There was another crash bug, so here's another release:
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.
