New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.004_Easy_There.2C_Hack_Response
This one makes the enemy response from hacking... anything... way less intense. Unless you were playing spire-infused empire or fallen spire. Then it's probably still the same. There was a bug that was inflating the response to hacks as if you were a spire player, and there were some other tweaks that needed to happen to give you even better estimates of the strength you'd face throughout a hack. Big thanks to Badger for calming the AI down in this area.
Dire CPAs are a feature for expert mode, and they were gated behind DLC3 for testing purposes until today. They've now been fully released to the base game at large, so everyone can enjoy this new pain, heh. Thanks to Strategic Sage for the idea, and to Badger for the implementation and tuning.
Faction beacons were a feature that I had to remove during the great refactor, and while random faction options were a very nice addition, a lot of folks have still been pining for the beacons to return. Today I managed to get the first two back and better than ever: nanocaust and fallen spire. How are they better than ever? Well, they don't drain performance, they don't compete for CPU and RAM unless you actually hack them, and there are a bunch of hacking options that let you choose specifically what you're going to get. The beacon system in general allows for combinations of factions to be added, and it only requires xml now (the old system also required custom code per beacon faction), so not only can we add in cool multi-faction beacons, but... well, so can any general xml modder. There are some other features that I'm still looking into adding to really capitalize on all this new power in this subsystem, so I expect we'll see some exciting things in this area for a while yet.
This build has a number of fixes and improvements to autotargeting as well, plus many other general fixes from myself and Badger. There are some improvements to the R-view thanks to Daniexpert, and that was a major investigation and careful fixing on his part, so big thanks there.
The More System Defenders Mod has been updated by CRCGamer to now include a version of the Stormfront Ark that can be used as the centerpiece in Ark Empire mode -- that's the first mod that adds new content to Ark Empires, but I'm hoping we'll see lots more of that, because it's really fun.
One other change that's in this build is that when you refit a modular ship's modules, it now has a 10 second paralysis. This keeps people from gaming modules and microing them during battle.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!