AI War Beta 5.051 "Optical Repair" Released!

This one starts our response to the winner of our first "Aim the nerfbat (AI-side)" poll. The landslide winner was the AI Eye. Curiously, the main call was not so much for the eye to be made less strong but to be made less monotonous and frustrating. As one player put it: fighting the first one is fun, and the second one, but by number five... not so much. So we've started adding new kinds of Eyes (and renamed the original to something less alliteratively alienating). More to come on that soon, but we wanted to get the other pending changes out sooner than the rest of the eye work could be completed. Speaking of the other stuff:

So, there was this little innocent change in 5.050. The one where I fixed the longstanding bug where a unit's repair-speed-multiplier was increasing the amount it repaired per time-unit, but didn't increase the cost proportionately to maintain the same cost/hp ratio. It was kind of necessary for balance as "activating" (repairing) a golem with an MkIII engie instead a MkI engie was pretty intensely different in a non-intuitive way since construction multipliers (used for assisting space docks, etc) increased both speed and resource consumption to maintain the same cost ratio.

So, innocent change, right? Not so much. Since MkI Engineers had a repair multiplier of 6 all of a sudden basically everyone was paying at least 6 times as much as they were used to for their repairs. This was particularly brutal with golems. Anyway, a lot of changes have been made to bring repair back to a less "dude, where did my economy go?" situation. Please let us know if it still feels off. But also bear in mind that econ has been a lot stronger in recent months due to changes to harvesters, energy, etc.

There are also several changes to clean up some backporting-related leftovers. Most notably, Chris took the whole sprite object pooling thing back out but did a much better job than I did when I attempted it. The result is a pretty startling graphical performance gain in some tests. How much it helps in your specific case... well, we'll see. But the memory-related crashes when the sprite-pool being too big and the performance problems when the sprite pool being too small shold be gone now. If you see any more crashes or other potentially-backporting-related problems, please let us know so we can deal with them. The sooner Chris can move on from that side of things, the more cool stuff will result ;)

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.