AI War Beta 7.013-7.014 "Revised Salvage" Released!

[LintMan]

Thanks for the awesome patch, Keith!  I love the unit selectability!  Because I'm apparently never satisfied, I'll mention the other half of my game start wish list: Let all the planets be selectable instead of just a certain random few.   Just throwing that out there.

The salvage changes are all positive as well.  I posted some longer thoughts on salvage here: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15002.0.html

[keith.lamothe]

Update: 7.014 hotfix for some unhandled errors in an edge-case of ship death where salvage was assuming the ship had a CurrentPlanet when it didn't.

[RockyBst]

Hmm, just had the Neinzul Mourner wardens nebula scenario come up. Flew my ship into the wormhole, put it on FRD and 30 seconds later I get informed that I've won. I imagine there's something going wrong with the first dimensional prison to open which is popping them all and causing no ships to be generated.

Gives you the equivalent loot of you having done literally nothing too, so no XP and only the bare minimum unlocks.

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, just had the Neinzul Mourner wardens nebula scenario come up. Flew my ship into the wormhole, put it on FRD and 30 seconds later I get informed that I've won. I imagine there's something going wrong with the first dimensional prison to open which is popping them all and causing no ships to be generated.

Gives you the equivalent loot of you having done literally nothing too, so no XP and only the bare minimum unlocks.

Whoops, haha.  Fixed that for 7.015, which I'll probably try to get out in the morning (Wednesday).

Or maybe I should just change the journal text to "... nevermind, they've apparently already all escaped."

[Faulty Logic]

A couple exploits that might be easy to fix:

Lightning torpedoes are still transportable. They don't attrition in transports. This is hilariously abusable:
AI HW + late game SF vs 30 transports full of missiles. The missiles win.

Also, for infinite money:

Build fortresses around an SF post. It kills them. Send in the remains rebuilders. Scrap the half-built fortresses for money. Repeat.

[keith.lamothe]

The missiles win.

With you, the warheads always win.

Thanks for the notes, though.  For some reason I thought I'd fixed the lightning torpedo in transport thing. 

The rebuild-from-never-fully-built-thing is an old one I keep going back and forth on.  One approach is to add a rule that "something killed before it even finished leaves no remains" but that could lead to unintuitive gaps in defensive formations set up just before an attack.

Another approach is to have rebuilt units start at like 1% (or even just 1 health) instead of 50%.  That would be more consistent across the board and generally acceptable to me.  But it's also a straight nerf for the player.  Which is perhaps acceptable in light of the overall economic impact of the salvage mechanic.

Alternatively I could have it try to remember "what is the highest health I've ever been at?" and have remains-rebuilding try for 50% but not go higher than that.  That would be more complexity (and a bit more memory footprint) than I'd really like to involve for that (notably, it could be a pain to get that remembered number to trans-migrate from the unit to the remains to the rebuilt unit to the remains to the etc).  So I'm leaning towards the rebuild-starts-at-1-health.

[Faulty Logic]

I think this is only a problem with fortresses, and it usually isn't worth the effort to build normal turrets half off.

So I'd recommend having fortresses only rebuild at 1%.

[Lancefighter]

If you are entertaining ideas for the destroyed under construction problem.. I would probably just make under construction turrets not valid targets (or low-priority targets). Instead, I would pose that construction be automatically paused if not supported by an engineer while the planet is under attack (say, n amount of uncloaked units on the planet, or 1 or more largeships present. Actually just some sort of.. firepower? present,maybe an early wave's worth).

Dunno how magical Aiwar nanites are, but from an actual construction perspective it kinda makes sense. Id probably say that sort of construction logic could apply to literally anything, but hey, we probably dont need to solve problems that dont exist.

[Kahuna]

Making turrets under construction not valid targets would make beachheading hilariously op. The player could build a "whipping boy" on a heavily defended AI planet.

[keith.lamothe]

Fixed that for 7.015, which I'll probably try to get out in the morning (Wednesday).

The best-laid plans of mice and software engineers... Gotta focus on TLF during the day, but I'll try for one after that so we can get the fix out for that mourners scenario and the hilarious multiplacing-command-stations thing.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, reproducing the showdown-cpa bug took a lot longer than expected, so no AIW release tonight.  But the first two showdown cpas no longer erroneously act like the third one

[Eternaly_Lost]

Ok, reproducing the showdown-cpa bug took a lot longer than expected, so no AIW release tonight.  But the first two showdown cpas no longer erroneously act like the third one

I be looking forward to it, but somehow I don't think it will help my showdowns at all. Operation see if the AI can run out of Motherships is a bit harder to stop then I first thought. They have a lot of Motherships.

[keith.lamothe]

I be looking forward to it, but somehow I don't think it will help my showdowns at all. Operation see if the AI can run out of Motherships is a bit harder to stop then I first thought. They have a lot of Motherships.

Yea, it gets pretty insane if you've got a lot of homeworlds and/or lots of superweapons.

Btw, have you noticed any difference in the frequency of the too-many-heap-sections crashes since 7.013?

[Eternaly_Lost]

I be looking forward to it, but somehow I don't think it will help my showdowns at all. Operation see if the AI can run out of Motherships is a bit harder to stop then I first thought. They have a lot of Motherships.

Yea, it gets pretty insane if you've got a lot of homeworlds and/or lots of superweapons.

Btw, have you noticed any difference in the frequency of the too-many-heap-sections crashes since 7.013?

Not yet, but I just started a new game on Sunday, and was on Vacation the week before. It takes time to get everyone going.

[Labfiend]

Also, can you add an entry in the galaxy map search display thing for turret controllers?  I freakin' love those things and have to go planet by planet looking for them.

The broader of the two custom filters should let you pick from core turret controllers, does it not?

Oh derp, for some reason I never thought to look for it under C for Core, always T for Turret.  Sorry