AI War 2 News

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!

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!

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!

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

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!