AI War 2 News

New hotfix build: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.303_Tutorial_Hotfix

This one fixes tutorials to not murder you either instantly (AIs on your starting planet) or if you take too long (waves for some reason).

This also adds back in the recently-removed-by-alterations version X map (as the default for X), but with fixes for the planet counts being offset too high. And of course the options to keep the more recent X style.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.302_Clarified_Invincibility

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

This fixes several bugs, and adds a few quality of life improvements. One of those is to really clearly tell you when you're trying to attack something that is not allowed. Oftentimes there's a unit that is invincible until you kill some other units first, or until it moves out of some location, or for another 30 seconds, or whatever. And having your ships just fail to attack it was bewildering. Now it really clears that up.

This also includes wider windows for things like C-clicking, so that you don't get accidental wrapping of things that shouldn't. This also let us spread back out the columns properly for ship tooltips, so those don't wind up with armor and mass on top of one another ever, etc.

Various windows now let you hit Esc to close them that previously (by oversight) did not. The tips windows show with much nicer and more informative headers.

That on-launch popup from the prior version of the game (which was harmless but annoying) is gone.

The AMU mod has more updates.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, with fixes to multiplayer as well as distributed economy mode: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.301_I_Always_Wanted_To_Be_A_Ghostbuster...

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

I spent at least three separate Halloweens as a Ghostbuster. One as an adult. As a kid in elementary school, I thought that sounded like just the best job. Now insert that clip of Frodo saying "but my own adventure turned out very different."

Mostly I laugh. This time, the problem with multiplayer was (at root) an endlessly-growing list of ships worried that they MIGHT be ghosts, and the client asking the host about that constantly and the host giving increasingly lengthy answers that slowed everything down.

It actually was more complicated than that, as these things always are, but "ghost suspects" were not properly having their "yes you were a ghost and died" or "no you're alive, what are you on about?" status updated in the central "ghost suspect" roll call. So the roll call just kept growing, infinitely, until the game couldn't take it anymore and your sim speed tanked to unplayable levels.

Now they do all this stuff properly, so far as I can tell, but this is hot off the presses so it needs more testing. What I can say is that multiplayer suddenly was by far the smoothest I've seen it as a client in quite a long time after these changes, and the numbers of ghost suspects and such all seem reasonable now, so fingers crossed.

It's possible that non-ghosts will start exploding on the client again because of this, because I put that sort of time-based code back in, but in reality I think that is just fixing particularly persistent ghosts. Knock on wood.

Distributed econ now gets science and hacking points properly, too, thanks to SirLimbo.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build, and tons of new map options! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.300_Mapsplosion

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

I had been planning on working on more bugfixes today, but honestly I was feeling pretty fatigued and unmotivated and so I decided to work on something else as a bit of a diversion. I'll be back on bugfixes and game mode stuff soon, but I hope you enjoy the fruits of this diversion.

This is essentially a Summer Of A Lot Of Free Stuff, which I think is good because we're planning on releasing three paid DLCs in 2021, so I feel a lot better about that with also loading you down with lots of new free base game stuff. Your financial support is greatly appreciated (and needed), but I don't want you to feel strongarmed into it.

So what's up this time? Last time it was variable-sized gravity wells. And campaign types are still evolving. And interplanetary weapons are coming sometime in the next month or so.

This time around it's map types. Not new map types, at least not right now in the base game. But the curious thing about AI War 2 is that it has a TON of map "types" available in sub-options for each larger type. AI War Classic had 4 different Maze map types, for instance, versus AI War 2 has the same thing with one main type and four sub-options. None of that is new.

What is new is that there are dozens of new options for a variety of map types in the base game in particular, and a lot of these really radically change the maps to the point they are almost unrecognizable. Both X and Honeycomb have some particularly interesting new variants. There are many QoL improvements in relation to choosing map settings, too.

More to come soon. Apologies for taking a break from bugs.
Enjoy!

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.203_More_Bugfixing

This one re-fixes (properly, this time, hopefully) that gost-related exception that was happening in multiplayer.

This one also reworks a lot of the map design logic and code so that it's easier for us to manage those.

It has a couple of mod updates in it, and Nr SirLimbo also put in a fix for ship chase ranges that was making them a bit stupid in large gravity wells.

More to come later today, but I wanted to get this MP hotfix out while I have some folks able to test it.

Enjoy!