We've just released another update: 0.8.3.00 Hollowed Dvorak
AI improvements
We've removed a pretty big item from our todo list with this update by making some pretty significant changes to AI so that the ships you fight will be a lot less dumb. The biggest part of this update was the work done on collision avoidance and pathfinding. Not only do the AI do a much better job now of avoiding terrain and plotting paths around it, but they also can do it while fighting and it's much less taxing on system resources.
The other significant change we're making is to give personality to individual captains. It's only a series of variables that determine their behavior, but it means different captains may behave differently when fighting in the same engagements. We can now tweak some numbers to make some captains more difficult to fight than others.
Here's a complete list of the changes we've made to AI:
- Ships now actively avoid collisions with asteroids (based on proximity)
- Ships now use pathfinding!!! (they are able to navigate complex asteroid fields, find paths around obstacles and follow after their targets almost anywhere)
- Ships now track more data internally about mounted weapons, beams, active modules and other subsystems. This allows them to make better decisions in combat about what tactic to use and which way to orient themselves to maximize DPS against their target. AI now should be able to use any ship design more effectively.
- AI (including friendly crew) should now be more effective at using Point defense turrets when targeting incoming missiles.
- AI Captains now uses better aiming behavior which allows them to target propulsion or weapons on ships. Some captains focus fire selected spots on their target.
- AI Captains will now use repair drones on themselves and friendly ships.
- AI Captains now use drone bays even when they are operating a gunnery console (previously drones were used only in navigation console)
- SSC Seraphim battleship (and any other ship designs with the module) will use Sinidal Cascade spinal weapon in combat
- Crew is now assigned Aggressivity and Cleverness stats which modify behavior in combat. Aggressive captains fight more up close. Clever captains make better decisions and use better targeting approaches(shooting at weapons or engines). Captains for each faction are assigned different values for these stats.
- Ships now use strafing for most of their movement during combat.
- Ships with missile factories on them are now considered missile boats and behave accordingly. They keep their targets at a distance and launch missiles (which are very effective at longer ranges).
- Ships now use different movement behavior in combat. They can choose to orbit, follow or do firing passes at their targets.
- Escorting behavior was improved (looks a little more graceful now)
- Ships can now decide to run away from combat. They will return to their previous task when they are safe.
- Docking ports unlocking behavior was changed - AI ships now need to take a certain amount of damage before they will open their airlocks. Before they would open on the first instance of damage making it too easy to capture some ships
Numeric visual squish
We're making all the numbers look smaller! I'll do another blog post about it after this. Short version is that the numeric values are the same but they look smaller so they are easier to read and compare prices.
The rest of the patch notes
- the minimum speed for higgs drive was upgraded to be in line with the changes to travel drive speed
- the loading animation can now handle situations where animation has become completely impossible. You won't see the animation obviously, but the task (such as saving your game) will still complete
- added shields to everett ship design
- We have performed a visual rework of all credit cost values. The underlying values remain the same, however they will be displayed as lower values
- capacitor rate stat is now equal to capacitor capacity for all cases. If after releasing this change we can remember why this wasn't originally the case, we will revert it
- added shields to everett ship design and fixed white transparent pixels
- Design screen: fixed contextual tooltip when selecting armor or shield tiles
- Docking ports unlocking behavior was changed: for the ports to unlock when ship recieves damage, it must be either small enough or it already took some damage
- planets were re-added to procedural worldgen for the rest of the universe
- unlocked warp gates are now stored in the character database. This will override the existing method without requiring any change to existing saves. If you have a gate that stopped working in your save, just enter it again to unlock that gate via the database.
- fixed a bug that could cause terrain data to not be saved if you teleported out of a sector (or respawned after dying) while a long operation was happening inside of a ship. This would cause the game to load old out-of-date data for that sector leading to broken warp gates, missing quest npcs, or dopplegangers of the player character. Hopefully this is the only thing causing said bugs, but we will keep an eye on it.
- fixed secret quest removing itself with error message when ship dies
- Survival arena got its stages and rewards reworked. Reaching certain stages can unlock certain designs for ship designer.
- Ship Designer: minor fix to tile removal logic when shift deleting with modules
- Ship Designer: fixed some conduits not mirroring properly with copy paste
- Fixed wrong reward for final Tier 1 research milestone.