Prerelease 3.186 (Cmd Stations+, Transport Nerf, Colored Planet Links, Fixes)

[rubikscube]

Making use of transports or other means of micromanagement can reduce the need of higher mark level scouts.

[Spikey00]

Send cleanup drones to scout.

[carlosjuero]

Thought Cleanup Drones were "blind"? If not then I would think that could be considered more of an "exploit" than using Transports to pop CStations... much cheaper than scouts and higher ship cap.

Send cleanup drones to scout.

[Spikey00]

They unfortunately are not; posted this a few days ago:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6694.0.html


I don't use it frequently, because as you say, it's an exploit, and I would rather not screw up the game.

[keith.lamothe]

I could have sworn that all engineers and variants thereof had the IsBlind flag for this exact reason...  But looking at the code I don't see it.  Will fix that right quick

[carlosjuero]

Wow, I never even thought to try something like that! I don't bring out Cleanup Drones unless I am establishing a beach head so I already tend to have scouts and ships in system.

They unfortunately are not; posted this a few days ago:

http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6694.0.html


I don't use it frequently, because as you say, it's an exploit, and I would rather not screw up the game.

[keith.lamothe]

Ok, they're blind for 3.187.  I'm sure some reason why they weren't blind will surface shortly after the release of that

Of course, doesn't do much to prevent cheese-scouting via teleport raiders and battlestations, but that's another issue and at least those are not always available.


One point to clarify is that these cheese methods aren't actually "scouting", per se, but rather just getting vision of the planets.  Scouting is only done by scouts proper (and eyebots and commandos... hmm, actually commandos could be pretty good at flood-scouting) what is needed to get intel reports and the planet summary, etc.


One way to close off these exploits is to play with an unrevealed map, so only scouts can make the first traversal of any wormhole

[Fleet]

I use cleanup drones to finish mopping up turrets after my main force has left or been destroyed, as often they took quite a lot out. Would this change mean I could no longer remove remains with only cleanup drones on a planet?

Minor issue I guess, so if this is a good fix for the effort thats fine. Thought I would make this known, though.

[Spikey00]

Well, they would be blind, so you wouldn't see them but they would still function on enemy planets.

[keith.lamothe]

Honestly I don't know if they would be able to find and remove remains if on a planet with no supporting visibility.  Either way, not a problem.

[Trezamere]

Gotta say as a mine lover the mine changes sound great, can't wait to try them out.

Did the logic that engineers prefer mines last in assist order ever get implemented?  Can't remember if that was a change or a community want thing.

[RCIX]

   * "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.

Cool! and it only took us, what, 8 months to convince you?

[x4000]

New version: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,6811.0.html