AI War Beta 4.025 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/11/ai-war-beta-4025-released.html

This update fixes a few small things, among them perhaps the most hilarious bug we've yet had.  In the prior beta version, the Mark I scouts basically "went postal" and suddenly had guns.  About half the time they'd attack, giving themselves away and getting themselves quickly killed (while stirring up potentially massive numbers of AI ships that would then counterattack the player), while the other half of the time they'd, you know, actually do their real job and scout.

Unintended hilarity aside, this release also makes the Neinzul Clusters a lot less nasty (no more translocation shots), and makes the Raid Starships have a much more unique niche (armor piercing galore against regular fleet ships, which finally gives a mobile counter to armor ships in the default always-available ships -- previously only the fixed-position laser turrets were a good armor ship counter).  Oh, and we fixed a small possibly-it's-a-tiny-memory-leak bug that might have been related to the issues that some folks were having on OSX.  Fingers crossed there.

Seem like a small update?  Indeed, it is.  Most of our work has been going into some not-yet-revealed updates that will be coming out tomorrow for the first public beta release of the new Light of the Spire expansion.  We're not normally very secretive, but in this case we kind of have to be because we don't want to promise something that it turns out we can't deliver in our ultra-aggressive timeframe for that expansion (that sucker goes official in a month and needs to be packed to the gills with awesome stuff you want by then, on a scale equal to or greater than The Zenith Remnant, as well as stable).  Needless to say, we expect LotS to be a pretty epic expansion, but we have to play it carefully and not promise anything that turns out to be infeasible in the timeframe we have.  So stay tuned. :)

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 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 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

[Winter Born]

maybe there needs to be a temporary insanity Guardian that only affects scouts

[x4000]

[Vinraith]

Thanks for the quick fix! I'm sure we're all looking forward to the LotS stuff.

[x4000]

My pleasure.

And, so am I (looking forward to LotS)!  Keith and I are both working independently on separate major features for that one, and we both agree that either of what we're working on could pretty much justify a $10 expansion by itself.  Should be pretty epic if we can pull it all off the way we hope.

[DakaSha]

yaaaay back to playing

Once again as an aspiring game developer i admire the work here
(btw i think I'm gonna get my gf to buy tidalis xD )

[x4000]

Many thanks for the support!  Glad the scouts are doing better for folks.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

I am so excited… This is going to be epic.

 

[Echo35]

(that sucker goes official in a month and needs to be packed to the gills with awesome stuff you want by then, on a scale equal to or greater than The Zenith Remnant, as well as stable).

This only serves to confirm my theory when I first joined the forums that you are, in fact, an AI yourself and are only developing this game to test battle plans on how you're going to wipe us all out. No human could develop that much that fast

[Buttons840]

My pleasure.

And, so am I (looking forward to LotS)!  Keith and I are both working independently on separate major features for that one, and we both agree that either of what we're working on could pretty much justify a $10 expansion by itself.  Should be pretty epic if we can pull it all off the way we hope.

Should put up a poll where we can vote for either "separate major feature" as our favorite.  The creator of that feature will only be revealed after the voting has finished, so no bias.*

* Of course, there normally wouldn't be any bias, but we all know that AI War secretly phones home, and that Keith has a back door connection to every game in progress, and is the source of all waves - including those 800 mark IV bombers that showed up without warning.

[x4000]

The ONLY reason this is possible is because we're being super selective about what we put in.  If it's not awesome AND fast to implement, it doesn't go in.  TZR was developed with half the manpower in 3x the time, and included a lot of stuff that was cool, but not a good cool-to-time-consuming-to-implement ratio.  At the moment we have such an amazing volume of ideas and suggestions, from ourselves and from players, that we're able to be really selective and still have a huge amount of content.  It's pretty nice.

And, we're still open for new ship ideas as noted in that other thread, too.  We're actually aiming to have all the new features done within the next 2.5 weeks, and then the rest of that time before release would be balance/bugfixes.

[superking]

question:

I started a new game with latest version

30 odd minutes in, I destroyed the command station of an MK III world (difficulty 7.6, mad bomber)

this creates a 1000+ size wave of MK III ships that appears miles out at the bottom right of my homeworld system and proceeds to fly slowly in and floor me.

my AIP was 30, waves were MK I, and literally the only structure on the MK III world I hit was the command station.

what is happening here, exactly?

also: encountered a bug I havnt been able to reproduce where a counterattacking MK III artillery golem that entered my homeworld system for some reason ceased to have a reload time, and fired out and endless, insanely powerful volley of missles for about 2 minutes, then returned to normal

[Mánagarmr]

If you get a short warning wave after blowing up a command station that means that that particular system had a Counterwave Guardpost, that will spawn a wave at one of your planets that does not have a Warp Jammer. They will, as you say, appear in system to the lower right, instead of at any wormholes.

And ouch on the Arty golem >.< That definately sounds like it could hurt.

[Winter Born]

If you get a short warning wave after blowing up a command station that means that that particular system had a Counterwave Guardpost, that will spawn a wave at one of your planets that does not have a Warp Jammer. They will, as you say, appear in system to the lower right, instead of at any wormholes.

And ouch on the Arty golem >.< That definately sounds like it could hurt.

Thous counter wave at this point in time always spawn in the lower right area of the random target system.
Building your com station top left if it makes sense for a particular system helps along with engine killing units to spread them out or grav turrets under a FF to slow them down, etc.

I dont have a handle on the mechanic that determines the size of the counter wave yet to add to the AI-wiki

[Berzeger]

Hi, just a quick question - when is the "coloured square instead of a ship" bug going to be fixed?