AI War 2 News

v0.880 Released! "Belatedly Finding Friends... And Enemies"

Release notes here.

I took a break from the tutorials work, and instead focused on performance when it comes to big background battles between warring other factions that you might run across.

There's more that we can probably make even more performant in that area, but we need to do more profiling and figure out things that we can spread out more across more sim steps in addition to what already is being spread. In case the new performance tweaks give you problems of some sort, there's an option in the Galaxy Options tab, under the Performance section, to turn that off.

At any rate, I want to see what happens with that as we're adding ever more stuff that might be fighting offscreen and out of sight -- it shouldn't be causing your main game to bog down like you were seeing before. But that's something we can definitely look into more on the new framework that now exists. I also wanted to get the new framework in sooner than later so that any bugs that are in it can be found suitably in advance of 1.0.

So, what else?

Badger came up with the idea that certain factions -- right now the Devourer Golem, the Nanocust, the Human Resistance Fighters, and the Marauders -- can be friends or foes that you discover partway into a game even if you didn't choose them from the start in the "custom start" lobby (or if they weren't baked into your chosen quick start).
Basically, this makes it so that as a game is going along, you can suddenly have a new wrinkle thrown in with one or more factions joining the party late... and likely making up for lost time, either to your benefit or not.
I'm a big fan of this, as this lets you either customize things up-front, or change your mind and add something later if you think it will help (or might hurt the AI more than it hurts you, anyway).
Neutral planets controlled by a non-player, non-AI faction now show with the colors of that faction. That's really helpful for Dyson Spheres, Nanocaust, and other things like that.
Fixed a confusing thing with transports, which was causing some people to think they couldn't load or unload them. You should now find that it "just works" as you would expect, but let us know if not.
We fixed a bunch of other bugs.
Zenith Trader purchases no longer cost you AIP if you lose them, which mirrors how they were in the first game.
Mercenaries now have much more varied units!
Hacking is now something the AI responds more strongly to, and for superterminals they start doing exogalactic strikes against you so that you can't just blob all your ships on the superterminal world and ignore the rest of the galaxy.

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

v0.879 Released! "Many Fixes and the Tutorial Rework Starts"

Release notes here.

A smaller one, while we get a lot of work done on the new tutorial framework. But still some exciting fixes, and other tweaks.

Hacking no longer freezes flagships in place, and doesn't have bugs related to canceling hacks anymore, and also shows a message explaining why your flagships can't leave that planet.
Forcefields no longer cause ships to get stuck against them.
Officer fleets with Arks and Golems are no longer going to be QUITE so late-game, aka not right to an AI homeworld.
The whole "ship caps changing as you change them between different fleets" thing is no longer a worry. Wow that was confusing.
Some other clarity things relating to swapping ships between fleets have been added, such as showing the ship counts in the interface.
Plus fixed a kind of sideways way you could get multiple copies of the same ship line in one fleet, thus causing manyproblems.
Mercenary Flagships got radar dampening, making them way more likely to live!
Transports that you give an attack order to (for purposes of the ships coming out of them) will no longer wander off to the southwest.
If the game has an exception on startup, it should always now show you rather than sometimes just seeming like loading xml assets was hung.
A LOT of work has been done on the new tutorials framework, but it's not ready yet. I'm really hoping that we start getting some player-made tutorials in there as I flesh out the framework more, incidentally. Some of them can be more scenario-like kind of like a "can you even win this" sort of "tutorial" if you want to. ;)

v0.878 Released! "Fleet Customization"

Release notes here.

Dang this one is big! Lots of long-awaited features in here:

You can now swap ship lines between mobile fleets you control, thus letting you mix and match your forces better and have themed fleets.
A lot of the fleets are more themed now in general.
There are some new and improved "game 101" explanations included in the how to play section.
Transports work vastly better, with a number of quality of life improvements like having ships that are constructed for a transport-with-stuff-in-it appear in it rather than next to it, and many many more.
The ability from the first game to set preferred targets for specific ships of yours is now in place here, too; for instance having this one specific selection of your ships target pike corvettes or whatever.
The Zenith Power Generator can no longer be cheesed from the Zenith Trader, but is still an interesting and valid choice from them.
There are new "Watchman Frigates" available at all your command stations, giving you some mobile ships to hunt down small AI stragglers without having to bring your fleets home just to tidy up one sniper or whatever.
Fixed several bugs relating to shots, which were sometimes leading to invincible almost-dead units, and in other cases degrading performance.
Fixed several bugs related to AI guarding ships and how those interacted with stacks, which would give the AI ridiculous numbers of ships (one savegame had more than 2 million pike corvettes in it) in a very short amount of time, thus making balance way off and degrading performance. This was probably not affecting most saves, but if you parked next to a warden post it would often get triggered, and AI civil wars would trigger it.
Fixed a number of UI annoyances with data that was flickering or jumping around or otherwise not stable, mainly because of things that needed to be buffered for the display thanks to multithreading going on.

v0.877 Released! "The Strikecraft Goldilocks Zone"

Release notes here.

The nanocaust have seen a big revision as part of this one, and I was definitely tempted to name the build after that. But the strikecraft being better-balanced compared to everything else probably affects more people, so here we are. The list of short-term general annoyances is getting much smaller, and the discussion that started it all is here.

So what's new?

Lots of bugfixes, and some ui enhancements and AI improvements all over the place.
You can now see the history of the AIP increases and decreases by clicking the AIP section of the top toolbar, which is SO handy -- thanks, Badger!
In Badger's own words, the nanocaust changes: The nanocaust rework is basically a dramatic simplification of the code. I took the Fleets mechanism out and put in a mechanism that basically says "If there are no enemies on planet X, take all the ships on this planet and attack any adjacent planet that is weak enough for the local forces to take. If there are no adjacent hostile planets, go to a random adjacent friendly planet". This was what I did originally but it was too powerful so I introduced the nanocaust fleets mechanic basically as a nerf. However, the end result was a rather boring and not-super-menacing nanocaust. So now it's back to its original terrifying version. I may need to introduce some additional mechanics to slow it down, we'll see. The logic it uses is also essentially the same logic that Marauder Raiders use.
The strikecraft balance is now reduced to 2x hulls instead of 3x, and attack multiplier down to 1.5x. So now your turrets should have a fighting chance. Big thanks to Puffin for aggregating that feedback and making the change. The strikecraft previously felt too chaff-y, but now are hopefully in the ideal middle ground; let us know!
Bunches of balance changes based on player feedback.
I've personally been traveling for the last week, but have written up some things that might interest you. Specifically:
My plans for tutorials are a lot more traditional now.
My plans for 1.0, techs, and fleets are written up and hopefully make sense.
Same for my plans for multiplayer, although that news is probably less welcome.
Still lots of exciting things in the works, as noted via various links, mantis, and so on.

v0.876 Released! "Counterattacks Ate My Waves"

Release notes here.

This one refines a lot of things from the prior build, and fixes up neutering, waves, and counterattacks all in one fell swoop. The list of short-term general annoyances is getting much smaller, and the discussion that started it all is here.

So what's new?

Counterattacks were working well in the prior build, but in some respects a bit TOO well. Basically the AI was being granted too many counterattack points (the same as too much salvage in prior builds), and so the counterattacks were just plain too large in a lot of situations. Things should be much more reasonable now, but we do expect it to be something we need to tune over time, so please do keep the feedback coming.
An unintended side effect of counterattacks that I completely missed was the fact that neutering a planet (scouring away all the guard posts but leaving the command station) was being treated as if you had failed to conquer the planet. Blah! This is definitely a big part of why we love having so many dedicated fans who are testing things out. Neutering is one of the oldest and most important strategies, and counterattacks were never supposed to mess with that. As of this new version, they no longer do; the command station isn't a counterattack-helping unit anymore, except for the AI Overlord version of it.
With some of the changes to waves in the prior build, I actually entirely broke waves, too. So they were supposed to be more specialized, but they wound up just not coming at all anymore! This was because waves themselves have been evolving a lot over time in the code, and the code needed a bit of a refactor in order to fully embrace the new "how much the AI pays for things is decoupled from how strong it is" balance change that we put in months ago. The AI needs to be able to know when to not send a wave, or when to spend a bit less on a wave than it might otherwise spend, and it was previously having to approximate that sort of thing in a way that could often be quite wrong just because there isn't a literal relationship between cost and strength. Now it's using real numbers and is thus able to make far more intelligent decisions.
Counterattacks were also happening too quickly, rather than being something that wouldn't kick in until a certain threshold of battle. We think that's fixed.
And there are a variety of other bugfixes, including the Global Command Augmenter hacks always being hidden (oops, typo on my part). Overall this should make the game far more pleasant to play, and the back-and-forth should feel a lot more natural.