





You must steal as much technology as you can, and take enough territory to fortify your bases and launch your attacks. But every conquest you make turns the attention of the AI ever more in your direction... so choose your targets with care.
It's "a sequel to [Arcen's] enormo-space RTS AI War, which we called'one of this year's finest strategy games' back in 2009" (Tom Sykes, PC Gamer)
What's New?
We still have a lot of work to do on the game, and we're undergoing some major work with our beta testers before heading to Early Access, but a lot is already awesome:- The game is crazy moddable.
- It's multithreaded to take full use of modern computers.
- The new 3D graphics are working out great.
- The UI has already been dramatically improved by the introduction of a tabbed sidebar in the main view, and streamlining of several other mechanics that felt very difficult in the past. More to come, there.
- We’ve got art for over 130 distinct units (not counting different mark levels), and there's more to come.
- We’ve got over 1500 lines of spoken dialogue from more than 25 actors, focusing primarily on the human side at the moment; we have a few hundred lines of AI-side taunts and chatter, some of which is recorded but just not processed yet.
- There are hundreds of high quality sound effects for a varied battlefield soundscape (with distance attenuation if you’re far away, and positional 3D audio if you’re down in the thick of it), all routed through a tuned mixer setup for optimal listening to all the various parts.
- We have a set of music from Classic that is over four and a half hours long, and the new music from Pablo is partly in, but mostly set to be mastered and integrated within the next week or two.
- There’s also a ton of map types, many of them new, and with a lot of sub-options to make them even more varied.
- And a whole lot more.
Are you a programmer interested in helping out on a multithreading issue ? Be sure to see the bottom (or this forum thread ).
Case Study of Modding: Marauders
Before talking about the release or multithreading, this is a great time to talk about the power that our Modder #1 (and volunteer developer to boot), Badger, has been able to exert thus far. He's made a ton of factions, but right now let's talk about Human Marauders, which were in the first game as well.
If you don't remember them from the first game, that's because they weren't too exciting; marauders were units that would periodically show up from the gravity well edge (not a wormhole) and cause some trouble. They were hostile to the player only, and were generally pretty insignificant. It added a tiny bit of spice, but not much.
Enter Badger.
He started from scratch when implementing these in the new game. His version of Marauders are hostile to everyone. They will attack any system they deem "weak enough to take," then drop in from the edge of the gravity well. If they destroy all the defenses, then they start building Outposts, turrets and additional ships. They're already starting to defend the planet as their own. If you leave the planet alone, the Marauders will keep making outposts, and each outpost will get stronger (ie it will build stronger defensive ships and more turrets).
Once an outpost hits Max Rank, it starts to build Raiders (powerful starships). Once the Marauders have built enough Raiders, they will attack adjacent-through-wormhole systems that they think are "weak enough to take." If you leave outposts at Max Rank, the marauders will be able to attack more and more often -- their "Attack Budget" gets bonuses based on how many Max Rank Outposts there are. Also the Max Budget gets increased every time they capture a planet.
People have been giving lots of balance feedback on the Marauders, as well as positive impressions for that faction on Discord . This also illustrates two pretty key points:
- The marauders are an example of what can be done with the modding tools of AIW2, but which was basically impossible for AIWC even for us as developers. Gives a bit of context as to why making this sequel was important.
- It's also a really good example of how a "Decent but not exciting" AIWC faction turned into something way cooler in AIW2, so buy AIW2 to get cooler stuff. ;) There are a lot of factions like that (all-new ones and revised ones), even though we're pivoting the core mechanics to be more like AIWC. For anyone worrying that this is just AIWC HD, please fear not!
Okay, right: release notes here.
Where to even start? This release is pretty sizeable.
- There's been a bunch of balance to minor factions.
- Mercenaries got some extra oomph.
- AI Waves were previously capped at 100 units (cough, whoops), but now will gleefully flood your planets properly.
- There are auto-build options for your convenience now available in the game settings.
- The salvage and reprisal mechanics from the first game are added back in.
- Golems are now available again -- five of them, anyway!
On my end of things, I upgraded the game to Unity 2018.2 and mono-.NET 4.6 . Some performance improvements were possible from this, and a lot more multithreading options. A few boosts happened out of the gate, and I was able to explore (and then discard) the Lightweight Rendering Pipeline as an option.
I spent a fair bit of time on the multithreading problem , but at this point I've been hitting a wall where I can't get the performance any higher. I'm sure with more time I could figure it out, but in the meantime there are bigger fish for me to fry in terms of performance blockers (namely the front-end vis layer's extreme performance hits, which I talked about two releases ago ).
Multithreading Help Wanted
Last release I asked for some help on the multithreading problem, which was clarified here . At this point, I've basically hit a wall in my ability to improve the threading without getting really excessive in my expenditure of time. There are a variety of other things that really need my attention right now, so I'm having to put this on the back burner.
That said, I've open-sourced our multithreading code and our core sim loop , so if there are any kind souls who want to take a look at it and help more directly with revisions, that would be super appreciated. I know folks were a bit hampered by being blind to the code before.
How to get at/test code:
[olist]
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Any help is appreciated! And I'm happy to answer questions. I have made a forum thread that is probably the best and easiest place for us to discuss this .
Right, Back To The Release
Anyway, that's enough out of me. This new release is pretty cool.
Enjoy!
Chris
I again wanted to mention: we have a new Steam Developer Page . If you go there and follow us, you'll be notified about other upcoming releases (including this one, of course).
Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+. SteamOS+
- Processor: Dual Core 64bit CPU (2.2+ GHz Dual Core CPU or better)Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 510+. Radeon HD5900+. or Intel HD4000+
- Storage: 4 GB available space
Recommended Setup
- Processor: Any Quad Core or 3.0+ GHz Dual Core CPUMemory: 6 GB RAM
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 660 2GB / AMD HD 7870 2GB
- Storage: 4 GB available space
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