AI War 2
4.024 Graveyard Digger
This one has a variety of bugfixes, including one big performance fix for games that last longer than half an hour to a few hours in a single session. It's entirely possible that this also has solved the fairly rare deadlock that folks were running into at times.
In DLC3, the Wights of the Necromancer have gotten a notable balance pass from Zeus, and some fixes from Tom.Prince.
ptarth also did a semi-automated spelling and grammar pass over all three of the DLCs, using a tool he created for that purpose (very cool).
In the standard list of map names, there are now mixed in a new set of 300ish names from the kickstarter backers who had the "planet proprieter" reward.
And both DLC1 and DLC3 now have achievements set up on Steam and GOG.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.023 Beacon Expansiveness
A bunch of new factions are now summonable via beacons, largely thanks to Daniexpert. This includes some returning favorites from old pre-4.0 beacons, but also includes new factions that have never had a beacon before. Previously it was a major performance drain to have a lot of beacon factions included, so we didn't do it often. Now it's not a drain at all, so we can have as many as we want.
Of course, the new problem that then led to was, "do we really want beacons to be so cluttered throughout the entire galaxy." This has led to a further set of beacon features, again implemented by Daniexpert, which divide the beacon factions into four "tiers" of importance (ranging from always seeding to being fairly rare). This neatly solves the problem for the base game and DLC factions, and also makes it so that mods can now hook into this without flooding the galaxy with beacons if you happen to have a dozen mod-granting factions enabled.
DLC2 has a new music track, which was jointly commissioned by Pablo and Badger, and composed by Badger. You'll also hear it coming up in the DLC3 trailer, which will be arriving this week (hey -- along with DLC3 itself!!).
DLC3 continues to get a wide variety of final polish, ranging from quality of life elements to bugfixes to feature and balance tweaks. Thanks to Badger, StarKelp, Zeus, and Tom.Prince for all their work on this over the last few days.
There are also a bunch of new achievements for DLC3, and a few new ones for DLC1, thanks to Zeus. Those will be integrated into Steam and GOG shortly. (If you earn them before they are, they will self-correct, no worries!)
Finally, some various bugfixes for the base game itself, relating to multiplayer, AI Reserves, AI Hunter, and various other bits.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.021 Scourge Of A Beacon
Been missing the ability to call the scourge via beacon? Well, that's returned, courtesy of Badger.
There are... a metric ton of small and midsize improvements to the base game and DLC3, and a couple of others for DLC1 and 2 in here as well. Big props to Badger and Zeus for smashing all these items.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.019 To Hack, Or Not To Hack
This has a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, a number of them centered around hacking.
The most critical thing from this build is a fix to a regression in the prior build that broke a lot of "hack for ships" type hacks. Sorry about that!
Other changes include making many of the hacks against Elderlings cheaper, and removing the ability to sabotage-hack the ultimate fortress at all (as Zeus notes on that one, "it should be slain in glorious combat, not with some cowardly sabotage hack."
Various other necromancer and templar balance tweaks are also now in place based on feedback.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.018 Stability And Abortability
This one has only two items in it, but both are pretty important for folks that are hitting a few specific issues.
First of all, in multiplayer, on the client there were sometimes floods of errors that would happen (usually but not always after 45 minutes or more of play). Turns out there was a one-line fix for that, it was an unfortunate mistake on my part. So that's nice to have fixed!
Secondly, in general lately it has been possible for the game to get into deadlock states for players in some cases. Because of the highly multithreaded nature of this game, that rarely means that the actual game freezes, but instead means that the background threads are locked up while the front-end still lets you look around, but you can't save or do anything. This hasn't been fixed yet, although it also doesn't affect everyone.
In this build, there are now new buttons in the escape menu, under the debug section, in that little pop up window. One of them says Log All Threads, and does just that. It will be somewhat helpful for us getting information to fix a deadlock (and a modder could cause a deadlock as well, so it's useful for them in the future also).
There is then a second item, which says "Abort All Threads." This one might actually crash the game, or might get it working again, it's hard to be certain (so far for me it has not crashed anything). But what is also does is gives us an exact stack trace from each thread of where it's stuck. Assuming that the deadlock is not one one of a couple of other less-likely spots, this should probably let folks work around it, as well as giving us the tools needed to nail them afterward.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.017 Feeling Helpful
If you have NPC allies, they are now notably more helpful when coming to your aid as of this version. Thanks to Badger on this!
There are also some notable balance adjustments to a lot of the speed-boosting structures, and to the speed caps on units. Similarly, some power generation rebalance for distributed-economy economic command stations. Thanks to CRCGamer on all of these.
Several updates to the Exotic Ships Mod, and then a whole heap of updates to DLC3. Thanks to Badger, StarKelp, Daniexpert, Zeus, and SirLimbo for all of the adjustments and polish.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.016 Necromantic Polish
Lots of quality of life polish and various final balance tunings for the Necromancer, the major new player type coming in DLC3. If you'd like to see more of what's coming with this new faction, a new video from Strategic Sage has dropped today on that very subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64J0dHs9ayQ
4.015 The Thrifty Architrave
A variety of bugfixes in this one, including one where the Zenith Architrave were so... thrift conscious... that they weren't buying anything in the prior build.
Some solid necromancer polish in this build as well, as we close in on the DLC3 release date and more folks getting to play with it.
And then finally, two new mods! The first one is by me actually, and is a visual-only mod that changes the regular colony-ship-style transports into "paladin transports" if you have DLC3 and turn on the mod. You can see a picture of it in the wiki.
The second mod is by Donblas, and is a tweak to Expert mode to allow you to still have fleet-wide bonuses in Expert mode. I'm really glad to see mods of things like the campaign types, since it is very much in the spirit of modding to create these sorts of variants from what the core game offers.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.014 The Intimidating Architrave
All of the art for both DLC2 and DLC3 is finally now done, along with the many various upgrades that were made to the art in the base game and in DLC1. This is a big milestone! Thanks to everyone for their patience with the DLC2 art delays in particular, that really went much longer than expected.
The best was saved for last in many respects, as the Zenith Architrave are meant to be a really intimidating alien faction, and they were really time consuming to get right -- and they are now completely integrated visually of this build. They're probably my favorite faction, visually, at this point (maybe elderlings or necromancer aside, it's hard to pick between those three).
A number of small tweaks and fixes are in this build as well, thanks to Badger going on cleanup duty with a number of recent tickets that came in through our bugtracker.
At this point, DLC3 is feature complete, all our art is done for everything, and it's just a matter of bugfixes and balance from here on in. We really are finally closing in on the finish line, which feels really good!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.013 Hotfixes
Mostly this just fixes some bugs that could get up in your face in the prior build when you started the game or were in the lobby. It also fixes a couple of other less-important bugs while I was at it.
This one also makes a shift to Expert mode, on the advice of Strategic Sage, to no longer force Dire CPAs to be a part of that mode. They are now only required on Logistician, but they're still optional on any mode.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!