AI War 2 News

Release notes here.

Yesterday we actually did a small hotfix version that had a number of cool things in it, but they were small enough that I didn't post about it here. So hence the version jump of two.

What's new between the two of these?

• There's a really cool new "Helping Hands" quick start in the Basics category, which basically sets you up with powerful human and alien allies that do most of the heavy lifting for you. It's a fun way to get in and play the game... kind of while NPC allies basically really do all the work. Aka it makes it a low-stress way to have someone just come in and experience things. Perfect for reluctant SOs, people who just want to play around with things, and so on.
  
• Yesterday's hotfix had a number of bugfixes, some centering around repeat plays of audio clips being excessive.
  
• Today has even more fixes, including some bugs that could rear up in the tutorials in an inopportune way.
  
• With some absolute-minimum-system-requirements hardware on linux, it was possible to get some funkiness in the latest versions of the game, so we tried to address that or at least give workarounds (adding Vulkan support in addition to just OpenGL). On OSX we also started supporting Metal as an option.
  
• Some minar speeling and gramr mistakes have been fixed in the tutorials. (Yes, I'm a dad. Sorry!)
  
• The credits screen now includes all 3048 of the kickstarter backers, categorized and alphebetized so that they can find their name (assuming they didn't go anonymous).
  
• There are several UI improvements to make things more clear, particularly when a flagship is hacking and thus can't leave the current planet.
  
• Also the multiplayer "menu" no longer opens a menu with sub-options saying "coming soon." Instead it pops open a text window with a short TLDR of when multiplayer is coming and then a long-winded explanation of why for people who want to find that out without having to go to the forums on our site or Steam.
  
• Several new options have been added for controlling things like other factions generate AIP or threat.
  
• Several hacks now cost a lot fewer hacking points, making them more attractive.
  
• The AI now gains some reinforcement cap at higher AIPs on difficulties over 5.
  
• Oh, and there was a nasty bug that is fixed in this build that could cause AI killing stacks to make the counterattack numbers go up WAY inappropriately much. So that was what some of those difficulty spikes were that a few people experienced, starting in the recent press build.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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.

After three long years, we're finally at the point where we're ready to start showing this off to the press in a non-preview fashion. This build does still have some bugs and some rough edges, but they're minor in the main and we have a week to finish up that sort of thing along with achievements.

As a mostly one-man shop now (plus awesome volunteers who keep increasing in number) there's only but so much lead time I can give, and I wind up feeling like I want every last everything to be perfect. As it stands we have about a week until 1.0, and I'm really pleased with how things feel. Seems like our growing list of players are, too, from the sound of things. So that's good!

What's new in this build?

• We finally have AI taunts in the game! This was something people really liked in the first game (when the AI says something mean to you when it does something clever or you do something stupid), and that has returned in a major way. In the first game I think we had a dozen, maybe two dozen, taunts in total. Now there are over two hundred.
  
• Ships can now load into transports from other planets (traveling to the planet of the transport first of course).
  
• Awesome new quick start scenario by community member Nuc_Temeron. We love the clever things you folks think up, and are always interested in including things like this for players to experiment with.
  
• More tutorial tweaks, thanks to Puffin.
  
• Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet.
  
• A whole bunch of bugfixes, some of the most significant ones relating to the new ability to select and control fleets from the galaxy map. That should now work properly in all cases, and not have the selection/hover issues it did briefly.
  
• Also some bugfixes to the metal usage reports, so that's more accurate.
  
• The energy usage in the resources bar can now be clicked and gives you a detailed breakdown of where you're earning and spending energy! This is... a surprisingly big win, in terms of making it clear what the state of your empire is.
  
• Bunches of improvements to the "strong against" version of the R-click view, to make it more correct and clear.
  
• New icons for the tech menu!
  
• Lower difficulty levels (less than or equal to 5) now have a variety of things making them easier than before. There were definitely some complaints about it still being too hard at those lower levels.
  
• Also a fix to make dire guardians appear properly, and some of the guard posts on the planets that would have dire guardians no longer be hyper-aggressive towards you. So this should make deep-striking a lot easier in the late game in particular, and thus help with some of the difficulty that a few people were reporting.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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.

More refinement, and one major new feature. First let's talk about the smaller stuff:

• The science menu is looking better, with more icons on there.
  
• The standing order buttons now show their hotkeys for you.
  
• There's a new "flagship movement mode" control option for all your mobile flagships and battlestations. This lets them either ignore or obey things like pursuit mode -- it's circumstantial which you'd prefer, per fleet, so an option was warranted.
  
• There's a new "tutorial" which basically is just directing you to the extended in-game "how to play" stuff, which sometimes people were otherwise missing.
  
• Dyson Antagonizers now come in over time, so you have a chance to deal with them before they start causing trouble.
  
• The AI taunts are all processed and split out by Pablo, and we're working on integrating those and choosing the best takes. Some more voice lines by the chief of staff (lady talking to you as things happen) are coming early next week. Actually, technically both will be integrated around then.
  
• Oh, there's also a new tip under the modding section that explains how to make your own Quick Starts, which is both super easy as well as something we figure a lot of non-modders may want to choose to do for themselves or to share with others.
  
• Now, on to the big one:
  

Custom Fleets (Aka the Remedy For Control Groups)

The release notes for these are here.

Essentially there are now 9 new fleets, each with 7 empty slots, that you can build off the sidebar of any of your command stations. Three are cloaked, three are fast, and three are regular.

What are you going to do with those new fleets? Well... anything you want! Including nothing, frankly.

So, here's the problem we solved with this:

• Essentially, sometimes people wanted to have really specialized fleets. As in, a fleet with all cloaking stuff, or one with all melee stuff, or whatever.
  
• And even though you can swap ship lines between fleets you capture, that doesn't guarantee you'll have enough slots or enough ship lines of the right type to make a full fleet.
  
• So a fair number of people were either wanting old-style control groups, where you can just make arbitrary groups of ships from across any fleets; OR they were wanting sub-fleets.
  

Why not just do one of those two things?

• The problem with old-style control groups is that a lot of the UI conveniences and automation just doesn't function with that. I thought I had a solution that would let me do something along those lines, but it was going to be really messy to set up as a player.
  
• The problem with sub-fleets is that that adds another level of indirection, and greatly complicates the UI. Really you don't need your melee ships to also be part of the larger fleet of "whatever they were in," if you want your melee ships to be assigned to a unique control binding and ordered around as a unit; you just need them to be in a new organizational unit all on their own. Aka, a new custom fleet, a new bucket, but previously there were not enough buckets.
  

Is this some sort of temporary workaround?

• No! Fleets are meant to be the primary organizational units of your stuff in AI War 2.
  
• This solution basically gives you some blank organizational units that you can use to subdivide your forces further than you used to be.
  
• In other words, it keeps to the ethos of the organizational style of the game -- which has a LOT of UI advantages to make your life easier -- while at the same time giving you more control.
  

Why have nine possible blank fleet templates?

• This is per-player in multiplayer, and based on how people tend to play this should be more than enough subdivision. With 7 slots in each one, you can make three separate cloak-themed fleets (maybe one is etherjet tractors, the others are more strike-oriented?) if you need to.
  
• That's HUGE, because it allows you to cover three different fronts with just cloaked units alone.
  
• Then you have three that have fast flagships, typically for raiding or melee or some other units that need to move around the map quickly.
  
• And then you have three that are just... "whatever." They're average flagships, and you can do whatever you need to with them.
  
• When you pair that with all the various flagships you pick up over the course of the game, you ought to really be able to customize things as much as you could possibly want, even when fighting on several fronts at once.
  

Isn't it a pain in the butt to have to manually configure fleets like this just for control groups?

• You could make that argument, but honestly I think this is LESS of a pain in the butt. Here's why:
  
• If you're just needing a really quick selection of things like "all the melee units on the planet I'm looking at," we already added hotkeys for things like that. For ad-hoc selection of ships at the local area, using things like C+M to select all the melee ships will more than cover you. It's by far the fastest thing.
  
• So the only real purpose of "control groups" in this sense is for NON-ad-hoc situations: aka long-term permanent or semi-permanent groupings of forces.
  
• Given that a lot of the big complexities that old control groups had that fleets solve revolve around "what happens when ships die and get recreated into the fleet," we get to bypass those complexities with the custom fleets just like we do with any other fleet.
  
• If we did custom control groups again, we'd be right back into the boat of things like "does this get automatically selected if it's created under xyz circumstances," etc.
  
• And what we found through lots of playtesting is that players were constantly surprised by the answer to questions like that regardless of what we chose to have the logic be. It just had too many edge cases, whereas fleets are always really predictable in how they are selected and how ships inside them act.
  
• You can also name fleets, unlike control groups, which is pretty handy. So you can have something like your "North Melee" group if you want to, and even if you've got that bound to a control group or not, you can easily remember what that thing is for (for now) and rename it again if you need to.
  
• Plus all the other conveniences with fleets, like changing around build orders, having higher ship marks from a fleet that has gained levels via fleet EXP, and so on. There's a bunch of stuff this keeps you having access to, and it also keeps the interface for managing that all the same across the board.
  
• I do realize that it's different from the control groups that you're used to in a lot of other RTS games, but no other RTS game has this huge number of units in it, nor the rapid recreation of units, nor the need to split your units over such a wide space. There are some others that come close on some or all of those fronts (Stellaris, Sins, AI War 1), but none of them really match what's going on here if there are a bunch of factions and you've got a ton of fleets and are fighting galaxy-wide while defending yourself.
  
• The bottom line is that we had to invent something a bit new in order to get at what you want out of the behaviors of fleets and units, and to keep micromanagement down, and yet to give you customization at the same time.
  
• When I think about this, I think about it kind of like the city management screens in Civ IV; those start out a bit automated, but you can swap things around as needed. And that could be tedious if you had to do it all the time, but you're usually setting up a given city for a very long time (or at least a middle-tier timeline) when you make changes to it. So their management screens wind up being the most efficient way to handle the setup, despite the fact they're different from what other games did before Civ IV.
  
• Anyway, since I know there will be at least a few people who are put off by the fact that this is different, I wanted to explain the reasoning for this, as well as note that we've explored all the alternatives. There's nothing else that we've considered or been pitched so far that is remotely so clean, that respects your time, that communicates to you so clearly, and gives you the flexibility that you've been asking for. Hope you guys like it. :)
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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.

More refinement! Lots of good stuff here.

• The intel sidebar has a bunch of colorization improvements, as well as difficulty estimates based on things like what ships are at the planets on the way to the objective. These sorts of things really should help new players (and frankly, anyone) choose ideal targets. Huge kudos to Badger for thinking of and implementing this.
  
• Logistical command stations now automatically watch adjacent planets to them, now further differentiating them from military and economic command stations -- as well as making it so that you don't have to spend hacking points to watch every planet on your hinterland.
  
• There's a fifth tutorial in place now, thanks to Puffin, as well as some improvements to the existing ones. Please do keep up with the feedback on these, we really appreciate it. And I did notice folks starting in and adding in guides in the wiki -- DemocracyDemocracy in particular -- so huge thanks there, too!
  
• Fixed a fairly long list of bugs and minor balance issues.
  
• Added three new ship variants, two of which are new citadel types.
  
• A variety of galaxy map improvements and other ui improvements, including the control group number still being visible but no longer replacing the count of contents in the fleet leaders.
  

As an aside, I've been personally having a rough time coming up on this release, so a lot of this content is developed by the volunteers (ever increasing in number, to my extreme gratitude). I haven't been nearly as productive this week as I'd have liked, although I do tend to discount things like marketing work and whatnot as not being "real work," so some of it's just that.

But there's a very palpable sense of fear that I have coming into this release, just because... well, it's been a rough few years, and the market is so saturated now, and the original game was something that people loved so much and expected us to surpass with this title. It feels like expectations are super high, the noise in the market is super high, and I have no idea if that will translate into actually being able to make a living making games again; I say "again," because despite laying off all the staff, I haven't been break-even (let alone profitable) on making games for... oh, four years now, I suppose. That's hard.

So I'm really heartened by all the various positive Steam reviews lately and over the last year, and I'm hoping the press has a similar reaction. I'm heartened by all the folks saying how they are finally feeling like the sequel is so much better than the original, and personally I agree, but it's hard to not let people for whom the sequel doesn't live up to their expectations set up camp in my head. I knew going into this that I could never please everyone, but the question is if I can please enough people, and keep pleasing them over time with more free additions and paid expansions, that I get to keep doing my dream job. Right now I don't have an answer to that, and I won't until the 22nd, so it's setting off my anxiety something fierce.

To compensate, I'm trying to get enough sleep, focus on specific tasks ]that I know need doing rather than the big picture, and in general just tidy up. It doesn't help that the Early Access release last year was by all accounts a big success and then I immediately got asked for a divorce and things spiraled down for a few months where I couldn't work. Things are incredibly much better now, and I'm actually really grateful for the turn my life took despite that temporary huge hardship, but that stuff still gets into parts of my brain and sits there.

You know, I'd really like to do this for a long time. It's been 10 years so far. I'd enjoy just making a living and making more games for another 10 or 20 or even 30 years. Hopefully with a lot less stress than the first 10 years had. Fingers crossed. Things honestly look to be heading that way, but it's hard not to be worried about it nonetheless.

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.

Mostly this one is about refinement, but it has some major quality of life additions on the galaxy map, most of those thanks to Asteroid.

• You can now adjust the scale of icons on the galaxy map (this one I added), and the default is a bit bigger. The smaller size was nice last version, but a little TOO squint-causing on most monitors. Now the default is larger and you can tune to taste.
  
• You can now hover over the links between planets and see intel about them, which explains all the various things that you otherwise had to memorize (why a dashed line, why red, etc, etc). Huge thanks to Asteroid for implementing this.
  
• Also, linkages that are having an actual wormhole wave coming now show up with an animation. Again thanks Asteroid!
  
• Nanocaust ships and Macrophage ships can now stack! Hooray for performance in those games that have those factions in huge numbers. Big thanks to Badger, this required a hefty extension to the core mechanics there.
  
• The stacking code was not working well at ALL with transports, causing all sorts of problems. Thanks to a lot of folks for help there, but particularly to WeaponMaster for figuring out the problem areas.
  
• The colors of some of the factions are now clearer in the quick starts -- big thanks to Puffin for that one.
  
• Several other bugfixes, balance tweaks, UI improvements, quick start improvements, and so on thanks to all of the above folks. Everybody has been really busy. Thanks all!
  

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