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:
* Names of the difficulty levels now fit what they feel like for new players instead of what they felt like before the AI improvements.
* New easy AI can now once again declare war on the player. But they will not consider other players relations and they will never declare war on the player when he already is at war.
* New medium AI no longer has dramatically reduced chance to declare war on the player. But they will not consider other players relations and they have dramatically reduced chance to declare war on the player when he already is at war.
* The diplomatic penalty for capturing cities has been normalized to be relative to the average population rather than the population of the previous city owner. This will reduce the likelyhood of a dogpile against the one who got the last city.
* AI will consider habitat provided by suburbs as slightly less valuable and expand a little more.
* AI will now consider the alien aggression settings of the game when considering when to expand. They expand earlier on settings below "very high".
* AI will now build colonizers and formers when at war but their military power is strong compared to that of their enemies.
* When AI has a storage of food and doesn't need to farm, it will now assume an average yield of 3 to prevent it from building useless farms in that period.
* AI will now build more aircraft units in inland cities when there are a lot of coastal cities.
* AI no longer considers standings and war status of other factions when deciding its diplomatic actions.
* AI will be far less aggressive towards weak players they like and more aggressive towards players they dislike, even if those are really dangerous.

Fixed:
* Fixed an issue that allowed the the AI to know whether a city was undefended or not without having vision.
* Fixed incorrect difficulty level description texts for dutch, french, german and italian.
* Fixed an issue where it was possible for the AI to sign contracts or ask for tribute in the same turn that it would declare war.
* Fixed an issue where AI would not determine the coastal to inland city ratio properly and thus underproduce naval forces on archipelago maps.
* Fixed an issue where AI would never attack cities when they didn't have access to artillery units yet.

Amazing news!

We are happy to announce that Slitherine lands on Bundle Stars!

Starting from today a number of our games will be sold on the Bundle Stars store at a very special discount price!

If you are of a mind to save don’t miss this amazing offer. A whole Slitherine bundle comprising of three different tiers with so many titles at an incredibly cheap price. Three games for 1.99$, seven for 3.99$ and eight for 7.99$!

https://www.bundlestars.com/en/bundle/slitherine-bundle

The details of the bundle are as follow:

Tier 1: $1.99

- Battle of the Bulge
- Time of Fury
- Pride of Nations

Tier 2: $3.99 (including Tier 1!)

- Vietnam ‘65
- Ravenmark
- Legions of Steel
- Close Combat Panthers in the Fog

Tier 3: $7.99 (Including Tier 1 and Tier 2!)

- Pandora First Contact


The Bundle offer is valid until May 14th!

But it’s not all, folks. Be sure not to miss these amazing discounts on some of our other titles:

Battle Academy – 75% off!
Battle Academy 2: Eastern Front – 75% off!
Battle of the Bulge – 33% off!
Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager – 50% off!
Distant Worlds: Universe – 50% off!
Last Days of Old Earth – 15% off!
Order of Battle: Pacific – 40% off!
Vietnam ’65 – 50% off!
Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon – 35% off!

All the discounts will be valid for 72 hours.

By buying these titles on Bundle Stars you will receive Steam keys and you will need to activate the products on Steam.

What are you waiting for? Don’t miss this unique opportunity and visit the Bundle Stars store now![www.bundlestars.com]

Improvements to the AI across the board and its focus to play to win have have made it frustrating to play on easier difficulties. Today's update should be a good start to make easy and very easy difficulties more manageable and enjoyable.

Changed:
* AI will no longer embark land units when they are seen by an enemy.
* AI formers will now cancel their action when they stand an in ion storm.
* AI will now be much nicer to other players on very easy and easy difficulties.
* AI will now be less aggressive on very easy and easy difficulties.
* AI will no longer declare war on human players on very easy difficulty.
* AI now has a very high inhibition threshold before it would declare war on a human player on easy difficulty.

Fixed:
* Fixed an issue that prevented AI formers from clearing fungus.
* Fixed an issue that could lead to unwanted war declarations.

Change log history[download.pandora.proxy-studios.com].

This update speeds up turn times, further improves the AI and fixes some inconsistencies.

Please see below for the full list of changes.

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.
* Fixed Agents outdated hints.
* Fixed ruin explored report wrongly showing when a Messari Portal is destroyed.
* Fixed an issue where the AI was so afraid of entering enemy territory with transports, that it would rather just leave them on the sea.

Change log history[download.pandora.proxy-studios.com].

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.

This larger community update focuses on improving the AI's diplomatic behavior as well as both economic and militaristic thinking. These are fruits of labor of Alexander Stumpp and the rest of the community. Thank you!

The AI's diplomatic behaviour is now less selfish and preventing someone else from getting too strong now has a higher priority than trying to exploit someone weak. There is also more distinction in the behaviour between different factions.

The AI will now use a completely new algorithm that considers the return of investment to determine whether to build units or buildings. This helps them to keep decent amounts of troops around while at the same time not falling behind with important buildings.

The way how the AI handles their formers has been improved a lot. They will defend them with their military so they don't have to run away from aliens. They will also be smarter about what to build where. This allows them to be more efficient with fewer cities.

The AI now takes more things into consideration when deciding what troops to build. Strategies like the tank rushes should be much harder to perform due to the AI getting missile launchers and their own tanks much earlier than before.

The calculation of refit costs has been reworked to be more consistent with the actual price of the units you upgrade into. You will notice differences especially when upgrading the base unit into one from another era. Turning your white tanks into blue ones will be quite a bit more expensive.

Those are just some of the highlights. Please see the change log[download.pandora.proxy-studios.com] for the full list of changes.

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.

The AI's diplomatic behaviour is now less selfish and preventing someone else from getting too strong now has a higher priority than trying to exploit someone weak. There is also more distinction in the behaviour between different factions.

The AI will now use a completely new algorithm that considers the return of investment to determine whether to build units or buildings. This helps them to keep decent amounts of troops around while at the same time not falling behind with important buildings.

The way how the AI handles their formers has been improved a lot. They will defend them with their military so they don't have to run away from aliens. They will also be smarter about what to build where. This allows them to be more efficient with fewer cities.

The AI now takes more things into consideration when deciding what troops to build. Strategies like the tank rushes should be much harder to perform due to the AI getting missile launchers and their own tanks much earlier than before.

The calculation of refit costs has been reworked to be more consistent with the actual price of the units you upgrade into. You will notice differences especially when upgrading the base unit into one from another era. Turning your white tanks into blue ones will be quite a bit more expensive.

Those are just some of the highlights. Please see the change log[download.pandora.proxy-studios.com] for the full list of changes.

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:
* Reverted change that made spies lose all movement points upon entering another faction's territory.
* Increased research costs for mechanization and transcendance eras.
* AI now considers the cost of a technology instead of its tier when weighting its value against other technologies.
* AI now considers defensive buildings as vital.
* AI will now build less units with flamethrowers once mechanical units are available.
* AI will now only stop to heal their colonizers when they are severely damaged.
* AI will now be more likely to fight with damaged units when they are in a city under siege in order to try and break the siege.
* AI will now be even more careful about using artilleries.
* AI will prefer defending with biological units while sending tanks to the attack.
* AI considers technologies that grant flat bonus buildings more valuable. (This will help the AI get the Recycling Tanks from the AC Factions Mod, which they would often ignore before.)
* AI now considers the safety of a city location in regards to aliens much more important.
* AI will now again send the closest potential defender to an undefended city instead of the best.
* AI will now make two cycles for rush-building in order to prioritize buildings and advancements over units.
* AI now only considers cities it actually knows when deciding whether to build naval or land units.
* AI now makes the same considerations about building Colonization Fervor that it does when deciding whether to build colonizers.
* AI will no longer acquire targets with its land artilleries that it cannot reach.
* AI will no longer attack unaggressive aliens when it would win but could lose its unit in the process.
* During a siege the AI will now retreat units that could be killed by the city's defenders.
* AI will no longer try to heal its damaged units while enemy units are nearby.
* AI will now send idle transports back home.
* AI will value colonization spots lower if units of other players are nearby.
* AI will no longer retreat a damaged unit to heal when none of the nearby enemy units are strong enough to kill it.
* AI artillery units shall no longer move next to enemy units in order to attack something behind them.
* AI now puts way more emphasis on production, beware of bigger armies!
* AI will now on average be slightly less aggressive.
* AI will now send stronger task forces to do pillaging so the pillaging troops cannot be just destroyed by the defender.
* AI will no longer try to attack cities with forces smaller than about twice the power of the cities defense. It will then keep the units at home till it has enough.
* AI will no longer try to heal heavily damaged units in cities that are under siege.
* AI will now try to prevent stacking too many units.
* AI will now try to move units through terrain that gives their type a bonus.
* AI will now defend more offensively instead of sitting back and waiting to be brought down by area damage.
* AI diplomatic behavior reworked once again to be more reasonable.
* AI now will consider the defensive structure in order to determine if it should sacrifice units attacking a city.
* AI will now request more units for attacking units near an enemy city.
* AI now will also use badly damaged units to conquer cities, hives, portals or ruins instead of running them home.
* AI will now prevent moving their artilleries through hostile territory.
* AI will stop making units when it cannot afford the upkeep cost.
* AI is now smarter about how to properly siege a city while reducing losses.
* AI will now be very conservative when dealing with aliens and not sacrifice any units at all.
* Improved AI technology selection to dynamically consider food and mineral technologies more valuable depending on farmers and miners.
* AI will now weight the maintenance cost of purifiers and suburbs more into the decision whether to build them or not.
* AI will now build roads only on mountains and forests.
* AI will now scout with its starting unit.
* AI will now use more units for scouting.
* AI will now consider advancements less valuable in comparison to buildings.
* AI will now ignore other players units when deciding whether to commit to an attack or not.
* General improvements to AI border expansion.
* An AI that considers itself considerably weaker than its opponents will now play more defensively.
* Removed limitation for how far the AI would go in order to kill a hive.
* When having morale issues, the AI will now play more greedy economically and less safe militarily. This will mostly affect lower difficulty levels.
* Brought back AI vision range prevention with transports but this time with much better performance.
* AI will no longer try to scout and thereby endanger their units in enemy territory when it already knows at least one city's location of that enemy.
* AI will now prefer cheaper units and units with higher vision range when scouting.

Fixed:
* Fixed an issue where the AI would not build buildings that would take less than one turn to build.
* Fixed an issue where damaged AI units would walk all the way back home instead of healing where they are.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would sometimes treat a target within a city as if the city and its increased defensive capabilities weren't there.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would refuse to step on fungus in order to siege an otherwise unreachable city.
* Fixed an issue that made all AIs way more aggressive than intended.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would ignore empty Messari portals.
* Fixed an issue where the order of commands for Tangaroa Watercraft was not in line with all other units.
* Fixed unit rank not being applied to units spawned by Colonization Fervor.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would cease to explore when it wanted to explore a tile in the water but lacked the advancement to get there.
* Fixed an issue that could prevent the AI from stepping into ruins when enemy troops were nearby.
* Fixed an issue where AI artillery sometimes would not shoot at units sieging their city.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would misjudge the amount of turns an attacking unit would require to reach a target.
* Fixed an issue where AI would not know where to retreat their units to if all cities are under siege.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would use bombardment on non-hostile units if they were in enemy territory.
* Fixed an issue where AI naval units would try to retreat to a non coastal city.
* Fixed an issue where the AI would pointlessly sacrifice units.

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:
* Increased research costs for mechanization and transcendance eras.
* AI now considers the cost of a technology instead of its tier when weighting its value against other technologies.
* AI now considers defensive buildings as vital.
* AI will now build less units with flamethrowers once mechanical units are available.
* AI will now only stop to heal their colonizers when they are severely damaged.
* AI will now be more likely to fight with damaged units when they are in a city under siege in order to try and break the siege.
* AI will now be even more careful about using artilleries.
* Aggression value now plays more of a role for the AI to decide whether to go to war, making peaceful factions much less likely to go to war.
* AI will prefer defending with biological units while sending tanks to the attack.
* AI considers technologies that grant flat bonus buildings more valuable. (This will help the AI get the Recycling Tanks from the AC Factions Mod, which they would often ignore before.)
* AI now considers the safety of a city location in regards to aliens much more important.
* AI will now again send the closest potential defender to an undefended city instead of the best.
* Replaced complicated calculation intense military allocation formula by an extremely simple one, that does the job just as fine.
* AI will now make two cycles for rushbuilding in order to prioritize buildings and advancements over units.
* AI now only considers cities it actually knows when deciding whether to build naval or land units.
* AI now makes the same considerations about building Colonization Fervor that it does when deciding whether to build colonizers.
* AI will no longer acquire targets with its land artilleries that it cannot reach.
* AI will no longer attack unaggressive aliens when it would win but could lose its unit in the process.
* During a siege the AI will now retreat units that could be killed by the city's defenders.
* AI will no longer try to heal its damaged units while enemy units are nearby.

Fixed:
* Fixed an issue where damaged AI units would walk all the way back home instead of healing where they are.