This is mostly a fixes and tweaks update as the 3v3 tournament is only in two weeks. Each team must have a new player so everyone is welcome to join. Sign up in this thread if you are interested.

There are two big balance changes: nerfs for superweapons and shields being disabled underwater. Aspis can now float, to give it some use in sea, and floating has been improved in general. The superweapon changes were motivated by some of the epic games on the large maps added in April. Starlight is much more expensive as it is the best at ending games, but games were ending a bit too early. Disco Rave Party and Zenith were differentiated by leaning into the slow aim and rate of DRP compared to the instant response of Zenith. Thanks for all the feedback in the thread on the forums.

The most notable fixes are for the rare Zenith gathering bug and the Fencer/Bulkhead transition issue. There are also many backend improvements to scripting and the engine (which was updated earlier in the week), some of which are relevant to modding so are listed in a section below. More Chinese translations have been contributed and a few campaign missions have been tweaked based on feedback.

Balance

Shields are disabled when the unit carrying them is submerged.

• The disable is the same as any other disable. Charge drops to zero and linking does not work.
• The unit must be completely underwater. This is the same threshold at which cloak is disabled and units are no longer detectable by non-sea vision.

Aspis can now float and floating in general has tweaks to help it stay above water.

• Units lobbed or gravity-gunned into the sea can float immediately.
• Note: This was already the case for sea-to-sea lobs and transport throws.
• Floating units no longer sink while teleporting.
• Note: Teleporting from land to the sea will still put the unit on the sea floor.

Cloak is cancelled immediately after a unit takes a decloaking action (such as firing). This was always the intention, but at some point action decloak gained a random delay of up to a third of a second.

Cornea no longer pays for personal cloak while area cloaking.

• This reduces its effective energy drain by 1 energy per second.

Firewalker is less indiscriminate.

• Now checks whether a friendly unit is directly in front of both barrels before firing.
• Aims a little higher for more clearance.

Zenith costs a bit more as part of a general superweapon nerf, but has more range.

• Cost 36k -> 38k
• Range 8400 -> 8800
• Fixed a rare bug that would transform it into an expensive doorstop.

Disco Rave Party costs a bit more and leans hard into directionality.

• Cost 40k -> 42k
• Health 12k -> 8k
• Range 7500 -> 7000
• Aim speed 4 degrees/s -> 2.5 degrees/s
• Full spin up time 1 -> 2 minutes (via reduced acceleration at high spin rates).
• Spin speed is now lost while turning, with greater losses at high spin.
• Eg a 45° turn drops spin 100% -> 58%, a 90° turn drops spin 100% -> 33%.

Starlight is much heavier as it is the superweapon that truly ends games.

• Cost 45k -> 60k
• Health 7500 -> 12k
• Range 10k -> 12k

Campaign

• Allied AIs are now Hard AIs on Normal difficulty (previously they were Normal AIs).
• Replace allied Merlins with Dantes in a few missions as they are prone to friendly fire.
• Adjusted partially built superweapons to leave cost-to-complete unaffected by balance changes.
• Moved Disco Rave Party slightly closer to the enemy base to partially account for its lower range.
• The mission briefing box now expands to avoid using a scrollbar for the tips section.
• Added a hint about mex income sharing to some of the first planets with allies.
• Made the hints for the Krow mission say a bit more about how to use Krow.
• Added a hint explaining Retreat Zones to the Krow mission.
• Cut hints down to four for Kirdipan (since the window is now expanded to show all hints).
• Fixed Romolis victory condition not checking for Merlins.

Maps

• Added start boxes for Supreme Strait.
• Improved lighting on All That Glitters.
• Fixed Timna Island box names.
• Enable alternate diagonal boxes for Calayo.
• Fixed small teams boxes for Angel Crossing.
• Added boxes for Pillar of Doom.
• Improved the widget that lets people tweak and save water and lighting tweaks.

Graphics

• Aegis spin animation is now based on shield charge (thanks Mach56).
• Improved line of sight rendering with AMD graphics (many cards were using a shaderless fallback).
• Contrast adaptive sharpening weakens when zooming out to counteract the grainy effect.
• Reenabled contrast adaptive sharpening by default.
• Added a subtle bloom shader.
• Bumpmapped water is now default for Lowest graphics as the others barely work.

Interface

• Added huge nuke warning toggle ingame under Settings/Accessiblity (thanks dunno).
• Improved the "Skip pregame chat" button on the replay controls.
• Language change updates unit selection texts immediately.
• Added translation capability for Zeno.
• Updated Chinese (both simple and traditional) translations (thanks Kitty, evilblue, et al).
• Updated Polish translations.
• Tweaked unit reply volumes slightly.

Modding

• Zeno no longer counts for Turtle Shell (but would have needed to deal real damage).
• Custom submarines now detected as such for Context Menu properly (instead of as ships).
• Added LUS preprocessing which translate uses of SFX.*, COB.*, math.{pi,tau}, math.{rad.sqrt}(constant) into constants. Local optimisations for these functions or tables should be removed.
• "morphUnitCreating" is now a game rules param (was team rules param).
• Added gadget:GamePaused(playerID, isPaused) to gadget handler.
• Chicken drone morphs now done via customparams.
• Missile silo automatically works with any custom missiles you add to the buildlist.
• Custom missile silos can exist and have moddable stockpile capacity via missile_silo_capacity customparam (still needs script support).
• Removed old nuke/antinuke models.

Fixes

• Fixed Zenith occasionally failing to gather meteors.
• Fixed Fencer and Bulkhead occasionally failing to transition between states correctly.
• Fixed always-floaters that teleport to from land to sea not automatically floating.
• Fixed cloak not being disabled on units when they are reclaimed.
• Fixed area cloakers with personal cloak erroneously being charged for personal cloak.
• Fixed the live unit reclaim tooltip using the old value (50%) rather than the new one (80%).
• Fixed an error upon comshared resign (thanks Shaman).
• Fixed debris texture.
• Fixed Zeno not being autogroupable (thanks Shaman).
• Fixed a rare crash to do with terraform.
• Fixed a bug where disabling units could break a factory.
• Increased Lua memory limit.

These changes look awesome IMO, thank you @Devs for all your hard work on keeping the game well balanced!

Zero-K v1.11.6.1

• Fixed an error to do with units dying shortly after they are lobbed.
• Fixed map edge extension not lining up on random maps.
• Improved default contrast adaptive sharpening zoom settings.