r17948b

*** This update hasn't been tested extensively on old save games. ***

Critical fixes:
- Fixed a bug that prevented income from being generated when doing a feasibility study.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when trying to automatically distribute sliders from a hidden slider.
- Fixed a crash with support missions trying to open a dialog twice in a turn.
- Fixed a crash that would occur if closing the game while it was booting up.
- Fixed a von neumann crash caused by the faction running out of resources for a new collector fleet.
- Fixed an issue with crashing gem/forge world events from trying to apply moral bonus.
- Drones can now be designed and assigned to ships.
- Battle Riders may now be launched and recovered via their weapon icons in combat.
- Combat turn flow was rewritten. All combat queries are now answered at once, and then all combat simulations play out.
- Fixed a bug that stopped biome colonizers from improving terraforming values.

Other fixes:
- Fixed a recent issue where only the default player profile would be used.
- Fixed tech requirements on a few freighter ship sections.
- Removed "freighter" designation from ship sections to which it was incorrectly applied.
- Tarka freighter savings cost has been reduced from 1.5-million to 150,000.
- Leviathan stats have been improved.
- Tweaked turret arcs on a number of ship and station sections.
- Stations whose crew die off stop rotating in combat.
- Patrol battle riders now follow their tenders better.
- Fixed an issue where battle riders were not swarming around stations effectively.
- Fixed feasibility speech cues from using wrong speech library.
- Fixed admiral driven speech to use proper case.
- Fixed researching sound.
- Fixed research completed early sound cue.
- Fixed the battle draw and winning battle speech cues.
- Fixed under-the-hood sliders to automatically reset themselves to zero.
- Fixed an issue with swarmers trying to assign themselves to systems with no planets.
- Fixed an issue with the flock bonus not being used as a percentage.
- Moved the overharvest warning event to the correct location to stop it spamming every time the IO was queried.
- Fixed an issue that caused the gem and forge world events to spam.
- Fixed battle manager bug when entering system with no Naval base.
- Made visual culling much more subtle on star map to avoid labels popping in and out.
- Cleaned up view filter modes, populated list through code instead of through xml.
- Fixed issue in battle manager where station slots where being displayed even if no CP was available.
- Properly hooked up Mission/Engine section name display to riders in rider manager.
- Combat ready animations no longer loop incorrectly on ships.
- Save games should stay significantly smaller now due to the disabling of a debug feature that was storing a detailed history of all previous changes.
- Fixed a visual issue where tracking torpedoes would draw erroneous lines across the screen.
- The trade view filter on the star map now shows different icons for star systems.
- Fixed a bug that caused the admirals to return an incorrect admiral prefix to sound cues.
- Fixed a bug where Liir Naval Stations were displaying Hiver station assets.
- Fixed visual jitter for battle riders returning to tender.
- Fixed an issue where turn events were not displaying for some.
- Fixed various sizing bugs in GUI lists.
- Protean pods will return attacks.
- Fixed incorrect terrain names in Clouds and Ring star maps.

Other changes:
- New entries have been added to the encyclopedia's Galactic Atlas.
- Added new weapons: Blast Storm Missile, Polaris Blast Beam Missile
- Added new Rift star map.
- Added the ability to skip camera transitions with the escape key.
- Added a tutorial help screen for trade.
- Added Zuul freighters.
- Added missing Von Neumann PD weapons.
- Adjusted station visibility distances for combat.
- Added default ship names for command ships, bore ships, and gate ships.
- Implementation of initial, new post combat dialog.
- Added trade Modifier for trade distances.
- Added a table to keep track of trade results to stop clients from not being able to see trade.
- Stopped the ability to trade with someone you are at war with.
- Increased the max planet range for provinces by 1 ly.
- Added a configuration ability for disabling the main menu combat scene. There is no user interface for this diagnostic option, but it can be modified at your own risk in

'%localappdata%\Sword of the Stars II\settings\settings.xml' by adding or modifying the LoadMenuCombat element with a True or False value.
- Added launch effects for planet-to-orbit weapons.
- Added "Reserve Slot" label to reserve rider slots.
- Added events for post combat.
- Added realtime feedback to trade slider adjustment in trade view.
- Added filter to battle rider manager to display only carriers in widget.
- Added color coding to riders in rider manager.
- Added max flock bonus to strat mods and hooked it up to morrigi drive tech.
- Added a function for adding orbits with orbit numbers.

Key known issues:
- There is no post-combat popup.
- Screen transition time still slow for some.
- Game not running in 64-bit for some (running 32-bit works).
- Looking for people unable to connect to GameSpy for MP.