Genre: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Simulator, Strategy, Indie
AI War: Fleet Command
AI War Beta 7.032/7.033 - Main combat-type MK I-III turrets now capped per-planet, new MK IV turrets and MK V fabricated turrets are capped galaxy-wide, and health and attack stats numerically scaled down... and other bugfixes!
This one takes a break from fixing The Bug (10/10 being winnable) so the changes already made in that direction can be evaluated. Instead the focus is on dealing with a couple other long-discussed requests:
- The main combat turrets have been switched from a galaxy-wide-cap on MkI/II/III and a per-planet cap on MkV to a per-planet-cap on MkI/II/III and a galaxy-wide-cap on MkV (and the newly-added MkIVs).
-- The MkI/II/IIIs now have a smaller cap, as a result, but the Spider and Sniper turrets have been given their own I-V lines, so between that and the MkIVs your chokepoint-defense potential hasn't been significantly nerfed (indeed, buffed slightly, from roughly 23k strength to roughly 24k strength)
-- And distributed-defense is now immediately possible from the beginning of the game, so long as you have the necessary metal and energy production.
- The health and attack stats (and armor and armor piercing) have been scaled down two orders of magnitude (divided by 100) to help with readablity and to pave the way towards later changes that will deal with some longstanding balance issues (mainly, that some superweapons are underwhelming because the normal units have gotten so powerful).
There's also some important bugfixes/etc. Including one hilarious one where capturing an AI HW would give you command of any future champ-nemesis exo spawned from there...
Update: 7.033 is out to scale some stats that I forgot wouldn't be automatically scaled with health and attack, etc (thus ending the Night When The Mines And Attritioners Rose In Terrible Wrath). Also fixed some bugs related to sniper/spider turret unlocks.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.029-7.031 - new warp relay AI structure and function to displace counterattack posts, and various balance changes
Updates went live on May 20th, with 7.031 on the 21st.
This one continues progress towards fixing The Bug (10/10 being winnable) but also provides some significant quality-of-life improvements along with the quality-of-extermination ones. Specifically:
- Counterattack Guard Posts are no longer core-game. They're still available as an AI plot if you want them (and there's the AI type that gets a bunch of them either way), but their core-game role is now filled by Warp Relays, which can be very threatening but are much less likely to act as annoying speedbumps.
- The revenge exos launched by dying Core Guard Posts have been replaced by a different form of exo provoked by AI-Homeworld-assault that isn't as strict about when the player needs to switch back to defense. It will hopefully still fulfill the goal of making most AI-HW assaults a "multi-stage boss fight", but there won't be as many stages and it won't be as tied to your specific actions during the fight (so you're basically never motivated to "hold back" to avoid tripping the next "stage", etc).
And various other changes like some improvements to make out-of-memory errors less likely in intense gamestates, rebalancing Planetary Armor Inhibitors, giving Econ stations more energy production, and making interaction between Carriers and Mines far more... entertaining (previously Carriers had Mine Evasions, but on reflection it was realized they probably had all the evasion of a cow on rollerskates), etc.
Update: 7.030 is out to hotfix the Counterattack Guard Post's last gasp of revenge: ANY AI wave could go to ANY planet. Curious.
Update: 7.031 is out to shift the warp relays to a separate AI Plot (instead of being core-game) as the feedback on the idea rather changed once the feature was actually implemented. Also some superterminal rebalancing.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.025-7.028 - General AI-gameplay mechanics refinement
This one focuses on polishing recently-introduced rough edges (mainly in terms of balance) and in general is the first step in a new effort to fix The Bug (10/10 being winnable). We don't want that setting to be an immediate "you die in the first 30 minutes, no questions asked" button, but things have clearly gotten out of hand.
Some other highlights:
- Hacking now has an extra source of suspense and challenge: once the hacking _stops_ there will be a rapid short-term post-hacking response from the AI proportional to how much you ticked it off during the hack. If you're adequately prepared this won't be too big a problem (though I hope it will add to the excitement). But if you've dug yourself too deep a hole... well, have fun with that ;)
- Carriers can no longer fly through your forcefields. They've come a long way from the super-cheesy "literally invincible, ignores forcefields completely" incarnation of old, and are now basically just a hyper-concentrated ball of death that can attack and be attacked in a very similar fashion as... well, a big pile of ships. Their attack is now more similar in potency to the ships inside, and is longer ranged (otherwise the larger forcefields and/or radar jamming really mess with them) but in general they won't just "cheat" their way through your defenses anymore. They'll just hammer them flat, unless you're adequately prepared.
- The alt-progress for champs no longer asks you to walk into the lion's den of pain just to make all the toys available. Previously you had to go to intensity 9, and if you followed the lobby's (bad, then) advice of setting a matching alt-nemesis intensity it was... well, varying from "interesting" to unwinnable.
- Salvage is now much less capable of making the Metal mechanic irrelevant for significant chunks of time (mainly this was a problem in superweapon games).
Update: 7.026 hotfix for several severe balance issues with the new hacking post-responses, and a few other fixes and changes that snuck in since 7.025.
Update: 7.027 just to do a quick balance iteration on the champion nemesis exos.
Update: 7.028 is another balance iteration on the champion nemesis exo stuff, along with a few other small changes from feedback during the week.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.023 - Champion-alt progress refined, ships in AI carrier are now destroyed on carrier receiving damage, warheads now do finite damage, AI changes, and golem and spirecraft balances
This one is kind of a beast. With TLF doing so well most of our time is going in that direction, but since it's doing well we also have a little time to spare for stuff like AIW. Which is nice.
The biggest individual thing is a major revision of the Alternate Champion Progress feature introduced in the previous non-hotfix release. I'd thought people who didn't want the nebula scenarios wanted a relatively low-impact version of the champion that didn't fundamentally change gameplay. Based on feedback it would appear I was wrong ;)
Anyway, this new iteration does allow that low-power, low-response option but you can also crank the intensity of the progress and the response up to levels where you're getting just as much power by late/end-game as you would with the normal progress mechanic. And probably just as much pain in return, we'll see how the balancing worked out there. If you're feeling cheesy or like providing the compensating challenge in some other way you can also crank up the progression and leave the response low or off.
Please keep the feedback coming; "champion revisions" won #2 on the big-items-for-8.0 poll and I'd really like to get champs to a place where they have a wider appeal.
All that aside, some other major changes in this beta release:
- Carriers are now always fully autotargeted, and damage to them is simply passed on to the contained units. This actually makes carriers way easier to deal with, so further balance changes are likely to come later, but most importantly this also makes them way less annoying to deal with, and thus makes the game more fun. It's very satisfying to see a wall of 1000-load carriers fly into the teeth of exo-class defenses and start melting.
- Lightning/Armored Warheads and Spirecraft Martyrs have been made essentially finite in damage potential now, though one may not normally think of "Ten Billion Damage" as "finite". Essentially these now spread X damage over all available targets rather than doing X damage to EACH target in range. More balance to come, I'm sure, but now these are at least theoretically capable of being balanced.
- Fixed a major bug in recent versions where the second AI player's threat/threatfleet/special-forces ships were often just stuck on worlds with no human presence at all. Also made several other important fixes and improvements to AI threat behavior in general.
- Reinforcements have had further refactoring, and now have a much more coherent sense of budget (i.e. not getting anything for "free"). Perhaps more importantly, any reinforcement strength "lost" to the various capping rules (which are there to prevent the AI just defensively stonewalling you when it's not a Turtle AI Type or whatever) is passed on to the Strategic Reserve (until it is full) and then towards augmenting waves. Neither use is particularly threatening in moderate doses (though if the redirect-to-SR thing turns into homeworld-stonewalling please let us know and we'll change that) but this way the "cost" of AIP no longer goes down when that cap is reached, etc.
- More Golem and Spirecraft balance changes; not as many as last time but we hope it helps move those towards where they need to be.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.021 - alternative champion mode, and tons of balances and bug fixes
This one is fairly hefty, compared to other recent patches. After the April 18th release of The Last Federation and a week of heavy post-release support for that game (which is still very much ongoing, but not quite 100% of our time now) I finally had time to get 7.021 ready.
The most important thing here is definitely the new alternate-champion-progress lobby option, in response to "Revising Champions" winning the #2 spot in the Big Items For 8.0 poll.
Basically if you want to play with Champions but don't want to mess with nebulae (and their scenarios) just turn this on and your champions will gain their XP alongside your normal Knowledge gathering, and will gain new unlocks when you capture or hack Advanced Research Stations, Advanced Factories, etc.
I'm sure this needs further balancing and polish and perhaps isn't even the right tree to bark up, but recent discussion indicated it was worth a try. And even if this option is worked out perfectly there's probably other revisions needed for champions. Anyway, more feedback is very welcome :)
Other high points from the release:
* The AI (on Diff 7+) now has "overrun" logic to recognize when its normal-threat forces are way more than needed at a specific planet (even when there's still some human presence). It then leaves a goodly chunk to mop up and sends the excess after another target.
* Most of the Golems have been buffed to better fit their balance targets, so they should be more interesting to play with. Unless it's the AI with the golems. Then it's more interesting to play with.
* The Spirecraft Siege Tower and Spirecraft Ion Blaster have been reimagined as much more combat-effective ships.
* Fixed a couple of bugs that were causing Desyncs in multiplayer. Always a relief to nail some of those.
* The AI's Implosion Guardians (including the Dires) have been nerfed. And there was much rejoicing.
There's also quite a few other bugfixes and balance changes.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
Arcen Games Presents: The Last Federation, 25% off launch week
Journalists and video channel owners interested in a copy of the game, please email arcengames[at]gmail[dot]com.
Arcen Games is proud to announce The Last Federation launches today for Windows PC, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms.
From the creators of AI War: Fleet Command comes an all-new grand strategy title with turn-based tactical combat, set in a deep simulation of an entire solar system and its billions of inhabitants. You are the last of a murdered race, determined to unify or destroy the 8 others. But you must work from the shadows, using superior technology -- bring your cape and cowl.
TLF will be available on Steam, Humble Store, GOG, GamersGate, Green Man Gaming, as well as direct from ArcenGames.com. Carrying a $19.99 standard tag, the game will be offered at 25% off for the first week -- bringing the price down to just $14.99 until April 25th.
Features * Turn-based tactical combat, with up to 5 factions competing at once.
* Extremely deep simulation of an entire solar system and its billions of inhabitants. Even just watching everything unfold in Observer mode is entertaining, as nations rise and fall.
* New-player-friendly ramp-up of complexity as you play, which you can disable if you're already a veteran.
* Eight races each have very distinct personalities and attributes. Each one even has its own completely unique political system.
* Difficulty levels split between the grand strategy and turn-based combat portions of the game, both ranging from quite casual to incredibly hardcore.
* Save and reload your game with ease any time, or tough it out in ironman mode.
* Composer Pablo Vega's best soundtrack to date, featuring 54 minutes of music and the vocal finale "Lay Down Your Arms."
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
AI War Beta 7.013-7.014 - AI balance changes and fixes, hotfix for performance hog
This one is partly a hotfix to deal with a fairly serious AI bug I introduced in the previous version, but there was a fair bit of other work in the hopper ready to go out as well.
Not a huge release, overall, because we're basically in the last week before the April 18th official release of The Last Federation. The AI thinks you should go take a look. It'll watch your defenses while you're gone.
Speaking of the AI, some background on the main bug this release fixes:
Whenever AI threat ships (unlike guard ships, threat ships are free to attack you wherever and whenever they please) are on a planet there's a basic decision tree that gets checked repeatedly on the AI thread:
I) Is there an interesting human presence here? Basically this means anything over a token force, or the presence of a human command station, or the presence of a human irreplaceable (fab, etc).
I.A) If so, are we seriously overmatched by the local forces, and have we been here long enough to run away?
I.A.1) If so, pick a random planet an run for it.
I.B) If we're not overmatched, do we seriously overmatch the local human forces?
I.B.1) If so, generally focus on knocking out any irreplaceable units and the command station (if any).
I.C) If we're pretty evenly matched, then let each ship pick the targets it's best against in an effort to win the fight.
II) But if there is no interesting human presence here:
II.A) If we're Special Forces:
II.A.1) Go to the currently designated Special Forces rally point (which could be its "waiting area" a few hops deep into AI Territory if there's nothing suitable, or it could be a sufficiently-important AI planet with human forces it wants to crush).
II.B) If we're Threatfleet (not just normal threat, but threat that got stuck waiting somewhere for over half an hour and thus joins the coherent Threatfleet)
II.B.1) Go to the currently designated Threatfleet rally point (which could be its "waiting area" a few hops deep into AI Territory, or it could be an AI planet under attack by human forces the Threatfleet thinks it can take, or it could be a neutral/human planet it thinks it can take)
II.C) If we're just normal threat, look at all the planets and sort them by a combination of Desirability (command stations and irreplaceables have various values of this) and Difficulty (based on the local forces there and the forces in the way from here to there), then get on the road to the best looking target. Later on, at each wormhole, each ship will check whether it should wait before proceeding due to an unfavorable local strength balance.
And normally all this works pretty well. Except when a certain boneheaded programmer (yours truly) is renovating the AI code and accidentally makes it so it thinks the answer to the question marked "I)" above is ALWAYS "no".
So the AI threat would get to the target planet, surrounded by hideously powerful human defenses protecting a pile of irreplaceables, and ask itself "is there an interesting human presence here?" ... "Nah. Where to next, Bob?".
If I ever add that behavior back to the game as a legitimate AI Type, I'll probably call it "Inebriated". Three sheets to the wind. Yet strangely still effective in many circumstances.
In other news, the AI is now much smarter (theoretically, see above) about factoring in your mobile forces: specifically, when looking at a planet to see if it can win a fight there, it considers not just the local mobile and static human strength but also human mobile strength within 3 hops. This makes it much more difficult to lure into attacking a planet with relatively light static defenses by just pulling your mobile stuff back to the other side of a wormhole, only to bring it back in immediately after the AI takes the bait. There are a few nuances to when mobile human strength counts in this way, and some other new rules about how it evaluates "can I take that planet?" to help embolden the AI to attack on multiple fronts once it's in a serious fight with you anywhere.
There's also a few other changes in there, like MkV Spirecraft Jumpships becoming immune to Black Hole Machines, the Core Guard Post on-death exos now always spawn on the post's planet (making it less mandatory to split your fleet during a high-difficulty AI Homeworld assualt), and Remains Rebuilders are a bit better about prioritizing Energy Collectors and stuff currently in their range, etc.
Update: 7.020 hotfix for some performance problems (i.e. 10 second freezes, in some cases on some machines) recently introduced into the reinforcement logic.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.017-7.018 - few balancing changes and bug fixes
7.017 - March 31st
This one isn't as packed as some of the other recent releases. During normal working hours I'm focused on The Last Federation, and even moreso right now as we're in the last few weeks before releasing that.
But there's some important player-facing changes and fixes in 7.017. Hacking an Advanced constructor no longer also charges you for a fab-hack, and the cost of sabotage-hacking is back down to 5 from 10 (was 2 until recently). Also, in light of Reprisal making fleetwipes more dangerous, the AIP cost of killing a Black Hole Machine has dropped from 10 to 5. Speaking of salvage, minor faction stuff dying on player planets now contributes to the player's salvage (the AI still doesn't salvage from minor faction deaths, as then they could lead to aggressive AI units with no player involvement).
One of the changes that snuck into 7.016 (because it was already done before the need for that hotfix became apparent) was to make the Starship component of waves scale much better with wave sizes. In this version other special parts of waves (like the Mad Bomber's extra bomber starships, Heroic's in-wave champions, etc) are using similar scaling logic. I expect that the Spire Hammer, in particular, just got a lot nastier once the AIP cranks up. Especially on higher difficulties you might find yourself on the uncomfortable end of a Spire capital fleet. What could go wrong?
Most of the actual work went into a very substantial code refactoring (primarily of AI Reinforcements) that didn't mean many player-facing changes... this time ;)
7.018 - April 7th
This one is another fairly small release while we're focused on the last few weeks before releasing The Last Federation,
So we shot some troublesome bugs. Some old, like some missing art assets for non-steam installs. Some new, like the Heroic AI using its newfound ability to buy more champions for its waves... a little too enthusiastically.
But the AI's also gotten better at shooting troublemakers. In the kneecaps (or suitably analogous regions). Mainly as a quality-of-life improvement, we've removed the AIP-on-death from Special Forces Guard Posts, so they're now autotargeted and won't clutter up your backfield with enemy units that trigger various "ah! There's an enemy on the planet!" logic in sub-optimal ways. Since that AIP (or increased special forces size, if left alive previously) was a significant (albeit small) part of the overall balance, however, a corresponding buff was made to the SF. Specifically, they now spend a portion of their strength on Riot Control Starships. Some of you may not be familiar with how much havoc Riots can cause. You'll probably know soon.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.013-7.016 - Salvage changes, and various back-end changes and balances and bug fixes and and and...
This one's visible changes mainly focus on improving the salvage mechanic introduced in 7.011 based on feedback during the week.
That largely takes the form of excluding various ship-death situations from generating salvage: zombie-mode ships dying no longer give the AI salvage, and reclaimed ships no longer give anyone salvage. More importantly, the AI no longer gets salvage from neutral planets unless it still has a guard post (that isn't a wormhole guard post or a special forces guard post) on the planet. Previously if the AI destroyed one of your command stations it would proceed to rack up the salvage killing the rest of the stuff on the planet. A good deal for it, and not bad as a kind of Shark plot, but definitely not suited for a core mechanic. Anyway, that bit's under control now.
Under the hood, there's been a metric ton of code changes to wrangle the on-ship-death logic into a more manageable form. Previously there were over 90 distinct ways for a ship to die, many with slight variations on exactly what order the on-death logic was checked. That's a natural consequence of 5 years of development (with little time for doing things quite as "cleanly" as we would prefer) and just needed to be brought back under control so that new rules like "reclaimed units don't cause salvage" can be added in one place rather than... well, over 90.
There was also a fairly thorough rewriting of the wave-building code to allow for future... experiments ;)
Many of you will be happy about the ability to right-click a planet in the lobby to change its bonus-ship-type. That's a perennially-beaten dead horse around here, but the time's come for the computer to stop fighting the player in the pre-game lobby. Or else just make the starting bonus ship types always uncontrollably random (and not revealed before the game) to remove the "workaround-by-tedium" situation. But since I couldn't find a sufficiently safe distance from which to observe the results of the latter...
There's a few other changes in there too, and I hope the one aimed at the "too many heap sections" error will at least make that one less frequent). We'll see.
7.014 hotfix for some unhandled errors in an edge-case of ship death where salvage was assuming the ship had a CurrentPlanet when it didn't.
7.015-7.016 notes This one is mostly a maintenance release, but there's some important iteration on Salvage and other features.
The salvage-reprisal waves were working pretty well but feedback showed they ultimately needed to be separated from normal waves into their own thing. Now they probably won't happen nearly as often (unless your fleet is an accident-waiting-to-happen permanently on the offensive... though I guess that's actually pretty accurate in some cases) and won't displace the normal wave mechanic. They'll also be much less of a threat in the early minutes of the game, to avoid the need for building serious defenses before you even start to attack.
The Neinzul Enclave Starship is hilariously powerful. In fact, hilariously over-powerful. And the hilarity is great particularly given the unit's past where relatively few players really wanted to use them. So we're not nerf-hammering it into the ground (indeed, the first two marks are getting a bit better), but ultimately it's not good for a single line of units to allow you to take heavily-defended systems without significant casualties. Further balance feedback (up or down) is quite welcome.
Hacking costs have seen another pass, with the ARS-redirection and design-corruption actions getting cheaper and the fab-hacking and sabotage actions getting more expensive.
And there's some important bugfixes, including one for the issue where the first two Showdown CPAs would imitate the third (and launch everything).
Update: 7.016 hotfix for a goof I made that had all mark-levels of enclave only getting mark-1 drones. Also some other changes from last night, but no time for a full blog post for just a few things, focused on TLF during the day.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
AI War Beta 7.011-7.012 - Resources combined into single resource unit, resource cap increased and now scales, AI and player "salvage" mechanics, and bugfixes on sim speed
This one carries a number of rather significant econ-related changes that have been brewing for a while:
Now that hacking has been around long enough and seems to be welcome, we've moved ahead with the combination of metal and crystal (into just metal) so that hacking can move up into the main resource bar. Crystal as a separate mechanic had some impact on the game, but ultimately we could do better.
The other main thrust was to nibble at both ends of the refleeting problem. To a large extent there's no problem if a major player fleet wipe takes a long time to recover from. Actions should have consequences. But if it _only_ takes time (specifically, the player's real wall-clock time), then that crosses the line from "reduced player ability" to "reduced player interest", which is not cool. So now the AI can "take the ball and throw it back" proportional to your offensive casualties. That nibbles at one side (making post-fleet-wipe more interesting, possibly terminally so). On the other side, when the AI takes casualties in your territory you get bonus metal-per-second while your command stations gather up the salvage. That nibbles at the other side (speeding up the refleet, if you survive).
Along with that, the resource cap (aside from updating for the m+c combination) now increases a bit with each command station and thus keeps up better as the scale of the conflict increases throughout the game.
Finally, there are a few bugfixes including a rather important one to the core timing of the simulation. Previously (as many of you noticed) the sim actually ran faster when you moved the mouse around like a crazy person. No longer :) But now the + and - speed settings have a more pronounced impact and the +10 speed (renamed to "+!!!") has been repurposed as a genuine "go as fast as you can" (while still drawing a few frames per second) setting. In the early game (before the sim load gets serious) that can let you pass a tremendous amount of sim-time very quickly if you want to.
7.012 hotfix for some unhandled errors on the Economy tab of the Stats window. Apparently it was still in denial about crystal.
The Winter 2013 AI War Sortie Bulletin topic at the community hub is a place to find other players.
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.
