AI War Beta 5.035 "Teleport Battle Stations And The Return Of The Dyson Sphere"

[TechSY730]

Keith, any more changes/fixes you are planning to stuff into 5.036, or is it pretty much ready to go?

It was all ready, but between that time and the time that Chris would have had a moment I came up with some other stuff I wanted to pack in there, so Chris is back to waiting on me

Aw man! Now I'm anxious to see what else you got up your sleeve.

Anyways, great work, both here and in AVWW!

[Wingflier]

Yes we all appreciate the hard work (in spite of and in addition to our constant distractions ;p)!

[TechSY730]

Woa, something I thought wouldn't be done, large number of player/HW re-balancing.

Though the waves and other stuff scaling with the starting number of homeworlds has one downfall, if someone loses their homes, they only get ONE homeworld core back, thus setting their ship caps to 1x. But, the AI still treat them as if they had their original number of homeworlds, thus giving them a rather unreasonable advantage. "Losing Home Stations (plural) resets ship cap" http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2610

It seems that either your ship cap should not be reset (maybe by giving you N cores back if you started with N home planets) or by having the AI recompute how many homeworlds + homecores the human team has when a home command station is lost, and adjust its waves and stuff accordingly.

[keith.lamothe]

Woa, something I thought wouldn't be done, large number of player/HW re-balancing.

Yea, well, someone went and slapped the 10/10 AI around with 8 homeworlds in a way that the other changes probably wouldn't have prevented

In general multi-HW has always been unbalanced, but some more obvious corrections came to mind

Though the waves and other stuff scaling with the starting number of homeworlds has one downfall, if someone loses their homes, they only get ONE homeworld core back, thus setting their ship caps to 1x. But, the AI still treat them as if they had their original number of homeworlds, thus giving them a rather unreasonable advantage. "Losing Home Stations (plural) resets ship cap" http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2610

Generally I'm not worried about that because in singleplayer if you lose any home you lose the game; that's not true in MP but multiple-players each playing with multiple-homeworlds is a pretty edge-ish case.  It'd be nice if the game remembered how many planets each player started with but right now it doesn't.  I'll see if that can be easily changed but I doubt it.

[TechSY730]

Though the waves and other stuff scaling with the starting number of homeworlds has one downfall, if someone loses their homes, they only get ONE homeworld core back, thus setting their ship caps to 1x. But, the AI still treat them as if they had their original number of homeworlds, thus giving them a rather unreasonable advantage. "Losing Home Stations (plural) resets ship cap" http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=2610

Generally I'm not worried about that because in singleplayer if you lose any home you lose the game; that's not true in MP but multiple-players each playing with multiple-homeworlds is a pretty edge-ish case.  It'd be nice if the game remembered how many planets each player started with but right now it doesn't.  I'll see if that can be easily changed but I doubt it.

Well, if having ship caps not reset when you lose your home is impractical, then maybe the other idea, make the AI update how many home stations + home cores it uses for wave et al computations whenever one is lost or gained?

[Nodor]

It's hard to be motivated to start a new game when all of the new shiny toys/balance issues for my difficulty range occur during game generation.  On the other hand, I'm beginning to feel withdrawl symptoms.

Is this beta update close or should I bite the bullet and attempt a 10/10 before the changes go live?

[keith.lamothe]

It's hard to be motivated to start a new game when all of the new shiny toys/balance issues for my difficulty range occur during game generation.  On the other hand, I'm beginning to feel withdrawl symptoms.

Is this beta update close or should I bite the bullet and attempt a 10/10 before the changes go live?

Sorry about the release hanging out there in limbo

I'm back to being done with what I want in for it (there are some other dirty tricks I want to put in, but they can wait, and for balance testing that would probably be good).  Chris and I are trying to finish up with some pretty significant changes for the first leading-up-to-1.2 AVWW update but once that's out hopefully an AIW prerelease will be possible.

[Nodor]

Good to know, looks like it's time to bite the bullet and try to notch another victory this weekend.   

[TechSY730]

Chris and I are trying to finish up with some pretty significant changes for the first leading-up-to-1.2 AVWW update but once that's out hopefully an AIW prerelease will be possible.

Seeing the kinds of major, awesome, stuff that is getting lined up for 1.104, I can see why you have your hands full.
Chris mentioned that 1.104 will hopefully be out tomorrow, so I can live with my "withdrawal symptoms" one more day.

[doctorfrog]

Same. I'm itching to get another map going, but I'm waiting on my next heroin score patch.

[TechSY730]

If I am being annoying, I apologize, but can we expect the next release sometime this week? Or are you trying to get AVWW 1.2 out the door first?

[keith.lamothe]

Normally I don't give ETAs but this really has been a lot longer than intended.  Plan is for tomorrow (tuesday) evening

[doctorfrog]

Thank you! This has been taking so long that I was starting to dream up plans for a special "Cricket" unit. Kind of like a type of scout, that, when it's posted in a system that's seen no kind of dang action for so long, it just starts *chirping.*

[TechSY730]

I just saw the Spirecraft shield bearer changes. Thanks for that; I didn't think that any refactoring of these would happen until AI War became the focus again. 
But of course, we didn't get our buff for free. This is going to make exo-wave defense much trickier now that the AI exo-waves have an answer to my tractor turrets, not to mention a good buff in effective HP of their exo-wave in general. 


For those wondering, starting in 5.036, the Spirecraft shield bearer will no longer shrink in size, and will be able to be put into low power mode. In return though, the AI will be able to spawn them in exo-waves.

[Wanderer]

Cool, that's good to hear, Keith.  I've been distracted lately so it wasn't affecting me much directly but it's cool to know it's coming.  I can't wait to see the name of the new one, personally.  My vote is something like "AI 10/10 learns how to fight again..."