Author: Tom J Nowell

Caretakers are now communist. For those of you not worried about Caretaker farms there are a few other improvements for Overdrive. The main fix for this release is the Geothermal morphing bug.

=== Balance ===
Minor balance changes:
* Dagger Damage 110 -> 110.1 (for 0-ish health cases)
* Increased Scallop and Duck torpedo turnrates so that they can reliably hit targets while in water which is just over their head.
* Tick sight distance 160 -> 240 (to reduce frustration and match Roach).
* Grizzly Range 550 -> 600 (it was supposed to have 600 but sometimes thought it had 550).

=== Overdrive/Communism ===
Some parts of overdrive have been rewritten to fix a few bugs and issues. As a side effect constructor and commander metal income is fully shared.

Energy sent to overdrive is now:
(Energy Income – Energy Expense)*(Energy Stored)/(Energy Capacity)

This equation is for the entire team. Those values are the total stored energy, capacity, income and expense summed together from each player in the team. The contribution by individual players is split proportionally based on their personal spare energy (Energy Income – Energy Expense). A player makes no contribution if they have no spare energy. Energy Income does not include reclaim (it was a messy edge case) but otherwise the system is unchanged for 1v1 purposes.

Old overdrive had a confusing taxation system which would partially equalize energy incomes across the team. This has been removed because it was opaque and could cause energy fluctuations. The new sharing system uses the fact that (Energy Stored)/(Energy Capacity) < 1 unless all players have full energy storage to share energy to stalling players. It is a result of the new equation that players with full storage will not spend all of their spare energy on overdrive unless all players have full storage. This causes them to share the excess energy to their allies.

In short:
* Automatic energy sharing only occurs at full storage. Take care of your own energy early in a teamgame.
* Constructor and commander metal income is shared.
* No energy fluctuation bugs.
* Reclaim does not contribute to overdrive. Otherwise the system is unchanged for 1v1.

=== Interface ===
* Set blue-green radar to be the default.
* Extended team summary in Deluxe Player List.
* Fleshed out and improved the accuracy of the extended economy tooltip (mouseover the images on the resource panel). Made possible with the change to overdrive internals.

=== Fixes ===
* Fixed large overdrive bug caused by morphing Geothermals.
* Starlight now ignores terrain while aiming.
* Fixed Grizzly range problem (it thought it had more range than it did).
* Fixed rare particles crash with specfullview toggling.
* Units can no longer fire while dropping in from space (post gamestart commander choosing).
* Fixed icon height widget to work with COFC.
* Fix for rare selection panel crash.
* Removed Ore Mex (it was broken).
* Fixed spectator mute defaults (now enables in FFA automatically).
* Possibly fixed rare 0 damage beam laser hits.
* Fixed mex death visuals.
* Context menu handles Wolverine and Claw properly. * Fixed edge case in set target command cancelling.

As usual, the tournament is scheduled to take place on the last Saturday of the month at 10 AM / 10:00 UTC.

Tournament format & rules:
– Registration is open until 1 hour before the official start time of the tournament.
– Double elimination
– Random seeding
– First map of each round is predetermined, the following maps in the winners bracket will be selected by the loser of the previous game from the featured 1v1 map pool.
– All winners bracket games will be best of 3 (including finals). All losers bracket games will be best of 1 with the exception of the losers finals (bo3).

It is possible to substitute for players who don’t show up. If you have signed up, make sure to show up on time. Those who fail to show up will likely be subbed out by 10:30 UTC.

The players coming first, second and third will receive special unique collectible awards to their player profile, and receive tournament points which will at the year’s end determine the year’s altogether best tournament player.

The theme of preselected maps is SirArtturi. I will post the exact list in the forum thread before the tournament.

The bracket can be accessed via this link.

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