AI War Beta 6.035-6.038 "Dire Protector" Released!

This one introduces Dire Guardians to the alpha players of the upcoming Vengeance of the Machine expansion. This won't hurt a bit, really. Remember, if you're interested in alpha testing for the expansion, please shoot me a PM in the forums.

This release also adds the fifth of six new bonus ship types planned for the expansion: The Protector Starship. It's our first "finite" counter-shooter in that one of its its module can shoot down, say, 100 missiles in a second (when fully loaded anyway, after that it's about 10 reloads per second) but not more than that. This is very different than the existing counter-shooter units like the Counter-Missile Turret which could shoot down 10 billion missiles per second if they were all fired at its allies within its range. Anyway, the new finite-counter mechanic is somewhat CPU/memory intensive so the cap on the Protector is low (2, like several other starships) and its module count is low as well (1 slot per mark), but the overall result is an interesting utility-player type that I hope y'all enjoy :)

There are a few other changes in there too, including a little rebalancing of the new Zenith Devastator and a likely-to-be-popular improvement to the Custom galaxy-map display modes (they now show immobile enemy units you've previously scouted).

Update: 6.036 is out to hotfix a bug in the last version where some old saves would load as if the "Fast Drones" toggle were turned off.

Update: 6.037 is out to fix a bug in the last version that threw errors when loading some saves from a couple versions ago (the protector starship had snuck out, and trying to load one that a wasn't modular with the game now knowing it was modular... yeah).

Update: 6.038 is out to fix a bug (that's actually been there for nearly a month, amusingly enough) preventing the creation of new Defender-mode games. Also fixed a laundry list of issues recently brought up by testers.

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.