Category: News

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.

Sign up in the comments!

The most observant of you probably have noticed by now that the monthly tournament was not held in June.

It is going to be alleviated with the 2v2 tournament to be held on on July 4th, at 10:00 (10 AM) UTC. Registration is open up until 1 hour before that time – and hopefully with an 1v1 and maybe even FFA tourneys later on.

Tournament format & rules:
– 2 human players per team
– 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).
– There’s a hard cap to amount of teams, which is 8. Any registrations over the limit will be added to waiting list to substitute for no-show teams.

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.

Current bracket can be seen here.

The map list for each round will be announced on Friday.

Sign up in the commments!

The past 5 days have seen versions 1.3.4.2 to 1.3.6.5 that have gone mostly unannounced. Releases are easy when nothing big and scary is hiding unreleased in the repository. It is much harder to take screenshots and write release posts. The following sections cover all the changes for these releases.

In other new; the latest engine is almost ready for use. The engine devs have been focusing on bug fixes and performance improvements. The results from the human trials last week are promising and all known bugs have been fixed. We are likely to permanently adopt the new version, which is great because recent benchmarks say to expect quite a performance boost.

=== Balance ===

Hunter is now smarter. This is to try to make Hunter vs Scallop balance reasonable at all levels of skill and attention.
* Increased cowardliness of unit AI. Fight now reliably avoids Scallop damage (except when the scallops have a concave).
* Increased Sonar Range 390 -> 450 so it is a bit less blind.

Scallop has reduced DPS and burst to try to make it worse against things it should not beat.
* Damage 180 -> 90
* Reload time 2 -> 1.4

Blastwing is now more usable in ordinary situations and less effective with Newton.
* Acceleration and Deceleration 0.1 -> 0.25

Balance affecting fixes:
* Fixed incorrect and inconsistent BP for commander morphs. Morphs are now about 20% slower.
* Added overkill prevention to Duck and Scallop torpedoes.
* Fixed target priority for kamikaze units. They are no longer targeted as if harmless.
* Moderator is now skirmished by long ranged things (Rogue, Recluse etc..)

=== Interface ===
* Transport AI no longer automatically transports units from factories by default (so it just implements the embark command). The automatic factory behaviour is too intrusive.
* Cleaned up graphics area of ingame menu and edge extension widget.
* Spectators can now see player reserve settings.
* Queued Solars look like Solars.

The following affect the default interface. Old players will not be affected but can reset their interface to the default in order to see the changes.
* Wait hotkey changed to Ctrl+W
* Area Mex hotkey changed to W
* Left click on Quick Selection Bar now selects the unit. Right click selects and focuses.
* Disabled cloak/firestate widget. Most cloaked units tend to want to fire from cloak. The widget also tends to fail.

=== Fixes ===
* Reduced occurrence of units becoming stuck in/on Shipyards.
* Improved/fixed construction priority.
* Fixed stockpile gadget error.
* Fixed antinuke coverage widget crash for spectators.
* Fixed antinuke coverage widget crash related to mobile antinukes.
* Fixed state icons not displaying.
* Fixed Gauss damage (200 -> 200.1)
* Improve delayed commander spawn position.
* Fixed Rogue script. * Fixed Win Counter.

Recent free time has yielded improvement to two features and a whole bunch of fixes.

=== Jumpjets ===

Jumpers can now jump onto wreckage, map features and structures. The Jumper will slam into the structure, possibility sustaining damage, and slide down the outside onto the ground. Use at your own risk because your units could slid somewhere inaccessible. On the upside they can just jump out if they are stuck. The jump UI colours have been shuffled around slightly to indicate when a jump command will hit a structure.

The purpose of this change is to fix two annoying limitations. Skuttles should be able to jump onto spire turret and it makes sense to sacrifice one Jack to kill a buried Singularity Reactor. Both of these things are now possible.

=== Antinukes ===

Antinukes have been improved with consistent behaviour as well as UI improvements to tell you exactly when your nuke will be intercepted. The switch to this engine version caused antinukes to make a poor attempt at stopping nukes which pass through their coverage. This behaviour is now fixed, antinukes make a very competent attempt to stop nukes passing through their coverage.

The important balance change here is that antinukes block every nuke which will pass over their coverage, not just nukes which will impact within their coverage.

=== Minor ===
[Spoiler]
* Widgets will be able to use the UnitStunned callin after the next engine update.
* Changed to cost icon to make it clearer that costs are in metal and energy.
* Added Stop command to pregame queue. Press the Stop button or hotkey to cancel you queue.
* Fixed Placeholder collision volume (it was too small).
* Ally selections with selection shapes are now hidden when the UI is hidden (F5)
* Increased air repair pad death clone size to match the living unit.

=== Fixes ===
[Spoiler]
* Fixed UI crash caused by starting a game after viewing a replay with replay progress hidden.
* Fixed Banisher animation using the opposite barrel and being able to restore its turret when stunned.
* Fixed the case where if the 2 best players on a team were AFK, their units would bounce between them instead of going to the 3rd player.
* Fixed lag/AFK timer being longer than intended (35 -> 30).
* Fixed resigned players’ resources not being shared away if they got any afterwards (due to the above or excess).
* Fixed resigned players receiving metal from mexes if they resigned when having 0 units.
* Fixed factory order queues missing Attack order.
* Fixed the remaining cursors which failed to draw on some hardware (Patrol, Wait and DGun).
* Fixed tacnukes not counting to stats.
* Fixed outdated Scallop description and helptext.
* Fixed a CAI2 load error.
* Fixed Ctrl+C behaviour with commanders from resigned players.
* Removed the ability to give illegal jump commands using command insert.