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 3.163:(Cumulative release notes since 3.120 are here
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Beta)
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* Flak turret shots now can only damage a finite number of ships (currently 5, 6, and 7 per shot for mk I, II, and III respectively), to prevent it from destroying arbitrarily large numbers of ships (basically it's a fragmentation bomb, not an energized-field-of-kill-all). Specifically, the actual targeted ship is always struck, and then the game randomly picks the secondary targets from eligible targets within the explosion radius, this is intentionally not using any kind of autotargeting logic to prioritize the secondary targets because, again, it's a frag bomb.
o To compensate, Flak turret attack power increased from 300, 600, and 900 to 3000, 6000, and 9000; also changed the attack penalty against heavy-ish fleet ships to make it much more possible to actually kill space tanks and the like with heavy sustained flak fire (though the tanks will still have the advantage, pound for pound, as they should). Other attack bonuses adjusted to make it so flaks in numbers should be fairly effective against all fleet ships, as that no longer means that they will be able to kill almost infinite numbers of them at once.
o Flak turret shot explosion radiuses for mk II and mk III increased (300 -> 350 and 300 -> 400).
o Flak shot travel speed from 1000 to 200 (doesn't affect their combat properties, really, just helps actually see something move).
* Changed normal wormhole exit behavior to automatically set destination to a point on a (filled) circle around the wormhole. Previously ships would sit directly on the wormhole and wait for a collision check; many versions ago this just meant the game slowed to a crawl while the collision checks ran, and in more recent versions the collision-checks-allowed-per-cycle throttle meant that ships just sat on the wormhole forever and got eaten by AOE. Now they should immediately fan out a bit and check for collisions when they stop.
* Fixed a number of bugs relating to the strong/weak simulation not being able to be run in the last few versions, and updated the simulation to include all the data for the recent new ship additions.
* The "Number of Simultaneous Shots" is no longer treated as a special ability for display purposes. Instead, when a ship has multiple simultaneous shots, there is now simply an "x2" (or whatever number) notation next to the main attack power.
o This makes it quicker to gauge the real attack power of a ship without having to dive into the abilities, and also takes up less visual space. The actual functionality it describes is unchanged.
* In the tooltips for ships, AI Progress increase/decrease conditions are now shown in highlighted yellow on the same line with resource production, to emphasize this more since AI Progress is essentially a very important resource.
* In the tooltips for ships, the immunities are now split out from the other normal abilities to make it so that they don't crowd out the rest of the abilities for things such as golems, etc. Now the immunities are shown in a slightly more concise notation, on a separate line, in a different color.
* The tooltips for multiple control nodes or space tugs are now shown much more concisely in the plantary summary hover lists, as was already the case with things such as fabricators.
* The text for the control nodes now wraps better.
* The health of booster trains and regenerator trains have both now been reduced 10x, to 20 million instead of 200 million. The regular astro trains still have 200 million health, while turret trains still have only around 10 million health.
o Turret Trains are now autotargeted by player ships like any other ships would be.
o The three types of Turret Trains have now had their attack increased by a linear 1000 points.
* Warheads, Fortresses, Golems, Starships, and Mark V ships now all no longer absorb EMPs, but now only are immune to them instead.
* Only a very few ships (a couple of Golems) had differing metal and crystal repair costs. These have been adjusted so that metal and crystal costs are always the same, and the tooltip is now more concise with simply specifying the repair rate as something that is always applying equally to metal and crystal.
* Hovering over the net energy display at the top of the screen now shows the positive and negative energy amounts that factor into that, for the local player and any teammates.
* Previously, "experimental" ships could not get into transports. Fixed.
* The ship costs (complete with icons and coloring, etc) are now always shown in the ship tooltips, rather than only in the buy menus. This makes it so that players don't have to go to the buy menus in order to make construction decisions.
o Additionally, this gets rid of the need to have energy use on the line with the ship caps, etc.
o And lastly, it now lets the repair cost move out of the abilities section and into the costs line.
* The lobby tooltips now show the costs for each of the starting ship classes (mark I only, but still).
* In the last prerelease, there was a bug with the starting ship icons in the lobby being displayed offcenter. Fixed.
* When ships take damaged from internal attrition (a negative regen rate, as with the cursed golem) that was previously tripping their "last damaged time" so that engineers could never repair them. Fixed so that now the "last damaged time" is not affected by this, which allows engineers to repair these sorts of ships.
o This now also applies to ships in attrition-emitter territory, which makes engineers a necessity in those zones, rather than pointless.
* The repair cost of the cursed golem was previously set abnormally low. Now that has been fixed to be the same as the broken cursed golem.
* Previously, when ships that were taking internal or external attrition hit zero from attrition, they would die. Now, instead the attrition will not take them below 1.
o Thus if an attrition-ed ship gets all the way down to 1, it's at death's door and can easily be killed by an enemy, but at the same time if no enemies are around, engineers can repair it back up to higher health. This removes some of the fiddly time-based aspects of things like the cursed golem if it's not on the front lines.
* Previously it was possible for a multiplayer savegame that was upgraded from an older version to a new version to cause a desync. Fixed.
o Even in the past, it should be noted that if the host saved immediately after the desync, and then reloaded that save, this issue would be bypassed. This fix simply removes the need to do that on savegames that are upgraded.
