AI War 2 News

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Campaign Types are a new thing that we've been working on for quite a while, and originally Sage and I were designing these together back last May. Now that the game has returned from beta, Sage has put together a comprehensive video guide that explains the where, the why, and the how of these new modes.

The truly important information is also available in the game, of course -- Sage himself wrote a lot of the tips and explanations that are in there -- but sometimes there's nothing like a good video to really show things off.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.004_Easy_There.2C_Hack_Response

This one makes the enemy response from hacking... anything... way less intense. Unless you were playing spire-infused empire or fallen spire. Then it's probably still the same. There was a bug that was inflating the response to hacks as if you were a spire player, and there were some other tweaks that needed to happen to give you even better estimates of the strength you'd face throughout a hack. Big thanks to Badger for calming the AI down in this area.

Dire CPAs are a feature for expert mode, and they were gated behind DLC3 for testing purposes until today. They've now been fully released to the base game at large, so everyone can enjoy this new pain, heh. Thanks to Strategic Sage for the idea, and to Badger for the implementation and tuning.

Faction beacons were a feature that I had to remove during the great refactor, and while random faction options were a very nice addition, a lot of folks have still been pining for the beacons to return. Today I managed to get the first two back and better than ever: nanocaust and fallen spire. How are they better than ever? Well, they don't drain performance, they don't compete for CPU and RAM unless you actually hack them, and there are a bunch of hacking options that let you choose specifically what you're going to get. The beacon system in general allows for combinations of factions to be added, and it only requires xml now (the old system also required custom code per beacon faction), so not only can we add in cool multi-faction beacons, but... well, so can any general xml modder. There are some other features that I'm still looking into adding to really capitalize on all this new power in this subsystem, so I expect we'll see some exciting things in this area for a while yet.

This build has a number of fixes and improvements to autotargeting as well, plus many other general fixes from myself and Badger. There are some improvements to the R-view thanks to Daniexpert, and that was a major investigation and careful fixing on his part, so big thanks there.

The More System Defenders Mod has been updated by CRCGamer to now include a version of the Stormfront Ark that can be used as the centerpiece in Ark Empire mode -- that's the first mod that adds new content to Ark Empires, but I'm hoping we'll see lots more of that, because it's really fun.

One other change that's in this build is that when you refit a modular ship's modules, it now has a 10 second paralysis. This keeps people from gaming modules and microing them during battle.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.003_A_Bit_Too_Chromatic_Horrifying

More bugfixes, in the main, and some more progress towards having minor faction beacons again (but this time with better performance and more features, and mod-friendly, and etc).

This version also includes an option for the Chromatic Horror that prevents it from scrambling your buildings and turrets around; that kind of takes the whole point of the Horror out of that guy, and may make the game much easier in general, but the Chromatic Horror is definitely a rage-generating machine when it wanders into your territory, so Badger took pity. I was a bit more inclined to leave it, since it's doing what it says on the tin, but I wasn't trying to be meanspirited about it. I think it's a valid option to have, because sometimes you don't realize just how disruptive it's going to be if it takes a long time to wander your way.

Bugfix-wise, there's several good ones for multiplayer, plus a number of ones for multi-AI scenarios, plus some general exception dampening.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.002_Macrophage_Live.21

This one is on the main branch and the beta branch. If you have any issues, you can always go back to most_recent_stable, or most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build.

The macrophage have been essentially braindead on the beta branch since September, and nobody noticed it until we came out of beta. Poor unpopular phages! They are all fixed back up now, so that's nice.

There are a number of various bugfixes in this one, and one of those is related to how gamecommands were seemingly getting corrupted on MP clients some of the time. The fix to the flicker in the hacking sidebar items is also really nice.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.001_Autobuild_Automation

This one is on the main branch and the beta branch. If you have any issues, you can always go back to most_recent_stable, or most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build.

This one has a number of bugfixes that came up over the weekend (it's inevitable with such a larger group of players coming in, much as we try to avoid that issue).

This also includes automation options for the automation game settings thanks to NR SirLimbo. Basically, any mod can now much more easily add settings to auto-build units of specific types at planets without having to go in and add special code for each one.

Marauders now use a lot fewer drones, but their drones are more powerful, so they should perform better and still be just as powerful. Big thanks to CRCGamer for getting those worked out.

Lots of new DLC3 things to test and play with thanks to Badger and StarKelp in particular.

The Macrophage Histiocytes mod by StarKelp is also back in action, which is exciting to see!

I wound up creating a lot of the framework today that is required for getting beacon factions back into the game (the old way those worked was super inefficient and not extensible, so I had to take those out during the refactor, and it's been on my todo list to add them back in in a better way that can work with any faction without custom code; in the meantime we have the new roguelike features in the base game, like random faction additions). This was in service of a fix to nomad galaxy having a few issues if you didn't already have nomads directly added, but it wound up doing double duty for getting through the trickier half of the beacon code.

Several other bugs were also fixed, among the various other tweaks and typo fixes.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!