Prerelease 1.007A now available (better music streaming support).

[x4000]

Here's the latest prerelease:  http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar1007A.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 1.006, so you have to already have 1.006 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.

What's new since 1.006:

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-A true Directsound-based streaming approach is now used for music.  This makes music load much faster, and saves between 70 and 140 MB of RAM compared to previous versions of the game.  This in turn makes the saved games load faster, as well.  This will also hopefully prevent the super-rare "out of memory" directsound error that was crashing the game when music was enabled.  This only affected one user so far, but still.

[Quitch]

The shoot through shield thing for snipers from late 1.0006 rocks, it's giving me a whole new way to take down shields and setup beachheads. AI really needs to react to it in some way though.

[x4000]

The shoot through shield thing for snipers from late 1.0006 rocks, it's giving me a whole new way to take down shields and setup beachheads. AI really needs to react to it in some way though.

They are just sitting there, I guess?  I'll add in something so that they add more sniper turrets of their own, so they try to match you in a bit of an arms race with this.  I can't think of much better to do just yet, because having them come out of the force fields to try to take down your sniper turrets would likely just get them killed, and be something players could easily exploit.  And throwing up a counter-sniper turret just seems kind of cheap.  Any ideas what you'd like to see, since you've bee playing with that to a good extent?  Glad you like it!

[Quitch]

Look to hit this sector with a warp gate wave to eliminate the turret threat.

Bring in ships and leave the shields at the same time.

Build counter-snipers in place of additional ships.

Cloaked ships would be good at eliminating snipers if they've been left as a beachhead alone.

Increase AI progress by 1 for every five minutes of constant sniper fire.


And I had a move bug with a non-combat ship, sent two science ships on a five sector jump from Voip to Verach, one ship moved properly but the other stopped moving upon emerging in Orier. I discovered the problem at 03:36:00ish

Here's an autosave from (I think) before I started moving them.

http://cid-79dfbf37bf7ef7d3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Autosave.sav

[x4000]

Look to hit this sector with a warp gate wave to eliminate the turret threat.

Bring in ships and leave the shields at the same time.

Build counter-snipers in place of additional ships.

Cloaked ships would be good at eliminating snipers if they've been left as a beachhead alone.

I like these, but I kind of figured that this was mostly coming up after you had already kicked off the warp gates and the command station, so the AI wouldn't be able to reinforce directly.  These are some good ideas, though, I'm sure I'll do something similar.

And I had a move bug with a non-combat ship, sent two science ships on a five sector jump from Voip to Verach, one ship moved properly but the other stopped moving upon emerging in Orier. I discovered the problem at 03:36:00ish

Here's an autosave from (I think) before I started moving them.

http://cid-79dfbf37bf7ef7d3.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Autosave.sav

This sounds like a non-bug annoyance that I've seen a few times.  Were you manually giving move orders?  If so, it's possible that this one ship left the planet it was on before you finished giving all your orders, so it just went to the planet you had selected and not all the way.  That's what it's always been with this, so far at least.

To combat this, in the next version of the game the auto-suggested paths are significantly better, so that should require fewer manual wormhole paths...

[x4000]

Okay, I think I figured out a way that is both effective and fair for them to deal with this snipers issue.  See the release notes of 1.007B:  http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,123.0.html