Prerelease/Expans 2.001I (Bugfixes, save RAM performance, mirror balance)

[x4000]

The latest prerelease is available at http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001I.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 2.000, so you have to already have 2.000 (or greater) installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.

F.A.Q. Answers:
1. If you have the base game, and install this, you will go into trial mode of the expansion.  Feel free to explore the expansion that way, but if you want to go back to full mode without buying the expansion, simply go into Settings, Expansions, and turn off the expansion.
2. All upcoming prereleases for the next few months (until the expansion fully releases) will have a mix of both expansion and non-expansion content.  If you just want the latest non-expansion content, see #1.
3. If you want to preorder the expansion (and get your full license key), see this page.  It's $9.99 USD (or equivalent), and requires a valid copy of the base game to play.
4. If you want to know all about the expansion in general, see that same page.
5. This prerelease version is compatible with any other version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
6. If you use this with your Steam copy of the game, however, you will be asked to enter your AI War CD key (which Steam provides, but normally you do not have to enter), and also the integration with Steamworks leaderboards and achievements may be disabled.  So you may want to make a separate install of the preorder version if you use Steam, at least for the moment.
7. PLEASE NOTE:  The new ships for the expansion are extremely preliminary at this stage.  They are fully functional when added, but they are not well balanced at all just yet.  The balance takes time, playtesting, and a fuller view of more of the ships.  So certain expansion ships are currently underpowered, while others are overpowered.  Your feedback on this is extremely valuable, as this is something we are adjusting at present based on community feedback as well as our own testing, but we don't expect to have things even close to perfectly tuned until sometime in December.  Our first priority is to get everything working and implemented, while honing the balance as much as possible, then to really heavily polish the balance once all the ships are in place.  Just FYI!
8. If you want to update an old savegame to the expansion, simply type "cmd:activate expansion 1" (without quotes).  This includes enabling the expansion ship classes, as well as enabling golems and other new capturables, although the population of those capturables is likely to be different from what it would have been if the expansion had been turned on from the start of the campaign given the same seed and other settings.  There is no way to disable the expansion for an existing game, however, so be sure not to save over your existing file if you want to go back to the non-expansion version of the game.


What's new since 2.001H:
(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)

-------------------

-Ships now prefer to autotarget enemy ships that do not reflect attacks (that are not mirrors).

-Ships now do a bit better autotargeting in general if they are chosing secondary targets.

-Several optimizations have been made to RAM usage when saving huge games.


Changes from prior prereleases.
------------------------------

-The Zenith Mirror ships now have a much stronger main attack, which is still not hugely powerful on its own, but which makes them certainly a mistake to completely ignore in battle (unlike previously, where they could only hurt enemy ships that actually chose to fire at them).

-Previously, there was a crash bug that could occur when a game was being upgraded to include the expansion.  Fixed.

-In the prior release, there was an error with the autotargeting that could cause paralyzers to not properly prioritize keeping as many ships paralyzed as possible.  Fixed.

[Guardia]

That fixed my only fear about the Mirror ships. It seemed totally reasonable to me that the AI would just choose not to shoot them in the previous state. Its more interesting now because you have to weigh damage over time from letting them live against something more akin to self imposed spike damage for killing them.

Really neat ship concept.

It is also a fun idea because you do something like build a fleet full of low priority targets compared to the mirrors so that you could maximize them getting shot. Bring some engineers along to refill their 'damage potential' and you're set. On that note it may be nice if mirrors gain some type of repair priority since they have a little more to gain from health than most ships. Just a thought it anycase.

[Fiskbit]

I'd be really interested in the mirror ships if they reflected shots at ships other than the ones that shot at them. I can see really cool tactical possibilities in situations where mirror ships are going up against, say, cruisers and bombers, with the cruiser missiles reflecting off the mirrors at the bombers.

[RCIX]

See this post for supporting the idea then!

[Fiskbit]

I'm not voting for a random attacker, though, but rather choosing the target that will maximize damage from that shot.

[x4000]

The CPU overhead, plus the gameplay complexity, of making mirrors reflect unevenly makes me against that.  That's basically a whole separate target selection loop of some sort per incoming hit, which could make them a real CPU hog.  Plus, I think it's just nonobvious how they will perform for players.  With this current sort of setup, they play individual ships off their own firepower, which I think is simpler to understand, and it's extremely CPU-friendly.

[Vaos]

Awesome changes! Time to try the Mirrors and Paralyzers some more.

[x4000]

That fixed my only fear about the Mirror ships. It seemed totally reasonable to me that the AI would just choose not to shoot them in the previous state. Its more interesting now because you have to weigh damage over time from letting them live against something more akin to self imposed spike damage for killing them.

Really neat ship concept.

It is also a fun idea because you do something like build a fleet full of low priority targets compared to the mirrors so that you could maximize them getting shot. Bring some engineers along to refill their 'damage potential' and you're set. On that note it may be nice if mirrors gain some type of repair priority since they have a little more to gain from health than most ships. Just a thought it anycase.

Glad you like the sound of it!  And, welcome to the forums by the way!  Mirrors probably would not benefit much from a higher repair priority, at least not during battle, because any ship that was hit within the last 3 seconds can't be repaired.  But, we'll see how it shakes out and if that seems needed as everyone is playing with them more.

Awesome changes! Time to try the Mirrors and Paralyzers some more.

Thanks!  They should both be a lot more interesting now.  Watching a big group of paralyzers "juggle" the paralyzation of enemy ships now is quite amusing and interesting.  I had actually coded that in yesterday, but had it checking engine health instead of paralysis, nonsensically, so it was working really strangely in the H release.  Always a bad idea to code in too much of a hurry...

[Revenantus]

That fixed my only fear about the Mirror ships. It seemed totally reasonable to me that the AI would just choose not to shoot them in the previous state. Its more interesting now because you have to weigh damage over time from letting them live against something more akin to self imposed spike damage for killing them.

Really neat ship concept.

It is also a fun idea because you do something like build a fleet full of low priority targets compared to the mirrors so that you could maximize them getting shot. Bring some engineers along to refill their 'damage potential' and you're set. On that note it may be nice if mirrors gain some type of repair priority since they have a little more to gain from health than most ships. Just a thought it anycase.

Glad you like the sound of it!  And, welcome to the forums by the way!  Mirrors probably would not benefit much from a higher repair priority, at least not during battle, because any ship that was hit within the last 3 seconds can't be repaired.  But, we'll see how it shakes out and if that seems needed as everyone is playing with them more.

Zenith mirrors are pretty terrifying. I just watched a fleet of 60 cruisers be instantly destroyed by the return of the initial volley.

This suggests that damage bonuses aren't being applied as expected. Cruiser Is have an attack of 1000 and a damage bonus of 0.5 against other cruisers. With the mirror's 40x damage boost, this means that the returned fire should inflict 20,000 points of damage. The cruiser is however killed instantly, suggesting that the mirrors default bonus of 1 is used, inflicting 40k damage.

[Revenantus]

UnitRelative.dat for 2.001I attached.

Seems that mirrors are fairly powerful - http://arcengames.com/communitywiki/index.php?title=Zenith_RSC

[x4000]

That fixed my only fear about the Mirror ships. It seemed totally reasonable to me that the AI would just choose not to shoot them in the previous state. Its more interesting now because you have to weigh damage over time from letting them live against something more akin to self imposed spike damage for killing them.

Really neat ship concept.

It is also a fun idea because you do something like build a fleet full of low priority targets compared to the mirrors so that you could maximize them getting shot. Bring some engineers along to refill their 'damage potential' and you're set. On that note it may be nice if mirrors gain some type of repair priority since they have a little more to gain from health than most ships. Just a thought it anycase.

Glad you like the sound of it!  And, welcome to the forums by the way!  Mirrors probably would not benefit much from a higher repair priority, at least not during battle, because any ship that was hit within the last 3 seconds can't be repaired.  But, we'll see how it shakes out and if that seems needed as everyone is playing with them more.

Zenith mirrors are pretty terrifying. I just watched a fleet of 60 cruisers be instantly destroyed by the return of the initial volley.

This suggests that damage bonuses aren't being applied as expected. Cruiser Is have an attack of 1000 and a damage bonus of 0.5 against other cruisers. With the mirror's 40x damage boost, this means that the returned fire should inflict 20,000 points of damage. The cruiser is however killed instantly, suggesting that the mirrors default bonus of 1 is used, inflicting 40k damage.

This is actually correct -- the Mirrors do not have any penalty against cruisers, so neither do their reflected shots.  Whatever the incoming damage is to the mirror, it reflects that back outwards with no penalties or chance of missing.  Their stats may need to be adjusted some, but the general formula is something I'm happy with.

[x4000]

UnitRelative.dat for 2.001I attached.

Seems that mirrors are fairly powerful - http://arcengames.com/communitywiki/index.php?title=Zenith_RSC

Thanks for that!  I'll include that with J, so that we'll have some in-game stats for the expansion ships as of I, at the very least.  J will be out sometime tomorrow at this point; it includes four new ship classes, and additionally has a hugely, enormously revamped target selection algorithm for the main simulation thread.  Performance seems to be about twice what it previously was, 4x in a few cases, during big battles in particular.  Also fixes some bugs related to targeting (countersniper issues, tractor beam delay issues, and prioritizing of several things in general), as well as much quicker target-changing for ships when they switch targets.  Oh, and the code is much more brief and easier to maintain, too.

Now, how many bugs is that introducing?  We shall see.  But with all the new attack types (area of effect, beam weapons, boosted shields, anti-shield weapons, etc), I needed to do a pretty heavy revamp.  The results seem quite worth it!

Anyway, so look for more that sometime tomorrow!

[Revenantus]

UnitRelative.dat for 2.001I attached.

Seems that mirrors are fairly powerful - http://arcengames.com/communitywiki/index.php?title=Zenith_RSC

Thanks for that!  I'll include that with J, so that we'll have some in-game stats for the expansion ships as of I, at the very least.  J will be out sometime tomorrow at this point; it includes four new ship classes, and additionally has a hugely, enormously revamped target selection algorithm for the main simulation thread.  Performance seems to be about twice what it previously was, 4x in a few cases, during big battles in particular.  Also fixes some bugs related to targeting (countersniper issues, tractor beam delay issues, and prioritizing of several things in general), as well as much quicker target-changing for ships when they switch targets.  Oh, and the code is much more brief and easier to maintain, too.

Now, how many bugs is that introducing?  We shall see.  But with all the new attack types (area of effect, beam weapons, boosted shields, anti-shield weapons, etc), I needed to do a pretty heavy revamp.  The results seem quite worth it!

Anyway, so look for more that sometime tomorrow!

Sounds great, looking forward to it. I'll be sure to run the simulation for the new ship classes.

These simulations are going to get really painful as the expansion release approaches. If you add your planned 80-100 ships, I estimate that the simulation is going to take approximately 119-156% longer to complete as compared to 2.0. 

[x4000]

Yep, that is definitely true about the simulation speed -- of course, hopefully these performance improvements will also help with the simulation run time.  We'll actually be at more like 130 new ships in all, as far as the simulation is concerned.  But I've got an idea for how to speed that up with some ship types in particular.

But in general, yes, the simulation time is going to grow linearly or worse with each expansion.  Hopefully computing power for our development workstations will also increase substantially well enough.  This is also just the sort of job I could potentially switch to being a multithreaded task instead of its current single-threaded nature.  That will be quite a job, but if it becomes needed I could potentially tackle that with the next expansion or something.

For anyone else reading along here, we're talking about a simulation that has nothing to do with actual gameplay, by the way -- so no worries there.  Actual in-game performance is no different in the expansion versus the base game.

[Kjara]

You could cache the simulation results as well(if fighters and cruisers haven't changed, no need to rerun them).