4.023 Beacon Expansiveness
New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.023_Beacon_Expansiveness
A bunch of new factions are now summonable via beacons, largely thanks to Daniexpert. This includes some returning favorites from old pre-4.0 beacons, but also includes new factions that have never had a beacon before. Previously it was a major performance drain to have a lot of beacon factions included, so we didn't do it often. Now it's not a drain at all, so we can have as many as we want.
Of course, the new problem that then led to was, "do we really want beacons to be so cluttered throughout the entire galaxy." This has led to a further set of beacon features, again implemented by Daniexpert, which divide the beacon factions into four "tiers" of importance (ranging from always seeding to being fairly rare). This neatly solves the problem for the base game and DLC factions, and also makes it so that mods can now hook into this without flooding the galaxy with beacons if you happen to have a dozen mod-granting factions enabled.
DLC2 has a new music track, which was jointly commissioned by Pablo and Badger, and composed by Badger. You'll also hear it coming up in the DLC3 trailer, which will be arriving this week (hey -- along with DLC3 itself!!).
DLC3 continues to get a wide variety of final polish, ranging from quality of life elements to bugfixes to feature and balance tweaks. Thanks to Badger, StarKelp, Zeus, and Tom.Prince for all their work on this over the last few days.
There are also a bunch of new achievements for DLC3, and a few new ones for DLC1, thanks to Zeus. Those will be integrated into Steam and GOG shortly. (If you earn them before they are, they will self-correct, no worries!)
Finally, some various bugfixes for the base game itself, relating to multiplayer, AI Reserves, AI Hunter, and various other bits.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!