AI War Beta 7.015-7.016 "Cleanup, Aisle 3" Released!

This one is mostly a maintenance release, but there's some important iteration on Salvage and other features.

The salvage-reprisal waves were working pretty well but feedback showed they ultimately needed to be separated from normal waves into their own thing. Now they probably won't happen nearly as often (unless your fleet is an accident-waiting-to-happen permanently on the offensive... though I guess that's actually pretty accurate in some cases) and won't displace the normal wave mechanic. They'll also be much less of a threat in the early minutes of the game, to avoid the need for building serious defenses before you even start to attack.

The Neinzul Enclave Starship is hilariously powerful. In fact, hilariously over-powerful. And the hilarity is great particularly given the unit's past where relatively few players really wanted to use them. So we're not nerf-hammering it into the ground (indeed, the first two marks are getting a bit better), but ultimately it's not good for a single line of units to allow you to take heavily-defended systems without significant casualties. Further balance feedback (up or down) is quite welcome.

Hacking costs have seen another pass, with the ARS-redirection and design-corruption actions getting cheaper and the fab-hacking and sabotage actions getting more expensive.

And there's some important bugfixes, including one for the issue where the first two Showdown CPAs would imitate the third (and launch everything).

Update: 7.016 hotfix for a goof I made that had all mark-levels of enclave only getting mark-1 drones. Also some other changes from last night, but no time for a full blog post for just a few things, focused on TLF during the day.

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.