Open Realm of Stars 0.20.0Beta

OROS 0.20.0Beta has been released.

This update adds AI difficulty levels to the game. There are 3 different difficulty levels: Weak, Normal and Challenging. These are not done in typical way where AI gets bonus depending on difficulty. Instead there are differences in AI algorithm. Biggest difference is how AI Exploration works. On weak it tries to move around the sun by keeping certain distance from the sun. This causes AI to move already explored sectors and isn't effective. On normal difficulty AI also tries to keep distance but same time move sectors which give most of the new unexplored sectors. Finally on challenging AI goes greed and only moves sectors which give most of new explored sectors. Main idea is that with better AI for exploration AI will eventually gain more planets and be more better in game.

There are also some minor changes for example how populations are handled on planets with higher difficulty levels. Challenging AI will not allow blocking planets by moving fleets there, it will try to send another fleet from another planet to destroy that. AI is also more aggressive, since earlier there was issue that AI did not make war against human player if borders were crossed too often. These changes make game more challenging, I probably didn't win once while playing test games if there was ancient realms in game. 

There are two new space races in the game too: Alteirians and Smaugirians. Alteirians are bit different to each other space races. These guys are weak but very smart folk. They don't live on planet surfaces but on planet orbitals. This cause that Alteirians are very easy to conquer by simply destroying their orbitals. Because they live on orbital they get big negatives on population production and mining which makes them really slow on building at beginning of the game. On the other hand their research can be over 4 times at beginning compared to other races. Alteirians also have challenging time against space pirates since they can be encountered quite early and are able to destroy Alteirian orbital. In fact Alteirians were the first space race that I actually lost complete during test games. On that I noticed that game is missing own "you lost" screen. This is now added, and player can choose if they want to see results immediately or let AI finish the game.

Another new space race is Smaugirians. These are folk that can place weapons and privateering modules to their freighters. These guys also have two new government types: Syndicate and Pirates. So in short Smaugirians can be played as space pirating race, if wanted. When their freighters have weapons other realms still count them as unarmed. So Smaugirians are kind of between that focus on trader(or stealing) and military actions. 

There are also some minor changes, like auto shoot in combat simply clicking the enemy ship. Also by default human player won't get all the news from other realms before they have had diplomatic meeting. Game can be also configured so that each realm is controlled by AI, so human can just watch how AI is playing the game. This is mostly when doing AI update, but it is there if someone else is interested see how AI plays. There are small changes also for tech trees. In theory each space race could have their own tech tree, but mostly they have shared techs. There are some exceptions for example Alteirians do not have terra forming tech since they don't live on planet, but they have bigger orbitals and orbital lifts. Mechions and Lithorians do not have food production tech since those guys do not eat food. Instead they have research and mining tech available only for those.