Glad to have you back, vonduus, and glad you're enjoying 5.0 so well!
That process of porting from 3.070 to 4.x was a really rough process just because the new engine was so different, and both more powerful and more limited in various ways; so certainly things like the sound issues, etc, were something we battled for a while until we found acceptable workarounds (and I don't think it was as distorted for everyone at all, which was part of the trouble in fixing that).
At any rate, 5.0 is definitely a mature version of the "new AI War," whereas 3.x was an extremely mature version of the "old AI War." Part of what we did as part of the porting, as you know, was basically reinvent a lot of parts of the game. Things like guard posts and guardians and starships and so on were either added or redefined, partly in an effort to help performance in the new engine, and partly in an effort to shore up a lot of the weaknesses in the "old AI War" all at once, and to move along from there. I knew that porting was going to be a messy process no matter how we approached it, so I figured we might as well
really make a mess of things and re-balance the whole game while we were at it. I think 4.0 was pretty solid, but not as much as 3.x, and certainly not as much as 5.x, as you say.
Anyhow, the big takeaway that folks should have is that that 4.0 process where we just completely redid the balance was probably a one-time thing in the life of AI War. Rather than just keeping old assumptions from the earliest versions of AI War, we changed all the fundamental things that had been bugging us at once. That meant that
everything had its balance affected. We still do ongoing balance shifts, but usually it's pretty localized and not that drastic in the first place. That's how the balance changes have been for
most of the life of AI War in general, excepting that one huge porting process.
I think a lot of people got fatigued with that porting process, both on the developer and the player side -- and given the awesome state of things now, we really don't have any incentive to do that again. We're really in a place where we can keep doing more expansions and more DLC without having to fundamentally rip things apart again; it's a lot more growth-friendly now, which was part of our goal.
In terms of siege starships in particular, bear in mind that there are now a lot of very large ships: guardians, starships, golems, spirecraft, guard posts, and on and on. The siege starships have a great role against them. However, force fields and fortresses are really meant to be a certain type of difficult close-quarters engagement, and so having long-range ships good against them is a bad thing in general and definitely isn't coming back. In general, having solutions where the player can expend a ton of time to avoid some other sort of penalty is something we try to avoid, as well.
Anyway, glad you're enjoying the new versions, and thanks for the kind words on it and Arcen, etc. We're definitely in much stronger shape now, which I'm quite relieved about, of course.
