Author: Tom J Nowell

Due to lack of availability of all the organizers, the month’s tourney will be postponed until first week of December.

While it would be possible to hold the human tournament this weekend, convening an adequate amount of human players with an announcement on Wednesday seems impossible.

With that in mind, this Saturday will still hold a tournament, with players who are much easier to assemble: AI’s!

The machines will duke it out round-robin BO3, ranked by win count. All ties will be resolved by additional games.

The tourney will likely be hosted on SpringGrid operated by gajop in a massively parallelized fashion, and the replays will be published after the games are resolved in this case. If the grid is somehow not available, the games will be manually proceeded at 4x speed on Springie hosts.

Maps for each game will be determined randomly by the tournament host device from this list:

TitanDuel
Eye_Of_Horus_v2
Intersection_v3
Red Comet
Barren
Bandit_Plains_v1
wanderlust_V01
Victoria Crater v2.1

The initial participant list is as follows:
CAI
CircuitAI
FreundAI
Shard (as shipped with engine version 100.0)
ZKGBAI

All these will be assembled in their latest available binary form (compiled linux64) and frozen at Friday, 27th November 2015, 23:59 UTC.

Additional bots can be submitted before that time as well in compiled binary form or source, compilation of which will be attempted but not guaranteed.

The only requirement is that the bots don’t use cheats.
And thus, glory to the robots.

These changes bring a nerf to some heavy static defenses and a bunch of fixes. Non-rectangular starboxes continue to be applied to more maps. Zeus is slightly more accurate in an attempt to tune Cloakybots.

Balance

DDM:

• cost: 1200 › 1600
• power now required to use heatray
• open/close approx. time: 4s › 15s

DDM, Annihilator, Behemoth:

• power required to aim weapons and open/close.

Stardust:

• minimum firing angle 30° below.

This has no effect on flat land but elevated Stardusts have a sizable minimum range depending on height.

Zeus:

• inaccuracy 2.8° › 2.4° [?]

Miscellaneous

• Wait pauses non-free Stockpile. [?]
• COFC camera scrolling obeys Smooth Mesh option and is FPS independent.
• Units undergoing an orbital drop [?] can no longer jump.
• Added a startbox creation tool for mappers. Consult the wiki for usage.

Fixes

• fixed non-dedicated Radar sources [?] being blocked by minor terrain irregularities.
• fixed EMP timer being inaccurate [?].
• fixed facplop being wasted when resurrecting a factory.
• fixed fall damage not being applied if the drop was perpendicular to the ground.
• fixed Outline effect not working on machines without shader support
• fixed Outline effect and X-ray effect to be more consistent with above water rendering when underwater [?].
• fixed the SI notation for tooltips and space-click menu.
• fixed Retreat causing a desync when used by a skirmish AI.