AI War Beta 5.052-5.057 "From The Shadows" Released!

[keith.lamothe]

This has one significant drawback - they can't rebuild their own shields so they are kind of one use right now.

Yea, I ran into that a ton in playtesting.  I kinda liked it because it made "shields down!" a fairly important event.  But it'd be nice if the shields would come back after, say, a minute or two.  In my case I just popped back across the wormhole to normal space and my waiting support engineers (a bit like a boxing match) but if you're deeper than that it could get kind of problematic for the usefulness of the shields.  On the other hand, the "regenerating health" nature of the shields (when you don't let them go completely down) is quite useful in staying in the fight.

It's quite tricky to play in first nebula you find with lvl 1 champion. I managed it but counted quite a few deaths before leveling champion up and getting better weapons

Yea, it's tricky to not die, those starbases hit like Mike Tyson riding on the front of a freight train

[Lancefighter]

Spent like 10 minutes messing around with it. Seems to be pretty solid so far. didn't really see obvious ways to levelup(well, i only had one level), and there was a minor graphical bug with the queue buttons showing up twice, that I should probably mantis.

I also feel like the champion ship should almost never end up being an icon, but thats more personal preference that doesnt really work when you can zoom out this far

[keith.lamothe]

I also feel like the champion ship should almost never end up being an icon, but thats more personal preference that doesnt really work when you can zoom out this far

Haha, yea, it'd have to be rather large to be visible from that distance.  Maybe for next expansion: Champion Moons

[Eternaly_Lost]

First thing I wished for when I played with the Champion is the ability to assign it to a squad key. I tried to make it number 6 on my keyboard but it refused to stick. Makes it rather annoying as I am far too used to just selecting squads to go right to them, even if it a single ship. I want a key that I can hit and assign as I play that brings it up. Not a lasting hot key like it has now, but like a normal assignment of a squad.

[Lancefighter]

I also feel like the champion ship should almost never end up being an icon, but thats more personal preference that doesnt really work when you can zoom out this far

Haha, yea, it'd have to be rather large to be visible from that distance.  Maybe for next expansion: Champion Moons

Thats no moon!

And if you dont actually *own* the unit, you cant put it in a control group

[keith.lamothe]

First thing I wished for when I played with the Champion is the ability to assign it to a squad key. I tried to make it number 6 on my keyboard but it refused to stick. Makes it rather annoying as I am far too used to just selecting squads to go right to them, even if it a single ship. I want a key that I can hit and assign as I play that brings it up. Not a lasting hot key like it has now, but like a normal assignment of a squad.

You could rebind "Galaxy-Wide Select Champion" to 6 (or whatever) instead of Ctrl+H, and unbind 6 from the normal squad selection command.

The reason it doesn't work with normal squad stuff is that squads can't include units from another player slot.  I could look at changing that specifically for hero units (there are good reasons it isn't possible with just-some-other-player's-normal-stuff) though not sure how well that would work out.

[keith.lamothe]

Thats no moon!

He took the bait!

[Lancefighter]

Speaking of bait.

Can you add a dyson gatling turret mod to the championship? Itd be really cool.

[Wingflier]

By the way, the Ancient Shadows banner on Arcen's front page is still linking to the AVWW purchase page.  Might want to change that

Yeah, I just had noticed that myself, too.  Thanks for the catch!

This isn't a mistake, it's a clever business strategy

[LaughingThesaurus]

I played around in trial mode, and found that I ended up devoting all of my focus to the champion. That's all fine and good, but the reason I did that was because switching between UIs was rather hard to do. Is it possible to add a hotkey for switching to different player UIs? I like to have my XP/health/shields visible.
Or, as an alternative, allow selecting a hero unit to switch you to that UI, if you are allowed to control that hero. Then, Ctrl+L back to your UI without a problem.
Even if all of this is impossible, I can at least get people into the game with the promise of "Well, you have the option now of controlling only one unit if you're worried about it being too complicated."

For the record, I'm sold. =D

...on a side note I found that attacking those starbases, you actually have to clear the units away to attack the starbases for you. Seems the starbase attack multipliers are exactly everything that champions are weak against. Makes me think of reverse-DotA.

[contingencyplan]

This looks awesome! I'll definitely be buying it after the semester's over and I have some time to play. As a question, will the expansion be available for preorder on Steam? I'm fine with buying directly if not or if y'all get more money, so long as I can tell Steam that I already have it (at least after release) - if I can avoid it, I'd rather not have to go through extra steps after telling Steam to install the game.

Update: 5.053 hotfix is now out, correcting a problem with loading a few textures on OSX and making it a bit clearer how you can add a champion player to the game (particularly in singleplayer).

Thanks for the feedback   If the lobby still doesn't make things clear, let us know, this just seemed better than more invasive (for us or you or both) changes that came to mind.

Indeed, much better.

Two suggestions:

1. The "Open (Can Add Champion)" is hugely confusing when you see it in the dropdown.  That only makes sense when it's seen as the selected item.  I'm not sure what to do about that, but it's an observation.

2. Adding tooltips to those dropdowns that are open or closed (and which don't have a player in them) could help explain some things here.  You're already doing it on the Role dropdown, after all.

As noted, I haven't bought AS yet, so I'll admit I'm posting blind. However, I'm curious as to the reasoning behind making champions take a separate player spot - was it the separate UI requirements, or balance, or limiting total stations and champions, or ...?


Offhand, I would think the easiest (for the player ) thing to do would have 3 options for the player: "Command" (or "Normal?" - command-station, like before), "Champion" (Champion only), and "Command + Champion" (combination of the two).


I honestly wouldn't expect everyone to automatically choose "Command + Champion," especially in multiplayer - handling the champion is obviously intended to be a "full-time job," just like managing the fleet, so trying to do both at once would likely be a major hassle. And as y'all balance how much the AI is upset at your new toy, it will be pushing things in the direction of "I'm going to actually have to make full use of this thing for it to be worth the trouble" (similar to the Botnet Golem ).


At least as far as spawning, I would expect that the combined option could be implemented by just firing the spawn code for both options and setting the Champion to the same player's control. I imagine the UI work would be more difficult, especially for the hotkey issue mentioned above + having different UI. Regardless, in both cases, y'all obviously know more about your code, and I'm sure I'm just echoing things y'all have already thought of.

[keith.lamothe]

I played around in trial mode, and found that I ended up devoting all of my focus to the champion. That's all fine and good, but the reason I did that was because switching between UIs was rather hard to do. Is it possible to add a hotkey for switching to different player UIs? I like to have my XP/health/shields visible.
Or, as an alternative, allow selecting a hero unit to switch you to that UI, if you are allowed to control that hero. Then, Ctrl+L back to your UI without a problem.

I could have Ctrl+H switch your UI, but you can also do Ctrl+H and then Ctrl+M to switch your UI to the hero (albeit you then have to close the module window).  It's just one of those tricky things where some people will want it one way, and some another   But given the ready access to Ctrl+L perhaps making Ctrl+H also switch your UI makes good sense.

Even if all of this is impossible, I can at least get people into the game with the promise of "Well, you have the option now of controlling only one unit if you're worried about it being too complicated."

Yea, one of my hopes for this is that people will have a much easier time doing "drop in, drop out" multiplayer, because a champion slot can be added for them mid-game or they can join as a helper-mode player and take over an existing champion.  And when everyone else drops back out the normal player can just control the champion directly without worrying about a whole separate empire, etc.

Of course, your friend might make your life difficult by stirring up a bunch of hornets' nests with their champion   "Whaddya mean you don't just respawn?"

...on a side note I found that attacking those starbases, you actually have to clear the units away to attack the starbases for you. Seems the starbase attack multipliers are exactly everything that champions are weak against. Makes me think of reverse-DotA.

Yea, particularly early on you don't want to try to solo those bases.  You'll last about 10 seconds going in with full shields.  Even later on you can't do anything like a stand-up fight with them but a Shadow Destroyer fitted with all missile modules (which have bonuses against the starbase's UltraHeavy hull type) could get in a relatively nasty alpha strike before having to run.  There's another module currently implemented that may be helpful for solo siege-ing too, but it's not available from the start.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Hmm, I kept throwing money at you guys, then I ran out. Is this a known bug with the money throwing gun?

[keith.lamothe]

As a question, will the expansion be available for preorder on Steam?

It's possible, but unlikely as they don't generally carry beta stuff.  They should also recognize keys bought from us but we can't guarantee it: if registers-on-steam is a 100% requirement for you then don't buy it until you can buy it direct from steam

However, I'm curious as to the reasoning behind making champions take a separate player spot - was it the separate UI requirements, or balance, or limiting total stations and champions, or ...?

Mainly it's what was possible with the underlying code architecture (tracking a bunch of extra data about a player is a lot easier than doing it about a ship, particularly when it comes to the tech unlocks, and various other issues) and what the UI supports.

handling the champion is obviously intended to be a "full-time job,"

Not really, you can just use it like a super-starship while you're in normal fleet-operations mode and go off on solo jaunts while you're waiting on refleets (that's actually one of the things I'm hoping to address with this: when you're refleeting you now have an alternative to Netflix! )

But yea, I thought about making it just another unit instead of another player, but I kept running into walls with that.

[Wingflier]

These "faction battles" on the "shadow planets" seem kind of grindy to me.  Do they get more difficult as the game goes on, or are you basically just resigned to keep your Champion there until the battle is slowly won over and over?