v1.024 Public Beta Now Available!

[Erik Rutins]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your patience. We finally have the second official update all packaged up, tested and ready for its final trial run. This public beta will go into next week and barring any serious issues, this will then become the second official update.

You can find the beta update in our Members Club (the Members link in the top nav bar). You will need to register your copy of Armada 2526, then go to Registered Downloads and you should see it there.

There are quite a few great improvements and fixes included in this update, many of which are based on community feedback. Kudos to Bob and Ntronium for their solid work on this update.

This also includes updated versions of .NET and DirectX as the ones in the original full installer were not as up to date as they should have been. Allowing these to run in the update installer will resolve that for anyone who is still having issues.

Change History:
v1.023 – February 17, 2009
• Second Official Update
Change List

New Features

Automatic Population Transport
This feature has been added to reduce the micromanagement involved transporting population around the galaxy
• Transports can be placed on automatic control. They will then automatically shuttle population between your colonies to maximize growth.
• A button has been added on the fleet review tab to allocate ships to automatic control.
• They can be placed under manual control either from the fleet review tab, or by explicitly given them an order to go somewhere.
• For each colony, you can set whether the automated ships can import or export population. There are separate settings for your own, and alien races.
• The automatically controlled ships attempt to maximize population growth. You may want to move population around manually to build up colonies quickly for strategic reasons.

Research And Bureaucracy Scaled To Game Size
These changes are primarily to support players who like to play large games
• Bureaucracy has been reduced, capped and related to map size.
• A game option has been added to further reduce or eliminate bureaucracy.
• By default the rate of technology research is scaled to map size and number of players
• The technology research rate can be set manually for custom games, and can be specified in scenario files.

Mod Support
These changes make it easy to apply mods to the game without changing the original files. You can have multiple different mods installed together, and even apply multiple mods together (for instance a mod that changes the UI appearance, with a mod that changes game play balance). You can make shortcuts to play the game with different mods applied.
• Mods can completely replace game files, or merely add new items. See the forums for more details on modding.
• Militia remove population if modded to have a population cost.
• A new capability “Initial Population” allows Ark Ships to found colonies that start with more than one population.
• The root of the save game name, can be set from the command line using the –sr option
• Fixed bug that prevented buildings that only produce ground units.


Balance Changes
The main thrust of these changes is to promote bigger, more interesting battles, greater use of ground units, and more research specialization.
• Adjusted Victory Conditions. Most notably for Walden and Hoon Yon.
• Low tax popularity bonus increased to 3
• Tech research time increased 50%
• Specialized labs level increased research level by 50% to cancel the above change. General labs are now less useful.
• Defense units defense value doubled.
• Ground unit strength increased 40%, both attack and defense.
• Ship upkeep costs reduced 30%. Some other ship factor modifications
• Reduced upkeep costs for Security Centers, Entertainment Centers, and Decontamination plants
• AI Expands less aggressively on easy level.

Minor Improvements
• Custom game settings now saved
• Bureaucracy level game option
• Special screen capture mode enabled for release builds.
• Improved AI for population management
• Improved AI for transport and assault ship construction
• AI now concentrates ground units at strategic points. Keeps assault ships with them to facilitate ground assaults.
• Fixed a problem that often caused the AI to abandon large attacks. Combined with the above changes, this makes the AI a more interesting opponent.
• Expanded range of techs that AI will not trade with players it dislikes, mistrusts, or is planning to attack.
• AI calls ships back from hovering over neutral colonies
• AI remembers tech and trade missions it has asked for or offered, and doesn’t keep repeating the same offers or demands.
• AI likes to make peace in inactive wars.
• Auto resolve improved for case of Corvettes vs Militia and other turkey shoot scenarios
• New Version of Slim DX.
• Use of precompiled shaders.
• Error logging for rendering errors, and more resistance to rendering errors.
• Higher right drag initiation threshold
• Battles don't end immediately after last ship dies
• Missile Cruisers stand off and fire. Shots more distributed
• Ship to ship engagement range depends on weapon range.
• Minimap visible area color improved.
• Greatly improved AI turn time on large maps.
• Added improved tooltips for fleets and buildings
• Colonies are named after stars when all colony names have been exhausted.
• Races that are more than the first level of Xenophobic won’t make defensive alliances with players of other races.
• Improved the default system for naming saved game files. Files sorted by date as default.

Bug Fixes
• Fixed crash deleting selected player in custom game creation screen
• Fixed bug preventing counter offers to pease or non aggression proposals with altered terms.
• Fixed various memory leaks
• Fixed bug when loading a game from within a game.
• Fixed a bug that meant sometimes ships would not stop in range once in range of their target.
• Improved pathing so that the system will find paths involving moving to a normal teleport, jumping to an open teleport, and thence to the destination.
• Fixed bug that caused invisible fleets to sometimes be shown during animation.
• Fixed bugs with detecting fleets of enemies with no stealth.
• Fixed bugs with hypersense.
• Fixed rounding bug with speed 6 ships
• Fixed bug that sometimes caused AI to massively overbuild assault ships.
• Fixed bug where “no workers” icon was not displayed on damaged buildings.
• Fixed bug where AI would persist in an attack, even though it had no ground attack ships. Fixed some rare internal AI bugs.
• Defensive alliances expire properly when non aggression pacts expire.
• Fixed typos and minor stat errors
• Custom game map sizes limited to 250 x 250 to prevent creation of large games that run out of memory.
• Fixed bug with movement areas.
• Set sensible default for length of non aggression pact

[martok]

Wow, that's one heck of a list of changes, improvements, and bug fixes. (No wonder the patch wasn't ready til now!) Can't wait to try it out!

[Erik Rutins]

The public beta has now been updated to v1.024. The following fixes and changes have been added since v1.023:

• Fixed Crash with auto controlled transports when you only have one colony.
• Fixed crash loading a battle scenario
• Fixed problems with some files not checking the mod path
• Fixed a problem with the AI not clearing out its intelligence observations. Reduces file sizes of long running games, and should help with problems saving large games
• Increased max map size to 300 x 300. Added a setting to allow advanced players to override this and play on bigger maps
• AI offers of support no longer require anything in return.
• Fixed a problem that could switch races in saved games.

[lion_of_judah]

I know this is the wrong forum but you in tech support have failed to respond to the problem with 1.34 in guns of august and the "trench error" so please once you tell me that this is in the wrong forum to take care of this issue. thanks

[Erik Rutins]

Which issue is this, could you provide a link please?

[lion_of_judah]

here is the link to the access violation trench error for 1.34 Guns of august. tm.asp?m=2362226

[Erik Rutins]

v1.024 is about to go official, with one additional bug fix, so the public beta has been removed. Thank you to everyone who sent us feedback during this process.

[Shark7]

Very nice patch. I finally got a chance to play with it over the weekend and the improvements, especially with the automatic transports, was spot on.