Author Topic: Prerelease 3.178 (Neinzul Cluster/Nest/Bomber/Viral, New Ion Cans, Starships+)  (Read 16535 times)

Offline Ozymandiaz

  • Hero Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 813
  • King of kings

PS
Are the starship HP increases a pointer to some kind of XP mechanics for starships?

I find it unlikely. I definitely hope not at least. ships gaining XP in AI war would be, imo, silly. Not the right flavour, I think :)

Edit: I started a new game, less Ion Cannons now :)
We are the architects of our own existence

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
just looking at the changelog, bombers etc now have a bonus against ion cannons- how about mass drivers? its a pretty popular cheese tactic for players to use them as damage spounges atm

Actually, those are considered to be of type "ion cannon," so the bonus does apply against them as well as the others.

Edit: I started a new game, less Ion Cannons now :)

Excellent!
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Epsilon Plus

  • Newbie Mark III
  • *
  • Posts: 47
Could this at least pave the way for some non-AI "big guns" that could be purchasable from the Trader? Maybe something that doesn't auto-kill like an Ion Cannon, but a fast-firing, relatively high damage projectile...
Well, there's the Heavy Beam Cannon Mk IV that you can get via knowledge; it's insta-fire with a fairly long range that does a total of 2,000,000 damage per firing, albeit split over 40 beams in a fan.

Ah, I forgot that they get exponentially nastier the higher you go. And then there's Fortresses and, well, kinda jumped to conclusions. Silly me.

Quote
Quote
The very last post of the 3.177 thread also pointed out that somehow AI ships are ending up way outside of the gravity well
Yea, some of them get waaay-the-waaaaaay out there. That was fixed in this release:
Quote
* Fixed a bug from the last couple of prereleases that could cause odd AI behavior such as its ships shooting off into the ether. It was a funny and unintended occasional side-effect of one of the recent performance improvements.
[/quote]

Forgot I started this game in 3.177... at least, I think I did.

Quote
Quote
Oh god I broke something. Accidentally made a group of 3000+, then tried to de-group. It's stuck at "waiting for players" now.
You know, yesterday I was looking through the game command creating code for various input events, and noticed that a number of the rarer cases (like control group assignment) were still using the normal string.concat method of building the comma-delimited list of ship object numbers rather than the StringBuilder.Append method.  I thought "ah, they won't do those very often, and shouldn't hit any limits".  Why do I still think things like that?  Anyway, thanks for letting me know, I can put the preventative measures in place.

Good to hear! I did find it strange to be getting an Out of Memory error, given that I have 3.5 gigs of it for Windows to use and quite a bit of virtual memory set aside...

Offline keith.lamothe

  • Arcen Games Staff
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 19,505
Good to hear! I did find it strange to be getting an Out of Memory error, given that I have 3.5 gigs of it for Windows to use and quite a bit of virtual memory set aside...
From the perspective of a single 32-bit application it doesn't really matter if you have 3 GB or 30 GB (ram + virtual), as in reality it tends to crash if it gets much higher than 1.4GB (varies, can get close to 2.0GB).  The advantage for them from the extra ram is that it's less likely to have any frequently-used piece put into virtual memory (which tends to kill performance).
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Good to hear! I did find it strange to be getting an Out of Memory error, given that I have 3.5 gigs of it for Windows to use and quite a bit of virtual memory set aside...
From the perspective of a single 32-bit application it doesn't really matter if you have 3 GB or 30 GB (ram + virtual), as in reality it tends to crash if it gets much higher than 1.4GB (varies, can get close to 2.0GB).  The advantage for them from the extra ram is that it's less likely to have any frequently-used piece put into virtual memory (which tends to kill performance).

Also of note when we switch AI War to Unity (as part of AI War 4.0), is that it will be using large address spacing even though it will still be a 32bit program.  So the usable cap will rise to around 3.2 GB or something along those lines.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline keith.lamothe

  • Arcen Games Staff
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 19,505
Well, maybe, I'll believe it when I see it ;)
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Heh.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Buttons840

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 559
Quote from: keith.lamothe
Quote
Is there any possibility we might get a little notification pop up? Something along the lines of "Urist Mcplanet is under attack from a Hybrid Hive!"
Maybe a popup that says "SIEGE!" ;) Yea, I'm planning on adding warnings when they're actually on your planets, just been thinkering about a more scalable system of handling these kinds of "ongoing events the player has intel on and should be told about" because honestly there's going to be a fairly large number of them when all's said and done.

I proposed a watch post similar to a guard post, freely available and cheap.  You could build one on any of your planets and whenever there is a hostile on that planet it will place a warning message on your screen.

For extra points you could make them customizable so we could set a custom warning message for the to display, and a threshold required to set them off (IE, only warn when there are 10 or more enemies on this planet), and other such things.

(Edit by Keith: crap, sorry, I hit modify instead of reply... again. This was my reply:

I proposed a watch post similar to a guard post, freely available and cheap.  You could build one on any of your planets and whenever there is a hostile on that planet it will place a warning message on your screen.
That would be helpful for direct attacks in human territory, but I'm having to come up with an intel-aggregation scheme for stuff happening on hostile worlds where the player has scouting, too, and not always related to numbers or strength of enemies present.

)
« Last Edit: August 12, 2010, 11:47:30 pm by keith.lamothe »

Offline Dragon

  • Full Member Mark III
  • ***
  • Posts: 218
    * The health of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have all now been doubled.


Just wondering, but why do Spire starships have 2 million less health then Zenith Starships?

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
    * The health of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have all now been doubled.


Just wondering, but why do Spire starships have 2 million less health then Zenith Starships?

Because they're cruisers, and so tend to be striking more from range.  They're really entirely different constructions, and just got combined into one "Alien Starship" line, heh.
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Dragon

  • Full Member Mark III
  • ***
  • Posts: 218
Ahhhh, okay.  So they are different, rather then just an upgrade....  Or are they an upgrade also?  If so, is that why they cost a ton of knowledge?

Offline x4000

  • Chris McElligott Park, Arcen Founder and Lead Dev
  • Arcen Staff
  • Zenith Council Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 31,651
Yeah, it's two different ships, they have completely different attributes in general. The spire costs a bunch of knowledge because... well, because it's awesome. ;)
Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games?  Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

Offline Vinraith

  • Hero Member Mark II
  • *****
  • Posts: 806
wait a second, zenith starships are packing 14 million HP?

isnt that going to make deepstriking datacenters ludicrously easy?

as in, oh, a data center 5 jumps from one of my planets. no mass drivers along the route. just sent two zenith starships there and back. odds of losing 14 million hp on the journey = low

That does sound a wee bit OP.  :-\

Offline Ktoff

  • Full Member Mark III
  • ***
  • Posts: 247
Just a quick question:

I have a MkIII and Mk IV Ion cannon on a Mk II Planet. Is this intended but unlikely behaviour, or is that not supposed to happen... I have not explored tho whole galaxy, but it seems to me that i have Ion III and IV on Mk II planets, Ion I on Mk III and Ion II on Mk IV planets which seems a bit strange.

Offline superking

  • Hero Member Mark III
  • *****
  • Posts: 1,205
I am massively of the oppinion that the neinzul nest types should be buildable at the zenith trader for human use. I gotta have me a viral swarmer nest 8)

 

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk