AI War Beta 5.077-5.079 "Cap Tectonics" Released!

This one finally implements a change that's been on the table in the forums for a month or so: fleet ship caps no longer go down at higher marks. This will help them be more attractive to human players and more useful for both players and the AI (previously a cap of mkV fleet ships actually had a lower cap-dps than a cap of mkIV fleet ships, for instance). The AI still gets a modifier to wave size to keep the higher-tech waves in check, but it's no longer being applied twice like it was. Also, to keep the tech-level difference from being too sudden in waves, the mixed-tech-level-wave rule from diff 9+ now applies to diff 5+.

Since all that was getting shaken up anyway, we went ahead and normalized the cap of all fleet ships that change with unit-cap-scale to be a multiple of 8. This makes it so playing on Low or Ultra-Low caps doesn't "chop off" any part of the cap when dividing it by 4 or 8. To make this work without changing balance, however, a ton of numbers had to be changed to maintain cap-dps and cap-health (and metal, crystal, and energy costs) compared to the previous version. There's still some balance change, but it's within a pretty narrow margin. And the good news is that while these changes were made the internal math was also made a lot more consistent with how we're actually balancing these things now.

There's also several bugfixes and balance changes, most notably reducing the "zombie apocalypse" potential of the recently-added Dark Spire minor faction. I thought it was entertaining ;)

Update: 5.078 hotfix is out to fix a bug where the AI was ignoring unit-cap-scale when sending waves. Result = hilarity.

Update: 5.079 hotfix is out to fix two nasty bugs, including one that could actually corrupt a savegame. Sorry about that! It was those nasty Dark Spire again *shakes fist*. I knew I was adding something mean to the game with those, but there's been this and the (unintentionally severe) zombie apocalypse a few versions ago, so it would seem I had no idea.

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.