AI War Beta 4.034 Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2010/11/ai-war-beta-4034-released.html

This release brings more bugfixes and balance goodies, as well as episode 6 of the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction campaign-within-a-campaign.  It's late and it's been a very long day, so for now I'll just refer you to the release notes above.  There's a lot of changes in this version, but they're all over the place in terms of what they alter, not really clustered on anything specific.

Starting tomorrow, we're going to be pushing through the last of the new ships for the Light of the Spire expansion.  "Last of the ships!?" I hear some folks exclaim.  "We were promised 100+ ships, and so far there's only been about 50 added."  Indeed.  My goal is to add about 130 new ships this week, which are all laid out and which the art for about 70% of are now done.  There's been a ton of art, design, and underlying-engine work to get it to this stage where now we can quickly implement the majority of the ships in a playable fashion in the next four days.

Then the next few weeks after this will be spent on balance, fixes, and polish rather than new content, which I know some folks are really looking forward to as much as the new content itself.  Exciting times, there's a lot of cool stuff -- a huge portion of it player-suggested as usual -- heading your way soon

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.

[TheMachineIsSentient]

Sounds good. About to try this in multiplayer.

[x4000]

Sweet, hope it goes well.

[Giegue]

ugh, you guys keep juggling the costs of starships back and forth...

[mavorspam]

I'm in the middle of a campaign with the Spire enabled, will this screw up my save?

[TheMachineIsSentient]

This is how it went...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqU6QhWLr-E

 
 

[unclean]

Not to be an ass here, but isn't this:

When a target ship gets into a transport or goes through a wormhole, shots that are incoming to that ship will now hit the the ship immediately. This prevents players or the AI from being able to use wormholes or transports to fire pot-shots and then disappear.

...just changing the rules to make up for a shortcoming of the AI? I know you're pressed for time on this expo, but it would be more impressive if the AI would actively counter those tactics instead, like warping in sniper guardians or building extra defenses near the wormhole.

[Winter Born]

Not to be an ass here, but isn't this:

When a target ship gets into a transport or goes through a wormhole, shots that are incoming to that ship will now hit the the ship immediately. This prevents players or the AI from being able to use wormholes or transports to fire pot-shots and then disappear.

...just changing the rules to make up for a shortcoming of the AI? I know you're pressed for time on this expo, but it would be more impressive if the AI would actively counter those tactics instead, like warping in sniper guardians or building extra defenses near the wormhole.

This is actually a long standing issue not related to the LotS expansion. It is basically a counter to the AI dancing in and out of a wormhole (a problem for people), and a common human player exploit used against the AI.

You want to warp in sniper guardians and I bring a scout starship to counter your snipers. Net result: I still get to fire and disappear w/o damage. Countering player exploits is not easy (close one, door open another) Transports are a great example of a unit that has been altered at least 6 times this year trying to reduce player exploits w/o removing the unit or making it useless.

Just like there are only so many CPU cycles per second to run the game, the 2 developers have only so much time for any particular issue. Sometimes the elegant solution like you are suggesting would consume so many resources the company would fail to do many other things and it turns out to be easily countered. I for one, am always looking for the advantage in the game, and some of my ass is probably showing in this post. 

[Ozymandiaz]

Awesomeness.

[x4000]

Winter Born pretty much said it. And, I should note, it's common practice for us to change the game to suitthe ai, as much as it is for us to suit the players. Games that are not created with the ai in mind are why you wind up with sprawling ai systems that still suck in most rts games. Because the game was designed for the pvp humans, not for ai players. There are some things ai simply isn't good at. If you look in the articles section of the news blog, way back to last year, you'll see a whole series of articles on the nontraditional approach I took to ai, and why it works so well. You can't separate the game design from the aindesign at present for a strategy game, that's why so many games fail with their ai: the game designers are setting their ai programmers up for failure. What I did was the opposite.

But, also everything winter born said.

[Ozymandiaz]

Just tested some more on my dual AI 8 game whit the spire, its much better now! No insane waves every minute! Mind, the waves are still powerful, but the new spire craft offset this somewhat. All in all it seems balanced rather well so far, considering I am playing with AI 8's, so off to get the second city so the AI can kill me again!

Oh, and I really love the removal of the timers for the survey missions, makes it much easier to prepare, and I feel mentally less stressed

New spire craft weapons also now rock! (poor pun intended)

[x4000]

Awesome.

[Salamander]

You guys are certainly busy with this project! I logged in at break earlier to check my e-mail and saw a bunch of notes to some of my new unit ideas. If even only 1 makes it it, I'll be pleased. I'm trying to suggest some variations from my old tabletop game I made but some of the ideas are already in the game or don't really add anything significantly different.

I haven't found any of the spire stuff beyond the minerals yet, but we don't have a lot of optional factions turned on in our 2-player game and are only on 5 AI difficulty until my friend gets more acclimated. I am certainly looking forward to these though.

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I note the AI Black Widow Golem is much tougher now - I had a hell of a time with one at a MK3 planet. However, the AI botnet golem on the next planet over is only 1.8 million HP, half what a player gets, which pretty much means it gets off 2-3 salvos before the bombers stomp its face in.  Or maybe even just gets one shotted by siege starships.

OTOH, an AI botnet golem has much more potential for being totally out of control on the defensive.. So I dunno.

ATM though, a botnet golem seems basically like a super zombie guardian in most respects. The MK IV zombie can instakill the vast majority of fleet ships anyway. I havent seen an actual MK V zombie guardian so i cant speak as to its power level.

[o1knives]

When a target ship gets into a transport or goes through a wormhole, shots that are incoming to that ship will now hit the the ship immediately. This prevents players or the AI from being able to use wormholes or transports to fire pot-shots and then disappear.

I know you all aren't looking at balance changes this week, but might it not be better to require ships to have a 10 sec "engine cool down?"  This makes it more annoying to raid, say,  system with two fortresses because, no matter where those two are in the system, all their shots WILL hit your ships.  So there really isn't as much of a point in, for instance, deciding to come through a different wormhole for a raid due to fortress position.  I also wonder if this won't make scouting WAY harder as scouts will not be able to outrun the multitude of ion canons that populate the AI galaxy.  Just some food for thought.