AI War 2 News

v1.332 Released! "The Extragalactic War Nears"

Several minor versions and a couple of beta versions have happened since Light and Shadow, the last one with a big writeup. Release notes for the most recent one are here. So what's been going on?

The visual updates for the game have continued apace. There are still lot of videos on that, even more than last time. There are also a number of sneak peeks at the art for ships in the first DLC expansion, which is coming (very) soon.
We've been working on the "extragalactic war" units for the AI, which are basically the super-units the AI is using in its larger war outside the galaxy. It can't be bothered to bring them back unless you really get a ton of super-units in certain fashions. To not break existing balance, we're being really conservative and only letting the weakest of these war ships appear in normal games at the moment. The main use for these is for fighting against late-game Fallen Spire players in the first DLC; but it can be used with other factions and even mods, as a core base game feature, and we expect to roll that out to more factions in the base game as we can get testing feedback on that.
Various bugfixes and balance tweaks, as always.
The Macrophage are notably smarter, on high difficulties in particular. Thanks, StarKelp!

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

BETA 1.330 Extragalactic War First Steps

Release notes here. We'd definitely appreciate some testers who are late in very large savegames that are involved with heavy human strength.

I'm not aware of any savegames that are out there where we'd want to see the extragalactic stuff kicking in, but there's the possibility that it might... so here we are in a beta again, for the moment.

To play this, on Steam make sure and go into the beta tab under properties for the game and choose current_beta. We're doing a beta version just to make sure that the extragalactic war units don't trigger unexpectedly early in some specific savegames that players have going already.

Thanks!

v1.328 Released! "Light and Shadow"

We've had three beta-branch releases that add and improve a LOT, and now this fourth one brings us back onto the main branch. Release notes here.

First up, we're working on some visual upgrades to the ships and how we light them. It's not any work on their models, but the effect is still notable in terms of how lively and modern they feel. We've put up a lot of videos on that lately.
There's still more to do on the ships (there are a lot of them!), so some of them look underwhelming at the moment but will be getting the full treatment soon.
We fixed a number of bugs in these builds, though, and we wanted you to have those sooner than later.
We also made a lot of updates to balance to make things more interesting and more challenging on the higher difficulties in particular. Things like counter-attacks from the AI are more likely to trigger now, dire guardians are way scarier, guardians in general have been rebalanced, a few overpowered golems are now tweaked to not be so OP, Raid Frigates can't be abused anymore, and...
The Macrophage has seen an enormous influx of additions and extensions, starting with the Territorial Update, and moving into the Hive Wars update.
Forcefields also have been adjusted and got some new abilities, including us adding the ability to have Hardened Forcefields as an option (those that don't shrink in size as they take damage) in addition to regular forcefields. Most of the mobile forcefield generating ships that you have use hardened forcefields now, and this makes them far more useful and less fiddly.
You can create your own quick starts from in-game now!
You can also turn on an option in the settings which let you load existing savegames or quickstarts into the lobby for further editing. This is a long-requested feature, and something we're still testing out a bit so it's hidden behind that optional feature.
The graphical settings that are specific to one machine no longer get synced via the steam cloud, which is useful for those of you playing the game back and forth between two computers.
Starting battlestations are stronger, camping next to the AI Overlord no longer freaks it out so much, and so much more.

BETA 1.323 Everybody Buff Now

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.

v1.321 Released! "Enjoy Your Break, Voice Lady"

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.