Prerelease 1.014M (AI tactics galore, new lit turrets, bugfixes, more mines)

[x4000]

The Latest prerelease is now out: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1014M.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 1.013, so you have to already have 1.013 (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 1.014L:
(Cumulative release notes since 1.013 are attached at the bottom)

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

-Previously, ships under force fields that were still building would have protection from the force field but would not show the green circle indicating their protection.  Fixed.

-New Lightning Turret Mark II and III has been added.  The Lightning Turret Mark I has had its strength reduced somewhat to compensate.  Lightning Turrets are also now their own class of turrets, no longer requiring laser turrets to be built first.

-Fixed several issues with lobby tooltip display when alt-tabbing out of the application and related.

-The METL and CRYS messages on the ship build buttons have been removed.  The amount of stored metal/crystal is now irrelevant in the new flow-based economy.

-Force fields are now drawn with greater transparency.

-Spiders and spider turrets now make an effort to attack ships with damage-able engines, rather than just going for the kill.

-It is now possible for players to build 3x as many mines as before.

-Ships in Free-Roaming Defender mode will now do a better job of dividing up the possible targets.

-Tactical retreats have been added for the AI on difficulty 5 and up.  If the AI finds itself sorely outnumbered on a planet, it will now retreat to somewhere else in the galaxy (or press forward on the attack to a different player planet, depending), thus introducing more uncertainty for the human players and the possibility of those retreating ships returning somewhere more deadly a bit later.

-The tactical intelligence of the AI on neutral systems has been improved; the AI now prefers to save its ships for other battles rather than wasting time with human forces in uncontested areas.

-When the AI has overwhelming odds against the player, it now acts a lot more vicious on difficulty 5 and up.

-The logic for ships waiting to go through wormholes on non-AI planets has been revamped so that AI ships behave more like expected in that situation.

-The logic for how starships fit into the waiting-for-wormhole logic has been revamped so that they will also act better.

-The weighting of warheads, turrets, and the like have been discounted in the internal firepower ratings so that the AI acts a bit better around them.

-Force fields were not properly displacing enemies.  Fixed.


CHANGES FROM PAST PRERELEASES
--------------

-Construction was still happening when paused in TBS-friendly pause mode in the last release.  Fixed.

-In recent prereleases, regen on ships was not working properly.  Fixed.

[x4000]

These are some nontrivial tactics changes, so watch out!  I had several flashes of inspiration today, and man is the AI a lot more brutal for it.  This allows for even more emergence, such as the AI regrouping and coming back in larger forces when there are smaller raids that would fail by themselves, plus other things like that.  It will also now go for the throat when before it might have piddled around for long enough for you to bring up forces to defend yourself.  A lot of the weaknesses of the AI as it stood before have been shored up now (such as it getting too distracted by harvesters, etc) -- the new system isn't entirely perfect, I'm sure, but this should be several leaps in the right direction.  Will be interesting to see how people do with it!

[Kalzarius]

Wow, this might really hurt in the game we have going with 72,000 AI ships (did I mention it was 68,000 until after we destroyed one AI world and wiped out four raids and two cross-planet attacks?).

Can't wait to see what this does.

The Lightning Turret Mark I has had its strength reduced somewhat to compensate.

Hmmm, I'll have to play with these a bit and see how they fare on the defensive.

By the way, absolutely positively love the new ship placement mode, although I seem to sometimes place down 10 instead of 5.  I'm assuming I may move the mouse a bit enough for it to consider it a drag.

[CautiousChaos]

These are some nontrivial tactics changes, so watch out!  I had several flashes of inspiration today, and man is the AI a lot more brutal for it.  This allows for even more emergence, such as the AI regrouping and coming back in larger forces when there are smaller raids that would fail by themselves, plus other things like that.  It will also now go for the throat when before it might have piddled around for long enough for you to bring up forces to defend yourself.  A lot of the weaknesses of the AI as it stood before have been shored up now (such as it getting too distracted by harvesters, etc) -- the new system isn't entirely perfect, I'm sure, but this should be several leaps in the right direction.  Will be interesting to see how people do with it!

Brilliant!  Love when you make changes to the AI to be more interesting such as the tactical withdrawls. 

[CautiousChaos]

Wow!  The tactical AI withdrawls are amazing!  Previously I was being invaded by a force of about 500 against my 600 and it was pretty much me chasing around the AI as it knocked down my harvesters.  Now, with this update, the AI went instead for my production facilities and knocked out my home base...  And then -- split it's forces up into two groups and exited through two separate wormholes!  This is good stuff!
-cc

[eRe4s3r]

I am under constant attack of groups 30 ships from the planets i research raided with my super huge fleet - apparently they flee from one death machine to the other, but this is MUCH more dynamic now, everything flies floats and shoots. Cool

I do have a rather annoying bug though - the counter of the Danger Blinking Icon increments and doesn't decrease, and there are NO ENEMY SHIPS in my sectors (i am sure of that)

Save shows it, just watch the counter and compare that to real situation in front of you ^^ Only 1 planet

Mhh, the blinking just doesn't seem to update right, sometimes it reports the right numbers but sometimes it continues to blink a while after everything is destroyed (which means its constantly blinking, i must have gotten the raider ai ,p)

Ok, apparantly i am just under massive attack from cloaked stuff ;p

[x4000]

Glad it's a hit!  This new set of decisions really makes the AI a whole lot more dynamic in general.  I don't know of many other strategy games that actually have the AI ever withdraw, either, so I think that's a cool differentiator.  It really adds a lot to the tactics -- and yes, sometimes they will pop out and back in, just checking if they are strong enough to take you now, but often that will result in them hitting you in an unexpected place or having a larger group than you were expecting, so that they can actually take you on, etc. 

This may even remove the need for the radiation clouds feature that has been discussed a lot, as the primary focus of that was really just to force the AI into making better decisions.  I'll be interested in hearing what others think, but I suspect it may now be moot or nearly so.

Kal, I'll have to watch out for the placement of 10 versus 5 items.  There might need to be some timing tweaking on that, I'm not sure.

[dumpsterKEEPER]

Wow, the game plays completely differently now with these AI changes! And by differently, I mean harder I know that Sins of a Solar Empire has the AI retreat when you enter a system with a vastly superior force, but in practice it doesn't play out anything like this. It was so neat (on multiple occasions) watching a group of AI ships attack one of my harvesters, and as a group of my ships in FRD mode closed in on them, the AI ships split into multiple groups and fled to different wormholes. In terms of the AI, 1.014M plays like an entirely different game!

There was one particular time where the AI attacked my home system with a decent wave while my ships were still getting into position for defense. The AI ships damaged my home command station to around 12% and could have easily finished it off before they were all destroyed, but as my ships closed in they chose to flee instead of pressing the attack and I managed to save my home command station. Perhaps it would be effective to make them less likely to flee when attacking high priority targets that are nearly destroyed? That would have ended the game right there if they had stuck around for another 10 seconds or so.

I agree that the radiation cloud mechanic is not nearly as important now. It might still be interesting to have specific buildings leave behind clouds to prevent instant rebuilds, but I don't think they would need to penalize the player nearly as much. It would probably be worthwhile to wait and see how the existing changes work out over time.

[x4000]

Wow, the game plays completely differently now with these AI changes! And by differently, I mean harder I know that Sins of a Solar Empire has the AI retreat when you enter a system with a vastly superior force, but in practice it doesn't play out anything like this. It was so neat (on multiple occasions) watching a group of AI ships attack one of my harvesters, and as a group of my ships in FRD mode closed in on them, the AI ships split into multiple groups and fled to different wormholes. In terms of the AI, 1.014M plays like an entirely different game!

Yeah, it's definitely like a whole new game.  It's really funny how different the AI can make things!

There was one particular time where the AI attacked my home system with a decent wave while my ships were still getting into position for defense. The AI ships damaged my home command station to around 12% and could have easily finished it off before they were all destroyed, but as my ships closed in they chose to flee instead of pressing the attack and I managed to save my home command station. Perhaps it would be effective to make them less likely to flee when attacking high priority targets that are nearly destroyed? That would have ended the game right there if they had stuck around for another 10 seconds or so.

Hmm, that's interesting.  They are really not supposed to do that in that situation, but I think I know where it might have come on.  I'll make some changes to try to prevent that -- it's a bit like herding cats with an emergent AI, it's not always apparent why it might do one thing versus another.  But I think I have an idea about it in this case.  Thanks for letting me know!  That's just the sort of thing I need data about with any major change like this.

I agree that the radiation cloud mechanic is not nearly as important now. It might still be interesting to have specific buildings leave behind clouds to prevent instant rebuilds, but I don't think they would need to penalize the player nearly as much. It would probably be worthwhile to wait and see how the existing changes work out over time.

The bigger thing that prevents instant rebuilds at this point is the build time of these structures.  I think it makes more sense to just mess with those and make them take longer to rebuild if the time penalty is what we are after.  It's consistent, it's nicer to the CPU, and it's simpler for new players to grasp immediately.  It still might be cool to have reactors give off damaging radiation clouds when destroyed, but that could be an entirely different thing from the generalized radiation cloud that was under discussion for a while.

[Admiral]

Just two cents... Please post in the future when you are working on i18n instead of doing real work (hehe) so we know not to expect lots of fun patches while you toil away at the rest of it.

That way I will busy myself with not checking the site and being disappointed by having no new releases!

[liq3]

Not sure if this is the best place to post it, but eh...

Repair rates atm are waaaaaaaaaay too low. Even with like 10 engis, tehy only repair at about 1,200 hp/s (on starships). Considering they have 1,500,000hp+, it takes forever to repair. That example would take TWENTY minutes. Way too long. Spires would be hell to repair, taking nearly an hour.

Mobile repair stations are also repairing way too slow. Buildings are hit by this terrible repair rate too.

[x4000]

Just two cents... Please post in the future when you are working on i18n instead of doing real work (hehe) so we know not to expect lots of fun patches while you toil away at the rest of it.

That way I will busy myself with not checking the site and being disappointed by having no new releases!

Yeah, will do.  I've made no new progress on that this week, as you can probably guess from everything else going on here.  But it's probably best that I do post that sort of thing so that people aren't wondering and so that I don't get progressively more stressed out as my todo list piles up while I'm working on that.

I figure at this point I have a solid 4-6 more days to go on the localization, so I'll probably need to average a day a week on that starting next week.  This week I gave it a miss because of all the economy stuff that needed to be finished more quickly.

[x4000]

Not sure if this is the best place to post it, but eh...

Repair rates atm are waaaaaaaaaay too low. Even with like 10 engis, tehy only repair at about 1,200 hp/s (on starships). Considering they have 1,500,000hp+, it takes forever to repair. That example would take TWENTY minutes. Way too long. Spires would be hell to repair, taking nearly an hour.

Mobile repair stations are also repairing way too slow. Buildings are hit by this terrible repair rate too.

It's the same as the initial build rate -- I will definitely look at this for 1.014N, but that probably won't be until the morning.  Great catch from you and Lars both, though -- I had not expected that issue.

[Kalzarius]

I'm not sure what's up with it, and haven't found a way to reproduce it other than just starting a new game, but I get the text "False," in the upper left hand corner underneath the timer.  It disappears after pressing F3, though.  Sometimes it will reappear, usually preventing me from seeing the number of ships in a raid that are on their way (which is what made me notice it in the first place).

Also, my engineers have a tendency to bounce around while trying (but failing) to accelerate a building queue.  I've also had the 'ship last seen' greyed-out icons last for upwards of 30 minutes (I've got one at 2400 seconds right now).