Prerelease 3.111 (Border aggression changes, science labs+, bugfixes)

[RogueThunder]

Updates in 3.109:

-Ships inside transports were disappearing when loading savegames in the last two versions.  Fixed.

Used some cheap Chinese cpus for the fetching function rather than a good name brand eh xD?
(Edit: For clerity, this is based on the fan-theory that transports have infinite space, it is simply a system tracking limit within that space that limits them to 200 ships xD)

Ahem... Jokes aside.
Too bad to see ARS having interesting uses go... Oh well.
Although its a patch old, did ZPG really need to produce 1/3 less energy? Building one from the zenith trader was ALREADY a rare thing to be worth doing... now?...

Also. HOLY YAY! Autobombs game, I'm coming back baby!

[superking]

I totally agree with the MK2 science lab changes, ace 

I dont remember if there is a thread, but anti-starship arachnids could use some love imo... they rarely prove effective against moving groups of starships and the player fabricated ones dont come in sufficent numbers to really threaten starship groups.
The look suitably terrifiying but just have a single short range irregular attack.. how about making them a melee type, with engine damage 

[FrostyThePyro]

actualy aracnids have fairly decent range, I think its the fire rate that kills them, as is, a fighter outperforms them in starship killing duty.

[Doddler]

I'm running into some issues with border aggression in my game.  The keyword here is 'border'.  I'm playing against difficulty 8 AI's, a Vicious Raider and Sledge Hammer.  These aren't very defensive AI's... in fact, I think they're some of the least defensive AI's, which is why I chose them.  

I'm at about 3 hours in, 500 AI progress.  I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but the AI is reinforcing their core worlds as if they were on alert... which is strange, because they aren't.  The AI homeworlds and their 3-4 or so adjacent core worlds all have 3000+ ships on them... which is pretty stupid in and of itself.  They aren't reinforcing any systems other than their homeworlds.  What's causing me issues is that now (other than the fact that the endgame is going to be absolutely brutal) is that now that the AI has hit the cap, border aggression is kicking in and the AI is throwing 50-200 core ships at me every couple minutes.

This is more of an issue of why the AI feels the need to have 3000 ships on like 8 un-alerted core systems than it is with border aggression, because I'm not sure it was designed to have core ship waves at 3 hours in the game!  Maybe that stupid devourer is to blame?

[x4000]

Doddler, I would suspect that it might be the devourer golem, yes.  Or, if all of the on-alert plants are at their capacity based on your having neutered them all or them being at a smaller ship cap in general, then the AI is may be choosing to reinforce their home planets with a slightly higher priority than other planets around.  I'd have to see a savegame to really know what is causing that specifically here, but whatever it is isn't new based on border aggression (that's a whole other, and very isolated, pocket of code).  In pre-border-aggression terms, what you would have seen was just a very highly stocked home planet for some reason.  Might be related to a devourer, a dyson sphere camped out at an inopportune location, or something else along those lines, would be my best guess -- but short of a save, I'd be hard-pressed to say for sure.

[Doddler]

I just don't see why he would be reinforcing his homeworld, it's not on alert or anything right now.  Here's a save I was going to use to report a different issue (Teleport Raiders after destroying a command station would sometimes become completely inert and not move).  It's at a point where the AI is sending core raiders at me.  All the on-alert worlds have no more than 400-500 ships, but the AI is constantly reinforcing his homeworld.  While I don't have sight of the homeworld in the save, a quick suiciding to reveal the map shows that the AI homeworld, Yed Posterior, has 3408 AI ships, and most of the core worlds have 1500-2500 ships as well.  It's worth mentioning that 700 of those are permamines, its interesting that mines count towards the border aggression counter!

[RCIX]

I hate to say it, but the Anti-Armor still suffers from what i call Swarmitis. What happens is that it's a swarm ship so you spam it, but they die like fleas when you send them into battle so they have little power. In my current game, I've built/lost 290 and they've killed a mere 90 (which is startlingly poor compared to my fleet ships. I could be using them wrong though...

[superking]

they have good speed, good damage and long range..

I assume they are meant to skirmish out of range indefinately while outputting damage

[@B0FH]

Just a little one, but the Tooltip for Science Lab 2's still states them as collecting research at half-rate

[Doddler]

I dunno, I think the new anti armors are absolutely amazing.  In my last game, where I have a 140% kill to loss ratio, my anti armors are pushing 400%.  They're like lower HP long range bombers that use missile ammo.  They devastate frigates, and other heavy defenses in the same way bombers do but from a long range.  Not only do they perform similarly to bombers, but they're also way cheaper with a higher ship cap.  They have weaknesses, their HP is low which makes them fairly ineffective in raiding situations when lightning is involved, and certain kinds of high value targets that bombers are strong against are immune to missile ammo.  Sometimes the AI will toss in anti missile turrets which really hurts a anti-armor heavy fleet.  You should watch them take out mirrors though, damn it's nice.  They've quickly become my new favorite ship.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I have a special place in my heart for anti-armors from the tutorial, it's been a pity in the past when they really haven't been so great... speaking of, the buffs should make the tutorial quite a bit easier

[x4000]

Regarding anti-armors as they currently stand -- RCIX's comments in particular -- I would point out that the power of them is going to vary by situation, as others have basically noted.  If the opposing ship mix is just really not in their favor, they'll do poorly.  If they run up against too many area-of-effect weapons in particular, they'll do poorly based on having low health.  I think that's an interesting and rather unique role for them, and why I went with them being so cheap on top of having such low health -- that way they can be awesome in some situations, and at least cheaply replaced in others.

[Draxis]

Nasty bug - We EMP'ed a system with a broken golem in, and it came online under the AI control :S

[keith.lamothe]

Whoa.  I guess the broken ones shouldn't absorb EMPs...

On the other hand, if you've got a working golem under your control and EMP the system... does it insta-heal it?

[x4000]

That's actually pretty cool, come to think of it.  Perhaps we should leave that as-is.