Pandora: First Contact Beta r6181

By Rebecca Smith,

Opt-in to the beta version by right-clicking on Pandora in your Steam library, choosing Properties and selecting the beta under the Betas tab.

Changed:
* AI will now lower their population growth if they suffer from overpopulation while at war.
* AI will now take aliens much more seriously and design more units in order to counter them early on.
* AI will briefly pause defending their formers while they have a colonizer so they can make sure the location they want to found their new city in will be properly defended.
* When a city is under siege and the attacker has enough cities to shut down healing completely via one orbital bombardment each turn, the defending AI will now act as if the city was sieged by artillery.
* AI will now move their units one tile per cycle as long as there are enemy units in the units' vision range. This allows them to react to units discovered while moving and generally improves their tactical ability with units that have more movement than vision.
* AI now considers faction boni for resource yields when evaluating terrain and tile improvements.
* AI will now consider resources inside the radius of a hive when evaluation locations to expand to.
* Changed how AI determines their relationship to other factions.
* A lot of tweaks to how the AI evaluates certain technologies.
* AI will now properly defend against aliens and lose newly found cities less frequently to them.
* AI will now scan bonus resources in order to nuke them.
* AI now prioritizes refitting formers to amphibious formers over any other refits as long as they are not at war.
* Slight improvement of AI early game unit composition.
* Income generated by units no longer impacts trade pacts. This change significantly reduces lag.
* Reverted earlier change that caused the AI to not attack things outside of its territory when being significantly weaker than its opponents.
* Improved AI's tactical behavior when fighting with larger amounts of weaker units.
* Against an opponent who has enough cities to cease healing with bombardment every turn the AI will fight more recklessly as opposed to sitting back in town and just taking damage.
* AI will now value buildings that grant operations more highly.
* The AI will now consider standing modifiers for war declarations.
* AI now considers the Advance Cost Computation device less useful for watercraft and mechs.
* AI is now much better at predicting how someone else will act in the case it would declare war. Beware: this makes it far more likely for them to help each other against a common threat.
* When considering war declarations the AI now considers the importance of distance to a possible target less important the when it gets closer to any victory type.
* AI will now make an educated guess about how much human players like it instead of always assuming a neutral standing.
* Reverted change where AI would value attacking enemy units inside their territory much higher than usual as this could lead to weird behaviour when fightning near borders.
* AI will not gather units at a rally point when the unit already is rank 10 or higher. This is to prevent first strikes with nukes becoming too effective.
* AI will now prefer to scan nearby enemy cities instead of random ones.

Fixed:
* Killing spies in transports should no longer result in an automatic unannounced war declaration.
* Selling units now grants you the intended 25% of their value instead of 12.5%.
* Fixed a comparison error that resulted in the AI not properly ensuring whether or not to build a colonizer early on.
* Fixed an error in the evaluation algorithm of buildings that caused the AI to build way too few units early on and making them very susceptible for rushes.
* Fixed French translation error.
* Fixed an issue where the pact leech of the ambassadors was only 1/25th as strong as it is supposed to be.
* Moving units and refreshing your unit positions during turn change no longer triggers a recalculation of your resource yields to be shown in the top bar. This drastically increases performance!
* There is now a preselection of unit designs to choose from for the AI. This reduces turn-time by quite a bit!
* Fixed an issue where the one tile per cycle movement would cause aliens, who have only one cycle, to not attack after moving.
* Fixed an issue where the calculation of what research to pick would be extremely slow due to inefficiently recalculating a value over and over. This drastically reduces turn-times!
* Fixed an issue where the AI did not properly consider technologies two technologies down the line by how important they are.
* Fixed an issue where the AI believed they could build an improvement on top of fungus.
* Fixed an issue where floating units would not move out of fungus when they should.
* Fixed a rare crash that could happen when loading a save game.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would never cancel an attack on a unit with the Pre-emptive Strike Initiator device even if it wasn't in range.
* Fixed updater crash when removing redundant files on Linux.

Windows Linux Mac OS X Game Patch

Written by Rebecca Smith

Rebecca is the Newshound Manager at TrueSteamAchievements, TrueAchievements and TrueTrophies. She has been contributing articles since 2010, especially those that involve intimidatingly long lists. When not writing news, she can usually be found sharpening her very, VERY, pointy grammar stick in anticipation of its imminent use. Outside of TSA, TA and TT, she works in an independent game shop so that she can spend all day talking about games too. At home, with a variety of PCs and consoles on hand from which to choose, starting with a ZX Spectrum, games are never far away there either. However, as you're not supposed to have an unhealthy obsession with just a single subject, she also likes to read and dream about owning her own tribe of minions. She'll occasionally go outside.