AI War 2 News

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!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.009_Architrave_Taming

This one slows down the rate at which the Zenith Architrave can rebuild when you are harassing them, and has a number of DLC1 spire balance updates as well.

There is also a fair bit of DLC3 balance tuning, and a whole bunch of new DLC3 art is now in place.

The More System Defenders mod has been updated by CRCGamer, and he also tuned quite a few other things in the main game (such as Black Widow Golems will actually be more likely to ever be seen in galaxies again).

It's been a bit of a slower period for balance and bugfixes, since there's been a focus on art, and then also we completely moved all of our web servers into a new spot, and that took quite a bit of doing, as well. The art is winding down in the next week or so, and then it's just bugfixes and balance and last kickstarter backer items.

This is coming together quite well!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.008_Exogalactic_Wayfinding

This one fixes a bug where exogalactic war units would sometimes chase the wrong target (sometimes you), which was particularly damaging in really high-faction-count games. Thanks to a variety of folks for the reports, and to Badger for figuring that one out.

This one also has a huge amount of balance changes to the necromancer in DLC3, mainly focusing on higher difficulty level play, thanks to Zeus.

There are another 70-some pieces of art in place now for DLC3, which is what I've been up to all day. You can always follow along with that on the watch-chris-art section in discord if you don't mind visual spoilers.

Daniexpert fixed a tricky bug with waves in multi-AI games sometimes coming from their homeworlds and then traveling through realspace rather than just spawning like they were supposed to -- excellent sleuthing there.

And there's a handful of other tweaks and fixes in here.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.007_Balance_And_Tuning

This one has a whole heck of a lot of balance tweaks to it, in all of the DLCs (released and unreleased) as well as the base game. Big thanks to CRCGamer and Zeus on that in particular.

Daniexpert has been doing a lot of bugfixing, and Badger and I have snagged a couple of them as well. A huge mound of new DLC3 art is now complete, and more will be coming shortly. It's getting on to screenshots and trailer time, so getting that all actually in place needs to happen on my end.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.006_Careful_Of_That_Federation.21

This one has a lot of bugfixes, some balance tuning, some mod updates, and also a new mod.

The starting position for Ark Empires is now more flexible, which is a nice boost for them (and what I had intended from the start). Big thanks to StarKelp for implementing that.

There were some deadlocks possible in recent versions, under apparently rare circumstances, but any-at-all is too frequent. I believe those were related to some locks that I put into the threading code in the prior week or so, and that has now been further refactored to no longer require locks, and thus not be possible to have deadlock. It will also run very slightly faster this way. Fingers crossed that was the correct code that was actually doing the deadlock, because that was a super rare thing. The deadlock, specifically, was "the game still responds fine, but time won't progress and commands won't be accepted anymore." The joys of multithreading mean that it's a lot different from the old style "program is frozen and we have to forcibly kill it."

I also put in a bunch of code to try to catch the issue with game commands getting corrupted on MP clients after a long period of playing. So far I've been running an MP session for about 20 minutes now (it's still running as I type) and I don't see any issues, but I didn't see them before, either. Hopefully the folks that did see the issues previously no longer will.

The new mod is the "Hydral Federation," by StarKelp, and is described as follows: "All of the races, fresh from the best ending from The Last Federation, have come to this galaxy. Lead by the Hydral, they have seen the endless war propagated by yourselves and the AI and have deemed you both a lost cause."

I find this absolutely hilarious and wonderful that these creations from our 2014 hit strategy game are now invading here via a mod. Did you know that that specific last Hydral is also the main character in our 2016 overlooked-gem Starward Rogue? It's a set a few billion years later, so the timeline of this mod actualyl checks out fine.

In other news, the DLC3 page has been updated to have its final feature list properly documented: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/

Until today, it had a mixture of proper features, scrapped features, features we gave you for free, features we moved to the expanded DLC1, and lots of missing features that we added since that page was last updated. April 21 is looking to be the real release day for this, for realsies this time, so that's exciting!

Badger has been working himself to the bone and is stepping back a bit now that his work for DLC3 is done, and will pretty much just be handling any really serious bugfixes I hand him. I'm also having to transition partially to the next project to make sure that I get things set up well enough so that people who are contractors now will have an actual proper full job when that starts in a few months. I have a lot of prep work to do, and all of it is still super secret, but I'm going to be really excited to share more of it with you in about a year. Usually you can get morsels out of me about upcoming stuff, because I just can't help but share, however that is often a really poor marketing decision and this time it's not my choice. It's all good.

I've been talking for a long about doing a Super Supporter DLC for this game, given how very costly and unprofitable this game has been to make, so that folks who feel like they got more than their money's worth could chip in more if they were so inclined. Even just setting up something really simple there takes time I don't have, and in general it leaves me with an iffy feeling to have a product like that, so we're just going to skip it. One of the planned bonuses will just be a free mod (that requires DLC3) that I put out.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!