AI War 2
4.012 The Zeusathon
This one has an absolute ton of balance tuning from Zeus, in both DLC2 and DLC3.
Badger also made a number of improvements to the Zenith Architrave, to make them work better in certain edge cases, as well as get more of their cool toys that they were missing. He also fixed some corner cases with the AI Hunter.
cml has updated his AI Core Shield Generators mod, and I got a bunch more art in place for DLC2 and DLC3.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.011 Multiplayer Stability
This one is almost entirely bugfixes, and not just for multiplayer. There are a few balance tweaks and a few quality of life improvements, as well.
The most notable multiplayer issues of the last half month are now fixed, and the question of wave warnings being delayed is now the main thing I'm wondering about. The other errors were due to me making certain parts of the code more strict so that they would error earlier and tell us when something was wrong, versus giving us inscrutably drifting-away problems. That worked great, and the actual core of the problem seems to have revealed itself.
A bunch of cross-threading issues for single player and MP have been fixed, and a really strange and rare bug where your ark empire ark could be deleted when loading a save is also fixed.
Huge thanks to gekko, who reviewed all of our quick starts and corrected issues in a whopping 18 of them! That was a major undertaking, and we're really grateful for the result.
Also a big kudos to Daniexpert, who tackled some particularly challenging code to fix an issue on the galaxy map where icons would sometimes disappear for a while after you had quit one save and loaded another. This was a very complex bug involving some of the unity hierarchy, so it was a very long day for him finding a lot of new things out.
A couple of AI types have been reclassified from Brutal to Hard or vice-versa, after discussion on mantis. And Badger added some improvements to the Warden logic as well as some other updates to journal entries, among other fixes.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.010 Iconucopia
This one has a huge number of bugfixes and balance tweaks, thanks to a really great sprint by Badger, Daniexpert, Zeus, and CRCGamer, with some additional fixes by NR SirLimbo. Essentially all the major things (MP aside) that have been reported recently that I haven't had time to work on because of the art and icons work are pretty much resolved, I believe. There's always more, but this was a giant chunk of stuff -- thanks so much to all of those involved.
cml's Core Shield Generators mod makes a post-refactor return, with more features than ever, too. If you were a fan of this feature in the first AI War, it now has even more options in this mod in the sequel.
On the icon front, I got all of the icons for DLC3 done (this was a huge number of them -- over 180, wow), and then also got some improvements in place for some other icons in the base game and DLC1. Zeus had some great suggestions on a few things that needed attention or could use better differentiation, such as the first three tiers of Exo War units. Badger also had advocated for having Arks have overlays so you can tell them apart at a glance, and that is now in place as well. These other items were in addition to the 180 items from DLC3.
For modders, the most exciting news is going to be that there are now 357 new ship icons in the game that are... not used for anything at all. They're cool, they're varied, and they're for you. This is more than the base game plus any one DLC in terms of total icon count, and of course these can be combined with overlays as desired for even more variety. These are all in the Ships3 or Ships4 dictionaries, and start with the word Emblem or the word Something. This should make for much more interesting variety in mod icons, as modders choose to update to these!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.009 Architrave Taming
This one slows down the rate at which the Zenith Architrave can rebuild when you are harassing them, and has a number of DLC1 spire balance updates as well.
There is also a fair bit of DLC3 balance tuning, and a whole bunch of new DLC3 art is now in place.
The More System Defenders mod has been updated by CRCGamer, and he also tuned quite a few other things in the main game (such as Black Widow Golems will actually be more likely to ever be seen in galaxies again).
It's been a bit of a slower period for balance and bugfixes, since there's been a focus on art, and then also we completely moved all of our web servers into a new spot, and that took quite a bit of doing, as well. The art is winding down in the next week or so, and then it's just bugfixes and balance and last kickstarter backer items.
This is coming together quite well!
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.008 Exogalactic Wayfinding
This one fixes a bug where exogalactic war units would sometimes chase the wrong target (sometimes you), which was particularly damaging in really high-faction-count games. Thanks to a variety of folks for the reports, and to Badger for figuring that one out.
This one also has a huge amount of balance changes to the necromancer in DLC3, mainly focusing on higher difficulty level play, thanks to Zeus.
There are another 70-some pieces of art in place now for DLC3, which is what I've been up to all day. You can always follow along with that on the watch-chris-art section in discord if you don't mind visual spoilers.
Daniexpert fixed a tricky bug with waves in multi-AI games sometimes coming from their homeworlds and then traveling through realspace rather than just spawning like they were supposed to -- excellent sleuthing there.
And there's a handful of other tweaks and fixes in here.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.007 Balance And Tuning
This one has a whole heck of a lot of balance tweaks to it, in all of the DLCs (released and unreleased) as well as the base game. Big thanks to CRCGamer and Zeus on that in particular.
Daniexpert has been doing a lot of bugfixing, and Badger and I have snagged a couple of them as well. A huge mound of new DLC3 art is now complete, and more will be coming shortly. It's getting on to screenshots and trailer time, so getting that all actually in place needs to happen on my end.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.006 Careful Of That Federation!
This one has a lot of bugfixes, some balance tuning, some mod updates, and also a new mod.
The starting position for Ark Empires is now more flexible, which is a nice boost for them (and what I had intended from the start). Big thanks to StarKelp for implementing that.
There were some deadlocks possible in recent versions, under apparently rare circumstances, but any-at-all is too frequent. I believe those were related to some locks that I put into the threading code in the prior week or so, and that has now been further refactored to no longer require locks, and thus not be possible to have deadlock. It will also run very slightly faster this way. Fingers crossed that was the correct code that was actually doing the deadlock, because that was a super rare thing. The deadlock, specifically, was "the game still responds fine, but time won't progress and commands won't be accepted anymore." The joys of multithreading mean that it's a lot different from the old style "program is frozen and we have to forcibly kill it."
I also put in a bunch of code to try to catch the issue with game commands getting corrupted on MP clients after a long period of playing. So far I've been running an MP session for about 20 minutes now (it's still running as I type) and I don't see any issues, but I didn't see them before, either. Hopefully the folks that did see the issues previously no longer will.
The new mod is the "Hydral Federation," by StarKelp, and is described as follows: "All of the races, fresh from the best ending from The Last Federation, have come to this galaxy. Lead by the Hydral, they have seen the endless war propagated by yourselves and the AI and have deemed you both a lost cause."
I find this absolutely hilarious and wonderful that these creations from our 2014 hit strategy game are now invading here via a mod. Did you know that that specific last Hydral is also the main character in our 2016 overlooked-gem Starward Rogue? It's a set a few billion years later, so the timeline of this mod actualyl checks out fine.
In other news, the DLC3 page has been updated to have its final feature list properly documented: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/
Until today, it had a mixture of proper features, scrapped features, features we gave you for free, features we moved to the expanded DLC1, and lots of missing features that we added since that page was last updated. April 21 is looking to be the real release day for this, for realsies this time, so that's exciting!
Badger has been working himself to the bone and is stepping back a bit now that his work for DLC3 is done, and will pretty much just be handling any really serious bugfixes I hand him. I'm also having to transition partially to the next project to make sure that I get things set up well enough so that people who are contractors now will have an actual proper full job when that starts in a few months. I have a lot of prep work to do, and all of it is still super secret, but I'm going to be really excited to share more of it with you in about a year. Usually you can get morsels out of me about upcoming stuff, because I just can't help but share, however that is often a really poor marketing decision and this time it's not my choice. It's all good.
I've been talking for a long about doing a Super Supporter DLC for this game, given how very costly and unprofitable this game has been to make, so that folks who feel like they got more than their money's worth could chip in more if they were so inclined. Even just setting up something really simple there takes time I don't have, and in general it leaves me with an iffy feeling to have a product like that, so we're just going to skip it. One of the planned bonuses will just be a free mod (that requires DLC3) that I put out.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
AI War 2 Campaign Types: The Definitive Guide, By Strategic Sage
Campaign Types are a new thing that we've been working on for quite a while, and originally Sage and I were designing these together back last May. Now that the game has returned from beta, Sage has put together a comprehensive video guide that explains the where, the why, and the how of these new modes.
The truly important information is also available in the game, of course -- Sage himself wrote a lot of the tips and explanations that are in there -- but sometimes there's nothing like a good video to really show things off.
Enjoy!
4.004 Easy There, Hack Response
This one makes the enemy response from hacking... anything... way less intense. Unless you were playing spire-infused empire or fallen spire. Then it's probably still the same. There was a bug that was inflating the response to hacks as if you were a spire player, and there were some other tweaks that needed to happen to give you even better estimates of the strength you'd face throughout a hack. Big thanks to Badger for calming the AI down in this area.
Dire CPAs are a feature for expert mode, and they were gated behind DLC3 for testing purposes until today. They've now been fully released to the base game at large, so everyone can enjoy this new pain, heh. Thanks to Strategic Sage for the idea, and to Badger for the implementation and tuning.
Faction beacons were a feature that I had to remove during the great refactor, and while random faction options were a very nice addition, a lot of folks have still been pining for the beacons to return. Today I managed to get the first two back and better than ever: nanocaust and fallen spire. How are they better than ever? Well, they don't drain performance, they don't compete for CPU and RAM unless you actually hack them, and there are a bunch of hacking options that let you choose specifically what you're going to get. The beacon system in general allows for combinations of factions to be added, and it only requires xml now (the old system also required custom code per beacon faction), so not only can we add in cool multi-faction beacons, but... well, so can any general xml modder. There are some other features that I'm still looking into adding to really capitalize on all this new power in this subsystem, so I expect we'll see some exciting things in this area for a while yet.
This build has a number of fixes and improvements to autotargeting as well, plus many other general fixes from myself and Badger. There are some improvements to the R-view thanks to Daniexpert, and that was a major investigation and careful fixing on his part, so big thanks there.
The More System Defenders Mod has been updated by CRCGamer to now include a version of the Stormfront Ark that can be used as the centerpiece in Ark Empire mode -- that's the first mod that adds new content to Ark Empires, but I'm hoping we'll see lots more of that, because it's really fun.
One other change that's in this build is that when you refit a modular ship's modules, it now has a 10 second paralysis. This keeps people from gaming modules and microing them during battle.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!
4.003 A Bit Too Chromatic Horrifying
More bugfixes, in the main, and some more progress towards having minor faction beacons again (but this time with better performance and more features, and mod-friendly, and etc).
This version also includes an option for the Chromatic Horror that prevents it from scrambling your buildings and turrets around; that kind of takes the whole point of the Horror out of that guy, and may make the game much easier in general, but the Chromatic Horror is definitely a rage-generating machine when it wanders into your territory, so Badger took pity. I was a bit more inclined to leave it, since it's doing what it says on the tin, but I wasn't trying to be meanspirited about it. I think it's a valid option to have, because sometimes you don't realize just how disruptive it's going to be if it takes a long time to wander your way.
Bugfix-wise, there's several good ones for multiplayer, plus a number of ones for multi-AI scenarios, plus some general exception dampening.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!