AI War 2 News

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.805_Bolstering_Spire

This one has a metric ton of art, a lot of which is focused on the spire, in both the base game and DLC1. Some of the rest is focused on the neinzul in DLC1 and DLC3. In general just making things look better, and adding new art for some of the new units that are coming to DLC1 as it expands shortly.

The Fallen Spire and Spire Infused Empires both work better than ever, and also are more clear, thanks to Badger. In particular, the bolstering mechanics are a lot more clear, and you get your third fleet when you are supposed to, rather than super late. Also more journal entries and other general help text.

On the bugfix front, there's more related to MP, and a few related to SP, again largely thanks to Badger.

There's also a shift with golems knocking smaller units out of the way, including your own units. Let me know how that feels; if it seems off, then I'll disable that except for giant things like the devourer golem.

There are several new spire factions coming to DLC1 in the near future, and those are drawing closer to creation thanks to StarKelp: Chromatic Spire, Gray Spire (both of which are dyson spheres), and then the Spire Shattering faction which sees... them at war including with the zenith dyson sphere, and also some dark spire involvement in a new and exciting way from the base game. I'm also going to be adding a Chromatic Spire Horror small faction in DLC1, because I had a series of cool ideas and some art that was cool that I made by accident while trying to make something else, and so it seemed like a good fit. It is a small faction, but should be neat.

In general there are now a lot more spire factions in this game: rather than just "regular" and "imperial" (which looked the same) and dark spire, we now have regular spire, imperial spire (which are visually distinct now), gray spire, dark spire, and chromatic spire. The chromatic are new in AI War 2 (all of the others had at least some presence in the original AI War), and they're by far the meanest and to some extent scariest out of them. They've been really fun to work on visually.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.804_Bug_Smooshing

This one is pretty much entirely bugfixes, and some major performance improvements as well. Hopefully multiplayer will be running even more smoothly, although there are still a couple of known issues that I need a bit more data for, or to test myself.

Badger and StarKelp were both on fire today, fixing all sorts of things, and I got a lot done as well.

Towards the evening I started working some on some revised spire graphics to improve the visuals in DLC1 a bit, and also to make room for the new spire factions and their units that are coming to DLC1. I'm not quite there yet on it, but the early stages are promising.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.803_Encyclopedia_Madness

When I originally set out to make the encyclopedia, I thought it would be about a half day of work. I also had in mind something relatively smaller. The end result took a solid day and a half, but is absolutely huge and really packed with features. I think I'm pretty much done with this for now, aside from a few tweaks I'll put in a while later. For now, this lets you sort and filter by all sorts of metrics, including several at once. This is also something that modders can easily extend. In-game it gives you extra information related to what factions actually have (that you can see), and what you can hack for or build but have not, and so on.

Tooltips also have improved a fair bit in terms of their placement so they are generally less in the way, and dropdowns behave much better (opening taller, and centering on the selected item when opening, rather than the top of the list). Lots of great quality of life improvements, there!

There are also some pretty key multiplayer fixes in this build, and some other multiplayer tracing elements that should help find the last of the canary issues if we still have more (I think we do, but I think they're reducing in severity at least).

The new faction stuff from StarKelp is also coming along well, so if you're a tester on that then there's lots of new good stuff. That will be properly announced coming up later this week when it's ready for everyone.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.802_New_Challengers_Approach

This is another big one. First off, it has a ton of bugfixes, including substantial improvements to multiplayer yet again.

The encyclopedia has seen a first round of updates, but there's more that needs doing. You'll notice some empty dropdowns and textboxes along the bottom, which I'll be filling in tomorrow or soon.

Challenger mode (the mode that is a step down from Expert but a step up from Humanity Ascendant) has seen a lot of updates, and all three of the new modes are now pretty close to final. Challenger is probably going to be my preferred way of playing now, personally, although the advanced players I expect will mostly live on Expert. And of course there's Strategic Sage cackling away over on Deathwish. The tooltips for these all do a better job of explaining what they are now, but expect more changes in that area soon.

If you're a DLC3 tester, you'll find a new faction in there which is actually from DLC1, but temporarily locked to the DLC3 testers until we get a bit more testing done on it, and the art. Expect a wider release to everyone who has DLC1 later this week, with details coming then. But if you have a DLC3 test key, please do give us feedback!

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#Beta_3.801_Load_Estimates_And_Unit_Encyclopedia

Another really huge one!

There's a new unit called the Ultimate Fortress that you'll run into out in the galaxy if you have the galaxy option turned on, are playing on difficulty 8 or higher, or are playing on expert mode. Zeus outdid himself with this terrifying thing, which also shows off some features from DLC3 (this is a base game unit).

In the lobby, and in the escape menu, there is now a "CPU load estimator" that gives you an estimate of how heavy the game you are running (or planning to run) will be. This lets you tailor your scenario to the sort of computer you have, and since it breaks down why it is heavier or lighter, and updates as you make changes, you can also tune your scenario to get the load that fits your machine while still having the maximum number of features and factions that you want. There are many more details on this in the release notes, but this is a really exciting thing.

Another exciting item is the new Unit Encyclopedia -- folks have been asking for this for ages, and it's finally here! It needs a bit more work right now with some of the categorization of some units, and it doesn't have any lore entries yet, but the vast majority of it is there and is working great. One cool thing is that this automatically adapts to mods, and modders can even extend it, so this isn't just an official-content feature.

Lastly, a number of bugs were fixed, as usual.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!