V1.5.4.11

A few days ago, Empire won the latest round of Planetwars with a deep strike to capture Sparta, the Federation homeworld. Throne was lost in the process (due to a malfunctioning warp jammer) but after a developer discussion we decided to continue the round with the surprising (to some) rule that homeworlds can be exploded. We aim to fix the bugs and balance issues found in this round and run further planetwars until we can support lengthy galaxy-wide wars. We should mostly be simplifying and polishing current mechanics instead of adding any new big things to planetwars.

Feedback is welcome.

Balance

• Disarm now interrupts bursts (in the same way that EMP does). For example a Catapult can start firing, get disarmed and finish firing when the disarm wears off.
• Djinn obeys disarm.
• Commander area jammer and area cloaker modules now drain energy. Not draining energy was a bug.

Interface

Added selection filtering, as requested here: Feature Request: More Precision For Mass Selection.

• All units have a Selection Rank state toggle that ranges from 0 to 3.
• Structures have rank 1, constructors have rank 2, and combat units (commanders included) have rank 3.
• When selecting multiple units the units without the greatest rank in the selection are filtered out.
• Hold Shift to ignore rank and create selections of mixed rank.
• Hold Ctrl to ignore rank above a certain (configurable) threshold. The default ignores rank differences above 1, this means that Ctrl+A will select all units with rank at least 1.
• Selection Rank is a state toggle so you can configure your unit defaults in 'Game/New Unit States', just like any other state toggle.
• If you don't want selection filtering then disable it in 'Settings/Interface/Selection'.

Hotkeys for setting a particular unit state are now configurable in the 'Game/Command Hotkeys' menu. Previously the only state hotkeys available through this menu would toggle the state. With these new commands you could, for example, bind a key to set your units to hold fire by binding "Fire State: 0".

Improved the state toggle icon for overkill prevention.

Chickens

• Fixed to White Dragon behavior.
• Removed Spidermonkey weapon lighting and reduced impulse.
• Tweaked some timing values. Lategame chickens occur slightly earlier and small chickens become obsolete sooner.
• Added savegame support for chickens.

Fixes

• Fixed command hotkey visualization for de-disabled commands during tutorials.
• Fixed night view in missions.
• Fixed Hacksaw description.
• Fixed unit AI command for non-transports.
• Fixed some shader errors on strict drivers.
• Fixed slow mex glow update when overdrive changes.
• Fixed Convict animation.