Line War News

Hello everyone!

We hereby announce a start of registration for the upcoming 23T2 1vs1 tournament!
It consists of 2 stages - and will go for approximately 2 weeks (1 week per stage). More details on stages will be presented later. Amount of participants are unlimited and everyone can participate. (NOTE: There is a chance that there wont be enough people to form a full group. If that happens, the one who registered late will be put in reserve for 1st stage - to switch those who didnt show up for a long time or cant participate in upcoming matches).

Matches will be played in a free format - DM your opponent and set a time when you can play together. (Similar to 23T1)

Registration will be open until September 14 6:00 PM (18:00) CEST.
Tournament will start in September 15 6:00 PM (18:00) CEST.

To register in tournament you need:

1. Log in or register on the Challonge website.
   
2. Sign up on the Challonge tournament signup page.
   
3. Fill the form for registration:
   
   1. Your Discord name in LW Discord server
      
   2. Your Steam profile ID/link to your steam profile ID
      
   3. Amount of matches you played in LW (approx)
      
   4. When you are available for playing LW (can be skipped)
      

More details will be posted later. If you have any questions - ask them to Nickname (@SomeoneSaidThatMyNicknameSucks) in the Line War Discord.

See you on the battlefield!

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.