AI War 2 News

Release notes here.

This release is very notable! We've had a lot of those, lately.

C-Clicking things to learn more.

It used to be that if there was a bunch of information about a group of ships, then you just got the names of the ships and not really any details. That was... quite a pain in some cases.

Suppose you see a new fleet that you might want to capture, but it just is telling you it has ships X Y and Z in there, and you don't really have descriptions for a couple of those? You'd just have to gamble with them, or use prior knowledge you'd picked up in past plays.

Now you can hold C while you click the flagship of the fleet, and you then get a hugely-detailed screen with all the info on each ship in there. As usual, hold Ctrl for even MORE details in a tutorial-style fashion if you want them.

This works in a variety of places, including incoming enemy wave warnings, AI guard posts full of reinforcements, and even tech upgrades for your ships. It always tells you in the tooltip when you can C-click, and I'm already personally wondering a bit how we ever lived without it.

AI Aggressiveness

There were a number of cases where the "press home an attack against a weak key target despite being outnumbered" or "push through a strong planet to a weak one" logic was just not kicking in with enough frequency. To the point that some folks thought it wasn't even on.

These sorts of aggressive behaviors only kick in on difficulty 5 and up, but they become increasingly common starting at difficulty 7 now.

Combat Factory Drones!

These things now can actually defend themselves with some drones that are specific to each type of combat factory. Sweet!

Astro Trains Majorly More Interesting

In the original game Astro Trains were more annoying than anything else, so we made them optional and people mostly ignored them. In this sequel, Astro Trains were mostly bland and they are optional and so people have mostly ignored them; we're not short for interesting factions.

The thing is, astro trains are a really cool platform for a lot of potentially-very-interesting concepts (supply routes, etc) in how they are implemented in this game, so having them be boring was kind of a bummer to put it mildly.

Badger and Puffin have put in a ton of work into making these way more interesting, with a lot of feedback from mantis and discord, and trains should now be a much more dynamic and interesting experience. We look forward to seeing what you run into with them now!

Plus Lots of Key Bugfixes!

• Those bugs with the sidebar mouseovers not showing the right thing all the time are fixed.
  
• Same with the ones with the collision detection boxes for mouseovers of buttons being too large.
  
• Same with cloaked stacks of ships getting full cloak back when anything on the stack died. Total cheese for you and your enemies!
  
• Also fixed not being able to build energy-generating things that cost zero energy if you had negative energy. Talk about OUCH!
  
• Fixed a bug that was causing a number of commands to get discarded improperly when ships went through wormholes. Sorry about that! That made for some troubling stuff.
  
• Plus the whole thing with decollisions persisting after wormhole traversals should now FINALLY be fully fixed, and this was one of the most annoying bugs people were seeing. Fingers crossed.
  
• And fixed some bugs with certain planets in certain circumstances flipping back and forth between an explored and watched intel status every second or so. Definitely also irritating.
  
• And actually there was a bunch of other stuff, too.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Release notes here.

Lots of fixes! These alone are worth a full release. And same with the number of balance changes. But that's not remotely all what's here...

Victory and Ending Scenes!

Now when you complete a game, it gives you a bit of text, a nice song, and a cool visual scene with some mild animation.

You can see them on youtube from the linked release notes, so that you don't expect more than it actually is. But this is a major step up from just "you win" at the end, which was a kick in the pants for sure.

Later we can always build this out more and more, add in graphs and whatever else, more text, or whatever we feel like. But having this as a baseline, and a solid version for 1.0, I'm really pleased about. Visually I prefer the game over screen by far, but the victory screen has just such killer music...

Turret and Minefields Revamp

Among all the other balance things, you'll notice that you have only a fifth as many turrets and minefields as before, but what you have are now 5x as powerful and expensive, and also larger. This makes it easier for you to place them (fewer clicks), and also improves performance in savegames where turret counts were getting absurd.

Icon Placement Overhaul

A lot of people were irritated by where the icons were placed in the game. Basically they floated really high above the ships themselves, so that we could do things like have them hidden by ships in front of them. But this was really problematic for people connecting the icons to the ships themselves.

There's actually a milder version of this going on in Fire Emblem: Three Houses that keeps throwing me off, honestly, and in some ways that was the final straw for my own game. ;) The new style of placement works more like Stellaris mixed with AI War 1, and it's vastly easier to tell what's going on. But it's completely customizable, so that you can put it back to the way it was before if you prefer.

Energy Surplus... Removed

Basically there was too much energy, all the time, before. Hopefully now you actually have to consider economic command stations, or not just putting all your turrets on every planet, either way. Or go for the Zenith Power Generators as an actual exciting capturable.

And A Lot Of Other Stuff!

But I got very little sleep last night and I'm super tired, so I'm ready to just get this out to you and you can read the release notes for the other details. This thing has been a really huge one!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Release notes here.

Lots of fixes! For most people, the defensive zombies aren't the most important new thing, but it made for a funny release title so here we are.

Defensive Zombies

So, the behavior of zombies -- enemy ships that your own ships have taken over -- is a matter of some contention at the moment (and really, always has been).

When the zombies are too defensive, then they wind up making planets really powerful because you accrue so many zombies just sitting around waiting for an enemy to be dumb enough to come and attack that horde. But then again, since you can't directly order around zombies (by design), you can't exactly go taking them on excursions or something when you want to use them offensively.

Zombies also have a shelf life after which they die, so if they sit around for too long defensively, fighting nothing, then they wind up also accomplishing nothing, which can be very frustrating as a player.

So we made the default behavior for zombies to be aggressive, and actually go out and fight. They'll go fight nearby worlds and deal some damage, which you are getting "for free," essentially. Obviously if there are enemies on the local planet they'll fight those first -- in either scenario -- but this is referring to what happens when the local planet has been cleared of hostiles.

The problem with zombies that strike out against neighbors is that this can cause unwanted aggro. Aka, it can feed the threatfleet or otherwise free guards that come attack you. That in itself can be useful in some cases, where enemies come crashing into your turrets and you get yet even MORE kills thanks to your short-lived zombie friends.

But what if the neighboring planet is very high-mark? What if you're playing on a razor-edge very-high difficulty level? In certain circumstances, having some trigger-happy allies that you can't control and who cause unwanted aggro can be game-ending.

So we added, somewhat buried, a "Defensive Zombies" option in the galaxy options menu. This changes the behavior for all of the player-allied zombies in the game, but also shortens their lifespans. Basically it means that you can't super-stack a planet with defensive zombies (hey, that's not fair), but you can make it so that if you've got a Botnet Golem next to an AI Homeworld, you won't accidentally aggro the AI Homeworld based on cleaning up the planet next to them.

As noted, these two modes work identically when there are local enemies to fight, anyway. So the need to toggle this mode back and forth should be... very limited. Assumedly it should only be for some players, in the very late game, with certain types of units under their control. They'd turn on defensive zombies in those last stages... or potentially leave on defensive zombies all the time if they're the difficulty 9 or 10 type of player.

For everyone else, the aggressive zombie style is probably for the best, if you even wind up with any zombie ships on your team anyway.

Revisions to the Low-Cap Cap Increases

Previously, ships with a cap of 1 were not allowed to have their cap increase based on things like leveling up. So you couldn't get additional frigates or forcefield generators in most cases. I personally had mixed feelings on that, and it bugged a lot of people.

We've adjusted that so that they get cap increases now, although if that leads to too many forcefields then we may need to implement something that rate-limits them further or something.

But at any rate, for the time being this is a solid buff for you, and doesn't affect other factions or the AI.

More New Stuff!

• All of the quick starts now include the Praetorian Guard in them. Thanks, Puffin!
  
• Those "audio mixer" errors that people were getting in the prior build are fixed. There was some extra data that was throwing things off, in a place it shouldn't have been. We've put in triple-redundant fixes for this.
  
• If you're playing super-heavy games that like to melt your CPU (200 planets where you capture everything and have a ton of factions on), then the game should no longer periodically give you error messages about it stopping thinking about certain background tasks prematurely because it assumes that it was hung since things were taking so long. This affects very few people, but should be welcome for those edge cases.
  
• The "galaxy map going black" bug should be fixed, and was probably related to the hexagon visual effect on just certain linux machines (and possibly hardware combinations with that). It should no longer obscure the map in any case, but you can also turn off the hexagons now, as well.
  
• Several other bugfixes and balance tweaks, plus new intel indicators and a performance boost to intel and warning generation have been put in.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Release notes here.

This one is pretty darn substantial! 

Audio

On the audio side, one of the things that really spurred me to make that a shorter-term priority is Why the sound of a gun had to be nerfed in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a video that came out yesterday by People Make Games.  I've heard similar stories before, but usually I tend to think of that in terms of other semi-tangibles like visual feedback, tells, telegraphs, or general smoothness. 

The non-music side of audio has been something I've really put a lot of effort into on a few titles, actually including this game... but the attenuation and general audio levels and mixing in this game was burying it.  There are still some sfx that need to be swapped out in general, I think, but the biggest problem was them cutting out beyond a certain zoom, or getting super quiet, or certain sounds (like explosions) not being mixed at a volume that you can hear well.  The first item in that list was IIRC intentional, but just a bad idea on my part.  And it got worsened over time as we made the far zoom able to go out further.

Anyway, so combat definitely has more "bite" now, which is good.

The Praetorian Guard

In the first game -- the original AI War  -- we had a thing called the "strategic reserve."  Basically it was a budget that the AI would hold back and use when you attacked their homeworlds, and it was added after a lot of playtesting suggested we needed something like that.  I think that was a 4.x+ addition, or something along those lines.  But we never felt like that was a good fit for this sequel, for various reasons.

However, the general niche that the strategic reserve filled was definitely needed here.  Players figured out that they could "boil off" the AI homeworlds a bit by going in and aggro'ing them, then letting the aggro'd guards join the hunter or warden fleets (and thus then leave and go elsewhere).  As long as you could survive the roaming hunter or warden or both, or keep them distracted, then you had a MUCH easier AI homeworld to deal with.  Stupidly easier, really.

For whatever reason, I immediately started thinking of this in soccer terms when this was brought to my attention.  Essentially in a lot of sports like that one, you have some forwards/offense, some midfield/versatile, some defenders, and then probably the "final defender" (aka goalie).   What I realized is that we basically had an AI structure with just offense and midfielders, with "inactive midfielders" that, once aggro'd, would go off and stop defending the goal, so to speak.

If this were soccer or hockey, it would be terribly unbalanced to either have a ton of new midfielders that can join an offensive at-will once the ball first goes near their goal.  It would also be incredibly risky if they all chose to act like forwards.  Where the heck are the dedicated defenders?

AI War 2 has the main AI faction (or "Sentinels") that are basically defacto guards/goalies at each planet until aggro'd and abandoned.  After that they either join the warden (midfielders, or somewhat floating defenders), or hunter (very predatory/lurking offense).

For MOST of the game, these three sub-groups work just well.  It's at the hoomeworld that this falls apart.  I had been against adding a strategic reserve to this game partly because it would just feed the hunter, making it so that when you attack the AI homeworld you'd be inevitably involved in a two-front battle (your planets and their homeworld), and it would turn into a race or a game of attrition or something else un-fun and uncharacteristic of the rest of the game.  Basically it was going to be un-balanceable without sometimes slaughtering you and other times being laughably easy.   It being a nice middle-ground was going to be the rare case.

So... we needed defenders.  Only for the very end of the game, and only for the AI homeworlds, but it was super needed.  The warden and the hunter can't be fed -- there needed to be something that acted kind of like half and half of those two, in terms of general logic, but which really prioritized protecting the AI homeworld(s).  It couldn't "leave the goal open," but it also shouldn't detract from the hunter or warden's ability to strike or buffer you elsewhere (so having the hunter or warden suddenly change behaviors and act like a defender fleet was going to be bad because they might be too slow to respond and that also could be exploitable, and that also would eliminate any interesting chances for the AI to give you a two-front battle -- the two-front battles aren't something I hate, I just didn't want them to be an inevitability every endgame).

Right: so we talked about it, and Badger implemented the Praetorian Guard.  These guys work as described as above, and keep the homeworld fights interesting while not letting off the pressure on the rest of the galaxy.  They fill the same niche as the strategic reserve, but without a risk of making the rest of the galaxy more dangerous in a generalized sense (they can't add pressure on offense, given they are dedicated defenders).

You'll have to start a new game to see these guys in action, but I'm very interested to see what happens with them.  Should be good!  I guess we need to make sure they show up in "quick start" games, incidentally.  If not, we can fix that in code.

Stacking

A bunch more changes have been made to stacking, centering  around bugfixes and balance, both.  There were some cases where stacks were much easier to deal with than they would have been if they were un-stacked, and that no longer should be so severe.

More New Stuff!

• There area couple of new achievements, although you can't see them yet.
  
• You can hack exogalactic wormholes to cancel them, which is pretty slick.  I love having more ways to use hacking points instead of military might.
  
• The Advanced Research Stations are a bit more intuitive, and a bit more balanced, and a bit more varied.
  
• A bunch of work on how orders are given and copied have been put in place, and there should be fewer issues with decollision messing up orders, or with units losing their orders after one ship on a stack is blown up, etc.
  
• The long-range planning for factions, which is basically their "conscious intelligence" now runs more frequently, but without bogging anything down.  The AI should therefore be a lot more responsive to rapid changes in the current situation.
  
• A variety of AI types have balance tweaks that make them a lot more unique and interesting.
  
• Watchman frigates are no longer so bloody expensive in energy or metal costs!
  

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options.  You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back.  Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc.  Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

Release notes here.

This one is a bunch of bugfixes and some balance tweaks, and some bits to help you find the in-game tutorial.

Sidebar: The title of this release is randomly a reference to Meet the Robinsons, which I highly recommend to anyone with kids. But it kinda fits the mix of "tutorials plus AI," I guess.

Details?

• A lot of people were missing the "How To Play" section, and asking the same questions over and over again. Even some of us directly working on the game were not remembering that you could see it in the in-game escape/pause menu. Clutter! There's colorization now to make it way easier to see.
  
• The How To Play section has a new bit on hacking, with some useful tidbits.
  
• The AI warden and hunter logic is now improved such that it should now be much more formidable. Before the units could sometimes trickle in, and now they go in full-force.
  
• There were some truly infuriating-to-players bugs (sorry about that!) relating to the fact that player units can now stack. When I wrote the stacking code, it assumed it would never be for human units, so there was some older code fighting against us. All seems to be well, now.
  
• There was also an unrelated bug with waves not spawning units. Wow that made things easier!
  
• The balance of some of the key AI structures has been tuned based on player feedback.
  
• Similarly, the balance of some of the player starting fleets.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to be much more detailed than a thumbs up, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris