AI War 2 News

Release notes here. Variagation means different color patterns in the same plant, and I thought that was appropriate for what we're doing with cloaking.

What's new?

• There were some problems with some people not being able to log their achievements to Steam, mostly those using non-US-English OSes or using linux. We think that's all fixed now, but let us know.
  
• There were three achievements for killing specific ships that were being granted to everyone who killed ANY ship. So... a few folks got lucky in the last day!
  
• The pursuit mode logic has been improved EVEN MORE by Badger, and it now retains its smarts while not sometimes ignoring a straggler who it still alive.
  
• Fix a (hilarious, if it doesn't happen to you) bug where shortly after game load macrophages might spontaneously Enrage and attack you.
  
• And then the big one is for last, and that's cloaking. We made several more changes here, to go along with what we did in the prior release.
  
• First off, your ships can start regaining cloaking points without getting completely decloaked first. This has been desired by people for a long time, as it was annoying to have partially-cloaked ships indefinitely.
  
• Secondly, ships now have a different number of shots (depending on the ship) before they decloak while firing their own weapons. For most mobile ships, they now decloak after their first shot, rather than after 5. For things like minefields, they actually get 20 volleys first, as do some starships and guardians and turrets.
  
• These differences in decloaking-from-firing speeds let us specialize the ships a bit more, with some being deep cloakers that are able to have a temporary invincibility window where nothing can shoot back at them when they spring their trap. Other ships, like Raptors, absolutely were OP and exploitable with the new regens-cloak-without-having-to-be-decloaked mechanics, and so they only get one shot before that happens.
  

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

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. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. 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!

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 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. All the achievements are now live on Steam, and we've also fixed up the build speed changes that were really bugging people in the prior build.

What's new?

• All 139 achievements are now live on Steam, so you can check out what those look like.
  
• The build speeds for higher-mark ships last build were sloooow. Way more than we meant to, because of a kind of hilarious bug (in a masochistic kind of way). Ships just reeeeally didn't want to finish building, and would get progressively slower as they nearly finished themselves. Not only did we fix that, we also rebalanced the build speed stuff in general.
  
• After you win the game, the AI ships now go braindead. This feels way more satisfying and like you've actually won the game. The other factions that exist, if there are any (Macrophage, Nanocaust, whatever) will still do their thing and may be something you want to continue fighting if that's the sort of thing you're into. You've won, but it's fun to see how the AI is its own beast compared to the other factions.
  

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

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. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. 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!

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 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 one is pretty huge! And it does finally have achievements -- 139 of them -- although not all of them will be visible on Steam for a few days.

So what's new?

• Achievements come with a few caveats, such as not having an in-game list to view them yet, and not all being visible on Steam. More things coming soon, and details on all that are in the release notes, but suffice it to say that this is build one of several that are rolling these out. Anything you achieve in this build onwards will be logged locally and later synced to Steam, though.
  
• Fixed several bugs, the most exciting of which was a crash with Marauders.
  
• Added a new "Methodical Pursuit Mode" that, holy cow, is ridiculously better at fighting than the old style. AI ships and yours and allies all now use it by default. Badger thought this up, and had a very interesting save where a player ally faction would mostly die against the AI on a weakish planet without this on, but handily win with it on. That's enormous!
  
• Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time. This is to make it so that your ability to field a refleeted giant-strength force isn't just going up crazily as your mark levels increase. You can always offset this time with engineers, but they are finite and cost you extra resources (mainly energy -- not anything extra in the long term of metal flows). This should keep the mid and late game balance a lot better versus players just having lots of insta-fleets over and over again.
  
• Increased most Frigate durability 50%. That's worth a line on its own, since some folks have been really wanting Frigates to feel more powerful and separate from the smaller strikecraft.
  
• Cloaking has been enormously rebalanced, though the mechanics themselves have not been particularly changed. But this being underwhelming in both your and enemy hands was a theme, and with various player suggestions Puffin has put together what I think is a really notable rebalance to this to make these a lot more interesting.
  

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

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. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. 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!

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 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. Lots of good fixes and tweaks in this one!

• There are finally random AI types that you can select in the lobby (Random Easier, Random Moderate, Random Hard, Random Brutal, Random Any), which is a long-requested feature that the first game had.
  
• The lobby now also sorts the AI types by difficulty group, identifies them by difficulty group (with nice colorization), and so on.
  
• Fixed an interesting bug during certain AI civil wars that could softlock the game.
  
• Added a new "Various Weapons" fleet name styling to the game, provided by DEMOCRACY_DEMOCRACY.
  
• Wormhole invasions actually send ships again properly -- our bad on that!
  
• Outguard hacking response is a bit nerfed to give you an easier time.
  
• Nerfed the Impactor Citadel to keep folks from planet-wiping with those.
  
• Lots of other balance changes, but the biggest one is to how some of the seeding happens for "random nasty AI stuff you might run into." That now has subcategories that make the distribution more pleasant.
  

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

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. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. 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!

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 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

It's nice to do a beta when needed, but it's also nice to keep that period brief. We found a number of problems in 1.015 that we fixed and pushed in two non-version-incrementing releases that we just wrapped into the older release notes.

Release notes for the new build are here. They're very small by comparison to most of our builds, but priority one was mainly to get things back out of beta in a clean way.

Also, I HAVE been working on achievement graphics, and spent waaaay too much time on those. Plus Badger has been working on the Scourge (shhh! It's a secret, coming soon in the first expansion), and we've been planning some other features and additions for that expansion and the base game. Measure twice, cut once.

I'm particularly pleased with some changes we're going to be making to the base game to allow for faction beacons to allow you to choose things like the strength/intensity of the faction when you hack them. That's will be so nice for quick starts as well as custom starts.

Also? Turns out that -- again knock on wood -- my concerns about balance being too easy for players with the outguard revamp were mostly unfounded. The hacking cost and related things there have made them so that they don't stick out like a sore thumb balance-wise, at least.

I'm still mildly concerned that the AI might need an economic buff on higher difficulties in the next few weeks, but they don't seem to be suffering majorly on the most common difficulties at least. So that's good!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

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. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. 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!

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 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