Is it possible to make AIWar Steam-free?

[vonduus]

Hi

A very busy friend of mine bought me AIWars on the Steam xmas sales and asked me to check out if this is what we need for our coop sessions, and this I have been doing since. The following is based on single player experience:

First the conclusion: This game is fantastic!!! I am definitely going to recommend it to anyone I know, and in a few days, when my friend gets the time, we are going to spend a lot of quality time killing aliens.

The tutorial is among the best I have been through ever, the intermediate tutorial really takes you by the hand and leads you through a viable strategy without confusing you too much with all the alternative strategies there are. Good work.

Then there is the game itself. I have been a strategy game grognard ever since the board gaming era, so in my first real game I made what I considered would be a decent challenge: random medium AI on level 7, realistic map. Well, after a few hours I got beaten up pretty badly - very pretty badly in fact. Being the person I am, this is exactly what fires me up:  I am gonna show that stupid AI that I can best it on this level, even if I shall spend the rest of my life doing so.

So I went on the internet to see if there was something I was missing, and ended up here. What a nice website: Nice serious people focused on the game, no trolling, wonderful. Most of the information I need is here, and in a few moments I will be starting up a new game trying to utilize what I have learned so far. But first I want to thank mister x for this wonderful game, I was amazed to discover that this great piece of software was developed parttime. I hope you get rich, you deserve it, at least I do hope that you can make this your main source of income.

But there is one thing that bothers me, though:

This game seems to be constantly upgraded, according to this website. Which is basically a good thing, no doubt about that, especially since x really listens to us end users and implements the best suggestions in the game. I see one problem though: My version is the Steam version, and I really don't like the Steam automatic update system. I have experienced with other games that they worked quite well in some version, then there was some update that spoiled the game, and then I could not revert to the old working version because of the Steam automatics. I want to upgrade when I feel I am ready, not when Steam orders me to, and I want the possibility of going back to older versions if I don't like the update.  My question is: Is there some way so I can unSteam my game (like retail buyers can Steamify their games, just the other way around?)

It is not a serious problem, if it is not doable I will just trash this Steam version and me and my friend will buy two other versions somewhere else.

Thank you for this great game. My family will surely hate you, but I guess that goes with being a succesful game developer .

vonduus

PS: One more question: When will the expansion be out? I understand that the expansions and the associated updates will be relased  indepedently of each other, but I will surely buy the exp anyway. I am totally new to this game, so I don't want to fiddle around with prereleases; on the other hand I do not want to get too used to some strategies that may become obsolete in a short while. I read the  threads on the rock-stone-paper issue, and got a bit worried that this tweaking will be an everlasting process, so that I shall have to continually relearn what works strategically and what does not, every time a new patch is out. When will AIWar reach a somewhat "final" version? ("final" here meaning a state where only minor tweaks can be expected). Okay, I am still playing the version that Steam downloaded, so this is not a factbased critique, just a worry.

[Morello]

Yes, you can simply get your CD key by right clicking on the game in the Steam list, and selecting View game CD key. Then you can download the game from this site, install it, and put this CD key into the game.

[vonduus]

Great, thanks for the quick answer!!!

[RCIX]

Welcome to the forums vonduus, it's always good to see another player

Morello is correct, AFAIK that's how you can do it. (I don't use Steam personally)

The expansion is slated for release 23rd of january i think. However if you want you can preorder it now and download the prerelease to try!

Also AFAIK, there there will only be a final version when both X4000 (the dev, Chris Park) and the players lose interest; he wants this to be around for as along as possible. He originally built this game to "scratch an itch" for a giant RTS game that wasn't like anything else out there and as long as he and/or other players have ideas and like the game, he'll be here!

Of course if you want, you can just stick with whatever version you have till a new one comes out, no one will have a problem with that.

Also, AI war is unique in that X maintains a single set of executables and DLLs for the whole game, including all expansions; when the 2.001 update comes out it will make the expansion demo available to all who install it, and any bugfixes to the expansion will also apply to the base game.

[end digest version]

[Fiskbit]

Thanks so much for the feedback, vonduus. All of us really appreciate it.

As Morello said, Steam keys can be used outside of Steam, as well as the other way around; if you purchased the game elsewhere, your key can unlock the Steam version without issue. When possible, we try to keep users from being locked into a specific version of the game; we're pretty anti-DRM, so letting users have a DRM-free version outside of Steam is important to us.

Regarding the expansion, I had been hearing tentative release dates of Jan 14th or so, but RCIX is mentioning a later one, so I'm not really all that sure now what the plan is. The goal is definitely January, though, and the expansion release should also be the free DLC release for the base game, since they're in the same executable. Users of the base game will be able to have a 3 hour trial of the expansion or disable that and play as usual.

Unfortunately, the updates for AI War are a bit of a double-edged sword. The game is likely to be changing for years, never really reaching any sort of 'final' state until it's simply not supported anymore (probably a long ways away). Balance is likely to be tweaked a lot, which I think is reasonable given the number of ships in the game. Balance tweaks happen even for games like Starcraft a decade after release. The changes in AI War might be a bit more drastic, though, especially at this stage where we're still trying to get things right according to player feedback. This game is really huge, and there's admittedly plenty of stuff, particularly balance-wise, that we have yet to get just right. We'll try to keep major shifts in the game to a minimum, but they could still happen in the future. We had some pretty big shifts in version 1.201, where we moved to a flow-based economy and also had reactors cost resources every second. It didn't destroy most saved games, but did make users have to do some initial adjustment to get everything back to a working position so their games could be continued. That isn't something we like doing, but ultimately it does benefit the game a lot and makes the experience better for all users, sans break-in period.

As for getting used to balance shifts and such, the game does offer simulation data for ship types in their tooltips, so you could at least use that to figure out what's good against what. It's not particularly ideal, but it does help address the problem.

Finally, you can also read the patch notes and decide to wait on applying a patch until your current game is completed, or roll back if you find a version isn't to your liking. You seem to already have this mentality, which is probably a good one to have, but I hope it doesn't keep you from updating in general if you find a particular update doesn't suit you at that moment.

I hope that was helpful. Please feel free to ask more questions or make suggestions for the game; we're always happy to respond!

[RCIX]

but Spikey is mentioning a later one

uh, don't you mean me?

[Fiskbit]

Whoops, yes. Sorry.