AI War 2 News

Chris here! By any sane metric I can think of, AI War 2 shouldn't exist. And yet it's more than I ever imagined it could be.

When we first set out to make this game three years ago, it was far less ambitious. Even that was going to be really hard. Somehow, in the process of falling down the stairs over and over again during this period, we wound up with a game that seems to be superior to the original.

This game shouldn't exist, but it does, and I'm both proud and stunned.


The intro to this post runs the risk of sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, but it's not actually about me. I'm not capable of making -- even just designing -- this game on my own. I don't think anyone is, really.

The fact that this game exists isn't a testament to me having some brilliant insight or a singular vision that I doggedly pursued. The reviews of the game are lovely, but give me entirely too much personal credit.

The state of this game is thanks to dozens of people critically thinking about this game -- what this one and the original means to them and to others -- and then a process of relentless, continuous, arduous iteration and improvement.


This section is long, and in some ways tangential, but if you read it you'll understand why I've put it here so prominently. You have this guy to thank as much as me or Keith for this game existing.

Badger has been involved since the kickstarter, with questions and comments and key insights. For a lot of the first year, he was responsible for something like 80% of the bug reports and feature ideas on our idea tracker. When a lot of other people were just bouncing off the game and waiting around for Keith LaMothe and I to figure things out on our own -- understandable, really -- Badger was there providing really key insight and ideas.

But that was barely the start for him. After a while I was essentially like "so, do you just want source code access, given how much you're doing here?" Because he had started doing some mods -- nanocaust and macrophage, at the time, IIRC -- and it was clear he would be less hand-tied if he had more access.

What happened next was essentially us getting a developer -- volunteer, no less -- who contributed as much to the design of the game as I did, in my opinion. Not only did he single-handedly conceive of and implement the nanocaust and macrophage, but he also did the dark spire and marauder impelementations, among many, many other things.

Some of the most brilliant and devious things that the AI has in this game compared to the first one? Badger. Some of your favorite UI detail screens, like metal flows? Badger.

Not to mention all the bugfixes, balance tweaks, and... just oodles more. This game wouldn't exist in anything like the state it does now without Badger. Any credit for my "singular vision" on the game is doing him a major disservice, but he's a quiet sort of guy when it comes to taking credit, so I wanted to take this chance to call him out in particular.


So, Badger is not remotely the only person I need to call out as being absolutely indispensable.

RocketAssistedPuffin has also been involved heavily for the last year plus, and has taken over huge numbers of things that I never would have had time for. After I implemented the new tech system one way, he's the one who figured out how to make it substantially more balanced. Most of the voluminous "balance change" sections on the release notes are from him working with other players or just reasoning things out himself.

Puffin has also had a ton of ideas on how to make things better in all sorts of sections of the game, and there was a period of about three months late last year where he and Badger were basically doing ALL the development on the game and I just pushed out releases of what they were doing. I was going through a really painful divorce and had a ton of anxiety and couldn't face work, and these two kept things alive and improving.

But it never stopped there. Those new tutorials you like? Puffin. I wrote the bulk of the "How To Play" in-game wiki sections, but the most basic and understandable ones for new players were... again, Puffin. I'm excellent at writing encyclopedic entries that fill you in on huge numbers of details, but he's the one who distilled "what's the most central stuff you need to know, as briefly as possible" so that people can actually get into the game in any reasonable timeframe. Compare his work here to the tutorials I did in the original game, and it's night and day.

And I'm still selling Puffin short, frankly, because he's done so many things over such a long period that I can't remember it all now.

More recently, we've had folks like WeaponMaster and Asteroid joining in and adding lots of bugfixes and quality of life improvements that I never would have had the time to do myself. Things like hovering over galaxy map links to see information on them were Asteroid. Endless tricky bugfixes were WeaponMaster. I'm selling them both short, but the release notes are filled with things that they either implemented or suggested or both.

And it doesn't stop there. Quinn stepped in an made a bunch of additions. Keith laid the original groundwork for the entire game simulation and multithreading (he was the main programmer and designer for the first year and a half, and actually on staff during that time).

And there were so, so many others. And more each month!


I'm pretty free with the source code access, because I'd rather have a consolidated community of people helping rather than a bunch of mods that you have to hunt down and find.

So a lot of the folks that have turned into volunteers are what would have been modders on most other games. They would have made their own thing that you had to install and then wonder about the cross-compatibility of.

This game does have a ton of moddability, and for anyone who wants to "just" be a modder, that's absolutely fine with me. But for a lot of the mods that are getting the most love, I'm happy to share source code access with those folks so that they're in no way hobbled, and so that their work can go out as additional content that every player can find via in-game options without having to hunt through Steam Workshop or whatever else.

It's an unorthodox approach, but a lot more team-oriented and lets us do quality control on each others' stuff, "mods" included, which is a big win. If someone wants to steal the source code for this game, they can just decompile it like any other game for the most part. I'd rather put my trust in people and see things flourish rather than retain a stranglehold out of fear or pride.


All of this help from others let me focus on some of the really tricky architectural and design problems, which led to things like us even being able to HAVE a simulation of this size, and to have it perform as smoothly as it does.

I got to build lots of mechanics that other people then actually turned into specific units. It also gave me time to focus on some really nagging problems that just made the early versions of the game... unpleasant.

If I hadn't had the time to think and talk to people about all those things, we never would have seen all the game evolve this way; I would have been mired in content development and other items just to get the basics out for the game.

The original design for this was something that Keith and I put together as a pair, but it only worked out so well. It was a good foundation, but needed... a lot of help. We both pushed that forward a lot, until the money situation got to the point where he (and all the other staff, eventually) had to step away, and I carried on "alone" (but with all those volunteers).

There came a couple of major turning points where I was reflecting on why I was so unhappy with this game as it existed, and listening to the various gripes that playtesters had, and then I was able to spend a month or three implementing something drastically new.

Fleets are the most notable of those, and they were initially met with a lot of mixed feelings and distaste because only part of my idea was there on the first public launch of those. Only in the last month or so has that feature completely come into its own, and that also had a lot to do with continuous feedback from people in early access telling me what they needed and what they did and didn't like.

We also had a number of points during development where we just couldn't escape certain performance problems, because there were suddenly battles that were an order of magnitude larger than the first game (which was itself the largest strategy game simulation of individual units that I'm aware of on the market until this sequel). So I got to focus on a whole bunch of crazy improvements and data structure inventions and even GPU shader tricks in order to make all this stuff work.

Without the rest of the community helping, there's no way I could have had time to work on all that sort of thing, even in three years of development. A game of this scope shouldn't run this well -- it shouldn't be possible -- but it is because I was given the gift of time by so many others.


It has been 10 years to the day since the first AI War came to Steam, and it's been 3 years of developing this sequel.

We didn't do any work on any AI War games from late 2014 through late 2016, but the rest of that time has been spent at least partly working on the original game or this sequel.

From version 5.0 of the original game through version 8.0, Keith was pretty much the sole developer on that while I focused on other things. He built out a ton of creative and clever things that made a return in this game, and also pushed the concept of what the AI could be -- adding in some traditional decision-tree style logic in places in addition to the more decentralized-style AI that I had come up with back in 2009. That one that originally made waves on slashdot and reddit and hackernews and so on.

I've worked as the producer and design lead on this sequel, among my many other roles, and so the fact that there seems to be a "singular vision" is hopefully a sign that I did a good job in that role. But the degree to which this is a product of dozens of people's work, over an extremely long period of time, really can't be understated.

That's what I meant all the way back at the start. This sort of thing shouldn't have happened. It's just so... unlikely. A ton of people came together over a decade and helped make something unlike anything else on the market.

That's before even getting into other major (former) staff contributors like Daniette "Blue" Shinkle doing the vast majority of the art and coming up with the way-prettier style of ship that evolved AFTER the kickstarter, the awesome score by Pablo Vega, and 25 voice actors who did a fantastic job as various humans and the AI.

And good grief, I'd be remiss not to mention Erik and Craig and all the other folks at Indie Bros, who helped manage so many aspects of this game, as well as often doing work like helping clean up voice lines, etc.


If you're interested in what is coming in the very short term, there's a post for that.

Similar if you want to know what the plan is for multiplayer.

For kickstarter backers (or anyone else who is curious), there's an FAQ as well as roadmap of stuff for the next few quarters relating to kickstarter stretch goals.

And I just have to once-again plug this awesome After Action Report by zeusalmighty.


I never wanted to make this game, because I didn't think I could. The original AI War seemed to be the high water mark of my career, and I spent a lot of time trying to make peace with that. But when the market shifted in 2015 and 2016 and finances started getting tight, it became clear that returning to the game that started it all was what made the most sense.

Thanks to all of the kickstarter backers for believing that we even COULD build this game. Keith and I felt like we could do something that would make you happy, but probably not something that would top the original. It took two extra years of development and an enormous village of people to make THAT a reality. So thanks to everyone for their patience and support during that time.

I also want to say a big thanks to everyone for their understanding during my divorce, which happened shortly after entering Early Access for this game. That made everything so much harder, and took me out of commission for a full three months or so where I just couldn't work much. I had to learn how to be me again, and come to terms with being a dad with shared custody rather than a full-time father, and all of that was incredibly hard.

But the good news is that, as has happened with this game itself, a lot of things in my personal life have turned out unexpectedly, improbably well in the last year. After deciding to date again (after 18 years off the market, wow), I wound up meeting the woman who is now my fiancée surprisingly quickly (all things considered). Kara and her daughter have made my entire world so much richer than I realized it could be, and my son finally has the sister he's wanted for so much of his life.

I feel incredibly fortunate, and a lot of my ability to get back to work and not crumble under the weight of anxiety and expectations for this game were thanks to Kara's support and presence. The reality of her life as a doctor and surgeon also helps to kind of put my own work into perspective, sometimes, in the best way.

However this turns out financially, and despite my anxieties about my future as a game developer, I'm incredibly proud of what we've all created together, and I feel surrounded by all the right people both at work and outside of work. This has been the hardest three year period of my life, but the end result has all been worth it.

Thanks to everyone, and I hope you enjoy the game -- both what it is now, and what's to come.

Very Best,
Chris

Release notes here.

The actually go-live time isn't until 11am EST tomorrow morning (the 22nd), but we're going ahead and pushing out this version now to make sure that everything is A-OK in advance.

We actually did a small build on Friday that introduced the hacking log, but it was a small one. Both of these add some various polish, balance, and bugfix items that are definitely cool. We'll do a more full post about the actual game launching when that happens tomorrow, but for now this is just the... basic notes. It's a very exciting and nerve-wracking milestone!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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.

Yesterday we actually did a small hotfix version that had a number of cool things in it, but they were small enough that I didn't post about it here. So hence the version jump of two.

What's new between the two of these?

• There's a really cool new "Helping Hands" quick start in the Basics category, which basically sets you up with powerful human and alien allies that do most of the heavy lifting for you. It's a fun way to get in and play the game... kind of while NPC allies basically really do all the work. Aka it makes it a low-stress way to have someone just come in and experience things. Perfect for reluctant SOs, people who just want to play around with things, and so on.
  
• Yesterday's hotfix had a number of bugfixes, some centering around repeat plays of audio clips being excessive.
  
• Today has even more fixes, including some bugs that could rear up in the tutorials in an inopportune way.
  
• With some absolute-minimum-system-requirements hardware on linux, it was possible to get some funkiness in the latest versions of the game, so we tried to address that or at least give workarounds (adding Vulkan support in addition to just OpenGL). On OSX we also started supporting Metal as an option.
  
• Some minar speeling and gramr mistakes have been fixed in the tutorials. (Yes, I'm a dad. Sorry!)
  
• The credits screen now includes all 3048 of the kickstarter backers, categorized and alphebetized so that they can find their name (assuming they didn't go anonymous).
  
• There are several UI improvements to make things more clear, particularly when a flagship is hacking and thus can't leave the current planet.
  
• Also the multiplayer "menu" no longer opens a menu with sub-options saying "coming soon." Instead it pops open a text window with a short TLDR of when multiplayer is coming and then a long-winded explanation of why for people who want to find that out without having to go to the forums on our site or Steam.
  
• Several new options have been added for controlling things like other factions generate AIP or threat.
  
• Several hacks now cost a lot fewer hacking points, making them more attractive.
  
• The AI now gains some reinforcement cap at higher AIPs on difficulties over 5.
  
• Oh, and there was a nasty bug that is fixed in this build that could cause AI killing stacks to make the counterattack numbers go up WAY inappropriately much. So that was what some of those difficulty spikes were that a few people experienced, starting in the recent press build.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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.

After three long years, we're finally at the point where we're ready to start showing this off to the press in a non-preview fashion. This build does still have some bugs and some rough edges, but they're minor in the main and we have a week to finish up that sort of thing along with achievements.

As a mostly one-man shop now (plus awesome volunteers who keep increasing in number) there's only but so much lead time I can give, and I wind up feeling like I want every last everything to be perfect. As it stands we have about a week until 1.0, and I'm really pleased with how things feel. Seems like our growing list of players are, too, from the sound of things. So that's good!

What's new in this build?

• We finally have AI taunts in the game! This was something people really liked in the first game (when the AI says something mean to you when it does something clever or you do something stupid), and that has returned in a major way. In the first game I think we had a dozen, maybe two dozen, taunts in total. Now there are over two hundred.
  
• Ships can now load into transports from other planets (traveling to the planet of the transport first of course).
  
• Awesome new quick start scenario by community member Nuc_Temeron. We love the clever things you folks think up, and are always interested in including things like this for players to experiment with.
  
• More tutorial tweaks, thanks to Puffin.
  
• Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet.
  
• A whole bunch of bugfixes, some of the most significant ones relating to the new ability to select and control fleets from the galaxy map. That should now work properly in all cases, and not have the selection/hover issues it did briefly.
  
• Also some bugfixes to the metal usage reports, so that's more accurate.
  
• The energy usage in the resources bar can now be clicked and gives you a detailed breakdown of where you're earning and spending energy! This is... a surprisingly big win, in terms of making it clear what the state of your empire is.
  
• Bunches of improvements to the "strong against" version of the R-click view, to make it more correct and clear.
  
• New icons for the tech menu!
  
• Lower difficulty levels (less than or equal to 5) now have a variety of things making them easier than before. There were definitely some complaints about it still being too hard at those lower levels.
  
• Also a fix to make dire guardians appear properly, and some of the guard posts on the planets that would have dire guardians no longer be hyper-aggressive towards you. So this should make deep-striking a lot easier in the late game in particular, and thus help with some of the difficulty that a few people were reporting.
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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.

More refinement, and one major new feature. First let's talk about the smaller stuff:

• The science menu is looking better, with more icons on there.
  
• The standing order buttons now show their hotkeys for you.
  
• There's a new "flagship movement mode" control option for all your mobile flagships and battlestations. This lets them either ignore or obey things like pursuit mode -- it's circumstantial which you'd prefer, per fleet, so an option was warranted.
  
• There's a new "tutorial" which basically is just directing you to the extended in-game "how to play" stuff, which sometimes people were otherwise missing.
  
• Dyson Antagonizers now come in over time, so you have a chance to deal with them before they start causing trouble.
  
• The AI taunts are all processed and split out by Pablo, and we're working on integrating those and choosing the best takes. Some more voice lines by the chief of staff (lady talking to you as things happen) are coming early next week. Actually, technically both will be integrated around then.
  
• Oh, there's also a new tip under the modding section that explains how to make your own Quick Starts, which is both super easy as well as something we figure a lot of non-modders may want to choose to do for themselves or to share with others.
  
• Now, on to the big one:
  

Custom Fleets (Aka the Remedy For Control Groups)

The release notes for these are here.

Essentially there are now 9 new fleets, each with 7 empty slots, that you can build off the sidebar of any of your command stations. Three are cloaked, three are fast, and three are regular.

What are you going to do with those new fleets? Well... anything you want! Including nothing, frankly.

So, here's the problem we solved with this:

• Essentially, sometimes people wanted to have really specialized fleets. As in, a fleet with all cloaking stuff, or one with all melee stuff, or whatever.
  
• And even though you can swap ship lines between fleets you capture, that doesn't guarantee you'll have enough slots or enough ship lines of the right type to make a full fleet.
  
• So a fair number of people were either wanting old-style control groups, where you can just make arbitrary groups of ships from across any fleets; OR they were wanting sub-fleets.
  

Why not just do one of those two things?

• The problem with old-style control groups is that a lot of the UI conveniences and automation just doesn't function with that. I thought I had a solution that would let me do something along those lines, but it was going to be really messy to set up as a player.
  
• The problem with sub-fleets is that that adds another level of indirection, and greatly complicates the UI. Really you don't need your melee ships to also be part of the larger fleet of "whatever they were in," if you want your melee ships to be assigned to a unique control binding and ordered around as a unit; you just need them to be in a new organizational unit all on their own. Aka, a new custom fleet, a new bucket, but previously there were not enough buckets.
  

Is this some sort of temporary workaround?

• No! Fleets are meant to be the primary organizational units of your stuff in AI War 2.
  
• This solution basically gives you some blank organizational units that you can use to subdivide your forces further than you used to be.
  
• In other words, it keeps to the ethos of the organizational style of the game -- which has a LOT of UI advantages to make your life easier -- while at the same time giving you more control.
  

Why have nine possible blank fleet templates?

• This is per-player in multiplayer, and based on how people tend to play this should be more than enough subdivision. With 7 slots in each one, you can make three separate cloak-themed fleets (maybe one is etherjet tractors, the others are more strike-oriented?) if you need to.
  
• That's HUGE, because it allows you to cover three different fronts with just cloaked units alone.
  
• Then you have three that have fast flagships, typically for raiding or melee or some other units that need to move around the map quickly.
  
• And then you have three that are just... "whatever." They're average flagships, and you can do whatever you need to with them.
  
• When you pair that with all the various flagships you pick up over the course of the game, you ought to really be able to customize things as much as you could possibly want, even when fighting on several fronts at once.
  

Isn't it a pain in the butt to have to manually configure fleets like this just for control groups?

• You could make that argument, but honestly I think this is LESS of a pain in the butt. Here's why:
  
• If you're just needing a really quick selection of things like "all the melee units on the planet I'm looking at," we already added hotkeys for things like that. For ad-hoc selection of ships at the local area, using things like C+M to select all the melee ships will more than cover you. It's by far the fastest thing.
  
• So the only real purpose of "control groups" in this sense is for NON-ad-hoc situations: aka long-term permanent or semi-permanent groupings of forces.
  
• Given that a lot of the big complexities that old control groups had that fleets solve revolve around "what happens when ships die and get recreated into the fleet," we get to bypass those complexities with the custom fleets just like we do with any other fleet.
  
• If we did custom control groups again, we'd be right back into the boat of things like "does this get automatically selected if it's created under xyz circumstances," etc.
  
• And what we found through lots of playtesting is that players were constantly surprised by the answer to questions like that regardless of what we chose to have the logic be. It just had too many edge cases, whereas fleets are always really predictable in how they are selected and how ships inside them act.
  
• You can also name fleets, unlike control groups, which is pretty handy. So you can have something like your "North Melee" group if you want to, and even if you've got that bound to a control group or not, you can easily remember what that thing is for (for now) and rename it again if you need to.
  
• Plus all the other conveniences with fleets, like changing around build orders, having higher ship marks from a fleet that has gained levels via fleet EXP, and so on. There's a bunch of stuff this keeps you having access to, and it also keeps the interface for managing that all the same across the board.
  
• I do realize that it's different from the control groups that you're used to in a lot of other RTS games, but no other RTS game has this huge number of units in it, nor the rapid recreation of units, nor the need to split your units over such a wide space. There are some others that come close on some or all of those fronts (Stellaris, Sins, AI War 1), but none of them really match what's going on here if there are a bunch of factions and you've got a ton of fleets and are fighting galaxy-wide while defending yourself.
  
• The bottom line is that we had to invent something a bit new in order to get at what you want out of the behaviors of fleets and units, and to keep micromanagement down, and yet to give you customization at the same time.
  
• When I think about this, I think about it kind of like the city management screens in Civ IV; those start out a bit automated, but you can swap things around as needed. And that could be tedious if you had to do it all the time, but you're usually setting up a given city for a very long time (or at least a middle-tier timeline) when you make changes to it. So their management screens wind up being the most efficient way to handle the setup, despite the fact they're different from what other games did before Civ IV.
  
• Anyway, since I know there will be at least a few people who are put off by the fact that this is different, I wanted to explain the reasoning for this, as well as note that we've explored all the alternatives. There's nothing else that we've considered or been pitched so far that is remotely so clean, that respects your time, that communicates to you so clearly, and gives you the flexibility that you've been asking for. Hope you guys like it. :)
  

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!

We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?

There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.

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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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