AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_2.811_Brief_Beta_For_Balance

So you do need to use the current_beta build on Steam or GOG to see it.

(I see your eye twitch! Don't worry, this won't be a beta that lasts for months.)

At the moment, we're in the middle of rebalancing a few things (as much as possible in a way to not mess with existing saves/campaigns) to allow for more valid styles of play. We may be adding a few lobby options in pursuit of that, but as much as possible I'm hoping to have a unified experience that is less power fantasy and more guerrilla warfare like the game's roots have always been. (I mean, Fallen Spire exists for the power fantasy already).

Anyhow, since we're in the middle of doing that, plus adding a bunch of mechanics and things for DLC2, there's a greater than average risk of bugs, and we also don't want the average player to get caught in the crossfire of discussion back and forth on what makes for the most wide array of ways to play. So we'll take a few days in beta to get that stuff sorted, and then pop back to the main channel again.

There's some really excellent stuff Zeus is working on mainly for DLC2 right now, so those who are testing that please do direct your attention to the Zenith Architrave. That got a major bunch of additions in this build. And it's his birthday!

CRCGamer and Strategic Sage and I, among others, are looking at a couple of axes of balance in the base game, and trying to make sure that remains as engaging as possible. The low-AIP style of play has been stifled recently, so I'm working to make that more viable, among other things. It's all this-week stuff. Hopefully mostly tomorrow-stuff.

Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.810_Hotfix_for_Death

Would that it was so straightforward to hotfix actual death, yeah? At any rate, there was a bug in the prior version (resulting from some fixes to ghosts on MP clients) that was... so thorough that it was ghostbusting some living things. Sorry about that!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.809_Self_Optimization

This one is mostly multiplayer-focused, but it has some core speed improvements to the singleplayer simulation as well as some bugfixes that also benefit everyone (particularly those with really fast AMD processors).

This also sees a number of improvements and updates to the SirLimbo suite of mods, and Space Planes and Expatriates have gotten some solid balance adjustments from CRCGamer.

So, what of multiplayer? This release is a pretty big deal! First off, major thanks to Bummeri and abuchris and their MP groups, because this would not have been possible without them.

1. There were STILL some ghosts possible on MP clients, but those seem to be well and truly dead now from several angles.

2. There was a major amount of ship "rubber banding" happening in combat with the AI sentinels in the last couple of weeks, due to a bug I accidentally put in when optimizing bandwidth a couple of weeks ago. That's now fixed.

3. The sync and ship-check data now uses vastly less bandwidth, and is structured so that it won't ever flood the client with too much information. There's now a call and response (ack, in network terms) going on, and this helps the network self-regulate to whatever its environment is. In other words, for this part of the network data, if the connection is slow and flaky, it will slow itself to compensate. If it's a speedy lan, it will up itself to match that. Overall in most cases this results in a lot of bandwidth reduction, and even more importantly it removes cases where potentially the client could get message-logged and get a lot of command lag from that.

MP is looking a lot more reliable now, knock on wood, which is really exciting. This has been quite a journey for it.

Enjoy!

Check out the latest podcast of eXplorminate, where Rob and Ben and I talk about AI War 2, the most recent beta period and resulting paradigm shift, upcoming DLCs, thoughts on AI design in general, and lots of other great design topics: https://anchor.fm/explorminate/episodes/Interview-with-Chris-McElligott-Park-on-AI-War-2-and-More-evpabk

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.808_MP_Ghostbusting

This one fixes up some remaining "ghosts" that were happening in multiplayer, so knock on wood hopefully that's the end of those. That was a fun thing where clients would still see certain dead ships that the host did not see.

This build also updates the Steamworks integration by about a year's worth of patches, so hopefully any Steam-specific networking issues are resolved via this. There's actually a newer version of the underlying Steam networking API in use, so that's an exciting thing that I didn't realize was even on the table as an option. Fingers crossed.

The hacking costs on ARSes have been substantially reduced compared to the prior build It was a misunderstanding that led to them being increased quite as much as they were. Sorry about that!

The Zenith generators got major buffs, and the AI Risk Analyzers got a major nerf. AI intelligence on difficulty 7+ went up quite a bit when you are trying to trap them via forcefields.

We also fixed a few bugs from the last patch, such as tutorials being broken and the AMU-based mods being broken. There's also a new "Hacker OS" planet name set by ZeroTheHero, and more beginner journals.

Enjoy!