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Changelog since 7.017 may be found here


7.017 - March 31st
This one isn't as packed as some of the other recent releases. During normal working hours I'm focused on The Last Federation, and even moreso right now as we're in the last few weeks before releasing that.

But there's some important player-facing changes and fixes in 7.017. Hacking an Advanced constructor no longer also charges you for a fab-hack, and the cost of sabotage-hacking is back down to 5 from 10 (was 2 until recently). Also, in light of Reprisal making fleetwipes more dangerous, the AIP cost of killing a Black Hole Machine has dropped from 10 to 5. Speaking of salvage, minor faction stuff dying on player planets now contributes to the player's salvage (the AI still doesn't salvage from minor faction deaths, as then they could lead to aggressive AI units with no player involvement).

One of the changes that snuck into 7.016 (because it was already done before the need for that hotfix became apparent) was to make the Starship component of waves scale much better with wave sizes. In this version other special parts of waves (like the Mad Bomber's extra bomber starships, Heroic's in-wave champions, etc) are using similar scaling logic. I expect that the Spire Hammer, in particular, just got a lot nastier once the AIP cranks up. Especially on higher difficulties you might find yourself on the uncomfortable end of a Spire capital fleet. What could go wrong?

Most of the actual work went into a very substantial code refactoring (primarily of AI Reinforcements) that didn't mean many player-facing changes… this time ;)

7.018 - April 7th
This one is another fairly small release while we're focused on the last few weeks before releasing The Last Federation,

So we shot some troublesome bugs. Some old, like some missing art assets for non-steam installs. Some new, like the Heroic AI using its newfound ability to buy more champions for its waves… a little too enthusiastically.

But the AI's also gotten better at shooting troublemakers. In the kneecaps (or suitably analogous regions). Mainly as a quality-of-life improvement, we've removed the AIP-on-death from Special Forces Guard Posts, so they're now autotargeted and won't clutter up your backfield with enemy units that trigger various "ah! There's an enemy on the planet!" logic in sub-optimal ways. Since that AIP (or increased special forces size, if left alive previously) was a significant (albeit small) part of the overall balance, however, a corresponding buff was made to the SF. Specifically, they now spend a portion of their strength on Riot Control Starships. Some of you may not be familiar with how much havoc Riots can cause. You'll probably know soon.

The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 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 6.000 or later, you can download that here.