Hey there, I need some help to get started (again)

[Cydonia]

I bought the game some time ago when it was promoted on Steam. I got started, played it a bit, and then forgot about it.^^ I just had not much time to play. Now I want to get back into it and I had a look at the forum again. I guess I missed some things in the time I was absent, and I'd be happy if someone could help me out. I just have a few questions:

I noticed that there were updates. How do I get them? I purchased the game on steam and don't know how to do this because usually steam automatically updates the games. Will steam make any trouble?

What are the major changes in gameplay? How can I find out my version number to compare?

There is an expansion on its way. Will it be on steam? Do you advise me, to better not buy it on steam because of the updating trouble? If I purchase the expansion not on steam, how can I get this working with my base game on steam?

How can I get these prereleases working?


I had a quick look at the forum, and I didn't find much information on what differences it makes if you are using steam. Maybe I typed in the wrong search parameters. But I found a bit, and these few informations make me a bit afraid that steam is causing trouble. But the game isn't TOO expensive so if it really gets as difficult as I'm afraid of, I might just buy a non-steam copy.^^
But first, let me know what you think. Maybe the situation is not that bad

[x4000]

Hi there,

Glad you're getting back into the game.  Steam will automatically update your game when we do official releases, but right now we have not made any official releases since the game came out on Steam.  So you're on version 2.0, if you've got the Steam version.  When you load the game, you can see that in the upper left corner.

If you want to use the prereleases before those come out on Steam, that's no problem; you can simply follow the instructions in the prerelease thread without incident.

The expansion will be on Steam, but I'm not sure yet about preorders until later in the process; I'm still talking with Valve about that.  Right now the ball is actually in my court with something I need to look at from them (as of the last couple of days), but there's a lot going on at the moment.

But at any rate, the only thing you lose if you are using the prereleases with a Steam version is the Steamworks integration; it won't log your achievements or leaderboard entries to the steam servers, and the UI won't get out of the way if you bring up the steam chat ingame, etc.  If you want those features, at the moment you'll need to wait for official releases instead of using the prerelease versions, though that might change in the future.

Hope that helps!

[Cydonia]

Oh yeha, there it is. 2.0 

Thanks a lot for your help, seems like I didn't miss as much as I expected.

And thanks for your amazing support. You really invest a lot of time in you game and its forum. You reply to each and every request, and quite fast too. This migt be the fastest and most personnel user support ever

[x4000]

My pleasure!

[Spikey00]

There are far too many new features and updates to the game to list--I advise that you check the expansion yourself to see what's new in it.

Updating to the recent expansion is easy as copy and pasting into the game directory--and you can easily disable it too from the in-game settings menu (retaining base-game changes, too).


If you're looking for a game, feel free to head onto our IRC (#rtsnet => #aiwar).  Yes, Chris is always there.  C:

[Fiskbit]

Cydonia: In the event that you want to continue to playing v2.0 on Steam with its various features (online leaderboards and achievements, etc), but also want to try the newest prerelease, you can download the non-Steam version of the game and use the license key that you got on Steam to unlock that version. Then you can apply the prerelease to it and give it a whirl.

The current prerelease has a lot of changes, with a lot of them related to the expansion. You get a 3 hour trial of the expansion that lets you try out all the new ships and expansion-only features, but can disable it in the settings menu if you wish to play a standard game with the current prerelease additions (which include efficiency improvements under the hood, graphical improvements, bugfixes, and a new command queue system that lets you queue up any type of command by holding shift when issuing them, among other things).

I hope that helps. If you've further questions, feel free to ask them here or on IRC.


Spikey: Regarding IRC, Chris doesn't really venture in there because he doesn't have the time for it. Revenantus and I handle IRC happenings. Also, to be more clear, that's #aiwar on irc.rtsnet.org; #rtsnet is a separate channel on the same network. People connecting to the channel via their own clients need to have the full network address.

[Spikey00]

Whoops, I should have separated that line from the IRC (in opposed on the forums).

Oh, my mistake.  Haha, IRC has never been too simple!  I'll refer people to the webpage instead--thanks for the information.