AI War 2 News

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!