AI War 2 News

BETA v0.864 Released! "Humanity Strikes Back"

Release notes here.

Reminder: to play the beta, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option. Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the pre-fleets version of the game.

If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused.

So what's new in this build? This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks? That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period. Anyway, what's new:

Right, so lately most of the balance changes have been in favor of the AI: the end battle wasn't challenging enough, some various behavior was suboptimal, etc, etc. This time is different.
The humans (that's us players) have been given way more tools to defend ourselves in the fleets versions of the game, but that comes at extra energy cost, and at times there were still not enough battlestations to go around, on top of that.
What this version does is attempt to address some of the inequity that middle-tier players were facing, particularly in the early game, economically-speaking.
In the last build, I put in notes on each difficulty level and said that if things were off, the description of the difficulty was correct and the balance was wrong. Surprising no-one, the result is that we are already finding the balance was a bit wrong on things like difficulty 7. With the way things were shaking out, 5 was more like 7 (but with a less-smart AI), and 7 was more like 8 or 9.
This version also makes it so that the Hunter and Warden Fleets are more different based on whatever difficulty levels you select for them. That's pretty handy as an addition from Badger.
kesseleth has added a new type of Instigator Base that feeds the Warden, which is really cool.
Four more quickstarts have been added in by Puffin.
Citadels are way more scary, which is a nice change also from Puffin.
WeaponMaster fixed a bug where crippled mobile factories were still able to build ships.
In general you also now have more lobby control over some things for the human faction, like if you want home human settlements and cryogenic pods, and if so how many.
There's also a stronger (positive) incentive to actually choose to have those!

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 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

BETA v0.863 Released! "Control of Capturables"

The title feature of this release is that you can now, in the lobby options section, control how many fleets of various kinds are seeded around the galaxy for you to capture. This is a pretty big deal, because while I think the default balance is good for most people, it may be that you want a more hero-centric gameplay experience (lots of officer fleets and lone wolf fleets), or maybe you want basically NO heroes, and it's just transports that your smaller strikecraft and frigates work around (so no officer fleets and a ton of basic fleets). For those who have felt like the game was drifting in one way or another (heroes-wise), hopefully this now gives you the feeling that you can make it whatever you want.
Going along with that, you can also make it so that there are even more battlestations on each planet that you capture battlestations on, if you want. If you were feeling like you didn't have enough turrets to go around without capturing too many undesirable planets, you can just crank that up to 3 or 4 instead of the default of 2, and suddenly your turret caps are going to be crazy and very flexible in terms of where you can put them. So if you were feeling like the defensive tools were too scarce... you can now adjust that. Or if you felt like it was too generous, you can go for something a lot more stripped-down and hardcore by making only one battlestation on those planets.
Those sorts of features show some of the power of the new lobby for us to really let you configure more about the game than you ever could in the first AI War, to get the experience you really want, but without it being crazy overwhelming in terms of what the interface to control all that is like. This is one of several reasons that I bumped the lobby redo up in priority -- some of these features were clearly things that some folks were going to need to feel like they were being heard, since they want more or fewer officers, for example.
Quick Starts have been gone since we switched up the savegame format, and they were waiting for the lobby redo to be done before we added those back in. Now that the lobby redo is done, we've started adding back in quick starts. There are only three at the moment, but it's a good start and we'll build back up again.
There are a whole bunch of bugfixes and a couple of typo fixes in this.
The factions tab now uses the human-readable names for things in its dropdowns, which is a lot clearer and more pleasing on the eyes. It also now shows you tooltips for line items in those dropdowns, which is pretty critical for selecting your starting fleet, AI types, and the like.
AI difficulty levels now have actual descriptions! These are based around the difficulty settings from the first game, and what the TARGET is for these difficulty levels in this game. It may be that we're missing the mark in the balance of various difficulty levels, so if something feels like it doesn't match its description then that's a matter of us needing to adjust balance, not the description being wrong. We'd definitely love feedback on that sort of thing.
You can now see what the contents of the fleet will be for each command station type before you build it. This is pretty key info in terms of letting you know that, for instance, military command stations get more turrets and thus are less in need of help from captured battlestations. I expect that military command stations will be more needed early in the game, for instance, and then as you capture more battlestations and shore things up, you may convert some of those to economic command stations and see a nice metal windfall thanks to your efforts. But before it was hard to know that this was even a thing you could do, since you had to test building each thing before you'd find out what they came with!

BETA v0.862 Released! "Lobby Overhaul, Knockback, Nanocaust, and the Final Battle"

This took WAY longer than expected, but that's because we veered into fully redoing the lobby, at long last. There are still some bits that are todo noted here, but it was getting into things that were smaller to fix than was worth making you guys wait any longer.
With the lobby being completely redone, this means you can have arbitrary numbers of factions now, and there have been a ton of other improvements and fixes.
The Nanocaust has gotten even bigger and scarier. Some of their weapons weren't even firing properly, but they now will.
Knockback is a huuuuge new thing that WeaponMaster has added to the game that we haven't had since the first game, and it's a lot more functional and fun here. It can be used in a variety of ways, including sucking things inwards rather than pushing them away. Thanks also to AnnoyingOrange for a bunch of math suggestions here, mainly for using a "baricenter" method for calculating when a bunch of knockbacks are happening on a ship at once (or many ships at once).
Along with making the Nanocaust scarier, Badger also went in and made the AI Overlord battle way more intense on difficulties 7 and up.
Puffin has been up to a lot with the balance, in adding a bunch more tweaks and changes to mines, giving translocation (knockback) to a number of ships and structures now, and so on.
The AI planets are no longer able to get turret reinforcement boosts from having guard posts, since that was causing players to have to rush around to avoid that happening. Instead there is a bonus strike craft increase a bit heavier, which is less taxing.
And a variety of bugfixes from Badger and WeaponMaster, ranging from the minor to some fairly major ones.
It's worth noting that now that I've done all this lobby work, the other interfaces that I have to work on seem waaaay less intimidating, so hopefully those will go more quickly. Nonetheless, there's no other area (aside from maybe the tutorial, or the addition of multiplayer back in) that is so monolithically huge. But those won't delay the intermediate releases of the game, since they don't actually replace anything from the existing game as it is this build. So... yay! Hopefully the last of the releases that are quite this huge and spaced out.

BETA v0.861 Released! "Strength Of Remains"

This fixes almost all of the non-cosmetic issues with the lobby. The big outstanding one is the inability to set your player color or even see it properly synced in the GUI.
Seriously considered calling this build "dropkicking dropdowns," but so many of the release names lately have been about the lobby or interface that I couldn't stomach it.
There is some chance that I broke some form of AI waves with the new data structure that they use, so if you see any waves doing funky things, please let us know. But the new data format will let Badger cleanly expand the capabilities of waves coming up soon (well, when he feels inspired and has time, anyway).
WeaponMaster fixed yet more bugs relating to incorrect math for how things like drones were being created.
Additionally, WeaponMaster put in some changes so that now that units that are remains, not fully claimed yet, or crippled no longer count in strength totals for planets. Now you can get a much more accurate sense of your actual strength at a planet if half your army has been shot to remains.
Various other goodies in here, such as ships unloading from transports inheriting orders and stances, and "Ally to AI" mode giving you complete vision of the galaxy since it's clear that's a sandbox mode for AI Civil Wars.

BETA v0.860 Released! "The Lobby Ate My Factions??"

A couple of random errors have been fixed in the game itself.
A whole lot of work has been done on the dropdowns code and the lobby code in order to make them... well, behave!
For real this time, you should be able to add any factions you like, and the data should be synced properly. Except the player colors. Those still have some sort of issue.
Once I finish up the last of the lobby-meets-data sort of problems, then I can finally work on actually making the lobby more visually appealing and functional (such as you being able to add any number of factions without them running off the bottom of the screen). We're getting close on that, but boy this has been a mess to untangle.
WeaponMaster also fixed some major math issues in the way it was calculating things for claiming entities for your faction, self construction, and so on. It's quite possible that all of these things are going to be ridiculously more expensive than you are used to now, since it was kind of giving it to you for free before (maybe?). If it's way off, then please let us (Puffin?) know so that we can adjust the claim costs and so on. But having the math working correctly is kinda important, so that's good either way.