AI War Beta 4.061/2 Released!

[x4000]

Thanks so much, guys.

And, that statement is definitely patently ludicrous, from the other thread.   

[TechSY730]

Any program that is worth it's salt is a program that isn't patched often. Windows for example isn't worth it's salt since it requires patches nearly monthly (of course you got to look at the size of the program)

lol...

Here is the difference between patches of this game and Microsoft style patching. Patching to add new features is great. Patching to fix bugs is also great (better to not have bugs in the first place, but how realistic is that? ) However, are the bug-fix patches dealing with the fundamental issues or the symptoms? For AI war, its mostly patching the fundamental issues. For Windows, is mostly covering up the "iffy" architecture with hacks that only cover one symptom. Thus, many patches deal with very similar issues, because the root cause is not really dealt with. The guys here don't mess around like that. (if they do, it's only to meet a deadline and the real issue is dealt with shortly after)

To be fair, Windows 7 is a step in the right direction. They are FINALLY getting around to decoupling what should of been user level stuff from the kernel (like the GUI). It only took them 7 major versions to start working on the major architectural problems, but at least their starting now.

EDIT: Oh, and speaking of ludicrous comments, do you want to derail this thread early and resume our discussion of embedded AI war, especially for the toaster platform? 

[Salamander]

The movement change appears to have an odd unforseen consequence. Last night Red Cossack and I were playing a game when I attacked a dead-end AI world and the entire time I was in there all my ships were capped at speed 8. Even after killing everything, including all the cloaked units and colonizing the system, my ships all capped at speed 8. The second they left the system, their speeds were all normal again.

I can try to give you guys a saved game tonight at home, but I hate to admit that I don't know how to do so at this time. 

[hullu]

Sounds like a Grav Drill in the system? =)

If it's not that, then it sounds like a bug=)

[Salamander]

No gravity drill, which was the first thing I was looking for when I noticed every ship moving 8. And as I said, the effect persisted even after cleaning the system of all hostiles and no structures were in system to capture, just spire asteroids.

[x4000]

If you can post a save preferably in mantis, that would be great! I've not seen that or heard other reports, so I assume it must be some edge case.

[superking]

the spire ship icons REALLY need the black outline so they fit with other ship icons, it looks fugly atm

[Echo35]

To be fair, Windows 7 is a step in the right direction. They are FINALLY getting around to decoupling what should of been user level stuff from the kernel (like the GUI). It only took them 7 major versions to start working on the major architectural problems, but at least their starting now.

But Microsoft did patch frequently. Vista was an open beta for 7 after all.

[Suzera]

"Science Labs Mark III now count as "sabotage" units that stirs up the AI into creating threat/free ships from its command station sort of like how an AI Eye would work. This replaces the old way of stirring up the existing ships sitting on the planet, which didn't work too well for a lot of reasons."

Does this mean that mk 3 science labs are going to be suicide? Because AI Eyes look like they can generate dozens of mk 2 units per second or something right now so by the time they cross a planet to actually blow up the partially constructed lab there's liable to be a thousand or two and you've only maybe built the thing 5-10% of the way so you won't even have any knowledge from it yet if they keep coming limitlessly.

[x4000]

Don't worry, they build at an entirely different rate from AI eyes.  This is more akin to the deepstriking rate, actually.  It may still be too hard, but if so it can be tweaked downwards.  It's vastly less intense than the AI Eyes, though.

[Suzera]

Cool. Sounds like it might be good. Raising the rate and the difficulty sounds nice. They were pretty tedious but not very difficult before.

[BobTheJanitor]

I checked out the scoreboard, which I hadn't actually checked before now. It did have incomplete games, but loading up my after-win saves and exiting made them correct themselves. So if you have occasional bouts of OCD and want your scoreboard to look right, you may have to load up your old games to make everything look pretty. Unfortunately it's got some scores in there from the tutorial that still show incomplete, and I'm not sure I have any saves to fix those with. Hopefully I can resist the urge to go all Lady Macbeth over those minor details.

But it does lead me to ask yet another question. Is there some reference somewhere to what the scores mean? Is it counting kills, or planets taken, or scouting, or tech unlocked, or ships built, etc. etc.? What's going into it? It's nice to see a big number, but without context I don't know if I have a good score or a terrible score. (Probably terrible in my case  )

[x4000]

For the score calculations, we don't really publish those too prominently because otherwise people tend to fixate on that, if you know what I mean.  But, in general it rewards all the various easily-trackable good behaviors: having a good Kill To Loss ratio, winning quicker rather than slower, building lots of ships, killing lots of ships, having a worse handicap than the AI (or no handicap), not using cheats, winning the game, using difficult minor factions (minor point there), not using minor factions that help you (minor point there), and so on.

Generally, the rule of thumb is: the more efficiently you win, the better your score.  If you play a 60 hour game because instead of fighting efficiently you just hit +10 speed to wait for your ships to rebuild after every battle, it won't be as good of a score if you play a 20 hour game where you were fighting tooth and nail every second of the time, and you won after a long hard victory.  Similarly, if you play a 60 hour game where it takes that long because you're having lots of detailed tactics and really conserving ships, and your KTD ratio is very high because if it, that will probably be an even better score, etc.

It's hard to say what a "good" score is, it's all relative, right?  So it's more a matter of comparing your various games against your other ones, or if you're on Steam you can look at the global scoreboards versus you there.  Actually, there's a link on the steam store page to where you can see the global scoreboards even if you're not on Steam.

[Red Spot]

This is so trivial I dont even want to post a mantis report about it and just do it here so it can be forgotten ..
The game displays date's at certain times, every time I start the game of load a game I think I lost a few months of my life .. 

[Suzera]

you just hit +10 speed to wait for your ships to rebuild after every battle

This actually leads to an overall quicker game usually due to (usually) better K:D and thus even less to rebuild compared to piecemealing your attacks if you're not wasting resources all the time and not making serious tactical errors on more than half of the planets.