AI War Beta 4.058 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/12/ai-war-beta-4058-released.html

We're still on holiday break until the 3rd, but this new release has some updates that we'd been working on before the holidays that we finished up today, and some other fixes.

Included in this one are, most notably, six new AI types for the Light of the Spire expansion.  That makes a total of eight for the expansion, which is going to be the final tally -- the focus was mainly on other kinds of features.  This also adds in 24 new achievements, 23 of which are for the new expansion and one of which is for the base game.

Additionally, we fixed that longstanding-since-Unity-porting bug with the trial mode not always being recognized until a restart of the application after an expansion was disabled or validated.

Lastly of major note, there's also a new ability on almost all self-attritioning units where they now won't self-attrition when in low-power mode.  For golems, Neinzul Younglings, etc, this is a pretty major change.

And there were actually a couple of other small fixes, see the release notes for details.  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.

[TechSY730]

Great work, but do you guys understand what a "holiday break" is? 

[Echo35]

Only in AI War would a patch add new AI Types

[ShadowOTE]

Excellent... now to start (yet another) new game, this one with my suggested AI type

[TechSY730]

Only in AI War would a patch add new AI Types

A patch during a "holiday" no less.

[BigJake]

Alright, I love the Thief AI.  I barged into a Mk III system with a capful of Mk II ffbs and triangles like I owned the place and those tractor platforms just picked em up and dragged them away in a dozen pieces.  They took them into neighboring systems where my captive ships were torn apart by fortresses.  It was glorious.

[HellishFiend]

Chris/Keith, "Self Attrition Only When Not Low-Power" to me sounds like it adds to the micro requirements and goes against the direction you wanted to take the game. I think the addition of this ability begs moving in the direction of attrition only occurring when a ship is actively attacking, or when the ship is in the presence of hostile ships on any given planet. I like the latter idea better, as it would require less drastic of a rebalance/recode and would still retain the feel that the current attrition system brings, without adding any micro for those ships.

Edit: Added mantis thread - http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2191

[MaxAstro]

Alternatively, a "power up" timer would achieve much the same thing by discouraging heavy micro and makes a lot of sense at least for golems.  Something along the lines of paralyzing the golem for 60 seconds when it is powered up would do the trick.

[keith.lamothe]

Alright, I love the Thief AI.  I barged into a Mk III system with a capful of Mk II ffbs and triangles like I owned the place and those tractor platforms just picked em up and dragged them away in a dozen pieces.  They took them into neighboring systems where my captive ships were torn apart by fortresses.  It was glorious.

[Ozymandiaz]

Yeah, the tractor platforms are really annoying in the AIs hand.

I tried a Hard Golem AI game now, and the AI is making a hard push against me... I fear I might even have to knowledge raid to get enough ships to make a pusch myself . I already got 1 Hive golem tho, so that helps a bit.

All around a decent change to the golems to make them interesting

[x4000]

New version: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,7965.0.html

[Fiskbit]

I, too, had concerns when I read this that painful micro was being introduced with the low power mode change. To help counter this, how about making it so ships don't reload while in low power mode? Not only does it make some amount of sense, but it removes a major incentive to micro during battles. The current behavior makes it appealing to put ships in low power mode, bring them out when and enemy is near, put them right back in, and repeat over and over until the enemies are dead. If they can't reload while in low power mode, then you can't effectively put them in this state during combat. Your only concern, then, would be putting them in low power mode when an enemy isn't near, which is a lot less micro-intensive and a lot less exploitative.

[x4000]

Ah, now that's a good solution. I like it.