Prerelease 3.100 (Transport balance, AI reinforcement nerf, AI home planet nerf)

[NickAragua]

The cheapness of invisible, invincible, undocumented wormhole guard posts: improved!

To be fair, they're not entirely invisible. When you EMP those suckers, they show up just fine. Still can't blow them up though.

[x4000]

The cheapness of invisible, invincible, undocumented wormhole guard posts: improved!

To be fair, they're not entirely invisible. When you EMP those suckers, they show up just fine. Still can't blow them up though.

They aren't invincible, either -- they can be destroyed really easily.  Just kill the command station, and they die.

[SmileyFace]

Thanks very much, it really means a lot to us. We try very hard to make sure and provide excellent support for AI War while still pursuing other projects, and it means a lot for that to be recognized!

It's easy to see the support. It's harder for it to sink in that a game studio cares about their games this much! I'm still... yeah, I haven't seen this before.

Reviews written on both sites. I'll check back sometime to see if the mods that be approve of them. There is only 1 review on co-optimus, I notice. That seems odd; Am I missing something?

Donations link appreciated and bookmarked. To be honest, I bought AI War + expansion on Steam, and... _{it was cheap}, so yeah... I'm looking to make financial amends *cough* This game has incredible depth, I love it, and I'd like to pay more for it.

[x4000]

Many thanks for the support and reviews!  We were the #1 PC game on Co-optimus for a really long time... something like 4-5 months, I believe.  But in all that time, no user reviews, just a lot of high star ratings that put us into that #1 slot.  Not sure why, particularly.  Most of our user reviews have been at MetaCritic, with a few at Direct2Drive, GamersGate, and other various user-review-style sites (GameFAQs, among others).  Thanks again!

[SmileyFace]

The cheapness of invisible, invincible, undocumented wormhole guard posts: improved!

To be fair, they're not entirely invisible. When you EMP those suckers, they show up just fine. Still can't blow them up though.

They aren't invincible, either -- they can be destroyed really easily.  Just kill the command station, and they die.

Oh haha! My response would be 

Followed by a as much of the system goes FRD.

[x4000]

[keith.lamothe]

What? You don't have an invincible turret ball waiting for them?

[SmileyFace]

What? You don't have an invincible turret ball waiting for them?

"Invincible turret ball?" More like an overrun turret flop of impending doom! I have been known not to build enough tractor turrets at the right times, hehe.

Crappy turret defence: It's an art, I tell you

So long as FRD defenders don't get patched an ability to form picket lines and demand extra pay/energy for all the extra work they do in my games, I'll be ok!

[keith.lamothe]

So long as FRD defenders don't get patched an ability to form picket lines and demand extra pay/energy for all the extra work they do in my games, I'll be ok!

New end-game AI plot: "Provoke Union Discontent"

[Draxis]

I think the reduced speed radius is far too small, in a lot of systems its impossible to manoeuvre around AI defences without being slowed to a crawl.  Some of the crispier units like raptors are very difficult to use.

[x4000]

Which slowing area are you running into?  the 16 or the 8?  I could always just bump it all out by another 20k on each of those three thresholds, unless even that seems like it would not be enough.  I had wondered about this, but wanted to see what people thought.

[FrostyThePyro]

so how does the slowing raidus interact with speed boosters? what i mean is currently if you have a +20 speed boost and a grav drill, you get a speed of 28.   (zenith time manipulator plus grav drill equals good times, grav drill + boost trains equal bad times).  Does the radius reduction do the same?

[x4000]

This overrides everything else, so the speed boosters have no effect on it at all.

[keith.lamothe]

I think this goes a long way to stopping some of the more exploitative behaviors... one thought on the tweaking of the ranges, is that the restriction should probably not include any area that player units could wind up in without explicit-player-orders, so the scout-retreat-radius should be equal to (or at least not far past) the first restriction radius; perhaps set both the retreat radius and the first restriction radius to 70k (-10k and +10k).

[x4000]

Could work well, yeah.