AI War 2 News

New build! Second one of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.202_General_Bugfixing

(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 one is not super exciting, unless you were impacted by one of the bugs this one fixes. That said, these are some juicy fixes, so YMMV

- Fixed a multiplayer exception that was happening trying to bust ghosts. Those darn ghosts again!

- (Not a bug, but) Humanity Ascendant now defaults to using all uniform gravity wells the same size as they always have been. It only starts introducing variant grav well sizes in Challenger mode, but you can change your preferences from the defaults in any of the modes.

- Beam weapon math has been adjusted and fixed in a variety of places. The spire ships will no longer miss their primary target at the end of a coilbeam, as one resulting improvement from this.

- Distributed economy mode wasn't working properly after saving and then reloading. Now it does.

- A variety of tooltips in the lobby were missing last build, but are back now.

- A complicated fix to an edge case when you're ordering units around on the galaxy map. There was a situation where they would ignore your orders if you told them to leave a planet and then "no wait stay after all" by clicking the planet. Now they listen properly.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New hotfix build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.201_Location_Hotfix

This fixes a bug in the prior build where older saves had their units all shifted around in location, along with a few other related coordinate issues. Sorry about that! That did inspire a potential new AI type for sometime in the future, at least.

This hotfix also happens to include some mod updates that fix a few things, and also potentially a fix to the Reset to Defaults breaking client connections in the MP lobby. That's been on my list since MP started, so we'll see if this really fixes that one.

New giant build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.200_Variable_Planet_Gravity_Well_Scales_And_QoL

(This changes a ton and may have bugs. If you run into an intractable one, 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.)

Okay! First up, this build might fix the multiplayer ghosts issue. Fingers crossed. But I made a lot of changes and simplified that to get that good and dead.

Secondly, for anyone who uses mods or has expansions installed, you can now see what is mod or expansion content all over the place. I'm talking fields in the lobby, items in dropdowns, and even quickstarts. The works. Mods can also now include quickstarts for the first time, too! Overall the idea is to help it become clear where things come from. Sometimes even I forget how much was packed into DLC1 (TSR), which really gets a lot less love than DLC2 (ZO). To make all this work, I had to re-code and extend a surprising amount of UI code, but all the bugs seem fixed now, knock on wood.

This build also introduces variable-sized gravity wells. The first AI War had larger gravity wells, but only one size. This game has always been more intimate in battlefield size (and/or more cutthroat, depending on how you look at it), but again there was no choice. Now there's a choice! And in fact, there are various "schemas" for various types of planets that helps you randomize in various interesting ways. The new defaults are to have some variable planet sizes, but nothing too extreme most of the time.

There are a number of bugfixes in this one, although the list of things that are on my short-term todo list grew a lot while I was implementing those two giant features above. So more soon on that front.

More soon in general.
Enjoy!

New build! Mega large one, too: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.104_Option_For_A_Distributed_Economy

(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.)

There's too much to fully summarize, so please do check the notes.

For all modes, hull techs have had some cost revisions to make the ship ones more viable (and the turret one less OP).

Idling transports now don't stack their bonuses, but only use the top one at any given planet. This mainly affects advanced players, but at any rate, spread those out now more.

When the AI has more than 1 strength on your planet, or a wave incoming, you can no longer switch your command station type (it's "pinned"). This prevents some exploits and baiting that advanced players were using, but shouldn't affect the average player at all.

Lots of new balance work and additions are in place for Challenger+ modes in general, and those options can be turned on in Humanity Ascendant, as well, if you want.

Forced on starting in Expert mode, but optional in lower modes, is a new Distributed Economy Mode. This is something we've wanted for a long time, but it's a bit more advanced. Essentially, it completely re-balances how metal and energy is granted from Asteroid Mining Reactors (Metal Harvesters) versus just the command station type itself. There's spreadsheets and everything for you to see the details, but the bottom line is it gives the AI more chances to be smart tactically, gives you more weak spots, and makes the number of asteroids per planet suddenly matter a lot more. You'll want to put econ stations on high-asteroid planets. The way that asteroids are seeded is also improved.

Plus two new mods by Zweihand! And many mod updates and general bugfixes and other tweaks.

The meat of Expert is still to come.
Enjoy!

New build! This one is a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.103_Reality-Bending_Tooltip_Hotfix

It fixes several mods that had exceptions in the prior version, but it also in general fixes a pretty apocalyptic and mind-blowing bug in the prior version. It was just a few lines of code where the ramifications were not clear to the code author (that's kinda on me), and this was easily fixed. But it created a really amusing portfolio of possible results. Some of my favorites:

- Units transforming into other units as you mouse over them in the sidebar. But not the ones you're actually hovering over, and not always.
- All of your units of some sort exploding randomly as you mouse over unrelated units on the battlefield.
- The very idea of some unit type disappearing from a fleet as you moused around.

This absolutely was savegame-corrupting as a bug, and we apologize for that, but hope you also enjoy the humor of the resulting reality bending results, at least. We had the first report that something was up within a few minutes of the build going out last night, and so rolled it back to be only on the beta branch until we could figure it out this morning. So hopefully it actually affected very few people in practice.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!