*** Release 9/17/2015 ***

Overview

We are moving onto 1.4 with its focus on AI improvements.  In the meantime, we wanted to address some bugs and add an extra level of polish.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Multiplayer: We've added checks to crashes when using a human or AI uses custom faction with bad or missing data.  

• Starting a multiplayer game will take considerably faster

• Fixed a mismatch between the battle viewer and the battle results

• Bug fixes and balance changes

Please note you may need to start a new game for some of the changes listed below

Balance

• Aggressive modifier is now 1.5 instead of 1

• Cruel is now 1.25 instead of 1 (again on opposing culture)

• Colonies (as opposed to your home world) now have a base maint of 4.

• capital planet influence per turn increased from 1 to 2

• Sensor range from home planet increased from 5 to 10

• Research Lab effect reduced from 25% to 15%

• Xeno Lab reduced from 30% to 25%

• Research institute reduced from 40% to 33%

• Research Center reduced from 55% to 40%

• Research Academy reduced from 75% to 50%

• Discovery Sphere reduced from doubling planet research to 60%

• Tech capital reduced from tripling to doubling

• Nerfs for other research buildings

• Age of War requirement reduced from 12 to 10

• Fixed series of AI bugs in which the AI would mistakenly send ships to a target that was out of range, and as a result, have their destination aborted and sit there.

• New AI exploration system that is much better at finding planets.

• If the FOW command is displayed the AI no longer gets vision bonuses

• AI drastically better at researching tech

• The capital planet of a Civilization now gets a unique improvement (the Capital City)

• AI will increase the weight of military based diplomacy modifiers if it has invasion tech

• Civilization Capital renamed to Capital City

• Opposing Culture base negative is -2 instead of -1

Campaign

• Fixed typos in the Snathi Campaign

• Fixed rare circumstances where if the Drengin or the Terrans were wiped out before the player had taken Snathi Prime, the Player would lose the game.  

• Added a few more checks to make sure UP doesn't appear in campaigns

• Completing the Snathi campaign no longer unlocks the "For Arcea" from the base campaign

Bug fixes

• Addressed a crash that happens when two AI fleets are merging but one them gets destroyed before the merge is completed.  

• Addressed several stuck turn issues.

• Selected rally points in the Set destination screen now flash

• Removed the Enable Tooltips option as disabling tooltips was causing unexpected behaviors.

• Fixed a crash that occurred when destroying planets.  

• Fixed an issue where the AI would ask for peace too easily from other players. It was ignoring the player rule that would prevent the player from asking for peace for a number of turns.

• Fix for a rare issue when the ship details would disappear from the ship list window

• Fixed for text overflow issues in the Command window

• Governors will now properly respect the auto-terraforming option

• Fixed an issue where the auto-terraform box wasn't working properly

• Ion Drive (and other techs) items no longer  overflow into the description area in medium UI.

• Double clicking a Governor will now use it for the colony.

• Changed Governors so that they will trigger a planet project when the planet is full.

• Battle viewer -

• Fixed a problem with the random number generation that made the battle viewer results different than actual results

• The damage indicators are now functioning correctly

• In MP, the Host Snathi ships thumbnails will now show for if the peer also has the Snathi

• Fixed a multiplayer crash when accepting trade offers for peace.

• Dramatically reduced the amount of time to start a Multiplayer game

• Added Heartbeat messages to better handle disconnects in MP games.

• Added checks to deal with bad faction data.  This was cause problems in multiplayer.

• Fixed a crash when loading a DLC map when the peer didn't have the map.  

• Fixed typos

• Change "Pirate Attacker" to just "Attacker" so that they do not read "Pirate Pirate Attacker" in the battle viewer and then salvaged.

• Made slight adjustments to the luminosity of the white dwarf star so the texture can be more easily seen

• Fixed the Pirate faction being tagged as DLC when it is not.

• Fixing a broken graphics for the economic relic

• The display stats in the tech tree screen tooltips are now rounding correctly

• Change upgrade window so ship names would not overflow

• Defying the United Planets no longer crashes the game.