AI War Beta 4.068 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2011/01/ai-war-beta-4068-released.html

This one has a long list of small tweaks and fixes, some more notable than others.  It's all over the place, so it's quite hard to summarize -- it's also really late at night.  Between those two factors, I'll mostly leave you to read them on your own.  A few things to bring to your attention:

The wormhole/resource point seeding is different from 4.067, and consistent with prior saves again.  Clarifications about that available here, for the curious/concerned.

In addition to the code changes, all of of the zoomed-in art for the spire ships in this expansion and the base game is now updated to have nice glows, etc.  It looks way better in game.  Changes to the far zoom icons are still coming.

A lot of GUI issues with textboxes, etc, were fixed.  That's another really notable thing in this one.

We're really winding down on what we're going to do pre-5.0 at this stage.  We're trying to do as little as possible that will risk further bugs, and so a lot of smaller things in the idea tracker have gotten archived for later.  There are still more balance/bugfix things to do, and there's the far zoom icon stuff in terms of the art, but other than that we're mostly to the point where if there aren't any major issues found, we'll be hitting 5.0 release candidates on Monday, going through a few days where Keith and I try to touch the code as little as possible while people make sure it still seems okay to them, with then us pulling the trigger on the official version on Wednesday or so.  Fingers crossed!

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]

Hooray. You made it  

More relevantly, you finally fixed that annoying engineers and moving ships thing  

Oh, and I already found a bug on the lobby for this version. Its already in mantis.  

EDIT: Seems you already fixed it as I was posting this. Wow, nice response time  

EDIT2: And just so the others don't feel left out, 

[hullu]

Also, you accidentally seem to have removed maws from my ongoing game, goodbye 20x omnomnomnom

[Wingflier]

Great job!

Were you guys planning on finishing the bonus ship balancing before the final release?  Just curious.

[fiorenzospa]

AHHHHH just yesterday night I reworked ALL my defence because this strange wormhole movement 
Do not move them again or I will warp in with 5000 mark V bomber!!! 

good job...

[BobTheJanitor]

First, let me say thanks for the hard work:

Thanks for the hard work!

Secondly, and I feel bad about this (I really do, I've become quite fond of this game even in the short few weeks I've played it so far) but I have to point out the following quibble: AI Eyes under forcefields was never the problem. Every guard post has to die before the AI Eye dies, ergo every guard post should be treated as an extension of the AI Eye. To really fix the grinding Eyes issue, you'd have to alter the game so that no posts ever spawned under a forcefield. So what's the point of the AI even using forcefields? Exactly! I don't know the exact fix for this that also encompasses not allowing ships to snipe through forcefields and keeps Eyes as a viable anti 'blob' tactic. Fortunately I do have full confidence in you to puzzle out a solution. (Caveat, I have not tried assaulting a planet with a forcefield and an Eye since the patch. Maybe the HP nerf has made it less grindy. But 60% of a long time is stilll a long time, I think)

Otherwise, thanks for the constant patching work.

[keith.lamothe]

Also, you accidentally seem to have removed maws from my ongoing game, goodbye 20x omnomnomnom

Oops, sorry, thanks for noticing that, it's fixed for 4.069 to properly load pre-4.068 saves with that option defaulting to "enabled"; it won't be able to correct games saved in 4.068 though, because it can't tell the difference between that and if you had started a new game and explicitly made that choice in the lobby.

Were you guys planning on finishing the bonus ship balancing before the final release?  Just curious.

There aren't very many of them left, but yes.

AHHHHH just yesterday night I reworked ALL my defence because this strange wormhole movement 
Do not move them again or I will warp in with 5000 mark V bomber!!! 

Methinks you should be worrying about the AI warping in the bombers, should the wormholes move again

Secondly, and I feel bad about this (I really do, I've become quite fond of this game even in the short few weeks I've played it so far) but I have to point out the following quibble: AI Eyes under forcefields was never the problem. Every guard post has to die before the AI Eye dies, ergo every guard post should be treated as an extension of the AI Eye. To really fix the grinding Eyes issue, you'd have to alter the game so that no posts ever spawned under a forcefield. So what's the point of the AI even using forcefields? Exactly! I don't know the exact fix for this that also encompasses not allowing ships to snipe through forcefields and keeps Eyes as a viable anti 'blob' tactic. Fortunately I do have full confidence in you to puzzle out a solution. (Caveat, I have not tried assaulting a planet with a forcefield and an Eye since the patch. Maybe the HP nerf has made it less grindy. But 60% of a long time is stilll a long time, I think)

Well, it does accomplish one important thing: it makes it more likely that the AI Eye can be directly assaulted without going through an AI ff if that's what you decide to do.  Of course, some of the command stations also get ffs, so maybe the eyes need to seed in some separate space or something, dunno.  And the AI Eye hull type going to command-grade does mean it will be a lot harder to chew through that 400m hp.

[Red Spot]

For forcefields you just need to 'remove' supply to that planet. For shield-posts you just need to wack the rest of the planet and build a CC, which auto-magicly seems to remove the shield-posts.
Chris already found the solution (Or did I run into some untintended behaviour ?)

[Zeyurn]

Very excited about the change to rally guardians.  Thanks for the great work as usual, guys!

[c4sc4]

The descriptions of the Command Centers still say that they need to be built near the colony ship. I also noticed that on an AI planet, my scouts had a " X guard posts keeping this unit alive" message. Also, in the lobby, I noticed that under ship types, it was listed some (or maybe all of them) twice.

[x4000]

Thanks, all -- for the comments, praise, and feedback.

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,8081.0.html

[Red Spot]

Asking this here as I dont know if this is a bug or simply a case of forgeting to change a description.
In my current game, 4.066, I have 2 barracks on planets with barracks and they seem to not grow beyond 200 ship.
I am not too sure about the 200 ships cap as I wacked the barracks fairly soon after finding them, but the 2/planet seems default behaviour.

I can provide a savegame from right after the message that x planet is building a barrack (at which point I found several planets actually had barracks).

[x4000]

They can grow larger, but depending on your ship cap that is the minimum size, so they won't often do so. I think it should be just one barracks, not two, but that's a comparably minor bug.

[Red Spot]

Want me to post a mantis report with savegame?

[x4000]

Sure, it will be good to have on file for later, but it's probably not something we'll attack before 5.0.  We're trying to limit the number of potentially-destructive changes we make right before a release.