=============================================================================== --- --- --- MASTER OF ORION II: BATTLE AT ANTARES --- --- --- --- Versions 1.1 - 1.31 --- --- --- --- Changelog --- --- --- =============================================================================== This is an ammended version of the changelog from the original readme.txt. It corrects the placement of version 1.3 patches that were erroneously listed in the version 1.2 section of the changelog and adds several previously unlisted patches (marked by *). In addition, two cd-rom releases are decribed that happened after the English and German 1.31 patches were released to the web. They contain two additional bug fixes but still carry the same version number 1.31. Rocco, Oct 14, 2023. =============================================================================== --- Version 1.1 --- =============================================================================== Game files: Nov 9, 1996 Readme: Nov 9, 1996 Release: Nov 22, 1996 Cd-rom no.: 0-460-40-101 The following items were changed or added after the manual had already gone to print. Custom Race Screen ------------------ -1 food was changed to -0.5 food and its cost changed to -3. Ship defense bonuses have been increased from +20 to +25 and from +40 to +50 at the same cost. A new special has been added. "Poor home world" costs -1 and makes your home world mineral poor. Star Name --------- After you colonize a planet for the first time, you will be allowed to enter a new star name. The length of the new name will be limited by the amount of horizontal space available on the main galaxy map. Bear in mind that each letter takes up a different amount of space. (For example, a "W" is wider and takes up more space than an "I."). In any case, you will be limited to 15 characters. Tactical Combat --------------- When playing tactical combat vs. a computer-controlled empire, there is a super-fast resolution mode. Press the "Z" key to turn on this super-fast mode. Click anywhere to turn off the super-fast mode. Combat graphics displays are minimal in super-fast mode, greatly speeding play. Hall of Fame ------------ To reset the Hall of Fame high scores, press Alt-C. This will restore the default scores. =============================================================================== --- Version 1.2 --- =============================================================================== Game files: Nov 21, 1996 Readme: Nov 21, 1996 Release: Nov 25, 1996 Cd-rom no.: MP190 288 D01R Bug Fixes: ---------- The following items no longer crash the game: - If the Antarans capture ships in space combat. - If you cycle through the opening menus. - If the name of the home system has too many letters. - If the player wins by being voted leader of the galaxy and the name of that player's emperor is longer than 10 characters. The game can now play head-to-head over a null-modem serial connection more reliably. Music no longer gets cut off when exchanging technologies during hot-seat play. When a system is demanded in the diplomacy screen, the proper message is sent to the other player. Offering gifts to other races will no longer hurt the player's diplomatic relationship. Evolutionary Mutation will now correctly give the player 4 points to distribute instead of a random amount. Creative races can no longer be made Uncreative with Evolutionary Mutation. * The player is now able to choose Warlord for Evolutionary Mutation. * Shield strength value is now correctly displayed in the Ship Design screen, including the effect of Multi-Phased Shields. * Clicking Alt-spacebar no longer displays a drop-down menu. Clicking F9 now always displays the distance between two stars on-screen. * Ship destination line graphics have been improved. * Planetary shield graphics have been improved. The hand icon no longer turns black before combat. The bombing explosions no longer turn black if bombing is resumed. Leader portraits on the ship info pop-up in tactical combat are no longer displayed in color but in greyscale. * Improved readability of leader names in the Colony screen. * The Hall of Fame now records players' high scores. The Hall of Fame now supports longer emperor names. =============================================================================== --- Version 1.3 --- =============================================================================== Language: en de Game files: Mar 3, 1997 Feb 19, 1997 Readme file: Feb 11, 1997 Feb 19, 1997 Date in readme: Feb 10, 1997 Feb 10, 1997 Release: Mar 3, 1997 Mar 1997 Cd-rom no.: n/a MP390 288 D01R Since version 1.3, the game is available in the German language. The 1.3 patch for the English version was released to the web on March 3, 1997 as a 2.9 MB zip file (that did not contain a readme file), and re-released on March 4 as a 3.3 MB zip file (this time with a readme). New Features ------------ The last customized race created will be saved. It can be loaded by clicking on the "Last Race" button instead of selecting a picture for your custom race to use. Customized races can now be named by their creator. Just click on the race name in the top middle of the Race Customization screen to edit the name. Individual ships can be renamed using the detailed ship display. This display is reached by right-clicking on a ship in the Fleet Movement pop-up list, the Fleet Operations screen or the Leaders screen. In the detailed ship display, left-click on the ship's name to enter a new ship name. Cycling through the ship pictures in the Ship Design screen will no longer change the ship name, preserving custom names. * When refitting a ship, you will be prompted to select a current ship design if there are any of the same size class as the ship to be refitted. The refitted ship will have its design updated to the chosen design's specifications. The design screen will still be available as an option as in earlier versions. In tactical combat, pressing "T" will end the current player's turn. Left-click on the marines displayed at the bottom of the Colony screen to display your current ground combat statistics. Rule Changes ------------ Tutor level should be a little easier. The Custom Race option is available on all difficulty levels. The Creative racial ability now costs 8 picks. As a result, the base Psilon race loses Artifacts home world and gains Large home world. The attacker will now always move first in tactical combat, except for Antarans, the Guardian and space monsters who will always move first regardless. Players no longer get System Specials if there is a monster there after combat. (This used to happen with eels since they don't attack you. It could also happen if two players showed up on the same turn: the monster attacks one and then the second player chooses not to attack the monster.) If both sides die in a battle vs. the Guardian, the player will get Loknar's special now. (Previously, you had to actually win the battle, not just tie.) Loknar now brings 1-2 extra randomly selected technologies. If already in your possession, no other technology is received instead. * In an obscure rule change, there are now always some pre-allocated ships for the humans in a single-player game. Before, the ship slots were allocated round-robin among all players. In games with very large number of ships, this meant that you might sometimes only be able to build a few ships in a turn. Gyro-Destabilizers now take 75 space and cost 50 BC. Their damage has also been decreased to 1-4 per size class of target ship. Ion Pulse Cannons now take 30 space, do 2-10 points of damage and cannot be modified to be Heavy Mount. Plasma Cannons have been increased to 25 space. Fighters have a 50% chance to avoid the effects of any ship self-destruct or warp core breach explosions. Assault shuttles are now one-shot weapons. They land their marines, but do not return to the launching ship. The Wide Area Jammer fleet wide bonus is no longer cumulative with any missile evasion bonus given by jammers. Only the best bonus applies. * The Damper Field will block any marine casualties caused by Neutron Blasters and Death Rays. Extra combat turns given by the Time Warp Facilitator will be given after the opponent has taken a turn. 1st player: normal turn 2nd player: normal turn 1st player: extra turn 2nd player: extra turn Missiles on the Missile Base get the ECCM mod immediately instead of at level 1 miniaturization and this mod no longer uses space. * Missiles on combat satellites now get ECCM immediately and the ARM and FAST mods at L1. These mods do not use space. * Combat Satellites have Warp Dissipator fitted once the technology is available. (An extra line has been added to the Star Base Specials table.) * The Guardian now has 2 Spatial Compressors. * Antaran ships now have missile jammers onboard. * Antaran Raiders (frigates) now have a Neutronium Bomb onboard and Intruders (cruisers) have 2 Spatial Compressors instead of 1. * AI now mounts Stellar Converters on Doom Star class ships. * Bug Fixes --------- Modem problems with head-to-head play have been addressed. A network synchronization bug involving viewing battle results when one player's computer was slower than the other has been fixed. The Tiny planetary shield crash bug is fixed. Graphical problems with planetary shields have been fixed. The lockup when all the ships on one side are in stasis is corrected. Ships in stasis will not take damage from ship explosions. Ships will now be able to reach Elite crew status. If your income is negative and you are giving tribute to another player, you give them zero BCs instead of a negative amount of BCs. Colony base maintenance cost is now 0 instead of 5 BC, preventing displayed nett income to be 5 BC too low on turn of a colony base completion. * Left-clicking on the Freighters window when all freighters are in use for population transport will no longer crash the game. * The overflow bug if you research more than 32,767 research points per turn has been fixed. The number now truncates to 32,767. The same fix was made for the player's gross income. When you acquired the application you were currently researching by nonresearch means (diplomacy, spying, etc.) and you were Creative or it was a gray box field, the game used to erroneously give you the whole field, resetting chosen research to none and amount of invested research points to zero. The game will now correctly assign you to research another application in the field (unless there are none, in which case you get the field). Researching a high tier ship shield technology no longer gives all lower tier ship shields for free. * Human players may now give Antaran technology to each other. Leaders starting experience is now equal to the xp threshold of their intended starting level (60/150/300 instead of 50/100/250). As a result, leaders now start at the correct skill level. * You are now able to hire "special" leaders. Leaders give their special technology when hired, even if hired on a later turn. Assassin leaders now correctly kill an enemy spy when you're told they do. The player will now benefit from Loknar's Galactic Lore skill. It used to be possible to circumvent the 5-turn ETA by sending the leader to the pool and then back to the same star system. This has been fixed. Captured ships with officers can no longer be refitted on the refit pop-up menu. Scrapping (captured) ships now gives you the opportunity to learn improved fuel cell technology. The Colony Building Queue screen is changed to list the planet name. If you press the "<" and ">" keys on the Colony screen and the Colony Building Queue screen, you will automaticaly skip the outposts in the lists. On the Fleets screen, the relocation hot-key has been changed to F5. The hot-key for cancelling all relocations has been changed to Alt-F5. Misc ---- "Zog, the Gnolam Capilatist" is now called "Grogg, the Gnolam Capitalist". * =============================================================================== --- Version 1.31 (English, German, French, Spanish) --- =============================================================================== Language: en de fr es Game files: Mar 26, 1997 Mar 26, 1997 Mar 26, 1997 Mar 26, 1997 Readme: Apr 11, 1997 n/a* Mar 24, 1997** Mar 11, 1997*** Release: Apr 11, 1997 Apr 1997 Apr 1997 Apr 1997 Cd-rom no.: n/a n/a MP290 288 D01R MP490 288 D01R * No readme is included in the German 1.31 patch. ** 'version 1.31' heading, but 1.31 patch notes are missing. *** 'version 1.3' heading, and 1.31 patch notes are missing. Since version 1.31, the game is available in the French and Spanish language. New Features ------------ Tactical combat ship initiative is now an option on the Game Settings window. When this option is enabled, ships in combat will move in the order of their initiative rating. The initiative rating is equal to the ship's total beam offense bonus divided by 10 plus the ship's current combat speed [Offense/10 +speed]. Thus, smaller ships should move before bigger, slower ones. Bug Fixes --------- The occurrence of "You are too powerful" messages from the computer AIs has been reduced. Various other changes to decrease the erratic behavior of computer AIs in diplomacy (such as races declaring war on you for economic expansion) have also been made. All ships in a fleet are removed from a system if that race accepts your demand to do so, instead of just the ships with weapons. If two races own planets in the same system, the colors of the labels now reflect that in the Windows 95 version. In the Colony system display, toxic planets are now colored gold instead of red and radiated planets are red instead of gold. (Except for tiny toxic, radiated and barren planets that are red, silver and gold resp.) Note that the updated file 'colsysdi.lbx' that contains this change is not present in the German version of the patch. * Using the Alt-CRUNCH cheat now triggers the cheat warning in multiplayer games. The Hall of Fame now records players' high scores. =============================================================================== --- Version 1.31 (spanish + italian) --- =============================================================================== Language: es, it (2-in-1) Game files: Apr 24, 1997 Readme file: Mar 11, 1997 (es), Feb 12, 1997 (it)* Date in readme: Feb 10, 1997 (es), Feb 11, 1997 (it) Release: May 1997 Cd-rom no.: MPB90 288 D01R * both with 'version 1.3' heading, and 1.31 patch notes are missing. New Features ------------ Spanish or Italian language can be set on the Game Settings window. The Accept button immediately puts the new language into effect and closes the menu. Bug Fixes --------- In combat with ship initiative enabled, ships trapped in a Black Hole Generator will now be destroyed after two turns instead of remaining immobilized. In the System window, the correct number of colony ships is now displayed when there are more than one present. =============================================================================== --- Version 1.31 (multilingual) --- =============================================================================== Languages: en, de, fr, es, it (all-in-one) Game files: Dec 18, 1997 Readme: n/a* Release: unknown Cd-rom no.: PPX90 288 D01R * The readme files haven't been updated for this version. New Features ------------ One of five languages can be set in the Game Settings window. The Accept button immediately puts the new language into effect and closes the menu. Bug Fixes --------- unknown ======================================|^|======================================