AI War Beta 6.017-6.018 "Defending The AI's Front Lawn" Released!

This one makes the AI a little more enthusiastic about its job of, well, not dying.



Previously people have really been encouraged (on high difficulty, at least) to keep AIP absolutely minimally low during the entire game. And it's fine (and encouraged) that you keep it low most of the game, but the AI homeworlds were not causing the kind of effective AIP increase that one might expect when you make a serious bid to, you know, kill the AI. Sure, actually killing an AI Home Command Station used to give a whopping +100 AIP, but most high-difficulty games seem to end with both of those being killed at basically the same time, after the player has been fighting on the AI homeworlds and killing core guard posts for quite a while. Seems like maybe the AI should object a bit more while you stand on its front lawn(s) lining up a double headshot, don't you think?



That said, we didn't want to totally take away the ability to play that way, as there are plenty of other ways players can (and do) make the game harder to compensate.



So we've added a new "Lazy AI" toggle to the AI Modifiers list in the lobby. If this toggle is on, then the new behaviors don't happen. If the new toggle is off by default. And when it is off, the following new rules apply:



1) The strategic reserve (which primarily exists to defend the AI homeworlds) has a static strength equal to what it used to be at 200 AIP. So attacking with less AIP than that won't save you any strategic-reserve-releated grief.



2) Killing a core guard post (one of the guard posts actually on an AI HW) increases the AIP floor by 10. There are 8 posts on each AI HW so your absolute minimal AIP floor when the last one goes down is 170 (due to the starting 10), and in reality you'll have more than that due to normal floor increases. So there won't be much point in starting a homeworld assault with AIP much lower than that.



The combined effect is that you'll generally need more power than you used to to actually punch out an AI HW (due to the strategic reserve), and if you've been playing low AIP through the midgame you'll have "may as well use it" AIP room due to the core-post floor increases. Also, the AI's response will actually ramp up during the homeworld assault phase, instead of staying mostly constant.



So get off the AI's lawn.



Or just turn on the Lazy toggle and it will stop waving the shotgun around as much.



Oh, we also fixed some bugs in this release; mostly from the nominations for our first "bug poll". A poll, incidentally, that I'm not sure I'm going to post because I'm not sure the voting options will make sense to folks, but we'll see.



Update: 6.018 hotfix to fix a bug preventing sending champions into unexplored nebulae.



Enjoy!



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.