.938 Release Candidate 7 now out.

[x4000]

Release notes: arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Bionic_Dues_Alpha_Release_Notes#Alpha_0.938_Release_Candidate_7

Restart steam to force an update, yadda yadda.

Real minor stuff this time, mostly cosmetic.  But a few nice touches prior to 1.0, anyhow.

[Pepisolo]

Regarding that bug I mentioned in the last release thread...actually just to make it explicitly clear what happens:

1) Start a New Game
2) Up pops Hot Tips: Starting a New game, player clicks OK
3) Rarely it will then pop up the Hot Tips: City Map window - while still on the loadout screen

I've tried for a while to reproduce it and actually find the exact conditions that cause it, but I can't. It seems random. It is rare and will only happen maybe once every 20 times I try. If it does happen, all it really means is that the player will get a City Map hot tips window twice; once on the loadout screen and once after the briefing narration. Hopefully it is just a Linux thing or better still something related to my own individual setup. I do find it annoying knowing that it's there and I can't track down the cause of it, though.

[Winge]

I like the new World Map appearance of Bahamut Devices and Robot Command Centers.  It makes me think, "Shiny!"

One question:  is there really ever a reason a player would NOT want to take out a Robot Command Center, especially at higher difficulties?  Right now, it is a given that I will take them out, even (or especially) if I am behind.

[chemical_art]

One question:  is there really ever a reason a player would NOT want to take out a Robot Command Center, especially at higher difficulties?  Right now, it is a given that I will take them out, even (or especially) if I am behind.

An arcen game where the goal is to end as fast as possible to prevent the exponential growth of robots? Naw!

[Winge]

I just noticed one possibly-unintended change as a result of the Hostage Mission changes.  Those are much better now, but may be a bit too easy now--I would say that I saved every pod, but I didn't get the achievement (Hard + Ironman difficulty)

One odd thing:  with the bots now choosing between player and pod, I noticed a few scenarios where the bots would 'pace' back and forth.  That basically gave me a free move or two to close in and eliminate the bots in question.  Might want to make the choice a one-time event (unless the pod/exo they target dies, in which case the logic runs again).  That would give players an interesting scenario--do they take out the bots that are closing in on their exos, or try to save the cryopods and possibly take damage/lose an exo?

[keith.lamothe]

One question:  is there really ever a reason a player would NOT want to take out a Robot Command Center, especially at higher difficulties?  Right now, it is a given that I will take them out, even (or especially) if I am behind.

In theory if you're behind you may need the extra time to catch up (the rest of the Bahamuts, Factories to nerf the bots, etc).

In practice it's entirely possible this never happens   We'll see, there's certainly room for balance refinement in the future.  As-is, I'm fine with "always doing all the Robot Command Centers is optimal" being a 1.0 thing, though I wouldn't want it to remain that way forever.

On the bit about making the hostage mission bots "remember" whether they picked chasing the exo or chasing the pod, that's something we could consider later on but in general the bot AI doesn't remember anything, it just reevaluates the whole board every turn.  The EagleBots remember something.  Poor things

[Misery]

One quick thing you might want to change right away:  Set the "show battle popups" to on by default.

Something I noticed while watching Das24680's LP of the game is that there were a few instances where he took a hit from something, but wasnt immediately aware of it since there wasnt enough visual feedback.  Yeah, I know it's displayed in the messages window, but it's really easy to end up not paying any attention to that whatsoever and sorta forget it's there.  I've seen this sort of thing happen in alot of LPs of various games, where something just isnt noticable enough for whatever reason, so the player just outright misses it.  Particularly when it's a game as complex as this one, where there's just so much to take in at once.

I bring this up mostly to prevent situations of great frustration for new players simply due to the fact that they werent aware that they'd just taken 2 hits the previous turn, and so their Exo dies to something that they thought it'd be able to absorb.  Which would be very frustrating indeed.

They can always choose to turn it off if they find it annoying.   You could even mention that fact in one of the tutorial text boxes early on.

[x4000]

I'm not keen on the battle pops, honestly -- it think it degrades the visual quality and gets cluttered fast. I also think that with your health bar right there, plus visuals of incoming shots and only one exo to watch, instances of this ought to be pretty low. Sometimes people are going to make mistakes; especially while trying to narrate during a new experience. We're trying to be sensitive to those, but not knee-jerk to w dry last one.

[Misery]

Hmm, in that case, there's one different thing that might do with a possible change, which is the visual effect that thunder traps put up when hit.  One of the uses of traps is that you can use them to figure out where invisible bots are, when they either walk over a trap or start firing at a sentry.  Thunder traps though put up an almost invisible lightning effect;  I can only see it myself if the bot walking on the trap is visible.  If it's not, I cant see the effect whatsoever and only know they are there by the popup. 


Other than that, and a couple of bizarre incidents of infinitely invisible stealthbots (cant reproduce that one;  happened in one boss mission, and then didn't happen again), there's no problems at the moment.   That I can remember, anyway.

Speaking of StealthBots, are they supposed to get 4 turns each time they vanish?  It says 2 on their tooltip, dunno if that's correct or not.  They've been taking 4 turns though.

Good luck with the release, by the way.  I'll be interested to see some player responses to this one.

[keith.lamothe]

On StealthBots, bear in in mind that their number of stealth turns stacks   So if like 60 sentries somehow fire on a nearby target, well...

Not that anyone in this room would stack up a sentry death trap like that.

[Misery]

.....well that explains a few things.  I'm guessing AoE strikes to nearby foes can do this as well?

On a related note, it turns out that having both HideBots and StealthBots taking up the top two slots in the final army list can make things really freaking difficult in Lion's Den or boss missions, because EVERYONE'S INVISIBLE.

I swear the RNG does this on purpose.

[keith.lamothe]

I swear the RNG does this on purpose.

It does have a strong history of initiative and innovation, if AIW is any indication.  We certainly didn't tell it to do all those exceedingly unpleasant things

[DanGoran]

I'm not sure if this belongs in here but i just bought the game on steam and it won't start, i click start and then a white window appear and then it says "bionic.exe has stopped working". some system info:

intel i 5 CPU 650@ 3.20 GHZ

6 GB RAm

Windows 7 64-bit.

[x4000]

I'm not sure if this belongs in here but i just bought the game on steam and it won't start, i click start and then a white window appear and then it says "bionic.exe has stopped working". some system info:

intel i 5 CPU 650@ 3.20 GHZ

6 GB RAm

Windows 7 64-bit.

Most likely it's a faulty download from steam -- simply have it verify your local files and it should fix it right up!

[DanGoran]

It said that 1 file couldn't be validated and that it would be aquired once more. Didn't work after that and not after a reinstall either.Perhaps it's something with Norton, ah well i'm off to bed.