Prerelease/Expans 2.001L (4 new ship class, major attack rewrite, performance+)

[x4000]

The latest prerelease is available at http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001L.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:
Note:  This prerelease is intended for both customers of the expansion AND customers of the base game only.  Please see below for details.
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 2.001I:
(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)

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

-On the technology unlock, "Zenith Starships" were still referred to as "Zinth." Fixed.

-The shield rating and health of advanced research stations have both been reduced to 1/4 their prior values.  This makes them far less invincible as targets to hit, and lets enemy ships target them more sensibly (it makes them a more interesting target for the AI to attack, and for the players to have to defend).

-Higher-level autocannons now get more of a clustering damage multiplier than the lower marks.

-The map population logic for capturables and AI special weapons has been revamped.  This both fixes some bugs that tended to make maps more generic than they should have been, and paves the way for a large influx of new special weapon types, which will individuall be more common in this expansion and the future.  The algorithm now supports randomizing the order in which they are added, and insuring that too many bad things or good things are not bunched on the same planet -- issues that were never a problem before, but would have become a problem over time with the old algorithm.

-Munitions boosting lines are now drawn much more faintly.

-New Ship Class (expansion only): Shield Booster.  Strong fighter in its own right, it also gives a 2x shielding bonus to nearby ships on your team.

-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Polarizer.  Fires straight through shields, and does higher damage to shields with more shielding.

-Enemy ships that are cloaked were previously invisible on the planetary summary sidebar.  Now they show up as a generic cloaking bubble, with a count of how many are present, though with no details on what types of cloaked ships there are.  This is similar to what players are able to see through the galaxy map intel summary.

-The internal logic for ship targeting and a number of other subsystems relating to combat and ship automatic interactions have been heavily revamped, leading to both better performance and better functionality/maintainability/extensibility.

-The free-roaming defender logic is now much improved for all ships, as is autotargeting in general.  The targeting intelligence of multi-shot ships is also particularly improved.

-Tractor Beams now have their own separate targeting cycle from weapon attacks and other similar, making them much more effective at quickly catching incoming ships.

-New Ship Class (expansion only): Beam Frigate.  Fires powerful high-range beam weapons that strike all enemy ships in a line.

-Attrition emitters now have to be explicitly targeted by player ships, like ion cannons, warp gates, etc.

-The blue force fields used by players are no longer damaged by shots being fired out from under them.  Instead, outgoing shots from under the force field are now reduced by 75% in power.

-New Ship Class (expansion only): Zenith Chameleon.  Midrange bomber that takes on the appearance of junk, and is unassailable, when not moving.

-New expansion-only AI type: Camouflager.  All of its mobile ships look like harmless pieces of junk when stationary and not firing.

-The Counter-Shooter ranges now get drawn below everything else, including resources and wormholes, to aid visibility.

-Previously, the counter-shooting ranges of ships was being shown for enemy ships -- even cloaked enemies.  Fixed.

-Previously, moving force fields could push even enemies that are immune to force fields.  Fixed.

-Previously, the Expenses By Player tab of the stats window was omitting any outflows for ships that were try to spending resources, but temporarily unable to actually spend them because of a resource shortage.  Fixed.

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

-Previously, some of the expansion ship classes were erroneously showing up in lobby even when the expansion was disabled or not installed.  Fixed.

-Previously, it was possible to gift command station cores between players, causing a rather serious exploit.  Fixed.

-Previously, in the new unified command queue, ships were losing their queued targets when they killed an earlier target.

-The "Always display wormhole names in front of ships" setting no longer affects the wormhole far zoom icon.

Edit:  Updated to version K, with the following changes:

-Fixed some performance glitches in version J.

-In past prereleases, ship assist/repair targets were not being queued properly in the new unified command queue.


Edit:  Updated to version L, with the following changes:

-Fixed a crash bug that could occur when Beam Frigates were fighting melee ships at incredibly close range.

[Vaos]

And again, a lot of excellent changes! Also, the only thing I was missing for this game is here now : a beam based unit.
Congratulations for doing such good work ! I am amazed at almost every prerelease version. Keep on.

Edit : What's this, a troop accelerator? Did you forgot to include it in the patchnotes or did you put it in the release per error? It would be also cool to know the different bonus of units (against other units and other units against them) so we can know their weaknesses without learning it the hard way.

[Kjara]

Troop accelerators are pretty old, just aren't that common(or weren't, perhaps they will be a bit more common with the new algo-- also there's no ai type built around them), so you won't see them every game.

[RCIX]

Sounds great! can't wait to see the new Chameleon in action

[RCIX]

Hmm. This is really odd, after installing the new patch things seem to have a bunch more lag...

Engineers continue assisting stuff after their task has been complete for a couple seconds, and ships sometimes dont precalculate their destination position when moving with other ships. Very odd. Plus, there's frequent choppiness and pauses in the game.

Plus, in a battle with maybe a thousand or two units,  My machine was lagging where it didn't used to (650 or so autocannons and a few hundred enemy ships).

[Kjara]

I'm not sure the listed numbers are right on autocannons in game(mk II's seem to grow at 2.5% rather than the 2% listed in the unitinfo--that matches the 2.5% you said in the other thread).

Second, there seems to be some sort of weird rounding error with the mkI's(assuming they are 2% per--if not the tooltip needs a fix), while building them, I usually go up by 2% but occasionally it switches over to odd numbers(and then eventually switches back).  Not a huge deal, but might be a symptom of a larger issue somewhere else.


Edit:Oh, and I think I've gotten confused by the definition of a 8.00 max.  It seems you are meaning that they will do 800% damage max, rather than having a max boost of 8.00(aka doing 900% damage).  Not sure if this can be cleared up?

Edit: Oh and one other random thing, I'm getting a boost of 680%(aka doing damage of 780%) with 274 autocannons in the planet when I really should be getting 2.5% more(aka the 680% boost should correspond to being boosted by 272 other autocannons, not 273).--This might have something to do with the oddness bit above with the mkI's?  It seems related, as with only 5 mkII autocannons, I have a boost of 10%(aka do 110% damage), which seems right, its just at the high end it seems a little off.

Edit2: Oh one last thing, how does the autocannon boost play with starships or munitions booster's boosts?  Is it multiplicative or additive?(aka if I have a 7x boost from other autocannons and 2 spires, do I do 8*3*base damage or do I do (1+7+2)*base damage)

[x4000]

Hmm. This is really odd, after installing the new patch things seem to have a bunch more lag...

Engineers continue assisting stuff after their task has been complete for a couple seconds, and ships sometimes dont precalculate their destination position when moving with other ships. Very odd. Plus, there's frequent choppiness and pauses in the game.

Plus, in a battle with maybe a thousand or two units,  My machine was lagging where it didn't used to (650 or so autocannons and a few hundred enemy ships).

Any more information you can provide would be helpful, right now this is fairly vague.  If you'll note above, I completely redid a lot of the targeting logic, with the goal of making it perform better and be simpler to maintain, and smarter with what it actually chooses to do.  I haven't seen any lag based on my testing, and in the enormo-battles that I test with (1300 player units vs. 4000 enemy units in one, 7000 player units versus 2000 enemy units in another), I was seeing either performance on par with before, or up to 2x better than before.  I also tested this a fair bit with very small battles (a few hundred ships in all), and was able to push it to 40ms turns where normally I only would average 60ms to 70ms turns max on my hardware (normally the game runs at 200ms turns, so this is with the game sped up).

So, at any rate, that's what I'm seeing on my specific hardware in my specific test cases.  If you have a savegame of where it was being more laggy, that would be much appreciated.  Also, it is really unclear to me what you really mean by laggy -- as in, is the game itself actually lagging (dropping frames), or is it a matter of the ships don't switch what they are doing as fast? 

For the activity-switching logic, I would expect that to be slower in the current build.  In this version, ships do pick an initial target list more slowly, but then they cycle through targets vastly more quickly, keeping them occupied a greater portion of the time.  That was why I broke tractor beams out into their own cycle (as noted above), was so that they would act more quickly without being bogged down by all of the changes to the attack prioritizing.  Some of the logic changes make great sense for attacks, and lead to a better experience there, but don't make as much sense for other things that are presently getting lumped in there -- the engineers not switching targets as quickly, the ships not pre-calculating destinations as quickly, that sort of thing.  I think I'll need to break those sorts of activities out into their own cycle, as well, so that they don't get slowed down by the changes into how the attack logic works.

So the part about activity-switching being slower is something I'll take a look at, and is just something I hadn't caught before, but the lag is completely unexpected based on my testing.  Can you post your system specs, in general, as well as a savegame of a scenario that is causing you lag worse than before?  If it's possible for you to run that savegame in the old version as well as the new and post differences, that would also be awesome to make sure we can quantify this (and that it's not something that actually would have lagged worse before, for some odd edge case reason).  If you press F3 while playing, it gives you a bunch of debug info.  The values in the "Last Turn Average Process/Render" line, and in the "Last Turn Part/Full" line, would be what I am interested in.  Those fluctuate a lot, but if you had info on around how those were performing in the past in the same scenario, versus on the new version, that would help at least quantify the difference a bit, and whether this is a sim thing or a render thing (my money is on sim of course, but it is good to do a sanity check).  I know that's a lot to ask, so just whatever you can do is appreciated, no pressure.  The savegame would be perhaps the most helpful thing at this stage.

With such a huge number of under the hood changes as were in this J release, some issues are probably inevitable (it was another "stomach transplant"), but the lag thing in particular is concerning to me because it's so counter to what I saw; I don't know if it is something to do with hardware, or the specific scenario (and something I need to optimize in that scenario), or what.

Thanks for letting me know!

[x4000]

And again, a lot of excellent changes! Also, the only thing I was missing for this game is here now : a beam based unit.
Congratulations for doing such good work ! I am amazed at almost every prerelease version. Keep on.

Glad you like it!  Thanks.

Edit : What's this, a troop accelerator? Did you forgot to include it in the patchnotes or did you put it in the release per error?

Troop Accelerators were DLC from I think June, but they are definitely the most rare of all the AI special ships.  They will be a tad more common now, but still quite unusual.

It would be also cool to know the different bonus of units (against other units and other units against them) so we can know their weaknesses without learning it the hard way.

Yes, that just takes time for compiling them, and so it tends to lag a bit.  Rev has been doing that for me so that I don't have to spend an hour or more of CPU time on my own computer to get them there, but eventually I'm going to be running those simulations a lot more in order to get the new ships better balanced than they currently are.  At the moment, the new stuff is all very much "rough draft best guess."

[x4000]

I'm not sure the listed numbers are right on autocannons in game(mk II's seem to grow at 2.5% rather than the 2% listed in the unitinfo--that matches the 2.5% you said in the other thread).

Second, there seems to be some sort of weird rounding error with the mkI's(assuming they are 2% per--if not the tooltip needs a fix), while building them, I usually go up by 2% but occasionally it switches over to odd numbers(and then eventually switches back).  Not a huge deal, but might be a symptom of a larger issue somewhere else.


Edit:Oh, and I think I've gotten confused by the definition of a 8.00 max.  It seems you are meaning that they will do 800% damage max, rather than having a max boost of 8.00(aka doing 900% damage).  Not sure if this can be cleared up?

Edit: Oh and one other random thing, I'm getting a boost of 680%(aka doing damage of 780%) with 274 autocannons in the planet when I really should be getting 2.5% more(aka the 680% boost should correspond to being boosted by 272 other autocannons, not 273).--This might have something to do with the oddness bit above with the mkI's?  It seems related, as with only 5 mkII autocannons, I have a boost of 10%(aka do 110% damage), which seems right, its just at the high end it seems a little off.

Edit2: Oh one last thing, how does the autocannon boost play with starships or munitions booster's boosts?  Is it multiplicative or additive?(aka if I have a 7x boost from other autocannons and 2 spires, do I do 8*3*base damage or do I do (1+7+2)*base damage)

That's a lot of comments and questions, and some of that I'll have to look into more and get back to you; I'm not confident all of that is 100% correct in-game at the moment.  I've added this to the bug reports forum so I'm sure not to miss it in the coming week or so:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2383.0.html

To answer those questions I can off the top of my head, for the boost it should be the max boost of 8.00, or 900% damage as you say.  For the interplay with munitions boosters, those are multiplicative -- so these are extremely wicked when paired with munitions boosters, perhaps too much so.  We shall see.

[x4000]

RCIX -- actually, in doing some more testing of my own, I am seeing a bit of a performance hit on some parts.  It's not enough to cause lag on my machine, but it would on other hardware potentially.  So no need for more from you at this point, I'm looking into that now, and will hopefully have a fix tonight.  Unless it's something really challenging that takes longer...

[RCIX]

Regarding the lagginess, both actually. On my machine, the attached save exhibits virtually all of the problems.

Go the the planet nu alpha 3, and watch the autocannons being repaired. You'll notice that the engineers take a while to select a new ship to repair after they are done with one. Then order them to move a (very) short distance. You'll see them act very unusually when attempting to find positions...
Then order them through the wormhole they came from; it gets fairly laggy in battle.

Edit: just saw your new post, hope this helps though.

[Kjara]

Other feedback(dealing with the queueing of orders I think).  If I tell my engineers to go repair something, then tell them to go repair something else, it gets added to the queue(even if I'm not holding down shift).  However, if I tell them to move somewhere, then go repair something, it breaks off the current repair job.

I also had an engineer that didn't want to stop assisting a dock that wasn't really building anything(it was looping over one unit that I was ship-cap at).  I seem to recall that before they would wander off and do something else in this case(say assist the starship dock right next door which was building and had the other of my starting engineers assist it).  In fact if I broke both of them off what they were doing, and then told them to go in frw mode near both docks, they would go back to the state where one was assisting each dock.

Edit: woops, first one has already semi been posted here:http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2288.0.html

VV Can do.

[x4000]

Other feedback(dealing with the queueing of orders I think).  If I tell my engineers to go repair something, then tell them to go repair something else, it gets added to the queue(even if I'm not holding down shift).  However, if I tell them to move somewhere, then go repair something, it breaks off the current repair job.

I also had an engineer that didn't want to stop assisting a dock that wasn't really building anything(it was looping over one unit that I was ship-cap at).  I seem to recall that before they would wander off and do something else in this case(say assist the starship dock right next door which was building and had the other of my starting engineers assist it).  In fact if I broke both of them off what they were doing, and then told them to go in frw mode near both docks, they would go back to the state where one was assisting each dock.

Can you post this sort of thing in the bug reports forum?  I've moved this one there.  But otherwise I wind up having to search all over the place for my todo items later on, which is really a time drain for me.  Thanks!

[x4000]

Update:  I found the performance bottleneck.  Turns out that I made one math error where I was adding 100 instead of multiplying by 100, and that was causing the collisions to be all wonky and sucking down the CPU.  Despite all the other performance gains, that was more than canceling them out.  I'm doing a few more passes through, and will have a new version online within 30 minutes.

[x4000]

Okay, version K has been uploaded, with the following fixes:  http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001K.zip

-Fixed some performance glitches in version J.

-In past prereleases, ship assist/repair targets were not being queued properly in the new unified command queue.