Prerelease/Expans 2.001T (Astro Turret Trains, Experimental Starship Fabs)
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Download: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001T.zip
This update contains two significant new units, being a new type of Astro Train, along with a new Experimental Starship Fabrication capturable (this is in the base game, too). There is a significant change to the proportions of resources that are required to construct the Starship line--a needed change, too! It is a very common observation that players usually run out of metal in comparison to crystal.
What's new since 2.001S:
-A number of updates have been made to the localization text files to reduce redundant entries and thus both file size and the number of words needing to be translated by around 4,500 in the base game alone.
-Three new expansion-only ships have been added: Astro Turret Trains I-III. Tough but not nearly-indestructible robotic courier. Has heavier turrets than normal astro trains, and so poses much more of a threat. More importantly, they reveal any cloaked ships that come near, and they tend to disrupt player minefields. Build Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets to protect against them, destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them, or attack them head-on. If destroyed, an individual astro turret train is gone forever, but its destruction comes at an AI Progress cost.
-The metal and crystal costs of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have now been reversed. This makes them cost much more metal than crystal, rather than the other way around. This provides an excellent counterpoint to many of the other starships and provides a good use for metal if it is too abundant compared to crystal in a campaign.
-The attack range and power of dreadnoughts have been doubled.
-New Starship (expansion only): Warbird Starship. Extremely fast starship with cloaking and a huge multi-targeting energy burst system. Great for clearing out hordes of enemy ships.
-New Starship (expansion only): Beam Starship. Fires very powerful high-range beam weapons that strike all enemy ships in a line.
-A new set of Experimental Starship Fabricators has been added for both the base game and the expansion. These are new capturables that are scattered around the galaxy map, a count of which can be seen in the Mission Summary in each campaign. Generally there are 1 per human starting planet. Each of these experimental starship fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Experimental Starship (which otherwise normally are not built at all, or the AI only builds, depending). These experimental starships are fairly expensive, but cost no knowledge to unlock and are quite powerful.
Players can see what kind of experimental starship will be produced at a experimental starship fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text.
In the base game, currently the only experimental starship is the Bomber Starship Mark I. In the expansion, a new Beam Starship and Warbird Starship can also be found. Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.
-It is now possible to put a single ship in multiple control groups.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-Fixed the description text for core fabricators.
-The way that core fabricators are populated at the start has now been changed for the expansion, so that there are more core fabricators available and they are a good mix from the expansion and from the base game. This will also scale better with future expansions.