The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.060 or greater of the game. Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab. If you don't yet have 3.060 or greater, you can download 3.060
here. This prerelease version is compatible with any vendor's version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
Note: If you have bug reports related to this release,
please log them in the
bug reports subforum with one bug per topic. It makes things infinitely easier for us. Thanks!
Looking for a Patch That Can Be Manually-Installed?Because of the time involved in creating multiple versions of each patch, we only create manually-installable patches for official versions of the game, not each beta prerelease. But you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch! Please note that current betas can only be successfully applied to version
3.060 of the game or later (if you later wish to revert to the official version for any reason, you can download the full raw files from the above link to do so).
To create your own manual beta patch, simply download these two files:
1.
Current Beta Director Xml File.
2.
Current Beta Zip File.
If you try to open that zip file, it will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file. Finally, create a new zip file on your computer, and put both the director and the fake-zip-file inside it. Call your outer zip file something that starts with Beta and ends with an extension of .zip. Beta.zip will work just fine, or you can name it after the specific version number if you want to hang onto it. And that's it! Now you have your very own manually-installable package of the AI War beta version of your choice, which you can install by simply selecting via your Updates window in the game. Please note that "Beta" in the filename is case-sensitive.
What's new since 3.153:(Cumulative release notes since 3.120 are here
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Beta)
-------------------
* Fixed an overflow error in the adjusted score calculations which sometimes was resulting in players with invalid reported scores.
o Note: in the process, this also makes some subtle changes to how adjusted scores are calculated, but the effects should be minor overall.
* Fixed an obscure crash bug relating to ship movement.
* In the last version, Mark II engineers were still using 3000 energy instead of 500. Fixed.
* In the last version, any time a shot hit its destination it was causing an explosion sound effect. Fixed.
* A significant new early-out performance improvement has been made for range checks. Especially when there are a lot of ships that are out of range of a battle on a planet (such as those at other guard posts), this now has a notable boost to performance.
* In the last version, munitions boosters and shield boosters were a couple of orders of magnitude too strong. Fixed.
* Scouts and Cloaker Starships now have a much-increased cloaking booster range. This does not affect how many other ships these units can boost, however, as there was already a finite cap on that.
* Cloaker Starships also now provide both counter-sniper and counter-dark-matter protection, in addition to their cloaking duties.
* The energy use of Zenith Electric Bombers has been reduced from 10k to 1k (except for the Core variant, which is now 2k).
* Remains Rebuilders and Cleanup Drones now use 25 energy each instead of 0. Mobile Builders now use 100 instead of 0.
* Attrition Emitters can no longer be paused, and now only use 10k energy instead of 18k.
Updates in 3.155: * Fixed a very longstanding subtle bug (from the 2.0 days) with net energy fluctuating when ships are passing through wormholes. This was extremely tough to track down, and in the end we completely rewrote the net energy handling to fix it.
* Ships in transports now still cost the normal energy they would cost outside the transport.
o Previously, transports could be used to too great of effect in terms of minimizing energy needs simply by loading ships into them.
* When the energy count is being shown for ships (either by pressing Alt+A, or via the net energy being low for you), transports now show their own energy plus that of all the ships inside themselves.