Prerelease 3.101 (Perf+, New Cheats, Sniper/Cutlass/Vamp buffs, scout star buff)

[SmileyFace]

-Scout Starships now fire counter-sniper flares, making them instantly something that should go with on many raids.

-Mobile Repair Stations can now be transported inside transports.

Ok, cool! Now that they have more military use, can scout starships be included with other military ships when click-dragging across the fleet? Currently I need to manually put them back into the fleet as they are excluded.

As for the MRS change, very nice

[superking]

I think it would be nice if MRS was selected with military ships too

[SmileyFace]

I think it would be nice if MRS was selected with military ships too

True that. I always move mine along with my fleet since they're fairly durable, the AI doesn't seem to target them, and they add tremendous longevity to my fleet if kept in tow. In short, this would save some extra clicking.

[Mánagarmr]

I always use the tactical grouping (CTRL+1 to 9) and include the ships that way. But yes, it would be easier if they were added as "military" and thus selected.

Also, can someone explain "Cold storage" to me? I seem to have missed this term.

[allmybase]

I just wanted to say I love the cheats and achievement names you guys come up with, always hilarious 

[keith.lamothe]

Also, can someone explain "Cold storage" to me? I seem to have missed this term.

It's not a gameplay thing, really, and the player doesn't have to think about it in-game.  For the curious, it is a special category where ships that are:

1) AI
2) Guarding something (and thus not moving around)
3) on a planet with no hostile uncloaked ships
4) on a planet with fewer than 30 (I think it's 30) hostile cloaked ships

Are basically omitted from all normal processing checks, and thus cost a very BARE minimum of cpu to support.  I may have forgotten some of the requirements.

Anyway at the start of the game, and anywhere in the galaxy you haven't been at all, most AI ships are cold storage, which is great for your framerate.

However, since they are handled differently in code, there have been some bugs, and when I change other stuff (like the planetary summary performance overhaul) sometimes I forget about it and thus the change is buggy.

[Mánagarmr]

Cheers! Informative as always!

[x4000]

I'm sorry to say I'm having a number of problems with 3.101:

- Destroying a Zenith Reserve now crashes the game.  This happens in my old existing game and in the new game I just started to test this.  Attached is the "reserve test" save which crashes when I use the fleet at Tojuhas to destroy the Zenith Reserve there.  It says "ArgumentOutOfRange" exception in the popup, but "out of memory" in the log (also attached).  edit: (FYI: my sysem is running Windows 7 64-bit, and has 4 GB RAM)

- The Zenith Mirror bonus unit I selected at start isn't showing up in either the one or two-homeworld starts I tried where I picked it (80 planet/grid map/seed 1531250000).  On the two-homeworld start, I did receive the other unit (eyebot).  On another 1-home start with MLRS, that ship showed up fine, so it appears a problem with the Mirror.  If you load the attached saves, you'll see it isn't there.  In the "missing mirror" save, you'll see only the basic units are available.

- Unit caps seem to be messed up for multiple-homeworld-start games.  Previously, starting with 2 homes gave you a double unit cap, and it appears it no longer does.  (I really hope this isn't a planned change!)  In any case, this seems to have mixed up my existing game, which got all confused about how many existing ships I had after I deleted a bunch.  Unfortunately I accidentally deleted this save.  

These have all been fixed for 3.102, which will be out shortly.  Sorry for the trouble there, I missed that these extra posts had even been made somehow (the forum stopped sending the notes to me for this thread).  The outofmemoryexception that you had in your error file was old, by the way -- see the date and game version.  The correct errors were appended further down.  That error, and the zenith mirror thing, were actually the same error.  And the unit caps were also sort of related.  Both were caused by something that I did that makes loading games faster (but which in this case also caused a couple of errors).

- Cleanup Drones and Remains Rebuilders nolonger seem to have the "R" or "C" underneath them in the summary bar on the right side of the planet screen.

I believe this is not new as of 3.101, but it is on our list to fix before the the next official release.  Keith has been reworking the planetary summary so that it uses less RAM, and I think this was an unintended side effect.  Thanks for the report, though!

[x4000]

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