This stable exists to fix some compatibility issues with Spring 95.0+. However as I was making a stable release and seem to be the most active balancer I decided to do some balance tweaks as well. People like to know about these sorts of thigs

Balance

Large Shields:

• Regeneration rate 57 -> 50 charge per second.

Brawler:

• Cost 800 -> 760

Banshee:

• Turret tolerance 180 -> 90 degrees

This makes it worse at fly-overs and at shooting aircraft.

Stiletto:

• Cost 600 -> 550

Vandal:

• Damage 70 -> 80

Panther:

• Speed 3.9 -> 3.6
• Normal Damage 160 -> 180
• EMP Damage 800 -> 1600
• Reload Time 2.5s -> 3s
• Max Paralysis time 1s -> 2s

Reduced debris damage 50 -> 20. This is mainly because debris damage was previously 0 and Blastwing became ridiculous.

Other Things

Fixed fixedwing and bomber unit type detection in gadgets for 95.0+. This was causing the "bombers fail to shoot" issue and probably some others but nobody noticed those.

Fixed Tick ejection from transports.

Amphibious units now automatically float when a transport is told to load them.

- Updated Bloom shader to use in-shader Gaussian distribution. This allows for
resolution-independence, and seems to perform better, at least on 2-year-old or
newer graphics cards.

- Removed Blur and Glow Amplifier settings, and Dilate pass setting from Bloom
shader. Added Maximum Highlight Brightness setting, which sets the maximum
brightness that will be added to the scene.

- Modified bloom thresholding to smoothly threshold. Pixels near the threshold
add nearly nothing, and it scales linearly to Maximum Brightness.

+1 the Banshee nurf & Vandal buff.

unsure about the stiletto cost drop as unit is not exactly undercosted, just situational.

Fear the brawler cost drop as they are now heading towards very high levels of resilience

Not sure the apsis change will address the real issue with shieldballs atm, which is the epic snowball of generalist felon alpha. The cheaper stiletto will help with this more I suppose!

Lower the shield exchange rate already!

other than that all seems good.

Stiletto is useful but basically seemed a bit bad for its cost compared to other options. It may put an air player too far back in the fighter war early and be worse than Licho late.

Panther is basically a broken unit as is so I feel that it can be messed with significantly. I would like to see if it can be moved into an anti-heavy role with the high ENP damage. It was already 1-shot stunning raiders so that part should be unchanged.

anti heavy? Isn't that the golly? and does the highest weight factory really need any more help vs heavies?

I think what it really needs is a low weight riot or skirmisher

Yes, my download rate is 3.6kbs! I had to wait 4 hours to download this only 5 days ago (when the stable build was 1.1.12.2. Is there no way to do the iterative release with patches instead of a full download? Seriously, unless you are changing major parts of the data schema or the game engine itself, this should only require a patch, perhaps a .cfg file change, even. This will become a burden if the version release process is not managed better. Please address this ASAP.

Would it make sense for Placeholder shots to go through shields the way Newton and capture beams do? It could be helpful in making shieldballs more vulnerable to Shockleys and Skuttles (Placeholder just barely outranges Felons but benefits from height).

Currently it appears that a shield will block an unlimited number of Placeholder blackholes no matter how depleted the shield is, because the shot is worth no damage. IMO that seems silly.