AI War 2
5.018 Easier Reconnection
Quick heads up: this is the last one for maybe half a month, probably, because I'm going to be traveling. Normal updates will resume in early July.
This build includes a number of tweaks and fixes from the usual suspects, including Tom Prince, CRCGamer, and SirLimbo. Lots of good refinement in here, including some balance fixes to unexpected cheese sources. There was a very unusual way of farming metal that folks discovered just recently, which is kind of cool to have pop up after 6 years of development, really.
In multiplayer, when clients disconnect, they can now reconnect much more smoothly without the host having to disconnect and rehost first. In my experience it worked if you just tried it twice anyway, but that was not apparent to everyone, and probably not universal anyway.
I also fixed some issues with improper long range thread planning happening after you reloaded the xml for the game by switching out mods or dlcs that are enabled (without restarting the game). This prevents a number of "thread stalled" issues, which so far as I can tell were all related to this one use case.
More to come in early July.
Enjoy!
Hooded Horse and Arcen Announce Partnership - And Forward Fiction AI War Books!
Hooded Horse Partnership
First off: Arcen is happy to join the Hooded Horse “stable,” working on an untitled project to be fully announced later. This title is set in the sci-fi Arcenverse, and has strategic elements, but further details will need to wait for video. For the moment, please enjoy the following in-engine preproduction screenshots.
Staff Again!
I’m taking the usual role of game director and code lead, but for the first time in almost half a decade, I won’t be so alone. This is a really big deal to me, and one of many reasons I’m excited to be working with Tim Bender and the others at Hooded Horse.
Many of the long-time AI War 2 collaborators are now joining fulltime, including Willard “Badger” Davis, George “Zeus” Tibbitts, and Spencer “StarKelp” Ferguson. Joining in a part-time capacity are Daniel “Daniexpert” Garcevic, Ethan “Democracy” Wong, and Quinn Beltramo.
Familiar faces Pablo Vega (composer), and Dan “Blue” Mann (artist/environment) also take key roles.
Forward Fiction Partnership
In related exciting news, Uproar Books is launching a new imprint called Forward Fiction, and a new series of canonical AI War books will be the flagship titles launched under that new label.
Forward Fiction has done a great job really immersing themselves in the lore of the games, including unreleased content. The first novel in the new AI War trilogy shows a lot of scenarios from the games in a new light, as well as laying the groundwork to explore some big questions that the games have yet to answer. It also includes a major character from the upcoming Hooded-Horse-published game.
I’ve wanted to show who the AI is fighting outside the galaxy for the last thirteen years, but I wanted to do the reveal in a closer-perspective game than any we’ve released thus far. This is one of several areas that Forward Fiction is tackling, and I’ve been really delighted by how meticulous they are in their planning and outlining.
I spent most of my life thinking I wanted to be a novelist and trying to get published. Despite finishing a few manuscripts, publication of my own work was always elusive. I wound up being far better suited for game development, but nonetheless I remain deeply interested in the print publishing world, and am really pleased with the care and quality I see coming from Forward Fiction.
Way More Info In The Coming Months!
Having someone else write novels set in a fictional universe of my creation is truly surreal, but in the best way. Rather like finding such an excellent publishing partner as in Hooded Horse. This is a whole new chapter for Arcen, and everyone on the team is really thrilled.
Media Contacts
About Arcen Games, LLC
Arcen Games is a Durham, NC based developer of strategy, tactics, simulation, and adventure games. Their first title, AI War: Fleet Command, was one of the most critically-acclaimed PC games of 2009. Other titles include The Last Federation, A Valley Without Wind, Starward Rogue, and many more. For more information, visit ArcenGames.com.
Press Inquiries: press@arcengames.com
About Hooded Horse, Inc.
Hooded Horse is a Dallas, Texas based publisher of indie strategy, simulation, and role-playing games. For more information, visit HoodedHorse.com.
Press Inquiries: press@hoodedhorse.com.
About Forward Fiction
Forward Fiction is a book publishing and marketing firm that specializes in developing novels
from existing intellectual properties, including video games, films, and television shows. For
more information, visit ForwardFiction.com.
Media Contact: Sarae Hope
sarae@forwardfiction.com
5.017 More Ways To Win
I really am having trouble summarizing this one, it's so large and voluminous.
One of the big new things is that SirLimbo has added some support for new win conditions other than beating the AI Overlord. You can enable these things through the galaxy settings, and it's also the sort of thing that other factions and mods can extend or use in new ways later.
There is a new DPS Hud mod by Dismiss, which gives you some new QoL UI tools, and his Outguard Party mod has also seen a number of updates.
Tom Prince put in another metric ton of fixes, quality of life improvements, and general updates. There are so, so many of these in this build. Dismiss also had a notable number of these added in this build.
CRCGamer added a few fixes, and then a sizeable number of balance fixes to a variety of units and factions.
Badger also put in a number of fixes and tweaks and QoL improvements, and made some updates to his DZ Sidekick mod.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.014 The Tom Show
This one is brought to you by Tom Prince, who did literally everything included in it.
Lots of various fixes and improvements in here, some relating to dyson spheres, others the dark zenith sidekick, others expert mode, others the zenith trader in necromancer games, and others various parts of the ui. It's quite a lot actually! Big thanks to Tom, these are great!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.013 Many Various
Lots of unrelated things in here, from lots of different people. We have a couple of new folks in svn making changes and additions now, namely Mike007/Facciola007 and Dismiss.
Tom Prince continues to knock out an impressive number of bugs and add various QoL improvements, and Badger and Daniexpert also have a number of challenging things that they got fixed up. Dismiss fixed some exceptions as well as making notable additions to unit encyclopedia functionality.
Badger updated the Dark Zenith Sidekick mod to make them more active earlier in the game.
Facciola007 has added five new mods, which center around various new starting options with fleets, new fleet names, and similar.
SirLimbo has been working on a number of technical framework additions, and as part of that he fixed some issues with the Entity Type Draw Bags, as well as adding more flexibility to them.
This really is a varied patch, so it's hard to sum up without just restarting the entire release notes linked above.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.012 Necromancer Balance
Lots and lots of things in this one. Among the most notable is, as you might guess, some more balance to the necromancer, thanks to Zeus.
This also includes a number of improvements to the modding framework from Tom Prince, and some extra flexibility to how campaign types can set various properties.
A good number of general fixes and tweaks in here from Daniexpert, and also some Dark Zenith balance tweaks from Zeus.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.011 Autobuild And Home Ark Strength
A number of more fixes and improvements and extensions to things from SirLimbo and Tom Prince, and then the new DZ Sidekick mod from Badger also got some balance updates.
A regression in the tooltip code is what led to the errors on swapping fleet lines, and that's been cleaned up now. Autobuild settings for some of the DLC2 structures have been added. And the Home Arks (when you play Ark Empire) now scale more consistently with how they do in a normal game, as well as all work consistently in terms of build speeds, etc.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.010 Client Message Order
This one is smaller, but for MP players it should be quite welcome. It fixes an issue where certain messages from clients could arrive out of order and then cause the game to get stuck "waiting on that client" indefinitely until that client disconnected and reconnected.
Included also are some excellent balance updates from CRCGamer, making a few Wards better balanced in DLC3, and making some other balance changes to the base game and DLC1.
Additionally, there are more UI quality of life improvements from Tom Prince, as well as some hacking framework improvements that make it easier for anyone (modders especially) to add in multiple-choice hacking popouts.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.009 Zeusathon II And DZ Sidekicks
This continues our recent trend of Very Large Builds. There's a ton of fixes and tweaks in here from Tom Prince and SirLimbo, as is a bit usual for recently. But this time, Zeus has come back and put out his "largest patch since DLC3 released," which is almost an understatement. Tons of balance to the necromancer, the zenith architrave, and otherwise.
Badger has created his first mod, which is kind of a surprise feature here. You need to have DLC2 to use the mod, but basically what this does is give you a human-playable version of the Dark Zenith, which is... not something I ever thought I would see. This only works if you have a human empire next to them, as is the case with the necromancer sidekick, so you either need two factions in single-player, or to use this in multiplayer. You control the Dark Zenith military forces only; their economy runs without your control (controlling the economy would be very tedious and unfun)
In some respects, this is like our prior concept for vassals, except... better in some respects? This also provides a nice template that other modders could use to make sidekick versions of our other factions, or of their own modded-in factions. Very interesting indeed.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
5.008 Xenophiles And Outguard
v5.008 includes the fix to the lobby bug in the prior build, and thus also all the other improvements are back from the prior build. Big thanks to Tom Prince for finding that one-character bug of mine.
But also in this build are just piles and piles of new goodies. In no particular order:
Lots of DLC3 updates, many of them Necromancer-related, ranging from balancing tuning from Zeus to quality of life and bugfixes from Tom Prince.
The Skirmisher AI has been heavily nerfed after player feedback, thanks to CRCGamer.
SirLimbo has more updates on the new prototype version of the tooltips (there's a personal settings option to preview it if you want), and Tom Prince also had some new additions there.
Brutal Guardians in DLC3 now have a lot better options for configuring them, thanks for SirLimbo (their original creator).
And then holy cow, there's a whole "Xenophile" update, mostly to the base game, thanks to Arnaud B, a longtime contributor. This has a few bugfixes, but mainly a giant list of balance updates to everything from the Zenith Dyson Sphere (to bring it up to interestingness levels along the lines of the Spire Spheres), the Dyson Ships, the Dark Spire, and Risk Analyzers. He ran these changes by me first, and it's the sort of thing that looks to really enhance the existing factions versus making them fundamentally different, so that was an easy thumbs up from me.
Then we have a new mod called Outguard Party, from first-time modder, long-time tester, Dismiss. This basically makes the Outguard almost-free to acquire, so that it's a lot more fun/interesting to experiment with them. I'd always avoided doing something like this for fear of balance implications, but as a mod this is a really great way to allow more experimentation in that area... and it may not have as notable of balance effects as I had always worried.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!