AI War Beta 6.022-6.023 "Honored Bugs" Released!

This one congratulates the 4 winners of our recent "bug of the year" poll by... well, exterminating them. Sometimes it's tough being the winner.

#1 was a longstanding-but-not-really-noticed-until-recently problem in the mapgen logic causing all Advanced Research Stations, Fabricators, and various other (though not all) capturables to seed only on planets controlled by the first AI player. Normally this didn't matter a whole lot, but if the first AI happened to be a really annoying type (Scorched Earth, notably) the pain was... noticeable. Anyway, several bugs were involved but mapgen is now more equitable in that regard.

#2 was another longstanding problem with how the preferred-target rules (where stuff you give a direct attack order to should prefer to shoot things similar to the designated target) worked when attacking Hybrids. It turns out that the problem basically applied to anything with a modular forcefield and there were also some problems with focus-fire and preferred-targeting in the general case. Normally I wouldn't have spent hours chasing something like this down because I perceive other things as being more important to the community, but the poll was helpful in correcting that perception. So this stuff is quite a bit tidier now. Not a great time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.

#3 turned out to not even be a bug: complaints that nothing was happening to go with the "Defensive Hybrids Are Mobilizing" message that can show up when you have Advanced Hybrids on and a CPA or exo or such happens. In the test case I saw the defensive hybrids were indeed switching to offensive types, but they still didn't have enough firepower to think they had a chance so they continued not-attacking. That's by design, as otherwise they just all charge to their deaths (more than usual, I mean). Nonetheless, this "mobilization" mechanic has been beefed up to be more noticeable. Maybe not such a bad time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.

#4 was updating the turret types to work nicely with ultra-low caps by changing them to have base caps divisible by 8. Rounding up all the stats for those into the newer more cap-oriented model took time, but it's done now. Which is good, as there's noises being made about rebalancing turrets in other ways. We'll see.

There are several other bugfixes and balance changes in this release. Notably, the exponential scaling of wave size with AIP on Diff 8+ has been removed after several months of feedback on it, and balance iteration continues on the nebula scenarios.

Update: 6.023 hotfix to fix an unhandled-errors bug in the last version with auto-load.

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.