AI War 2 News

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!

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!

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!

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.