AI War 2 News

LOTS of stuff, but just pushing to beta right now. We need a bit more testing on some of this. I'll write up the details more after this is out of beta, but for now you can test this by using the current_beta branch in Steam. Feedback very welcome!

Release notes here.

It's rare that I include a joke in the title of a release, but this one was a comment by StarKelp on discord and was too good to pass up. He helped find a really annoying QoL bug with the voice lines playing repetitively in certain cases, so here we are. Full release notes here.

• A variety of bugfixes that make life more pleasant and/or make the enemy more deadly.
  
• Your own forcefields that are bumped out of the way by enemy Norris Effect units will now move back into position on their own, thus re-covering wormholes that previously were just left open. This is a pretty major addition when you're fighting certain enemies that push your shields around, and was the thing I wouldn't have thought to do. Big kudos to Badger on adding this!
  
• Added a new Damage Amplification thanks to Quinn, who has basically created a new mechanic for ships that can be used to counter golems and other super-units with ships that use this mechanic. This mechanic is available for modders immediately, and we're working on ships of our own to make use of it.
  

More to come soon!
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

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.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

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 super detailed, 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

Another week, another six beta releases which now are officially out here. This is a big one! For the full story, you'll want to start reading at 1.310, if you haven't been on the beta branch.

• First up, the Warden fleet of the AI now uses fire teams. This is... a complete game-changer for them. You can't trick and trap them like you used to, although you can still mess with them in various ways. They're just way smarter and more fluid in how they respond to your messings.
  
• We went through a ton of code and fixed up any potential problems that we found during a code review. This cleaned up a few rare bugs that may or may not have actually been seen in the wild by players yet.
  
• Fixed a variety of achievements that were not properly triggering -- huge thanks to Quinn for putting in those fixes for us!
  
• Fixed a bug where in certain circumstances, NPC factions could cause AI ships to turn threat against you, leading to your unexpected doom.
  
• Improved some more of the fire team logic so that they don't get distracted by things like command-station-remains (which are already shot to death and do not require further shooting at this time). Prior to this, certain fire teams could get stuck waiting around to kill something that was already dead, thus letting you avoid the consequences of the hunter being after you.
  
• The debug menu has been updated heavily to show which items are considered cheats and which are not. One item that was previously a cheat -- revealing the entire map -- is now just considered a "lifestyle choice." In the first game you could choose to play with the entire map revealed from the start, after, all, so why not here?
  
• We also added an option that lets you scout the entire map but not have each planet permanently watched. Neither of these count as cheats.
  
• We also made several substantial improvements to how we read in xml from mods, enabling some new functionality for modders.
  
• Fixed a couple of cross-threading issues that could see drones get lost when they went back into their hub ship, or which could see stacks dying incorrectly in terms of the actual number of lost units. This was majorly weakening some units previously, particularly if you had your stack caps set unusually low.
  
• Some re-balance to the marauder empires, which could get overlarge and slow things down -- now that they are so much smarter, they don't need quite as many units to mop the floor with enemies, anyway.
  
• Exos (of a certain strength) are now able to launch against you on multiple planets simultaneously, splitting their forces and then coming for you from several angles. This makes them look better as they swarm in, being less stacked up, and also makes defending against them more challenging.
  
• A variety of other bugfixes, tweaks, UI refinements, and so on.
  
• If this doesn't sound quite as large of a release as I made it out to be at the start of the post... just wait until you see the difference in the warden and the hunter fleets and how that changes the game for you. It's a whole new ballgame these days.
  

More to come soon!
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

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.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

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 super detailed, 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 is a small one, mainly hotfixes.

• The Devourer now eats the Trader, as it should.
  
• Instigator bases now spawn much closer to you until 600 AIP, after which they can get fully cheeky again. Previously they could really mess with you at random starting at only 300 AIP.
  
• There were a couple of brand-new bugs that you could run into thanks to the new pathfinding code, and those are fixed.
  
• There were several longer-standing bugs that are also fixed.
  
• The top-of-screen notifications for Cross Planet Attacks are more succinct and don't have a largely-useless subscreen.
  

More to come soon!
[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!
[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

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.
[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

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 super detailed, 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 is another huge one, which is why it took us a week to get it to you.

• The top item here is performance, as the name of the release implies. The new fire teams are awesome and make the AI so much smarter, but we were having late-game performance problems with very long-running threads that would actually stall the AI and all the other factions for minutes at a time if your galaxy was large and populous enough. Badger and I went through all of this with a scalpel and made performance improvements on the order of a 2000% increase for some of the savegames in question.
  
• There are still the occasional savegames with a very over-active set of marauders or nanocaust that don't perform as we'd prefer them to, but the vast majority of our test cases (with usually hundreds of thousands of ships) moved from being insanely sluggish to running at full speed.
  
• Exos have gotten much craftier about how they pursue their targets across planets. This is something... that will come in handy in existing savegames but also with features-to-come. (Cough)
  
• Cross Planet Attacks (CPAs) have been massively reworked to be more efficient on your CPU, as well as to be more clear in how they work and to not cheat the AI out of higher-mark ships. The CPA is now an event worthy of the name, without completely emptying the AI larder so to speak.
  
• Puffin has made enormous numbers of changes to fleet designs that you'll find throughout the galaxy, making them less mono-tech, and also has added 15 more fleet designs in general. We were noticing some unfortunate trends in how people use techs, and we're trying to encourage synergies rather than deep investment into a single thing over all else. This is the first step in that direction, but it's a strong one.
  
• Instigator bases stressing you out? That's now a setting you can turn off to not have them. They add mild time pressure that is good for the game as a whole, but which some people don't appreciate. We try to accommodate as many playstyles as possible.
  
• Astro Trains AND the Macrophage got some buffs. The AI and player strength levels had been growing and outpacing these.
  
• The Zenith Trader has been revamped a bit in terms of the wares it offers, no longer letting you exploit it to just get way too many goodies. It now works more like the first game, where you have to really consider what you want a bit more, rather than just putting everything everywhere.
  
• Bunches of other bugfixes and AI tweaks and improvements and balance tweaks have also been included, plus other interface clarity improvements. This is a pretty huge list of stuff.
  

More to come soon!


[h3]Please Do Report Any Issues![/h3]

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!


[h3]Problem With The Latest Build?[/h3]

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.


[h3]The Usual Reminders[/h3]

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 super detailed, 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