Full release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.615_Sidekick_Mod_Updates For the most part, this is just some balance and bugfixes so the Dark Zenith Empire, plus in general a fix to the Scourge Bane. All of these are part of the excellent Sidekicks mod, aka the 4th unofficial (free) DLC for the game, by Badger. In unrelated news, getting closer and closer to Heart of the Machine! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It has seen a number of updates to the demo for everything from localization to bugfixes and balance lately, too.

[ 2024-12-21 04:53:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.614_Classic_Fusion_Returns This one gets Classic Fusion working again. That's a total conversion mod that makes this game function like a hybrid of AI War 1 and 2. Some other mod updates had broken this one, and it's been broken for a while, but now it's back. Big thanks to Badger for getting the code in place for those fixes, and to Puffin for recompiling it. Badger's Sidekicks mod has a variety of cool updates in this one, including various balance and bugfix updates to the new features in the prior build. This includes improvements to the Dark Zenith Empire, which remains such a cool new way to experience the game. In other news! Heart of the Machine is coming to early access on January 31st. Be sure to wishlist it to hear about updates! It is seriously huge for launch, and I'm excited to explore it more with you during EA: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Also the demo is updated recently, and there's a new trailer. The language translations are increasingly excellent in the demo, but still have another week or so of going through LQA.

[ 2024-12-15 00:59:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build with updates to the sidekicks mod. Full release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.613_Dark_Zenith_Empire If you haven't tried the Sidekicks mod, it's really worth a go -- more each build. It's by one of the main developers of the game itself, so as far as mods go... well, it's practically like a fourth expansion, but for free. I take no credit for any of that, it's all Badger and what he's wanted for his own multiplayer sessions. This particular build adds a full "Dark Zenith Empire" option, alongside the sidekick version of the same idea. You've played as the spire, but have you ever played as the Zenith? It's worth noting that the developer behind this mod is literally the same person who developed out the Zenith factions for the main game, so this is... prime stuff. Seriously, more people need to play it! In other news, Heart of the Machine has an official release date: coming to Early Access on January 31st! If you haven't wishlisted it yet, be sure to do so! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ There's also an updated trailer for the game, AND a fully updated demo with new content, a complete ui overhaul, and a ton of other goodies.

[ 2024-12-07 04:40:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Fairly small update, with just changes to the very-cool Sidekicks mod. As I've mentioned a few times, it's by one of the main developers of the game, and at this point rivals the size of a DLC -- for free. So if you haven't given it a try, and are interested in some morecontent, it's really worth a look. Full release notes are here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.612_More_Sidekicks_Mod_Updates In other news, Heart of the Machine keeps drawing closer and closer. And we do still have slots open for the beta test! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/

[ 2024-11-02 23:29:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build with updates to the sidekicks mod. Full release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.611_Sidekicks_Mod_Updates If you haven't tried the Sidekicks mod, it's really worth a go. It's by one of the main developers of the game itself, so as far as mods go... well, it's practically like a fourth expansion, but for free. I take no credit for any of that, it's all Badger and what he's wanted for his own multiplayer sessions. In other news, Heart of the Machine is coming quite soon! If you haven't wishlisted it yet, be sure to do so! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/

[ 2024-10-19 23:18:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Very minor updates to a few mods: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.610_Minor_Mod_Updates

[ 2024-09-15 00:31:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.609_Evil_Armories The Scourge Infused Empire from last build's update have gotten more updates to them, including to their armories and to the AI enemy spawns. This build also fixes a bug with some accidental quadratic scaling for damage done by hacked officer ships. There are also quite a number of updates to all of Arphar's mods in this one, with some noted fixes to League of Evil, Azaran Empire, and Fantasy War. I think there are actually more tweaks than the release notes currently list. Enjoy! In other news, the heart of the machine demo is still available, and playtesting applications are also still open. The UI overhaul is still ongoing, which isn't available in the demo yet, but I should be finished with that in the next week finally. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ If you want to try those things sooner than later, and also see past where the demo currently ends and help provide feedback and bug reports prior to the game launching later this year, then do be sure to sign up for the playtest! We have over 200 folks participating at the moment, but are always wanting more. Just fill out this form: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5 And then make sure you're a member of our discord: https://discord.gg/arcengames Some folks did the form without joining the discord, and they don't wind up getting a key.

[ 2024-09-07 20:57:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.608_Scourge_Infused_Empire This one has a bugfix to the experimental stacking algorithm, and then a host of mod updates from Badger. The sidekicks mod has gotten a number of balance updates and minor new features, and then one large new feature -- the "Scourge Infused Empire." This is a regular human empire like you are used to, but comes with a vassal Scourge faction under it. This vassal faction is less independent in some ways than the regular Scourge as allies, and the vassal version allows for you to do construction and technology choices for them directly. Enjoy! In other news, the heart of the machine demo is still available, and playtesting applications are also still open. There's a large UI overhaul going on right now, which isn't available in the demo yet, but will be in a few weeks. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ If you want to try those things sooner than later, and also see past where the demo currently ends and help provide feedback and bug reports prior to the game launching later this year, then do be sure to sign up for the playtest! We have over 200 folks participating at the moment, but are always wanting more. Just fill out this form: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5 And then make sure you're a member of our discord: https://discord.gg/arcengames Some folks did the form without joining the discord, and they don't wind up getting a key.

[ 2024-08-31 20:30:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.607_Imperial_Mercy Some speculate that the Imperial Spire were showing mercy in their restraint against the AI Homeworlds. Others that these inscrutable aliens were simply allowing their powerful human allies the honor of the killing blow. But the truth is far more strange: about five different bugs in their programming, and them not being updated to properly handle dire guard posts when we added them to the game. Wait, let's go with... mercy. They were being merciful, and no longer will be so. ;) There are also a solid number of updates to the Sidekicks mod. In completely other news, you can still try the demo at the moment for Heart of the Machine. It's massive, and there are more updates coming for it in the near future: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ If you want to get those updates sooner than later, and also see past where the demo currently ends and help provide feedback and bug reports prior to the game launching later this year, then do be sure to sign up for the playtest! We have over 200 folks participating at the moment, but are always wanting more. Just fill out this form: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5 And then make sure you're a member of our discord: https://discord.gg/arcengames Some folks did the form without joining the discord, and they don't wind up getting a key.

[ 2024-08-03 20:50:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.605_Multiplayer_Optimization This one has some notably new options for multiplayer, to allow clients that are over-saturated with data to basically do less diff-checking in the background and thus reduce the incoming traffic. This mostly applies to really heavy games with a ton going on in them, but Badger was able to get notable improvements (like 50% reduction in network traffic) with some of the options -- and then other times there was not really any improvement at all. So the options are there, with clients being able to try them out if they run into issues on a specific campaign, and we'll see how that helps. There are also many updates to the Sidekicks mod, and a couple of minor bugfixes. Enjoy!

[ 2024-07-06 18:39:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.604_Lunar_Invasions This one has a couple of small multiplayer improvements, and then a new Lunar Invasions feature in the Sidekicks mod. If you've missed it, Heart of the Machine's demo from NextFest is still active until the end of this month! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ If you didn't miss it, and you're itching for more sooner than later, then be sure to join our discord -- and our tester group here: https://forms.gle/nNwEnzRyVPMS7bYg6

[ 2024-06-22 23:14:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.603_That_IS_A_Moon This has some balance changes to the base game, as well as new features to the sidekick mod, including Dyson Moons, which are quite cool. Enjoy! Heart of the machine has been a part of this NextFest, and there's a couple of days left for you to try the (massive!) demo, if you want: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ PC Gamer has called this game the most exciting thing happening thing happening in the 4X genre right now, and in general the feedback from demo players has been hugely useful for me to work on making the onboarding even smoother. There's also some cool coverage of the game emerging around now, such as this one from Splattercatgaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jLw0TgJ31Y If you've been a part of the demo and you'd like to join the private testing that will be ongoing after the demo concludes, or if you missed the demo and would like to do the same, be sure to stop by the Arcen discord and sign up here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1248015123382276217

[ 2024-06-15 23:46:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.602_Planetcrasher There were a solid pass of bugfixes, my favorite of which is that if you crash a planet into the AI homeworld, it now properly kills them. Hence the name of the update. The Dyson Sidekick mod got a bunch of reworked units from Zeus, and the Dark Zenith can get its Resources from killing enemy ships, allowing you to manage your economy more closely. These changes do break save compatibility with savegames using that mod, so if you're using a modded version of the game, you can use the most_recent_stable branch to continue until the next patch. But it sounds like this is worth restarting for, with that mod. To be clear, unmodded games have no issues with save compatibility, and mods other than the sidekicks one also don't have any issues. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing is ongoing, and you can sign up on our discord if you're interested. It's also going to have a public demo very shortly, so be sure to check that out and/or wishlist the game. ALSO, finally, for the first time in a year, the store page has been fully refreshed with updated graphics and visuals, and a killer new trailer: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ There's also some cool coverage of the game emerging around now, such as this one from Splattercatgaming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jLw0TgJ31Y

[ 2024-06-09 01:13:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a small patch with some more Sidekick mod content. https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.601_More_Sidekick

[ 2024-05-25 21:58:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

There were a couple of bugs in the prior build, which messed with the Fallen Spire. Those are now fixed: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.600_Hotfix

[ 2024-05-20 00:53:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Two exciting pieces of news today!

AI War 2 Itself

First up, AI War 2 has a large new patch: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.599_Sockets_And_Sidekicks Badger and Zeus have really outdone themselves here, with a bunch of clever ideas. In particular, there is a new Socket Increaser structure that is possible to find in the galaxy when you have the Sidekicks mod enabled. This then allows for a lot of fun new objectives for sidekicks, necromancers, and similar to go get in order to have more sockets. The Dark Zenith have also been rebalanced to be more... well, balanced in all respects. A lot of thought from these two went into it, and it was carefully implemented. There are other more-minor balance changes, comparably, and a bunch of other mod updates. Good times!

Heart of the Machine!

It has been just over a year since there were last people outside of Arcen or Hooded Horse able to playtest this game. I had thought many times that testing was just on the horizon, and I must have been an awful tease about that -- it was completely unintentional, apologies. But testing is not just soon, it's NOW. The first batch of about 30 testers (18 returning and 16 new) got their hands on the game today. The next batch of 15 people will get the game on Monday, and those are already locked in. But there are still some openings on the batch for Thursday, and there will be more waves following on after that every few days. The reason for the staggered waves is to continually collect fresh first impressions, after people's feedback from the wave before. So don't worry about missing an earlier wave if you want to be a tester; that just means you get a more-polished version to start from in the near future. The store page is in dire need of a refresh (the visuals and text are a year out of date), but be sure to wishlist it if you haven't already: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ And if you want to sign up for testing, be sure to stop by our discord! https://discord.gg/arcengames Cheers, Chris

[ 2024-05-19 00:19:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.598_Sidekicks_And_Elderlings Some bugfixes and balance shifts related to Elderlings, and then some more Sidekick mod updates. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in... "soon" amount of time! I am going to go out on a limb and say that it may be within the next 1 week for real this time. We're getting gradually closer! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1225940358052188252 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-04-27 20:01:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.597_Sidekick_Bits A few tweaks to the sidekicks mods. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in... "soon" amount of time! I am going to go out on a limb and say that it may be within the next 1.5 weeks for real this time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1225940358052188252 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-04-20 23:34:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.596_Deflicker Fixes a couple of minor regressions from last week's build, and then has a few tweaks to some mods. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in... "soon" amount of time! I am going to go out on a limb and say that it may be within the next 2 weeks for real this time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1225940358052188252 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-04-13 21:25:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.595_Deprotect This one has a mix of fixes and improvements from Dismiss, and Sidekicks updates from Badger. The biggest changes in here are things to help with memory usage in extreme scenarios (think thousands of Dark Zenith in battle at once, that sort of thing). Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in... "soon" amount of time! I am goin gto go out on a limb and say that it may be within the next 3 weeks for real this time. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1225940358052188252 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-04-06 22:57:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.593_Devourest This one is entirely from Dismiss. It has a lot of backlog of minor approved fixes and tweaks to things to fix a few bugs, and to make a few new things possible for coders in a non-regression-likely way. It also includes some mod updates, and a new mod called the Devourest Golem, which basically makes that existing faction more interesting and dangerous. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in... "soon" amount of time! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1212790205824639027 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. A few things are taking me a bit longer than expected, leading to testing having been pushed back a bit again, but it's creeping asymptotically closer. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-03-23 21:26:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.591_Exception_Tidying This one is various bits of tidying and mod updates. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in 1-2 weeks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: End of Feb update on testing if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-03-16 18:47:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.590_Informative_Quickstarts This one adds more tweaks to the Sidekicks mod, and also adds more information on the quickstarts screen. It also fixes a regression in the prior build where the savegame folders were not in the most-recently-used order. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in about 2 weeks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: End of Feb update on testing if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-03-09 21:14:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.589_Lone_Zombie.2C_Progressive_Quickstart This one fixes a few bugs in last weeks' build, like the fact that double-the-zombies were being generated most of the time. There was also a multiplayer-specific regression with an exception in general. Quickstarts are being reorganized and expanded a bit by Strategic Sage. Previously, there was a progressive flow of easier-to-harder for the base game, but the DLC quickstarts weren't really organized in that way. Now they are, alongside other improvements to them. There are also more to the Sidekicks mod. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume in about 2-3 weeks! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discord.com/channels/240637654717300736/1212790205824639027 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-03-02 19:47:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.588_Zenith_Consistency This one has a number of smallish improvements. The most notable of these is a fix to on-death effects from Dismiss, which should lead to more consistent results that you would expect when you're zombifying enemies. There are a large number of updates from Strategic Sage to the quickstarts; improving descriptions, tweaking balance, and adding a few new ones. There are also a few tweaks to the Sidekicks mod. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume sometime in March! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-02-24 19:27:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.587_Deguardianing This is a small one that is basically a dewormer but for giant guardian spacecraft. A fix in the prior build to a 5-year-old bug caused massive shifts in balance that were unintended. Fixes are nice, but giant shifts in balance are not; aside from opening the floodgates to too many guardians, the game balance was just as desired without the fix, so we simply reverted it. In some respects not my preferred solution, but at the same time with a game this complex, we would have been chasing unintended consequences to AI types for months. So in this case, a particular bug which is bad math is actually working as intended. Hmm. There are also a few tweaks to the Sidekicks mod. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume sometime in March! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-02-20 15:50:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.586_More_Polish This is another small one, mostly bugfixes. This also includes several mods like Classic Fusion becoming functional again. And more updates to Sidekicks. Enjoy! Heart of the Machine private testing will resume sometime in March! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-02-18 00:08:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.585_Sidekick_Updates This is a pretty small one, with mainly updates to the Sidekicks mod, by Badger. This also suppresses an occasional error about memory leaks that is very much a false positive (it usually is indicative of a thread being a bit slow, not an actual memory leak). Rather than being up in your face with a scary message about what seems to be a major bug, it just logs a silent warning instead. This really only is a tool for modders; if they see a log flooded with those, then they should know they are doing something wrong and be able to fix whatever their issue is. But regular players, often not even using mods, would occasionally get one or two of these and think there was a much larger problem, when in reality it was just kind of a burp of one background thread being a bit slower to give something back than ideally is the case. The network improvements from the prior build are reportedly really helping the game a lot in multiplayer, so I'm very glad to hear that. Enjoy! Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing will likely resume in March. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-02-10 21:37:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.583_MP_Hardening This one has some mod updates to the Sidekicks mod, and then it also solves some issues that could occur in multiplayer. Most notably, this makes it so that doing a resync in the middle of an MP game no longer causes a rash of spurious errors, with an additional risk of the game crashing. Secondarily, it hardens some methods against potential exception in general during regular partial syncs on MP clients. Overall I would not expect this to be a panacea for MP, but every time a full sync is done, things generally clean up nicely. And a lot of the things that cause a client to diverge are based around errors, so that also helps from the other end. Beyond that, why exactly sometimes clients get into a strange mode that is only fixed with a resync is a mystery to us. It's not something we can easily replicate with two players, as it pretty much always works perfectly for us that way -- but then some players run into problems quickly with only two players, even on LANs. The larger the game, and the further apart people are, the more likely problems seem to be -- usually. That's what is so frustrating about those particular MP gremlins, is that not only can we not reliably reproduce them at all, but the conditions others are experiencing to cause it are really varied. That is deeply frustrating. So the improvements in this build should help ease that substantially, and if you're using auto-resync then that should be way cleaner in particular. But as a perfect solution for the issues that folks still run into more than I had realized, I don't think that's there. If you are playing multiplayer and you run into outright exceptions rather than strange behavior, always do send those to us, though -- that really helps, since those are things where we can tangibly fix something that is a contributor. Thanks for reading. Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing will likely resume in March. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-02-03 21:57:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.582_Tuning This has some tweaks and tuning in general, and then updates to a bunch of mods. This also removes a folder called MSBuild, which was only useful to modders, and which was being (erroneously) flagged by Malwarebytes as a trojan. Since this was consistently annoying and alarming a number of people, that's removed and modders can just download it from our discord. A text file is there instead, with instructions for how to find it for the few people who need it. Steam is not always great about removing files, so if it's still there for you, and you care, then look in the ReliableDLLStorage folder in your game install folder, and just delete the MSBuild subfolder. It won't come back after you delete it, but steam should ideally delete it for you. Leaving it in place also will be fine, as it's not a harmful folder and never was. But if it's being wrongly flagged by your antivirus, and that bugs you, go ahead and get rid of it. Enjoy! In other news! Our first console release has happened. Yesterday, Starward Rogue launched on the XBox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch platforms. Very exciting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pldE6CJGkmc Regarding Heart of the Machine, if you've been following our discord, then you know that the testing on that got pushed back some. Testing did not start in late December, but instead will be a February or March thing. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ It's really nice to be able to give the game the amount of development time it truly deserves, but thanks for your patience with the repeated delays on it. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of one of the phases of testing in the future. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2024-01-26 16:19:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Or at least that's the intent. It won't harm anything if it doesn't work. :)

[ 2023-12-31 00:44:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.581_Mod_Updates This one is mostly focused on some updates to mods, including fixing the AMU mod so that it no longer errors on start. It also tweaks a couple of minor text things in the main game to make them more clear. Enjoy! In other news! Been talking about Heart of the Machine for a year and a half now, and it's very close to opening back up for alpha testers again. That will start in the week after Christmas, for those who are interested. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ Essentially it's on the border between alpha and beta there, because the bulk of the art and core mechanics and code are complete, but it's a matter of actually fleshing out content on the systems that are now in place. If you have time in that timespan, and that style of testing seems interesting to you, please do sign up. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either this earlier stage of things, or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-12-21 14:26:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.580_Curve_League This one has quite a long laundry list of small and midsize tweaks, fixes, and changes. Primary thanks to Dismiss, but also SirLimbo and Arphar for a variety of the items. There are a number of new experimental features that you can opt into if you're interested (see link for details), as well as updates to several of the included mods. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is very out of date, but will have updates in the next few months. You can see more sneak peeks of things on our discord in the meantime, if you want! The game will be launching in 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers before the end of this year; the game has gone through a huge amount of growth and changes, and I can't wait to show that off to more folks. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-12-14 00:20:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.579_Hotfix_3

[ 2023-12-07 14:06:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Full notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.578_Hotfix_2

[ 2023-12-06 13:59:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.577_Hotfix

[ 2023-12-05 12:40:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.576_Tooltip_QoL This is another hefty new version. It includes a number of fixes and improvements, some of the fixes rather crucial; there was a regression that was affecting some people's savegames, and may have been related to my improvements to memory reduction in the game. Dismiss seems to have sorted things out with folks related to that, so big thanks there. There is also... just... such a long list of small fixes and other minor improvements. It's a very long list. You should read it above if you're interested. Again, pretty much all Dismiss. Then there are some updates to the Radiant mods by Radiant Phoenix, mostly minor tweaks. And lastly, as per the name of the release, there are some new experimental tooltips, which you can see examples of in the wiki link above. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is very out of date, but will have updates in the next few months. You can see more sneak peeks of things on our discord in the meantime, if you want! The game will be launching in 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers before the end of this year; the game has gone through a huge amount of growth and changes, and I can't wait to show that off to more folks. Feel free to go to our discord https://discord.gg/arcengames and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-12-05 00:38:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Turns out the prior version had some issues loading for people without existing settings file. Apologies about that, it's solved now.

[ 2023-11-12 15:53:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

There were a couple of small errors in the build from earlier today, those are fixed now.

[ 2023-11-11 20:24:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.572_Polish_And_Reduced_Memory_Pressure Twenty-two days since the last one, wow. Time really flies sometiems. This one has a bunch of things to polish up the game in various ways, and reduce memory turnover and memory usage in certain late-game situations. Also some bugfixes that help some specific crazy savegames. If you're playing certain absurdly-huge games that were getting too high in RAM usage and losing performance because of it, it should be notably better now. For most folks it won't be noticeable, but it's great to keep those edge cases in check. The list of other relatively small things that are fixed are really long, and worth a look in the release notes. This includes fixes to a number of different mods, as well as the base game. Big props to Dimiss for the big majority of that, and RadiantPhoenix for the rest. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is very out of date, but will have updates in the next few months. You can see more sneak peeks of things on our discord in the meantime, if you want! The game will be launching in 2024. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers before the end of this year; the game has gone through a huge amount of growth and changes, and I can't wait to show that off to more folks. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-11-11 19:33:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI WAr 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.570_Petawatt This one is absolutely enormous, in terms of the number of fixes and tweaks in it. It also has a bunch of mod content! Dismiss has been going through and painstakingly fixing all of the regressions from the last few months, as well as adding new QoL features for players, and fixing various much-older bugs that just never got much attention, as well. The work here is seriously impressive. Hope everyone enjoys, the notes are quite long. Radiant Fleets is a new mod, which has a bunch of new fleet options and even some new ark options for various factions. Lost Spire Coilbeam is another new mod, which kits out the lost spire frigates with coilbeams like their bigger brethren. Playable Flenser is an interesting mod that seems to be mostly for humor/fun, but basically you get your own flenser from the start of the game (the highest-tier possible AI Exo War unit, for reference; aka the "asterisk of doom"), and then can upgrade it, etc. You do have to power it, though, and it requires a petawatt... so good luck with that I guess. It's certainly a fun concept for a mod. The Sidekicks mod has some balance adjustments and bugfixes, and there are also some fixes to Classic Fusion and other mods. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. The game is officially pushed back to 2024 now, if you didn't see, but perhaps that's not a surprise. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within the near future, probably November or December. The game is continuing to build in an exciting way, we'll have a lot to show prior to it releasing. There are already sneak-peak dumps of info and screenshots you can see in the official discord channel that you can't see anywhere else. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-10-20 13:52:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.569_Standards_and_Practices Lots of fixes in this one, to a wide variety of things. Some fixes to regressions from the recent past, and others from further back. Also several updates to mods, and a new mod related to the color picker window. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within the near future, but the exact timeline is no longer certain. It probably will be sometime in October, and we'll also have some general news for it in the next few weeks. The game is continuing to build in an exciting way, and I can't wait to show more soon. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-10-03 23:59:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.568_AMU_Recovery This one has a handful of fixes, and then a number of mod updates. For those using SirLimbo's mods, those are now functional again after being broken in the prior build. This new set of changes includes some cool stuff to Radiant Phoenix's stable of mods, and a number of balance and fun things with the Sidekicks mods from Badger, as well. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within the near future, but the exact timeline is no longer certain. It probably will be sometime in October, but no promises; sorry about the shifting estimates. That said, stuff with that game is really continuing to build in an exciting way, and I can't wait to show more soon. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-09-30 23:48:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.567_Scourge_Civil_War This one is quite small, aside from mods. There are a few bugfixes and RadiantPhoenix which are not yet fully documented in the release notes, but those are fairly small. There are some inwork things on several mods as well, but then the completed things are mainly from Badger on his Sidekicks mod. This includes a new Scourge Civil War faction, and some notable balance improvements in general. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within the near future, but the exact timeline is no longer certain. It probably will be sometime in October, but no promises; sorry about the shifting estimates. That said, stuff with that game is really continuing to build in an exciting way, and I can't wait to show more soon. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-09-23 21:21:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New hotfix build for AI War 2, fixes issues in the build from yesterday: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.566_You_Saw_Nothing

[ 2023-09-10 15:09:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.565_The_League_Of_Arphar_Mods This one is pretty huge on the modding front, and it's not just the mods from Arphar -- although they are certainly the hugest part. Essentially, Arphar has introduced two entirely new factions, with their own ships and everything. He's also updated a number of his existing mods, and added new map types in them, and a bunch of other things. One of the new mods is The League of Evil, which is just such a cool name to begin with. Those have extra bonuses in them if you're playing as a Necromancer yourself, which is extra cool. There's also a new City Ships mod, which has a new invader appear with an allegiance that you can set. This release also has the first instance of a mod that mods another mod; in this case, Arphar has added yet another mod, which mods the Hydral Federation mod by StarKelp, adjusting balance. Badger has made some balance updates to the Sidekicks mod. Dismiss has made a ton of updates to his own mods, as well as to some core code things to support other modders, and to fix a few recent bugs and typos, and add some extra features related to ship targeting. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within two weeks, probably. Last week was super productive, and the plans for this next week really bring a lot of things together in a way where having testers again would make sense. Very excited for folks to see what's going on, it's really quite an exciting title. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-09-09 23:20:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.564_MMAP_No.21 This fixes a crash issue that was occurring on linux due to "too many mmaps" due to a bug in unity that also gets hit in some other popular games, but which we're now able to bypass hitting thanks to the extensive debugging aid of Zoey. As a side effect of investigating this, performance should be better related to large amounts of text being shown on every OS, and on every OS there is a notable reduction in RAM usage in all games. Dismiss has fixed up the FRD waffling that could happen, and also consolidated some of the other FRD settings. And then there are a few mod updates, and some new features for modders. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers within the next few weeks. I'm making great progress, but still not quite ready to add tester feedback into the mix. Very excited for folks to see what's going on, though. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-09-01 01:19:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build, this one mainly with a number of tweaks in it: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.563_Tweaks You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers... at some point in the near future? I'm plugging away on lots of super cool stuff, but it's not quite to the point where I actually need feedback on it yet. That will change in a few weeks at most. Can't wait to show off more gameplay and videos and screenshots and such before too much longer, too, because it's really coming togther very well. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-08-26 23:23:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Second AI War 2 build of the day, so you know there were some issues in the prior one: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.562_Woah_There_Buddy The bugs that were in there are now fixed, and a couple of new mod things have also been added. You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers... at some point in the near future? To be honest, I hit the milestone where I had planned to bring in testers, but I find I am just not ready for them; specifically, I have plenty of things to work on, I don't have any questions that testers could answer at the moment, and I want to stay focused on pushing things further fast. It will change at some point in the coming weeks to where I start wanting to have feedback, but I no longer have an exact milestone. I mainly just need to be at a point where I need more testing than what I can do on my own. It won't take too long, in the grand scheme. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-08-21 22:40:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

New A War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.561_Have_At_Thee This one is pretty giant. The bulk of it is from Dismiss, except for some of the mods. There are a couple of performance improvements and other fixes. There are also a lot of improvements to the lobby to make options clearer, the faction list prettier and also more informative, and so on. There are also a number of improvements that are more focused on ease of use of the codebase for coders and modders. There's a new mod by first-time modder (but longtime Youtube instructor) Strategic Sage, who has made a mod called "Simple Options," that simplifies the lobby quite a bit. Another new mod by a new modder is Radiant Maps, by RadiantPhoenix. These range from interesting topologies, to hair-tearing topologies, to a few humor-focused topologies. Points of Interest, Generator, and Necro Party have also all seen updates from Dismiss, ranging from a new AI type -- contributed by Arphar, along with info for some of the fixes -- to various smaller fixes and improvements. You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be resuming having alpha testers... at some point in the near future? To be honest, I hit the milestone where I had planned to bring in testers, but I find I am just not ready for them; specifically, I have plenty of things to work on, I don't have any questions that testers could answer at the moment, and I want to stay focused on pushing things further fast. It will change at some point in the coming weeks to where I start wanting to have feedback, but I no longer have an exact milestone. I mainly just need to be at a point where I need more testing than what I can do on my own. It won't take too long, in the grand scheme. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-08-21 14:02:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.560_Let_The_Ambushes_Resume_.28Until_Morale_Improves.3F.29 This fixes the ambush posts (thanks Dismiss!) and possibly some other related mechanics. This also includes a number of mod updates, and a couple of minor quality of life improvements. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha started, but then was put on pause while a lot of stuff is reworked. That rework has been ongoing for a couple of months now, much longer than expected, but we're now within a few weeks of being able to start things up again. The game will be unrecognizable to prior testers, thanks in large part to feedback from them, and I'm really excited about just how even much more awesome it is. We'll roll back around to regular tester additions as soon as we can. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-08-01 13:42:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.559_Deringing This one includes a bugfix to an annoying issue with "rings that stick around too long" that has bothered some people (but not shown up for everyone) for a long time, fingers crossed. This also includes improvements to the outguard sidebar interface courtesy of Dismiss, updates to a few mods, and some improvements for coders working with the game. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha started, but then was put on pause while a lot of stuff is reworked. That rework has been ongoing for a couple of months now, much longer than expected, but we're now within a month from being able to start things up again. The game will be unrecognizable to prior testers, thanks in large part to feedback from them, and I'm really excited about just how even much more awesome it is. We'll roll back around to regular tester additions as soon as we can. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-07-27 18:26:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Wow it has been a month. Incredible. Well, new AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion_Part_II#5.558_New_Mods_And_Authors The prior post-completion release notes page reached FIFTY EIGHT THOUSAND WORDS, so there's a fresh new release notes page that is way shorter. For a game where official development finished a year and a half ago, to have 58k words of changes spread out over 68 releases in that post-release timespan is pretty incredible. A bulk of that was from either Badger while he was staff at Arcen, or then volunteers and modders such as Dismiss and Puffin in particular (and Badger as a volunteer/modder as well, I should be clear). Anyhow, about this actual release: couple of minor bugfixes in the main game, and some changes to make things easier for coders. Then a whole bunch of mod content. There's a whole new mod, Azaran Empire, introducing a new faction by Arphar. The idea is that this new faction are a highly centralized empire bringing their own planet into the galaxy from which they will produce ships to take over planets and build structures to bolster their production. Face off against them in order to gain rewards and hack their facilities to gain new ships to use either against them or the AI. Or fail and watch them take over the galaxy. Includes rewards for Necromancer, alongside some rewards for Humans to keep on fighting. Sappers alterations is a new mod by another new author, obscuris. This mod alters how the Neinzul Sappers faction behaves and how their economy works, along with adding new units and mechanics. There are then notable numbers of updates for a variety of mods by Dismiss, including ExoWar, Reclaimers, and Points of Interest. And then also updates to Badger's notable Sidekicks mod, which is a pretty beefy extension of some concepts from DLC3. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha started, but then was put on pause while a lot of stuff is reworked. That rework has been ongoing for a couple of months now, much longer than expected, but I think that we're now within about a month from being able to start things up again. The game will be unrecognizable to prior testers, thanks in large part to feedback from them, and I'm really excited about just how even much more awesome it is. We'll roll back around to regular tester additions as soon as we can. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-07-22 01:20:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings! Today at 09:00 am PDT, our friends from HeroCraft PC are releasing the new post-apocalyptic strategy game Revival: Recolonization. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1306770/Revival_Recolonization/ It's a 4x strategy game set on Earth after the apocalypse caused by the AI uprising. Lead one of the survivor clans, change the climate and landscape with high technology, create unique combat units by combining different types of weapons, fight against automatons and zombies, and make humanity great again. [previewyoutube=HLzw-sz9nts;full][/previewyoutube] To celebrate the occasion, we created a special bundle, which includes three great games: Revival: Recolonization, Thea 2: The Shattering, and AI War 2. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33362/4X_Gods__Machines/ Dive into the exciting world of strategy games with us!

[ 2023-06-28 16:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.557_Minefield_Balance This one has a number of balance improvements to minefields thanks to CRCGamer. It also has more balance changes to the sidekicks mod from Badger. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started, and we're doing new waves of testers every few weeks. It will be a (still... still!) a couple more weeks before the next group. We're going through some notable internal extensions and revisions based on earlier tester rounds, and we'll roll back around to regular tester additions as soon as we can. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-06-24 20:34:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.556_Performance.2C_MP.2C_and_Mods This one has an eclectic list of things. There's a new performance option which can greatly increase performance in certain late-game scenarios if you want to try it out. There are fixes to some recently-introduced multiplayer client-side bugs. There are a whole huge heaping of mod updates. And some other minor tweaks and extensions. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is more up to date than it was, but a lot is still to-be-revealed. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started, and we're doing new waves of testers every few weeks. It will be a (still!) a couple more weeks before the next group. We're going through some notable internal extensions and revisions based on earlier tester rounds, and we'll roll back around to regular tester additions as soon as we can. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-06-10 23:13:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.555_Dismiss_Rebalance This one has exclusively stuff from Dismiss, ranging from additions and tweaks to the main game, to a new rebalance mod. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is still a tad out of date, but has some updates compared to what it was before. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started, and we're doing new waves of testers every few weeks. It will be a couple of weeks before the next group. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-05-26 01:53:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.554_Dismiss_Spectacular This one has a ton of stuff from Dismiss, ranging from additions to his mods, to various new features that other modders can use, and a variety of tuning and fixes to some game features. Also includes a variety of new additions from Badger. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is still a tad out of date, but has some updates compared to what it was before. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started, and we're doing new waves of testers every few weeks. It will be a couple of weeks before the next group. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-05-18 23:06:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.552_Multiplayer_Improvements This one has some multiplayer improvements to make initial connection easier when you're using a variety of mods and DLC, and it has some improvements to stability in long-session late-game multi-client situations. Also more updates to the Sidekicks mod. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine! Steam page is out of date and will be for a while yet, but we're working away. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started, and we're doing new waves of testers every few weeks. It will be a couple of weeks before the next group. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-05-12 15:03:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The one has a few updates to some of the dyson sidekick mod features, and then a HUGE heaping of updates to the Classic Fusion total conversion mod. Release notes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.551_Updates_To_Classic_Fusion More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started! We're bringing in new folks every week or so, in small batches to get fresh first impressions. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-05-06 22:52:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.550_Overkill_And_Civil_Wars Several fixes to autotargeting and to Zenith Civil Wars, and then a bunch of updates to the Sidekicks mod. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ The closed alpha has started! We're bringing in new folks every week or so, in small batches to get fresh first impressions. Feel free to go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-04-28 03:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.545_Laser_Beams This fixes the non-point-laser beams all acting like point-lasers and just hitting their destination target, which made a variety of large ships, most notably the spire, way weaker than they were supposed to be. That was a regression from March 17th, so it was in there about half a month. Apologies! Also has improvements to the sidekicks mod, and a few other tweaks. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in the few weeks -- exactly when is still up in the air, but continuing to have good progress toward it and want to have a solid list of folks when it's time -- so if you want to register your interest for that, please go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-04-09 00:29:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.544_Sidekick_Tweaks This one has a small fix to crippled ships in pursuit mode, and beyond that is a variety of changes to the Sidekicks mod. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in a few weeks -- exactly when is still up in the air, but we're progressing rapidly toward it and want to have a solid list of folks when it's time -- so if you want to register your interest for that, please go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase. There is now a direct signup form here: https://forms.gle/sYj9hH3Bh2TJ2Hbx5

[ 2023-04-01 23:28:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.543_Dismissed This one is entirely courtesy of Dismiss, hence the name for the patch. All of these are pretty much hotfix-focused things, including some visual glitches, that one crash issue from the last two builds, and some mod updates as well. Big thanks to Dismiss on this one, and please see the release notes for full details. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in a few weeks -- possibly starting at the end of next week, possibly a bit later than that -- so if you want to register your interest for that, please go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase.

[ 2023-03-26 19:38:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.542_Mercenary_Pirates_And_Memory_Allocation Big thanks to Dismiss in particular on this one, as he hunted down some code that was causing memory allocation exceptions and crashes in the prior build. Some things from a background thread had been altered to touch things on a main thread that were never supposed to be touched, and that was the unexpected result. Those things should be fixed now, but please let us know either way. There are other improvements in here, such as the methodology for showing key icons (like the officers or fleet transports) in front of the other icons, making them easier to click. This is something I was actually not in favor of, and worried about performance for. But it turned out really well, and doesn't seem to negatively affect performance. Big props to Dismiss for both implementing it and sticking to his guns in the face of my negativity on the topic. For anyone who prefers the old behavior, there is now a CPU Load subcategory option in the Performance settings category that lets you make it work as-before if you prefer. There are various other improvements in here, and a whole bunch of new mods as well. Dismiss has a new mod called "The Xushido" which introduces a new more-complex style of Human Resistance Fighters (HRF), but these guys are mercenary pirates instead. Badger continues to have more with the Sidekicks mod, ongoing balance and tuning of those. That's really an increasingly polished (and giant) mod at this point, it's quite cool to see. And more things, too! See the release notes for details. More to come soon. Enjoy! You can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. The Steam page is very out of date and doesn't show as much as I'd like to about the game yet, but we'll have more to show soon, and it's really exciting. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in a few weeks -- possibly starting at the end of next week, possibly a bit later than that -- so if you want to register your interest for that, please go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase.

[ 2023-03-26 00:24:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.541_Fully_Armed_And_Operational_Dyson_Sphere This one has a number of mod improvements, including some things for Sidekicks, and leveling up the Dyson Sphere sidekick in particular. The work of the Badger. It also has a lot of experimental tooltip improvements that you can opt into from SirLimbo, and some updates to AMU. It also has a wide variety of bugfixes and improvements from Dismiss, most of which don't seem to be on the wiki quite yet, but should be before too long. Classic Fusion has also seen some updates to keep up to date with the core codebase changes, thanks to Puffin. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in a few weeks, so if you want to register your interest for that, please go to our discord (https://discord.gg/arcengames) and post here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/1086679572373848244 if you're interested in being a part of either the early alpha or a later phase).

[ 2023-03-19 01:11:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.540_Civvies_Return Mostly just a small hotfix. If you've been having performance issues in recent versions, it may be because the enable reinforcement logging was for some reason turned on. This build should automatically set that back to off if that was the case. But you can also look in Settings, Debug and see if any of the options there are yellow/on if you're concerned. This one also fixes Civilian Industries to work with the current build of the game, as it's apparently been broken for two builds. There are a couple of other small fixes in here, and then also a balance pass on the Vicious Raider. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in hopefully under two months now, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-03-05 23:38:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.539_Dark_Spire_Unapocalypsing Lots of new things in this one! It has a cure for one of the new Dark Spire settings "causing the apocalypse" if you chose it, which I found to be such amusing wording that it became the title of this release. Overall there are a lot of subtle improvements and changes in this one, many related to drones, and a lot of these are things that benefit various mods and what they are trying to accomplish. Additionally, there are a whole host of mod updates, well worth a look. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll be running a closed alpha starting in hopefully under two months now, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-03-05 00:56:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.538_Return_of_The_Dragons Goodness! It's been a hot minute since the last build. Blink and suddenly it's been 15 days. Well, Dismiss and StarKelp and Badger and CRCGamer have clocked a bunch of updates in this one; to the base game, to DLCs, and to mods. There have been some UI improvements to the settings menu, and to having some added hotkeys for things that you might frequently want to do, like open the encyclopedia to a specific area. The search bar in the galaxy map view is also now more functional for quick searches of planets or units. Some old galaxy options that are really no longer needed in light of other features that replaced them have also been removed. The alternative win condition related to the Zenith Architrave now works properly again, after being broken for a bit with a regression. Balance improvements to a number of units, and Dragons now show up to fight the fallen spire again. The Dark Spire now have an option in the lobby that makes them grow slower and have more unit variety, rather than being quite so intense and just having Eidolons everywhere. This one is an opt-in feature in the lobby. For the Neinzul Custodians, you can now manually control which subfactions spawn, and optionally choose which Enclave each subfaction gets. Lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes to Badger's giant Sidekicks mod, good stuff in there. If you haven't tried that yet, you really should! Balance tweaks and fixes in the Points of Interest mod as well, and the Outguard Party mod, and the Reclaimers mod, all from Dismiss. And lots of other little things, besides the above. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-02-26 01:10:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.537_Tweaks_And_Balance Nothing super huge in here, just a number of tweaks and balance adjustments. Several mod updates as well, mostly Badger things for his Sidekicks factions and similar. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-02-10 19:53:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.536_Extended_Sidekicks Fun thing for AI War 1 fans: The Classic map type will now always have at least one planet with only one wormhole in. From Badger: The Dyson Sidekick mod is renamed to be the Sidekicks Mod, and the Dark Zenith mod is scrapped since it's folded into the main Sidekicks mod. Lots of updates to this and other related mods. Also added a new Ark Sidekick player type in this mod. From StarKelp: The Leere mod has gotten a number of updates. From SirLimbo: Huge rebalance to Extended Ship Variants, a popular mod that adds even more unit types to the game. This hadn't been adjusted since the DLC2 timeframe, and he noted that it really showed. It includes a lot of nerfs and fixes, to make things more balanced in the larger scope of the game. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-01-30 15:31:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.535_LiteNetLib_Fix This one fixes a regression in the prior build that broke LiteNetLib networking for the game, and it also includes some balance work on the hangars in DLC2, and some additions to the Dyson Sidekick mod. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-01-23 19:40:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.534_Modular_Blasphemy This one has a new quickstart called The Blasphemous Badger, and it also includes a number of quality of life improvements including the ability to suppress the "spend more module points" prompt. It also includes better/proper stacking for the necromancer, some neinzul wild hives improvements from StarKelp, and various Dyson Sidekick improvements from Badger. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-01-21 01:48:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.533_Tuning This one is a lot of small tuning, and some mod adjustments. There are a number of good changes in there, but they're diverse enough that they are hard to sum up. See the full release notes for details. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha starting in the next few months, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-01-14 19:00:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy New Year! New AI War 2 build for you: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.532_Post_Necromancer_Victory_Text This makes the 7th calendar year with AI War 2 builds in it, goodness. This build has a variety of improvements from mostly Badger, and a few from Dismiss and Puffin as well. There is finally separate victory text when you win as the Necromancer, which is pretty awesome. The Dyson Sidekick mod also got this treatment. There's a variety of bugfixes and balance improvements in general, as well as to several mods. I also upgraded the Shapes library that we use for drawing selection circles, and the hope is that this will solve an issue with stuck selection circles that was occasionally coming up. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that early next year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2023-01-05 01:47:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small new AI War 2 hotfix build. https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.531_MP_Fixes Fixes a bug with a mod, a minor multiplayer bug, and also improves a small sub-area of MP networking speed. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that early next year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-12-17 23:59:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.530_Malkovich.3F This one fixes a long-running intermittent issue where all of the Dark Zenith planets would be named "Malcovich." When the game runs out of planet names, which shouldn't happen with any reasonable planet name set, it names every further planet that way as a nod to a certain scene in *Being John Malcovich*. However, the DZ planets were sometimes doing this when there were plenty of names left, which was a curiosity. Thanks to Badger for fixing that. Badger also got in a couple more multiplayer fixes, as well as some improvements to the tooltip clarity as it relates to the Scourge Nemesis. Puffin has added a huge number of updates to his total conversion "Classic Fusion" mod, which you can read about in the full release notes. Dismiss has made a number of adjustments to his many mods, and fixed a few areas of tooltip or data confusion in the main game, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that early next year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-12-16 20:10:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.529_Refinements This one has a number of quality of life improvements and small bugfixes, and also improves the balance of the spire-infused empire. There are also a couple of MP-specific minor improvements. A number of mods have had updates as well, including Dyson Sidekick, Ship Line Upgrades, and Juicy Journals. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-12-09 21:45:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.528_Juice.2C_Upgrades.2C_And_MP This one has a couple of fixes for multiplayer, thanks to Badger. This also includes updates to his Dyson Sidekick mod to help with balance. It also includes a new sandbox mode for Necromancer which is super OP, but interesting. Lots of updates to NR SirLimbo's various mods, including Ship Line Upgrades, AMU, and others. Dismiss has fixed a few bugs in the main game, added a new cheat command, and then also updated his own mods, including Points of Interest. There's a new mod in here as well from @Juic3 that formats (and edits when needed) the journal entries to be more consistently in-game character and not 4th wall breaking. Thanks to Dismiss for adding that in. Sounds like feedback is desired. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-12-04 02:16:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.527_Mostly_Mod_Updates This one is also mostly mod updates, like the prior one, but it also has some bugfixes and balance tweaks in there. In particular, if you wanted to have Elderlings be your friend, they not get a lot more powerful faster, as before they were too weak on average. AMU has a new OCD sub-feature that allows you to essentially inspect any part of the game's data and alter it on the fly. Basically cheat engine built into a mod, which is pretty nifty. Dyson Sidekick balance is better, and some things are better organized and have a few bugs fixed. Dismiss's growing selection of mods all got lots of updates, the notes are well worth checking out. More System Defenders also got some bugfixes to it. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-11-30 21:07:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.526_AMU_Returns The bulk of this one is mod updates, which you'll want to refer to the release notes linked above for the main details of. The AMU mod by NR SirLimbo is fully back in action after something like a year of being down because I changed the underlying format of the game so severely during The Great Refactor. He didn't just work on porting over what he had before for his general modding framework, but actually extended it even further, which is very interesting to see. On top of that, there is a new Ship Line Upgrades mod that is a companion mod to AMU, which "allows players to upgrade and downgrade ship lines in exchange for a new resource, Command Frequency Bandwidth. Downgrading ship lines grants, upgrading costs bandwidth and something else (either Hacking or Science points, or inflicting additional AIP)." Several of Dismiss's mods got minor updates, and the Dyson Sidekick mod from Badger also got a few balance updates. In the main game, out of modding land, the Deep-Space Anomaly Analyzers have had a couple of bugfixes and a number of balance updates. Thanks to Badger and CRCGamer on those. Also one other bugfix in wave notifications. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-11-21 16:45:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Second AI War 2 build this week! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.525_Faster_Multiplayer This one is very exciting in the area of multiplayer in particular, but a little bit performance in the late-game in general. This fixes a few client-only memory leaks and several other issues that were causing the game to kind of chug and feel like it was laboring in certain late-game scenarios in multiplayer. Those same savegames are now buttery smooth, which is a really exciting thing to see. Lots of great sleuthing work by Badger on this, and a lot of great fixes from him on there. I also contributed a few fixes this time around, after he identified where the problem areas were. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-11-19 23:11:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.524_StarKelp.27s_Return This one has some very exciting updates from StarKelp, who has returned from some private leave issues, and is also joining us working on Heart of the Machine. He's knocked out some improvements and bugfixes to Macrophage, Custodians, and Migrant Fleets in the main game/dlcs, and has also done a bunch of major work on many of his mods. Civilian Industries and The Lost Humans have both gotten some major updates and some bugfixes, and the Hydral Federation has gotten a major balance rework. He also added yet another mod, this one being the Leere mod. Dismiss and Badger have both also been working a ton on their own mods and other bugfixes, including Dyson Sidekick, AI Lieutenants, Reclaimers, and Points of Interest. Lord of Nothing's Exowar mod has been added, too. Classic Fusion, the total conversion mod by Puffin, has been updated to work with recent game changes. And CRCGamer has made some balance updates. Wow, what a huge one! More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-11-17 04:00:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.523_Customizable_Ship_Materials_.28Via_Mods.29 This one adds a lot of cool new tweaks and mod additions from Dismiss as well as Badger. The title feature is from Dismiss, and basically allows materials from one ship to be grabbed and used on something else using some xml at this point. This is quite interesting for modders looking to mix and match things to get new styles of ships without doing a whole new unit visual set. There's another big addition from Dismiss, namely an automation addition: Auto-place all of something in the build menu by right clicking or double clicking it! This is intended as an alternative to the build automation settings. So you can still quickly build all station keepers for example, but decide when exactly and on which planets to do so. There are a number of balance adjustments in here from CRCGamer as well, mostly relating to DLC3 ships. Specifically some of the Venators, and some of the ships that the Jabberwock AI beats you in the skull with. NR SirLimbo also made some adjustments to making sure that the Brutal Amalgam Guardians are not TOO much beneficial food for the Necromancer. Mods improvements include more to Dyson Sidekick by Badger, the ability for the Necromancer to work with Outguard in the Outguard Party mod, and a variety of other new improvements. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-11-08 00:52:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New AI War 2 build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.522_Secret_Factions A really large amount in this one, particularly on the modding front. There are a handful of bugfixes in here, and a number of balance tweaks and tunings, and also a new galaxy option called Secret Faction Details, which does rather what it says on the tin. It's hard to go into as much detail as I would like on this, because there's really just a laundry list of lots of unconnected things, including with the mods. I would try to summarize a bit more, but in some respects it would be repeating almost the entire release notes above. There are new foes in some mods, better balance in others, and in general lots of things resulting from feedback and testing. Be sure to check out the full list above, and give some of those mods a go if you haven't tried them yet. No separate downloads required! More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-10-30 00:25:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build for AI War 2! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.521_Mod_And_Tooltip_Polish This one is more polish on some of the prototype tooltips and a few beacon things thanks to Dismiss, and then a bunch of updates in the vein of polish to the mods of Dismiss, and the Dyson Sidekick mod by Badger. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-10-20 04:06:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build for AI War 2! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.520_Reaper_Chrysalis This one has a variety of mod changes and additions, many from bother Dismiss and Badger. The Dyson Sidekick mod faction by Badger is now reportedly his favorite creation for this game, even surpassing the Necromancer in coolness factor. This new release contains a lot of why, with supply lines for you to interact with and attack, and battles between the AI and the Dyson Chrysalis. This build also includes some improvements to regen golem balance from CRCGamer. More to come soon. Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-10-15 23:03:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build for AI War 2! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.519_Ethereal_Tachyons This one has a number of bugfixes that are mostly pretty small, but which fix some annoying edge cases. Same thing for balance. This then has a number of large updates to a variety of mods. Points of Interest in particular got a lot of new content, including Fairy Grottos and Null Fields. But really, quite a few of the mods got updates. More to come soon! Enjoy! (Usual reminder: you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine, if you want to keep up with it. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.)

[ 2022-10-13 01:35:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build for AI War 2! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.518_Conveniences_And_Quickstarts This one has a number of small conveniences from Badger and Dismiss, ranging from being able to see your remaining required spire city counts in the interface, to more permissive placement of turrets when you are clicking in an area. This one also has a number of new quickstarts from Badger, which set you up in some very interesting multi-faction situations. In particular, he notes his favorite is the "It's basically all the minor factions on one team against you" one, further noting "I feel like Dr. Frankenstein, but if he made 20 monsters and sent them to attack all those people who won't get off his lawn." I, for one, am happy to see just what happens when venturing onto that lawn. CRCGamer has also made a number of improvements to balance, and fixed a few typos and similar. One of the big things you'll notice is more of the "improved strikecraft" variants appearing in Advanced Research Stations, which should be quite pleasant. Dismiss has also been updating his Generator mod further, with a variety of map improvements. And lastly, Badger has been further updating his Dyson Sidekick mod, with bugfixes, usability improvements, and clarity improvements. More to come soon. (And hey, did you know you can wishlist our upcoming title Heart of the Machine? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2001070/Heart_of_the_Machine/ We'll also be running a closed alpha on that later this year, so keep an ear out.) Enjoy!

[ 2022-10-01 23:29:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.517_Achievement_Unlocked This one includes more bugfixes of various sorts, and a variety of mod updates. Several of the achievements, and one of the mods, are centered around fixing some older achievements that were broken. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-26 20:25:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, just some hotfixes: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.516_Hotfix

[ 2022-09-20 23:01:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.515_Hotfix This one has a couple of hotfixes. Linux became unstable partly because of a steam API update in the prior version (I think), and a GOG API update was also not helpful. Hopefully this solves those stability issues. There was also a necromancer bug in the prior version if you did not have one of Badger's mods on, and that is now fixed. This also has a few other updates from Badger, and from CRCGamer on balance. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-18 21:05:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.514_Refinements This one has a whole lot of refinements in a variety of areas. Some more multiplayer fixes and improvements from Badger. Some encyclopedia improvements from Dismiss. A number of DLC2-focused balance changes, and some additional starting battlestation fleet styles from CRCGamer. Lots of mod updates from Badger and Dismiss. I did a minor version upgrade of the unity build that we use (2020.3.32 to 2020.3.34), which has a few OSX/Linux specific fixes. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-18 00:55:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.513_Necromancy_And_Reclamation This one has some tweaks and improvements to Necromancers, as well as a whole bunch of mods. Dyson Sidekick, DpsHud, Outguard Party, Reclaimers, and Points of Interest all saw updates. Lots of updates from Dismiss and Badger, primarily. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-12 21:43:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.512_Dyson_Reapers This one allows exo-war units to attack the necromancer. Spicy! Maybe convert them to mummies, or maybe run in fear? (I'm sure it will be mummies) This one has a huge rebalance of the Dyson Sidekick mod by Badger, making them a lot more balanced and interesting based on his ongoing playtesting with his multiplayer group. The Reclaimers and Point of Interest mods by Dismiss also have a number of bugfixes and tweaks. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-09 03:05:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.511_Modtopia This one has yet more multiplayer improvements, and some general bugfixes, both from Badger. There are also a number of balance improvements from CRCGamer, and some quality of life improvements by Dismiss, and then... so many new mods, and mod changes! There's a new Exowar Overhaul mod by Lord of Nothing, which gives you more exo war unity variety. The Dyson Sidekick by Badger has been refined a lot further, although I understand even more refinements are planned. His multiplayer group has been getting happily murdered in that scenario, so I gather these are balance and other adjustments to make that a more fair fight. Dismiss has been an absolute mod factory in this timeframe. The Reclaimers mod has exploration outposts now. The Generator mod has more map refinements. Points of Interest is an all-new mod that includes new game features like Points of Interest (natural phenomena, etc), and also new AI types. Not listed in the release notes, but Puffin has also made a ton of updates to his Classic Fusion total conversion mod. If you've been playing that and enjoy it, make sure and let him know! I don't think he's heard anything from anyone except other modders, and that's a pretty amazing mod he's got going on. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-09-04 00:25:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.508_Multiplayer_Bug_Smiting_Part_4 More bugfixes for MP, and more balance in general for the necromancer, the dyson sidekick, and a load of mod updates. Dismiss comes in with a bunch of updates to his Outguard Party mod, the Reclaimers mod, and the Generator mod. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-08-25 19:51:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.507_Multiplayer_Bug_Smiting_Part_3 Another big batch of MP bugfixes from Badger, along with other bugfixes and balance tuning from Badger, CRCGamer, and Dismiss. Also lots of mod updates from Dismiss that aren't in the release notes, but should be visible in-game. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-08-20 23:33:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.504_Multiplayer_Bug_Smiting_Part_2 This one includes more MP fixes, as well as some fixes and balance to SP. Lots of work from Badger, CRCGamer, and Dismiss in here. The MP fixes mostly center around when new planets appear, as well as quiet some logging with some of the Neinzul factions. Really there's not an overall theme here with the fixes and balance, each line item pretty much speaks for itself in the release notes. It's a great collection of stuff to have fixed, including a number of items complained about recently by folks. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-08-07 21:32:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.503_Multiplayer_Bug_Smiting This one fixes the most notorious of the multiplayer bugs that players have been facing -- big thanks to Badger for rooting out several that I just could not see, and had looked right past before. Wormhole changes were completely not working when sent to clients unless you disconnected and reconnected, due to a really subtle bug that I'd been unable to find for months. Badger found and nailed it. Then there was also a bug with occasional corruption of data with any faction that used fireteams, which was also incredibly subtle in its expression. Badger found and fixed that, too, along with the hacks getting out of sync on the client. Previously, when the fireteams sync got messed up, it was pretty much just completely scrambled on the client from then on until disconnect and reconnect, so a number of other bugs should be gone now thanks to that one fix. In a similar vein, the bug with units being in random wrong spots on the client, but only sometimes, is hopefully now fixed -- that one is very hard to test in such a way that we can be sure it is gone, but fingers crossed. The fix for that was another subtle one, but seems logical that it would resolve it. There are also new MP sync options. There's a button in the debug menu under the escape menu that you can press to force an immediate sync to all of the clients, from the host or clients, so that if things don't look right on the clients, they will be straightened out right away versus anyone needing to disconnect and reconnect. Secondarily, there's a new setting (under Networking) called "Host Only: Force Sync Interval". On this interval (in minutes), the game will automatically sync all data to clients. So if you set this value to 20, every 20 minutes the game will resync to clients. What about beyond multiplayer? Well, CRCGamer has made a number of balance improvements to DLC units, and also to his More System Defenders mod. Badger has also made some balance improvements to his Dyson Sidekick. Classic Fusion by Puffin and a variety of mods by Dismiss have also gotten a variety of updates, but those haven't had their notes updated in the wiki; that's up the the mod authors themselves, and I think they may have some notes inside the mods themselves. It looks like there's a whole new mod from Dismiss as well, which is exciting! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-07-30 03:06:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

A variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks in this one, along with updates to Outguard Party, Classic Fusion, and other mods: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.502_No_More_Overlord_Doubling One of the larger bugs this one fixes is "wow two AI Overlord Phase 2s appeared instead of one." That was a bug that was introduced over a really long period of time, in a really indirect fashion; it seems to have actually become extant in early July, but the groundwork to make it work was laid much longer ago. The most interesting question on that one is "why wasn't this extant prior to July?" which, even with code history, is actually hard to answer in this case. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-07-19 22:10:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.501_Fixes This one is smaller, mainly some fixes. Some of those for mods, some for the main game. More fixes and similar are coming; it's been a really busy period, and those of us internally have been spread unusually thin. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-07-14 02:44:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, and it's truly a whopper: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.500_Classic_Fusion.2C_And_A_Megaton_Otherwise The first thing of note is that Puffin's massive total conversion "Classic Fusion" mod is now released in this build. This has been a two-year project for him, and it essentially hybridizes the first and second AI War games, using the engine of the second game but mostly ship stats and designs and such from the first game. This is a very exciting thing, because Puffin and I wound up having some disagreements on just where to be similar to the first game versus where to be divergent, and I'm really glad to see his version of that vision now as something that others can also enjoy. Hopefully it brings a lot of fans of the first game joy! But wait! I said there was a megaton otherwise. By that I mean this is absolutely a packed build, partly because it's about 3 weeks of work; I was traveling out of the country to visit family, and folks were busy while I was away and couldn't push builds. Badger has also added a new mod, this one the Dyson Sidekick. "This is a new player-controllable faction. Play as a coalition of Zenith, Neinzul, Templar and Spire trying to build a Dyson Sphere, while fighting the AI and the Reapers, the forces of an evil Necromancer." Good grief! That's quite cool, and also huge! And another big mod: The Reclaimers by Dismiss are a human faction dedicated to human recovery and advancement in the galaxy, though not through direct combat. And SirLimbo has re-released his AMU mod: "Right now AMU is only at about 20% of the code it had before, but a lot of AMU has been integrated into the main game, so the actual progress is probably between 30-40%." Outguard Party by Dismiss has been updated to v3! DpsHud by Dismiss has been updated to v2! Tom Prince fixed a ton more bugs, and made a number of more things run more smoothly. CRCGamer has been working on balance like a madman. These are each really long sets of release notes all on their own, and exciting even for folks who aren't interested in all these new mods and such. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-07-09 04:08:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.018_Easier_Reconnection Quick heads up: this is the last one for maybe half a month, probably, because I'm going to be traveling. Normal updates will resume in early July. This build includes a number of tweaks and fixes from the usual suspects, including Tom Prince, CRCGamer, and SirLimbo. Lots of good refinement in here, including some balance fixes to unexpected cheese sources. There was a very unusual way of farming metal that folks discovered just recently, which is kind of cool to have pop up after 6 years of development, really. In multiplayer, when clients disconnect, they can now reconnect much more smoothly without the host having to disconnect and rehost first. In my experience it worked if you just tried it twice anyway, but that was not apparent to everyone, and probably not universal anyway. I also fixed some issues with improper long range thread planning happening after you reloaded the xml for the game by switching out mods or dlcs that are enabled (without restarting the game). This prevents a number of "thread stalled" issues, which so far as I can tell were all related to this one use case. More to come in early July. Enjoy!

[ 2022-06-14 03:35:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey! Chris M. McElligott Park here, founder of Arcen Games. Double announcement today, involving two new partners and a lot of awesome staffing news, as well.

Hooded Horse Partnership

First off: Arcen is happy to join the Hooded Horse stable, working on an untitled project to be fully announced later. This title is set in the sci-fi Arcenverse, and has strategic elements, but further details will need to wait for video. For the moment, please enjoy the following in-engine preproduction screenshots.

Staff Again!

Im taking the usual role of game director and code lead, but for the first time in almost half a decade, I wont be so alone. This is a really big deal to me, and one of many reasons Im excited to be working with Tim Bender and the others at Hooded Horse. Many of the long-time AI War 2 collaborators are now joining fulltime, including Willard Badger Davis, George Zeus Tibbitts, and Spencer StarKelp Ferguson. Joining in a part-time capacity are Daniel Daniexpert Garcevic, Ethan Democracy Wong, and Quinn Beltramo. Familiar faces Pablo Vega (composer), and Dan Blue Mann (artist/environment) also take key roles.

Forward Fiction Partnership

In related exciting news, Uproar Books is launching a new imprint called Forward Fiction, and a new series of canonical AI War books will be the flagship titles launched under that new label. Forward Fiction has done a great job really immersing themselves in the lore of the games, including unreleased content. The first novel in the new AI War trilogy shows a lot of scenarios from the games in a new light, as well as laying the groundwork to explore some big questions that the games have yet to answer. It also includes a major character from the upcoming Hooded-Horse-published game. Ive wanted to show who the AI is fighting outside the galaxy for the last thirteen years, but I wanted to do the reveal in a closer-perspective game than any weve released thus far. This is one of several areas that Forward Fiction is tackling, and Ive been really delighted by how meticulous they are in their planning and outlining. I spent most of my life thinking I wanted to be a novelist and trying to get published. Despite finishing a few manuscripts, publication of my own work was always elusive. I wound up being far better suited for game development, but nonetheless I remain deeply interested in the print publishing world, and am really pleased with the care and quality I see coming from Forward Fiction.

Way More Info In The Coming Months!

Having someone else write novels set in a fictional universe of my creation is truly surreal, but in the best way. Rather like finding such an excellent publishing partner as in Hooded Horse. This is a whole new chapter for Arcen, and everyone on the team is really thrilled.

Media Contacts

About Arcen Games, LLC

Arcen Games is a Durham, NC based developer of strategy, tactics, simulation, and adventure games. Their first title, AI War: Fleet Command, was one of the most critically-acclaimed PC games of 2009. Other titles include The Last Federation, A Valley Without Wind, Starward Rogue, and many more. For more information, visit ArcenGames.com. Press Inquiries: press@arcengames.com

About Hooded Horse, Inc.

Hooded Horse is a Dallas, Texas based publisher of indie strategy, simulation, and role-playing games. For more information, visit HoodedHorse.com. Press Inquiries: press@hoodedhorse.com.

About Forward Fiction

Forward Fiction is a book publishing and marketing firm that specializes in developing novels from existing intellectual properties, including video games, films, and television shows. For more information, visit ForwardFiction.com. Media Contact: Sarae Hope sarae@forwardfiction.com

[ 2022-06-14 02:13:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New... ginormous... build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.017_More_Ways_To_Win I really am having trouble summarizing this one, it's so large and voluminous. One of the big new things is that SirLimbo has added some support for new win conditions other than beating the AI Overlord. You can enable these things through the galaxy settings, and it's also the sort of thing that other factions and mods can extend or use in new ways later. There is a new DPS Hud mod by Dismiss, which gives you some new QoL UI tools, and his Outguard Party mod has also seen a number of updates. Tom Prince put in another metric ton of fixes, quality of life improvements, and general updates. There are so, so many of these in this build. Dismiss also had a notable number of these added in this build. CRCGamer added a few fixes, and then a sizeable number of balance fixes to a variety of units and factions. Badger also put in a number of fixes and tweaks and QoL improvements, and made some updates to his DZ Sidekick mod. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-06-10 02:24:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.014_The_Tom_Show This one is brought to you by Tom Prince, who did literally everything included in it. Lots of various fixes and improvements in here, some relating to dyson spheres, others the dark zenith sidekick, others expert mode, others the zenith trader in necromancer games, and others various parts of the ui. It's quite a lot actually! Big thanks to Tom, these are great! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-28 15:54:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.013_Many_Various Lots of unrelated things in here, from lots of different people. We have a couple of new folks in svn making changes and additions now, namely Mike007/Facciola007 and Dismiss. Tom Prince continues to knock out an impressive number of bugs and add various QoL improvements, and Badger and Daniexpert also have a number of challenging things that they got fixed up. Dismiss fixed some exceptions as well as making notable additions to unit encyclopedia functionality. Badger updated the Dark Zenith Sidekick mod to make them more active earlier in the game. Facciola007 has added five new mods, which center around various new starting options with fleets, new fleet names, and similar. SirLimbo has been working on a number of technical framework additions, and as part of that he fixed some issues with the Entity Type Draw Bags, as well as adding more flexibility to them. This really is a varied patch, so it's hard to sum up without just restarting the entire release notes linked above. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-27 00:25:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.012_Necromancer_Balance Lots and lots of things in this one. Among the most notable is, as you might guess, some more balance to the necromancer, thanks to Zeus. This also includes a number of improvements to the modding framework from Tom Prince, and some extra flexibility to how campaign types can set various properties. A good number of general fixes and tweaks in here from Daniexpert, and also some Dark Zenith balance tweaks from Zeus. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-21 02:50:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.011_Autobuild_And_Home_Ark_Strength A number of more fixes and improvements and extensions to things from SirLimbo and Tom Prince, and then the new DZ Sidekick mod from Badger also got some balance updates. A regression in the tooltip code is what led to the errors on swapping fleet lines, and that's been cleaned up now. Autobuild settings for some of the DLC2 structures have been added. And the Home Arks (when you play Ark Empire) now scale more consistently with how they do in a normal game, as well as all work consistently in terms of build speeds, etc. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-18 00:51:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.010_Client_Message_Order This one is smaller, but for MP players it should be quite welcome. It fixes an issue where certain messages from clients could arrive out of order and then cause the game to get stuck "waiting on that client" indefinitely until that client disconnected and reconnected. Included also are some excellent balance updates from CRCGamer, making a few Wards better balanced in DLC3, and making some other balance changes to the base game and DLC1. Additionally, there are more UI quality of life improvements from Tom Prince, as well as some hacking framework improvements that make it easier for anyone (modders especially) to add in multiple-choice hacking popouts. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-14 18:57:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.009_Zeusathon_II_And_DZ_Sidekicks This continues our recent trend of Very Large Builds. There's a ton of fixes and tweaks in here from Tom Prince and SirLimbo, as is a bit usual for recently. But this time, Zeus has come back and put out his "largest patch since DLC3 released," which is almost an understatement. Tons of balance to the necromancer, the zenith architrave, and otherwise. Badger has created his first mod, which is kind of a surprise feature here. You need to have DLC2 to use the mod, but basically what this does is give you a human-playable version of the Dark Zenith, which is... not something I ever thought I would see. This only works if you have a human empire next to them, as is the case with the necromancer sidekick, so you either need two factions in single-player, or to use this in multiplayer. You control the Dark Zenith military forces only; their economy runs without your control (controlling the economy would be very tedious and unfun) In some respects, this is like our prior concept for vassals, except... better in some respects? This also provides a nice template that other modders could use to make sidekick versions of our other factions, or of their own modded-in factions. Very interesting indeed. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-13 01:43:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.008_Xenophiles_And_Outguard v5.008 includes the fix to the lobby bug in the prior build, and thus also all the other improvements are back from the prior build. Big thanks to Tom Prince for finding that one-character bug of mine. But also in this build are just piles and piles of new goodies. In no particular order: Lots of DLC3 updates, many of them Necromancer-related, ranging from balancing tuning from Zeus to quality of life and bugfixes from Tom Prince. The Skirmisher AI has been heavily nerfed after player feedback, thanks to CRCGamer. SirLimbo has more updates on the new prototype version of the tooltips (there's a personal settings option to preview it if you want), and Tom Prince also had some new additions there. Brutal Guardians in DLC3 now have a lot better options for configuring them, thanks for SirLimbo (their original creator). And then holy cow, there's a whole "Xenophile" update, mostly to the base game, thanks to Arnaud B, a longtime contributor. This has a few bugfixes, but mainly a giant list of balance updates to everything from the Zenith Dyson Sphere (to bring it up to interestingness levels along the lines of the Spire Spheres), the Dyson Ships, the Dark Spire, and Risk Analyzers. He ran these changes by me first, and it's the sort of thing that looks to really enhance the existing factions versus making them fundamentally different, so that was an easy thumbs up from me. Then we have a new mod called Outguard Party, from first-time modder, long-time tester, Dismiss. This basically makes the Outguard almost-free to acquire, so that it's a lot more fun/interesting to experiment with them. I'd always avoided doing something like this for fear of balance implications, but as a mod this is a really great way to allow more experimentation in that area... and it may not have as notable of balance effects as I had always worried. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-08 02:45:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.007_The_Reasonable_Architrave Heck of a lot in this one. The Zenith Architrave were accidentally still generating income for themselves while the game was paused, and that is stopped now; they should be way more consistent difficulty. Thanks to Badger for finding that rabbit hole. Really a lot of necromancer odds and ends that constitute polish, error avoidance, better handling of edge cases, and so on. Most of that was Tom Prince. There are also some new modules in for the Necromancer now that cost a mere one module point, so you won't be forced to have remainders anymore. Thanks to Zeus. Evidently we still have some softlock situations, and aborting all the threads was not working, so that was clearly not a thread stuck issue. That mean it was an "Exchanger variable" stuck in a wrong state. I extended the threading framework to now centralized ThreadingExchangers, and extended the "abort all threads" functionality to reset these, as well. This should definitively let us find the softlocks for anyone who still has them... knock on wood. Oh, Elderlings are no longer such Science Pinatas for human empires. That was a nice thing to get rid of. A number of other bugfixes, some MP specific and some not, in general. Few mod updates. Experimental tooltip mode additions by SirLimbo. Improvements to the Showdown Device hacking. Dyson Sphere faction hacking scaling balance from StarKelp. So many things! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-05-05 19:38:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.006_End_To_Spontaneous_Combustion More cleanup and fixes, and this also puts an end to the "my ships spontaneously combust sometimes" bug that has been around in rare reports for the last month, and then got more common with the influx of new players. Big thanks to Badger for figuring out the solution on that one. Lots more necromancer polish bits, most of those thanks to Tom Prince, and some balance adjustments to the Migrant Fleets from StarKelp. SirLimbo also found and fixed a strength calculation bug, which now makes it so that strength is more accurately reported (it will look lower in many cases, but it's actually just being reported more correctly; the actual underlying power is all the same). More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-30 03:09:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.005_Threat_Properly_Threatens Lots of fixes, and some balance tweaks. The threat counter shows properly again, which is probably the most notable fix in here. That was a recent regression. The second most notable fix is that some of the AI Eyes and similar in DLC3 no longer are quite so good at taking your lunch money. A number of multiplayer fixes in here, several of which could lead to error cascades, so that's nice to have gone. A number of UI and mechanical fixes from SirLimbo and Tom Prince, and other general cleanup. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-27 03:19:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.004_Misc_Polish Just various polish and bugfixes, nothing too earth shattering (hooray!). There's still more to fix and polish what with the major new influx of players in the DLC3 code and multiplayer and so forth, but in general we're really pleased how clean things have been. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-25 01:16:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Second release of today, the actual notes are one big wall of text: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.003_Revenant_Efficacy Essentially it's a lot of minor bugfixes and balance tweaks based on feedback from the new influx of players. One of the most notable fixes that is relevance for our new and growing cohort of necromancers is related to corrosive damage. Essentially, units that used corrosive damage (like Revenants) would cause you not to get your usual necromancy results because of the indirect nature of the deaths of your victims. It now properly recognizes you as the cause of death, and thus Revenants no longer accidentally cheat you out of your full and proper undead army. This was particularly important for Elderlings and Templars, who are where you get Essence and other resources from -- so the Revenants could really cost you (whoops). Other than that one, the rest are a fairly minor laundry list (hooray), but it's still nice to have such a big dump of things cleaned up. Nothing like a new large batch of players to blow open new issues that weren't found in the prior year of testing! It's a good problem to have, but all the same thanks for your patience. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-24 02:26:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of what is probably two hotfix builds for today: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.002_Venators_Optional This one makes the scary new Venators from DLC3 optional, unless you are playing on Challenger mode or higher. Thanks to Badger on that. This also lets you cycle through ships with unspent modules by repeatedly clicking that notification, which is really nice. Thanks StarKelp! Lots of tooltip improvements and fixes and tweaks from NR SirLimbo. I put in a few multiplayer fixes for some odd corner cases that a few players ran into, and part of the reason for the early push is to get more feedback on that. A variety of more bugfixes and journal entry improvements from Badger, unit fixes from CRC Gamer, a beacon fix from Daniexpert, and so on. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-23 20:16:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Small followup release! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.001_First_Post-Completion_Tweaks This one has a bunch of tweaks and fixes from Badger, nothing too serious thankfully, and some minor corrections from CRCGamer and SirLimbo as well. More tweaks and fixes based on feedback coming early next week. Thanks so much for your support!

[ 2022-04-23 02:01:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of all, we have a lovely new DLC for your perusal. The Neinzul Abyss is hands-down the largest and most impressive piece of DLC that we've ever made, and it's larger than a lot of standalone games. Its store page explains it better than I can here, and with pictures and everything, so if you're curious, I hope you'll stop by.

About This DLC's Creation

That DLC was the product of a year of work by a really dedicated core team of folks, and an even larger extended team of testers. The core folks from that group are joining me later this year on another project that is not yet announced, but it provides a sort of happy ending capstone to all of the stress and work of this particular game's six-year history. I can't talk about that a whole lot yet, but I am planning on updating the company history novella to include the AI War 2 period hopefully sometime before the end of 2022. I hope I can do their contributions justice at that time, but in the meantime we have the credits, the release notes, and I'll say a few things here.

The Necromancer's Origins

The original concept of the Necromancer was "just this little side thing" that Badger had cooked up as a way to give his dad more to do when they were playing multiplayer together a year ago. This is remarkably similar to how I saw the original AI War: Fleet Command as this "little side project" for myself back in 2008, so that my dad and uncle and I could play it together. The necromancer has grown for the past year, with multiple major revisions, I think three separate design documents, and a huge injection of creativity from others. Puffin was the one who suggested we be able to capture guard posts with the necromancer, and I can't imagine the faction without it now. Zeus is the one who came up with all the detailed unit balance, and in particular things like the Totems and Orbs.

Echoes Of The Ancients

Originally this DLC was going to be much smaller, and it was going to have some other key features in it -- vassals, most notably. We were also planning on doing a DLC4, which would have been called Echoes of the Ancients, and it had a logo and internal Steam setup and everything. StarKelp and Democracy were brought on specifically for DLC4, and Zeus was meant to be a part of both. I think that the ideas that we cut were ones that were good -- the vassals, if we had really gotten them fully implemented, would have been incredibly cool. But ultimately, what happened to these two expansions is that we cut out everything that was merely good... and what remains is only what is great.

"Chill" Factions Also Deserve A Look!

There are so many factions in this DLC, and I feel like some of them -- most notably StarKelp's -- are really getting kind of overlooked in the excitement for the Necromancer, and the challenge of the Venators that the AI has now, and things like that. But what makes me happiest about his factions are that they are... not universe-devouring. I specifically wanted a larger population of factions that players could turn on and coexist with, and either interact with them or ignore them. Factions that are individually unique and interesting, but which don't just completely take over the entire game's meta by their very presence. I feel like that's a bit what the Zenith Architrave can sometimes do as part of DLC2, and it's what the Zenith Dyson Sphere does in the base game, and the Spire Spheres in DLC1 (which were also an addition by StarKelp in the last few months). I have vague memories of playing Star Control 2 when I was a kid, along with later games that were more strategic like Master of Orion, and one of the things that stuck out to me in all of them were... the interesting neighbors who fit the above description. They existed, they were interesting, they were sometimes threatening or a problem, but they also just... were. These factions may not be as high-profile as the Necromancer, and I do indeed get why, but I hope that you'll try out some games with four to six relatively chill factions turned on and see what happens. To me, with that sort of thing, the sum is greater than the parts.

About The New Units

On unit design, Zeus continues to amaze, I need to also be sure to point out. He was instrumental in DLC2, and you have him to thank for the cruisers, among other things. He and CRCGamer both really knocked things out of the park in DLC2. I wasn't sure how Destroyers could really hold up to Cruisers, since by definition the latter seems like it would be more exciting. However, by combining in the orbital mechanic and the new Wards that he came up with, the Destroyers absolutely hold their own. We had a number of surprise additions in unit design from Tadrinth (way too many to mention, but the new AI Eyes are certainly one standout) and from SirLimbo (the Brutal Guardians are most notable), and that really rounds things out. Both SirLimbo and Tom Prince did a lot of programming assistance as well, ranging from bugfixes to mechanical additions to quality of life and tooltip bonanzas. Oh -- heck, ptarth also has had a number of items lately in there. There's so many people! I'm very grateful.

Last Thanks For This DLC

There are so many testers to thank, but for the last of the production team I want to thank two more people. Sigrun Edelmann did a fantastic job with the skeletons and wights for the necromancer, which were a very challenging set of concept pieces, and helped set the tone for the rest of the art for those factions. And finally, Democracy did a lot of concepting in partnership with StarKelp, quite a lot of writing (some of which is going to be coming soon to the encyclopedia in-game, actually), and also did the beautiful and informative treatments on the DLC3 store page and the newly-expanded-DLC1 store page.

Multiplayer!

Hey, multiplayer has finally lost its beta status! I am sure that there will still be bugs that crop up that need looking at, so please feel free to still use our bugtracker to report those. In general, though, we seem to have a grown number of small groups who are playing and not having any issues that are too serious (or play without any issues at all). One reason I can't just claim it's absolutely squeaky-clean is the niche nature of the multiplayer (it's a much smaller set of players than the main playerbase) paired with the pretty intermittent nature of issues that are found. This game is incredibly massively multi-threaded, and has a huge volume of data that is synced in a time-sliced fashion across the network, and most issues result from one of those two things. Either some particular data gets a bit stale on the client after 45+ minutes of playing, or threads clash in a client-specific way that we are then able to patch with one or two lines of code as soon as we have a report.

Support For This Game, In General

This is the end of the era of us developing the game AI War 2 on a fulltime basis (well, fulltime in my case), and of us working on new features for the game. However, this is the happy kind of end of an era. I can't tell you how frustrated I've been with some comments over the years from people who wanted to "wait until it was finished," which I never knew how to take. AI War 2 has never been a "live service game" (ugh, gross), but it is a living game like... well, like Dwarf Fortress or something. I would argue that Dwarf Fortress was "done" a decade ago. It had a huge amount of content, you could play it for hundreds of hours... that's a completed game. Minecraft was also complete like 10 years ago. But both of those games have been getting content and bugfix updates for a decade, despite being "done," and I see that as a positive thing with sandboxy type games, rather than as a drawback. To me, that's where I've seen AI War 2 as existing since... let's say 2019, at least. Anyway, the important thing is that we aren't just running off into the night and leaving you with whatever unknown things pop up. If there's some notable bug that only rears its head on a specific machine a year from now, then we'll still set aside time to fix it. The really minor nits are getting less attention now, but there's still going to be at least weekly new builds for the foreseeable future. What that vague statement means is really entirely dependent on how engaged the playerbase is. If we're not getting any reports of note to fix, we won't just make up some extra work to do. But with all this exciting new stuff out, I don't see that being the case.
I think that this is sort of the realm that Factorio lives in these days? I understand there's a giant paid expansion on the way for that game, but if we ignore that it seems to be a game that just gets fixes now for the most part, and then is the domain of modders beyond that. Factorio is far more popular than AI War 2 is or ever was, so things will look a bit different, but overall those are the sort of role models I look to when it comes to long-term support for games. The original AI War had quite a lengthy post-any-DLCs period of legacy support, itself. So this is pretty familiar, in that regard. TLDR: Please do not be alarmed, please do not consider the game "dead," but please also be patient as some bugs may take more like a week to fix instead of a day as they were in the past. (The interplay between a game being "dead" or "complete" or "alive" versus "unfinished" is a very murky on that gamers in general cannot seem to agree on, and I do see the dilemma. But that's a whole other topic).

What Is Next For The Arcenverse?

Right, so we have this big interconnected sci-fi multiverse that spans a whole lot of our games (but not all of them). We've had a long run of titles directly in that multiverse, and at the moment it's time to take a little break. We are going to be working on another title (in fact, it's already in progress), but it's not set in the Arcenverse and isn't related to the ongoing storylines of humanity, the AIs we created, the last Hydral and its friends, or any of that crew. This is instead a new and self-contained IP, which is a refreshing change for the moment. I expect that we'll next return to the Arcenverse sometime in the next 3-4 years. Whether that is for another large project like AI War 2, or whether that's on something smaller like Calling The Rain, I don't yet know. That latter title is a concept that was intended to be a solo project for me to complete in about a six month span, and it's set in the final days of Earth around the same time period as Bionic Dues or In Case Of Emergency Release Raptor, but for now that one is on hold while we pursue something more interesting as a larger group. There are some other interesting developments regarding the Arcenverse that might pop a bit sooner than the next mainline game, but it's still early days on that front and so you'll just have to wait and find out, for now.

So How About A Project Retrospective?

Oof. It's awfully early to do a postmortem, because the project certainly isn't dead. I'll be very curious to see how things play out over the next 6+ months in particular. Most notably, how much more intensely modders might get into this now that we're no longer such a moving target for them. That said, I do get asked a lot of these questions, recently in particular, so how about a bit of a Q&A instead. I'll be on a couple of podcasts in the next month or two to talk more about AI War 2's conclusion, so you'll be able to catch more then, also.

How Do You Feel About Kickstarter Now?

I believe I said in an interview in 2012, "I'm glad kickstarter exists, but I hope I never have to use it." In 2016, I put aside my reservations and wound up using kickstarter as a way to try to save staff from losing their jobs (Keith, Blue, and Pablo). My verdict? It was a terrible idea. The kickstarter generated about $116k gross (factoring in backerkit and direct paypal pledges), so something like $90k net, I suppose. This amount of money goes by fast. If the original design we had started with for the kickstarter had worked out perfectly, then it would have been fine. But that's not at all how things went. Once you've done a kickstarter, you've taken people's money. An in some cases, a lot more than what exchanges hands for, say, Early Access. So you are absolutely on the hook for what you said you'd deliver. My personal experience was that I found myself in an untenable situation. I could either do things I didn't want to do, and lose a lot of money in the process, or I could break faith with those backers. Either way, someone was going to get screwed, pardon my french. I think that we can all point at lots of kickstarters that were a shambles, and where the backers got royally hosed.
I took the opposite route, because I was able to and felt that it was important to do so. However, I hope that nobody holds up AI War 2 as a kickstarter "success story." It is absolutely a horror story, and the only reason you have this awesome cool product is because I did a lot of financially-inadvisable things to make it possible, and put in a really insane number of hours, AND I had a huge amount of help from "volunteers" like Badger and Puffin who came into the project and then spent way more of their time than they had originally intended because it was interesting work, and they knew I was struggling and wanted to help. In general, AI War 2 has cost me a lot in lost wages from if I had been doing something else, and I have several hundred thousand dollars fewer in assets than I did prior to starting the project. If it hadn't been for all the free help, and I don't just mean Badger and Puffin even though they are the most voluminous cases, you could probably triple or quadruple that loss, or just take a much lower-quality game. For most of the last four years, I have felt like I've been in indentured servitude, in a very real sense.

That Sounds Very Negative. Why Keep At It, Then?

Well, okay. Financially, this was a big hole that just kept sucking in money. And gameplay-wise, this has been the most challenging project I've ever worked on, although it was a great learning experience. Part of me absolutely hates this project and the process I went through to bring it to fruition, but that's not remotely the whole story. This game is a freaking technical marvel. From the standpoint of code architecture, multi-threading, and even networking, I have never been so challenged in my professional life. And I loved that. The gameplay was a passion project for various others, most notably Badger, but for me I was passionate about the tech to make it happen.

Multithreading

There is some genuinely novel stuff in this game (I think, anyway) under the hook to make it all go. If you have a suitably large enough campaign, and a 30-core computer, I'm pretty sure my technical framework here can put it to use. The question of how to multi-thread a linear process has been at the forefront of computer science for the last few decades, ever since Moore's Law started slowing down for individual cores. The original AI War 2 was multi-threaded for the AI itself, and Stars Beyond Reach had a pretty cool threading model that was leagues ahead of any other 4X titles I've seen. But AI War 2 takes it to the next level. What is even more interesting to me is how layered the codebase became. There are a lot of really crazy "add on" features like the "Fireteams" that Badger coded, and those are able to do intensely complex calculations that most games would not have the CPU time for, and then they feed their information back to the main game in a mostly-non-blocking way. Even our auto-targeting and collision logic is run in a mixture of time-sliced and multi-threaded fashion, and that has evolved over the years of working on this game.

Self-Analyzing Code

When we started having memory leak issues last summer, I rewrote a ton of the engine to make it able to self-analyze, and to find memory leaks not just in our code, but in theoretical modder code that has not been written yet. I had realized that the level of complexity mods were reaching was such that we'd never be able to tell if some specific mod was dragging down the rest of the game or not, and that was actually true of our own official factions, too. That was an amazingly interesting problem to get to solve. And it is solved.

Networking

The networking, too, was an endless challenge. This is my... I think 5th networked multiplayer game? The first one I coded on the classic principles that all older RTSes used. Tidalis then used the same network model despite being a puzzle game, but for A Valley Without Wind we had to do something more hybrid. So for that game and its sequel, Keith and I converted that to work a lot more like Minecraft does, mixed with some of the logic for games like Terraria or Counter-strike or similar. The plan with AI War 2 was always for it to be a deterministic simulation and follow the same rules as the original AI War. Keith had that working as early as 2017. However, I kept running into performance bottlenecks with the way we were handling threading, and then divergences in sync as I tried to solve those. Eventually I just gave up trying to maintain determinism, as I could see that the single-player experience was never going to run fast enough or be robust enough if I hobbled it with that design consideration for the sake of multiplayer. So we simply disabled multiplayer and stopped trying to maintain it for quite a while, We did keep to some general conventions that are deterministic-ish, because it makes for less error-correction in the grand scheme, but still. Something new was going to be needed.
If it hadn't been for the multiplayer side of things, I probably would have just called the game done after DLC1. So if you enjoy these last two DLCs, then please know that you have multiplayer to thank for that. The game was already a big financial loss by the time DLC1 came out, and it only got substantially more dire since then. But multiplayer had been promised, so by god multiplayer was going to be included. And we'd work on some other cool content to keep ourselves sane (and grow the game, and maybe make some extra money on the side) as we did so. There's a big section on our wiki about multiplayer, but the short answer is that I again had to hybridize. Under the hood, from purely a networking standpoint, AI War 2 works a bit like an MMO, of all things, but also a bit like an FPS and a bit like an RTS. It also uses a unique and highly-effective form of encoding that is smaller than gzip and doesn't require the same CPU overhead. That encoding turned out to be very hard to debug, so there is a rich suite of debugging tools related to it, too, at this point. A lot of the problems being solved are similar to those of fast-paced multiplayer games, so the solutions in AI War 2 aren't exactly unique. What is interesting is that a lot of the "fast paced" data is actually coming from background threads and AIs rather than a large group of players, though. I disguise that as well as I can, but there are still moments of oddness, especially under dodgy network conditions, same as you would see with any action game. Generally those are a lot less severe than the equivalent of poking your head out around a wall, seeing a sniper, ducking back behind the wall, and being informed a second later of your death; that's one advantage of having lots of little units rather than just one player avatar, I suppose. Anyway, stuff like this -- technical things -- are most of the reason why I got up every day out of bed for the last 5+ years and worked on this project.

Making A Sequel Is A Foolish Endeavor

If I was only here for the technically-challenging things, it would not have taken nearly five years. The rest of the time was... all of us who worked on this project... trying to top the original AI War in every way we could. The problem is, the two games are fundamentally different at a low level. There were certain design choices that made the first game hard to expand past a certain point, and so that it could only have factions of a certain complexity. But also, certain choices in the design meant that even after FIVE HOURS of introductory tutorials, players were still feeling like they were lost. The original AI War has netted just under $2m at this point, which is frankly insane to me for a game with such a steep learning... cliff. The reasons that people love it are, unfortunately for us working on the sequel... not uniform. This is one of the things that makes a sequel so challenging.

It's A Question Of Identity

Are you a fan of Zelda? That must mean that you love Breath of the Wild, right? After all, that's a genre-defining once-in-a-decade sequel right there. Well, I love BotW, but I also see the point of the people who hate it because of its lack of traditional dungeons. "What is a Zelda game" means really different things to different people. The same was true when we made A Valley Without Wind 2, and it has been even more true with AI War 2. The tactical layer in AIW2 is notably less robust than that of its predecessor, but the strategy layers are notably more robust as well as accessible. This was the goal, although it took an awfully long time to get there and a lot of help from a lot of people. And it brought in a lot of people who had bounced off the first game, as well as pleasing many fans of the first game in a new way. But for another subset of players, this sequel will forever "not be AI War enough" for them, by whatever their metrics are. A lot of the last five years has been spent listening to fans, and trying to figure out if we could adapt just one more piece of the classic game into the new one. If we just tweak X, will that be make the onboarding easier for new fans, while still satisfying existing ones? If we tweak Y, can we dazzle folks with this thing that was never possible in the original, and get away from apples to apples questions in the first place?

Classic Fusion

Puffin has been working on a giant "Classic Fusion" total conversion mod for AI War 2 that is apparently going to release in the next couple of weeks, and it has a different answer to many of these questions than my and Badger's concepts in the main game wound up being. I know Democracy and a few other folks have been testing that, and really enjoying it, and I'm really glad to see that things like that exist. Specifically I know that for Puffin, the tactical side of things mattered a lot more to him than it did to me. He's been working like a madman on this total conversion for about two years now, and I think he's thoroughly tired of it, so shortly after it comes out, it sounds like it will be handed off into the care of the larger community. I suppose it will be ironic if eventually that is the preferred way to play the game, but I certainly won't mind it if that's true. I also don't know if that will be true or not; we'll find out! It's not a competition, anyway. It's more about what scratches specific itches for specific players.

More Total Conversion Mods?

Beyond Classic Fusion, it will be interesting to see what other large-scale mods, or indeed what other total conversions, might arrive. At this point, AI War 2 is as much an engine-for-strategy-games as it is a single strategy game, but it's nontrivial to learn. AI War, the original, has had a pretty decent long life in its post-DLC6 age (that was in 2014). I'll be curious to see if AI War 2 has a substantially longer shelf life due to its modding platform.

Spiritual Successors!

I think that going the "spiritual successor" route is almost always going to be a bit better these days. I really enjoyed Deathloop, which is in some ways related to the Dishonored games, but doesn't have the baggage of trying to "be Dishonored AND be Deathloop." Bioshock was free to be itself, and not also have to include the full entirety of System Shock 2 in there. Everyone is still trying to remake System Shock 2, or make a proper successor, and I feel a lot of kinship with the folks engaged in that; AI War, the original, has been my own personal white whale in that same sense.

Yet Direct Sequels Do Teach You

Still -- even though AI War 2 is not a perfect successor to all aspects of the original AI War, same as has been the case with the Total Annihilation series, the Fallout series (multiple times), or many other notable franchises... the pursuit of that white whale has been an incredible education for me personally. After making the original AI War, I thought I understood why it was good. But I was worried I didn't. It turns out I was right on both counts. After making AI War 2, my thoughts about both games are a lot more nuanced and informed, and I will always be very grateful to this game for that education. It was torturous at times, but there was a lot about myself, about game design, and about player mindsets in general that I couldn't have learned any other way. This has been a very hard project, but even as it was under way I could always tell how much I was learning from it.

Thanks For All The Fish!

It's been really rewarding to see so many players come and go over the last six years with the game, and to gradually temper the final product to be something that has so many options (campaign types and otherwise) that hopefully it satisfies most of the people most of the time, while still providing dozens or hundreds of hours of entertainment in a more accessible way. Internally, Badger and I and the others are of the mind that this is now definitively bigger, definitively better, than the original. There will always be some folks who prefer the original X-Com, but being able to bring intellectually-challenging games to a wider audience has value. Especially if players can start one way, with one level of challenge, and then keep turning up the heat in various ways as they head down the rabbit hole. This project has been a meeting of minds and hearts, both in terms of the production staff involved with it, and the players who have helped us shape it. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this ride. That part of the ride is now over, but I have every expectation of a long and fruitful legacy ahead of this title. Very Best, Chris M. McElligott Park and the rest of the Arcen crew!

[ 2022-04-22 22:28:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, here on DLC-Eve! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.995_DLC3_Release_Candidate_1 A number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, and then more last-minute refinement to DLC3. Big thanks to Badger, Zeus, CRCGamer, StarKelp, and Tom.Prince on this one. Also another heaping helping of spelling and grammar fixes thanks to ptarth! Tomorrow is the day when DLC3 finally drops! We're really excited to share it with folks. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-22 01:52:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.025_Lightning_Conduction This one is packed with bugfixes, and also gives a random color to beacon factions so that they don't get confused with other factions when you enable one (you can then further change their color as you wish). Some of these bugfixes are for multiplayer, others are for Ark Empire, a variety are for the lobby, and one makes it so that lightning AOE effects and other similar effects now show again. Big thanks to all the bug reporters as usual, but I can't help but notice that Dismiss in particular is an MVP in the recent few weeks in terms of finding things en masse. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-20 20:40:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.024_Graveyard_Digger This one has a variety of bugfixes, including one big performance fix for games that last longer than half an hour to a few hours in a single session. It's entirely possible that this also has solved the fairly rare deadlock that folks were running into at times. In DLC3, the Wights of the Necromancer have gotten a notable balance pass from Zeus, and some fixes from Tom.Prince. ptarth also did a semi-automated spelling and grammar pass over all three of the DLCs, using a tool he created for that purpose (very cool). In the standard list of map names, there are now mixed in a new set of 300ish names from the kickstarter backers who had the "planet proprieter" reward. And both DLC1 and DLC3 now have achievements set up on Steam and GOG. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-19 16:14:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.023_Beacon_Expansiveness A bunch of new factions are now summonable via beacons, largely thanks to Daniexpert. This includes some returning favorites from old pre-4.0 beacons, but also includes new factions that have never had a beacon before. Previously it was a major performance drain to have a lot of beacon factions included, so we didn't do it often. Now it's not a drain at all, so we can have as many as we want. Of course, the new problem that then led to was, "do we really want beacons to be so cluttered throughout the entire galaxy." This has led to a further set of beacon features, again implemented by Daniexpert, which divide the beacon factions into four "tiers" of importance (ranging from always seeding to being fairly rare). This neatly solves the problem for the base game and DLC factions, and also makes it so that mods can now hook into this without flooding the galaxy with beacons if you happen to have a dozen mod-granting factions enabled. DLC2 has a new music track, which was jointly commissioned by Pablo and Badger, and composed by Badger. You'll also hear it coming up in the DLC3 trailer, which will be arriving this week (hey -- along with DLC3 itself!!). DLC3 continues to get a wide variety of final polish, ranging from quality of life elements to bugfixes to feature and balance tweaks. Thanks to Badger, StarKelp, Zeus, and Tom.Prince for all their work on this over the last few days. There are also a bunch of new achievements for DLC3, and a few new ones for DLC1, thanks to Zeus. Those will be integrated into Steam and GOG shortly. (If you earn them before they are, they will self-correct, no worries!) Finally, some various bugfixes for the base game itself, relating to multiplayer, AI Reserves, AI Hunter, and various other bits. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-19 01:55:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.021_Scourge_Of_A_Beacon Been missing the ability to call the scourge via beacon? Well, that's returned, courtesy of Badger. There are... a metric ton of small and midsize improvements to the base game and DLC3, and a couple of others for DLC1 and 2 in here as well. Big props to Badger and Zeus for smashing all these items. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-16 01:50:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.019_To_Hack.2C_Or_Not_To_Hack This has a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, a number of them centered around hacking. The most critical thing from this build is a fix to a regression in the prior build that broke a lot of "hack for ships" type hacks. Sorry about that! Other changes include making many of the hacks against Elderlings cheaper, and removing the ability to sabotage-hack the ultimate fortress at all (as Zeus notes on that one, "it should be slain in glorious combat, not with some cowardly sabotage hack." Various other necromancer and templar balance tweaks are also now in place based on feedback. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-14 19:31:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Second build of the day! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.018_Stability_And_Abortability This one has only two items in it, but both are pretty important for folks that are hitting a few specific issues. First of all, in multiplayer, on the client there were sometimes floods of errors that would happen (usually but not always after 45 minutes or more of play). Turns out there was a one-line fix for that, it was an unfortunate mistake on my part. So that's nice to have fixed! Secondly, in general lately it has been possible for the game to get into deadlock states for players in some cases. Because of the highly multithreaded nature of this game, that rarely means that the actual game freezes, but instead means that the background threads are locked up while the front-end still lets you look around, but you can't save or do anything. This hasn't been fixed yet, although it also doesn't affect everyone. In this build, there are now new buttons in the escape menu, under the debug section, in that little pop up window. One of them says Log All Threads, and does just that. It will be somewhat helpful for us getting information to fix a deadlock (and a modder could cause a deadlock as well, so it's useful for them in the future also). There is then a second item, which says "Abort All Threads." This one might actually crash the game, or might get it working again, it's hard to be certain (so far for me it has not crashed anything). But what is also does is gives us an exact stack trace from each thread of where it's stuck. Assuming that the deadlock is not one one of a couple of other less-likely spots, this should probably let folks work around it, as well as giving us the tools needed to nail them afterward. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-14 01:37:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.017_Feeling_Helpful If you have NPC allies, they are now notably more helpful when coming to your aid as of this version. Thanks to Badger on this! There are also some notable balance adjustments to a lot of the speed-boosting structures, and to the speed caps on units. Similarly, some power generation rebalance for distributed-economy economic command stations. Thanks to CRCGamer on all of these. Several updates to the Exotic Ships Mod, and then a whole heap of updates to DLC3. Thanks to Badger, StarKelp, Daniexpert, Zeus, and SirLimbo for all of the adjustments and polish. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-13 18:34:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.016_Necromantic_Polish Lots of quality of life polish and various final balance tunings for the Necromancer, the major new player type coming in DLC3. If you'd like to see more of what's coming with this new faction, a new video from Strategic Sage has dropped today on that very subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64J0dHs9ayQ

[ 2022-04-11 19:35:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.015_The_Thrifty_Architrave A variety of bugfixes in this one, including one where the Zenith Architrave were so... thrift conscious... that they weren't buying anything in the prior build. Some solid necromancer polish in this build as well, as we close in on the DLC3 release date and more folks getting to play with it. And then finally, two new mods! The first one is by me actually, and is a visual-only mod that changes the regular colony-ship-style transports into "paladin transports" if you have DLC3 and turn on the mod. You can see a picture of it in the wiki. The second mod is by Donblas, and is a tweak to Expert mode to allow you to still have fleet-wide bonuses in Expert mode. I'm really glad to see mods of things like the campaign types, since it is very much in the spirit of modding to create these sorts of variants from what the core game offers. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-08 04:08:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.014_The_Intimidating_Architrave All of the art for both DLC2 and DLC3 is finally now done, along with the many various upgrades that were made to the art in the base game and in DLC1. This is a big milestone! Thanks to everyone for their patience with the DLC2 art delays in particular, that really went much longer than expected. The best was saved for last in many respects, as the Zenith Architrave are meant to be a really intimidating alien faction, and they were really time consuming to get right -- and they are now completely integrated visually of this build. They're probably my favorite faction, visually, at this point (maybe elderlings or necromancer aside, it's hard to pick between those three). A number of small tweaks and fixes are in this build as well, thanks to Badger going on cleanup duty with a number of recent tickets that came in through our bugtracker. At this point, DLC3 is feature complete, all our art is done for everything, and it's just a matter of bugfixes and balance from here on in. We really are finally closing in on the finish line, which feels really good! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-07 05:17:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hotfix build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.013_Hotfixes Mostly this just fixes some bugs that could get up in your face in the prior build when you started the game or were in the lobby. It also fixes a couple of other less-important bugs while I was at it. This one also makes a shift to Expert mode, on the advice of Strategic Sage, to no longer force Dire CPAs to be a part of that mode. They are now only required on Logistician, but they're still optional on any mode. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-06 13:27:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.012_The_Zeusathon This one has an absolute ton of balance tuning from Zeus, in both DLC2 and DLC3. Badger also made a number of improvements to the Zenith Architrave, to make them work better in certain edge cases, as well as get more of their cool toys that they were missing. He also fixed some corner cases with the AI Hunter. cml has updated his AI Core Shield Generators mod, and I got a bunch more art in place for DLC2 and DLC3. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-06 05:05:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.011_Multiplayer_Stability This one is almost entirely bugfixes, and not just for multiplayer. There are a few balance tweaks and a few quality of life improvements, as well. The most notable multiplayer issues of the last half month are now fixed, and the question of wave warnings being delayed is now the main thing I'm wondering about. The other errors were due to me making certain parts of the code more strict so that they would error earlier and tell us when something was wrong, versus giving us inscrutably drifting-away problems. That worked great, and the actual core of the problem seems to have revealed itself. A bunch of cross-threading issues for single player and MP have been fixed, and a really strange and rare bug where your ark empire ark could be deleted when loading a save is also fixed. Huge thanks to gekko, who reviewed all of our quick starts and corrected issues in a whopping 18 of them! That was a major undertaking, and we're really grateful for the result. Also a big kudos to Daniexpert, who tackled some particularly challenging code to fix an issue on the galaxy map where icons would sometimes disappear for a while after you had quit one save and loaded another. This was a very complex bug involving some of the unity hierarchy, so it was a very long day for him finding a lot of new things out. A couple of AI types have been reclassified from Brutal to Hard or vice-versa, after discussion on mantis. And Badger added some improvements to the Warden logic as well as some other updates to journal entries, among other fixes. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-05 03:37:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.010_Iconucopia This one has a huge number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, thanks to a really great sprint by Badger, Daniexpert, Zeus, and CRCGamer, with some additional fixes by NR SirLimbo. Essentially all the major things (MP aside) that have been reported recently that I haven't had time to work on because of the art and icons work are pretty much resolved, I believe. There's always more, but this was a giant chunk of stuff -- thanks so much to all of those involved. cml's Core Shield Generators mod makes a post-refactor return, with more features than ever, too. If you were a fan of this feature in the first AI War, it now has even more options in this mod in the sequel. On the icon front, I got all of the icons for DLC3 done (this was a huge number of them -- over 180, wow), and then also got some improvements in place for some other icons in the base game and DLC1. Zeus had some great suggestions on a few things that needed attention or could use better differentiation, such as the first three tiers of Exo War units. Badger also had advocated for having Arks have overlays so you can tell them apart at a glance, and that is now in place as well. These other items were in addition to the 180 items from DLC3. For modders, the most exciting news is going to be that there are now 357 new ship icons in the game that are... not used for anything at all. They're cool, they're varied, and they're for you. This is more than the base game plus any one DLC in terms of total icon count, and of course these can be combined with overlays as desired for even more variety. These are all in the Ships3 or Ships4 dictionaries, and start with the word Emblem or the word Something. This should make for much more interesting variety in mod icons, as modders choose to update to these! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-04 06:13:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.009_Architrave_Taming This one slows down the rate at which the Zenith Architrave can rebuild when you are harassing them, and has a number of DLC1 spire balance updates as well. There is also a fair bit of DLC3 balance tuning, and a whole bunch of new DLC3 art is now in place. The More System Defenders mod has been updated by CRCGamer, and he also tuned quite a few other things in the main game (such as Black Widow Golems will actually be more likely to ever be seen in galaxies again). It's been a bit of a slower period for balance and bugfixes, since there's been a focus on art, and then also we completely moved all of our web servers into a new spot, and that took quite a bit of doing, as well. The art is winding down in the next week or so, and then it's just bugfixes and balance and last kickstarter backer items. This is coming together quite well! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-04-01 03:02:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.008_Exogalactic_Wayfinding This one fixes a bug where exogalactic war units would sometimes chase the wrong target (sometimes you), which was particularly damaging in really high-faction-count games. Thanks to a variety of folks for the reports, and to Badger for figuring that one out. This one also has a huge amount of balance changes to the necromancer in DLC3, mainly focusing on higher difficulty level play, thanks to Zeus. There are another 70-some pieces of art in place now for DLC3, which is what I've been up to all day. You can always follow along with that on the watch-chris-art section in discord if you don't mind visual spoilers. Daniexpert fixed a tricky bug with waves in multi-AI games sometimes coming from their homeworlds and then traveling through realspace rather than just spawning like they were supposed to -- excellent sleuthing there. And there's a handful of other tweaks and fixes in here. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-26 02:56:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.007_Balance_And_Tuning This one has a whole heck of a lot of balance tweaks to it, in all of the DLCs (released and unreleased) as well as the base game. Big thanks to CRCGamer and Zeus on that in particular. Daniexpert has been doing a lot of bugfixing, and Badger and I have snagged a couple of them as well. A huge mound of new DLC3 art is now complete, and more will be coming shortly. It's getting on to screenshots and trailer time, so getting that all actually in place needs to happen on my end. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-25 03:13:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.006_Careful_Of_That_Federation.21 This one has a lot of bugfixes, some balance tuning, some mod updates, and also a new mod. The starting position for Ark Empires is now more flexible, which is a nice boost for them (and what I had intended from the start). Big thanks to StarKelp for implementing that. There were some deadlocks possible in recent versions, under apparently rare circumstances, but any-at-all is too frequent. I believe those were related to some locks that I put into the threading code in the prior week or so, and that has now been further refactored to no longer require locks, and thus not be possible to have deadlock. It will also run very slightly faster this way. Fingers crossed that was the correct code that was actually doing the deadlock, because that was a super rare thing. The deadlock, specifically, was "the game still responds fine, but time won't progress and commands won't be accepted anymore." The joys of multithreading mean that it's a lot different from the old style "program is frozen and we have to forcibly kill it." I also put in a bunch of code to try to catch the issue with game commands getting corrupted on MP clients after a long period of playing. So far I've been running an MP session for about 20 minutes now (it's still running as I type) and I don't see any issues, but I didn't see them before, either. Hopefully the folks that did see the issues previously no longer will. The new mod is the "Hydral Federation," by StarKelp, and is described as follows: "All of the races, fresh from the best ending from The Last Federation, have come to this galaxy. Lead by the Hydral, they have seen the endless war propagated by yourselves and the AI and have deemed you both a lost cause." I find this absolutely hilarious and wonderful that these creations from our 2014 hit strategy game are now invading here via a mod. Did you know that that specific last Hydral is also the main character in our 2016 overlooked-gem Starward Rogue? It's a set a few billion years later, so the timeline of this mod actualyl checks out fine. In other news, the DLC3 page has been updated to have its final feature list properly documented: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/ Until today, it had a mixture of proper features, scrapped features, features we gave you for free, features we moved to the expanded DLC1, and lots of missing features that we added since that page was last updated. April 21 is looking to be the real release day for this, for realsies this time, so that's exciting! Badger has been working himself to the bone and is stepping back a bit now that his work for DLC3 is done, and will pretty much just be handling any really serious bugfixes I hand him. I'm also having to transition partially to the next project to make sure that I get things set up well enough so that people who are contractors now will have an actual proper full job when that starts in a few months. I have a lot of prep work to do, and all of it is still super secret, but I'm going to be really excited to share more of it with you in about a year. Usually you can get morsels out of me about upcoming stuff, because I just can't help but share, however that is often a really poor marketing decision and this time it's not my choice. It's all good. I've been talking for a long about doing a Super Supporter DLC for this game, given how very costly and unprofitable this game has been to make, so that folks who feel like they got more than their money's worth could chip in more if they were so inclined. Even just setting up something really simple there takes time I don't have, and in general it leaves me with an iffy feeling to have a product like that, so we're just going to skip it. One of the planned bonuses will just be a free mod (that requires DLC3) that I put out. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-16 22:56:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

[previewyoutube=n5F6I-VoICs;full][/previewyoutube] Campaign Types are a new thing that we've been working on for quite a while, and originally Sage and I were designing these together back last May. Now that the game has returned from beta, Sage has put together a comprehensive video guide that explains the where, the why, and the how of these new modes. The truly important information is also available in the game, of course -- Sage himself wrote a lot of the tips and explanations that are in there -- but sometimes there's nothing like a good video to really show things off. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-14 13:55:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.004_Easy_There.2C_Hack_Response This one makes the enemy response from hacking... anything... way less intense. Unless you were playing spire-infused empire or fallen spire. Then it's probably still the same. There was a bug that was inflating the response to hacks as if you were a spire player, and there were some other tweaks that needed to happen to give you even better estimates of the strength you'd face throughout a hack. Big thanks to Badger for calming the AI down in this area. Dire CPAs are a feature for expert mode, and they were gated behind DLC3 for testing purposes until today. They've now been fully released to the base game at large, so everyone can enjoy this new pain, heh. Thanks to Strategic Sage for the idea, and to Badger for the implementation and tuning. Faction beacons were a feature that I had to remove during the great refactor, and while random faction options were a very nice addition, a lot of folks have still been pining for the beacons to return. Today I managed to get the first two back and better than ever: nanocaust and fallen spire. How are they better than ever? Well, they don't drain performance, they don't compete for CPU and RAM unless you actually hack them, and there are a bunch of hacking options that let you choose specifically what you're going to get. The beacon system in general allows for combinations of factions to be added, and it only requires xml now (the old system also required custom code per beacon faction), so not only can we add in cool multi-faction beacons, but... well, so can any general xml modder. There are some other features that I'm still looking into adding to really capitalize on all this new power in this subsystem, so I expect we'll see some exciting things in this area for a while yet. This build has a number of fixes and improvements to autotargeting as well, plus many other general fixes from myself and Badger. There are some improvements to the R-view thanks to Daniexpert, and that was a major investigation and careful fixing on his part, so big thanks there. The More System Defenders Mod has been updated by CRCGamer to now include a version of the Stormfront Ark that can be used as the centerpiece in Ark Empire mode -- that's the first mod that adds new content to Ark Empires, but I'm hoping we'll see lots more of that, because it's really fun. One other change that's in this build is that when you refit a modular ship's modules, it now has a 10 second paralysis. This keeps people from gaming modules and microing them during battle. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-11 02:34:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.003_A_Bit_Too_Chromatic_Horrifying More bugfixes, in the main, and some more progress towards having minor faction beacons again (but this time with better performance and more features, and mod-friendly, and etc). This version also includes an option for the Chromatic Horror that prevents it from scrambling your buildings and turrets around; that kind of takes the whole point of the Horror out of that guy, and may make the game much easier in general, but the Chromatic Horror is definitely a rage-generating machine when it wanders into your territory, so Badger took pity. I was a bit more inclined to leave it, since it's doing what it says on the tin, but I wasn't trying to be meanspirited about it. I think it's a valid option to have, because sometimes you don't realize just how disruptive it's going to be if it takes a long time to wander your way. Bugfix-wise, there's several good ones for multiplayer, plus a number of ones for multi-AI scenarios, plus some general exception dampening. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-10 02:01:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.002_Macrophage_Live.21 This one is on the main branch and the beta branch. If you have any issues, you can always go back to most_recent_stable, or most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build. The macrophage have been essentially braindead on the beta branch since September, and nobody noticed it until we came out of beta. Poor unpopular phages! They are all fixed back up now, so that's nice. There are a number of various bugfixes in this one, and one of those is related to how gamecommands were seemingly getting corrupted on MP clients some of the time. The fix to the flicker in the hacking sidebar items is also really nice. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-09 01:52:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.001_Autobuild_Automation This one is on the main branch and the beta branch. If you have any issues, you can always go back to most_recent_stable, or most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build. This one has a number of bugfixes that came up over the weekend (it's inevitable with such a larger group of players coming in, much as we try to avoid that issue). This also includes automation options for the automation game settings thanks to NR SirLimbo. Basically, any mod can now much more easily add settings to auto-build units of specific types at planets without having to go in and add special code for each one. Marauders now use a lot fewer drones, but their drones are more powerful, so they should perform better and still be just as powerful. Big thanks to CRCGamer for getting those worked out. Lots of new DLC3 things to test and play with thanks to Badger and StarKelp in particular. The Macrophage Histiocytes mod by StarKelp is also back in action, which is exciting to see! I wound up creating a lot of the framework today that is required for getting beacon factions back into the game (the old way those worked was super inefficient and not extensible, so I had to take those out during the refactor, and it's been on my todo list to add them back in in a better way that can work with any faction without custom code; in the meantime we have the new roguelike features in the base game, like random faction additions). This was in service of a fix to nomad galaxy having a few issues if you didn't already have nomads directly added, but it wound up doing double duty for getting through the trickier half of the beacon code. Several other bugs were also fixed, among the various other tweaks and typo fixes. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-08 02:30:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is one of the more challenging sets of release notes I've ever had to write up, and not for any bad reason. How can I really summarize 90 beta releases that span 230 days (Jul 17th, 2021 to today), and which have full notes that are 184 thousand words long? I can't even just skim those full release notes, because they are longer than TWO trade paperback novels. So... please know that this is super-abbreviated, however long this turns out to be. Let's talk big picture, first:

Why did we go into beta at all?

The short version is that I wanted:

• The code to be able to monitor itself, and in particular mods, to look for bad behavior (memory leaks or performance issues, in particular).
• The performance to be better than we had before, despite the extra monitoring we were going to be doing.
• The data structures that we were using to make sense in the context of the way factions and faction modding had turned out, which was way more robust than I'd ever expected.
• And for all this to work equally well in multiplayer or single-player.

I figured this might take about a month. The core of this took two months, and then cleanup took another half year while also developing out new and improved features. If we had halted all development, that process would have been faster, but it also would have more bugs at this point. Instead, we put all the new-feature development alongside the fixing-fallout-from-the-refactor, and that was a much better way to handle that.

All Old Savegames Do Not Translate Forward!

Hopefully everyone knows that I'm a really big proponent of keeping savegame compatibility, so I don't break something like that lightly. AI War Classic went through 6 years of development and never broke long-term savegame compatibility. With AI War 2, we hit a point where there were simply too many architectural gains that we could make by reformatting things, and so this beta is the singular long-term save breaking build we're going to do. If you have existing games you want to finish from prior to this build, you will need to do that via the Betas tab. There's a y_historical_3_309 that will let you finish older games from pre-4.0, and that will be left in place indefinitely.

Big Picture, What Is New?

This has been a technical revolution for the game, and performance is better than ever, a well as using however many cores you have. Multiplayer works better than ever before. There are multiple new modes of play, called "Campaign Types." There are a bunch of new features for the base game, and for DLC1, all available now (the price of DLC1 is also rising today to match that of DLC2 and 3). Modular ships are a thing now, as one example of new stuff. How about a list? I am going to omit everything that is from DLC3 development, because that gets even longer.

• "The Great Refactor" has new code structures, with BaseInfo and DeepInfo, and there are guides to programming mods in thathere on youtube.
• The threading model has been reworked three separate times, improving each time, and here are some conceptual diagrams that help make it clearer how that works.
• Multiplayer works on an entirely new premise, and here's a conceptual diagram for how that works. It's wonderfully effective.
• Wormhole Invasions have been completely reworked from scratch by Badger, and are a lot more fun now.
• The unit tooltips have been almost entirely reworked by -NR-SirLimbo, and the number of readability improvements in them is voluminous.
• Raid Engines now have a ton more features, thanks again to -NR-SirLimbo.
• The number of balance improvements made to the base game and DLC1 and DLC2 is just hard to really overstate, and that's mostly been the work of Zeus Almighty and CRCGamer, with some assists from a number of other folks.
• DLC1: New map type! "Classic" has been added by Badger, and it provides an experience a lot like the Realistic map type did in AIWC. Instantly a favorite for me.
• DLC1: Mods and otherwise can now define "GameEntityTypeData Extensions", which is very useful for mods.
• DLC1: New Chaotic map type, created by tom.prince!
• The game now has support for Total Conversion mods, which in turn also support mods of those mods. RocketAssistedPuffin is working on a giant first TC mod, called Classic Fusion, which blends aspects of the first and second games together. That is not yet out, but it's cool that it works.
• DLC1: There is a new Ark Empire player type, which lets you have a powerful Ark instead of your normal home command station. It's a more nomadic, challenging way to play. It's a lot like the earliest versions of the game that were closer to the original kickstarter design document, but more fun (if a bit less like traditional AI War).
• DLC1: Spire-Infused Empires provide a new way to experience the Fallen Spire campaign without having to do relic chases or any of that business. You just have spire cities from the start and start duking it out with the AI from moment one. Big thanks to Badger for implementing this design.
• DLC1: Modular ships have been added! The first ones to get this are the Spirecraft ships, but you can also find this on the CRCGamer's Riot Control Cruiser in DLC2, and on many ships in the upcoming DLC3.
• DLC1: Doomsday Mode. This was an idea from Puffin, implemented by Badger, which sees the galaxy collapse into oblivion around you as you play. Win fast or perish along with your foes!
• Ironman Mode has come to the game, allowing you to play games where you can't save-scum. Big thanks to Badger for adding this.
• Roguelike Additions have also been added to the base game, including things like adding random factions, or adding some random game features. Again big thanks to Badger.
• There have been so many quality of life features that I can't even really go over them all. Notifications, intel, and so many other things now work better than ever.
• There's a new in-game Ship Encyclopedia, which automatically includes data from any mods you have enabled. It has a varied of helpful categorizations of ships (big thanks to Puffin for filling out all that data!), plus the ability to filter, search, and sort by various types of data.
• The game is now able to detect when specific NPC factions are behaving in a way that will be draining to the performance of the game, and shows that.
• DLC1: Warheads and Interplanetary weapons have been added, but more about that in another section.
• DLC1: New Spire Dyson Spheres factions implemented by StarKelp, along with a big overhaul to the Zenith Dyson Sphere in the base game, and a new Splintering Spire faction. More about those below.
• DLC1: New Chromatic Horror faction that wanders around and causes chaos as it goes.
• A CPU Load Estimator in the lobby now lets you know what level of CPU Load the game you are contemplating is likely to require in the late game. The early game pretty much always performs great (better than ever now, too), but if you're setting yourself up for a choppy late-game experience, you now can see that.
• A bunch of art from the base game, and DLC1 got major improvements! Also a lot of new art for DLC2!

There are some major omissions from that list, which I'm going to talk about separately:

Campaign Types: Expert Mode and Beyond

This is a huge topic all on its own, but essentially these are new ways to experience the general content of the game. These have increased complexity, or more formalized rules, or both. They also tend to get increasingly difficult, but you can use lower-difficulty enemies in concert with a more complex campaign type, so it's not purely a matter of difficulty. This is more about the complexity of strategic thinking, if that makes sense. Humanity Ascendant is the default gameplay mode, and the one you've known for quite some time. HA campaigns are dynamic, aggressive, and reward the seizure of territory with powerful features even if they are difficult to defend. Your primary challenge will be assembling a force that can crack the AI Homeworld(s) without allowing the AI to scale beyond your means to defend against. Other than your home command station, there are few strategic locations that are critical to defend, making HA campaigns more of a cat-and-mouse war. Challenger is a new mode, which basically just disables some of the more cheat-style configuration options from the lobby, as well as enforcing a few things like Distributed Economy (making your metal harvesters worth defending), as well as a few other minor tweaks. Expert is an alternate, more difficult, official campaign type for AI War 2. Expert campaigns are tense and complex, where you must choose your strategic targets very carefully and have many fronts that you must defend. You must fight a minimum of two AIs, like in the original game -- a lot of the complexity of the game is lost when you only have one AI, because you don't get that ramp-up in challenge after defeating the first one, and have to figure out how to still deal with the second one. In addition to everything that Challenger mode adds, this mode forces on mechanics that make beachheading harder to cheese. You also get only one Battlestation at the start, rather than two. There are some other features that are only forced on for Expert, but you can enable most of those features in lower modes as well. Logistician is basically Expert mode, but with the addition of Fuel to manage. Fuel is a complex new system, and we encourage you to give it a try, but it's not going to be for everyone. Fuel makes you have to take more planets, has a major impact on the general flow of your game, and requires you to manage logistics in a way that the game otherwise does not ask of you. Expect some new Strategic Sage videos on this subject shortly, as he was one of the primary architects behind this and the other higher-complexity game modes. Deathwish is the final new campaign type, and it is meant for brutalizing people with permanent losses of key items when they make a mistake, restricted map types, enforced ironman, and other not-for-mainstream-play type of features. This is basically the "Full Sage" mode.

Mod Updates!

In general, we don't directly maintain mods ourselves, but here's what is going on with all the mods:

New Mods

• Devourer Chrysalis by NR SirLimbo, adds devourer golems that can evolve and change.
• From Spire Frigate to Dreadnought by ArnaudB, adds the ability to upgrade the Lone Spire Frigate to upgrade in various ways.
• Lost Humans by StarKelp adds a whole host of cool things that are actually only possible because of the new code framework. This was StarKelp's way of creating some cool stuff while experimenting around in the new framework.
• Strategic Rebalance by Zweihand, gives an experience a bit more like the original AI War. There are also line items for DLC1 and DLC2 for this.

Substantially Updated Mods

• AMU - a lot of the "cheat engine" type of features from this have been moved from this mod by NR SirLimbo into the base game itself, and the rest of the parts of this mod have been updated to work with the new code framework.
• Civilian Industry by StarKelp has been massively overhauled to better code standards and the new code framework.

Unaffected Mods

• Capturable Dreadnoughts by Zweihand
• Exotic Ships by -NR-SirLimbo
• Extended Ship Variants by -NR-SirLimbo
• Frigate Focus, by CRCGamer
• Micro Mod Collection by -NR-SirLimbo
• More Frigates by Zweihand
• More Starting Fleets by Zweihand
• More System Defenders by CRCGamer
• Powerful Command Stations by ArnaudB
• Raising The Floor Multi AI Adjustment by ArnaudB
• Supercharge Raiders by ArnaudB
• Super Saiyan Overlord by Zweihand
• Tame Dark Spire by ArnaudB

Discontinued Mods

• AI Shield Generators, by cml. Originally we were going to fold this into the main game for Expert mode, and I did some official art for shield generators, but we decided to not make this a part of the main game. I believe cml is planning to resurrect this mod with some new options at some point.
• Kaizer's Marauders by -NR-SirLimbo was a very popular faction, but for now it's disabled as it has never been ported to the new code framework.
• More Starting Fleets Plus by Zweihand. I believe that the contents of this contextually turn on as part of the main More Starting Fleets mod, now, so this one was just redundant,
• Spire Railgun Shop by Lord of Nothing has been discontinued, because the titular railguns are now available as a part of DLC1 as modules on the new modular Spire. Done with permission from Lord of Nothing!
• The Reprocessers by CRZgatecrusher. This hasn't been updated to the new code standards, and it's the one other big code-based mod other than Kaizer's Marauders that has been left behind in this way.

New DLC1 Features

A lot of these were mentioned above, but basically it's two new map types, modular ships (fallen spire particularly, but the feature in general for modding purposes), Ark Empire and Spire-Infused Empire player types, and then the new Spire factions from StarKelp. About those new factions...

Splintering Spire

A large scale war between the Dark Spire and all Sphere factions in the galaxy. Sphere factions will unleash small task forces that band together in an attempt to dismantle Dark Spire VG for parts, while the Dark Spire VG will be far more likely to expand. As Dark Spire VGs are destroyed, they will leave behind Derelicts, that Sphere factions will than fight over for extra income for their respective factions. Yesterday's friend is tomorrow's foe. A Gray Sphere, a Chromatic Sphere, and a Dark Spire faction will be automatically included when this Faction is enabled, and these factions will use the Intensity set on this faction. If you help either the Gray Spire or Chromatic Spire become suitably dominant, you will be able to hack them in order to get either Warheads (Gray Spire) or Interplanetary Weapons (Chromatic Spire), respectively. HIGH IMPACT: By enabling this, not only are you adding in two Sphere factions and a Dark Spire faction, but every single one will be stronger than normal, and be actively aiming to fight. You will have a whole other war to worry about during your own. Most notably, the Dark Spire do not care who attacked them, and will be out for blood. You'll want to shore up your defenses more than usual to account for this.

Spire Dyson Spheres

In addition to the Zenith Dyson Sphere, you can in general choose to have Gray Spire Dyson Spheres, or Chromatic Spire Dyson Spheres without getting the entire Splintering Spire thing going. They are beautiful and deadly and really cool to have around. Oh, and there's also the Chromatic Spire, too. Man there's so much!

Multiplayer!

Technically I'm still noting that part of the game as being in beta (as it always has been), but that status will be gone within the next month. Most of the serious issues are gone now, but there are still enough nits that I want a last bit of extra testing before I call that non-beta. It's quite playable now, though, and the worst thing that might happen is that a client might need to disconnect and reconnect to solve some passing issue. This is a major milestone for us!

Conclusion!

Yeah, we've been really busy on this. And there's more to come soon. We're also going to do a Developer Supporter Pack DLC before too long, because the fact is that we don't make a living from this game (I have a huge financial loss from it actually). But I'm really proud of how this is shaping up, and the Complete Edition with the truly giant third DLC is also coming within about six weeks, give or take a tiny bit. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-04 22:03:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.907_Release_Candidate_4 Release Candidate 4 is just final bugfixes, really. Unless something really dire comes up over the next 10 hours or so, this will pretty much be the version that becomes v4.0 tomorrow, with us finally out of beta. If there are any last minute fixes or tweaks other than this that are needed, please let me know within that next short period! After v4.0 and us coming out of beta, then it's just a month and a half or so until we fully release DLC3 and the Complete Edition for AI War 2, so this is an exciting time! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-03 23:09:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.906_Release_Candidate_3 This one took a bit longer than expected to get working, but that's because there are some multiplayer issues that I'm trying to iron out at the last here, and those tend to be the most time-consuming types of bugs to sort out. Overall there are a huge number of bugfixes in this new build, for both singleplayer and multiplayer. Arguably a lot of these are not important enough to warrant not coming out of beta, and I'm not sure that the remaining issues that exist cross that line, either. So the beta exit will either be tomorrow or (more likely) Friday. But this isn't just a bugfix build! There are a bunch of new FRS options from CRCGamer, all of which are very powerful but don't give fleet-wide bonuses. This makes them work very well on Expert+ mode, and they're interesting in the other modes as well. The lightning and storm warheads have been revised in DLC1, again by CRCGamer, to be a bit more like AIWC's counterparts. Essentially, these do even more damage to groups now, but they can't concentrate that damage into single targets to snipe an exo war unit (or similar) now. Expert mode and above now treats the player power level as being higher, and so the AI is more likely to deploy Exo War units against you. Great idea by Badger. NR SirLimbo has been working hard on the tooltips, further refining them so that they are easier to read than ever -- with fuel, without fuel, both are improved. There's a handful of other new things, including some new bughunting tools, a few new cheat codes, and so on. I had to substantially change the serialization format (for the network and savegames) as part of this build, just FYI. Things seem to be working fine in that area, but there's a slightly higher chance of issues, including corrupt savegames, compared to usual. This is a big step forward for improving multiplayer stability across the board, however. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-03-03 02:28:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.905_Release_Candidate_2 This one has a number of bugfixes, some balance fixes to DLC3 in particular, and then a split to the campaign types so that Expert is now split between Expert and Logistician. This release also includes a minor new "Civil Authority" metal gifting and repayment mechanic, although it's a fairly small detail. Tomorrow I hope to get through more of the relevant bugs that are left and preventing beta exit, and then Wednesday for release? That seems like good distance from Elden Ring, but it's all about the feedback on these builds. Some folks were really put off by their experience with Expert, and handling that a bit better should hopefully be a thing that makes it more enjoyable for more folks, rather than frustrating. More to come soon. Enjoy.

[ 2022-02-28 23:48:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.904_Release_Candidate_1 Happy Elden Ring Day, I guess? We'll just post this as a release candidate for now, and hop off the beta branch on Monday unless something dramatic comes up over the weekend. This build puts even more finishing touches on multiplayer, and it's now truly the best it's ever been in this title, which is really gratifying to see. This build also fixes a bug with our random number generator in general, which was causing mapgen in the lobby to not give you consistent results given the same seed. "Pull" shots (reverse knockback) and attractant fields also both work again. And the Dark Zenith better at linking their planets. There are some various other bugfixes, and balance adjustments for DLC3 and also DLC2. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-26 01:03:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.903_Multiplayer_Polish We're getting SO close to being out of beta. The plan was tomorrow, although it's International Elden Ring Day, so maybe that's not the wisest move? Regardless, there are a lot of major strides here. We might come out of beta tomorrow but not fully announce until Monday, we'll see. New in this build, factions now have an icon next to their name in the lobby when you're choosing one to add, which adds a lot to making them easier to choose and tell apart. Does not apply to the DLC3 factions just yet. Lots more balance to DLC3 in general. Lots of bugfixes across the board, too. Some particularly notable ones: A number of notable multiplayer stability improvements. Multiplayer client-side ship jitter/lag gone. Multiplayer clients no longer have disappearing ships. (These were the most major remaining MP issues!) Tachyon beams and similar now show up properly in tooltips again, unlike the last few builds. If you weren't playing with distributed economy on, it was erroneously still giving you metal harvester bonus income if you were using any command station type other than military. This is now fixed, which prevents players in the more basic game modes from having an excess of income to the same degree. The game now properly calculates overall power level, which means that exowar units will actually show up again. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-25 02:22:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.902_Spire_Onslaught The Chromatic Spire Dyson Sphere, Gray Spire Dyson Sphere, and Splintering Spire factions (all in DLC1) are now available for everyone with that DLC! Previously, these were gated to just DLC3 testers while we ironed out the most notable kinks in them. These are very interesting factions, because they can be used a few different ways. For a very low impact method, you can simply enable the new dyson spheres and they'll have some minor impact on their local neighborhood, and not much else. Low impact factions can be quite nice for adding flavor! On the other hand, if you add the Splintering Spire faction, then a whole bunch of things happen: the dark spire, plus all the dyson spheres, are automatically added. The chromatic and gray spire are busy harvesting some dark spire remains that they are slingshotting in from outside the wormhole network, and in general they have a bit of a war going on with that. If you help one side become suitably powerful, this unlocks the ability to hack for either warheads (Gray Spire) or Interplanetary Weapons (Chromatic Spire). This is an exciting new war front that you can turn on in your game, and it unlocks some powerful new tools for you, as well, if you engage with it. Major thanks to StarKelp for the excellent implementation of this, and to Ovalcircle for a lot of early feedback on it. Also regarding spire, the fallen spire have gotten a bit of a nerf compared to what they've been since gaining modular capabilities. Their power had roughly quintupled, but now it should be more back in line with what it is supposed to be. Big thanks to CRCGamer for fixing that up. Lots more DLC3 updates, some bugfixes, and a variety of new pieces of art. The new DLC1 spire features now all have proper icons, and the last of the base-game art updates that I had planned (command stations, data centers, battlestations, and more) are now in place. Additionally, some more DLC2 are is implemented. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-23 02:35:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.901_Modular_Forcefields Lots is happening around here these days! The modular units feature is now feature-complete, mainly needing bug reports and testing now. Any weapons can be set up and used in whatever combination, and the same with a variety of features like cloaking and tachyon and tractor beams. The game now supports modular hull and shield health, and also bubble forcefields. It's possible that at some point more types of modules will be added, but realistically this is plenty and quite large already; it matches everything that AIWC could do, I believe, except that it's easier to use and can support (a lot) more modules per ship. Expert mode and the others like it now have fancy new introductions thanks to Strategic Sage, and a few more balance items tweaked in them. DLC2 now has a new Prototype Assault Frigate that is CRCGamer's first modular unit, and quite cool to see. Additionally, his Riot Control Cruiser was always intended to be modular, but was just waiting for the modular code to arrive. Now that it has, the RCC is also fully modular! This only applies to new games, but old ones will still function, just minus the modular RCC. Zeus and Badger have been working hard on DLC3's factions, with lots happening in the Necromancer, Templars, and Elderlings in particular today. And then the bugfixes... so many bugfixes! Bonus Random Factions working again is one of the big ones, but forcefields also are up properly instantly when you load from savegames, versus having to unpause for a moment first to see them. Actually, in the area of forcefields there are a number of quality of life improvements (like showing their boundaries, built or unbuilt, when you are in construction mode). Beta exit will hopefully happen this Friday, and at the moment we seem on schedule for that. It's less about new stuff and more about polish and fixes at this point, for the remainder of the week. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-22 02:40:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.900_Modular_Ships_.2F_Ship_Loadouts Not a lot exciting in this one... I mean, there are modular ships / ship loadouts now, but it's not like that's the most-requested feature or anything. Right! So, modular ships -- actually, quite exciting indeed. There are a few more pieces I still need to add to those, and we need actual data for many of the ships (actual modules, etc), but the core framework is there now, and it works well. I've been mentally rehearsing this code for like two years, so in the end it went a lot more smoothly than I was expecting. At the moment the only modular ships are the Fallen Spire ones, which now blend over the Spire Railgun Shop mod's weaponry into the main game as modules. Thanks to Lord of Nothing for the designs in that mod, and for allowing us to fold in his work as modules and retire his mod. It's really nice to see all the spirecraft not just having coilbeams. Of course, we'll be adding more! In terms of the spire area, and otherwise. DLC3 balance has been seeing a ton of updates and improvement today in this build, too, thanks to the hard work by Zeus and Badger. There's really quite a lot in there. There's a few notable bugfixes, including some to mods in general, and to wormhole invasions acting a bit off. There are also more updates to the Splintering Spire faction/scenario, with lots of hard work by StarKelp in that area. It's still locked to only DLC3 testers for the moment, but that should end soon. In general the expectation is that we'll be coming out of beta in this coming week. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-21 01:54:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.807_Spire_And_Neinzul This one has many exciting things! The most exciting new thing in this one is the Splintering Spire, which is a new DLC1 group of factions that is presently in preview. It should see a wider release within the next week, but right now we're just seeking feedback on it from DLC3 testers. So please give it a try! StarKelp has been doing awesome work with that. Secondly, there's a lot of balance updates, mostly to DLC3 but a bit to DLC1, thanks to Zeus, and a number of fixes from Badger. The necromancer and elderlings have seen a lot of good balance here. Lastly, there's a solid set of bugfixes in here, including some beam weapon math fixes from NR SirLimbo. Also a few nullref and other protection fixes thanks to Badger. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-20 03:44:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.805_Bolstering_Spire This one has a metric ton of art, a lot of which is focused on the spire, in both the base game and DLC1. Some of the rest is focused on the neinzul in DLC1 and DLC3. In general just making things look better, and adding new art for some of the new units that are coming to DLC1 as it expands shortly. The Fallen Spire and Spire Infused Empires both work better than ever, and also are more clear, thanks to Badger. In particular, the bolstering mechanics are a lot more clear, and you get your third fleet when you are supposed to, rather than super late. Also more journal entries and other general help text. On the bugfix front, there's more related to MP, and a few related to SP, again largely thanks to Badger. There's also a shift with golems knocking smaller units out of the way, including your own units. Let me know how that feels; if it seems off, then I'll disable that except for giant things like the devourer golem. There are several new spire factions coming to DLC1 in the near future, and those are drawing closer to creation thanks to StarKelp: Chromatic Spire, Gray Spire (both of which are dyson spheres), and then the Spire Shattering faction which sees... them at war including with the zenith dyson sphere, and also some dark spire involvement in a new and exciting way from the base game. I'm also going to be adding a Chromatic Spire Horror small faction in DLC1, because I had a series of cool ideas and some art that was cool that I made by accident while trying to make something else, and so it seemed like a good fit. It is a small faction, but should be neat. In general there are now a lot more spire factions in this game: rather than just "regular" and "imperial" (which looked the same) and dark spire, we now have regular spire, imperial spire (which are visually distinct now), gray spire, dark spire, and chromatic spire. The chromatic are new in AI War 2 (all of the others had at least some presence in the original AI War), and they're by far the meanest and to some extent scariest out of them. They've been really fun to work on visually. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-18 04:05:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.804_Bug_Smooshing This one is pretty much entirely bugfixes, and some major performance improvements as well. Hopefully multiplayer will be running even more smoothly, although there are still a couple of known issues that I need a bit more data for, or to test myself. Badger and StarKelp were both on fire today, fixing all sorts of things, and I got a lot done as well. Towards the evening I started working some on some revised spire graphics to improve the visuals in DLC1 a bit, and also to make room for the new spire factions and their units that are coming to DLC1. I'm not quite there yet on it, but the early stages are promising. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-16 02:45:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.803_Encyclopedia_Madness When I originally set out to make the encyclopedia, I thought it would be about a half day of work. I also had in mind something relatively smaller. The end result took a solid day and a half, but is absolutely huge and really packed with features. I think I'm pretty much done with this for now, aside from a few tweaks I'll put in a while later. For now, this lets you sort and filter by all sorts of metrics, including several at once. This is also something that modders can easily extend. In-game it gives you extra information related to what factions actually have (that you can see), and what you can hack for or build but have not, and so on. Tooltips also have improved a fair bit in terms of their placement so they are generally less in the way, and dropdowns behave much better (opening taller, and centering on the selected item when opening, rather than the top of the list). Lots of great quality of life improvements, there! There are also some pretty key multiplayer fixes in this build, and some other multiplayer tracing elements that should help find the last of the canary issues if we still have more (I think we do, but I think they're reducing in severity at least). The new faction stuff from StarKelp is also coming along well, so if you're a tester on that then there's lots of new good stuff. That will be properly announced coming up later this week when it's ready for everyone. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-15 04:34:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.802_New_Challengers_Approach This is another big one. First off, it has a ton of bugfixes, including substantial improvements to multiplayer yet again. The encyclopedia has seen a first round of updates, but there's more that needs doing. You'll notice some empty dropdowns and textboxes along the bottom, which I'll be filling in tomorrow or soon. Challenger mode (the mode that is a step down from Expert but a step up from Humanity Ascendant) has seen a lot of updates, and all three of the new modes are now pretty close to final. Challenger is probably going to be my preferred way of playing now, personally, although the advanced players I expect will mostly live on Expert. And of course there's Strategic Sage cackling away over on Deathwish. The tooltips for these all do a better job of explaining what they are now, but expect more changes in that area soon. If you're a DLC3 tester, you'll find a new faction in there which is actually from DLC1, but temporarily locked to the DLC3 testers until we get a bit more testing done on it, and the art. Expect a wider release to everyone who has DLC1 later this week, with details coming then. But if you have a DLC3 test key, please do give us feedback! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-14 02:35:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.801_Load_Estimates_And_Unit_Encyclopedia Another really huge one! There's a new unit called the Ultimate Fortress that you'll run into out in the galaxy if you have the galaxy option turned on, are playing on difficulty 8 or higher, or are playing on expert mode. Zeus outdid himself with this terrifying thing, which also shows off some features from DLC3 (this is a base game unit). In the lobby, and in the escape menu, there is now a "CPU load estimator" that gives you an estimate of how heavy the game you are running (or planning to run) will be. This lets you tailor your scenario to the sort of computer you have, and since it breaks down why it is heavier or lighter, and updates as you make changes, you can also tune your scenario to get the load that fits your machine while still having the maximum number of features and factions that you want. There are many more details on this in the release notes, but this is a really exciting thing. Another exciting item is the new Unit Encyclopedia -- folks have been asking for this for ages, and it's finally here! It needs a bit more work right now with some of the categorization of some units, and it doesn't have any lore entries yet, but the vast majority of it is there and is working great. One cool thing is that this automatically adapts to mods, and modders can even extend it, so this isn't just an official-content feature. Lastly, a number of bugs were fixed, as usual. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-13 06:01:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.800_That_Expert_Has_A_Deathwish.21 This one is huge, considering it's the second one of the day. And the first one had the giant Spire Infused Empire in it! This one doesn't quite complete Expert Mode, but it's getting darn close at the point. Other than some UI bits, and some stuff for the fallen spire / spire infused route, this handles all of the wishlist items for that mode, although there is more testing and I'm sure discussion needed. This also includes some deathwish items, although they also may need testing and/or revisions. Deathwish is the extra-expert mode specifically for Strategic Sage and whoever he can convince to jump down that dark hole with him. :) DLC3 continues to get more balance adjustments, and the Necromancer flagships now have far cooler names. Oh, and bugfixes! Wow, there's a lot of good ones in here. The sidebar and the galaxy map should both now behave fully, and the galaxy map performs a ton better, too. The "Find Unit" mechanic was entirely busted since I added time-slicing to the galaxy map, and I have a feeling that wasn't all. At any rate, it's all good now, as I switched to multithreading instead of time-slicing. And a few exceptions are solved, among a few other glitches. Definitely an exciting time, and it feels like we're quite close to exiting beta finally, though I don't want to jinx it. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-12 03:48:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.799_Spire_Infusion On the one hand, this is a hotfix because it fixes a stupid bug of mine that broke map generation in the last build (my bad). On the other hand, this is a pretty exciting build, because it adds the final planned player type to the game: the Spire Infused Empire, part of DLC1. Essentially, a number of people have wanted to play the Fallen Spire campaign, but not have all that business with chasing relics and such. The general feedback is simply wanting to control the big spire ships and do the big battles in more open war, but minus the questing and story bits. That's what the Spire-Infused Empire provides: a spire city right from the start, and the ability to build more simply by taking certain numbers of planets. It's a way to quickly and dramatically get into open war with the AI, and it pairs well with a lot of other factions. You can't use it and Fallen Spire at the same time (as they are two twists on the exact same thing), but you can pair it with necromancers in DLC3, or giant Zenith factions in DLC2, or scary bois like the Dark Spire in the base game. Major thank-you to Badger for taking this off my plate and implementing it. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-11 15:07:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.798_Reliability This one is all about the bugfixes, for the most part. The most serious issues that exist should be resolved now. Hopefully this makes multiplayer even more playable. This also includes some new features for DLC1, although they are only behind a cheat code right now. Those will be coming out in actual direct gameplay over the next week or so. What's the feature? Why, the return of warheads! A fan favorite from the first game. Lost Humans also got some updates, and there is a balance update that should make macrophage a lot more active. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-11 03:09:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.797_Eldritch_Art This one is a bit different! It has a pretty huge amount of new art for the game, including some revisions to things in the base game and DLC1, and new art for DLC2 and 3. The release notes have videos of a couple of particularly cool items. There's more to come on this front, but it's not going to mean a full halt to work on code or anything like that. Speaking of code, there's a number of new goodies in this version! Your ships no longer target hostile units you are in the process of hacking (like ion cannons), which is pretty slick -- thanks to Badger for that. Additionally, a lot of updates have happened for the Necromancer and the Elderlings in DLC3. More to come soon, including more bugfixes. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-10 05:23:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.796_Greatly_Thinning_The_Turncoats This one still has an occasional turncoat unit (grrr), but they are REALLY hard for us to hit, now. Versus after yesterday's build, threads were no longer insane, but turncoats were still frustratingly frequent. There was also a performance regression in the build of yesterday or the day before, and that's fixed now. Occasional turncoat aside, this is running really well right now! Pretty much all of the other recent bugs of notable severity have also been fixed. If you get an exception in this build, please do give us your log, as it has some direct info and then some info following the exception. A screenshot of the exception doesn't show the whole story. Necromancer also continues to evolve thanks to Zeus and Badger, and there are now tips of the day and regular tips about the "wait for stragglers" mode. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-08 00:23:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.795_Deduplicating This one hopefully is going to fix a LOT of the strangeness that we've been seeing. Essentially, this was a confluence of a couple of bugs that combined in some nasty ways, but generally speaking did so only a few times an hour per machine. The frequency has gone up a lot more recently because of how much more multithreaded the game is than before, but the root bug goes back to November 17th. At the moment, we shouldn't see any more units switching sides, or any of the other random background thread exceptions that were suddenly extra-prevalent in the last week. So for now I'm going to close all those tickets, and if we see new things, then we'll address those fresh. A whole lot of the codebase has also been further improved when it comes to the threading model, and so the error count really should be a lot lower coming up. Fingers crossed, but testing on my own machine so far is good. Dire CPAs continue to get refinement from Badger, and the necromancer got a LOT of improvements, in particular in balance and in clarity and ease of use. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-07 01:47:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.794_Synchronicity This one has some (hopefully) major improvements to some of the odd threading issues we've been seeing on the beta branch. The release notes have the details, but essentially I had switched a couple of our pools that are used in a cross-thread fashion to use the (relatively) new Concurrent collections from Microsoft, and near as I can tell those have some accuracy issues. I've switched back to traditional locks, and the performance is still great, and hopefully things will be back to the former level of accuracy. The whole turncoat unit issue is a deeper rabbit hole than before, so I've increased the debug output details for those, but it's possible that my pool thread lock changes will already resolve it. We'll see. This build has a few other bugfixes, although there's still more I need to get to on mantis. Also included in this version are some more Expert Mode improvements from Badger, and some DLC3 improvements from him as well. And lastly, I've added proper official art for two of the largest DLC2 Dark Zenith units. More to come on that front, and for DLC3 and some base game revisions, too. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-06 01:53:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.793_The_Turncoat_Question There was limited time today, but this one includes the new Dire CPAs feature thanks to Badger for DLC3 testers to experiment with (it will be public to everyone on the beta branch soon). This one also includes more instrumentation to try to figure out why ships are switching sides, since they are still doing that sometimes. I'll be very curious to hear what the reason is when someone runs into it again in the new version. Thankfully, a number of other bugs were able to actually be fixed, versus just better-instrumented. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-04 22:50:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.792_Thread_And_Entity_Sanity Wow, I keep thinking that we're getting close to being out of beta, and then more strange stuff pops up. Thank you so much to everyone testing on the beta branch, because this really helps us to make sure things are as clean as possible when we come back off this branch. To that end, there are two major fixes in this build that should solve a lot of issues. First of all, the way that entities (ships, etc) are centrally tracked has been reworked a fair bit. This should prevent some of the truly bizarre issues we were seeing lately such as your units suddenly belonging to the AI, or vice-versa. Worst case, it will actually give an error message and let us know what's up, rather than just silently robbing you or gifting you. Secondly, there's a lot more thread protection in there to prevent threads from overrunning themselves. I suspect that this was the root cause of a ton of issues here. Badger had figured out a way to prevent that, and applied that to some of the short-term planning threads with success, and so now this is applied everywhere throughout the game. Knock on wood, that should solve crashes and a whole bunch of other random stuff that was fairly recent in appearance. In multiplayer, the pings now have a notification, which is a pretty major quality of life improvement. There are some other improvements to how flagships show up if they have both a control group number and an overlay (previously it just showed the overlay). ARSes also give variable numbers of units (depending on the ARS), which is quite fun and interesting. The Lost Humans mod continues to gain more updates from StarKelp, and includes some things like a Scourge Lab that can appear, Construction Convoys, and its own galaxy map filter. Behind the scenes, I've been working on artwork for DLC3, the latent DLC2 art, and the new DLC1 art (for new features coming to DLC1), as well as some replacement art for the base game in places where I feel like the art just needs some improvement. All in all, I have... 325 unique pieces of art to do for that, turns out. So... yeah. That's going to be a few months, since I'm going to be needing to also work on actual bugs and features and so on. It took me a day and a half just to get the list and the prep work done. DLC3 is slated for late April at this point, largely because of this big list of things. That said, as has been happening, there will be plenty of ongoing updates, including art drops and code and balance and so on. So there will be plenty happening between now and DLC3 releasing. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-04 03:12:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.791_Network_Defragmentation There are a few new expert mode additions in here, making that even more difficult and interesting -- thanks to Badger for adding those! Also some nice DLC3 improvements. On the networking front, I've made a number of improvements that should yield a better experience, lower bandwidth usage, reduced errors in some spots, and no more "traveling back in time" for some units under heavy load/fragmentation conditions. Beyond that, a metric ton of bugfixes are in this build, some related to MP, others related to the game as a whole. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-02 02:24:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.790_Defense_Against_Rogues This one has some improvements from Badger to the tech window, and also includes several bugfixes from him (including some cross-threading fixes that are high-priority and were bothering folks over the weekend). Beyond that, StarKelp has a number of fixes and improvements to his Lost Humans mod, including adding new Rogues for you to meet. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-02-01 00:45:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.789_Network_Consolidation This one has a whole lot of cool new things for the necromancer, if you're a DLC3 tester at the moment. For everyone, there's a lot of networking improvements in here. Accuracy, speed, and a lower number of options when it comes to steam networking. I also found that the steam networking in particular was causing some hitching and freezing on the client and host, and moved that code onto a background thread where it no longer causes that. I'm not sure if I got all the canaries or not, but it seems like I got a number of them, anyhow. There are some new tools that allow you to send metadata headers along with the data, and if you run into a canary, then you can go into personal settings, network, and enable that to get a more precise hit as to where the problem is. If you're the client and getting the error (most likely case), then the host actually is the one who has to enable the metadata send, because they're the one generating the data. Oh yeah! I almost forgot, but there are literally dozens of bugfixes for nullrefs in here. It touches pretty much every faction in the game in at least a couple of places. All that carnage from a couple of builds back with the new rash of nullrefs should be solved now. Also, tachyon beams work again, unlike the last build or two where I had messed those up with a boolean inversion. More to come soon, but hopefully this does well for folks in multiplayer over the weekend. I still have some known bugs to iron out, but in terms of random performance drops and error popups, fingers crossed those are largely a thing of the past. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-29 05:53:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.788_Canary_Search This one fixes a bunch of more stuff with multiplayer, and a few single player bugs like tachyon beams not working. This also gives some great new quality of life improvements when dealing with cloaked enemy ships on a planet. As far as multiplayer goes, I think it's pretty much more solid now than it ever has been before, but there are a couple of places where I know the code is being sent incorrectly (we get "canary warnings" from that). At the moment, I haven't been able to find those yet, so I've put in more canaries, and that should give us proper info on it as people hit the new canaries. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-28 19:00:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.787_Yet_More_Performance I had hoped to be out of beta a week or so ago, but we're not quite there yet. On the plus side, we're continuing to make some astronomical strides in general stability, performance, and so forth. This applies to singleplayer and multiplayer. We have a couple of dramatically-overpopulated huge savegames that would have ground to a halt in the past, and they now actually run at about half sim speed and 30fps; by simply adjusting the game speed up to 2x, you can run those in realtime, in other words. I prefer that the game run at 60+ fps, of course, and at full sim speed; but in this particular situation, we're talking about 9.5 hours into a game with 13 intensity-10 factions, 3 difficulty 9 AIs, and three other factions in addition. In total, under the hood, 49 factions in place, and about 550k ships in 40k groups. That is... really really extreme, and the fact that it's quite playable now is something I'm really pleased by. Even better, the game now uses far more of your processor cores as of this version for these extreme sort of scenarios. It won't use excessive CPU in a normal situation, but it does scale up as-need, even on 16+ cores. There are some safety mechanisms in here that are new for various NPC factions, which allow them to force stacking when they start getting too many units spawned. This is useful even for modders, so that if they wind up with runaway unit counts on high intensities of their factions, they can have the game automatically adapt and get better performance out of it. In the event that the automated logic doesn't get the job done, it now shows what is going over budget in a warning fashion, which should encourage people to submit savegame bug reports where more direct tuning can be done by the faction author. Overall I like giving people the tools to succeed and not shoot themselves in the foot, so this is a big step forward in that regard. These mechanisms only apply to NPC factions, not to player ones, incidentally. Lots of bugfixes in this build, many of which are related to the recent "don't reference a wrong unit" code that was put in. But also, this fixes a couple of notable multiplayer bugs, and so hopefully the multiplayer experience is smoother than ever, as well. I still expect some remaining small issues for a bit, but so far I'm really heartened by just how well it's running on my test setup. Civilian industries got some updates as well, and runs again (it was busted at the last moment in the prior build). More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-28 02:43:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.786_A_Very_Intense_Patch Whew, this one is absolutely giant. It's mainly focused on polish and bugfixes, but it has a number of DLC3 features in there as well. I was hoping to get out of beta last week, but there were too many things that have needed attention. I'm happy with the progress that is happening now, though. This new build includes some performance improvements for extreme faction situations, which allows factions to detect poor performance and then throttle themselves. We had a save with a ton of intensity 10 factions in it that were getting over a million units in the game, and the performance was really suffering. Now it scales up way less rapidly in there, and the performance is much better. If we are alerted to other poor-performing faction saves, we now have tools where we can fix those up when the saves are provided. This is also something that modders can make use of. DLC3 changes abound, such as the Elderlings having some new hacks you can do against them, and lots of Wild Hives updates, and Necromancer updates... the list is long. Bugfixes are really voluminous here in general, too. A lot of multiplayer fixes are included, but there are also many single-player ones. There were also some really nasty bugs relating to pooling of units in really high-load games, and those are now fixed. A couple of these things were pretty giant amounts of code surgery, and some of those will give a few errors in the short term rather than silently doing something wrong. As we find those, we'll fix them and then they also won't have errors. At the moment we've fixed a few hundred cases of those, but there are likely more lurking (none have shown up in testing at the moment, but that's not an ironclad thing by any stretch). A lot of this had to do with making things more resilient when the game is under extreme load. Making it work more correctly in those cases, as well as making it not run as slowly in those cases. Mod-wise, Civilian Industries has seen a bunch of updates from StarKelp, and they now perform a lot better and send less data in multiplayer, too. Existing civilian industries games are broken, but all other saves are fine. StarKelp also added a new Lost Humans mod, which is a cool new thing that allows for Travelers and Lost Colonies to spawn out in the world. This is a unique mod in that it uses a non-faction-based mechanism to have these work, which is a first among mods. Very cool feature that is also very low-load. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-26 03:12:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.785_Just_Bugfixes This one just has some bugfixes, none of them TOO serious. That's kind of the idea for the period leading up out of beta. Hopefully if things are looking good, then Monday might be the day. I guess maybe Tuesday if the winter storm coming up knocks out my power, or if there are enough bugs that we need one more day of testing at that time. More to come soon!

[ 2022-01-15 03:40:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.784_Tractor_Recursion Lots and lots of bugfixes, a few DLC3 additions, and some quality of life tweaks. I typed up most of a longer post, had to step away for a bit to take care of something, and discord ate it when I got back. Nice. So I'll be super brief, instead. We need to keep an eye on this for a bit longer before we let it out of beta, clearly, but I'm quite encouraged in the main. Thanks to everyone for all your bug reports. More to come soon!

[ 2022-01-14 03:48:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.783_The_Return_Of_Multiplayer.21 Multiplayer is BACK, folks. There were a lot of beta-branch-specific bugs since the great refactor started, because I needed to get singleplayer working first, and then get multiplayer going. I am very very happy to report that this should be the most stable and most performant version of multiplayer yet, beating out the stable branch most likely, knock on wood. There are still some things that I'm sure will come up in testing, but the ghosts issue seems to finally be fully resolved, which means the "my stuff explodes for no reason" issue, in other words. There are some other small bugfixes here, but mainly this is MP stuff. There are also a number of notable balance adjustments to DLC3 content, mostly thanks to Zeus. This feels really good, although it did take me a day longer than I originally expected. I've been able to play 10-20 minutes of multiplayer gametime at once without issues now, though (and I just didn't test further than that). More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-12 03:11:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.782_Smooth_Reloading Hopefully we are in the last few days before this comes back out of beta. I have some known issues I need to fix in multiplayer, but once again we've cleaned up the full (I think?) list of known bugs of any seriousness that are afflicting multiplayer. This build also makes it so that when you reload the xml for the game by changing enabled mods or dlc, it now does so in a smooth way with actual interface feedback about what is happening. This is how it was prior to the beta period, but since the beta period it's been jerky and slow and seems like the program is frozen at times. All fixed now! This build sees tractor beams able to drag ships around again properly, tachyon beams no longer over-negating cloak, invulnerable ships truly being invulnerable again, necromancy working again, stacks splitting less aggressively, ships no longer losing orders when going through wormholes, no "infinite threat spawn" situations anymore, and so on. Improvements-wise, this includes a feature where ship lines transferred between fleets now take on the orders of the fleet they are being transferred to. And some work on vassals in DLC3, though that doesn't have its control interface yet. Necromancers also got a number of balance improvements and tweaks. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-10 03:12:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.781_Tachyon_Healing_Reversal This one... fixes all of the really major bugs that I'm aware of in single-player! So heap on some more, see what you can find! ;) I still have some known multiplayer bugs that I need to fix before we're able to leave beta, but beyond that and whatever new is reported... that's where we are. So that's quite exciting! Also exciting? Your own tachyon beams (you know, the ones for revealing clocked enemies?) will no longer accidentally heal enemy cloaking devices, making them perma-cloaked no matter how much the enemy shoots you. Yes... in the past build, I made an error and tachyon beams were your own worst enemy, creating invisible unhittable terrors of enemies who could shoot you with impunity. Seeing that was actually pretty menacing, and I understand it cut a swath through several player empires. Uh... my bad! This new version has some performance improvements (again), and also a lot of improvements to how notification hovers work. If a notification talks about things on multiple planets, it now highlights all the planets of relevance. The necromancer got a number of new powers in this build thanks to Badger, and also got a bit of a nerf to the very late game since they were getting absurd apparently. Finding the ideal power curve for that new player faction is a work in progress, but sounds like it's coming along. I particularly like that the Neinzul Elderlings have sanity that they lose, and are losing it faster now. That's fun. The build yesterday also had some bugs in the new hull system from SirLimbo, which is understandable for something so huge. Those are fixed now, although it sounds like there are a few final gasps from other bugs in that bit of code. Thanks to everyone who has been testing, and hopefully the next few builds are uncommonly clean for how things have been the last half year. We're finally nearing the exit of beta, and the end of the great refactor, which is a milestone I will really relish. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-07 04:04:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.780_Nomadic_Ark_Empires_And_The_Hull_System The last couple of builds had some notable bugs, apologies for that. Those are all solved, and performance has been boosted yet again (compared to the distant past, not just the recent past), and there are some quality of life improvements. Beyond that, there's a very cool hulls system that -NR-SirLimbo has added to the game, mainly for mods. This is something that lets you create more AI War 1 style hull types and ammo types and vulnerabilities and strengths. It's not something the main game uses much, but it is used in order to provide Heroic Ship traits (really big ships that are immune to most "bs attacks," so to speak). Beyond that, it's a really interesting platform for mods to do cool things. The More System Defenders mod has returned, and there was at least one other mod depending on it that is now working again, too. The Ark Empire in DLC1 has been very close to completed! Thanks to Badger on the most recent batch of items there. I still have a very few last bits to add in, but in general you start with an Ark that is nomadic in the middle of enemy territory. In other words, you don't automatically have your first planet, you have to fight for it... or you can opt NOT to take that planet at all, and instead to take one of the neighbors as your first planet. And your actual king is an ark that is mobile and that you can move around as you wish, so your empire is permanently fluid. It's a very interesting way to play, and gets back to the original kickstarter goals and designs. I don't think it's going to be the way that most people prefer... but then again I could be wrong. It also includes build-your-own-starting-fleet mechanics, which are super exciting. The normal empire that we have now is something that we built because the Ark Empires just "didn't feel like AI War" when it was the only way to play. But now the Ark Empires are much more advanced, and optional, so I'll be curious to see what people find is more fun in the end. Badger also made a number of major improvements to the Intel menu, making it way more readable. Necromancer got some tweaks from Badger, and expert mode got some tweaks from Tom. Puffin is also still steadily working away on his massive Classic Fusion total conversion mod. Lots of cool things afoot! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2022-01-06 00:42:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.777_Last_Refinements_For_The_Year This is quite a big one! Dozens of bugfixes to the game and to various mods, and things should be running better than ever. Plus a whole lot of other things: Doomsday mode (a new DLC1 feature) got some refinements from Badger. Expert mode got some more refinements from Tom. The message log has been upgraded a ton so items in it are clickable, and same for the right-side temporary messages that pop up. They have tooltips explaining what will happen when you click each line, and the message log has a new icon in the bottom left so it's clearer that it's not just for MP chat. Speaking of icons, the tabs on the left sidebar have gone iconic rather than text-based. We have more room now, they're more attractive, and people have not been a fan of the sideways text that used to be there. Puffin has been busy on his Classic Fusion mod, which is not yet released, but which is seeing a lot of internal updates frequently. Three new mechanics have been added by him to the game in general to support some of what he wants to do there, and that's the devourer, weapon points, and infestation ship mechanics. Goodness! The list of bugfixes is pretty intense, and StarKelp has made both improvements and fixes to his Civilian Industries mod. And lastly, a last-day-of-the-year surprise from ArnaudB, he's created a new "From Spire Frigate to Dreadnought" mod, which lets you hack the lone spire frigates to turn them into massive spire battleships or dreadnoughts. Wow! Well, more is going to be coming very soon, but not before the end of the year (which is in about five hours where I am). Happy New Year!

[ 2021-12-31 23:31:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.774_Metal_Flows Whew, okay, lots of cleanup in this one, largely from the work yesterday. The way that metal outflows were working is much faster as of yesterday, but there were a variety of problems I needed to fix up today. It's even faster now, and also actually fully correct as well. Another thing that has been really-wrong for a long while (during the beta) was the way that tech previews were showing ship counts. That's now vastly more efficient, as well as actually -- again -- being correct. This also applies to the strengths/weaknesses R view, all of which I had to pretty majorly re-code. The other bug that has been biting a lot of people lately is one where a bunch of ships would complain about the "squad in central registry was actually" errors flooding through the game. The root issue is there in the stable build (though silent), and has been there for years (it's the root of the ghosts in multiplayer, also), but it's gotten much worse in the beta since we now do so vastly much more multithreading (and now has errors that pop up when there's a problem). That should now be fixed, and we should not be seeing that error anymore, knock on wood. There are a few specific cases where we might see an error about the central registry if the timing is just wrong and I need to update some code, but that should be rare. Right! There's still other bugs that people have noted, and I plan on trying to plow through a ton of those tomorrow, as well as actually getting to my correspondence. I wanted to go ahead and get these major fixes in today, though, so I focused there first. This build also includes a planet cap of 120 by default now (though you can unlock it with a personal setting in the performance section), because anything above that is kind of death by a thousand paper cuts for performance on even very modern machines. 120 planets was the original limit in the first AI War, and things should perform quite nicely up to there on machines in this game now. The only places where I'm still seeing performance lag (though I'll need more data) is currently on 180 planet maps with tons of factions and deep into the midgame, and even there I'm still averaging 60 fps now, with full sim speed, so that's a lot of wiggle-room and should see normal map sizes really play very nicely. And lastly, now the expatriate tech can upgrade human resistance fighters and ALL outguard (not just some of them), which makes the HRF in particular way more useful as an ally than they ever have been in the past. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-29 03:34:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.773_The_Turbo This one is a bit unexpected in its content. There's a few bugfixes and QoL improvements, but then mostly I focused in majorly on both sim performance and framerate for the game, and got some pretty magical results. Overall there were some places where in a giant galaxy from user deadzone with a ton of ships and factions, I had like 60% sim speed at best. I now have 100% sim speed on that, with some very occasional dips that I haven't yet located. That particular save also was extremely choppy, and was giving me a framerate that was maybe in the 40s, but extremely jerky because the frame times were so uneven. I've done a ton of work on that, and I'm now seeing closer to 60-70 fps, with some dips still on that as well, but with it largely being smooth instead of jerky. I get so used to playing midsize games, or the early game, or just whatever saves people are sending in, that I don't usually see these performance hotspots unless someone happens to give me a save that has it. If you've got such a savegame, then please feel free to either pop it on our bugtracker or send it to me on discord. The changes to make this work so much better were nontrivial, so there are likely going to be some cross-threading bugs resulting from this. That will keep us on the beta branch slightly longer, but honestly it just depends on testing results. I have a big backlog of correspondence as well as bugtracker tickets to look at since being out for the holiday, and I promise I'm not ignoring any of that -- I just wanted to really focus on this thing today, since it's the sort of thing that both is really important as well as leads to potential new bugs. Having this in sooner than later, and then dealing with the existing reports, should let me double up on dealing with those reports plus new ones. So how is performance now? I'm getting pretty diminishing returns on the one savegame that was a big problem for me so far. All the other saves I have were already fine. Do you have any saves that still are problematic in the new version? If so, send them on over! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-28 03:08:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.772_Refinements_And_Polish Okay, I really need to stop predicting what my next day is going to be like. I was planning on finishing up the bugfixes for multiplayer today, but instead I had to spend a bunch of time on the phone with Intuit (uggggh), and then there were a rash of other issues that affect both single player and multiplayer, so I worked on those, instead. We really are getting close on the beta being back to the stable branch, but there's still just a bit too many things going on for me to be ready to pull the trigger yet. There's an interesting poorly-performing mid-game save that deadone77 provided, and before we come out of beta I want to see if I can't get that running smoothly. I suspect it already runs better than the stable branch would have with that scenario, but now with all the beta improvements I can actually see which parts are slower and I think I can deal with that. I suspect that if I can get that solved, then that will be a major performance boon for games in general in that sort of state, which will be great for all of the more active factions. Anyway, so there's still some random bugs, there's that performance thing I want to get dealt with, and there's the MP bugs that I still need to work with. As far as getting out of beta goes, that's the full list of what I'm aware of. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so I'm going to be signing off for a few days to spend time with my family. I hope that you and yours are having a great holiday season if you celebrate anything around this time, and if the next holiday for you is New Years, I'll be seeing you well before then. That's the other big reason I don't want to go out of beta right now: doing that right before a holiday where I'm not around and a number of new people are likely to show up seems unwise. I'll be back on the 27th or so. Thanks so much to everyone who has been working so hard on testing, and discussing, and tweaking and fixing things! Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-24 02:47:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.771_Expert_Mode_And_Civilian_Industries Thanks to Tom, this one has a version of expert mode that is very close to feature-complete. Balance feedback is still needed from more folks on it, and I have some more ui work to do on the top resource bar, and there are some more optional features planned for expert mode, but the really core stuff is all there from Strategic Sage's point of view, which is super exciting! He and I had been plotting these features since May, so that was quite the wait, and I thank him for his patience and ongoing advice on it. Tom has really made expert mode happen way faster than I would have been able to, which is a huge boon, I'm really grateful. In other news, I've reviewed all the mods since we're nearing the end of this beta period, and marked the ones that are not ready yet as being disabled, and let the various authors know for those who did no already know. On that note.... Civilian Industries has been something that took a ton of work to convert over, but StarKelp came in and smashed the last of the issues with that, and it's now back in working order for the first time since entering the beta period! That's quite exciting since this is one of the most popular mods, particular for newer players. I've been working primarily on multiplayer, getting the bugs in that ironed out so that the beta branch will be as-good-or-better than the current stable branch for multiplayer. I'm not quite to that point yet, and I would not call the multiplayer playable on the beta branch just yet, but I think perhaps tomorrow it will be. There's a few other last-minute bugs that I see have been reported for single player as well, so I'll knock those out before we get off the beta branch in general. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-23 03:37:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.770_Bug_Roasting Not quite off the beta branch yet, but I'm hoping that either tomorrow or the next day will see that. There were some severe regressions and some other major issues that just got missed in the last build, but those are all cleared up now and I'm currently not aware of any major bugs in the single player game for the base game and the first two DLCs. If there's more I'm missing, please continue to let me know! Multiplayer remains offline in the beta branch, but I aim to get that sorted out tomorrow. I had been hoping to get that all done today, but the vast majority of my day got taken up by the other bugs on the roster. For multiplayer, the main thing that I have to get working again is the initial handshake and the way that deserialization buffers work; during the refactor, I changed that back in July, and I recall thinking "oh yeah, I'll have to check and make sure that all does right when I get to testing multiplayer." At the time, I thought that was going to be August! Still, as extra-long as this giant beta period has been, the game is exceptionally polished from it. The extra throughput that we have made a severe memory leak I introduced a couple of days ago something that almost flew under the radar. That's maybe a strange flex, but in the past, or indeed in most programs, a memory like that would have been paired with far more substantial general program slowdown. (I've thoroughly checked this for other leaks, and beyond that one boneheaded one from the 17th, we're good). I've done a couple of major system refactors in my past work, twice on really large business systems spanning a bunch of servers, and a few times on games for Arcen (including the original migration from my hand-coded engine over to have Keith and I piggyback Unity back in 2010), and this has by far been the largest. The entire AI War 2 project has in general been a time of pushing technical boundaries in order to open up new gameplay and modding and performance abilities, and that has been a challenge to balance along with the regular schedule for the game, but I'm really glad to where the technology has (very nearly) arrived at now. When we first set out to work on AI War 2, neither Keith nor I had ambitions for nearly such complex factions, AI that would process so much data, or support for mods of such complexity. But that's how the game and its community have evolved, and the modern version of the game really handles all of it very well. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-21 06:04:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.769_Neinzul_Custodians_And_Total_Conversions Let's start with a question: aside from multiplayer, if you're in the beta branch, are you seeing anything that would prevent us from merging back with the main branch? Because I've finished all the todo items off my list for single-player. I have another day or day and a half of multiplayer work and fixes to do, plus whatever bug reports people make in that timeframe, but other than that we're head back for the stable branch for the first time since mid-July, good grief! But seriously, if I'm missing something please let me know! This version has a lot of bugfixes, and yet more total conversion support. The first total conversion mod for AI War 2, called "Classic Fusion," seems to be nearing a releasable state. It's essentially recreating most of the original AI War (AI War Classic) in the AI War 2 engine, with the AI War 2 factions, and with other specific tweaks to kind of merge the two games and meet in the middle. I got my first taste of booting it up today, and just going into the build menu -- which looks like AI War 2, of course -- made me immediately have this intense wave of nostalgia as I saw all the AIWC ships and structures, reborn in a new fashion. This is something Puffin has been working on for years now, and it's quite a feat. Tom has also added more refinements for fuel in expert mode, which seems quite welcome! That mechanic has seen a lot of discussion on discord, and I'm glad that it's getting balance and attention. In the short run I've been focusing my efforts on getting us out of beta, but even after that there's a long list of other items I plan to work on for expert mode, DLC3, DLC1 late additions, and some other general base game additions. Speaking of DLC3, StarKelp has been working hard on the Neinzul Custodians, which is basically the Roaming Enclaves. The Neinzul Wild Hives, another DLC3 faction, also got some updates and some new planet-wide ship mechanics to go with them. This game went from being "oh, poor Neinzul, they get no representation and it's all spire and zenith" to "wow, we have five substantial Neinzul factions in the third DLC." I am pleased with this development, and the further expansion of the lore and civilization of this race. Out of the three main alien species in the AI War universe, they've always been the least-explored. Nice to be reversing that! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-20 03:34:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.768_Ironman_And_Doomsday This one has a lot in it! First of all, lots of bugfixes and performance improvements, getting us closer to being out of the beta branch. Hopefully next week, knock on wood! Perhaps even more exciting, this one adds some new features to the base game and to DLC1: The "ironman mode" (where you can't savescum) was previously part of DLC3 for testing, but is now part of the main game and ready for use by anyone. In DLC1, there is now an optional "Doomsday Mode" you can turn on, which causes the galaxy to progressively collapse around you as you play. You can make it more or less intense. Thanks to Puffin for coming up with the cool idea, and to Badger for implementing it! Expert mode has also seen a lot of balance updates, thanks to vigorous discussion on discord, advice from Strategic Sage in particular, and thanks to Tom for implementing the changes. Fuel should be more interesting and challenging now, is the short of it, and there's also some options for trying out a few different balance variants of it. Tadrinth has added yet another cool AI type for DLC3, which is the "Speedster" this time. This one uses fast ships in waves, has speed magnifiers on all planets, and has special speed booster guardians in the warden fleet. Also in DLC3, the necromancer, templars, and elderlings have gotten a whole heap of updates to make them more balanced and fun. Lots of cool additions from Zeus in particular, and also a lot of balance adjustments from Badger based on discord feedback. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-19 04:11:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.767_Elderling_Sanity We're suddenly VERY close to being able to come back out of the beta branch! Our remaining todo items for that milestone are here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=25884 If you know of any bugs that are important to have fixed before we get off the beta branch, then please do let us know! Comment on the bugtracker issue of note to bump it to the top, for instance (you can use your steam login if you want). When it comes to coming out of the beta branch, that's a major milestone because we've been on the beta branch since July, good grief. Literally six months as of... today, actually. I'm hoping to be out of beta mid next week, but it depends on what people mention in the meantime. Out of beta won't mean that Expert mode or the new DLC1 and DLC3 items are all done, but it will mean that folks can play the most-stable version of multiplayer yet, as well as just generally having all the awesome improvements from the last six months. Speaking of awesome improvements, there's a lot going on with DLC3 features and factions still, too. Tadrinth has added a super intense new Panopticon AI type, which comes complete with a bunch of new unique AI Eyes just for it. Badger has been rebalancing and expanding the Neinzul Elderlings, which now have a sanity meter and can basically go insane in certain circumstances (overcrowding). Elderlings are a really terrifying enemy in general, but they're also a really dynamic and interesting ally when you choose to set them up that way. The maddening of Elderlings works a little bit differently when they are neutral or antagonistic to you compared to when they are your allies, but both are very exciting and help give even more of a lovecraftian feel to this DLC. StarKelp has been working on the Neinzul Wild Hives, making them drastically more fast-acting and violent, like an infection. I've been focused on bugfixes, and other blockers for coming out of beta. Hovering over icons in the planet view now works properly again (was a recent regression), the intel sidebar no longer jumps all around like an insane elderling, and tutorials are now fully functional again. Plus other smaller items! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-17 04:24:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.766_The_Red_Harvest This one has a bunch of necromancer and templar and sapper improvements for those testing DLC3, plus many other balance items. For those on the beta branch for pre-DLC3 stuff, this has a number of significant bugfixes, most notably around reloading the xml for switching what your enabled mods and/or expansions are. This is the first time that has worked since the start of the Great Refactor, and it's a relief to have that done because it was the single most complicated thing on my todo list prior to us being able to get back off the beta branch. This build also improves raiders and raid starships a bit, and adds some exciting new foes when you're playing a fallen spire game in DLC1. Yesterday I spent most of the day organizing items on our bugtracker so that everything is in one place and I can see what is needed to finish out the beta period, the DLC3 test period, expert mdoe, and the complete edition in general. That helps a lot! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-16 03:58:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.765_Easier_Upgrades_And_Necromancer_Surge This one feels fairly game-changing just because of one QOL feature in it, which is that you can upgrade your fleets (and see more details about them) right from the techs tab. Various folks had requested that over the years, and having that in now is really awesome. You can still use the upgrade on the fleet details popout as well, but now you can basically do it whichever way is more convenient. DLC3 is getting a ton of refinement in this build for our testers to enjoy, and the necromancer is really coming together. Metal and energy (and thus also fuel) are no longer things that necromancer needs to worry about; it's all hacking, science, essence, and hexes. The necromancer is definitely feeling increasingly great to play, and it's definitely a simpler (but potentially brutal) mode, which was the idea. There are a fair number of bugfixes in this build as well, including some of the more prominent ones that were annoying people in the prior build. Mainly thanks to Badger and Tom for those fixes. There's lots going on, and a lot of the new and revised factions and features are really hitting a point where they are being close to being feature complete. Quite exciting! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-14 03:38:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.763_Necromancer_Reanimation_And_Refinement This one has a number of bugfixes, and a number of extensions for player types and map generation. It also has some improvements for total conversion mods, which is letting Puffin get a lot further along with his Classic Fusion mod. The necromancer is now nearing completion, pending testing at least. They are better balanced in a variety of ways, and they are now able to reanimate AI guard posts to use for their own defenses (instead of the usual turrets), which is a really cool idea that Puffin had. Tom has been killing it with lots of bugfixes and refactors and modding-framework extensions and so on. I also started the behind-the-scenes data additions that are required for the upcoming ship encyclopedia, and got the first bits of data in for that. These are also useful for the search on the galaxy map for units, as we can search by thematic tag, now. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-10 02:07:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.762_Expert_Necromancers This one mostly has a lot of work from Badger and Tom from over the weekend, and a lot of it is centered around making the necromancer more balanced and functional. One notable improvement from Tom is that a lot of the build menu is now more moddable, which makes it easier for modders to customize things that they want to have happen in the future. That's a welcome addition for sure! I also put in some improvements to Expert mode, most notably the fuel bits that are new as of last release. Strategic Sage pointed out that we needed about 5x as much Argon and Radon to start out for the game to really be feasible. There were also a number of questions about how the fuels are seeded, and I've made some adjustments there to make for a more interesting and varied set of fuel seeding. There are now some "super clusters" of fuel that you can find around the map (most maps) that are highly desirable for fuel purposes... but might have many other drawbacks. So, as usual, it's pro's and cons time. I also added a really important new Fuel Availability galaxy map filter mode, which allows players who are playing with fuel enabled (whether in expert mode or not) to quickly see what fuels are available where, and in what aggregate quantities. This makes it a lot easier to plan the fuel side of your expansion, and it's also useful for getting a sense of how fuel is distributed around the galaxy at the moment. The wiki is also in the process of being updated to include a lot more information, thanks to Badger and Lord of Nothing. SirLimbo also got in a couple of moddability improvements at the request of Puffin. Lots of busy folks! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-07 05:09:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.761_Savegame_Safety The biggest takeaway from this one: we're not going to be intentionally breaking savegames anymore after this version. As has been the case for most of the last 5 years, there's occasionally a version that corrupts itself or something, but aside from those rare incidents the savegames from now on should remain backward-compatible. I had been planning on finishing up the last of my main stuff for the Necromancer Empire in DLC3 this week, but instead I wound up touring around a lot of random things to make sure that we achieved savegame stability first, instead. Necro Empire is still on my very short list. So what's new in this version? Well, a lot of the meat of Expert Mode is finally in place, with three fuels for three categories of ship. Argon for the normal smaller and midsize ships, Xenon for officers and elites, and Radon for turrets and forcefields. It's incredibly unbalanced and a bit janky right now, because this is just the very first prototype version hot off the presses. Please do note that this only applies if you play in Expert mode, but the idea is to give you more reasons to hold different territory, and more to lose permanently when you are attacked various places. It's going to need a number of iterations before it's ready for prime time, but I'm excited to hear what the early testers among you think. This is an addition to the base game, so anyone can test it without needing any DLC. The Ark Empire player type for DLC1 is also better-balanced now, so that should be more fun to play. More changes are still planned for this, as noted last release. The game now supports "total conversion" mod support, where basically a mod replaces all of the game data with something of its own. There is at least one such mod in the works (cough Puffin cough), that one being focused on a fusion of concepts between AI War 1 and 2. The game now officially supports that sort of thing, making it easier to toggle into those without having to manually replace files or something. There's also a LOT of DLC3 work in general, and Showdown Devices continue to evolve. The necromancer and templar factions now have the first pass of their final icons (aka, they're final pending testing feedback). These factions are freaking huge -- this was 82 icons just between the two of them! There's also some bugfixes and other goodies from the usual suspects. As always lately, thanks to tom.prince and NR SirLimbo for substantial additions to what Badger and I are working on. This one also needs a large shoutout to Strategic Sage for a lot of the expert mode design, which I'm very excited about even though we haven't gotten into the balance stages of that yet. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-04 00:02:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.760_Chaotic_Maps_And_Ark_Empires This one has been inwork for 12 days now, and it has 9300 words (29 printed pages) of release notes. Uh... enjoy? So what's happening here, broadly? Well, there's a lot of bugfixing and quality of life stuff, for sure. Just all, all over the place. This is bringing us a lot closer to being able to come back off the beta branch, and more immediately to stop breaking savegames with new builds. We aren't quite there on that last point, as I have some more to do tomorrow that will probably break saves. But we'll be moving back to our usual policy of "every save is supposed to work forever into the future" within this week. There's a new Chaotic map type that has been added to DLC1 by tom.prince, and it's a really cool one. Going along with the Classic map that Badger added to DLC1, our first DLC that had no maps now has two awesome ones right next to each other. If you don't have DLC2, then Ark and Golem balance is now much better. If you do have DLC2, it's basically the same as you've been used to. It just wasn't meant to be exclusive to DLC2, that was an oopsie. LOTS of work has gone into the "player types" system, and there are now at the very least stubs for each of the player types that we intend to have for the base game and DLCs 1 and 3 (DLC2 has no player types planned at this time). The Necromancer Empire is a way of playing necromancer all by yourself in DLC3, and it's not fully ready for prime time testing yet, but it's getting close. By the end of this week is the goal. The Necromancer Sidekick is only for multiplayer, and is basically when a non-imperial necromancer teams up with another player. That's also basically ready to go, though multiplayer on beta is not. The Ark Empire in DLC1 is a really cool new thing that's also a throwback to our earliest alpha versions and the kickstarter design for this game. It works mostly like a regular empire, except you start out in an Ark (randomly or directly chosen) with a fleet (that is somewhat build-your-own but with restrictions) and no home on the map. Fight for a home, settle in, and then the rest of the game is more familiar. But your ark is both militarily significant as well as your "king" -- if it dies, you lose. I'm going to have a hard time choosing between necro and ark empires, personally, and figure I'll be bouncing between the two of those. No more regular empires for me for a while. The spire-infused empire is another DLC1 player type that is just a stub for now, more coming soon. Same for the Suzerain player type in DLC3. A new spectator player type for the base game is fully ready to go. Map generation in the lobby is a lot more smooth, and/or shows you the progress of its work if it's a really slow map. In general it feels way smoother, and no longer freezes your UI. And just... wow so many bugfixes and quality of life tweaks. I know I mentioned that in the first line or so, but it's literally pages and pages of those things. Major thanks to Badger and tom.prince in particular, and also SirLimbo. Oh, and SirLimbo has been continuing his work on the Brutal Guardians feature for DLC3, too. Very cool stuff. This release was particularly slow in coming because I didn't want to have too many player types in there half-finished. But at least those that are that way are clearly marked now, and in general they are all coming right along. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-12-01 04:17:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.754_Player_Types This one adds a whole lot, all at once! This paves the way for some MAJOR cool things that we are going to be doing in the near future, and that modders can also do. First of all, there's a whole new system where modders can now expand the central GameEntityTypeData in ways that were impossible previously. This gives a lot of power for adding custom functionality for various factions, and the necromancer code that already existed for DLC3 has been ported to this. Secondly, the necromancer "faction" is now gone, which has been the plan for a while, and now there is a necromancer "player type." Specifically, there are no longer multiple types of player factions that you can choose independently (that was a real pain in the interface for players, and hard to find what was available, as well as a pain in the code). Instead, you just choose a "player slot" and can then choose, easily and quickly, from any of the various options that affords. In the base game, that will be Human Empire and Spectator (being able to watch a game while not being part of it at all is always fun). In DLC1, we'll have Ark Empire added, as something of a throwback to the earliest versions of this game. I'm considering a Spire-Infused Empire hybrid for DLC1 that pulls from the fallen spire concept but makes it a bit more direct. We'll see if there's time. In DLC3, we'll have two forms of necromancer: Lone Necromancer, and Necromancer Empire. I'm also thinking about adding in a Solo Ark mode, which probably would be for DLC3 also, since it would work best with the vassals feature from there. There were some other various bugfixes, and some code improvements. This is (maybe) the last of the REALLY large refactoring-type things that I have on my list for this game, so this is a great milestone to have hit. There are still some known issues with the lone necromancer right now, but they're listed and they're not super critical. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-19 03:06:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.753_Necromancer_Externalizing This one is the earliest part of the work to allow for multiple types of human player factions without actually having to choose separate factions. This part of the work is mostly focused on moving a lot of the Core code (closed source) for the necromancer to be in External code (open source, and thus also moddable). The goal is for modders to have the flexibility to implement custom player types as well without having to alter the core game code. Tom found a variety of more bugs to slay, and slew them, which is super awesome and I'm really grateful. Badger also fixed some bugs, and added some more features for the necromancer, which gives them decloaking abilities. Tom and Strategic Sage have been talking a bit, and looking at the design document that Sage and I were working on all the way back in May (good grief!) relating to fuel in Expert mode. Tom has started a rough implementation on that based on that design, which is really unexpected and super cool. Right now it's implemented as part of a mod, since it's just a roughed-in version so far. But getting this in place to be able to start testing out the ideas Sage and I had will be a really big boost for making sure it is actually a feasible design that is fun, so this is a big win. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-18 03:11:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.752_Pathfinding_Efficiency In the past, whenever I've talked about the efficiency of pathfinding, I've universally been speaking about CPU usage or "number of paths calculated per second" or something along those lines. This time, I'm talking about RAM efficiency -- how much RAM is used, how it gets reused, and so on. We do a lot of pathfinding on a lot of threads for a lot of reasons, and that data can be absolutely enormous if we're caching it for too long. Similarly, in the past, we've had major CPU load caused by not caching it enough. What I've done at this point is kept the caching to the level of "this current slice of time for this thread," whatever that means. Sometimes it means "this frame" when we're talking about the UI. A lot more frequently, it means "this simulation step," when it's something for the simulation itself (aka, for 100ms). Even vastly more frequently, it means "this run of long-range-planning operation," which is something that happens intermittently for each faction every few seconds and lasting for usually part of a second, but up to several seconds if need be. The TLDR is that the amount of CPU computation should be roughly the same as before, but the RAM usage is reduced by around 300ish MB on midsize games with a fair number of factions in a slightly larger than average galaxy. It may also be a fix to yet another memory leak, but I can't be certain. It is a solution to an annoying thread-contention issue that I still don't understand the full nature of, but have decided to work around in this particular case by just making everything so much more efficient in the first place. This build sees a number of other bugfixes, and more of SirLimbo's AMU settings being implemented into the base game as options. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-17 00:52:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.751_Faction_Processing_Groups Friday I was out because I was just exhausted and needed a day of recovery. Others went gangbusters on that day and over the weekend working on the game, though. There's lots of bugfixes thanks to Badger, tom.prince, Puffin, and NR SirLimbo; improvements to contextual info provided by the ARS thanks to Badger; and the start of some of the "extended galaxy settings" from AMU being implemented into the base game thanks to NR SirLimbo. Additionally, there's a number of new features and improvements in the unreleased DLC3 for our testers there, including some xml work by Puffin Emeritus, which certainly deserves special mention. The big theme of the largest remaining errors I saw after the weekend were in our random number generators and pathfinding. In both cases, neither piece of code was actually the problem at all -- these were pieces of very good code that were simply canaries for "hey, two threads are using me at the same time, that doesn't work!" In all cases, it looks like the faction-specific Long Range Planning (LRP) code was still able to overlap itself sometimes. I think that for that to happen, you needed to have some factions that shared data. AI border aggression and relentless waves do that in any game, but if you had multiple copies of a faction, then that would also do it in the prior build. Please note, of course, that all of those cases are supposed to work fine, but that seemed to be the conditions for replicating it for now. Today I introduced a new xml-driven piece of data called a "faction processing group," which is basically a way for factions to say "I don't run while those others are running. Normally the LRP logic for general factions all runs at once, with the exception of factions that are multiples of one another, or which share some other processing logic like border aggression and relentless waves do. I had existing protections in place to already try to handle this exact concept, but they were code-driven, mildly hidden because of that, and also had a few errors relating to them. At this point, code that was a bit more scattered around is a lot more linear and has been rewritten to hopefully work quite well. In my brief testing today after finishing this, I don't see these errors anymore, but it's impossible to prove a negative. So if you were one of the testers running into this, please do let us know if things are still an issue. Fingers crossed, I do think I got rid of it, and also fingers crossed, this seemed to be the only category of thread left that had this sort of effect. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-16 00:10:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Ho. Le. Mo. Le. Wheeew, new build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.750_Smooth_Simulator This one rips up the entire threading model that we've been evolving for the game since 2016, and replaces it with something more modern, as well as fixing a number of threading-related bugs and other issues. The TLDR is that it's faster than ever, especially on older computers, and it works REALLY well and is way easier for myself and others to debug, too. The game was downright unplayable for the last few weeks in terms of things like stalled threads and a bunch of cross-threading issues. I've been really tearing my hair out, trying to figure out what on earth was going on, and simplifying code, simplifying it further, and lots of experimenting. Daniexpert really gets MVP once again for truly excellent help with bugtesting and reporting in this arena. Special thanks also to tom.prince, who had lots of great ideas and commentary on the threading model and things that we'd have to consider. There were several cases where I was going to do one thing, and chatting with tom on discord let me skip a few steps of pain and jump to a better solution. There's also a bunch of other improvements in here, and various features for DLC3. I am extremely weary, though, so I'm not going to enumerate all of them. I thought I'd be done with this threading thing days ago, and then I started wondering when on earth I'd be done with it at all. Very happy to say it seems to work well now, and if there are remaining problems, they will be much easier for me to debug. Tomorrow, it will be time to move on and work on other bugs and features that have been delayed by this whole mess. I think this was first on my radar on October 27th, maybe a bit before, so this was QUITE a diversion. The release notes have pretty much the whole story, and the chris-talks-code-gameplay discord subchannel has the rest of it, if you're curious. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-12 05:48:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.746_Phantom_Ship_Syndrome This one has a toooon of bugfixes. Some of these are fixes to regressions in the prior build, of which there were an uncomfortable number. An amusing one was causing lots of phantom icons to spring up all over the place, in this kind of insanity kaleidoscope. Others were just error spam. These were a result of my improvements to the collections to lazy-initialize, and there were some edge cases in a couple of them that I did not properly account for. That's fixed now. Hey, also there are several features that had been "DLC3 while testing" that are now part of the base game. Roguelike features like Hidden Galaxy, and then the new Border Aggression feature. There's a large class of exceptions based around "someone changed a thing on the unit and we're looking at it belatedly and now it's null and time to throw an exception." Those are all fixed, because we no longer allow them to be nulled out. That led to some interim internal hilarious bugs with scaling and stats being off, but now it seems to work fine, knock on wood. So this is a pretty large category of stuff that no longer will break anywhere in the codebase. There were some pathfinder errors that could still pop up, although these were new ones. These are now fixed. They MAY have been related to thread timings, but I'm not sure. Either way, I made some changes to make them more robust in their defenses, and that seemed to work. Another big group of bugs were some "invisible dead ships" that would hang around on planets, sometimes with a full forcefield showing, and then also appear on the galaxy map. I am not sure why exactly that started happening, but I have it so that it self-repairs properly now. Most ships don't properly explode on death anymore (but their icons still do), so that's something else I need to fix next week. Last major known issue that really impacts play lately is the stuck threads issue. I've made some progress on that, in large part due to Tom and in particular Daniexpert doing some debugging. I've corrected a few of the most major cases, and then there's a couple of remaining cases that I now have a pattern for reproducing, and will start chasing down on Monday. In the meantime, as long as you don't reload the game too too many times, it seems to work fine. Or if it's messed up and you reload one more time, then it also fixes itself. I don't think pausing and unpausing works anymore. But overall if there are behaviors you see, or other ways to get it to mess up, then I'd love to have that information. Hopefully after a lot of these things, code will kind of start settling down. I still have one major piece of surgery, which is to take the necromancer away from being its own faction and to instead be a faction type for humans. That will probably be some bugs. And there are still other known issues like the xml reload locking up (though I need to retest that actuallly), and tutorials and beacons not being re-enabled yet. But a lot of the biggest, scariest things seem to be slowly settling down. Or we're just through the first batch and about to discover a giant new cache of new ones, who knows. Hopefully not. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-06 01:32:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.745_Deadlock_Removal This one has a lot more going on under the hood than might be apparent on the surface. It's more efficient in how it allocates RAM (which you can see in certain logs mainly), and it is also safer in how it allocates that RAM (thus avoiding some deadlock situations that I had introduced in the last few weeks). So that's very pleasing, but not exactly a marquee feature for people playing. Deadlocks are a special sort of bug that I particularly hate, though, so I'm glad to have it gone. While I was doing that, Tom has added a new cheat (grantalltechs), and a number of ui improvements and bugfixes. For DLC3, Zeus has been adding yet more orbital stuff, and the DLC3 testers can now properly test that, too. These orbital bits are suuuuper cool. There's also a new general rare "nasty pick" that is an orbital inertial battery. Playing with DLC3 simply enabled is one of those things that won't make the game harder (that's always important), but just like DLC1 makes it so that there are so many more turret types all over the place (thanks to Democracy and Puffin), DLC3 makes things come alive more with various orbitals here and there even amongst non-orbital AIs. The galaxy-wide caps are now properly shown thanks to Tom, and Zeus made the super fortress a lot more super. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-05 02:19:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build, lots of fixes once again! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.744_Pathfinding One of the most annoying issues lately has been "pathfinder errors," and it turns out they were a source of memory leaks, as well. And also just some general performance degradation, and over-use of RAM. I've done a massive refactor on it, and it now uses literally multiple orders of magnitude less data, which is great for everyone. It's not super well tested yet, but it seems to work from what I can tell so far. There's a new issue where if you try to do the F7 dump prior to the first time you load into a game, and then load into a game, it locks up. No idea what that's about, but it's on my list for soon. The number of truly severe issues seems to be dropping, which is good, and at the same time we're getting into a position where performance is able to be better than ever before. I also made a new... kind of complicated to understand, but easy to use... data structure called ThreadStaticWrapperedPooledItem. This funky thing lets us use the magic of the ThreadStatic while not having collections and other large portions of data orphaned on threads that are no longer using those items. Over time, I'll likely convert even more things to using this rather than just directly using ThreadStatic collections. It should be a notable improvement in memory usage, without any extra CPU cost during normal operations. This thing is one of the strangest pieces of code I've written, but despite that it is something I'm really pleased with because of just how effective it is. Tom fixed a whole bunch of other errors in this release, including notifications not showing up properly in the prior version (that was an oops on my part). Lots more excellent bug reporting and narrowing-down of issues from Daniexpert, saving me and others a huge amount of time. Seriously, I'm so grateful to our testers, Daniexpert most of all recently. Badger is continuing to improve the Elderlings in DLC3 for those testing that, and Zeus has made some very exciting further improvements to the new Orbital AI type in DLC3 (it's one of the most surreal AI types we've ever had, and an instant favorite for me). Tom also added a number of quality of life improvements to various parts of the UI, which is very cool! Tomorrow I'm hoping to knock out the strange "ships are showing when they should not be" bug and a number of other things. This pathfinder issue was always going to be a huge time sink, but I'm glad to have it done. And the new ThreadStaticWrapperedPooledItem is a new power tool that I can start strategically using anywhere else where we start seeming to have too many allocations over the course of many game loads. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-04 02:18:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, tons of bugfixes and improvements: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.743_Return_Of_The_Imperial_Spire We're getting closer to having stability, but not there yet. Fallen Spire, on the other hand, seem to be pretty much returned to their former glory thanks to Tom, and the main things missing now are the final bolstering interface and then the new modular stuff. NR SirLimbo continues to work magic on the technical front, adding many new options to how outguard can spawn things, which is quite exciting for modders as well as the DLC developers. Brutal Lair is a little less brutal, thanks to Badger toning that down. A lot of new cool things to test if you're in the DLC3 beta, related to Necromancer start options, the Elderlings being better and more interesting, and so on. More bugfixes and hardening of code and other general refactors and improvements from me, and from Tom, and from Badger. Some balance tweaks and fixes from Zeus and CRCGamer. Daniexpert continues to be a super help with the debugging of things like serialization issues, etc. It's coming along, and more is coming soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-11-03 02:22:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, and there's some surprises in here! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.742_.22Classic_Map.22_For_DLC1 1. First off, there's a new map type for DLC1 (hey, wasn't that complete in early 2020?) based loosely on some of the favorite maps from AI War Classic. In general, we're going to be beefing up DLC1 and adding more to it over the next few months, then renaming it and slightly raising the price. Folks just don't seem sold on this DLC to the same degree that DLC2 is exciting them, and so we'd like to fix that so that it's truly a must-have. If you already have the DLC (or buy it now while it's still slightly cheaper), you're just getting this bonus stuff for free. 2. Lots of bugfixes, including many for the Fallen Spire. Huge thanks to Tom for most of these. The Fallen Spire is apparently pretty much fully playable again on the beta branch, although there's still some bits I need to finish to fully bring it home. 3. Badger's done a lot with the Necromancer faction for those folks testing DLC3, and feedback would be awesome. Not only that, but there's a new Elderlings faction that is related to Necromancers, or that you can use independently of them, and which are kind of roaming monsters in the galaxy. I'm really excited about this addition. DLC3 is really just getting kind of mind-blowingly large, and I'm really excited about it. That's one of several reasons we really needed to up the game on DLC1 so that it feels comparable to these other two giants. 4. Consulting with Tom, there's a new strategy for how I'm quarantining ships that have recently died, so that there's a lot less chance of random errors in the codebase related to UI elements or otherwise still referencing something that is in the process of being disassembled. The changes here solve a whole host of known bugs as well as a bunch of likely unknown ones. Tom did further refinement to fix more of them, with a lot of debug assisting from Daniexpert. 5. Speaking of Daniexpert, they've been invaluable for helping me find and fix more memory leaks and odd-allocations of RAM over the last few days. There are several notable fixes that really eliminate the most notable memory leaks that we've been able to find so far, and the game also runs more smoothly than ever. Whether there are any more memory leaks remaining is not yet clear, so please do let us know what you find! There are a number of known exceptions that I haven't had a chance to look at yet, both reported on Steam and on mantis, but I'll be getting to those mainly on Tuesday. I've got some other things going on on Sunday and Monday that will cut into my work time a lot, but I'll be back at things on Tuesday. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-31 05:37:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, not nearly as exciting as yesterday, but it's solid progress: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.741_Clogging_Holes 1. On the subject of trying to hot-reload the xml files: I've made some progress on that, but there's still more to do. There's some added functionality I need to add, apparently, before that's really going to work as well as I need it to. But it definitely got a lot closer today, and this took about the first half of the day to work on it. Right now if you try to hot reload xml, it will potentially lock up the game, but when you kill it and reload it, it will have what you want. I just need to fix the whole lock up part, but it's one step at a time. 2. On the subject of the memory leaks, which still exist: Notice I'm not saying "the memory leak" anymore? I do suspect that there was mainly one big memory leak in the past, but at this point there are definitely multiple. Some of them are caused by the semantic changes I've made to how we use collections -- aka, in building the panopticon, I introduced new temporary memory leaks, but in exchange I gain the ability to find them and kill them, and also to improve performance in general in the future. I fixed at least six memory leaks today, none of which were the "big one" that is causing the most trouble. Daniexpert was kind enough to provide a very useful core dump from that new feature, and by diffing that against an early-stage core dump of my own, this is how I'm not just finding the memory leaks, but also places where I can optimize capacity allocations. The side effect of the latter is that the game runs faster, and most notably that it's wicked fast to load savegames now. I mean, it's down from something like 1.5 seconds to 0.5 seconds; that hardly matters, but it does feel nice. And the overall ram usage being lowered, and the during-gameplay performance improvements that this also leads to, are the real win. I'm currently going painstakingly through that one core dump, and just fixing things as I find them after careful analysis, rather than trying to find the big leak that I know is in there. Something has allocated 23 million objects when it really should be closer to three million based on another metric, and in that core dump is the answer to that question. When I find that, hopefully tomorrow or the next working day, that should be the end of the big memory leak (knock on wood). In the meantime, I don't want to leave any smaller memory leaks around just because I'm in a hurry, so I'm taking the time to do it right. 3. On the subject of the stalling background threads: This is really intermittent and frustrating, and requires you to more or less restart the game to get it to work properly after it happens. It only seems to happen after having loaded multiple savegames in one run of the game. While chatting with Daniexpert about the data he was able to show me from it happening to him again today, I think I may have come up with a solution for it. I'll need to actually implement it and test it, but I'm hoping I can squeeze that in tomorrow, as well. 4. Everything else? These items are my top priority right now until they are fixed. After that, there's many other general bugs, and then a load of new features and things coming down the pipeline. I'm really excited about those things, but I want to finish this stuff out right and have this running really smoothly for everyone. I really have no idea how many more days of this pre-everything-else work is left, but I will be able to do daily releases like this one with updates, at least. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-29 00:15:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Whew, okay, this one is pretty huge: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.740_Code_Panopticon The idea of a "panopticon" is that it's a structure where there's absolutely no privacy, and there's perfect observation of everything that happens inside. Dystopian thought, right? Well, in this case, I've been working on constructing a panopticon... for memory leaks. The idea is for myself or modders (whoever has caused the memory leak) to be able to get a few core dumps (you can generate those by just hitting F7 now) and then have an idea of what is leaking, which then makes fixing it much easier. A rather nasty memory leak bug has been lurking for a few weeks now, and I do think I solved it, to be honest... but before you get too excited, there's at least one new one. Or maybe it's a different flavor of the prior one, but the new one acts different, so I suspect it's new. As I've been constructing my panopticon for bugs, there's been a lot of adjustment required in many areas of the code. I clearly have a few blind spots remaining, so it's not a true panopticon yet, anyway. That said, the game is playable enough for the beta branch, and there's great stuff going on in here, so with a few caveats please have at it! One of the caveats is that if you change around your selection of mods and/or dlcs that are enabled, right now that can cause a lockup or a bunch of errors or work perfectly, variably. It's on my list. But what else is new? A number of other folks have been super productive, too: Tom from discord has offered to help with a "bit" of bugsmashing, after examining the open source parts of the code and noting a few things he could fix. He's then been on a real tear throughout the codebase, just fixing tons of items and resolving lots of tickets. That's super helpful, and I'm incredibly grateful! Among other things, the Fallen Spire are mostly playable again. They're still missing the ability to switch which fleet is being bolstered, and the modular ships aren't in there yet, but Tom has tested and fixed everything else except for the transciever, which is wicked cool and saves me a ton of time I can put into other things for you guys. Badger decided the AI needs more mean things it can do to you, so he's working on a Svikari variant that can be friends with the AI instead of you. He also made the planet sidebar way more informative when you've got a crippled flagship, versus being misleadingly stuck at one health tick. Zeus is back in the saddle with a number of balance changes, plus a number of not-listed-yet really cool things for DLC3. One of them involves a gravity well full of orbiting guard posts, which is... just plain awesome. Daniexpert fixed up the Lost Spire Frigates to "Roam if Instructed" by default, which was a satisfying venture into code for yet another modder/volunteer. For those with DLC3 early keys, Badger also majorly reworked the Necromancer, and they're ready for some serious testing. Right now it's just the Necromancer helper, so you need to add them as a secondary faction to your main empire and then hit F4 to swap to them. The solo-focused necromancer empire will be coming before too long, and Puffin had some great ideas on that which I'm excited to try out. I still have a number of code things to fix up in the wake of this panopticon business, but I'm hoping that this will be the last truly large refactor of the game. I'm ready to just focus on bugfixes and more features and such, versus rearranging things in painful detail like this. But things are going to be in much better shape for modders for the long haul now, despite the short term bugs, so I'm definitely pleased about that. Lots more is coming soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-28 06:09:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Second beta build of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.711_More_Fixes I still have to chase the memory leak that we've got going on, and a new rash of reports of various things arrived this evening thanks to Daniexpert (that really is helpful, so thank you!), but this build cleans up some of the issues, and also adds a bit more performance in a couple of areas. This build also fixes the Civilian Industries mod to once again compile, and I am assuming it works but I have not tested it. There's still a lot changing at the moment, and will be for another few weeks I imagine, but for now this is kind of "business as usual in the beta." I'm going to take this weekend off, after working the last two. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-16 01:59:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.710_Hotfixes_Serialization_and_Performance Possibly the first of two for today, we'll see. This one fixes some latent bugs in the prior build, mostly about loading transports and saving the game. You know, not anything important. This also makes the UI sidebars more responsive, and fixes a possible glitch in xml importing and two definite glitches in necromancer hacking. The death registry work in general is also moving along towards prep for multiplayer. Lots of things going on and improving these days, but since we're in this kind of chaotic beta period it's certainly leading to lots of bugs, too. I'll be glad to be out of this beta period when we can be, but at the same time it's still really gratifying how much we're able to improve the core of the game while we're in here. It just makes a terrible mess, as grover would say to elmo. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-15 17:20:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.709_Upgrades_And_Serialization_Fix This one upgrades to a newer version of unity, fixing a number of bugs of relevance, including likely fixing the freeze on startup that was sometimes happening. Additionally, this release should fix the bug where sometimes units would just turn feral on you when loading a savegame, and all bumrush you for no reason. Apparently testing with the golemite AI faction really makes for a show. If you see this again, please do let us know. A number of performance improvements have been made in this build, although there's more I wanted to do. I'll continue pushing on with that over time. I also made some adjustments to have a death registry, which has some single player uses (it's related to those performance and correctness bits above), and then also will be the final solution to the ghosts problem in multiplayer once I finish wiring that up. Final solution? How can that be? Well, the client will be told of things that have died, and the client can ask the host about dead things, as well. That way, the worst thing we can have is not a ghost, or an accidental death -- both two outcomes possible before -- but instead just a "stale data for some reason" issue. That is far less severe, and should be easier to debug if it happens, but even that happening should be way less likely. SirLimbo continues to be on a roll adding things to the main game and for DLC, working on some changes that affect how mines show their remaining "number of times they can go off," and then also adding a bunch more stuff for the Brutal Guardians in the Dire Guardian Lair for DLC3. I was hoping to redo some of how transported ships work, or how drones work, while we're in here doing this much surgery anyway. That's been on my wishlist for a long time. Unfortunately... wow. It's just really complicated to try to change it, and it would lead to worse performance if I did. Given I'm trying to make performance go the other direction, I don't feel great about that. It was worth a shot, but I'm going to give it a pass. I still have some other during-beta things to refactor, to speed up, and to make easier to use in general, but the list is growing shorter. Then it's just a matter of getting the last of the bugs out, making sure multiplayer is going well, and then it's the new-feature train for a while. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-15 00:48:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another new beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.708_Bugfixes_And_Death_Spawn This one is smaller, but hits a number of bugs that were bothering people. It also adds some more new features that SirLimbo is working on for some of his new guardians and such. There is still a serialization bug at the moment (probably), and at any rate I still have more to break in serialization in general. I didn't quite get through my entire list of things I wanted to, but I wound up finding some interesting nests of programming errors and sorting those out. Whether there is a wider issue on that front at the moment or not I am not yet sure, but I have a couple of targets set for review tomorrow. In the meantime, hopefully things work out well savegame-wise, but please let us know if not. Badger would love some feedback on those new wormhole invasion styles, by the way! Those are in the base game, and are on by default, unlike what I reported last time. If you're a tester for DLC3, then more feedback and testing with the necromancer and the sappers are also greatly desired at the moment. Lots of changes have happened with them since the last time we got much meaningful feedback. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-14 03:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.706_Expanded_Wormhole_Invasions_And_Raid_Engines (Please note: this one again breaks savegames, and there's a known save corruption glitch from the prior version.) Well! It's been a busy six days since the last release. This new build mainly has cool new things from Badger and SirLimbo, however, so let's talk about those things first. I tried to fix one bug that could cause a freeze on startup, but other than that I didn't contribute anything here. First of all, Badger has added options for Wormhole Invasions in the lobby that make it so that you can have something more interesting than the old style of them. Specifically, you can have them just send waves (well, that's a bit different), OR you can have them... you know... drill through the fabric of reality, forge a link between one of your undefended planets and somewhere in deep enemy territory, and spawn several waves at your soft underbelly. That last option might sound crazy, but it's not meant to be purely punitive. The cool thing about it is that it also changes the nature of the map so that you can now ALSO directly go attack the AI deep in its own territory. Yeah, sure, your underbelly just got exposed, but you also now have a direct link directly into potentially useful territory. If it suits you, you can just reinforce your empire on that side, and use it as a new launching-off point against the AI. Or if it doesn't suit you, you can protect your empire by destroying the projector to shave off that unwanted link. Remember that you have to turn this option on in the lobby to give it a try. Right now, by default things still work how they did before. If this is popular, maybe this will become a default for some game mode, or maybe it will just stay a niche cool new option; it's hard to say, and we'd love feedback. SirLimbo, meanwhile, has been expanding the concept of "raid engines" in general by adding a lot of new features that allow for the creation of Dire Guardian Lairs, which was a concept we had in the original game. This new implementation takes it to new levels, though, and the new units that will be involved will be part of DLC3, so I won't say too much about them yet. For my part, I had two days where I was out of town, and then I've spent all weekend and the first two days of this week completely reworking Arcen's website. That thing was old and creaky, not mobile-friendly much at all, and really not... good at showing the important information. We also had two blogs, which I had started neglecting to update because of how much of a pain it was. I'm still not done with the makeover, but there's a lot of good stuff there, and hopefully it really enhances people's ability to find out what they want to know about Arcen as a company. I also wrote a couple of blog posts as a response to some questions that some students sent me: 1: https://arcengames.com/what-are-the-different-phases-in-a-development-cycle-when-creating-an-indie-game/ 2: https://arcengames.com/what-tools-do-developers-use-to-make-an-indie-game/ 3: https://arcengames.com/have-you-noticed-a-change-in-the-way-a-game-is-developed-throughout-the-years/ I'll post a bit more about this tomorrow when I hopefully finish the last of my changes, and then I'll be back to my normal coding. For now, feel free to poke around the revamped site (the game pages have yet to be reworked; if anything seems temp-y or unfinished, it probably is). More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-13 01:38:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.705_Blazing_Collections_And_The_New_Spire (Note: all savegames won't work when loaded into this version, because of the major under the hood changes. There will be another release or two like that coming up in the near future, then I'll be done with that.) Okay, this is getting a bit ridiculous. This is five days of really intensive work (like 12-14 hour days for all five). Initially I started with a few mild bugfixes (fun!), and then I started moving in to splitting up the fallen spire faction and necromancer so that they have the new relationship that they need (cities and their mobile fleets separated out (exciting!), and I got partway through that. I also started working on modules/loadouts (even more exciting!). Then something else grabbed my attention again: the performance of our collections (lists, dictionary, queues, stacks, etc) left a lot to be desired. The ones that were most problematic were ones from Microsoft, and the source is open. The others that were problematic tended to wrapper these problematic ones. So at first this led into a big investigation with myself and NR SirLimbo profiling the heck out of the microsoft classes and then my adapted version that stripped out some suboptimal things in their code. In general, depending on what we were testing -- and SirLimbo had to create a new in-engine testing framework for us to be able to measure this with a sensitivity in the nanosecond range -- down to a millionth of a second or so, for our practcal measurement purposes). The general results of that were that, on average, the worst result from my new versions on windows or OSX was about a 0% to a 2% improvement for certain activities, and then closer to a 10% improvement for others (Sort in particular). Then for certain things that have to do with initializing data to the proper size, the improvement was about 300%. I then started porting over more data structures, and finding all sorts of really unfortunate things in there. Doing things like looping over dictionary.Keys instead of just dictionary actually is hugely slower, did you know that? It's not documented anywhere, you have to just check the code. There were a bunch of other strange gotchas. And our own ArcenSparseLookup collection, which Keith implemented 5 years ago with notes in there saying "this is TEMPORARY, and has bad performance, will need to replace this later" has been all through our codebase. I spent the last 9 hours or so (split between last night and today) replacing that thing. It was used all over the place, and had at best half the performance of the newer version of the dictionary that I now use, before you even get into further improvements. And I did get into further improvements. So how much faster are things? I don't rightly know! These were a thousand little paper cuts, all over the place, slowing things down. We no longer are covered in said paper cuts. Things feel snappier, but I haven't run any real stressful load cases just yet. I'll be very interested to hear what you experience. I'm going to be out for the next day or two, but then I'm going to be circling back around to bugfixes, the fallen spire, and so on. The fallen spire _might_ be playable right now in this build, but I'm not certain. The ablity to switch which mobile fleet each city is bolstering isn't there right now, and that's the main thing I just outright didn't finish. Anyhow, lots of exciting progress on a lot of things. I didn't really expect another digression into performance improvements, but these ones are extremely nice and are things I can carry with me into future projects, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-06 19:17:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.704_Unexpected_Turbo_Sim_Speed Weeell... this is cool and unexpected. I sped up the sim last release, right? Um... well, I did it again, except even moreso this time. I am able to run 111 factions at almost full sim speed now, which is just plain insane. My framerate stinks when I do it, but that's a separate matter. We also can run far more planets than anytime in the past, so we've increased the max planet counts to 300 on all maps. It does take a more powerful computer to run these, which the game warns you about, but there's no reason for it not to be an option now. This isn't just about crazy high planet counts or crazy high faction counts, though. This will have tangible benefits to lots of players, whether they are on weaker hardware or are just getting into giant late game battles that previously slowed down a lot, etc. It's possible that battles of sufficient size will still cause slowdown, but the effect won't be compounded by this general load, so there's a lot more margin for giant battles to take up room if they need to. Quite aside from the above, this release contains just an absolute ton of bugfixes, almost all of which are things that resulted from the great refactor, but a few of which were much longer-standing. It's getting cleaner and cleaner, which is thanks to the folks who keep testing things out and reporting what they find. Thank you in particular to Vinco, BoBy, Arctic, whimsee, nas1m, and HarryT -- you all rock! Let's see... I also got started on the very earliest part of modular loadouts for ships, although there's not a lot to see yet. But it's nice to be getting started on that. A new planet naming style by Angel of death is now in the game, as well. If anyone is wondering how NR SirLimbo is coming with his work on his mods (AMU and the like), it's an impressive and intensive task that he's going through. He's documenting it on discord, and it's really awesome to see how he's not just porting things over, but rather is actively making his modding framework and tools even better than it already was. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-10-02 04:41:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.703_Smooth_Sim This one does two really cool things that I didn't have on my radar, but now I'm super excited about: First, the performance of the entire simulations should now be better. You heard me! Giant planet counts, giant battles, whatever. I'm not saying it will be buttery smooth on every machine, but it should be somewhere between moderately to drastically improved, depending on your machine. A lot of the reasons why I was able to do this have to do with the timings of triggering sim steps, and less to do with the actual sim steps themselves. Essentially we had some dead air time (less than fully utilized CPU) between certain types of actions. Those gaps are now closed, so your CPU will run flat-out when it has to. Also along with this, you can now see (by right-clicking the clock in the bottom left) how close your simulation is to being at the point where it would start slowing down. Nifty! Secondly, the speed of the simulation is measured more accurately AND it does a much better job of sticking closer to 100% sim speed when things are going well. It averages between 99-103% now, whereas previously it was almost always 95%. That 5% drop was causing visual micro-stutters in the movement of ships, so now things move much more smoothly around. I've tested this at 30, 60, and 100 fps. There are a number of notable bugfixes in this one, including the fix to the "AIP goes up by 10 every time I load a save" bug, and errors with wave and spire debris notifications. I also made two new youtube videos today to help modders and faction designers understand the intricacies of multiplayer and threading in the game as much as I can: https://youtu.be/EV2WTB5l0vA https://youtu.be/7JxIbYIy_2I And for those who would rather skip that degree of info dump, there are diagrams: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#New_Diagram_For_Modders.2FProgrammers:_AI_War_2_Threading_Model I am now done with all of the videos and similar supplemental materials I had planned for modders, which is excellent. Now I can really continue to focus just on bugfixes and other improvements. At the moment I know there must be plenty of bugs in here, but there have been very few reports. If you have some spare time and would be interested in testing, please do give the latest betas a play! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-09-30 02:55:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.702_Bugfixes_And_Mod_Conversion This one is mostly bugfixes, but also converts the Civilian Industries mod to work in the new framework. There's a four and a half hour video where you can watch me doing that, if you're inclined. This also specifically disables all of the other code mods that are known to not work. They are still distributed to you, but if you go in the file system and get them to be enabled again, all you'll get is errors. So... uh... maybe wait for the mod authors to get those updated first. Non-code mods largely were not affected at all, but now there's no longer a case of you having to wonder "should this mod work, or should it error?" If a mod that you see in the distributed list from us is broken now, we want to hear about it. On that subject NR SirLimbo is working like crazy to get his selection of popular mods ported over, but it's going to be a TON of work. He's been building his own modder framework on top of our codebase (that's what "AMU" is for), and so naturally that's a lot more difficult to port over than a "traditional native code mod" like Civilian Industries. You can keep up with his progress and send him encouragement on the modding section of our discord server, but he's estimating it may take him a couple of months of very intensive work to get it all going again (after all, unlike me, this isn't his fulltime job, and that's still with him really working like crazy on his projects). This build fixes most of the really major bugs that I am aware of, although I am aware of several that I didn't have time to fix today. I'll get those tomorrow, along with continuing on with whatever else is new. Thank you to everyone doing the testing on this new code framework! Once the errors start quieting down, then some of the other exciting things I have planned are going to get some attention, like loadouts for fallen spire ships, better fallen spire fleet organization/setup, and... well, there's a whole list of things prior to DLC3, and then there's DLC3 stuff as well. Expert mode will be getting some more attention soon, too, but it's all mostly based around how long I am responding to bugfixes. I'm definitely pleased with where things are, overall, at the moment. The game is going through those first bumpy bits after a major transition, but it's not quite as bad as I had feared it might be (so far -- it's early yet). Enjoy!

[ 2021-09-28 22:38:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.701_Natural_Object_Order This one is just bugfixes, as you might expect. I also made something like 4 hours of video tutorials on how to mod the game and how to use a variety of the code, which you can check out if you're into that sort of thing. The goal of that was to help ease the transition for existing modders into the new framework. The number of bugs that people found were not overwhelming in number, which is nice, but I think at least part of that was because the ones that were found were severe enough to prevent too much testing. Ironically, most of those really severe bugs were just a few small things that were pretty easy to fix, so... well, that's a good thing. The really big culprit was that I had allowed NaturalObject (aka no ownership) units to be in any order, rather than always being the 0th faction in the list, and that caused all sorts of crazy bugs if you happened to have it out of position 0 in your new save. If it was in position 0, then a lot of those same things were fine. Other bugs included a few xml typos, a couple of years-old bugs that just became relevant but were not new, and some places where I had switched something to a new more efficient format, but the old format would throw an error if it was still called, and there were still some lingering calls to them. All in all, so far none of the bugs were really very time consuming to fix, but as noted they were severe enough to really prevent deep testing by very many people. Hopefully this build is a lot more straightforward for people to test further with. Thank you for the help with testing! Enjoy!

[ 2021-09-24 04:58:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.700_Bulk_Of_The_Great_Refactor Wow, it's been 26 days since I last pushed a public release. You know, the last release was called "Code Will Change," and that was SUPPOSED to just be a reference to a Persona 5 Song (Life Will Change), and a kind of play on words about how much code had changed in the prior build. Instead, uh... it was prophetic. The last 26 days have been grueling and intense, but at the same time really satisfying. The release notes JUST FOR THIS RELEASE are 44,000 words. That is novella-length, and it is also similar in length to entire sections of release notes from AIW2 and AIWC in the past. So... what the heck is going on? Essentially, I've reconstructed most of how the game talks about "external" data, and made it a lot more controlled, better-designed, and multiplayer-friendly. It's a lot harder for modders (or faction programmers, or me) to make errors now. RAM usage is down, CPU usage is improved, bandwidth requirements should be way down, and many other benefits. On the front end, in-game, not a whole lot is different. In this specific build, there are a few things that don't work or are temporarily disabled. Tutorials, random factions, beacons, multiplayer, and most mods are out of commission temporarily. The savegame format has also been completely reworked, so all savegames prior to this version are now unusable in this version. Why was this worth it? Well, I had kind of hit a wall with multiplayer where it was just going to be a mess in an ongoing fashion, and this was the only way forward. But even for single player, this brings clarity to the code, makes modding easier, and reduces the chances for errors. It also should help performance, particularly in large and complex games. We're working towards completing all aspects of this game and putting it into "long term support" by January 2022, and I wanted to really make things shine here. On the surface, not a whole lot is different in this new version, but under the hood this is just a whole new world, and I'm really proud of how it's turning out. Expect some bugs in the short term, but please do help us test, if you don't mind. You do need to use the beta branch to see this build, of course, for now. Also, I will be breaking savegames more in the near future, just as a fair warning. There are some notable improvements I want to make to various factions (like fallen spire, etc), that should make the user experience better. I also am planning on getting loadouts in place, and adding more features to DLC1 to finish up the last kickstarter features. Anyhow, we have a lot of things going on at the moment: kickstarter last features, DLC1 additions, loadouts, expert mode, ship encyclopedia, all the stuff for DLC3, general polish, and finishing up the last of multiplayer. This giant refactor is a strange thing to do late in the life cycle of a game, but it's hopefully a solid demonstration of our commitment to wanting you all to be able to enjoy this game for years and years. My time working on this in a fulltime capacity is winding down, and we plan on releasing the Complete Edition in January, but this game has a long and healthy life ahead of it, I predict. In a month or so we'll also be adding a Super Supporter optional DLC that lets you help offset the costs of development, which really have been way higher than earnings. At the moment, the game needs to gross another $800,000 or so before I'll see my first dollar of actual profit from this five year project. I don't know that that will ever happen, but at the moment I'm cool with that. I'm just really proud of how this is turning out, and I'd like to see this end on a really positive note. More to come soon. Expect rapid releases on the beta branch again, now that the bulk of The Great Refactor is done. Enjoy!

[ 2021-09-23 00:19:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.605_Code_Will_Change This one's title is a reference to the Persona 5 song that I'm rocking out to right now (Life Will Change), because I'm feeling pretty darn good after today's work. We now have some networked personal settings that can be handled really easily with xml and which transmit themselves to the host ONLY if they differ from the defaults, and which allow us to make intelligent automation decisions on the host based on client data that was previously inaccessible. We also now have a whole new framework for checking achievement statuses, tips to give you, automation to run, and many other things that were previously very expensive (in terms of CPU time) when you add it all up cumulatively. We used to run that stuff (until today) on the main simulation thread in what we call the "stage 3 faction code." It turns out that had a number of problems with various things like the host being a spectator in MP, or the host not being a human empire (maybe they're a necromancer), or even in solo games if there is no human empire at all (maybe you're playing solo ark plus vassals, or maybe ark empire). All those cases now work, whereas before they would not have. More than just solving problems, though, this provides a really high-performance and easy-to-read model for modders to follow with their own factions. It is quite "puppy proof" (as described in the prior release notes), without restricting what coders in that part of the codebase can do. So, yeah. I'm feeling good. There's still more to do for multiplayer (waves, some notifications, and AIP are not visible on clients right now, and I'm not sure MP clients even connect properly because of general bugs that I just haven't bothered to fix yet during this rip and tear phase). And there are a couple of other little odds and ends there. But overall these are great strides forward, they benefit both solo and MP, and we're coming closer and closer to being back off the beta branch for solo, and hopefully then shortly after out of beta for MP. Happy weekend!

[ 2021-08-28 02:55:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.604_Puppy_Proofing.2C_Part_1 Not a lot is different in this one, from an end-user player perspective, but... uh... a LOT is different, at the same time? I fixed a couple of minor bugs, or made them report themselves better so I can see them and smash them when they surface again. Also, chain lightning looks suitably awesome again. But that's about it... ...Until you see this giant section called "Rip and Tear for Multiplayer." I am essentially ripping the guts out of many parts of the game, and putting it back together differently. At the moment, on the beta branch, it means multiplayer is completely trashed, by the way. Why do all this -- is this just shuffling the furniture around? No, it's... super important, but it's really also very hard to explain. But I'll give it a shot. See... coding multiplayer games is hard. And no two are exactly alike. Trying to code multiplayer is like trying to... um... analogies are also hard. It's a bit like trying to teach in a foreign language that's just similar to one you actually know? The assumption is that you're going to make many mistakes, some of them hilarious, and people will correct you and it will be fine. The problem is, that's assuming that you have someone to TALK to, in that analogy. Let's instead imagine you are writing a paper in this foreign language you sort of know. It's going to be a long paper, maybe a dissertation. Maybe a whole series of novels! This is a big important project to you, and you keep it mostly under wraps until it is done. You test it all in single player and it's great, and then you show it to people and... well, native speakers are going to give you an absolutely apocalyptic amount of feedback, and require you to pretty much redo the whole thing. Right, so who am I talking about, anyway? Me? Badger? Modders who code to the game? ...Yeah, pretty much all of the above. Every multiplayer game is like a new foreign language, and as I've been developing this one, I've been putting in safeguards against even myself, and learning what doesn't work. But what gets really discouraging is when there's a seemingly infinite surface area for cross-threading issues or memory leaks to pop up in, in particular. So, with my code architect hat on, I have to think about that less from a "just fix what's in front of you" sort of manner, and more from a "make it so that we can't break it so easily" standpoint. The engine of your car is really dangerous. It's hot, stuff moves around really fast, there are gears, etc. But it's also REALLY hard to get your hand caught in there. A lot of thought goes into making it so that the appropriate service technicians can get in and do what needs doing for maintenance or for more drastic repairs, but so that they don't cause collateral damage and nobody gets hurt. This is a lot like that. I'm less worried about the bugs of today, as far as multiplayer goes, than I am the bugs of next year, or the year after. If AI War 2 has a rich modding scene, I want it to thrive for years after my main time with it is through, and to do that I need to code to protect against errors in code that hasn't even been written yet, potentially by people who have never even heard of the game yet. As a side bonus, lest that seem needlessly ambitious, it also solves some bugs that have very much been present in the last year in actual code, and which I have struggled repeatedly to eradicate. This last month has been a lot of stepping back and trying to make the whole thing "safer" (harder to create bugs via mistake-because-did-not-know-secret-word-conjugate or whatever), as well as lowering the amount of data being sent. In essence, pulling it a bit more toward the single player experience. I'm getting close, but new things pop up all the time still. When I'm done and it's tested, we should be out of MP beta for good.

[ 2021-08-27 00:49:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.603_Last_of_the_Recent_Known_Regressions This one fixes all of the recent regressions of which I am aware. I wish chain lightning was a bit prettier than it is at the moment, but I'll worry with that later on if I need to. This still hasn't really been stress tested with a bajillion tractor beams using the new beams pipeline, and I have not tested to see if the hacking beam works, but all of the engineering beams are working great, and chain lightning works great (if slightly less fancy than I want). All of the other strange stuff of late with pause causing some oddities, or starting new maps being not centered properly on your planet, or saves not seeming to remember your last planet you were at, are all fixed. So is the Exit to Desktop just taking you back to the main menu! There are certainly other bugs that I'm aware of, but all of the really annoying or serious ones seem to be dealt with now. Actually in the most recent beta you couldn't change lobby settings! So that's also fixed. Zweihand added in a new starting fleet option, for Zenith Onslaught, which has a bunch of ships from that DLC. There's still lots more to come in terms of bugfixes and QoL and such, but depending on the urgency of those things I may just focus on multiplayer for a bit. There's still a pair of remaining issues where I really need to rip and tear some code before things get better (notifications at the top bar, and the "description appenders" for certain units), so I had probably better start there. Those might accidentally break some things for single-player (again, sigh), but those are the last really main such things involved for multiplayer. After that I need to load up multiplayer and start fixing whatever I find until it's fully functional again in the new reduced-scope-on-client paradigm. There are some optional things that I can do to help with RNG determinism past client-or-host-gates, but honestly when it comes to those the game self-repairs so fast in MP that I'm not overly worried about the problems those cause. I will get to that, but it's probably not urgent. We shall see. Anyhow, MP is almost certainly not going to be ready for play this weekend, because this stuff with the ship to ship lines took VASTLY longer than I expected, but I will be supremely frustrated if we aren't in a MP-ready state for the weekend after. My hope is that maybe sometime next week, or the week after at the latest, that we can merge the beta branch back into stable. I won't be ready to declare MP out of beta until we have more testing on it, but all these code upheavals of the last month should mean that the surface area where things can go wrong in MP is way reduced, as well as bandwidth itself also being reduced. Now that we're taking more time on DLC3, I can also try for the original vision for Expert mode, so that will be sometime soon, too. But not prior to merging back to the stable branch, unless I'm for some reason just waiting on tester feedback. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-26 02:29:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.602_Linesanity Please bear in mind that this one has some known issues. If you have a bunch of problems, please use the most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build. If you have big cases of tons of beam weapons or chain lightning or tractor beams or tachyon beams (if you have those turned visible) in a savegame, then seeing how that runs for you in the prior version versus the new version would also be really interesting to me on a variety of hardware. Some folks were struggling before with ultra-many-tractors being shown, but that should be a thing of the past (knock on wood). Overall this new build has a couple of small QoL improvements, mainly better hover and tooltips over wormholes, and then a tiny bit of balance (one unit -- electric bombers), and then everything else is bugfixing work / refactoring. The way that we draw "ship to ship lines" like repair lines, claim lines, chain lightning, beam weapons, and so forth has been re-coded from absolute scratch. It was having performance problems before, as well as three interlocking pools that were really complicated for me to manage, as well as various bugs like some beam weapons or hacking lines not showing up in the past. There are NEW bugs now, but these ones are at least in a simpler (from the outside, to manage) framework that doesn't require pools. It did require quite a lot of computer science / mental acuity testing on my part, which I may or may not have passed with various levels of success. ;) There's a list of known issues, most of which are cosmetic or minor QoL right now. I don't think any of the new issues are actually about correctness or performance, but fingers crossed. This is hot off the presses, and I've only been able to test it on so many scenarios. I'm releasing this one now, despite knowing there are still some things wrong with it, because (as noted) those are mostly cosmetic, and I could really use the testing help from folks who are interested. I'll be banging on this more tomorrow to get the rest of this out. This is one of those things that affects both single player and multiplayer, but one thing that was part of my plan this week was to get a lot of multiplayer stuff shored up and to hopefully get us closer to exiting the beta branch for both SP and MP sooner than later. Also, our timeframe for releasing DLC3 (aka NA) has been pushed back to January. There's an actual much more accurate description of what is in the new DLC there now, though: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/ This is going to be the final DLC, and it's a really big one. Some of the things that you may notice that have vacated from the old page description are roguelike stuff (that is out NOW, for free, in the base game instead!), and the Obscura (those got cut and replaced with a ton of other stuff). My goal is to finish up all the kickstarter last items by sometime in November still, and so when the AI War 2 Complete Edition comes out in January, that should really be the complete thing. We will of course still have some bugfix releases, and the modding scene will hopefully continue to grow post-complete-collection, but I'll be working on some other projects. At the moment a smallish hex-based turn-based strategy game is sitting at the top of my interest pile, but I keep switching concepts, so we'll see what sticks. Part of my time will start going to that starting in November. Anyway! In the short term, it's all AI War 2, all the time. Lots more to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-25 02:28:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.601_Tuning_Before_A_Respite The last one for a few days. I'm going to be out of the office for some family functions until Monday the 23rd, after which I'll be back to working on things. This version has a lot of really notable polish and quality of life improvements, as well as some notable fixes to recent bugs. Hopefully the single player experience is going to be really solid and playable with this build, but more testing will be needed to be sure. Multiplayer is I'm sure all kinds of busted right now, but that's something I'm going to finish tackling after I am back in the office. Essentially, there are still some more bits that I need to split up so that they work properly on the host and the client with the client having less data being sent to it now. There are also a variety of things likely going wrong on the client at the moment (inactive thread warnings that are harmless, etc) that would make the current beta really not suitable for playing multiplayer at all. The work of this week has made a rock-solid MP experience, which also uses less bandwidth, a lot closer to reality. I am maybe a week or two out, knock on wood, from reaching that. The downside is that in the meantime the beta branch doesn't really have playable multiplayer at all. The stable branch does. Please excuse our construction debris! As far as single player goes, the number of serious bugs SEEMS to be falling to an all new low since the major 3.500 update and all the pooling that came with that, but I also think that people have been testing a bit less in the last week, so it may just be fewer reports. At any rate, my hope is to have another stable branch release of the game in general within a few weeks, but it just depends on what testing is like. I am not feeling great about how things are progressing on my part of the schedule for DLC3, but everyone else's work seems to be on time, so that's good at least. I'm not sure how I'm going to really handle this predicament, but it will become more clear as I get through with the pooling-related bugbears, and get MP potentially out of beta for the first time in this game's life. It will work out either way, but I'm hoping for something that doesn't involve insane overtime on my part or a delay in the DLC3 release date. This new build really feels a ton better with some of the QoL improvements, by the way. Holy cow does it make the at-planet window better (thanks Asteroid for the suggestion!), and the planet highlighting when hovering over notifications on the top bar working well again is really a relief (because I find I can't tell what is going on without that). More to come next week. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-19 03:22:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.600_Multiplayer_Sprint There's a saying about going through cycles of bugging and debugging, when it comes to code. The last few weeks have been debugging. Today and for a few days is mostly going to be bugging. The multiplayer code simply doesn't need to be doing as much as it has been trying to, and so there's a bit of a shift in the design so that several new categories of data are host-directed and the clients thus do less as well as seeing exactly what the host sees. This will be a bandwidth-reducer as well as lowering the surface area for multiplayer-related bugs. There are a few benefits to general efficiency when it comes to single-player, too. In the very short term, the beta branch of multiplayer is no longer feature-complete, as the client is now temporarily blind to a few things (notifications, intel tab) and may have some extra errors that happen when hovering over certain units. Among the other bugs already reported. My goal is to sprint through all of these things in the next few weeks, although from Thursday through Monday I'll be traveling, so there will be a brief hiatus. This particular build also includes some excellent new fixes and tweaks for single-player, with the map darkening and focusing now working a lot better (it had been a regression sometime recently). The notifications temporarily do not function when it comes to the map darkening and highlighting, but that's part of the general rework of those that I'm doing for multiplayer purposes and now also this purpose. Lots of mods got updates to function with the latest code, and all of them should now be functional again. And a couple of other random bugfixes. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-18 06:24:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.510_Threads_And_Science This one hits a number of bugfixes, and some quality of life improvements as well: 1. Double-clicking to center on a selected fleet should now work as you would expect it to, rather than being overly aggressive as it always has been before. 2. The "are you sure?" from the tech tab, including hotkeys and settings to bypass it, now also applies to the hacking tab. This is actually a pretty big deal, since hacking points are your most finite resource and you don't want to accidentally spend them when you think you might be opening a submenu. 3. The ships that benefit from a tech upgrade or downgrade, or a fleet upgrade, have been a thorn in our side for quite some time. Either not showing counts correctly, or not showing all the items being counted, etc. The presentation on all this has jumped up a substantial amount, and it now shows accurate mark levels, differentiation between mobile ships and defenses, and other things of that nature. This was quite a lot. 4. There were a number of random-seeming threading bugs that were popping up still in the last version. Those should be all fixed now, with some new strategies for tying threads together and monitoring and managing them. I wasn't directly seeing what many others were (go figure), so I can't verify that it's definitely all fixed, but fingers crossed it should be. 5. Fixed several longstanding minor bugs and ui annoyances that predate the beta, just as a palate cleanser of sorts between some of these other large items. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-17 05:10:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.509_De-Apocalypsing_The_Code This one is HUGE in terms of how many bugs it smashes. The recent version 3.500 added pooling to a lot of new parts of the game, and prevented a giant memory leak, but it also introduced a fairly apocalyptic number of bugs. I've been super stressed about it, honestly, wondering if that would smash my whole schedule and last for months, or what. Well, today I wound up being able to duplicate and smash two really major bugs that were systematically destroying the game if you played for a long while in one game, or as soon as you loaded up a savegame or starting a new game after quitting to the main menu from playing previously. Some of these are a bit amusing. The details are all on the chris-talks-code-gameplay, in really great detail as I explored through these things today. But the short version is: 1. Since 3.5, if you started a new game fresh, it wouldn't save what mods and dlc you had enabled in the save. This was troublesome, but not a world-ender. 2. After pooling kicks in (aka, after loading a save or starting a campaign after exiting to the main menu, or after playing long enough), the systems on new ships would be kind of randomly scrambled around. So... the cloaking device on ship A is now a random weapon from ship B, which has a weapon from ship C, etc. As you can imagine, this made for all sorts of truly insane bugs. 3. A whole bunch of pooled external objects were being incorrectly re-added to the pool and then redistributed, which meant that multiple things were sharing the same data storage. It's like if 400 people try to share one footlocker. Uh... yeah, it gets confused fast. 4. Pools of external objects were busted in general after the first load, and would just keep giving out the same initial object over and over again. The footlocker problem all over again, just a different location and even more severe. Some other smaller bugs were also fixed, and many bits of preventative code were added. This stuff will help with the stability of multiplayer (since single player and multiplayer have a huge amount of their code in common), but multiplayer on the beta branch is still not ready for playing. I have some more breaking in that area to do before I get to fixing, but the result should be really worth it. Lower bandwidth requirements, more accuracy, fewer desyncs that require repair. I'm hoping to get the main game, AND multiplayer, out of beta really soon. I won't be around much tomorrow, as it's my daughter's birthday. Not sure how much this weekend, either. Maybe in bits and pieces. But definitely back to normal schedule on Monday. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-13 03:18:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.508_Hotkey_Heaven This one finishes fixing up the orbital stuff for DLC3, which you can see some videos of on discord if you're interested (the chris-talks-gameplay-code section). More relevant for everyone, the various hotkeys (like V for pursuit mode) now work as toggles properly, versus you having to hit V for on, and Ctrl+V for off. This was really buggy prior to last October, hence the switch to this awful system, but now it works great because I took a bit of a different premise. A number of balance shifts have been made, most notably a global speed cap on player units to keep them from being multiplicatively speed-boosted to insanely overpowered degrees. The tooltips have seen a number of updates for added correctness and informativeness, and there's a slew of random bugfixes. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-12 02:10:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.507_Spare_A_Moment_For_Your_Orbitals Okay, this one is largely a digression. But first, what's the stuff in here for the bulk of folks? - More tools for looking at threads that might be misbehaving. It seems to be intermittent. - Badger got the tech window code to provide a more accurate count of upgradable ship lines. It does not fix problems with the turret count though. - Several bugfixes that were pretty minor. Beyond that, I took a bit of a side track today, and worked on a major new gameplay mechanic for DLC3. Well, kind of a cluster of them. The core thing is ship orbits around other ships, the gravity well center, other ships orbiting other ships, and so on. There's more I need to do there to make it fully smooth, and I haven't had time to test the versions that are not focused around the fleet leader, but it's a start. Why this side track? I learned today that Zeus's availability for doing his portion of DLC3 is going to be ending later this month, so I was now the bottleneck for him being able to do the work he wanted to. There's a few other things along those lines that I'm going to knock out, and that will give the testers more time to test, too. Then I'm not holding up anyone else's work while I continue to bang my head against the wall of the codebase and get all the post-pooling errors that remain fixed. The number is really shrinking, which is good, but the number did not shrink today. As those drop in number, I will then shift back to multiplayer and work on that. There's some major ripping and tearing I plan to do in that area to make the client really work well. Interestingly, I found an unexpected source of desyncs in the ship creation code today when I was working on the orbital work, so that's something I can improve. The game already self-repairs from desyncs, but the less work I make it do in that regard, the better it is for your bandwidth and for smoothness on the client. So that was an unexpected and nice find, but it's a nontrivial fix to solve it. (Passing a Context object past a client-barring gate is insta-desync, is the short explanation). Loadouts are one of those things that are on my short term list of things to make ready for the others, and that will be backported to DLC1 as well. Though I'm not sure precisely when on that bit. There's a bunch of other features and work, and I'm not entirely sure how well things will fit into my schedule. We'll find out as each week passes. Right now it looks like the "true" versions of Expert and Deathwish mode are not going to come to pass, unfortunately. Strategic Sage and I have been discussing that, and essentially trying to get the Fuel concept or the other things we wanted in there is a HUGE time gamble for us both, and there's no guarantee that it will yield the feel that either of us are looking for. And meanwhile, most players are super happy with the Humanity Ascendant mode as it is, so I'm chasing a very tiny minority goal there. It's something I wanted to do, but it's looking like it's not remotely commercially viable right now. I don't plan to remove those other modes, because they do add on some stricter rulesets, but they may never be as divergent as they were intended to be. There's a few nice QoL improvements still planned for the near future, because they are fast and the sort of thing everyone will appreciate. I'm going to try to avoid making promises for the next little while, because I'm really having to react on my feet to what comes up in testing and what other contributors need for their work and so on, so it's hard for me to keep a straight-line focus like if I was working in a vacuum by myself. Anyway, the release tempo is going to stay fast for a while, either way. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-11 04:15:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

We're still in beta, but today strikes a solid blow against the forces of entropy that are keeping us captive there for the moment: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.506_Setsuna_Notices_A_Lobotomy SirLimbo made a number of improvements to shot compression (which was a really huge overhaul of multishot by him to work better with stacks), and this build fixes a number of things that he found over the weekend. Some of the "ships not shooting despite there being plenty of targets" bugs sound like they are fixed. All of them? Hopefully, but who knows. On my end, I've been chasing the bug that originally Setsuna and Zweihand reported, where certain factions just seemed to go stupid every so often. The most egregious was the Zenith Trader just camping out on a planet for 45 minutes. Based on reports, Badger figured out that this had to be something to do with the long-range-planning code, and managed to replicate the problem. I chose to go in a rather comprehensive direction, and started reviewing all of our threading code in and around that area. I'd rather not be purely reactionary to bugs as they come up, you know? In the end, today I only found the one bug (and it was two lines of very well hidden code), but along the way I simplified a lot of code, and made a lot of the threading code faster. How much faster? It's... really going to depend a lot. The older and slower your CPU is, but the more cores you have, the better for these improvements. So older quad-cores will probably see the largest gains. Even for me on a really new octa-core (as of late last month), I seem to be feeling extra smoothness, though. This also prevents a number of possible bugs that MAY have been affecting things in the beta period with various messages from the background threads getting lost on their way to the simulation. I can't prove that was happening, but I strongly suspect it, and based on some of the bug reports that were very intermittent, that would fit. At any rate, it's no longer possible, so the problem will either go away or not. I'm mainly setting my sights now on bugs relating to the FakeEntity, and those related to the unit cap multiplaction insanity of which Zweihand has been exploring the nature. I know that multiplayer in the beta is quite broken right now, but I'm going to do another two rounds of ripping and tearing on that before I patch it fully back up. I have some great ideas to really put a stake through the heart of the main multiplayer woes that we've had for a while, and it should also lower bandwidth requirements. Hopefully after all those bits are done -- hopefully this week -- we'll be back off the beta branch. And hopefully we'll have multiplayer in an official state, rather than a beta state, before the end of the month. Meanwhile, this weekend I spent my time working on concepts for ludonarrative coherence in the next game I want to make (in super early preproduction right now), and that's a fitting new goal after most of a decade chasing procedural storytelling. I really hit the high note of that with The Last Federation, and AI War 2 has mostly been a technical and design and art reawakening/exploration/R&D period for me, so having a new mission for the next half-decade feels really good. October and November will be winding down AI War 2, but there will still be lots of little releases for it throughout 2022, plus whatever modders get up to. And in the meantime, I have lots to do here, myself! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-10 03:19:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New daily beta! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.505_Long-Term-Thread_Efficiency 1. Okay, there has been so much code review today, and for the longest time I didn't really find all that many things of concern. Yes I was able to make some improvements to correctness after pooling in some areas, but it was nothing that would explain the sorts of errors that Zweihand and Setsuna were reporting seeing intermittently. Which was a surprise, because I figured it would be in the external data for factions. 2. After working on verifying that was all okay and fixing up the parts that were not, Badger and I got to talking about the Zenith Trader case in particular. The Zenith Trader uses a data structure for its movement that most of the newer factions didn't use. That data structure was basically a copy of parts the main game data, for purposes of use on the "long term planning" AI/NPC threads. I had mentally flagged that category of data as being potentially problematic when I was making things pooled a bit ago, but a problem with it wasn't obvious. 3. Rather than start testing and debugging that long-term data copy, I decided to strip it entirely out instead. This isn't used by more recent factions for a reason. Essentially, as I've further developed my thinking on ways to speed up multi-threaded simulations (once you take perfect determinism off the table), it was clear that the long-term-data copy was a relic of the old deterministic way of thinking. This had been on my radar for at least a year as something I wished I could kill, but the game was working fine and so there was no sense rocking the boat. Well... now the game was NOT working fine, so it was the perfect time to strip that out. So what was the result? Well... it's hard to say. Those behaviors that were observed were already really intermittent. This may have been the part of the code that was causing them, or this may have been utterly unrelated to the bug I was ostensibly chasing. But I do know one thing: this data and the way it was generated was one of the biggest slowdowns for the game, on the main sim-coordinating thread. I have wondered for years where the "performance leak as planet counts climb" was, and I think that as I was stripping this stuff out I got my answer. The amount of time spent calculating this stuff was staggering, and also completely unneeded. It's an excellent showcase of why my newer method for multithreading is so superior in the first place. I'm running on a really beefy CPU these days, so I don't notice a huge difference since I already had full sim speed, but it does seem a little snappier to load the savegames at the very least, or maybe that's my imagination. I'll be curious to hear if there's a noticeable speed boost for anyone playing a more extreme game setup, or with a lower-spec machine. ---- This did, naturally, break all the code mods again. The Arcen-maintained ones and AMU are updated, but I didn't give SirLimbo any warning or any time to update his actual faction mods. Hey, this is a beta after all. There is some more data along the lines of this long-term data (it's data for short-range planning, in this case), and I may look into stripping that out as well, thus breaking all mods AGAIN. My final ideas for some of the problems seen in multiplayer are also something I plan on implementing soon, and those are going to require reworking all the notifications and intel tab entries and a lot of unit tooltip addenders, which faction mods also tend to have in abundance. It's a bit of a rough time to be modding via code here! But the result is going to be a leaner simulation for singleplayer, and a vastly more performant and accurate situation in multiplayer, too. I'm not thrilled with how this is hitting my schedule, but hopefully some of these simplifications also remove the bugs that are lingering at the moment. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-07 00:13:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New daily beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.504_Multiplayer_Achievements So what's new? 1. All relating to Zenith Onslaught, 44 more achievements have been added to Steam. 2. Achievements should now work vastly better on multiplayer clients, and this paves the way toward a few other MP data changes that should benefit the MP experience soon. 3. You can no longer click outside of the gravity well to give funky invalid orders to your ships that also then cause save errors. Additionally, the cursor now follows you smoothly around the edge of the gravity well when you are out of bounds. 4. Unit rotations are remembered when you save and load, and units can be set to spin, or to face the target they are firing at, and a variety of things like that. The effect with all turrets is not perfect, but that's because of a baked in offset on them. The xml tools exist for anyone to fix the effect so that it's perfect, but I won't have time to do that one myself. Lots going on! 5. Huge amount of rework on the systems attached to units. There have been ongoing problems with them since we started pooling units in the last week or so. Those problems should all be solved now, knock on wood. 6. Some multi-threading things have been made so they work better and an accidental modder trap has been removed (after I found a Badger caught in there; I didn't even mean to arm the thing). 7. A bug in recent builds made it so that Humanity Ascendant was the only mode you could play, but now you can play Challenger or Expert or Deathwish or Sandbox properly again. 8. There's one very strange bug related to the "fake unit" that we are still chasing, and it's demonstrably not fixed but should give me much more informative error messages so that I can fix it tomorrow. More to come soon. Enjoy! P.S. - It's my goal at this point to really get multiplayer that final bit done so that it's not in a beta state anymore. My hope is over the next couple of weeks for that to happen. P.P.S. That way it's plenty in advance of the October DLC, which will be the final DLC for the game, paired with an AI War 2 Complete Edition. I'll still have some pretty frequent releases into November as I wrap up the last of the kickstarter items, and anything else that needs bugfixing. My plan is then do do light occasional features and fixes after that point, and to keep mod updates that people do getting pushed out to the full audience, but that will mark the end of the main era of AI War 2 development. For financial and family health reasons, I need to make a change, and I'm also really looking forward to working on new projects -- as well as ending this one on a really super high note, since the game has had something of a renaissance lately. (Those volunteers and such who know more about this situation should feel free to speak freely except on the health matters, for anyone who has questions.)

[ 2021-08-06 00:05:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.503_Multiplayer_Sound This one is pretty much all about the bugfixes, and it absolutely SLAYS in that regard. Summarizing the high points: 1. There were still some async calls being made to unity asset bundles, which meant it could still deadlock. That now is not the case. So maybe no more deadlock? 2. Where we used to load around a thousand individual tiny icons from asset bundles, we now load eight larger dictionaries. This has a notable performance boost to the UI sidebars for things like the planet view, and it also loads faster, and it also is less likely to deadlock on load (lots of small calls tend to be the cause of that). 3. Several systematic reviews of unit-related code pooling variables have been done, and a number of omissions were found. These were responsible for a number of pooling-related bugs from the last three builds, and are now fixed. But saves from those builds may still have errors built in. 4. The lobby now behaves like you would expect regarding the camera, home planet selection, etc. 5. Drones work reliably again! And drone producers use less CPU to do their work, too. 6. There was a major bug in the delayed sound playback (which is not super frequently used, but is some for voice and such) that has been there since April 2018. People have been suspicious that it was hanging onto some sounds way too long and playing them late, etc. I found that bug -- possibly two contributors to it, anyway -- and slew them both. There is also now an indicator in the escape menu to tell you how many queued sounds there are, if you're feeling suspicious in the future of delays with sound playback. The core bug here was an embarrassingly basic logic inversion. 7. Multiplayer has had a lot of general bugfixes, as has solo play, but also it now has a whole new subsystem (not yet tested, ran out of time and this is beta) for the host to generate certain kinds of sounds (voice clips, etc) and propagate them to the client. This is helpful, because the client was sometimes incorrectly playing them or missing playing them. I plan to make some more changes in this area to lean on the host a bit more and reduce client data load and processing even further. At the moment, all of the really major issues from the last month that I'm aware of are fixed. Now on to the reports of things that I am NOT aware of yet. ;) It is... inevitable. It is my destiny. /Palpatine. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-05 02:41:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.502_Input_Salve Still in the beta branch for right now. This one fixes a ton of bugs, including almost all the ones that I mentioned in the last release (not the mis-centering in the galaxy map, which is a minor cosmetic thing really). 1. It also has come to my attention that the game hangs sometimes on start for some people, across OSes, on the latest betas. A lot of investigation went into that today (you can see it on discord if you want in chris-talks-code-gameplay), and the end result is that unity is definitely having a bug where sometimes it will just take its ball and go home during loading from asset bundles. It's some sort of cross-threading thing, and I've done a bunch to mitigate that, but there's still some other things I can do. I haven't seen any mention of this on unity's issue tracker in recent builds, so this is either a regression on their part or it is resources.load() conflicting with asset bundle loading. Either way, I'd rather not wait for them to fix it, and reproducing it is spotty at best. Anyhow, so that's improved, but may not be gone entirely. 2. Input handling, on the other hand, is VASTLY improved compared to the last half month. I made a number of changes in July that were attempting to help with some unusual control schemes that one user wanted to do, and it wound up fouling up things for everyone. Today I've revised that code further and it now works better than ever (knock on wood, so far as I can tell), although the one use case that individual wanted isn't possible anymore. But the code is a lot more brief and clear and functional than it was prior to the foulup, so that's nice. And our new double-click handling improvements are still all here. 3. Fixed an exception popup in the last build if you didn't have DLC3 installed, and that was preventing random factions from working. Those now work! 4. Tooltips now work flawlessly again, versus being strange like they have been for the last half month or so in the beta branches. 5. Some more metal and energy consumption fixes, this time provided by NR SirLimbo. 6. Mod updates by SirLimbo, and also cml added support for random factions to his mod. 7. Plus just more random exception fixes relating to recent changes on the beta branch. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-04 02:23:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.501_Shot_Compression_And_Bugsmashing This one has a major new feature in it that NR SirLimbo has been wanting to put in for a while, and he was waiting for the next big beta period (that's now!) to do it. It's called "shot compression," and it's basically like stacking for shots. In a lot of respects, it lets stacks of ships with multi-shot abilities work a lot more like they do when they are not stacked, replacing a number of more ad-hoc types of approximation that I had put in over the years instead. I like this solution a lot, but SirLimbo notes that it definitely does need more testing by folks. This build also adds the major feature of RANDOM FACTIONS to the base game! That was a cool feature that Badger cooked up, and it was going to be in DLC3 for a while, but instead it's free to everybody. We'll properly announce that as a marquee new feature when we come out of the beta branch, but for now folks willing to deal with this beta period can go nuts. :) In other news, since the release of that last build there were certainly a number of bugs that folks have reported, and some of those are fixed while others are still a work in progress. It's coming fairly quickly so far, knock on wood, and hopefully a release tomorrow will affect the last really large things. 1. Fixed a whole mess of exceptions and errors that could happen, many of which predated the beta period, at least for multiplayer. 2. The ability to use HDR displays apparently was causing certain displays to be very dark. At least I hope that's what it was. There's no good reason for this game to use HDR displays, to be honest, so I just turned that back off. 3. Fixed some super longstanding Astro Train bugs, so now they work properly. 4. Fixed some even MORE longstanding bugs relating to energy and metal displays per planet, and things like that. There were a number of them that were showing correctly in one spot (and calculating correctly for the actual bonuses), but then showing incorrectly on a variety of screens. That's all consolidated now and shows correctly everywhere now. 5. Notifications at the top of the screen don't flicker anymore (that was a regression in the last version). 6. Galaxy map icons now react visibly to being hover-over, like icons in the planet view do. This makes things feel so much more responsive! Also, the underlays behind planets react like their planet itself, which is also really helpful when you're using the search tool in particular. Major bugs still known: - Hovering over units and planets on the galaxy map DOES always highlight them (so the hovering is working perfectly), but the actual tooltip does NOT always show up. There are some other places in which the tooltip also does not always show up correctly. - Double-clicking and a few other mouse items are acting a bit funky. I need to read those reports in more detail. - Going into the lobby the first time is still mis-centered. - Some various other exceptions that folks have run into and reported. I'm hoping to have those things wrapped up tomorrow, and then we'll see what new things folks run into as it gets more and more stable here. It is annoying to have a bunch of code regressions, but that's part of the territory when making such large changes. These should hopefully pass quickly, and in general things just feel so much more smooth! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-08-03 01:52:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! Wow it's been a while, so this is huge. https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.500_Data_Integrity_And_Game_Tech_Upgrades This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.500 as the version. On Steam, there is a most_recent_stable_beta if you have problems with this one and need to fall back to 3.313 as the previous beta. So what's going on with this release? Well... a lot! 1. We've upgraded the version of the unity engine that we're using by a lot of versions, and so now we have native M1/Silicon support for macs, as well as better support for OSX and Linux in general. Also also, it's probable that the bug with Radeon cards on OSX in Metal is fixed. 2. I made a ton of improvements visually and performance-wise to the main menu yet again, so that runs better than ever even on very low-end machines. 3. There have been a number of UI performance improvements in general. Visually nothing is different much. 4. Random bugfixes, but really only a handful of them in the main. 5. A HUGE architecture rework when it comes to how data is loaded and pooled. It turns out that we were having a ton of memory leaking out in various ways, and I've now pretty much entirely put a stop to that. Thanks to Daniexpert for bringing this to my attention. This particular thing is so overwhelmingly large in how much of the game that it touches that there may be some lingering bugs that are unknown, and there are a handful of fairly minor known issues listed in the release notes, too. 6. There are now anti-memory-leak tools for modders and faction developers to be able to monitor their own stuff, too. So far just by watching at the OS level, it doesn't look like much is leaking there at the moment, if anything, but it's nice to have. 7. The memory leak work, which was extensive, also doubles as a helper for multiplayer client integrity checking. I haven't gotten into that yet, but it's going to be very useful for getting the last of the MP oddities out of the way. Known issues? Sure: - Centering is off when going into the lobby usually the first time. - Notifications at the top of the screen flicker at the moment. - Mods: Chrysalis Devourer and Kaizer's Marauders are probably re-broken despite SirLimbo just fixing them a bit ago. - Mods: The Reprocessors mod is likely broken until it gets a code update. - All other other mods should be working fine from what we can tell. - Unknown factor: not sure if we are clearing playeraccounts the proper amount, in multiplayer in particular. Will need testing by me. - Unknown factor: who knows what else is wrong. This has been a tectonic shift for the game. But those are the known issues, at least. - Unknown factor: It is probably going to be important to check that things like the Zenith Miner Mining, and any other units with particle effects (Zenith Miner Probe, etc) all are properly working and not getting stale, too. - Unknown factor: Same deal with some of the special effects, like lightning blasts and such. Those haven't been tested yet, and are at a minor risk of having the same problem, although the code review looks good so far. This has been an absolute slog and a ton of work, but I'm really pleased with how much more responsive the game is, and all the new power and capabilities. This is one of those items that wasn't on my radar at all, but I'm glad I was able to put in the time and get it improved. Now let's just have fingers crossed that we don't run into too many regression bugs over the next days and weeks. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-31 04:57:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.313_Input.2C_Selection.2C_And_Flagships This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.313 as the version. For now, we're going to leave 3.309 as the main non-beta version for everyone. These new builds are killer, and bring a lot to the table, but are buggy in the short term because I had to change so much, and I can't remotely find every edge case when making such large changes. This one changes the input system around a lot in a low level way, so it should feel a lot better. This one also makes HUGE changes where you can suddenly select anything and everything -- enemy units, neutral things, etc. You can pause neutral units before you would even be capturing them. It also hides cloaked enemy units even from your sidebar. Stationary flagship mode is a really useful (but harder to get used to from the start) mode, and it has a "punch through" key of Z that lets you issue orders to a flagship in that mode. Now you can hold Z to give ignored-by-the-flagship orders to fleets NOT in stationary flagship mode. So you can use it either way, which is handy. A laundry list of bugfixes in here, although there are still some issues with engineers that I'm aware of, and drones don't build, and a few other things. It should be plenty playable in the main, but there's some stuff that will need attention for sure. More to come soon, as this shakes out and we find all the bugs and grind those into paste. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-16 23:52:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.312_Hotfix This one is just a hotfix for a boneheaded compile chain error that slipped in at the last moment before I did the release last night. Sorry about that! This also has a few other random fixes and improvements in there from Badger and Zweihand, since they were already ready to go when I made the hotfix. More to come soon!

[ 2021-07-16 13:22:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.311_Engineer_Multitasking (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one continues the improvements from the beta build I put out yesterday, which is rewriting a huge amount of how engineers make their decisions and how they go about their work in general. For one thing, did you know that engineers can do a bunch of things at once? Specifically, they can repair something, build something, and boost a factory all at the same time if they are in range of them all. This is not new, but it only ever drew one assistance line. Now you can properly see all that sort of thing, and the lines themselves are more attractive and informative about the state of metal flows going to each thing. There are also slightly different line colors and styles for things like assisting construction of a structure versus boosting a factory versus doing a repair (before these were all identical). The line visuals are more efficient on the GPU/CPU AND prettier now in general, which also includes tractor beams and a few other unrelated lasers and such. Also, in terms of multiplayer, or assisting NPC factions, the math is finally settling down into something that is very close to correct. There's more things that I need to fix up with this, but it's demonstrably better than two releases ago, so I'm taking this back out of beta. Tomorrow I hope to finalize all the rest of this, but it will partly depend on feedback and what folks notice that might still be a bit off. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-16 01:36:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.310_Engineering_Intelligence_Injection This one is on the beta branch! In Steam, you will need to select current_beta to see it. On GOG Galaxy, you'll need to select Beta. In the game you should then see 3.310 as the version. If you have a chance, please do try this new beta version, and pay careful attention to your economy and your engineers and repair, etc. There are still some known issues with engineers (getting indecisive at times, choosing not-the-optimal-order-I-say-in-the-release-notes to do things in), but I think that they're still actually more functional than the prior version. And I'm not aware of any other bugs right now that are new. However, as with any version that changes so many things (this serious changed a LOT, and I still have more to do next build to get those last known things fixed), there is the chance for something to be dramatically wrong with it. Hence a beta that is possibly just going to last a day or so. If your economy is correct and not getting eaten by things improperly, then I'll be happy; that's honestly my main worry, because I changed so much there. So what's up with this build in general? 1. Network privacy settings if you play by IP and are streaming and want to hide that from your screen. 2. Fix a bug that was causing slowdown by spamming the error log in the prior build. 3. Completely re-code most of the engineering logic, and a lot of how assistance from engineers is applied to things they are building or boosting, etc. - Previously in MP, the person receiving help from your engineer paid for it instead of you. Some help you were! ;) Now you pay for it properly, as expected. - Way more options on being able to help out allies in MP and even SP. - Ability to boost factories in general in MP, or build things for allies. - Fix to engineers running off to strange corners of the gravity well (and possibly same fix for melee units). - New injection of intelligence in engineer priorities for what to build first, etc. (This doesn't work fully yet, but all the other new features do.) - Engineers no longer move in small jumps to get to their target. They go there much more quickly and smoothly. 4. Bit of data savings, and several minor performance improvements. 5. Fix to the bug from the last few months where a lot of ship-to-ship lines were not drawn, AND a fix to them sometimes hanging around TOO long. Feedback is really welcome, and I hope to get the rest of the remaining issues with these tomorrow, along with some other bugs and improvements. If you're curious how some of these longstanding engineers could last so long... well, check out my last playthrough, where I show myself playing the first two hours (gametime) of the game. Notice my use of engineers? Essentially, whatever was auto-created I let happen, and I ignored them beyond that. It's part of my general playstyle that I rarely have the extra metal to spare, and I play on accelerated time, so engineers just put me in the Drain economy state more often than not. It's a very strange thing not to play with engineers much, but I don't, and so I was completely blind to how prevalent this stuff was. Sorry about that! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-14 23:30:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.309_Hangar_Staff (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Wow, it's been over a week since the last release! I've really been pretty absorbed with some of the art updates, including all of the wormholes, and the title menu for the game (as shown below). I'm really pleased with how much more detailed it turned out, AND how much more efficient. The overall visual quality of the hangar scene in the main menu is much much higher, but it also probably runs much faster on every spectrum of machine. We also finally have some human characters hanging around in the dock -- having a chat, waiting impatiently for doors that never open, and taking a break by themselves, respectively. This helps give a sense of what the scale of the doors and ships and objects are. And, per discussions on discord and unlike the Death Star, we did build in a safety railing. Meanwhile, Badger made some notable improvements to hacking estimates. A lot of hacks didn't really give an indication of the strength of the response you are likely to see, but now do. He also improved the battle notification trigger code, making it easier to notice where battles that actually require your attention are located. A couple of minor tweaks and fixes, and lots of updates to many mods by several authors. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-12 23:33:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.307_Art_Overload_And_The_Devourer_Chrysalis (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) There are so many projects going on right now for AI War 2! Personally, I'm taking a pause from Expert (and the other related) modes, and working on some art upgrades and general artwork. There's something north of a dozen new or updated unit graphics in this particular build. I have on my todo list another... 140ish.
One of the cool things changed in this one is the AI Command Stations, which you see ALL OVER THE PLACE. They were some of my much older art, where I was trying to get a sense of large scale without having repeating elements or using greebling (which is how Star Wars makes things feel large). Normally in not-outer-space, you use horizon lines, distance fog, and other things to give a sense of scale. None of that really exists in space, although in the last few years I have discovered that using a smaller camera FOV actually does give some of the benefits of horizon lines (making things seem larger than life), while also avoiding lens distortion of spherical objects (aka all the planets don't turn into ovals near the edge of the screen). At any rate, there was a great discussion about those sorts of techniques, and things that I've learned that work well or poorly, in our discord. Links to the relevant parts are in the release notes. The new command station started out being something I was iffy on after my initial paint work -- I came back after lunch and noted that now I hated it -- but after working with it in my more modern shaders, the result is actually really killer. Here it is:
Other command stations, and also fortresses of various types, and various capturables in the base game, are all on the schedule for major upgrades like this. There's also a lot of Zenith Onslaught art coming. A major new mod also is now out as of this release: the Chrysalis Devourer. This is something that NR SirLimbo has been working on for what seems like most of 2021 so far. It's a really ambitious faction that asks the question: what if the Devourer Golem actually evolved over the course of the game? And somewhere along the lines, additional questions like "what if it behaved more like a real animal?" and "what if you could defeat it temporarily, but it held a grudge?" The result is something that preview testers in the discord modding channel have been enjoying a lot. Behind the scenes, there's also a lot of work going on for the next expansion, which will now come out in October. Our "DLC3" is being split into two parts, because once again the scope has grown and we have a lot of people working on things with it. So the first part will be October, part 2 will be Q1 2022. More information on that will be available in the coming months, and we'll have updated the store page with the new info, too. There's a lot of features that have not been announced yet at all, some features that were announced but which will now just be given free to everyone who has the base game, and then some features that are going in either one part or the other.
Multiplayer isn't perfect yet, but is getting there. A lot of bugs have been slain recently in general, so taking a detour into art after being so bug-oriented for a bit seemed like a good idea. There's a lot more bugslaying in the near future, though. And there's still various other free features coming this summer, like Interplanetary Weapons, among others. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-07-04 02:05:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.306_Tweaks (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) These are just a few tweaks, including some new visuals for the base game and ZO, a bugfix in the AMU mod, etc. The spire hammer AI type also got some new units in ZO, which is nice. There's more in the works, but I've spent most of the last couple of days (and a lot of the weekend) working on getting my physical and digital workspace working better. My desk for the last year and a half has been all kinds of lacking in ergonomics, and I've been feeling it quite a bit. But I hadn't put it together until it was pointed out to me a couple of weeks back. Ergonomics matter! So much easier to get more done when it isn't uncomfortable or outright painful. So depending on what your own desk situation is, I hope you don't have a blind spot like I did. Anyhow, I've also been on a continual quest for a few years to try and get the build processes to happen faster, and make it easier for me to make art updates in particular by having them not take so long. A full build of the art packages for the game would typically take 90 minutes, and I haven't been able to get much improvement on that despite how Unity has been improving their own systems. I finally am upgrading computers (in the near future), but my current machine is kind of falling apart (keyboard keys don't always work correctly, getting inexplicably slow in other areas, etc), so I figured I'd see what I could improve in the shorter term while I wait for the new one. And... uh... well, my wife describes it as something that you might see on The Office, and I think that's apt. Heh. Five years ago I had put together my current machine, and it included one really fast NVME SSD for the OS, a second SSD that is less fast in 3.5" form factor, and , and a 7200 RPM SSD in 3." form factor. So naturally I had my OS and some programs on the NVME drive, and then all my working stuff on the second SSD... Except I didn't. I've been running, all this time, with all my main work stuff on the HDD. No wonder things were so slow! It took 18 hours just to transfer 375 GB off that to the actual SSD; it was getting like 6MB/sec. Today, after that was completed, I can now actually upload things faster, compile a bit faster and build those 90 minute art packages in... 12 minutes. Good grief! So this should make me a lot more efficient, with less waiting around. And once I have my new computer in a month or so, it should get even faster than that. I'm definitely excited, since it really reduces the barrier from me updating certain parts of the game. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-29 23:39:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.305_Fruits_Of_A_Snipe_Hunt (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) A snipe hunt is a foolish errand (and apparently is also an actual bird, as well as an interesting etymological root for sniper, but none of those bits are relevant). Yesterday and the day before I had very long days, but seemed to accomplish next to nothing. I was trying to recode how the game loads and parses its xml files, to make them more efficient and get around a rare bug I had stumbled onto three days ago and then turned (accidentally) into a super common bug. This morning I wound up just having to check in all that work, in case I need some of the results in the future, and then just revert it all and start over. During my 12+ hour snipe hunt, I discovered the general parameters for what makes the game load a bit faster, and what does not. So I came back and used much simpler principles to get some of those speed gains, and correct the loading bug in general, and that's that. Sorry it took so long, that was super frustrating. Various other small bugfixes and performance improvements also resulted from that diversion, so those are now in this build also. SirLimbo was also really busy during this time period, and he fixed the coilbeam math as well as unifying beam weapon math in general. He also continued to make improvements to the tooltips, and got the new icons in there for various status effects. Unfortunately the full-color versions that I did last week looked terrible when small, so those also had to get completely redone in single-color fashion. Those look much better, but I'll probably refine them some in the future. Several other bugs were fixed, Zeus made a number of balance tweaks to some very high-end ships, and some other experimental changes went in for purposes of testing for later. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-26 22:25:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.304_Coilbeams_No_Longer_Tickle (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one is filled with goodness: - You can use Ctrl+1 or similar to assign the hotkeys to fleets. This has been requested for a while. - There's a helper command that lets you rename campaigns if you want to split a campaign you're in. - Officer fleets and spire fleets will now "Roam if Instructed" in new savegames, which is the more-expected behavior. You can still toggle it either way. - Lots of tooltip updates! More awesomeness from NR SirLimbo, showing debuffs and buffs in a way that has never been available before. - Fixed several threading bugs, and a bug where spire flagships could hack the ARS, and some bugs with marauders. - Swapping fleet leaders is no longer possible, but you can swap all the ship lines in a fleet using the prior interface's location. Same general effect, but minus negative side effects. - Fixed several bugs with beam weapon math, most notably a recent one that made spire coilbeams basically do "tickle level" amounts of damage (100x too low). - The mod Kaizer's Marauders is now its own separate faction rather than overwriting the vanilla Marauders faction. This means you can have both on at once, or choose between them, or even see how the two of them compete with one another! This also fixed a few bugs with it. That said: This will break existing savegames that have Kaizer's Marauders in them. To finish those games, you can temporarily use the "v3.303 - Last version before the Kaizer's Marauders split" beta build in Steam. You may have to exit and restart Steam before this appears. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-24 00:17:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New hotfix build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.303_Tutorial_Hotfix This one fixes tutorials to not murder you either instantly (AIs on your starting planet) or if you take too long (waves for some reason). This also adds back in the recently-removed-by-alterations version X map (as the default for X), but with fixes for the planet counts being offset too high. And of course the options to keep the more recent X style. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-22 15:45:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.302_Clarified_Invincibility (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This fixes several bugs, and adds a few quality of life improvements. One of those is to really clearly tell you when you're trying to attack something that is not allowed. Oftentimes there's a unit that is invincible until you kill some other units first, or until it moves out of some location, or for another 30 seconds, or whatever. And having your ships just fail to attack it was bewildering. Now it really clears that up. This also includes wider windows for things like C-clicking, so that you don't get accidental wrapping of things that shouldn't. This also let us spread back out the columns properly for ship tooltips, so those don't wind up with armor and mass on top of one another ever, etc. Various windows now let you hit Esc to close them that previously (by oversight) did not. The tips windows show with much nicer and more informative headers. That on-launch popup from the prior version of the game (which was harmless but annoying) is gone. The AMU mod has more updates. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-21 22:36:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, with fixes to multiplayer as well as distributed economy mode: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.301_I_Always_Wanted_To_Be_A_Ghostbuster... (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) I spent at least three separate Halloweens as a Ghostbuster. One as an adult. As a kid in elementary school, I thought that sounded like just the best job. Now insert that clip of Frodo saying "but my own adventure turned out very different." Mostly I laugh. This time, the problem with multiplayer was (at root) an endlessly-growing list of ships worried that they MIGHT be ghosts, and the client asking the host about that constantly and the host giving increasingly lengthy answers that slowed everything down. It actually was more complicated than that, as these things always are, but "ghost suspects" were not properly having their "yes you were a ghost and died" or "no you're alive, what are you on about?" status updated in the central "ghost suspect" roll call. So the roll call just kept growing, infinitely, until the game couldn't take it anymore and your sim speed tanked to unplayable levels. Now they do all this stuff properly, so far as I can tell, but this is hot off the presses so it needs more testing. What I can say is that multiplayer suddenly was by far the smoothest I've seen it as a client in quite a long time after these changes, and the numbers of ghost suspects and such all seem reasonable now, so fingers crossed. It's possible that non-ghosts will start exploding on the client again because of this, because I put that sort of time-based code back in, but in reality I think that is just fixing particularly persistent ghosts. Knock on wood. Distributed econ now gets science and hacking points properly, too, thanks to SirLimbo. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-20 00:56:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, and tons of new map options! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.300_Mapsplosion (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) I had been planning on working on more bugfixes today, but honestly I was feeling pretty fatigued and unmotivated and so I decided to work on something else as a bit of a diversion. I'll be back on bugfixes and game mode stuff soon, but I hope you enjoy the fruits of this diversion. This is essentially a Summer Of A Lot Of Free Stuff, which I think is good because we're planning on releasing three paid DLCs in 2021, so I feel a lot better about that with also loading you down with lots of new free base game stuff. Your financial support is greatly appreciated (and needed), but I don't want you to feel strongarmed into it. So what's up this time? Last time it was variable-sized gravity wells. And campaign types are still evolving. And interplanetary weapons are coming sometime in the next month or so. This time around it's map types. Not new map types, at least not right now in the base game. But the curious thing about AI War 2 is that it has a TON of map "types" available in sub-options for each larger type. AI War Classic had 4 different Maze map types, for instance, versus AI War 2 has the same thing with one main type and four sub-options. None of that is new. What is new is that there are dozens of new options for a variety of map types in the base game in particular, and a lot of these really radically change the maps to the point they are almost unrecognizable. Both X and Honeycomb have some particularly interesting new variants. There are many QoL improvements in relation to choosing map settings, too. More to come soon. Apologies for taking a break from bugs. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-19 03:53:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.203_More_Bugfixing This one re-fixes (properly, this time, hopefully) that gost-related exception that was happening in multiplayer. This one also reworks a lot of the map design logic and code so that it's easier for us to manage those. It has a couple of mod updates in it, and Nr SirLimbo also put in a fix for ship chase ranges that was making them a bit stupid in large gravity wells. More to come later today, but I wanted to get this MP hotfix out while I have some folks able to test it. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-18 18:20:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! Second one of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.202_General_Bugfixing (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one is not super exciting, unless you were impacted by one of the bugs this one fixes. That said, these are some juicy fixes, so YMMV - Fixed a multiplayer exception that was happening trying to bust ghosts. Those darn ghosts again! - (Not a bug, but) Humanity Ascendant now defaults to using all uniform gravity wells the same size as they always have been. It only starts introducing variant grav well sizes in Challenger mode, but you can change your preferences from the defaults in any of the modes. - Beam weapon math has been adjusted and fixed in a variety of places. The spire ships will no longer miss their primary target at the end of a coilbeam, as one resulting improvement from this. - Distributed economy mode wasn't working properly after saving and then reloading. Now it does. - A variety of tooltips in the lobby were missing last build, but are back now. - A complicated fix to an edge case when you're ordering units around on the galaxy map. There was a situation where they would ignore your orders if you told them to leave a planet and then "no wait stay after all" by clicking the planet. Now they listen properly. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-17 23:37:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

New hotfix build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.201_Location_Hotfix This fixes a bug in the prior build where older saves had their units all shifted around in location, along with a few other related coordinate issues. Sorry about that! That did inspire a potential new AI type for sometime in the future, at least. This hotfix also happens to include some mod updates that fix a few things, and also potentially a fix to the Reset to Defaults breaking client connections in the MP lobby. That's been on my list since MP started, so we'll see if this really fixes that one.

[ 2021-06-17 13:37:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New giant build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.200_Variable_Planet_Gravity_Well_Scales_And_QoL (This changes a ton and may have bugs. If you run into an intractable one, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Okay! First up, this build might fix the multiplayer ghosts issue. Fingers crossed. But I made a lot of changes and simplified that to get that good and dead. Secondly, for anyone who uses mods or has expansions installed, you can now see what is mod or expansion content all over the place. I'm talking fields in the lobby, items in dropdowns, and even quickstarts. The works. Mods can also now include quickstarts for the first time, too! Overall the idea is to help it become clear where things come from. Sometimes even I forget how much was packed into DLC1 (TSR), which really gets a lot less love than DLC2 (ZO). To make all this work, I had to re-code and extend a surprising amount of UI code, but all the bugs seem fixed now, knock on wood. This build also introduces variable-sized gravity wells. The first AI War had larger gravity wells, but only one size. This game has always been more intimate in battlefield size (and/or more cutthroat, depending on how you look at it), but again there was no choice. Now there's a choice! And in fact, there are various "schemas" for various types of planets that helps you randomize in various interesting ways. The new defaults are to have some variable planet sizes, but nothing too extreme most of the time. There are a number of bugfixes in this one, although the list of things that are on my short-term todo list grew a lot while I was implementing those two giant features above. So more soon on that front. More soon in general. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-17 01:44:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! Mega large one, too: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.104_Option_For_A_Distributed_Economy (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) There's too much to fully summarize, so please do check the notes. For all modes, hull techs have had some cost revisions to make the ship ones more viable (and the turret one less OP). Idling transports now don't stack their bonuses, but only use the top one at any given planet. This mainly affects advanced players, but at any rate, spread those out now more. When the AI has more than 1 strength on your planet, or a wave incoming, you can no longer switch your command station type (it's "pinned"). This prevents some exploits and baiting that advanced players were using, but shouldn't affect the average player at all. Lots of new balance work and additions are in place for Challenger+ modes in general, and those options can be turned on in Humanity Ascendant, as well, if you want. Forced on starting in Expert mode, but optional in lower modes, is a new Distributed Economy Mode. This is something we've wanted for a long time, but it's a bit more advanced. Essentially, it completely re-balances how metal and energy is granted from Asteroid Mining Reactors (Metal Harvesters) versus just the command station type itself. There's spreadsheets and everything for you to see the details, but the bottom line is it gives the AI more chances to be smart tactically, gives you more weak spots, and makes the number of asteroids per planet suddenly matter a lot more. You'll want to put econ stations on high-asteroid planets. The way that asteroids are seeded is also improved. Plus two new mods by Zweihand! And many mod updates and general bugfixes and other tweaks. The meat of Expert is still to come. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-12 01:24:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! This one is a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.103_Reality-Bending_Tooltip_Hotfix It fixes several mods that had exceptions in the prior version, but it also in general fixes a pretty apocalyptic and mind-blowing bug in the prior version. It was just a few lines of code where the ramifications were not clear to the code author (that's kinda on me), and this was easily fixed. But it created a really amusing portfolio of possible results. Some of my favorites: - Units transforming into other units as you mouse over them in the sidebar. But not the ones you're actually hovering over, and not always. - All of your units of some sort exploding randomly as you mouse over unrelated units on the battlefield. - The very idea of some unit type disappearing from a fleet as you moused around. This absolutely was savegame-corrupting as a bug, and we apologize for that, but hope you also enjoy the humor of the resulting reality bending results, at least. We had the first report that something was up within a few minutes of the build going out last night, and so rolled it back to be only on the beta branch until we could figure it out this morning. So hopefully it actually affected very few people in practice. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-09 16:56:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.102_The_Start_Of_Multiple_Campaign_Types (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one is a pretty huge departure from our recent work! We still have more fixes and tuning that we will be doing (and there is a fair bit of that actually in this build as well), but the major new focus in this release is the START of us having more than one campaign type. Back when we did the big Paradigm Shift (v2.8) build a few months ago, that made the game vastly more palatable to most players. Speaking for myself, honestly that was the first time where I started truly enjoying the midgame. Before that I just played the early game, and other people's endgames. However, this broadening of appeal -- as nice as it is -- did make the game notably easier for the players who are a lot more advanced than I am. It also simplified certain aspects of territory control to a degree that, while making for a great first 100 or 200 hours of gameplay, doesn't have true staying power for those people with hundreds of hours in the game. When this was brought to my attention, back a few months ago, my immediate thought was: different campaign types. There's no way to serve all players with one mode. The modes, in general, are now outlined in the release notes above. I'll write more about them in the future, when they're closer to finished. There's also some excellent pinned posts about them on discord: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/851583269682282587/851887957861990410 Plus that's a great spot to discuss the new modes in general. Balance: lone wolf fleets are no longer a separate category. Fleet bonuses are denied to golems. Stats are more accurate on siege frigates. Other bits. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-09 01:31:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.101_Buffs.2C_Fixes.2C_And_Quickstarts This one is primarily to fix quickstarts being broken in the prior build (for people without DLC1 or DLC2) -- that was an unfortunate regression from some seemingly-unrelated xml parsing improvements, but it's fixed now. Sorry about that! In this version there are a number of buffs to a few turrets, and most notably the Orbital Mass Driver and Ion Cannon. More tooltip refinements and fixes are in place, the AMU mod and several others have updates, and there's a new experimental change with how enemies pop out of wormholes when traveling in large groups. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-06-07 18:04:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our first update of June is crazy huge. It's one of those "touches every player's experience" releases. First of all, the tooltips have gotten some major upgrades. Here's an example of one that is showing the new smallest-version of information. NR SirLimbo has condensed things, organized things, and in general added a ton of variation and clarity on there. I also made it possible to have ship icons in the tooltips finally, and boy is it nice being able to see the art that way:
Still on the subject of tooltips, and this might seem silly, but essentially in a ton of menus the tooltips are now better at staying out of your way. Having the tooltip adapt to the position of your cursor and what you are mousing over, and be near to your normal line of vision but not actually blocking it is surprisingly challenging. But I'm really glad how that has turned out, and how much easier it makes the lobby and settings experiences:
Oh, and the final thing about tooltips -- they now are more responsive in general. In particular, they go away much faster after you stop mousing over something, which just makes everything feel more smooth. We also added options in the settings window for configuring a tooltip delay before they show if you want that (for units and planets in the main game view, not for UI elements), but it's off by default. So far all we've talked about is tooltips, but honestly that's one of the more central bits of the game. Quick diversion, then. There's various new art, including some updated and added shaders, and the new Dark Mirror and Darker Mirror in DLC2 (Zenith Onslaught), among others:
I like them even better in motion. Oh, wow. Certain things I think "that wasn't already released?" This build has been inwork for a few days.

• Zombie Ping Pong is now harder to play for long periods with the AI, if that means anything to you (if you are a Botnet Golem fan, then it most certainly does).
• You can scale the text size of the contents of the big popup windows, finally.
• You can press F4 to immediately switch between player factions, if there are multiple. This is great if you're playing MP and need to help a friend. It's also great if you want to play multiple factions at once, by yourself, for various reasons we can think of.
• There's a whole new Tips sidebar, and Tips and Journal Entries are now visually differentiated, on separate tabs, clearly marked, etc.
• Specifically, you can press F1 to view the new tips tab, and it even has nice categories for each tip. When these tips are added, it gives you a 3-second center-screen banner to let you know, too (which you can turn off if you prefer, but I actually really like it even though I know how to play; it serves as an early warning system of finding certain enemies in particular).

Turns out there's still quite a bit more to this release. There were a number of balance adjustments, including some buffs to some not-scary-enough AI guardians. There's also now three Cruiser Construction Facilities per galaxy in DLC2, rather than one. More options for cruisers to be relevant earlier rather than later. A lot of the most annoying bugs that folks have reported are also now fixed. The list is long! The Spire Railgun Shop mod also got an update.

[ 2021-06-05 00:29:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.006_Rising_Spire (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one properly fixes OSX OpenGL support. Sorry that didn't quite work correctly on the Saturday build, but it should now. This one also sees some major balance adjustments (buffs to the player) for DLC1's Fallen Spire campaign. As the game has continued to evolve, that has remained a popular way to play, but those ships under your command were starting to feel rather on the underpowered side. I believe it was Badger whose play group noticed that during a MP session over the weekend, and so ArnaudB went through and made a ton of adjustments to make that more in line with what they once felt like (sometimes this is a bit of an arms race with ourselves). At any rate, Combat Factories in the base game also got a buff to the strength of their drones, AI Golems in the base game and DLC2 both got buffs, and there have been a lot of improvements and fixes to Outguard. Thanks to ArnaudB, CRCGamer, and StarKelp for those things, along with a few other fixes and tweaks. More to come soon!

[ 2021-05-31 22:04:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.005_Radeon_Returns (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one adds back OpenGL support as a legacy option for Mac OSX. Essentially, for anyone with a Radeon card, this is what you'll need to use until driver updates are issued that fix the bug that causes the screen to go splashy and plaid in certain circumstances on Metal. For everyone else, there's a generalized minor memory leak fix (ugh) that should lead to improved performance over long playtimes (yay). There are some QoL improvements, mostly fairly minor, and a number of DLC2-specific bugfixes. Also you can now see a lot more info about golems and citadels and such that you've not captured yet. SirLimbo has also made some sizeable updates to the AMU and Kaizer's Marauders mods. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-29 21:46:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.004_Post_Processing_Options (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one has been a surprising amount of work, and unlike the last three post-DLC releases, it's not just focused on refinement (though there is some of that, too, in here). This one provides a TON of new options for ways to adjust the post-processing pipeline for the visuals of the game, ranging from bloom to sharpening effects to antialiasing. There are some new effects in here to make things look nicer in general, but there's also the ability to turn off a lot of things in case they are unwanted, a performance drain, or are causing you problems -- right now there is a problem with OSX computers with Radeon cards with some post processing effect, but I'm not sure which one. So I went overboard and just made everything super configurable. Nice bonus for everyone while chasing that one issue. As a side effect of this, I discovered a visual disturbance in some of our nebula backgrounds... so I went ahead and updated and tuned 84 of those nebula backgrounds to look a lot more striking visually. I also corrected a color grading issue that was setting the white balance in an unpleasant way and making the game look worse than my prep environment where I actually finalize models in-engine. I had been wondering about that. Even with side by side screenshots it is not SUPER noticeable... but it is to me. You'll just generally notice that things look a lot more lush and vibrant. If things are TOO vibrant for your taste, just turn down the saturation in your Display settings window to get a grittier feel. Check out #watch_chris_art to see screenshots. More to come soon, and lots of typos were also slain in this build. And other bugs. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-29 03:44:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.003_Continuing_To_Refine (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) The tweaks, fixes, and additions continue! So many folks have added so many things to this one that it's a bit hard for me to summarize. Basically there's a lot of little things based on feedback that players have found, mostly edge cases, and this build resolves a lot of them. There's still a pile of others, but it's the sort of thing that generally only affects a minority of players in the main. We're still chewing through them! This version also includes a new quickstart for DLC2, ZA civil wars actually being a thing, new Zenith Trader wares if you have DLC2, and more. There are also some tutorial updates from Zweihand, and play guide updates from Tzarro . Plus lots of mod authors updated their mods in various ways! More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-25 01:18:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.002_More_Tweaks (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This is a collection of tweaks and fixes and updates to the base game and both DLCs, plus several mods. I took the day off today, as I was not feeling very well and needed some time to recuperate. I plan to be out this weekend unless there's something critical, and then hopefully get back to things nice and refreshed on Monday. This has been an intense few months, and I'm feeling it now more acutely than I was expecting to have hit me. Fortunately, lots of other folks got a lot of cool things done in this version for tweaks and tuning, so that's gratifying to see. More to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-22 01:23:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.001_The_Onslaught_Continues (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This is a "small" one, I guess? In general, we've been really pleased with how few bugs folks have been finding in DLC2 that were really serious. There's a funky issue in general with Mac computers that have a Radeon card (that's a very small selection of Macs), and there's an attempted fix in this build but will probably take one more set of fixes before that's fully done. Macs with Intel or NVIDIA cards all seem fine. Badger upped the intelligence of the hunter yet again, and as a consequence to a lesser degree all other fireteam-based factions, too. Lots of balance tweaks from ArnaudB, and more text fixes by Tzarro. A couple of MP fixes related to DLC2, and some solid tuning to DLC2 based on the new feedback, mostly by Badger and Zeus. I added in some more display options for certain monitor styles, and to disable certain fullscreen visual effects (this is the thing to help with Macs with Radeons), and SirLimbo has some fixes for his mods. More to come soon. We've been taking extra time to talk to people and help with questions and get feedback and so on. Tomorrow I am hoping to do more of a bug blitz on my own part. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-20 03:41:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Well! This is a milestone that is... only a year late. Seriously, I was supposed to have my part of the work done for this last May, not this May. But the wait has definitely been worth it, as the amount of content, and the refinement of everything in and around this release, has grown seemingly exponentially. Have question, or just want to connect with other players? Please do join us on discord: https://discord.gg/arcengames

Zenith Onslaught

This expansion is the largest in the history of our company, and that's really saying something. It got so large at one point that it had to be split in half, and it's STILL the largest ever for us (admittedly, after the split it did grow a huge amount again). Willard "Badger" Davis has been the mastermind behind the exciting new features in this DLC, chiefly the very complicated and interesting factions, but also the new AI types, map types, and bringing features like nomad planets into this game. Zeus Almighty took up the mantle of lead on unit balance and detailed unit design, with major assistance from CRCGamer and ArnaudB, who also had a lot of major new contributions of their own. That has left me more room to focus on art, even though that did kind of triple the artwork load (and make me also want to make some revisions and additions to the art in the base game). All of this would not have been possible without our awesome testers, who provided a constant flow of feedback for weeks, months or even up to a full year in some cases. Now that we're about to have such a wider audience for this expansion, we are standing by to react to things that people might find that the 20 or so of the rest of us missed, though. The art in this expansion is something I'm really proud of, and is showcased well in the trailer for it: https://youtu.be/G3lCUvB5VuE I made some really major engine extension to make DLC2 possible, both from an artistic standpoint and to support what Badger wanted to do with factions, nomads, etc. And for the new game mechanics that Zeus, CRC, and Arnaud were wanting for their units. I'm really excited to take these to new areas in the future. Speaking of art in the future, there is more that I plan to make unique in the DLC2 art over the coming weeks, and also in the base game, and potentially a few revisions in the DLC1 area. Now that we have a lot of new capabilities, there's a lot more I want to do with it. The game looks great already, but expect some facelifts in a variety of areas, coming in batches over the next month or so. You can see those early in the watch_chris_art discord channel, typically.

Base Game

Most of the exciting things in the base game have been discussed recently as part of the Paradigm Shift update, so I'll just link you to there. If you're coming back after an extended absence, or you're just plain new in general, there are some excellent video tutorials in there if that's your sort of thing. Since the 2.8 build a month or so ago, it's mostly been refinements and polishing as we've had a larger group of players enjoying the game. Coming up in the next few months, we're going to start adding new game modes to the base game:

• Expert Mode, aimed at players who want to be forced to hold more disadvantageous territory (as with the first game), and have permanent campaign consequences for certain types of loss.
• Deathwish Mode, aka Strategic Sage mode, which will dial that up to 11.
• Sandbox Mode, for when you don't want to really participate, but just want to watch all the other factions doing their thing. Or you want to play, but mess around outside of the normal parameters that would be considered balanced.

We're also going to be bringing Interplanetary Weapons to the base game in the next couple of months, as well as Loadouts (basically kinda-sorta like modules). Those will also see some integration into a number of mods, and DLC1 in particular, but also a couple of units in DLC2.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer co-op has been feature-complete for months, but is still undergoing testing. The original intent was a simultaneous launch with Zenith Onslaught, but the novel heavily-multithreaded shared-simulation approach has required more testing time than expected. Please feel free to join in and share any feedback you have! The multiplayer in this game required some novel design work that we hope can be useful to other developers; once we're past the last of the bugs we hope to present our findings so that other games in other genres can benefit from our work in making self-correcting mod-safe multi-threaded complex simulations of arbitrarily large sizes a reality. We expect no more than 1-2 more months of MP beta, as the bug count falls with weekly updates. Last night was a major victory over one set of bugs that has been making the MP super unplayable for the last week or two after the MP part of the game had been a lot more stable for months. Go figure. At any rate, early word so far is that it's working great now, though there's still more bits and pieces to tidy up. I would have loved to call MP done today, and say it's no longer beta right in time with this new DLC's launch, but I think it's more important to be honest there. It's a very late-stage beta, and there's a solid chance that you can play and have not too many issues (after last night's patch in particular). Right now it's mostly in a state of "when I hear about more bugs, I will fix them, but right now I don't know of anything major that is MP-specific."

Future DLCs

We do have two more DLCs planned for over the course of this year. That is more than we would usually do, but we have a lot of volunteers and contractors who have a lot of things they want to do, and overall it's just really very busy around here these days. This feels like a good thing. All of the DLCs will be optional, fairly priced, paired with major free base game updates, and very meaty. I really appreciate your support, as Arcen is a tiny company and AI War 2 has been a challenging project that is really blossoming recently. Thank you so much for your patronage, and we all hope you enjoy the game! Chris McElligott Park Founder, Arcen Games

[ 2021-05-18 15:13:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.000_Begin_The_Onslaught This is a fairly small one, mainly focused on last minute tweaks and fixes. The version number is certainly significant, though: we've reached 3.0! This is the final build before the new Zenith Onslaught DLC arrives, along with the Titan Edition, in a few minutes. I'll have more to say in a bit about those, but for now have you seen the gigantic (sort of secret) release notes history for ZO? https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Zenith_Onslaught_Patch_Notes Those are huge! This actual 3.0 patch might be small on its own, but it's the culmination of years of work. I'm sure to be superseded by 3.001 later today, or tomorrow at the latest, heh. We're always in motion. And we're so excited that more people will be able to experience the new Zenith Factions, Cruisers, and all of that new goodness so soon! (Also we are excited about the prospect of being able to operate in the black instead of in the red, if we're honest. There's a lot to be excited about right now). Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-18 14:43:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.999_DLC_Eve (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Lots of last minute fixes and tweaks, a lot of them the sort of thing where we went "how did none of our testers find this?" But Democracy and some others ran a long game last night and found a whole crop of new bugs, so those got squashed. Speaking of bugs, a not-so-new bug from the last few weeks has been making multiplayer just miserable for the clients, and I could not figure it out for the life of me. After chasing it for a long time, and getting lots of reports that I couldn't replicate, I was finally able to replicate it. Once it was replicatable, its days were numbered. It turned out to be three complex bugs in one, but they're all fixed now and so the client experience is a lot more sane. No more disappearing fleets and units. On the DLC2 front -- hey, that launches in about 11.5 hours from now! -- there's some really cool new additions as well, with some last minute new controls to allow you more control over targeting crashing nomad planets or zenith miners. These are semi-wildcard type aspects of DLC2 when you enable them, so the ability to use hacking points to turn them to your advantage (rather than having no choice but to fight and defeat them if they were unfavorable to you) adds a lot of new strategic options for advanced players in particular. For casual play, it still adds options, but it probably won't be game-deciding at that level. SirLimbo's mods got some updates as well, and Tzarro helped us find a ton of typos that are now fixed, most in the base game. Oh! There's two new fun cheat codes for DLC2. One to get all Zeus's cruisers, and the other to spawn a Miner Probe. Titan Edition and DLC2 arrive super soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-18 03:45:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.910_Onslaught_Approaching (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) First up, check out Strategic Sage's video showcasing some of the new DLC2 stuff coming Tuesday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZXIckolnhM There's a followup video there as well on his channel, I believe. Today I've been mainly working on finishing up the new art subsystem, which lets us now do things like this (this is in-game footage from DLC2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XaVNQ04KlE This version sees some more DLC2 art integrations even beyond that, plus some balance changes and bugfixes to DLC and the base game, plus some nontrivial mod updates. It's late and I'm super tired or I would write more, but things are coming together really well. Excited to have more folks finally experiencing the Zenith factions after a full YEAR of development on Badger's part with them. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-16 03:07:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.909_The_Hunt_Intensifies (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Okay, another "wow a lot of stuff" build for you. First up, the hunter (and some other factions that use fireteams) have gotten way smarter thanks to Badger (after commentary by Strategic Sage). Also they happened to get way more efficient on the background threads when he did that work, too, so double bonus. There's a whole new graphical subsystem in place that I've added, which allows for particle effects and all sorts of crazy things, and I'm already putting that to use in the base game as well as DLC2. You'll notice that AI Warp Gates and similar now look way cooler. Lots of bugs were fixed, and in terms of multiplayer I did a huge "code hardening" pass to preemptively deal with a lot of potential issues there. This doesn't deal with the "client explodes every 8 seconds" bug, but I plan to hit that before the end of Monday. This other set of fixes took about 6 hours today and was also pretty important. DLC2 got various new features, like the ability to steer crashing nomads into targets of your choice. Lots of balance and updated quickstarts, too. Another new cruiser that you can hack for, this time from alien sources rather than human. Also the AMU mod (and thus Kaizer's Marauders) now has its serialization fixed, so no more broken savegames involving that mod. Thanks to NR SirLimbo for being on top of that. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-15 04:40:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.906_Journaling_Along (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Wow there's a lot in here! And I am super duper tired, so I'm not sure I can do it justice. DLC2 continues to get massive updates based on feedback. And there's a ton of journal updates thanks to donblas and Tzarro for people who are running into new situations that might be challenging for them. In DLC2, multiple Zenith Architrave factions will only get into civil war with one another if you enable that option. Those wars can be... uh... challenging to work around for a new player. So having that optional is definitely nice. There are a variety of bugfixes, and I've also been working on some major new visual components for the game as well as specific new stuff for DLC2. Expect to see new warp gates and so forth (visually) tomorrow. You can also check out the non-animated version on the watch_chris_art subsection of our discord channel, although it also has a lot of DLC2 spoilers. Also a number of mod updates in here. No multiplayer updates yet. There are a couple of known issues that are serious and which make playing MP an exercise in frustration for the client right now. I'm having to juggle multiple things, so will hopefully have that resolved over the weekend or on Monday by the latest. Balancing that around the needs of the trailer work and related things is really tough. Multiplayer is going to continue to see weekly updates, and continue to make rapid improvements (this past week or two has been a backslide in stability as I chased the ghosts problem), but it looks unlikely to be ready to call final on the 18th. We're going to stick with accurate names. Right now it's beta, and rapidly getting better. We'll call it done when it is.

[ 2021-05-14 02:24:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.905_Alien_Homes (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one includes some notable visual upgrades for the Zenith territory in DLC2, and adds some features for visually-distinct areas that can be used in future mods and expansions (or the base game if we want). This fixes a couple of bugs as well, including one major one with military command station strength being very underestimated in various parts of the UI (so it was not clear to you how much better they were from that standpoint), and for the AI (so it could be baited into those worlds in high level play). This version also fixes a couple of the more hard to read icons, in particular differentiating the ODSS and the TSS visually more. Also new is the Exotic Ships mod by NR SirLimbo! He's been working on that one for a while, and it includes a lot of new stuff all in one mod that can hook into the base game, DLC1, and DLC2. It's pretty cool to be heading towards a DLC launch where there's a day 0 mod that already works with the new content.

[ 2021-05-12 01:42:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.904_Dragon_Hotifx (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This one is mostly a hotfix for a mistake in the prior version that caused errors for anyone with both DLC1 and DLC2 installed and running. It also includes some balance tweaks that just happened to also be done around the same time and would have been in the next patch. Fun fact, since we're chatting: did you know we're actually going to split the third DLC into two parts as well? We already had to do that with DLC2 (coming out on May 18th), but now it's happening again. Essentially lots of folks (well, okay, mainly Badger for this one specific problem) stuffing in so many things that it makes sense to split. In the case of DLC3, what that means is that we'll be pulling forward the "roguelike options" stuff and the vassals into a sooner release, paired with some other unannounced stuff, and that will be both sooner and at a lower price point. Then the (now fourth) DLC called Neinzul Abyss will be focused around the Neinzul and Obscura factions, and Champion and Necromancer player modes. There's a bunch of other stuff also slated for the intermediate DLC3, and if DLC2 is an example then we will also have a large amount of random other additions that are awesome (example: cruisers, minefields, and a bunch of new golems, none of which were in the specs even for the post-split DLC2. This was instead a case of Zeus, ArnaudB, and CRCGamer being the ones who added a ton of stuff -- with input from Democraft as well). I really like working in this sort of loose collective like this, because it is really turning out some quality content drops that are stupidly large. I also have sizeable free base game updates planned for the next few months, from me. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-11 14:57:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.903_Journals_For_Miles (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) This has a lot of a refinement of a lot of things. Lots of bugfixes, particularly for multiplayer, based on tester feedback. Thank you everyone who is running through those! It seems like there is a certain category of bug that is just way more common on AMD machines right now, since AMD is apparently ahead of intel in doing really fast multithreaded context swtiching. I'm experimenting with some new ways to reduce the error count without us having to be reactive to what people find (yay being proactive instead). There are a number of new journal entries in this release which are meant to be a help for new or returning players, or even to highlight features you might not know about in general. There's going to be more of those coming over the next week, largely thanks to the feedback of folks, some of them press, who had questions we had not encountered before. DLC2 has a lot more balance changes, to the DZ, ZA, and Spire Hammer in particular. These are extremely welcome, but I feel like not getting into the details because... spoilers. The release notes are unredacted, so read those sections at your own risk. I also took some time out today to make a new video, which turned out to be much longer than intended. The first 17 minutes or so are really packed with information that a new player would want, and that even an experienced player might have missed. Do you direct upgrade your fleets? Do you use the blue and green strength icons in the tech tab? How quickly do you hit 200 strength? Etc. But I was having fun and got sucked in, and so wound up making a hour+ video that shows the entire early game: https://youtu.be/5N1XgZ9Donc Hope it helps!

[ 2021-05-11 01:48:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.902_Rather_Refined_Ghosts (Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.) Lots of new things in here! Multiplayer has gone through the wringer, and a metric ton of fixes are in place for it. I believe I also got "the big one" that was causing all the ghosts in the first place, and the subsequent "all my stuff exploded and then reappeared" bug. This version also completely recodes how "ship to ship lines" (beam weapons, repair beams, chain lightning, lasers, etc) work. They are more efficient, and look better, and there was a minor memory leak with them that is now gone. My testing so far has no strangeness with them, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with how much code I had to change for these (during a press build of all things), so if you see oddities please do report them. There's a lot more help in here for new players in the form of tips-style journal entries, and even more coming on Monday and Tuesday. Huge thanks to Vincent for lots of outsider feedback that helped us rush forward with this. The Dark Zenith and the Svikari factions in DLC2 also got a major rebalance for the low difficulty levels (mostly under 5). The mid and high difficulties were great, but they were super overpowered when low. The ZA got some tweaks as well, but it was less extreme. Some other balance tweaks for the base game make turret counts better and keep carrier guardians out of waves against you. Exos also now should act more like exos and less like waves. Whew, that was a much larger set of changes than expected, but we're really grateful to all the testers and volunteers who are helping make it possible to parse all this new information and do something about it. More soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-09 01:52:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.901_AIP_Reduction_Clarity First up: a reminder that if you have trouble with the most recent build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back (or more if there was a problem build). This is how I sleep easily at night after making some major changes. The changes in this one aren't too major overall, aside from some fixes to multiplayer that needed to happen, and that don't seem to affect single player negatively in my testing. When AIP is reduced really early in the game (lucky datacenter find) and your AIP floor is hit, it's now much more clear about what is happening and why. A handful of small bugfixes and DLC2 tweaks are in this one as well. There is currently a known issue that some of the starting turret counts and similar are a bit off. We're looking into that, but will do another update in the morning once we've figured out what exactly the intent is there. Too many cooks, sometimes, and we don't want to just change that repeatedly. In the main, things are looking quite smooth, which is good! Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-07 02:03:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.900_First_Press_Build This one is the first to be available to press for looking at the upcoming Zenith Onslaught DLC (launches May 18th). I still have a lot of art to finish before launch (but all the icons are done!), and there are some remaining MP issues that need attention, but this is getting extremely solid. This particular build also solves a couple of different ways that could let you accidentally get killed during tutorials. I still haven't been able to reproduce it other than wandering into the wrong planet, but I can see some ways in which it could come about. The tutorial now keeps the AI from moving between planets, and also keeps you from going into planets that would kill you in the earliest tutorials in particular. Badger also made a lot of quality of life updates that should be helpful for both experienced players and new ones. And then of course lots of behind the scenes goodness from Zeus, CRCGamer, and ArnaudB on actual DLC2. This version includes some notable updates to turret balance to make them simpler to use while still keeping their essence. And the More System Defenders mod got a few upates. And lastly, the "Next Steps" journal has a great selection of actual useful advice now, thanks to Strategic Sage. So many folks helping this come together cleanly. Thank you to everyone! There will likely be another release later today with more tweaks. And lots more over the next two weeks with art drops, balance tuning from our beta testers, and more MP fixes. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-06 16:25:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.899_Almost_Press_Build We're a day out from sending press copies of Zenith Onslaught out, so that's very exciting. You can see some of the very first graphics related to DLC2 in this update, even in the base game, since the Zenith Trader got a facelift to match the new Zenith theming. Other base game Zenith units will be getting that sort of treatment in the coming weeks, though not all of them before ZO actually launches. This version also relaxes some of the restrictions on how many helpful buildings can seed around the galaxy. Basically, you can make it easier by having more things to capture. We're going to be working on some post-DLC2 content that involves Game Modes that are more restrictive versus more freeform, and for the default mode that we have right now (which will be called Humanity Ascendant), we may as well lean into being more permissive and freeform. The more hardcore modes will not allow such luxuries, but that's the nature of having two modes: two different audiences. We don't want folks to feel like we only cater to the really expert players. There's a bunch of little UI updates in QoL features in this build, most of them kind of random but definitely very handy. Badger did a lot of those. For modders, you might be interested to know that the Test Chamber now works again, and has a number of helpful utility methods with it. That makes it way easier to test out new units for the main game or DLC or a mod, if you're designing them visually in particualr. Couple of bugfixes in here, but not much. I'm aware of some other outstanding multiplayer issues that I need to resolve in the morning, and a couple of things that could be more clear, and apparently the tutorial can still kill you if you take your time reading. So those things are for the morning for me. If you see anything else, please let us know. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-06 01:52:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.850_Icons.2C_Targeting.2C_And_ODSS Wow, I feel like I've been down a really deep hole for a few days. I've been deliberately ignoring almost all emails, though you could catch me on the watch_chris_art discord section all through this time. It's been icon-finalization time for the new DLC that's coming up, and that was a hefty bit of work. It surprises me just how many icons there are for the new DLC -- way more than for the first game, and in general increasing the total count for the game by 50%. That includes the first DLC, the base game, and a variety of icons that I put in there that are unused but are present for mods to make use of. Anyhow, now that that insanely tedious but important task is done, I can come up for air, fix the handful of MP errors that I'm aware of, and then mostly get back to working on art (but it's the more satisfying type of art, at least to me). I won't have a need to lock myself in isolation for two days to do the other art, which is nice. And these were long freaking days, 12 and 14 hours or so, I think it was. All told it was vaguely around 170 icons, depending on how you count them. I also updated some icons in the base game that you'll probably appreciate having an improved look. Oh, and some Scourge stuff for DLC1 got major facelifts. Other stuff also happened! Lots of DLC2 stuff, but that doesn't go in these release notes. SirLimbo made some fixes and improvements to various shot-hitting logic to make the math more accurate in all cases. Badger added a new tip of the day. ArnaudB extended the ODSS to three hacks instead of two. Waves against marauders won't be so high anymore. AI attacks against Civvies will be lower. AMU got some notable updates. More soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-05 03:00:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.816_Frigate_Icons_And_Tuning This cleans up a few bugs, including some with Kaizer's Marauders and another cross-threading bug in general that could get tripped on AMD machines. This also rebalances the anti-spy stuff to be less harsh. And there's new icons for frigates! Part of the icon work going into DLC2 in general, though obviously that also affects the base game and DLC1. Now light, medium, and heavy frigates all have slightly different icons, and none of them look like boats. Enjoy!

[ 2021-05-02 00:40:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.815_Polishing_And_Bugfixing We are back from beta, and this new version includes a lot of polishing and bugfixing, improvements to the bastille turret, and many various items for our DLC2 testers to bang on. This also has another raft of multiplayer fixes, although thankfully the number of those required is going down quite a lot. We seem to have slain both ghosts as well as the creeping command lag, and the new MP issues reported were actually all related to DLC2! So that's a nice thing to be whittling down so far. During this beta period, we've increased energy requirements quite a bit for superweapons, and also scaled back the number of ship lines you have access to. Officer fleets no longer come with free ship lines, but also now cost much less AIP to capture. ARSes and similar have slightly fewer choices, but the ODSS in particular now has a better balance of choices rather than giving you too many redundant ones. There's a Goldilocks Zone of "just enough choice but not too much" that we're trying to hit, and we seem to be quite close, if not there. As part of the beta process, the AI got some new anti-spy buildings for its highest-mark planets, so you can't just spy on them with impunity in those areas. We also took away the mechanic that caused the AI to automatically mark up to mark 3 by the time you attack their homeworld; if you want to run a low-AIP game, you can now do that. The mechanic still remains on difficulty 10, but we decided it was needlessly punitive (not the original intent at all) on lower difficulties than that. There are a number of new hotkeys that are default-unbound that you can use for things like selecting-only-turrets or for placing half or a third of a cap when you click. Thanks to donblas on those. AI homeworlds and bastion planets now have special icons and styling that make them easier to spot. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-30 23:58:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

One more beta for the road! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_2.814_Hotfix_For_Murder-By-Powerup This is just a hotfix. You know, for... keeping you from getting murdered by your own collectible powerups. Assuming there are no other major issues, we're done with this beta phase, but (cough) let's let this one get tested a bit before I pull that trigger. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-30 14:13:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_2.813_Golem_Relations You need to use the current_beta build on Steam or GOG to see it. Assuming that all seems sane with this build, this is the end of the current beta period. What's new in this one? There are a few bugfixes and QoL improvements (thanks to donblas for several of those). There's a new anti-spy system and some improved spy balance, courtesy of CRCGamer. The Arks and Golems have all been made cheaper in AIP to capture, cost WAY more energy to run (they were stupidly undercosted in energy), and no longer come with any ships when you capture them. You just get them for themselves, not for the fleet they're toting along. Thanks to Strategic Sage for the suggestion about the energy costs, as well as a raft of related items. Existing savegames that would be thrown into negative energy by balance changes now automatically get a free energy handicap that keeps that from happening, which gives us a freer hand to make large energy usage changes like this without breaking anyone's campaign. You get one more choice again from the TSS, bringing that back into middle-balance. The Reprocessors by CRZgatecrusher has been updated to the latest code standard, and Civilian Industry has been updated to have better late game performance by ArnaudB. I put in a ton of fixes to multiplayer, and this time I think all the last of the ghosts are gone. Thanks to Bummeri, greyhoundgames, KaleR, and Jusa for the great reports in that area. There's some new stuff I'm planning for post-DLC2 with alternative game modes, but it will have to wait a few weeks at the moment. You can read the current iteration of that design here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PkSQoFIYZDN42jaYvjQ_pLGGWYJrYq4mfhFZvfJjNyk/ It's open for public comment. For the next couple of weeks, I intend to focus just on bugfixing, MP, and DLC2 icons and art. Then on to game modes, etc, after DLC2.

[ 2021-04-30 01:10:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_2.811_Brief_Beta_For_Balance So you do need to use the current_beta build on Steam or GOG to see it. (I see your eye twitch! Don't worry, this won't be a beta that lasts for months.) At the moment, we're in the middle of rebalancing a few things (as much as possible in a way to not mess with existing saves/campaigns) to allow for more valid styles of play. We may be adding a few lobby options in pursuit of that, but as much as possible I'm hoping to have a unified experience that is less power fantasy and more guerrilla warfare like the game's roots have always been. (I mean, Fallen Spire exists for the power fantasy already). Anyhow, since we're in the middle of doing that, plus adding a bunch of mechanics and things for DLC2, there's a greater than average risk of bugs, and we also don't want the average player to get caught in the crossfire of discussion back and forth on what makes for the most wide array of ways to play. So we'll take a few days in beta to get that stuff sorted, and then pop back to the main channel again. There's some really excellent stuff Zeus is working on mainly for DLC2 right now, so those who are testing that please do direct your attention to the Zenith Architrave. That got a major bunch of additions in this build. And it's his birthday! CRCGamer and Strategic Sage and I, among others, are looking at a couple of axes of balance in the base game, and trying to make sure that remains as engaging as possible. The low-AIP style of play has been stifled recently, so I'm working to make that more viable, among other things. It's all this-week stuff. Hopefully mostly tomorrow-stuff. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-29 00:13:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.810_Hotfix_for_Death Would that it was so straightforward to hotfix actual death, yeah? At any rate, there was a bug in the prior version (resulting from some fixes to ghosts on MP clients) that was... so thorough that it was ghostbusting some living things. Sorry about that!

[ 2021-04-28 14:15:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.809_Self_Optimization This one is mostly multiplayer-focused, but it has some core speed improvements to the singleplayer simulation as well as some bugfixes that also benefit everyone (particularly those with really fast AMD processors). This also sees a number of improvements and updates to the SirLimbo suite of mods, and Space Planes and Expatriates have gotten some solid balance adjustments from CRCGamer. So, what of multiplayer? This release is a pretty big deal! First off, major thanks to Bummeri and abuchris and their MP groups, because this would not have been possible without them. 1. There were STILL some ghosts possible on MP clients, but those seem to be well and truly dead now from several angles. 2. There was a major amount of ship "rubber banding" happening in combat with the AI sentinels in the last couple of weeks, due to a bug I accidentally put in when optimizing bandwidth a couple of weeks ago. That's now fixed. 3. The sync and ship-check data now uses vastly less bandwidth, and is structured so that it won't ever flood the client with too much information. There's now a call and response (ack, in network terms) going on, and this helps the network self-regulate to whatever its environment is. In other words, for this part of the network data, if the connection is slow and flaky, it will slow itself to compensate. If it's a speedy lan, it will up itself to match that. Overall in most cases this results in a lot of bandwidth reduction, and even more importantly it removes cases where potentially the client could get message-logged and get a lot of command lag from that. MP is looking a lot more reliable now, knock on wood, which is really exciting. This has been quite a journey for it. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-28 01:48:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Check out the latest podcast of eXplorminate, where Rob and Ben and I talk about AI War 2, the most recent beta period and resulting paradigm shift, upcoming DLCs, thoughts on AI design in general, and lots of other great design topics: https://anchor.fm/explorminate/episodes/Interview-with-Chris-McElligott-Park-on-AI-War-2-and-More-evpabk

[ 2021-04-27 19:57:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.808_MP_Ghostbusting This one fixes up some remaining "ghosts" that were happening in multiplayer, so knock on wood hopefully that's the end of those. That was a fun thing where clients would still see certain dead ships that the host did not see. This build also updates the Steamworks integration by about a year's worth of patches, so hopefully any Steam-specific networking issues are resolved via this. There's actually a newer version of the underlying Steam networking API in use, so that's an exciting thing that I didn't realize was even on the table as an option. Fingers crossed. The hacking costs on ARSes have been substantially reduced compared to the prior build It was a misunderstanding that led to them being increased quite as much as they were. Sorry about that! The Zenith generators got major buffs, and the AI Risk Analyzers got a major nerf. AI intelligence on difficulty 7+ went up quite a bit when you are trying to trap them via forcefields. We also fixed a few bugs from the last patch, such as tutorials being broken and the AMU-based mods being broken. There's also a new "Hacker OS" planet name set by ZeroTheHero, and more beginner journals. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-23 22:31:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.807_Beginner_Journals_and_MP_Sync This one fixes the last of the known serious multiplayer bugs, which is very exciting! I'm sure that there will be more, but there have been a couple that we have been chasing and trying to isolate since the start of MP, and the last of those got nailed today. This version increases the hacking point costs for the ARS and FRS a bit, since people were getting just kind of stupidly overpowered with them previously. It might need more tuning up in the future, but we didn't want to go too crazy with it. The main goal here is trying to ease back toward the same sort of difficulty balance that the game had prior to the Paradigm Shift. We don't want to sprint in that direction (wow whiplash), but in general the way that difficulty drifted downward is not something that is intentional. Also new in this build are some beginner journals that are contextual and give you some advice on first steps to take after 1 minute of gameplay. You obviously don't have to take the advice, but especially for folks who boot this up cold, it should be a help. Blitzkrieg Turrets got a bit of a nerf, and Makeshift Drones got a bit of a buff. There was also a strange crash that could happen on linux machines in the prior build, and that is now fixed. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-22 21:50:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.806_Correctness_By_Attrition The title of this one is a bit amusing, because again this refers to two different thing. On the one hand, attrition effects are now more correct in the game when they are interacting with stacks of smaller units, doing commensurate larger damage to them. On the other hand, network results are getting more correct, gradually, as I wear down the bloody errors in a lengthy process of attrition. Speaking of multiplayer, this build is kind of a big deal for it, because I finally found and fixed a number of rather core issues that were cascading into other areas of the game. The number one thing that I fixed was that sometimes there were "ghost" units that the client thought were still alive, but the host knew was dead. These were sometimes missing the sync process, and persisting on the client indefinitely -- potentially for hours. This was causing a lot of wrong behavior and constant sim divergence and fixing, as you might imagine, for the ships that were reacting to the ghosts. Similarly, the client could have a wrong idea of which AI subfaction owned certain units, and so the local simulation would give the wrong AI decision-making a go, causing a constant pop over and pop back. Most "rubber band" issues were something like that, where the client and host just couldn't figure each other out. Lastly, for certain kinds of data sync, I had a sudden idea and put in some extra (configurable) delays into the existing time slicing that these have. With the default settings, this is a network traffic reduction of over 75% (actually closer to 84%, but hey it will vary by machine). The really critical stuff syncs as fast as ever, and so it's very likely that you'd never notice a difference other than things being snappier. This is quite exciting. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-22 00:27:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.805_Relentless_On_Several_Levels This fixes an absolute metric ton of multiplayer bugs. It also makes the "relentless" AI waves way smarter, and able to pursue more complicated and unexpected objectives. This version also introduces per-difficulty variants of the AI Overlord (the final boss), so that the challenge is appropriate at each level. We had based it around difficulty 8 during the paradigm shift, and donblas was quick to let us know how much of a difficulty spike that created at the end of a difficulty 6 game. The overlord should now be nicely tuned for each difficulty level, with 9 and 10 being even harder than before. Speaking of difficulty 10, there are two different versions that you can run into; the x-4000 and the PFFN. They are definitely terminators in relentless pursuit of your tasty home station. A lot of other bugfixes and balance tweaks in this one, and still working on DLC2 art as well. One key balance change is to make the dyson sphere substantially LESS relentless in turning its neighborhood into a parking lots for its giant (now unopposed) armada. They were a wee bit overtuned. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-21 07:38:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.803_Multiplayer_Option_Overload Second one in a day usually isn't a good sign, but this isn't too awful. There are a few minor bugfixes and lore tweaks that just happened to be ready, but the main reason for this release is to give you a truly absurd number of Steam networking options. We are having trouble getting any one method to reliably work for everyone. Some methods are better than others, but they don't all work for everyone. And some work better or worse depending on what part of the world you live in. So we have options, at least temporarily, that look like this:
Hopefully over time we get to pare that back down, with a small number of options that work for everyone. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-17 01:38:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.802_Multiplayer_Steams_Onward We briefly had a v2.801, but had to revert that because it had a couple of critical bugs. The changes from that have been included in this new build, which runs great. Overall this is just a laundry list of bugfixes and tweaks that people reported, but most of them are centered around multiplayer -- specifically on Steam. Our dalliance with the Steam P2P networking framework is likely coming to an end, because that was incredibly unreliable and a lot of people actually had commented that other games had problems with it, too. That leaves us with Steam Sockets, which is Valve's newer networking model, but it doesn't support multi-channel data, which causes a lot of slowdown for this specific game. Thankfully, Steam Sockets does support multiple ports, so I've adapted it to use four ports as if they were four channels, and the performance is through the roof from that. Additionally, we now support using Steam Sockets either in a relayed fashion (goes through Valve's network, which they say is faster than the general Internet backbone, but varies a lot based on where you and your friends actually live), or via a direct fashion (just connects you and friends directly, even across a LAN if need be). The direct fashion is WAY faster in my experience, but it's slightly more of a pain to set up (host tells others their IP). Badger also slew his own dragon, which was a way for the AI threat against the dyson sphere to turn against you unexpectedly. It was actually a general memory leak that has been around since October 2019, as well, so this was really a great one to find and fix. Not sure how much this may have been negatively impacting performance in some games. The load game menu also now performs better when you have a really huge number of savegames or campaigns. Previously it had an annoying delay when first opening. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-16 15:24:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.801_Initial_Hotfixes This one is just a couple of hotfixes, which probably are not actually that urgent but I wanted to err on the side of caution. There was one bug that could impact players upgrading from certain much-older versions of the game, and there was a super rare bug that could corrupt the occasional savegame (autosave was almost always going to rescue that situtation, but I'd still rather not rely on that). Beyond that, this also potentially improves the ability of Steam P2P networking to connect, and it also adds the ability to use Steam P2P without allowing relay through Valve's servers. The fact that LitnetLib has been outperforming Steam's networking so much so far has been really disconcerting and quite annoying. In our Steam Sockets implementation, I don't yet have a way to avoid the relay servers, but I think I have a method that will work both for that as well as allowing for multi-channel (read: faster) communications even when relay servers are in use. I'll have to experiment with those options a bit more, but hopefully we wind up with a minimum of choices (because choices can be overwhelming) while still providing reliable and simple network options for everyone. More to come soon, though my focus is mainly going to be split between art and the multiplayer stuff for a bit. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-15 01:18:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been one hundred and twenty-nine days since the last major release writeup, with forty-nine releases in all (all on the public beta branch), and notes starting here and spanning a further... one hundred and four thousand words. That is literally midsize novel-length. If you haven't been reading as it went, I'm not sure that I can quite summarize everything, so let's hit the high points.

The TLDR Of The Paradigm Shift

"Everything is the same but also different" is a good way to phrase this, I think. Most of the central concepts of the game are the same -- how combat works, how the economy works, what techs there are, how you upgrade in broad terms, and so on. Much of the new version should feel very very familiar, which is of course the idea. If you are a player with next to no hours under your belt, the two versions are pretty much indistinguishable except for the many UI improvements. And yet. If you have a dozen or more hours in the game, this is going to feel like VERY alien territory for a short while. Essentially everything you ever knew about the meta for the game is changed in very drastic fashion, and even some of the major goals of the game (like Global Command Augmenters) don't exist anymore. Word from most of our beta testers has generally been along the lines of "holy cow, this is vastly better in almost every way." (The second bit of opinion is also "hey, the game got a bit easier -- so many bump the AI difficulty up by 1 from what it was before for whatever your play level was.") Anyhow. The game's meta allows for more playstyles, is more flexible, is more fun, and is still plenty challenging if you tune your difficulty or add extra factions. As to what changed and why, I'll get into the major items down below. We also have a wide array of under-the-hood improvements for you in this build, plus tons of new mods by independent mod authors. Our second paid expansion for the game, Zenith Onslaught, is coming May 18th with an absolutely gargantuan amount of content.

New Video Tutorials

While this rarely happens, the meta of the game has shifted dramatically over the course of the beta. Basically all of the older video tutorials for this game are now nonsensical in the new paradigm. They give advice that is now blatantly backwards, they talk about units that don't exist, and they describe a meta that has entirely moved on. Thankfully, both Strategic Stage and eXplorminate Rob have been making new videos for you for the last few months. Huge thanks to both of them, and also to the mountains of suggestions from both of them that helped to refine this new Paradigm over the course of the beta period. Here are their suggested starting points: https://youtu.be/fp0PSvZlKso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noDhOL51rPA&list=PL8cNlze3fGQj1SaZWDqcVck_RtM7_t-ui&index=1

Area 1: Balance Curves

This is the first thing that chucks the old meta out the window, and it's paired with lots of subtle balance changes to a variety of techs and ships. But, essentially, the way in which you get stronger is fundamentally different. Old Meta: You can invest in limited technology pairs to get a few ship lines to Mark 7. Whatever fits with that is pretty much what you have to stick to. Anything outside of this is basically chaff, and potentially quite useless. This means you were heavily dependent on the RNG, and have a small force of elite units that you use, mixed with a large group of ships that may not even be worth it to bring to battle. New Meta: Aim for mark 4, not mark 7, in most cases. Try to get as many to mark 4+ as possible, if you want maximum strength. The ramp-up of a single unit is still linear (thus mark 7 is stronger than mark 4), BUT the number of ships you are granted goes up rapidly in the lower marks and tapers once you reach mark 4 (for strikecraft; for frigates, it goes more to mark 5, and for turrets it's mark 6). Don't worry! You actually get even more ships at mark 7 than you would have had in the old paradigm. But if you are minmaxing, or even broadly trying to optimize, investing your science points super narrowly is no longer ideal. TLDR: it is way more viable to upgrade widely, while still investing deeply in a few specialist areas. You'll use more of your forces, have vastly higher strength in general, higher unit counts, and more flexibility in how to play. You're free of the shackles of the RNG, while still needing to adapt to what you find. If you want the really long explanation of all of this, there are multiple spreadsheets for you to read if you want. They're all linked there in the release notes.

Area 2: More Asymmetry

You and the AI are now MUCH more differentiated. The AI no longer gets frigates at all, but their guardians are way more fearsome. AI waves are vastly larger, but so are your defenses. The AI has more nasty tools in more places, but you have more ways to hack or bypass or even take them over. TLDR: essentially the AI and the humans both got massive makeovers, both got more exciting, but also both diverged increasingly from one another.

Area 3: Less RNG

Old Meta: There were many places where you were handed a very specific ship, or three ships, and you got no choice relating to them. Take them or don't. In some cases, you could hack to do a "re-roll" and see if the new options were more to your liking. This was incredibly suboptimal. It encouraged both save-scumming and a gambling-style mentality. New Meta: Most places that offer you a ship now offer you only one at a time, BUT give you a choice between something like 6-8 options. There's no such thing as a gambling-style re-roll. In most of these locations, once you select your first ship, it wipes the slate and gives you a new array of options. You can't save-scum to optimize this (that wastes your time!). TLDR: You have a LOT more choice now, but it's more meaningful choice. You may not get your exact favorite units, but you can get something that fits with the current campaign in some way. You are encouraged to explore new units, but not forced to do so.

Break For: Technical Improvements

Let's take a break from discussing the meta, and talk about the technical improvements. Briefly. Essentially:

• We're running a newer version of the unity engine. This runs smoother for most everyone, but some very old Windows 7 machines or High Sierra machines may have problems. Both of those OSes are old enough that they do not get even critical security updates from Microsoft or Apple, so you are strongly advised to update in both cases.
• OpenGL support on Mac OSX is removed, but Metal has been optimized and polished to work super well. This is basically leaning into how Apple prefers games to work, and the results are actually quite stunning even on really old hardware that is below minimum system requirements. My main mac I test with is a 2011 Macbook Pro that is well under minimum requirements, and it runs far more smoothly now.
• RAM usage has been optimized for the base game and the first DLC, to a huge extent.
• The way we draw things like circles in the game has been improved so that it's more attractive, and way more efficient. If you draw a bunch of range circles, it's now both prettier and more performant.
• Linux support also got some various boosts, and Vulkan on that and other platforms should work much better now, too.

Area 4: Science Refunds

Old Meta: You spend science to upgrade your ships or fleets, and it's gone forever. If you find something later in the game that makes you wish you had chosen differently, too bad. For this reason, most players would "float" large balances of un-spent science points until late in the game. This actually was the single largest thing contributing to the complexity spike leading into the midgame, in my opinion. Related: Hacking Points (HaP) were also spend-and-gone-forever, but for most players there is so little of worth to hack that you will have an abundance, making this kind of a non-factor. New Meta: You still spend science to upgrade your ships or fleets, but you can get it back at a later point by using a new button at the bottom of the Science sidebar tab. This will cost you some hacking points (HaP) to do, so you can't just do it infinitely, but it's a very attractive offer and allows you to go all-in on science during the early, middle, and late game. It allows you to transform your empire as you grow and as you find out more of what is available to you, which is extremely nice. AI War 2 is very much about adapting and working with what you have on hand. The ability to respec your spent science, both in tech categories and individual fleets/command stations allows you to be MUCH more flexible than before. So start experimenting! Related: Hacking Points are still spend-and-gone-forever. And you have more than ever. However, now there's a LOT more to hack, and that is brought into the forefront in general. Some folks (like Strategic Sage) still carry large balances of extra HaP as they play, but most playstyles will see you having to make fairly tough calls with how you use these. TLDR: Science points now firmly represent empire-design, and as such allow you to make changes as you go. Asking you to commit to techs forever, based on your limited early game knowledge in any campaign, is just plain unfair and unfun, so is gone. Hacking points, however, have stepped up to occupy the role of "decision with long term consequences, but you need to make it anyway." The nature of these is that using them is substantially less stressful, but still impactful. I want both elements in the game, but I don't want you (or me) to be stressing out about the long-term side of things above a certain threshold.

Area 5: Hacking, In General

Old Meta: The interface was very clunky, but you could hack to sometimes weaken some AI stuff, but not much of it. You could also sometimes hack certain buildings to gain new powers for yourself. But overall you could honestly ignore a lot of this if you were not playing on a high level. New Meta: The interface is pretty and helpful, and the number of things you can hack -- enemies, friends, even yourself -- is insanely high. You hack for new ships, you hack to steal superweapons, you hack to turbocharge your golems, you hack to transform your transports or battlestations. And occasionally to get some science points refunded. Additionally, there is a small bonus for taking planets adjacent to your own. While it isnt a lot, it does add a nice little dynamic. The effect this has on the game is immense, because (for instance) if you previously felt like your Armored Golem was a paper person in the presence of your current foe, you can not only upgrade it via science, but you can also hack it to directly improve its hull. TLDR: Your hacking points are now super precious, because now it's a target-rich environment for them. You may still have extras at the end (the float is not a bad idea), but there are easily 5x more things for you to do with hacking points than you can actually ever acquire. So your priorities will reveal themselves.

Area 6: "GCAs" and Battlestations

Old Meta: You start with one battlestation. You can capture more. There are also citadels out there, which are a bit overpriced but kind of the same thing. They all are what they are when you find them. For most of your defenses, you will rely on your command stations, and finding Global Command Augmenters (GCAs) to unlock loads of new turrets for them. You get new turrets in overwhelming lumps all at once. In some cases you have to hold planets if you don't want to spend hacking points. New Meta: You start with TWO battlestations, and can never get any more of them. You can choose to capture Citadels, which are way more expensive but also way more useful. GCAs are gone, and Turret Schematic Servers (TSSes) and Other Defensive Schematic Servers (ODSSes) are out there instead. The hack for a TSS or similar can be done 2-3 times, and gets more dangerous and also more expensive each time you do it (per building). You get to choose ONE line of turrets or other defenses to add to your kit, and then it rerolls for a whole new set of choices after that. Most of the time, your hacks will benefit all of your command stations AND your battlestations and citadels, but you can also do special hacks that give extra ship cap for that turret line to just one battlestation or citadel, instead. TLDR: You're no longer so flooded with information about new things you just got ("here are four new turrets, all at once"), and you can also choose specific units that you want to acquire, with some limitations. In other words, your empire is designed with much more intention, and there are no "useless units" cluttering things up all over the place.

Break For: UI/QoL Improvements

Let's take another break, this time for something that has been very exciting to basically everyone who plays the game:

• The planet sidebar now has many new options, including list view, views broken out by faction, new sort options, and even fleet displays.
• There's a handy writeup in the How To Play menu under Getting Started that explains how this works in more detail.
• Seriously, that new planet sidebar is fire. You can make it look like it always used to if you prefer, but the usability of it has gone through the ceiling.
• The various settings-style menus now not only have subcategories (THANK you, organization!), but they also divide their content into regular and advanced. The advanced content is just one click away, but otherwise kept out of your face unless you turn it on.
• You can now multi-move ship lines around, or even swap fleet leaders between fleets. There was much rejoicing.

Area 7: Other Capturable Changes

There's a lot, so let's go through them just briefly:

• Fleet Research Stations (FRSes) actually are super useful now. Their units are not so overpriced, but also only work on smaller individual fleets.
• IGCs and similar have been removed, as they were redundant with other aspects of the new meta.
• The Advanced Research Station (ARS) now uses that new style of hacking for units that gives you more choice in a serial fashion, without ever needing rerolls.
• Fleet Capacity Extenders (FCEs) were also removed, as they clashed with the new FRS design, and also were pretty darn redundant now that you have so much choice directly from the ARSes and so forth.
• You will capture comparably few fleets, and you can't make custom ones anymore from the sidebar, so you won't have a bunch of idle transports sitting around anymore on your home planet. You have enough to meet your needs, but rarely too many more than that.
• In the event that you DO have extra transports even in the new model, they can now be strategically placed on economy-focused plants to give a passive economy buff if you leave them on that planet for at least 5 minutes. Even your "useless" stuff is now quite useful.
• When it comes to upgrading your Fallen Spire cities, this is now done via clicking a notice at the top of the screen. Previously it did it automatically, sometimes in a non-ideal order. Now you get to control the order in which it happens.
• Outguard units are easier to get into contact with, and hopefully will become a part of more midlevel player strategies. Advanced play has used them for a while, but they are vastly easier to understand now.

Area 8: A More Active AI

This is another one that is hard to summarize into any one thing. But in general, here are some highlights you will quickly notice:

• AI waves sizes are CRAZY stronger. They were previously incredibly rare and very weak. They are still not something that is likely to end the game for you, but they actually factor in now. They are also no longer cowards. They used to run away the moment you out-strengthed them in turrets. These new waves are a part of the Relentless AI subfaction; that means they will fight to the death and constantly seek to do battle with you.
• Phase 2 of the AI Overlord is a lot more interesting and intense, and the final battle got several buffs in general.
• AI Reserves are smarter.
• So are the AI Praetorian Guard, Hunter, and Warden.
• The AI Warden in particular is way more aggressive, fine with losses, and able to regenerate itself a bit faster than before. It doesn't have to worry about carefully preserving itself, and in some ways is actually more similar to your forces in that it can take a beating, regroup, and try again.
• Overall the style of the AI is less "try to wait until the player cannot possibly win before we attack at all" and is instead "harass them at various levels constantly, and exploit any openings that come up... while holding some forces in reserve for those decisive strikes that are so effective when timed well."

Area 9: Massive Balance Work

This is the work of many people, mostly longtime players and/or modders who have turned volunteer. ArnaudB, CRCGamer, and Zeus Almighty are the three largest direct contributors, but Strategic Sage had a lot of excellent advice, and Metretek kept pushing the boundaries of ultra-high-level play. Among so many others! Let's try and hit some highlights:

• The balance of battlestations and citadels is all new, as befits their new status.
• The balance of turrets has been further refined, often with a lot of help from user Democracy (who designed a lot of the DLC1 turrets).
• Frigates are actually useful now! Their balance work is still ongoing in some ways, but they have shifted from being a metal sink into being something you can main.
• The way you generate metal and energy has been dramatically updated, in terms of which mix of command stations you should employ.
• Randomized ship line amounts are gone, so each line you get now has a specific hand-designed meaning.
• Forcefields and frigates and other small-cap units like that usually do not gain cap anymore as they mark up; instead you start with more of them to begin with.
• Forcefields in general have had several balance overhauls, leading them to be less overpowered in average games but also still viable in Fallen Spire (and other mega unit) games, while scaling their tech cost to be more linear. You also don't have to worry about them getting knocked out of place anymore.
• Visibility from logistics stations and military stations is increased a lot, plus you can place a new unit called Spies as pickets.
• A ton of other factions got upgraded to be more useful, including the Marauders and Scourge. This is to say nothing of mod factions, many of which were added outright or were majorly expanded.
• Alien ships that you can acquire via hacking are now a lot better deal and more exciting.
• You're no longer quite drowning in turrets so much as you were before, and energy and such has all been rebalanced, as has their attack power. You can very much defend yourself, but it's much less of a hassle to do so.
• Brownouts now have a grace period and are harder to trigger, but last a bit longer when they do happen.

What's Else Is New?

• I mean... it's really a lot! You'll notice little things on almost every screen of the game.
• In a lot of cases, it's simply more clear and more balanced, or easier to make what you want into reality.
• The Fallen Spire campaign from DLC1 now has a vastly more robust set of lore entries, many of which are adapted in from the beloved campaign in the original AI War.
• On Steam, there's a new "beta" branch pointing to the last pre-paraidgm-shift build. (z_historical_2_715 Release 2.715 - The last version before the Major Paradigm Shift of Early 2021.) So if you had a game in progress that you'd prefer to finish in the prior style, please feel free!

More to come soon!

Multiplayer Schedule?

Both shared-faction and multi-faction multiplayer are in public beta at the moment. Details here. Right now there are continual intermittent bugs that we are sorting out as reports of those come in, but most of them do not prevent folks from having a great session. Some of these are in mods, and we are helping with support on that where we can within reason. All of the features of all styles of multiplayer are here now, so it's just a matter of ironing out the last bugs. I also recently added a new Steam P2P networking support option, but Valve has been having some server issues and so we still retain the other Steam Connection-Oriented (Steam C-O) framework for folks who run into issues with that. We were planning to dump Steam C-O in favor of Steam P2P, since P2P is better when it works, but given the ongoing issues Valve seems to have had with P2P for several months, we may keep both indefinitely. Both GOG and LitenetLib continue to work well, and both have been upgraded to use multiple data channels like the Steam P2P mode is able to do. This is a big advantage compared to Steam C-O in terms of connection throughput.

DLC2: Zenith Onslaught

Our first non-kickstarter-related expansion comes out in May of this year. Probably. We've had to push it back a number of times, partly because of this large Paradigm Shift (worth it!), and partly because this thing is so huge. You can read all about it, at least in a limited preview format. You can also watch me working on the art for it here on discord. Sometimes I also do livestreams on youtube, which you can watch later if you miss them. This expansion represents a large opportunity for us, since it will coincide with the game fully launching its multiplayer mode. A lot of news outlets didn't fully cover the original launch of AI War 2 because we released it in a crowded season and it came out with too little advance notice. So we're trying to turn that around with this expansion and hopefully get some more traction with a wider audience for the base game itself. Part of why I was so intent on refining the base game so much was that I really wanted to make it easier for both new players and veterans to get the most out of it.

DLC3: The Neinzul Abyss

Our second piece of DLC for 2021 will hopefully come out before the end of the year, and you can read about that here. The themes for this expansion, so far, are really focused on some roguelike options, as well as new ways to play. On the roguelike front -- which is all optional, but really fun for those who like the feeling of raw exploration -- there are new random factions, plus all sorts of ways to turn any campaign into something you enter into fairly blind and discover as you go. When it comes to new ways to play, there are TWO new player factions. Normally you play as what we call a Human Empire, which is basically just "the human faction." But DLC3 adds:

• Our new take on the Champions faction from the first game, which includes ways to explore the 5th dimension and fight all sorts of new foes there.
• A surprising new Necromancer faction, which allows for a partner (or two or three) in multiplayer to take control of the zombies that are generated, as well as become a zombie-making machine in general. Build necropolises, and so on. For once the necromancer in a story isn't the big bad... it's you.
• Yet another surprising new mechanic, Vassals let you have a buddy-NPC faction that you give more direct orders to. This is backwards compatible with the base game and other expansions, and it's expected that many mods will likely also want to hook into this.

And this is before we get into the Neinzul faction that I'll be designing, and which can be friend or foe.

Remaining Kickstarter Stuff?

No progress since my last update, but plans have crystalized some. The actual work is all to be post-DLC2. I covered what is left back in update #65. Interplanetary Weapons are something still coming for free to the base game (they were a stretch goal), and those should be a thing this summer. I keep putting this off because it's hard to make them as epic as I'd like. Our original stretch goal just described guns that can shoot neighboring planets, but... that doesn't really affect how you play all that much. My goal with these is to allow for new strategies both in offensive and defensive areas. I have some solid ideas for a few designs that may work, but we'll have to test them and make sure they are suitably awesome. The backer planet naming will happen around the same time, as well as the ability to send some taunts back from the player at the AI. As far as player taunts against the AI goes, Badger had the great idea that this should actually be a bit of a prestige thing, where it actually makes the game harder but then gives you special accolades at the end. "I won the game on difficulty 8 with two taunts!" etc. We'll probably do another batch of AI taunts as well, and the Cyber Cipher reward for mysterious messages will be something that we tackle during that DLC3 period. Design and Name an AI is something that will be around the same time as the third DLC3, same as the Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff. A lot of new lore stuff has been getting integrated lately, and we've been figuring out how to do that in a non-obtrusive way that still lets you get at pages and pages of context if you want it. That's an exciting thing, because the lore is deep and wide, but also not something we want in your face in a glaze-over-RPG-text fashion. There are two lingering art-related backer rewards I still need to follow up on, but then that's it. I've been getting much more practiced at digital sculpting and painting, so I'm definitely excited to return to those two, as they were challenging ones.

What Happens After That?

That is enormously up in the air. The release of this game started out going well, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game were a big help for folks passing by at the start. 2020 was a very rough year, financially, though. The company's 2020 income fell to less than half of what it was in 2019, and that was already one of our lower years in terms of income. That level of income isn't sustainable, even with me being a one-man shop now (volunteers aside), so it all comes down to what 2021 winds up looking like. So far it is just more of 2020, but I've been putting so much effort into refining the base game for a reason. And we do have those two new DLC planned for this year, along with the final multiplayer drop and so on. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. If the trend doesn't turn around? I will likely spend most of 2022 working on other smaller titles in a completely solo fashion, rather than continuing to work on AI War 2 in a fulltime capacity. And after that, we'll see. AI War 1 was a game that I stepped away from after four years and three DLC expansions, but then we kept up support for it with periodic updates and yearly DLC for another few years after that. That worked well, but that was when we were a four-person studio. I'd like to do something similar here if I can, but a big part of this may wind up being partnering increasingly with modders, we'll see. The mod scene for AI War 2 remains vibrant, and I hope to see it grow. This game is a financial loss for me on paper, but there was a lot of R&D work that will pay dividends to future titles, so I have to partially look at it as an investment in infrastructure. But since Arcen is a one-person shop again, dividing my time between multiple projects will be an "interesting" exercise. Anyhow, I mainly want to have this in a state I'm proud of, which I can now finally say is the case without any reservations.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. Thank you!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2021-04-14 16:28:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.775_Prepare_For_Beta_Exit You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This is just some polish and balance tweaks, focused on trying not to rock the boat while cleaning up last things before we exit beta. We've been on a beta branch for almost three months now, which is an INSANELY long period of time, but a lot of great things happened during it, and it's time for this to head back to stable soon. Unless something dire happens, that will happen on Wednesday the 14th. Most of my personal time right now is going into work on art for DLC2, which you can watch and comment on the process of here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/825178033500848149/831306561489993791 Rather than doing a stream (which I did last week, and will do again at some point), I've been focusing on just writing up what I'm doing and posting frequent images in progress. Makes it easy to give feedback, and gives you just the bullet points of the process. Things are looking pretty smooth right now, so fingers crossed. This does NOT mean multiplayer will be out of beta -- that needs another month or so in the cooker, but please do test in the meantime. All in all, I'm quite pleased with how things are coming along, and really excited for folks who have been on the stable branch to see the many gargantuan new beta updates. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-13 00:42:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build with a hotfix is out: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.773_Civvies_Hotfix This one makes Civilian Industries (mod) work again.

[ 2021-04-09 18:20:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build with hotfix is out: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.772_Wormhole_Hotfix You can now use wormholes again!

[ 2021-04-09 14:06:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.771_Critical_Performance_Mass You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Ugh, that last version had all sorts of performance problems and was quite a hash. It turns out that most of it was relating to the ConcurrentPool<> that I added, and remarked at the time might be problematic. It turns out it was... VERY problematic. A lot more problems than I was originally attributing to it were actually just related to that (such as having 70,000 stale shots in one person's save). In the process of investigating a couple of huge saves that were running slowly, I wound up actually making some more performance improvements above baseline that we had had, and some saves that were only running at 80% speed because of some useless background chatter now run at full speed. This version also includes a couple more multiplayer fixes, including (hopefully) getting LiteNetLib to work again, and also preventing some MP client errors from several mod factions. Hopefully this is nice and stable so I can focus on art tomorrow. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-09 00:10:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.770_Multiplayer_Metal You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one has a ton of bugfixes to multiplayer, and also a huge number of fixes to Metal on OSX, and Vulkan for Linux. I haven't tested the latter lately, but it should be doing much better (though there's always OpenGL). On OSX, Metal is vastly more performant when it comes to how textures are used in RAM and consequently VRAM, so getting that in tip-top shape was a priority. I also managed to shave off another 600 MB of RAM usage in general between the base game ships and the DLC1 ships and a few last bits of the main game body. This makes the game load faster, and also will make a lot of scenes higher-performance if you have a GPU with low amounts of VRAM in particular. This also makes more room for the influx of new content in DLC2, but not at the sake of quality; things are just more optimized now. But wait! So much more! Marauders got a ton of buffs and tweaks from CRCGamer. Lots of corvettes got balance refinements from him also. Coilbeams should no longer deal 100x too much damage to secondary targets thanks to ArnaudB. Forcefields have gotten a bit of a nerf at baseline, but actually get more powerful at very high levels so that they are still useful when the Fallen Spire and similar are around. Command Station balance and energy usage has been tuned quite a bit as well, with these changes to cmd and ffs being an ArnaudB project aimed to making more viable playstyles with them. Badger fixed the bug with multi-AI games having too few Praetorian Guards (that an oops by me), and ships with ff harmonics can now use wormholes under ffs. Oh, and there was a memory leak in shots that SirLimbo found, and I got that fixed up today. It was a major performance drain. More soon!

[ 2021-04-08 00:26:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.768_RAM_Reduction You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one has even more buffs to frigates, and it also makes the vanilla Marauders quite a bit more buff. Thanks to CRCGamer for orchestrating both of those. This build also sees the removal of Fleet Capacity Extenders, as they have been super overpowered in the beta. This also removes High Capacity Transports, but replaces those with a very intriguing new High Energy Transport. The new transport option provides the first major new way to get energy in quite a while, and in this case it's a ton of energy in exchange for a decent pile of hacking points (60). Please see the release notes for detailed rationale on both, but this in general should make the game substantially more balanced (players have been enjoying some very OP combinations for a bit now). This version is also retiring support for OpenGL on OSX: nobody needs it, and it turns out that it actually does run much worse. Metal is now the sole graphics framework that we provide for OSX, which basically what Apple prefers anyhow. On my old 2011 macbook that is FAR below minimum specs for running the game, the changes in this build take me from "so laggy I can barely move the mouse properly" to "smooth as butter with models off" again. Another big win on the technical front? Without reducing visual quality in a way that would be visible, we've massively optimized our RAM usage. The total savings are around 700MB of RAM usage removed now, which also makes the game load that much faster, too. If you have been watching our youtube channel or the watch_chris_art discord channel, then you also saw I painted the first DLC2 unit today. It's a relatively small Zenith unit, called the Hersir (pictured below). My new art pipeline is ready!

[ 2021-04-03 01:54:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.766_Huge_Multiplayer_Speed_Boost You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one introduces a new mod that lets you basically just have nothing but frigates, and it includes some more buffs to frigates in general. After that, there's a really huge speed boost to multiplayer networking, most notably if you are on Steam (but also present on GOG and elsewhere). The Steam networking was actually the most used, but also the most laggy, so now it has caught up to the others and they have all leapt forward. The short explanation is that there are many ways to interact with Steam's networking (four main ones), and the primary one that I chose turned out to be suboptimal for our particular use case. One of the nice things about running a beta. I switched from their "connection oriented" multiplayer model to their entirely-separate peer-to-peer model, and the results are staggeringly better. I am temporarily leaving the connection oriented steam multiplayer in as an option, but I'll probably comment out its xml entry if everyone is having good success on P2P. The second part of the explanation is that -- partly now due to this shift -- we are able to run with multiple parallel data channels, rather than having a single lane for all data. If you imagine this like a highway, this shifts from being two lanes to being eight lanes -- with literal fast lanes that are all that is needed to keep the game moving. The slower traffic can take its time and it doesn't hurt anything. If this solves the bulk of the lag that people are seeing -- and it should -- then this may mean that multiplayer is very very close to being full production ready. I'll wait until May to call that final, and fix bugs that pop up in the meantime. But it's feeling SO smooth. Enjoy!

[ 2021-04-02 01:21:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.765_The_Hunt_For_Frigates_And_Civilians You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one is huge! It starts off the frigate buffs that everyone has been feeling we need, although more is coming. This also sees the return of the Civilian Industries mod to functional status. StarKelp, the mod author, is stepping away for a time, and I'm taking responsibility for keeping it running as our API grows, but not for any extensions. This is one of our most popular mods, and one of the few defensive allies that is just kind of a gentle presence versus a Big Brother who changes the dynamic entirely, so this makes a lot of sense to me. Multiplayer also got a metric ton of bugfixes in this build, and should run better than ever. You can search by sidebar short name on the galaxy map filter, too. More System Defenders mod has seen a bunch of frigate buffs. AMU mod has a bunch of extensions and bugfixes, as well as some new features to collaborate with other mods. I am also working on the art for DLC2 at the moment, which includes a LOT of figuring out pipeline details for the Zenith in particular. I want them to look amazing, so I'm making sure to take the proper time. You can watch the process unfold in screenshots and text here: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/825178033500848149/826211731737935912 If you're curious about how a lot of things work behind the scenes with 3D art in a realtime environment in general, I am basically showing the process from initial sculpt to final shader work and LODs. Currently with this process I'm to the point of trying to choose how I prefer to paint the sculpts. More on that tomorrow, likely; feel free to follow along at any time, or ask questions. More to come soon, including MP performance work.

[ 2021-04-01 00:26:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.764_Command_Station_Hotfix You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one is a pretty key hotfix, since the last build wound up being unplayable thanks to you not being able to build command stations. Sorry about that! This also reimagines the X map to be way more interesting, courtesy of Badger, and it prevents it from being a crazy unbalanced and unfun map compared to all the other varieties. There's also a buff to the number of forcefields that economic and military command stations get. Thanks to ArnaudB for getting that sorted, and more is coming later. Additionally, there was a pretty funky bug that was either extremely old or relatively new, and which caused issues based on you being able to accidentally give clicks to do... various things, to be honest... through the left-hand sidebar. These clicks were potentially the longstanding reason why occasionally some folks would see their ships "randomly" go to the upper left of the gravity well, seemingly of their own accord -- it was probably actually a player click on the GUI getting translated to that in a funky way. Anyhow, I haven't heard much about that issue in a lot of months, but there was a new rash of the same sort of problem when placing command stations, so hopefully this just fixes all of what we were seeing. Knock on wood, this should now be nice and stable for the weekend. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-26 19:58:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.763_QoL_Explosion You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. I am indescribably proud of this new build, I have to say. It feels like an entirely different game in a variety of areas -- all just interface conveniences, really -- and it's entirely due to various folks pushing me on areas that I didn't think were important. It turned out that they were important, and the results are just... wow. I didn't think it would work out this well, which is why I hadn't done this in the past. There's a heck of a lot here, so let's break it down. First of all, the default sidebar view is now one that blends text and icons, and it so much easier to see what is happening via. In truly giant battles, it's better to switch to the icon view sometimes, or you can if you just prefer the old style. But this new style works super well, and that's entirely to my surprise. All units now have a full name and abbreviation now; lists are much easier to read. Many screens got tiny touches to make them more readable and more informative in general. There's a bunch of stuff on the selected ships panel that people have wanted for ages. There's an "advanced mode toggle" that hides huge number of settings that are superfluous for 99% of the time. But you can easily see where settings are hidden, and even unhide them with one click. The feeling is transformative, as information overload goes way down in the settings and lobby, and you can just see what you need. As part of this, we also now have a way of setting the four AI difficulties via one dropdown by default (though you can turn that off and set individually if you want). Scourge is smarter! UI more responsive to clicks! Multi-swap fleet members! Swap fleet leaders! Two new mods! Metric ton bugfixes! Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-26 02:54:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.760_Xenophiles_And_Overlords You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Lots of things in here! I mean -- a LOT. Player command station balance is adjusted to encourage play with more types and have a few less extreme situations. Overlord Phase 2 has been completely overhauled, and it now makes a concerted counterattack against your own home command station. It has harmonics to get through forcefields, it's slower than before, and it solo-phases away while on its own homeworld or bastion planets. Prepare for impact or for a chase, or both. ArnaudB updated a TON of alien-themed factions so that you can hack them for way more interesting stuff, more times. Overall the balance there is now such that you can actually hack them and have a lot of useful stuff from doing so. Superterminal, Polarizer, Botnet Golem, Watchman Frigates, and Imperial Spire all got substantial balance adjustments. Tons of bugfixes. One of the biggest is that if you play with dyson sphere on, you won't be getting hit with giant waves of anti-dyson hunter anymore. And if your save was in the middle of you getting hit by such, loading that save will now show those being discarded and you can actually continue playing properly. We also moved the release date for DLC2 back again, from April 15th to May 18th. We all need that extra time to finish really doing all the factions justice in terms of art and unit design and mechanics, and there's still so much going on in the beta that this was unavoidable. We have constant substantial forward momentum, but the inherent scope of things can make the release date itself feel a bit like a treadmill. We are actually getting closer on it, despite needing that extra time. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-19 21:01:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.758_Threat_Explanation You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Badger has gone in and made some tweaks to my sidebar display to make it even more awesome. I am very pleased with his results! Plasma Guardian's have gotten a nerf from ArnaudB, which I think is a big sigh of relief for everyone, heh. I fixed a whole lot of random bugs, most of which were relating to accurately and clearly explaining information to the player. The most notable new thing is that it is now making is super clear when hunter forces aren't threat, and aren't a cause for you to give up in despair. We were having multiple people with situations where the hunter fleet was 600+ strong, and just seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. But the interface was showing them a far lower number for threat (a quarter or less of that hunter value). This seemed like a display bug (and actually there were some, but the widest view of it was not actually a bug). So, here's a fun thing that was never clearly shown in the interface of the game before now: sometimes some Hunter units just don't care about you. Instead, they REALLY super hate someone else. These hunter ships are not counted in threat, but when you filter for hunter ships you will shoot them. If you go fly into range with them, they will happily pass the time by murdering you. But they aren't hunting you, they won't come to the aid of some other planet of the AI, they won't do anything other than hunt whoever it is they are after (unlucky dyson sphere? Marauders? It varies.) This is pretty awesome, because there's this large force out there, and you probably should make a point to go around, but they are no danger normally. The real hunter danger was usually 1/10th the total shown. Now you can see it in game clearly!

[ 2021-03-17 00:08:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.757_Super_Mega_Exciting_Sidebar You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Wow! This one hits some bucket list items for me, in one manner of speaking. The planet sidebar tab has been a bear and not my favorite interface for like three years now. And yet it's the most primary interface you use for finding ships and such. I probably should have done this sooner. At any rate, lots of quality of life improvements. First of all, the sidebar is just plain sorted better (it's subtle but immediately applicable), and it also never blends units from different factions together. Secondly, there are two new filter modes that you can toggle on in a new options section right on the sidebar, which lets you break things out either just by faction, or by (mobile and station) per faction. This can be a great alternate view to check relative faction strengths, or a view you use all the time. Additionally, the game now shows you the fleets of the local planet on the planet tab, not the fleets tab. This is vastly more clear (you can still see them on the fleets tab, but it doesn't double them up anymore). There's slightly different/more info in these new fleet displays on the planet tab, in that it shows you the health of the flagship if it is damaged. It also shows crippled flagships way more clearly. You can also much more quickly click into and edit local fleets. You can also Watch fleets, to keep an eye on them even when they are distant from you! The crippling mechanics have been simplified WAY back down. Bail out is now off by default, as are hacking point costs. Repair cost multipliers are a flat 2x. Ships now cripple at 1 HP, not 10% health. You can adjust these settings during gameplay. Superterminal hack is still weak, but I ran out of time. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-13 02:42:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.756_Choice_OF_Injury You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Right now the most_recent_stable_beta points to 2.753 still, because both last builds were not great. There were some invincible ships happening in the last build, but that's fixed now. More exciting is the new stuff. The way that ship crippling works is finally revamped, like I've been talking about for a week or so. Essentially, all of the new mechanics are optional, though; you can turn literally all of them off, and make crippling just be "it doesn't work until it's repaired back to full health." By default, though, it uses the most friendly version of the new "bail out" system (Trigger On!) to warp the crippled ship back to the nearest friendly space. It also costs more to repair until it is no longer crippled (which means 100% health now, not 10%), but it's not in a way that should bankrupt your metal. And that can be tuned. It also now costs you a few hacking points when ships get crippled; more for bigger stuff. Again that can be turned off or tuned. We wanted a variety of consequences, to have people avoid getting crippled carelessly if possible, but not to the point where people want to reload saves. Superterminal and Dark Spire VG hacks should be way more tame now. They were too rough. Citadels have gotten a rework, being more cheap (in AIP) and more effective in some ways, but not coming with built in turrets to start with. Forcefield harmonics let certain very large ships fly through enemy forcefields as if they are not there, but they still can't fire at the ships under them. If you scrap some units on planets that are friendly to you, you get back a percentage of the metal now. 15% by default, but you can customize. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-11 01:46:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.755_Hotfixes You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Right now the most_recent_stable_beta points to 2.753 still, because the prior build was anything but stable. Apparently I was very tired yesterday evening, because not all of my most recent changes for part of that build even compiled, and I forgot to code the last half of one. That was... a first for me, in 12 years of doing this. But in terms of what caused stability problems, that actually had nothing to do with my oversights, and was simply a matter of the new "states of matter" feature that is mostly DLC2-oriented having some "this is new and large" standard kinds of issues. Being able to get all our new unit mechanic features in for DLC2, and pave the ground for some of that for DLC3, as part of the tail end of this beta period really speeds things up and will pay dividends for stability in the main branch in the future. Beyond that, GregC discovered that the 4th tutorial was un-completeable in the beta branch, so that's solved. Sigma7 and Ryulong had found a strange case in the beta where your flagships could disappear, or even your home command station, now that you can mark down by refunding fleet upgrades. These were not new issues in the last day or week, but it's great to have those fixed well BEFORE we go back to the stable branch. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-10 18:04:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.754_Buffs_And_Bugfixes You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Hmm, nothing overtly new in here to get us closer to DLC2, but there was a lot of planning on some of the last unit gameplay features for that done in the morning, which is good. This build starts off with some nice buffs that ArnaudB created for some units that have been a bit undervalued in the beta period. Things that just lost their luster relative to their counterparts. It moves on into a large number of bugfixes, clearing out a large portion of things on our mantis bugtracker that needed to be dealt with before we head back to the stable branch. Then it adds two interesting twists for you. First, some immobile force fields. These aren't everywhere, but these are FFs that are immune to the Norris Effect, enemy bullies can't push your shields out of the way and then wreck your stuff. Before you had to just hope you had enough firepower to kill a Norris-wielding enemy. Now you can plan around them. Secondly, stationary flagship mode. I coded it a while back, and it worked almost the opposite of how I thought it did. Shows how much passes in and then back out of my own personal memory. At any rate, I updated it to work in such a way that it is actually useful, and can have stationary flagships as rally point sources, etc. Still more to come on the crippling front in general, plus a big pile of new features relating to DLC2, post-DLC2 base game features, and even DLC3. Then it's going to be art and bugfixes for me for a while, which I'm very happy about. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-10 00:14:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.753_Interplanetary_States_of_Matter You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one has a number of mod fixes from over the weekend thanks to SirLimbo, and ArnaudB has also made some excellent updates to Interplanetary Engineers to make them a lot more functional and present. He also adjusted the balance for beachheading in general, as the build times there were getting a bit on the long side. We have some other changes coming tomorrow relating to crippled centerpieces and letting you control a few different ways of having that work with the lobby, but most of that was in the discussion stage today. Right now it's maybe a bit on the cruel side with how expensive crippled golems are, but crippled transports are a nonissue. SirLimbo also fixed up a missing tag on the devourer golem's gun, which was letting it shoot anything and everything, not just limiting it to mobile combatants. The result was that it was eating far too much of enemy worlds, heh. Battlestations now cost a proper amount to repair, and citadels now cost a proper amount to claim. The rest of the name of this release comes from some features that are mostly forward-looking to DLC2 and 3, but which are backported a bit into how the spire relic phases in and out in DLC1. Essentially, "states of matter" for ships are going to be an increasing thing, for certain factions anyhow, and also relating to champions in DLC3. So this lets us have one big shared framework that works for all of those purposes, versus just having a bunch of individually-coded features. It's of course worth noting that this data-driven approach means that mods can have an easier time coming up with their own states of matter... Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-08 23:28:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.752_Golden_Devourer You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one brings in a new golden ring laser that is mostly a feature for DLC2, and adds it onto the Devourer Golem. That Golem was looking kind of pathetic compared to more recent dangers in the galaxy anyway, but now it has a strong new danger level to it: https://youtu.be/IckDa6s_7j0 Fireteams in general now are a lot less timid, and thus most factions in the game (base and DLCs) are likely to seem more active. It's hard to cut of the Praetorian Guard as much, but there's a nice interplay where you still CAN... but not as firmly. A couple of bugs were also fixed, and several new features for DLC2 were added. The AMU mod works once again, having been updated to support the new features relating to repair that were added last version.

[ 2021-03-06 01:02:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.751_Repairs_And_Clarity You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one fixes up the way that repairs work after ships are crippled so that it is no longer the old exploity way, nor is it the new annoyingly-slow way. If you didn't know what the old exploity way was, then that was the old annoyingly-slow way also. Either way, now there's an economic impact from having a transport cripple, but not a slowdown in gameplay. That's a big win for everyone, since it keeps things moving without confusing new players or making anyone wait wall-clock time. Guardian balance has been adjusted a lot (them in waves at mark 3 baseline was intense, whoops), and some various mapgen fixes are in (insufficient bastion worlds are no longer, etc). There are still a few known issues from recent stuff, including that the AIP from warp gates is still given to you if you did the hack to try to avoid that. Didn't quite have time for that one today. Also in this build the AMU mod and thus also Kaizer's Marauders no longer work, because we made some changes to the base game features (repair) in a way that it let you override. Hopefully that mod will be updated tomorrow or so, but I can't speak for the mod author. All in all, this is meant to be a polish release, where the focus is making things less annoying or less confusing, in the few places where those traits were present. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-04 23:33:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.750_Bastions_And_Tuning You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. It's been 6 days since the last release, which feels like a lifetime, and it shows in this release. Most of what is new in this one is just tweaks and fixes and tuning (and features for DLC2), but the release notes are REALLY long for it, and it really shows how much polish this adds. This one also adjusts balance fairly substantially in a few areas, though, so let's talk about that. First of all, the AI homeworlds were getting to be nuts in terms of their power on high difficulties in particular. A number of changes have been made to make the end battles more versatile and give you more options. Against a single giant planet, you only have a few types of ships that work. So instead, we now have split out things a bit into the homeworld and some surrounding "Bastion" planets. The dire guard posts are divided between those now, versus all being on the single homeworld planet. All you have to do is kill those dire guard posts to then go for the guardian, but the fact that they are not all on one planet now is both making it easier and more challenging at the same time, somehow. It opens up more places for you to use multiple potential strategies, too. You also can't cheese running transports back to friendly territory to make them instantly repairable. Note that when in stationary mode, transports can be given orders to move to another planet and they will stay put while their ships rally there. We'll make that more clear in the interface next build, but it means you can park small transports next door to your attack target. Guardians now appear in waves, if the wave is powerful enough to warrant that. TONs of mod updates, too. Enjoy!

[ 2021-03-04 03:23:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.748_Defaults_And_Fixes You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This release is not SUPER exciting, but it fixes a few issues with recent betas with exceptions popping up when you started quickstarts in particular. Those were actually a group of cross-threading issues that I introduced when I made the game start having more up to date information on the galaxy map even before the first unpause, so it's nice to have those worked out. The game also is now able to reset you to the defaults on more settings (selectively, when we need it to) if your game version is older than whatever the current is. We use this sort of feature to make sure that if you were playing, say, a year ago (or even a month ago or a week ago at this point) and you come back, you don't have very stale non-default values for something important. We just get you to the new default, and then you can further tune it to whatever (back to what it was if you prefer), but overall you don't miss an important balance shift because of old savegame or last-lobby-settings data. Most relevantly this is for the home human settlements and cryo pods. We give you TONS more of those now by default, and that's important to the early economy so that you're not so metal-starved. But a lot of people were going to miss that until we added this. This release also fixes a typo that had messed up Ambush Turret balance, and restructures the sniper unit group to be more useful to more people. Sniper turrets, etc, are all untouched, and those are far easier to get in the prior-to-beta versions, so if you really liked the old sniper behavior, you should still have ready access to it. But now more people have more options in a variety of ways. In DLC2 work, chain lightning: https://youtu.be/wVGZhGtxtBM

[ 2021-02-26 02:14:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.747_Outguard_Usability You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Okay, so first up some news. The release date for DLC2, The Zenith Onslaught, is being moved back about 3 weeks, to April 15th instead of March 23rd. Really sorry about that, but I've been trying to get as much of the base game in great shape as possible, and with all the changes on the beta branch and the related workload it has set me behind. I know that this has been a long string of endless delays, and a lot of folks are understandably frustrated with me about that, and I really do apologize. Further, I understand that some of the things I've been working on lately really don't feel like they are advancing the goal of getting you DLC2 on time. There have been a lot of digressions and a lot of extra polish rather than focusing on the meat. I used my best judgement in those cases, but I understand that some folks very vocally disagree with the choices I've made there. That's okay. I don't have any hard feelings about it on this end, although that is hard to hear. I try to use my best judgement and make the most people the happiest I can in general, but that doesn't always work out. In the coming few weeks, until I get the DLC2 features fixed up, I'm essentially going to only be working on anything that's absolutely critical outside of that. I can't really afford another delay in this endless sense, and it's not fair to the various other people who have put in a lot of work on this project. So if you have minor bugs or balance requests in the next few weeks, I hope you'll forgive me setting those aside for a bit. This new build makes Outguard feel nice. I thought that was relevant. It also makes the Warden less scary for 20 minutes. Thank you all for your support.

[ 2021-02-25 02:26:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.746_Release_The_Warden You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one was a minor detour, but I think you're really going to like what we've cooked up for you in this one. There are some general bugfixes, and things like tachyon beams working again. Some last scourge tuning to get them to fully behave as intended. A lot of the hacking cost increases that I put in last build have been lowered back down, but the number of hacking points you start with is also now a bit lower. Ships under construction now only take 3x as much damage, rather than 10x as much. Then the big item: the Warden fleet. The Warden has been supremely cowardly for a while now, often parking near you and -- in its fear -- amassing ludicrously powerful fleets that could crush you like a bug... but are afraid to come near you. When they finally would, they would just leave no trace left (of your offensive fleet). This wasn't a good feel for playing with, so the Warden has been recalibrated rather substantially. The Warden is now aggressive, reckless, splits itself into multiple parts as needed, lurks when needed but still enjoys the occasional strike in just when it's inconvenient (and then sometimes runs away after beating some minor bit of your armada senseless). It's never going to hit you with something game-ending at this point, probably -- that's the Hunter's job, anyway -- but it's now a dynamic and surprising force to reckon with out there on the map. The AI suddenly seems a lot more alive. The AI got a few other buffs. When you assault their homeworld, and AI now goes to mark 3 no matter what. Shark B is integrated more tightly into the AI. Beachheading against the AI is now slower at higher marks. This feels fun and vibrant so far to us -- hope you enjoy!

[ 2021-02-24 01:54:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.745_The_Unsmothering You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Sooo... a lot of what's new in this one won't affect you fully unless you start a new campaign, not that that means you have to stop your old campaign. But essentially, players were just being absolutely bombarded with choices to the point that multiple people noted how off-putting that was (on several levels -- new players being overwhelmed, and experienced players always have access to everything). This also led to giant turret death balls, in particular, because the turrets were way too cheap AND too plentiful. Hopefully the new balance here feels more appropriate, so that there's always interesting things to find, but it's not like you're stumbling over diamonds with every step you take. Getting rewards at quite that frequency makes them feel downright devalued in general. Not to mention, doing quite so many hacks can sometimes make things like the late game spire response even more terrifying, but that may still be the case, not sure. Speaking of the fallen spire, your cities no longer upgrade inappropriately early, and they no longer upgrade automatically. Before, it was really frustrating where if you had two cities become upgrade-able at the same time, you couldn't choose which it would be. It would default to the oldest, but you had very little control. Now you have complete control. Also better info in the tooltips on why you can't upgrade yet, or why you can, depending on what the circumstances are. Various bugs were fixed, some out of control turrets were balanced to be more on par with others in general power, sentry frigates are not flooding you, and lots of work on features for DLC2 (not out yet).

[ 2021-02-23 01:55:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.744_Scourge_Industries.2C_Inc You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. More refinements and bugfixes are the main items, but then we have some major updates from the community, too. First up, ArnaudB has done a major rework of the Scourge, building on the work that he put in last build, to make their economy scale more sensibly at all the various difficulty levels. Your ability to destroy their structures and set them back should feel more notable now, etc. Secondly, the Civilian Industries mod has gotten a large update from StarKelp, to make it compatible with the various newest features of the beta branch. This also includes some experimental changes to ship stats, which should be interesting to test. Badger also swooped in with a surprise new feature in the form of fire teams being able to escort ships, and that is something the Scourge now use. Overall lots of other little things, and more to come soon. Enjoy!

[ 2021-02-20 22:47:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.743_Scourge_Growth_Chart You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. More refinements, and more work on features for the upcoming DLC2. Nothing dramatic in terms of vanilla/DLC1 changes this time... well, except for the scourge balance! Essentially, the Scourge have a number of mechanisms by which they grow in power. Mostly it is based on things the player does, like rising AIP or capturing science or whatever. It's not meant to be pacing you like rubber-band AI, but it is meant to take the pressure off of you in a time sense. In other words, these are milestones you would hit no matter what, but each player hits them at a different speed. So we made it so that the scourge ramps up on a similar timescale to you, rather than being free to ramp up on its own independent timescale. That way you're not in an all-fired rush, time-wise, which is something we prefer to avoid doing to you even with extra-dangerous secondary factions like the Scourge. Well... the game balance has shifted a lot over the last year in general, but in particular over the last few months. Players taking more planets is more of a viable strategy now than ever, and more people do it. The Scourge balance levers were last tuned prior to some of these changes, and as a result it wound up starting very weak, and then growing too strong depending on how many planets and similar you took. Thanks to ArnaudB for looking into this and making changes, the Scourge now starts a bit stronger but then also grows in a way that is more natural-feeling in the current game meta. This keeps them strong and interesting, but not the late-game extermination force they were before on high intensities. Several other bugfixes and balance tweaks, but other than DLC2 work things are happily calm!

[ 2021-02-20 01:52:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.742_Hacking_Balance You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This is just further refinement, mostly focused on balance more than anything else. Hacking points were still too plentiful, and you could hack in deepstrike territory without any downsides, and battlestation science upgrades were way too cheap. On the other hand, your lone wolf fleets and various other kinds of fleet leaders can do a variety of hacks now, and it says what kind of hackers are viable for each hack type. This makes it so that in particular in DLC1, spire fleet leaders can hack for most things (just not more ship lines). ALSO, neutral planet science extraction is back, just more expensive in hacking points. I hadn't fully considered the range of multi-faction situations where this was relevant, particularly when allied nanocaust, or even enemy nanocaust, might take a ton of territory that you need to get science from without taking over the planet. There were a couple of bugs related to DLC1, and I'm not sure how new they were; there's one more that I need to chase down tomorrow. And there's one more major fix now in place to prevent the dreaded cross-threading errors that have been happening for the last half dozen beta versions. Fingers crossed that nailed that one. Plus other minor fixes and tweaks. How's balance feeling now? If folks need more time to test while this is in beta, that's fine; for the most part I'm going to shift my attention to working on DLC2 as much as possible, while dealing with the bugfixes and tuning that comes up.

[ 2021-02-18 02:12:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.741_Refining_The_Big_One You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This is a refinement of yesterday's big new build, as you might imagine. One of the things that is unusual about this beta release is that we're breaking savegames from the prior build. They were just THAT unbalanced (in your favor), and we want to make sure that any further feedback on this beta branch is not some funky hybrid. Sorry about that; normally maintaining savegame compatibility is at the top of our list. This new build fixes a number of bugs and tweaks a lot of things, but mostly it's just refining the same ideas into a more-balanced form, minus a few of the bugs that were also in the way. Players were having just absolute HEAPS of turrets in the prior version, and hacking points were still too abundant. So that is probably the most notable shift in balance here. But at the same time, we're also trying to give minefields and watch standers their day in the sun, so there's a new and cheaper to hack structure that grants those. The Warbird balance changes that were supposedly in the prior version also didn't get applied, so that was still OP as heck. Now it's tuned properly. On the other end of things, hacking ARSes and TSSes/ODSSes (the new split DSSes) no longer cause the AI response to ramp up. That was something that was too imbalanced against you. Another interesting change is that now Relentless AI Wave units that find themselves on a planet of themselves or allies will fight there if there is at least 3 enemy strength there (aka you-strength, typically). This way, when you're hacking in enemy territory or enduring a counterstrike, the enemies don't run off for your worlds but instead fight you in place. Hopefully this is a lot closer to the balance mark!

[ 2021-02-16 22:31:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New MAJOR beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.740_The_Big_One You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This is the last major set of features and changes from the current beta cycle. There will be further tweaks and fixes and tuning based on feedback from players, but the goal is to get out of beta this week if all seems to be well. This new build does a lot of things, all at once. You can hack your transports to transform them between various forms, and the same for combat factories. The ARS is way more valuable and can be hacked multiple times. The IGC (if you even know what that is) has been removed for being useless. The GCA (wow a central unit) has been replaced in all new campaigns by a way cooler and even more powerful Design Schematic Server (DSS). It should feel very familiar, but the nuances are very different. Battlestations no longer seed in the new campaigns for you to capture, but you start the game with two battlestations instead of one... and those battlestations gain any turrets you unlock via the DSS (holy cow). Citadels are faster, more expensive, but also get the DSS unlock benefits. Higher difficulties no longer have slower hacks. The extra intensity is now packed into the same amount of time as lower difficulties. There's a new transport type: High Capacity. It lets you double ship lines for a few ships if you put them in there. The other basic boring transports now give you economic benefits if you leave them on a planet for 5 minutes without them getting crippled. Extra transports are now money, not annoyance. And a bunch of other minor balance updates, bugfixes, and some notable mod updates. There's a lot in here!

[ 2021-02-15 23:38:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.734_Bugfixes You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. More stuff to come later, but this is basically just a selection of bugfixes that needed to come out sooner than later. Thanks to all the folks who tested the new stuff and found these! The AI Shield Generators mod by cml has also been updated to be in the new format that hacks use in the game now. The FRS ships had a number of bugs with them last version, but one thing that has been clarified (as well as being fixed up) is that now their bonuses DO affect the flagship, except for the speed bonus. The tooltips make all of that clear, and the turbo raiders can be in fleets that are +1 larger since they don't help the flagship. This means that ultima bombers pair GREAT with a golem or ark and a collection of frigates, for instance. The starting defensive fleets have also been toned down, as a balance item in this release. For whatever reason, they wound up otherwise being about 2x as powerful as all other fleets and from what you get from a GCA, etc. Now they're consistent with everything else. The rest of the stuff was actual bugs, with interface/display issues, FRS mechanics, and some extra officer fleets seeding.

[ 2021-02-12 18:09:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.733_Arks.2C_Reprogramming.2C_And_FRS You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Right... so I'm still plugging away at the hacking overhaul work and related balance. It's taking longer than expected, but the results are, frankly, pretty glorious. Last build, golems got the ability to be buffed by you hacking them to give them much more hull durability. This build, arks join in the fun. Some can get buffs to their shields in the same way, while others get firepower buffs. You can really beef out these ships if you want to, now. On the other hand, competing for your hacking points, you can now "reprogram enemy units." There were previously some one-off "hack ion cannon" and mass driver hacks, but this is a more generalized version of the same thing (capture an enemy unit and bring it to your side). It scales how much it costs by what the unit is and how high a mark it is. You can capture the ion cannons and mass drivers, are well as black hole machines, magnifiers, fortresses, and superfortresses. Or you can sabotage them for less HaP, or you can just fight them. The FRS structure has had a HUGE revamp in its units. They are all marks 5-6 now from the get-go, and are very powerful just as regular ships; basically the experimental fabricator from the first AI War. These cost far less AIP to take, so are actually viable. Their fleet-wide bonuses are still there, but only work on very small fleets now. It says the size of the fleet for each one, and what units are good to pair with them. If you like to main frigates, a couple of formerly "useless" FRS ships are now a goldmine for a small fleet like that. Most of the hacks that allow you to get science via odd ways are gone (spire archive aside). Bad balance. More hacks will be added tomorrow!

[ 2021-02-12 03:31:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.732_Recon.2C_Golem_Buffs.2C_And_Sabotage You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Okay, whew, this is lasting a bit longer in beta than intended. But I still hope to escape this week. There is a TON going on in this one. Essentially, there have been a lot of major upgrades to the hacking mechanics under the hood, and also to how it works for you in the interface. This paves the way for a lot of more additions and updates in the next two days, too. New in this version are some hacks that allow you to greatly improve the recon range of specific logistical or military command stations... at quite a hefty hacking point cost. But the power of this can be pretty insane, if used at the right time. Also new is the ability to hack your own golems and majorly increase their durability (regardless of their mark level). The hacking cost here isn't too extreme, but it's the sort of thing that is now competing for your hacking points with other things. The sabotage hack has been upgraded massively so that you can now select the target from a list rather than it being a fiddly "the thing you are closest to" mechanic. It also now has variable hacking point costs depending on the target, rather than always being a flat 15 HaP. This allows for us to make certain other targets sabotage-able, such as... warp gates! This is a new interesting way to dodge AIP, but it comes at the cost of HaP that you may prefer to use elsewhere. Distribution nodes now give you 80 HaP rather than 20, so those are suddenly extremely valuable and exciting. Turret ranges are a bit higher at mark 1 for you, but no longer increase with higher marks. Some lobby options have been removed that now have equivalent hacks in-game. Things are shaping up well!

[ 2021-02-11 04:06:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.730_Spies.2C_Early_Officers.2C_And_Randomness_Options You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Lots of cool new stuff in this one! First of all, when you start new games, you'll notice one of the less-powerful golems or arks is available at a planet near you. That gives some interesting early game options, and helps make those units more useful since they have less purpose in the late game than their counterparts. Next up, there's a new unit: spies! There's even a new galaxy map mode related to them. And some upgrades to the recon abilities of logistical and military command stations. Economic command stations have been dominating people's desires for a lot of this beta, but now the other two are rallying with major buffs to situational awareness in their area. The Galaxy Options screen also looks very different now -- much better organized, with subcategories and all those sorts of things like the settings have. There are also a variety of new mapgen-related options that allow you to make for far-more-random distributions of capturables. There's a chance now of mid-mark-level planets right by your homeworld, too. But you can either up or down that chance with these new settings. The tech vault has seen more balance go into it (no more hull techs, and far fewer tech vaults in general in the galaxy), and science refunds now cost more hacking points. There is a tug of war between "play it as you find it" and "design your empire" as the two ethos of the game, and I'm trying to make sure that neither gets in the way of the other unduly. The last bit of this beta period is pretty much entirely focused on that specific issue, and maximizing player choice through gameplay rather than lobby options where possible.

[ 2021-02-10 03:44:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.729_Tech_Vaults.2C_Bugfixes.2C_And_Major_AMU_Updates You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. We're getting very close to coming back out of the beta branch! The largest remaining piece of technical work was a new way to allow for hacks to give you various arbitrary options that programmers can define. NR SirLimbo was needing that for one of his mods, and I also wanted to be able to do this sort of thing as part of my Tech Vault overhaul. So that's now done! The tech vaults in general are WAY more powerful and interesting now. You can't convert them into science anymore, but now they give you four options instead of just one, and they adapt automatically to exclude any techs you've already maxed out. They now also are more than just weapon techs. They now give 2 weapon tech options, 1 hull, and 1 "special" option. This last one could even be a command station class! It's almost a certainty that something in there will be useful to you, and if not the reroll will give you four new options. NR SirLimbo kindly fixed a number of bugs that he found in the main game, and I got a few others. He also majorly updated his AMU mod to no longer error with the latest beta, as well as to add a lot of other new functionality (things like major brownouts, and a bunch (43!?) of core game settings that you can now alter through this mod. One major theme from the last month is killing the entire concept of getting "screwed by the RNG." Randomness is great, but when you are not precognizant, we don't want you to get backed into a corner or have no good options. So a lot of the recent changes are aimed in that direction, while still maintaining the need to think ahead and play smart. Maybe two or three more days before we come back out of beta.

[ 2021-02-09 03:04:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.728_Full_Multiplayer_Beta You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Hey! This is a pretty huge milestone release... except it's on the beta branch right now, so it only semi-counts. We'll be coming off the beta branch next week sometime, and make bigger announcement posts then. What's the milestone? FULL multiplayer beta! There are still known bugs that need fixing, but all of the features for multiplayer are now in place. This new build not only gives you the ability to gift metal in lump sums and ongoing flows, but it also allows you to provide energy to your ally empires, and even swap hacking points around. The balance for hacking points is also adjusted in general, so that everyone gets a bit less in multi-faction multiplayer now. You take so many planets in multi-faction MP that you have hacking points coming out your ears, otherwise. This release also is a big deal in terms of convenience with hackers even in single player. Essentially the game no longer tries to "guess" which hacker you want to use when multiple are available. It uses a better algorithm to find what you mean, and otherwise asks you to clarify. You can also nickname any faction! Many players are already planning to have the Zenith Trader running around as Tradey Boi, apparently. Human Resistance Fighters got a few buffs, and there's a new Expatriate hull tech that works for them like the Alien tech works elsewhere. The tech refund screen and related from last build also got some refinement and tuning. There's still a few more features relating to hacking and new hacks for you that I have planned before we come out of the beta branch. But we're getting darn close now! If you're not already playing on the beta branch, please consider doing so. We'd love feedback.

[ 2021-02-06 02:50:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.727_Tech_Refunds_And_Balance_Tuning You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. Feels like this one took forever, and it's absolutely huge. The headline feature #1 is that now you can spend 2 hacking points to undo the science investments you have put into a tech line or a fleet. This is a HUGE deal, because now you can safely invest your science in the early game, and if the RNG is "not in your favor" later, or you didn't plan well, or heck your priorities just changed, you can re-spec. This ability to adapt as you go is pretty important, and I'm kind of shocked I never even thought of this prior to now. Hacking points are still a finite thing, so you can't do this endlessly, but they are generally plentiful enough that this won't be too painful of a cost. A number of ships have been updated to be in different technologies now, too, with this release. Without the re-spec ability, this would likely completely break a number of savegames since you might have science committed to places that are now pointless. But these adjusted tech memberships for ships help to make all the techs more balanced and sensible. We are also continuing to finalize the tech descriptions and what techs have new names at all. You also can't swap ship lines out of a fleet you've not fully claimed yet, too. Oh good grief! This release also has the ability to gift fleets and planets between empires in MP. This release has been that long inwork I forgot that was still new. There's a new Ambush Carrier Frigate in the base game, donated by CRCGamer. Astro trains got more exciting. Many mod updates. Major pathfinding improvements for giant games in particular, but it benefits everyone. Many of these features are huge on their own, but almost get lost in this release.

[ 2021-02-04 22:15:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.726_Tech_Tuning You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one is a smaller tuning release. It further tweaks the names of the techs based on a lot more feedback (see that discord channel linked in the release notes if you want to participate), including renaming a couple of the new name back to the old ones. The idea is to have the new names not fluctuate anymore shortly, so that we are settled onto the new naming scheme and everyone is hopefully happy. Think we're close now! There are new mod updates as well, including to more system defenders to make them fit with the new station keeping tech style. MLRS Turrets have become Fusion Turrets and gotten a small buff/rebalance, and DLC1's Fusion turrets are now Dispersion Turrets (since that's what their mechanic already was). Plus other minor fixes, and The Reprocessers mod making targeting of homeworlds super unlikely.

[ 2021-01-30 23:01:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.725_Techs.2C_Metal.2C_Energy_And_Ceasefires You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one has some substantial changes to the NAMES of techs, which also now get descriptions. We are still probably going to make some more changes to those based on discussion in the naming_and_balance section of our discord: https://discord.gg/snQBW4g9Gr The idea is to make sure that they are as clear as possible while also being nice to read and say. There are some substantial economic boosts for players in this build as well, and coprocessor are now reserved for multi-AI games only. Brownouts are less easy to trigger, but last a bit longer. Several mods got updates, and a variety of small balance changes are included.

[ 2021-01-30 00:29:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.724_Mod_Bonanza You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one fixes a bug in the prior version that was preventing AI Reserves from sending ships against you, and also changes up how the AI sends waves against other factions (basically they go straight Hunter now). This new version also includes a ton of updates to our settings menu to make things more easy to find, and organize all sorts of categories of options so that you can actually focus in on specific items that otherwise were just kind of lost in an overwhelming soup of words. Like that sentence! We also introduced explicit mod prerequisites, so that mods can define both what expansions and what other mods they require. When you enable such a mod, it now does its best to enable any other mods it depends on without you having to worry about it. Since we have a "modder framework" mod in place by NR SirLimbo, this makes it easier for other modders to use that without it confusing players. The mods themselves now are visually broken out into their own tab, and into their own categories (normal, cosmetic, and framework). This new build includes three new cosmetic mods by ArnaudB, all of which are actually balance adjustments (but which don't break savegames to be turned on or off). There's also another new mod, this one by CRZgatecrusher, called The Reprocessers. This is a new faction by the same name that organizes attacks, then does research, builds, has a lifecycle, and replicates.

[ 2021-01-28 23:57:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.723_AI_Accountant_Fired.2C_And_Relentless_Waves You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. WOW this one changes a lot in terms of balance. It turns out that about a month ago, I accidentally capped the Warden and the Praetorian Guard factions HARD. So hard that they have barely been present in the game during this time. They had the budget, but they just had nowhere to spend it. There's a bunch of new math in place that now gives them appropriate better caps depending on the AIP and the difficulty level of that AI subfaction in question. The original release where the budgets changed and these caps got reduced too low was called "The AI Visits An Accountant," which by and large was a great release that moved things forward. But it is amusing that this big mistake was in there, and so this release referring to that accountant being fired was an immediate joke on discord. Beyond that, though, waves also got some major balance changes. Gone is the code that makes them try to "make sure they can win" with each wave. That would lead to situations where if you were too well-defended in certain spots, you could guarantee you'd never be attacked there. And if you were equally well-defended everywhere, then you could guarantee you'd see no waves until an apocalyptic one showed up. Now that doesn't happen, waves are more common and less targeted, and this gives the Hunter some interesting potential openings as well as making things a lot more lively and actually testing your defenses in all parts. Someone on discord a few weeks ago described this as like "raptors testing the fence." There's also a new AI subfaction, "relentless waves," which keeps the Hunter from getting any of the wave forces. They're here to fight and die. Hunter was fine on its own.

[ 2021-01-26 22:49:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.722_AI_Wave_Balance You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one has a few last performance improvements (this time just for when you are showing ship ranges), and it also includes some mod updates and a few fixes like not letting you go into negative hacking points anymore (thanks, Dominus!). The star of the show with this one is definitely the faster, stronger waves from the AI. As documented in the release notes at some length, waves were incredibly underpowered before to the point that they were all but a non-presence in the game. This version changes that, substantially, so that waves are now actually a factor and you have more than the Hunter to worry about when it comes to defending border worlds. I experimented with a number of other changes, such as more aggressive mark-leveling for the AI, but backed off of those. I did give the player more forcefields on their homeworld, though -- that is needed in the case of early bomber assault waves. Overall there's a huge amount of extra danger in the game now, from different angles of attack than we've been seeing for a while. Given the insane boosts to the players' power, particularly in the early game, this should hopefully balance that out a bit AND make waves an interesting part of the game again. There has been talk of also increasing the number of guardians the AI gets, but that feels like overkill to me at this particular moment. I'll be very curious to hear how balance feels, in a broad sense, to folks who play at different difficulty levels. This beta branch is not intended to make the game harder (per se), but is intended to make more strategies viable, more techs viable, and have more varied games as a whole. How's it feeling this build?

[ 2021-01-25 23:17:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.721_Histiocytes_And_Circles You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one fixes a major performance problem that has crept in for some graphics cards, for some OSes, on the latest driver versions. Essentially, the selection circles around ships were stupidly bad performing lately. They now perform vastly better, and also look way more modern and clean. Other things like the range circles still need to be updated, but it's been a lot of work to get the framework in general here. Also, there's a lot of updates to game balance. Turrets in particular got some love from ArnaudB, who helped make the new turret balance make more sense and be more consistent. NR SirLimbo and CRC Gamer also updated their mods. StarKelp also has an entirely new mod available, called Macrophage Histiocytes, which basically greatly extends the base-game Macrophage faction and gives them a ton of new options and powers. As friends or foes, this is a pretty cool new item to be able to play with!

[ 2021-01-23 02:21:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.719_Unity_2019.4.2C_And_Performance You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too. This one fixes a couple of bugs related to viral shredders, but then beyond that it's all about an upgrade of the unity enginge. It looks like the download size is about 1.6GB at least on OSX, so that's what's up with that -- lots of file format changes in the internal databases. As part of the upgrade, there were some really notable performance improvements here, most specifically around the drawing of thousands of icons on the galaxy map or planet view. There's more I need to do still relating to the drawing of lines and circles when you have tons of ships selected, but I plan to tackle that tomorrow. OSX, Windows, and Linux should all see a big surge in compatibility, particularly Vulkan on Linux and Metal on OSX. No native support for the new Mac Silicon chips yet, but unity has that in a beta build and that's probably inevitable in a year or two if they either backport it or get the related version suitably bug-free. This version is a major jump forward in unity build numbers, well over a year, largely because we needed the new version to be rock solid and actually give some tangible benefits. We're finally at that point, knock on wood, so here we are! Please note the made with unity splash screen is annoying and temporary. It will be gone in tomorrow's release.

[ 2021-01-21 02:40:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.718_Tutorial_And_Tech_Fixes You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. This one refines a lot of things from the non-beta branch (fixes to tutorials and the stale text bug), and also refines the techs interface a lot so that you see very accurately what you are getting, and more easily see color coding for upgrades at a glance. The starting support fleets also get more engineers. The AI still needs some buffs in the beta branch right now, but so far things seem to be feeling good on the player end, so I'm really happy about that. Rather than doing adaptive unlocks in the coming weeks, there's a new plan I have in mind for some new hacks that will give you more control over the RNG without giving you COMPLETE control over it. Basically this disrupts the existing game flow less, and because of how much more widely people are unlocking techs as it is with the new balance curves, adaptive unlocks would likely have just led to too-few metas for playing the game. My two goals have been to increase the number of viable metas, and to prevent you from getting hosed by the RNG. The balance curves took us farther on the second goal than I expected, so I'm adapting my plans based on feedback. Thanks to everyone playing the beta branch!

[ 2021-01-19 23:35:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.717_Tuning_And_Optional_Capture You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. This one makes a number of refinements to the last version, which had things like broken GCAs, etc. One reason among several that we went to the beta branch over the weekend. The game is indeed far too easy right now, but the frigates are no longer so ridiculously overpowered as they were in the prior beta build. We need to do a few things to make the AI a bit more beefed-out to match all the large power improvements that players got in the last build, but we'll take this a few steps at a time. We also fixed a number of bugs, a number of mods were updated by their authors, and capturing things like golems and arks can now be paused or even halted entire -- that's a pretty handy new power! You also no longer have to worry about Poltergeists in most games unless you get into a mega faction like the Fallen Spire. Next build, expect further refinements and bugfixes, but also some notable buffs to the AI forces to give them a fighting chance against yours -- particularly in the early game. It's not super clear to me yet whether the new balance is still too strong in your favor in the late game, but in the early game it's no contest in favor of players. This is why we do a beta for a bit!

[ 2021-01-18 23:24:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.716_The_Great_Balance_Curve You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam to play this one. This one has a TON of balance changes, mostly in the favor of players. Hopefully we have not made things too easy, but we can dial up enemies as-needed. The overarching goal of this new balance is to make it so that most of your ships get stronger, faster, at lower mark levels, and then get diminishing returns at higher mark levels. Enemy ships largely still get stronger in a roughly linear fashion. This keeps the progressive linear challenge of enemies, while giving you the freedom to invest more widely in techs than you could before. Frigates also got a number of really major buffs, and should be a lot more viable. Units like turrets, minefields, station-keepers, and other planetary defenses now start with much larger ship caps and then only grow in power -- not ship cap -- as they mark up. No more paucity of turret coverage in the early game, or touring back around your planets to place turrets every time you mark up. There are a lot of quality of life improvements in general, mostly aimed at informing you better on tech upgrades, and also for purposes of making for a wider variety of playstyles. More balance tuning is expected soon (based on feedback, mainly), but we also have a number of other exciting QoL additions and game-flow improvements planned. This version already makes you a bit less at the mercy of the RNG at high levels of play, but we're going to be doing even more in that area very soon.

[ 2021-01-16 03:02:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.715_Unload_Queuing This one has a number of bugfixes, and then the major new addition is a QoL feature: the ability to queue turning on/off pursuit and attack-move modes, and transport unloads. So you can queue a transport to fly across the galaxy, get into position, and unload in pursuit mode if you wish, now. It doesn't support queuing load commands (waiting for all the other ships to get there is an interesting proposition, particularly when you figure common use cases and how those work), but the current additions cut down on what is hopefully the vast majority of the extra babysitting you might do. (Personally, I am not one for starting a fight on a remote planet until I can actually watch the initial disposition of units, but I do understand that others have different views, and especially for soft targets -- or defense -- that makes sense.)

[ 2021-01-11 22:45:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.714_Frigate_Surge_And_CSGs This one makes frigates WAY more powerful and plentiful (mostly in fresh campaigns only, but the energy cost reductions apply to existing games also). This is quite exciting! There are several mods that have been updated to be in line with this change, or to otherwise include a few fixes and tweaks. On the subject of fixes and tweaks, the tutorial will no longer wreck you if you push a bit too far (recent Praetorian Guard change is great for the main game, but not tutorial). And last but definitely not least, there's another new player-created mod that is now included with the game. This one is called AI Shield Generators, and is basically like the older "Core Shield Generators" (CSGs) concept from the first AI War. Modder cml made them configurable and much cooler this time, from what I can tell. It's nice to see that feature again!

[ 2021-01-10 01:13:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Happy new year! New build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.713_Marauding_Again This one is entirely focused on fixes to some of the included mods, most notably the Kaizer's Marauders. I was on a short trip for the new year with my family, and now I'm getting back into things this week to finish up the last of multiplayer, work on base game refinements, and push into work on DLC2. Fingers crossed, but 2021 should be a very exciting time for AI War 2! Heck, even just the first quarter or two should be pretty epic, knock on wood.

[ 2021-01-05 23:04:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.712_Civilian_Pause Just a small one this time. It improves the functionality of pause for multiplayer, and also gets the Civilian Industries mod to function again. If you have a version that errors when you try to unpause, then please restart Steam to force it to get the version that doesn't do that. There was about a 20 minute window where you could get that corrupted version -- apologies! Other than important hotfixes, this will be the last build until January 5th or so, but I'll be keeping an eye on things and so if there's something urgent then please either @ me on discord or submit a mantis ticket, or ideally both. Thanks!

[ 2020-12-31 20:33:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build is now out! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.711_Deep_Memories We're back out of beta surprisingly fast, partly because the response to the prior build was so positive, but also because I have been piling on the bugfixes and wanted to have those out to everyone as fast as possible. This new build has a lot of great fixes to the last non-beta build, although we are aware that the Civilian Industries mod will shut itself off while trying to run in this new version. All the other mods seem okay with it. In this build, deepstriking just got a lot smarter, and your transports are also now more obedient. Along with a huge laundry list of other things.

[ 2020-12-30 23:11:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.710_The_AIs_Visit_An_Accountant Please use the current_beta branch on Steam to test it. This is a huge overhaul of how the AI deals with a whole lot of things are higher difficulty levels (it was being a little too nice about a few things), and it's also a solid reshaping of the graphs for how AI budgets increase over time. They are more aggressive right at the VERY start, then they accelerate a lot more slowly than before to a lower overall point, then they spend the middle game in a lower state than before as well, and then they accelerate upwards faster to meet the same "beyond the late game" dark place if you go that far. Essentially the idea is to make playing the early game less tense, the middle game more feasible, and the late game just as punishing if you go too far. But there are a ton of other changes here, some related to multiplayer, others related to making the AI more reactive on high difficulties when you lose a planet in its territory, and others relating to several included mods. We are still hearing some persistent complaints about a few tech lines that are "too good" and thus boring because it requires you to over-specialize the same way every time, so there are a variety of plans in general to make more tech lines just as exciting. Please let us know what you think when you get a chance, so we can get back out of the beta branch hopefully by next week sometime.

[ 2020-12-30 02:07:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.709_Obedient_Engineers This is the last release (barring any crises that come up) until the 28th of this month. I'll be taking time off to spend with my family, and I hope everyone else is having a good (and safe) time with their holiday of choice. If there's anything critical, please ping me on discord, or you can always use the most_recent_stable beta branch on Steam. This new build adds some minor UI improvements, some notable bugfixes in various areas but particularly when it comes to engineers that aren't in pursuit mode, some slight multiplayer improvements, some nerfs to extragalactic war unit speed, some extra data centers for larger maps, and some mod updates. Enjoy!

[ 2020-12-23 22:42:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.708_Mapgen_For_Multiplayer The last of the known lockups with multiplayer clients is now fixed, plus a variety of less-common MP bugs. Also fixed up the behavior of artillery golems and similar so that they will never chase units. Some bugs that led to super-speed warden or CPA fleets are also smashed. And a kind of nutsy bug that sometimes made the hacking costs of the get-science hacks really high in the last few weeks. Lastly, this also includes a huge number of overhauls of how map generation seeding happens for multiplayer when there are multiple human empires. This one of the bigger things that had been on the list for multi-faction multiplayer preventing it from reaching beta, so that's a great milestone. There are now finally enough fleets and such for everyone to have a good time. Expect the AIP to be vastly higher in multi-faction multiplayer in general, and there are fewer AIP reducers to go along with that; you're going to really need to use your combined forces, since you're all getting so many fleets and powerups now.

[ 2020-12-22 00:03:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been sixty-six days since the last major release writeup, with THIRTY-FIVE releases in all, and notes starting here and ending here. We are now in a mix of multiplayer alpha and beta! (Depends on how you play, some methods are feature-complete and others are not.) If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that is here.

Badger's Retirement

Okay, this would be a really really long digression, but I hope you take a moment to click over and read about the legacy of Badger and Puffin. Both have retired from working on the game fully (although both still hang out and occasionally poke things in), and so I'm now the sole remaining active developer on the game. With that being said, this is "news" as of a month and a half ago (for Badger -- for Puffin, it was much earlier this year), and we've had 28 releases since Badger retired, so I do okay on my own. This isn't a cause for concern, but rather a moment to take stock of their achievements and celebrate them. It's also worth noting that Badger is still doing some remaining work here and there on DLC2, and he's already decided to return and is working on content for DLC3.

New Main Menu

You might have noticed the new main menu if you've logged into the game in the last month:
If your computer fans turn on and your FPS is only like 30, please don't freak out. This is actually the (by a really large margin) most intensive scene in the entire game. I get 90fps on it and in the game on my main dev machine, and a measly 30fps on my under-min-sys-requirements mac computer, but it's usable on both. Even my below-specs mac is getting like 60-90 fps in-game with ship models turned off. The main menu might seem like a strange thing to revise, but it's the first thing that you see when you load up the game. We wanted something that felt more epic and exciting, and that had a darker and more appropriate thematic feel for the game. Personally, I also wanted a view from inside a spaceship looking out, since usually we only ever see spaceships from the outside during actual gameplay. I also majorly updated the ending scenes (both win and loss), so those are more epic now.

UI Overhaul, And Usability Galore

Okay, so for one thing I did a complete visual overhaul of what buttons look like, and backgrounds on all the UI bits, and things like that. This no longer feels vaguely website-ish. It feels like... well, like a hardcore strategy game with a lot of space themes. But that's not all we did. There are new functions for doing searches for units or planets by name on the galaxy map. There are a ton of new galaxy map filters that show more information of various sorts. You can easily see where threat is, or the hunter or warden, etc. You can edit planet names, set priorities per planet like the first game (but with more options), add narrative notes to planets, and more. You can also ping planets or locations on planets, and you can ping with multiple colors to help communicate meaning while you're discussing on voice chat. The notices up at the top of the screen now have backgrounds that indicate their severity/importance, and are automatically sorted by that. There's also a new fleet status window that Badger added despite being retired (he actually did a ton of QoL stuff in the last month, since he was actually starting to play both on his own as well as with his family and friends and thus noticing more things). The fleet status window is particularly helpful for keeping an eye on what is going on in your empire, or in all the empires of players in multiplayer. ...but it's been 66 days. Come on, we're just getting started.

AI Improvements

• The AI Hunter has gotten more intelligent multiple times over, and fireteams in general have gotten smarter. You have pre-retirement Badger to thank for these.
• Deepstriking (the AI Reserves) got a number of AI updates from Badger right before he retired.
• The way that AI Sentinels handle their reinforcement budget was completely overhauled by me, making them much more threatening and interesting.
• The way that AIs use turrets has also been redone, so that they really don't use remotely so many as before. They really should be putting their resources into things that can strike you offensively, so the planets with a bunch of turrets are now far more rare.
• Turrets have actually been rebalanced fairly substantially, largely thanks to post-retirement Puffin, who was still collecting ideas from the community and implementing them along with his own thoughts.
• We made a number of changes to how strength values are calculated, to more accurately represent how dangerous ships actually are. This makes it easier for you to make good decisions, but also plays directly into the intelligence of the AI and other NPC factions.
• There were a number of cases where the AI Sentinels would hold onto threatfleet ships (which are not very smart) for too long rather than giving them over to the Hunters. We looked at that and I decided to just brute force them into giving their ships to the Hunters if they can't get whatever they think they are doing done in 3 minutes.
• Thanks yet again to post-retirement Badger, various factions including the nanocaust and marauders are able to invade your galaxy in a delayed fashion, which is pretty cool. Rather than having them there from moment one, they show up a while into the game.

More Mods!

• Another new included-by-default mod is now in place: Civilian Industries, by StarKelp. This is turning out to be a really popular mod, which involves a lot of defensive and economic buddies hanging around. Strategic Sage has been doing a video series with the Civilian Industries helping him against the Scourge from DLC1.
• NR SirLimbo has been adding a prolific number of mods, as well as several frameworks for modding. His Extended Ship Variants (for the base game and for DLC1) have become really standard fare for a lot of players, and his Kaizer's Marauders are a vastly more complex and dangerous interpretation of the base game Marauders. At the moment he is working on a new and evolutionary style of Devourer, but that is currently still in earlier testing and not yet included for everyone in the main game.
• I did an enormous overhaul of our XML Parsing capabilities, upgrading it so that the data is parsed faster, and also more correctly. This fixed up a number of blocking issues that were preventing certain mods from being possible, and consequently we saw a huge uptick in new mods right after that.
• Oh man, the mods from NR SirLimbo kept coming! There's a micro mods collection in there now, too. He's been absolutely prolifically busy on several fronts. It's hard to understate just how involved his Kaizer's Marauders are, in particular. And his AMU tool is there to support any modders who want to use it, making it easier to make complex mods like his.

Multiplayer Bits

• Multiplayer itself has seen a ton of improvements at a technical level and otherwise, it probably goes without saying. But this has been the major focus of mine during this period, despite the detour into quality of life improvements.
• Multiplayer went through a number of changes at a technical level as I experimented with how to get the smoothest experience in terms of sync, while at the same time keeping things moving. The end result was not what I had planned on, but is instead something that relies on data I collected in real world use cases. It works ridiculously well.
• The ability to swap ship lines between players was added by NR SirLimbo, which was really kind of him and saved me having to do it. He also made that interface a bit less overwhelming in general even in single player.
• I added in the ability to finally share control of a single faction, and that's the mode that is just now going into beta (aka feature-completeness). The multi-faction mode will hopefully join it in beta status in the next week or two at most.

Other Visual And QoL Improvements

• I redid all of the visuals for area of effect attacks, most notably tesla attacks. It looks SO much cooler now. The old version was okay, but not nearly as varied. And when I upgraded the lighting pipeline during the runup to DLC1 late last year, the AOE visual effects actually wound up taking a step down in visual quality.
• I added a new Stationary Flagship Mode, which I had expected to be popular but actually was almost universally hated. But it is still something that you can enable if it solves a gameplay problem you have. A few people were enjoying it, so that's a win in my book. But it's no longer on by default for everyone.
• The way that galaxy map links are drawn has been updated to be a gradient of the two colors of the owners between those planets, which was a cool addition of post-retirement Badger.
• For a long while, we've had some trouble with trying to use one button for toggling on or off modes like pursuit and attack move and so on, and so I split those into two functions where you can clearly tell it if you are turning them on or off. This solves a lot of intermittent frustrations people were having.
• Post-retirement Badger added a whole host of other quality of life improvements.
• Post-retirement Puffin added about thirty-six new space backgrounds of various sorts, for use in-game and on the galaxy maps. These were mostly created using the shader tool I set up a few years ago, but the results are the result of a lot of artistic work and experimentation on his part. They really spruce up the variety in the game, and in particular make the galaxy maps look nicer.
• I also spent a goodly while making it so that we are now able to include arbitrary sprites in text. This involved further customizing our version of TextMeshPro, which now has a number of unique features for us. This paired well with our overhaul of the icons for various resources, and in the future we'll do things like embedding ship icons in tooltips.
• The visuals for shots themselves are now a lot more appropriately-scaled for various zoom levels, so battles look nicer.
• There are also now battle indicators on the galaxy map, making it more obvious where there are fights happening in your territory without it becoming a circus.

What's Else Is New?

• Astro Trains got a buff to make them more interesting.
• Post-retirement Badger also added a variety of roguelike options for not revealing things about what the galaxy you are entering entails, which is a cool feature.
• A bunch of performance improvements in text generation, and UI updates in general, have been made. SirLimbo and I wound up going down a giant rabbit hole on the text generation in particular, but it makes it so that really length text narratives and dynamically-generated lists of ship tooltips no longer suck the performance out of your game.
• Error handling is also vastly more robust in the game, and when errors happen you now get much more information about what is happening and especially if there are a bunch of silent errors hammering your log.
• Ever thought that "snipers and drones are useless, because they just aggro entire enemy planets and get me killed?" Well, they now have a new aggro invisibility ability, which solves that problem and lets them remain useful without being unfair or annoying.
• For our linux players, we've added a variety of tools to get around the unity bug with mousewheel scroll being backwards, so that is one annoyance off the list.
• The number of bugfixes and general balance tweaks are too staggering to recount, but it's a lot.

More to come soon!

Multiplayer Schedule?

There are two ways of playing: a shared faction, which is now in beta and thus basically complete aside from bugfixing; and multiple faction, which still has some known issues and missing features and thus remains in alpha. I expect to sort out the remaining known issues, while fielding ongoing bug reports, over the next 1-2 weeks at the most. At that point, multiplayer is effectively finished aside from just giving it time to collect any more bug reports people come up with. One thing I should point out is that this is an insanely complicated game from a technical standpoint, and so the more testers the better. The game might be working perfectly for most people in most situations, and then you come along with your friends and run into something catastrophic and wonder how anyone could possibly play this. Send me your bug reports, and I can generally have that stuff knocked out in a couple of days. But without your bug reports, if other people aren't running into it, I'll never know it's there.

DLC2: Zenith Onslaught

Our first non-kickstarter-related expansion comes out in early 2021. Maybe January, or potentially February. You can read all about it, at least in a limited preview format. We've had a number of testers banging on this for months now, and the detailed unit design and art to go with it are the last pieces we'll be putting together. This expansion represents a large opportunity for us, since it will coincide with the game fully launching its multiplayer mode. A lot of news outlets didn't fully cover the original launch of AI War 2 because we released it in a crowded season and it came out with too little advance notice. So we're trying to turn that around with this expansion and hopefully get some more traction with a wider audience for the base game itself.

DLC3: The Neinzul Abyss

Our second piece of DLC for 2021 will hopefully come out more around the middle of the year, and you can read about that here. It's something that came into existence largely because Badger kept adding too many things to DLC2. DLC2 was either going to be massively expensive, or any other DLC we ever did was going to look paltry and small by comparison. We made the sensible decision to split these out into two products that we can thus offer at better prices -- and also take extra time to do cool extra things for DLC3. I'm looking forward to getting to fully design my first faction, versus just collaborating on factions with others or doing the art and technical support for them.

Remaining Kickstarter Stuff?

There's a diminishing number of things. I covered a lot of it back in update #65. Interplanetary Weapons are something still coming for free to the base game (they were a stretch goal), and I'll be working on those while I work on DLC3. The backer planet naming will happen around the same time, as well as the ability to send some taunts back from the player at the AI. We'll probably do another batch of AI taunts as well, and the Cyber Cipher reward for mysterious messages will be something that we tackle during that DLC3 period. Design and Name an AI is something that will be around the same time as the third DLC3, same as the Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff. There are two lingering art-related backer rewards I still need to follow up on, but then that's it.

What Happens After That?

That really depends. The release of this game started out going well, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game were a big help for folks passing by at the start. 2020 has been a rough year, though, when we really look at the data. The company's income has fallen to less than half of what it was in 2019, and that was already one of our lower years in terms of income. We do have those two new DLC planned for 2021, along with the giant multiplayer updates and so on that are free, so hopefully that trend will turn around. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. If the trend doesn't turn around? I don't know, exactly. The structure of modern online stores may ultimately wind up forcing our hand. I'd probably have to either choose between working on an entirely new project unrelated to AI War 2, or start working on a sequel instead of more expansion. Both prospects have a lot of downsides, but they also have some substantial upsides. Right now I don't feel super inclined to leave the AI War franchise after all this work and developing this giant engine, so I'm more inclined to stick to something closer to home than try to reinvent the wheel. If you look at the evolution of AI War 2 since launch, the current build you're able to play is already practically AI War 3. It looks better, plays better, has better AI, has more content, and is much more technically advanced. Right now the frustration is that more or less we're doing most of that work for free (personally I have still lost about $240k in making AI War 2, versus earning any actual money, if you look at my spent money versus earned), and it's hard to get press attention for a "year old game." Since we started this project, more than half a console generation has come and gone, sheesh! I have no shortage of ideas, but I don't want to work for someone else and right now the open market is feeling fairly indifferent. I have a lot of hope for 2021, though. :)

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. Thank you!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-12-07 00:39:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been six days since the last major release writeup, with four releases in all, and notes starting here and ending here. We are in multiplayer alpha! If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that from now on is here. We've had the first victory over the AI in multiplayer happen, and we're knocking down MP bugs steadily.

AI Improvements And Additions

Okay, this is a really big release, actually. Far more than we had intended to do, but so it goes. First off, the star of the show is definitely the new "Tsunami CPA" option in the galaxy options screen. You can turn it on for existing savegames or new campaigns, but temporarily it is off by default. It turns Cross Planet Attacks into the sort of... scary tidal wave of doom or glory that the pre-3.0 days of AI War Classic used to enjoy. We'll always keep the option to have boring-style CPAs in this game, where basically the CPA just releases a bunch of threat that join the Hunter fleet. That's... fine. But as a number of people have noticed, that's a very anticlimatic result after a scary countdown timer. The hunter is its own thing, and is intelligent and scary in its own way, but it's also cautious and coordinated. That's the very opposite of what a Cross Planet Attack used to represent, 8 years or so ago, in the first AI War. A Cross Planet Attack is meant to be a flood of ships from all over the galaxy, only lightly coordinated at best, that wash up on the shores of your defenses and either dissipate or carry the wreckage inland. So that's what happens now, if you turn on the Tsunami CPA option. It's basically a thousand screaming idiots running at you from every direction, only sort of avoiding danger. And they go for the throat, too, if they can get past your external defenses. It's thrilling and quite unlike anything the AI War multiverse has seen since maybe 2012. How I've missed this. However, here's the thing that makes this extra cool and also quite new-feeling: the hunter may be cautious, but it also is quick to capitalize on openings. And it operates alongside the Tsunami CPAs. So while those are washing up on your defenses, and you think you're going to be okay... sometimes the hunter shows up at just the wrong time and tips the balance. It turns out that a meticulous and ruthless planner, given a thousand screaming idiots for cover, is even more effective. Moving on from the keystone feature: In a whole bunch of other areas for the AI, there are things that look on the surface like nerfs to the ship budgets for the AI, but actually are not quite what they seem. The changes are complicated enough that it's really easy to misunderstand the implications of them even if you read really carefully. But to summarize the most important one, essentially the AI is... less reactive in how it applies its budgets when it feels like its king is under pressure. It now trusts that it has been building a good and solid defense for a long time, and keeps pressing its own attacks on you. Previously you could run into REALLY protracted final battles with the AI homeworlds, where the AI was being super defensive and making it really hard for you to win... but also really hard for you to lose. Now the AI final fights won't be quite so hard to win... but at the same time there is a dramatically higher chance of you outright losing during them. Aside from this, there are what amount to some legitimate nerfs to the AI in the warden and praetorian guard sub-factions, if those are at their full cap for whatever reason. Rather than donating excess income to general defenses (which made some AI types turn out to have generalized defenses that were way inflated in an inappropriate way), they just lose that budget. This is more in keeping with the first AI War as well, and should not affect most games. A few specific AI types may wind up needing a buff, but let us know how those feel (Special Forces Master and Praetor, mainly). Oh, also speaking of the AI's intelligence, the highest-level AIs (difficulty 8 and up) will now underestimate their strength a bit when deciding to engage you. This will make them tend to engage you with overwhelming force more often, again like the first game. And in general, turrets were being undervalued in terms of strength, which was hurting the decision-making of all factions. So the strength values of those have been tweaked upwards (how the strength is reported, not what the damage of the actual turrets is), and that should lead to all factions making more sensible decisions on heavily turreted player planets. Oh, and it's harder to bait the hunter into your meat grinders on difficulty 8 and up. You're welcome. ;)

What's Else Is New?

• There's a bunch of new little lore bits that now appear in the game when you are getting started! This includes backstory on the Spire and Zenith if relevant when you find them, and backstory on the AI. Some of these bits of lore are brand new information, and other are things that were easy to miss.
• The Civilian Industries mod not only now works again, but also has been getting a number of substantial updates by its author, StarKelp.
• Lots and lots of bugfixes.
• One bugfix in particular fixes an issue where all of the fireteam-based faction ships were being lobotomized upon loading a savegame since September 3rd. So that made the hunter, the nanocaust, scourge, etc, all really stupid for at least 30 seconds after loading a savegame. That was a one-line typo on my part, but is now fixed.
• The Nanocaust has seen a bunch of buffs in general, since they were starting to seem lackluster compared to the newer factions that are more powerful. The devourer golem is coming up soon in terms of getting some new power levels (in its case those will be lobby options instead of a straight buff).
• In the arena of multiplayer, we found an interesting bug a while back that was causing any ships in transports to get duplicated endlessly on clients, which led to all manner of bugs and eventually crashes. The bugs we've been fixing since then have not been nearly so serious, and it's really great to see how a variety of people are playing a variety of multiplayer scenarios with success now. There are still plenty of missing MP-specific features and MP-specific bugs, but it's coming a long way fast thanks to testers.

More to come soon! Looking for more information about multiplayer and DLC2? A recent post on September 25th has a lot of details.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-10-01 21:48:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Can you hop into multiplayer and play now? Why... yes, you can! There will be bugs, at this point, but we're well into alpha now, and the first waves of testers have helped us fix a lot of things. Since the last update post fifty-seven days ago (WHOAH), we've had thirty releases, starting with notes here and ending here. If you want the full info on multiplayer's current status, the place to look at that from now on is here.

What's New Other Than Multiplayer Stuff?

• Heck of a lot of bugfixes and balance tweaks, as you might imagine.
• You can have multiple Devourers and Zenith Traders if you like.
• The Imperial Spire (in DLC1) has a number of improvements.
• Ion Cannons are particularly more effective now.
• Melee units now do battle far more effectively, too.
• The way the galaxy map is drawn has had a lot of improvements, most notably in the lobby. This feels SO much better in singleplayer and multiplayer.
• Some features from the upcoming DLC2 (which is now pushed until January 2021) have been backported to the base game. Notably, you can now hack Dyson Spheres like an ARS.
• Dark Spire got a number of improvements, including more interactivity with other factions that hate them.
• Hit the R key to reset the camera rotation and orientation, at long last.
• Improvements and flavor updates to Human Resistance Fighters.
• Lots of changes to AI Eyes to actually make them formidable again.
• Lots of improvements to mod compatibility, which broke code-based mods temporarily, but ultimately make them work better in both singleplayer but especially multiplayer.
• Scourge (from DLC1) intelligence improvements.
• Civilian Industries By StarKelp has been added as our second off-by-default mod that we're distributing for the mod author. It may be broken at the moment because of some of the overhauls relating to multiplayer, but we'll have a working build again as soon as that is ready from the author. It's a very cool mod.
• More Starting Options By ArnaudB has been added as our third off-by-default mod. This one adds a lot of new options for starting fleets for you.
• There is a new "Find Planet" command (cmd:findp yourtexthere) that lets you find planets by name, which is super useful.
• Better Default Screen Resolutions! This has been bugging people for a while. It's now defaulting to your desktop resolution and fullscreen windowed mode when you start the game for the very first time.
• More voice lines related to the nanocaust and a few other factions.
• The AI difficulty descriptions have been completely rewritten and are way more clear as to what you can expect, without making you feel bad. Huge thanks to Tzarro on this!
• "Fireteam dynamic resizing" is a new feature that leads to massive performance gains in very late-game situations with a lot of enemy factions in play. Huge win by Badger.

More to come soon! Read on to hear about multiplayer and DLC2.

What's The State Of Multiplayer?

If you want a truly exhaustive writeup about multiplayer, this has everything. We have now been in multiplayer alpha for sixteen days, in a "soft launch" status. Basically, we only told people who were really paying a lot of attention in the Steam forums or on Discord. We had enough testers out of that smaller group to run into a whole slew of issues, and thanks to them you are now not going to be one of the folks to run into things that are that bad. At first it was a situation where errors were immediate, and then it was a case of maybe being able to play 20 minutes at a time. As of a day or two ago, Suzera and Ipsum were able to play for about three and a half hours without major errors, until they hit a game-breaking dead-stop issue. However, the host was able to save their game, send it to me, and now on the new version they can keep playing as if nothing had happened; this may well be the first completed "real" multiplayer game of AI War 2 (assuming they win, heh). At the moment you can definitely still expect some bugs, and things are not quite as smooth (visually) on the clients as we would prefer. But we've made a huge number of strides, and it should be playable from start to finish aside from whatever unknown bugs you run into. There's a list of many of the known issues, but most of them are not that serious at the moment.

What's The Difference Between Alpha And Beta?

Beta means feature-complete. We're not there yet, on multiplayer. Things like sharing a faction between two players doesn't have an interface yet. Spectator mode has only been somewhat tested. Lots more testing is needed in general. Balance needs to be thought about by people who are actually playing it. There are some features like gifting between players that are an obvious need. Etc. There's a list of questions for multiplayer alpha testers that can have a major material impact on what beta (and later fully released) multiplayer functions will be like, so if you have an opinion, please feel free to let us know!

What Makes Multiplayer Beta?

When we have all of the major features missing from the alpha, then that's a relatively feature-complete multiplayer experience. When sync issues are not routinely a problem, and other bugs are not prevalent, then you can basically have an expectation of a "normal multiplayer experience." Connect, play, disconnect when done. The purpose of the beta period is to have lots of people attempting that, so that we find the strange edge cases. Or other features that are needed that we are missing. Or balance problems that are specific to having multiple players. At this point, the schedule is such that we'll be hitting beta status sometime in October. But we're in a more-robust-than-I-expected alpha status at the moment, so there is that. If you're wondering "when can I play with my friends and actually just have a good time doing it," my hope is that the answer is... maybe now? Depends on your tolerance for bugs. If you're new to the game, or have a low tolerance for things that break, then my real answer to that question is "it should feel like finished and polished multiplayer in November," based on how things have been going so far.

What About DLC2?

This is something we haven't really been talking about too much, mainly because it seemed in poor taste to be talking about it before multiplayer was ready. At any rate, Badger has really outdone himself on his part of it, and I'm very excited by what is there. For my part of it, I have yet to even start it, and probably won't be able to until sometime in October at the earliest because of multiplayer work. So the end release for this expansion will probably be in January, which is when we'll likely also call multiplayer "fully gold" in order to maximize the chance of marketing. But realistically, hopefully multiplayer is there for you in every meaningful respect in November. What can I tell you about this new expansion? Well, it's much larger than the first one. It's also not free to kickstarter backers, as an aside. It's called Zenith Onslaught, and it does live up to its name. I look forward to being able to share more about that with you in the future, but for now I need to keep my eye on the multiplayer ball.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-09-26 02:54:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just an update on how things are progressing: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Version_2.120_Improved_Lobby_Map_Experience There's a lot still going on with the lobby that I have to sort out, plus then some immediate sync issues once we get past there. You can see a general list of the things that I'm aware of at the moment here: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Multiplayer_Remaining_Todo_List I'm keeping that broadly updated as I discover new things as I test things out. The UI issues for the lobby are dwindling in number, which is good, and all of the initial connection work is done for all platforms, which is also good.

Big picture, though, what's remaining before alpha?

1. Still need to be able to assign players to human factions in a nice fashion. This is a thing that is maybe one more day of work, knock on wood. 2. I think that for the galaxy map display itself, I have a slight bit more work to do on that given recent feedback. Hopefully half a day of work. 3. After starting the game from the lobby, there are some bits like starfield (but not planet) backgrounds that are out of sync, and I'm not sure why. In the lobby the starfield backgrounds are also out of sync. I need to fix that to make sure it's not a wider problem. Hopefully an hour or two of work. 4. Every ship that is created after the initial world setup is immediately desynced at the moment, as in their core IDs are different between the client and the host. Yes, I do plan on having robust desync repair, but goodness we need to also start by having fewer sync issues than THAT in the first place. This is something that I need to investigate what the ideal solution will be, and it's probably the single most complicated thing remaining for multiplayer. This could take weeks, but hopefully I can make it "good enough" in under a week of time and then refine it during the alpha. 5. There's some strange latency on the client end that I need to look into, which is probably some sort of complex timing-based issue with all of the threads. I am hoping that there won't be more than a few days of looking into that required before an alpha. 6. I do need to then actually code in the desync-repair loop, which again is a giant piece of work, but something I plan to handle in stages. My hope is to do a version that is less efficient but only takes me a couple of days to start out with.

After this checklist

At this point we'd have working multiplayer in an alpha state, minus some features and definitely minus some efficiency, but I can work on the features and efficiency during the alpha. Hopefully within a month or so of starting the alpha, things have stabilized out into a beta format where everything is working and we're just catching the odd item here and there. Some technical things, like adjusting how GameCommands are structured from a code sense, will be absolutely massive and cause a lot of bugs for a little while, and I'm choosing to do those during the alpha rather than before it. My hope is that I can make it minimally invasive, but either way things will get solved faster by having more testers.

Timing?

I'm going to be mostly unavailable for the next week for some last family stuff prior to my kids starting the new school year, so the earliest versions of the alpha won't be in August, quite. Sorry about that, it's hard to take time off especially when folks are so excited, but I also need to be a dad and husband. If I had to guess, we'll hopefully have something that people can comfortably play with in the week of September 7th. THAT said, technically multiplayer alpha is there now, it's just immediately divergent in the reality that you and your friend see. In some ways that is actually quite amusing, although I don't think it would be a fun way to play. For the host, everything is normal, but the client is on an increasingly bad acid trip. ;) I may shift around the order of operations in how I approach certain pieces of work some, to brute-force solve desyncs, for instance, and then see how bad that makes performance feel. Working backwards in that sort of fashion might let people test sooner than later, but I remain antsy that the experience in that sort of scenario would be un-fun enough to turn away some testers. Either way, past some certain point there will be a question mark of "when is this officially alpha," since alpha is technically feature incomplete and buggy by nature. Right now I think I draw the line as this being not officially alpha because I don't want feedback from anyone on it, since I know where the core problems are and I need to focus on those before we start looking for further bugs.

More soon!

Anyhow, it's an exciting time and we're getting closer! I am really pleased and encouraged with how responsive I've been able to make the lobby after focusing down on it, and I think that we'll see the same thing with the rest of the game as I get enough time with the multiplayer components of each bit. Cheers! Chris

[ 2020-08-17 19:51:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Multiplayer is not ready yet -- but this is a big milestone on that path. We expect to be into the alpha for multiplayer sometime next week. Since the last update post sixteen days ago, we've had ten releases, starting with notes here and ending here. I recently talked a lot about multiplayer and our plans for that in the short and middle term. I think all that is still accurate, but I'm going to talk about things again based on what I now know. Our release notes page also has a section with the current multiplayer todo list for your easy reference.

What's New Other Than Multiplayer Stuff?

• Relating to DLC1, the Scourge have gotten a number of new tweaks and fixes.
• Various other UI tweaks and improvements, including a few to the lobby.
• A fix to a memory leak and a crash to the desktop that were possible for some people to hit in the last month. Those had to do with some newer ways of loading assets faster that didn't always agree with everyone's computer.
• We fixed a handful of cross-threading exceptions that were possible.
• The imperial spire now always give you vision properly.
• Several ship behavior improvements.
• The music selection/change window is now much improved.
• The Dyson sphere got a few buffs.
• A couple of speed improvements in parts of the codebase, and a couple of serialization fixes.
• A fix for the self-building ships owing extra metal above their actual cost.
• Several improvements to how stacks of ships behave, balance-wise. This most notably improves Vanguard Hydras.
• Campaigns in the load menu are now sorted by how recently something was saved in them, not alphabetically. Oh my goodness this feels so much better.
• Some minor nanocaust tweaks, and AI Exogalactic War unit tweaks in general.
• Some balance tweaks to the Fallen Spire ships.

More to come soon!

What's The State Of Multiplayer?

This is a screen (edited to blur out some names) that makes me very happy:
For multiplayer, the intent is to have three general solutions for HOW data is transmitted across the Internet. Two our of three of those are complete. This doesn't mean that the game is ready to play, though, because WHAT data is transmitted across the Internet (or LAN) matters a whole lot more, and that still has a ways to go. But we'll talk about that in a minute. First up, how do we connect to players and how does data get between them? [olist]

LiteNetLib. Originally FORGE Remastered, but that was not performing well in my tests, so I swapped it out. This is fully working. This is what you would use if you want absolutely no central services or servers, or you want to play on a LAN or a VPN with friends. It's extremely fast, and will try to do NAT traversal if you are playing across the Internet, but there's a very high possibility that you would need to use port forwarding with this. I built in a lot of things to make it easy to find your IP addresses with this, and it should support IPv4 or IPv6 with no troubles (though only IPv4 has been tested).

Steam. This is fully working. Basically, the host opens the lobby in multiplayer mode, or loads a savegame. The client clicks join game and sees a screen like the above with all of their Steam friends. Click connect next to the one who is hosting, and Steam brokers a route through any firewalls you have, sets up a very fast relay through their own servers, and connects you with your friend without ever revealing the IP addresses of either of you. It's not possible that you would have to worry about ports or port forwarding or any of that sort of thing, as it doesn't use any of that in a traditional sense.

GOG Galaxy. Not yet working. This solution will only work for Windows and OSX right now, and not also Linux like the other two solutions do. This one will work a whole lot like Steam, although with less in the way of relay servers. I'm still working with GOG to figure out a few technical bits at the moment. [/olist] At this point, this covers HOW data gets around. Other than GOG, which I'm waiting on information for, I'm completely done with this work (any future found bugs aside). The work of this stuff is:

• Getting you and one or more friends connected.
• Then keeping you connected and data moving fast between you.
• And finally, making sure you know when someone disconnects.

These have no idea what is being said while you are connected, or really any concept of what the game is or what it is doing. Their job is immensely complicated, but it's all about the shipping and transfer of data, and not about what the data is.

What's The Barrier To Multiplayer Alpha?

In order to play multiplayer at all, you first have to get connected and stay connected. That's done. The game also then has to have a system for talking between clients and the host, and keeping everything in sync. Someone clicks a button or gives orders to a unit, and everyone else sees the result. Etc. A huge amount of that sort of data-sharing is already done:

• The initial sharing of the state of the galaxy, so that everyone is on the same starting point, is done. It nicely pauses things until everyone is caught up, so that if someone is popping in in the middle that's not a problem.
• The actual routing of all the GameCommands that the AI and players issue, and the central time clock ticking, and that sort of thing has been done since 2017, and something we've been continually working on keeping up to date. I'm sure there will be bugs, but I can verify that the vast bulk of this is working correctly already.
• With the lobby itself, there's a bunch of UI stuff that is particularly complicated, more than the rest of the game in some respects, and that is partially done. Right now there are a number of known bugs in there that I'm sorting through.
• We also have to know which players are controlling which factions, or who is choosing to just be a spectator, etc. That's on my list for early next week along with the lobby bugs.
• During gameplay, certain things will drift out of sync because of the multithreading that we do, and because of floating point inconsistencies between machines in a few places. We need to have the game roll through and self-analyze itself and fix those sync errors. A lot has been built out here in terms of design, but the basic version needs to be implemented before people can play for too long without sync errors being hilariously in the way.

And in terms of a multiplayer alpha, that's kind of all that we have left to do. The main time question mark is just how many bugs I run into. I also do want to convert the GameCommands into a new format that is more efficient, and that will probably introduce even more bugs, but that will ultimately be a speed boost for both single-player and multiplayer games.

What Will Multiplayer Alpha Be Like?

Buggy, probably. And definitely not feature-complete. Hopefully you can play with a friend for at least 20-30 minutes before there are catastrophic pileups of sync errors, and then saving and reconnecting is fast (3-10 seconds, probably). But I would not expect to be able to play an entire game. I also expect to see some funky things that we did not expect, such as trouble using certain interfaces or issuing certain commands. Those should be pretty quick to fix, on average. There's also a bunch of features that are multiplayer-specific that will be missing. Want to trade ship lines with a friend? Too bad, at first. Text chat? Sure, that's there already. Science sharing? Yep, already there! Passing some metal over? Nope, not yet. During the alpha, one of the things that we'll be soliciting feedback on is what features you want. We have a pretty good idea, based on all those years of co-op in AI War Classic, but it's still good to hear what feels lacking here, since there are a lot of concepts and features in this game that did not exist in the first.

What Makes Multiplayer Beta?

When we have all of the major features missing from the alpha, then that's a relatively feature-complete multiplayer experience. When sync issues are not routinely a problem, and other bugs are not prevalent, then you can basically have an expectation of a "normal multiplayer experience." Connect, play, disconnect when done. The purpose of the beta period is to have lots of people attempting that, so that we find the strange edge cases. Or other features that are needed that we are missing. Or balance problems that are specific to having multiple players. I'm still hopeful that we'll reach the start of beta during August, and at the moment that seems like a reasonable goal. The one real wildcard remaining is how much of a bear the sync code winds up being, since everything else is either complicated-but-done, or some type of code I have done many times over the last 11 years. The Steam networking integration, and even to some extent LiteNetLib, were the other two major wildcards, and it's really rewarding to have both of those behind me. I do need some extra assistance from the GOG SDK team in the short-term before I get that platform up and running, but if that isn't ready until sometime in the beta period that wouldn't be the end of the world. I would just prefer it to be done sooner. We will probably have a multi-month beta period, just to let people have lots of time to run into any particular issues. This will also give me time to then step back and do my work on DLC2, and then we can officially launch both that and the free multiplayer update at the same time. October still seems reasonable for both. If you're wondering "when can I play with my friends and actually just have a good time doing it," my hope is that the answer is "during beta, later this month." Fingers crossed!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-07-31 22:21:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Since the last update post twelve days ago, we've had six releases, starting with notes here and ending here. Last time I talked a lot about multiplayer and our plans for that in the short and middle term. You can read the details, but in order to keep things organized our current release notes page has a section with the current multiplayer todo list for your easy reference. One other really cool thing since last time is that I've written up an explanation of the AI in this game, and how it's different from the much-vaunted-in-2009 AI of the original. That's definitely worth a read.

What's New?

• A lot of code reorganization has happened to get us through the first couple of todo items of multiplayer. Things are so much easier now; I was going to do a first "discussion between two computers in AI War 2 since 2018" yesterday, but I got sidetracked with other items. At any rate, that's hopefully what I'll be up to tomorrow, now.
• Quick Starts were initially broken for a lot of players in version 2.090, but we got that taken care of quickly. One of those things that can happen when the game is in a beta branch for a long time.
• We improved the speed at which certain pieces of code can search for entities, which basically makes it so that various mods and factions can use less CPU time to do their thing. There was a discussion on discord about methodologies, and I had a stroke of inspiration. Figured why wait.
• Badger has started adding some new "Reactive Guidance" for new players, which basically gives you journal entries suggesting alternatives if it notices you falling into certain kinds of traps. For those who skip the tutorials or are otherwise rusty or unsure, this helps to keep them aware of the framework they might want to consider working within.
• We had several other speed boosts to parts of the game, and a number of small bugfixes both long-coming and to recent things resulting from the beta.
• Keith and Badger both added some new ship intelligence items, which make your own ships that much smarter without you having to micro them. Engineers peeling off of their normal duties to prioritize a cripple flagship that just limped home is thanks to Keith.
• Left clicking on your metal income now shows you some new stats for units you've killed. Right-clicking shows the old flows data. This is kind of a sneak preview feature.
• A bunch of updates have been made to the main menu to prep it for multiplayer's alpha coming up so soon.
• You can now properly have multiple player profiles, and add new ones and switch between them and edit and delete them. This is another item that's useful for multiplayer.
• There are some new features that let you actually run the game without loading all the ship graphics other than icons, which effectively lets you run the game under the normal minimum system requirements. Two of the computers I want to use for multiplayer testing at my desk fall into that category, so that's quite useful. And if you want a just-icon view for your low-powered laptop, that's now a feasible thing, in general.
• There was some major confusion in the last couple of versions with the ability to enable and disable mods and expansions -- it required a restart of the game, but did not make you do that or tell you so. Now it makes you do that, and so the potential for accidental confusion is fixed up.
• We've made the defaults for the icons in gamespace larger, so that you can see them better on average-sized screens. If you're running a very large screen or a very high DPI screen, you can still adjust these to be smaller (or even bigger if the opposite is true!), but this new default should be more comfortable for more people.
• Mods with code can now distribute their code all in one folder, which makes them far easier to install and remove.
• Mods can FINALLY add new icons, although I need to make a tutorial on how to do that. But this is the last area that wasn't moddable.
• Our methods of loading and drawing icons are improved in general, and use a lot less RAM and VRAM, as well as allowing us more space for an indefinite number of icons. In our one big monolithic sprite dictionary, we were going to be running out of space before finishing DLC2 in the prior approach.
• It's worth noting that with the new style of drawing icons, lowest-supported-level GPUs will probably see a significant speed boost. This is because they can now store the entire material and its textures all in direct tiny amounts of VRAM rather than shared system/virtual VRAM that is slower; this is a major benefit for the older Intel HD 4000 HD cards in particular.
• There are several new things that are pooled now on the galaxy map, making galaxy map generation even faster again. This should also fix a DLC2-only memory leak with nomad planets, but we've not properly tested that yet. Hopefully our DLC2 early testers let us know.
• There is now a galaxy setting to grant players Watch vision for 1, 2 or 3 hops from all command stations.
• On the galaxy map, we've reworked the shader for how we draw the icons of planets and ships at them, and thanks to that we no longer ever have problems with the planet drifting away from the wormhole lines leading to it when you view it at a somewhat oblique angle (usually the side of your screen). That was a really longstanding irritation!
• And that hopefully concludes my last couple of rabbit holes, so I can get on with multiplayer proper. I do think that the improvements to performance are a nice boon, though.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-07-16 01:52:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Since May 22nd, we've been working hard on the game in the beta branch, and now we're back onto the main branch for everyone to enjoy the new items. The full release notes start here and finish here. Let's see if I can't summarize that down a bit, though. The TLDR is that this is almost all prep for multiplayer. If building and testing multiplayer was a car trip, this would be like getting the car in tip-top shape right before you start the trip. If the trip is into rough terrain, then good preparation is going to mean a far smoother trip once you get on the road. So let's take a look at that, and then the other bits that are unrelated.

Data Compaction, Many Times Over

Savegames are vastly smaller. They're also more efficient to write to disk, and to read. This was a massive overhaul, but it also directly effects the way we will be transmitting network data messages. I've written about the benefits of this at length in the past, so I'll skip rehashing that here. But the short version is that essentially there is a LOT going on in this game, and during networked play we need to be able to fix desyncs on the fly. The only way to really do that is if we can efficiently send large amounts of correction data in the background while not interrupting your main play. Back in May, I wasn't feeling really confident that it would work out well. It was borderline, but the processing load and the amount of network packets required was going to be iffy. Any good engineering student knows that you want to build in redundancy: if your bridge can only hold ten tons, and it will have nine tons on it regularly, you're asking for a terrible accident. You want to start out with a lot more extra capacity to avoid the tragedy, and you also want to do that from the start rather than trying to strengthen the bridge while people are driving on it. So that's where we are now: the metaphorical bridge is ridiculously braced and ready for action. This was a really massive undertaking, and it was the chief thing that led to the extended beta period here, so hopefully it makes intuitive sense why I chose to do this before getting into a functional multiplayer alpha rather than mixing the two together.

Game Loading Improvements

This might seem unrelated to multiplayer, but one of the things that we have to be really careful of is that all the players have the same data about game units when they load in. Because this game was built from the ground up with mod support in mind, there are certain things that I realized could be impairing this consistency. So I put in a bunch of new auto-checking to make sure that things happen the way I expect, and in the process: [olist]

Fixed a few issues that were impacting mainly mod authors, making them have far more xml than they needed to.

Made the game load vastly faster for everyone (depends on your computer, but for me it loads in 7-24 seconds now instead of 16-90 seconds. The big variance is largely based on how busy my hard drives are and what is already cached in RAM from prior runs.

Made it possible for mods to adjust base units (like Raider) and then have those modded changes cascade to all of the descendants of that base unit (Daggers, etc).

Implemented some code that lets us verify that things are consistent regardless of how your OS does the sorting of files in its filesystem. This sort of thing was going to be a potential barrier to cross-platform play between OSes, but it no longer is.

This also lets you now disable mods and expansions that you have installed from within the game UI, if you don't want to play with them at the moment. This is key for multiplayer, where you might not have or want the same mods or expansions as someone else you are playing with, and the people with extra stuff can now just disable that in order to play with one another -- no need for someone to reach for their wallet just to play multiplayer with you, if you have extra DLC, for instance.

This prior one also lets us now distribute some mods with the game, but have them be in an "off by default" starting state. This lets various mods be a lot more easily-accessible, without us having to support them in an official capacity or them affecting every game anyone plays. The first mod to be included like this is The Spire Railgun Shop by Lord of Nothing. [/olist]

Rebuilt Compiler Pipeline

This sounds like a yawn sort of item, so I'll keep it brief. But it's something that first Keith and then later I had been working on since 2017 or so, and there were some key limitations with how we were able to link against some of the extra language features that... well, the various multiplayer libraries we're going to be using (Steam, GOG, and Forge Remastered) all use. This mean that there was a certain indirection I had to previously build in in order to load those things, and in order to test and change pieces of code in those specific areas it was literally an ELEVEN MINUTE wait for me while I hoped that whatever I changed was okay. Normally it should be a couple of seconds of turnaround, but because of our compiler chain limitations, these specific libraries couldn't be linked in the direct fashion we prefer. This was going to make bugfixing in multiplayer an absolute nightmare, as you can imagine, since being able to routinely test things without eleven minute delays peppered all throughout my day is pretty important. If I have a one-line typo, I need to be able to fix that and then see the results within a few seconds, not after 11 minutes. That whole thing was making me dread working on certain aspects of multiplayer, so I put more time into it and finally managed to fix the root problem. Hooray!

Prepping For Efficient Multiplayer Messages

We have long used a very efficient "serialize by index" (instead of name) method to make savegames smaller and more efficient, but that sort of thing could not work in multiplayer because there was no way to have a shared set of agreed-upon indices between the host and client(s). The game has now been upgraded to handle fully setting those up so that now the host and clients get those synced automatically when the game starts, and so the ultra-efficient smaller messages now work in multiplayer and not just on disk.

Fireteam Specialists

This is a major new feature that Badger created for the upcoming second DLC for the game, which will be called Zenith Onslaught. (Please put away any pitchforks -- I have not been working on DLC2 at all yet, as my focus is appropriately on multiplayer. And multiplayer is not something in Badger's scope to help with). Anyhow, like fireteams themselves (which were developed initially for DLC1), these new abilities for them have been backported into the base game. Basically this lets some group, like the AI Hunters, have a sub-group that is chasing just a specific faction. Or just a certain part of your faction. Examples: 1. You're The Little Fish Let's say that perhaps the nanocaust is being absolutely terrifying, and they are a third-party against you and the AI. A faction like them is now able to piss off the AI enough to cause extragalactic war units of the AI to appear. Those are things like the flenser, at the upper levels, where just one of those is absolutely game-ending for you as a player if you don't have the fallen spire or some other sort of mega faction going on on your own side. Anyhow, previously we couldn't use something like the flenser in this fashion, since the AI would eventually probably turn it on you and end the game prematurely and unfairly. But now we can keep the flenser fully focused on whatever aggro'd it so much in the first place -- the nanocaust, in my current example. This means that you can be present in the galaxy while the AI is fighting a much larger foe than you are, using much larger firepower. This is... just plain cool. It also has strategic ramifications, as you'll want to avoid the planet with the flenser while it's fighting the other foe, even though the flenser will never fully turn on you and go wreck all your planets. It's just going to be a fight that doesn't involve you, but that you have to work around, and the flenser will head back out of the galaxy to deal with its war there once it deals with the target here. (Of course, the flenser is an extreme example. Mostly you'd see smaller extragalactic war units making an appearance. But mods, and probably DLC2, could aggro the AI enough to cause a really strong faction like that to get into a war that is larger than the one you yourself are engaged in). 2. A Specialist Group Is After Your Treasure Right now this is used for Major Data Centers (MDCs) in particular. Previously when you captured those, the challenge that they presented was exogalactic waves that would spawn against the planet of the MDC while you were hacking it. If you survived the entire time, then you'd get to keep the MDC. That mechanic is... overused and kind of boring. For MDCs, we no longer use exogalactic waves at all. Instead, the AI hunter fleet gets a bit of extra budget with some specific objectives to go kill your MDCs. This makes the AI have an appropriate response to you getting the new treasure, but it's not in the form of this series of kind of hacky waves that come at you over and over. Instead these are groups of specialists in fireteams who are intent on intelligently taking out that treasure when they can. This makes the AI seem much more alive and intelligent, versus just a dump of units at you that you have to withstand temporarily. 3. Changes To Player-Allied Factions Your allies will no longer go around popping warp gates, which was causing AIP to increase. Instead the AI is now able to use these new mechanics with specialist hunter teams to hunt your allies appropriately. In other words, the AI is now able to mount a proportional response to actions, but without your allies having to do something annoying like destroying warp gates that you might prefer consider existing.

Other Items

• Holy cow, the one bad thing about an extended beta is that it can delay certain fixes. One of those was that all of the AI (and I think Outguard units as well) had the equivalent of mark 1 hull and shields for the last couple of months if you weren't on the beta branch. That's going to be a bit of a jump in difficulty on campaigns that were vanilla if you were on the last non-beta one all this time -- apologies.
• There were a bunch of other bugs fixed that were less likely to affect everyone, but which were still annoying and which are great to finally have on the main branch.
• A bunch of achievements that were not triggering correctly now do.
• The Parasitic Starting Fleet has had its balance improved, and should be more attractive to start with now.
• AI ships from spire debris are now a lot more dangerous.
• The Imperial Spire Fleet now gives you vision on their planets so that you can watch the fireworks.
• Multiple copies of the same faction type (whether they are friends or enemies to one another) now try to spread themselves out in the galaxy to make things a lot more interesting. If your playing with good and evil marauders both at once, then they won't be neighbors most of the time, now.
• We improved how we are doing our fixed-integer math, which fixes some math rounding issues that could lead to a bit of odd data with certain bonuses on the UI in particular.
• Fixed a very unusual bug where the AI was basically able to get frigates "for free" as part of their reinforcements in the rare cases that they actually used them.
• Make the Marauder less likely to suicide themselves against Praetorian Dragons.
• During gameplay, when you click into the Galaxy-Wide Options screen it now shows you ALL of the values, not just the ones you can edit.
  As with the factions screen, it just has the ones that are non-editable as text values, but you can examine your settings this way and also see their tooltips.
• If the game runs into an exception while trying to start up, it now gives you a visual error rather than the loading process just seeming to hang.
• The Nanocaust and Dark Spire shouldn't be able to rebuild a Nanobot Center or a Locus for at least a few minutes after a previous one on that planet was destroyed.
• Cross planet waves against a specific faction now will stay focused on that faction (and not go off and attack the player).
• The "brighter color" hex and color for faction teams now uses new logic by -NR-SirLimbo to make sure that faction names should always be nicely readable even if their actual colors are normally very dark.
• Various more voice lines have been integrated into the game.
• The game now has a Notification for when Dark Spire Loci are warping in.
• It turns out there were some sort of edge cases where the AI king could be dead but its faction would not have gone through the "we have lost" logic. We don't yet know how that could possibly be possible, but we now have a safety check from then on in the future that makes sure that even if the kings death was somehow missed when it happens, it now recognizes that it happened in the next few seconds and will mark the faction as defeated.
• Fixed a SUPER longstanding bug where it would sometimes write "Was looking for a wormhole (some stuff) but couldn't find one." This was also causing some bad ship behavior. It's been around, but rare, for years now.
• Fixed a "fun" bug where some enemy ships with fireteamss would be unable to decide between targets; they would get partway to one target, then turn around as if going to the other target. This looked like a Buridan's ass style problem with the targeting code. The actual problem was that Fireteams were incorrectly declaring themselves winners of a battle without showing up.
• Fixed what appears to have been a relatively old bug (somehow?) where the max strength of a lot of fleets was not being properly calculated. It seems like this may have slipped by for a few months, or since a bit before DLC1 somehow.
• Also fixed a bug that probably goes back to the start of fleets, where instead of the current strength of fleets on the fleets sidebar, it was showing their total strength. For command station fleets, it was showing a max that they could not even hit, too.

More to come soon! But here's some further reading on what we're doing in detail:

Multiplayer Schedule, And Why

It feels like an endless wait for multiplayer, doesn't it? I hear you on that -- I think it probably feels even longer for me, since I'm the one working directly on it daily and it's been so many things. I wanted to take a minute to step back and address WHY things are taking so long. You may or may not know this, but we actually had fully functioning multiplayer for this game back in 2017, before turning it off because we couldn't reliably try to keep sync in the game while building out so many features like we were doing until late 2018. It seems like it should have been a simple matter of just turning back on that old code, right? Well... unfortunately as we developed the game, it got a lot more complex. Essentially, the first AI War existed in a perfectly deterministic state where, after initial game sync, nothing had to be sent between clients and the host except for commands from the players and the higher-level AIs. It also sent some basic check messages to make sure that results were not diverging on your machines -- and if it detected a divergence, then it would flag that as a desync and stop you from playing until you saved, reloaded, and had the clients reconnect. That determinism was achieved through a lot of really rigorous coding practices, and using fixed-integer math instead of floating-point math, and only using one thread for the main simulation. In AI War 2, we can't really enforce how rigorous modders' code is; we also are using many threads, all of which are designed to be deterministic but which... turns out sometimes are not because of exceptions that we can't solve in a deterministic way without slowing the entire game way down; and we have to use some floating point math here and there (forcefield pushback, for one) in order to get the accuracy and performance the game needs. So what this means is that the entire premise for multiplayer in AI War 2 got more complicated. The game is MOSTLY synchronous, MOSTLY deterministic, and does a great job at running blazing fast. But desyncs can and will happen, probably with some frequency depending on how different your PC specs are from the people you are playing with (or what errors in rigor have been made in mods you want to use), and the old approach of stopping the game and making you reload and reconnect is absolutely unacceptable. You could be running into those sort of issues once an hour, or once a minute, depending on the circumstances. That means that, while we strive for determinism as much as possible, we also need to have automatic desync repair. This is familiar more for action games (which exist in a state of constant desync by nature) rather than strategy games. I have experience with this from the A Valley Without Wind games, but they have an incredibly small fraction of the amount of data that AI War 2 has going on. It's a much less intense environment as a multiplayer coder. Anyhow, this has meant that the environment has to be extra well-prepared for sending efficient messages, since there will be more of them. It also has to be able to fix small problems in a spot-fix fashion without re-syncing the entire game. These added challenges meant that I needed to restructure some substantial bits of the code that were working perfectly fine if you look at them from any other context. I still have some areas to deal with for that, but the list is getting much smaller. We're still on track to have multiplayer "in the next few months," but I realize I've been saying that for months now. The really good news is that alpha of multiplayer should be way more smooth, and a lot shorter of a period before we can get to the point of it being fully polished. I'm keenly aware that as soon as folks can play multiplayer, they will do so; and if it's a broken mess on the first alpha, and it takes me months to make meaningful improvements to it, I will lose my testers. So I'm being extra cautious and hitting all the areas that I expect I will run into before even starting the first alpha. That should ultimately be a lot less stressful on me in a time-pressure sense once we start doing multiplayer alpha.

What's Remaining For Multiplayer?

So what is the todo list, then? It's getting shorter!

• Now that the compiler chain is improved, I need to get Steam and GOG linked in a better way, and also get Forge Networking linked in that fashion. This will be FAR easier than what we were doing before, and more in line with how those respective libraries expect you to use them. I'm very excited about this being possible, finally.
• The actual cycle of multiplayer messages being sent and received, and that keeping the game flow going, is done and has been for years (literally since early 2017), but I need to reintegrate that into our core dlls and improve the efficiency of some bits of it. It's not large amounts of code, thankfully.
• I need to redo how the initial world state is sent to new clients joining in, but that will also be quick -- thanks to the rework of world save data styles and sizes.
• Our old style of desync-detection from 2017 has been stripped out now, and I need to add in a new kind of rolling desync detection that will find problem entities and then allow us to fix them. To keep this fast and relevant, I'm only going to care about a few things: position, health, and shields. If those match, then probably everything else is close enough. How to handle the time differential on this is really challenging, and only in the last couple of months did once facet of this occur to me. I have a couple of solutions in mind, but it's going to be... "fun."
• The way that we send information in multiplayer is by GameCommand, and right now those are generic and bloated (they are overly multi-purpose). I am going to replace those with a new set of custom GameCommands that us developers and modders can use as-needed and have them take full advantage of the new smaller data sizes. Fun fact, this will also make single-player run very slightly faster when a lot of things are going on.
• The really big one that remains is making sure that the cross-machine identifiers (PrimaryKeyIDs) are consistent between machines. I don't fully have this figured out yet, but I think that the interim state of it will essentially be that there are occasionally too many messages being passed around because of rolling sync errors. I will probably punt this issue into something I look at during the alpha, so that I can gauge what sort of impact it really has on performance, and where the problems are coming from.
• After that it's more or less a matter of making sure that the lobby fully works as we expect, and various other small UI systems to get multiplayer basically playable. A lot of work went into the lobby in particular in the last few months to make that as close to as ready to go as possible.
• There are then whatever changes we need to make to balance in order to make things "feel right," which will be a matter of working with the multiplayer alpha and beta testers. A lot of things we already did in the past, like making science collection a humanity-wide thing that each player gets a copy of, rather than something people have to do individually (what a pain that was in AIWC). We will have to scale waves like we did in AIWC multiplayer, or in some other fashion. But a lot of the difficulty scaling is inherently handled by AIP being higher when you have to take more planets in multiplayer.

So, to sum up the plan for the short term: [olist]

I need to re-link the networking libraries using the new compiler chain. This might take a couple of days. I'll do it on a beta branch in the next week or so, at least for a bit, because it will potentially break the ability to log achievements on some machines or OSes until I get it fixed back properly (assuming it doesn't work on try one).

Then I will pull the network-loop code back into the main game, which is a part of one day job.

Then I need to generalize that to work for all three networking code paths (Steam, GOG, Forged), which probably will only take a couple of days at most.

Then I need to re-code GameCommands to be more efficient and special-purpose. This is probably a job that is a couple of days long, and will potentially lead to widespread bugs for a week or so after it.

Then I need to implement V1 of the desync detection and correction code, which should probably only take a few days.

Then I need to get the basic connection interfaces working, so that you can choose to connect to players via Steam, GOG, or a direct IP address (forged). This will be a moderate challenge, because Steam and GOG both have APIs that I'm pretty unfamiliar with in this exact area. Once the connection is going, it's much easier. But with the new compiler chain, at least I can hopefully get these going in a matter of days or a week rather than it being something that takes multiple weeks.

At that point we should be able to reasonably declare that the multiplayer alpha is ready, as you should be able to connect to friends and play with them, and the desyncs would cause network performance degradation rather than something permanent that your game can't recover from.

Then it's a matter of the other features on multiplayer, mainly regarding things like donating fleets between one another, and/or whatever else we come up with that is desirable.

Oh, and during that period if we're seeing network degradation or other issues due to the constant need to sync errors, then that will be to be investigated and improved. But those things are most of what the focus of the alpha/beta will be on. [/olist] How long will each of those line items take in reality? I guess it depends on what gotchas I run into that are unexpected at the moment, but you can always watch the release notes to see how things are coming. A lot of the really hefty things that required major reworks of the game are done, so that's a win. There are some things that I'd probably prefer to do sooner than later, like allow you to enable and disable expansions/mods from the main menu without a restart of the game, so that might take a chunk out as well. But it should make things easier on everyone as they get more into multiplayer.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-07-06 17:35:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is on the beta branch, as there are still a lot of unstable changes that we are working through. The more testers the better, please! Full notes here.

How To Play A Beta Branch Build

To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a week, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but we fully expect some savegames to throw cosmetic errors at the very minimum. Please report and upload those here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/

What's New?

• Last release that I wrote up was one about data compaction and how that affects savegame filesizes. We had managed to get one very large (8.3507 MB) savegame down to 2.4009 MB, and a lot of other saves had also been shrunk notably. At the time I noted I was not done yet, though.
• Using even more aggressive and targeted optimization for key fields, and for strings, that key savegame has dropped from 2.4009 MB to 1.3444 MB.
• Why the heck does that matter so much? Multiplayer. The game has to be synced when a new player connects, but beyond that we also have to be able to run desync-repair from the host to the clients. The smaller that data is, the more efficiently it will run. The newest methods not only are smaller amounts of data, but also use less CPU power to do their work.
• There will be some future work on GameCommands themselves -- those things that the game passes around for both singleplayer and multiplayer games to keep them running in a consistent way -- but the really heavy lifting on the data-formatting side is all done now.
• We actually had three other releases since the last one I wrote up, and a lot of other things have happened in there beyond just my push for data efficiency.
• Badger fixed a ton of bugs, and I fixed a few.
• The Parasitic Starting Fleet is now a lot more buff, hopefully feeling more balanced.
• A bunch of bugs relating to 2.062 beta were fixed, including allegiances that were wrong, too many waves spawning at times, etc. We are really glad we did a beta for this!
• Several more fixed achievements.
• A variety of fixes that make modding easier for certain pieces of data (or possible at all).
• A major revision to our internal FInt (fixed integer math) class, repairing a very minor bug that caused some strange math results for the last 10 years or so (since well before AIW2).
• The Warden and Hunter fleets now actually do something again on the beta branches, whereas they've been complacent since 2.062.
• Marauders got smarter.
• And so on.

More to come soon! But here's some further reading on what we're doing in detail:

What's Next For Multiplayer?

I've been so heavily focused on making savegames smaller and getting the data storage/transmission formats as efficient as possible, that most other things for multiplayer seem like they've taken a back seat. But! I've also been taking this time to review many parts of our codebase and continue to make plans for desync avoidance and desync repair, the two major things that would be gumming up your network connection if not handled correctly.

• I still need to get the latest version of Forge Networking Remastered in place, and then I'll be working on actual multiplayer data transmissions through that, Steam, and/or GOG, depending on how you choose to connect.
• The actual cycle of multiplayer messages being sent and received, and that keeping the game flow going, is done and has been for years (literally since early 2017).
• I do need to redo how the initial world state is sent to new clients joining in, but that will be quick.
• Our old style of desync-detection from 2017 has been stripped out now, and I need to add in a new kind of rolling desync detection that will find problem entities and then allow us to fix them. To keep this fast and relevant, I'm only going to care about a few things: position, health, and shields. If those match, then probably everything else is close enough.
• Making sure that the cross-machine identifiers (PrimaryKeyIDs) are consistent between machines is really tough, and that I've been looking at a couple of methods for that. This is one of the things that I've been investigating the most alongside the data size compaction. There are some code path changes I will likely make in order to make this work properly, we shall see.
• After that it's more or less a matter of making sure that the lobby fully works as we expect, and various other small UI systems to get multiplayer basically playable.
• There are then whatever changes we need to make to balance in order to make things "feel right," which will be a matter of working with the multiplayer alpha and beta testers. A lot of things we already did in the past, like making science collection a humanity-wide thing that each player gets a copy of, rather than something people have to do individually (what a pain that was in AIWC). We will have to scale waves like we did in AIWC multiplayer, or in some other fashion. But a lot of the difficulty scaling is inherently handled by AIP being higher when you have to take more planets in multiplayer.
• Anyhow, I really didn't want to have to take a multi-week hiatus during the middle of active multiplayer testing in order to optimize our data formats (which was going to be needed), so I went ahead and did that up front instead. It's a relief to have that part done, so I can move forward on other bits!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-06-16 22:13:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

This is on the beta branch, as it's a freaking huge number of changes. The more testers the better, please! Full notes here.

How To Play A Beta Branch Build

To play this on Steam, please go under betas and choose current_beta from the drop-down list. We would really appreciate some testers on this so that we can get back out of beta status as quickly as possible! There is not currently a way to get the beta versions on GOG, but we won't be in that status for more than a week, knock on wood. We want to make sure we didn't break anything with all the substantial changes in here, but we fully expect some savegames to throw cosmetic errors at the very minimum. Please report and upload those here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/

What's New?

• The biggest thing for me personally is the new data compaction stuff, which I have been pouring hours into in preparation for multiplayer. The last thing I want is for multiplayer to be functional, but immediately laggy as soon as we have the desync repair stuff going. I needed to start with efficient data storage and transmittal so that there wouldn't be a point where I need to disappear for a week to redo all that after we're into multiplayer's alpha.
• I'm not entirely done with my data compaction shenanigans, but I'm very excited about how it has turned out so far. I do expect it to result in a number of user-facing errors, though, so hence the beta, which I really hope you'll partake in.
• Badger fixed a number of bugs, including several achievements that were not triggering. Also that all the AI units have had the equivalent of mark 1 shields/hull for the last two weeks??
• Meanwhile, Badger also implemented another major fireteams upgrade, this one which is intended for the upcoming DLC2 but has been backported to the base game.
• The first use of this fireteams code is to let the AI really fight some other faction other than you with giant fists, without killing you in the process. Aka, let it fight the Marauders or the Nanocaust using REALLY BIG AND SCARY GUNS if those two factions are taking over the galaxy... but don't have that be game-ending for you. You're not the problem, after all, from the AI's point of view.
• The second use of this is to let us have certain sub-groups of the AI faction, most notably Hunters right now, which have a sub-subgroup that just focuses on one objective after you harass them. The example in place right now is Major Data Centers (MDCs). Those always triggered an Exogalactic Wave, previously, which was boring -- more ships come in increasing waves, and you survive them or don't. It felt kind of uninspired. NOW, instead, the hunters get a major buff to a certain sub-team that explicitly hunts the MDC and its protectors... and if it wins against that, eventually, then they just leave you alone -- "job's done, bye!"
• The way that the hunter deals with allied factions to you is a lot more interesting, too, rather than your allies causing rapid AIP gains by killing all the warp gates and aggroing the AI in that way.
• These are some major strides forward towards multiplayer being a smooth and fun experience as we get into that, and towards the DLC2 that will come out around the time multiplayer fully releases (multiplayer will be free). Please note that none of the DLC2 stuff is slowing down multiplayer at all, as Badger is not working at all on multiplayer and I'm entirely focused on that and related things for now.
• Oh, also, for the sake of modders we've documented some new things that will help with making sure mods are multiplayer-compatible.
• Note that if a mod you like turns out NOT to be multiplayer-compatible, the game should still be playable. You'll just have a ton more desync-repair messages going back and forth, related to the mod. This is an excellent example of why I want those desync-repair messages to be absolutely as efficient as they possibly can be, which means representing all our data in as tiny a format as possible.

More to come soon! But here's some further reading on what we're doing in detail:

Why Do We Care About Compaction?

I explain what I mean by this below, and go into detailed benchmarks. The release notes have a lot of other detailed info. But a TLDR of why this matters is certainly a good place to start:

• Smaller savegames are easier to transmit across the network when you're initially synchronizing your game from a host to clients.
• Doing it via our compaction method, versus compression, uses FAR less CPU cycles, and thus makes the transfer of even small, frequent bits of data run more smoothly.
• Doing it via our compaction method makes even small bits of data... smaller. Compression often requires a lot of data before it makes much difference.
• Given that we are going to have frequent small commands being sent back and forth just to have the game run at all, and then we ALSO are going to have the desync-repair data going back and forth that is still small (but substantially larger at the scale of network messages), this is pretty critical.
• So the TLDR of the TLDR is that we use less bandwidth and less CPU to do the same thing, and thus your game will run way more smoothly in multiplayer.
• And it has the side benefit of making savegames a lot smaller, and also faster to save.

Data Compaction vs Compression

What the heck is data "compaction?" Well, in the most direct sense here, it's a term I made up. The way I'm defining the term, for purposes of what we're doing here, is "making data smaller at the level of small objects, as we put it into a binary stream." Wait, what? Basically... it's something we do as we go along, and it works on very small pieces of information. A single integer. One ship and its data. That sort of thing. Compression, by contrast, requires a lot of processing AFTER you put in your data to some sort of format. So to compress a bunch of data in AI War Classic, for instance, we write roughly 30MB of data for a savegame into a temporary buffer, and then we run GZIP compression on that, which turns it into maybe 1MB that we can store on the disk or send across the network. That 30:1 ratio is legitimately what AIWC was seeing, on average, by the way. The downside is that it only really works well for very large amounts of data, and it also requires a lot of processing every time it wants to send or save. You'll notice that AIWC has a noticeable hitch in itself every time it saves the game. AI War 2, by contrast, doesn't use compression and thus doesn't have that sort of hitching. AI War 2 is a lot smarter about how it represents its data to start with (using binary formats directly instead of a unicode-based format), and uses clever tricks to also know when not to send data of certain sorts (if I don't have X properties, then don't bother tracking them). So this realistically converts what would have been 30MB in AI War Classic into something that might be... 5 MB in AI War 2. Beyond that, though, requires a lot more work, because we actually have far more data here than in AI War Classic -- enough that despite our better formats and such, we'd be back up around 10 MB or so for savegames. Several years ago, perhaps four now, Keith LaMothe came up with a great new concept he called "buzzsaw binary," and we posted benchmarks on how incredibly efficient it was at storing data. After working out some kinks with it, we've been using that for the last few years, and it saves blazing fast, as you've probably noticed. Basically, this takes each data point that we want to store in binary and writes it directly into a bitstream (which C# does not officially have -- they only have bytestreams). As it writes to our custom bitstream, it analyzes each piece of data and figures out if it can make it any smaller than would normally happen for that kind of data. The types of data that Keith built support for were string, 32bit integer, and 64bit integer. The last of those also gave us support for our own FInt fixed-integer format, and by extension also some limited float support (thought we avoid float as much as possible). The plan was always to go further, and he left notes to himself to do so directly in the code, actually. With this format, storing a byte was actually highly inefficient, taking on average 10 bits rather than 8. But we never even tried to directly store bytes, so that was kind of irrelevant. In most programming languages, integer numbers can be stored as 8, 16, or 32 bits, with or without the ability to have negative numbers (called signed numbers). In the prior edition of buzzsaw binary, we assumed all numbers were signed and could be up to 64 bits, and wrote them out in a manner that still produced results that were often 16 bits or less for a 32bit number. That was a savings of 50% or more, in lots of cases. A big part of the savings is what to do with "default case" numbers, such as those that are 0. How many bits should you take to store that zero? By default, a 32bit number will take 32 bits to say 0, and a 64bit number will take 64 bits to say 0. In buzzsaw binary, regardless of the bit level of the number, it has always taken us 1 bit to store a zero. One tricky thing is that we use a lot of -1s as defaults for various reasons, and that was something that required 10 bits to store. Ack! So for me, I went in and finally figured out Keith's code, and added a ton of comments to make it clear what was going on. I added explicit support for

• 8bit (aka byte) and 16bit (aka short) numbers
• And some special cases for:
• numbers of 16 or more bits that cannot be negative
• numbers of 16 or more bits that cannot be any smaller than -1
• and 8 bit numbers (bytes) that are frequently 0

Those are... strange categories, I know. But when you look at the data we use, and apply the same sort of buzzsaw binary approach, but with more hinting from the higher-level program (as well as more appropriate number formats for variables instead of int32 for everything), then you wind up with some truly amazing compaction. I've detailed the macro results of that here. Bytes now take an average of 4.74 bits in a savegame, down from 10ish in our previous implementations. In the benchmarks I just not the percentage relative to the normal 8 bits. "32 bit numbers that cannot be less than -1" are averaging out at 2.71 bits instead of 32. Overall file sizes for the game dropped in this build to commonly about 70% of what they previously were, and as low as 28% in one case. The actual data format change only represents a savings of 10%, sadly, but it's still a win, even if it is a minority of the gains.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-06-05 21:43:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

This one is nothing but a collection of bugfixes, but there are some very welcome ones. Full notes here. What's new?

• You can upgrade forcefield frigates beyond mark 4, as they now use the heavy hull tech type.
• Fleet Research Stations, new in the last version, now properly charge you AI Progress (AIP) for the things you get from them.
• Handy new cheat code "heal me" that is useful for bugtesting.
• Multiple improvements to make tachyon sources way more efficient.
• A fix to make tachyon sources work at the proper speed when they are on background planets (with coarse processing on) or when you have the sim speed higher than one. Previously it took longer to decloak enemies, but now it works at the same speed regardless of those factors. This is a super old issue! At least two years old, if not more.
• We also found and removed a really super old form of performance profile logging, which generally was unused but could be toggled on by some unknown mechanism and then slow down your game at some points. This was code that hadn't been touched in 2-3 years, s it was a surprising find.
• Fallen Spire cities that were able to rarely get extra flagships now have those properly scaled back. And if you ever have a city missing its flagship, it will fix that for you (though we've no reports of that).
• And finally, there was a very annoying issue that if you had selected any ships directly and they changed planets, it would deselect them. Selecting by fleet did not have this problem, so to people who experienced it, it just seemed intermittent. As someone who pretty much always selects by-fleet, I had not been seeing the issue until it was pointed out with steps on how to reproduce it.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-05-22 21:03:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Only a day later, but this is a big one! Full notes here. What's new?

• First off, Badger found a bug in some of the fire teams code that had been leading them to be less efficient with their forces (using overwhelming force where it was not needed). This was actually a really cool behavior in the Nanocaust, and the "Nanocaust Deathballs" are both menacing as well as fun and engaging to avoid, so we've left that behavior for them.
• But for all the other factions and sub-factions that use fireteams... watch out! As Badger puts it: I'm not sure how impactful this will be, but the answer might be "Very", at least for any faction that had enough ships to be overkilling their targets significantly. There are lots of potential cases. Where the Hunter has just broken through a chokepoint and now has its pick of weakly defended economic planets, it's now going to be a lot scarier.
• Next up, mobile forcefield generator ships are now a lot more useful since they no longer come with the damage penalty. This mostly helps you.
• ...but AI forcefield generators now in general no longer have the penalty at all, for the (relatively) rare cases when they do use a forcefield. Both of these things bring this part of the game more in line with AI War Classic.
• You can now have up to 40 ship lines per fleet, rather than 5. Also, swapping ships between fleets on the same planet no longer destroys the fleets. Your ability to customize fleets is now far greater.
• Raiders have gotten a buff, but no longer have the one-off "super-charges the rest of their fleet" ability, since that was out of place on its own with them, and way too powerful to have on random ships you can find now that the fleets can be arbitrarily large.
• There is a brand new structure that you can find and hack in new campaigns: the Fleet Research Station. It allows for you to get new, advanced fleet-bonus-giving large ship lines if you hack them AND pay an AIP penalty.
• There are currently six of these types of ship lines, and they open very new kinds of play and synergies in these large fleets. If some of them seem expensive for what they are, bear in mind that you may not be considering just how impactful they can be if you have a truly giant fleet. All of these things give fleet-wide buffs ranging from the raider-style speed boost, to attack and defensive boosts of various sorts.
• We will likely explore the concept of these sorts of fleet-wide perk-centric ship lines through FRSes more in the future, either through future free updates or in DLC, or both. But basically this gives the sort of flavor I was thinking of with what fleet EXP upgrade perks would once have given... but still minus the grind, and now with potentially even more power as well as more flexibility. You may not use these much, depending on your playstyle, but they should hopefully be the sort of thing that is a cool and incredibly helpful tool to use a minority of the time. I really enjoy mechanics like that, where they aren't mandatory for play but are things that are killer if the circumstances are right.
• Plus some bugfixes and other tweaks!

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-05-22 02:20:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Very similarly to the prior release, it's been 24 days since the last writeup (and in this case, the last non-beta build). This new version is only the fifth public build since then, though most of them were hefty and were in beta. Full notes here. What's new?

• First up, there is a brand new "journal" concept, which lets us put in a whole bunch of new thematic or useful text that you can find. And of course it can be used in mods. I don't personally plan to use it a whole lot, but I know some mod authors and some folks wanting to volunteer some minor lore writing have been waiting for this.
• Chat, as used for multiplayer and for the AI talking to you, has been revamped a fair bit, since the journal-like things are no longer a part of that. It's now more efficient, and has a few new capabilities, like...
• Cheat codes and debug commands issued via chat have been added! Am I strange for feeling like cheat codes are anachronistic in the current market? Sigh. Anyway, I've always liked having those for folks.
• Fleet EXP has been removed, and we're no longer planning on doing the "perks" system that we've been talking about for about 2 years. Basically it was always something that could cause you to have to grind, and there are simply better ways to let you upgrade fleets and make them how you want them.
• Speaking of, all fleets (or their flagships at very minimum) can now be upgraded directly by science. There have been some science costs rejiggered based on this, and a lot of interface additions to make this really smooth in the most recent version in particular. This basically gives you a cheap way to have the same-ish experience, but without the ability/requirement to grind for levels.
• There's a big new "hooks" framework for mods, which we can use to talk to mods in an indirect way when they want to do something right before, during, or after key events.
• There's an interesting new debug setting that you can enable to test some new mechanics: "Enable Astro Train Power Increase"
• Drones of all sorts now get upgraded based on their spawner being upgraded, so they are far more dangerous than before.
• The dyson sphere voice lines should now be played properly.
• Cloaked and agile transports are both something you can now find in the wild in new campaigns.
• Lots and lots of bugfixes!

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-05-20 22:14:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

The last release I did a writeup on was 25 days ago, an eternity. This new version marks the twelfth public build since then, although the most recent stretch were in beta. Full notes here. What's new?

• First up, we got GOG Galaxy support fully working, and also improved some of our Steamworks integration. Both of these are in preparation for multiplayer over (and potentially between) those two platforms. Overall we are having three options for how you can connect with people for multiplayer, and those were the two I'm least familiar with.
• As part of this, we also finally fully got the support for achievements in GOG Galaxy in there.
• As part of THAT, we also improved the performance of some of the achievement checks on Steam, and made it so that your offline achievements are properly stored no matter how you play.
• The Scourge got some minor buffs.
• The AI Reserves now announce themselves for a moment before attacking, versus just showing up out of the blue.
• The pathfinding between planets is now smarter when you are ordering your ships around, and there are three modes you can swap your ships between (Default, Safest, or Shortest).
• Non-scourge factions that use fireteams are now better about stacking their units (across fireteams, often), which helps enormously with performance in certain late-game situations.
• A whole heap of quality of life improvements to the text chat window (for upcoming multiplayer), including some new UI framework bits under the hood to make that possible.
• Techs that have already been fully unlocked now continue to show up on the tech sidebar, since having those disappear was freaking confusing.
• When viewing the tooltip for a unit, it now shows how many upgrades have happened out of how many upgrades for each tech line that benefits the unit.
• Lots of changes to how planets are stored and iterated-over, some of which are building toward some future DLC content as well as some future content for late-adding extra players to multiplayer games.
• Various minor UI improvements.
• Three new options for turning off beams of certain types under the Performance tab of Personal Settings. In certain super-lategame battles, turning off tachyon beam visuals can be an incredible performance boost. It may be to the point that we advise just turning those off in general.
• There's a new Journal tab, but it doesn't do anything yet. Coming soon!
• Command stations that die now come back still with any upgraded levels that you bought with science for their specific planet. It was an error that that was not already the case!
• Ships that you have not fully claimed yet, like golems, no longer charge you energy.
• In the escape/system menu, there is now a View/Edit Factions option that brings you into a new screen. This screen lets you edit the colors for any faction (even zombies and outguard, which never have been editable before).
• The V/E Factions screen also lets you edit any of the settings for Discoverable factions, up until you hack their beacon. This is incredibly helpful if you decide a bit of a way into the game that you'd like a really specifically-configured enemy or allied faction of whatever sort to come in... now you can configure that rather than just getting the faction defaults when hacking them to bring them in.
• Lots and lots of bugfixes!

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-04-28 00:50:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Wowzers. This one has been a marathon, even though it hasn't been that many days since the last release. Notes here. A ton of under-the-hood bits have been overhauled for how to load savegames and the lobby, and everything moves a lot more smoothly now. Specifically:

• The functionality for loading an existing savegame or quick start into the lobby for further editing is now fully functional in all respects.
• When you leave the lobby and come back, it now remembers your last settings.
• When you start a game from the lobby it remembers your last settings.
• There is a button in the lobby that now lets you reset everything to the defaults.
• You don't run into problems with stale visual data in the lobby anymore (several bugs in this area).
• You can load quickstarts that were saved with an expansion enabled even if you don't have that expansion. Expansion content will be omitted. Should also work for quickstarts created with mods.
• And yes, this does have direct benefits to multiplayer work, as well, it's worth noting!

There are also some other bugfixes, and two new giant Extragalactic units, one of which is called the Thunderchild. After wrestling with this release for the better part of a week, the name was just too perfect for this build as a whole. ;) More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-04-03 03:57:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been 17 days since the last build, but there's a whole lot of goodness in this new one. Release notes here. Also: I got married last week! It was supposed to be next month, but on account of pandemic we had to adjust our plans. My wife is a physician, and in the spirit of family unity I suggested we both add to our last names rather than it just being her; so I'm now Chris McElligott Park, not Chris Park. As to the actual build, there's a ton of stuff:

• Lobby improvements, and better stuff with loading saves into the lobby.
• Bunches of bugfixes.
• The ability to see and switch music tracks via the debug screen.
• Settings and profiles being forward-compatible in case you need to roll back your game version without losing those things.
• Bunches of improvements and tweaks to the scourge, and other Spire Rises content.
• A bunch of improvements to the Macrophage in the base game, allowing for multiple versions of their faction, among other things.
• TONS of balance tweaks, including a lot more AI ship groups for more variety, etc.
• And a whole lot of other things.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-03-27 00:49:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

We had one smaller hotfix, and then now this bigger one.

• The first hotfix corrected a bug that was happening with transports in the prior version with all the performance updates.
• There are a variety of general fixes and tweaks in both releases.
• The new release makes sure that you can always see your cripple transports/flagships no matter what, as they come home. Very helpful!
• The Dyson Antagonizer has gotten some balance changes to make them less frustrating to deal with.
• The Marauders got several fixes and adjustments, which makes them more interesting but is also a net nerf to them.
• A variety of fixes and improvements for The Spire Rises (first DLC), including some tooltip clarity as well as giving the Scourge the ability to guard their stuff a bit more.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-03-09 23:14:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've had a series of hotfixes since 2.001 launched, and now we've got a more meaty release.

• This one includes a variety of bugfixes and balance tweaks for both the expansion and the base game.
• The way that engineers do repairs or assist other ships is now in a more intelligent hierarchy, which avoids some edge cases.
• Several UI additions make certain things more clear, such as why remains can't be rebuilt at this time, how long until ships can be repaired, etc.
• And then the large item is that, thanks largely to one savegame that was strangely stuttery, we found a way to majorly improve the performance of the game for everyone. Some general micro-stutters that have always been present are no longer there, and in general we've simply had a plethora of unexpected benefits from a small area of the code (entity removal) that normally we wouldn't have suspected.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-03-04 21:23:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

The first expansion for AI War 2 is out! It's time for a little retrospective of how things have been going since the October 1.0 launch of the base game.

Base Game Updates

Put most simply, we've had 47 patches to the base game since 1.01, which is about one every 3 days. There have been a few of those that were just little hotfixes, and some were on the beta branch temporarily, but most of these were quite substantive. The largest of these was v1.3, The Grand New AI, on January 10th, which we called "almost a sequel in terms of how much it adds." That's a huge read on its own, so I won't recap it here, but suffice it to say it added a ton of content and a complex new intelligence to the AI. Some of that (like the awesome fire teams mechanic) was us backporting work from this new expansion to the base game. Other bits were just us updating the base game. I'm actually struggling a little bit on how to even describe what has been happening in the base game, because there's no singular improvement. It's just been relentless evolution and refinement on basically every front. We've had a lot of really involved testers, and some of the first large-scale mods (Civilian Industries, Galactic Conquest, and others), and a number of those modders have also been contributing code or ideas to the main game itself. We also continue to have a healthy number of volunteers who pop in and out and make various additions. Things I really wanted, but which kept sliding down my own todo list, like the ability to load a quick start or savegame into the lobby for further customization. Dominus Arbitrationis and StarKelp have been the two most active on that sort of front. Heck, StarKelp has kind of adopted the Macrophage faction from the base game and has been adding cool new features to them. Anyway, the release history is long, and public, and has a lot of detailed writeups already. Suffice it to say, things have been VERY active.

Expansion 1: The Spire Rises

The base game was already huge, and something that we considered to be on par with AI War Classic and maybe... two of its six expansions? Something along those lines, although it's apples to oranges since the content in AI War 2 tends to be so much more versatile and involved. I'll skip summarizing what is in this new expansion and just let you read about that on its own page, so instead I can speak a little more broadly here. The very short version is that we now consider AI War 2 plus this expansion to give parity to be equivalent to AIWC and four out of its six expansions. Wowzers.

AI Goes Up To 11

The Scourge are a faction born out of the desire to fulfill the Nemesis kickstarter stretch goal in a more... entertaining and robust fashion. That's just how Badger, the mastermind behind this race, is. The original concept was one large ship that harasses you mercilessly; that's still here, but instead we also get a faction of multi-racial slaved warriors doing even more involved and interesting stuff. Being able to set the scourge as your ally is one of the things that amuses me the most. Just last night, StarKelp was playing in that fashion and watching the AI Hunters duke it out with human-allied scourge. The result was a galaxy mostly swept clean by the scourge, and then an amusing of AI-on-AI tag in the ruined wasteland as the hunter fled around the galaxy, fighting as needed, and the scourge split up and chased them, occasionally seeming to have a small group pause and catch their breath on the safety of his home planet. The fact that things like this can exist inside the game... that makes me really happy. The really key testers for the Scourge were zeusalmighty, Astillious, Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong, and Ovalcircle.

Going Into All-Out War

The Fallen Spire, the other big faction in this expansion, were again to satisfy a kickstarter stretch goal, but in a more-fun way. We didn't get as much into the scripted-campaign territory (that's just not personally as high on my list), but we did build out the citybuilding to a ludicrous degree. And we then built out the AI forces to a ludicrous degree, giving them the ability to pull back in Extragalactic War units from "whatever it is they are fighting outside the galaxy." Those two big expansions of the content for this faction are just how I think about things. ;) We've been really fortunate to have some huge-fan Fallen Spire players from the first game, such as Matt "Vinco" Taylor, show up to test things and let us know where we were failing in this expansion. Things like the relics having a stronger response or phasing in and out of reality came about because of him, and so much of the citybuilding balance and the effectiveness of the Imperial Spire in the alternative victory condition were thanks to feedback from Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong.

Looking To The Future

There's more that we could do with the fallen spire, and we do plan on that, but it's already a really solid and huge thing that is a fun new way to play the game. The amount of core content that we wound up adding was far above what we initially planned, so certain things like journals or multiple loadouts were pushed until later because there are just only so many hours in a day. The nice thing is that some of those features can double as work for expansion 2, so as we enhance things we'll continue backporting not just to the base game, but also the first expansion. For now it's kind of a matter of balancing that against my goal to finally get multiplayer going fully.

The Sheer Volume Of Turrets

Soooo... this was not really planned at all, but is one of these things that we added in because somebody (Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong in this case) had a great idea and we wanted to do it. He basically observed that in the base game, there are not all that many turrets, and they are not spread evenly among all the technology lines (because how could they be). Looking at the base game, I see there were 11 combat turrets, plus orbital mass driver and ion cannons as major combat turrets. Then we had a further 2 non-combat turrets in the form of tractor and tachyon turrets. And that was it. Out of the 11 combat turrets, one of those was also curiously larger and scarier than the rest, with a higher cost and much lower unit count. Democracy thus made a big ol' table for each tech, with columns for regular combat turrets in each row, and then one larger-than-average turret in each row. Working with Puffin, and then getting some assists in new code from Dominus and Badger and myself, plus a whole heck of a lot of new art on my end, and we wind up with THIRTY freaking new combat turrets in this expansion. It's madness. They're so much fun and so varied, too! The first game never had anything like these.

Game Mechanics For All

We wound up adding new game mechanics to support the scourge, the spire, the turrets, and the new arks -- yes, there are five new arks as well in this expansion. In a lot of games, you'd see that sort of stuff gated off if you don't buy every last expansion, and so if you're a modder you have to think about what expansions the player does and does not have if you want to allow them to fully use your mod. I'm not a fan of that. We build all the new mechanics into the base game so that any mod can use any mechanic, and the modder never has to worry about what expansions you have unless they are explicitly setting out to mod expansion content. This keeps things going along really well, mods-wise, and lets you consider our expansions on their own merits individually without having to wonder if they block you from getting some mods you want.

The Sheer Volume Of Art

Oh, yeah. One of the things that we recently did for the base game was massively upgrade the lighting, and add a lot more pleasing detail onto many ships. That required me to go through and touch basically every ship and structure in the base game, which was a great result but super time consuming. We also added some VERY large new ships for the Extragalactic War feature, which is something I wanted to be in the base game so that any expansion or mod can trigger those guys. Right now mainly only the Fallen Spire trigger it, but it shouldn't be a feature that is limited to them in the long term. After all was said and done, the art asset bundles for the base game are about 1 GB. Looking to the first expansion, then, the total amount of art wound up being... 714 MB. That's absolutely insane, but shows just how large some of these factions are, not to mention all the turrets.

Hey, Multiplayer!

We haven't forgotten about that! In fact, we've been coding in preparation for it from day one, and have continued to make some revisions to things to make things easier to implement there. Balancing things out with such a small workforce has been hard, but now the turn for this aspect of the game has come. To make things as easy on players as possible, the plan is to try to use three different transport layers to allow for playing multiplayer in any of three fashions. Firstly, we'll have some general basic networking based on Forge Remastered. There's some light NAT punchthrough in there, which is a big feature that we said we wanted for this game, but it's only going to work but so well. You ultimately need relay servers and such, and that's expensive to set up and maintain-forever. But this would be the absolutely-no-DRM-or-service way to play multiplayer, and probably the ideal way to play via LAN. So here we are with this. Secondly, we'll implement Steam networking as another transport layer. The game code is all the same either way, but then the code and networks that is transmitting the data of the game is different in these cases. This should be the most seamless experience for Steam players who want to play via the internet. Steam has relay servers, NAT punchthrough, and a bunch of other things that a small group of people can't hope to match. So we'll just use theirs! But locking you into this wouldn't be cool, hence other options. Thirdly, we're going to implement GOG networking as the last transport layer. This one works very similar to Steam's, has all the same cool functionality for bypassing firewalls without a hassle to you, and even has some inter-connectivity to Steam players. The only real downside in the short term is that it doesn't have Linux support (since the GOG Galaxy client doesn't support Linux yet). When they have it, we'll add it. None of this means we're going to have matchmaking, because for games that last a long time that just doesn't make any sense. But for connecting with your friends via your platform of choice, this should make it so that you can just connect and play. During the next few months I'm definitely going to be wanting to have a variety of testers to help us iron out the bugs and find network load bottlenecks, etc, before we move towards calling this "true multiplayer support."

Beyond Multiplayer and DLC 2

Badger and Puffin and I have some things that we'd like to do for a DLC 3, and there are always new ideas coming up in general. This project has been in work since 2016, and we could probably spend another four years on it and still never run out of ideas we want to work on. What happens long-term is still... something that remains to be seen. When multiplayer and the other base game features come out around the same time, that will finally discharge the last of the kickstarter obligations. What happens after those obligations are finally met is... up to the market, really. At the moment, AI War 2 doesn't fully pay the bills, and it never has. It is close to doing so, and our hope is that with expansions and related promos and so on it will start doing so. In the current climate on Steam, back catalog sales drop by roughly half basically every year, which was income we used to rely on. I still feel cautiously optimistic despite having to take on debt to cover half of my expenses last month (and having had to take on debt to a greater or lesser degree for 33 out of the last 36 months), but I figured it was worth noting. Everything we've been accomplishing lately has been on a shoestring, despite such a successful 1.0 launch. That sounds glum, but I'd rather give you an honest appraisal than potentially have some surprise after we get into summer if things are still on a downward-trending or flat trajectory. We're hoping that paid DLC and the free multiplayer update will reverse or at least delay that trend. There's more that we want to do beyond the "minimum required to finish this up."

The Very Short Term Future

The Scourge are very battle-tested at this point, but we're sure that with a large influx of new players we'll find more things to fix or improve. The Fallen Spire also feel quite polished at this point, but it's hard to know if it's balanced well for all difficulty levels. So we'll probably have a lot of tweaks regarding that. Our testers were all pretty skilled. There are things we'd still like to add to the Fallen Spire, and we'll probably do that while also getting started on the beta version of multiplayer. But for now we're going to stop working all the nights and weekends. We can get plenty of done without that, now that we're past this initial milestone. Badger is already digging well into DLC 2, to make things easier on himself schedule-wise later. So the hope is for us to not really hit a crunch period again like we've had the last month. One of the shortest-term things is that we want some more varied and descriptive icons for some of the new turrets and ships, and so that will be coming out later today. There just wasn't time, we were all falling asleep in our chairs. Lots more good stuff to come soon! We're really proud of what has been accomplished in the last few months, and we hope that you get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-02-27 17:39:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Several minor versions and a couple of beta versions have happened since Light and Shadow, the last one with a big writeup. Release notes for the most recent one are here. So what's been going on?

• The visual updates for the game have continued apace. There are still lot of videos on that, even more than last time. There are also a number of sneak peeks at the art for ships in the first DLC expansion, which is coming (very) soon.
• We've been working on the "extragalactic war" units for the AI, which are basically the super-units the AI is using in its larger war outside the galaxy. It can't be bothered to bring them back unless you really get a ton of super-units in certain fashions. To not break existing balance, we're being really conservative and only letting the weakest of these war ships appear in normal games at the moment. The main use for these is for fighting against late-game Fallen Spire players in the first DLC; but it can be used with other factions and even mods, as a core base game feature, and we expect to roll that out to more factions in the base game as we can get testing feedback on that.
• Various bugfixes and balance tweaks, as always.
• The Macrophage are notably smarter, on high difficulties in particular. Thanks, StarKelp!

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-02-22 03:44:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. We'd definitely appreciate some testers who are late in very large savegames that are involved with heavy human strength. I'm not aware of any savegames that are out there where we'd want to see the extragalactic stuff kicking in, but there's the possibility that it might... so here we are in a beta again, for the moment. To play this, on Steam make sure and go into the beta tab under properties for the game and choose current_beta. We're doing a beta version just to make sure that the extragalactic war units don't trigger unexpectedly early in some specific savegames that players have going already. Thanks!

[ 2020-02-17 16:48:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've had three beta-branch releases that add and improve a LOT, and now this fourth one brings us back onto the main branch. Release notes here.

• First up, we're working on some visual upgrades to the ships and how we light them. It's not any work on their models, but the effect is still notable in terms of how lively and modern they feel. We've put up a lot of videos on that lately.
• There's still more to do on the ships (there are a lot of them!), so some of them look underwhelming at the moment but will be getting the full treatment soon.
• We fixed a number of bugs in these builds, though, and we wanted you to have those sooner than later.
• We also made a lot of updates to balance to make things more interesting and more challenging on the higher difficulties in particular. Things like counter-attacks from the AI are more likely to trigger now, dire guardians are way scarier, guardians in general have been rebalanced, a few overpowered golems are now tweaked to not be so OP, Raid Frigates can't be abused anymore, and...
• The Macrophage has seen an enormous influx of additions and extensions, starting with the Territorial Update, and moving into the Hive Wars update.
• Forcefields also have been adjusted and got some new abilities, including us adding the ability to have Hardened Forcefields as an option (those that don't shrink in size as they take damage) in addition to regular forcefields. Most of the mobile forcefield generating ships that you have use hardened forcefields now, and this makes them far more useful and less fiddly.
• You can create your own quick starts from in-game now!
• You can also turn on an option in the settings which let you load existing savegames or quickstarts into the lobby for further editing. This is a long-requested feature, and something we're still testing out a bit so it's hidden behind that optional feature.
• The graphical settings that are specific to one machine no longer get synced via the steam cloud, which is useful for those of you playing the game back and forth between two computers.
• Starting battlestations are stronger, camping next to the AI Overlord no longer freaks it out so much, and so much more.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-02-13 18:58:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

LOTS of stuff, but just pushing to beta right now. We need a bit more testing on some of this. I'll write up the details more after this is out of beta, but for now you can test this by using the current_beta branch in Steam. Feedback very welcome! Release notes here.

[ 2020-02-06 01:26:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's rare that I include a joke in the title of a release, but this one was a comment by StarKelp on discord and was too good to pass up. He helped find a really annoying QoL bug with the voice lines playing repetitively in certain cases, so here we are. Full release notes here.

• A variety of bugfixes that make life more pleasant and/or make the enemy more deadly.
• Your own forcefields that are bumped out of the way by enemy Norris Effect units will now move back into position on their own, thus re-covering wormholes that previously were just left open. This is a pretty major addition when you're fighting certain enemies that push your shields around, and was the thing I wouldn't have thought to do. Big kudos to Badger on adding this!
• Added a new Damage Amplification thanks to Quinn, who has basically created a new mechanic for ships that can be used to counter golems and other super-units with ships that use this mechanic. This mechanic is available for modders immediately, and we're working on ships of our own to make use of it.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-02-01 04:02:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another week, another six beta releases which now are officially out here. This is a big one! For the full story, you'll want to start reading at 1.310, if you haven't been on the beta branch.

• First up, the Warden fleet of the AI now uses fire teams. This is... a complete game-changer for them. You can't trick and trap them like you used to, although you can still mess with them in various ways. They're just way smarter and more fluid in how they respond to your messings.
• We went through a ton of code and fixed up any potential problems that we found during a code review. This cleaned up a few rare bugs that may or may not have actually been seen in the wild by players yet.
• Fixed a variety of achievements that were not properly triggering -- huge thanks to Quinn for putting in those fixes for us!
• Fixed a bug where in certain circumstances, NPC factions could cause AI ships to turn threat against you, leading to your unexpected doom.
• Improved some more of the fire team logic so that they don't get distracted by things like command-station-remains (which are already shot to death and do not require further shooting at this time). Prior to this, certain fire teams could get stuck waiting around to kill something that was already dead, thus letting you avoid the consequences of the hunter being after you.
• The debug menu has been updated heavily to show which items are considered cheats and which are not. One item that was previously a cheat -- revealing the entire map -- is now just considered a "lifestyle choice." In the first game you could choose to play with the entire map revealed from the start, after, all, so why not here?
• We also added an option that lets you scout the entire map but not have each planet permanently watched. Neither of these count as cheats.
• We also made several substantial improvements to how we read in xml from mods, enabling some new functionality for modders.
• Fixed a couple of cross-threading issues that could see drones get lost when they went back into their hub ship, or which could see stacks dying incorrectly in terms of the actual number of lost units. This was majorly weakening some units previously, particularly if you had your stack caps set unusually low.
• Some re-balance to the marauder empires, which could get overlarge and slow things down -- now that they are so much smarter, they don't need quite as many units to mop the floor with enemies, anyway.
• Exos (of a certain strength) are now able to launch against you on multiple planets simultaneously, splitting their forces and then coming for you from several angles. This makes them look better as they swarm in, being less stacked up, and also makes defending against them more challenging.
• A variety of other bugfixes, tweaks, UI refinements, and so on.
• If this doesn't sound quite as large of a release as I made it out to be at the start of the post... just wait until you see the difference in the warden and the hunter fleets and how that changes the game for you. It's a whole new ballgame these days.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-31 02:50:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is a small one, mainly hotfixes.

• The Devourer now eats the Trader, as it should.
• Instigator bases now spawn much closer to you until 600 AIP, after which they can get fully cheeky again. Previously they could really mess with you at random starting at only 300 AIP.
• There were a couple of brand-new bugs that you could run into thanks to the new pathfinding code, and those are fixed.
• There were several longer-standing bugs that are also fixed.
• The top-of-screen notifications for Cross Planet Attacks are more succinct and don't have a largely-useless subscreen.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-24 03:38:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is another huge one, which is why it took us a week to get it to you.

• The top item here is performance, as the name of the release implies. The new fire teams are awesome and make the AI so much smarter, but we were having late-game performance problems with very long-running threads that would actually stall the AI and all the other factions for minutes at a time if your galaxy was large and populous enough. Badger and I went through all of this with a scalpel and made performance improvements on the order of a 2000% increase for some of the savegames in question.
• There are still the occasional savegames with a very over-active set of marauders or nanocaust that don't perform as we'd prefer them to, but the vast majority of our test cases (with usually hundreds of thousands of ships) moved from being insanely sluggish to running at full speed.
• Exos have gotten much craftier about how they pursue their targets across planets. This is something... that will come in handy in existing savegames but also with features-to-come. (Cough)
• Cross Planet Attacks (CPAs) have been massively reworked to be more efficient on your CPU, as well as to be more clear in how they work and to not cheat the AI out of higher-mark ships. The CPA is now an event worthy of the name, without completely emptying the AI larder so to speak.
• Puffin has made enormous numbers of changes to fleet designs that you'll find throughout the galaxy, making them less mono-tech, and also has added 15 more fleet designs in general. We were noticing some unfortunate trends in how people use techs, and we're trying to encourage synergies rather than deep investment into a single thing over all else. This is the first step in that direction, but it's a strong one.
• Instigator bases stressing you out? That's now a setting you can turn off to not have them. They add mild time pressure that is good for the game as a whole, but which some people don't appreciate. We try to accommodate as many playstyles as possible.
• Astro Trains AND the Macrophage got some buffs. The AI and player strength levels had been growing and outpacing these.
• The Zenith Trader has been revamped a bit in terms of the wares it offers, no longer letting you exploit it to just get way too many goodies. It now works more like the first game, where you have to really consider what you want a bit more, rather than just putting everything everywhere.
• Bunches of other bugfixes and AI tweaks and improvements and balance tweaks have also been included, plus other interface clarity improvements. This is a pretty huge list of stuff.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-23 03:49:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one really is just a laundry list of tweaks and fixes.

• First up, lots of folks noticed that combat engineers and combat sentry frigates were not constructing in the prior build. This was the unfortunate intersection of some new (good) logic and some old (bad but not harmful until now) xml inheritance. That's now fixed!
• The right hand blank chat/log window in the lobby is now removed, making forumite Sounds much happier but possibly also frustrated since he was going to mod it out.
• The main menu no longer chugs with bad performance. That had to do with achievements resubmission to Steam, and didn't affect the GOG version of the game (but would have as we get GOG galaxy support in soon).
• We also are hunting an obscure performance drain that happens on the late game in super-high planet count games (200ish planets) with a few hundred thousand units and 8+ factions, etc. It's still a playable game on the savegames we have found there (about 40% speed at baseline), but we're hoping to clear that up so it performs as well as anything else. So far it's been investigation more than solution.
• The nanocaust now can use fire teams! (Oh dear.)
• Marauders can consolidate their planets a bit faster.
• Sabotage hacks are now less aggo and cheaper -- good for you.
• Beyond that it's just a handful of more bugfixes and tweaks.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-15 03:29:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is another followup to the epic one from a couple of days ago, mainly focused on some bugfixes and yet even more AI deadliness.

• First up, the Hunter fleet was previously only using the exciting new fire teams feature if you chose the new "Assassin" option. That's not something most people would know to do, and it wouldn't automatically kick on in existing quick starts, or existing savegames, and so on. That's no fun!
• So we've made it so that all of the Hunter fleets now use fire teams, instead, and we took away the Assassin option since it would now have been identical to Normal. All of the existing savegames will work, and now have scary fire teams doing all the fun things I talked about in the epic update. Not opting-in required.
• We also made a number of general improvements to AI threat and the hunter fleet IQ/logic, letting them make better decisions on several fronts. Loading existing savegames where they waffled about now has them hulk smash.
• There's a general feature called "group move" that can be used by players or by NPCs/AIs. There were some awesome improvements made to this functionality by Eagleheart a few months back for player purposes, but they just didn't work well for AIs, which caused exos and fire teams to sometimes be on the slow side or staggered strangely. Now something closer to our old logic is used for AIs/NPCs, making them formidable again, while Eagleheart's logic is used for players like it was intended to be.
• Beyond that it's just a handful of more bugfixes.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-14 03:16:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is a small followup to the truly epic one from a couple of days ago, mainly focused on some bugfixes and balance tweaks. More is in store for soon, but this is just a bit of tidying.

• Okay, maybe I lied? For the frigates, the benefits in this version might actually make them viable for the first time in the eyes of a lot of players. They were dying quickly partly due to being targeted over-aggressively in the past, and now it works more like it did in AIWC. To some folks this may actually be pretty monumental. We'll see if it's enough to redeem frigates, or if they need more.
• Snipers now do a better job of taking out the explicit kinds of targets you set for them and nothing else until that stuff is dead if you order them around manually, which is also a win.
• Coarse background processing, and/or faster simulation speeds, should never let ships sneak past wormholes that are physically blocked by forcefields anymore. This is a big deal for players who like to keep their doors locked, so to speak, and were previously finding enemies sneaking in through the cracks.
• You can't use crippled flagships to give you vision on enemy planets anymore, which closes yet another clever exploit that the same players who were using it asked us to fix.
• Beyond that it's just a general laundry list of bugfixes.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-12 20:05:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

If you've been in the forums, you know that we've been in an opt-in beta period for the last... goodness, has it been three weeks? Release notes start here and then keep going here, here, here, here, and finally with today's last bits here. That's almost 15 thousand words of text, 29 pages in a word document. So let me try to break that down so you don't have to read every last bit. There's so much in v1.3 that it almost feels like a sequel in some ways, which is how we like it.

First Up: AI Defenses

This is probably the part of the new version that is most going to shock you when you load up a new campaign in particular. The AI is... well, scarier. They have more strength in more places, more variance in how they place things, and so on. At a quick glance, it looks like the game got harder (and for a while in the betas that was empirically true). But we've spent a lot of time trying to dial that back with the 1.3 build in particular so that it looks scarier and gives a more varied challenge, but isn't actually baseline harder (except difficulty 10). The really key thing to note about the AI defenses on each planet is that, while they may be numerically a lot stronger than they once were, they are also more spread out -- most of the time. This means that -- most of the time -- you can divide them up and attack them piecemeal, which is something we dearly missed from AI War Classic. That's now back, and we're really excited about it. But we actually went further than that and also made it so that there are now legitimately some "hotspot" planets that ARE harder. They don't seed very frequently on low-and-middling difficulty levels, and they don't seed very near your starting position, but this is another cool thing we were missing from AI War Classic. In Classic, sometimes you would run into a planet that was an unusually high mark, or that had a giant forcefield, or a superfortress, or whatever. We have had things like that in this sequel for a really long time, but the planets still somehow felt... homogeneous after you got enough hours in the game. So now the AI sometimes wormhole-camps its guard posts, sometimes masses them into a giant bundle that you have to take on at once, and other fun challenges. These sorts of exceptions really add some flair and excitement.

Beefing Up AI Intelligence

This is I suppose more of an item related to offense, except it also applies to the warden and the praetorian guard, both of which are defensive in nature. So I guess this is just a general thing. First of all, Badger invented this handy new thing called "fire teams," which are sub-groups that the AI factions can order around independently. They can merge and split and coordinate and pincer and fake you out and a whole bunch of other things. Basically something like the hunter fleet used to be a monolithic entity that came after you. It was smart and huge and scary... but it was all in one place that you could keep track of. It was hard to always predict what it was doing, but it could only be thinking of one thing at a time and so you could make some pretty accurate guesses based on its singular positioning. None of that works anymore, because now the hunter fleet will fragment itself to pursue multiple goals at once. So will marauders, and a bunch of other factions and parts of the AI. You may still have a very good idea of what some part of the body of the hunter is thinking... and then be surprised that it was holding some substantial reserve well out of your viewing range, waiting for the opportune time to catch you off guard. The cliche thing at this point would be to say "clever girl" with a picture of the three raptors. But that's just one part of fire teams. Oh, hey -- almost forgot. We also made the subconscious mind of AI ships (and your ships in "pursuit mode") a whole lot smarter. You can trust your pursuit mode ships to take care of business much more efficiently now -- to the point that battles they lost on their own in the past they now win. Of course, that works against you just as frequently as for you...

Parallelism And The Lack Of Brain Function

Right, so we discovered something kind of crazy in this series of builds. You know how you can fast-forward time up to 10x, and it doesn't cause any extra CPU load? Well... that was true, but it didn't speed up the "cognitive functioning" of the higher-level AI. Basically if you divide the intelligence for units and factions into subconscious/autonomic and conscious levels of thought... the subconscious/autonomic parts were as smart as ever on 10x difficulty, but the conscious thought of any faction that wasn't controlled by a human was incredibly hobbled. This had to do with how we schedule some of the multithreading of background functioning for factions to support their "conscious thought" without eating CPUs with limited numbers of cores if you have many many factions at once in a big game. It was a complicated technical issue, but essentially meant that for some relevant reasons that we can't break without breaking future multiplayer support, at 10x speed the AI was only getting a chance to even try to think consciously every 60 realtime seconds instead of every second or so. We had reports of people who beat difficultly 10 AIs by largely playing on 10x speed, and exploiting the fact that they could issue a ton of micromanagement commands and just fight the subconscious of the AI before it even consciously realized they were there. The first solution to this was for us to look at our architecture and see if we could squeeze out more parallelism. A lot of us have quad-core computers with hyperthreading (so 8 virtual cores), or even just dual-core computers with 4 virtual cores. The odds of any player having a single-core computer is vanishingly small, though there are some players in that boat. There's an option to turn off PFP (Parallel Faction Processing) if you need to, but for most computers you should get a performance boost or at least be performance-neutral with the way it is currently.

Major Performance Improvements

Right, so this is no small thing. Even for those who have opted into the beta are in for a bit of a shock with the very latest build. All throughout these last three weeks we've been squeezing more performance out of the game, but in particular we've been able to make a ton of strides in the last day. Some of the savegames we were seeing that had 10% of normal speed on my quad-core now run easily at full speed. Half on the subject of performance but half on simulation correctness, we found that our pooling of game entities was causing huge numbers of bugs that popped in and out of existence and not actually making things faster anymore. This was originally intended to help performance back before unity introduced their time-sliced garbage collector, and it did work very well. We pool a TON of things in this game, and all of that is an enormous benefit to performance in general, garbage collector aside. But the actual pooling of entities -- ships and structures -- had to go. It was causing problems on the background "faction consciousness" threads and often leading the AI to give wrong orders or even sometimes give orders to YOUR ships because of the nature of pooling. All of that is solved now. In the process of investigating this, we also really wanted to cut down on certain kinds of "game commands" that the background factions were sending that really didn't need to be there. Game commands are multi-player compatible ways for the faction consciousness threads (and human players) to give orders to ships above the in-simulation subconscious/autonomic commands that ships handle on their own. Keeping that smaller reduces the CPU load in single player, and will reduce the network load as we work in multi-player. Also on the subject of performance, now that the AI is using more turrets than it used to (that's part of the general new defensive strategies that the AIs use), their turrets were... an annoying performance drain. Normally we just stack mobile units if there are too many of them, or they go into guard posts as reinforcements, etc. But none of that can happen for turrets, which are stationary. To combat that issue, we made all of the AI turrets into Great-Turrets, which are about 5x stronger and costlier than the human counterparts. In existing savegames from older versions it automatically strips out 4/5ths of the turrets to make sure you don't get absolutely wrecked. But this minor consolidation keeps performance thrumming along as well.

So Many Balance Changes!

Beyond great-turrets and fire teams and how the AI fortifies its own planets, a lot of other things have evolved here. One of the most recent favorites of mine is that dire guard posts on the homeworlds of AIs now cost AIP to destroy, and the overlord itself costs less than before. But as an added bonus, you now get a ton of science and hacking points from destroying the overlord -- who is also now stronger, to properly meet the threat of the late-game fleets you can easily muster these days. All of this makes for more dynamic escalation in multi-AI games in particular, but also even with just a single AI. The way that player ship caps are calculated is also more consistent in terms of what you can expect with each mark level that you increase. You get a much more consistent number of frigates added, for one thing. We also very harshly changed how the growth curve went for individual ship strength as mark levels went up. The multipliers were getting higher as well as the base attack power, meaning that in some cases a ship that was mark 7 could just evaporate its mark 5 opposite numbers. Now things remain more stable all the way through mark 7, having a more linear growth rate. A ton of ships individually got balance tuning based on feedback, far too many to mention. We also revised and improved the way that planets are spawned in terms of the mix of mark levels (ratios based on difficulty) in the central areas of the galaxy (meaning between the player and AI homeworlds, not physical center). We also made the "neutering" of AI planets into something VASTLY more powerful that you can do, as it much more sharply curtails what sort of reinforcements they can get there. We also entirely block reinforcements on AI planets if they are outnumbered 2:1. So that's majorly in your favor, and a great new tool. On the flip side, AI planets left to their own devices now have a much larger cap of ships that they can store up if you leave them alone for tens of hours. Those of you who like to capture entire galaxies (not the normal way to play the game!) will have some interesting new challenges, but it should still be possible on the typical difficulties for that sort of thing (5 and 6). Oh! And in map styles that are really cramped -- mazes or snakes, for instance -- you now get a much kinder seeding of the early-game tools you need (Global Command Augmenters, etc). Lest you think that all the seeding improvements we made were in favor of the AI.

New "Adaptive" AI Type!

This is something people have been asking for for a while. Rather than fighting against an AI that works one way for the whole game... what if the AI kept switching up its style and you never knew what it was? That sounds... terrifying. But you guys wanted it, and so we added it. Good luck with that. ;) There are 15 new achievements in place relating to the five difficulties of adaptive AI types, so there's more to hunt.

Max Game Speed Of 5x

In the past, you could make the game run at up to 10x realtime speed. This was useful when the game was chugging (which it does a lot less often now), or when you just wanted to get past a certain slow section. I myself tend to play on 3x or 4x speed normally and just pause frequently. I dunno why, it's just my personal taste. The problem with going above 5x is that a lot of things start to break down. We start running into the sorts of problems that you normally see in physics simulations that have very fast-moving objects and no continuous collision detection on. Even at 5x, your minefields are a lot less effective, and ships with shorter ranges will get off fewer shots against enemies. A lot of that is simply unavoidable without increasing the CPU load dramatically in order to achieve that 5x speed boost, which of course would defeat the whole purpose. We looked at how people were playing and various scenarios run repeatedly at different speeds, and decided that 5x was the maximum at which the simulation really still resembles itself. So that's the new cap, if anyone is wondering why.

SO MANY Interface Improvements

Tooltips alone have gone through so much. Rather than having just "regular tooltips" that show a lot of info, and "full tooltips" that show even MORE, we now have three levels and the default is vastly more brief. It's surprisingly easy to use and makes the game so much more approachable. But all the information is still there at your fingertips. A lot of interfaces now show you vital info like ship strengths or more about what will be improved by a tech,

Back To The Subject Of Difficulty

So is the game harder now than in the prior builds? ... Depends on what difficulty you're playing at. Difficulties 9 and 10 are likely going to be vastly harder than before, while 5-7 should be about the same, and less than 5 probably will look fancier in terms of enemy movements and positions but not actually be much more challenging. But you probably will have to use more of your gray matter in order to deal with more varied situations on average, more of the time, so it should in general be an even more interesting experience at most every difficulty level. We kind of tilted some of the ship numbers in your favor a bit in order to make it so that all the new AI intelligence doesn't just overwhelm you, and that may make some older savegames extra hard, it's hard to be sure. And in some cases you may say "you call that tilting strength in my favor?" ;) And to that we mainly say "you should have seen it before during certain points of the beta." What can sometimes look very intimidating is something you really can just go in and dismantle piecemeal, because you have the superior ability to field replacement craft, among many other advantages. Big thanks to all the people who were helping us out so much during the beta with their thoughts on everything, as that helped us shape things out to be a lot more interesting without being brute-force harder.

And Hundreds Of Other things

• Lots of bugfixes and balance tweaks detailed in the full release notes.
• Particularly a bunch of improvements for xml modders.
• You can now hack GCAs in order to re-roll their options (thanks donblas!).
• Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.
• Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.
• Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes.
• Add a "Select all non-flagship military on planet" selection option.
• Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. (Thanks donblas).
• Maps now default to having 7 FCEs instead of 11 (there were just too many before).
• Some updates to the Octopus map generator from Tadrinth.
• Added some more tips, including explanations of Wave, CPA, etc.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2020-01-10 21:27:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one is all about the balance and bugfixes, and in a few cases those go hand-in-hand. What's new?

• There was a major bug in the game in the last month or so where not every "after a ship dies" bit of data was being logged. This came about when we started using a (much) more efficient way of removing ships from stacks, and it led to some really interesting (sigh) inconsistencies. With small weak ships on your side fighting large stacks of enemies, you'd get next to no counterattack strength and not a lot of experience. With really large ships that could blast entire midsize stacks in one shot, you'd get cataclysmic counterattacks and... the amount of exp gained actually was funky there.
• Anyway, so we fixed the bugs and everything should be logged correctly now... but things like counterattack strength had to be rebalanced in order to (hopefully) not murder you with overstrong responses now that it correctly registers all the deaths. Our internal testing is okay so far, but there's only a couple of us.
• If there's a larger problem with this, then it's literally just a couple of values in an xml file for us to get it balanced better based on your feedback. Please let us know sooner than later if that is the case. I'll be working tomorrow morning, but then not later on Christmas Ever or at all on Christmas Day. If there's a murderous set of stats there, we'd sure like to know prior to then. I'll be back the day after Christmas fully.
• Next up, the amount of time you have to react to waves has been reduced a ton, to be more like the first game and in general not give you such a ridiculously long time to withdraw your offensive forces and use them on defense. If you over-commit on offense now, that could be more trouble than before.
• The Outguard has seen a lot of balance work, mainly in the form of buffs, but in the form of nerfs for a couple of specific lines. You're much more able to hack to get these without getting smacked around unduly. Thanks to StarKelp for continuing to helm this.
• There was another major bug with "stuck ships" or "phantom lines" that were visual artifacts (often the stuck ships were invisible but you could hover over them). These were not something that impacted actual gameplay, but visually they looked very strange and could get in the way of interacting with real units. They also didn't go away until you restarted the program; exiting the campaign and loading another or the same one wouldn't do it. This should be fully fixed now, after a huge bug-hunt for it.
• If the game thinks you're using a cheat, it now tells you when you do so. This should mostly be apparent when you use things in the debug menu, but in other cases it might be that it's thinking you're cheating when you're not, and we'd like to find those cases if there are any. Right now it's just a suspicion, but the code we've looked at seems clean.
• Several other smaller bugfixes and balance tweaks also are in here.

More to come soon! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so we're back down to just Very Positive. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-24 03:28:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Variagation means different color patterns in the same plant, and I thought that was appropriate for what we're doing with cloaking. What's new?

• There were some problems with some people not being able to log their achievements to Steam, mostly those using non-US-English OSes or using linux. We think that's all fixed now, but let us know.
• There were three achievements for killing specific ships that were being granted to everyone who killed ANY ship. So... a few folks got lucky in the last day!
• The pursuit mode logic has been improved EVEN MORE by Badger, and it now retains its smarts while not sometimes ignoring a straggler who it still alive.
• Fix a (hilarious, if it doesn't happen to you) bug where shortly after game load macrophages might spontaneously Enrage and attack you.
• And then the big one is for last, and that's cloaking. We made several more changes here, to go along with what we did in the prior release.
• First off, your ships can start regaining cloaking points without getting completely decloaked first. This has been desired by people for a long time, as it was annoying to have partially-cloaked ships indefinitely.
• Secondly, ships now have a different number of shots (depending on the ship) before they decloak while firing their own weapons. For most mobile ships, they now decloak after their first shot, rather than after 5. For things like minefields, they actually get 20 volleys first, as do some starships and guardians and turrets.
• These differences in decloaking-from-firing speeds let us specialize the ships a bit more, with some being deep cloakers that are able to have a temporary invincibility window where nothing can shoot back at them when they spring their trap. Other ships, like Raptors, absolutely were OP and exploitable with the new regens-cloak-without-having-to-be-decloaked mechanics, and so they only get one shot before that happens.

More to come soon! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-21 03:19:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. All the achievements are now live on Steam, and we've also fixed up the build speed changes that were really bugging people in the prior build. What's new?

• All 139 achievements are now live on Steam, so you can check out what those look like.
• The build speeds for higher-mark ships last build were sloooow. Way more than we meant to, because of a kind of hilarious bug (in a masochistic kind of way). Ships just reeeeally didn't want to finish building, and would get progressively slower as they nearly finished themselves. Not only did we fix that, we also rebalanced the build speed stuff in general.
• After you win the game, the AI ships now go braindead. This feels way more satisfying and like you've actually won the game. The other factions that exist, if there are any (Macrophage, Nanocaust, whatever) will still do their thing and may be something you want to continue fighting if that's the sort of thing you're into. You've won, but it's fun to see how the AI is its own beast compared to the other factions.

More to come soon! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-20 03:40:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one is pretty huge! And it does finally have achievements -- 139 of them -- although not all of them will be visible on Steam for a few days. So what's new?

• Achievements come with a few caveats, such as not having an in-game list to view them yet, and not all being visible on Steam. More things coming soon, and details on all that are in the release notes, but suffice it to say that this is build one of several that are rolling these out. Anything you achieve in this build onwards will be logged locally and later synced to Steam, though.
• Fixed several bugs, the most exciting of which was a crash with Marauders.
• Added a new "Methodical Pursuit Mode" that, holy cow, is ridiculously better at fighting than the old style. AI ships and yours and allies all now use it by default. Badger thought this up, and had a very interesting save where a player ally faction would mostly die against the AI on a weakish planet without this on, but handily win with it on. That's enormous!
• Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time. This is to make it so that your ability to field a refleeted giant-strength force isn't just going up crazily as your mark levels increase. You can always offset this time with engineers, but they are finite and cost you extra resources (mainly energy -- not anything extra in the long term of metal flows). This should keep the mid and late game balance a lot better versus players just having lots of insta-fleets over and over again.
• Increased most Frigate durability 50%. That's worth a line on its own, since some folks have been really wanting Frigates to feel more powerful and separate from the smaller strikecraft.
• Cloaking has been enormously rebalanced, though the mechanics themselves have not been particularly changed. But this being underwhelming in both your and enemy hands was a theme, and with various player suggestions Puffin has put together what I think is a really notable rebalance to this to make these a lot more interesting.

More to come soon! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-19 04:53:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Lots of good fixes and tweaks in this one!

• There are finally random AI types that you can select in the lobby (Random Easier, Random Moderate, Random Hard, Random Brutal, Random Any), which is a long-requested feature that the first game had.
• The lobby now also sorts the AI types by difficulty group, identifies them by difficulty group (with nice colorization), and so on.
• Fixed an interesting bug during certain AI civil wars that could softlock the game.
• Added a new "Various Weapons" fleet name styling to the game, provided by DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.
• Wormhole invasions actually send ships again properly -- our bad on that!
• Outguard hacking response is a bit nerfed to give you an easier time.
• Nerfed the Impactor Citadel to keep folks from planet-wiping with those.
• Lots of other balance changes, but the biggest one is to how some of the seeding happens for "random nasty AI stuff you might run into." That now has subcategories that make the distribution more pleasant.

More to come soon! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-17 02:37:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's nice to do a beta when needed, but it's also nice to keep that period brief. We found a number of problems in 1.015 that we fixed and pushed in two non-version-incrementing releases that we just wrapped into the older release notes. Release notes for the new build are here. They're very small by comparison to most of our builds, but priority one was mainly to get things back out of beta in a clean way. Also, I HAVE been working on achievement graphics, and spent waaaay too much time on those. Plus Badger has been working on the Scourge (shhh! It's a secret, coming soon in the first expansion), and we've been planning some other features and additions for that expansion and the base game. Measure twice, cut once. I'm particularly pleased with some changes we're going to be making to the base game to allow for faction beacons to allow you to choose things like the strength/intensity of the faction when you hack them. That's will be so nice for quick starts as well as custom starts. Also? Turns out that -- again knock on wood -- my concerns about balance being too easy for players with the outguard revamp were mostly unfounded. The hacking cost and related things there have made them so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb balance-wise, at least. I'm still mildly concerned that the AI might need an economic buff on higher difficulties in the next few weeks, but they don't seem to be suffering majorly on the most common difficulties at least. So that's good! Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-14 02:00:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sometimes when we introduce changes that are sufficiently large, we like to run it through a beta branch first. This is one of those releases, with the changes to the Outguard. We'd love it if lots of folks would give this a try, so that we can feel confident bringing this back off the beta branch and onto the main branch in the next day or two. To play this beta branch, right-click the game in Steam, choose properties, then go under the betas tab and choose current_beta. Release notes here. Various cool stuff:

• The Outguard have been completely rebalanced and reworked thanks to StarKelp, and there are a couple of new Outguard groups already. These changes seem really good, but they are substantial enough that they need more testing than we can do internally.
• We also fixed a pretty major bug with marauders that would degrade performance heavily if they were hanging around on planets that have no enemies on them. This is one reason we want to get out of the beta branch asap.
• Fixed another bug that could cause a lot of the planets to be named Murdoch in recent builds of the game.
• Lots more voice line integration work done.
• You can prevent your ships from pathing through specific planets now, to make it easier to give orders to your ships to go from point A to point B while avoiding some scary area you discovered (AI eyes, etc).

Repeat From Last Release: My Armchair Guesses About Coming Balance I think that the player is getting enough buffs in the prior build and this beta build that essentially you'll have better defenses -- and actually use them -- and thus more ability to wield your offensive fleets. I think you'll be able to take more planets with less fear, and thus have a stronger economy in general AND more fleets. I think that once the outguard changes are in, people are going to start really using those a heck of a lot more, and that those will be decisive in certain close battles. This is absolutely going to wreck balance (in your favor) for a short while, is my prediction. But getting it so that all your tools feel useful to you, and so that you use them all, is definitely worth it. I'm NOT feeling like we need to then come in and start nerfing you in some other way. I just don't think that would be satisfying. I also don't think that the AI's problem is going to be one of strategy -- that it's not smart enough and that's why things are suddenly easier. With that in mind, and also thinking about the spire frigate being a decisive thing against diff 10 AIs when people win that scenario, I'm thinking that we're going to need to make the AI a lot richer to compensate for the fact that you have all these new things. There are some interesting suggestions that people have relating to data centers and MDCs to make those more costly, and the discussions there are worth having for sure. Maybe that will be enough, and either way something like that might be needed. But I think that essentially in the endgame of particularly a diff 10 game, we're going to want to make sure that if you have a spire frigate that is just ultra powerful... well, that these powerful machines have an equally powerful unit to send against you for an epic punch-out. I think that may be lacking right now; we're giving you some trump cards and superweapons and so on, but despite the praetorian guard I don't think the AI can really be considered to have those right now. And that's okay, that's just part of the arms race. It being able to whip out more than the PG and exos in the late game, and possibly it doing more with dire guardians or somesuch in that timeframe... that might feel more like it has the same sort of endgame forces to meet your own strike teams. We'll see how that evolves. Thoughts will be quite welcome. Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-12 18:43:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one has a lot of cool stuff that should make more playstyles viable. It may make the game a little easier than we want, but one step at a time. Balance Swinging Your Direction A Bit For Once Next release will have some exciting changes to the outguard that StarKelp has designed and implemented, and that may swing things even more in your favor. We'll see how that works out, but it's likely that the AI is going to need an economic boost or something. We're actually very open to suggestions on that; in the current build this is essentially a tech nerf to the AI, and then there's essentially an economic boost to players if they start actually using outguard as we had always wanted them to... so it's not really a lack of strategy on the part of the AI or a need to toss more exo waves at you... it feels like they may wind up needing a compensatory economic boost of some variety as well, although exactly how that will feel in practice is something we're interested in trying to predict based on your experiences in this and the next build. Hey, The Website Work Is Done! We went through a giant overhaul migrating our website and various services from an older VPS to a new cloud-based solution, and that -- of course -- took far longer than expected. A few hours turned into a day. But the good news is that the wiki and mantis are running faster than ever, and even the forums are -- knock on wood -- back to running full speed again like they have for most of the last decade. They've been painfully slow for the last few months, increasingly frequently, and then that started spreading to our other parts of the site. Other Bits

• Minefields should feel way better now, thanks to Puffin.
• More voice lines are in.
• A bunch of UI tweaks and fixes are in.
• Peter Ebbesen gave us much better beginner tip text for science and engineering -- thanks Peter!
• The reason higher-AIP games are now more possible is that the AI techs up at higher AIPs than before, and that varies by difficulty more now.
• A heck of a lot of player defenses are now stronger, too, wow. Or cheaper in techs. This might seem like overkill, but some people were not really using them too much because the mobile stuff was more cost-effective, and that was bad. Again, if we're swinging things too much in your favor, we'll just have to swing the economy or similar on the AI's side, too.
• Actually your economy is now buffed as well, in terms of taking less science to tech up command stations, and you getting more energy out of a lot of the structures, too. This again makes it more viable to have full proper defenses.

My Armchair Guesses About Coming Balance I think that the player is getting enough buffs in this build and in the next build that essentially you'll have better defenses -- and actually use them -- and thus more ability to wield your offensive fleets. I think you'll be able to take more planets with less fear, and thus have a stronger economy in general AND more fleets. I think that once the outguard changes are in, people are going to start really using those a heck of a lot more, and that those will be decisive in certain close battles. This is absolutely going to wreck balance (in your favor) for a short while, is my prediction. But getting it so that all your tools feel useful to you, and so that you use them all, is definitely worth it. I'm NOT feeling like we need to then come in and start nerfing you in some other way. I just don't think that would be satisfying. I also don't think that the AI's problem is going to be one of strategy -- that it's not smart enough and that's why things are suddenly easier. With that in mind, and also thinking about the spire frigate being a decisive thing against diff 10 AIs when people win that scenario, I'm thinking that we're going to need to make the AI a lot richer to compensate for the fact that you have all these new things. There are some interesting suggestions that people have relating to data centers and MDCs to make those more costly, and the discussions there are worth having for sure. Maybe that will be enough, and either way something like that might be needed. But I think that essentially in the endgame of particularly a diff 10 game, we're going to want to make sure that if you have a spire frigate that is just ultra powerful... well, that these powerful machines have an equally powerful unit to send against you for an epic punch-out. I think that may be lacking right now; we're giving you some trump cards and superweapons and so on, but despite the praetorian guard I don't think the AI can really be considered to have those right now. And that's okay, that's just part of the arms race. It being able to whip out more than the PG and exos in the late game, and possibly it doing more with dire guardians or somesuch in that timeframe... that might feel more like it has the same sort of endgame forces to meet your own strike teams. We'll see how that evolves. Thoughts will be quite welcome. Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-11 02:28:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Lots more stuff, and there was an intermediate hotfix build as well in here. Main new things:

• The AI now writes you a chat message as well as giving you the voice taunt. So if you have sound off, or voice off, or just have trouble understanding it in the din of battle... now you can see what the AI is saying.
• There was previously a big mix of funny and serious things that the AI would say, all in one big soup. The first game was always deadly serious when it came to the AI's messages, so that was a bit of a shock to some folks; and humor is subjective, so some of the jokes fall quite flat for some people. The humorous AI messages are still there, now, but have to be turned on via a specific option in the audio settings. The AI is dryly sarcastic at times now, but nothing over the top.
• If you've set priorities for an intel item (higher or lower than usual), you can now see that on the galaxy map!
• There are now multiple naming schemes for fleets, just as there are multiple naming schemes for planets. There's the original list (now called "random," and there are others based on US States, Ancient Gods, Mathematicians, Cowardly Words, and so on. Thanks, donblas!
• The start of having an in-game journal of important (and recent less-important) chat messages is now in place. This will be important for the Fallen Spire campaign in the first expansion, and it's useful in general. Also nice for multiplayer.
• There's a whole heck of a lot of bugfixes, including most of the ones that Badger had noted as what he felt like were the most critical things affecting the most people.
• The Bomber Fleet that you could start with is now gone, as it was really overpowered.
• Major Data Centers are now balanced a bit differently, too.

Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-06 22:04:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is a big one, in terms of having a lot of items. They fall into six main categories:

• Continued UI polish.
• Some experimental changes to group-move from a new volunteer dev.
• Tweaks to the Intel screen and some new beginner objectives for ARS, GCA and flagship capturing to teach people that those are critical early objectives.
• Continued balance work, including making AI homeworld assaults harder and adding a new "Turret" tech.
• Owning Major Data centers now causes Exos against the player for higher difficulty games, in the ongoing arms race between very skilled players and developers.
• Lots of other bugfixes and balance tweaks.

There's stuff from three sources beyond the usual developers and volunteer devs: donblas, Eagleheart, and StarKelp have all made notable code contributions in this one. There was a bit more of a gap between this one and last one because I was sick AGAIN last week, this time with norovirus that landed me in the ER. I'm all better now, but it managed to get everyone my kids and my fiancee as well in the end (though not as bad), and we had to skip the Thanksgiving gatherings to not infect others. Fun times! But good grief, coming back to to see what everyone had been up to, after monitoring some of it off and on during the worst of my illness, it's quite shocking just how much was done. It's got me itching to get some more changes of my own in there. Beyond that, let's talk about some other specific items from the release notes:

• Wormhole invasions have been nerfed, so that they don't hit you so hard.
• A bunch of fleet designs have been tweaked or improved, as have a number of ship designs.
• Hey, you can upgrade battlestation/citadel fleets via spending science now, just like you can planetary fleets!
• Bounty Hunters are now far more interesting.
• Pulsar Tanks are now far more frightening.
• Spire Frigates now perform better (StarKelp's improvements) as well as being more dangerous in general. Please check how the balance of this kind of beam weapon feels now.
• Alarm posts now actually work -- yet more danger for you.
• Drones now work better and are reabsorbed and after battle.
• You can see AI Eyes on the galaxy map, for easier planning of routes, now.

Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I've got a shortlist of items to work on from Badger, and hopefully I can get to the achievements and whatnot sooner than later. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time! The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-12-03 22:31:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Relatively small release, and honestly the largest improvements are to the metal flows detail screen. But something about hacking, and in particularly spire archives, always makes me think of this scene from Star Trek TNG. "I just love scanning for life forms" pops into my head in daily life much more often than I should probably admit. ;) So what's new in this one in general?

• Brownouts should now be more obvious in the interface when you're facing one of those. I still have some plans for making "really dire situations" way more obvious in the UI in general, but this is a solid step.
• The metal flow planning popup, as mentioned, is much improved yet again.
• Spire Archive Extraction hack now only takes 5 minutes at base, rather than 15 -- so at difficulty 10 it no longer takes (shudder) an HOUR.
• Units under construction take bonus damage from being shot, which should really adjust the flow of things quite a bit when you're trying to rebuild under fire, and in general fixes a balance issue/exploit that could be present.
• Other bugfixes and balance tweaks and visual polish.

Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those, particularly after such a large change as was required for the duplicate fleets stuff. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I'm definitely not going to be getting to my originally-planned todo list of achievements this week, simply because there have been more important things that folks have brought up instead, and we've been focusing on those. The achievements will hopefully be something I have time to get in next week, but some of that depends on what reports come in between now and then. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-11-18 23:04:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Lots of stuff in this one! Also, there's a new interview with me and Rob chatting over at the eXplorminate's podcast, if you're interested.

• There's a new option under the debug settings that lets you forcefully change the difficulty of the AIs if you want to, after having already started the game. Later on this will make it so that achievements aren't valid during that savegame if you use this sort of thing, but it's a nice tool to have if you're enjoying yourself but want to up (or down) the challenge belatedly without starting all over.
• Fixed a bunch of bugs, including a number of cross-threading ones that were relatively rare but definitely annoying when they happened.
• The hacking difficulty has been rebalanced a bit, to make it easier early on and harder later.
• A whole heck of a lot of balance changes in all sorts of areas of the game based on feedback, but let's highlight a few specific areas:
• Arks and Golems and "Lone Wolf" fleets are much easier to actually find sooner in the game. They're also cheaper (in AIP) to capture, and more powerful.
• Outguard can now be hired at no hacking cost, and all of them now have flagships, and in general they are all much stronger. Some can also be hired twice now!
• And then lastly, unrelated to balance, we did a lot of work to get the game to load mods a bit more gracefully, and to be able to load expansions (the first of which is now in the earliest stages of work), and to be able to have mods of expansions, etc.

Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those, particularly after such a large change as was required for the duplicate fleets stuff. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I'm definitely not going to be getting to my originally-planned todo list of achievements this week, simply because there have been more important things that folks have brought up instead, and we've been focusing on those. The achievements will hopefully be something I have time to get in next week, but some of that depends on what reports come in between now and then. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-11-14 22:38:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here.

• Some players have noted that they're able to deep-strike way into enemy territory with what feels like too little response from the AI. So... now the AI has a new AI Reserve force (in new campaigns only) that it can bring in to help defend its planets when it detects you deep-striking.
• A lot of the hacks in the game are now quicker to run (and thus also have a lower total output of scary AI ships as you do the hack), and they have either a lower or zero increasing cost for repeat use of a specific hack type. So this counterbalances things quite a bit, making certain hacks that were too hard to pull off before now possible.
• The time it takes to hack (and thus the scary ship count that results) now increases starting on difficulty 6 and up, rather than being the same on all difficulty levels. It's still lower on all difficulty levels than it was in the last two builds, but now there's more of a gradation depending on your chosen difficulty level.
• Engineers are faster at their jobs, and transports cost less metal.
• Fixed a variety of bugs, most of which were really rare things that only happen if you have a processor running at a certain very high speed (at least that seems to have been the common theme).

Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those, particularly after such a large change as was required for the duplicate fleets stuff. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I'm definitely not going to be getting to my originally-planned todo list of achievements this week, simply because there have been more important things that folks have brought up instead, and we've been focusing on those. The achievements will hopefully be something I have time to get in next week, but some of that depends on what reports come in between now and then. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-11-08 22:40:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Duplicate Ship Lines In One Fleet The marquee feature in this build is that you have full freedom with your fleets now to combine the same ship type into multiple slots of a single fleet if you want. Aka, if you have three lines of snipers or bombers, you can just slap those all in one fleet and order them around, now. This was a feature that people have been making some noise about for months, but it wasn't something I could figure out how to do from a technical standpoint. When I originally designed fleets, it assumed that there was always only a single line of a ship type per fleet -- why would we ever want to do it differently? Turns out there are a lot of reasons, and today I finally had an idea on how to solve it. That... didn't work at all. ;) But that quickly led to another idea, which worked out great. This was a huge set of changes throughout the codebase, so if you see anything funky with these, please do let us know. Bugfixes Galore! There are also a lot of bugfixes in here, including several things that were cross-threading race conditions. One of them was manifesting as a memory leak in certain savegames, on certain computers in particular, when the moon was just right, etc. All of the things we're aware of are now fixed up nicely at this point. Hey, Economy! Nice To See You Again! Were you feeling slightly... under-funded in the prior build in the very early game? Your starting structures now generate a more respectable baseline of metal again. There are also several techs that are now cheaper on the science front, making them a lot more attractive. And those watchman frigates of yours don't cost so darn much energy anymore. Please Do Report Any Issues! If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those, particularly after such a large change as was required for the duplicate fleets stuff. We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. I'm definitely not going to be getting to my originally-planned todo list of achievements this week, simply because there have been more important things that folks have brought up instead, and we've been focusing on those. The achievements will hopefully be something I have time to get in next week, but some of that depends on what reports come in between now and then. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-11-07 21:43:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. There are actually several releases in one here, since we had a few small ones we just posted about on the forums rather than making a full announcement. But we're back to where we'll be doing an announcement for each release again. This particular build... does a whole heck of a lot, good grief. The release notes are very long, so here are some highlights:

• Advanced Research Stations now give you a whole bunch of choices on which ship to gain for yourself without you having to spend hacking points every stinking time. This is super fun and gives you a lot more power.
• Advanced Research Stations can't merge ship lines anymore (people found that confusing), but before you get your pitchforks out -- some folks on Discord were inclined to head that direction...
• A whole new structure, Fleet Capacity Extenders, has been added. These let you double the ship cap of any strikecraft or frigate line in the fleet that hacks it. You get to choose the line you want to up the cap on, so it's way more powerful than the confusing ARS mechanic ever was. And these things are very plentiful. May your fleets be ever larger and prosper.
• Fleets themselves are now capped to just 5 lines across the board, and the custom fleets are both easier to use as well as being nerfed a bit.
• BUT now ALL of your fleets can have extra ships put into them to bring them up to 5 lines. That wasn't possible before, so you might be stuck on 1-3 lines forever on all but the custom fleets.
• The EXP mechanic now only works for mobile offensive fleets (this does include support fleets, but not citadels or battlestations or planetary fleets), and consequently it also only counts these types of fleets when calculating the penalty or bonus to EXP generation.
• Planetary fleets could get some serious exploity cheese happening with EXP leveling them up, so with that gone -- see above -- we now have the ability for you to spend science to upgrade a specific planet. It's powerful, but comes at a non-renewable-resource cost. We may have some more balance to do in this area (in fact that's all but guaranteed), but it's changed as conservatively as possible for now and should skew in your favor if anything.
• Minor factions can now be on their own teams with one another, if you want! So you can have the macrophage and nanocaust team up with one another versus you and the AI. Before the factions had to always hate everyone, ally to AI, or ally to the player. Now there's even more possibilities.

The number of balance improvements and UI improvements and bugfixes is just absurd, so here's a few highlights that may affect a lot of people in particular:

• Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots were doing way too much damage under certain specific conditions.
• Hovering over a save game in the Load menu will tell you how many times that save game has been loaded. So if you're stuck at a particularly hard spot then you'll get some feedback as to how hard it is.
• Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications).
• Zombification no longer works on Dyson ships, Dire Guardians and such things. It was kindof OP. But the old behaviour can be enabled as a Galaxy Setting.
• Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels. Yow. This should give a more proper challenge to the ultra-high-difficulty games.
• The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units.
• If your fleet outnumbers the AI "enough" on a planet then all the Guard Posts will release their ships so the ships can run away. Again, yow.
• AIP Floor is now increased by 35% of AIP gain, up from 20%. So you can't cheese the SuperTerminal so much.
• Reduced minimum and maximum unit type counts in the more thematic Fleets (i.e the ones with mass Fusion Bombers). This is incredibly synergistic inherently, with far more units in general too.
• Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers. It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.
• Income in general has been slashed from metal harvesters and economic command stations, as it was out of balance.
• Turrets are no longer quite so energy-hungry, as it was difficult to field all of them.
• Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships.
• Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority as a target, so the AI will be way smarter about dealing with them.
• A whole bunch of balance and tuning relating to hacking.

There's just a really huge amount of stuff in this one, it's pretty nuts. There's a lot more we want to do, and a lot of discussions I have had to put on hold for the last two days so that I could get some work done instead of gathering info like I was for most of the prior two weeks. I'm hoping that people playing the game on the really high difficulty levels will find things a lot more interesting now, particularly with some avenues of cheese closed off but also with more strategic options opened up at all difficulty levels. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-11-06 02:36:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This has been a very busy week! Personally I was doing semi-successful broadcasts of myself playing the game on Steam, and then the world's longest AMA on reddit, and originally before that just looking into a ton of correspondence with players and press, answering questions, etc. Meanwhile, Badger and Puffin have been going great guns with all the stuff they added to this new build. A lot of it is just general polish stuff that gets noticed as the player count increases -- and that stuff is definitely notable on its own. But there's also some new quick starts, an experimental revised pursuit targeting mode, and a bunch of revisions and improvements to the titular three AI structures. There are also a number of balance fixes, and a surprisingly high number of typos that nobody caught until now. The release has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-25 21:35:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Chris here! By any sane metric I can think of, AI War 2 shouldn't exist. And yet it's more than I ever imagined it could be. When we first set out to make this game three years ago, it was far less ambitious. Even that was going to be really hard. Somehow, in the process of falling down the stairs over and over again during this period, we wound up with a game that seems to be superior to the original. This game shouldn't exist, but it does, and I'm both proud and stunned.

The Secret? Community

The intro to this post runs the risk of sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, but it's not actually about me. I'm not capable of making -- even just designing -- this game on my own. I don't think anyone is, really. The fact that this game exists isn't a testament to me having some brilliant insight or a singular vision that I doggedly pursued. The reviews of the game are lovely, but give me entirely too much personal credit. The state of this game is thanks to dozens of people critically thinking about this game -- what this one and the original means to them and to others -- and then a process of relentless, continuous, arduous iteration and improvement.

MVP Award: BadgerBadger

This section is long, and in some ways tangential, but if you read it you'll understand why I've put it here so prominently. You have this guy to thank as much as me or Keith for this game existing. Badger has been involved since the kickstarter, with questions and comments and key insights. For a lot of the first year, he was responsible for something like 80% of the bug reports and feature ideas on our idea tracker. When a lot of other people were just bouncing off the game and waiting around for Keith LaMothe and I to figure things out on our own -- understandable, really -- Badger was there providing really key insight and ideas. But that was barely the start for him. After a while I was essentially like "so, do you just want source code access, given how much you're doing here?" Because he had started doing some mods -- nanocaust and macrophage, at the time, IIRC -- and it was clear he would be less hand-tied if he had more access. What happened next was essentially us getting a developer -- volunteer, no less -- who contributed as much to the design of the game as I did, in my opinion. Not only did he single-handedly conceive of and implement the nanocaust and macrophage, but he also did the dark spire and marauder impelementations, among many, many other things. Some of the most brilliant and devious things that the AI has in this game compared to the first one? Badger. Some of your favorite UI detail screens, like metal flows? Badger. Not to mention all the bugfixes, balance tweaks, and... just oodles more. This game wouldn't exist in anything like the state it does now without Badger. Any credit for my "singular vision" on the game is doing him a major disservice, but he's a quiet sort of guy when it comes to taking credit, so I wanted to take this chance to call him out in particular.

Growing Volunteer Developer Corps

So, Badger is not remotely the only person I need to call out as being absolutely indispensable. RocketAssistedPuffin has also been involved heavily for the last year plus, and has taken over huge numbers of things that I never would have had time for. After I implemented the new tech system one way, he's the one who figured out how to make it substantially more balanced. Most of the voluminous "balance change" sections on the release notes are from him working with other players or just reasoning things out himself. Puffin has also had a ton of ideas on how to make things better in all sorts of sections of the game, and there was a period of about three months late last year where he and Badger were basically doing ALL the development on the game and I just pushed out releases of what they were doing. I was going through a really painful divorce and had a ton of anxiety and couldn't face work, and these two kept things alive and improving. But it never stopped there. Those new tutorials you like? Puffin. I wrote the bulk of the "How To Play" in-game wiki sections, but the most basic and understandable ones for new players were... again, Puffin. I'm excellent at writing encyclopedic entries that fill you in on huge numbers of details, but he's the one who distilled "what's the most central stuff you need to know, as briefly as possible" so that people can actually get into the game in any reasonable timeframe. Compare his work here to the tutorials I did in the original game, and it's night and day. And I'm still selling Puffin short, frankly, because he's done so many things over such a long period that I can't remember it all now. More recently, we've had folks like WeaponMaster and Asteroid joining in and adding lots of bugfixes and quality of life improvements that I never would have had the time to do myself. Things like hovering over galaxy map links to see information on them were Asteroid. Endless tricky bugfixes were WeaponMaster. I'm selling them both short, but the release notes are filled with things that they either implemented or suggested or both. And it doesn't stop there. Quinn stepped in an made a bunch of additions. Keith laid the original groundwork for the entire game simulation and multithreading (he was the main programmer and designer for the first year and a half, and actually on staff during that time). And there were so, so many others. And more each month!

Volunteers Beat Modders, I Think

I'm pretty free with the source code access, because I'd rather have a consolidated community of people helping rather than a bunch of mods that you have to hunt down and find. So a lot of the folks that have turned into volunteers are what would have been modders on most other games. They would have made their own thing that you had to install and then wonder about the cross-compatibility of. This game does have a ton of moddability, and for anyone who wants to "just" be a modder, that's absolutely fine with me. But for a lot of the mods that are getting the most love, I'm happy to share source code access with those folks so that they're in no way hobbled, and so that their work can go out as additional content that every player can find via in-game options without having to hunt through Steam Workshop or whatever else. It's an unorthodox approach, but a lot more team-oriented and lets us do quality control on each others' stuff, "mods" included, which is a big win. If someone wants to steal the source code for this game, they can just decompile it like any other game for the most part. I'd rather put my trust in people and see things flourish rather than retain a stranglehold out of fear or pride.

What Did I Actually Do, Then?

All of this help from others let me focus on some of the really tricky architectural and design problems, which led to things like us even being able to HAVE a simulation of this size, and to have it perform as smoothly as it does. I got to build lots of mechanics that other people then actually turned into specific units. It also gave me time to focus on some really nagging problems that just made the early versions of the game... unpleasant. If I hadn't had the time to think and talk to people about all those things, we never would have seen all the game evolve this way; I would have been mired in content development and other items just to get the basics out for the game. The original design for this was something that Keith and I put together as a pair, but it only worked out so well. It was a good foundation, but needed... a lot of help. We both pushed that forward a lot, until the money situation got to the point where he (and all the other staff, eventually) had to step away, and I carried on "alone" (but with all those volunteers). There came a couple of major turning points where I was reflecting on why I was so unhappy with this game as it existed, and listening to the various gripes that playtesters had, and then I was able to spend a month or three implementing something drastically new. Fleets are the most notable of those, and they were initially met with a lot of mixed feelings and distaste because only part of my idea was there on the first public launch of those. Only in the last month or so has that feature completely come into its own, and that also had a lot to do with continuous feedback from people in early access telling me what they needed and what they did and didn't like. We also had a number of points during development where we just couldn't escape certain performance problems, because there were suddenly battles that were an order of magnitude larger than the first game (which was itself the largest strategy game simulation of individual units that I'm aware of on the market until this sequel). So I got to focus on a whole bunch of crazy improvements and data structure inventions and even GPU shader tricks in order to make all this stuff work. Without the rest of the community helping, there's no way I could have had time to work on all that sort of thing, even in three years of development. A game of this scope shouldn't run this well -- it shouldn't be possible -- but it is because I was given the gift of time by so many others.

A Decade In The Making

It has been 10 years to the day since the first AI War came to Steam, and it's been 3 years of developing this sequel. We didn't do any work on any AI War games from late 2014 through late 2016, but the rest of that time has been spent at least partly working on the original game or this sequel. From version 5.0 of the original game through version 8.0, Keith was pretty much the sole developer on that while I focused on other things. He built out a ton of creative and clever things that made a return in this game, and also pushed the concept of what the AI could be -- adding in some traditional decision-tree style logic in places in addition to the more decentralized-style AI that I had come up with back in 2009. That one that originally made waves on slashdot and reddit and hackernews and so on. I've worked as the producer and design lead on this sequel, among my many other roles, and so the fact that there seems to be a "singular vision" is hopefully a sign that I did a good job in that role. But the degree to which this is a product of dozens of people's work, over an extremely long period of time, really can't be understated. That's what I meant all the way back at the start. This sort of thing shouldn't have happened. It's just so... unlikely. A ton of people came together over a decade and helped make something unlike anything else on the market. That's before even getting into other major (former) staff contributors like Daniette "Blue" Shinkle doing the vast majority of the art and coming up with the way-prettier style of ship that evolved AFTER the kickstarter, the awesome score by Pablo Vega, and 25 voice actors who did a fantastic job as various humans and the AI. And good grief, I'd be remiss not to mention Erik and Craig and all the other folks at Indie Bros, who helped manage so many aspects of this game, as well as often doing work like helping clean up voice lines, etc.

A Few Common Questions

If you're interested in what is coming in the very short term, there's a post for that. Similar if you want to know what the plan is for multiplayer. For kickstarter backers (or anyone else who is curious), there's an FAQ as well as roadmap of stuff for the next few quarters relating to kickstarter stretch goals. And I just have to once-again plug this awesome After Action Report by zeusalmighty.

My Deepest Thanks

I never wanted to make this game, because I didn't think I could. The original AI War seemed to be the high water mark of my career, and I spent a lot of time trying to make peace with that. But when the market shifted in 2015 and 2016 and finances started getting tight, it became clear that returning to the game that started it all was what made the most sense. Thanks to all of the kickstarter backers for believing that we even COULD build this game. Keith and I felt like we could do something that would make you happy, but probably not something that would top the original. It took two extra years of development and an enormous village of people to make THAT a reality. So thanks to everyone for their patience and support during that time. I also want to say a big thanks to everyone for their understanding during my divorce, which happened shortly after entering Early Access for this game. That made everything so much harder, and took me out of commission for a full three months or so where I just couldn't work much. I had to learn how to be me again, and come to terms with being a dad with shared custody rather than a full-time father, and all of that was incredibly hard. But the good news is that, as has happened with this game itself, a lot of things in my personal life have turned out unexpectedly, improbably well in the last year. After deciding to date again (after 18 years off the market, wow), I wound up meeting the woman who is now my fiance surprisingly quickly (all things considered). Kara and her daughter have made my entire world so much richer than I realized it could be, and my son finally has the sister he's wanted for so much of his life. I feel incredibly fortunate, and a lot of my ability to get back to work and not crumble under the weight of anxiety and expectations for this game were thanks to Kara's support and presence. The reality of her life as a doctor and surgeon also helps to kind of put my own work into perspective, sometimes, in the best way. However this turns out financially, and despite my anxieties about my future as a game developer, I'm incredibly proud of what we've all created together, and I feel surrounded by all the right people both at work and outside of work. This has been the hardest three year period of my life, but the end result has all been worth it. Thanks to everyone, and I hope you enjoy the game -- both what it is now, and what's to come. Very Best, Chris

[ 2019-10-22 15:36:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. The actually go-live time isn't until 11am EST tomorrow morning (the 22nd), but we're going ahead and pushing out this version now to make sure that everything is A-OK in advance. We actually did a small build on Friday that introduced the hacking log, but it was a small one. Both of these add some various polish, balance, and bugfix items that are definitely cool. We'll do a more full post about the actual game launching when that happens tomorrow, but for now this is just the... basic notes. It's a very exciting and nerve-wracking milestone! More to come soon. Enjoy! Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd! We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game? There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-21 23:10:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Yesterday we actually did a small hotfix version that had a number of cool things in it, but they were small enough that I didn't post about it here. So hence the version jump of two. What's new between the two of these?

• There's a really cool new "Helping Hands" quick start in the Basics category, which basically sets you up with powerful human and alien allies that do most of the heavy lifting for you. It's a fun way to get in and play the game... kind of while NPC allies basically really do all the work. Aka it makes it a low-stress way to have someone just come in and experience things. Perfect for reluctant SOs, people who just want to play around with things, and so on.
• Yesterday's hotfix had a number of bugfixes, some centering around repeat plays of audio clips being excessive.
• Today has even more fixes, including some bugs that could rear up in the tutorials in an inopportune way.
• With some absolute-minimum-system-requirements hardware on linux, it was possible to get some funkiness in the latest versions of the game, so we tried to address that or at least give workarounds (adding Vulkan support in addition to just OpenGL). On OSX we also started supporting Metal as an option.
• Some minar speeling and gramr mistakes have been fixed in the tutorials. (Yes, I'm a dad. Sorry!)
• The credits screen now includes all 3048 of the kickstarter backers, categorized and alphebetized so that they can find their name (assuming they didn't go anonymous).
• There are several UI improvements to make things more clear, particularly when a flagship is hacking and thus can't leave the current planet.
• Also the multiplayer "menu" no longer opens a menu with sub-options saying "coming soon." Instead it pops open a text window with a short TLDR of when multiplayer is coming and then a long-winded explanation of why for people who want to find that out without having to go to the forums on our site or Steam.
• Several new options have been added for controlling things like other factions generate AIP or threat.
• Several hacks now cost a lot fewer hacking points, making them more attractive.
• The AI now gains some reinforcement cap at higher AIPs on difficulties over 5.
• Oh, and there was a nasty bug that is fixed in this build that could cause AI killing stacks to make the counterattack numbers go up WAY inappropriately much. So that was what some of those difficulty spikes were that a few people experienced, starting in the recent press build.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd! We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game? There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-17 00:48:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. After three long years, we're finally at the point where we're ready to start showing this off to the press in a non-preview fashion. This build does still have some bugs and some rough edges, but they're minor in the main and we have a week to finish up that sort of thing along with achievements. As a mostly one-man shop now (plus awesome volunteers who keep increasing in number) there's only but so much lead time I can give, and I wind up feeling like I want every last everything to be perfect. As it stands we have about a week until 1.0, and I'm really pleased with how things feel. Seems like our growing list of players are, too, from the sound of things. So that's good! What's new in this build?

• We finally have AI taunts in the game! This was something people really liked in the first game (when the AI says something mean to you when it does something clever or you do something stupid), and that has returned in a major way. In the first game I think we had a dozen, maybe two dozen, taunts in total. Now there are over two hundred.
• Ships can now load into transports from other planets (traveling to the planet of the transport first of course).
• Awesome new quick start scenario by community member Nuc_Temeron. We love the clever things you folks think up, and are always interested in including things like this for players to experiment with.
• More tutorial tweaks, thanks to Puffin.
• Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet.
• A whole bunch of bugfixes, some of the most significant ones relating to the new ability to select and control fleets from the galaxy map. That should now work properly in all cases, and not have the selection/hover issues it did briefly.
• Also some bugfixes to the metal usage reports, so that's more accurate.
• The energy usage in the resources bar can now be clicked and gives you a detailed breakdown of where you're earning and spending energy! This is... a surprisingly big win, in terms of making it clear what the state of your empire is.
• Bunches of improvements to the "strong against" version of the R-click view, to make it more correct and clear.
• New icons for the tech menu!
• Lower difficulty levels (less than or equal to 5) now have a variety of things making them easier than before. There were definitely some complaints about it still being too hard at those lower levels.
• Also a fix to make dire guardians appear properly, and some of the guard posts on the planets that would have dire guardians no longer be hyper-aggressive towards you. So this should make deep-striking a lot easier in the late game in particular, and thus help with some of the difficulty that a few people were reporting.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd! We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game? There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-15 01:16:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. More refinement, and one major new feature. First let's talk about the smaller stuff:

• The science menu is looking better, with more icons on there.
• The standing order buttons now show their hotkeys for you.
• There's a new "flagship movement mode" control option for all your mobile flagships and battlestations. This lets them either ignore or obey things like pursuit mode -- it's circumstantial which you'd prefer, per fleet, so an option was warranted.
• There's a new "tutorial" which basically is just directing you to the extended in-game "how to play" stuff, which sometimes people were otherwise missing.
• Dyson Antagonizers now come in over time, so you have a chance to deal with them before they start causing trouble.
• The AI taunts are all processed and split out by Pablo, and we're working on integrating those and choosing the best takes. Some more voice lines by the chief of staff (lady talking to you as things happen) are coming early next week. Actually, technically both will be integrated around then.
• Oh, there's also a new tip under the modding section that explains how to make your own Quick Starts, which is both super easy as well as something we figure a lot of non-modders may want to choose to do for themselves or to share with others.
• Now, on to the big one:

Custom Fleets (Aka the Remedy For Control Groups) The release notes for these are here. Essentially there are now 9 new fleets, each with 7 empty slots, that you can build off the sidebar of any of your command stations. Three are cloaked, three are fast, and three are regular. What are you going to do with those new fleets? Well... anything you want! Including nothing, frankly. So, here's the problem we solved with this:

• Essentially, sometimes people wanted to have really specialized fleets. As in, a fleet with all cloaking stuff, or one with all melee stuff, or whatever.
• And even though you can swap ship lines between fleets you capture, that doesn't guarantee you'll have enough slots or enough ship lines of the right type to make a full fleet.
• So a fair number of people were either wanting old-style control groups, where you can just make arbitrary groups of ships from across any fleets; OR they were wanting sub-fleets.

Why not just do one of those two things?

• The problem with old-style control groups is that a lot of the UI conveniences and automation just doesn't function with that. I thought I had a solution that would let me do something along those lines, but it was going to be really messy to set up as a player.
• The problem with sub-fleets is that that adds another level of indirection, and greatly complicates the UI. Really you don't need your melee ships to also be part of the larger fleet of "whatever they were in," if you want your melee ships to be assigned to a unique control binding and ordered around as a unit; you just need them to be in a new organizational unit all on their own. Aka, a new custom fleet, a new bucket, but previously there were not enough buckets.

Is this some sort of temporary workaround?

• No! Fleets are meant to be the primary organizational units of your stuff in AI War 2.
• This solution basically gives you some blank organizational units that you can use to subdivide your forces further than you used to be.
• In other words, it keeps to the ethos of the organizational style of the game -- which has a LOT of UI advantages to make your life easier -- while at the same time giving you more control.

Why have nine possible blank fleet templates?

• This is per-player in multiplayer, and based on how people tend to play this should be more than enough subdivision. With 7 slots in each one, you can make three separate cloak-themed fleets (maybe one is etherjet tractors, the others are more strike-oriented?) if you need to.
• That's HUGE, because it allows you to cover three different fronts with just cloaked units alone.
• Then you have three that have fast flagships, typically for raiding or melee or some other units that need to move around the map quickly.
• And then you have three that are just... "whatever." They're average flagships, and you can do whatever you need to with them.
• When you pair that with all the various flagships you pick up over the course of the game, you ought to really be able to customize things as much as you could possibly want, even when fighting on several fronts at once.

Isn't it a pain in the butt to have to manually configure fleets like this just for control groups?

• You could make that argument, but honestly I think this is LESS of a pain in the butt. Here's why:
• If you're just needing a really quick selection of things like "all the melee units on the planet I'm looking at," we already added hotkeys for things like that. For ad-hoc selection of ships at the local area, using things like C+M to select all the melee ships will more than cover you. It's by far the fastest thing.
• So the only real purpose of "control groups" in this sense is for NON-ad-hoc situations: aka long-term permanent or semi-permanent groupings of forces.
• Given that a lot of the big complexities that old control groups had that fleets solve revolve around "what happens when ships die and get recreated into the fleet," we get to bypass those complexities with the custom fleets just like we do with any other fleet.
• If we did custom control groups again, we'd be right back into the boat of things like "does this get automatically selected if it's created under xyz circumstances," etc.
• And what we found through lots of playtesting is that players were constantly surprised by the answer to questions like that regardless of what we chose to have the logic be. It just had too many edge cases, whereas fleets are always really predictable in how they are selected and how ships inside them act.
• You can also name fleets, unlike control groups, which is pretty handy. So you can have something like your "North Melee" group if you want to, and even if you've got that bound to a control group or not, you can easily remember what that thing is for (for now) and rename it again if you need to.
• Plus all the other conveniences with fleets, like changing around build orders, having higher ship marks from a fleet that has gained levels via fleet EXP, and so on. There's a bunch of stuff this keeps you having access to, and it also keeps the interface for managing that all the same across the board.
• I do realize that it's different from the control groups that you're used to in a lot of other RTS games, but no other RTS game has this huge number of units in it, nor the rapid recreation of units, nor the need to split your units over such a wide space. There are some others that come close on some or all of those fronts (Stellaris, Sins, AI War 1), but none of them really match what's going on here if there are a bunch of factions and you've got a ton of fleets and are fighting galaxy-wide while defending yourself.
• The bottom line is that we had to invent something a bit new in order to get at what you want out of the behaviors of fleets and units, and to keep micromanagement down, and yet to give you customization at the same time.
• When I think about this, I think about it kind of like the city management screens in Civ IV; those start out a bit automated, but you can swap things around as needed. And that could be tedious if you had to do it all the time, but you're usually setting up a given city for a very long time (or at least a middle-tier timeline) when you make changes to it. So their management screens wind up being the most efficient way to handle the setup, despite the fact they're different from what other games did before Civ IV.
• Anyway, since I know there will be at least a few people who are put off by the fact that this is different, I wanted to explain the reasoning for this, as well as note that we've explored all the alternatives. There's nothing else that we've considered or been pitched so far that is remotely so clean, that respects your time, that communicates to you so clearly, and gives you the flexibility that you've been asking for. Hope you guys like it. :)

More to come soon. Enjoy! Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd! We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game? There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-12 01:18:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. More refinement! Lots of good stuff here.

• The intel sidebar has a bunch of colorization improvements, as well as difficulty estimates based on things like what ships are at the planets on the way to the objective. These sorts of things really should help new players (and frankly, anyone) choose ideal targets. Huge kudos to Badger for thinking of and implementing this.
• Logistical command stations now automatically watch adjacent planets to them, now further differentiating them from military and economic command stations -- as well as making it so that you don't have to spend hacking points to watch every planet on your hinterland.
• There's a fifth tutorial in place now, thanks to Puffin, as well as some improvements to the existing ones. Please do keep up with the feedback on these, we really appreciate it. And I did notice folks starting in and adding in guides in the wiki -- DemocracyDemocracy in particular -- so huge thanks there, too!
• Fixed a fairly long list of bugs and minor balance issues.
• Added three new ship variants, two of which are new citadel types.
• A variety of galaxy map improvements and other ui improvements, including the control group number still being visible but no longer replacing the count of contents in the fleet leaders.

As an aside, I've been personally having a rough time coming up on this release, so a lot of this content is developed by the volunteers (ever increasing in number, to my extreme gratitude). I haven't been nearly as productive this week as I'd have liked, although I do tend to discount things like marketing work and whatnot as not being "real work," so some of it's just that. But there's a very palpable sense of fear that I have coming into this release, just because... well, it's been a rough few years, and the market is so saturated now, and the original game was something that people loved so much and expected us to surpass with this title. It feels like expectations are super high, the noise in the market is super high, and I have no idea if that will translate into actually being able to make a living making games again; I say "again," because despite laying off all the staff, I haven't been break-even (let alone profitable) on making games for... oh, four years now, I suppose. That's hard. So I'm really heartened by all the various positive Steam reviews lately and over the last year, and I'm hoping the press has a similar reaction. I'm heartened by all the folks saying how they are finally feeling like the sequel is so much better than the original, and personally I agree, but it's hard to not let people for whom the sequel doesn't live up to their expectations set up camp in my head. I knew going into this that I could never please everyone, but the question is if I can please enough people, and keep pleasing them over time with more free additions and paid expansions, that I get to keep doing my dream job. Right now I don't have an answer to that, and I won't until the 22nd, so it's setting off my anxiety something fierce. To compensate, I'm trying to get enough sleep, focus on specific tasks ]that I know need doing rather than the big picture, and in general just tidy up. It doesn't help that the Early Access release last year was by all accounts a big success and then I immediately got asked for a divorce and things spiraled down for a few months where I couldn't work. Things are incredibly much better now, and I'm actually really grateful for the turn my life took despite that temporary huge hardship, but that stuff still gets into parts of my brain and sits there. You know, I'd really like to do this for a long time. It's been 10 years so far. I'd enjoy just making a living and making more games for another 10 or 20 or even 30 years. Hopefully with a lot less stress than the first 10 years had. Fingers crossed. Things honestly look to be heading that way, but it's hard not to be worried about it nonetheless. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-11 02:02:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Mostly this one is about refinement, but it has some major quality of life additions on the galaxy map, most of those thanks to Asteroid.

• You can now adjust the scale of icons on the galaxy map (this one I added), and the default is a bit bigger. The smaller size was nice last version, but a little TOO squint-causing on most monitors. Now the default is larger and you can tune to taste.
• You can now hover over the links between planets and see intel about them, which explains all the various things that you otherwise had to memorize (why a dashed line, why red, etc, etc). Huge thanks to Asteroid for implementing this.
• Also, linkages that are having an actual wormhole wave coming now show up with an animation. Again thanks Asteroid!
• Nanocaust ships and Macrophage ships can now stack! Hooray for performance in those games that have those factions in huge numbers. Big thanks to Badger, this required a hefty extension to the core mechanics there.
• The stacking code was not working well at ALL with transports, causing all sorts of problems. Thanks to a lot of folks for help there, but particularly to WeaponMaster for figuring out the problem areas.
• The colors of some of the factions are now clearer in the quick starts -- big thanks to Puffin for that one.
• Several other bugfixes, balance tweaks, UI improvements, quick start improvements, and so on thanks to all of the above folks. Everybody has been really busy. Thanks all!

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-07 23:19:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Oh good grief this one is huge. From one day's work, too. Let's get down to it! The Title Feature: Commanding From The Galaxy Map Okay, so a funny thing happened when I added fleets to the game a few months ago: people started expecting to be able to select them on the galaxy map. It was a completely natural thing to expect, but it wasn't something I'd ever thought of, and the first game certainly didn't work like that (ships didn't even appear on the galaxy map). I also didn't realize for a while how crippling it felt not to have this ability. To be able to SEE those fleets of yours, but then you click them and it just does... nothing. The galaxy map had always been for information, and generally the ships shown there were for enemy structures you might consider capturing. What was to interact with? Until fleets. So, yes: now we have the ability to select fleets, drag a band-box around them, use alt and shift for subtractive and additive selection, and so on. This all pairs nicely with the cross-planet move orders stuff that Badger has done more recently. You can't issue direct attack or assist orders from the galaxy map at the moment, and I'm not sure I want to add that. Generally the things shown are your own fleets and then enemy capturables; rarely something of an enemy that you'd want to directly attack. Even if it is something you'd directly attack, it's usually something defended by a bunch of other stuff you should deal with first rather than charging directly at. What you can do is select stuff with ease from the galaxy map, and then click over to a planet (double click takes you in), and then right-click to move to a specific spot on the planet or give an attack order there. OR you can select stuff on the galaxy map, and give them move orders at a planetary level from there. Will we need more refinement on this? Almost certainly. I imagine there are various modifiers and conveniences people will be looking for. But this is a huge step up already, so we'll slot those other things in as we have time. I'm mostly probably going to be gunning for the sidebar and for achievements, next, personally. Galaxy Map Visuals It's not quite an overhaul, per se... but everything feels very different now. You can see more ship icons at each planet, but they aren't as large and in the way. Planets themselves are smaller. There are dotted lines between enemy planets and your planets where they can't attack you via wormholes (wow this feels amazing to see). The way planets are selected looks better, and their text is positioned and sized better. You can see selected fleets on the galaxy map even if you didn't select them directly here. You can see what kind of command stations you've built on each planet at a glance based on the planet icon. The intel tab highlights just the specific relevant planet for the thing you might want to capture or hack, not ALL the things of its type. You can hover over the planet/local/ships tab icons again and highlight which planets have THOSE things. Oh, yeah: and the galaxy map stays where you put it. Zoom and positioning and so on, as you move between planets, rather than recentering you over and over again. Wow that one feels huge, too. Hey, We Have Four Tutorials Now! I actually feel like this is a big disservice that I'm only getting to this at this point in the release notes. This is huge news! We do have more tutorials needed, and the last two of these in particular are hot off the presses and Puffin was feeling as tired as I am I think, so please be understanding of that and helpful in your feedback. But boy, this is such a huge relief to me, personally, to have some solid tutorials in there again. We've had the written "How to Play" bits, but some people just want the interactive stuff. I get that, so now we have both. Video tutorials will come soon, but I've kinda lost my voice at the moment and I'd rather have all the new GUI improvements and general quality of life improvements in there. I really have to say, enormous thanks to Puffin on this. Badger took the hit the first time around and did the very big long tutorial that was available at the start of Early Access. And it was good! People seemed to really like it. But then I went and Changed Everything (tm) with fleets and so on, and the tutorial that he made just became about 80% obsolete. This time around, Puffin has stepped up and saved my bacon and is doing a series of smaller bite-size tutorials on the same general subjects, but in the new mechanical framework of the game. Back when Badger added the first one, we could only HAVE one tutorial, so he had to make his big and cover all the stuff. But from a design standpoint, we decided this time around it made much more sense to have smaller bite-size ones on specific topics so that people could skip the bits they already understand, or don't want to learn about right now... or revisit some specific topic they forgot, as the case may be. Thanks to Puffin, I'm able to work on all these things like the galaxy map improvements while he's doing those tutorials. And frankly, I'm not the best one for explaining the game since I know it so well and tend to be either too detailed or not detailed enough. I did the tutorials for the first game -- AI War Classic -- and everyone has been raving about how much better Badger's ones were for AI War 2. This makes sense to me, but has tended to add to my anxiety when trying to do tutorials myself. Not that I wouldn't have done them... but boy it has been a huge relief to have someone else do that so that I could focus on concrete polish stuff. Bugfixes, Balance, and UI Improvements! There's a hefty number of these, too! Badger and Asteroid and I have been busy, and WeaponMaster has pointed out several things for this one after sifting through code, too. The strength/weakness code gives a more succinct and readable result now, and more changes are planned -- thanks Asteroid! Decollision has had a few things fixed up, thanks to items WeaponMaster found. NRSirLimbo made some excellent suggestions that led to Badger finding some substantial bugs in the metal tracking code, and that also lets you view metal flows while paused. And... a bunch of other little stuff. This release was nuts. I'm really happy with where the game is getting to. Puffin also did a bunch of internal achievements work that isn't visible yet because I have yet to do the UI for it, but that was also a big win. I'm heading off for the weekend, now, so hopefully folks enjoy! Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted! We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too. Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions. I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles. But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting. It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing. Back Monday! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-05 02:34:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one has a lot of little UI improvements, many of which center around hotkeys.

• Some of the sidebar hotkeys are more natural now (F for fleets, etc).
• A number of the controls in the controls configuration menu have been recategorized or clarified.
• You can now hold the R key while looking at ship stats in order to see either the strengths or weaknesses of that ship type versus other ship types. This is a preliminary sort of thing, but it's something a lot of people have been wanting and getting started with it is good. Big thanks to Asteroid for that!
• The mercenaries have been renamed to Outguard instead, and coming up before too long we're going to be changing how they work. Basically to make them both more thematic (end of the world for humans we'd see more natural cooperation, seems like), and something that people use more frequently.
• Ships should hopefully no longer wiggle back and forth when they're doing slight kiting movements.
• You can now tell if an AI has a warp gate adjacent to a planet of yours based on the thickness of the line between your planet and theirs.

Overall this was a pretty small release, but it lays the groundwork for more stuff coming soon. Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted! We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too. Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions. I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles. But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting. It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing. Other Fixes And Improvements There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-03 23:11:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one actually has some key bugfixes as well, including a change to how stacks work that really has an enormous impact on balance. The AI may be too weak now, since more of your shots actually hit stacks now since that bug was fixed. There are also some new hotkeys for placing multiple ships at once when constructing them, and some on-screen indicators for what those hotkeys are when you go into build mode. We've also built out a TON of the stuff for the tutorial framework itself, although there's still plenty more to do. But we did get enough that... First Tutorial Is Ready! This is a very small tutorial that just focuses on how to move around and things like that, but it's similar to what was in the old tutorial (for this game) as part of a larger tutorial. This version is a little bit cleaner and slightly more informative since we're able to cover more in more steps with less work, and we were able to easily adjust it to do some colorization to aid in readability. But one thing that's really notable here is that this is a micro-tutorial on a specific topic, by design. This way we can have a variety of small tutorials of this sort that are topical and that you don't have to play again and again (or even at all) if you want to skip ahead a bit. In talking to folks, it became clear that they really want to be able to just "get on with things," and that means different things to different people. So by making it really seamless and convenient and a series of micro tutorials, we're able to hopefully meet the desires of a lot of you at once. And of course we'll also do some videos later on, kind of in a Let's Play style. And we have the in-game wiki with lots of written explanations already. And the game is full of tooltips to help you contextually learn in general. So hopefully whatever your learning style is, we'll be hitting it. We don't want anyone to feel forced into a style of tutorial they don't like (whether that's reading, interactive, or video; everyone seems to want different things, which is okay). Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted! We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too. Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions. I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles. But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting. It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing. Other Fixes And Improvements There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-03 01:54:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. The visual look of the game is pretty notably different, in the sense that the whole affair looks more "serious" now. The borders of icons are thinner, and the saturation is 80% of what it used to be (by default). If you want the saturation back up bright and cheery (or even more gloomy), then you can adjust those values in settings. If your monitor is extra bright or dark compared to a baseline, you can also now adjust the general brightness up and down. These settings affect the entire screen, GUI included, so this keeps the colors consistent between the GUI and the playing field, which is really nice. Cross-Planet Move Orders So you have a group of ships selected that are on multiple planets. Some of them are on planet A with you, and others are on planets B and C. You want to issue a move order to a specific spot on planet A and have them all go there. This now works. Previously, the ships on planets B and C would just ignore the orders. This is something people always wanted in AI War Classic, and is finally now possible thanks to Badger implementing that here (though Keith and I did lay a lot of groundwork, we never took it this final critical step). This also means that you can have ALL your ships off on some other planet(s), visit a hostile enemy planet, and queue up movement orders on their planet... and your ships will route there and then keep going. This should also work for attack orders, but there may be some issues with that at the moment. Thinking about it right now, I think that potentially if there's an attack order against a ship that is not on the current planet, then it treats that as an invalid order and clears it out (normally that's a good thing if your target ship runs away from the planet you are trying to attack it on). I am guessing we just need to make it say something along the lines of "if there are wormhole orders, then treat all orders after those orders as valid no matter what" in order to solve this issue. Anyway, so we're making good progress, but there are still nits and things here and there. Tutorials Speaking of making progress, our tutorial engine is coming along swimmingly. There really aren't as many TYPES of conditions for progressing tutorial stages as I had once been thinking there were. A lot of them involve "go to this place" or "look at this thing" or "build some specific things" or "kill some specific things." All of that is able to be generalized pretty darn well, which will be my main task for tomorrow. The tutorial framework is practically complete except for that particular element, in terms of the truly core components. There will be more that we want to add over time, but by the end of tomorrow I think we'll have enough conditions and whatnot in place that we can recreate what the old tutorial used to be if we wanted to (not that that tutorial makes sense anymore, given it was pre-fleets and teaches a lot of things that no longer exist). Among other improvements to the tutorial framework (such as making it all xml-driven and VASTLY easier to update and create tutorials), you also now have to click the tutorial text to advance it to the next step, rather than it advancing without you just because you meet the conditions. That was endlessly confusing for people in the past. Don't get me wrong, there will be plenty of latent requests for the tutorial system that I'm sure I'll be adding for months, so I don't expect to be done tomorrow or something. But being able to hit a big baseline goal like that so quickly -- ability to recreate the old tutorial if it made sense now -- is a definite win in my book. Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted! We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too. Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions. I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles. But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting. It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing. Other Fixes And Improvements There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-10-02 01:29:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. There are a variety of interface improvements in this one, and some small bits of balance updates. The quick starts are also completely reworked and should be more favorably balanced for new players to not have them get overwhelmed. Tutorials On the tutorial front, right now we're still building the tooling for our tutorials/scenarios system. This is a fully xml-driven system, so anyone can create a tutorial with just a text editor and no code experience whatsoever. There's a starting example that I've created that doesn't do much except show off how to do the various stuff. With this build of the game, the ability to fully design your own map starting state, complete with factions and what and where their ships are, is now in place. That's the end of part 1 of the tutorial/scenario framework, because everything stems from that original map design. The next part is actually building a tutorial in that space which progresses along, etc. The next part is a lot more time-consuming and something that we'll likely be adding little bits to for months or years as people want new things added in, but the ability to have a general scenario with a set of goals that you have to achieve to win, and the ability to trigger certain things like waves from the AI, should be relatively quick to get in there. A lot of things that get into more advanced scripting of things like AI behavior we wouldn't want to do, anyway -- this is still meant to be the same general game, of course. But for the easier tutorials, making it so that you don't have a wave coming until AFTER you hit some milestone is certainly a big deal. Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted! We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too. Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions. I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles. But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting. It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing. Map Generation Overhaul While I was at this in terms of working on the tutorial map design components, I also redesigned how the map generation components worked in general. Before if you had a low number of planets and a middling or high number of factions, the map generation process could throw errors about there not being enough room to seed all the things it needed to seed. That was confusing, and then even in other situations it could be rather bland with only one thing of importance on any given planet; you rarely would see a big mean weapon and a big good capturable on the same planet, and you'd never see a big good capturable and a small minor capturable on the same planet. The new system is a lot more flexible and it should be practically impossible to get the confusing error messages anymore on map generation. Instead it just absolutely packs the planets that are there with all the things it is trying to seed, and in general the maps are going to feel a bit more... varied and patchwork now, rather than quite as homogeneous as before. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-30 21:50:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. The graphics for ships and structures being incomplete was one of our biggest bugbears... since forever, really. We always were adding more ships and structures faster than we could do graphics for them. It's been well over a year since I've done any new ship visuals, because my focus was elsewhere, but in the last week it's been time to tidy all that up in preparation for our 1.0 launch on (tentatively) October 22nd; and that includes revised trailers and screenshots, of course. More than just adding a bunch -- 80ish -- of new ship and structure visuals (and overhauling the lighting and bloom on all the rest of them about a week ago), this particular build also vastly improves the quality of the background planet visuals by moving them to updated shaders, adjusting their levels, and so on. I made some improvements to the planet visuals back during the "lighting and darkness" release, but this is a whole other level of improved. Other stuff:

• There's only one bugfix in this build, which is hilariously little in terms of that sort of thing, but you can see where our focus has been. We'll be returning to interface, bugfixes, and tutorials now that the visuals are done.
• There are four new ship variants (Ram, Fusion Saw, Kite, and Ion Disruptor) now in the game.
• There are some other moderate balance tweaks, such as spider units being a lot more effective, weapon jamming ships working a lot more effectively and efficiently, forcefield guardians having a forcefield of any notable size, and a few other bits.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-27 16:47:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Release Date For 1.0 Coming Up! We're closing in on an official date for launch of 1.0! At this point we're tentatively thinking October 22nd, which would be the 10 year anniversary of AI War Classic arriving on Steam. I suddenly feel very old, thinking about how large a span of time that is; when I was younger I remember thinking the gap in time between Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander was unthinkable, but that was... literally also a 10 year gap. So that date seems very fitting, and it seems like a good spot in the market, and it seems like it would give us enough time to get all our ducks in a row as far as 1.0 being fully up to snuff goes. Note that this isn't 1000% firm of a date yet, so this isn't a full announcement, but it's a heads up. Now... About This Actual Release?

• There are actual ship graphics now for 35 new ships and structures that were just using repeat stuff. This has been on my todo list since May 2018, so that's a pretty big win. Huge thanks to Puffin for making this go so much faster.
• There's another batch of ship graphics almost as large coming this week still, plus the macrophage and parasites need some more work out of this current batch, and there's a whole host of improvements to the planet visuals in the backgrounds coming this week, too. Then we can start taking final trailer footage and final screenshots, hopefully.
• The balance of the Dark Spire has been adjusted a TON, to make it so that they are less likely to come kick your butt for reasons unrelated to you actually doing badly. There were too many little side things that you had no control over that were feeding the Vengeance Generators energy, but no longer. Thanks to Badger for solving this, and as he put it, "thanks to NRSirLimbo for a spirited lament." In seriousness from both of us, it's exactly the sort of thing we need when it comes to factions and whatever other sort of balance.
• The tech unlock hack no longer charges you science, which was a whoopsie. Thanks to WeaponMaster for fixing that!
• Badger has also been working on the Intel menu, working adding color and so forth to make that more readable and less overwhelming.
• Queued wormhole orders can also now be seen on the galaxy map in the style of AIWC... although this seems to have uncovered an actual bug with queued wormhole orders themselves, so any reports that can help us find a way to repro that and nail that bug are appreciated.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-24 14:11:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one is focused on further refinement.

• When you first load up the game, the messages are now thematic and/or humorous. I particularly enjoy that the computer calculates the odds, briefly panics, and then institutes a calming routine. Depending on how fast your hard drive is, and how long it's been since you last ran the game (and thus cached a lot of it in part of your folder), you'll get to see more or fewer of those.
• There are two new major hacks for ARSes: one to re-roll the contents, and another to convert it into science.
• Structures you place can't self-build anymore if their fleet leader isn't present and functional (excepting fleet leaders themselves!). This prevents several exploity things players could do.
• You can C-click any flagship now, and if it's one that you can normally manage it gets you into the fleet management screen directly. SUPER extra convenient, for sure.
• The fleet management screen now has a button letting you load or unload transports by clicking instead of just having to know the hotkeys.
• The fleet management screen now has the long-requested feature to scrap all the distant units (not on the same planet as the flagship), which is particularly useful when uprooting and moving battlestations and citadels around.
• A bunch more range circles are now shown, and are colorized to tell you what they are. You can more easily stay out of gravity or tractor range by actually seeing those now, etc.
• A ton of new keybinds have been added for quickly selecting all your snipers, melee units, mobile flagships, battlestations, factories, cloaked units, and so on. This is planet-wide (like the mobile military selection one), and so is a quick way to select things across fleets that you would commonly want to select. If there are more such hotkeys that would be desirable, please throw those up on mantis for us to let us know!
• You can see how long a hack will take right on the hacking menu, now.
• A number of bugfixes have been put in.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-13 21:25:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This release is very notable! We've had a lot of those, lately. C-Clicking things to learn more. It used to be that if there was a bunch of information about a group of ships, then you just got the names of the ships and not really any details. That was... quite a pain in some cases. Suppose you see a new fleet that you might want to capture, but it just is telling you it has ships X Y and Z in there, and you don't really have descriptions for a couple of those? You'd just have to gamble with them, or use prior knowledge you'd picked up in past plays. Now you can hold C while you click the flagship of the fleet, and you then get a hugely-detailed screen with all the info on each ship in there. As usual, hold Ctrl for even MORE details in a tutorial-style fashion if you want them. This works in a variety of places, including incoming enemy wave warnings, AI guard posts full of reinforcements, and even tech upgrades for your ships. It always tells you in the tooltip when you can C-click, and I'm already personally wondering a bit how we ever lived without it. AI Aggressiveness There were a number of cases where the "press home an attack against a weak key target despite being outnumbered" or "push through a strong planet to a weak one" logic was just not kicking in with enough frequency. To the point that some folks thought it wasn't even on. These sorts of aggressive behaviors only kick in on difficulty 5 and up, but they become increasingly common starting at difficulty 7 now. Combat Factory Drones! These things now can actually defend themselves with some drones that are specific to each type of combat factory. Sweet! Astro Trains Majorly More Interesting In the original game Astro Trains were more annoying than anything else, so we made them optional and people mostly ignored them. In this sequel, Astro Trains were mostly bland and they are optional and so people have mostly ignored them; we're not short for interesting factions. The thing is, astro trains are a really cool platform for a lot of potentially-very-interesting concepts (supply routes, etc) in how they are implemented in this game, so having them be boring was kind of a bummer to put it mildly. Badger and Puffin have put in a ton of work into making these way more interesting, with a lot of feedback from mantis and discord, and trains should now be a much more dynamic and interesting experience. We look forward to seeing what you run into with them now! Plus Lots of Key Bugfixes!

• Those bugs with the sidebar mouseovers not showing the right thing all the time are fixed.
• Same with the ones with the collision detection boxes for mouseovers of buttons being too large.
• Same with cloaked stacks of ships getting full cloak back when anything on the stack died. Total cheese for you and your enemies!
• Also fixed not being able to build energy-generating things that cost zero energy if you had negative energy. Talk about OUCH!
• Fixed a bug that was causing a number of commands to get discarded improperly when ships went through wormholes. Sorry about that! That made for some troubling stuff.
• Plus the whole thing with decollisions persisting after wormhole traversals should now FINALLY be fully fixed, and this was one of the most annoying bugs people were seeing. Fingers crossed.
• And fixed some bugs with certain planets in certain circumstances flipping back and forth between an explored and watched intel status every second or so. Definitely also irritating.
• And actually there was a bunch of other stuff, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-12 02:07:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Lots of fixes! These alone are worth a full release. And same with the number of balance changes. But that's not remotely all what's here... Victory and Ending Scenes! Now when you complete a game, it gives you a bit of text, a nice song, and a cool visual scene with some mild animation. You can see them on youtube from the linked release notes, so that you don't expect more than it actually is. But this is a major step up from just "you win" at the end, which was a kick in the pants for sure. Later we can always build this out more and more, add in graphs and whatever else, more text, or whatever we feel like. But having this as a baseline, and a solid version for 1.0, I'm really pleased about. Visually I prefer the game over screen by far, but the victory screen has just such killer music... Turret and Minefields Revamp Among all the other balance things, you'll notice that you have only a fifth as many turrets and minefields as before, but what you have are now 5x as powerful and expensive, and also larger. This makes it easier for you to place them (fewer clicks), and also improves performance in savegames where turret counts were getting absurd. Icon Placement Overhaul A lot of people were irritated by where the icons were placed in the game. Basically they floated really high above the ships themselves, so that we could do things like have them hidden by ships in front of them. But this was really problematic for people connecting the icons to the ships themselves. There's actually a milder version of this going on in Fire Emblem: Three Houses that keeps throwing me off, honestly, and in some ways that was the final straw for my own game. ;) The new style of placement works more like Stellaris mixed with AI War 1, and it's vastly easier to tell what's going on. But it's completely customizable, so that you can put it back to the way it was before if you prefer. Energy Surplus... Removed Basically there was too much energy, all the time, before. Hopefully now you actually have to consider economic command stations, or not just putting all your turrets on every planet, either way. Or go for the Zenith Power Generators as an actual exciting capturable. And A Lot Of Other Stuff! But I got very little sleep last night and I'm super tired, so I'm ready to just get this out to you and you can read the release notes for the other details. This thing has been a really huge one! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-07 20:38:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Lots of fixes! For most people, the defensive zombies aren't the most important new thing, but it made for a funny release title so here we are. Defensive Zombies So, the behavior of zombies -- enemy ships that your own ships have taken over -- is a matter of some contention at the moment (and really, always has been). When the zombies are too defensive, then they wind up making planets really powerful because you accrue so many zombies just sitting around waiting for an enemy to be dumb enough to come and attack that horde. But then again, since you can't directly order around zombies (by design), you can't exactly go taking them on excursions or something when you want to use them offensively. Zombies also have a shelf life after which they die, so if they sit around for too long defensively, fighting nothing, then they wind up also accomplishing nothing, which can be very frustrating as a player. So we made the default behavior for zombies to be aggressive, and actually go out and fight. They'll go fight nearby worlds and deal some damage, which you are getting "for free," essentially. Obviously if there are enemies on the local planet they'll fight those first -- in either scenario -- but this is referring to what happens when the local planet has been cleared of hostiles. The problem with zombies that strike out against neighbors is that this can cause unwanted aggro. Aka, it can feed the threatfleet or otherwise free guards that come attack you. That in itself can be useful in some cases, where enemies come crashing into your turrets and you get yet even MORE kills thanks to your short-lived zombie friends. But what if the neighboring planet is very high-mark? What if you're playing on a razor-edge very-high difficulty level? In certain circumstances, having some trigger-happy allies that you can't control and who cause unwanted aggro can be game-ending. So we added, somewhat buried, a "Defensive Zombies" option in the galaxy options menu. This changes the behavior for all of the player-allied zombies in the game, but also shortens their lifespans. Basically it means that you can't super-stack a planet with defensive zombies (hey, that's not fair), but you can make it so that if you've got a Botnet Golem next to an AI Homeworld, you won't accidentally aggro the AI Homeworld based on cleaning up the planet next to them. As noted, these two modes work identically when there are local enemies to fight, anyway. So the need to toggle this mode back and forth should be... very limited. Assumedly it should only be for some players, in the very late game, with certain types of units under their control. They'd turn on defensive zombies in those last stages... or potentially leave on defensive zombies all the time if they're the difficulty 9 or 10 type of player. For everyone else, the aggressive zombie style is probably for the best, if you even wind up with any zombie ships on your team anyway. Revisions to the Low-Cap Cap Increases Previously, ships with a cap of 1 were not allowed to have their cap increase based on things like leveling up. So you couldn't get additional frigates or forcefield generators in most cases. I personally had mixed feelings on that, and it bugged a lot of people. We've adjusted that so that they get cap increases now, although if that leads to too many forcefields then we may need to implement something that rate-limits them further or something. But at any rate, for the time being this is a solid buff for you, and doesn't affect other factions or the AI. More New Stuff!

• All of the quick starts now include the Praetorian Guard in them. Thanks, Puffin!
• Those "audio mixer" errors that people were getting in the prior build are fixed. There was some extra data that was throwing things off, in a place it shouldn't have been. We've put in triple-redundant fixes for this.
• If you're playing super-heavy games that like to melt your CPU (200 planets where you capture everything and have a ton of factions on), then the game should no longer periodically give you error messages about it stopping thinking about certain background tasks prematurely because it assumes that it was hung since things were taking so long. This affects very few people, but should be welcome for those edge cases.
• The "galaxy map going black" bug should be fixed, and was probably related to the hexagon visual effect on just certain linux machines (and possibly hardware combinations with that). It should no longer obscure the map in any case, but you can also turn off the hexagons now, as well.
• Several other bugfixes and balance tweaks, plus new intel indicators and a performance boost to intel and warning generation have been put in.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-09-04 00:53:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. This one is pretty darn substantial! Audio On the audio side, one of the things that really spurred me to make that a shorter-term priority is Why the sound of a gun had to be nerfed in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a video that came out yesterday by People Make Games. I've heard similar stories before, but usually I tend to think of that in terms of other semi-tangibles like visual feedback, tells, telegraphs, or general smoothness. The non-music side of audio has been something I've really put a lot of effort into on a few titles, actually including this game... but the attenuation and general audio levels and mixing in this game was burying it. There are still some sfx that need to be swapped out in general, I think, but the biggest problem was them cutting out beyond a certain zoom, or getting super quiet, or certain sounds (like explosions) not being mixed at a volume that you can hear well. The first item in that list was IIRC intentional, but just a bad idea on my part. And it got worsened over time as we made the far zoom able to go out further. Anyway, so combat definitely has more "bite" now, which is good. The Praetorian Guard In the first game -- the original AI War -- we had a thing called the "strategic reserve." Basically it was a budget that the AI would hold back and use when you attacked their homeworlds, and it was added after a lot of playtesting suggested we needed something like that. I think that was a 4.x+ addition, or something along those lines. But we never felt like that was a good fit for this sequel, for various reasons. However, the general niche that the strategic reserve filled was definitely needed here. Players figured out that they could "boil off" the AI homeworlds a bit by going in and aggro'ing them, then letting the aggro'd guards join the hunter or warden fleets (and thus then leave and go elsewhere). As long as you could survive the roaming hunter or warden or both, or keep them distracted, then you had a MUCH easier AI homeworld to deal with. Stupidly easier, really. For whatever reason, I immediately started thinking of this in soccer terms when this was brought to my attention. Essentially in a lot of sports like that one, you have some forwards/offense, some midfield/versatile, some defenders, and then probably the "final defender" (aka goalie). What I realized is that we basically had an AI structure with just offense and midfielders, with "inactive midfielders" that, once aggro'd, would go off and stop defending the goal, so to speak. If this were soccer or hockey, it would be terribly unbalanced to either have a ton of new midfielders that can join an offensive at-will once the ball first goes near their goal. It would also be incredibly risky if they all chose to act like forwards. Where the heck are the dedicated defenders? AI War 2 has the main AI faction (or "Sentinels") that are basically defacto guards/goalies at each planet until aggro'd and abandoned. After that they either join the warden (midfielders, or somewhat floating defenders), or hunter (very predatory/lurking offense). For MOST of the game, these three sub-groups work just well. It's at the hoomeworld that this falls apart. I had been against adding a strategic reserve to this game partly because it would just feed the hunter, making it so that when you attack the AI homeworld you'd be inevitably involved in a two-front battle (your planets and their homeworld), and it would turn into a race or a game of attrition or something else un-fun and uncharacteristic of the rest of the game. Basically it was going to be un-balanceable without sometimes slaughtering you and other times being laughably easy. It being a nice middle-ground was going to be the rare case. So... we needed defenders. Only for the very end of the game, and only for the AI homeworlds, but it was super needed. The warden and the hunter can't be fed -- there needed to be something that acted kind of like half and half of those two, in terms of general logic, but which really prioritized protecting the AI homeworld(s). It couldn't "leave the goal open," but it also shouldn't detract from the hunter or warden's ability to strike or buffer you elsewhere (so having the hunter or warden suddenly change behaviors and act like a defender fleet was going to be bad because they might be too slow to respond and that also could be exploitable, and that also would eliminate any interesting chances for the AI to give you a two-front battle -- the two-front battles aren't something I hate, I just didn't want them to be an inevitability every endgame). Right: so we talked about it, and Badger implemented the Praetorian Guard. These guys work as described as above, and keep the homeworld fights interesting while not letting off the pressure on the rest of the galaxy. They fill the same niche as the strategic reserve, but without a risk of making the rest of the galaxy more dangerous in a generalized sense (they can't add pressure on offense, given they are dedicated defenders). You'll have to start a new game to see these guys in action, but I'm very interested to see what happens with them. Should be good! I guess we need to make sure they show up in "quick start" games, incidentally. If not, we can fix that in code. Stacking A bunch more changes have been made to stacking, centering around bugfixes and balance, both. There were some cases where stacks were much easier to deal with than they would have been if they were un-stacked, and that no longer should be so severe. More New Stuff!

• There area couple of new achievements, although you can't see them yet.
• You can hack exogalactic wormholes to cancel them, which is pretty slick. I love having more ways to use hacking points instead of military might.
• The Advanced Research Stations are a bit more intuitive, and a bit more balanced, and a bit more varied.
• A bunch of work on how orders are given and copied have been put in place, and there should be fewer issues with decollision messing up orders, or with units losing their orders after one ship on a stack is blown up, etc.
• The long-range planning for factions, which is basically their "conscious intelligence" now runs more frequently, but without bogging anything down. The AI should therefore be a lot more responsive to rapid changes in the current situation.
• A variety of AI types have balance tweaks that make them a lot more unique and interesting.
• Watchman frigates are no longer so bloody expensive in energy or metal costs!

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-31 00:31:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one is a bunch of bugfixes and some balance tweaks, and some bits to help you find the in-game tutorial. Sidebar: The title of this release is randomly a reference to Meet the Robinsons, which I highly recommend to anyone with kids. But it kinda fits the mix of "tutorials plus AI," I guess. Details?

• A lot of people were missing the "How To Play" section, and asking the same questions over and over again. Even some of us directly working on the game were not remembering that you could see it in the in-game escape/pause menu. Clutter! There's colorization now to make it way easier to see.
• The How To Play section has a new bit on hacking, with some useful tidbits.
• The AI warden and hunter logic is now improved such that it should now be much more formidable. Before the units could sometimes trickle in, and now they go in full-force.
• There were some truly infuriating-to-players bugs (sorry about that!) relating to the fact that player units can now stack. When I wrote the stacking code, it assumed it would never be for human units, so there was some older code fighting against us. All seems to be well, now.
• There was also an unrelated bug with waves not spawning units. Wow that made things easier!
• The balance of some of the key AI structures has been tuned based on player feedback.
• Similarly, the balance of some of the player starting fleets.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-26 23:47:04 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is a hefty release, with a lot of welcome gameplay, performance, and technical improvements. So, details?

• There is now an "autobuild factories" option, which is helpful.
• Magnifiers and Alarm Posts are back.
• Advanced Research Stations (ARSes) are back, although they work differently from the first game or from earlier in this game; they augment the fleets system. Each of these gets a Frigate or Strikecraft type; hacking the ARS grants that ship line to the hacking flagship.
• A bunch of new icons are available, and are used by some of the new capturables.
• Hacking a specific target (like an ARS) is now done by the flagship closest to the target, and also decloaks that flagship.
• When the AI reconquers a planet, its Guard Posts will 'Warp In' over the next 10 minutes, each bringing with it a small company of guardians. It was frustrating (particularly on high-mark planets) for the AI to instantly get hundreds of strength of defenses on a planet after reconquering. This now gives you a window to counterattack and destroy the helpless Warping In guard posts.
• A big laundry list of bugfixes.
• Another big laundry list of performance improvements.
• Stacking for player ships, for the first time, so that you can have crazy ship caps in the late game without tanking your performance.
• Updated the Steamworks integration, so hopefully that works properly now on OSX and Linux (please let us know!).

The Performance Snipe Hunt I spent a LOT more time than expected chasing down late-game performance issues in this build, mainly because I was concerned that those could bleed over into more games than realistically they were at the time of the last release. It was time well spent, because we fixed a number of bugs we would not have found any other way, and a number of savegames will perform better than ever. However, there's still some elusive timing issue in certain savegames, and I can't find what it is despite basically building a custom performance profiler into the game over the last eight days. Eyeroll. But it's funny, because one game with 200k ships might perform better than another with only 60k ships. And it's not the AI logic, and it's no longer decollisions or something like that. In all those cases, you can crank up the game speed and still get a realtime game speed, although now it's much more kind to the networking interface (for the future) than it would have been. So fast-forward to the rescue, I guess. It's just choppy in those circumstances. The few remaining problem cases tend to be with a lot of factions on, and a lot of battles at once, and late into the game, and usually more than 100k ships out there; most of those run at least 2x as fast now as they did for me previously, which is a good thing. Unless we really hit some trouble spots, I think I may set aside performance stuff until post-1.0 (only a month or so left!) and focus on tutorials and other things that affect a much wider group of players. Most late-game campaigns actually perform just peachy, having CPU time to spare despite the insane simulation size. So this thing is optimized as heck, really. But it's a personal irritation for sure when there are some semi-rare cases where I'm not sure why things aren't as smooth as I'd like. Frankly in those same circumstances, in the original game you'd be running at something like a quarter of wall clock time with far less going on, whereas here you can at least keep things realtime even if the ships jump around a bit in a way that irritates me. So I'll set that aside and just work on the bigger fish at this point. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-20 21:33:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. A neighborhood watch is normally something that is neighbors looking out for one another, but in this case I'm mis-naming the release in honor of the algorithm changes that Badger made to protect PLAYERS from having so darn many mark 6 and 7 planets in their galaxies. New galaxies generated in the game should be a lot more palatable. So, what else?

• Interface improvements to the top bar (the various things you can click for more details).
• Golems for the Warden fleet (yow!).
• Marauders now more deadly.
• Several bugfixes in code both new and old.
• Several new tools to help us FIND some rare-ish bugs that we can't repro locally.
• Other conveniences like you not accidentally being able to build things that would put you into negative energy (and thus lose your forcefields all at once).

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-12 23:42:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. I took a break from the tutorials work, and instead focused on performance when it comes to big background battles between warring other factions that you might run across. There's more that we can probably make even more performant in that area, but we need to do more profiling and figure out things that we can spread out more across more sim steps in addition to what already is being spread. In case the new performance tweaks give you problems of some sort, there's an option in the Galaxy Options tab, under the Performance section, to turn that off. At any rate, I want to see what happens with that as we're adding ever more stuff that might be fighting offscreen and out of sight -- it shouldn't be causing your main game to bog down like you were seeing before. But that's something we can definitely look into more on the new framework that now exists. I also wanted to get the new framework in sooner than later so that any bugs that are in it can be found suitably in advance of 1.0. So, what else?

• Badger came up with the idea that certain factions -- right now the Devourer Golem, the Nanocust, the Human Resistance Fighters, and the Marauders -- can be friends or foes that you discover partway into a game even if you didn't choose them from the start in the "custom start" lobby (or if they weren't baked into your chosen quick start).
• Basically, this makes it so that as a game is going along, you can suddenly have a new wrinkle thrown in with one or more factions joining the party late... and likely making up for lost time, either to your benefit or not.
• I'm a big fan of this, as this lets you either customize things up-front, or change your mind and add something later if you think it will help (or might hurt the AI more than it hurts you, anyway).
• Neutral planets controlled by a non-player, non-AI faction now show with the colors of that faction. That's really helpful for Dyson Spheres, Nanocaust, and other things like that.
• Fixed a confusing thing with transports, which was causing some people to think they couldn't load or unload them. You should now find that it "just works" as you would expect, but let us know if not.
• We fixed a bunch of other bugs.
• Zenith Trader purchases no longer cost you AIP if you lose them, which mirrors how they were in the first game.
• Mercenaries now have much more varied units!
• Hacking is now something the AI responds more strongly to, and for superterminals they start doing exogalactic strikes against you so that you can't just blob all your ships on the superterminal world and ignore the rest of the galaxy.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-09 21:33:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. A smaller one, while we get a lot of work done on the new tutorial framework. But still some exciting fixes, and other tweaks.

• Hacking no longer freezes flagships in place, and doesn't have bugs related to canceling hacks anymore, and also shows a message explaining why your flagships can't leave that planet.
• Forcefields no longer cause ships to get stuck against them.
• Officer fleets with Arks and Golems are no longer going to be QUITE so late-game, aka not right to an AI homeworld.
• The whole "ship caps changing as you change them between different fleets" thing is no longer a worry. Wow that was confusing.
• Some other clarity things relating to swapping ships between fleets have been added, such as showing the ship counts in the interface.
• Plus fixed a kind of sideways way you could get multiple copies of the same ship line in one fleet, thus causing manyproblems.
• Mercenary Flagships got radar dampening, making them way more likely to live!
• Transports that you give an attack order to (for purposes of the ships coming out of them) will no longer wander off to the southwest.
• If the game has an exception on startup, it should always now show you rather than sometimes just seeming like loading xml assets was hung.
• A LOT of work has been done on the new tutorials framework, but it's not ready yet. I'm really hoping that we start getting some player-made tutorials in there as I flesh out the framework more, incidentally. Some of them can be more scenario-like kind of like a "can you even win this" sort of "tutorial" if you want to. ;)

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-07 21:02:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Dang this one is big! Lots of long-awaited features in here:

• You can now swap ship lines between mobile fleets you control, thus letting you mix and match your forces better and have themed fleets.
• A lot of the fleets are more themed now in general.
• There are some new and improved "game 101" explanations included in the how to play section.
• Transports work vastly better, with a number of quality of life improvements like having ships that are constructed for a transport-with-stuff-in-it appear in it rather than next to it, and many many more.
• The ability from the first game to set preferred targets for specific ships of yours is now in place here, too; for instance having this one specific selection of your ships target pike corvettes or whatever.
• The Zenith Power Generator can no longer be cheesed from the Zenith Trader, but is still an interesting and valid choice from them.
• There are new "Watchman Frigates" available at all your command stations, giving you some mobile ships to hunt down small AI stragglers without having to bring your fleets home just to tidy up one sniper or whatever.
• Fixed several bugs relating to shots, which were sometimes leading to invincible almost-dead units, and in other cases degrading performance.
• Fixed several bugs related to AI guarding ships and how those interacted with stacks, which would give the AI ridiculous numbers of ships (one savegame had more than 2 million pike corvettes in it) in a very short amount of time, thus making balance way off and degrading performance. This was probably not affecting most saves, but if you parked next to a warden post it would often get triggered, and AI civil wars would trigger it.
• Fixed a number of UI annoyances with data that was flickering or jumping around or otherwise not stable, mainly because of things that needed to be buffered for the display thanks to multithreading going on.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-08-03 23:27:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. The nanocaust have seen a big revision as part of this one, and I was definitely tempted to name the build after that. But the strikecraft being better-balanced compared to everything else probably affects more people, so here we are. The list of short-term general annoyances is getting much smaller, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new?

• Lots of bugfixes, and some ui enhancements and AI improvements all over the place.
• You can now see the history of the AIP increases and decreases by clicking the AIP section of the top toolbar, which is SO handy -- thanks, Badger!
• In Badger's own words, the nanocaust changes: The nanocaust rework is basically a dramatic simplification of the code. I took the Fleets mechanism out and put in a mechanism that basically says "If there are no enemies on planet X, take all the ships on this planet and attack any adjacent planet that is weak enough for the local forces to take. If there are no adjacent hostile planets, go to a random adjacent friendly planet". This was what I did originally but it was too powerful so I introduced the nanocaust fleets mechanic basically as a nerf. However, the end result was a rather boring and not-super-menacing nanocaust. So now it's back to its original terrifying version. I may need to introduce some additional mechanics to slow it down, we'll see. The logic it uses is also essentially the same logic that Marauder Raiders use.
• The strikecraft balance is now reduced to 2x hulls instead of 3x, and attack multiplier down to 1.5x. So now your turrets should have a fighting chance. Big thanks to Puffin for aggregating that feedback and making the change. The strikecraft previously felt too chaff-y, but now are hopefully in the ideal middle ground; let us know!
• Bunches of balance changes based on player feedback.
• I've personally been traveling for the last week, but have written up some things that might interest you. Specifically:
• My plans for tutorials are a lot more traditional now.
• My plans for 1.0, techs, and fleets are written up and hopefully make sense.
• Same for my plans for multiplayer, although that news is probably less welcome.
• Still lots of exciting things in the works, as noted via various links, mantis, and so on.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-30 17:25:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one refines a lot of things from the prior build, and fixes up neutering, waves, and counterattacks all in one fell swoop. The list of short-term general annoyances is getting much smaller, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new?

• Counterattacks were working well in the prior build, but in some respects a bit TOO well. Basically the AI was being granted too many counterattack points (the same as too much salvage in prior builds), and so the counterattacks were just plain too large in a lot of situations. Things should be much more reasonable now, but we do expect it to be something we need to tune over time, so please do keep the feedback coming.
• An unintended side effect of counterattacks that I completely missed was the fact that neutering a planet (scouring away all the guard posts but leaving the command station) was being treated as if you had failed to conquer the planet. Blah! This is definitely a big part of why we love having so many dedicated fans who are testing things out. Neutering is one of the oldest and most important strategies, and counterattacks were never supposed to mess with that. As of this new version, they no longer do; the command station isn't a counterattack-helping unit anymore, except for the AI Overlord version of it.
• With some of the changes to waves in the prior build, I actually entirely broke waves, too. So they were supposed to be more specialized, but they wound up just not coming at all anymore! This was because waves themselves have been evolving a lot over time in the code, and the code needed a bit of a refactor in order to fully embrace the new "how much the AI pays for things is decoupled from how strong it is" balance change that we put in months ago. The AI needs to be able to know when to not send a wave, or when to spend a bit less on a wave than it might otherwise spend, and it was previously having to approximate that sort of thing in a way that could often be quite wrong just because there isn't a literal relationship between cost and strength. Now it's using real numbers and is thus able to make far more intelligent decisions.
• Counterattacks were also happening too quickly, rather than being something that wouldn't kick in until a certain threshold of battle. We think that's fixed.
• And there are a variety of other bugfixes, including the Global Command Augmenter hacks always being hidden (oops, typo on my part). Overall this should make the game far more pleasant to play, and the back-and-forth should feel a lot more natural.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-16 19:44:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This is a big one! The list of short-term general annoyances is getting much smaller, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new?

• You can FINALLY turn off construction on individual ship lines in your mobile fleets.
• There's a bunch of other stuff you can see about fleets that is handy info to have, too, in their tooltips.
• Waves are now thematic based around the planets they come from, so they should be something that you can plan for without them being absolutely homogeneous around the galaxy. The release notes explain it better, but I didn't go with my "Wave Mainframes" idea because this is simpler all around, less cluttered, and gives more variety without being a mess. It may need more tuning, we shall see.
• Salvage and Reprisal Waves are gone. What? Hol' up a minute.
• The release notes again explain it better, but we have a really cool new Counterattack mechanic that takes the place of Reprisal Waves, and which gives you waaaaay more control over the amount of risk you take on when you attack an overly-strong target.
• In recent builds, some players were getting game-ending reprisal waves "out of nowhere" because of how they were attacking and how the fairly-invisible salvage mechanic worked. This was not something I liked at all, because it basically feels like something you can't control; and in some respects that was literally true, whereas in other respects you needed to have secret knowledge to avoid it. Bad bad bad in both cases.
• The new counterattacks can actually be far stronger than reprisal waves in the recent builds -- absolutely apocalyptically game-ending, in fact -- but the important thing is that the communicate to you the whole time from the point at which they start becoming dangerous. That then gives you a chance to run away and take your small beating (rather than letting it get apocalyptic), or it lets you double-down and paralyze the counterattack long enough for you to eventually dispel it outright by killing all the AI guard posts and command stations on that planet.
• Put another way, it adds some brinkmanship into attacking oversized targets, and gives you the controls to choose just how far you push things. If you can stall the counterattack and then cancel it, that's absolutely the best thing... but the risk of doing that if you might not be able to could mean that you bring down the roof on your head. It's all dynamic, right on the screen in front of you, and gives you an immediate feeling and source of back-and-forth.
• And for smaller targets, it doesn't even come into play and bother you, because this specific mechanic isn't supposed to be a response to you just playing the game in general. There are things like Cross Planet Attacks, reinforcements, and the hunter fleet for that already. We didn't need yet another mechanic that was inevitable. We needed something devastating-but-avoidable, and hopefully the round-one balance on this is somewhat reasonable at least. I'm sure it will need more tuning over time.
• Oh dang, we also added three new hacks, too (thanks Quinn!). You can hack big weapons of the AI to take them over (Orbital Mass Drivers and Ion Cannons), which gives you new strategic/tactical options during taking a planet. Unlike the first game, there was no way to capture these before now. And then you can also hack a co-processor to find all the other co-processors if you don't want to wait for regular scouting to find them.
• Techs also show you a bunch more info that is helpful for when you're trying to capture new fleets, and new fleets also show you more accurate information based on your current techs and bonuses, rather than showing their mark-1-defaults.
• Good grief we also fixed a bunch of bugs, too. This really is a pretty hefty release.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-12 20:24:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. Finally! The first tiny bits of the fleet management screen. Lots more to come. The list of things that are planned for the short term to address general annoyances is here, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new?

• You can now rename your mobile and battlestation fleets.
• You can now pause all construction on individual mobile fleets (pausing construction for specific ship lines is coming, along with other goodies).
• You can see a lot more info about fleet status from the fleet tooltips, and in the fleet management screen those line items ALSO have tooltips that explain them even further.
• There are two new hacks, which allow for you to take over Global Command Augmenters (GCAs -- those newthings that give you more turrets or other defenses at all your command stations if you capture and hold them) and Intra-Galactic Coordinators (IGCs -- those things that add a multiplier to your ship caps for strikecraft or turrets if you capture and hold them) without having to capture and hold the planet. But it costs you a lot in hacking points, so now you have an interesting decision to make.
• There are also a bunch of new options relating to permadeath for certain categories of structures, and you can either make things more-permadeathy or less-permadeathy depending on your tastes.
• A number of tips and strategies have been updated in-game to make the gameplay more clear now that GCAs are a thing and battlestations are less of a thing.
• Reprisal wave balance has been nerfed again.
• Golems and Arks now cost AIP to capture, and have larger fleets in general. Let us know how much more powerful we might need to make them in general, if we do, to justify their costs.
• You start out with 2 million metal rather than 540k, so that you never get metal starved at the very start of the game. That was just a silly way to start.
• There's a new starting fleet option, the Consumer Fleet, which is all about eating your enemies in various ways.
• The metal flows interface now updates in realtime and also shows data in a more readable format.
• We fixed a whole host of bugs, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-09 19:58:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This works with existing savegames, but has the biggest impact on new ones. This gets at another big batch of most-annoying-recently issues. The list of things that are planned for the short term to address those bits is here, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new?

• First up, there's a new way to reduce AI Progress in the form of Major Data Centers... but the catch is that you have to hold the planet they are on. The positive side is that their AIP reduction is HUGE.
• In general there are also now a lot more data centers than there used to be, unless you were playing on difficulty 4 or below.
• The number of battlestations and citadels on the map has dropped ENORMOUSLY. Where it might have been several dozen of them previously, it's now barely half a dozen in most cases (though you can make it add more in the lobby options if you want).
• The battlestations were previously the only way to get more turrets and other defenses beyond the super-duper basics for your command stations, and this was... hard to manage as well as really annoying for players.
• Battlestations still remain in a much smaller number because they are great for making beachheads or for AUGMENTING a choke point in your empire, but they are no longer the key way you get new turrets and defenses.
• A new structure, the Global Command Augmenter, has been added to the game. GCAs are something that you have to capture and hold the planet they belong to, but they give ALL of your command stations a bunch of new turrets and minefields and whatever else that are randomly rolled at the start of the campaign.
• Basically the GCAs solve all of those "things are inconvenient by not being part of my main command station" issues, give you something new as a reason to capture and hold territory, and also really act as a force multiplier on your empire as a whole.
• Soon there will also be the ability to hack them so that you don't have to hold them (lower cost) or even capture them at all (higher cost), but we didn't have time for that in this release.
• There are also some notable new ways to get science and hacking points in general, now. Previously Distribution Nodes were kind of useless and just gave you metal (which is generally not that exciting or in that short of supply), as did astro trains. Now you get science and/or hacking points from those, which is extremely valuable and exciting instead.
• The odds of your eyeballs being seared in by strobing lightning and/or grenade visual effects is now a lot lower, as those are now smaller in number but also a lot stronger. Actually both of these got way more useful in general, with bonuses against stacks, etc.
• AI Guardians also no longer seed so plentifully as before -- it was quite ridiculous on the mark 6 and 7 planets, mainly because originally the game hadn't expected those sorts of planets to exist.
• The AI also now has its own version of turrets, which are lower-range by far, and thus their battlefields feel a lot more segmented now.
• Also the AI uses far fewer turrets, and uses more monochromatic turrets on planets and near specific guard posts in general. This makes it a lot easier for you to plan meaningful assaults, and also makes it so that their guard posts and strikecraft do more of the heavy lifting. Turrets were always meant to be more of a player thing.
• There are a variety of player structures that previously died to remains, letting you rebuild them infinite numbers of times if you lost them. We're going to add in an option later on to let you have that behavior again, but for now they die permanently AND are way more robust (3x the health and shields). The idea is for there to be some risk to you in the middle-game, but for these to not fall over like paper dolls. More balance on these may be needed, but we want to experiment with more permadeath options in general that some players will enjoy and others will avoid.
• Strikecraft in general now have 3x the health and 2x the attack power that they used to, letting them hold their own as the backbone of everyone's fleets a lot more. This is a lot more like the first game was, but we may need to tune this more over time.
• There are also now sliders in the lobby that let you adjust the relative strengths of strikecraft, turrets/guard posts, and frigates/guardians. We're looking for feedback on our defaults so that things feel as ideal as possible, but we're also recognizing that some people want slower or faster games, and so these options allow for people to set that up no matter what.
• Golems and Arks are now rare, and only accessible in the late game or very late midgame. We're going to be making them even more powerful and come with some extra costs, soon, based on the plans here. Definitely a great idea by Kesseleth, and we're partway through implementation. This also means that the starting fleets now just all use transports rather than golems or Arks, which again emphasizes your strikecraft more.
• You can also now read about what the various Warden and Hunter fleet types do, which was actually informative even to me.
• And there are a variety of other small things in here. This was a big release!

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-05 21:22:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This took a bit of extra time because I was moving house and moving my office, but also because we realized that there's a lot of new cool stuff that we really do need to work on, beyond what I had indicated last release, in order to get this where we want. The list of things that are planned for the short term to address those bits is here, and the discussion that started it all is here. So what's new in this actual build?

• "Supply" has been removed as a concept, because it was decidedly annoying. There are other things that will need to be added in to really make fleets manageable well, post-supply -- but those are in the link above, and planned for quite soon. Item one was to get rid of the annoying thing.
• Tractor beams now have a lot of the benefits from the first game, including behaviors like the AI mobile ships with tractor beams actively working to kidnap your ships again and drag them off to stir up more threat and other bad things.
• Tons of bugfixes, including one to that stutter that ships often had during battle, and another to make autobombs hesitate less before blowing themselves (and hopefully some enemies) to smithereens.
• A whole messload of balance tweaks in general have also been added. This ranges from certain strikecraft becoming way more useful (space planes and mirages for the win in particular), to forcefields becoming more viable to use, brawlers becoming slightly translocator-y and in general having a better feeling, and some of the golems not being SO overpowered compared to the others.
• Another big balance change is that now guard posts have a lot of their personal hull into shields, making it so that fusion bombers are now a lot more useful against them, which is good for you.
• The Instigators are now a lot more substantial in how they respond to you, giving you much larger forces to deal with rather than a small trickle. They still give you plenty of time to deal with them, but they're actually a threat you'll notice and fear now, particularly depending on the difficulty level.
• Turrets that are distributed to guard posts should also now be a lot less varied per guard post/planet, making it so that you're less likely to run into "well, that mashup of turrets just counters everything, so I can't really plan around it" issues like before.
• Tractors and tachyon systems and cloaking systems now get better at higher marks!
• When there are multiple AIs, they now pose more of a threat than before, with their budgets not being simply equal to a single AI like before.
• The first of some of the new features (other than the removal of supply and the turret mix changes) are also in, in the form of some offensive hacks you can use against AI planets to weaken either their turrets or their guard posts (respectively), thus giving you more to do with your hacking points against the AI itself. Even more is coming on that front, but the idea is that there should be more options to use your hacking points in ways that might prove critical to you actually being able to take out a tough enemy planet. This is far preferable to there being such a paucity of ways to harm the AI via hacking that you just hack for science all the time.
• Oh, and a bug where reprisal waves were double-sized is now fixed. That should make that a lot more balanced.

We're still in sort of a polish/refinement stage, but at this point we're also in one where there are a number of substantial feature adjustments in order to really make the fleets stuff shine as much as possible. This wasn't something that I had fully foreseen, but it's definitely welcome given how much this adds to the strategic options you'll be enjoying. More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-07-03 18:34:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Hey, we're finally exiting the beta branch for our updates for the first time since... mid April? Wow, that was a long stretch, but it was definitely worth it. Things aren't perfect yet in the new mechanics set, but we're getting there and we're definitely streets ahead compared to the old mechanics from April. First, let's talk about what is new in this specific build:

• Some bugfixes with a few map generation areas.
• The metal flows screen is now far more functional and useful.
• 26 new in-game tips have been added to the strategy/tips section, for new and returning players. If you're "returning" since the April versions before we went into the beta branch, that will still be useful to you.
• We recently added a Starting Battlestation for each player in addition to their Starting Fleet, but now we've also got a new Starting Support Fleet as well. This lets you hit the ground running a lot faster.
• Mark levels from EXP gains are now limited to only some ship types, and not everything in your entire fleet. But we can customize this in the xml, so we'll be able to tune this as needed based on feedback.
• Abunch of tech changes have been put in, mostly relating to things that were EXP-upgrade-only before, or in some cases Markless (not upgradeable at all).
• In some other cases, we took away some techs for things like the Ark centerpieces, and made those solely reliant on EXP mark level upgrades, and for Citadels we made those just all one tech rather than three different ones.
• In all, there are a lot more techs now, and the importance of science is very much retained compared to recent versions, but there's also a lot more flexibility surrounding how you do your various upgrades.

Next, let's quickly note what "more control" is still to come very soon, hence why this is called "part 1" on the release title:

• I still need to implement that stupid fleet management screen. Hopefully tomorrow morning, knock on wood. At least a preliminary version of that.
• Based on a conversation with AnnoyingOrange, I want to reduce the number of battlestations that are around for you to capture by a LOT, and instead make it so that in the place of most of those you're getting things that add new turret types that are available at all your command stations. That's more in line with the original game, and should be kind of a "best of both worlds" situation, hopefully. Less fiddling with battlestations, but still tons of turrets everywhere, and still battlestations forsome occasions. Right now there is just too much reliance on battlestations, which feels clunky to use simply because of the volume of them.
• I also do plan on putting in some sliders in the lobby that will let us control things like the relative strengths and hulls of strikecraft compared to their baseline, to make them more useful alongside frigates and the other big guys, etc. They're balanced well relative to one another, but are currently a bit too quick to die in general... but then again everyone has different tastes, so we'll make this a config thing.
• There may be more resulting from this conversation, and please feel free to join in.

I'm hoping to get to all those things this week, but we'll see how it goes since I'm also in the middle of moving house and my office, so it's a challenging time with so much going on. But I feel like those are probably the top items that are needed in order to really give the last bits of control back to you that you might feel is lost with the fleets update at the moment. (And in most respects the fleets update actually already gives you way more control -- as well as way more units -- but I'm shooting for "universally better" and not "has some unfortunate tradeoffs." We're getting there.) Now that we have enough of the tutorial-y in-game wiki things in place, it was time to exit beta because what we have in these builds is way more polished and refined than the version from April. Time to get everyone banging on this and seeing what they think. And if you're just sitting down to play the game and enjoy it, I think this is by far the most enjoyable version at the moment despite the ongoing todo list. So, let's say you've not been paying attention since April and haven't tried the betas.... what's new?

• Well, there's this whole new concept called fleets, and it replaces control groups as well as making things far more streamlined while giving you more to manage than ever before. Essentially it makes it easier to manage larger numbers of ships, and makes it FAR easier to subdivide your forces and do multiple things at once, but it also has a lot of customizability (some of which is still to come, but a lot of which is there in the techs already), and both a mixture of hand-designed and procedural elements.
• There are literally a few dozen new ship types, most of which are interesting variants on prior ship types at the moment, but which also help differentiate your fleets even further from one another.
• We got rid of the old style of tutorial, and are working on an in-game wiki for specific questions, and then just having things be contextually explained as you see them in other cases, and then later will likely have some mild tutorial-lite things that pop in optionally when you play and give you rewards if you follow them, or no penalties if you opt to skip them. Basically the idea is to be a bit more modern than the old style of tutorial, and teach you as you play, plus letting you look up things like complex advanced strategies in a concise format in-game rather than having to go to forums or a wiki for those things.
• The quick starts are all new.
• The lobby is all new, and vastly easier to use. There are a few todos left on that as well, but nothing super critical right now.
• The sidebar has really evolved in order to support fleets and their new way of constructing things, and that includes a completely revised Tech tab.
• Related, there's a whole new system of techs that should be really clear as soon as you see it, but basically allows for synergy between similar ships all being upgraded at once.
• Also related, your fleets gain EXP in battle and level up, although only some of the ships see the benefits of that (primarily the fleet leaders, but also a few others). Later on there will also be perks that you can choose with each level-up, but that's coming a bit later on.
• All 7 marks are now used by both players and the AI, and the marks are more granular and balanced rather than having such giant jumps.
• The AI has been made a lot smarter, repeatedly.
• And a bunch of map types have been improved, and map generation times are faster.
• The planets controlled by the AI are a lot more varied and interesting instead of all being big blobs of everything. This fits heavily with the new fleets stuff so that you can bring the right fleet for the job. If you use fewer fleets, you'll get an EXP bonus.
• The Lost Spire Frigate faction has been removed from the game, and is now just a core part of the game (and expanded as well) all the time.
• Command Stations are way more varied and interesting (the player ones).
• There are a ton of new lobby options that let you really customize your experience without it being overwhelming to see.
• You can now have as many AIs as you want in the game, and you can even throw them into a civil war if you want to.
• Ships rallying is gone, as are "space docks" and "starship constructors" and "build queues." Instead the fleet leaders now build things directly with the help of factories that are within one hop of them. And a whole bunch of logistical things that were major pains in the rear previously are thus solved all in one fell swoop.
• Fleet leaders are now faster in general to move around, which feels more fun.
• The game has Strike versus Officer fleets, allowing you to choose a more hero-unit-focused type of experience or a more mob-fleet-style experience. You can either choose that based on what you capture in-game, or you can tweak those things in the lobby some.
• The economy has been rebalanced several times over, and you can't shoot yourself in the foot by accident by upgrading a unit anymore. But old low-mark units can actually become useful chaff now if you upgrade other units in their same fleet (they then get progressively cheaper).
• The entire method for scouting has been replaced, and is a lot more direct and progressive, rather than encouraging needless micro like the old system did. But you do still have the power to directly scout things, or set up pickets, thanks to some hacks involving nanites.
• We redid all the fonts, the entire post processing stack, and upgraded the unity enginetwice. There were a bunch of bugfixes in their changes, too, among them finally a fix to the stutter from the garbage collector.
• There have been loads and loads of balance tweaks, and general ui usability improvements that are just plain too numerous to list.
• The galaxy map itself is also more attractive and a lot more legible at the same time.
• Did we mention the AI is way smarter? Like... it's not a small thing. Badger was busy all over the place in that part of the code.
• There's a new "crippled" mechanic for your centerpiece ships, which is far preferable to things like them going back to neutral and then you having to do a corpse run.
• Did we mention lots of bugfixes? All sorts of them. It's been over two months, after all.
• A new knockback mechanic has been added, thanks to WeaponMaster, and it includes a lot of special features that the first game never had. Including even things like implosion-style knock-inward effects for some ships, etc.
• The AI hyper-alertness has been toned down, making it so that stealth on AI planets is actually something you can do now.
• Certain ships now have the ability to grant a bonus to all the ships in their fleet, helping make fleets even more unique and combinatorial. We haven't done a ton with that yet, but the mechanic style is cool and we plan more of it.
• You can now see your metal outflows by clicking the metal resource part of the top header.
• Oh, you can also choose from a number of different planet naming styles in the lobby now, to get very different feels of galaxy.
• And did we say the AI was smarter? Yeah, it also has some major improvements to how it handles reinforcements and responding to you when aggro'd.
• ...and there's a whole bunch of other stuff, way too much to mention.

We're basically in a state where there are definitely still some things that I will feel a lot happier when those are done, BUT this is by far the strongest version of the game yet in my opinion. And wherever there may be weaknesses or oversights, either those are things that are on the very short term schedule (such as noted above in this release notes) or things that we might not be aware of and hope you'll tell us about. In some cases it has simply been a matter of adding lobby options to support different playstyles, such as a desire for fewer hero units, things like that. There may also be some things that aren't explained as well as they should be or are nonobvious, and I hope that you guys will ask those questions to I can get those into the in-game wiki or otherwise address them in tooltips contextually or what have you. Exciting times! More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-25 06:35:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• The EXP that fleets gain is now handled really differently, and hopefully in a more balanced fashion.
• That said, there are still some open questions about the fleet EXP mechanics and a few related items that I'd definitely be interested in feedback on.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-22 17:39:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This one fixes a bug with savegames that were being created in the prior build being unreadable. Sorry about that one!
• This one also removes the tutorial button in general, as the current plan is not to do the prior style of "scripted tutorials that you play through," unlike earlier builds of this game and unlike the original AI War. That's so last-decade: people largely want to just start playing, you know?
• With that in mind, we're leaning on three different techniques to teach people how to play, two of which are partly in place at the moment, and the third of which will be coming along soon.
• Firstly there's the Intel tab, which brings really important stuff to your attention and has been there for a long while. Plus the really robust tooltips, most of which you can hold Shift on to get a full explanation of the mechanic of the ship in question right at that location.
• Secondly, there's a new How To Play Section that has been added as of this build, and which is kind of like a wiki for answering specific questions you might have. This goes into more depth than we can do in a play-as-you-go tutorial anyhow, and wiki-style explanations for things were always considered kind of required for the original game anyway (but were actually on our wiki rather than being embedded in the game like this now is).
• The How To Play section needs a lot of fleshing out, and if anyone has ideas on what they'd like us to explain, or if they have strategies that they want to contribute to the strategy sections, etc, then that's of course very welcome. Sometimes the best people to think of what the first things they want to look up are the people who wanted to find that information recently themselves.
• There is also a new Tip of the Day system on the main menu, which I've wanted for a while. Contributions to that are also welcome.
• Thirdly, and not in place at all yet, we're going to be having some little "mini missions" that encourage you to do things that are helpful to your cause, and thus teach you bits of strategy inherently as part of the game, and which give you a reward in-game for doing it if you want to. This is similar to something we did in The Last Federation, and it's a different form of "teaching by playing." Letting you actually just play, but then giving you some missions that you can reject or accept that give you an in-situ way of learning about strategic options that you might want to partake in.
• Anyway, between these three approaches the hope is that players are able to get into the game easier than ever, and without having to worry about if there are 5+ hours of tutorials or whatever. We'll see how this works long term, but it seems promising, since it covers both major learning styles right in the game, rather than having some stuff in the game and the rest on our wiki and youtube.
• Note that there's currently a lively discussion ongoing about what to do about EXP, since right now it's definitely super unbalanced for a lot of reasons.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-21 21:30:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• Lots of big-deal stuff in this one, just like in the last one! Feedback is really heavily desired on the fleet EXP level-up thresholds in particular.
• So the most notable thing, potentially, is that now basically as your fleets fight and destroy enemies, they gain EXP for doing so and then eventually level up. This has always been planned, and for things like engineers and command stations (and a few other things), it's actually the only way that those can level up; science techs don't directly support them.
• This is an automated process (the leveling up), contrary to what I'd been thinking about for a while, since that's way less micromanagement for you. But then what I'd been thinking of as alternative ways to spend EXP (for fleet customization purposes) will instead be "perk points" that you get on level up. Rather like what happens in a variety of action games, Dying Light comes to mind. Or Horizon: Zero Dawn, etc. A bunch of others.
• There are ten new quickstarts in here for you to enjoy, too -- thanks, Puffin!
• The mark level colors are now completely revised, so that you can properly read the gradient of difficulty across the galaxy map when looking at it colors-wise.
• The AI no longer gets so much salvage, so it no longer will have such crazy strong reprisal waves early in the game.
• Your player homeworlds are now able to produce a lot more energy, which helps a variety of things early in the game in particular.
• Energy costs for lower-mark units now goes down when they are in fleets with higher-mark ships, same as happens with metal as of the prior build. This only applies to player ships, so the fact that this can make you suddenly more or less vulnerable to nucleophilic or other effects with those ships is just one of those things you have to manage on those ships you choose to leave outdated. In some cases it's a real advantage, in others it makes them really vulnerable to specific ships like eyebots.
• Drones now never cost you energy, as that was something that could really mess you up. For the same reason they haven't been costing metal for quite some time.
• Several other bugfixes are in place, and we also upgraded the version of unity and hopefully that will fix the glitchy icons in the sidebar. If you see that glitch again, please let us know!
• And then one of the other best things for last, you now start with a hand-designed battlestation defensive fleet (of your choosing from a selection of 5) on your home planet, just like you start with a hand-designed offensive fleet of your choosing from a different selection of 5. This makes it so that you don't have to babysit your home planet at the start, you get one more bit of personality into your starting position from moment one, and also the very idea of battlestations (and the key role they serve) is introduced now from minute one even if you skip the (currently disabled) tutorials.
• We're closing in on 0.900. I need to get the fleet management screen v1 in place, and then we'll iterate on that from there later on. Then it's just a matter of new tutorials, and I think we're where we need to be for this to come out of beta. There's then still a lot to do to get to 1.0, including a lot of things on fleets and whatnot, but with those additions the current build is I think complete and contained enough that it's definitely not beta-quality anymore.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-20 20:53:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• There are a whole heap of bugfixes in this one, and a lot of them make the factions or AIs work better and smarter.
• There are also some explicit improvements to the AI intelligence, specifically around waves in particular and how they use those.
• And some other cases where things like Raid Engines just really were Not Okay (tm) on third party faction worlds because they weren't designed for that sort of thing. So those factions and the AIs just kind of agree "okay, let's just remove the raid engine from that planet and all move on with life." Raid Engines are more of a special present for you, the player. ;)
• Reprisal Waves in particular have seen a big improvement, and now work more like the first game. Basically, it was way too easy for you to see a target AI planet that you were no match for, and just spend a lot of time whittling it down. Reprisal Waves were always supposed to stop you from doing that by having a mechanic whereby the AI essentially goes "okay, that was cute, now swallow my boot heel. If you're coming back, you'd better be prepared for real and not try to cheese me through economic-powered attrition." In this game that wasn't really hitting back hard enough, so some people were doing the whittling thing, especially with Fleets now being more of a streamlined thing. So this loophole hopefully being closed should be a big deal in terms of people really having to play smart and not just use their economy to bludgeon something out of their reach.
• There were also some really notable cases where AIs were not releasing their reinforcements from guard posts or similar when they should have been, or releasing them way too early. In some ways that was like the AI holding one hand behind its back for no good reason. Expect to be suplexed now, properly.
• There are multiple styles of how you can have your planets named, now! There are various ones named after stars, cities in various countries, the original list from Keith and I, and some tongue-in-cheek humorous ones. You can also add your own (and if you create something cool that you'd like us to add for others, we can do so). I need to remember to make a how-to document on that feature, but it's pretty nifty.
• Hacking is no longer quite so tough, particularly on superterminals. It was pretty insanely over the top difficult. But really there were a variety of hacking changes that should be a lot more pleasant.
• Puffin also made a lot of balance changes, making transport centerpieces way more useful and less likely to suicide (partly thanks to Badger for his suggestions there, as well as all the AI work he did). But then there was also a big change in the tech costs for things like Arks and Citadels in particular, making those way less costly so that you can actually reasonably afford them.
• Then when it comes to mark levels, hoo boy a ton has changed. Previously the AI only used marks level 1 through 5, but you could get up to mark 7. This was... really backwards. Now the AI uses all 7 mark levels, and you still can, too. Especially with the reductions in tech costs, you're more likely to be able to get more high-level stuff, too. Though the XP upgrades for fleet mark levels are still to come, and that will push you even higher in that regard.
• THEN, even beyond that, mark levels are now a heck of a lot less extreme in how they ramp up. The mark 2 units were literally over twice as good as mark 1 units, which was a holdover from AIWC that really didn't make any sense anymore. And then there was a more gradual growth up to mark 7, but it was still a huge amount of power creep with strange spikes. Now things are far more gradual, and so mark 1 units aren't immediately useless. And mark 7 units don't immediately mean you overpower everything. It's supposed to be important that you increasing mark levels on fleets,as are the mark levels of AI planets being higher or lower when you choose to fight them, but the balance was just all off because it was built on the premise of the first game which... is just different in a wide variety of ways. The new balance might not be perfect yet, but it should be a lot more satisfying than before and also should make it so that your really huge power jumps are where they should be: getting more fleets. Or upgrading something that is in a ton of fleets all at once.
• But going even further than that when it comes to lower mark levels being useless or a liability up until now... those were always supposed to be useful as at least being cheap chaff... but the cost for a mark 1 unit was the same as a 9x more powerful mark 7 unit, so you could just absolutely tank your economy on stupid stuff that was no help. Even with the mark levels being more balanced now, the lower marks now get cheaper as you unlock higher mark ships of any sort in a given fleet -- the more the difference, the cheaper the lower marks get. So you can actually make some fleets that have one really good ship type in there and then a ton of super-cheap chaff, if you want, which is definitely useful as a way to be a bullet sponge against certain types of AI forces (nothing AOE, but something that fires directly, for sure). The AI doesn't get this benefit, it's just for players. In the first game, higher mark levels got more expensive, but in this game that approach could wind up bankrupting your economy if you simply upgrade a tech innocently, so the discount approach for older stuff had to be taken instead. And it's fleet-based rather than global in order to encourage... more unique and interesting fleets, and to give you more opportunities to show your cleverness with how you upgrade your fleets.
• Keeping on with the idea of making fleets something that feel good in their default-ish state without you needing to turn off a bunch of units (like the old-expensive mark 1 units), we've also implemented the first of a new type of ability: Raiders now make all the other ships in their fleets, other than the centerpiece, at least as fast as they are. So if you have some awesome Raiders for doing fast strikes, and then a bunk of slow space tanks that were absolutely a horrible combo before... guess what? Now you have awesome fast raiders AND supercharged wicked fast space tanks to go with them. Suddenly that particular fleet isn't a bad combo, it's this new and more powerful thing because of the strange mixing. We plan to do more things along those lines, to really keep emphasizing the procedural and cool combinatorial elements of the game.
• Also, there's a new interface thing where you can click your metal resource text in the top bar and see your metal outflows, which is really useful. It's a preliminary version and may have some bugs, so feedback is appreciated.
• Last week I was thinking about some large systemic changes to the game in order to try to solve some problems that are persistent but really more isolated. This week, thanks to tons of feedback, we've all been thinking more along the lines of ways to improve the specific pain points (aka, make you want to use all the units in every fleet if we can, for example), but without going through this in a really extreme fashion. It was already a lot closer to being correct than I was giving it credit for, and some more creative thinking has really led to some new approaches that I think will be a lot more palatable.
• With that said, I've still been reluctant to focus on the fleet management screen so far, because if you've got that and are happily turning off a problematic unit then you probably won't tell us about it and we can't make it awesome. ;) But that will be something I add next week, I think. Even so, trying to keep that to the simple model I outlined, or something close to that, by simply making all your options useful in some way rather than a complete economic drain like something like autobombs might be now.
• Beyond that we need to get the revised tutorial in place and make sure that as much of the balance is sane as possible, and then I think we're ready for 0.900! We then have a ways to go on polishing and adding things (like subscreens for seeing more about your empire) heading into 1.0, but that will be a really big milestone and in theory that could be next week. Maybe I just jinxed it, but it sure would be nice; I guess it depends on what people find over the weekend. I think we're getting out of the territory where the beta versions are more complicated to get into than the non-beta versions, and where they won't be going through as drastic of shifts as they have been over the last few months. Certainly my fingers are crossed for that, but it seems like we're getting into that ballpark.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-15 03:15:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• A couple of minor lobby improvements, but nothing super major.
• There are now some lobby options that can be changed during gameplay, and the performance options (stacking is the only thing there right now) have moved to that section. This prepares us for multiplayer staying in sync down the line. All the other settings (not lobby options) are player-specific and local-only, versus the lobby options stuff is shared across the entire galaxy. So this is big groundwork for later stuff. Thanks to Badger for suggesting.
• A variety of improvements have been made to the selected units / fleets window, including having it show selected fleets instead of individual units when you've selected an entire fleet. This is pretty useful for a lot of reasons.
• AI units were being aggro'd from way too far away when your ships were just sitting there innocently, and that now both defaults to a (vastly) lower value and also is something you can customize in the lobby options.
• Also AI units were being aggro'd even by your cloaked units, which is fixed. So between this and the prior change, there's a ton of deepstriking you can now do. Thanks to Puffin for figuring out these last two ones in terms of what was wrong.
• Fixed a bug where on the galaxy map (and in the lobby) it would often seem to click the wrong planet if you were zoomed out a lot in particular. Thanks to WeaponMaster for noticing that this was because there were some collision hitboxes we were leaving turned on for icons of "important ships at the planet." So that should all feelway better, now.
• And then command stations no longer are able to be exploited to keep things like beam cannons from your military command station after transforming it to an economic one.
• Then fixed some other visual glitches and oddities, including a variety centering around the Zenith Trader.
• Side story: I keep working on the fleet management screen on paper and then tossing it out, because it's really complicated in that it can be different between different types of fleets, and I'm not sure how many things we might want to add to this screen in the future in general, which makes it hard to settle on a design. I've decided today that I'm going to use a settings-screen-like approach with categories and such, but that is all code-driven, which is kind of a cross between the map tab left sidebar in the lobby, and the newin-game galaxy-wideoptions screen that I implemented today. The work that has gone into the lobby has given me a big advantage on doing those sort of interfaces super quickly, turns out, so that seems like a reasonable way to design this screen and then it will also be kind of infinitely extensible.
• So the moral of the side story is that I think I can finally stop messing around on paper with the fleet management screen and actually implement that thing without worrying about how I'm hemming myself in (because I won't be). In some ways it's slightly less elegant than I was planning, but it is definitely going to be more usable, which is the bigger thing to me. And vastly quicker to implement. It can always be reworked later if need be, I figure, but this would be a great place to start. It's a relief to have that mechanic figured out.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-04 19:48:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• Right, so lately most of the balance changes have been in favor of the AI: the end battle wasn't challenging enough, some various behavior was suboptimal, etc, etc. This time is different.
• The humans (that's us players) have been given way more tools to defend ourselves in the fleets versions of the game, but that comes at extra energy cost, and at times there were still not enough battlestations to go around, on top of that.
• What this version does is attempt to address some of the inequity that middle-tier players were facing, particularly in the early game, economically-speaking.
• In the last build, I put in notes on each difficulty level and said that if things were off, the description of the difficulty was correct and the balance was wrong. Surprising no-one, the result is that we are already finding the balance was a bit wrong on things like difficulty 7. With the way things were shaking out, 5 was more like 7 (but with a less-smart AI), and 7 was more like 8 or 9.
• This version also makes it so that the Hunter and Warden Fleets are more different based on whatever difficulty levels you select for them. That's pretty handy as an addition from Badger.
• kesseleth has added a new type of Instigator Base that feeds the Warden, which is really cool.
• Four more quickstarts have been added in by Puffin.
• Citadels are way more scary, which is a nice change also from Puffin.
• WeaponMaster fixed a bug where crippled mobile factories were still able to build ships.
• In general you also now have more lobby control over some things for the human faction, like if you want home human settlements and cryogenic pods, and if so how many.
• There's also a stronger (positive) incentive to actually choose to have those!

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-03 20:14:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• The title feature of this release is that you can now, in the lobby options section, control how many fleets of various kinds are seeded around the galaxy for you to capture. This is a pretty big deal, because while I think the default balance is good for most people, it may be that you want a more hero-centric gameplay experience (lots of officer fleets and lone wolf fleets), or maybe you want basically NO heroes, and it's just transports that your smaller strikecraft and frigates work around (so no officer fleets and a ton of basic fleets). For those who have felt like the game was drifting in one way or another (heroes-wise), hopefully this now gives you the feeling that you can make it whatever you want.
• Going along with that, you can also make it so that there are even more battlestations on each planet that you capture battlestations on, if you want. If you were feeling like you didn't have enough turrets to go around without capturing too many undesirable planets, you can just crank that up to 3 or 4 instead of the default of 2, and suddenly your turret caps are going to be crazy and very flexible in terms of where you can put them. So if you were feeling like the defensive tools were too scarce... you can now adjust that. Or if you felt like it was too generous, you can go for something a lot more stripped-down and hardcore by making only one battlestation on those planets.
• Those sorts of features show some of the power of the new lobby for us to really let you configure more about the game than you ever could in the first AI War, to get the experience you really want, but without it being crazy overwhelming in terms of what the interface to control all that is like. This is one of several reasons that I bumped the lobby redo up in priority -- some of these features were clearly things that some folks were going to need to feel like they were being heard, since they want more or fewer officers, for example.
• Quick Starts have been gone since we switched up the savegame format, and they were waiting for the lobby redo to be done before we added those back in. Now that the lobby redo is done, we've started adding back in quick starts. There are only three at the moment, but it's a good start and we'll build back up again.
• There are a whole bunch of bugfixes and a couple of typo fixes in this.
• The factions tab now uses the human-readable names for things in its dropdowns, which is a lot clearer and more pleasing on the eyes. It also now shows you tooltips for line items in those dropdowns, which is pretty critical for selecting your starting fleet, AI types, and the like.
• AI difficulty levels now have actual descriptions! These are based around the difficulty settings from the first game, and what the TARGET is for these difficulty levels in this game. It may be that we're missing the mark in the balance of various difficulty levels, so if something feels like it doesn't match its description then that's a matter of us needing to adjust balance, not the description being wrong. We'd definitely love feedback on that sort of thing.
• You can now see what the contents of the fleet will be for each command station type before you build it. This is pretty key info in terms of letting you know that, for instance, military command stations get more turrets and thus are less in need of help from captured battlestations. I expect that military command stations will be more needed early in the game, for instance, and then as you capture more battlestations and shore things up, you may convert some of those to economic command stations and see a nice metal windfall thanks to your efforts. But before it was hard to know that this was even a thing you could do, since you had to test building each thing before you'd find out what they came with!

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-06-01 01:57:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This took WAY longer than expected, but that's because we veered into fully redoing the lobby, at long last. There are still some bits that are todo noted here, but it was getting into things that were smaller to fix than was worth making you guys wait any longer.
• With the lobby being completely redone, this means you can have arbitrary numbers of factions now, and there have been a ton of other improvements and fixes.
• The Nanocaust has gotten even bigger and scarier. Some of their weapons weren't even firing properly, but they now will.
• Knockback is a huuuuge new thing that WeaponMaster has added to the game that we haven't had since the first game, and it's a lot more functional and fun here. It can be used in a variety of ways, including sucking things inwards rather than pushing them away. Thanks also toAnnoyingOrange for a bunch of math suggestions here, mainly for using a "baricenter" method for calculating when a bunch of knockbacks are happening on a ship at once (or many ships at once).
• Along with making the Nanocaust scarier, Badger also went in and made the AI Overlord battle way more intense on difficulties 7 and up.
• Puffin has been up to a lot with the balance, in adding a bunch more tweaks and changes to mines, giving translocation (knockback) to a number of ships and structures now, and so on.
• The AI planets are no longer able to get turret reinforcement boosts from having guard posts, since that was causing players to have to rush around to avoid that happening. Instead there is a bonus strike craft increase a bit heavier, which is less taxing.
• And a variety of bugfixes from Badger and WeaponMaster, ranging from the minor to some fairly major ones.
• It's worth noting that now that I've done all this lobby work, the other interfaces that I have to work on seem waaaay less intimidating, so hopefully those will go more quickly. Nonetheless, there's no other area (aside from maybe the tutorial, or the addition of multiplayer back in) that is so monolithically huge. But those won't delay the intermediate releases of the game, since they don't actually replace anything from the existing game as it is this build. So... yay! Hopefully the last of the releases that are quite this huge and spaced out.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-30 04:57:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This fixes almost all of the non-cosmetic issues with the lobby. The big outstanding one is the inability to set your player color or even see it properly synced in the GUI.
• Seriously considered calling this build "dropkicking dropdowns," but so many of the release names lately have been about the lobby or interface that I couldn't stomach it.
• There is some chance that I broke some form of AI waves with the new data structure that they use, so if you see any waves doing funky things, please let us know. But the new data format will let Badger cleanly expand the capabilities of waves coming up soon (well, when he feels inspired and has time, anyway).
• WeaponMaster fixed yet more bugs relating to incorrect math for how things like drones were being created.
• Additionally, WeaponMaster put in some changes so that now that units that are remains, not fully claimed yet, or crippled no longer count in strength totals for planets. Now you can get a much more accurate sense of your actual strength at a planet if half your army has been shot to remains.
• Various other goodies in here, such as ships unloading from transports inheriting orders and stances, and "Ally to AI" mode giving you complete vision of the galaxy since it's clear that's a sandbox mode for AI Civil Wars.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-18 03:26:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• A couple of random errors have been fixed in the game itself.
• A whole lot of work has been done on the dropdowns code and the lobby code in order to make them... well, behave!
• For real this time, you should be able to add any factions you like, and the data should be synced properly. Except the player colors. Those still have some sort of issue.
• Once I finish up the last of the lobby-meets-data sort of problems, then I can finally work on actually making the lobby more visually appealing and functional (such as you being able to add any number of factions without them running off the bottom of the screen). We're getting close on that, but boy this has been a mess to untangle.
• WeaponMaster also fixed some major math issues in the way it was calculating things for claiming entities for your faction, self construction, and so on. It's quite possible that all of these things are going to be ridiculously more expensive than you are used to now, since it was kind of giving it to you for free before (maybe?). If it's way off, then please let us (Puffin?) know so that we can adjust the claim costs and so on. But having the math working correctly is kinda important, so that's good either way.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-16 20:11:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• There was an incremental hotfix 0.858 build that made the game unplayable if you changed anything in the lobby. That came out back on the 9th.
• The lobby is now pretty much functional again, although there are still some funky bits to it. But it's now back to the funky bits that were pre-unity-upgrade, for the most part, I think.
• The big thing is that you can actually add factions again, in the lobby.
• Overall the lobby doesn't look much different (yet), but it has had a huge amount of work under the hood to make it MP-safe and in general lay the groundwork for the visual rework. And to fixmost of the bugs that were plaguing it, although there are still a few knocking around. It also makes the lobby way more responsive, in most cases responding instantly rather than on a half-second delay.
• Raid Engines are also back! Hence the part of the release name about that.
• Zombies, for both the AI and players, now work vastly better.
• There are several other features and balance tweaks, and a number of AI improvements to make the AI and other factions smarter in various ways.
• Several small interface improvements, including the intel tooltips for capturing battlestations and flagships being a lot more informative.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-15 20:56:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This one makes the AI way harder by fixing a variety of bugs and adding a variety of new behaviors. Thanks, Badger!
• The galaxy map bloom is less, and can be tweaked now.
• A flagship of yours getting crippled actually has some consequences now.
• Your energy going negative now causes construction to halt, and anything that you don't have the energy to run can be STARTED in construction but won't actually complete.
• Wow the amount of balance changes here, particularly to AI stuff. Here was Puffin's side of things to make things feel more balanced with the higher-tech stuff that players now have available all the time. The AI wasn't keeping up!
• Puffin also adjusted a lot of your flagships to be stronger now than they were, but it depends on the type.
• Economic command stations can now have multiple energy collectors again, which is a pretty big deal now that you need energy properly!
• A variety of bugfixes from Badger and WeaponMaster really clean up a number of annoying issues or strange galaxy seeds.
• I spent a goodly while trying to fix the lobby, and made a few things mildly better, but didn't really fix it. I've got a much better idea of how to redo it from scratch (which was already planned), though, now. I guess I'm doing that sooner than planned!
• I'm in much better health now, thanks to everyone who was asking after me -- that meant a lot.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-09 05:25:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This is a smaller-ish release, with great stuff in it thanks to Badger, Puffin, and WeaponMaster.
• I was unfortunately out with a health incident, although I'm getting functional again.
• The thing I'm most fond of in this release is the fact that the hunter fleet (which was already meant to be like a raptor stalking you) is now even better at coordinating its attacks on you when a wave is about to hit you. Hence the release name, which is actually shockingly apt.
• Beam weapon balance is also possibly now in the realm of sane thanks to WeaponMaster, and then Puffin took that even further.
• A number of improvements and fixes for when the AI is having a Civil War with itself are now in place, thanks to Badger.
• Science hacking now scales in cost more intuitively.
• A number of bugfixes and balance tweaks beyond that.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-04 17:41:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• In a lot of ways, this release is NOT hitting the most-important issues that testers have identified thus far. Please know that we are thinking about those and making plans! In the meantime, these things also really needed to be addressed.
• The really big thing that people want are the rest of the controls for fleets so that the feeling of mildly being on autopilot in some areas is no longer there. There's been various talk about that being "the new direction" of the game and folks who are unhappy with that, but bear in mind it's just a couple of pretty key fleet management interfaces missing, not some grand design to take away a lot of control from you. Though the fact that things function in the main so wellwithout those key fleet management screens is actually a big design goal, which we seem to have hit well. Nonetheless, that's coming soon no matter what.
• Right, so the galaxy map has been a bit of a mess for a long time. It has been various degrees of mess depending on when you look at AIW2, but suffice it to say that the sequel's map always felt inferior to that of the first. Visually and scale-of-stuff-wise, and in general referring to clarity of that screen... this build should be lightyears ahead of any prior build.
• There's still plenty more for us to do with the galaxy map as well, and there has been some rumbling of "why did you take away the ability to hover over specific ships and find them easily," and my only answer to that right now is that those things are coming soon as well. As far as the ship hover bit, some of the sidebar changes that are coming necessitated a change, so here we are.
• You can now hack (very cheaply) to get the science off of neutral planets. If you've actually conquered the planet, then just let your command station get the science for free... but this is something that is required for balance reasons because of a bunch of new things in this game (you not getting charged AIP for when a planet is taken over by a third party ally or enemy-to-all faction, for instance). My initial reaction was "just let flagships also gather science," but Badger quickly pointed out all the various exploits people can now do if we did that. This new approach allows you to actually get more science than before for the amount of AIP you incur, but not in an exploity way.
• Speaking of science... Puffin has completely redone how much the various techs cost to be more inline with the pre-fleets versions of the game, which should make things a lot more affordable-feeling and in general just be more sane.
• Puffin has also majorly toned down just how much more fearsome the mark 5+ ships are. Originally I figured that those ships would be AI only (the mark 6 and 7 variants in particular), and so I made the scaling on those pretty ludicrously powerful. Now it actually turns out that with the new style of techs, it is PLAYERS who are almost exclusively able to reach those higher mark levels (and that's something that seems thematically fitting), so the numbers really needed a rework in a major way. Just upgrading your stuff to an insane degree was always the best choice, versus spreading it around.
• Puffin has also really been busy making forcefields feel a lot more notable, giving you that shield-cracking vibe from the first game again, and in general working on a variety of balance things to differentiate units a bit more. We had an interesting private discussion about some more things that might need to change in this area, but for now what is in place definitely are major steps in the right direction.
• Bugfix-wise, the intra-galactic coordinators and other known issues from the prior builds are all now fixed up. Plus steamworks integration works again, and a handful of other things. There's a fun bug with the mousewheel being inverted in Unity 2019.1 on linux, and until they fix that we've implemented a settings option that lets you work around it.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-05-01 02:45:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• Wow this one was a detour, in the main. If any build is likely to break for you in some crazy way, it's this one. We upgraded unity, and our methods for drawing text, and how dropdowns work, and how the network code (which is used even in single player in a loopback fashion) hooks in... and a whole bunch of other stuff. How we compile, and what we compile against. What the post-processing stack is.
• This was all stuff that needed to happen sooner than later, because there are a plethora of bugfixes in unity and in the textmeshpro asset that we use for text that really make life nicer in general, but this is part of why we did this during the beta period. Also folks were complaining about the fonts a lot, so they're wholly new. There are little issues all over the place with things that could be a slightly better size or slightly more clear, though, I feel like.
• I'm going to be out until sometime on Sunday, and then back fully on Monday. So if you have a big problem in this build that doesn't let you go further, then please just roll back to the prior one in the manner described below (the most_recent_stable thing).
• That said, it's seeming pretty darn good in the main, and I wanted folks to be able to bang on this some while I'm off, so here we are.
• But that's not remotely all!
• WeaponMaster has been making some of the individual-ship AI smarter in various ways.
• Badger has been making some of the threatfleet AI smarter in various ways.
• A handful of quality of life improvements and bugfixes have been added.
• Puffin has been making the balance way more pleasant when it comes to techs, in terms of some things being cheaper and some things being costlier.
• Overall there was quite a bit of refinement, even aside from the big unity upgrade.
• That periodic stutter (which was caused by "garbage collection") should now be gone thanks to a new feature in unity to do incremental garbage collection, so hence the name of this release. We've been asking them for a proper generational garbage collector since literally 2010, and this is at the very least a step in the right direction (and they claim that their R&D folks found this performed better than generational GC in most cases, so... okay, I guess). Anyway it's something we're really happy to finally see!
• Two known issues:
• 1. In the bottom right corner of the main menu, it says you're not logged into Steam even though you are, and also if you are logged into Steam the backdrop for the main menu might be just stars instead of the usual colorful thing with ships flying by. We'll be upgrading our Steam integration dlls next build, which should fix that. Hopefully it causes no other issues.
• 2. The intra-galactic coordinators for turrets and strikecraft do who-knows-what (maybe nothing?) right now. We wanted to get this build out asap, since it's beta anyway.

More to come soon. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-04-26 23:40:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• This build is perhaps the biggest example of why we wanted all this testing feedback prior to going to 0.900. Just saying. The number of things that irritated people in prior 0.850-era builds that are now fixed is pretty enormous. Let's talk about those!
• Auto-assigned hotkeys for your fleets (in new savegames) are now more likely to be useful for you.
• Your command stations will now auto-rebuild themselves if you lose them but win the battle with battlestations or citadels in place. Yay lack of busywork!
• You can actually hack unexplored planets to explore them with nanites, properly! This is a pretty big deal, as it's the only means of manually scouting without incurring an AIP cost.
• Bunch of irritating bugs fixed, and the longwinded backstory has been condensed down to the important points.
• Tired of having all of your fleets have giant centerpieces in them? ME TOO! I, too, like lots of little strikecraft for most of my forces. Thus we now have Strike type fleets with just a transport at the center, and then "Officer" type fleets that are more like what you've been used to.
• Protip: take Strike fleets against ion cannons and mass drivers. Officer fleets are suicidal there.
• Note: we thought about making lobby options for giving you more or fewer Officer or Strike fleets relative to one another, but frankly it's more interesting if you make those choices in-game (in my opinion). If there absolutely aren't enough of one kind of fleet to find, then... we'll consider lobby options. But choices made through gameplay rather than the lobby are so much more satisfying...
• Most of the Officer-style centerpieces are a lot faster, so there's less waiting around for them. Even though they aren't QUITE so central as before.
• The AI's costs to purchase most things doubled, so you won't be getting wrecked with quite so large of enemy forces anymore.
• Your higher-mark ships no longer cost more metal than your lower-mark variants, so you can't accidentally hose youreconomy by upgrading a tech. Techs are 100% positive goodness now, no downsides (opportunity cost aside). Don't worry, you'll still need that metal for all the other fleets you're getting now.
• There's a whole bunch more cases where you get extra engineers, in new savegames only.
• There's a whole bunch more cases where you get extra decloaking ships, in new savegames only.
• Among those bugfixes, you can actually select between the different starting fleet types, now. Enjoy those parasites... ;)
• And the really huge one: there are no more mysterious AIP increase penalties for having too many fleets at one place. We'll deal with the exploits that you can potentially get up to later in terms of fleetballing too much, but the first solution we had was just plain irritating and not good. There is discussion about potential options here, if you want to get in on that.

More to come tomorrow. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-04-23 02:26:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• Your ships no longer go through a rally phase from the factories they are built at to the centerpieces they will then join. This was slow and annoying and caused all sorts of intractable issues when it comes to you wanting your fleet to act cohesively. Now things just directly come out of their centerpiece and inherent the behaviors and orders of the centerpiece. It's not like any one factory was doing all the construction, anyhow, in most cases. This directness solves a lot of logistical irritations, and prior to 0.850 I'd been wondering if I needed to do this. Turns out yes!
• Your tooltips now show you what techs upgrade a ship, if any. Yay! It also talks about upgrading fleets as a whole, which isn't in yet but will be soon.
• AI Command Stations that exist after an AI has reconquered a planet have been a minor pain in the rear for a while. They seem to suggest that more AIP will be charged to you when in fact that is not the case. They also allowed more recently for some exploity behavior when you farm them for scouting intel. All of that stuff is now fixed up by having them simply be split into their own new category of command station that notes that they are a result of reconquest.

More to comeMonday. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-04-20 21:31:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game. If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused. So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

• Your command stations have been rebalanced a bit, and the descriptions have been updated a lot in order to keep veteran AIWC players from making assumptions that get them into trouble. Aka, economic command stations are not always the answer anymore, and in fact can be kinda risky depending on the scenario.
• Bunch of bugfixes.
• Drones actually work now! At least for the hive golem. Still have not tested them for the third party factions and AI guard posts. Let us know (with savegames, please) if those are having problems.
• Just to save you some pain of hunting down cloaked AI guard posts that are harmless but hiding on your planet, those now lose cloak when their command station dies. This actually can be used in your favor in a couple of combat ways, too, actually: "the enemy's gate is down" on heavily cloaked planets, if you catch my drift.
• There were a bunch of bugs with double-clicking which have been in there forever, and are now fixed.
• The whole "control groups style number buttons" stuff now works again, except that you can't (yet) assign fleets manually to the numbers. But the first 10 you get will automatically be assigned numbers for you. Baby steps! The automation is useful long-term for new players and lazy people (like me) anyway who otherwise might not think to set their control group numbers and just do things the hard way, but the ability to manage that by hand is something that obviously we want you to have, too.
• Dire guard posts no longer wreck your AIP.
• Some of your forcefield units now have a much bigger forcefield, making them way more useful.
• Citadels all shoot much further now, and battlestations all now have much more personal shielding.
• The AI doesn't tech up remotely so fast anymore (by AIP levels), because the AIP increases are a lot more common in the new versions of this game. It's actually a lot more in line with how I used to play the 3.x versions of AIP, where I'd usually have a final AIP of 500ish.
• Note that you can still play a spectrum of high-AIP and low-AIP games in this sequel, but overall that spectrum has been slid a bit more upwards compared to the first game. Frankly this is good, because otherwise the AI stays kind of brainless because it really isn't aware you exist. The new game mostly forces you to get into the territory of "it knows you're there, but just really doesn't care" if you're playing a low-AIP game.

More to come probably tomorrow! I'll be working tomorrow, so might have another build out then. Enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-04-19 22:24:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. To play it, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the much-older (heck it's been a month and a half now) version of the game. Soooo... I'm a little stuck as to what to even say, here. Here's what this is, in a nutshell, I guess:

• The game was feeling stagnant (to me personally) for a variety of reasons, and I wrote up a big document about what I intended to do to fix that.
• I figured that an initial proof of concept would take "a week," and in an ideal world it might have been possible. But that's obviously not what happened.
• Instead of a small proof of concept, we actually doubled down on a lot of the most interesting things going on in the new build, and that document I originally linked doesn't even convey the full scope of what has already changed.
• This also actually slaughtered a ton of bugs and to-dos and complaints from mantis and the steam forums, so good stuff all around.
• Hooray! Month and a half well spent.
• That said:
• We're missing some things again, like tutorials, quick starts, and a fleet management screen.
• Also I hate the icons and the ships tab, functionally and visually. This is not new.
• There's probably a ton of bugs, given only three of us have been testing this at all, and we haven't even tried to test all the parts that are here.

Why should you play this new build?

• If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and want to help us refinement (bug reports, please!).
• If you already mostly know what you're doing with the game, and are just ready to play the next phase of it.

Under what circumstances should you NOT play this new build? It's under the BETA tab for a reason:

• If you just want to play a game that is polished and doesn't have any blatantly missing pieces, I'd advise waiting for 0.900.
• If you have an allergy to bugs, and/or the thought of losing your savegame repeatedly prior to 0.900 bothers you, then I'd wait.
• If you have no idea what you're doing and would like some form of tutorial, then this absolutely isn't for you yet.

What's Actually New?

• I just... this is where I struggle.
• Most everything is refined.
• The release notes are over 20k words long.
• The initial document describing what is changing and why was 12k on its own.
• Control groups are gone and fleets are in, and fleets are awesome and a player-side thing.
• The docks tab is gone and a new fleets tab is in. That one is only partially implemented.
• The way techs work is completely redone, and is way better.
• The way hacking and planet capture work are way better.
• Many bugs were fixed, and achievements (not yet on Steam, but local at least) have been added.
• There were a variety of AI improvements, and mapgen got a whole heck of a lot of overhauling.
• Your ability to field a large force of spaceships, and to customize what sort of defenses your planets have, is through the roof compared to earlier versions of this game or the original game.
• Transports are gone, but all your mobile flagships (Arks or Golems) now can do that. Press L to load and U to unload.
• Factories (formerly docks) are now incredibly automated, and the whole concept of things like build queues, rally points, and so on are all gone. It just does what you want, now, without you having to tell it how. You more or less tell it how by what you build and where you put things.
• Scouting has been completely revamped from the ground up, and there's a "hard mode" for that if you want. It's mostly automated and thus serves the role of gradual-information-dispensing that it was always supposed to. There's no way for you to cheese or grind it anymore.
• The way AIs defend their planets is completely different, and each planet is much more of a puzzle box for you to solve.
• There are way fewer capturables around the galaxy in a types-of-things-to-hack sense, like for instance Design Servers and all that sort of thing are gone. This might seem alarming. Even after writing the original big document, it alarmed me.
• But the reality is that there is more to capture than ever before, in the form of partially procedurally-generated FLEETS of ships that each dramatically improve your offensive or defensive (or both!) power. It's shockingly gratifying as a way to grow in power, and the galaxy is absolutely littered with these things. You can really field quite the force, now.
• The way the AI buys stuff is completely different (from how it worked before and from how it works for you, too), and it's way more effective and scary and interesting.
• Your risk of losing very early into the game because you left your king (in a Chess sense) undefended is higher than ever, especially if you play with many factions on. Your risk of losing in the middle and late game is also a lot higher.
• In general things happen faster (not in a reaction-time sense, but in a not-waiting-for-things sense), and you're both more powerful and more exposed at all times. Games that are won are likely to be several hours shorter, and I expect that games that are lost are likely to be even shorter compared to their counterparts in earlier versions or the prior game.
• There are literally dozens of new ship variants and new ship types. It's actually kind of absurd how much new stuff there is. The sense of discovery, even for me, is notable as I look through the galaxy. That new stuff isn't marginalized, either, which is doubly cool. You'll actually be seeing it with frequency, just not all in one big ugly soup.
• A bunch of stuff that took two or three steps (like colony ships! hackers! etc!) has been simplified a lot to just be one step. Efficiency! Let's get on with it.
• Savegames are vastly smaller in size, but actually have more data in them. We're using a completely different format.
• The tutorial is disabled right now because we have to completely go in and redo how that works.
• If you're interested in our most immediate todo list, here it is. Though some of that is misleading, because some of that stuff we might not wind up doing until after 1.0 or even at all. I'm really not sure the hyperspace stuff is a good idea. That applies to several things on the list. But it's a working list.

Badger and Puffin and I would all love to have your thoughts on this, as we've been working on all sorts of various elements of it. The absolute scale of this game has been rather staggeringly shoved in my face as I've undertaken this rework, but rather than stop with half measures and just implement band-aids, I've been going for the full deal fix as I see it. So hence a month and a half rather than a week. What Now? What happens next is thatwe finish up some of the interfaces, decide whether or not to do some of those items on the todo list or leave well enough alone, fix a bunch of bugs and balance things that you guys toss at us, and then we'll ditch the beta status and go back to main steam branch builds when we hit that massive 0.900 build. That will basically be this version, but fully finished and polished and with tutorials and all that jazz. Think of this as kind of the needed preview version, and also a way for us to get a bunch of bugs out of the way (thanks to you finding them) without us inflicting them on people who just want to play the old version of the game. Remember way back a year or so ago when we did "The Pivot," and that was the largest change in the game that I thought it was going to have? That brought usmechanically back toward the first game in a huge number of ways. It also started a bunch of people asking if this game was just a reskin or what. This new version, the arrival of the Fleets concept, basically is 2.0 of the concept of The Pivot. Mechanically this takes us actually really far from the first game, and anyone asking about reskin status at this point after seeing any of the ui I will seriously wonder about. Butgameplay-thematically andgame-flow-wise this is taking us way back toward the first game, back towhat I loved about it in its earliest days. In a lot of respects, at this point the amount of content is so astounding thanks to things like procedural fleets that I'm feeling like the smartest way to reach 1.0 from here is to focus on polishing the mechanics and interfaces, fixing bugs, getting multiplayer in, and in general going for something tightly polished (and still huge) versus dripping with even more new mechanics. We can save that stuff for post-1.0. In the shortest term, my goal is to get to a really stable and awesome 0.900 build, which should be the best version of AIW2 to date, and potentially better than any of the AIWC builds. We shall see. The proof is in the pudding, and today you guys finally get to actually get to taste things. Hope you enjoy! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-04-18 21:11:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Chris here! It's been a few months since I last did the podcast guest thing, and it's nice to be getting back on that horse, so to speak. This is a favorite show of mine to guest on, and they've moved to a new format with live chat and streaming going on during it. Here's the details: Chat Room -https://discord.gg/ZvY7dhk YouTube Stream -https://gaming.youtube.com/spacegamejunkie/live Twitch Stream -https://www.twitch.tv/spacegamejunkie If you miss the show, don't worry, you can still watch it later on without issues. The main thing you'd be missing is the ability to put questions in through the chat room, assuming the moderators are going to be passing some of those along. I don't know about you, but I can't read the chat room while also speaking coherently, so I tend to put it out of my sight as much as possible and rely on the hosts to bring up anything that people want me to address. Version 0.900 Work on that new version is coming along well, but it's HUGE in terms of how much code is being changed and how much it adds for players to find, do, etc. I keep coming up with more things I want to address, too, and Puffin and Badger also keep coming up with really good points. Because of those shifts, most likely we'll do a 0.850 release first, sometime next week, and only in the beta branch on Steam. It will likely be buggy as heck, and it will definitely be suboptimal in a lot of ways where we're not remotely finished with some new aspect of the GUI or whatever. There are some GUI subscreens that are needed for the full 0.900 experience that there just isn't time to do before next week, but it would be good to be getting testing and feedback for other kinds of bugs in the meantime. Hopefully then we can spend a few weeks finishing the 0.900 work list, polishing whatever is wrong with the beta versions just from the sheer number of code changes, and so on. Various thing that might interest you in the new version:

• Squads are going away, as I know people weren't fond of that.
• Hopefully by 0.900, but not right away next week, we'll have some replacement icons for ships.
• There's a bunch of new ship variants available right out of the gate.
• There is a new concept of Fleets, which is... kind of Stellaris-like in a vague way as I understand it, but also just kind of its own new thing. It will lead to waaaay larger effective ship caps for you, way more varied battle groups and defensive groups, and in general also a lot less micromanagement.
• You can read about some of the detailshere, but those details are at least somewhat out of date, now.
• You can read the kind of stream-of-consciousness flow of what's actually changinghere, but bear in mind that so many things are half-done that certain things are out without their replacements being in place yet. So please refer to the first document to see what is in general planned, despite the fact that some plans have evolved a bit as implementation has been ongoing.
• One TLDR problem that this new update addresses is basically I didn't like how exploration felt in this game. The factions and whatnot are awesome, but the feeling of actual exploration was completely missing from me and it has nothing to do with the amount of content. Throw in more content and it would have just felt more cluttered. Instead it was a matter of how exploration plays out really being suboptimal. So scouting is one thing that is being completely redone, but that's not the only aspect to exploration that needed work.
• The other big TLDR problem that this new update addresses was that there were a lot of various things when it comes to managing your empire -- in this sequel and the original -- that either couldn't be done very easily, or at all, because of the UI or general design. You had too much or too little control in various ways, a bunch of stuff that needed to be automated in the first game because it was a pain, and a bunch of interfaces that were painful or text-heavy because of the underlying design. There are actually a substantial number of further improvements in these areas that are being discussed by Puffin and Badger and I that aren't in either of the documents above, but those will most likely come starting after 0.850 next week so that you can comment on those as we go.

This project has been a strange one, because for a goodly while I've really loved the tech that we've built for it, and I've loved the AIs and the factions and a bunch of that sort of thing, but the actual act ofplayingthis game... hasn't really done it for me. I remember having similar feelings about the original game around this same time of year in 2009, as I was pushing on towards a 1.0 in May of that year. I'm not sure if 1.0 is still feasible for May of this year or not, but one way or the other this is going to take a titanic leap forward in terms of just letting us allget on with itand enjoy ourselves at the appropriate level of strategic thinking, versus being bogged down in minutiae or not having the tools we need to properly exert control over a giant galactic empire. Did I mention that this will probably up your effective ship caps by like 10x? So for those folks who have been feeling like things felt toosmallhere compared to the original game, I definitely heard and agree with you. The Fleets concept was something Eric proposed over a year ago, and it's bringing in some code bits that Keith put together over two years ago but which have never seen much use since then. All in all, it's an exciting time, and my enthusiasm for the project has really skyrocketed with the realization that some of those "intractable" problems actually do have solutions that can be resolved -- and in the short term, even! A lot of the most key bits are already halfway implemented. Thanks, as always, for your support! Chris

[ 2019-03-26 19:45:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. This is the last build before the 0.900x phase of the game's development process, and it's a big one! First off, what's new in this release?

• A bunch of changes have been made to balance, as usual.
• Several new ship mechanics have been added, such as a new "Bunker Buster" and "Charger" mechanics.
• Several new capturable units have been added, such as Zenith Matter Converters, Distribution Nodes, Advanced Factories, and Spire Archives.
• The AI has had a variety of upgrades that should make it properly more aggressive in a variety of circumstances where it was previously holding back. Consider yourself warned. ;)
• A bunch of bugfixes, including finally the fix for that "game command issued noise" sound effect playing when inappropriate.
• A bunch of changes to stacking of AI units to make it work better, and also feel more like a real game feature rather than just a performance optimization (it was always meant to be both).
• A huge raft of changes to various minor factions, generally keeping up the arms race that seems to be perpetual with all of them. Smarter, stronger, more interesting, you get the idea.

Next up... what's that about a new phase?

• The new phase is called The Arrival of Fleets, which should give you some ideas on what is planned.
• The goal with it is to take the game from "that early access feel" to a true 1.0 game.
• As part of that, along with the goals of making the gamefeel more like the first game, we're actually going to be diverging a bit more from the first one in a mechanical sense to converge on it in a "spirit of the beast" sense.
• Yes, that is vague.
• I want you to see it in practice before I try to explain it too much, because the document I wrote to outline my plans was 12,000 words long. Badger and Puffin and Eric have read it and commented quite a bit, and my hope is that we'll have a version you can actually play within the next week.
• THAT said, I haven't actually done a full hours analysis yet, so no promises, but we're going to be working on it as fast as we can.
• No you can't read the document yet, but I will have it for you to read as the release changes come out. The document is the result of your cumulative feedback over the last three months, and my musings on it as well as suggestions from a variety of you, and it's enough of a change that I want you to be able to feel it in practice rather than us all armchairing it ad nauseum.
• If this absolutely hits the fan and is terrible, then we've only lost a week, but so far the guys I showed it to are really excited about it to their surprise (and mine), so my hope is that after it comes out we go into revision and refinement as part of the new phase, not a rollback. Fingers crossed, eh?
• But either way it's just hard to have you read a 12k word document and digest that and try to form a big opinion when it isn't something you're treating like a job. Fifteen minutes of just playing in the new system will be so much more informative for you.

We'll be back soon, but in the meantime you can watch this space in horror/fascination as you see things out of context and partially explained and implemented as we do the release notes. ;) Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-03-06 04:01:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Badger has really outdone himself with this one, I have to say. This adds quasi-experimental support for multiple AI factions in the galaxy, along with a bunch of new tools for letting specific AI types spawn specific things at game start. Then Puffin has been really on top of it with a bunch of new unit types and AI types, some of which are partially implemented for the time being. And Badger added black hole machines. And science hacking is no longer such a research goldmine for you, anymore -- spend those hacking points on more varied goals, folks! ;) There's yet more fixes in here that were figured out by WeaponMaster, too. Man you folks all rock! I honestly spent most of the day asleep; I was that sick. Antibiotics are helping. But some of that is I think just a stress response to a larger existential crisis of sorts that I've been going through for the last few months and am feeling more acutely in the last week or two for a couple of reasons. I'll... have some thoughts up on that soon, as I try to figure out how to get myself properly functional again. For now these other guys are killing it, which I'm eternally grateful for, and the game is evolving an amazing amount without me. I feel really bad about that, but at the very least it is a relief to see how this is coming along despite my personal issues. Silver linings! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-02-27 01:32:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. This version has a surprisingly-robust revamp of the tech costs and the scaling between tech levels in general, thanks to Puffin. I didn't have any idea this was coming, and he trialed this with players on the forums first and it quickly became clear that the new approach is better. Huge kudos! Slightly more pressingly, there was a big bug in the prior version that was causing the AI to get massively strong massively quickly. This was due to some xml values being more than a little opaque in their meaning. To aid in meaning, I split those out into three different sub-values instead, now. But if you were wondering why the last build was suddenly kicking your butt instantly, that's what it was. Sorry about that! DarkArchon figured out what was going on with transports and similar not showing their paths on the galaxy map when you try to predict routes from one place to another, and/or them being too hard to see in general. Big thanks there! My illness has been compounded by allergies and got a bit worse, so I've been mentally sluggish this week. I plan on getting a bit more done tonight and tomorrow in terms of that document for "substantial changes" that I was referring to last release. I guess I'll just repeat my notes from last time, on that subject: "I'm writing up a document that explains my design for some substantial changes -- please hold your pitchforks -- that I think will address most of the complaints people have about control groups, fleet management, fleetballing, the docks ui, and maybe even scouting. That last bit I hadn't expected to tackle, but as I've been going through things in a comprehensive fashion I realized that it's actually just as much related as the rest of it." "I think it's only a couple of days of work for me once I finish writing it up, so the design and writeup process is longer than the actual implementation time if I'm correct on that. But this has been a bugbear set of issues for me for over a year, and I'd rather measure twice and cut once on it." "It's also a short enough amount of work once it is done that I'm planning on inflicting it on everybody AS I give you the explanation document, rather than giving you the document first. ;) My rationale for that is that we can all nitpick the theory of it forever, but it's hard for anyone to see exactly what I have in my head from a document and not just react to parts of it. Much easier to have the full thing out and then react to that, and the document then serves the purpose of illustrating if there's some place where the actual implementation deviates from intent, or where further refinements or rework is needed to keep to the spirit of the intent." The UI framework that I was looking into may be amazing, but unfortunately may be a nonstarter due to lack of linux support. Bummer! That would have saved a huge amount of work on my part, but there's potentially no real workaround there. Their engineers are looking into it, but my hopes aren't high. Back to the notes from last time: "Assuming that the big changes go over well with folks, then that's the last big design hurdle remaining for the game, prior to 1.0 at least. The new plan for multiplayer, detailed two releases back, will still need to be implemented, and the ui will need to be majorly updated in one fashion or another, but everything else is just a matter of content and getting individual slices of work done, versus something that is a larger design question. So that's very good! It was important for me to start nailing the really tough stuff as soon as I got back to work, since I really didn't want that hanging over me." "As noted recently, I am fully back at work now. If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don't go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there's enough there to get the important pieces across.I'm increasingly happy, for a variety of reasons, and that's a real relief. Life is still a work in progress, and finances even more so, but there's a path forward." Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while Iwas away. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-02-22 20:26:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. I'm slightly sick and very tired, so the release notes will mostly speak for themselves, I think. But there's a lot of amazing stuff in there from Weapon Master, helpfully integrated by Badger and Puffin, along with a long list of things that they also put together. The Dark Spire are getting increasingly cool, and the AI is more active in a variety of ways, and tractor beams are a lot more of a thing. My contributions to this release are pretty well nil, but I have been working away on the next great thing, don't worry. Basically I'm writing up a document that explains my design for some substantial changes -- please hold your pitchforks -- that I think will address most of the complaints people have about control groups, fleet management, fleetballing, the docks ui, and maybe even scouting. That last bit I hadn't expected to tackle, but as I've been going through things in a comprehensive fashion I realized that it's actually just as much related as the rest of it. I think it's only a couple of days of work for me once I finish writing it up, so the design and writeup process is longer than the actual implementation time if I'm correct on that. But this has been a bugbear set of issues for me for over a year, and I'd rather measure twice and cut once on it. It's also a short enough amount of work once it is done that I'm planning on inflicting it on everybody AS I give you the explanation document, rather than giving you the document first. ;) My rationale for that is that we can all nitpick the theory of it forever, but it's hard for anyone to see exactly what I have in my head from a document and not just react to parts of it. Much easier to have the full thing out and then react to that, and the document then serves the purpose of illustrating if there's some place where the actual implementation deviates from intent, or where further refinements or rework is needed to keep to the spirit of the intent. I have a couple of other irons in the fire at the moment as well, one of which is looking into a replacement ui framework that might make things vastly easier on all of us that want to do any UI work. So depending on how much those other things take up time-wise, it could in theory be as late as the end of next week before I have the big new set of changes out, but a big part of me would like to have those out this week if possible. Probably not feasible, but it would be nice. Assuming that the big changes go over well with folks, then that's the last big design hurdle remaining for the game, prior to 1.0 at least. The new plan for multiplayer, detailed two releases back, will still need to be implemented, and the ui will need to be majorly updated in one fashion or another, but everything else is just a matter of content and getting individual slices of work done, versus something that is a larger design question. So that's very good! It was important for me to start nailing the really tough stuff as soon as I got back to work, since I really didn't want that hanging over me. As noted recently, I am fully back at work now. If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don't go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there's enough there to get the important pieces across.I'm increasingly happy, for a variety of reasons, and that's a real relief. Life is still a work in progress, and finances even more so, but there's a path forward. Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while Iwas away. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-02-20 02:11:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. The way that the AI sneaks around has some bugfixes and works better now, and the Hunter fleet should be a lot stronger because of the AI knowing better when to retreat. AIs choosing to sneak past your forces and harass you should now be more effective, too. And the nanocaust should do a lot better of a job of dispatching its units. Thanks to Badger for all of these changes. Puffin also made some tweaks to things that make transports slightly better, though there's more I need to do directly on that. And he also made the Fusion Bombers really really a lot more effective in their targeting and also more powerful in general. They're now a lot better without you having to micro them. On my end, I put an end to fixed-int math, which fixes several immediate bugs such as ships circling other ships when they were supposed to linearly kite, or ships getting stuck on forcefields. These were a couple of bugs that I just couldn't figure out a graceful solution to, no matter how long I stared at them over the last half year or so. I also had been unable to figure out a graceful way around some obvious multiplayer desyncs that I knew were going to be persistently arising; that is part of why I haven't implemented multiplayer yet. Yesterday I finally had an insight, which is partially detailed in the link above, about a way to simply auto-repair desyncs in this game and thus solve all of these problems at once. Part of the reason this fixes anything in single player is that it lets us stop using fixed-int math and use floating point math instead. Those bits are now in place. The actual auto-repair of desyncs in multiplayer is something that I still have to code, but it should be under a week of work when the time comes for that, and it's certainly less than the months of chasing desyncs that was otherwise going to happen. This is a pretty big deal, because it will allow for multiplayer sooner than later -- no I still don't have a timeline, though, just yet -- and it also lets us simply brush away some of the more inscrutable bugs that were due to threading issues, fixed-int precision problems, or the like. Definitely a case of working smarter rather than harder, but it's only possible because of a long laundry list of other architectural choices and flexibilities that this game has thanks to the last couple of years of work. So if we'd thought of this a year or two ago, in an abstract sense, it still wouldn't have seemed feasible because the architectural constraints of most games just make this infeasible. But because of the multi-layered, pooled nature of the current game, suddenly I realized that this was possible. For those who missed the recent news, I am fully back at work now - yay! If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don't go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there's enough there to get the important pieces across. Anyway, I'm back now and very happy about that. Actually pretty happy in general, these days, which is good. Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while Iwas away. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-02-07 20:39:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. At long last, transport ships in the style of the original game have been added to the sequel! Except we implemented them in an even friendlier fashion here. It may be possible to do some cheesy tactics with these since they load and unload instantly, but we'll deal with that as the case arises. I'd prefer not to make them cumbersome to use in that old style unless folks are really reporting that as needed. As it stands, now a whole plethora of new and returning strategies are now possible: all the planet-hopping you want to do now works again, for instance. Deep strikes... you name it.
This build also has a number of balance tweaks thanks to Puffin, and several bug fixes from Badger along with Risk Analyzer balance from him. For those who missed the recent news, I am fully back at work now - yay! If you were wondering what was up, I recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don't go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there's enough there to get the important pieces across. Anyway, I'm back now and very happy about that. Actually pretty happy in general, these days, which is good. Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for having held down the fort while Iwas away. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-01-31 18:08:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. This is an entire month's worth of changes from the volunteer brigade, and the list of changes is far too long for me to fully address here. But one thing that is almost a minor note inside the release notes list itself is the fact that CPAs are going to be properly coming for you now. Eh... good luck with that! On the plus side, lots of balance fixes also help, and spider turrets will do their job more effectively, and control groups now function like you'd expect from other RTS games. Oh and Exogalactic Strikeforces are more freaky now. And some dire guardians are new to make your life more difficult. In general there's just a huge amount here. So! Almost three months ago I wrote about troubles inmy personal life, and then that really took me out of commission for longer than I ever expected it might. I've recently put together a video explanation of what happened. I don't go into a lot of detail, for privacy reasons, but there's enough there to get the important pieces across. Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for holding down the fort while I've been away. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2019-01-25 23:39:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Right - so I took a 90ish day sabbatical from work. What the heck was that all about? I said I'd update you guys on that (and be coming back to work properly) in January, so here we are. This was a really tough video to make, but overall I'm doing well these days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPwsiRYQIek&feature=youtu.be There is a new release that also just came out today, so things are getting back into gear production-wise, which is good. That release is the cumulative work ofthe volunteers over the last month, they've been amazing. Coming up this next week I will be able to actually get cracking on some creative work of my own, for the first time in basically a quarter. Thanks again for your patience with me during this, everybody. It really has meant a lot.

[ 2019-01-25 23:38:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. The title of this one is a programmer-y joke at the expense of us human meatbags. But I think it's also a pretty apt description of some of the new AI behaviors in terms of how it decides to take major actions at a planet. Sometimes bumrush you, sometimes go away for a while and come back, etc. This is a lot more in line with how the first game handled pieces of its AI at the mid-management tier, so to speak. Big thanks to Badger for adding this. There are a variety of other tweaks and fixes in here, including some changes to Risk Analyzers and Wormhole Invasions. You'll also start seeing reconquest waves on all difficulties. I've gotten almost all the end of year finance stuff done now, finally, and in general am feeling better inmy personal lifedespite things continually falling apart in various new ways each week it feels like. I'm getting fewer and fewer unpleasant giant surprises, so my confidence in my ability to keep my butt in the chair and focus on work-work rather than finances-work and outside-life-things-that-require-too-much-new-learning-work is rising. I'm still not where I want to be yet on that score, but I'm rapidly gaining, finally. I'm starting to feel more like myself again. Amusingly, I took my son to see the new Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie yesterday, and that was ridiculously meaningful of a movie to both of us for very different reasons. I've written (in a frustratingly vague way) about how I've felt a couple of times over the last months like I've flipped between universes that look similar but are actually different, and seeing certain aspects of that on the big screen in an emotionally-loaded animated movie was surprisingly cathartic. That movie is crazy well done and well written. We'll see if it lasts, but in a strange way since seeing that movie I've felt more like myself than I have since my mysterious incident that I'll explain to you in the future when I can. As I noted the last two times, rest assured that this won't be a permanent state of affairs, and I'm not going anywhere. This is hopefully a once-per-lifetime event. Thanks again to everyone for their support and kind words. Continual thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for holding down the fort while I'm functionally (not literally) handicapped. I'm getting increasingly excited about getting back into things and doing some big things with the game, and that's the best sign that things are improving. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-12-19 14:39:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Bunches of improvements for various factions, and also for the "unit stacks" feature. There's still more I plan to do with that feature in general (such as making AOE and beam weapons actually have a bonus against stacks, for one example), but for now this lets you choose custom stack sizes and how things stack, etc. If you're on a stronger machine, the need for stacks is pretty diminished. A number of requested balance changes have also been brought to you by Puffin. In general this is yet another release brought to you by Badger, Quinn, and Puffin. I'm extremely grateful to them for continuing to hold down the fort. Frustratingly, I'm still easing back into things with various end of year finances and other business bits. I also have been having a metric ton of things I've been having to learn about rapidly outside of work, legally and financially and... otherwise, so it's just been a period of a lot of information onboarding for me. I keep thinking I'm right about ready to get back to proper coding and design work, but it's been a bit of a longer stretch than I ever imagined it would be. Ithink I'm almost through with that, but I keep saying that and then there's more to learn and do. I should be able to explain to folks what happened in my personal life by late January, but right now there's still just a lot happening with that that is private, as well as kind of rapidly changing states of things. There have been some particularly positive developments in the last week in particular, so I'm hopeful that those will have a bit of an effect that bleeds over into me being able to properly do my effing job again. As I noted last time, rest assured that this won't be a permanent state of affairs, and I'm not going anywhere. This is hopefully a once-per-lifetime event, and despite the continual additional unexpected hurdles and hoops I've run into, things have been getting better. Particularly in the last week. But Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day after any of the times it burned down, so I'm taking things as quickly as I reasonably can. I really am getting there! Thanks again to everyone for their support and kind words. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-12-10 21:49:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. There's a lot of stuff in here! Hacking is better, construction is better balanced, and balance in general has gotten a huge bunch of changes. Visually there are some improvements in how large some ships are, so that you can see them better. Huge thanks to particularly Puffin and Quinn on this release, and also Badger for some pieces. So... what about some of the bigger-picture stuff? I should be working on all sorts of things ranging from the lobby to some of the unit control pieces. I'm still... easing back into things. Most of my work so far has been end of year finances type stuff. I'm going to be doing more actual proper work on this in short order, though. I should be able to explain to folks what happened in my personal life by late January, but prior to that it's something I really can't talk about yet. I've been feeling really bad about thinking I was ready to fully come back and then not really being able to hack it quite yet. This is... a first for me, since I started working in tech 17 years ago. Work was always where I escaped to. Ultimately I'll be fine, but the worst case here is that the schedule slips by a couple of months because of first my sabbatical and then my reduced productivity for a bit. Given the nature of the event, I feel like I'm doing decently well, but everyone's mileage varies. Rest assured that this won't be a permanent state of affairs, and I'm not going anywhere. This is hopefully a once-per-lifetime event for me. And I really am getting better, in the main. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-11-27 22:11:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. There are things! They are new! The release notes themselves are pretty much brief enough to cover it, to be honest. There's some good fixes and tweaks in here, again from Puffin and Badger and Quinn. I have still been out for the count. My personal life has still been completely upside down and sideways, but this week it's been on balance more good changes than bad. Still just a lot of getting used to... a completely new method of existence, really. I'm finally mentally and emotionally and physically getting recovered enough that I think that I'll be coming back to work more or less like normal next week, unless something NEW happens. My schedule is still going to be reduced from what it used to be, but I'm going to really focus on getting important stuff done efficiently, and I have Quinn and my dad as a big help on that. So... yeah. Continued apologies. This is just the largest life change event I've had, other than having kids, since I became an adult. So I'm just having to process and adjust, and I will get back on track. Thanks for bearing with me, and to all the folks keeping things going while I've been reeling. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-11-09 22:01:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Right! It's been 17 days since the last release, which is a hugely long period for us, so there's a ton in here. Even though I didn't personally do any of it; it's all thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn. Huge, huge, thanks to those three for holding down the fort and getting a lot of really important stuff done. Hacking should feel a lot more balanced now, and works on based on a new premise in terms of how strong the response is to your hacks. Before it would start out pitiful in response and then turn universe-eating without warning. No longer! A couple of hacks also weren't working right, and now do. Drones now actually work properly in all cases now, or at least should. They also can't be repaired anymore, since they are finite-life ships by definition. There were a couple of nasty bugs that Badger fixed, including a nullref that made it look like the game had frozen and might have caused some other seems-like-a-different-bug-but-is-really-the-same-thing issues. Balance has seen an incredible amount of work thanks to Puffin and all the feedback he's been getting. The list is really, really long. There's so much stuff in there, but I really like the changes to make Mercenaries that you can hire a lot more durable and useful, the Astro Trains that the AI has a lot more dangerous, and Minefields and Instigator bases a lot more of a presence now.

Why the Change in Schedule?

Last time I did a release, 17 days ago, I said this: "Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon." That... obviously had a sudden and unexpected stop. I posted about this a few days ago, in general terms, and unfortunately I can't be more specific for privacy reasons. I want to assure you that I'm not going anywhere long-term, but my life has been absolutely turned upside-down unrelated to anything with Arcen. One way or another, my life is very different from now on, forever, compared to what it was 17 days ago. I appreciate the words of comfort that folks have had, and those that have reached out in various ways, and overall the lack of speculation of what it is. I swear I'm not trying to be a tease about this. My natural instinct is to share and over-share what is going on with me, but there are times in life when that's not possible or advisable. I'll be OK. And I plan on finishing the 1.0 of this game on schedule, and then to continue developing this game after that for a long time to come. Expansions that are paid, plus free post-launch updates, for maybe a half decade again, like what happened with the first game. But my schedule is going to be all over the place because of these recent developments, and I'm not going to be reliable on a day-to-day basis in terms of when I can do what. So expect larger releases a little bit further apart. A fair number of you have said that's what you prefer, anyway, so I guess that's good. I'll be honest: this has been the darkest, scariest time of my life. Meanwhile, things with Arcen and AI War have been going pretty relatively great, go figure. I may talk about what happened sometime in years to come, but not in any capacity sooner. At this point I have the specialists lined up who are able to help with this situation, and now it's a matter of putting in the time and getting used to my new and sudden reality. But please don't let this put you off of picking up the game. I promise I'll do right by all the fans and customers, as has always happened in the past. People freaking out that the game suddenly won't get completed or something would only take my life from rock bottom to somewhere even lower. Please do trust me to finish what I've promised you, and I won't let you down. I apologize for being such a downer in this post, and I don't expect to be discussing it much publicly in the future. But I've got roughly a 6 month period before I know at all what the shape of my future life is going to look like, so that uncertainty is going to be there chewing at me for at least that long. Despite that, I'll do my best. I've been a bit slow climbing back on the horse so far, but I intend to get some proper work done this week and get a bit more momentum of my own going. Again huge thanks to Badger, Puffin, and Quinn for holding down the fort while I've been away. If there are other folks who want to volunteer to dig into things in that way as well, that sort of help is welcome, although I have nothing to offer in return. Anyway -- I hope you have a lot of fun with the new build, it looks pretty killer from what I've seen so far!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-30 17:05:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. This has a couple of notable bugfixes, and it tunes the balance on the hacking response from the AI waaay down. That was some game-ending level of hacking response that some folks were getting. Badger is currently in the process of reworking how the hacking response severity gets calculated anyhow, but for now we just toned down the existing mechanic since the new logic isn't ready yet. This version also simplifies the speed controls some, and adds in legitimate Game Speed Styles (rather like the first game had). These GSSes, rather than being like fast-forward or slow-motion (which we do also have), act as balance shifters to either make the game more frenetic or more contemplative. The default values here are the same, but there is a speed now that is Epic (quite contemplative), all the way up through Cheetah (very fast), all the way through Insane and Plaid (because why not). Some folks feel like it's too fast, some folks feel like it's a little slow, and now everyone can play the way they want while leaving the in-game wall-clock alone. Except when you want to fast-forward for a bit, which obviously you can still do. Also? Sabots are not so darn terrifying anymore, so your starships should breathe a sigh of relief. Big Topics It's late and I'm quite tired, so I don't feel like getting into these full discussions right now. But basically I am hearing what you're saying about things like the control groups being difficult to manage, and some of the things you want to be able to control with them, build queues, etc. I've been thinking hard on some solutions for those, and I think there will be some good changes to come out of that. Thanks for your patience, in the meantime. The lobby is something that I desperately want to get fixed up to a nicer state, but with all the feedback pouring in on actual in-game areas I think I am going to have to delay that a bit more than I had expected. I had figured the lobby would be done by the end of October, but now I think it's better to say November instead. The overall game experience will evolve a lot faster and more pleasingly that way. Don't worry, I'm not going to forget about it! There are also some very valid concerns/wishes that folks have for more options on the galaxy map to find things easier, and some things related to making scouting easier (and/or results of scouting to be easier). Those are also on my radar, and something I'm putting ahead of the lobby right now because I think that will help everybody more directly. Oh, and getting some of the tutorial things a bit better, like it not skipping ahead on you, and telling you what a colony ship is. I want to get a tip of the day in there, and maybe an in-game FAQ or something. And then of course the growing list of small wishes, big wishes, small bugs, big bugs... These last couple of days have been maybe too much talking on my part, so I am going to try to balance that more with the actual work of developing the game. Even with a 10 hour workday, I still have 72 unread messages at the moment. It's a good problem to have! Don't get me wrong. But it does require me to try and work on time management a bit better. Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon. Thank you everybody so much for the support, and the kind words, and the positive reviews. It's making such a big difference to us. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-18 02:18:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been quite a saga, if you've followed along all this time. All that extra time paid off! At this point we have what fans have nearly-universally hailed as a worthy successor to the original classic. We still have plenty more to do prior to 1.0 in Q2 of 2019, but the game is ready to play now and we hope you'll come enjoy it and give us further feedback. Pick up the game now for 10% off!

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The sequel improves the UI, the graphics, the audio, and many of the core mechanics. It's an across-the-board upgrade. But even more than that, it brings in new friends and foes alike -- large factions are now possible, with their own sophisticated AI, economies, and rules. Marauders are now able to conquer territory, and build up their own bases if left un-checked. The nanocaust feeds on the strength of those around it, while the macrophage happily grows in the background, sending out spores... Enjoy the classic human vs AI cage match, or expand to a much wider living galaxy.

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[ 2018-10-18 00:03:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Whew! It's been a really long day, but I feel like I didn't get really that many things in. Most of my day was spent on the forums, and I know I promised that a few things would be in this build that got pushed back -- apologies to those folks. I think it was three features. I should be able to get them in tomorrow, but I'm going to be a bit more careful about my promises from now on when it comes to short-term schedule. Basically I wound up spending a lot of my time listening to folks and finding out what gripes are bothering them the most. That was a super useful way to spend the time, even though it caused the feature list to be a little shorter than usual. Still, the list isn't bad:

• A couple of minor clarity improvements.
• You can now see text and icons out further on the galaxy map, and you can customize when (or if) they disappear (it gets cluttered if you keep them all the way out).
• The planet tooltips show you some substantially more useful info, so less clicking around.
• You can build turrets and the like in groups of 5 by holding down Ctrl now, like in the first game.
• The various modes that ships can be in can now all be mixed and matched (so group-move+stop-and-shot+frd, if you want).
• There's an awesome new attack-move mode, which is kind of a hybrid of several other modes and brings a much-needed way to automate small offensive actions. Pursuit mode is great for defense, and this is basically the offensive equivalent now. I spent a lot of time talking toTerrarius about the existing options, and eventually realized there was simply a gap that needed to be filled with something new.
• The game should no longer submit anonymous hardware statistics to unity. Sorry that we accidentally had that on; let us know if you still see it, please. Thanks tolonetrav and Demerzel for bringing this to our attention.
• A couple of other bugs were fixed, including the inability to save during the tutorial.
• Ships being in hold-fire mode messing with their ability to re-cloak is fixed.

And then a couple of major balance tweaks!

• Basically, people were too rich and the AI was too poor. So...
• You now only get 30 hacking points per planet, instead of 40. Hopefully this feels just right, instead of being over-abundant or pauperish.
• The AIP gained per destroyed command station is now 25 instead of 15. Basically the amount of ramp-up that the AI has from AIP is a bit more tame than the first game, and so this balance shift should bring them more in line with the first game. It also has the side-effect, Puffin noted, of letting the AI get substantially more mad at other factions, which is a cool side effect.
• And ambush turrets also got a variety of buffs to make them more effective.

Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon. I wish I had been able to get every last everything done in one day, but that's of course not realistic. But we'll make quick progress. Thank you everybody so much for the support, and the kind words, and the positive reviews. It's making such a big difference to us. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-17 02:12:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. I really wanted to make a Spaceballs joke as the title for this build, but all of the ones I could think of are both rude and involve keeping firing, not ceasing fire. Anyhow! If you have cloaked ships, and you want said ships to stay cloaked instead of breaking out in a murderous spree, now you have but to hit the N key. Or whatever key you like! This version also fixes the recently-added in-game keybinding... not actually properly applying said keybindings. I'm on a roll! Again, apologies for that. Speaking of, this also fixes an annoying thing I introduced earlier today where if you were trying to place a bunch of units at once, it wouldn't really listen. This was a casualty of the double-click fix. So again: my roll continues. Badger made some tutorial improvements for this build, too, and both the AI and player salvage income got a boost since it wasn't mattering enough. If you restart your steam client, it will download thenew build immediately. Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon. Well, aside from today -- three releases in one day isn't the norm! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-16 02:08:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Well, this is hugely embarrassing --we introduced a last-minute bug today that made the objectives menu (and some other menus!) completely illegible. The fix is now out, along with a bonus fix for a much more longstanding issue with double-clicking units. Thanks topango andla_nague for bringing this to our attention, and thanks to everyone for being patient with us about this one. If you restart your steam client, it will download the fix immediately. Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-15 19:22:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Early Access arrives at last! Welcome to all the new players. :) There's nothing particularly huge in this update, but it fixes up a couple of last-minute bugs as well as a few bits of the tutorial. Expect more tomorrow, and each day this week. We've been maintaining a schedule of roughly 3-5 releases a week for a while now, and we don't expect for that to change anytime soon. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-15 18:03:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. At last! Finally you can view and edit the controls from within the game, rather than having to open a text file. Sorry that took so long! That's the last of the important interfaces, except for the lobby in the custom start. That one is still not going to be pretty (and bug-free) until sometime this coming week at the earliest. Next week at the latest. A bunch of other pieces of the interface are now prettier, and generally easier to read, in this new version. A variety of bugs were fixed. And engineers got a 3x speed buff to their function, while fortresses got an all-around offensive buff. I still have more to fix up with the tutorials! Augh, I feel like I'm running around like a madman, in some respects. The tutorials have a few places that still confuse people, and the presentation of the tutorial text could be a bit nicer, could definitely stand to have a log, etc. Hopefully I can get that done prior to launch tomorrow, we shall see. It's not a crisis without it, but I just want everything to be as polished as possible for the start of EA. Either way, moreto come tomorrow!And each day after that. EA starts tomorrow, but that's not going to interrupt the schedule that we've been maintaining for the last few months. Thanks for reading and playing! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-14 21:45:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Whew! This one should feel a lot more fun to play, just from a fundamental low level. Previously, various aspects of the UI were feeling kind of sluggish, and the keyboard and mouse controls sometimes did, too. That wasn't a framerate issue, but rather was a series of code issues that I inflicted on myself. Lots of untangling happened today, and the results feel so buttery smooth. Another really big item that has returned is the selected ships window. That wasn't something I had been planning on doing until during EA, but it's something that acts as both an important informational aid (what do I have selected?), an important helper in battle (how much health, cumulatively, does my selected stuff have?), and a general self-teaching aid (hey, there are buttons for pursuit, group move, scrap, etc!). Those various benefits, particularly the last one, convinced me to spend some time and get that in earlier. Some bits of the UI have also been made a little prettier and/or a little more clear, and we fixed dozens of typos in the tutorial (sorry...!). Forcefields and Tutorials Oh! AI forcefields are almost completely a thing of the past (all stationary ones are), and your own forcefields aren't quite so darn sturdy anymore, either. It was Not Fun sitting there firing forever on an overpowered AI forcefield that wasn't even protecting much to begin with. A number of people ran into that during the tutorial, and that should flow much more smoothly now. There's still more work that I need to do on the tutorial, following various feedback fromth_Pion as reported bySizzle, and with some more notes from Craig and Puffin. But I'll get to that tomorrow; it's quite late now. I hadn't planned on spending a bunch of time in this area, but people brought it up as being thetrue first impressions item, and that folks were having a few issues related to it, so I've adjusted my plans accordingly. Lobby? This does unfortunately push back the timeline on the lobby into next week, after EA starts, but that is probably for the best given all the other improvements I've been able to put in instead. I wish that wasn't an early thing that people might run into, but Puffin has been working on making a lot more quick start options with more difficulty ranges and types of ships and AIs, so it's... hopefully a case of most people playing those anyway, at least at first. Those should be far less overwhelming to someone new, anyway. Next Up Aside from the tutorial work, and whatever bugfixes seem most pressing pre-EA launch, I'm going to do my best to get the view/edit controls screen in. I think that will fit in the time I have left. Some of the most important keybindings (pursuit mode, etc) are now directly exposed on the interface, though, so it's notquite as dire as it previously was (it's still really important to get ASAP). More to come tomorrow!And each day after that. EA starts the day after tomorrow, but that's not going to interrupt the schedule that we've been maintaining for the last few months. Thanks for reading and playing! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-14 01:33:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. The name of this release comes from a pair of contradictory bugs fixed in this build. They're best summed up by a fun savegame that HeartEater7 provided: Longwinded Storytime

• 200ish Eyebots and Agravic Pods of his are sitting on a planet, staring at an enemy Concussion Guardian.
• They refuse to shoot it unless you tell them to shoot it manually.
• Meanwhile, it has less than 1% health left and is slowly shooting at them, not doing much damage because it's just one ship and they're all pretty high-mark.

So... what was causing the problem?

• TheConcussion Guardian erroneously had data on it stating that massive damage was incoming from shots that no longer existed.
• It's almost a certainty that these shots were aimed at it when it was under a forcefield, and the forcefield blocked the shots but didn't bother to tell the Guardian that the damage was no longer inbound.
• Because of this, the Eyebots and Agravic pods ignored the Guardian as a potential target because -- any second now! -- it was about to be obliterated.
• Manually giving them an order would cause them to go "whatever, pile on the overkill!" And it would thus die.

The fix was fairly simple: I have the ships track their literal incoming shots now, not a cache of the incoming damage from them, and so they immediately notice when a shot has been blocked without hitting them. If we later add some other mechanic that clears shots without them hitting a ship, this will also still work. If the Guardian had managed to warp out of the planet via a wormhole right before incoming shots hit it, this also handles that sort of case. So that problem was fixed, and your ships won't ever be shy about murdering the enemy anymore. So what happened next? Well, this particular savegame then fell prey to another oft-reported (in the last month) bug. Lucky for me, since it had been hard to repro otherwise. Here's what went down:

• Those same 200 ships are staring down the concussion guardian when I load the save.
• When I unpause, they all unload into it at once, murdering it before it can get off a single shot, and then they start circling the spot where it died, firing into the voice for a good 5 more seconds before being satisfied.
• Good grief that overkill! One light breeze would have knocked it out. Take it easy, guys!

I had overkill-prevention logic in the targeting code, where ships would avoid targeting things that they knew were going to be targeted. But that's part of making a targetlist, which then the ships choose viable targets from for the next partial second. Once they have the list, they have at least part of a second for some of that data to get stale (such as, in this case, one ship firing a shot that now means it will be overkilled -- as soon as that first shot is fired, it's time to stop any further firing at it. If this was a larger battle, it would be time to shoot something else). The solution to that was pretty easy: just add the overkill-check logic in the "get ready to fire at a target in our list" part of the code. Then they say "he's already about to die within 1-2 seconds, what else can I shoot?" The answer in this limited scenario is "nothing," so they just sit there. In the case of a bunch of Ambush Turrets waiting at a wormhole, the situation was much different, though. Puffin had a savegame where they would frustratingly overkill just a single ship in a volley, wasting tons of ammo while more ships poured in. Why shoot that one guy so much!? After this fix, the Ambush Turrets immediately and efficiently murder everything, like they were always designed to do. Expect your turrets to be far more valuable now, along with... well, everything really. But that goes for the AI, too. So that fixed everything, right? Not quite. Now here's what happened:

• Same scenario with the 200 ships v 1 guardian.
• Unpause, and a single shot from an agravic pod fires out and kills it. Yay!
• ...and as soon as the guardian explodes, ALL 200 SHIPS START FIRING AT THE SPOT IT DIED AND CIRCLING IT!
• Guys! Seriously, cut that out!

But this was actually great news for me, because this meant that this was that other big bug and I could repro it 100% of the time. Turns out that theproblem here was kinda stupid, since I was able to instrument the code and see what was happening. 200 ships v 1 was absolutely ideal for that scenario. Here's what was happening under the hood:

• Guardian is on death's door, all the 200 ships read this correctly.
• One shot is fired, all others correctly read that it's about to die.
• Guardian dies. At this point, its object gets put back into the "object pool" for use.
• At this time, the "HasBeenRemovedFromSim" flag gets set to true to let everyone know that it's dead.
• All is well so far. Now it's time to blank out it's data so that it's fresh to load next time as another ship, whenever it is needed from the object pool.
• Uh-oh, like a moron I was immediately settingHasBeenRemovedFromSim back to false! So they immediately thought it was alive again.
• And even worse, we store health as an "amount lost," which I was clearing back to 0, which meant that suddenly they thought it was at full health!
• The only reason theyever stopped firing at that ship was that its object got repurposed for something else, and then they detected that condition (thanks to SquadWrapper noting the new PrimaryKeyID) and thus treated it as gone.

So... the solution was pretty easy. First, have it not setHasBeenRemovedFromSim to false until an object comes back OUT of the pool. Secondly, just to be on the safe side, set the health lost to an obscenely high amount so that everyone thinks the ship is dead no matter what. Don't set that back to 0 until, again, the ship comes back out of the pool. Either one of these conditions should be sufficient for every reference to this ship to say "this thing isn't valid anymore," but having both in there just makes me feel a little more comfortable. And now all that stuff works perfectly. Yay! So, What Else? Mmm, lots of good stuff:

• Yet more brief-ening of ship tooltips, which feels oh-so-good. The original text is still there if you hold Ctrl, as it notes in the tooltip.
• Improvements to the profile screen thanks toDominus Arbitrationis, based on notes from Bobtree about how unclear that was as the very first thing the game shows you.
• More improvements to the tutorial by Badger, thanks to a bunch of great notes byrkfg and Pepisolo.
• Ships should no longer do that "blip into a different place for a bit" thing when they first enter a new planet, or when you first switch planets. That was a really annoying one!
• Ships staying selected when going through wormholes sometimes-but-not-always, in a very confusing way, is now gone. So the "accidental orders to ships on other planets" issues should be gone.
• Fixed the issue with really slow ships not turning to face their movement direction, and moving in a really jittery fashion.
• Open-sourced several significant portions of the ship logic code.

More to come soon! My hope is to focus on the view/edit controls screen, and the lobby, as probably my last main pre-EA-launch things. Then we start EA and get working on whatever seems most pressing to people. Only a few more days, now! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-13 02:56:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. (Singing) I can see clearly now, the HUD is small... Right! I'm very excited about this one, it has a lot of long-desired pieces of polish in it. And some bits that were not long-desired, but are exciting all the same.

• The settings menu is better organized, and doesn't have any more non-functional bits in it.
• The camera controls, in terms of how sensitive each bit is, can properly be configured again.
• Tooltips can be sized in general, so that their text is not so huge if you're on a huge monitor.
• Same with the sidebar! And the top bar! And notifications! The whole HUD, really!
• The default size of most HUD elements and tooltips is somewhere around 80% as large now as it used to be, since most people felt it was too large. But now you can configure them!
• Rather than having one monolithic "GUI Scale," which really is a bit nonspecific, there are four or five key areas you can size independently.
• And you can now scale the icons of ships! They're also smaller by default, now. Same with the wormhole names.
• You can actually skip drawing the 3D models of ships entirely, if you want to -- for instance if you're on a right potato of a GPU. The game is fully playable in a just-icons fashion, if you wish.
• Tooltips now SAY LESS, aside from being better-sized. This is a huge thing I've been wanting to do for a month or so. By default, they no longer explain game rules or give extra-comprehensive stats on every aspect of a ship.
• However, you can now hold Ctrl to see the full tooltips that you've been having up until now. Or you can toggle those to always be the full tooltips, if you like. But frankly the abbreviated ones are a lot easier to work with.
• Most of this stuff, so far, basically makes it so that you can see the main view a lot better, without the HUD and icons crowding you out.
• We also fixed a bunch of bugs and clarified some things that were unclear.
• And improved the tutorial a bit, particularly with some mis-spellings.
• There are also a couple of more difficult quick starts now available, thanks to Puffin.
• And your starships won't be getting murdered by ion cannons anymore. :)

More to come soon! Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-12 02:35:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release noteshere. Took an extra day compared to what I was planning for this release, but there's a ton in here! First of all, there are a ton of balance improvements that Puffin has put together in order to diversify what gets a damage bonus against what. There's a lot of tuning in that area of the game in particular. Quinn added in the ability not just to delete savegames, but also to delete campaigns, which is super welcome. A few other tooltip improvements have been made to clarify a few things, and a few tutorial improvements, and a fix for that really irritating bug with the flickering sidebar. Marauders are a lot more aggressive, cross planet waves are a lot more sneaky, astro trains are a lot less plentiful, brownouts are a lot more painful, and there's now a cooldown on how quickly you can rebuild something that was just destroyed. Thanks to Badger on huge amounts of that. Outside of that, we've also done some new kickstarter-exclusive background art thanks to Cath, and then I've created new marketing headers for the game (finally!) as well as new Steam Trading Cards. Here's a sneak peek! New header:
Compared to the old one:
And then here's a sneak peek at the Steam Trading Cards (which won't turn active until the game releases into Early Access on Monday):
And this is what the associated backgrounds look like:
And this is just for fun:
New Release Date? Yep! We're now releasing on Monday, which is the 15th, instead of Thursday the 18th. Why? Rimworld announced their 1.0 will be on the 17th. And we, uh... wanted to give them some personal space. ;) Big congrats to them, by the way. Thanks for reading!More to come soon. Problem With The Latest Build? If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choosemost_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of ournew SteamDeveloper Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also:Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-10 02:23:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. As the first build since we started our press preview period, I wish there were some grand exciting features in here, but alas it's just bugfixes and UI polish.  Mostly UI polish.  Frankly it makes the game experience that much more pleasant, though, so it's worthwhile stuff to be sure.  It's just not flashy. Most of the flashy stuff will be coming during EA at this point, since prior to that it's all about polish and bugfixes and balance one way or the other.  Well... and added art for the ships that are still missing that.  That's going to be exiting. Anyway, more to come soon! Also, if you're into that sort of thing, here's a tutorial on how to mod UI elements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw7d8r2DNkw It presupposes a fair bit of knowledge I'll admit, but for our existing crew of modders and volunteer devs it should clear some things up. Thanks for reading!  Next build will likely be Monday. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-06 02:46:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This marks the first build of the game that is available to press to preview.  How nerve-wracking!  There's still a lot we need to finish up in the next two weeks prior to Early Access when it comes to polish and bugfixing, but we have to actually let people see the game at SOME point.  I'm really pleased with how this particular build is feeling, though.  There are still known issues, but the fundamentals are really strong. One of the cool new things in this build is the addition of quick starts, which folks have been asking for forever.  It basically provides a really handy way to get into the game without having to ever touch the lobby and all its complexity.  Which is doubly good right now, because the lobby is still a mess of temporary UI.  The quick starts will be hugely useful long after the lobby is polished, though, because they allow for easy choices of cool scenarios. If you want to create a quick start option of your own (please feel free!), you can simply go through the following process:

• Create a game with the settings you want.
• Save it.
• Write up a little description about it, and put a name for it.
• Send it to us on the forums or mantis.

It's very straightforward! There are also a number of changes in this build to make things prettier and to fix a fair list of bugs.  More to come soon! Oh right... we also have a new trailer!  Huge thanks to Pepisolo for going all-out on this one.  He really put in a ton of time, and it shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cimaJgm0WDM The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-04 17:56:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one fixes all of the super-duper critical bugs that I'm aware of.  There are plenty more bugs to go around, and we'll definitely be getting to those.  But right now it's a balance between the UI work, bugfixing and balance tweaking, and other needed refinements.  I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about just spending tomorrow on the UI. Thursday -- the day after tomorrow -- is when our big press push goes down, so if there's anything super duper critical hopefully we can get that in the next day or two.  The sidebar and the profile screen and the lobby/start options are my main foci for tomorrow, and hopefully I can just work on those and ignore mantis for the day.  I can dream, right? ;)  I expect Thursday and Friday are going to be heavy bugfixing days. Anywho, the biggest bugfix in this new build is that orders were getting scrambled up between units in a variety of ways.  We pool the orders (as of a few weeks ago), and what was happening is that a given order could be added back into the pool twice... thus meaning that multiple ships then get the order back out of the pool and use it for different things.  Then each of THEM could put it back in twice, leading to four ships having one order that's all scrambled up and not fully what was told to any of them.  So that led to ships eventually just acting outright insane.  Shooting nothing, flying into the bottom left corner, abandoning orders in the middle of a routine flight from A to B... you name it.  Thankfully that's all sorted now; thanks for your patience with it! Anyway, hence the title of this build. There were various other bugs fixed as well, and a notable new feature: the ability to order your bloody engineers around!  Before they just did whatever they felt like.  Now you can actually tell them to go work on something specific, and you can even lock them in to just boosting the performance of a specific dock -- same as in Classic.  Except in the new version it's even better, because even while they are locked in, they can do other things within their range if the dock doesn't need boosting right this instant.  That's a minor thing, but fairly valuable. More to come soon. :) Reminder: RocketAssistedPuffin has stepped into a volunteer balancer role, and he is not only looking for feedback, but he's actively integrating lots of things that other people are suggesting on our forums and Discord, as well as things that he's finding and coming up with himself.  The more feedback the better, for sure. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-03 00:48:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release notes here. This one has a ton of stuff in it.  The core focus for me, personally, was on making the last things more attractive that we'd need for our upcoming trailer, as well as to get the main menu improved so that it makes a better first impression.  The menu itself still needs better button visuals, but look how pretty (in a highly dithered gif):
We also got some more voice acting work done in preparation for the Early Access launch, although it's not implemented yet.  And some of the worst of the sidebar glitches are now fixed (though there are still numerous more there to fix, as well as some key bugs elsewhere to fix -- I will be getting to those soon!). You can now click wormhole names to go through the wormhole, which I know is something that people have wanted for a long time. A variety of balance changes are in, including turrets getting nerfed and guardians getting buffed.  Fewer guardians go along with waves now, and Arks do a lot more damage. Several ships have real graphics now that did not before.  Such as the spire!  They use subsurface scattering and are colored now, rather than being ugly white:
They went from some of the ugliest units to some of the prettiest.  They have new models, too.  The sentry starship also went from very hideous to really really cool looking, too.  Those are what you can see moving past in the main menu now, actually. There are two new AI types, and various changes to the AI types in general. The bug with schematic servers having a bunch of duplicates is fixed. And lots more!  Badger and Puffin were really busy on this one, and Craig was working on audio editing in addition to his work on the trailer, and Eric worked on tidying up tons of the voiceover writing as well as writing new ones, and Quinn put in several fixes including the garbled background story placement.  So many people helping out -- thanks everyone! More to come soon. :) Reminder: RocketAssistedPuffin has stepped into a volunteer balancer role, and he is not only looking for feedback, but he's actively integrating lots of things that other people are suggesting on our forums and Discord, as well as things that he's finding and coming up with himself.  The more feedback the better, for sure. The Usual Reminders Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do. Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support. Enjoy! Chris

[ 2018-10-02 05:28:49 CET ] [ Original post ]