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3.102 The Start Of Multiple Campaign Types

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.102_The_Start_Of_Multiple_Campaign_Types

(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 a pretty huge departure from our recent work! We still have more fixes and tuning that we will be doing (and there is a fair bit of that actually in this build as well), but the major new focus in this release is the START of us having more than one campaign type.

Back when we did the big Paradigm Shift (v2.8) build a few months ago, that made the game vastly more palatable to most players. Speaking for myself, honestly that was the first time where I started truly enjoying the midgame. Before that I just played the early game, and other people's endgames.

However, this broadening of appeal -- as nice as it is -- did make the game notably easier for the players who are a lot more advanced than I am. It also simplified certain aspects of territory control to a degree that, while making for a great first 100 or 200 hours of gameplay, doesn't have true staying power for those people with hundreds of hours in the game. When this was brought to my attention, back a few months ago, my immediate thought was: different campaign types. There's no way to serve all players with one mode.

The modes, in general, are now outlined in the release notes above. I'll write more about them in the future, when they're closer to finished. There's also some excellent pinned posts about them on discord: https://discordapp.com/channels/240637654717300736/851583269682282587/851887957861990410

Plus that's a great spot to discuss the new modes in general.

Balance: lone wolf fleets are no longer a separate category. Fleet bonuses are denied to golems. Stats are more accurate on siege frigates. Other bits.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

3.101 Buffs, Fixes, And Quickstarts

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.101_Buffs.2C_Fixes.2C_And_Quickstarts

This one is primarily to fix quickstarts being broken in the prior build (for people without DLC1 or DLC2) -- that was an unfortunate regression from some seemingly-unrelated xml parsing improvements, but it's fixed now. Sorry about that!

In this version there are a number of buffs to a few turrets, and most notably the Orbital Mass Driver and Ion Cannon. More tooltip refinements and fixes are in place, the AMU mod and several others have updates, and there's a new experimental change with how enemies pop out of wormholes when traveling in large groups.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

3.100 Commander Vision

Our first update of June is crazy huge. It's one of those "touches every player's experience" releases.

First of all, the tooltips have gotten some major upgrades. Here's an example of one that is showing the new smallest-version of information. NR SirLimbo has condensed things, organized things, and in general added a ton of variation and clarity on there. I also made it possible to have ship icons in the tooltips finally, and boy is it nice being able to see the art that way:



Still on the subject of tooltips, and this might seem silly, but essentially in a ton of menus the tooltips are now better at staying out of your way. Having the tooltip adapt to the position of your cursor and what you are mousing over, and be near to your normal line of vision but not actually blocking it is surprisingly challenging. But I'm really glad how that has turned out, and how much easier it makes the lobby and settings experiences:



Oh, and the final thing about tooltips -- they now are more responsive in general. In particular, they go away much faster after you stop mousing over something, which just makes everything feel more smooth. We also added options in the settings window for configuring a tooltip delay before they show if you want that (for units and planets in the main game view, not for UI elements), but it's off by default.

So far all we've talked about is tooltips, but honestly that's one of the more central bits of the game.

Quick diversion, then. There's various new art, including some updated and added shaders, and the new Dark Mirror and Darker Mirror in DLC2 (Zenith Onslaught), among others:



I like them even better in motion.

Oh, wow. Certain things I think "that wasn't already released?" This build has been inwork for a few days.

  • Zombie Ping Pong is now harder to play for long periods with the AI, if that means anything to you (if you are a Botnet Golem fan, then it most certainly does).
  • You can scale the text size of the contents of the big popup windows, finally.
  • You can press F4 to immediately switch between player factions, if there are multiple. This is great if you're playing MP and need to help a friend. It's also great if you want to play multiple factions at once, by yourself, for various reasons we can think of.
  • There's a whole new Tips sidebar, and Tips and Journal Entries are now visually differentiated, on separate tabs, clearly marked, etc.
  • Specifically, you can press F1 to view the new tips tab, and it even has nice categories for each tip. When these tips are added, it gives you a 3-second center-screen banner to let you know, too (which you can turn off if you prefer, but I actually really like it even though I know how to play; it serves as an early warning system of finding certain enemies in particular).




Turns out there's still quite a bit more to this release. There were a number of balance adjustments, including some buffs to some not-scary-enough AI guardians.

There's also now three Cruiser Construction Facilities per galaxy in DLC2, rather than one. More options for cruisers to be relevant earlier rather than later.

A lot of the most annoying bugs that folks have reported are also now fixed. The list is long! The Spire Railgun Shop mod also got an update.

3.006 Rising Spire

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.006_Rising_Spire

(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 properly fixes OSX OpenGL support. Sorry that didn't quite work correctly on the Saturday build, but it should now.

This one also sees some major balance adjustments (buffs to the player) for DLC1's Fallen Spire campaign. As the game has continued to evolve, that has remained a popular way to play, but those ships under your command were starting to feel rather on the underpowered side. I believe it was Badger whose play group noticed that during a MP session over the weekend, and so ArnaudB went through and made a ton of adjustments to make that more in line with what they once felt like (sometimes this is a bit of an arms race with ourselves).

At any rate, Combat Factories in the base game also got a buff to the strength of their drones, AI Golems in the base game and DLC2 both got buffs, and there have been a lot of improvements and fixes to Outguard. Thanks to ArnaudB, CRCGamer, and StarKelp for those things, along with a few other fixes and tweaks.

More to come soon!

3.005 Radeon Returns

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.005_Radeon_Returns

(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 adds back OpenGL support as a legacy option for Mac OSX. Essentially, for anyone with a Radeon card, this is what you'll need to use until driver updates are issued that fix the bug that causes the screen to go splashy and plaid in certain circumstances on Metal.

For everyone else, there's a generalized minor memory leak fix (ugh) that should lead to improved performance over long playtimes (yay).

There are some QoL improvements, mostly fairly minor, and a number of DLC2-specific bugfixes. Also you can now see a lot more info about golems and citadels and such that you've not captured yet.

SirLimbo has also made some sizeable updates to the AMU and Kaizer's Marauders mods.

More to come soon. Enjoy!