AI War 2 News

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!

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!