AI War 2 v0.878 Released! "Fleet Customization"

[x4000]

Release notes here.

Dang this one is big! Lots of long-awaited features in here:

• You can now swap ship lines between mobile fleets you control, thus letting you mix and match your forces better and have themed fleets.
• A lot of the fleets are more themed now in general.
• There are some new and improved "game 101" explanations included in the how to play section.
• Transports work vastly better, with a number of quality of life improvements like having ships that are constructed for a transport-with-stuff-in-it appear in it rather than next to it, and many many more.
• The ability from the first game to set preferred targets for specific ships of yours is now in place here, too; for instance having this one specific selection of your ships target pike corvettes or whatever.
• The Zenith Power Generator can no longer be cheesed from the Zenith Trader, but is still an interesting and valid choice from them.
• There are new "Watchman Frigates" available at all your command stations, giving you some mobile ships to hunt down small AI stragglers without having to bring your fleets home just to tidy up one sniper or whatever.
• Fixed several bugs relating to shots, which were sometimes leading to invincible almost-dead units, and in other cases degrading performance.
• Fixed several bugs related to AI guarding ships and how those interacted with stacks, which would give the AI ridiculous numbers of ships (one savegame had more than 2 million pike corvettes in it) in a very short amount of time, thus making balance way off and degrading performance. This was probably not affecting most saves, but if you parked next to a warden post it would often get triggered, and AI civil wars would trigger it.
• Fixed a number of UI annoyances with data that was flickering or jumping around or otherwise not stable, mainly because of things that needed to be buffered for the display thanks to multithreading going on.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

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Enjoy!

Chris

[Sintara]

Awesome, looking forward to a new game when I get home!

[AnnoyingOrange]

Really liking the ship swap and the transport changes, but there's a few things that seem a bit weird to me.

First, golems and arks seem to be irrelevant: even on a 120 planet map I only see a couple and they're usually right next to the AI homeworld , so they're usually not worth picking up at all as you won't have time to level them up via XP and you'll have better things to spend science on.
I've tried messing with the fleet spawn settings, and at best I can get 5-6 of them to occupy all planets right next to the AI homeworld.
I get that they're supposed to be super units, but they already cost a lot of AIP and enough metal and energy to fund hundreds of turrets, having them scattered around the map in a mostly random fashion a la AIWC seemed fine to me: as of now they actively discourage you from taking the planet they're on, and given how they're positioned that feels a bit trollish.

Second, different fleets with the same centerpiece and the same levels can have ship lines for the same ship, but with significantly different ship caps: for example, one transport will have 2 siege frigates, and another will have 4, or a mobile factory will have 10 engineers while another has 15.
While this opens up some interesting gameplay options such as capturing a fleet to upgrade your ship cap on another fleet, or taking some unit only because they have an unusually large cap, it's kind of confusing to keep track of it all at the moment and a UI hint or two might be needed: something like "this ship line is better than one ship line you already own" and "this centerpiece has more build slots than that one you already own".

Third, reprisal seems to be a bit on the low side, with full fleet wipes losing hundreds of MK4 ships generating reprisal waves smaller than normal ones.

That being said, good job as always and good luck with the game!

[x4000]

AnnoyingOrange -- thanks for all the reports!

Golems and Arks:

* The "Officer Fleets" with the Arks and Golems should now generally be 3-5 planets away from the AI homeworlds, rather than directly adjacent to the AI homeworlds frequently like they were before.
** There are still very very few of them, and if they feel like an afterthought then we really need to pump them up in terms of power. But they're expensive and far away so that they can be late-game ringers for you, exciting last conquests, essentially.

And then: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=21471

Centerpieces thing:

* The "multiplied_frigate_ship_cap_for_mobile" and "multiplied_strikecraft_ship_cap_for_mobile" have been removed, as these were things that caused the number of ships to be increased at specific centerpieces.
** Prior to us being able to swap units between lines, that was no problem.  But now it's something that was just confusing, and there are better ways to accomplish the equivalent thing.
** For Arks and Golems (officers), having larger fleets isn't really the point anyhow; they should be bigger and scarier on their own, and the fact that their fleets are not really better or worse than other fleets is fine.
*** In the future, we can make it so that they pull from a separate set of fleet designs that have larger caps built in, if we want, and the good thing is that then when there are ship swaps between fleets, the extra ships will transfer properly.  There doesn't seem to be a need for that right now, but the important note is that it's actually possible if  we do feel inclined.
** This change is going to reduce the ship counts on a lot of the fleets, in existing savegames as well.  If this is a problem, then please let us know and we can adjust the seeding count ranges on the fleet designs in order to rectify that.   But in general it MAY be that people were having a few too many strikecraft and such anyhow, and that Golems/Arks are underpowered; we want you to feel inclinded/excited to pick up those officers in the late game, but it may have been that the regular ships were so plentiful that it wasn't really worth it.

And also:

* The swap ship line interface now shows you how many ships are in the cap of each line you might be trading.  This way you can more easily see the actual relative powers of ships with the same line type, for instance, but different caps.

Relating to reprisal waves, I assume you mean the new counterattacks mechanic, correct?  I can't remember for sure, but I think that it is treating higher-mark losses as identical to lower-mark losses.  Maybe it shouldn't do that after all.  Or maybe it needs some other tuning.  If you have any suggestions or savegames about specific stuff with that, I'd definitely be interested.

Thank you!