AI War Beta 3.905 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/10/ai-war-beta-3905-released.html

More bugfixes and balance tweaks, and a number of visual polish things.  And some performance improvement things, as well as another go at fixing that OSX threading crash.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 3.701 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 3.701 or later, you can download the windows installer for 3.711, or the OSX installer for 3.712. Once you do an in-game update, they'll both be on the latest version, despite starting at slightly different versions.

[Buttons840]

Typo on the wiki.  3.906 shows at the current release, while 3.905 is the prerelease.

[Winter Born]

Dec '10: AIW: Light of the Spire

 

[Collic]

I know the wave size issue has been closed on the tracker now, but it still needs some work imo. Single digit waves are back again for me. At AI progress of just over a hundred it bumped up to the 55 range, which seems much better. However, for one of the AIs I was still getting those very small waves. Have attached a couple of screens. I realise this is very hard to balance now given you're dealing with ship caps as well as difficulty along with AI progress.

Stupidly I have random AI types enabled, but my hunch is some of the reduced wave size turtle AI types are exasperating the issue. On a far more positive note, the music skipping for me is much improved, to be point of being almost completely eliminated. Great work

edit: Oh, I should add this is two difficulty 7 AIs moderate and easier. Cheers !

[x4000]

Glad the music skipping is so much better.

On the waves: what ship types are they?  In my game, I'm seeing fairly sensibly-sized waves, overall, at the moment.

[Collic]

Snipers seem to be coming in a consistently small size. What I have noticed is I'm getting a lot of cloaked ship types in waves - could that be the reason why?. I'm sure its one of the AI types thats causing the extreme micro waves. Those screen-shots are of both AIs in the same game at the same progress.

I think I need to start a new game and start manually enabling different AI types to see what difference it makes

edit:On that note - are the cheats enabled ? Would manually bumping AI progress to look at the wave sizes work as a way of looking at this ?

another edit: about the music - the progress on this awesome. Its the issue I wanted to see fixed above all others

[x4000]

Cheats work if you turn them on per-game.

Snipers should be in tiny little waves, though perhaps not quite that small.

And, we're really pleased about the music stuff, too.

[Collic]

Excellent, I'll have a look and experiment with the different AI types before I comment on the sizes again, at least then I'll be able to give you some better feedback if I do.

[x4000]

Thanks!  That also could be a factor, yeah: half the sniper cap (on a defensive AI) with low AIP could theoretically be that low.

[Salamander]

Decoy Drones have the description: "Tough, armored vessel with no significant guns. Attracts all fire from enemy ships to itself in place of ships within it's protection area.", but they have an armor of 0 and are ultra-light hulls, which doesn't match mesh up with the description of being tough and armored, but they do have 200k health which is probably fine for that statistic.

As a another possible issue, I just did an attack on an AI system with all 9 I could build via a Fabricator, and while my losses in the attack were small as it was, I lost none of these guys at all. I'll have to try them out more to see if it was just odd luck or if they are not working properly though.

[Lancefighter]

Last i checked in slimdx they had a health of 1m, and actually attracted fire from /everything/, even if it meant shots were fired over their max range.

[Salamander]

Last i checked in slimdx they had a health of 1m, and actually attracted fire from /everything/, even if it meant shots were fired over their max range.

The attraction thing may just have been what the AI was shooting me with, lots of long range specialty ships this game, but the 200K health and no armor I'm seeing right now in my paused game.

Here's a screenshot:



I filed a bug for the health/armor but not the decoy issue yet as I need to watch the battles more closely to say if there is a problem or not.

[Lancefighter]

yeah thats definitely a tad weak for decoying. mk1 FF bearers are better...

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7385.0.html