Patch 4 (bug fixes, balance adjustments, and gameplay improvements)
Hi folks,
We've patched Terra Invicta today with a number of bugfixes and some balance adjustments.
Note that we keep multiple versions of the game available for you to play. Here's our guide to playing newer and older builds on Steam if you ever run into issues with the default build, or would like to test-drive new features while we are still making sure they are ready for prime-time: https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29540
A new campaign is not required. (We'll let you know if it is for technical reasons, or if changes will throw off the balance significantly).
Here are all the changes. It covers several versions we have had live on our beta branches this week, but they're all in the build.
0.3.23
Content
- 4 new event illustrations, 1 objective illustration
Balance
- reverted some combat hab module power requirements from .22
- increase research university output
Bugfixes
- crash fix 2674 (buddy movie when one of the participants got killed offscreen)
- crash fixes to refits when null parts get returned
- fix to crash when a mission is revalidated against a destroyed ship/fleet
Known issues
- Bombardment & counterfire will get looked at next
- We're still chasing a crash when an org gets duplicated somehow.
- Need to fix how the the alien threat-o-meter updates. I was gonna do that today but I finally got sick after like 4 years and my brain is kinda mushy, c'mon sudafed don't fail me now
0.3.22
Balance / Gameplay
- Messed with mining profiles: more nobles on Mercury, more water on D-type asteroids, more fissiles on Stony and Metallic asteroids. Requires new campaign to take effect.
- Missiles and gun shells require less damage to destroy.
- PD weapons will fire at mag weapon shells at a minimum expected .5 damage instead of 1, meaning they will fire at greater ranges (at less damage per hit at those ranges). These two changes should address a lot of "my pd won't fire" issues.
* All space combat modules now carry three weapons: A PD weapon; your best antiship laser (if available, otherwise best nonmissile weapon); your best "gun"-type weapon (naval gun, mag, plasma). Some human space combat modules have changed power requirements. THIS WILL MESS WITH YOUR HABS IN SAVEGAMES (sorry about that). All hab combat modules have significantly reduced hit points.
- SimulateCombat() : Starting distance between combatants now equal to the range of the longest range offensive weapon in the combat.
- a coup in a nation will cancel all pending coup missions in that nation
- Hostile Takeover attempts no longer gain benefit from councilor being detained
- Several new projects to oppose alien enthralls/terror attacks sprinkled throughout the tree
- added turkey claim on Astana with United Turkestan project
- added crackdown to a couple more orgs, increased cost of t1 admin org a bit
- added beginning of AI to favor particular weapon types in design at a "meta" level rather than just via scoring for role. Right now this is only for the aliens so their ships evolve more during a campaign. Future intent is to have responsive designs and factions favoring certain types.
- dialed back AI preference for spoils in a couple of places
- Increased antimatter output of atomsmasher and supercollider by 10x. Still to look at: Harvester mechanics
- Doubled research output of Research campus. Slight power requirement increase.
UI
- New Animated Arrow! maybe next time the patch notes will tell us what it does, ben
- Added warning that mods disable achievements
- Updated Mission Buttons with Arrows to Highlight interactablity -- oh is this it, ben? did you do operations UI too lmk
- Updated Tutorial Tips to make "Next Tip" Uninteractable when reaching the end of the tutorial
- Updated Starting Tutorial to show "Dont Show Again" rather than "Hide" for increased accuracy
- nation UI shows days to exec consolidation
- destroyed hab module tooltip should now show what used to be there
- When the game is force-paused so you do something, the PAUSED overlay will turn red.
- When a save fails, a dialog will pop instead of crashing the game
- removed some alert spam when an enemy fleet moves within an orbit that's otherwise interesting to you, but not toward one of your assets
- made UI element for org stars a little larger case we keep hearing about missing stars; maybe this'll fix it
Bugfixes
- Fix for random pauses during gameplay caused by AI fleets engaging each other.
- Adjustments/fixes to AttackWithFleet goal desired combat strength. Issue #2618
1) Aliens now consider all threats in a particular system, not just from faction's they are at war with.
2) Fixed a bug with GetThreatLevelAtLocation() where system threats from war factions weren't considered when warEnemiesOnly == true
3) Moved the warEnemiesOnly logic into GetWarAdjustment(). It now returns 0 if factions are not at war.
4) GetWarAdjustment() now returns 0.1 if factions are not at war, up to 1 if they are.(with intermediate values based on hate).
5) Reduced system threat level penalty to -66% to -30%. This is necessary to not underestimate a enemy faction's strength simply because the have many fleets as opposed to one big one (this is easily exploited by the player).
6) Fixed bug in FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.ComputeDesiredFleetCombatValue() where the threat level was mostly ignored, resulting in the aliens sending single ships to attack stations (zero required attack strength because the station had no defense modules) despite the player having fleets in orbit waiting to intercept them.
- Tiny ships bugfix. Issue #2507
- Bugfix #2623. Prevents a crash on load when the orbit period of a fleet is < 1 second and the fleet's epoch is 1 AD. There's something wrong with the transfer planner to have produced such a situation in the first place, but the save I have to work off of is after whatever went wrong. This at least lets the game load.
- More Changes related to weird random pausing
*** Added a log note if the pause is due to time event queue being overloaded
*** Removed what appears to be extraneous gameTime.Pause in TISpaceCombatState.InitiateCombat as that might trigger it on AI/AI combat. For human player involved combat there's a Pause in SpaceCombatManager
- Fix one more crash when AI fleets looking for nearby resupply habs
- fix a bunch of typos, thanks Discord!
- Fix for pip input reversal bug when tabbing in and out of game
- AttackWithFleet goal will recheck daily to ensure the target still belongs to an enemy faction to prevent hi-larious Servant bombing of alien nation while it's conquering stuff
- Fix for 2181 - Hab rename UI will now display properly when accessed outside of the hab menu list
- Removed both joystick axis from input manager so gamepads don't send input.
- Fix cohesion calculation in anocracies (effect was reversed) FULL PROPS TO THE TI REDDIT FOR CATCHING THIS ONE ↲ -
- Fix bad project prereq requirement for Initiative objective path, which was blocking progress ↲
- Fix bad monitorcontroller.cs that was putting turrets in the wrong place and causing crashes in combat
- Fix ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION for dropbox/Onedrive installs
- fix a couple of duplicate bonus missions on orgs (2644)
- fix 2704 (CP maintenance check on un-controlled nation)
- fix 2671 crash when AI tries to refit weapons and comes up with no candidates for a slot
- fix 2651 (chs loc bug)
- 30mm Autocannon will fire at incomings again. It can barely hit anything so it's still pretty bad. Needs more work.
0.3.21
Balance
- slightly increased years until invasion for cinematic and normal
- added difficulty setting targeting human player and "attack-the-leader" behavior. For the human player, AIs will only gain extra hate if they are the most powerful faction or have announced their win goals AND (this part is new) they are beyond a minimum ideological distance from the human player. That distance varies by difficulty. So on normal HF won't target Resistance player solely because Resistance player is winning (but Servants will). This is a pretty significant mid/late game muzzle for the AI and will get adjusted based on player feedback.
- dialed back the "how much MC you can use" threat evaluation by aliens on normal difficulty slightly
UI
- updated dV tooltip
- New font for korean mod
- Small edit to CP Cap tooltip wording
Bugfixes
- Bugfix #2585: Scuttled ships will no longer attempt to run their maneuvering thrusters (which was causing a crash to desktop).
- Bugfix #2595: Now preventing circular fleet interception (where fleet A intercepts fleet B which intercepts fleet A). This was intended to be disallowed and caused a stack overflow. Note: old saves which had circular interception will now load and play, but the fleet that hasn't launched yet will have its transfer aborted silently. The old saves will also log some errors related to the circular interception, since those shouldn't exist in the future.
- Bugfix #2598: Fixed bug in apsides calculation that would try to delay fleet launch until after the sun burned out.
- Bugfix #2627: The AI was trying to get an estimate travel time to intercept a fleet via microthrust. This doesn't work, but it also caused a null reference exception when it tried to get the target fleet's inclination. I've added the code to generate an inclination -- the microthrust intercept will get cancelled later should the AI actually attempt it (the estimate travel time code is very simplified, so it may judge a transfer to be microthrust only when it isn't).
- Fix for 2596 - Force tooltip container back to the base tooltip canvas on tooltip deactivation to prevent accidental destruction of tooltip gameobjects, added additional logging.
- Fleet with NaN position causes crash bugfix. Issue #2631
- cleaned up more tutorial tips not closing when their screen exits
- CameraManager.HandleAnimations() : selectionChangeUnityRotation zero look vector bugfix. Issue #2642
- Fix for 2625 - Notifications that are too long and prevented UI buttons from being clicked and will now scroll properly in Chinese & Japanese.
- Bugfix #2630: Fixed crashes related to fleets aborting their transfers after combat.
- Fixed rare case of fleet disband destroying tooltip container on it's 15-second delayed destroy invoke call
- Bugfix #2631: Prevented microthrust transfers that are changing the eccentricity of the orbit from producing negative semi major axis in the middle of the transfer. This would cause the fleet to dissapear during the transfer (or worse, cause a crash), since it would have an illegal orbit.
- SpaceObjectSelection.SelectObject() : newSelection == null NRE bugfix
- SingleFleetOperation() : split out ships that cannot transfer from fleet.
- GetBestOperation() : defense fleet now only targets fleets that aren't docked a station (station targeting has its own logic). Issue #2586
- (Internal) - save files now store and log when mods are active at any time during the save
- Fix for 2647 - Unity returning wrong object with gameobject.Find, using our solarSystem.FindObjectinstead.
- Fix for #2666 - Combat UI needed to be updated on ship destruciton
- Updated Ship Designer DV numbers to reflect the games internal model
- FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.bombardmentGoal : incorrect condition bugfix. Before, bombardmentGoal == true for stations and false for bases, which is backwards. Fixed the condition and then went ahead and made this a property instead of a field.
- SingleFleetOperation() : undock bombardment fleets if they do not need to repair/resupply. Issue #2662
- Fix for 2648 - Councilor will now properly find a fallback location when onboard a ship being scuttled with no other ships in the fleet.
- Added a check in AI get best operation that resupplyhab is still valid, 2646
- Fixed NRE when nation has no executive faction but asked to score improving relations 2635
- Fixed an index error crash in the giveresources terminal command FOR YOU DIRTY CHEATERS
- Fixed a crash when a fleet with a "assemblefleet" goal was destroyed and the goal checked in on how the fleet was doing 2636
- Fixed a crash when the AI had selected the disarm nuclear weapons policy 2669
- Fixed a crash when a new councilor's trait doesn't allow them to have a starting region because no region qualifies
- SingleFleetOperation() : getting rid of "low relative dv" useless ship criterion. Otherwise, this can result in a loop of joining fleets then splitting them. Also unnecessary because once the fleet attempts a trajectory and fails due to dv, the split will occur anyways.
- MergeFleetOperation : swapping absorbing/joining roles if the actor has a join fleet goal
- fix issues related to advising councilors not being cleared on nation destruction
- prevent factions from finalizing missions outside of the mission phase
- ManageFleetGoals() : primary hab defense goal NRE bugfix.
- Fixed #2683
- Fixed issue with disengaging ships not removing the UI
- added some save-fixing for councilors with null locations
- added some error handling for a funky combat state a player sent in to prevent crash
- FIX crash when badly damaged army conquers the AA this one was driving me nuts
If you are looking for past patch notes:
Patch 3
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3284836971988927017
Patch 2
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3284836971975123462
Patch 1
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940209510622
Hotfix 1
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940208564694
And for notes on our EA plans
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940207547123
We've patched Terra Invicta today with a number of bugfixes and some balance adjustments.
Note that we keep multiple versions of the game available for you to play. Here's our guide to playing newer and older builds on Steam if you ever run into issues with the default build, or would like to test-drive new features while we are still making sure they are ready for prime-time: https://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=29540
A new campaign is not required. (We'll let you know if it is for technical reasons, or if changes will throw off the balance significantly).
Here are all the changes. It covers several versions we have had live on our beta branches this week, but they're all in the build.
0.3.23
Content
- 4 new event illustrations, 1 objective illustration
Balance
- reverted some combat hab module power requirements from .22
- increase research university output
Bugfixes
- crash fix 2674 (buddy movie when one of the participants got killed offscreen)
- crash fixes to refits when null parts get returned
- fix to crash when a mission is revalidated against a destroyed ship/fleet
Known issues
- Bombardment & counterfire will get looked at next
- We're still chasing a crash when an org gets duplicated somehow.
- Need to fix how the the alien threat-o-meter updates. I was gonna do that today but I finally got sick after like 4 years and my brain is kinda mushy, c'mon sudafed don't fail me now
0.3.22
Balance / Gameplay
- Messed with mining profiles: more nobles on Mercury, more water on D-type asteroids, more fissiles on Stony and Metallic asteroids. Requires new campaign to take effect.
- Missiles and gun shells require less damage to destroy.
- PD weapons will fire at mag weapon shells at a minimum expected .5 damage instead of 1, meaning they will fire at greater ranges (at less damage per hit at those ranges). These two changes should address a lot of "my pd won't fire" issues.
* All space combat modules now carry three weapons: A PD weapon; your best antiship laser (if available, otherwise best nonmissile weapon); your best "gun"-type weapon (naval gun, mag, plasma). Some human space combat modules have changed power requirements. THIS WILL MESS WITH YOUR HABS IN SAVEGAMES (sorry about that). All hab combat modules have significantly reduced hit points.
- SimulateCombat() : Starting distance between combatants now equal to the range of the longest range offensive weapon in the combat.
- a coup in a nation will cancel all pending coup missions in that nation
- Hostile Takeover attempts no longer gain benefit from councilor being detained
- Several new projects to oppose alien enthralls/terror attacks sprinkled throughout the tree
- added turkey claim on Astana with United Turkestan project
- added crackdown to a couple more orgs, increased cost of t1 admin org a bit
- added beginning of AI to favor particular weapon types in design at a "meta" level rather than just via scoring for role. Right now this is only for the aliens so their ships evolve more during a campaign. Future intent is to have responsive designs and factions favoring certain types.
- dialed back AI preference for spoils in a couple of places
- Increased antimatter output of atomsmasher and supercollider by 10x. Still to look at: Harvester mechanics
- Doubled research output of Research campus. Slight power requirement increase.
UI
- New Animated Arrow! maybe next time the patch notes will tell us what it does, ben
- Added warning that mods disable achievements
- Updated Mission Buttons with Arrows to Highlight interactablity -- oh is this it, ben? did you do operations UI too lmk
- Updated Tutorial Tips to make "Next Tip" Uninteractable when reaching the end of the tutorial
- Updated Starting Tutorial to show "Dont Show Again" rather than "Hide" for increased accuracy
- nation UI shows days to exec consolidation
- destroyed hab module tooltip should now show what used to be there
- When the game is force-paused so you do something, the PAUSED overlay will turn red.
- When a save fails, a dialog will pop instead of crashing the game
- removed some alert spam when an enemy fleet moves within an orbit that's otherwise interesting to you, but not toward one of your assets
- made UI element for org stars a little larger case we keep hearing about missing stars; maybe this'll fix it
Bugfixes
- Fix for random pauses during gameplay caused by AI fleets engaging each other.
- Adjustments/fixes to AttackWithFleet goal desired combat strength. Issue #2618
1) Aliens now consider all threats in a particular system, not just from faction's they are at war with.
2) Fixed a bug with GetThreatLevelAtLocation() where system threats from war factions weren't considered when warEnemiesOnly == true
3) Moved the warEnemiesOnly logic into GetWarAdjustment(). It now returns 0 if factions are not at war.
4) GetWarAdjustment() now returns 0.1 if factions are not at war, up to 1 if they are.(with intermediate values based on hate).
5) Reduced system threat level penalty to -66% to -30%. This is necessary to not underestimate a enemy faction's strength simply because the have many fleets as opposed to one big one (this is easily exploited by the player).
6) Fixed bug in FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.ComputeDesiredFleetCombatValue() where the threat level was mostly ignored, resulting in the aliens sending single ships to attack stations (zero required attack strength because the station had no defense modules) despite the player having fleets in orbit waiting to intercept them.
- Tiny ships bugfix. Issue #2507
- Bugfix #2623. Prevents a crash on load when the orbit period of a fleet is < 1 second and the fleet's epoch is 1 AD. There's something wrong with the transfer planner to have produced such a situation in the first place, but the save I have to work off of is after whatever went wrong. This at least lets the game load.
- More Changes related to weird random pausing
*** Added a log note if the pause is due to time event queue being overloaded
*** Removed what appears to be extraneous gameTime.Pause in TISpaceCombatState.InitiateCombat as that might trigger it on AI/AI combat. For human player involved combat there's a Pause in SpaceCombatManager
- Fix one more crash when AI fleets looking for nearby resupply habs
- fix a bunch of typos, thanks Discord!
- Fix for pip input reversal bug when tabbing in and out of game
- AttackWithFleet goal will recheck daily to ensure the target still belongs to an enemy faction to prevent hi-larious Servant bombing of alien nation while it's conquering stuff
- Fix for 2181 - Hab rename UI will now display properly when accessed outside of the hab menu list
- Removed both joystick axis from input manager so gamepads don't send input.
- Fix cohesion calculation in anocracies (effect was reversed) FULL PROPS TO THE TI REDDIT FOR CATCHING THIS ONE ↲ -
- Fix bad project prereq requirement for Initiative objective path, which was blocking progress ↲
- Fix bad monitorcontroller.cs that was putting turrets in the wrong place and causing crashes in combat
- Fix ERROR_SHARING_VIOLATION for dropbox/Onedrive installs
- fix a couple of duplicate bonus missions on orgs (2644)
- fix 2704 (CP maintenance check on un-controlled nation)
- fix 2671 crash when AI tries to refit weapons and comes up with no candidates for a slot
- fix 2651 (chs loc bug)
- 30mm Autocannon will fire at incomings again. It can barely hit anything so it's still pretty bad. Needs more work.
0.3.21
Balance
- slightly increased years until invasion for cinematic and normal
- added difficulty setting targeting human player and "attack-the-leader" behavior. For the human player, AIs will only gain extra hate if they are the most powerful faction or have announced their win goals AND (this part is new) they are beyond a minimum ideological distance from the human player. That distance varies by difficulty. So on normal HF won't target Resistance player solely because Resistance player is winning (but Servants will). This is a pretty significant mid/late game muzzle for the AI and will get adjusted based on player feedback.
- dialed back the "how much MC you can use" threat evaluation by aliens on normal difficulty slightly
UI
- updated dV tooltip
- New font for korean mod
- Small edit to CP Cap tooltip wording
Bugfixes
- Bugfix #2585: Scuttled ships will no longer attempt to run their maneuvering thrusters (which was causing a crash to desktop).
- Bugfix #2595: Now preventing circular fleet interception (where fleet A intercepts fleet B which intercepts fleet A). This was intended to be disallowed and caused a stack overflow. Note: old saves which had circular interception will now load and play, but the fleet that hasn't launched yet will have its transfer aborted silently. The old saves will also log some errors related to the circular interception, since those shouldn't exist in the future.
- Bugfix #2598: Fixed bug in apsides calculation that would try to delay fleet launch until after the sun burned out.
- Bugfix #2627: The AI was trying to get an estimate travel time to intercept a fleet via microthrust. This doesn't work, but it also caused a null reference exception when it tried to get the target fleet's inclination. I've added the code to generate an inclination -- the microthrust intercept will get cancelled later should the AI actually attempt it (the estimate travel time code is very simplified, so it may judge a transfer to be microthrust only when it isn't).
- Fix for 2596 - Force tooltip container back to the base tooltip canvas on tooltip deactivation to prevent accidental destruction of tooltip gameobjects, added additional logging.
- Fleet with NaN position causes crash bugfix. Issue #2631
- cleaned up more tutorial tips not closing when their screen exits
- CameraManager.HandleAnimations() : selectionChangeUnityRotation zero look vector bugfix. Issue #2642
- Fix for 2625 - Notifications that are too long and prevented UI buttons from being clicked and will now scroll properly in Chinese & Japanese.
- Bugfix #2630: Fixed crashes related to fleets aborting their transfers after combat.
- Fixed rare case of fleet disband destroying tooltip container on it's 15-second delayed destroy invoke call
- Bugfix #2631: Prevented microthrust transfers that are changing the eccentricity of the orbit from producing negative semi major axis in the middle of the transfer. This would cause the fleet to dissapear during the transfer (or worse, cause a crash), since it would have an illegal orbit.
- SpaceObjectSelection.SelectObject() : newSelection == null NRE bugfix
- SingleFleetOperation() : split out ships that cannot transfer from fleet.
- GetBestOperation() : defense fleet now only targets fleets that aren't docked a station (station targeting has its own logic). Issue #2586
- (Internal) - save files now store and log when mods are active at any time during the save
- Fix for 2647 - Unity returning wrong object with gameobject.Find, using our solarSystem.FindObjectinstead.
- Fix for #2666 - Combat UI needed to be updated on ship destruciton
- Updated Ship Designer DV numbers to reflect the games internal model
- FactionGoal_AttackWithFleet.bombardmentGoal : incorrect condition bugfix. Before, bombardmentGoal == true for stations and false for bases, which is backwards. Fixed the condition and then went ahead and made this a property instead of a field.
- SingleFleetOperation() : undock bombardment fleets if they do not need to repair/resupply. Issue #2662
- Fix for 2648 - Councilor will now properly find a fallback location when onboard a ship being scuttled with no other ships in the fleet.
- Added a check in AI get best operation that resupplyhab is still valid, 2646
- Fixed NRE when nation has no executive faction but asked to score improving relations 2635
- Fixed an index error crash in the giveresources terminal command FOR YOU DIRTY CHEATERS
- Fixed a crash when a fleet with a "assemblefleet" goal was destroyed and the goal checked in on how the fleet was doing 2636
- Fixed a crash when the AI had selected the disarm nuclear weapons policy 2669
- Fixed a crash when a new councilor's trait doesn't allow them to have a starting region because no region qualifies
- SingleFleetOperation() : getting rid of "low relative dv" useless ship criterion. Otherwise, this can result in a loop of joining fleets then splitting them. Also unnecessary because once the fleet attempts a trajectory and fails due to dv, the split will occur anyways.
- MergeFleetOperation : swapping absorbing/joining roles if the actor has a join fleet goal
- fix issues related to advising councilors not being cleared on nation destruction
- prevent factions from finalizing missions outside of the mission phase
- ManageFleetGoals() : primary hab defense goal NRE bugfix.
- Fixed #2683
- Fixed issue with disengaging ships not removing the UI
- added some save-fixing for councilors with null locations
- added some error handling for a funky combat state a player sent in to prevent crash
- FIX crash when badly damaged army conquers the AA this one was driving me nuts
If you are looking for past patch notes:
Patch 3
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3284836971988927017
Patch 2
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3284836971975123462
Patch 1
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940209510622
Hotfix 1
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940208564694
And for notes on our EA plans
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940207547123