================================================================================ Pandora: Eclipse of Nashira Change Log ================================================================================ Version 1.6.7 (June 08, 2016) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This update primarily deals with the overopportunistic dogpiling behaviour AI empires used to show in the past. AIs will be much friendlier towards players who pose no threat and now need an actual reason to attack you other than seeing you already are troubled with other factions. Please see below for the full list of changes. Changed: * AI no longer considers standings and war status of other factions when deciding its diplomatic actions. * AI will be far less aggressive towards weak players they like and more aggressive towards players they dislike, even if those are really dangerous. * Renamed difficulty levels to better fit what they feel like for new players. * Default difficulty for new players starting the game decreased. * AI will consider habitat provided by suburbs as slightly less valuable and expand a little more. * AI will now consider the alien aggression setting of the game when considering when to expand. They expand earlier on settings below "very high". * AI will now build colonizers and formers when at war but their military power is strong compared to that of their enemies. * When AI has a storage of food and doesn't need to farm, it will now assume an average yield of 3 to prevent it from building useless farms in that period. * AI will now build more aircraft units in inland cities when there are a lot of coastal cities. Fixed: * Fixed an issue that allowed the the AI to know whether a city was undefended or not without having vision. * Fixed incorrect difficulty level description texts for dutch, french, german and italian. * Fixed an issue where it was possible for the AI to sign contracts or ask for tribute in the same turn that it would declare war. * Fixed an issue where AI would not determine the coastal to inland city ratio properly and thus underproduce naval forces on archipelago maps. * Fixed an issue where AI would never attack cities when they didn't have access to artillery units yet. Version 1.6.6 (February 29, 2016) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Improvements to the AI across the board and its focus to play to win have have made it frustrating to play on easier difficulties. Today's update should be a good start to make easy and very easy difficulties more manageable and enjoyable. Changed: * AI will no longer embark land units when they are seen by an enemy. * AI formers will now cancel their action when they stand an in ion storm. * AI will now be much nicer to other players on very easy and easy difficulties. * AI will now be less aggressive on very easy and easy difficulties. * AI will no longer declare war on human players on very easy difficulty. * AI now has a very high inhibition threshold before it would declare war on a human player on easy difficulty. Fixed: * Fixed an issue that prevented AI formers from clearing fungus. * Fixed an issue that could lead to unwanted war declarations. Version 1.6.5 (February 19, 2016) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This update speeds up turn times, further improves the AI and fixes some inconsistencies. Please see below for the full list of changes. Changed: * AI will now lower their population growth if they suffer from overpopulation while at war. * AI will now take aliens much more seriously and design more units in order to counter them early on. * AI will briefly pause defending their formers while they have a colonizer so they can make sure the location they want to found their new city in will be properly defended. * When a city is under siege and the attacker has enough cities to shut down healing completely via one orbital bombardment each turn, the defending AI will now act as if the city was sieged by artillery. * AI will now move their units one tile per cycle as long as there are enemy units in the units' vision range. This allows them to react to units discovered while moving and generally improves their tactical ability with units that have more movement than vision. * AI now considers faction boni for resource yields when evaluating terrain and tile improvements. * AI will now consider resources inside the radius of a hive when evaluation locations to expand to. * Changed how AI determines their relationship to other factions. * A lot of tweaks to how the AI evaluates certain technologies. * AI will now properly defend against aliens and lose newly found cities less frequently to them. * AI will now scan bonus resources in order to nuke them. * AI now prioritizes refitting formers to amphibious formers over any other refits as long as they are not at war. * Slight improvement of AI early game unit composition. * Income generated by units no longer impacts trade pacts. This change significantly reduces lag. * Reverted earlier change that caused the AI to not attack things outside of its territory when being significantly weaker than its opponents. * Improved AI's tactical behavior when fighting with larger amounts of weaker units. * Against an opponent who has enough cities to cease healing with bombardment every turn the AI will fight more recklessly as opposed to sitting back in town and just taking damage. * AI will now value buildings that grant operations more highly. * The AI will now consider standing modifiers for war declarations. * AI now considers the Advance Cost Computation device less useful for watercraft and mechs. * AI is now much better at predicting how someone else will act in the case it would declare war. Beware: this makes it far more likely for them to help each other against a common threat. * When considering war declarations the AI now considers the importance of distance to a possible target less important the when it gets closer to any victory type. * AI will now make an educated guess about how much human players like it instead of always assuming a neutral standing. * Reverted change where AI would value attacking enemy units inside their territory much higher than usual as this could lead to weird behaviour when fightning near borders. * AI will not gather units at a rally point when the unit already is rank 10 or higher. This is to prevent first strikes with nukes becoming too effective. * AI will now prefer to scan nearby enemy cities instead of random ones. Fixed: * Killing spies in transports should no longer result in an automatic unannounced war declaration. * Selling units now grants you the intended 25% of their value instead of 12.5%. * Fixed a comparison error that resulted in the AI not properly ensuring whether or not to build a colonizer early on. * Fixed an error in the evaluation algorithm of buildings that caused the AI to build way too few units early on and making them very susceptible for rushes. * Fixed French translation error. * Fixed an issue where the pact leech of the ambassadors was only 1/25th as strong as it is supposed to be. * Moving units and refreshing your unit positions during turn change no longer triggers a recalculation of your resource yields to be shown in the top bar. This drastically increases performance! * There is now a preselection of unit designs to choose from for the AI. This reduces turn-time by quite a bit! * Fixed an issue where the one tile per cycle movement would cause aliens, who have only one cycle, to not attack after moving. * Fixed an issue where the calculation of what research to pick would be extremely slow due to inefficiently recalculating a value over and over. This drastically reduces turn-times! * Fixed an issue where the AI did not properly consider technologies two technologies down the line by how important they are. * Fixed an issue where the AI believed they could build an improvement on top of fungus. * Fixed an issue where floating units would not move out of fungus when they should. * Fixed a rare crash that could happen when loading a save game. * Fixed an issue where the AI would never cancel an attack on a unit with the Pre-emptive Strike Initiator device even if it wasn't in range. * Fixed updater crash when removing redundant files on Linux. * Fixed Agents outdated hints. * Fixed ruin explored report wrongly showing when a Messari Portal is destroyed. * Fixed an issue where the AI was so afraid of entering enemy territory with transports, that it would rather just leave them on the sea. Version 1.6.4 (December 21, 2015) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This larger community update focuses on improving the AI's diplomatic behavior as well as both economic and militaristic thinking. These are fruits of labor of Alexander Stumpp and the rest of the community. Thank you! The AI's diplomatic behaviour is now less selfish and preventing someone else from getting too strong now has a higher priority than trying to exploit someone weak. There is also more distinction in the behaviour between different factions. The AI will now use a completely new algorithm that considers the return of investment to determine whether to build units or buildings. This helps them to keep decent amounts of troops around while at the same time not falling behind with important buildings. The way how the AI handles their formers has been improved a lot. They will defend them with their military so they don't have to run away from aliens. They will also be smarter about what to build where. This allows them to be more efficient with fewer cities. The AI now takes more things into consideration when deciding what troops to build. Strategies like the tank rushes should be much harder to perform due to the AI getting missile launchers and their own tanks much earlier than before. The calculation of refit costs has been reworked to be more consistent with the actual price of the units you upgrade into. You will notice differences especially when upgrading the base unit into one from another era. Turning your white tanks into blue ones will be quite a bit more expensive. Those are just some of the highlights. Please see below for the full list of changes. Added: * Added a sophisticated AI algorithm to determine whether and how many field training operations should be constructed and if field training technology should be researched. * Added return of investment algorithm to the AI's production agent, improving whether and which buildings to build. * Messari portals now grant a reward to the player destroying them. * The AI is now capable of going for an economic victory. Changed: * Reverted change that made spies lose all movement points upon entering another faction's territory. * Increased research costs for mechanization and transcendance eras. * AI now considers the cost of a technology instead of its tier when weighting its value against other technologies. * AI now considers defensive buildings as vital. * AI will now build less units with flamethrowers once mechanical units are available. * AI will now only stop to heal their colonizers when they are severely damaged. * AI will now be more likely to fight with damaged units when they are in a city under siege in order to try and break the siege. * AI will now be even more careful about using artilleries. * AI will prefer defending with biological units while sending tanks to the attack. * AI considers technologies that grant flat bonus buildings more valuable. (This will help the AI get the Recycling Tanks from the AC Factions Mod, which they would often ignore before.) * AI now considers the safety of a city location in regards to aliens much more important. * AI will now again send the closest potential defender to an undefended city instead of the best. * AI will now make two cycles for rush-building in order to prioritize buildings and advancements over units. * AI now only considers cities it actually knows when deciding whether to build naval or land units. * AI now makes the same considerations about building Colonization Fervor that it does when deciding whether to build colonizers. * AI will no longer acquire targets with its land artilleries that it cannot reach. * AI will no longer attack unaggressive aliens when it would win but could lose its unit in the process. * During a siege the AI will now retreat units that could be killed by the city's defenders. * AI will no longer try to heal its damaged units while enemy units are nearby. * AI will now send idle transports back home. * AI will value colonization spots lower if units of other players are nearby. * AI will no longer retreat a damaged unit to heal when none of the nearby enemy units are strong enough to kill it. * AI artillery units shall no longer move next to enemy units in order to attack something behind them. * AI now puts way more emphasis on production, beware of bigger armies! * AI will now on average be slightly less aggressive. * AI will now send stronger task forces to do pillaging so the pillaging troops cannot be just destroyed by the defender. * AI will no longer try to attack cities with forces smaller than about twice the power of the cities defense. It will then keep the units at home till it has enough. * AI will no longer try to heal heavily damaged units in cities that are under siege. * AI will now try to prevent stacking too many units. * AI will now try to move units through terrain that gives their type a bonus. * AI will now defend more offensively instead of sitting back and waiting to be brought down by area damage. * AI diplomatic behavior reworked once again to be more reasonable. * AI now will consider the defensive structure in order to determine if it should sacrifice units attacking a city. * AI will now request more units for attacking units near an enemy city. * AI now will also use badly damaged units to conquer cities, hives, portals or ruins instead of running them home. * AI will now prevent moving their artilleries through hostile territory. * AI will stop making units when it cannot afford the upkeep cost. * AI is now smarter about how to properly siege a city while reducing losses. * AI will now be very conservative when dealing with aliens and not sacrifice any units at all. * Improved AI technology selection to dynamically consider food and mineral technologies more valuable depending on farmers and miners. * AI will now weight the maintenance cost of purifiers and suburbs more into the decision whether to build them or not. * AI will now build roads only on mountains and forests. * AI will now scout with its starting unit. * AI will now use more units for scouting. * AI will now consider advancements less valuable in comparison to buildings. * AI will now ignore other players units when deciding whether to commit to an attack or not. * General improvements to AI border expansion. * An AI that considers itself considerably weaker than its opponents will now play more defensively. * Removed limitation for how far the AI would go in order to kill a hive. * When having morale issues, the AI will now play more greedy economically and less safe militarily. This will mostly affect lower difficulty levels. * Brought back AI vision range prevention with transports but this time with much better performance. * AI will no longer try to scout and thereby endanger their units in enemy territory when it already knows at least one city's location of that enemy. * AI will now prefer cheaper units and units with higher vision range when scouting. * AI transports will still show respect to Carcharodons but not to an extent that completely prevents them from traveling to their target at all. * AIs starting with a former will no longer defend with the former as long as they don't have contact with any other faction. * AI will no longer consider the experience device a top tier device for mechs. * AI scouting units will no longer stop near an enemy to heal. They will instead continue scouting while being damaged and only heal if there's no threat nearby. * AI is now smarter about when to use the field training operation. * AI is now slightly more expansionistic. * AI will no longer pillage in territories of a much weaker opponent to not reduce the value of the city it is most likely about to capture. * Not having access to any unit that can mount artillery weapons will reduce the likelihood of the AI going to war. * AI will aim for fewer units armed with machine guns once it has access to heavily armored units. * AI will now prefer attacking with the unit that has lower movement first when it has the choice so the unit with higher movement can pick another target. * AI will now avoid sieging cities with superior defenders when it has no artillery. * AI will now better adapt to the topography when it comes to whether or not building naval units. * AI will now adapt to the change of spies losing hitpoints by not using them again until they are fully healed. * Slightly increased the importance of tank tech for the AI. * Revisited AI expansion algorithm to no longer be tied to missing buildings but to potential habitat instead. * AI will no longer over-react to aliens and instead try to get along with fewer units. * AI will now consider total power more important when deciding what kind of units to build. * AI will now be smarter about researching armor technology and a few other techs had their evaluation adjusted as well. * AI will now clear alien hives much sooner. * AI will now play a little less production-oriented and instead do more research. * AIs will generally be slightly less likely to backstab. AIs with low aggression value like The Ambassadors and Terra Salvum will be much less likely to backstab the victim and more likely to backstab the aggressor. * AI will now prioritize rush-buying buildings instead of upgrading units. It will still prefer upgrading over rush-buying units. It will only rush-buy units if it is rather rich and will save some credits for future rush-buying of buildings and upgrades. * AI will no longer explore when it is at war and knows the location of at least one city of their enemy. * AI will now remove energy parks, field laboratories and construction bays with much less hesitation when there's more important improvements to build. * AI will now aim for 25% of their army as artillery instead of 20%. * AI will once again rush-buy units in cities that are under siege. * Tweaked how AI values the importance of military to protect their economy. * Tweaked the AI's return of investment values for some advancements and buildings. * AI will no longer try to match certain percentages of units with certain weapon types when it feels those units are no longer useful. * AI is now allowed to refit flame thrower units into units with other weapon types. * AI is now allowed to refit units with the basic machine gun or the basic missile launcher into anything else. * AI is now allowed to refit artillery units into advance cost computation device from whatever device they might have used before. * AI will now value trade and research pacts more by how profitable they are instead of their relationship with the trade partner. * AI will no longer artificially hate factions with weaker military nor love factions who are not the leader in a victory condition. They will, however still slowly reduce their standing towards the leader in a victory condition. * AI now has a better feeling about what weapon types it should use. * Faction aggressiveness now plays a slight role into what industry-to-science ratio an AI prefers. * AI is now able to declare preventive wars in order to have the first strike if they see a player building up troops at their borders. * When the AI analyzes who to go to war with, it will now consider a player hated by others as a more valuable target. * AI will now delay its first expansion when it sees more aliens then it has military to deal with. * AI will now perform desperation attacks in cities sieged by artillery in order to prevent a scenario of losing a bigger army because a sieging unit cannot be killed without sacrifice. * AI will now request retreat when you have 20% of your army on their borders instead of a fixed size. * AI will now consider using nukes after doing diplomacy so it can use them in a first strike right after declaring war. * Reduced the spread in how many units are considered to be safe between different factions. This makes rushing the Ambassadors a little harder. * AI will now calculate the value of Naval Transport Logistics by how much water tiles they have scouted compared to land tiles. * Improved how the AI evaluates the growth buildings with a formula provided by Hans Lemurson. * When considering what weapons to use the AI now considers aliens as much less important than the units of other factions. * Improved AI tile improvement selection. * AI is now able to trade tiles between cities in order to stack two boni of the same type. * AI will now protect their formers against aliens instead of having them run away and thus cancel their project every time an alien gets close. * AI will now like growth buildings less when they have issues with overpopulation. * AI will now delay the first Colonizer when they feel they have too little military. They will still build Colonization Fervor though. * AI will now avoid working tiles near a border with someone who they have war with. * AI will no longer use field training on units outside of cities. * AI players at war will no longer be purely defensive if they feel too weak but their opponent is involved in more wars then themselves. * AI now has a slightly different algorithm to determine who to make a non-aggression pact with. * Upgrading from one unit tier to another now takes into account that armor, weapons and devices are more expensive on the higher tier unit. This resolves an exploit that allowed getting units much cheaper by refitting than it was by buying them. * Togra's "Resourceful" property has been reworked. It no longer halves refit costs. Instead it accounts for 100% of the value of the old components when refitting as compared to the 50% that other factions get. * AI will no longer defend their formers when they have less non-ranged military units than cities and colonizers. * Once having started building a tile improvement, the AI will now finish it instead of reconsidering every turn. * AI now takes increased refit-cost into account when deciding whether to refit or not. * AI will no longer pursue economic victory when someone has already won the game. * Military score now will no longer drop below 50% of what it would be when all units are at full health. * AI is now aware of how useful the "Recovery Enhancement System" device is as a means to counter artilleries. * AI will no longer send units into enemy territory for nothing else but pillaging improvements. * AI will be more careful about attacking units inside of enemy territory. * AI will now pillage improvements during a siege of a city. * AI will now reposition their units during a siege of a city in order to get to more favorable terrain. * AI is now allowed to replace the Enhanced eXperience Processor with something else when refitting units. * AI will now once again prefer their strongest units to defend their cities. * AI will now always prioritize construction bays and field laboratories lower than mines on a hill. * AI will now consider the quality of a city location more important than the proximity. * AI will now concentrate more on buildings when it doesn't have contact with another faction yet. * AI willingness to build fungus advancements is no longer tied to how many miners it currently has. * AI will now aim for about 1/7th of their army as artilleries instead of 1/4th. * AI will now be more adaptive with their worker-to-scientist ratio. In average this should result in more production and less science. * AI shall treat their artilleries with more care and only bring them to a battle where their conventional troops have the upper hand. * AI should be more sane about war declarations on units passing by their borders. * AI shall now gather the majority of their troops in a city closer to the border during peace. * AI will no longer use so many units for scouting as this made them more susceptible for surprise-attacks. * AI will be more aggressive against aliens. * Trade and research pact income now scales with how happy your population is compared to the rest of the world. This results in higher income on lower difficulty levels, lower income on higher difficulty levels and no change on medium difficulty level. The same factor is applied to the income of the Ambassadors' faction bonus. * AI will build more units in their well developed cities at the expense of developing new cities slightly slower. * The amount of credits the AI saves for emergencies now will be roughly the same independently of how many players are in the game. * AI will now consider mineral and food buildings more important when these resources are rare. * Slightly improved when the AI builds certain advancements like Fungus Cultivation and some of the later advancements of each era. * AI will now gather their troops at the city closest to the faction with the strongest army instead of the city closest to the faction which is closest in general. * AI will be harder to convince to sign trade and research pacts when their people are much happier than yours. * AI will not start hating a faction for being ahead in military victory progress before their population is twice as high as the average. This will prevent you from always being hated by everyone when playing Solar Dynasty. * AI will not apply the minimum level requirements for refitting a unit to formers anymore. * AI now is aware of units with the "Heavy" attribute and how to properly counter them. * AI will make the value of hitpoints for a unit dependent from how many units it already has building the best counter to what it sees when it has few units and the more powerful units when it already has a lot of units. * AI now will react to a captured spitter as it would react to artilleries. * AI will no longer build Formers and Colonizers when it is at war. * AI will try to get aircrafts as an alternative to countering cannon-mounted heavy units. Fixed: * Fixed an issue where the AI would not build buildings that would take less than one turn to build. * Fixed an issue where damaged AI units would walk all the way back home instead of healing where they are. * Fixed an issue where the AI would sometimes treat a target within a city as if the city and its increased defensive capabilities weren't there. * Fixed an issue where the AI would refuse to step on fungus in order to siege an otherwise unreachable city. * Fixed an issue that made all AIs way more aggressive than intended. * Fixed an issue where the AI would ignore empty Messari portals. * Fixed an issue where the order of commands for Tangaroa Watercraft was not in line with all other units. * Fixed unit rank not being applied to units spawned by Colonization Fervor. * Fixed an issue where the AI would cease to explore when it wanted to explore a tile in the water but lacked the advancement to get there. * Fixed an issue that could prevent the AI from stepping into ruins when enemy troops were nearby. * Fixed an issue where AI artillery sometimes would not shoot at units sieging their city. * Fixed an issue where the AI would misjudge the amount of turns an attacking unit would require to reach a target. * Fixed an issue where AI would not know where to retreat their units to if all cities are under siege. * Fixed an issue where the AI would use bombardment on non-hostile units if they were in enemy territory. * Fixed an issue where AI naval units would try to retreat to a non coastal city. * Fixed an issue where the AI would pointlessly sacrifice units. * Fixed several issues that caused the AI to not explore in a logical human-like way as it was intended. * Fixed an issue where the AI would not shoot at naval alien units with non-naval artillery from inside a city. * Fixed an issue where the AI would commit way too many troops to destroying Messari portals. * Fixed an issue where the AI would send more and more units to an already well-enough attacked target each cycle because it would find another unit more suitable than the one that already was on their way. * Fixed an issue where the AI would build too many colonizers during the Messari invasion. * Fixed an issue where the AI could not declare war despite knowing the location of the faction that it wanted to declare war on. * Fixed an issue where AI units could be in a loop of unlimited movement. * Fixed an issue that prevented AI naval units from attacking units that are not adjacent to water but adjacent to a city that has access to water. * Fixed an issue where the AI would build a Colonizer despite having Colonization Fervor available. * Fixed an issue where the AI would not cancel an attack if it was on a road and need less movement points to the target than it thought. * Fixed an issue that could happen to AI Colonizers when they had to go through fungus to reach their destination. * Fixed an issue where AI units would stand outside a sieged city and do nothing if they were too weak to overwhelm the attacking units. * Fixed an exploit involving the Bantham Flak and refitting by no longer allowing negative cost for refits. Thanks to Hans Lemurson for reporting that! * Fixed an issue that could cause the AI to not attack besiegers with their defending artilleries under certain circumstances. * Fixed an issue where artilleries that would like to retreat, but can't due to being blocked, would do nothing instead of attacking. * Fixed an issue that prevented the Messari from teleporting new units through their portals. * Fixed an issue where capturing a Spitter would leave it with less than 0.1 hitpoints which would mean it'd die when attacking despite being ranged. * Fixed a potential crash when the AI evaluated attacking a unit with no owner. * Fixed an issue where the AI would run its Formers from minor threats despite them being sufficiently defended. * Fixed an issue where the AI would restart building a tile improvement when it was threatened. * Fixed an issue where the AI would come to wrong results about how valueable morale-boosting buildings are in a city with takeover migration. * Fixed an issue where the AI would calculate the value of armor on artilleries incorrectly. * Fixed a rare possible crash in city sorting. * Fixed an issue where the AI would downgrade the armor of a unit while refitting it. * Fixed an exploit that allowed building population growth when you had no minerals. * Fixed an exploit that allowed to harvest the same tile with several formers by using remote autonomous harvesting as a command to the whole stack. The option will not be available unless there's only one former on the tile. * Fixed an issue where the trade income could get out of control due to squaring the population in the formula. Version 1.6.3 (June 19, 2015) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed: * AI will make slightly fewer formers. * AI will make even fewer formers once it has the advancement that increases the working speed of formers. * AI will use significantly more miners and workers instead of scientists when they require buildings and units and can keep pollution at bay. * AI will consider standing more important in its decision to go to war. * AI will slowly drop standing on a player that has a weak military compared to themselves. * AI will no longer issue pillaging tasks to artilleries. * Added a small offset to the AI army evaluation for relationship decay and war declaration in order to prevent it becoming an issue right of the bat. Version 1.6.2 (June 15, 2015) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed: * AI is now less likely to use nukes and black holes on an opponent when it is far superior in conventional military. This is to not have to clean up so much waste after capturing the cities anyways. * AI now prioritizes building Colony Ship Dismantling over getting the minimum amount of units. * AI now prioritizes flat-boni from buildings according to how much of a resource they already have. * Improved AI building priorization. * AI will no longer diversify its troop composition before it has made contact with other factions. This allows them to better handle the aliens on bigger map sizes. * AI will be slightly more aggressive towards players whose economy is worse than theirs. * AI will now handle ruins with the attack agent, giving them a much higher priority than before. * AI will now value negative habitat higher when it comes to how fast it expands. This results in faster expansion. Fixed: * Fixed crash when researching Nukes with French localization active. * Fixed a possible crash connected to Agents in Transports. * Fixed an issue where Agents in Transports of the AI would stop doing anything. * Fixed an issue where Agents of the AI would not use all sorts of operations after the changes of success rates. * Fixed an issue where the AI would forget that it wanted to retreat a unit once it entered a transport. * Fixed an issue where naval artillery of the AI would not retreat to a city while kiting. Version 1.6.1 (June 7, 2015) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed: * Adjusted AI difficulties to compensate for the smarter AI; medium difficulty no longer gives the AI any bonuses. * Difficulty now defaults to medium again. * Decreased agent production cost by 33%. * Declaring war will now automatically cancel your non-aggression-pact. This does not allow you to cancel the pact before its minimum duration is over and it also does not save you from the diplomatic repercussions connected with canceling a non-aggression pact. * Doubled relationship importance for war declarations. * Reduced the effect of distance on the AI's likeliness to go to war. * Reduced the effect of standing on the AI's likeliness to go to war. * Reduced the effect of aggression value on the AI's likeliness to go to war. * When there is no science victory enabled all factions will act very aggressive. * AI will no longer declare war when it has too few units. Fixed: * Fixed an issue where undamaged units would not flank. * Fixed an issue where the AI would not build the required minimum of units. * Fixed an issue where the AI would try to scout ruins with aircraft. * Fixed an issue where the AI would offer peace when it should not. * Fixed diplomatic penalty for capturing cities being much higher than intended. * Fixed an issue that could prevent artillery units attacking from inside a city. * Language fixes. Version 1.6.0 (June 3, 2015) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This large free update tremendously improves the AI, overhauls espionage and rebalances diplomacy. Thanks go to community member Alexander Stumpp's hard work for making it possible. The update also adds the long-awaited French translation, thanks to Steve Torres. The AI will now play a lot more like the best human players play the game: expand slower, dynamically improve tiles, adjust the tax-rate, handle resource emergency situations, prioritize refitting, perform flanking and out-of-sight maneuvers, build more diverse units, effectively use artillery and much more. To address the repetitive nature of the espionage mechanic, success chance for missions can no longer reach 100% and agents can now lose health even if they complete a mission successfully. To combat exploitative behavior when factions have cities close to eachother, agents now lose all their movement points when entering another faction's territory. Diplomacy has also been rebalanced and improved to make both dialogue and gameplay interactions more meaningful. Those are just some of the highlights. Please see below for the full list of changes, including balance tweaks and fixes. Added: * Added French translation thanks to Steve Torres. * Added custom mouse cursor graphic. * Added number of turns each pact has been in effect to the diplomacy screen. * Added new population icons to show the yield each colonist provides. * Added AlternativePopulationIcons option in Pandora.xml to switch to an alternative set of population icons. * Added support for unicode characters up to and including the Cyrillic script (0x4FF), allowing those characters to work correctly with the Plain (DejaVu Sans) font as well as any other custom unicode font that has the corresponding glyphs. * Added video setting for choosing the title screen. * Added AI ability to dynamically alter the tax-rate. * Added AI ability to raze cities if their morale gets too bad. * Added a mechanism for the AI to check how useful a war will be and make its decision to go to war depending on that. * Added AI ability to flank targets. * Added a new mechanism for the AI to determine whether it should build units or economy. It prevents overcommitting on either by tying them together with a dynamic percentage-value. * Added better support for teams in AI's diplomatic behavior. * Added a new algorithm for the AI to always try to land troops outside the vision of the enemy. * Added mechanism for AI to process multiple loops for it's unit moving sub-agents so it can give a new command to a unit that has already moved but is left with movement points after all units have moved. * Added Alexander Stumpp and Steve Torres to the credits. Changed: * Increased agent production cost by 33% and reduced movement by 25%. * Success chance for infiltration missions is now directly deduced from infiltration attack/defense power and can't reach a 100%. * Different infiltration missions now provide a bonus or penalty to the infiltration attack power based on their difficulty. * Agents now lose health when performing an operation. * Agents can now complete or fail their mission independently of dying. The chance to lose an agent is now equal to half of the operation failure. * Adjusted advancements, buildings and devices that provide an infiltration attack or defense power bonus. * Agents now lose all remaining movement upon entering another faction's territory. * Difficulty now defaults to easy. * The percentage of trade and research pact income as well as the Ambassadors parasitic trait now dynamically adjust to a players share of global population. On average the treaties will be about 35% less powerful. * Population lost by using the "Raze" button will now include migration from takeover. * Moved Planetary Market to one subtier earlier in the research tree. * Moves of human factions are now prioritized over moves of alien factions. * When there is no pollution a negative number will now display how much pollution the city can bare before it becomes a problem. * Positive pollution is now shown as a red number. * Made terrain-colors on the minimap darker to make it easier to tell it apart from cities and units. * Improved mouse wheel scrolling of GUI components. * Increased maximum amount of playable factions via advanced setup in a game from 9 to 13. Only makes sense with a mod that adds new factions. * AI now chooses technologies to research in a similar fashion of how experienced players choose technologies. * AI will now, on average, commit more scientists to research. * AI now considers pollution when assigning population to jobs. * AI will now expand much slower and focus more on improving its existing cities instead. * AI now considers quality more important than quantity when it comes to building units. * AI now has an emergency behavior to resolve economical crises. * Reworked how AI determines it's tile-improvements; it should now be much closer to what an experienced player chooses. * AI will now be more careful with its units when exploring. * AI will now heal wounded units before sending them to attack. * AI now considers more sophisticated criteria when choosing locations to expand to. * AI now considers more sophisticated criteria when choosing tiles to expand it's existing cities borders to. * AI no longer builds new formers as long as enemies are within the area of their city. * Improved AI behavior when it comes to avoiding the loss of formers. * AI can now perform several diplomatic actions within one turn. * AI will now gradually lower their diplomatic relations to whoever is closest to victory. * AI will no longer grant you gifts all the time just because they like you. * AI players are now more difficult to convince to declare war on others. * AI will now prioritize devices that best fit the unit type. * AI will now consider the tier of unit components when evaluating which unit to build. * AI now can and will use fungus once it has the two advancements boosting its yield. * AI will now allocate more minerals into boosting its newly found cities. * AI will now lower their standing to someone capturing a city depending on that cities importance for its previous owner. * AI now takes device and unit type into consideration when deciding which units to use as defenders. * AI no longer considers distance when picking defenders for its cities. * AI no longer voluntarily gifts away its credits. * AI will now use bombardment and nukes primarily to kill transports and disrupt healing in besieged cities. * AI will now be much more careful about where to use blackholes. * AI will now rather save a WMD for better use than to risk over-nuking a target. * AI will now rather pillage tile improvements instead of retreating if it considers the defenses of a city too strong. * Improved AI behavior when confronted with long-range units. * AI will now keep units inside their cities if they are not needed otherwise. * AI will now consider WMD buildings more valuable. * AI is now much more likely to build naval units in coastal cities. * AI will no longer value research once it has enough science for a research victory. * AI will now prioritize enemy units in their territory as more important target. * AI will now use a certain amount of artillery units in their offenses. * AI will now use mineral sources with less than two minerals only if there's almost no other minerals available. * AI will no longer build watercraft when it is at war with someone who only has cities with no access to water. * AI decision when to make peace is now more in line with its decision when to declare war. * When refitting the AI will now stick to the same weapon type to stay cost-efficient. * AI will now always prioritize refitting their units over purchasing other things. * If the AI is at war with someone and doesn't know any cities of that someone, but it has seen the border, it'll prioritize exploring there. * Made sure that AI always uses their artillery units before its other units. * When at war with another faction, the AI will be much less likely to attack native wildlife. * AI will now rather upgrade its formers to amphibious than using harvest. * AI is now more sensitive about whether it should perform a rush or prepare to defend against one. * AI will now try to avoid getting its transports spotted by its enemies. * AI will now value forests more for fighting pollution before it has Pandora Construction. * AI will now prefer tiles that are most suitable for their units when approaching an enemy city. * AI will no longer retreat heavily injured units to a city under the effect of an ion storm. * Improved AI behavior in city defense. * AI will no longer try to heal units other than the necessary defenders in a city that is under siege by artillery units. * AI will now consider food less important when looking for city locations. * AI will now consider minerals more important when looking for city locations. * AI border expansion will now consider if additional food tiles are needed or not. * AI will offer friendly deals less frequently in order to not annoy the player. The frequency is about 10%. * AI will no longer declare war on factions it hasn't scouted yet. * AI artillery units now prefer the device that allows them to attack multiple times a turn over other modules. * AI will now use a more dynamic defender count. * Lowered number of scouting units for the AI once it has a contact to not be caught off-guard with a significant amount of troops away from home. * AI will no longer waste precious scans on hives. * AI will no longer try to surround cities with too complicated surrounding geography like canals or peninsulas that make surrounding really hard and take long. * When needed, the AI will now switch between first tier automatic and first tier missile weapons since this doesn't cost anything. * AI is now much less likely to sign or request open borders treaties. * Added more diversity to AI unit designs to make it harder to hardcounter them. * Improved AI spy handling by allowing them to preposition for an operation next turn instead of just going straight ahead and risk ending up with no movement left. * AI shall no longer attack aliens or sieging units when the success chance is 100% but the attacking unit might die in the process. * AI is now more likely to backstab its neighbor when he is at war. * AI spies will no longer steal research when the AI has all technologies. * AI will now reduce its food production in order to fight overpopulation once it does not find any more spaces to colonize. * AI will now rather expand than produce buildings or advancements that do not combat unhappyness when it is unhappy. * AI will now always run the highest tax rate when there are no technologies left to research. * AI is now aware of circumstances where certain buildings and advancements are so useful that it should get them even if it would want to build military. * AI will now use formers as a last resort defense. * AI now prioritizes cities without research or industry boni for obtaining food and minerals. * AI artillery units should no longer attack enemy cities on their own. * AI artillery units will now always try to keep their distance to enemy units. * AI units will attack enemy units with first strike device even when they will lose in order to damage them. * Slightly increased the amount of artillery units the AI builds. * When considering whether a city is under siege, the AI now also looks at besiegers outside of its actual borders. * AI is smarter about when to avoid walking through fungus and when to not care. * AI will no longer use artillery units for exploring. * AI will no longer let its artillery units be lured out of its cities when the city is being sieged. * When playing without scientific victory enabled the AI will no longer consider relations when deciding whether to declare war or not. * Language tweaks. Fixed: * Fixed a crash that could occur when loading a save game in a specific state. * Fixed operations not replacing durations when deployed on territories. * Fixed Scites and Carcharodons turning aggressive before Xenomorphs. * Fixed water suburbs and water purifiers costing 2 credits instead of 3. * Fixed Fungus Mutagenesis and Fungal Hormones not providing bonuses for water fungus. * Fixed army panel sometimes showing units that are no longer in the territory. * Fixed mouse wheel sometimes not scrolling drop lists. * Fixed purchasing from the economy panel not always working. * Fixed water fungus not appearing in territory hints. * Fixed Ambassadors leeching from pacts not actually being added to their income. * Fixed an exploit that allowed you to interrupt AI formers by stepping a unit onto them when you had open borders. * Fixed a bug that swallowed the majority of diplomacy messages sent to the player by the AI. * Fixed an exploit where you could reduce the amount of credits an AI asks for during negotiations by spending them before stating you are willing to pay. * Fixed an issue where paying tribute was considered the same as denying to pay. * Fixed game pace not affecting the duration of temporary tile modifications like the ion storm cast by the Messari. * Fixed a bug that under certain circumstances led to miscalculation on city growth when using the growth project. * Fixed an issue where morale was not properly applied to credit income from non-tax sources like gold deposits. * Fixed the algorithm that determines whether a tile is a chokepoint. * Fixed Terra Salvum's Ecologic trait not working on water fungus. * Fixed an issue with war declaration on third party requests. * Fixed issues with Steam overlay on Linux. * Fixed errors in German translation. * Fixed AI not building advancements that are unlocked by killing sea monsters. * Fixed a rare case where the AI would waste some of its mineral income each turn. * Fixed AI ships acquiring targets near unreachable inland lakes. * Fixed AI upgrading units into options that aren't actually better. * Fixed AI ignoring how you react to a tribute demand. Standing will now properly change. * Fixed a bug that prevented AI from realizing it cannot heal in water fungus. * Fixed an issue where AI units could get stuck when they targeted something they could not see. * Fixed AI not using as many units for defending as it should. * Fixed AI artillery and sniper units not always attacking targets when they should. * Fixed AI not caring about their new cities for the turn they are founded. * Fixed an issue causing AI land units to try and pillage improvements inside lakes. * Fixed waterborne artillery units of the AI not acquiring targets further inland. * Fixed an issue where the AI would downgrade formers. * Fixed an issue that could prevent the AI from going to war. * Fixed automated formers no longer feel responsible for city defense. * Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the AI to attack units that it shouldn't attack. Version 1.5.4 (November 8, 2014) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed: * Changed fullscreen modes to use OpenGL scaling instead of changing the display resolution. This also fixes Mac OS X fullscreen issues. Fixed: * Fixed Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) cursor issues. Version 1.5.3 (October 9, 2014) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Added: * Added button to toggle grid in the world screen. Changed: * Changed steal / sabotage modifier from 25% - 100% to 25% - 75%. * Increased upkeep for suburbs and purifiers from 2 to 3. * Building suburbs now requires Pandoran Construction. * City tile now provides +1 food and +1 minerals. Fixed: * Fixed a single drop pod being able to drop an entire unit stack. * Fixed amphibious formers not being able to explore ruins. * Fixed crashes and empty strings for diplomacy actions involving third parties in multiplayer. * Fixed incorrect hotkey listed for the grow fungus order. * Minor language fixes. Version 1.5.2 (October 3, 2014) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Added: * Riot now affects power of units in the city. * Tweaked visual effects of Ningen attack and Vulcan Mine deployment. Changed: * Agents no longer prevent territories from being harvested by a city. * Changed steal / sabotage modifier from 50% - 100% to 25% - 100%. * Changed Itala Palomino's title in the German version. Fixed: * Fixed dialogue panel crashes for certain diplomacy options in multiplayer. * Fixed Amphibious Former pathfinding. * Fixed Amphibious Formers not being able to properly grow and clear fungus in water. * Fixed Watercraft not becoming buildable after a city gained access to the sea via terraforming. * Fixed players not receiving pact termination messages when other factions terminate trading or research pacts with them due to sanction demands. * Fixed agents being able to steal negative credits. * Language and translation fixes. Version 1.5.1 (September 20, 2014) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed: * Changed amount of players based on world size from 2, 4, 6, 6, 6 to 3, 5, 7, 7, 7. * Changed Agent faction icons to not reveal who is the owner of the Agent. * Halved city takeover migration. * Reduced Vulcan Mine duration from 10 to 8. * Language tweaks. Fixed: * Fixed Amphibious Former crash when using medium or low quality textures. * Fixed diplomacy crash. * Fixed incorrect diplomacy dialogue lines. * Fixed sharing maps not establishing new contacts. * Fixed automated Formers not building water improvements. * Fixed eclipse infiltration attack bonus not being taken into account. * Fixed auto unit cycle swapping to next idle unit before an infiltration order finishes. * Fixed invasion cinematic playing even when cutscenes are disabled. * Fixed pacts providing a too high share. * Fixed several translation issues. Version 1.5.0 (September 17, 2014) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------