Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for April 29th, 2023. A progress update has been a long time coming, but it is here. The main significant update is that Admirals can now be ordered to attack other fleets or cities. Also, updates to the load/save system won't force a game restart when then internal structures get changes, so now updates between version shouldn't make your save games crash.
AI Updates
There has been movement in the AI this release. While it's been a long time coming, this is a BIG part of the AI helper system. The Admirals now know how to attack cities and fleets. Which means the enemy can now do this too. But that means you can simply make an Admiral AI, and tell it to attack a city or ships, and then forget about it. It will start to build ships based on the designs available (if you have any. If not, it will request you design some). It will build a combination of assault ships and salvage ships. Once it has determined it has enough ships to do the job, it will order the ships to attack. After the battle, the salvage ships will be on hand to clean up the mess to get extra resources.
Quality of Life
As a minor part of the update, save games now have a version code in them that is actually used now. This means that older saves from a previous release won't crash the game if the save format happens to change. I have always resisted changing certain internal structures of the game because I knew it would break people's save files. The new addition should stop that from happening when enhancements happen.
Short-term RoadMap
The Admiral AI needs a good shake down to make sure it is done. So expect tweaks in the coming weeks. Hopefully the usability issues in the RTS screen will now have time to be worked on.
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/