AI War Beta 4.031 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/11/ai-war-beta-4031-released.html

Today's release has yet more Fallen Spire minor faction stuff, basically adding a third "episode" to the story progression of that minor faction.  We won't say anything more about that, for risk of spoilers, but it's cool as always with the Fallen Spire work. :)

Also notable in this release is a new Ship Design screen on the Controls screen, for better modular ship designing, as well as smaller savegame files (and possibly a fix to that pthread_getschedparam OSX issue we've been chasing).

Beyond that, there are a few bugfixes and balance tweaks (Raid Starships should be useful again, Avengers are tougher, etc).  Other parts behind the scenes have still been inwork and aren't quite ready for release yet, but more is coming!  The first of the Spirecraft, including their unique (and as-yet unrevealed) new method of being built, are both coming soon.

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.

[DakaSha]

hmm is the FF bug still there? didn't see it mentioned in the release notes

[TechSY730]

Well the forcefield bug seems to be a complex issue. I'm guessing that the damage is computed at the time of the bullet being shot, not at the time of it hitting. Is this right? If so, depending on how the internal API is set up, would that mean alot of re-factoring to change?

Anyways, keep up the good work. 

[DakaSha]

I don't doubt there would be a reason. I just want to know before I start a game ^^

edit: yeah still there.

[keith.lamothe]

I looked at the orbital-mass-driver save of the ff-bug, and what I found has been there for _ages_, probably since the IRE was implemented.  So it doesn't have to be fixed today.

The other bug, where reportedly a single missile-immune unit under a ff makes the ff missile immune, sounded new, but I didn't see a save posted for that one and my brief attempt to reproduce the situation failed.

[x4000]

hmm is the FF bug still there? didn't see it mentioned in the release notes

That's not particularly a high priority for us, as that bug has been in place since 2.0 or prior and people have just now noticed it.  We're only fixing stuff that is easy or very high priority at the moment, while we're... oh, I'll just refer you here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7533.0.html

[DakaSha]

wow I didn't know that bug has existed so long. But does it only happen with "buildings" ? Or does it also happen with ships? Is it just the one volly of fire? or does the ship become "cursed"?

[x4000]

Shot damage is (and always has been, actually, even back to pre-1.0 days) calculated when the shot is fired.  I'm not even sure that I want to change that, actually.  As far as some of the subtleties of this specific bug go... when it changes targets from a forcefield to a ship or vice/versa, it probably should be the one case where it should recalculate the damage since the target technically changed.

There's no difference in any kind of ships, there's no such thing as "structures" in terms of the combat model -- all ships are just ships.

And yes, it's just whatever shots are incoming when the target is changed, which is why nobody's noticed it before now.  The only time this would ever be a problem is when a lot of somethings do huge damage to the forcefield, but not the thing under it, and their damage multiplier then switches from one to the other.  In any other circumstances, it wouldn't even be a big enough difference to be noticeable, I don't think, which makes this moderately obscure except against certain ship types.

[DakaSha]

ok well thats semi-good to hear then (although it may explain my docks suddenly disappearing form time to time xD)

Guess I will start another game and see how it goes then ^^

[zebramatt]

I would suggest that the priority of the forcefield bug very much depends on the likelihood of the scenario resulting in significant AIP cost or complete loss. If my Human Colonies are at more risk from certain units when otherwise safely tucked under a forcefield, I'd want this fixed pretty sharpish, regardless of how long it might have been the case. Not to mention, any recent or future rebalance involving damage against forcefields might result in new terrifying pitfalls for my high profile ships.

If it's only a couple of extreme fringe cases, then simply knowing what those are might be sufficient to inform strategy in future.

I've not the time to look into it myself at present but it would certainly be useful to know what the implications of that bug are!

[orzelek]

Last revamp of FF Bearers may mean that this bug will be hit more often - quite many units now have more armor than FF Bearer and they can be hit by shots that had damage counted against FF Bearers armor.

It's less visible with normal forcefields since there is much less of them - but since they have no armor the effect will be always on the bad side - your unit under FF will get more damage.

Also if hull type is taken from FF not unit under it - this will seriously affect anything that is not a structure type and attackers have bonus against structures (it will be counted for FF and damage applied to unit under it then). Reverse maybe also true - damage calculated against FF may not use multiplier while it would get it against unit under FF.

[Ozymandiaz]

Finally got to try out the FF bearers again.

They are not as good any more, but, having a bunch of them together with an MRS does mean that your force is very hard to kill.

I suspect the MRS is more to blame then the FF bearers in light of recent MRS discussions. All in all the new FF range is great, and the HP boost in place of armor was good.

If MRS is going to be as is, I suggest making FF bearers immune to repair and giving them a natural regen rate.

[zebramatt]

If MRS is going to be as is, I suggest making FF bearers immune to repair and giving them a natural regen rate.

See Mantis Issue #1192.

[Winter Born]

The new ship design tab is very cool.

If additional modules could be easily added to the choice menu I can see many candy techs related to optional unlockable modules

[x4000]

Just a heads up, most likely no prerelease today.  Keith is in the middle of "episode 4" for the fallen spire minor faction, and that's not likely to be ready for release until tomorrow, and I've been on art duty all day, so I don't have much in the way of code to release yet, either.  But, on the bright side all the art assets for the Fallen Spire campaign are pretty much done (sans galaxy view and buy images so far), so that's 17 more ships with graphics as of today -- whew, busy!

Tomorrow I'll be back on coding, and hopefully the mark I-V variants of the carrier, self destruction, and warp gate guardians will make an appearance (the graphics for those having been in place for a while).  Beyond that... well, there's a lot of various stuff I still have left to do before the 19th, from the spirecraft to a couple of new bonus ship classes to otherwise.