AI War 2 News

Release notes here.

Oh good grief this one is huge. From one day's work, too. Let's get down to it!

The Title Feature: Commanding From The Galaxy Map

Okay, so a funny thing happened when I added fleets to the game a few months ago: people started expecting to be able to select them on the galaxy map. It was a completely natural thing to expect, but it wasn't something I'd ever thought of, and the first game certainly didn't work like that (ships didn't even appear on the galaxy map).

I also didn't realize for a while how crippling it felt not to have this ability. To be able to SEE those fleets of yours, but then you click them and it just does... nothing. The galaxy map had always been for information, and generally the ships shown there were for enemy structures you might consider capturing. What was to interact with? Until fleets.

So, yes: now we have the ability to select fleets, drag a band-box around them, use alt and shift for subtractive and additive selection, and so on. This all pairs nicely with the cross-planet move orders stuff that Badger has done more recently.

You can't issue direct attack or assist orders from the galaxy map at the moment, and I'm not sure I want to add that. Generally the things shown are your own fleets and then enemy capturables; rarely something of an enemy that you'd want to directly attack. Even if it is something you'd directly attack, it's usually something defended by a bunch of other stuff you should deal with first rather than charging directly at.

What you can do is select stuff with ease from the galaxy map, and then click over to a planet (double click takes you in), and then right-click to move to a specific spot on the planet or give an attack order there. OR you can select stuff on the galaxy map, and give them move orders at a planetary level from there.

Will we need more refinement on this? Almost certainly. I imagine there are various modifiers and conveniences people will be looking for. But this is a huge step up already, so we'll slot those other things in as we have time. I'm mostly probably going to be gunning for the sidebar and for achievements, next, personally.

Galaxy Map Visuals

It's not quite an overhaul, per se... but everything feels very different now. You can see more ship icons at each planet, but they aren't as large and in the way. Planets themselves are smaller. There are dotted lines between enemy planets and your planets where they can't attack you via wormholes (wow this feels amazing to see).

The way planets are selected looks better, and their text is positioned and sized better. You can see selected fleets on the galaxy map even if you didn't select them directly here. You can see what kind of command stations you've built on each planet at a glance based on the planet icon.

The intel tab highlights just the specific relevant planet for the thing you might want to capture or hack, not ALL the things of its type. You can hover over the planet/local/ships tab icons again and highlight which planets have THOSE things.

Oh, yeah: and the galaxy map stays where you put it. Zoom and positioning and so on, as you move between planets, rather than recentering you over and over again. Wow that one feels huge, too.

Hey, We Have Four Tutorials Now!

I actually feel like this is a big disservice that I'm only getting to this at this point in the release notes. This is huge news! We do have more tutorials needed, and the last two of these in particular are hot off the presses and Puffin was feeling as tired as I am I think, so please be understanding of that and helpful in your feedback.

But boy, this is such a huge relief to me, personally, to have some solid tutorials in there again. We've had the written "How to Play" bits, but some people just want the interactive stuff. I get that, so now we have both. Video tutorials will come soon, but I've kinda lost my voice at the moment and I'd rather have all the new GUI improvements and general quality of life improvements in there.

I really have to say, enormous thanks to Puffin on this.

Badger took the hit the first time around and did the very big long tutorial that was available at the start of Early Access. And it was good! People seemed to really like it. But then I went and Changed Everything (tm) with fleets and so on, and the tutorial that he made just became about 80% obsolete.

This time around, Puffin has stepped up and saved my bacon and is doing a series of smaller bite-size tutorials on the same general subjects, but in the new mechanical framework of the game. Back when Badger added the first one, we could only HAVE one tutorial, so he had to make his big and cover all the stuff. But from a design standpoint, we decided this time around it made much more sense to have smaller bite-size ones on specific topics so that people could skip the bits they already understand, or don't want to learn about right now... or revisit some specific topic they forgot, as the case may be.

Thanks to Puffin, I'm able to work on all these things like the galaxy map improvements while he's doing those tutorials. And frankly, I'm not the best one for explaining the game since I know it so well and tend to be either too detailed or not detailed enough. I did the tutorials for the first game -- AI War Classic -- and everyone has been raving about how much better Badger's ones were for AI War 2. This makes sense to me, but has tended to add to my anxiety when trying to do tutorials myself. Not that I wouldn't have done them... but boy it has been a huge relief to have someone else do that so that I could focus on concrete polish stuff.

Bugfixes, Balance, and UI Improvements!

There's a hefty number of these, too! Badger and Asteroid and I have been busy, and WeaponMaster has pointed out several things for this one after sifting through code, too.

The strength/weakness code gives a more succinct and readable result now, and more changes are planned -- thanks Asteroid! Decollision has had a few things fixed up, thanks to items WeaponMaster found. NRSirLimbo made some excellent suggestions that led to Badger finding some substantial bugs in the metal tracking code, and that also lets you view metal flows while paused.

And... a bunch of other little stuff. This release was nuts. I'm really happy with where the game is getting to. Puffin also did a bunch of internal achievements work that isn't visible yet because I have yet to do the UI for it, but that was also a big win. I'm heading off for the weekend, now, so hopefully folks enjoy!

Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!

We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.

Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.

I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.

But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.

It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.

Back Monday!

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 has a lot of little UI improvements, many of which center around hotkeys.

• Some of the sidebar hotkeys are more natural now (F for fleets, etc).
  
• A number of the controls in the controls configuration menu have been recategorized or clarified.
  
• You can now hold the R key while looking at ship stats in order to see either the strengths or weaknesses of that ship type versus other ship types. This is a preliminary sort of thing, but it's something a lot of people have been wanting and getting started with it is good. Big thanks to Asteroid for that!
  
• The mercenaries have been renamed to Outguard instead, and coming up before too long we're going to be changing how they work. Basically to make them both more thematic (end of the world for humans we'd see more natural cooperation, seems like), and something that people use more frequently.
  
• Ships should hopefully no longer wiggle back and forth when they're doing slight kiting movements.
  
• You can now tell if an AI has a warp gate adjacent to a planet of yours based on the thickness of the line between your planet and theirs.
  

Overall this was a pretty small release, but it lays the groundwork for more stuff coming soon.

Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!

We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.

Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.

I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.

But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.

It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.

Other Fixes And Improvements

There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid!

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 actually has some key bugfixes as well, including a change to how stacks work that really has an enormous impact on balance. The AI may be too weak now, since more of your shots actually hit stacks now since that bug was fixed.

There are also some new hotkeys for placing multiple ships at once when constructing them, and some on-screen indicators for what those hotkeys are when you go into build mode.

We've also built out a TON of the stuff for the tutorial framework itself, although there's still plenty more to do. But we did get enough that...

First Tutorial Is Ready!

This is a very small tutorial that just focuses on how to move around and things like that, but it's similar to what was in the old tutorial (for this game) as part of a larger tutorial.

This version is a little bit cleaner and slightly more informative since we're able to cover more in more steps with less work, and we were able to easily adjust it to do some colorization to aid in readability.

But one thing that's really notable here is that this is a micro-tutorial on a specific topic, by design. This way we can have a variety of small tutorials of this sort that are topical and that you don't have to play again and again (or even at all) if you want to skip ahead a bit.

In talking to folks, it became clear that they really want to be able to just "get on with things," and that means different things to different people. So by making it really seamless and convenient and a series of micro tutorials, we're able to hopefully meet the desires of a lot of you at once.

And of course we'll also do some videos later on, kind of in a Let's Play style. And we have the in-game wiki with lots of written explanations already. And the game is full of tooltips to help you contextually learn in general.

So hopefully whatever your learning style is, we'll be hitting it. We don't want anyone to feel forced into a style of tutorial they don't like (whether that's reading, interactive, or video; everyone seems to want different things, which is okay).

Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!

We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.

Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.

I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.

But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.

It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.

Other Fixes And Improvements

There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid!

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.

The visual look of the game is pretty notably different, in the sense that the whole affair looks more "serious" now. The borders of icons are thinner, and the saturation is 80% of what it used to be (by default).

If you want the saturation back up bright and cheery (or even more gloomy), then you can adjust those values in settings. If your monitor is extra bright or dark compared to a baseline, you can also now adjust the general brightness up and down. These settings affect the entire screen, GUI included, so this keeps the colors consistent between the GUI and the playing field, which is really nice.

Cross-Planet Move Orders

So you have a group of ships selected that are on multiple planets. Some of them are on planet A with you, and others are on planets B and C. You want to issue a move order to a specific spot on planet A and have them all go there. This now works. Previously, the ships on planets B and C would just ignore the orders.

This is something people always wanted in AI War Classic, and is finally now possible thanks to Badger implementing that here (though Keith and I did lay a lot of groundwork, we never took it this final critical step).

This also means that you can have ALL your ships off on some other planet(s), visit a hostile enemy planet, and queue up movement orders on their planet... and your ships will route there and then keep going.

This should also work for attack orders, but there may be some issues with that at the moment. Thinking about it right now, I think that potentially if there's an attack order against a ship that is not on the current planet, then it treats that as an invalid order and clears it out (normally that's a good thing if your target ship runs away from the planet you are trying to attack it on).

I am guessing we just need to make it say something along the lines of "if there are wormhole orders, then treat all orders after those orders as valid no matter what" in order to solve this issue. Anyway, so we're making good progress, but there are still nits and things here and there.

Tutorials

Speaking of making progress, our tutorial engine is coming along swimmingly. There really aren't as many TYPES of conditions for progressing tutorial stages as I had once been thinking there were. A lot of them involve "go to this place" or "look at this thing" or "build some specific things" or "kill some specific things."

All of that is able to be generalized pretty darn well, which will be my main task for tomorrow. The tutorial framework is practically complete except for that particular element, in terms of the truly core components.

There will be more that we want to add over time, but by the end of tomorrow I think we'll have enough conditions and whatnot in place that we can recreate what the old tutorial used to be if we wanted to (not that that tutorial makes sense anymore, given it was pre-fleets and teaches a lot of things that no longer exist).

Among other improvements to the tutorial framework (such as making it all xml-driven and VASTLY easier to update and create tutorials), you also now have to click the tutorial text to advance it to the next step, rather than it advancing without you just because you meet the conditions. That was endlessly confusing for people in the past.

Don't get me wrong, there will be plenty of latent requests for the tutorial system that I'm sure I'll be adding for months, so I don't expect to be done tomorrow or something. But being able to hit a big baseline goal like that so quickly -- ability to recreate the old tutorial if it made sense now -- is a definite win in my book.

Repeat Notice: Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!

We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.

Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.

I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.

But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.

It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.

Other Fixes And Improvements

There are a number of bugfixes and balance tweaks that seemed to be the highest-priority items that people had brought to our attention. Thanks to Badger on the bulk of those. And the build menu now has icons thanks to Asteroid!

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.

There are a variety of interface improvements in this one, and some small bits of balance updates. The quick starts are also completely reworked and should be more favorably balanced for new players to not have them get overwhelmed.

Tutorials

On the tutorial front, right now we're still building the tooling for our tutorials/scenarios system. This is a fully xml-driven system, so anyone can create a tutorial with just a text editor and no code experience whatsoever. There's a starting example that I've created that doesn't do much except show off how to do the various stuff.

With this build of the game, the ability to fully design your own map starting state, complete with factions and what and where their ships are, is now in place. That's the end of part 1 of the tutorial/scenario framework, because everything stems from that original map design.

The next part is actually building a tutorial in that space which progresses along, etc. The next part is a lot more time-consuming and something that we'll likely be adding little bits to for months or years as people want new things added in, but the ability to have a general scenario with a set of goals that you have to achieve to win, and the ability to trigger certain things like waves from the AI, should be relatively quick to get in there.

A lot of things that get into more advanced scripting of things like AI behavior we wouldn't want to do, anyway -- this is still meant to be the same general game, of course. But for the easier tutorials, making it so that you don't have a wave coming until AFTER you hit some milestone is certainly a big deal.

Tutorial and Scenario Designers Wanted!

We're going to be working on our own tutorials based on this system, but I'd definitely love to see a really robust number of scenarios from other folks, too.

Everybody has a different perspective, and maybe you want to teach some specific tactic or even set up kind of a small contained puzzle-like challenge cage-match with 5 planets against the dark spire and nanocaust with a quest you design with unusual victory conditions.

I think that sort of thing is just super fun, and it's a way to play the game in a more bite-sized fashion. Some of those sorts of things aren't even really tutorials, they're more advanced challenges or puzzles.

But anyway, the tutorials system is a pretty robust framework that allows for all sorts of different scenario designs that I'd love to see people really lean into. I've been explicitly trying to make this as easy as possible for non-coders to do -- all you need is a text editor -- and the idea of seeing what creative things people come up with to both teach and test players is exciting.

It's more or less the same idea behind modding, where people add various map types or ship types or whatever else, except this time it's custom scenarios for teaching or testing.

Map Generation Overhaul

While I was at this in terms of working on the tutorial map design components, I also redesigned how the map generation components worked in general. Before if you had a low number of planets and a middling or high number of factions, the map generation process could throw errors about there not being enough room to seed all the things it needed to seed.

That was confusing, and then even in other situations it could be rather bland with only one thing of importance on any given planet; you rarely would see a big mean weapon and a big good capturable on the same planet, and you'd never see a big good capturable and a small minor capturable on the same planet.

The new system is a lot more flexible and it should be practically impossible to get the confusing error messages anymore on map generation. Instead it just absolutely packs the planets that are there with all the things it is trying to seed, and in general the maps are going to feel a bit more... varied and patchwork now, rather than quite as homogeneous as before.

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