Happy belated Easter! There are lots of gameplay adjustments in this one, but the most notable change is the new and improved???™ Quickmatch system. As always, refer to the changelog for details.

Quickmatch Improved and Enabled

The quick matching system ‘Juggler’ has had improvements and has been re-enabled. Juggler preferences can now be set with Zero-K lobby and defaults to Never. Preferences are used to automatically search/create organise games with people that also want to play that kind of game.

QuickMatch is activated by button in Zero-K lobby multiplayer tab or by joining autohosts with Stars.

People who cannot use Zero-K lobby can set their preferences on their home page – “Game preferences”.

There are now 3 levels of TEAMS host, small medium and large. These hosts will automatically start a game if the number of players is within their desired range. Automatic starting can be postponed with the command ‘!postpone’. Games which are too small can still be manually started and if a game is too large it will be split into two games with players sorted by elo. The game sizes are:

• Small 2v2 – 4v4
• Medium 4v4 – 8v8
• Large 5v5+

Please pay attention to this and configure your preferences based on your likes.

QuickMatch creates games from waiting people according to their preferences to satisfy greatest number of people.

1) It tries to make game of similar ELO skill. For 1v1 max ELO difference is 250 points.

2) It can only move you from your current game to new game if you like the new game type more than current game type, or same as current game type and moving you will allow other game to start, whilenot breaking current game.

3) Games where you are moved are always withing recommended player level for that game type (it will never move you to empty room alone etc).

Zero-K lobby/springies now also allow private hosting of unpassworded games.

Balance

Factories:

• Cost 550 -> 700
• Build Speed 5 -> 10

With the previous BP change it became a bit hard to spend at game start. This factory change is experimental so feedback would be helpful.

Penetrator, Annihilator and Sharpshooter do not fire at radar dots by default. They completely refuse to fire at a radar dot unless their ‘fire at radar’ state toggle is enabled.

Krow:

• Slows to 75% speed while dropping bombs.

Jugglenaut gets an anti unit special weapon. It can pickup all ground units around it and throw them at anything nearby.

Golliath:

• Cost 1900 -> 2200

Sumo:

• Cost 2200 -> 1900
• Jump range 300 -> 360
• Gun damage up 20%
• Stomp damage up 25%
• Stomp AOE 300 -> 340 (diameter)

Dominatrix can capture Dominatrix. This can form trees of control that completely flip when the head is killed.

Archer:

• 3xish damage
• faster projectile.

Grizzly:

• Range 550 -> 600

Clam:

• 25% faster resurrect speed. This is more of a fix because resurrect should drain 7.5 energy whereas due to an oversight it drained 6.

Commander torpedo DPS increased 50%.

Submerging a units in water puts out fires.

Overdrive Distribution

More overdrive metal is given to team members who contribute their energy. 50% of the overdrive distribution is weighted by how much energy a player contributes. The other 50% is distributed evenly between all players.

Base metal extraction sharing is unchanged, this is still evenly distributed.

Physics

In unit-unit collision both units take damage. As an aside they also take the same amount of damage (unless of course one is armoured).

Licho no longer collides with aircraft. This is to prevent mid-air catastrophes. Other aircraft are already set to not collide.

Units skid around a bit more and don’t take so much damage from sliding along the ground. Technically put speed for fall damage only uses 50% of the tangential component of velocity to the ground. The speed reduction vector is also mostly in the direction of the normal.

Pathing

Units should now stop to turn if given a movement order behind them. Slow turning units can now turn on the spot instead of wandering into turret range.

Lag Monitor

Units that the taker creates are not given to the afk player when they return. Exceptions are factories to give the afk player back their factory plop.

Afk players do not receive metal income. It is split between their teammates.

Removed sexism.

Graphics

New explosion effects for Merl and Pillager.

LOS + Radar view has been recoloured. Most importantly areas with LOS and no radar are not dark blue.

Sound

There are now game Victory and Defeat triggered music tracks.

Changed Buoy and Halberd weapon sound effect.

Fixes

• Fixed tooltips for BP 5/6 change.
• Fixed game over bug that would cause both teams to win if the last unit that died was a Puppy.
• Puppy should get stuck underground less.
• Puppy now takes 5s to self-d.
• Initial States should now correctly set states when units are received from other teams.
• Added buildpic for Bantha
• Reordered a few build menu items to obey cost ordering.
• Fixed Freaker description.
• Pillager can now shoot in all directions because it would not turn itself to shoot.

Somehow quite a few changes made it into this version. The new flow field style pathing has been enabled for almost all units (even enemy units) to see if it is an improvement. An across the board 1/6th build power reduction is now being tested. Gravity gun behaviour should be a lot more consistent. In more mundane balance Bandit has had a small nerf and Djinn is significantly cheaper.

Balance

Bandit:

• DPS reduced by 5%.
• Removed autoheal.

Djinn:

• Cost 1800 -> 800
• Speed 1.2 -> 1.4

As an experimental change all build powers were reduced by 1/6th. Repair, reclaim, resurrect and construction effectively takes 20% longer.

Gravity gun and Water Cannon power increased by an unknown factor.

Gravity Guns

Replaced the purely engine dependant implementation of gravity beams with a gadget.

• Impulse is a lot more predictable and balancable.
• Planes, Ships and Gunships are now significantly affected by gravity guns.

Known impulse capacitors have been. But do not despair that unit launching is now impossible, the partial rewrite has dramatically increased the predictability and power of ‘legitimate’ unit cannons.

Unit collision damage has been partially reinstated for units with high speed. The high speed cutoff is required to prevent collision damage during normal movement. A fast unit is damaged as if it hit the ground with that speed, the collidee is not damaged.

Pathing

Most push resistance was removed as an experiment to see if pathfinding will improve.

• Enemy units can be shunted and flowed past in the same manner as allied units.
• Crabe is the only push resistant unit. As it cannot be shunted around.

Disabled push resistance works fairly well in this version. In previous versions, packing units into a tight area was arming the mouse traps in a demonstration of fission. A little bump would cause a unit to wander 100s of elmos off it’s position which would really screw up things like cloaker and mine placement.

With this engine version, instead of moving around units merely float about when pushed. This means a well placed shield or cloaker will not be affected too much. Cloaked units such as Flea, Roach and Tick will stay cloaked while pushed. Pillager and Slasher seem to be able to fire.

Removed some Stealth/Cloak ambiguity

The obscure ability of Spy and Skuttle to stealth while uncloaked has been removed. This was inconsistent with other cloaked units and completely undocumented.

Fixes

• Tweaked some cloakybot tracks to better fit their feet base.
• Fixed Urchin gun position when placed in very shallow water.
• Removed occasional console output about pylons.
• Puppy no longer gathers wreckage while stunned or under construction.
• Transport impulse capacitor.
• Nanoframe impulse capacitor.
• Bantha missile now has a reasonable size. The triple missile pack is probably going to be fireable with a manual weapon of some sort.
• Fixed some unit tip misspellings.

v1.0.3.9

Thanks CaptianBenz for the great new Bantha model. Apart from the model there are a reasonable number of small fixes. Lastly Spring 88.0 has been released, there are few new fixes in this one since the dev version. Now that there is an official release it should be easier for Linux users to find pre-complied packages.

Engine

Spring 88.0 has been released. There are few changes since the development version (87.0.1-68-g6cefe1d) that was previously used. ZKL users will update automatically and because this release is official there should be packages around for Linux users.

Pathfinding seems to have improved in this release and units are more prone to clump together.

The workaround for area commands is now completely removed.

Balance

Archer:

• 15% more damage
• 15% more impulse

Bantha:

• Missile range increased 800 -> 950 (This is to make it equal to laser, just a usability thing).

=== UI===

Gesture menu has a few more options that can be toggled through settings or with UIkeys.

• Added a toggle to disable right-click to open.
• Added a bindable UIkey that opens the menu that does not interact with the mouse.

Small Fixes

• Fixed longstanding area mex bug related to queuing area mex and normally placed mexes together.
• Shredder now has a range ring.
• EMP healthbar and flash now displays for units on less than 1% health.
• Fixed small bug in ferry point UI.
• Fixed self-d detection with units that don’t count. For example terraform points and wolverine mines.
• Added proper wrecks for Grizzly and Djinn.
• Fixed very rare pylon bug (I could only cause it by creating all units and destroying them in the same frame).
• Might have fixed Dominatrix retargeting.
• Moderator sound is now louder. An engine change appears to have reduced it’s volume.

Important Engine Change

Spring 87.0.1-68-g6cefe1d is now in use for most of the autohosts

The next engine release looks at best a few days away. The bugs are already fixed in the development branch of spring but the engine devs are not releasing because they don’t know how broken 87.0 is. Some of the bugs are serve and have no workaround so for now we are using the development branch.

Command Inactivity – Broken area commands, guard commands, patrol commands (with reclaim and repair) are fixed.

Sea Nanoframe targeting – Torpedoes can target nanoframes in sea. The workaround for this bug was broken.

Chicken Crash – The common crashes experienced in chicken games should be fixed.

Stuck units in factory – This is fixed.

Users Zero-K Lobby do not have to worry because they will automatically update. Users of other lobbies on Windows could take this opportunity to update to ZKL (or download an installer). Linux users will have to compile the engine from source or wait at least a few days for packaged 88.0.

Windows install (for non-ZKL users) – http://springrts.com/dl/buildbot/default/develop/87.0.1-68-g6cefe1d/

Building on Linux guide – http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=27860 and http://springrts.com/wiki/Building_Spring_on_Linux

With up to this commit in develop branch https://github.com/spring/spring/commit/6cefe1d4e60432a67bcc29bd3bd252278b8ddeb6

Balance

We are honing in on a balanced Amphibious Factory. Here are the changes since v1.0.3.4

Buoy

• Range 430 -> 450
• Removed weapon AOE (it does not need this vs ships)
• Slow damage 400 -> 250
• Reduced water drag, rise is faster. It rises so fast that on an average depth map (90 deep) it pops right of the water like a cork. This causes the first shot fired by Hunter to pass right underneath it.

Convict:

• HP 800 -> 650
• Shield Regen 12 -> 10

Scalpel

Duck

• Speed 2.6 -> 2.7

Scalpel:

• Turn rate 500 -> 600
• Damage 600 -> 660
• HP 640 -> 680 (because 1 shoting each other is a bit too extreme)
• Range 440 -> 450 (still dancing around LLT range)

Scrubber:

• Cost 90 -> 85

Fixes

• Some amph units had area mex command.
• Disabled AA micro until it is fixed.
• Fixed some Pillager, Penetrator and Tremor targeting behaviour.
• Torpedo Boat and Sub both have Bouncing torpedoes so they can shoot in very shallow water.

"Bilhamil" has posted another video featuring his ongoing research:Controls look much more advanced now and allow you to do basically all normal things :)To see older videos of the multi touch RTS technology check:and

It has only taken 3 tries to fix almost all of the bugs in the last release. I’ll list them here so everyone can start reporting things for v1.0.3.4 with full knowledge of what should have been fixed.

The latest engine release badly broke area reclaim, resurrect and repair behaviour. The main fix in v1.0.3.3 is a workaround of that bug that appears to work a lot of the time.

jseah’s static AA intelligence improvement is now enabled. Static AA avoids overkill and is less baitable. It didn’t quite make it into the main stable due to time constraints.

The last 3 versions mostly fix oversights in v1.0.3.0. Here is a summary:

• Fix Penetrator damage (for a few games it did 6k damage, 2x too much).
• Tweaked new Skeeter model waterline (it looked a bit too buoyant).
• Fixed infinite duration damage over time fire.
• Newton and Jugglenaut gravity beams can target Amphibious units.
• Added factory guard toggle button for Amphibious factory.
• The “whuwhuwhwhu” teleport sound is now played locally as intended. It will not be heard map wide.
• Big Bertha can target gunships if you force it to and now prefers to target statics. It used to have no target preference.
• Fixed small bug with jumpjet velocity prediction.
• Fixed a rare and minor bug in CAI unit choice.

A new version, with a new factory (and a new naming scheme).

This is the biggest stable release for a long time with almost a month since the last one as there were a lot of changes that could not be partially implemented. The new Amphibious factory is arguably the biggest change and took significant development time. This release is congruent with an engine release so a lot of long standing bugs are fixed. This version also includes a months worth of small fixes and balance adjustments that is normal for a stable, the delay just means there are more of them at once.

Enjoy!

New Factory: Amphibious Bots

The underwater amphibious bot factory has finally been added. There were always vague plans to flesh out the underwater combat ever since the rudimentary implementation in CA was removed.

This factory should diversify and flesh out the underwater combat in sea as well as acting as another flex factory on mixed sea-land maps. There are a few new unit concepts in this factory so it may even be land viable (similar to hovercraft). Remember, at this point balance is not expected!

Descriptions of the units can be found here: http://zero-k.info/Wiki/factorypage_amph

There is an amphibious teleporter with a short demonstration video.

Balance

Athena is no longer ploppable. The major motivation is to remove the blind factory RPS and remove the extremely fast landgrab it creates.

Snake (Mainline Submarine) Damage and Health increased ~10%:

• Damage 410 -> 450
• Health 1250 -> 1400

Hunter (torpedo ship):

• Health 1800 -> 1600

Halberd (Hovercraft Assault):

• Range 300 -> 200
• Shoots an energy pulse projectile instead of a missile.

Penetrator:

• Range 1050 -> 1020

Low ROF lasers now penetrate shields if the change is below beam damage/5. Put simply they are significantly worse at shield penetration. This affects Annihilator, Penetrator, Bantha, Stinger (HLT) and Grizzly.

Merl:

• Damage 700 -> 800

Tremor:

• AOE 130 -> 144

Pillager:

• Range 1140-> 1180

Hovercon, differentiated from Mason:

• Speed 2.7 -> 2.8
• HP 900 -> 800

Necro (Shieldbot Constructor):

• Cannot Rez
• HP 660 -> 800
• Cost 130 -> 140
• Shield 900 charge, 12 regen (worse per cost than Thug, equal would be 14)

Newton (Gravity Turret):

• Reduced the occurrence of complete ineffectiveness.

Mobile cloaker and shield are now amphibious. Static cloaker and shield float.

Increased Sumo’s usable range though at long range it has very low damage.

Terraform:

• 18ish% cheaper.
• The construction point of a terraform segment is placed on the segment boundary in the direction towards the constructors that have been told to construct it. The direction updates if the constructors move.

Re-added fall damage and it is now handled more consistently than previously.

• Units are no longer elastic, they lose 70% of their velocity on a ground bounce.
• Fall damage is based on velocity and mass and should be consistent.
• Collisions between units cause no damage because such collisions can happen without flying through the air. This is clear to anyone who has played Hovercrafts.
• Units take a proportion of their health in extra damage if they land outside the map. The damage linearly increases to 100% of their health from 0 up to 800 elmos beyond the map edge. Approximately Hammer range for reference.

Chicken

Reduced easy chicken difficulty.

UI

Added optional range display for selected units. Enable through Control -> Settings -> Defence Ranges -> Show selected units ranges.

Space+click on most UI elements now brings up the options window for that element.

Rector (Cloakbot Constructor) and Ultimatum (anti mech walker) automatically cloak when built be default. The initial states setting for personal cloak has been reset to default values.

Reordered factory tab and factory buildlists along more logical lines. The factory tab is grouped by type with easier factories to the left. Factory build lists has categories ordered internally by cost. These are:
Constructor – Everything Else – Artillery – Anti Air – Mine – Unarmed.

Unit Renames

• Firestorm -> Pheonix (Area Firebomber)
• Necro -> Convict (Shieldbot Constructor)
• Cudgel -> Hermit (Spider Assault)
• Pit Bull -> Gauss (Popup Gauss Turret)

Audio

Torpedo fire sound effect is now dependant on whether the torpedo was fired above or below the water. Urchin (Torpedo Turret) now has a submerged gun when in floating mode.

Increased volume of ship unit replies.

Added 3 more music tracks by Denny Schneidemesser.

Graphics

Fixed area cloaker effect. It now fades out towards the top instead of stopping at a hard edge.

New model for Skeeter (missile scout boat).

Dominatrix control line is now stippled.

Fixes

Fixed artillery chase behaviour on idle and fight command. Arty only automatically gives itself an attack command for land attacking static defences.

• It will stop and attack turrets, prevents walking into turret range.
• It will not gain automatic attack commands on mobile units. Prevents walking into turret range if the enemy unit retreated.
• Affected units are; Hammer, Penetrator, Merl, Wolverine, Pillager and Racketeer.

Fixed small problems with Krow, Dante, Sumo, Recon Commander and Mace turret and firing animations. These were caused by a model optimisation script.

Fixed cloak with shielded commanders. It is again impossible to cloak a commander which is carrying a shield.

Fixed small LLT overshoot exploit made possible by it’s extendible barrel. The barrel extension animation has been removed.

Some prediction calculations now take jumpjet velocity into account.

Fixed queue loss on commander morph. May have fixed queue loss on unit transfer.

Engine

This release corresponds with an engine release (from 85.0 to 87.0). Here are some fixes that should be visible to players, full changelog is here https://github.com/spring/spring/blob/release/doc/changelog.txt

• Fix Brawler/Blackdawn weapon jam when set to hold fire.
• Fixed excessive unit bouncing while pathing (replaced with high frequency, inconsequential, bouncing).
• Fixed permanent unit speed reduction after a “move at slowest speed in selection” command (Hold Ctrl and give a move comand).
• Aircraft no longer take off and disappear if killed while landed.
• Fixed a rare bug in which antinukes would fail to fire.
• All terrain units no longer give up on move orders while climbing steep cliffs.
• All BeamLasers could shoot through the surface of the water. This has been fixed and we’re lucky noone noticed. Stiletto is now significantly better against ships because previously any beam that did not score a direct hit would explode on the sea floor. Now they explode on the sea surface so can hit via AOE.
• Fixed rare invulnerability that would occur if a jumpjet unit becomes paralysed at the end of it’s flight.
• Units in transport are hittable again.
• Reduced occurrence of jumpjet units becoming stuck on opponents.
• Units under construction within factories are much easier to select.

Because poll shows that most players wish to either wait for SpringLobby support (which is nowhere to be seen) or to push forward with more advanced matchmaking, system is put offline for now. You wont be moved to available games so pay more attention …

This is a version of small changes. Panther is slightly better, Vindicator is slightly worse but retains the cool lasers. CaptainBenz finally finished his Catapult model and has tweaked the spider textures. Unit AI should show a slight improvement with velocity prediction inspired by canoba.

Added CaptianBenz’s Catapult model and updated some spider textures.

Fixed Initial States handing of Priority. All units have a Nanoframe Priority and constructors additionally have Constructor Priority.

Tactical AI:

• AA, skirms all gunships.
• Added enemy velocity prediction.

There are particularly noticeable improvement to poor turn rate units such as Dominatrix and Scalpel.

Reverted 25% Krow bomb reduction. That change was sneakily included in only in the previous stable.

Fixed CAI’s windmill nanoframe spam.

Increased Panther’s accuracy vs fast small units (Flea and Glaive).

Fixed bug where Outlaw would slow down allied repair.

Vindicator range reduction. Now it must fly over ground units to shoot them. It cannot snipe commanders with no retaliation.

• The lasers now have spherical range
• Range reduced 350 -> 300.

Added optional circular area command for manually bound Set Target commands. Fixed set target’s overzealous target tracking when targeting a cloaked unit.

Fixed small command menu quirk that occurred when it was clicked on with a terraform command selected.