Ok, I've more or less let AIW rest this week to make sure there were no critical problems with the 7.0 official release. There were a few bumps but nothing too worrisome. And 7.001 is actually the official steam version right now, iirc, as it removes the need for owners of the first four expansions to enter their expansion license keys into their steam copy (VotM already doesn't use in-game keys).
So the next expansion and 8.0 are planned to be released in October. Probably late-October, considering that I'm working on another project scheduled for release in September (though we're planning for Chris to take over lead-programming on that sometime in August as my family is expecting its third child in late August or early September).
I've got a number of things I want to work on for 8.0, including some revisions to the basic wave logic (right now it's very hard for me to control wave composition because it's such a multi-stage process, and there are things I'd like to do in the future like guardian-only waves for a special AI type, and multi-stage "pulsed waves" as a less cheesy/micro-inducing way of achieving "alpha soak" than the recently removed 3-initial-fighters thing, and so on) and... well, a bunch of other stuff really. I try not to talk too much on the forums about pie-in-the-sky stuff as folks tend to be disappointed when only a portion of it ever materializes
But there are also a number of moderate-to-large items on the table that we've dicussed previously in these forums, and I'd like to know what y'all's priorities are for the next official version. Because this list isn't all getting done for 8.0, or even 9.0 probably, who knows when
Mostly it's a matter of what else is on the table and what has priority.
Below I've listed the items I could think of off the top of my head (and some by help of the trello list I keep), but before doing a poll I'd like to ask if you folks remember something else that should be on this list. I've probably forgotten lots of stuff:
1) Promoting Hacking to a full resource
- the idea being to replace crystal, and just combining m+c as they're functionally interchangeable except for the 1.5 conversion ratio
- this is the main thread where we discussed this:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,12812.msg141921.html#msg1419212) Revising Champions
- whether it's new scenarios, new direct-use-abilities, changing how unlocks are done, etc
3) Revising the Beachheads AI Plot
- adding less death-on-wheels manifestations so they can be used to make chokepointing harder without hard-countering them, then making it scalar
4) Reworking Armor
- first we'd need to find a solution that people actually like. Some are ok with just removing it, some are ok with making it a simple %-based rule, but others really want to retain the current level of complexity in terms of having more impact on high-rof attackers, etc.
- Frankly at this point I've just been quietly removing armor and armor piercing from most units that I rebalance unless it seems to make good thematic sense that they be there, and not putting armor or armor piercing on most new units (unless, again, it really makes sense). Keeping this up for a while will probably largely resolve the issues people have with armor as there will be a much smaller list of ships with either characteristic.
5) Diversifying Fallen Spire events
- So instead of every shard recovery being a survey-ship-then-escort-home, having a random roll between that, and another mode where the shard is stationary and just needs to be defended for X minutes, and another where the shard is in a hostile ship that you have to blow up to get the shard (which probably just warps to your subspace receiver at that point to save further trouble), and whatever else we come up with
6) Revising the Astro Trains plot (again)
- basically now it's at least interesting, compared to its previous incarnation, but it's
hard. If we can work out something better for these I'm happy to work on it if it's really a priority for people.
7) Improving Hybrids
- implementing hybrids recolonizing neutral planets (presumably in a way that does not cost AIP to retake), restoring their ability to build defenses (presumably with some kind of per-planet cap to avoid them stacking like 50 FF-IIIs on a single ARS command station, etc), restoring their ability to build more hybrid facilities (again with some kind of restraining mechanism so it doesn't get out of control), and whatever else we can cook up that's feasible.
8 ) Improving Spirecraft
- These work pretty well right now, honestly, as many AARs and such attest, but there's definitely room for improvement.
9) Downscaling health/attack/armor/etc stats
- Basically just dividing all those numbers by 10 or 100 or whatever; there are some units that will need special attention due to having values low enough that the round-off would be significant. Just doing this in itself isn't terribly complex, but it's a lot of work so I'm not really going
10) Reworking relationship between superweapons and non-superweapons
- This would basically go along with #9 (the downscaling of stats), and the idea would be to not downscale the superweapons as far as the other ships, so that there's more distinction between, say, a MkV Zenith Starship and an Armored Golem.
- I think there's still some dissent on this, so we'd need to sort out exactly what it is that people want here first.
11) New Sentinel types
- as per
this post from Hearteater.
12) In-game IRC client
- I've done tests where I can successfully get the game to send and receive lines to the normal AIW IRC channel (though we wouldn't want to use exactly the same channel, probably, but the folks running the server are ok with us using the service for this purpose), but there's a lot of work involved in getting the interface even semi-reasonable. Not sure if it can be done without writing our own textbox, actually, to get away from the bugs in Unity's, which is a lot of work.
13) Revising the Hunter plot
- I'm basically planning on doing this anyway since it's so recent, but including here for completeness.
Edit: added these from replies and remembering some other things I'd meant to add, etc :
14) Balancing energy, especially early game vs late game dynamics
15) Tweaking balance of player economy, especially harvester vs econ station upgrades, and early game vs late game income levels
16) UI improvements to make it more "accessible" to new players
17) Turret cap rework
- Basically to make distributed defense more feasible without significantly buffing or nerfing chokepoints.
- basically something like
http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=11815 , but probably with a mutual on-the-same-planet exlcusivity between core turrets and the structures that provide more local turret cap for normal turrets
18) Defender mode rework
- it's never really worked right, and no one seems to care, because they hardly ever play it
19) Improve consistency of balance across different Unit Cap Scale and Combat Style settings.
So, what else?
