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AI War 2 News

Hooded Horse and Arcen Announce Partnership - And Forward Fiction AI War Books!

Hey! Chris M. McElligott Park here, founder of Arcen Games. Double announcement today, involving two new partners and a lot of awesome staffing news, as well.

Hooded Horse Partnership


First off: Arcen is happy to join the Hooded Horse “stable,” working on an untitled project to be fully announced later. This title is set in the sci-fi Arcenverse, and has strategic elements, but further details will need to wait for video. For the moment, please enjoy the following in-engine preproduction screenshots.



Staff Again!


I’m taking the usual role of game director and code lead, but for the first time in almost half a decade, I won’t be so alone. This is a really big deal to me, and one of many reasons I’m excited to be working with Tim Bender and the others at Hooded Horse.

Many of the long-time AI War 2 collaborators are now joining fulltime, including Willard “Badger” Davis, George “Zeus” Tibbitts, and Spencer “StarKelp” Ferguson. Joining in a part-time capacity are Daniel “Daniexpert” Garcevic, Ethan “Democracy” Wong, and Quinn Beltramo.

Familiar faces Pablo Vega (composer), and Dan “Blue” Mann (artist/environment) also take key roles.



Forward Fiction Partnership


In related exciting news, Uproar Books is launching a new imprint called Forward Fiction, and a new series of canonical AI War books will be the flagship titles launched under that new label.

Forward Fiction has done a great job really immersing themselves in the lore of the games, including unreleased content. The first novel in the new AI War trilogy shows a lot of scenarios from the games in a new light, as well as laying the groundwork to explore some big questions that the games have yet to answer. It also includes a major character from the upcoming Hooded-Horse-published game.

I’ve wanted to show who the AI is fighting outside the galaxy for the last thirteen years, but I wanted to do the reveal in a closer-perspective game than any we’ve released thus far. This is one of several areas that Forward Fiction is tackling, and I’ve been really delighted by how meticulous they are in their planning and outlining.

I spent most of my life thinking I wanted to be a novelist and trying to get published. Despite finishing a few manuscripts, publication of my own work was always elusive. I wound up being far better suited for game development, but nonetheless I remain deeply interested in the print publishing world, and am really pleased with the care and quality I see coming from Forward Fiction.

Way More Info In The Coming Months!


Having someone else write novels set in a fictional universe of my creation is truly surreal, but in the best way. Rather like finding such an excellent publishing partner as in Hooded Horse. This is a whole new chapter for Arcen, and everyone on the team is really thrilled.

Media Contacts


[h2]About Arcen Games, LLC[/h2]

Arcen Games is a Durham, NC based developer of strategy, tactics, simulation, and adventure games. Their first title, AI War: Fleet Command, was one of the most critically-acclaimed PC games of 2009. Other titles include The Last Federation, A Valley Without Wind, Starward Rogue, and many more. For more information, visit ArcenGames.com.

Press Inquiries: [email protected]

[h2]About Hooded Horse, Inc.[/h2]
Hooded Horse is a Dallas, Texas based publisher of indie strategy, simulation, and role-playing games. For more information, visit HoodedHorse.com.

Press Inquiries: [email protected].

[h2]About Forward Fiction[/h2]
Forward Fiction is a book publishing and marketing firm that specializes in developing novels
from existing intellectual properties, including video games, films, and television shows. For
more information, visit ForwardFiction.com.

Media Contact: Sarae Hope
[email protected]

5.017 More Ways To Win

New... ginormous... build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.017_More_Ways_To_Win

I really am having trouble summarizing this one, it's so large and voluminous.

One of the big new things is that SirLimbo has added some support for new win conditions other than beating the AI Overlord. You can enable these things through the galaxy settings, and it's also the sort of thing that other factions and mods can extend or use in new ways later.

There is a new DPS Hud mod by Dismiss, which gives you some new QoL UI tools, and his Outguard Party mod has also seen a number of updates.

Tom Prince put in another metric ton of fixes, quality of life improvements, and general updates. There are so, so many of these in this build. Dismiss also had a notable number of these added in this build.

CRCGamer added a few fixes, and then a sizeable number of balance fixes to a variety of units and factions.

Badger also put in a number of fixes and tweaks and QoL improvements, and made some updates to his DZ Sidekick mod.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.014 The Tom Show

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.014_The_Tom_Show

This one is brought to you by Tom Prince, who did literally everything included in it.

Lots of various fixes and improvements in here, some relating to dyson spheres, others the dark zenith sidekick, others expert mode, others the zenith trader in necromancer games, and others various parts of the ui. It's quite a lot actually! Big thanks to Tom, these are great!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.013 Many Various

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.013_Many_Various

Lots of unrelated things in here, from lots of different people. We have a couple of new folks in svn making changes and additions now, namely Mike007/Facciola007 and Dismiss.

Tom Prince continues to knock out an impressive number of bugs and add various QoL improvements, and Badger and Daniexpert also have a number of challenging things that they got fixed up. Dismiss fixed some exceptions as well as making notable additions to unit encyclopedia functionality.

Badger updated the Dark Zenith Sidekick mod to make them more active earlier in the game.

Facciola007 has added five new mods, which center around various new starting options with fleets, new fleet names, and similar.

SirLimbo has been working on a number of technical framework additions, and as part of that he fixed some issues with the Entity Type Draw Bags, as well as adding more flexibility to them.

This really is a varied patch, so it's hard to sum up without just restarting the entire release notes linked above.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

5.012 Necromancer Balance

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.012_Necromancer_Balance

Lots and lots of things in this one. Among the most notable is, as you might guess, some more balance to the necromancer, thanks to Zeus.

This also includes a number of improvements to the modding framework from Tom Prince, and some extra flexibility to how campaign types can set various properties.

A good number of general fixes and tweaks in here from Daniexpert, and also some Dark Zenith balance tweaks from Zeus.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!