AI War Beta 7.025-7.028 "Extermination Protocol MkI" Released!

This one focuses on polishing recently-introduced rough edges (mainly in terms of balance) and in general is the first step in a new effort to fix The Bug (10/10 being winnable). We don't want that setting to be an immediate "you die in the first 30 minutes, no questions asked" button, but things have clearly gotten out of hand.

Some other highlights:

- Hacking now has an extra source of suspense and challenge: once the hacking _stops_ there will be a rapid short-term post-hacking response from the AI proportional to how much you ticked it off during the hack. If you're adequately prepared this won't be too big a problem (though I hope it will add to the excitement). But if you've dug yourself too deep a hole... well, have fun with that ;)

- Carriers can no longer fly through your forcefields. They've come a long way from the super-cheesy "literally invincible, ignores forcefields completely" incarnation of old, and are now basically just a hyper-concentrated ball of death that can attack and be attacked in a very similar fashion as... well, a big pile of ships. Their attack is now more similar in potency to the ships inside, and is longer ranged (otherwise the larger forcefields and/or radar jamming really mess with them) but in general they won't just "cheat" their way through your defenses anymore. They'll just hammer them flat, unless you're adequately prepared.

- The alt-progress for champs no longer asks you to walk into the lion's den of pain just to make all the toys available. Previously you had to go to intensity 9, and if you followed the lobby's (bad, then) advice of setting a matching alt-nemesis intensity it was... well, varying from "interesting" to unwinnable.

- Salvage is now much less capable of making the Metal mechanic irrelevant for significant chunks of time (mainly this was a problem in superweapon games).

Update: 7.026 hotfix for several severe balance issues with the new hacking post-responses, and a few other fixes and changes that snuck in since 7.025.

Update: 7.027 just to do a quick balance iteration on the champion nemesis exos.

Update: 7.028 is another balance iteration on the champion nemesis exo stuff, along with a few other small changes from feedback during the week.

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.