Prerelease/Expans 2.001Y/Z (2 New Mines, Remains Rebuilder, Cleanup Drone, Perf+)
Topic: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2655.0.html
Download: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001Z.zip
What's new since 2.001Y/Z:
-New expansion-only ship: EMP Mine. Please see the topic for more information.
-New expansion-only ship: Area Mine. Please see the topic for more information.
-Some internal performance improvements have been made to the simulation logic in a variety of areas.
-Mine remains are now practically invincible to conventional attacks. Again, please see the topic for more information.
-New ship: Cleanup Drone. Removes exploded enemy mines and turrets, to prevent them from being rebuilt by enemy mine/turret layers. Previously this was accomplished with engineers (once those engineers had finished with anything else that they considered a higher priority, which caused some challenges), or via manual targeted. Now, having a specialized unit dedicated to cleanup makes it much simpler to clear exploded enemy mines without any micromanagement.
-The following ships now drop remains on their destruction in the same manner that mines always have: advanced warp sensors, tachyon beam emitters and stealth tachyon beam emitters, and all turrets. Consequently, all of these ship types are also now immune to reclamation.
-Mine Layers have been renamed to Remains Rebuilders, and now are a general purpose rebuilder for any ship types that leave remains. They also now only will rebuild ships that were owned by the player who controls the rebuilder, rather than also working on allied ships.
-Remains Rebuilders now have cloaking, making them easier for players to keep alive (and more devious for when the AI has them, incidentally). They also now have 100k more health. They also no longer require unlocking, and thus no longer have any associated knowledge cost now that they are more of a general-purpose ship. Their ship cap has also been raised about 3x.
-Ship Remains that belong to AI players, but which are not on AI planets, now automatically explode -- thus saving players the trouble of creating cleanup drones to clean them up manually.
-Previously it was possible for Remains Rebuilders to send a player into negative energy through their rebuilding. In recent prereleases, they were also doing their rebuilding for free. All fixed, and now they are not instantly rebuilt, either, but rather are kicked off so that they then construct themselves over time for an ongoing resource cost as with every other aspect of the new economy. For the first time ever, this also applies to the AI when it is rebuilding ships -- thus the AI Remains Rebuilders are not nearly so threatening as mine builders used to be, since they can't just instantly respawn large numbers of ships.
-Mines have little to no impact on performance of the game.
-Ships that are self-building are no longer cloaked while under construction (if they have the cloaking ability, previously that would be engaged while they were still under construction, which was erroneous).
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-In the last prerelease, the niche text overlays for ship icons were showing incorrectly offset to the side.
- Collision detection in regards to mines have been addressed.
Updates in 2.001Z:
-Since remains and their cleanup and rebuilding are now so important, when Cloaking is disabled in the lobby options here is now a non-cloaked version of the Remains Rebuilder that players and AIs will use, and a non-cloaked version of the Cleanup Drone that players can use.
-All ships that are immune to reclamation now have a strong attack penalty against the Raid Starship line, and Parasites.
-The movement speed of all parasites has been nearly doubled.
-EMPs and Area Mines now cost 4k knowledge instead of 3k as in the past prerelease.