AI War Beta 5.046 "The AI Is Not Amused" Released!

This one deals with the resurgence of a most bothersome bug (for those not following the link, it's a joke about people beating 10/10). On higher difficulties the AI will now be harder to "put to sleep" with AIP reduction. The AI will now be more clever with the schizo-wave modifier and still send homogenous waves some of the time because they're sometimes more effective (particularly pure-bomber and pure-frigate, depending on circumstances). Reinforcements have been buffed a bit as experience since the big reinforcement-system overhaul has shown what I expected: too few reinforcements now that it's actually paying for everything. A few other things.

Oh, yea: Core Guard Posts. Those are going to hurt more now. They're still pretty quick to kill if you have a lot of firepower (indeed, the core spire shield guard post had its health cut nearly in half, and almost all of the others don't even have 10% of that), but they will take a much more serious bite out of your attacking force in the process. One of the main ideas behind the Core Guard Posts to begin with was to have a kind of "multi-stage boss battle" at the end of the game. Well, now it will be harder to gun them all down in one go ;)

The combination of the above will probably render 10/10 basically impossible to actually win in the absence of a lot of player cheese. But I thought that after the last time I buffed 10/10, so I'm figuring someone will prove me wrong :) If, on the other hand, I've made things too excruciating, please do let us know. Balance is an ongoing process :)

There's also the much-requested slider for controlling the intensity of the new nebula/planet/etc backgrounds, and a memory optimization that may significantly help people running insanely big scenarios squeeze in under the memory ceiling for longer.

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.