AI War Beta 5.091-5.092 "Apply MkII Sanding Machine" Released!

This one contains several relatively small changes. Some are important fixes, some are just polishing up for the official release.

Perhaps most significantly, military command stations have been reworked into a substantially more powerful unit in their own right. Their actual contribution to a main-chokepoint defense isn't much changed (which is to say, it's still really powerful thanks to the planetary munitions boost), but their ability to hold off small attacks on otherwise unsupported planets is much better. Combined with the new miniforts, you can defend a satellite world fairly well without devoting any global turret or fleet cap to it. Even that will still crumple pretty fast under anything like a serious AI assualt, however, which is how it should be.

Many players have been asking for another warp gate to move newly-built player-controlled "nebula ships" to a better starting position, and this release ties those production facilties into the starship constructor warp gate since the ships are basically just (sometimes smallish) starships built from a different tech base. I could also just add a dedicated new gate type if this doesn't work out but wasn't sure having it on the buy menu sometimes and not other times would work right given the nature of the circumstances you'd need one.

Also, a fairly nasty bug involving the CTRLS window thinking you were discarding changes by opening it has been fixed. Those of you bedeviled by it can enjoy the game again now ;)

Update: 5.092 hotfix is out to fix a couple nasty bugs in the last version. One caused unhandled errors when a CPA launched, the other prevented group-move from working when giving an order to move to another planet. There's also some important changes to nebula seeding in there that I think will help overall.

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.