Prerelease 3.189 (Balance Changes And Bugfixes)

[Jesterman]

Oh it will definitely hold true with the Unity switch.  One of the main saves I use for testing is from sometime in 2009.

so heres a question about the port. At this point, is it going to be a straight conversion or are there going to be new balances built into unity ai war 1.0?

[keith.lamothe]

Well, it won't be 1.0   This is intended to be a straight port, so that we can make sure the game is stable, etc, before getting back to changing stuff.  There will be tons of changes between that initial prerelease and the official 4.0 release, though.

That said, there are some not-straight-port changes already in, which are listed here:

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_4.0_Beta

[Lancefighter]

Added "Blitz" combat style which is like Fast and Dangerous but the ship speed is doubled again. Also, "Normal" has been renamed to Epic/4X-like and "Fast and Dangerous" has been renamed to "Normal".

interesting - what prompted the additional combat style? (also, I'm not sure i could take ships moving twice as fast again.. some neinzul ships are already fast enough >.> )

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, some of the Neinzul ones might have to be artificially capped in that mode, actually; at some point they might start skipping straight through small forcefields, etc due to coarsenss of checking.

Anyway, there's been tons and tons of feedback on the game being too slow and people not even knowing about F&D, so we wanted to still offer the same modes as before but start people on F&D first and let them tune it down if they want.  Blitz is just for the crazy people

[Lancefighter]

yeah I support the change from 'normal' to '4xslowmo' and 'f&d' to 'normal' totally 
and as it stands, some ships can virtually bypass gravity turret effects due to the coarseness... i could certainly see skipping through forcefields

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, we'll see how all that goes

[Vinraith]

Does that mean that the speed formerly known as fast & dangerous is going to be the default speed from now on? Just curious, I'll turn it to "Epic" anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, it will be the default; but if you've already played then your settings.dat already has a LastCombatStyle (or something like that) and that wouldn't be affected (so if you play on normal now it would use Epic).  In theory we could have it convert to the new default but that sounds like it would be frustrating for existing players who already know what speed they like

[Jesterman]

Well, it won't be 1.0   This is intended to be a straight port, so that we can make sure the game is stable, etc, before getting back to changing stuff.  There will be tons of changes between that initial prerelease and the official 4.0 release, though.

That said, there are some not-straight-port changes already in, which are listed here:

http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_4.0_Beta

Ah thanks. And to clarify, i knew it would be working off of 4.0 but what i had meant to ask (though you answered it for me) was if between current ai and the first beta of unity ai, if there would be changes.  (just clarifying cause didn't want make myself look like a doof)

Thanks for the answer though!

[keith.lamothe]

Right, the idea is that 3.189 and this coming prerelease will not be significantly different in terms of the actual simulation.  The interface will be somewhat different since we had to totally re-implement it and have different tools to work with now.

[Ozymandiaz]

Fast and dagerous becomes normal? I did not see that comming (mental note: start all my games on epic )

[x4000]

I'm going to go ahead an un-sticky this topic, despite the fact that this release is still "live" in many senses.  We're not planning on updating the SlimDX version again, unless something drastic happens.