AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.750_Bastions_And_Tuning

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

It's been 6 days since the last release, which feels like a lifetime, and it shows in this release. Most of what is new in this one is just tweaks and fixes and tuning (and features for DLC2), but the release notes are REALLY long for it, and it really shows how much polish this adds. This one also adjusts balance fairly substantially in a few areas, though, so let's talk about that.

First of all, the AI homeworlds were getting to be nuts in terms of their power on high difficulties in particular. A number of changes have been made to make the end battles more versatile and give you more options. Against a single giant planet, you only have a few types of ships that work. So instead, we now have split out things a bit into the homeworld and some surrounding "Bastion" planets. The dire guard posts are divided between those now, versus all being on the single homeworld planet. All you have to do is kill those dire guard posts to then go for the guardian, but the fact that they are not all on one planet now is both making it easier and more challenging at the same time, somehow. It opens up more places for you to use multiple potential strategies, too.

You also can't cheese running transports back to friendly territory to make them instantly repairable. Note that when in stationary mode, transports can be given orders to move to another planet and they will stay put while their ships rally there. We'll make that more clear in the interface next build, but it means you can park small transports next door to your attack target.

Guardians now appear in waves, if the wave is powerful enough to warrant that. TONs of mod updates, too. Enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.748_Defaults_And_Fixes

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This release is not SUPER exciting, but it fixes a few issues with recent betas with exceptions popping up when you started quickstarts in particular. Those were actually a group of cross-threading issues that I introduced when I made the game start having more up to date information on the galaxy map even before the first unpause, so it's nice to have those worked out.

The game also is now able to reset you to the defaults on more settings (selectively, when we need it to) if your game version is older than whatever the current is. We use this sort of feature to make sure that if you were playing, say, a year ago (or even a month ago or a week ago at this point) and you come back, you don't have very stale non-default values for something important. We just get you to the new default, and then you can further tune it to whatever (back to what it was if you prefer), but overall you don't miss an important balance shift because of old savegame or last-lobby-settings data.

Most relevantly this is for the home human settlements and cryo pods. We give you TONS more of those now by default, and that's important to the early economy so that you're not so metal-starved. But a lot of people were going to miss that until we added this.

This release also fixes a typo that had messed up Ambush Turret balance, and restructures the sniper unit group to be more useful to more people. Sniper turrets, etc, are all untouched, and those are far easier to get in the prior-to-beta versions, so if you really liked the old sniper behavior, you should still have ready access to it. But now more people have more options in a variety of ways.

In DLC2 work, chain lightning: https://youtu.be/wVGZhGtxtBM

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.747_Outguard_Usability

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

Okay, so first up some news. The release date for DLC2, The Zenith Onslaught, is being moved back about 3 weeks, to April 15th instead of March 23rd. Really sorry about that, but I've been trying to get as much of the base game in great shape as possible, and with all the changes on the beta branch and the related workload it has set me behind. I know that this has been a long string of endless delays, and a lot of folks are understandably frustrated with me about that, and I really do apologize.

Further, I understand that some of the things I've been working on lately really don't feel like they are advancing the goal of getting you DLC2 on time. There have been a lot of digressions and a lot of extra polish rather than focusing on the meat. I used my best judgement in those cases, but I understand that some folks very vocally disagree with the choices I've made there. That's okay. I don't have any hard feelings about it on this end, although that is hard to hear. I try to use my best judgement and make the most people the happiest I can in general, but that doesn't always work out.

In the coming few weeks, until I get the DLC2 features fixed up, I'm essentially going to only be working on anything that's absolutely critical outside of that. I can't really afford another delay in this endless sense, and it's not fair to the various other people who have put in a lot of work on this project. So if you have minor bugs or balance requests in the next few weeks, I hope you'll forgive me setting those aside for a bit.

This new build makes Outguard feel nice. I thought that was relevant. It also makes the Warden less scary for 20 minutes. Thank you all for your support.

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.746_Release_The_Warden

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

This one was a minor detour, but I think you're really going to like what we've cooked up for you in this one. There are some general bugfixes, and things like tachyon beams working again. Some last scourge tuning to get them to fully behave as intended. A lot of the hacking cost increases that I put in last build have been lowered back down, but the number of hacking points you start with is also now a bit lower. Ships under construction now only take 3x as much damage, rather than 10x as much.

Then the big item: the Warden fleet. The Warden has been supremely cowardly for a while now, often parking near you and -- in its fear -- amassing ludicrously powerful fleets that could crush you like a bug... but are afraid to come near you. When they finally would, they would just leave no trace left (of your offensive fleet). This wasn't a good feel for playing with, so the Warden has been recalibrated rather substantially.

The Warden is now aggressive, reckless, splits itself into multiple parts as needed, lurks when needed but still enjoys the occasional strike in just when it's inconvenient (and then sometimes runs away after beating some minor bit of your armada senseless). It's never going to hit you with something game-ending at this point, probably -- that's the Hunter's job, anyway -- but it's now a dynamic and surprising force to reckon with out there on the map. The AI suddenly seems a lot more alive.

The AI got a few other buffs. When you assault their homeworld, and AI now goes to mark 3 no matter what. Shark B is integrated more tightly into the AI. Beachheading against the AI is now slower at higher marks.

This feels fun and vibrant so far to us -- hope you enjoy!

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.745_The_Unsmothering

You need to use the current_beta branch on Steam or GOG to play this one. If you have trouble with it, there is a most_recent_stable_beta, now, too.

Sooo... a lot of what's new in this one won't affect you fully unless you start a new campaign, not that that means you have to stop your old campaign. But essentially, players were just being absolutely bombarded with choices to the point that multiple people noted how off-putting that was (on several levels -- new players being overwhelmed, and experienced players always have access to everything). This also led to giant turret death balls, in particular, because the turrets were way too cheap AND too plentiful.

Hopefully the new balance here feels more appropriate, so that there's always interesting things to find, but it's not like you're stumbling over diamonds with every step you take. Getting rewards at quite that frequency makes them feel downright devalued in general. Not to mention, doing quite so many hacks can sometimes make things like the late game spire response even more terrifying, but that may still be the case, not sure.

Speaking of the fallen spire, your cities no longer upgrade inappropriately early, and they no longer upgrade automatically. Before, it was really frustrating where if you had two cities become upgrade-able at the same time, you couldn't choose which it would be. It would default to the oldest, but you had very little control. Now you have complete control. Also better info in the tooltips on why you can't upgrade yet, or why you can, depending on what the circumstances are.

Various bugs were fixed, some out of control turrets were balanced to be more on par with others in general power, sentry frigates are not flooding you, and lots of work on features for DLC2 (not out yet).