We've finally solved a minor bug that caused anti-air missiles to sometimes penetrate aircraft. While quite rare, it was causing Vandal to make unfortunate mistakes against Thunderbird. Besides the fix, there are a few buffs for Hover and Shieldbots, and nerfs for Rover and Amphbots. Badger is of particular concern as it needs adjusting after its unit AI improvement. We are also experimenting with extra initial resources, with the goal being to give players more freedom in the early game.

Balance

Increase starting resources slightly as an experiment.

• Initial resources 250-> 325 metal and energy.

Metal Extractor is lighter and cheaper for quicker and riskier expansion.

• Cost 90 -> 85
• Health 640 -> 600

Felon is better shielded and matches Thug's recharge time.

• Max shield 1600 -> 1800
• Recharge rate 16 -> 21

Convict matches Thug recharge time too.

• Recharge rate 9 -> 10.5

Vandal is better at shooting in dense clumps.

• Shorter collision volume.
• Higher angle of fire.

Limpet is a little worse against assaults.

• Slow damage 1500 -> 1200

Bulkhead is even less tanky.

• Health 1650 -> 1540

Dart aims faster.

• Turret speed 200 -> 320 degrees/second

Scorcher has regained the status of 'very good' so it can be returned to its previous price.

• Cost 125 -> 130

Badger is easier to catch.

• Speed 60 -> 55.5

Claw (Badger's mine) is worse at hitting small nimble units

• Sight radius 64 -> 120
• Decloak radius 50 -> 80 (consistent with 2x2 footprint units).
• Flight time 1s -> 1.7s.
• Initial projectile speed 50 -> 70
• Final projectile speed 300 -> 130
• Projectile acceleration 200 -> 50
• Turn rate reduced by 28%
• Toned down projectile lighting

Dagger fully loses some nerfs from last year. Its price nerf (75 -> 80) remains.

• Speed 143 -> 144
• Range 210 -> 212

Bolas has small buffs as it is easy to overdo.

• Cost 185 -> 180
• Speed 95 -> 96
• Range 230 -> 232

Engineer chassis is slower.

• Speed 39 -> 36

Lotus is slightly worse when built under fire.

• Added 0.8 second post-construction deploy time.

Planes have some important fixes.

• Fixed all anti-air, Ogre and Picket projectiles sometimes passing right through aircraft.
• Reduced the size of plane hit volumes to better match their model now that the underlying issue with anti-air inconsistency resolved.

Modding

• Added modoptions to set innate income and initial resources.
• Added a modoption to randomly set initial resources.
• Added a modoption to set seeds for random maps.
• Added support for weapondefs_mod and explosiondefs_mod. Mods can define these files to act on the weapon/explosions tables as they are loaded.

Why must you nerf lotus? Did people have problems with comms going into lotus range and building a lotus?

Felon and Convict balls are back on the menu :o

quote: Turret speed 200 -> 320 degrees/second

YES!!!


Regarding Badger, why not just make it so that mines are not invisible if dropped in LoS (instead looking slightly transparent as if they were allied) and are targettable? I've seen people targetting Fencers manually at each dropped mine to clear them out.
This could be done via widgets, but an actual main-game approach seems better here.

quote: Added a modoption to set seeds for random maps.

Excellent :)
I love some of the random crags.

Gets printed to infolog, look there (can run a replay to retrieve it as well if you don't get it the first time).

My game (Steam-less Windows install) can't download this. Probably related to https://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/34195

RandomX i also had problem with downloading the new version using the lobby. updated via steam worked for me (on ubuntu)

That's the first thing I tried, actually. Just tried again by downloading a fresh copy. Same problem. The launcher's creation date is 3/22/2018, which doesn't really inspire confidence since these download issues are very recent.

[Spoiler]