AI War 2 News

Release notes here.

The graphics for ships and structures being incomplete was one of our biggest bugbears... since forever, really. We always were adding more ships and structures faster than we could do graphics for them.

It's been well over a year since I've done any new ship visuals, because my focus was elsewhere, but in the last week it's been time to tidy all that up in preparation for our 1.0 launch on (tentatively) October 22nd; and that includes revised trailers and screenshots, of course.

More than just adding a bunch -- 80ish -- of new ship and structure visuals (and overhauling the lighting and bloom on all the rest of them about a week ago), this particular build also vastly improves the quality of the background planet visuals by moving them to updated shaders, adjusting their levels, and so on. I made some improvements to the planet visuals back during the "lighting and darkness" release, but this is a whole other level of improved.

Other stuff:

• There's only one bugfix in this build, which is hilariously little in terms of that sort of thing, but you can see where our focus has been. We'll be returning to interface, bugfixes, and tutorials now that the visuals are done.
  
• There are four new ship variants (Ram, Fusion Saw, Kite, and Ion Disruptor) now in the game.
  
• There are some other moderate balance tweaks, such as spider units being a lot more effective, weapon jamming ships working a lot more effectively and efficiently, forcefield guardians having a forcefield of any notable size, and a few other bits.
  

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.

Release Date For 1.0 Coming Up!

We're closing in on an official date for launch of 1.0! At this point we're tentatively thinking October 22nd, which would be the 10 year anniversary of AI War Classic arriving on Steam. I suddenly feel very old, thinking about how large a span of time that is; when I was younger I remember thinking the gap in time between Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander was unthinkable, but that was... literally also a 10 year gap.

So that date seems very fitting, and it seems like a good spot in the market, and it seems like it would give us enough time to get all our ducks in a row as far as 1.0 being fully up to snuff goes.

Note that this isn't 1000% firm of a date yet, so this isn't a full announcement, but it's a heads up.

Now... About This Actual Release?

• There are actual ship graphics now for 35 new ships and structures that were just using repeat stuff. This has been on my todo list since May 2018, so that's a pretty big win. Huge thanks to Puffin for making this go so much faster.
  
• There's another batch of ship graphics almost as large coming this week still, plus the macrophage and parasites need some more work out of this current batch, and there's a whole host of improvements to the planet visuals in the backgrounds coming this week, too. Then we can start taking final trailer footage and final screenshots, hopefully.
  
• The balance of the Dark Spire has been adjusted a TON, to make it so that they are less likely to come kick your butt for reasons unrelated to you actually doing badly. There were too many little side things that you had no control over that were feeding the Vengeance Generators energy, but no longer. Thanks to Badger for solving this, and as he put it, "thanks to NRSirLimbo for a spirited lament." In seriousness from both of us, it's exactly the sort of thing we need when it comes to factions and whatever other sort of balance.
  
• The tech unlock hack no longer charges you science, which was a whoopsie. Thanks to WeaponMaster for fixing that!
  
• Badger has also been working on the Intel menu, working adding color and so forth to make that more readable and less overwhelming.
  
• Queued wormhole orders can also now be seen on the galaxy map in the style of AIWC... although this seems to have uncovered an actual bug with queued wormhole orders themselves, so any reports that can help us find a way to repro that and nail that bug are appreciated.
  

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 focused on further refinement.

• When you first load up the game, the messages are now thematic and/or humorous. I particularly enjoy that the computer calculates the odds, briefly panics, and then institutes a calming routine. Depending on how fast your hard drive is, and how long it's been since you last ran the game (and thus cached a lot of it in part of your folder), you'll get to see more or fewer of those.
  
• There are two new major hacks for ARSes: one to re-roll the contents, and another to convert it into science.
  
• Structures you place can't self-build anymore if their fleet leader isn't present and functional (excepting fleet leaders themselves!). This prevents several exploity things players could do.
  
• You can C-click any flagship now, and if it's one that you can normally manage it gets you into the fleet management screen directly. SUPER extra convenient, for sure.
  
• The fleet management screen now has a button letting you load or unload transports by clicking instead of just having to know the hotkeys.
  
• The fleet management screen now has the long-requested feature to scrap all the distant units (not on the same planet as the flagship), which is particularly useful when uprooting and moving battlestations and citadels around.
  
• A bunch more range circles are now shown, and are colorized to tell you what they are. You can more easily stay out of gravity or tractor range by actually seeing those now, etc.
  
• A ton of new keybinds have been added for quickly selecting all your snipers, melee units, mobile flagships, battlestations, factories, cloaked units, and so on. This is planet-wide (like the mobile military selection one), and so is a quick way to select things across fleets that you would commonly want to select. If there are more such hotkeys that would be desirable, please throw those up on mantis for us to let us know!
  
• You can see how long a hack will take right on the hacking menu, now.
  
• A number of bugfixes 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 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