It's taken a while, but 3.5 is nearing completion (there are only a few features left to add), and I think it's time to start the voting for features and bugfixes to be included in 3.6...and there are a lot of candidates this time.
So the basic rules of voting are the same as last time: For each feature or bug you're interested in, assign a rating from 1-100 saying how much you want it (where 100 is the most, 50 is something you want half as much, etc.). If you're not that interested in any, you can vote less than 100 for all of them. Bugfixes and features will be tracked separately.
The options for features are:
1. Create the "Focus Research" production option, a research equivalent to "Stockpile Energy".
2. Create an auto-plant-forest auto-terraforming action for formers.
3. Make it moddable to have fully automated units continue full automation after being withdrawn from enemy territory.
4. Enable bombing as artillery for air units. Air artillery would be at range 1 and only against non-air targets (and would have the effects of nerve gas against bases). "Duels" would be done when attacking SAM units, and the maximum range and max damage vs. base/bunker, sea, and open would be set separately from land artillery; there would also be the ability to make it single-target. In addition, if this is implemented there will be the ability to choose, for each non-missile air chassis type, whether artillery is always present (e.g. make it mandatory on copters and single-target to weaken chop-and-drop), present only with the Heavy Artillery ability, or unavailable (by default, it will be present only with Heavy Artillery, and Heavy Artillery is by default not available to air units, so it will play the same as without the mod).
5. Make it moddable to require a network node in a base to carry out techsteal and/or Kill Prominent Researcher in that base.
6. Create a "can only be built by AI" special ability, so that you can place it on predesigned units to make AI-only units.
7. Create the possibility for "interlude landmarks". Unlike regular landmarks, these would not show up on the map, and could not be placed in-game, but they could be placed by a scenario (or even map) creator, and interludes could be made for getting within a certain distance of them (with further ability to adjust things somewhat based on what other interlude landmarks have been reached at what distance.)
8. Increase the 2048 unit limit to something set by alphax.txt. Because this is fairly major, its total score will be halved...but it will vastly reduce the difficulty of many other possible changes. Speaking of which.
9. Make infiltration not necessarily permanent; instead, infiltration would create a "pool" that is then depleted over time, with the rate of depletion being affected by the target's PROBE rating; when it hit 0, infiltration would end. Repeating the infiltration action would restore the pool to maximum, and The Empath Guild would both increase the size of the pool and set it to maximum once built (but once it ran out, you'd need to infiltrate again).
I am not sure yet if this is feasible without changes such as the one needed to increase the 2048 unit limit (option
; therefore, if this wins, I will investigate; if it is not possible without option 8, any votes for this will count toward 8 as well, and this will only be selected if option 8 is as well.
10. Make an option that artillery vs. ship battles are to the death.
11. Make "Territory: max distance from base" moddable for sea bases. Make it moddable how close a sea square has to be to land to be claimed by a land base, or vice versa. Also make it moddable how far out to sea a square can be and still be claimed by a land base merely for being within its normal territorial radius (provided there are no bases in the same sea trying to get it), and likewise for how far inland a square can be and still be claimed by a sea base for being within its normal territorial radius (assuming no bases on that continent trying to get it).
12. Make the duration of sunspots, as well as their frequency, moddable.
13. Enable interlocks for energy theft.
14. Make the game remember the last directory it saved to, and default to that when saving.
15. Allow faction bonuses for forest nutrients/minerals/energy just like for fungus
16. Allow setting of PROBE modifier to be immune to infiltration, and modifier to be immune to all probe team actions (as Hunter-Seeker Algorithm).
17. Turn the Caretakers' "cannot build Voice of Planet" and "cannot build Ascent to Transcendence and will declare vendetta on anyone who does" into faction features that can be applied to any faction for any project, facility, or predesigned unit.
18. Allow users to assign a single faction ability to each project or facility, to then apply to the base with that facility/faction with that project. (Start-of-game things such as TECH and UNIT wouldn't apply, of course, and something faction-wide like TECHCOST would work for projects but not facilities.)
19. Allow the cost of changing social engineering to be proportional to total population as well as difficulty.
The options for bugfixes are:
1. Make children's creches actually work right (i.e. fix all creche-related bugs). This is fairly straightforward, and gets its total score doubled.
2. Fix the MP faction graphics bug.
3. Fix the bug where apparently the AI can attempt to corner the global energy market while such an attempt is already in progress.
4. Fix the bug where reactor autodesigns apply even when autodesign is turned off.
5. Fix the bug where turning a base to another faction causes non-combat units to disappear.
6. Make it so that in an artillery duel, the attacker does not sometimes have a -100% hasty penalty.
7. Make it so that the prompt about breaking a truce/treaty occurs before attacking a square with artillery (even if it doesn't hit), and before air attacks are intercepted, not after.
8. Make the faction energy bonus/penalty show up in the energy report screen (F3).
9. Examine a potential lead from kyrub that may fix the "bases are too cheap when exchanged" problem...and if it does turn out that what he noticed is a bug, fix it. This should be fairly straightforward, and will count double.
10. Make "disable automatic prototyping" work properly in TCP/IP games.
11. Make it so that you can't invite AI to attack a human player unless you can contact them, and cannot call council unless you can contact all human and AI players.
