AI War 2 News

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.752_Golden_Devourer

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 brings in a new golden ring laser that is mostly a feature for DLC2, and adds it onto the Devourer Golem. That Golem was looking kind of pathetic compared to more recent dangers in the galaxy anyway, but now it has a strong new danger level to it: https://youtu.be/IckDa6s_7j0

Fireteams in general now are a lot less timid, and thus most factions in the game (base and DLCs) are likely to seem more active. It's hard to cut of the Praetorian Guard as much, but there's a nice interplay where you still CAN... but not as firmly.

A couple of bugs were also fixed, and several new features for DLC2 were added. The AMU mod works once again, having been updated to support the new features relating to repair that were added last version.

New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Multiplayer_Alpha_And_Beta#Beta_2.751_Repairs_And_Clarity

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 fixes up the way that repairs work after ships are crippled so that it is no longer the old exploity way, nor is it the new annoyingly-slow way. If you didn't know what the old exploity way was, then that was the old annoyingly-slow way also. Either way, now there's an economic impact from having a transport cripple, but not a slowdown in gameplay. That's a big win for everyone, since it keeps things moving without confusing new players or making anyone wait wall-clock time.

Guardian balance has been adjusted a lot (them in waves at mark 3 baseline was intense, whoops), and some various mapgen fixes are in (insufficient bastion worlds are no longer, etc).

There are still a few known issues from recent stuff, including that the AIP from warp gates is still given to you if you did the hack to try to avoid that. Didn't quite have time for that one today. Also in this build the AMU mod and thus also Kaizer's Marauders no longer work, because we made some changes to the base game features (repair) in a way that it let you override. Hopefully that mod will be updated tomorrow or so, but I can't speak for the mod author.

All in all, this is meant to be a polish release, where the focus is making things less annoying or less confusing, in the few places where those traits were present. Enjoy!

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.