New build, and it’s truly a whopper: https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Post_Completion#5.500_Classic_Fusion.2C_And_A_Megaton_Otherwise

The first thing of note is that Puffin’s massive total conversion “Classic Fusion” mod is now released in this build. This has been a two-year project for him, and it essentially hybridizes the first and second AI War games, using the engine of the second game but mostly ship stats and designs and such from the first game. This is a very exciting thing, because Puffin and I wound up having some disagreements on just where to be similar to the first game versus where to be divergent, and I’m really glad to see his version of that vision now as something that others can also enjoy. Hopefully it brings a lot of fans of the first game joy!

But wait! I said there was a megaton otherwise. By that I mean this is absolutely a packed build, partly because it’s about 3 weeks of work; I was traveling out of the country to visit family, and folks were busy while I was away and couldn’t push builds.

Badger has also added a new mod, this one the Dyson Sidekick. “This is a new player-controllable faction. Play as a coalition of Zenith, Neinzul, Templar and Spire trying to build a Dyson Sphere, while fighting the AI and the Reapers, the forces of an evil Necromancer.”

Good grief! That’s quite cool, and also huge!

And another big mod: The Reclaimers by Dismiss are a human faction dedicated to human recovery and advancement in the galaxy, though not through direct combat.

And SirLimbo has re-released his AMU mod: “Right now AMU is only at about 20% of the code it had before, but a lot of AMU has been integrated into the main game, so the actual progress is probably between 30-40%.”

Outguard Party by Dismiss has been updated to v3! DpsHud by Dismiss has been updated to v2!

Tom Prince fixed a ton more bugs, and made a number of more things run more smoothly. CRCGamer has been working on balance like a madman. These are each really long sets of release notes all on their own, and exciting even for folks who aren’t interested in all these new mods and such.

More to come soon.
Enjoy!

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

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

Lots of last minute fixes and tweaks, a lot of them the sort of thing where we went “how did none of our testers find this?” But Democracy and some others ran a long game last night and found a whole crop of new bugs, so those got squashed.

Speaking of bugs, a not-so-new bug from the last few weeks has been making multiplayer just miserable for the clients, and I could not figure it out for the life of me. After chasing it for a long time, and getting lots of reports that I couldn’t replicate, I was finally able to replicate it. Once it was replicatable, its days were numbered. It turned out to be three complex bugs in one, but they’re all fixed now and so the client experience is a lot more sane. No more disappearing fleets and units.

On the DLC2 front — hey, that launches in about 11.5 hours from now! — there’s some really cool new additions as well, with some last minute new controls to allow you more control over targeting crashing nomad planets or zenith miners. These are semi-wildcard type aspects of DLC2 when you enable them, so the ability to use hacking points to turn them to your advantage (rather than having no choice but to fight and defeat them if they were unfavorable to you) adds a lot of new strategic options for advanced players in particular. For casual play, it still adds options, but it probably won’t be game-deciding at that level.

SirLimbo’s mods got some updates as well, and Tzarro helped us find a ton of typos that are now fixed, most in the base game. Oh! There’s two new fun cheat codes for DLC2. One to get all Zeus’s cruisers, and the other to spawn a Miner Probe.

Titan Edition and DLC2 arrive super soon. Enjoy!

That is literally midsize novel-length.  If you haven’t been reading as it went, I’m not sure that I can quite summarize everything, so let’s hit the high points.

The TLDR Of The Paradigm Shift

“Everything is the same but also different” is a good way to phrase this, I think.

Most of the central concepts of the game are the same — how combat works, how the economy works, what techs there are, how you upgrade in broad terms,  and so on.  Much of the new version should feel very very familiar, which is of course the idea.  If you are a player with next to no hours under your belt, the two versions are pretty much indistinguishable except for the many UI improvements.

And yet.  If you have a dozen or more hours in the game, this is going to feel like VERY alien territory for a short while.  Essentially everything you ever knew about the meta for the game is changed in very drastic fashion, and even some of the major goals of the game (like Global Command Augmenters) don’t exist anymore.

Word from most of our beta testers has generally been along the lines of “holy cow, this is vastly better in almost every way.”  (The second bit of opinion is also “hey, the game got a bit easier — so many bump the AI difficulty up by 1 from what it was before for whatever your play level was.”)

Anyhow.  The game’s meta allows for more playstyles, is more flexible, is more fun, and is still plenty challenging if you tune your difficulty or add extra factions.  As to what changed and why, I’ll get into the major items down below.

We also have a wide array of under-the-hood improvements for you in this build, plus tons of new mods by independent mod authors.  Our second paid expansion for the game, Zenith Onslaught, is coming May 18th with an absolutely gargantuan amount of content.

New Video Tutorials

While this rarely happens, the meta of the game has shifted dramatically over the course of the beta. Basically all of the older video tutorials for this game are now nonsensical in the new paradigm.  They give advice that is now blatantly backwards, they talk about units that don’t exist, and they describe a meta that has entirely moved on.

Thankfully, both Strategic Stage and eXplorminate Rob have been making new videos for you for the last few months.  Huge thanks to both of them, and also to the mountains of suggestions from both of them that helped to refine this new Paradigm over the course of the beta period.

Here are their suggested starting points:

Area 1: Balance Curves

This is the first thing that chucks the old meta out the window, and it’s paired with lots of subtle balance changes to a variety of techs and ships.  But, essentially, the way in which you get stronger is fundamentally different.

Old Meta: You can invest in limited technology pairs to get a few ship lines to Mark 7.  Whatever fits with that is pretty much what you have to stick to.  Anything outside of this is basically chaff, and potentially quite useless.

This means you were heavily dependent on the RNG, and have a small force of elite units mixed that you use, with a large group of ships that may not even be worth it to bring to battle.

New Meta: Aim for mark 4, not mark 7, in most cases.  Try to get as many to mark 4+ as possible, if you want maximum strength.  The ramp-up of a single unit is still linear (thus mark 7 is stronger than mark 4), BUT the number of ships you are granted goes up rapidly in the lower marks and tapers once you reach mark 4 (for strikecraft; for frigates, it goes more to mark 5, and for turrets it’s mark 6).

Don’t worry!  You actually get even more ships at mark 7 than you would have had in the old paradigm.  But if you are minmaxing, or even broadly trying to optimize, investing your science points super narrowly is no longer ideal.

TLDR: it is way more viable to upgrade widely, while still investing deeply in a few specialist areas.  You’ll use more of your forces, have vastly higher strength in general, higher unit counts, and more flexibility in how to play.  You’re free of the shackles of the RNG, while still needing to adapt to what you find.

If you want the really long explanation of all of this, there are multiple spreadsheets for you to read if you want.  They’re all linked there in the release notes.

Area 2: More Asymmetry

You and the AI are now MUCH more differentiated.  The AI no longer gets frigates at all, but their guardians are way more fearsome.  AI waves are vastly larger, but so are your defenses.  The AI has more nasty tools in more places, but you have more ways to hack or bypass or even take them over.

TLDR: essentially the AI and the humans both got massive makeovers, both got more exciting, but also both diverged increasingly from one another.

Area 3: Less RNG

Old Meta: There were many places where you were handed a very specific ship, or three ships, and you got no choice relating to them.  Take them or don’t.  In some cases, you could hack to do a “re-roll” and see if the new options were more to your liking.  This was incredibly suboptimal.  It encouraged both save-scumming and a gambling-style mentality.

New Meta: Most places that offer you a ship now offer you only one at a time, BUT give you a choice between something like 6-8 options.  There’s no such thing as a gambling-style re-roll.  In most of these locations, once you select your first ship, it wipes the slate and gives you a new array of options.  You can’t save-scum to optimize this (that wastes your time!).

TLDR: You have a LOT more choice now, but it’s more meaningful choice.  You may not get your exact favorite units, but you can get something that fits with the current campaign in some way.  You are encouraged to explore new units, but not forced to do so.

Break For: Technical Improvements

Let’s take a break from discussing the meta, and talk about the technical improvements.  Briefly.  Essentially:

• We’re running a newer version of the unity engine.  This runs smoother for most everyone, but some very old Windows 7 machines or High Sierra machines may have problems.  Both of those OSes are old enough that they do not get even critical security updates from Microsoft or Apple, so you are strongly advised to update in both cases.
• OpenGL support on Mac OSX is removed, but Metal has been optimized and polished to work super well.  This is basically leaning into how Apple prefers games to work, and the results are actually quite stunning even on really old hardware that is below minimum system requirements.  My main mac I test with is a 2011 Macbook Pro that is well under minimum requirements, and it runs far more smoothly now.
• RAM usage has been optimized for the base game and the first DLC, to a huge extent.
• The way we draw things like circles in the game has been improved so that it’s more attractive, and way more efficient.  If you draw a bunch of range circles, it’s now both prettier and more performant.
• Linux support also got some various boosts, and Vulkan on that and other platforms should work much better now, too.

Area 4: Science Refunds

Old Meta: You spend science to upgrade your ships  or fleets, and it’s gone forever.  If you find something later in the game that makes you wish you had chosen differently, too bad.  For this reason, most players would “float” large balances of un-spent science points until late in the game.  This actually was the single largest thing contributing to the complexity spike leading into the midgame, in my opinion.

Related: Hacking Points (HaP) were also spend-and-gone-forever, but for most players there is so little of worth to hack that you will have an abundance, making this kind of a non-factor.

New Meta: You still spend science to upgrade your ships or fleets, but you can get it back at a later point by using a new button at the bottom of the Science sidebar tab.  This will cost you some hacking points (HaP) to do, so you can’t just do it infinitely, but it’s a very attractive offer and allows you to go all-in on science during the early, middle, and late game.  It allows you to transform your empire as you grow and as you find out more of what is available to you, which is extremely nice.

AI War 2 is very much about adapting and working with what you have on hand. The ability to respec your spent science, both in tech categories and individual fleets/command stations allows you to be MUCH more flexible than before. So start experimenting!

Related: Hacking Points are still spend-and-gone-forever.   And you have more than ever.  However, now there’s a LOT more to hack, and that is brought into the forefront in general.  Some folks (like Strategic Sage) still carry large balances of extra HaP as they play, but most playstyles will see you having to make fairly tough calls with how you use these.

TLDR: Science points now firmly represent empire-design, and as such allow you to make changes  as you go.  Asking you to commit to techs forever, based on your limited early game knowledge in any campaign, is just plain unfair and unfun, so is gone.

Hacking points, however, have stepped up to occupy the role of “decision with long term consequences, but you need to make it anyway.”  The nature of these is that using them is substantially less stressful, but still impactful.  I want both elements in the game, but I don’t want you (or me) to be stressing out about the long-term side of things above a certain threshold.

Area 5: Hacking, In General

Old Meta: The interface was very clunky, but you could hack to sometimes weaken some AI stuff, but not much of it.  You could also sometimes hack certain buildings to gain new powers for yourself.  But overall you could honestly ignore a lot of this if you were not playing on a high level.

New Meta: The interface is pretty and helpful, and the number of things you can hack — enemies, friends, even yourself — is insanely high.  You hack for new ships, you hack to steal superweapons, you hack to turbocharge your golems, you hack to transform your transports or battlestations.  And occasionally to get some science points refunded.  Additionally, there is a small bonus for taking planets adjacent to your own. While it isn’t a lot, it does add a nice little dynamic.

The effect this has on the game is immense, because (for instance) if you previously felt like your Armored Golem was a paper person in the presence of your current foe, you can not only upgrade it via science, but you can also hack it to directly improve its hull.

TLDR: Your hacking points are now super precious, because now it’s a target-rich environment for them.  You may still have extras at the end (the float is not a bad idea), but there are easily 5x more things for you to do with hacking points than you can actually ever acquire.  So your priorities will reveal themselves.

Area 6: “GCAs” and Battlestations

Old Meta: You start with one battlestation.    You can capture more.  There are also citadels out there, which are a bit overpriced but kind of the same thing.  They all are what they are when you find them.  For most of your defenses, you will rely on your command stations, and finding Global Command Augmenters (GCAs) to unlock loads of new turrets for them.  You get new turrets in overwhelming lumps all at once.  In some cases you have to hold planets if you don’t want to spend hacking points.

New Meta: You start with TWO battlestations, and can never get any more of them.  You can choose to capture Citadels, which are way more expensive but also way more useful.  GCAs are gone, and Turret Schematic Servers (TSSes) and Other Defensive Schematic Servers (ODSSes) are out there instead.

The hack for a TSS or similar can be done 2-3 times, and gets more dangerous and also more expensive each time you do it (per building).  You get to choose ONE line of turrets or other defenses to add to your kit, and then it rerolls for a whole new set of choices after that.  Most of the time, your hacks will benefit all of your command stations AND your battlestations and citadels, but you can also do special hacks that give extra ship cap for that turret line to just one battlestation or citadel, instead.

TLDR: You’re no longer so flooded with information about new things you just got (“here are four new turrets, all at once”), and you can also choose specific units that you want to acquire, with some limitations.  In other words, your empire is designed with much more intention, and there are no “useless units” cluttering things up all over the place.

Break For: UI/QoL Improvements

Let’s take another break, this time for something that has been very exciting to basically everyone who plays the game:

• The planet sidebar now has many new options, including list view, views broken out by faction, new sort options, and even fleet displays.
• There’s a handy writeup in the How To Play menu under  Getting Started that explains how this works in more detail.
• Seriously, that new planet sidebar is fire.  You can make it look like it always used to if you prefer, but the usability of it has gone through the ceiling.
• The various settings-style menus now not only have subcategories (THANK you, organization!), but they also divide their content into regular and advanced.  The advanced content is just one click away, but otherwise kept out of your face unless you turn it on.
• You can now multi-move ship lines around, or even swap fleet leaders between fleets.  There was much rejoicing.

Area 7: Other Capturable Changes

There’s a lot, so let’s go through them just briefly:

• Fleet Research Stations (FRSes) actually are super useful now.  Their units are not so overpriced, but also only work on smaller individual fleets.
• IGCs and similar have been removed, as they were redundant with other aspects of the new meta.
• The Advanced Research Station (ARS) now uses that new style of hacking for units that gives you more choice in a serial fashion, without ever needing rerolls.
• Fleet Capacity Extenders (FCEs) were also removed, as they clashed with the new FRS design, and also were pretty darn redundant now that you have so much choice directly from the ARSes and so forth.
• You will capture comparably few fleets, and you can’t make custom ones anymore from the sidebar, so you won’t have a bunch of idle transports sitting around anymore on your home planet.  You have enough to meet your needs, but rarely too many more than that.
• In the event that you DO have extra transports even in the new model, they can now be strategically placed on economy-focused plants to give a passive economy buff if you leave them on that planet for at least 5 minutes.  Even your “useless” stuff is now quite useful.
• When it comes to upgrading your Fallen Spire cities, this is now done via clicking a notice at the top of the screen.  Previously it did it automatically, sometimes in a non-ideal order.  Now you get to control the order in which it happens.
• Outguard units are easier to get into contact with, and hopefully will become a part of more midlevel player strategies.  Advanced play has used them for a while, but they are vastly easier to understand now.

Area 8: A More Active AI

This is another one that is hard to summarize into any one thing.  But in general, here are some highlights you will quickly notice:

• AI waves sizes are CRAZY stronger.  They were previously incredibly rare and very weak.  They are still not something that is likely to end the game for you, but they actually factor in now.  They are also no longer cowards. They used to run away the moment you out-strengthed them in turrets. These new waves are a part of the “Relentless AI” subfaction; that means they will fight to the death and constantly seek to do battle with you.
• Phase 2 of the AI Overlord is a lot more interesting and intense, and the final battle got several buffs in general.
• AI Reserves are smarter.
• So are the AI Praetorian Guard, Hunter, and Warden.
• The AI Warden in particular is way more aggressive, fine with losses, and able to regenerate itself a bit faster than before.  It doesn’t have to worry about carefully preserving itself, and in some ways is actually more similar to your forces in that it can take a beating, regroup, and try again.
• Overall the style of the AI is less “try to wait until the player cannot possibly win before we attack at all” and is instead “harass them at various levels constantly, and exploit any openings that come up… while holding some forces in reserve for those decisive strikes that are so effective when timed well.”

Area 9: Massive Balance Work

This is the work of many people, mostly longtime players and/or modders who have turned volunteer.  ArnaudB, CRCGamer, and Zeus Almighty are the three largest direct contributors, but Strategic Sage had a lot of excellent advice, and Metretek kept pushing the boundaries of ultra-high-level play.  Among so many others!

Let’s try and hit some highlights:

• The balance of battlestations and citadels is all new, as befits their new status.
• The balance of turrets has been further refined, often with a lot of help from user Democracy (who designed a lot of the DLC1 turrets).
• Frigates are actually useful now!  Their balance work is still ongoing in some ways, but they have shifted from being a metal sink into being something you can main.
• The way you generate metal and energy has been dramatically updated, in terms of which mix of command stations you should employ.
• Randomized ship line amounts are gone, so each line you get now has a specific hand-designed meaning.
• Forcefields and frigates and other small-cap units like that usually do not gain cap anymore as they mark up; instead you start with more of them to begin with.
• Forcefields in general have had several balance overhauls, leading them to be less overpowered in average games but also still viable in Fallen Spire (and other mega unit) games, while scaling their tech cost to be more linear.  You also don’t have to worry about them getting knocked out of place anymore.
• Visibility from logistics stations and military stations is increased a lot, plus you can place a new unit called Spies as pickets.
• A ton of other factions got upgraded to be more useful, including the Marauders and Scourge.  This is to say nothing of mod factions, many of which were added outright or were majorly expanded.
• Alien ships that you can acquire via hacking are now a lot better deal and more exciting.
• You’re no longer quite drowning in turrets so much as you were before, and energy and such has all been rebalanced, as has their attack power.  You can very much defend yourself, but it’s much less of a hassle to do so.
• Brownouts now have a grace period and are harder to trigger, but last a bit longer when they do happen.

What’s Else Is New?

• I mean… it’s really a lot!  You’ll notice little things on almost every screen of the game.
• In a lot of cases, it’s simply more clear and more balanced, or easier to make what you want into reality.
• The Fallen Spire campaign from DLC1 now has a vastly more robust set of lore entries, many of which are adapted in from the beloved campaign in the original AI War.
• On Steam, there’s a new “beta” branch pointing to the last  pre-paraidgm-shift build.  (z_historical_2_715 Release 2.715 – The last version before the Major Paradigm Shift of Early 2021.)  So if you had a game in progress that you’d prefer to finish in the prior style, please feel free!

More to come soon!

Multiplayer Schedule?

Both shared-faction and multi-faction multiplayer are in public beta at the moment.  Details here.

Right now there are continual intermittent bugs that we are sorting out as reports of those come in, but most of them do not prevent folks from having a great session.  Some of these are in mods, and we are helping with support on that where we can within reason.

All of the features of all styles of multiplayer are here now, so it’s just a matter of ironing out the last bugs.  I also recently added a new Steam P2P networking support option, but Valve has been having some server issues and so we still retain the other Steam Connection-Oriented (Steam C-O) framework for folks who run into issues with that.

We were planning to dump Steam C-O in favor of Steam P2P, since P2P is better when it works, but given the ongoing issues Valve seems to have had with P2P for several months, we may keep both indefinitely.

Both GOG and LitenetLib continue to work well, and both have been upgraded to use multiple data channels like the Steam P2P mode is able to do.  This is a big advantage compared to Steam C-O in terms of connection throughput.

DLC2: Zenith Onslaught

Our first non-kickstarter-related expansion comes out in May of this year.  Probably.  We’ve had to push it back a number of times, partly because of this large Paradigm Shift (worth it!), and partly because this thing is so huge.  You can read all about it, at least in a limited preview format.  You can also watch me working on the art for it here on discord.  Sometimes I also do livestreams on youtube, which you can watch later if you miss them.

This expansion represents a large opportunity for us, since it will coincide with the game fully launching its multiplayer mode.  A lot of news outlets didn’t fully cover the original launch of AI War 2 because we released it in a crowded season and it came out with too little advance notice.  So we’re trying to turn that around with this expansion and hopefully get some more traction with a wider audience for the base game itself.  Part of why I was so intent on refining the base game so much was that I really wanted to make it easier for both new players and veterans to get the most out of it.

DLC3: The Neinzul Abyss

Our second piece of DLC for 2021 will hopefully come out before the end of the year, and you can read about that here.  The themes for this expansion, so far, are really focused on some roguelike options, as well as new ways to play.

On the roguelike front — which is all optional, but really fun for those who like the feeling of raw exploration — there are new random factions, plus all sorts of ways to turn any campaign into something you enter into fairly blind and discover as you go.

When it comes to new ways to play, there are TWO new player factions.  Normally you play as what we call a Human Empire, which is basically just “the human faction.”  But DLC3 adds:

• Our new take on the Champions faction from the first game, which includes ways to explore the 5th dimension and fight all sorts of new foes there.
• A surprising new Necromancer faction, which allows for a partner (or two or three) in multiplayer to take control of the zombies that are generated, as well as become a zombie-making machine in general.  Build necropolises, and so on.  For once the necromancer in a story isn’t the big bad… it’s you.
• Yet another surprising new mechanic, Vassals let you have a buddy-NPC faction that you give more direct orders to.  This is backwards compatible with the base game and other expansions, and it’s expected that many mods will likely also want to hook into this.

And this is before we get into the Neinzul faction that I’ll be designing, and which can be friend or foe.

Remaining Kickstarter Stuff?

No progress since my last update, but plans have crystalized some.  The actual work is all to be post-DLC2. I covered what is left back in update #65.

Interplanetary Weapons are something still coming for free to the base game (they were a stretch goal), and those should  be a thing this summer.  I keep putting this off because it’s hard to make them as epic as I’d like.  Our original stretch goal just described guns that can shoot neighboring planets, but… that doesn’t really affect how you play all that much.  My goal with these is to allow for new strategies both in offensive and defensive areas.  I have some solid ideas for a few designs that may work, but we’ll have to test them and make sure they are suitably awesome.

The backer planet naming will happen around the same time, as well as the ability to send some taunts back from the player at the AI.  As far as player taunts against the AI goes, Badger had the great idea that this should actually be a bit of a prestige thing, where it actually makes the game harder but then gives you special accolades at the end.  “I won the game on difficulty 8 with two taunts!”  etc.

We’ll probably do another batch of AI taunts as well, and the Cyber Cipher reward for mysterious messages will be something that we tackle during that DLC3 period.  Design and Name an AI is something that will be around the same time as the third DLC3, same as the Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff.  A lot of new lore stuff has been getting integrated lately, and we’ve been figuring out how to do that in a non-obtrusive way that still lets you get at pages and pages of context if you want it.  That’s an exciting thing, because the lore is deep and wide, but also not something we want in your face in a glaze-over-RPG-text fashion.

There are two lingering art-related backer rewards I still need to follow up on, but then that’s it.  I’ve been getting much more practiced at digital sculpting and painting, so I’m definitely excited to return to those two, as they were challenging ones.

What Happens After That?

That is enormously up in the air.

The release of this game started out going well, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game were a big help for folks passing by at the start.  2020 was a very rough year, financially, though.  The company’s 2020 income fell to less than half of what it was in 2019, and that was already one of our lower years in terms of income.

That level of income isn’t sustainable, even with me being a one-man shop now (volunteers aside), so it all comes down to what 2021 winds up looking like.  So far it is just more of 2020, but I’ve been putting so much effort into refining the base game for a reason.  And we do have those two new DLC planned for this year, along with the final multiplayer drop and so on.  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.

If the trend doesn’t turn around?  I will likely spend most of 2022 working on other smaller titles in a completely solo fashion, rather than continuing to work on AI War 2 in a fulltime capacity.  And after that, we’ll see.

AI War 1 was a game that I stepped away from after four years and three DLC expansions, but then we kept up support for it with periodic updates and yearly DLC for another few years after that.  That worked well, but that was when we were a four-person studio.  I’d like to do something similar here if I can, but a big part of this may wind up being partnering increasingly with modders, we’ll see.  The mod scene for AI War 2 remains vibrant, and I hope to see it grow.

This game is a financial loss for me on paper, but there was a lot of R&D work that will pay dividends to future titles, so I have to partially look at it as an investment in infrastructure.  But since Arcen is a one-person shop again, dividing my time between multiple projects will be an “interesting” exercise.  Anyhow, I mainly want to have this in a state I’m proud of, which I can now finally say is the case without any reservations.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we’d definitely like to hear about those.

Thank you!

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 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

We are now in a mix of multiplayer alpha and beta!  (Depends on how you play, some methods are feature-complete and others are not.) If you want the full info on multiplayer’s current status, the place to look at that  is here.

Badger’s Retirement

Okay, this would be a really really long digression, but I hope you take a moment to click over and read about the legacy of Badger and Puffin.  Both have retired from working on the game fully (although both still hang out and occasionally poke things in), and so I’m now the sole remaining active developer on the game.

With that being said, this is “news” as of a month and a half ago (for Badger — for Puffin, it was much earlier this year), and we’ve had 28 releases since Badger retired, so I do okay on my own.  This isn’t a cause for concern, but rather a moment to take stock of their achievements and celebrate them.

It’s also worth noting that Badger is still doing some remaining work here and there on DLC2, and he’s already decided to return and is working on content for DLC3.

New Main Menu

You might have noticed the new main menu if you’ve logged into the game in the last month:

If your computer fans turn on and your FPS is only like 30, please don’t freak out.  This is actually the (by a really large margin) most intensive scene in the entire game.  I get 90fps on it and in the game on my main dev machine, and a measly 30fps on my under-min-sys-requirements mac computer, but it’s usable on both.  Even my below-specs mac is getting like 60-90 fps in-game with ship models turned off.

The main menu might seem like a strange thing to revise, but it’s the first thing that you see when you load up the game.  We wanted something that felt more epic and exciting, and that had a darker and more appropriate thematic feel for the game.  Personally, I also wanted a view from inside a spaceship looking out, since usually we only ever see spaceships from the outside during actual gameplay.

I also majorly updated the ending scenes (both win and loss), so those are more epic now.

UI Overhaul, And Usability Galore

Okay, so for one thing I did a complete visual overhaul of what buttons look like, and backgrounds on all the UI bits, and things like that.  This no longer feels vaguely website-ish.  It feels like… well, like a hardcore strategy game with a lot of space themes.

But that’s not all we did.  There are new functions for doing searches for units or planets by name on the galaxy map.  There are a ton of new galaxy map filters that show more information of various sorts.  You can easily see where threat is, or the hunter or warden, etc.  You can edit planet names, set priorities per planet like the first game (but with more options), add narrative notes to planets, and more.

You can also ping planets or locations on planets, and you can ping with multiple colors to help communicate meaning while you’re discussing on voice chat.  The notices up at the top of the screen now have backgrounds that indicate their severity/importance, and are automatically sorted by that.

There’s also a new fleet status window that Badger added despite being retired (he actually did a ton of QoL stuff in the last month, since he was actually starting to play both on his own as well as with his family and friends and thus noticing more things).  The fleet status window is particularly helpful for keeping an eye on what is going on in your empire, or in all the empires of players in multiplayer.

…but it’s been 66 days.  Come on, we’re just getting started.

AI Improvements

• The AI Hunter has gotten more intelligent multiple times over, and fireteams in general have gotten smarter.  You have pre-retirement Badger to thank for these.
• Deepstriking (the AI Reserves) got a number of AI updates from Badger right before he retired.
• The way that AI Sentinels handle their reinforcement budget was completely overhauled by me, making them much more threatening and interesting.
• The way that AIs use turrets has also been redone, so that they really don’t use remotely so many as before.  They really should be putting their resources into things that can strike you offensively, so the planets with a bunch of turrets are now far more rare.
• Turrets have actually been rebalanced fairly substantially, largely thanks to post-retirement Puffin, who was still collecting ideas from the community and implementing them along with his own thoughts.
• We made a number of changes to how strength values are calculated, to more accurately represent how dangerous ships actually are.  This makes it easier for you to make good decisions, but also plays directly into the intelligence of the AI and other NPC factions.
• There were a number of cases where the AI Sentinels would hold onto threatfleet ships (which are not very smart) for too long rather than giving them over to the Hunters.  We looked at that and I decided to just brute force them into giving their ships to the Hunters if they can’t get whatever they think they are doing done in 3 minutes.
• Thanks yet again to post-retirement Badger, various factions including the nanocaust and marauders are able to invade your galaxy in a delayed fashion, which is pretty cool.  Rather than having them there from moment one, they show up a while into the game.

More Mods!

• Another new included-by-default mod is now in place: Civilian Industries, by StarKelp.  This is turning out to be a really popular mod, which involves a lot of defensive and economic buddies hanging around.  Strategic Sage has been doing a video series with the Civilian Industries helping him against the Scourge from DLC1.
• NR SirLimbo has been adding a prolific number of mods, as well as several frameworks for modding.  His Extended Ship Variants (for the base game and for DLC1) have become really standard fare for a lot of players, and his Kaizer’s Marauders are a vastly more complex and dangerous interpretation of the base game Marauders.  At the moment he is working on a new and evolutionary style of Devourer, but that is currently still in earlier testing and not yet included for everyone in the main game.
• I did an enormous overhaul of our XML Parsing capabilities, upgrading it so that the data is parsed faster, and also more correctly.  This fixed up a number of blocking issues that were preventing certain mods from being possible, and consequently we saw a huge uptick in new mods right after that.
• Oh man, the mods from NR SirLimbo kept coming!  There’s a micro mods collection in there now, too.  He’s been absolutely prolifically busy on several fronts.  It’s hard to understate just how involved his Kaizer’s Marauders are, in particular.  And his AMU tool is there to support any modders who want to use it, making it easier to make complex mods like his.

Multiplayer Bits

• Multiplayer itself has seen a ton of improvements at a technical level and otherwise, it probably goes without saying.  But this has been the major focus of mine during this period, despite the detour into quality of life improvements.
• Multiplayer went through a number of changes at a technical level as I experimented with how to get the smoothest experience in terms of sync, while at the same time keeping things moving.  The end result was not what I had planned on, but is instead something that relies on data I collected in real world use cases.  It works ridiculously well.
• The ability to swap ship lines between players was added by NR SirLimbo, which was really kind of him and saved me having to do it.  He also made that interface a bit less overwhelming in general even in single player.
• I added in the ability to finally share control of a single faction, and that’s the mode that is just now going into beta (aka feature-completeness).  The multi-faction mode will hopefully join it in beta status in the next week or two at most.

Other Visual And QoL Improvements

• I redid all of the visuals for area of effect attacks, most notably tesla attacks.  It looks SO much cooler now.  The old version was okay, but not nearly as varied.  And when I upgraded the lighting pipeline during the runup to DLC1 late last year, the AOE visual effects actually wound up taking a step down in visual quality.
• I added a new Stationary Flagship Mode, which I had expected to be popular but actually was almost universally hated.  But it is still something that you can enable if it solves a gameplay problem you have.  A few people were enjoying it, so that’s a win in my book.  But it’s no longer on by default for everyone.
• The way that galaxy map links are drawn has been updated to be a gradient of the two colors of the owners between those planets, which was a cool addition of post-retirement Badger.
• For a long while, we’ve had some trouble with trying to use one button for toggling on or off modes like pursuit and attack move and so on, and so I split those into two functions where you can clearly tell it if you are turning them on or off.  This solves a lot of intermittent frustrations people were having.
• Post-retirement Badger added a whole host of other quality of life improvements.
• Post-retirement Puffin added about thirty-six new space backgrounds of various sorts, for use in-game and on the galaxy maps.  These were mostly created using the shader tool I set up a few years ago, but the results are the result of a lot of artistic work and experimentation on his part.  They really spruce up the variety in the game, and in particular make the galaxy maps look nicer.
• I also spent a goodly while making it so that we are now able to include arbitrary sprites in text.  This involved further customizing our version of TextMeshPro, which now has a number of unique features for us.  This paired well with our overhaul of the icons for various resources, and in the future we’ll do things like embedding ship icons in tooltips.
• The visuals for shots themselves are now a lot more appropriately-scaled for various zoom levels, so battles look nicer.
• There are also now battle indicators on the galaxy map, making it more obvious where there are fights happening in your territory without it becoming a circus.

What’s Else Is New?

• Astro Trains got a buff to make them more interesting.
• Post-retirement Badger also added a variety of roguelike options for not revealing things about what the galaxy you are entering entails, which is a cool feature.
• A bunch of performance improvements in text generation, and UI updates in general, have been made.  SirLimbo and I wound up going down a giant rabbit hole on the text generation in particular, but it makes it so that really length text narratives and dynamically-generated lists of ship tooltips no longer suck the performance out of your game.
• Error handling is also vastly more robust in the game, and when errors happen you now get much more information about what is happening and especially if there are a bunch of silent errors hammering your log.
• Ever thought that “snipers and drones are useless, because they just aggro entire enemy planets and get me killed?”  Well, they now have a new aggro invisibility ability, which solves that problem and lets them remain useful without being unfair or annoying.
• For our linux players, we’ve added a variety of tools to get around the unity bug with mousewheel scroll being backwards, so that is one annoyance off the list.
• The number of bugfixes and general balance tweaks are too staggering to recount, but it’s a lot.

More to come soon!

Multiplayer Schedule?

There are two ways of playing: a shared faction, which is now in beta and thus basically complete aside from bugfixing; and multiple faction, which still has some known issues and missing features and thus remains in alpha.

I expect to sort out the remaining known issues, while fielding ongoing bug reports, over the next 1-2 weeks at the most.  At that point, multiplayer is effectively finished aside from just giving it time to collect any more bug reports people come up with.

One thing I should point out is that this is an insanely complicated game from a technical standpoint, and so the more testers the better.  The game might be working perfectly for most people in most situations, and then you come along with your friends and run into something catastrophic and wonder how anyone could possibly play this.

Send me your bug reports, and I can generally have that stuff knocked out in a couple of days.  But without your bug reports, if other people aren’t running into it, I’ll never know it’s there.

DLC2: Zenith Onslaught

Our first non-kickstarter-related expansion comes out in early 2021.  Maybe January, or potentially February.  You can read all about it, at least in a limited preview format.  We’ve had a number of testers banging on this for months now, and the detailed unit design and art to go with it are the last pieces we’ll be putting together.

This expansion represents a large opportunity for us, since it will coincide with the game fully launching its multiplayer mode.  A lot of news outlets didn’t fully cover the original launch of AI War 2 because we released it in a crowded season and it came out with too little advance notice.  So we’re trying to turn that around with this expansion and hopefully get some more traction with a wider audience for the base game itself.

DLC3: The Neinzul Abyss

Our second piece of DLC for 2021 will hopefully come out more around the middle of the year, and you can read about that here.  It’s something that came into existence largely because Badger kept adding too many things to DLC2.  DLC2 was either going to be massively expensive, or any other DLC we ever did was going to look paltry and small by comparison.

We made the sensible decision to split these out into two products that we can thus offer at better prices — and also take extra time to do cool extra things for DLC3.  I’m looking forward to getting to fully design my first faction, versus just collaborating on factions with others or doing the art and technical support for them.

Remaining Kickstarter Stuff?

There’s a diminishing number of things.  I covered a lot of it back in update #65.  Interplanetary Weapons are something still coming for free to the base game (they were a stretch goal), and I’ll be working on those while I work on DLC3.  The backer planet naming will happen around the same time, as well as the ability to send some taunts back from the player at the AI.

We’ll probably do another batch of AI taunts as well, and the Cyber Cipher reward for mysterious messages will be something that we tackle during that DLC3 period.  Design and Name an AI is something that will be around the same time as the third DLC3, same as the Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff.  There are two lingering art-related backer rewards I still need to follow up on, but then that’s it.

What Happens After That?

That really depends.

The release of this game started out going well, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game were a big help for folks passing by at the start.  2020 has been a rough year, though, when we really look at the data.  The company’s income has fallen to less than half of what it was in 2019, and that was already one of our lower years in terms of income.

We do have those two new DLC planned for 2021, along with the giant multiplayer updates and so on that are free, so hopefully that trend will turn around.  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.

If the trend doesn’t turn around?  I don’t know, exactly.  The structure of modern online stores may ultimately wind up forcing our hand.  I’d probably have to either choose between working on an entirely new project unrelated to AI War 2, or start working on a sequel instead of more expansion.  Both prospects have a lot of downsides, but they also have some substantial upsides.

Right now I don’t feel super inclined to leave the AI War franchise after all this work and developing this giant engine, so I’m more inclined to stick to something closer to home than try to reinvent the wheel.  If you look at the evolution of AI War 2 since launch, the current build you’re able to play is already practically AI War 3.  It looks better, plays better, has better AI, has more content, and is much more technically advanced.

Right now the frustration is that more or less we’re doing most of that work for free (personally I have still lost about $240k in making AI War 2, versus earning any actual money, if you look at my spent money versus earned), and it’s hard to get press attention for a “year old game.”  Since we started this project, more than half a console generation has come and gone, sheesh!  I have no shortage of ideas, but I don’t want to work for someone else and right now the open market is feeling fairly indifferent.

I have a lot of hope for 2021, though.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we’d definitely like to hear about those.

Thank you!

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 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

Base Game Updates

Put most simply, we’ve had 47 patches to the base game since 1.01, which is about one every 3 days.  There have been a few of those that were just little hotfixes, and some were on the beta branch temporarily, but most of these were quite substantive.

The largest of these was v1.3, The Grand New AI, on January 10th, which we called “almost a sequel in terms of how much it adds.”  That’s a huge read on its own, so I won’t recap it here, but suffice it to say it added a ton of content and a complex new intelligence to the AI.  Some of that (like the awesome fire teams mechanic) was us backporting work from this new expansion to the base game.  Other bits were just us updating the base game.

I’m actually struggling a little bit on how to even describe what has been happening in the base game, because there’s no singular improvement.  It’s just been relentless evolution and refinement on basically every front.  We’ve had a lot of really involved testers, and some of the first large-scale mods (Civilian Industries, Galactic Conquest, and others), and a number of those modders have also been contributing code or ideas to the main game itself.

We also continue to have a healthy number of volunteers who pop in and out and make various additions.  Things I really wanted, but which kept sliding down my own todo list, like the ability to load a quick start or savegame into the lobby for further customization. Dominus Arbitrationis and StarKelp have been the two most active on that sort of front. Heck, StarKelp has kind of adopted the Macrophage faction from the base game and has been adding cool new features to them.

Anyway, the release history is long, and public, and has a lot of detailed writeups already.  Suffice it to say, things have been VERY active.

Expansion 1: The Spire Rises

The base game was already huge, and something that we considered to be on par with AI War Classic and maybe… two of its six expansions?  Something along those lines, although it’s apples to oranges since the content in AI War 2 tends to be so much more versatile and involved.

I’ll skip summarizing what is in this new expansion and just let you read about that on its own page, so instead I can speak a little more broadly here.

The very short version is that we now consider AI War 2 plus this expansion to give parity to be equivalent to AIWC and four out of its six expansions.  Wowzers.

AI Goes Up To 11

The Scourge are a faction born out of the desire to fulfill the Nemesis kickstarter stretch goal in a more… entertaining and robust fashion. That’s just how Badger, the mastermind behind this race, is.  The original concept was one large ship that harasses you mercilessly; that’s still here, but instead we also get a faction of multi-racial slaved warriors doing even more involved and interesting stuff.

Being able to set the scourge as your ally is one of the things that amuses me the most.  Just last night, StarKelp was playing in that fashion and watching the AI Hunters duke it out with human-allied scourge.  The result was a galaxy mostly swept clean by the scourge, and then an amusing of AI-on-AI tag in the ruined wasteland as the hunter fled around the galaxy, fighting as needed, and the scourge split up and chased them, occasionally seeming to have a small group pause and catch their breath on the safety of his home planet.  The fact that things like this can exist inside the game… that makes me really happy.

The really key testers for the Scourge were zeusalmighty, Astillious, Ethan “DEMOCRACY” Wong, and Ovalcircle.

Going Into All-Out War

The Fallen Spire, the other big faction in this expansion, were again to satisfy a kickstarter stretch goal, but in a more-fun way.  We didn’t get as much into the scripted-campaign territory (that’s just not personally as high on my list), but we did build out the citybuilding to a ludicrous degree.  And we then built out the AI forces to a ludicrous degree, giving them the ability to pull back in Extragalactic War units from “whatever it is they are fighting outside the galaxy.”  Those two big expansions of the content for this faction are just how I think about things.

We’ve been really fortunate to have some huge-fan Fallen Spire players from the first game, such as Matt “Vinco” Taylor, show up to test things and let us know where we were failing in this expansion.  Things like the relics having a stronger response or phasing in and out of reality came about because of him, and so much of the citybuilding balance and the effectiveness of the Imperial Spire in the alternative victory condition were thanks to feedback from Ethan “DEMOCRACY” Wong.

Looking To The Future

There’s more that we could do with the fallen spire, and we do plan on that, but it’s already a really solid and huge thing that is a fun new way to play the game.  The amount of core content that we wound up adding was far above what we initially planned, so certain things like journals or multiple loadouts were pushed until later because there are just only so many hours in a day.

The nice thing is that some of those features can double as work for expansion 2, so as we enhance things we’ll continue backporting not just to the base game, but also the first expansion. For now it’s kind of a matter of balancing that against my goal to finally get multiplayer going fully.

The Sheer Volume Of Turrets

Soooo… this was not really planned at all, but is one of these things that we added in because somebody (Ethan “DEMOCRACY” Wong in this case) had a great idea and we wanted to do it.  He basically observed that in the base game, there are not all that many turrets, and they are not spread evenly among all the technology lines (because how could they be).

Looking at the base game, I see there were 11 combat turrets, plus orbital mass driver and ion cannons as major combat turrets. Then we had a further 2 non-combat turrets in the form of  tractor and tachyon turrets.  And that was it.  Out of the 11 combat turrets, one of those was also curiously larger and scarier than the rest, with a higher cost and much lower unit count.

Democracy thus made a big ol’ table for each tech, with columns for regular combat turrets in each row, and then one larger-than-average turret in each  row.  Working with Puffin, and then getting some assists in new code from Dominus and Badger and myself, plus a whole heck of a lot of new art on my end, and we wind up with THIRTY freaking new combat turrets in this expansion.  It’s madness.  They’re so much fun and so varied, too!  The first game never had anything like these.

Game Mechanics For All

We wound up adding new game mechanics to support the scourge, the spire, the turrets, and the new arks — yes, there are five new arks as well in this expansion. In a lot of games, you’d see that sort of stuff gated off if you don’t buy every last expansion, and so if you’re a modder you have to think about what expansions the player does and does not have if you want to allow them to fully use your mod.

I’m not a fan of that.  We build all the new mechanics into the base game so that any mod can use any mechanic, and the modder never has to worry about what expansions you have unless they are explicitly setting out to mod expansion content.  This keeps things going along really well, mods-wise, and lets you consider our expansions on their own merits individually without having to wonder if they block you from getting some mods you want.

The Sheer Volume Of Art

Oh, yeah.  One of the things that we recently did for the base game was massively upgrade the lighting, and add a lot more pleasing detail onto many ships.  That required me to go through and touch basically every ship and structure in the base game, which was a great result but super time consuming.

We also added some VERY large new ships for the Extragalactic War feature, which is something I wanted to be in the base game so that any expansion or mod can trigger those guys.  Right now mainly only the Fallen Spire trigger it, but it shouldn’t be a feature that is limited to them in the long term.

After all was said and done, the art asset bundles for the base game are about 1 GB.

Looking to the first expansion, then, the total amount of art wound up being… 714 MB.  That’s absolutely insane, but shows just how large some of these factions are, not to mention all the turrets.

Hey, Multiplayer!

We haven’t forgotten about that!  In fact, we’ve been coding in preparation for it from day one, and have continued to make some revisions to things to make things easier to implement there.  Balancing things out with such a small workforce has been hard, but now the turn for this aspect of the game has come.

To make things as easy on players as possible, the plan is to try to use three different transport layers to allow for playing multiplayer in any of three fashions.

Firstly, we’ll have some general basic networking based on Forge Remastered.  There’s some light NAT punchthrough in there, which is a big feature that we said we wanted for this game, but it’s only going to work but so well.  You ultimately need relay servers and such, and that’s expensive to set up and maintain-forever.  But this would be the absolutely-no-DRM-or-service way to play multiplayer, and probably the ideal way to play via LAN.  So here we are with this.

Secondly, we’ll implement Steam networking as another transport layer.  The game code is all the same either way, but then the code and networks that is transmitting the data of the game is different in these cases.  This should be the most seamless experience for Steam players who want to play via the internet.  Steam has relay servers, NAT punchthrough, and a bunch of other things that a small group of people can’t hope to match.  So we’ll just use theirs! But locking you into this wouldn’t be cool, hence other options.

Thirdly, we’re going to implement GOG networking as the last transport layer.  This one works very similar to Steam’s, has all the same cool functionality for bypassing firewalls without a hassle to you, and even has some inter-connectivity to Steam players.  The only real downside in the short term is that it doesn’t have Linux support (since the GOG Galaxy client doesn’t support Linux yet).  When they have it, we’ll add it.

None of this means we’re going to have matchmaking, because for games that last a long time that just doesn’t make any sense.  But for connecting with your friends via your platform of choice, this should make it so that you can just connect and play.  During the next few months I’m definitely going to be wanting to have a variety of testers to help us iron out the bugs and find network load bottlenecks, etc, before we move towards calling this “true multiplayer support.”

Beyond Multiplayer and DLC 2

Badger and Puffin and I have some things that we’d like to do for a DLC 3, and there are always new ideas coming up in general.  This project has been in work since 2016, and we could probably spend another four years on it and still never run out of ideas we want to work on.

What happens long-term is still… something that remains to be seen.  When multiplayer and the other base game features come out around the same time, that will finally discharge the last of the kickstarter obligations.

What happens after those obligations are finally met is… up to the market, really.  At the moment, AI War 2 doesn’t fully pay the bills, and it never has.  It is close to doing so, and our hope is that with expansions and related promos and so on it will start doing so.  In the current climate on Steam, back catalog sales drop by roughly half basically every year, which was income we used to rely on.

I still feel cautiously optimistic despite having to take on debt to cover half of my expenses last month (and having had to take on debt to a greater or lesser degree for 33 out of the last 36 months), but I figured it was worth noting.  Everything we’ve been accomplishing lately has been on a shoestring, despite such a successful 1.0 launch.

That sounds glum, but I’d rather give you an honest appraisal than potentially have some surprise after we get into summer if things are still on a downward-trending or flat trajectory.  We’re hoping that paid DLC and the free multiplayer update will reverse or at least delay that trend.  There’s more that we want to do beyond the “minimum required to finish this  up.”

The Very Short Term Future

The Scourge are very battle-tested at this point, but we’re sure that with a large influx of new players we’ll find more things to fix or improve.

The Fallen Spire also feel quite polished at this point, but it’s hard to know if it’s balanced well for all difficulty levels.  So we’ll probably have a lot of tweaks regarding that.  Our testers were all pretty skilled.

There are things we’d still like to add to the Fallen Spire, and we’ll probably do that while also getting started on the beta version of multiplayer. But for now we’re going to stop working all the nights and weekends.  We can get plenty of done without that, now that we’re past this initial milestone.  Badger is already digging well into DLC 2, to make things easier on himself schedule-wise later.  So the hope is for us to not really hit a crunch period again like we’ve had the last month.

One of the shortest-term things is that we want some more varied and descriptive icons for some of the new turrets and ships, and so that will be coming out later today.  There just wasn’t time, we were all falling asleep in our chairs.

Lots more good stuff to come soon!  We’re really proud of what has been accomplished in the last few months, and we hope that you get a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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!

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 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

(Store links: Steam, Humble, GOG)

When we first set out to make this game three years ago, it was far less ambitious. Even that was going to be really hard. Somehow, in the process of falling down the stairs over and over again during this period, we wound up with a game that seems to be superior to the original.

This game shouldn’t exist, but it does, and I’m both proud and stunned.

The intro to this post runs the risk of sounding like I’m tooting my own horn, but it’s not actually about me. I’m not capable of making — even just designing — this game on my own. I don’t think anyone is, really.

The fact that this game exists isn’t a testament to me having some brilliant insight or a singular vision that I doggedly pursued. The reviews of the game are lovely, but give me entirely too much personal credit.

The state of this game is thanks to dozens of people critically thinking about this game — what this one and the original means to them and to others — and then a process of relentless, continuous, arduous iteration and improvement.

This section is long, and in some ways tangential, but if you read it you’ll understand why I’ve put it here so prominently. You have this guy to thank as much as me or Keith for this game existing.

Badger has been involved since the kickstarter, with questions and comments and key insights. For a lot of the first year, he was responsible for something like 80% of the bug reports and feature ideas on our idea tracker. When a lot of other people were just bouncing off the game and waiting around for Keith LaMothe and I to figure things out on our own — understandable, really — Badger was there providing really key insight and ideas.

But that was barely the start for him. After a while I was essentially like “so, do you just want source code access, given how much you’re doing here?” Because he had started doing some mods — nanocaust and macrophage, at the time, IIRC — and it was clear he would be less hand-tied if he had more access.

What happened next was essentially us getting a developer — volunteer, no less — who contributed as much to the design of the game as I did, in my opinion. Not only did he single-handedly conceive of and implement the nanocaust and macrophage, but he also did the dark spire and marauder impelementations, among many, many other things.

Some of the most brilliant and devious things that the AI has in this game compared to the first one? Badger. Some of your favorite UI detail screens, like metal flows? Badger.

Not to mention all the bugfixes, balance tweaks, and… just oodles more. This game wouldn’t exist in anything like the state it does now without Badger. Any credit for my “singular vision” on the game is doing him a major disservice, but he’s a quiet sort of guy when it comes to taking credit, so I wanted to take this chance to call him out in particular.

So, Badger is not remotely the only person I need to call out as being absolutely indispensable.

RocketAssistedPuffin has also been involved heavily for the last year plus, and has taken over huge numbers of things that I never would have had time for. After I implemented the new tech system one way, he’s the one who figured out how to make it substantially more balanced. Most of the voluminous “balance change” sections on the release notes are from him working with other players or just reasoning things out himself.

Puffin has also had a ton of ideas on how to make things better in all sorts of sections of the game, and there was a period of about three months late last year where he and Badger were basically doing ALL the development on the game and I just pushed out releases of what they were doing. I was going through a really painful divorce and had a ton of anxiety and couldn’t face work, and these two kept things alive and improving.

But it never stopped there. Those new tutorials you like? Puffin. I wrote the bulk of the “How To Play” in-game wiki sections, but the most basic and understandable ones for new players were… again, Puffin. I’m excellent at writing encyclopedic entries that fill you in on huge numbers of details, but he’s the one who distilled “what’s the most central stuff you need to know, as briefly as possible” so that people can actually get into the game in any reasonable timeframe. Compare his work here to the tutorials I did in the original game, and it’s night and day.

And I’m still selling Puffin short, frankly, because he’s done so many things over such a long period that I can’t remember it all now.

More recently, we’ve had folks like WeaponMaster and Asteroid joining in and adding lots of bugfixes and quality of life improvements that I never would have had the time to do myself. Things like hovering over galaxy map links to see information on them were Asteroid. Endless tricky bugfixes were WeaponMaster. I’m selling them both short, but the release notes are filled with things that they either implemented or suggested or both.

And it doesn’t stop there. Quinn stepped in an made a bunch of additions. Keith laid the original groundwork for the entire game simulation and multithreading (he was the main programmer and designer for the first year and a half, and actually on staff during that time).

And there were so, so many others. And more each month!

I’m pretty free with the source code access, because I’d rather have a consolidated community of people helping rather than a bunch of mods that you have to hunt down and find.

So a lot of the folks that have turned into volunteers are what would have been modders on most other games. They would have made their own thing that you had to install and then wonder about the cross-compatibility of.

This game does have a ton of moddability, and for anyone who wants to “just” be a modder, that’s absolutely fine with me. But for a lot of the mods that are getting the most love, I’m happy to share source code access with those folks so that they’re in no way hobbled, and so that their work can go out as additional content that every player can find via in-game options without having to hunt through Steam Workshop or whatever else.

It’s an unorthodox approach, but a lot more team-oriented and lets us do quality control on each others’ stuff, “mods” included, which is a big win. If someone wants to steal the source code for this game, they can just decompile it like any other game for the most part. I’d rather put my trust in people and see things flourish rather than retain a stranglehold out of fear or pride.

All of this help from others let me focus on some of the really tricky architectural and design problems, which led to things like us even being able to HAVE a simulation of this size, and to have it perform as smoothly as it does.

I got to build lots of mechanics that other people then actually turned into specific units. It also gave me time to focus on some really nagging problems that just made the early versions of the game… unpleasant.

If I hadn’t had the time to think and talk to people about all those things, we never would have seen all the game evolve this way; I would have been mired in content development and other items just to get the basics out for the game.

The original design for this was something that Keith and I put together as a pair, but it only worked out so well. It was a good foundation, but needed… a lot of help. We both pushed that forward a lot, until the money situation got to the point where he (and all the other staff, eventually) had to step away, and I carried on “alone” (but with all those volunteers).

There came a couple of major turning points where I was reflecting on why I was so unhappy with this game as it existed, and listening to the various gripes that playtesters had, and then I was able to spend a month or three implementing something drastically new.

Fleets are the most notable of those, and they were initially met with a lot of mixed feelings and distaste because only part of my idea was there on the first public launch of those. Only in the last month or so has that feature completely come into its own, and that also had a lot to do with continuous feedback from people in early access telling me what they needed and what they did and didn’t like.

We also had a number of points during development where we just couldn’t escape certain performance problems, because there were suddenly battles that were an order of magnitude larger than the first game (which was itself the largest strategy game simulation of individual units that I’m aware of on the market until this sequel). So I got to focus on a whole bunch of crazy improvements and data structure inventions and even GPU shader tricks in order to make all this stuff work.

Without the rest of the community helping, there’s no way I could have had time to work on all that sort of thing, even in three years of development. A game of this scope shouldn’t run this well — it shouldn’t be possible — but it is because I was given the gift of time by so many others.

It has been 10 years to the day since the first AI War came to Steam, and it’s been 3 years of developing this sequel.

We didn’t do any work on any AI War games from late 2014 through late 2016, but the rest of that time has been spent at least partly working on the original game or this sequel.

From version 5.0 of the original game through version 8.0, Keith was pretty much the sole developer on that while I focused on other things. He built out a ton of creative and clever things that made a return in this game, and also pushed the concept of what the AI could be — adding in some traditional decision-tree style logic in places in addition to the more decentralized-style AI that I had come up with back in 2009. That one that originally made waves on slashdot and reddit and hackernews and so on.

I’ve worked as the producer and design lead on this sequel, among my many other roles, and so the fact that there seems to be a “singular vision” is hopefully a sign that I did a good job in that role. But the degree to which this is a product of dozens of people’s work, over an extremely long period of time, really can’t be understated.

That’s what I meant all the way back at the start. This sort of thing shouldn’t have happened. It’s just so… unlikely. A ton of people came together over a decade and helped make something unlike anything else on the market.

That’s before even getting into other major (former) staff contributors like Daniette “Blue” Shinkle doing the vast majority of the art and coming up with the way-prettier style of ship that evolved AFTER the kickstarter, the awesome score by Pablo Vega, and 25 voice actors who did a fantastic job as various humans and the AI.

And good grief, I’d be remiss not to mention Erik and Craig and all the other folks at Indie Bros, who helped manage so many aspects of this game, as well as often doing work like helping clean up voice lines, etc.

If you’re interested in what is coming in the very short term, there’s a post for that.

Similar if you want to know what the plan is for multiplayer.

For kickstarter backers (or anyone else who is curious), there’s an FAQ as well as roadmap of stuff for the next few quarters relating to kickstarter stretch goals.

And I just have to once-again plug this awesome After Action Report by zeusalmighty.

I never wanted to make this game, because I didn’t think I could. The original AI War seemed to be the high water mark of my career, and I spent a lot of time trying to make peace with that. But when the market shifted in 2015 and 2016 and finances started getting tight, it became clear that returning to the game that started it all was what made the most sense.

Thanks to all of the kickstarter backers for believing that we even COULD build this game. Keith and I felt like we could do something that would make you happy, but probably not something that would top the original. It took two extra years of development and an enormous village of people to make THAT a reality. So thanks to everyone for their patience and support during that time.

I also want to say a big thanks to everyone for their understanding during my divorce, which happened shortly after entering Early Access for this game. That made everything so much harder, and took me out of commission for a full three months or so where I just couldn’t work much. I had to learn how to be me again, and come to terms with being a dad with shared custody rather than a full-time father, and all of that was incredibly hard.

But the good news is that, as has happened with this game itself, a lot of things in my personal life have turned out unexpectedly, improbably well in the last year. After deciding to date again (after 18 years off the market, wow), I wound up meeting the woman who is now my fiancée surprisingly quickly (all things considered). Kara and her daughter have made my entire world so much richer than I realized it could be, and my son finally has the sister he’s wanted for so much of his life.

I feel incredibly fortunate, and a lot of my ability to get back to work and not crumble under the weight of anxiety and expectations for this game were thanks to Kara’s support and presence. The reality of her life as a doctor and surgeon also helps to kind of put my own work into perspective, sometimes, in the best way.

However this turns out financially, and despite my anxieties about my future as a game developer, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve all created together, and I feel surrounded by all the right people both at work and outside of work. This has been the hardest three year period of my life, but the end result has all been worth it.

Thanks to everyone, and I hope you enjoy the game — both what it is now, and what’s to come.

Very Best,
Chris

There is a new release that also just came out today, so things are getting back into gear production-wise, which is good.  That release is the cumulative work of the volunteers over the last month, they’ve been amazing.  Coming up this next week I will be able to actually get cracking on some creative work of my own, for the first time in basically a quarter.

Thanks again for your patience with me during this, everybody.  It really has meant a lot.

Took an extra day compared to what I was planning for this release, but there’s a ton in here!  First of all, there are a ton of balance improvements that Puffin has put together in order to diversify what gets a damage bonus against what.  There’s a lot of tuning in that area of the game in particular.

Quinn added in the ability not just to delete savegames, but also to delete campaigns, which is super welcome.  A few other tooltip improvements have been made to clarify a few things, and a few tutorial improvements, and a fix for that really irritating bug with the flickering sidebar.

Marauders are a lot more aggressive, cross planet waves are a lot more sneaky, astro trains are a lot less plentiful, brownouts are a lot more painful, and there’s now a cooldown on how quickly you can rebuild something that was just destroyed.  Thanks to Badger on huge amounts of that.

Outside of that, we’ve also done some new kickstarter-exclusive background art thanks to Cath, and then I’ve created new marketing headers for the game (finally!) as well as new Steam Trading Cards.  Here’s a sneak peek!

New header:

Compared to the old one:

And then here’s a sneak peek at the Steam Trading Cards (which won’t turn active until the game releases into Early Access on Monday):

And this is what the associated backgrounds look like:

And this is just for fun:

New Release Date?

Yep!  We’re now releasing on Monday, which is the 15th, instead of Thursday the 18th.  Why?  Rimworld announced their 1.0 will be on the 17th.  And we, uh… wanted to give them some personal space.   Big congrats to them, by the way.

Thanks for reading!  More to come soon.

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

This marks the first build of the game that is available to press to preview.  How nerve-wracking!  There’s still a lot we need to finish up in the next two weeks prior to Early Access when it comes to polish and bugfixing, but we have to actually let people see the game at SOME point.  I’m really pleased with how this particular build is feeling, though.  There are still known issues, but the fundamentals are really strong.

One of the cool new things in this build is the addition of quick starts, which folks have been asking for forever.  It basically provides a really handy way to get into the game without having to ever touch the lobby and all its complexity.  Which is doubly good right now, because the lobby is still a mess of temporary UI.  The quick starts will be hugely useful long after the lobby is polished, though, because they allow for easy choices of cool scenarios.

If you want to create a quick start option of your own (please feel free!), you can simply go through the following process:

• Create a game with the settings you want.
• Save it.
• Write up a little description about it, and put a name for it.
• Send it to us on the forums or mantis.

It’s very straightforward!

There are also a number of changes in this build to make things prettier and to fix a fair list of bugs.  More to come soon!

Oh right… we also have a new trailer!  Huge thanks to Pepisolo for going all-out on this one.  He really put in a ton of time, and it shows:

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