The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.000 or greater of the game. Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab. If you don't yet have 3.000 or greater, you can download 3.000
here. This prerelease version is compatible with any vendor's version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
Note: If you have bug reports related to this release,
please log them in the
bug reports subforum with one bug per topic. It makes things infinitely easier for us. Thanks!
Looking for a Patch That Can Be Manually-Installed?Because of the time involved in creating multiple versions of each patch, we only create manually-installable patches for official versions of the game, not each beta prerelease. But, if you're running version 3.022 of the game or higher, you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch! If you don't yet have 3.022, but do have 3.000 or greater, you can download a simple zip containing the files of 3.022
here. Simply unpack those on top of your existing files in your AI War folder, and voila -- you're on 3.022.
To create your own manual beta patch, you'll want to go
here. This folder contains all of the beta updates. You just need whatever the most recent one is at the time (probably the same version number as this post). Download that zip file, which if you try to open will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file. Next download the updated
Director.Xml file from that folder. Finally create a new zip file on your computer, and put both the director and the fake-zip-file inside it. Call your outer zip file something that starts with Beta and ends with an extension of .zip. Beta.zip will work just fine, or you can name it after the specific version number if you want to hang onto it. And that's it! Now you have your very own manually-installable package of the AI War beta version of your choice, which you can install by simply selecting via your Updates window in the game.
What's new since 3.039:(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-Relaxed "am I out of range" checks on shots that were causing them to disappear mysteriously in a lot of cases (particularly involving decoys).
-Previously ships reduced to very low percentages of engine health (particularly those like dreadnoughts with low normal speeds) could sometimes fail to move despite having an effective speed of 1. Fixed to be able to move at the slowest possible speed in those cases, even if it's more than they deserve.
-Fixed Devourer Golem description to note that they also eat scouts despite scouts not having attack power (they are mobile military despite this).
-The move speeds of all the scouts, and the scout starship, have all been doubled to counter the effects of the much-larger tachyon beams that are now on planets.
-Previously, AI ships could be set free by chasing scouts too far away from their guard posts, which could lead to early waves of higher-level ships if players were unlucky in their scouting. This was most noticeable against the Tag Teamer AI type. Fixed.
-Warp gates now only cost 5 AI Progress to destroy, while command stations now cost 15. Thus making it cheaper to gate-raid, but the same price to take a new planet.
-Alarm posts, Raid Engines, and Black Hole machines now increase the AI Progress by half as much as before when they die.
CHANGES TO PAST PRERELEASES
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-Previously if Icon Grouping was enabled ships emerging from a wormhole were not being drawn until something was done to refresh the working icon grouping information, fixed to immediately wipe a ship's working icon group on planet transition.
-Previously if Icon Grouping was enabled and multiple constructors with rally points were selected, only the rally point of the "top" constructor would be drawn; fixed to make sure each constructor is placed in its own icon group to prevent this problem.
-Warp gates were not auto-exploding in the absence of a friendly command station, fixed.
-Previously the change to make extremely high cost structures build in larger steps was causing assisting engineers to not report their outflows on the expenses-by-player stats screen unless the stats screen was loaded during a cycle where a build step actually occurred. Fixed to report the expenditure/cycle rate at the last build step in that case.
-In the prior version, there could be issues with metal/crystal deposits and wormholes being shuffled around in various ways in loaded savegames. Fixed.
