to move smoothly at the same rate as the tractoring ship.
-Previously the game would sometimes stop auto-incrementing AI progress despite game settings, fixed.
-Fixed some line wrapping issues with riot control starship modules.
-Fixed a bug that could allow missing voice files or a missing sound card to crash the game, rather than just writing to SoundLoadExceptions.txt.
-Previously, if sound was disabled then the visual taunts from the AIs were not even shown. Fixed.
-Fixed an extremely rare crash bug relating to unit construction if cleanup drones or remains rebuilders were assigned to assist an in-progress building (given that they have no powers of assistance it now just does nothing).
- a bug was fixed where the number-of-resistance-to-spawn was being computed pretty much exactly the wrong way, such that in many cases you would never see them spawn.
- fixed a bug where CPAs were basically not happening on difficulty 8+
-Fixed a performance-affecting bug that would cause performance to drop over time as ships moved between planets a lot.
-Fixed the description of the Deflector Drones, which was out of date.
-Fixed a bug incorrectly restricting the set of ships available for freeing by a CPA (which could make a CPA "disappear" if not enough lower-tech ships were available in a low-difficulty or low-ai-progress game).
-Fixed a minor bug that basically excluded force-field bearers and ai ships protected by them from being freed by a CPA. (units under normal forcefields will and should still be considered ineligible for CPA)
-Fixed bug that was letting the AI mapgen with forcefields even with Heavy Defense off (they can still do this on spokes maps, for the hub planets; this is intentional)
-Fixed bug where ships in cold storage were frequently not being displayed in the planetary summary.
-Fixed bug when show-unexplored-planets is off where ships won't use a valid explored path across the galaxy map if an unexplored path was shorter.
-Fixed bug where multiple overlapping forcefields were sometimes letting enemies move through them.
-Corrected cluster-attack-penalty math (again) so that Sentinels and whatnot should have the right effective multipliers.
-The transport numbers now only appear above allied ships, not enemies.
-Schizophrenic waves were not working in conjunction with cross-planet waves. Fixed.
-Fixed a bug where ships killed by self-exploding units (like the Zenith Autobomb and lightning missile) were not triggering several normal on-death checks like negative-AI-progression (Data centers, Co-processors) and spawning ships (Zenith Reserve).
-Fixed a bug where ships would keep "chasing" targets that were already gone or overkilled. This fix may introduce other behavior problems, so please let us know.
-At some point in the recent past, scrapping stopped giving resources because it was restrained to only AI ships rather than only non-AI ships. Fixed.
-Previously PlanetaryShieldBooster, PlanetaryShieldInhibitor, BlackHoleMachine, RadarJammer, and RadarJammerIIs would continue having their system-wide effects in low-power mode. Since the effect is based off their presence in the system and actually checking them for low-power mode every cycle would add a non-trivial load to the simulation, they can no longer be put in low-power mode. They can still be paused during construction, though (and they should not be having their system-wide effects while under construction).
-fixed rounding error in cpa size calculation
-fixed bug preventing ctrl-right-click on wormhole from issuing a wormhole order to the selected ships regardless of the presence of other valid right-clickable targets (i.e. enemy ships) under the cursor
-fixed bug where marauder spawn conditions were using the wrong rollup for computing the presence of non-AI ships.
-Fixed another exceedingly rare music-related crash bug.
-Changed icon-combination recalculation to be always clear both directions of the association, despite the performance cost of this, to prevent rare cases where the same icon group was being released into the pool twice, leading to a variety of strange things including flicker.
-Previously ships paralyzed while fading in from a wormhole were basically stuck and invlunerable until the paralyze wore off; fixed to continue the fade-in process even when paralyzed.
-previously the "engineers prefer non-military" control node was not catching some cases where a very nearby military ship would be preferred.
-fixed bug in tutorial where it wasn't checking the right unit list to determine if a specific planet's ion cannon had died.
-other minor fixes to tutorial accuracy.
-Fixed a longstanding bug in the networking that made clients sometimes unable to connect on the first or second tries to a host. This was something of a "race condition" bug, and so recent betas may have been seeing this bug more frequently for some players due to overall game loading performance being improved.
-previously if you had auto-unit-building control nodes and there was a resource harvest point at just the right point to the right of your command station, it could prevent those auto-construction orders from being started; fixed to properly shift the auto-spawn point to avoid that collision.
Special Thanks
-Thanks to HitmanN for pointing out that forcefield generating ships did not note in their tooltips that they are immune to tractors, for suggesting the Heavy Turret and providing graphics for it.
-Thanks to HellishFiend for suggesting the reclaimed-ships-rally-to-MRS behavior and promoting the overkilling-ok-if-no-other-ships-in-range behavior change.
-Thanks to I-KP for pointing out that the SuperFortress was only taking 100 energy.
-Thanks to corfe83 for suggesting that shots wasted on overkill automatically reload the firing ship.
-Thanks to Drutt-Myth for reporting a crash bug in 3.080.
-Thanks to Draxis for reporting and providing a save of ships popping out at odd places when their exit wormhole was covered by forcefields, for reporting and providing a save of zenith viral shredders taking excessive time to auto-target and also not replicating when the tooltip said they would, for suggesting that Ion Cannons spread out engine-damage fire, for reporting a crash bug in 3.085, for reporting that zenith mirror shot reflection had stopped working.
-Thanks to waveman55 for reporting the divide-by-zero bug with focus-fire nodes, for suggesting that transports have a finite unload rate (but maintain the blow-the-walls-off emergency unload option via scrapping), for bringing to our attention that hostile dyson gatlings are far too harmless, for reporting and providing a save and detailed steps-to-reproduce on the excessive-closing behavior, for reporting that transports were displacing rally posts.
-Thanks to caesarbear for pointing out that astro trains were killing capturable constructors near wormholes with a ridiculously small number of shots.
-Thanks to xeren for reporting the desyncs in 3.081, for reporting that AI waves were getting seriously (and erroneously) distracted by captured core warhead interceptors.
-Thanks to triggerman602 for reporting a divide by zero bug in 3.082, for reporting some serious galaxy map pathfinding issues, for reporting that the single-planet maintian-engineer-count control nodes had an incorrect ship cap.
-Thanks to vonduus for reporting and hunting down the cause of mysterious forcefield generator displcements, for reporting and providing a save of a slowdown issue that we were thus able to fix.
-Thanks to Ozymandiaz for pointing out some odd tech costs.
-Thanks to RogueThunder for pointing out that Decloakers cannot be powered down and are thus given an inordinately difficult time against cloak-heavy AIs with Zenith Mirrors, for pointing out that Planetary Shield Boosters were continuing to provide their bonus in low-power mode.
-Thanks to RodSerling for suggestions on AI modifiers to make waves harder to prepare for, for reporting that that aggregate targeting was not behaving properly when a "leader" was put into low-power mode and thus stopped updating its target lists..
-Thanks to Doddler for suggesting that the now-non-capturable core warhead interceptor's health be dropped, for suggesting that exploration in an unexplored game be less exploitable (engies, etc), for reporting the exploit with manufactories with handicaps turned on, for suggesting that AI ships try to destroy black hole machines if trapped by them, for reporting that AI melee ships in waves were sitting around when they could be slicing things up, for reporting that resistance fighters and marauders were still not spawning properly, for reporting that clickable alerts were sometimes still clickable after expiring, for pointing out that heavy beam cannons should list multiple beams as simultaneous shots.
-Thanks to Moonshine Fox for reporting and providing a video of tugged ships behaving strangely.
-Thanks to Thiima for reporting that the game would sometimes stop auto-incrementing AI progress despite game settings.
-Thanks to kjara for pointing out that AntiArmor MkIII health was low compared to other anti armor ships.
-Thanks to Delwack for suggesting clickable alerts.
-Thanks to BobJustBob for suggesting an option to hide the galaxy structure.
-Thanks to Nightcill for reporting an error in the transport tooltip.
-Thanks to Kalzarius for reporting some line wrapping issues with riot control starship modules, for reporting that scrapping was no longer giving resources, for reporting that the planetary summary was not updating while paused, for reporting that constructors sending ships to other planets were failing to send them beyond the first womrhole after saving and loading (in a specific set of prereleases), for reporting that the engineers-prefer-non-military node wasn't working in some cases, for reporting that ctrl-right-click on wormholes was not working if there were overlapping enemy ships, for reporting that the planetary summary was not handling some control groups properly..
-Thanks to dumpsterKEEPER for reporting the extraneous line on the galaxy map in 3.086
-Thanks to DarkEdge for reporting the crash bug with the construction of units being assisted by a cleanup drone.
-Thanks to TheWordWillSetYouFree for his comments about golem costs.
-Thanks to SNAFU for suggesting that force field generators not move due to the Stay-at-MRS control node.
-Thanks to wyvern83 for suggestions on improving the desirability of sentinel frigates, for noting that sentinel frigate cluster attack penalty was being applied wrong.
-Thanks to XRsyst for suggesting that Data Centers and Zenith Reserve be not-autotargeted.
-Thanks to ShadowOTE for reporting and providing a save to find and fix a very nasty CPA-not-happening problem.
-Thanks to AlexV for suggesting several performance improvements for loading savegames and the game itself.
-Thanks to allmybase for reporting a bug with the AI getting forcefields even with heavy defenses off.
-Thanks to RCIX for reporting one of many planetary summary bugs, for suggesting a control node to prevent ships from using allied rally posts.
-Thanks to jonasan for reporting starship modules being left behind when the starship boarded a transport, for reporting the ships being lost out of transports on savegame load.
-Thanks to Nihilus (and others) for reporting that forcefields were acting porous sometimes.
-Thanks to FrostyThePyro for suggesting that leech starships not be capturable via tractor beams.
-Thanks to LintMan for reporting that Heavy Beam Cannon MkIIIs were acting like non-weapons, for suggesting the Manage Players update to allow for secondary human-controlled players.
-Thanks to Burnstreet for reporting the expoit with transports being repairable.
-Thanks to RogueThunder for reporting that a data center killed by autobombs did not apply its negative AI progress.
-Thanks to LintMan, FrostyThePyro, and jonasan
-Thanks to superking for suggesting that the player be alerted of AI Progress Alerts.
-Thanks to Lancefighter for suggeting single-planet versions of the auto-build-engineer control nodes (and for not holding the whole can't-reclaim-dyson-gatlings-anymore thing against us).
-Thanks to Sigma7 for pointing out that FRD/autotargeting behavior towards astro trains is very similar to what people want towards the devourer, making that fix easy.
-Thanks to Aegis for reporting that paralyzed enemy ships were sometimes being completely ignored by the autotargeting behavior.
-Thanks to Fleet for pointing out that after the MRS range increase the Fortress's multi-repair range was pretty pathetic.
-Thanks to Buttons840 for reporting that the auto-build-engineer control nodes were not working in a particular case.
