Monday, March 31, 2014

AI War Beta 7.017 "Ominous Rumblings" Released!

This one isn't as packed as some of ther other recent releases. During normal working hours I'm focused on The Last Federation, and even moreso right now as we're in the last few weeks before releasing that.

But there's some important player-facing changes and fixes in 7.017. Hacking an Advanced constructor no longer also charges you for a fab-hack, and the cost of sabotage-hacking is back down to 5 from 10 (was 2 until recently). Also, in light of Reprisal making fleetwipes more dangerous, the AIP cost of killing a Black Hole Machine has dropped from 10 to 5. Speaking of salvage, minor faction stuff dying on player planets now contributes to the player's salvage (the AI still doesn't salvage from minor faction deaths, as then they could lead to aggressive AI units with no player involvement).

One of the changes that snuck into 7.016 (because it was already done before the need for that hotfix became apparent) was to make the Starship component of waves scale much better with wave sizes. In this version other special parts of waves (like the Mad Bomber's extra bomber starships, Heroic's in-wave champions, etc) are using similar scaling logic. I expect that the Spire Hammer, in particular, just got a lot nastier once the AIP cranks up. Especially on higher difficulties you might find yourself on the uncomfortable end of a Spire capital fleet. What could go wrong?

Most of the actual work went into a very substantial code refactoring (primarily of AI Reinforcements) that didn't mean many player-facing changes... this time ;)

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.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

AI War Beta 7.015-7.016 "Cleanup, Aisle 3" Released!

This one is mostly a maintenance release, but there's some important iteration on Salvage and other features.

The salvage-reprisal waves were working pretty well but feedback showed they ultimately needed to be separated from normal waves into their own thing. Now they probably won't happen nearly as often (unless your fleet is an accident-waiting-to-happen permanently on the offensive... though I guess that's actually pretty accurate in some cases) and won't displace the normal wave mechanic. They'll also be much less of a threat in the early minutes of the game, to avoid the need for building serious defenses before you even start to attack.

The Neinzul Enclave Starship is hilariously powerful. In fact, hilariously over-powerful. And the hilarity is great particularly given the unit's past where relatively few players really wanted to use them. So we're not nerf-hammering it into the ground (indeed, the first two marks are getting a bit better), but ultimately it's not good for a single line of units to allow you to take heavily-defended systems without significant casualties. Further balance feedback (up or down) is quite welcome.

Hacking costs have seen another pass, with the ARS-redirection and design-corruption actions getting cheaper and the fab-hacking and sabotage actions getting more expensive.

And there's some important bugfixes, including one for the issue where the first two Showdown CPAs would imitate the third (and launch everything).

Update: 7.016 hotfix for a goof I made that had all mark-levels of enclave only getting mark-1 drones. Also some other changes from last night, but no time for a full blog post for just a few things, focused on TLF during the day.

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.

Monday, March 24, 2014

AI War Beta 7.013-7.014 "Revised Salvage" Released!

This one's visible changes mainly focus on improving the salvage mechanic introduced in 7.011 based on feedback during the week.

That largely takes the form of excluding various ship-death situations from generating salvage: zombie-mode ships dying no longer give the AI salvage, and reclaimed ships no longer give anyone salvage. More importantly, the AI no longer gets salvage from neutral planets unless it still has a guard post (that isn't a wormhole guard post or a special forces guard post) on the planet. Previously if the AI destroyed one of your command stations it would proceed to rack up the salvage killing the rest of the stuff on the planet. A good deal for it, and not bad as a kind of Shark plot, but definitely not suited for a core mechanic. Anyway, that bit's under control now.

Under the hood, there's been a metric ton of code changes to wrangle the on-ship-death logic into a more manageable form. Previously there were over 90 distinct ways for a ship to die, many with slight variations on exactly what order the on-death logic was checked. That's a natural consequence of 5 years of development (with little time for doing things quite as "cleanly" as we would prefer) and just needed to be brought back under control so that new rules like "reclaimed units don't cause salvage" can be added in one place rather than... well, over 90.

There was also a fairly thorough rewriting of the wave-building code to allow for future... experiments ;)

Many of you will be happy about the ability to right-click a planet in the lobby to change its bonus-ship-type. That's a perennially-beaten dead horse around here, but the time's come for the computer to stop fighting the player in the pre-game lobby. Or else just make the starting bonus ship types always uncontrollably random (and not revealed before the game) to remove the "workaround-by-tedium" situation. But since I couldn't find a sufficiently safe distance from which to observe the results of the latter...

There's a few other changes in there too, and I hope the one aimed at the "too many heap sections" error will at least make that one less frequent). We'll see.

Update: 7.014 hotfix for some unhandled errors in an edge-case of ship death where salvage was assuming the ship had a CurrentPlanet when it didn't.

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.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

AI War Beta 7.011-7.012 "Salvaged Resources" Released!

This one carries a number of rather significant econ-related changes that have been brewing for a while:

Now that hacking has been around long enough and seems to be welcome, we've moved ahead with the combination of metal and crystal (into just metal) so that hacking can move up into the main resource bar. Crystal as a separate mechanic had some impact on the game, but ultimately we could do better.

The other main thrust was to nibble at both ends of the refleeting problem. To a large extent there's no problem if a major player fleet wipe takes a long time to recover from. Actions should have consequences. But if it _only_ takes time (specifically, the player's real wall-clock time), then that crosses the line from "reduced player ability" to "reduced player interest", which is not cool. So now the AI can "take the ball and throw it back" proportional to your offensive casualties. That nibbles at one side (making post-fleet-wipe more interesting, possibly terminally so). On the other side, when the AI takes casualties in your territory you get bonus metal-per-second while your command stations gather up the salvage. That nibbles at the other side (speeding up the refleet, if you survive).

Along with that, the resource cap (aside from updating for the m+c combination) now increases a bit with each command station and thus keeps up better as the scale of the conflict increases throughout the game.

Finally, there are a few bugfixes including a rather important one to the core timing of the simulation. Previously (as many of you noticed) the sim actually ran faster when you moved the mouse around like a crazy person. No longer :) But now the + and - speed settings have a more pronounced impact and the +10 speed (renamed to "+!!!") has been repurposed as a genuine "go as fast as you can" (while still drawing a few frames per second) setting. In the early game (before the sim load gets serious) that can let you pass a tremendous amount of sim-time very quickly if you want to.

Update: 7.012 hotfix for some unhandled errors on the Economy tab of the Stats window. Apparently it was still in denial about crystal.

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.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

AI War Beta 7.010 "Oops!" Released!

This one is a small bugfixing update to deal with some critical issues that came to my attention just this morning. Between working on The Last Federation (and, before that, Bionic Dues) and a third daughter coming along in September there hasn't been room in my schedule for AI War coding.

That said, I fully intended to fix any major problems that came up (the latest versions being beta releases after all), and I figured such stuff would bubble up to me without my needing to personally take time from new project coding to check mantis on a different project and such.

I was wrong (and should have verified my assumptions earlier), and there's been a few unhandled-errors/save-corruption reports sitting out there since at least late September. Very sorry about that, I will be more vigilant in the future.

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.