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 3.178:(Cumulative release notes since 3.120 are here
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Beta)
-------------------
* EMP Warheads and Tachyon Warheads all now do a small, localized amount of area damage when they explode, in the manner of a lightning warhead but with a much smaller area of effect and level of damage. This gives an added bonus to the use of these warheads, just to sweeten the deal a bit.
* Tachyon Warheads now have a ship cap of 2 per player rather than 4 per player.
* New Mark II and Mark III Tachyon Warheads have been added in addition to the existing Mark I Tachyons. The new higher marks cost more AI Progress (and more metal and crystal), but have far more health (better for deep strikes), do more localized damage, and cause enemy ships to be decloaked for much longer.
* New Mark I and Mark II Armored Warheads have been added in addition to the existing one, which was renamed to Mark III. The new lower marks have the same level or armoredness, but cost a lot less to build, cost only 10 or 15 AI Progress to use respectively instead of 20, but do less damage to a smaller area. When you can't get lightning warheads to a target that you're unable to kill any other way, these guys are the way to go, but they're definitely very costly and not to be used casually. The new lower marks at least provide some more flexibility when going after smaller groups of ships, or lower-health ships.
* The recently-added mark III, IV, and V ion cannons can now be captured by players on planet ownership change. However, they increase the size of incoming enemy waves to that planet by x4, x6, and x10, respectively. These are definitely not something to capture on border planets without first killing all the adjacent warp gates!
o The recently-added mark III, IV, and V ion cannons can also now be purchased from the Zenith Trader, but they are ridiculously expensive in metal and crystal.
* Previously, no ships had any attack bonuses against ion cannons. Now bombers and similar (anything with bonuses against "heavy defense" structures) has 1/3 their normal "heavy defense" bonus against ion cannons. This makes especially the higher-level ion cannons not quite so fearsome in the hands of the AI, as well as not so permanent-bottlenecking in the hands of the players.
* Added Neinzul Silo (I-V) structures. When a Silo's planet is on alert, it periodically generates minor-faction-controlled warheads that will target human planets and cost no AIP when used (since the human is not using them).
* Added Neinzul Rocketry Corps minor faction that initially seeds Neinzul Silos on roughly 8% of the AI planets on the map (fairly distant from any human homeworld, with the mark level of the planet on which they are placed. On higher difficulties the silos can be of higher level (indeed, IV and V only ever show up on diff 8+).
* Neinzul Viral Cluster attack power reduced by about 84%.
* Neinzul Viral Swarmer:
o Attack power reduced by 80%.
o Replication now requires 5 times attack power in damage, rather than 3x.
o Health reduced by 50% (self-decay takes same amount of time).
* Converted some remaining string.concat list-building blocks to StringBuilder.Append, to prevent some (non-impossible) cases that would cause out-of-memory crashes.
* Previously teleporting units (like engineers) were completely immune to speed boosting, even if their teleportation was shut down by a grav drill or a game option. They are now no longer "officially" immune to speed boosting, but act as such unless their teleportation is somehow shut down.
* Previously there was a bug that would cause units in cold storage not to be affected by nuclear explosions. Fixed.
* The metal and crystal cost of nuclear warheads has been increased from 50k each to 75k each.
* Nuclear warhead mark II has been added (costs 750k metal and crystal):
o Causes a multi-planet nuclear explosion when destroyed by enemy forces or by scrapping. Destroys all resources and most ships on the planet on which it is set off and all adjacent planets. Does not affect core ships or starships. Also causes supply to be permanently lost for all teams at that planet, meaning you then cannot use science labs, docks, etc.
o Be VERY careful not to detonate it on OR adjacent to a planet belonging to your team! AI Progress jumps upward by 500 every time a nuclear warhead is detonated, so this is something to be done with extreme care.
* Nuclear warhead mark III (doomsday device) has been added (costs 7.5 million metal and crystal):
o When this warhead is destroyed by enemy forces or by scrapping... the effect is nothing short of a galaxy-wide catastrophe that destroys all resources and most ships on EVERY planet. It still does not affect core ships or starships, but it causes supply to be lost for all teams on all planets.
o You can still win the war after using a weapon of this magnitude, but be wary of the terrible cost! There is not much of a galaxy left to inhabit after an event such as this, and the AI Progress will jump upward by 5000. This chilling piece of hardware truly belongs amongst the weapons we wish we could disinvent.
* Previously, transport ships mistakenly had an infinite ship cap when they were supposed to be limited to a ship cap of 60 per player. Fixed.
* Transport Ships Mark II have been added:
o These cost far more energy to operate, but they slowly heal all ships contained within themselves; Neinzul Younglings are healed faster.
* Fixed a bug from 3.178 that was preventing Hybrid Hives from spawning... at all.
* Mark II and III metal and crystal harvesters have been added as four new unlockable technologies.
o The mark II technologies cost 2000 knowledge each, and the mark III technologies cost 2500 each. Combined, therefore, they equal the cost of unlocking mark II and mark III economic command stations, respectively. However, these can be unlocked piecemeal, or in addition to the economic command stations, which adds a lot of flexibility.
o The gather rate of the mark I harvesters is 12 (same as before), and the new mark II gather rate is 13, and new mark III gather rate is 14. That might not sound like a big improvement, but when you have a lot of harvesters throughout the galaxy that can add up to a serious degree. When you don't have many harvesters, however, that's not all that worthwhile.
o There is, however, a second benefit to these new harvesters: they cost the same to build as the regular harvesters, but they build significantly faster (2x as fast at mark II, 4x as fast at mark III). On highly-contested planets where harvesters are frequently getting killed, this makes these an attractive alternative to harvester exo-force-fields.
o Command stations will automatically build the highest tier of harvester available, which is always desirable since the higher tiers of harvester don't cost any more than the lower-tier ones (aside from the knowledge cost to unlock them in the first place).
+ However, please note that the existing harvesters will NOT automatically be upgraded, as the destruction and reconstruction of them could tank your economy at a bad time. To upgrade all your harvesters, simply go to each planet, click the select all the harvesters from the planetary summary, and delete the old ones. New, higher-mark ones will appear in their place.
o Please keep on the lookout for any odd behavior related to the new harvesters, as these were rather intensive to add to the game in a code sense. The chance of subtle bugs with these is pretty high, because a lot of various ships interact with them in a lot of various ways.
