Prerelease 1.008E.

[x4000]

TESTED UNDER G

AI progress is 133 shown as II/IV, but shouldn't that be I/IV? Wiki makes reference to some higher level AI types, but this suggests personalities, however the current figures makes it look like it means levels.

EDIT: Definitely a bug, AI Progress increased to 134 and counters changed to I/III.

Ha, okay, I figured it out.  Basically, when a savegame was loading, it was calculating the tech level only based on the positive AI Progress points that have been gained, not including the negative AI points (from destroying data centers, etc) that you had achieved.  The reason I store both, if you're wondering, is because I have some internal thresholds that the AI Progress can't be reduced below if the AI Progress gets too high.  For instance, if the total positive AI Progress is 450 or more, the negative offsets can't reduce the effective value below 100 (but the negative offsets are still there, so if the positive AI Progress goes above 450, those data centers would not have been destroyed in vain). 

There are many other thresholds like that, the lowest one being that if the positive AI Progress is >= 100, it can't be reduced below 30.  I wanted the AI to have a certain minimum strength if the players are doing a lot of destruction, but by the same token I did not want the players to have to memorize thresholds and avoid destroying data centers when already at or below a threshold.  So, hence this solution.  Simply fixing the order in which the AI reads its values back from the save file has fixed this for the upcoming H prerelease.  Thanks for letting me know about this!  I couldn't think why this could possibly happen, at first.

[darke]

It would also be nice to be able to build a building on top of an engineer. With the slower flying ones it usually isn't an issue, but the teleporting ones bamfing into right where you're about to place down another turret to help build the last turret you placed gets annoying after a while.

I'll do you one better.  How about if I make it so that buildings aren't blocked by any mobile ships, but rather just cause the other ship to move out of the way when they are placed?  That would make placing mines and turrets much easier in a planet that has a lot of mobile guys guarding a wormhole, for instance.

Thanks. I was going to suggest something like that, but couldn't quite get the wording right that it actually made sense.

Oh, hell yeah, that's the way to do it!  It's just my job to thwart you as much as possible in return.   I've always loved being a DM in RPGs and dungeon crawls (like the board game Descent, which is awesome but incredibly time consuming for a board game), so I see my role as the AI programmer in a similar light.  I'm one of those DMs who likes to push the players as far as possible, and yet give them a path to victory if they play well.  But when players figure out a loophole, like this, then I'm all about closing that or else making it still-valid-but-now-with-costs-of-its-own.

You're not kidding about Descent. I "Evil Overlorded" it for a while, including a Road to Legends campaign. The campaign started the week after the expansion was released and we only got to near the top of the Silver difficulty of the campaign before the *next* expansion to Descent came out. Incredibly fun, but the definition of time sucking.

[x4000]

Thanks. I was going to suggest something like that, but couldn't quite get the wording right that it actually made sense.

Sure thing!

You're not kidding about Descent. I "Evil Overlorded" it for a while, including a Road to Legends campaign. The campaign started the week after the expansion was released and we only got to near the top of the Silver difficulty of the campaign before the *next* expansion to Descent came out. Incredibly fun, but the definition of time sucking.

Yeah, I almost always play Overlord, myself.  I never got into RTL much, it was just too slow and no real rewards.  I definitely prefer the base game, but I haven't got the very latest expansion yet.  Just not much time, these days, and after RTL my group kind of lost interest for a while...