AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.765_Easier_Upgrades_And_Necromancer_Surge

This one feels fairly game-changing just because of one QOL feature in it, which is that you can upgrade your fleets (and see more details about them) right from the techs tab. Various folks had requested that over the years, and having that in now is really awesome. You can still use the upgrade on the fleet details popout as well, but now you can basically do it whichever way is more convenient.

DLC3 is getting a ton of refinement in this build for our testers to enjoy, and the necromancer is really coming together. Metal and energy (and thus also fuel) are no longer things that necromancer needs to worry about; it's all hacking, science, essence, and hexes. The necromancer is definitely feeling increasingly great to play, and it's definitely a simpler (but potentially brutal) mode, which was the idea.

There are a fair number of bugfixes in this build as well, including some of the more prominent ones that were annoying people in the prior build. Mainly thanks to Badger and Tom for those fixes.

There's lots going on, and a lot of the new and revised factions and features are really hitting a point where they are being close to being feature complete. Quite exciting!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.763_Necromancer_Reanimation_And_Refinement

This one has a number of bugfixes, and a number of extensions for player types and map generation. It also has some improvements for total conversion mods, which is letting Puffin get a lot further along with his Classic Fusion mod.

The necromancer is now nearing completion, pending testing at least. They are better balanced in a variety of ways, and they are now able to reanimate AI guard posts to use for their own defenses (instead of the usual turrets), which is a really cool idea that Puffin had.

Tom has been killing it with lots of bugfixes and refactors and modding-framework extensions and so on.

I also started the behind-the-scenes data additions that are required for the upcoming ship encyclopedia, and got the first bits of data in for that. These are also useful for the search on the galaxy map for units, as we can search by thematic tag, now.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.762_Expert_Necromancers

This one mostly has a lot of work from Badger and Tom from over the weekend, and a lot of it is centered around making the necromancer more balanced and functional.

One notable improvement from Tom is that a lot of the build menu is now more moddable, which makes it easier for modders to customize things that they want to have happen in the future. That's a welcome addition for sure!

I also put in some improvements to Expert mode, most notably the fuel bits that are new as of last release. Strategic Sage pointed out that we needed about 5x as much Argon and Radon to start out for the game to really be feasible. There were also a number of questions about how the fuels are seeded, and I've made some adjustments there to make for a more interesting and varied set of fuel seeding. There are now some "super clusters" of fuel that you can find around the map (most maps) that are highly desirable for fuel purposes... but might have many other drawbacks. So, as usual, it's pro's and cons time.

I also added a really important new Fuel Availability galaxy map filter mode, which allows players who are playing with fuel enabled (whether in expert mode or not) to quickly see what fuels are available where, and in what aggregate quantities. This makes it a lot easier to plan the fuel side of your expansion, and it's also useful for getting a sense of how fuel is distributed around the galaxy at the moment.

The wiki is also in the process of being updated to include a lot more information, thanks to Badger and Lord of Nothing. SirLimbo also got in a couple of moddability improvements at the request of Puffin.

Lots of busy folks! More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.761_Savegame_Safety

The biggest takeaway from this one: we're not going to be intentionally breaking savegames anymore after this version. As has been the case for most of the last 5 years, there's occasionally a version that corrupts itself or something, but aside from those rare incidents the savegames from now on should remain backward-compatible.

I had been planning on finishing up the last of my main stuff for the Necromancer Empire in DLC3 this week, but instead I wound up touring around a lot of random things to make sure that we achieved savegame stability first, instead. Necro Empire is still on my very short list.

So what's new in this version?

Well, a lot of the meat of Expert Mode is finally in place, with three fuels for three categories of ship. Argon for the normal smaller and midsize ships, Xenon for officers and elites, and Radon for turrets and forcefields. It's incredibly unbalanced and a bit janky right now, because this is just the very first prototype version hot off the presses. Please do note that this only applies if you play in Expert mode, but the idea is to give you more reasons to hold different territory, and more to lose permanently when you are attacked various places. It's going to need a number of iterations before it's ready for prime time, but I'm excited to hear what the early testers among you think. This is an addition to the base game, so anyone can test it without needing any DLC.

The Ark Empire player type for DLC1 is also better-balanced now, so that should be more fun to play. More changes are still planned for this, as noted last release.

The game now supports "total conversion" mod support, where basically a mod replaces all of the game data with something of its own. There is at least one such mod in the works (cough Puffin cough), that one being focused on a fusion of concepts between AI War 1 and 2. The game now officially supports that sort of thing, making it easier to toggle into those without having to manually replace files or something.

There's also a LOT of DLC3 work in general, and Showdown Devices continue to evolve. The necromancer and templar factions now have the first pass of their final icons (aka, they're final pending testing feedback). These factions are freaking huge -- this was 82 icons just between the two of them!

There's also some bugfixes and other goodies from the usual suspects. As always lately, thanks to tom.prince and NR SirLimbo for substantial additions to what Badger and I are working on. This one also needs a large shoutout to Strategic Sage for a lot of the expert mode design, which I'm very excited about even though we haven't gotten into the balance stages of that yet.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.760_Chaotic_Maps_And_Ark_Empires

This one has been inwork for 12 days now, and it has 9300 words (29 printed pages) of release notes. Uh... enjoy?

So what's happening here, broadly?

Well, there's a lot of bugfixing and quality of life stuff, for sure. Just all, all over the place. This is bringing us a lot closer to being able to come back off the beta branch, and more immediately to stop breaking savegames with new builds. We aren't quite there on that last point, as I have some more to do tomorrow that will probably break saves. But we'll be moving back to our usual policy of "every save is supposed to work forever into the future" within this week.

There's a new Chaotic map type that has been added to DLC1 by tom.prince, and it's a really cool one. Going along with the Classic map that Badger added to DLC1, our first DLC that had no maps now has two awesome ones right next to each other.

If you don't have DLC2, then Ark and Golem balance is now much better. If you do have DLC2, it's basically the same as you've been used to. It just wasn't meant to be exclusive to DLC2, that was an oopsie.

LOTS of work has gone into the "player types" system, and there are now at the very least stubs for each of the player types that we intend to have for the base game and DLCs 1 and 3 (DLC2 has no player types planned at this time).

The Necromancer Empire is a way of playing necromancer all by yourself in DLC3, and it's not fully ready for prime time testing yet, but it's getting close. By the end of this week is the goal. The Necromancer Sidekick is only for multiplayer, and is basically when a non-imperial necromancer teams up with another player. That's also basically ready to go, though multiplayer on beta is not.

The Ark Empire in DLC1 is a really cool new thing that's also a throwback to our earliest alpha versions and the kickstarter design for this game. It works mostly like a regular empire, except you start out in an Ark (randomly or directly chosen) with a fleet (that is somewhat build-your-own but with restrictions) and no home on the map. Fight for a home, settle in, and then the rest of the game is more familiar. But your ark is both militarily significant as well as your "king" -- if it dies, you lose.

I'm going to have a hard time choosing between necro and ark empires, personally, and figure I'll be bouncing between the two of those. No more regular empires for me for a while.

The spire-infused empire is another DLC1 player type that is just a stub for now, more coming soon. Same for the Suzerain player type in DLC3. A new spectator player type for the base game is fully ready to go.

Map generation in the lobby is a lot more smooth, and/or shows you the progress of its work if it's a really slow map. In general it feels way smoother, and no longer freezes your UI.

And just... wow so many bugfixes and quality of life tweaks. I know I mentioned that in the first line or so, but it's literally pages and pages of those things. Major thanks to Badger and tom.prince in particular, and also SirLimbo. Oh, and SirLimbo has been continuing his work on the Brutal Guardians feature for DLC3, too. Very cool stuff.

This release was particularly slow in coming because I didn't want to have too many player types in there half-finished. But at least those that are that way are clearly marked now, and in general they are all coming right along.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!