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 3.183:(Cumulative release notes since 3.120 are here
http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Beta)
-------------------
* Astro trains in general (including turret trains), and also astro train stations, are now a lower priority for player ships to auto-attack. This will help somewhat with ships getting distracted by turret trains, but if ships are already latched on and firing on it, it may still be 5-10 seconds before they decide to shoot at something else, so this may not have as large an effect as some might prefer.
* Electric shuttle shot-stagger-time increased from 12 cycles to 22, but now tracked separately for mark I, II, III, and IV. There is now a significant advantage from stacking different mark levels of electric shuttles together, rather than the previous penalty due to lack of control over which marks fired when the stagger was over.
* Lightning turrets now use shot-stagger-time too, 12 cycles and tracked separately by mark I, II, and III (and entirely separately from electric shuttles).
* Logistics Command Stations now no longer generate a force field, but instead halve the speed of all enemy ships on the planet (in addition to their existing bonus of speeding up allied ships; can really help when trying to catch Neinzul Younglings). The highest mark version (III) now also prevents enemy units from teleporting while they are on the planet.
* Military command stations now have tachyon beams:
o Mark I has 10000 range.
o Mark II has 20000 range.
o Mark III covers the entire planet in tachyon beams, so all enemy units that can possibly be decloaked will be.
* Military command stations now provide a planet-wide munitions boost effect for all allied ships, mark I/II/III stations now provide 20%, 50% and 100% attack power boosts, respectively. Note that these still obey the normal munitions boosting rules for the maximum boost each ship type can receive (turrets and starships can only get about 20%, etc).
* Fixed crash bug that could occur when killing the command station on a planet with an AI Warp Counterattack Guard Post.
* The AI is now much less likely to send (normal) starships at the player in the first 40 minutes.
* Added proper description to AI Core Leech Guard Post.
* Added proper lightning-ball shot type to AI Core Electric Guard Post.
* Corrected typo in AI Core Zenith Fortress Guard Post definition, base range from 50000 to 5000 (meaning actual range from 53000 to 8000).
* Metal and Crystal Harvester Marks I/II/III now produce 12/14/16 instead of 12/13/14.
* Fixed bug in the remove-ship-cap cheat that would stop a fleet ship queue when it hit the cap that wasn't supposed to be there.
* Previously there was a bug that would overwrite the first buy-tab of a multi-tab constructor (like a starship constructor) with a pause button if it was still self-building, even though it already has a pause/play button on the top button row. Fixed to not have a pause button on the tab row.
* Fixed a bug in the galaxy view planet-mouse-over metal/crystal income display that would count the last non-paused metal/crystal rates of a paused manufactory in the total, leading to inaccuracies if there were manufactories on the planet that had been paused since the game was last loaded.
* Context menu auto-scout and auto-gather-knowledge options now auto-close the menu and play a sound, rather than giving no direct feedback.
* Neinzul Bomber (and Preservation Bomber) attack power cut by 50%.
* Neinzul Preservation Warden rate-of-building-younglings cut by 50%.
* Fixed bug where an exo-galaxy wormhole was not providing "golem supply" if it happened to be on a nuked planet. It will now provide supply regardless of how much everything else is glowing.
* Fixed bug where planetary summary sidebar item mouseover was displaying a controlling player name and color despite the fact that it's generally impossible for this to be a truthful representation since units from multiple players can be combined into one planetary summary sidebar item.
* Added protective mechanism to prevent a crash when closing the game after disconnecting the original sound output device.
* Fixed bug where a ship with a target-to-kill would not clear that target if all remaining enemy ships on the planet are killed at the same time as that target and no other targets are available. This would lead to an FRD ship converging on the target's last location and staying there until other enemies come along.
* Fixed bug that was allowing a hive golem to keep producing wasps in low-power mode. It can still produce wasps outside supply, this is intentional.
* Building a mark III science lab on an AI planet now attracts more hostile attention from the AI.
* Fixed bug in auto-assist logic where repairers were not properly prioritizing lower-health-percent ships.
* Fixed bug where AI engineers repaired broken golems (they couldn't activate them afterwards, and the golem would revert to original broken health if captured by the humans, so no big deal before).
* Fixed bug where paralyzed ships could be put into cold storage, which would stop their de-paralyze countdown.
* Nanoswarms can no longer target ships that are immune to reclamation.
* Nanoswarm max-targets-affected-by-explosion from 4/7/10/13/16 to 2/4/6/8/10.
* Nanoswarm metal/crystal cost from 15/25/50/75/100 to 10/20/30/40/50.
* Fixed a bug where the far-zoom icon for Neinzul Youngling Cockroaches were not showing up correctly.
* Fixed a bug where the spent metal/crystal in the Economy Stats tab was often being over-reported. This won't fix existing savegames, but should prevent the problem in new ones.
* The knowledge cost of Neinzul Regeneration Chambers has been dropped from 3000 to 1000. Previously it was higher because the Chambers were expected to work a bit differently, but as they have turned out they needed their cost to be reduced.
* The AI will no longer use the following ships as homogenous waves:
o Forcefield Bearers
o Munitions Boosters
o Zenith Autobombs
o Shield Boosters
o Youngling Nanoswarms
* The accuracy of drawing angled lines has been improved fairly substantially.
* The way that links between planets are drawn in the galaxy map has been altered substantially:
o Previously, supply was shown via a darker thicker line underneath the main link lines. That has been removed, and now the main lines normally draw a bit thinner, and then become thicker to denote supply.
o The relationship between the two linked planets are now shown via the color of the line.
+ Gray lines now denote unknown relationship, or a link between two neutral planets.
+ Yellow lines now denote links between friendly and neutral planets.
+ Green lines now denote links between friendly planets.
+ Orange lines now denote links between friendly and enemy planets.
+ Red lines now denote links between enemy planets or enemy and neutral planets.
* Fixed some longstanding ants-in-the-pants issues with AI melee and autobomb units (frequent switching between destinations).
* Fixed bug where tractoring an AI Ship and then killing it while there was an AI regenerator (like a regen train) on the planet would cause it to properly respawn on an adjacent planet but then be snapped back to the original planet due to tractor (and often way out of range at that point). Now will properly break the tractor first.
* Updated Transport description.
* Transports are now always subject to the gradual-unload rule when on a hostile planet (they can still bulk-unload on a friendly planet or a neutral planet that is in-supply).
* Transports can no longer be scrapped on a hostile planet (they can still be scrapped on a friendly or neutral planet).
* MkII Transports gradual unload rate increased from 10/second to 20/second (mkI is still 10/second).
* Fixed bug where Alarm Posts would not trigger when being killed, instead of having a 50% chance to trigger as they should.
* Updated Golemite AI Type description to reflect lack of AI penalty from repaired golems.
* Cloaker starships now prefer to cloak ships with transport capacity or buy menus over other ships. However, this preference will not let it "kick out" an ship already chosen by the starship for cloaking in order to "make room" for a transport (or whatever) that has just come into range.
* Human-controlled attrition emitters now do not damage AI-held units that cause AI progress on death (like distribution nodes and zenith reserves).
* Hybrid base "class" distribution changed from 47.5% Attacker / 47.5% Defender / 5% Builder to 40% Attacker / 30% Defender / 30% Builder. This should moderately reduce their early-game threat and increase their later-game threat.
* Teleport Raider and Teleport Battlestation damage to Hybrid Facilities reduced to 20% and 40% of previous, respectively, to make it a bit harder to teleport through enemy territory and clean out all the Hybrid infrastructure.
* Reduced overall attack power of Hybrid machine gun and laser cannon modules by roughly 20%, and significantly reduced bonuses against various ship types (particularly fighters).
* Fixed bug that would make the estimated build time be wrong for a self-building unit that was being assisted by higher-than-mark-I engineers, due to the multipliers on those higher mark assistants.
* Fixed a crash bug related to neinzul regeneration chambers unloading a repaired neinzul ship.
Updates in 3.185 * Fixed bug where some minor faction units (like the mining golem) were getting orders from the AI thread that conflicted with their proper behavior. The AI thread now no longer issues orders for those units.
* Some players were running into cases where tractor beams were not acting for a number of seconds after enemies exited a wormhole due to throttling, so moved tractor-beam target-checking throttle into central throttle logic, made more intelligent about how much load the operations actually involve.
* Now when a constructor is unable to complete the item at the front of its build queue due to insufficient energy, any engineers assisting it will be properly flagged as failing to assist. Assuming they were not directly ordered to assist that constructor, they will shortly start looking for other building projects they can assist (like, hopefully, a new energy reactor).
* Fixed crash bug from 3.184 that would happen when a unit holding more than one unit in a tractor beam then died.
* Fixed bug in 3.184 that was setting all the "counter shooter radius" of all tractor beams, forcefields, gravitational turrets, and cloaking boosters to 0. In some cases these abilities were still working (albeit more slowly) but in others like the grav turrets they were not working at all. This was also preventing these units from drawing their proper area during placement, etc.
Updates in 3.186 * Previously when placing a construction template with cloaked enemy ships obstructing one of the placements, that placement would be randomly bounced away to some place that did fit. It will now simply not build that placement.
* Tugs are now much less likely to stop hauling a ship just inside MRS repair range (which can be quite a ways off), and instead get closer to the MRS before releasing the towed ship in order to make the repairees easier to defend.
* "Mines" have now become "minefields." The following changes now apply to all mines, including regular, EMP, and Area mines.
o The max health of mines is now 8x higher, as is their regen rate.
o The metal and crystal costs of mines are now 6x higher.
o The ship caps on mines are now 4x lower.
o Minefields are now 16x larger than the older mines used to be (256x256 instead of 64x64).
o The damage dealt by an individual minefield is now 3x what it was before, and is now shown in the tooltip.
o Minefields now take 3x longer to build.
* These changes will affect existing savegames, but human players may still have a large number of mines in play that will suddenly look all overlapped and be way above the ship cap for the player. Once these mines are exploded, they won't rebuild if the player would be over ship cap. It's a bit of an advantage to mine-loving players who upgrade older savegames; the mines can simply be scrapped to counteract this.
* Individual ships are now only able to hit any minefield once per second. So, for example, if Ship A hits minefield 1, and if it survives that hit, it then has 1 second of immunity to pass by minefields 1, 2, 3, etc. If it moves so slowly that it is still touching minefield 1 after a second has passed (and minefield 1 and Ship A are both still alive), then Ship A will hit minefield 1 again. This would also happen if a ship was tractored or paralyzed on top of a minefield -- it would keep getting hit once per second until either the minefield or the ship was exhausted.
o This is PER SHIP only. So if Ship A hits minefield 1 and gains immunity, that doesn't matter for Ships B or C, which could also hit minefield 1 on that exact same instant.
o This also does not apply to area effects. So if Ship A hits minefield 1, and minefield one does area damage or paralysis to Ships B, C, and D, then B, C, and D still can hit minefield 1 or other minefields. In fact, Ship B could collide with minefield one, damaging itself and doing area damage to Ships A, C, and D.
* Mines are no longer all-or-nothing damage, now that they are minefields. If their damage would overkill the ship that hits them, they now only deal the actual damage that would kill the triggering ship. This in turn reduces the amount of damage taken by the minefield itself, and if there is an area damage effect, it also reduces how much area damage is taken by the other nearby enemy ships.
* Fixed an occasional crash bug in 3.185 relating to waves being generated.
* On difficulty 5 and up, the AI will now build nests of sniper turrets every so often (like the spider turret nests, except larger).
o The random occasional sniper turrets are still seeded as normal, because these have some desirable effects such as "pinging" larger ships every so often in order to prevent their healing, as well as knocking off tachyon-revealed scouts, and similar.
o These will be seeded into existing savegames.
* On difficulty 7 and up, the AI will now build occasional gravitational turrets of varying marks. These will be seeded into existing savegames.
* Only the Mark V AI guard posts are now immune to snipers, EMPs, nuclear explosions, and being insta-killed. Previously, it was Mark IV and up.
* Wormhole guard posts now have 20 million health instead of 2 billion, which means that they can be killed after being stunned via an EMP, but they take a lot of firepower to do so.
* Special Forces Guard Posts now have 4 million health instead of 400k. Their attack range has been reduced from 1500 to 1000.
