V1.5.2.24

Ground units have more of a chance to shine with some nerfs to the more oppressive and generalist air units. On the Steam front we have improved the resilience of out Steam packaging by disabling wrapper automatic updates. All updates for the Steam version are automatically packaged and updated via Steam. The upshot is that the singleplayer content will be playable without an internet connection.

Balance

Wyvern is still a powerful attrition bomber, just with a slower rate of attrition:

* Rearm time increased 5s -> 30s. Previously all planes would take 5s to rearm.

Hawk is tankier to cement its superiority and should be nicer to control:

* Health 1000 -> 1100
* No longer reduces turnrate when firing (only speed and acceleration are reduced).

Rapier is much more vulnerable to anti-air and slightly more vulnerable to riot units. It is also worse at covering territory:

* Speed 3.9 -> 3.65
* Range 360 -> 350

Flail has its missile escapabilty brought in line with other missile anti-air units:

* Flight time 6s -> 3.5s

Lobby

There are now four difficulty levels of AI: very easy, easy, medium and hard. These levels are selectable through the AI menu or as options in skirmish quick play. Survival mode (chickens) is also now an option in quick play.

The reports from players that they would use individual 3v3 and 4v4 matchmakers were greatly exaggerated. There are now three matchmaker queues:

* 1v1
* Teams
* Coop

The teams queue will make a game of size 2v2 to 4v4. The coop queue is a new queue which will have two to five players fight either CAI or chickens, depending on the map selected. It currently uses CAI but we are looking into replacing it with circuit AI of variable difficulty levels.

Fixes

* Removed unpathable areas from maps correctly.
* Fixed savegames breaking factories.
* Fixed esc interaction with the command menu. It now closes tabs correctly.
* Fixed some image preloading.
* Fixed (or at least reduced) a rare issue with large structures on spires/holes being stuck at 0% construction because the inbuilt Spring terraforming is trying to flatten the ground.
* Removed misleading reload bar from bombers. Pheonix and Thunderbird now technically have 1s reload time, down from 10s, but since they take 5s to rearm this change should do almost nothing.