Line War News

A new, dedicated balance patch was shipped yesterday. It's one of the biggest balance changes so far since release. Here are some highlights:

• Various Tank nerfs, adressing the 3 Factory / Tank opening meta
  
• Much greater range bonus for entrenched units, which increases the game's space control element
  
• Commandos always spotted by non-Tank land entities at point-blank range
  

See Release Notes for more info and watch this replay between SomeoneSaidMyNicknameSucks and Plantblock (both of whom are pros) for an example of the new, great gameplay.

Dear players,


I and Imphenzia have reached an agreement that I will acquire his full share of Studio Centurion (the company that develops Line War) at some point in the following month. The agreed price tag is considerable for a company bringing such small revenue. I say this in an attempt to convince you, dear reader, that it would be illogical of me to do so, had I not the intention to continue developing the game full-time until at least the first piece of single-player content, Skirmish AI, sees the light of day.

Praise and applause to Imphenzia for his monumental feat of bringing Line War to this fine state! What are the odds that I would find and hook up with such talent, living in my own city, ready to take on work in as diverse areas as music, sound effects, animation, modeling, programming and PR? Luckily, we have agreed that Imphenzia will continue to assist me in the role of consultant for at least another year.

[h2]WHERE THE HECK IS MY SINGLE-PLAYER EXPERIENCE!?[/h2]
Our first public announcement indicating a complete shift towards single-player development was made in March. To tell the truth, only about 160 hours have been spent on AI since then. The most important reason for such low dedication has been uneven workload. Because of the lack of sufficient funds, working on the project became increasingly hard for Imphenzia (read his post [not yet available] for more information) and I never liked the prospect of being the only one working full-time in a two-man company. This hindrance will now be removed, for reasons explained above.

[h2]WHEN WILL SKIRMISH AI SHIP?[/h2]
My full-time will now be spent on Skirmish AI for at least 4 months. I will post a few reports on proof of progress (or lack thereof) this Autumn. My personal goal is for Skirmish AI to be released before Christmas, but don’t take that as a promise! It will hopefully also contain co-op vs AI and a new handicap system that can be used for boosting the starting conditions of individual players (human or AI). This will enable balanced matches for teams that are uneven, as in 2v1s or symmetric matchups between players of different skill.

[h2]SUPPORT THE GAME VIA PATREON[/h2]
It was always our intention to heavily re-invest in the game if revenue permitted and it became popular. Best way to support the game now is to buy it, of course. Now, you also have the option of becoming a Line War patron.

[h2]BALANCE PATCH & TOURNEY AROUND THE CORNER[/h2]
Stay tuned for information about the next balance patch and an upcoming tourney. It will be published within two days.


Wish you all a happy Steam Strategy Fest!


Sincerely
Basantos

[h3]Line War - TactiCon 2023[/h3]
We are excited to announce that Line War is one of the selected games to be featured at TactiCon 2023, a digital convention hosted on Steam celebrating strategy video games. This is the second edition of TactiCon and it highlights those who develop strategy games and gathers the players who love to play them. We feel honored that Line War has been chosen as one of the games. There was a large number of submissions for the event hosts to choose from ranging from independent developers to large established game studios.

TactiCon 2023 starts 11th May 2023 at 19:30 CET / 10:30 AM PST here on Steam. We hope that this event will bring new players to Line War that we can all enjoy lining up alongside and against for some exciting Line War matches.

[h3]Single Player Progress[/h3]
Behind the scenes, single-player development is underway and we are making good progress. We have assessed different approaches to develop the single-player AI and we believe that we've found a solid model that we are implementing now. We wanted to find a path that can offer a respectable level of resistance in a seemingly intelligent way and that is also architected so that it can be extended and improved upon over time to give you an increasingly formidable opponent to play against.

The AI model that we are developing builds on clustering algorithms that provides the AI with accumulating knowledge of its own and hostile units, structures, geography, and how they relate to each other. It plays by the same rules as human players and, of course, it takes the fog of war and visibility into account. There is a lot of development work yet to be done and we are not aiming to rush anything out before we believe it offers a sufficient level of quality that can be expected by an AI opponent.

Although our current focus is to build a skirmish AI that plays matches, we can re-use the same technology for single-player mission-based content and community-created challenges.

Initially, the AI will support 1v1, FFA, and possibly human co-op against a single AI opponent. The AI is not yet designed to be able to play as a team player because adding cooperative awareness and the ability to consider allies will require additional work that we will do at a later stage. We don’t have an ETA for single-player mode yet but we will keep you updated here on Steam and in the Line War Discord.

During TactiCon 2023, and while we continue to develop Line War, we hope that you continue to enjoy what the game already has to offer. It has been exciting to see the quality of matches that are being played since the most recent releases with balance updates, and the addition of the aircraft carrier unit.

Have fun and enjoy the strategy focus during TactiCon!

Now that the team modes, the Aircraft Carrier, and the game-play polish is completed (read all about it and watch the trailers here) we will focus development to bring you single-player content in Release 37.



[h2]Basic AI Skirmish[/h2]
A basic AI is being developed so you can play Line War whenever you want, whether you have an Internet connection or not, or if you simply prefer to battle it out against the computer instead of human opponents. It will also work as a practice ground where you can play as much as you want without feeling like you'll be judged by performance or play style.

The AI will play according to the same rules as you, it will only see what a human would see, and it will issue commands based on its observations. It will be a behavioral decision tree-based AI that tries to gather intelligence, and it will act based on what it sees and what it predicts. Creating a great AI is difficult and it is not our mission at this stage to create a masterful expert player, we leave that to the top 100 players of the Line War leaderboard. If you beat the coming basic AI consistently, you are ready to combat it out in the multiplayer world.

We already have a basic AI in the works, but with the risk of it sounding a bit too technical, the new and more performant architecture resulting from the Teams release requires us to update the AI to work in this new architecture.

In the future, we'd like to explore the possibility of Machine Learning AI - but that is beyond our capacity and funding at the moment - which is why Release 37 will begin with the basic AI model.

[h2]Missions and missions editor[/h2]
Imagine missions where you are challenged to eliminate the opponent, destroy a base, intercept an airstrike, defend your base, perform a d-day-like amphibious invasion, or conquer a continent as quickly as possible. You can play these missions over and over again and achieve better and better scores based on your performance. You can achieve gold-level results if you complete a mission within a certain time frame or with minimal casualties or funds.

A mission editor will allow anyone to create and publish missions based on scripted behaviors with triggers, predetermined commands, and actions. Performance criteria for the mission can be set to reward the player upon completion. Maybe your objective is to complete all the missions. Maybe your objective is to get gold-level results on every mission. Or maybe your mission is to be at the top of the mission leaderboards for the best amphibious invasion with the least amount of casualties.

We'll decide whether to design our own, or hand-pick popular community-created missions, as the official set of missions for seasons.



[h2]First step towards single-player content[/h2]
These will be our first steps towards providing single-player content in Line War to make it accessible to everyone. In the future, we would like to explore Machine Learning AI opponents, a map editor for fully custom scenarios or reenactments, skinnable units (imagine ranges of WW2 skins), and even campaigns with a storyline.

We are very happy and humbled by the many positive reviews of Line War praising the gameplay and the command system. We have identified the two biggest challenges of Line War to be:

• Small number of concurrent players
  
• Lack of single-player content
  

These two challenges are overwhelmingly represented in the negative feedback. Through the past year, we added the requested team feature and we've worked to polish the game and lobby experience to a higher level. We hope that adding the single-player content can turn the tide over time to encourage more players to get Line War. Even if people are playing the game in single-player mode, the active player count is an important factor to many when deciding whether to get a game or not.



Line War is being funded through its own sales and we're only two individual developers, so let's take one step at a time. The pace at which we can develop is directly related to the number of sales of the game so please consider buying Line War now if you've been looking forward to the single-player content.

[h3]If you are waiting for Line War single-player content - make sure to read our next Steam announcement within the next couple of days about single-player content coming in Release 37 - meanwhile we have some very exciting news to share! [/h3]

Release 36 is now out which brings you not only the Aircraft Carrier but also tons of big improvements to multiplayer lobbies, graphics, camera control, replay control, settings, balance changes, and 100 new in-game video tutorials to methodically guide new players only to name a few things.

[h3]Watch the Aircraft Carrier trailer here:[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Cinematic trailer to showcase new graphics, camera control & replay features:[/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We are excited about this release as it is an important step to continue to mature Line War to a stable, enjoyable, competitive RTS game. The beta period was longer than we would have liked which split the already small concurrent player pool for a period so we hope that we can now enjoy some better matchmaking possibilities. The lobby system has been improved so you can create and browse lobbies better.

[h2]Release 36 - Aircraft Carrier - full release notes[/h2]

[h3]AIRCRAFT CARRIER[/h3]
Mobile airbase with a capacity of 3 aircraft.
[h3]AUDIO[/h3]

• New UI audio for events in lobby and chats - if game is out of focus, you know when someone joins lobby
  
• Global volume control in settings
  
• Independent volume control of menu music and in-game music
  
• Independent volume control of in-game, UI, and ambience sound effects
  
• Audio listener is better placed in the world depending on what camera is showing
  

[h3]CAMERA CONTROL[/h3]

• Camera zooming now zooms to proper extents without jittering
  
• Added strategic overview camera mode in game, zoom past max distance or press Slash key to toggle
  
• Increased zoom extents allowing closeups
  
• Zoom now moves camera forwards and backwards and changes field of view (instead of just altering field-of-view)
  
• Zooming combines camera movement, field-of-view and tilting at different distances
  
• Camera extent perfectly aligns with navigable areas of the map in north and south
  
• Improved settings for camera zoom, zoom sensitivity, and panning speed
  
• Overview camera always show special sites icons in-game, replay, and lobby
  
• Improved middle-mouse click-drag panning of map for better mouse pointer accuracy
  
• Improved zoom-to-mouse-pointer handling
  
• Added automated smooth camera panning over time in replays for content creation (see keyboard legend)
  
• Free-flight camera mode added to replays
  

[h3]GRAPHICS[/h3]

• Shadows casting on units and structures
  
• Smoothing enabled for many units and structures
  
• Reflective and smoothness settings for units now gives them a higher quality look
  
• Fixed layer sorting, structures, units, commands, territory border, water are now sorted correctly
  
• Improved trees, corrected normal maps, enlarged, solidified
  
• Ambient occlusion enabled
  
• Improved shadow quality with cascading on Very High setting
  
• Added Subpixel Morphological Anti-aliasing SMAA (if you want antialiasing under water)
  
• Improved VSync and framerate handling to avoid GPU running at full speed
  
• Opacity control for borders, icons, commands, and co7mmand decorations
  
• Underwater bubbles and torpedo trails improved and always visible
  
• Improved water trail visuals for ships
  
• Ship splashes are now arced in direction of travel instead of circles
  
• Added under-water bubbles for sunken ships and debris
  
• Added under-water mesh and particles for energy wells at sea
  
• Added energy icon over energy wells to make them easier to find
  
• All aircraft now have rigidbody crash animations as they break apart and crash on land or at sea
  
• Improved water splashes for debris and crashing aircraft
  
• Replaced special sites icons in overview with new colorful ones
  
• New Aircraft Carrier unit mesh
  
• Higher wrapped texture-based damage on units and structures
  
• Changed to neutral color rotor blades on helicopters - they always had blue tips before
  
• Improved mountain-based structures, should never have mountains penetrating airports any longer
  
• Improved deforestation masks for structures and units to make them easier to see in forests
  
• Added normal-based slope shading for mountains to compensate for removed terrain shadowcasting
  
• Increased forest tree density
  
• New unit production animations - they don't penetrate buildings or fling parts at ridiculous distance
  
• Removed tesselation for territory borders as it had minimal impact and caused graphic artifacts
  

[h3]LOBBY[/h3]

• World seed favorites
  
• World seed voting
  
• World seed history
  
• Drawing/collaboration/inspection features on the world of the lobby
  
• Full owner editing support for Public lobbies
  
• Public lobby means passive hosting only (no more auto-merge)
  
• Using 3 600 sec duration for lobby hosting (instead of silent termination)
  
• Full lobby browser support in lobby (i.e. manually connecting to another lobby as a party)
  
• Improved lobby design with more intuitive management of teams and players
  
• New in-game camera mode in Lobby view allowing zooming and toggle between tilt and overview
  
• Tab key toggles full screen and windowed map view
  
• Navigation test tool (Q key) - ensure that narrow straits can be navigated through
  
• Air range overlay tool (W key) - shows the ranges of short, mid, and long range aircraft
  
• Rocket range overlay tool (E key) - shows the range of rockets from launchpads
  
• Energy pipeline range overlay tool (R key) - shows maximum range of an energy pipeline connection
  
• Vote Up / Vote Down buttons to help lobby owner decide which map to player
  
• World favorites functionality with screenshots of world seeds
  
• World seed history with vote statistics
  
• New lobby browser from within a lobby to merge capability to compatible lobbies
  
• GeoSignal (Alt + G) now possible to send in lobby
  

[h3]LOBBY BROWSER[/h3]

• More information in the list
  
• Also lists ongoing matches
  

[h3]PERFORMANCE[/h3]

• Graphics jobs enabled to offload graphics onto separate thread for improved client performance
  
• GPU instancing for many of the objects
  
• Improved VSync-handling to avoid running at unnecessary high framerates
  
• Removed shadowcasting for terrain - it had minimal visual effect for millions of triangles
  
• Removed trees from west and east no-go zones
  

[h3]REPLAYS[/h3]

• Better backward compatibility
  
• Paging when # of replays grow beyond 1000
  
• The overview mode (Slash key or zoom out past max zoom) with territory control highlighting
  
• F key toggles fog-of-war modes between on, off, and hybrid
  
• New hybrid fog-of-war mode showing the shading of what a player can see, but shows all units and structures
  
• Space key toggles between player views
  
• 1-8 keys selects specific players
  
• Z key activates the new free flight camera mode (useful for content creation)
  
• C key toggles commands from own (default), none, and all players
  
• V key toggles command routes from none (default), player view (as in game), and all players
  
• T key toggles time and messages (useful for content creation)
  
• R key toggles mouse cursor visibility (useful for content creation)
  
• U key toggles UI (useful for content creation)
  
• Comma (,) key and Period (.) key sets start and end points for smooth camera panning
  
• Shift 1-0 pans camera smoothly between start and end points set with comma and period keys
  

[h3]TEAM[/h3]

• Spectate mode when defeated with 1 or more allies still alive
  

[h3]TUTORIALS[/h3]

• 100 new tutorials covering Basic, Intermediate, Advanced techniques
  
• Strategic tutorials added
  
• Improved tutorial navigation
  

[h3]SETTINGS[/h3]

• Settings are always accessible through F10 in any game state
  
• New settings system with categorized and paged settings
  
• New hints in settings to explain what settings do
  
• Reset button for all settings to restore to default setting
  
• Quality presets from Lowest to Ultra balancing performance and visuals
  
• New Audio controls to independently control global in-game and menu music, menu ambiences, and sound effects
  
• Replay default settings
  
• Prepared pages and information about coming keyboard remapping and localization
  
• New player count and status dropdown at the top in menu and lobby screens
  
• Settings are context based and only visible if they can be modified in combination with others
  

[h3]UI[/h3]

• Dialog windows and modals improved for consistency
  
• UI animations
  
• New disconnect and player states in the team view in-game
  
• Picking guide moved to right side to not overlap players
  
• Picking guide hides older steps to not run out of screen-space
  
• New higher quality energy and capital icons
  
• New icons special sites in overview modes
  
• Improved tool-tip appearance and placements
  
• Added confirmation dialog to resign - no more accidental resigns
  
• Added confirmation dialog to leaving lobby
  
• Improved consistency of Esc-key to back out of everything behavior
  
• New Discord information to guide new players to discord to make friends and find players
  

[h3]COMMAND LINE WORLD IMAGE EXPORTER[/h3]

Use command-line argument to batch export screenshots of world seeds.
Usage: LineWarClient.exe -batchmode -export-world -seed 

Required paramters:
 -export-world          Exports world(s) as an image file(s)

 -seed         Specifies which seed(s) to export
                        e.g. -seed 9 or -seed 9,10,11 or -seed 1-1000

Optional Parameters: 
 -path            Specifies path to write images to
                        e.g. -path "c:\An Existing Directory" 
                        default path is "%appdata%\..\LocalLow\Studio Centurion AB\Line War" 
 -resolution       Specifies resolution of image file
                        e.g -resolution 3840x2160
                        default is 1920x1080 
 -jpg                   Forces JPG image insted of PNG 
 -hide-overlay          Hides overlay icons 
 -hide-seed             Hides seed overlay in top-left corner
 -batchmode             Unity parameter to run silent instead of launching game

Resulting images will be named .png, e.g. 9.png
A json-metadata file is written named .txt containing information about the world
A log file is written .txt with information about time taken to generate each seed

[h3]MISC[/h3]

• Showing number of Line War players currently online
  
• Client offline mode supporting replays, tutorials & sandbox
  
• Brand new settings dialog giving granular control
  

[h3]GAMEPLAY[/h3]

• Display names of allied players in sharing dialog
  
• Major tooltip overhaul (incl lobby world)
  

[h3]BUGS[/h3]

• Better AFK detection reducing the risk of "lobby kidnapping"
  
• Very long public lobby host/search process (it used to end silently after X minutes, now it's 1 hour with a clear ending)
  
• Adding unit to production queue cancels current unit production
  
• 16-bit integer (short) causes overflow in summary
  
• Tutorial popup not showing when playing for the first time
  
• Bypass password if through invite
  
• Unit production animations now accurately show what is being produced as producers go in and out of fog-of-war
  
• Ships now always sink properly instead of sometimes getting stuck at the surface
  
• Many lobby management bugs addressed with quirky UI and lobby management issues
  
• Enemy command routes and artifacts removed in replay toggling
  
• Capping VSync steps (preferred) or setting target frame rate now reduces framerate to avoid overload
  

[h3]GAME BALANCE[/h3]

• Territory income 12 => 10
  
• Slightly less probability of spawning > 5 Cities
  
• Slightly decreased max in randomization-range for conquerable sea territories
  
• Compensate map eco loss of above with
  
• Industries per City (3,3) => (2,5)
  
• Industries further away from City
  
• Max Towns 12 => 15
  
• 20% increase of conquerable water territories
  
• Bomber never drops two bombs on a single target in a single flyover
  
• Bomber speed cruise 2.1 => 2.35
  
• Bomber bombing speed 70% of cruise speed
  
• Bomber bombs 23 x 10 => 19 x 12
  
• Bomber HP 150 => 145
  
• Bomber AA priority slightly increased
  
• Interceptor missile count 4 => 6
  
• Interceptor AA cannon count 8 => 6
  
• Defender's Grenade bonus 15% => 25%
  
• Defender's range bonus 0.2 => 0.3 (absolute)
  
• Rocket blastwave direction taken into account for entrenched units (90 degree rear sector means zero armor bonus)
  
• Tank production cost 50 => 52
  
• Tank conquer rate 7 => 6.2
  
• Infantry production cost 17 => 18
  
• Infantry speed 0.39 => 0.40
  
• Infantry and Commando buffs
  
• Forest firepower 10% => 20%
  
• Forest armor 10% => 20%
  
• 4% lower energy consumption for sea units (now same as tanks)
  
• Energy consumption for units in combat is always 25% even if not moving
  
• Entrenching 40% faster
  
• Helicopter HP 125 => 135
  

If you missed it earlier, Release 35 brought Teams and FFA support for up to 8 players:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We're exited as we begin development on Release 37 - Singleplayer content.
We have now performed some of the important architectural changes to the game that needed to be in place before we could fully focus on single-player content. We began to develop a basic practice AI last year, but it would not be compatible with the architectural changes required for teams which is why we prioritized completing that.

For the future success of the game, we hear the feedback and understand that single-player content is desired so it is our focus. If you are excited about single-player modes, you can support this step of the development process by grabbing a copy of Line War now and you will get single-player content in the next update. We are working towards a basic AI to play against and scriptable capabilities for in-house and community-created scenarios and challenges.