0.0.3 Change Log:
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* Slightly improved amount of bonus ship production AI empires get in hard mode
* AI Empires are now much more likely to attack if they think they can win instead of waiting. It's important they don't attack every time they think they can win, or they'd be too predictable and miss out on some flexibility.
* AI Empires now have reserve-keeping considerations in their logic. They will now form sensible front lines and mass forces in an effective way. This can result in large masses of ships on static front lines, but when one side finds a weak spot and breaks through they will exploit it very quickly and thoroughly. Note that this logic considers the entire "local area" around a system. The AI may choose not to attack a nearby world with 1 ship defending it (even if they have 1000s with which to do so) if there are lots of local defenders who could arrive soon enough to make a difference.
* Player AI in watch_mode is now more judicious with its reenforcement pool. Still not as competent as a good player would be at using that mechanic, however.
* AI improved in general. Players will find it to be much more challenging now.
* Slightly increased the frequency of off-map pirate raids.
* New toggle to watch only "close" battles: Ctrl + Shift + C. For now, this is battles where there is less than a 50% difference in ships, or where the difference in ships is less than 10. You'll still see some lopsided ones but mostly it's there. This makes watch_mode more interesting, in particular.
* Any fleet which has nowhere to retreat to gets the "charge!" bonus, slightly improving their rolls in battle. Any fleet defending their last world gets the "last stand" bonus, which is similar.
* More star colors
* Toned down the fog of war colors a little bit
* Planets now have some deserts and mountains. Still somewhat prone to being pangeas. In the near future I want to play with the idea of some of them being on the "night side" or "day side", with the ones on the "night side" having lit up urban spots when they are close-in.
* Experimenting with polygonal ship "sprites" on a transparent base. They aren't perfect yet, but they add some more variety and flavor. Shrunk their size back down to give the bigger battles a sense of scale. A small percentage of ships in a fleet are upscaled, to give the impression of a number of ship classes. This is probably the final form of the ship "sprites" until I get my hands on a pixel artist to make genuine sprite sheets for them.
* AI Empire factions will no longer start within immediate attack range of the player, giving both at least a little breathing room. In practice, this means that almost all games should be "winnable" for a human player. Note that this makes many starts deceptively peaceful.
* A "political map" can now be toggled by pressing P. Most space 4x games use "influence bubbles" for the political map, but I've gone with a different approach here. The map is equally divided into grid squares, with each square being assured of having only one local system within it. In political map mode the square is colored by the owner of that system. In a future update I'll include separate side HUD information for political map mode (to accompany the diplomacy system in a soon-ish update).
* A bit of optimization. The strategic AI routines are pretty involved at this point, especially when multiple large factions exist in the late game.
* The phonetic alphabet used for naming fleets is now based on moons, planets, stellar objects, astronomy or physics terms, etc. instead of the standard NATO phonetic alphabet I was using as a placeholder.
* Bug Fix: Fleets will no longer hang at 0 turns ETA. Since the AI relies on accurate ETAs as much as the player, a byproduct of this is even better AI. Note that a fleet can be very close to its destination and still have 1 turn to go. I am still considering more legible ways of representing fleets on the map. In the meantime, clicking on a fleet will show its ETA in the side HUD.
* Reenforcement Pool: The player no longer automatically places all of their reenforcements in the reenforcement pool, which was an overwhelming advantage that left the AI basically no chance. Now, there is a small percentage chance for reenforcements to be placed in the pool while the remainder will spawn in place, requiring more judicious fleet management to win. A good player will still outplay the AI, most of the time.
* It is now possible to drag-select multiple locations and deploy all of their fleets at once. Currently it will always send all ships available from the chosen planets within range of the selected target, but in the future I'll include a +/- pop-up on each selected world to allow for finer tuning. In the meantime, I felt this feature was essential for good flow now that the reenforcement pool mechanic is less prominent.