AI War 2 News

New build, and tons of new map options! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.300_Mapsplosion

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

I had been planning on working on more bugfixes today, but honestly I was feeling pretty fatigued and unmotivated and so I decided to work on something else as a bit of a diversion. I'll be back on bugfixes and game mode stuff soon, but I hope you enjoy the fruits of this diversion.

This is essentially a Summer Of A Lot Of Free Stuff, which I think is good because we're planning on releasing three paid DLCs in 2021, so I feel a lot better about that with also loading you down with lots of new free base game stuff. Your financial support is greatly appreciated (and needed), but I don't want you to feel strongarmed into it.

So what's up this time? Last time it was variable-sized gravity wells. And campaign types are still evolving. And interplanetary weapons are coming sometime in the next month or so.

This time around it's map types. Not new map types, at least not right now in the base game. But the curious thing about AI War 2 is that it has a TON of map "types" available in sub-options for each larger type. AI War Classic had 4 different Maze map types, for instance, versus AI War 2 has the same thing with one main type and four sub-options. None of that is new.

What is new is that there are dozens of new options for a variety of map types in the base game in particular, and a lot of these really radically change the maps to the point they are almost unrecognizable. Both X and Honeycomb have some particularly interesting new variants. There are many QoL improvements in relation to choosing map settings, too.

More to come soon. Apologies for taking a break from bugs.
Enjoy!

New build, mostly a hotfix: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.203_More_Bugfixing

This one re-fixes (properly, this time, hopefully) that gost-related exception that was happening in multiplayer.

This one also reworks a lot of the map design logic and code so that it's easier for us to manage those.

It has a couple of mod updates in it, and Nr SirLimbo also put in a fix for ship chase ranges that was making them a bit stupid in large gravity wells.

More to come later today, but I wanted to get this MP hotfix out while I have some folks able to test it.

Enjoy!

New build! Second one of the day: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.202_General_Bugfixing

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

This one is not super exciting, unless you were impacted by one of the bugs this one fixes. That said, these are some juicy fixes, so YMMV

- Fixed a multiplayer exception that was happening trying to bust ghosts. Those darn ghosts again!

- (Not a bug, but) Humanity Ascendant now defaults to using all uniform gravity wells the same size as they always have been. It only starts introducing variant grav well sizes in Challenger mode, but you can change your preferences from the defaults in any of the modes.

- Beam weapon math has been adjusted and fixed in a variety of places. The spire ships will no longer miss their primary target at the end of a coilbeam, as one resulting improvement from this.

- Distributed economy mode wasn't working properly after saving and then reloading. Now it does.

- A variety of tooltips in the lobby were missing last build, but are back now.

- A complicated fix to an edge case when you're ordering units around on the galaxy map. There was a situation where they would ignore your orders if you told them to leave a planet and then "no wait stay after all" by clicking the planet. Now they listen properly.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

New hotfix build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.201_Location_Hotfix

This fixes a bug in the prior build where older saves had their units all shifted around in location, along with a few other related coordinate issues. Sorry about that! That did inspire a potential new AI type for sometime in the future, at least.

This hotfix also happens to include some mod updates that fix a few things, and also potentially a fix to the Reset to Defaults breaking client connections in the MP lobby. That's been on my list since MP started, so we'll see if this really fixes that one.

New giant build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#3.200_Variable_Planet_Gravity_Well_Scales_And_QoL

(This changes a ton and may have bugs. If you run into an intractable one, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

Okay! First up, this build might fix the multiplayer ghosts issue. Fingers crossed. But I made a lot of changes and simplified that to get that good and dead.

Secondly, for anyone who uses mods or has expansions installed, you can now see what is mod or expansion content all over the place. I'm talking fields in the lobby, items in dropdowns, and even quickstarts. The works. Mods can also now include quickstarts for the first time, too! Overall the idea is to help it become clear where things come from. Sometimes even I forget how much was packed into DLC1 (TSR), which really gets a lot less love than DLC2 (ZO). To make all this work, I had to re-code and extend a surprising amount of UI code, but all the bugs seem fixed now, knock on wood.

This build also introduces variable-sized gravity wells. The first AI War had larger gravity wells, but only one size. This game has always been more intimate in battlefield size (and/or more cutthroat, depending on how you look at it), but again there was no choice. Now there's a choice! And in fact, there are various "schemas" for various types of planets that helps you randomize in various interesting ways. The new defaults are to have some variable planet sizes, but nothing too extreme most of the time.

There are a number of bugfixes in this one, although the list of things that are on my short-term todo list grew a lot while I was implementing those two giant features above. So more soon on that front.

More soon in general.
Enjoy!