Prerelease 1.008E.

[x4000]

Here's the latest prerelease:  http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1008E.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 1.007, so you have to already have 1.007 (or greater) installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.

What's new since 1.007B (C and D were internal releases):
(Cumulative release notes since 1.007 are attached at the bottom)

-------------------

-The overzoom border is now displayed better on large/wide monitors, or those monitors with an unusual resolution.

-There is now a "Show Details" option in the Save and Load menus, which lets players see the dates of each savegame.  The Details view also has sortable columns, and the game remembers whether the user last used Details or normal view.

-The backslash key now selects the first idle ship from the current selection.

-Fixed a very rare bug where blocked shots could cause enemy ships to become unshootable because of how their total damage was too high.

-The amount of collected knowledge at the current planet is now shown over top of all science labs (like Exhausted shows), and in the popup menu for quick-selection of science labs.  This makes science labs quicker and easier to check the status of.

-The filter for Mobile Military in the galaxy map was incorrectly calculating the values for Allies and Team.  Fixed.

-A bug with astro trains commonly just hanging out at their train stations should now be fixed.

-The hover-tips now work while waiting for players in a multiplayer game.

FIXES FROM PAST PRERELEASES
--------------

-All of the lines in the science lab tooltips now respond to the extra tooltip size, except for the resource lines.

[darke]

-The amount of collected knowledge at the current planet is now shown over top of all science labs (like Exhausted shows), and in the popup menu for quick-selection of science labs.  This makes science labs quicker and easier to check the status of.

This I like.

I haven't managed to break the pathing again yet, so it looks like that's all sorted. At least until you touch it again.

More "bugs", they were mostly found in 008B, so it's possible they were fixed in 008E, but I suspect they've probably been around a while.

Teleport engineers and repairing: The Engineer II can't seem to repair ships in the middle of a pack. It keeps teleporting around trying to find a spot to "stop" so it can start repairing and it can't find any. The Engineer I's only work because they keep repairing whilst flying around.

In relation go this, the Engineer II's bamf sound is rather cool, but it gets somewhat irritating when it goes off every 500ms for a minute or so after a major attack (it's trying to find a nice spot to land, it can't so it keeps bamfing until something else comes along to repair the ships it's trying to target). Might be worth having a timer so it can't sound more then once every 5 seconds, even if there's a bunch of them teleporting all around the map, on the other paw fixing the above will probably eliminate the main annoyance of it.

It would also be nice to be able to build a building on top of an engineer. With the slower flying ones it usually isn't an issue, but the teleporting ones bamfing into right where you're about to place down another turret to help build the last turret you placed gets annoying after a while.

"Paused" text in the galaxy map is aligned left, but it center aligned on the main map. The "game does not have input focus" is center aligned on both screens.

The "attack the harvester" AI is b0rk3n in odd ways now, I've seen it do it at least since the original release of 008A, but I'm don't recall the problems in the 007 series. Basically the ships fly in start pecking on a harvester, then decide something else is important, fly off to shoot at a ship, or one of my buildings for a bit, if I don't kill it then, it flys back to another harvester, and pecks a little (we're talking maybe 10% damage here? 3 or 4 shots?) then flys off to hit on another building/ship/whatever. It seems to have a suicidal urge to attack my turrets after hitting my harvester a little. (This is still in 008E.)

[Quitch]

-The backslash key now selects the first idle ship from the current selection.

Quitch approves.

While're on the subject of idle, can ships on the move please change their description from IDLE to whatever they're doing, MOVING, REPAIRING, etc. It would be nice to be able to tag engineer units as guards or something so I can see from my list at-a-glance which ones are intentionally idle e.g. sitting by wormhole defences. Pretty minor though owing to the way these guys are built and the ability to order queue during building.

[vendolis]

Hi there,

first, nice game, not yet played over the third tutorial on, but already read a lot of your forum posts on different sites. Quite impressive your dedication and energy to keep up with everywhere.

Short bug report (just possible mistakes in the Tutorial Text):

1. Tutorial, "Lets move your Scout. See the spinning green thing on your Minimap?" (You seem to have changed that at some time to red)
The other time you reference this is when you enter the Galaxy view and you say: "In this tutorial, your planet is the blue one and the enemy planet is the green one."

3. Tutorial: At some point the box begins with: "To build ships on n planet..." Guess it means "a" and not a variable number ('n' | n element N) ;-) Yes I am reading too much mathematics stuff... I got confused for a second ;-)

[Quitch]

Any changes to AI progress? It was ranked as tech III at 210 in previous releases, now I'm tech IV even though I've reduced it to 185.

EDIT: AI progress has now increased to 186 but tech is at III??

Graphical glitch with enemy tractor beam attached. I was warping in and out of the same wormhole.

[x4000]

While're on the subject of idle, can ships on the move please change their description from IDLE to whatever they're doing, MOVING, REPAIRING, etc. It would be nice to be able to tag engineer units as guards or something so I can see from my list at-a-glance which ones are intentionally idle e.g. sitting by wormhole defences. Pretty minor though owing to the way these guys are built and the ability to order queue during building.

I love it, added to my list.

[x4000]

I haven't managed to break the pathing again yet, so it looks like that's all sorted. At least until you touch it again.

Ha, excellent.  Yes, I don't plan on touching it any more if at all possible.  Systems like that are too interrelated to be easily shifted too often.

More "bugs", they were mostly found in 008B, so it's possible they were fixed in 008E, but I suspect they've probably been around a while.

Teleport engineers and repairing: The Engineer II can't seem to repair ships in the middle of a pack. It keeps teleporting around trying to find a spot to "stop" so it can start repairing and it can't find any. The Engineer I's only work because they keep repairing whilst flying around.

Ooh, that is an interesting limitation.  I had not thought of that, but your analysis is really dead on.  This isn't really a bug per se, but it's a limitation I'd like to put a workaround in place for.  Added to my list to address.

In relation go this, the Engineer II's bamf sound is rather cool, but it gets somewhat irritating when it goes off every 500ms for a minute or so after a major attack (it's trying to find a nice spot to land, it can't so it keeps bamfing until something else comes along to repair the ships it's trying to target). Might be worth having a timer so it can't sound more then once every 5 seconds, even if there's a bunch of them teleporting all around the map, on the other paw fixing the above will probably eliminate the main annoyance of it.

Let's see what fixing the above does, and then we'll see about this.  I might make a settings option to turn off this sound effect or make it less frequent or something, too.

It would also be nice to be able to build a building on top of an engineer. With the slower flying ones it usually isn't an issue, but the teleporting ones bamfing into right where you're about to place down another turret to help build the last turret you placed gets annoying after a while.

I'll do you one better.  How about if I make it so that buildings aren't blocked by any mobile ships, but rather just cause the other ship to move out of the way when they are placed?  That would make placing mines and turrets much easier in a planet that has a lot of mobile guys guarding a wormhole, for instance.

"Paused" text in the galaxy map is aligned left, but it center aligned on the main map. The "game does not have input focus" is center aligned on both screens.

Yeah, this was by design with the difference in pause -- that's simply so that when players are paused and want to look at the galaxy map, the pause text isn't blocking the planets at the top center.  Other than that, there wasn't any reason to be inconsistent between the screens.

The "attack the harvester" AI is b0rk3n in odd ways now, I've seen it do it at least since the original release of 008A, but I'm don't recall the problems in the 007 series. Basically the ships fly in start pecking on a harvester, then decide something else is important, fly off to shoot at a ship, or one of my buildings for a bit, if I don't kill it then, it flys back to another harvester, and pecks a little (we're talking maybe 10% damage here? 3 or 4 shots?) then flys off to hit on another building/ship/whatever. It seems to have a suicidal urge to attack my turrets after hitting my harvester a little. (This is still in 008E.)

Hmm, that's interesting, I'll look at that in my next release, too.  Thanks!

[x4000]

first, nice game, not yet played over the third tutorial on, but already read a lot of your forum posts on different sites. Quite impressive your dedication and energy to keep up with everywhere.

Thank you!  And, welcome to the forums!

1. Tutorial, "Lets move your Scout. See the spinning green thing on your Minimap?" (You seem to have changed that at some time to red)
The other time you reference this is when you enter the Galaxy view and you say: "In this tutorial, your planet is the blue one and the enemy planet is the green one."

Oh, great catches there -- indeed, thanks to player requests it changed from green to red post-release.  I've corrected that for the next prerelease, now.  Thanks!

3. Tutorial: At some point the box begins with: "To build ships on n planet..." Guess it means "a" and not a variable number ('n' | n element N) ;-) Yes I am reading too much mathematics stuff... I got confused for a second ;-)

Haha, always good to hear from the math department.   This was actually corrected in a past release (or prerelease, can't recall), so I think you aren't on the very latest version with this one.  At least, I can't find it in 1.008E, though I did find the line you are referring to.

Thanks for your support of the game!

[x4000]

Any changes to AI progress? It was ranked as tech III at 210 in previous releases, now I'm tech IV even though I've reduced it to 185.

EDIT: AI progress has now increased to 186 but tech is at III??

You were playing a technologist before.  See this:  http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Techs  You have an exceptionally low AI Progress, in part due to the very low volume of planets you are capturing.  That's throwing the difficulty all off in your games, I think.  We'll see what my changes in F do for you...

Graphical glitch with enemy tractor beam attached. I was warping in and out of the same wormhole.

Thanks!  Those look like Ctrl-lines, though, not tractor beam lines.  But the main issue here is that you shouldn't be able to warp out if you're held by a tractor beam, so I'll work with that.

[x4000]

Okay, a lot of this is addressed in the next prerelease:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,152.new.html#new

The AI should be much harder to deep-raid against now, especially over time (there won't be much difference right at the very first, but over time in the game it will get more significant).

[Quitch]

Any changes to AI progress? It was ranked as tech III at 210 in previous releases, now I'm tech IV even though I've reduced it to 185.

EDIT: AI progress has now increased to 186 but tech is at III??

You were playing a technologist before.  See this:  http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_AI_Techs  You have an exceptionally low AI Progress, in part due to the very low volume of planets you are capturing.  That's throwing the difficulty all off in your games, I think.  We'll see what my changes in F do for you...

My question here is why is tech IV at 185 then III at 186.

And I will do my damndest to ensure I have as easy a time as possible at whatever difficulty I play. Playing to win and all that

Graphical glitch with enemy tractor beam attached. I was warping in and out of the same wormhole.

Thanks!  Those look like Ctrl-lines, though, not tractor beam lines.  But the main issue here is that you shouldn't be able to warp out if you're held by a tractor beam, so I'll work with that.

No concern, there's no bug with tractor beams, I warped in and out because I had more ships than they had beams to fire at me. Some of the ships were trapped and had to shoot their way out.

[x4000]

My question here is why is tech IV at 185 then III at 186.

I see.  It's probably a display anomaly, since your two AI civs have two different tech levels -- one being a technologist, the other not.  I'll update this in the next version so it is more clear on the screen (it should show III/IV in that situation, but right now it's just picking one at random).  Might also be an underlying issue with them actually trying to use the same level, I will check on that though...

And I will do my damndest to ensure I have as easy a time as possible at whatever difficulty I play. Playing to win and all that

Oh, hell yeah, that's the way to do it!  It's just my job to thwart you as much as possible in return.   I've always loved being a DM in RPGs and dungeon crawls (like the board game Descent, which is awesome but incredibly time consuming for a board game), so I see my role as the AI programmer in a similar light.  I'm one of those DMs who likes to push the players as far as possible, and yet give them a path to victory if they play well.  But when players figure out a loophole, like this, then I'm all about closing that or else making it still-valid-but-now-with-costs-of-its-own.

No concern, there's no bug with tractor beams, I warped in and out because I had more ships than they had beams to fire at me. Some of the ships were trapped and had to shoot their way out.

Okay, cool.  Well, there's some extra cleanup code in the F version that will prevent any possible issues that might have come up.  But glad to know that cleanup probably won't need to trigger, anyway.

[Quitch]

My question here is why is tech IV at 185 then III at 186.

I see.  It's probably a display anomaly, since your two AI civs have two different tech levels -- one being a technologist, the other not.  I'll update this in the next version so it is more clear on the screen (it should show III/IV in that situation, but right now it's just picking one at random).  Might also be an underlying issue with them actually trying to use the same level, I will check on that though...

According to the Wiki the mine layer one should have a tech level of I.

[x4000]

I'm checking on that now...

[Quitch]

TESTED UNDER G

AI progress is 133 shown as II/IV, but shouldn't that be I/IV? Wiki makes reference to some higher level AI types, but this suggests personalities, however the current figures makes it look like it means levels.

EDIT: Definitely a bug, AI Progress increased to 134 and counters changed to I/III.