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Please see the original post here
Changelog may be found here
This one is jam-packed with some pretty significant gameplay changes. First up is defender mode, from which this patch takes it's name. I actually forgot to mention it in the release notes summary last week, but one of those patches actually improved some of the stuff about defender mode, in terms of the timing of waves, etc. Well, this patch changes a whole ton of stuff about it, to the point that defender mode is pretty much ready to go -- pending your testing feedback, of course.
I should go on and mention at this point that we're gearing up for an official release of what is now being called AI War 5.0, along with Light of the Spire, this Thursday or Friday if all goes well. Again, pending your testing feedback -- so be sure to let us know about the most serious issues you want us to be sure to fix before 5.0 hits. We're trying to weed out the trivial stuff at this stage, and are just focusing on those remaining pieces of polish that are actually really important for the next official.
Why the change to calling this release 5.0 instead of 4.4? Because so much has changed it's really a whole new era compared to 4.021, the current official version. Almost every ship in the game has been rebalanced, tons and tons of new gameplay rules and mechanics have been added, and in general the "feel" of the game is as different from 4.0 as version 3.0 was from version 2.0. In general, I really feel like 5.0 combines a lot of what was best about all the past eras: the general difficulty of 2.0, the good parts of the pacing from 3.0 and 4.0, most of the rules shifts from 4.0, the sub-battlefields centering around forcefields and fortresses from the 1.0 era, and so forth.
Please see the rest of the post here.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.