Prerelease 1.006D now available.

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(Version 1.006C was not released publicly.)

Here's the latest prerelease:  http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1006D.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 1.005, so you have to already have 1.005 installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.

What's new since 1.006C:
(Cumulative release notes since 1.005 are attached at the bottom)

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-In the last prerelease version, there was a crash bug if you tried to click items in the selected items button menu in the planetary view.  Fixed.

-There was previously a crash bug if players tried to Ctrl-click an exo-galaxy wormhole.  Fixed.

-In the last version, if you sent ships between planets while in the Free-Roaming Defender mode or Attack-Move mode, they would arrive at the other end and have a mangled wormhole path.  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.

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bump

[Quitch]

AI engineers repairing a data centre don't appear to show a repair animation.

The Disp list uses the phrase ship when it means unit.

Using Find stops you left-clicking into star systems, you have to tab out and in again.

Autosave should not display a progress dialog

Find should allow you to find all types of ship X, not just Mk. Ideally there'd be a level one higher to differentiate between ships and structure.

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AI engineers repairing a data centre don't appear to show a repair animation.

I'll check it out, that's interesting.

The Disp list uses the phrase ship when it means unit.

That's intentional.  Everything in the game is referred to as a ship or a unit, since they are all space vessels.

Using Find stops you left-clicking into star systems, you have to tab out and in again.

This is by design.  If you read the notes about find, left clicking star systems is for selecting ships or deselecting ships across planets, and then right-clicking gives them an order.  If you right-click in the middle of nowhere, it will also take you out of the find mode.

Autosave should not display a progress dialog

Yeah, I was on the fence about this, but left it in to see what people think.  When you are in a game with 60,000+ ships the autosave can take around 2 seconds or so, and it's annoying when you think the game might just be freezing or something.  Until this release it was taking more like 5 seconds, so it's much less of an issue now, but still.  Knowing that, what is your opinion on it?  I'm still on the fence, I could see how it might be too annoying to be helpful.

Find should allow you to find all types of ship X, not just Mk. Ideally there'd be a level one higher to differentiate between ships and structure.

Everything is considered a ship, there's no "structures" in the game per se.  This hails from the fact that, originally, everything was mobile (even turrets, command stations, etc, although these moved incredibly slowly and could not leave the current planet).  For various reasons it was decided to change the base-type ships to be immobile, but the convention of calling them all ships or units has remained.

Adding a second find mode that lets you find all ships by type would also be interesting, I think.  For some things, like Energy reactors, that would just be "Resource" and would also include all of the science labs, harvesters, etc, which would make this only useful for military ships.  I'll look into this in upcoming releases.

Thanks!

[Quitch]

For the purposes of find it would be helpful to differentiate mobile units with weapons from everything else. I might want to bring all my fleet in for the final blow, but right now I'd need to select every unit of every type. Hardly a biggie though.

Selecting all units of a type is much more useful though, I was being raided by some bombers and was looking for the closest cruisers. but this took several clicks as I went through each mark.

For autosave I see why you'd want the dialog, but might I suggest something a little more out of the way. A simple message up by the minimap "Autosaving..." would do.

Messages in the top left should be spaced out better from the resource counters, I'd also appreciate some audio warning when I get a message. Raids appear up there without (I think) a sound and the top left is not somewhere my eyes are often visiting.

Oh, and the AI doesn't react to you attacking its engineers, it lets them sit there and die.

One last "only for me" suggestion, ALT-Click priority number flashes all matching priorities on the galaxy map. This is for making it easier to find a target, in my case I was eye hunting for data centres trying to making out the little P8s.

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For the purposes of find it would be helpful to differentiate mobile units with weapons from everything else. I might want to bring all my fleet in for the final blow, but right now I'd need to select every unit of every type. Hardly a biggie though.

Hmm, find is really meant for cherry-picking specific smaller groups of units moreso than for doing large-scale fleet movement.  The best route with that would be to go planet-to-planet and just hitting Ctrl+, or something.  I don't know, it seems like trying to blend the cherry-picking Find function and the sort of automation it sounds like you are looking for would be a mistake, just because it would complicate use of the Find function even more (and it is already reasonably complex -- you had missed the movement ability, for instance).

What I would be interested in doing is potentially trying to build out some sort of "bulk fleet movement" functionality or something.  I don't know, I'm just reaching here, I'm still thinking of this very broadly since I don't have a full concept of what all you are looking for.

Selecting all units of a type is much more useful though, I was being raided by some bombers and was looking for the closest cruisers. but this took several clicks as I went through each mark.

So, this plays right into what I was thinking of, and what you were looking for there.  If I added "M Mil" or some other abbrebiation like that as a new button under the Find button (so, I'm thinking two separate Find buttons, but I guess it could be just a big category at the top of the list of things to Find under the existing Find), then it would have the ship types that are "mobile military" as I call it.  So then you could just select cruiser, use the functionality of the find as it otherwise already is, and then route them over there immediately. 

Thoughts?  As I'm thinking about this more, just having a top-level option in the existing Find menu that says "MOBILE MILITARY" and then has the categories is probably the way to go...

For autosave I see why you'd want the dialog, but might I suggest something a little more out of the way. A simple message up by the minimap "Autosaving..." would do.

Could be; I'll have to rework the autosaving a bit to make that work (since that's then a DirectX refresh issue instead of the simpler GDI+ refresh), but I think that's a fine idea.

Messages in the top left should be spaced out better from the resource counters, I'd also appreciate some audio warning when I get a message. Raids appear up there without (I think) a sound and the top left is not somewhere my eyes are often visiting.

Oh, I love the idea of adding a sound effect to warn of new raids incoming.  Not sure what you mean by "spaced out better," though.  They are below the level of the resources, so there should not be any overlap.  And I'm keeping them as "in the corner" as possible, given how many sometimes get up there (you can generally get 2x the number of players, so in an 4 player game you commonly have a list of 8 things there.  In eight player games you can get 16x messages there, which really limits the amount of room on 768px-tall monitors.  But if there's some sort of bad overlap or something that I'm just not seeing, or some other issue, please do let me know.

Oh, and the AI doesn't react to you attacking its engineers, it lets them sit there and die.

Wow, I don't know how many times I've seen this happen, but it never crossed my mind to do anything about it (duh).   Yeah, that should be an easy fix in a soon release, I don't know what I was thinking.

[Quitch]

For the find menu what I would most hope to see would be for each category an ALL button in addition to the various Mks, so Cruiser 1, 2, 3, ALL. Military as a whole, while useful, is less so since usually the unit count view will give you a good idea of which planets are housing ships.

As regards the top left I was thinking the messages were tucked in too close to the resources, but I've only played solo thus far so I don't know how many I might expect to see later.

As regards engineers the AI leaves them by themselves, they should check for command posts and force fields to lurk near when not doing anything. Often they're on top of wormholes and I convert them with parasites as I jump through.

I also seem to have a problem with ships forgetting orders, see this save. I jumped control group 1 from Has to Mikfoki, their orders being move from Has to Kidudo. Checking on this group I found several were sitting a little way from the wormhole in Mikfoki doing nothing. I thought this odd but assumed I'd misclicked and gave them the order again. Yet watching them in Osroaid I saw several come out the wormhole and then stop. A CTRL check showed they had no orders, yet pressing 1 confirmed they were in the group, not fresh parasite conversions.

EDIT: This seems to be happening to a number of my long range moves, I'm finding trails of ships just stopping dead in their tracks.

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For the find menu what I would most hope to see would be for each category an ALL button in addition to the various Mks, so Cruiser 1, 2, 3, ALL. Military as a whole, while useful, is less so since usually the unit count view will give you a good idea of which planets are housing ships.

Gotcha -- I meant for them to have a category of MOBILE MILITARY at the very top, and then under that to have Cruiser, Bomber, Fighter, whatever, and you'd select all marks of the specific type by clicking these.  Same thing, basically, just grouping all the mobile military stuff since you had thought that would be good (and I concur).

As regards the top left I was thinking the messages were tucked in too close to the resources, but I've only played solo thus far so I don't know how many I might expect to see later.

Gotcha.  I could probably move it down a couple of pixels, but they right now are a standard amount of height down for multiple rows of text, so I'm not really certain that is needed.  Thoughts?

As regards engineers the AI leaves them by themselves, they should check for command posts and force fields to lurk near when not doing anything. Often they're on top of wormholes and I convert them with parasites as I jump through.

Yep, when they are idle, right now they just stay wherever they are.  I was also thinking of making them run to those sorts of locations when they have nothing better to do.

I also seem to have a problem with ships forgetting orders, see this save. I jumped control group 1 from Has to Mikfoki, their orders being move from Has to Kidudo. Checking on this group I found several were sitting a little way from the wormhole in Mikfoki doing nothing. I thought this odd but assumed I'd misclicked and gave them the order again. Yet watching them in Osroaid I saw several come out the wormhole and then stop. A CTRL check showed they had no orders, yet pressing 1 confirmed they were in the group, not fresh parasite conversions.

Hmm, any chance that these ships used to be in Free-Roaming Defender mode before you issued the wormhole command?  In the last few prereleases I discovered a similar issue to the one you are describing, and it was related to that.  Otherwise, maybe these guys were on the next planet already or something -- when you select control group 1, it only selects on one planet at a time, perhaps these guys were on a separate planet from the main bulk of your fleet when the original command was given?

I'll post a small new version shortly, which will have the Free-Roaming Defender mode fix.  So if that was the cause, then this will fix it.  If you continue to see this issue in the new release, please do let me know!

[Quitch]

All these ships would likely have been attack moving prior to being given the wormhole move order. There is also the possibility that other ships in group 1 existed in other planets owing to engine damage.

Ship selection sounds good

Height of text should be fine as is.

I've just noticed that ships won't attack Ion Cannons when on an attack move, despite their destruction not upping the AI score.

I'm getting close to victory now, I can smell it Does the AI reveal its type at the end yet? I want to see what I was playing against

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And now that new version is out:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,97.0.html

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All these ships would likely have been attack moving prior to being given the wormhole move order. There is also the possibility that other ships in group 1 existed in other planets owing to engine damage.

Got it.  If they were Attack-Moving, that might also have been the issue.

I've just noticed that ships won't attack Ion Cannons when on an attack move, despite their destruction not upping the AI score.

This is because you can capture Ion Cannons, and then use them for yourself, if you take the planet.  Can be pretty wicked against incoming waves if the AI tech level is still low enough.

I'm getting close to victory now, I can smell it Does the AI reveal its type at the end yet? I want to see what I was playing against

Awesome!  It doesn't reveal the types just yet.  But let me check your specific save file (Eh) that you were playing...

Looks like AI 1 is a Backdoor Hacker, and AI 2 is a Fortress Baron.

[Quitch]

Thanks for that. Judging from the changes in E I think I'll finish up this game first before upgrading.

[Quitch]

I haven't moved to E yet owing to the warning, but in my current game I'm wondering if AI progress is broken or I'm missing something about how it works.

I destroyed a command station and a warp gate but my AI progress stayed at 5. Later I destroyed an AI home and AI progress stayed at 5. Now I've just destroyed another one or two in another sector prior to assaulting the final AI home and AI progress is still at 5.

EDIT: I'm guessing that maybe the data centres belonged to the AI whose home I destroyed and therefore no longer have an effect on AI progress?

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Hmm, that's strange -- I have not seen that.  I'll see if I can duplicate it, but could you send me the file you are playing with?  When I load the Eh savegame that you sent first, I see that it has an AI Progress of 8.  I'll take a look through this logic and make sure that everything is okay (as part of the stuff related to 1.006E, anyway), but if you have any more info on this, that would be much appreciated.

[Quitch]

It later increased to seven but I don't recall destroying anything, it just seemed to quietly happen at some point.

Unfortunately I haven't kept the save but having now won in 12hrs 17min (after making really hard work of taking on the second AI homeworld) I'm planning my second game at difficulty 7 using fast and dangerous (makes taking down shields less of a chore)