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Genre: Simulator, Strategy

Pandora: First Contact

Eclipse of Nashira Version 1.6.3 Released

Changed:
* AI will make slightly fewer formers.
* AI will make even fewer formers once it has the advancement that increases the working speed of formers.
* AI will use significantly more miners and workers instead of scientists when they require buildings and units and can keep pollution at bay.
* AI will consider standing more important in its decision to go to war.
* AI will slowly drop standing on a player that has a weak military compared to themselves.
* AI will no longer issue pillaging tasks to artilleries.
* Added a small offset to the AI army evaluation for relationship decay and war declaration in order to prevent it becoming an issue right of the bat.

Change log history.

Version 1.6.2 / 1.4.5 Released

Updated Pandora: Eclipse of Nashira to version 1.6.2 and First Contact to 1.4.5.

Version 1.6.2 (Eclipse of Nashira)


Changed:
* AI is now less likely to use nukes and black holes on an opponent when it is far superior in conventional military. This is to not have to clean up so much waste after capturing the cities anyways.
* AI now prioritizes building Colony Ship Dismantling over getting the minimum amount of units.
* AI now prioritizes flat-boni from buildings according to how much of a resource they already have.
* Improved AI building priorization.
* AI will no longer diversify its troop composition before it has made contact with other factions. This allows them to better handle the aliens on bigger map sizes.
* AI will be slightly more aggressive towards players whose economy is worse than theirs.
* AI will now handle ruins with the attack agent, giving them a much higher priority than before.
* AI will now value negative habitat higher when it comes to how fast it expands. This results in faster expansion.

Fixed:
* Fixed crash when researching Nukes with French localization active.
* Fixed a possible crash connected to Agents in Transports.
* Fixed an issue where Agents in Transports of the AI would stop doing anything.
* Fixed an issue where Agents of the AI would not use all sorts of operations after the changes of success rates.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would forget that it wanted to retreat a unit once it entered a transport.
* Fixed an issue where naval artillery of the AI would not retreat to a city while kiting.

Version 1.4.5 (First Contact)


Fixed:
* Fixed crash when researching Nukes with French localization active.

Version 1.6.1 / 1.4.4 Released

Updated Pandora: Eclipse of Nashira to version 1.6.1 and First Contact to 1.4.4.

Version 1.6.1 (Eclipse of Nashira)


Changed:
* Adjusted AI difficulties to compensate for the smarter AI; medium difficulty no longer gives the AI any bonuses.
* Difficulty now defaults to medium again.
* Decreased agent production cost by 33%.
* Declaring war will now automatically cancel your non-aggression-pact. This does not allow you to cancel the pact before its minimum duration is over and it also does not save you from the diplomatic repercussions connected with canceling a non-aggression pact.
* Doubled relationship importance for war declarations.
* Reduced the effect of distance on the AI's likeliness to go to war.
* Reduced the effect of standing on the AI's likeliness to go to war.
* Reduced the effect of aggression value on the AI's likeliness to go to war.
* When there is no science victory enabled all factions will act very aggressive.
* AI will no longer declare war when it has too few units.

Fixed:
* Fixed an issue where undamaged units would not flank.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would not build the required minimum of units.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would try to scout ruins with aircraft.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would offer peace when it should not.
* Fixed diplomatic penalty for capturing cities being much higher than intended.
* Fixed an issue that could prevent artillery units attacking from inside a city.
* Language fixes.

Version 1.4.4 (First Contact)


Added:
* Added French translation thanks to Steve Torres.

Fixed:
* Fixed issues with Steam overlay on Linux.

Eclipse of Nashira Version 1.6.0 Released

This large free update tremendously improves the AI, overhauls espionage and rebalances diplomacy. Thanks go to community member Alexander Stumpp's hard work for making it possible. The update also adds the long-awaited French translation, thanks to Steve Torres.

The AI will now play a lot more like the best human players play the game: expand slower, dynamically improve tiles, adjust the tax-rate, handle resource emergency situations, prioritize refitting, perform flanking and out-of-sight maneuvers, build more diverse units, effectively use artillery and much more.

To address the repetitive nature of the espionage mechanic, success chance for missions can no longer reach 100% and agents can now lose health even if they complete a mission successfully. To combat exploitative behavior when factions have cities close to eachother, agents now lose all their movement points when entering another faction's territory.

Diplomacy has also been rebalanced and improved to make both dialogue and gameplay interactions more meaningful.

Those are just some of the highlights. Please see the change log for the full list of changes, including balance tweaks and fixes.

Eclipse of Nashira Version 1.6.0 Released

This large free update tremendously improves the AI, overhauls espionage and rebalances diplomacy. Thanks go to community member Alexander Stumpp's hard work for making it possible. The update also adds the long-awaited French translation, thanks to Steve Torres.

The AI will now play a lot more like the best human players play the game: expand slower, dynamically improve tiles, adjust the tax-rate, handle resource emergency situations, prioritize refitting, perform flanking and out-of-sight maneuvers, build more diverse units, effectively use artillery and much more.

To address the repetitive nature of the espionage mechanic, success chance for missions can no longer reach 100% and agents can now lose health even if they complete a mission successfully. To combat exploitative behavior when factions have cities close to eachother, agents now lose all their movement points when entering another faction's territory.

Diplomacy has also been rebalanced and improved to make both dialogue and gameplay interactions more meaningful.

Those are just some of the highlights. Please see the change log for the full list of changes, including balance tweaks and fixes.

Eclipse of Nashira Beta r5714 Released

Opt-in to the beta version by right-clicking on Pandora in your Steam library, choosing Properties and selecting the beta under the Betas tab.

Added:
* Added better support for teams in AI's diplomatic behavior.
* Added a new algorithm for the AI to always try to land troops outside the vision of the enemy.
* Added mechanism for AI to process multiple loops for it's unit moving sub-agents so it can give a new command to a unit that has already moved but is left with movement points after all units have moved.

Changed:
* AI will now allocate its population differently when it is at war or when it is preparing for war.
* AI will no longer sign science treaties with those who are above average in research.
* Moves of human factions are now prioritized over moves of alien factions.
* AI will now prioritize enemy units in their territory as more important target.
* Allowed AI to use all unused ships for exploring.
* AI will now use a certain amount of artillery units in their offenses.
* AI will now use mineral sources with less than two minerals only if there's almost no other minerals available.
* AI will no longer build watercraft when it is at war with someone who only has cities with no access to water.
* When playing as Togra University the AI will now make use of Zak0r's upgrade strategy.
* AI decision when to make peace is now more in line with its decision when to declare war.
* When refitting the AI will now stick to the same weapon type to stay cost-efficient.
* AI will now always prioritize refitting their units over purchasing other things.
* If the AI is at war with someone and doesn't know any cities of that someone, but it has seen the border, it'll prioritize exploring there.
* Made sure that AI always uses their artillery units before its other units.
* When at war with another faction, the AI will be much less likely to attack native wildlife.
* AI will now rather upgrade its formers to amphibious than using harvest.
* AI is now more sensitive about whether it should perform a rush or prepare to defend against one.
* AI will now try to avoid getting its transports spotted by its enemies.
* AI will now value forests more for fighting pollution before it has Pandora Construction.
* AI will now prefer tiles that are most suitable for their units when approaching an enemy city.
* AI will no longer retreat heavily injured units to a city under the effect of an ion storm.
* Increased maximum amount of playable factions via advanced setup in a game from 9 to 13. Only makes sense with a mod that adds new factions.
* Improved AI behavior in city defense.
* AI will no longer try to heal units other than the necessary defenders in a city that is under siege by artillery units.
* The percentage of trade and research pact income as well as the Ambassadors parasitic trait now dynamically adjust to a players share of global population. On average the treaties will be about 35% less powerful.
* AI will now consider food less important when looking for city locations.
* AI will now consider minerals more important when looking for city locations.
* AI border expansion will now consider if additional food tiles are needed or not.
* AI will offer friendly deals less frequently in order to not annoy the player. The frequency is about 10%.
* AI will no longer declare war on factions it hasn't scouted yet.
* AI artillery units now prefer the device that allows them to attack multiple times a turn over other modules.
* Population lost by using the "Raze" button will now include migration from takeover.
* AI will now use a more dynamic defender count.
* Lowered number of scouting units for the AI once it has a contact to not be caught off-guard with a significant amount of troops away from home.
* AI will no longer waste precious scans on hives.
* AI will no longer try to surround cities with too complicated surrounding geography like canals or peninsulas that make surrounding really hard and take long.
* When needed, the AI will now switch between first tier automatic and first tier missile weapons since this doesn't cost anything.
* AI is now much less likely to sign or request open borders treaties.
* Added more diversity to AI unit-designs to make it harder to hardcounter them.
* Improved AI spy handling by allowing them to preposition for an operation next turn instead of just going straight ahead and risk ending up with no movement left.
* During peace the AI will now try to position unused units in the way of incoming spies.
* AI shall no longer attack aliens or sieging units when the success chance is 100% but the attacking unit might die in the process.
* AI now does a much better job considering pollution when calculating its worker distribution.
* AI is now much more likely to backstab its neighbor when he is at war.
* AI spies will no longer steal research when the AI has all technologies.
* AI will now reduce its food production in order to fight overpopulation once it does not find any more spaces to colonize.
* AI will now rather expand than produce buildings or advancements that do not combat unhappyness when it is unhappy.
* AI will now always run the highest tax rate when there are no technologies left to research.
* AI is now aware of circumstances where certain buildings and advancements are so useful that it should get them even if it would want to build military.
* AI will now use formers as a last-resort defense.
* Increased Agent production cost by 33 % and reduced movement by 25 %.
* Success chance for infiltration missions is now directly deduced from infiltration attack/defense power and can't reach a 100%.
* Different infiltration missions now provide a bonus or penalty to the infiltration attack power based on their difficulty.
* Agents now lose health when performing an operation.
* Agents can now complete or fail their mission independently of dying. The chance to lose an agent is now equal to half of the operation failure.
* Adjusted advancements, buildings and devices that provide an infiltration attack or defense power bonus.

Fixed:
* Fixed a bug that prevented AI from realizing it cannot heal in water fungus.
* Fixed game pace not affecting the duration of temporary tile modifications like the ion storm cast by the Messari.
* Fixed an issue where AI units could get stuck when they targeted something they could not see.
* Fixed AI not using as many units for defending as it should.
* Fixed AI artillery and sniper units not always attacking targets when they should.
* Fixed a bug that under certain circumstances led to miscalculation on city growth when using the growth project.
* Fixed AI not caring about their new cities for the turn they are founded.
* Fixed a bug that swallowed the majority of diplomacy messages sent to the player by the AI.
* Fixed Ambassadors leeching from pacts not actually being added to their income.
* Fixed an issue causing AI land units to try and pillage improvements inside lakes.
* Fixed waterborne artillery units of the AI not acquiring targets further inland.
* Fixed an issue where morale was not properly applied to credit income from non-tax sources like gold deposits.
* Fixed an exploit that allowed you to interrupt AI formers by stepping a unit onto them when you had open borders.
* Fixed the algorithm that determines whether a tile is a chokepoint.
* Fixed an issue where automated formers would always consider aliens always as hostile.
* Fixed Terra Salvum's Ecologic trait not working on water fungus.
* Fixed purchasing from the economy panel not always working.
* Fixed water fungus not appearing in territory hints.
* Fixed issues with Steam overlay on Linux.

Eclipse of Nashira Beta r5458 Released

Opt-in to the beta version by right-clicking on Pandora in your Steam library, choosing Properties and selecting the beta under the Betas tab.

Added:
* Added number of turns each pact has been in effect to the diplomacy screen.
* Added custom mouse cursor graphic.
* Added video setting for choosing the title screen.
* Added support for unicode characters up to and including the Cyrillic script (0x4FF), allowing those characters to work correctly with the Plain (DejaVu Sans) font as well as any other custom unicode font that has the corresponding glyphs.
* Added AI ability to dynamically alter their tax-rate.
* Added ability to raze cities to the AI if their morale gets too bad.
* Added two sets of new icons for farmers, miners, workers and scientists that gain higher yields than normal.
* Added option in Pandora.xml to switch between the two sets of new icons.
* Added a mechanism for the AI to check how usefull a war will be and make its decision to go to war dependand on that.

Changed:
* Moved Planetary Market to one subtier earlier in the research tree.
* Improved mouse wheel scrolling of GUI components.
* Made terrain-colors on the minimap much darker to make it easier to tell it apart from cities and units.
* AI now is more aggressive about dealing with aliens.
* AI now chooses technologies to research in a similar fashion of how experienced players choose technologies.
* AI now will, in average, commit more scientists to research.
* AI now considers pollution when assigning population to jobs.
* AI now will expand much slower and focus more on improving its existing cities instead.
* AI now considers quality more important than quantity when it comes to building units.
* AI will now prefer late-game-devices over early-game-devices.
* AI now has an emergency behaviour to resolve economical crisis.
* Reworked how AI determines it's tile-improvements. It should now be much closer to what an experienced player chooses.
* AI will be more careful with its units when exploring.
* AI now will heal wounded units before sending them to attack.
* AI now considers more sophisticated criteria when choosing locations to expand to.
* AI now considers more sophisticated criteria when choosing tiles to expand it's existing cities borders to.
* AI no longer builds new formers as long as enemies are within the area of their city.
* Improved AI behavior when it comes to avoiding the loss of formers.
* AI now can perform several diplomatic actions within one turn.
* AI now will gradually lower their diplomatic relations to whoever is closest to victory.
* AI will no longer grant you gifts all the time just because they like you.
* AI players are now more difficult to convince to declare war on others.
* AI now will prioritize devices that best fit the unit-type.
* AI now will consider the tier of unit-components except of the device when evaluating which unit to build.
* AI now can and will use fungus once it has the two advancements boosting its yield.
* AI will now allocated more minerals into boosting its newly found cities.
* AI will now lower their standing to someone capturing a city depending on that cities importance for its previous owner.
* AI now takes device and unit-type into consideration, when deciding which units to use as defenders.
* AI no longer considers distance when picking defenders for its cities.
* AI no longer voluntarily gifts away its credits.
* AI will now use bombardment and nukes primarily to kill transports and disrupt healing in besieged cities.
* AI will now be much more carefull about where to use blackholes.
* AI will now rather save a WMD for better use than to risk overnuking a target.
* Depending on their aggression-level AIs now may consider making more units as a means of expansion rather than building colonizers.
* AI will now rather pillage tile-improvements instead of retreating if it considers the defenses of a city too strong.
* Improved AI behavior when confronted with long-range-units.
* AI will now be more careful about where to colonize.
* AI will now keep units inside their cities if they are not needed otherwise.
* AI will now consider WMD-buildings more valuable.
* AI now is much more likely to build naval units in coastal cities.
* AI will no longer value research once it has enough science for a research-victory.

Fixed:
* Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a save game in a specific state.
* Fixed operations not replacing durations when deployed on territories.
* Fixed Scites and Carcharodons turning aggressive before Xenomorphs.
* Fixed water suburbs and water purifiers costing 2 credits instead of 3.
* Fixed Fungus Mutagenesis and Fungal Hormones not providing bonuses for water fungus.
* Fixed army panel sometimes showing units that are no longer in the territory.
* Fixed mouse wheel sometimes not scrolling drop lists.
* Fixed errors in German translation-files.
* Fixed AI not building advancements unlocked by killing sea-monsters.
* Fixed a rare case where the AI would waste some of it's mineral income each turn.
* Fixed an issue where paying tribute was considered the same as denying to pay.
* Fixed AI ships acquiring targets near unreachable inland-lakes.
* Fixed AI upgrading units into options that aren't even actually better.
* Fixed an exploit where you could reduce the amount of credits an AI asks for during negotiations by spending them before stating you are willing to pay.
* Fixed AI ignoring how you react to a tribute-offer. Standing will now properly change.

Version 1.4.3 / 1.5.4 Released (Mac OS X Hotfixes)

Updated Pandora: First Contact to version 1.4.3 and Eclipse of Nashira to 1.5.4.

The following changes apply:
* Changed fullscreen modes to use OpenGL scaling instead of changing the display resolution. This fixes Mac OS X fullscreen issues.
* Fixed Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) cursor issues.

A bigger update is still in the works.

Eclipse of Nashira Version 1.5.3 Released

Added:
* Added button to toggle grid in the world screen.

Changed:
* Changed steal / sabotage modifier from 25% - 100% to 25% - 75%.
* Increased upkeep for suburbs and purifiers from 2 to 3.
* Building suburbs now requires Pandoran Construction.
* City tile now provides +1 food and +1 minerals.

Fixed:
* Fixed a single drop pod being able to drop an entire unit stack.
* Fixed amphibious formers not being able to explore ruins.
* Fixed crashes and empty strings for diplomacy actions involving third parties in multiplayer.
* Fixed incorrect hotkey listed for the grow fungus order.
* Minor language fixes.

Change log history.

Multiplayer Gathering Today!

We're playing some grand multiplayer matches in 3 hours (4 pm CET), so come join us on Teamspeak www.the-battlefield.com if you want to chat or play. Everyone welcome.

See http://steamcommunity.com/app/287580/discussions/0/613936673579329797/ for more info.