It's rather chilly here in Canada at the moment, where winter has finally fallen and people have already begun to hang Christmas lights; at least the traffic hasn't murdered me [yet]! Here are the latest changes in our latest version, 2.001R!
Topic: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2561.msg15945/boardseen.html#new
Download: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001R.zip
What's new since 2.001Q:
-All ships that have at least 1 million health are now immune to blades. This prevents some exploits with the Zenith Viral Shredders, and makes for more sensible attack logic with Cutlasses.
-Turrets can no longer have their munitions boosted or their shields boosted, but they are now immune to minor electric shots and blades.
-Teleport Raiders, Anti-Starship Arachnids, and Teleport Battle Stations are now immune to tractor beams, since they can no longer shoot them.
-Deflector Drones now fire a new Energy Burst ammo type, instead of using minor electric ammo.
-A new set of Core 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 2 per human starting planet, same as advanced factories. Each of these core fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Core ship (which otherwise normally only the AI can build).
The ship caps for core ships are quite low (and can be seen in the planetary summary by hitting F1 a few times), and the core ships are also very expensive, but they also cost no knowledge to unlock and are quite powerful.
Players can see what kind of core ship will be produced at a core fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text.
In the base game, all 9 of the core ships from the base ship classes can be found as core fabricators. In the expansion, those 9 plus an additional 11 core ships from the expansion can be found. Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.
-A new expansion-only capturable, the Zenith Power Generator, has been added: Advanced Zenith power generator that produces a massive amount of energy at a very tiny cost. AI progress goes up by 20 if this is destroyed, and while your team holds it, the AIs will send 2x stronger waves against this planet.
-In the expansion only, the "energize" cheat now creates 10 Zenith Power Generators instead of 10 mark II energy reactors.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-The new font has once again seen a number of readability improvements, most notably with all of the numbers but also with a few of the other characters.