Prerelease 3.041 (Bugfixes, balance tweaks, AIP Floor Adjustments)

[x4000]

The latest beta is available via the Updates window in version 3.000 or greater of the game.  Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab.  If you don't yet have 3.000 or greater, you can download 3.000 here.  This prerelease version is compatible with any vendor's version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.

Note:  If you have bug reports related to this release, please log them in the bug reports subforum with one bug per topic.  It makes things infinitely easier for us.  Thanks!

Looking for a Patch That Can Be Manually-Installed?
Because of the time involved in creating multiple versions of each patch, we only create manually-installable patches for official versions of the game, not each beta prerelease.  But, if you're running version 3.022 of the game or higher, you can easily create your own manually-installable beta patch!  If you don't yet have 3.022, but do have 3.000 or greater, you can download a simple zip containing the files of 3.022 here.  Simply unpack those on top of your existing files in your AI War folder, and voila -- you're on 3.022.

To create your own manual beta patch, you'll want to go here.  This folder contains all of the beta updates.  You just need whatever the most recent one is at the time (probably the same version number as this post).  Download that zip file, which if you try to open will say it's corrupt -- that's okay, it's not really a zip file.  Next download the updated Director.Xml file from that folder.  Finally create a new zip file on your computer, and put both the director and the fake-zip-file inside it.  Call your outer zip file something that starts with Beta and ends with an extension of .zip.  Beta.zip will work just fine, or you can name it after the specific version number if you want to hang onto it.  And that's it!  Now you have your very own manually-installable package of the AI War beta version of your choice, which you can install by simply selecting via your Updates window in the game.

What's new since 3.040:
(Cumulative release notes since 3.000 are attached at the bottom)

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-The game no longer checks for jpg versions of missing pngs, which makes it load faster.

-All of the various error files are now cleared at the start of every run of the program, preventing those files from getting too huge and causing game slowdowns because of missing images or whatever other cosmetic issues.

-AI floor calculations now extended to 300 floor at 1450+ total progress (previously only went up to 100 floor at 450+ progress)

-Previously AI engineers in FRD mode could get into a cycle of moving to a nearby guard post and then back to their FRD anchor point over and over again.  Fixed to re-anchor their FRD point to the guard post.

-AI floor calculation is now more granular, increasing floor by 1 per 5 total progress instead of 10 per 50 progress.

-Fixed Tutorial 3 to prevent AI ships from entering FRD mode and thus attacking human player ships when the instructions specifically state that this will not happen.

-Made Astro Trains immune to paralysis attacks.

-Fixed tooltip for paralysis attacks to display partial seconds of duration.

-Previously cleanup drones could start cleaning up permamines when the human player had begun construction of a command station on the planet.  Fixed to not allow the cleanup drones to start cleaning up permamines until the command station is complete.

-changed super terminal description to be (hopefully) less confusing.

-previously cluster attack penalties were more harsh than intended, changed to a more gradual (but increasing) rate of decline.

-changed line breaks in distribution node description to prevent odd wraps.

[Buttons840]

Looks like were getting close to an official release?

Every time I see a new update I think "there is nothing left to be fixed," but not so.  (Meanwhile, the devs are thinking, "I sure wish there was nothing left to fix.")

[x4000]

The goal is Monday or so for the official release, just to be sure there is enough time over the weekend for final testing and any last tweaks, etc.  There are still a bunch of bug reports in the bug reports forum, but a lot of them a pretty obscure at this stage.  That forum never empties out completely, just due to the obscurity of some bugs and the fact that we'd never do releases or add new features if bugs always held up everything completely, but our goal is always to get that as low as possible and certainly to get anything serious or that is more impactful to more people out of there.  With such a huge game, there are always obscure bugs that people will run into, and probably always will be, but fortunately that still means that many people don't run into much, if anything, playing on the official releases.

[vince0018]

-changed super terminal description to be (hopefully) less confusing.

Is the super terminal the one where when you hold it (capture the planet) it spews out ships while lowering your AI progress but raising your floor. If that's the one I had to read through the description like 5-10 times before I thought I might understand what it did. However after holding it until I couldn't contain the massive fleets pouring out I finally decided to destroy it. It looked like I had removed about 50 AI progress by holding it, and learned kinda what AI floor progress was, but shortly after it looked like I had as much as I did before capturing it. I don't know if destroying it adds that much progress because that seems almost like there was nothing gained at all, and after the length I'd held it the AI had such a large fleet they swept through all my brothers planets and eliminated him from the game. Anyways maybe I didn't understand how they're supposed to work. This was somewhere around patch 3.038 by the way.

Also I had a question about formations. I know how to use J + right-click to keep my fleet in their formation, but I thought it would be easier if I used the sticky formations control node, so I built it. But after moving my fleet as a formation it's impossible to change that formation or add new ships to it without destroying the control node and rebuilding it every time you want to change it. I could be missing something here but there's got to be an easier way. Of course I could always just hold down the j key, but this almost seems like that control node has potential but isn't perfect. Just my 2 cents.

Well I've been enjoying the game alot, though I've missed out the last week due to personal problems, but I really appreciate developers who take such care in creating and maintaining a game of such quality. I read that you (x) said you'd be supporting this game for another decade, if you could, and I have yet to see any developer support a game for that long. Even if you don't fully hold out on that promise for whatever reason, the fact that your willing shows something I hope more people involved around games will show in the future.
    -Vince

[keith.lamothe]

Doesn't the "end" key cancel formation mode along with every other mode?  If it's not working on formation mode please let me know so I can fix that.

[vince0018]

 "End." I didn't know that, I'm gonna give it a try, sorry I wasn't aware of that. I guess I didn't check the controls thoroughly enough. I'm sure it's working fine, gonna check it out right away.

EDIT: Ya clearing formations with the end key works great, helps a whole lot, thanks.

[keith.lamothe]

The list of controls is quite long and many keys are non-intuitive due to the crowdedness.  After the official release I hope to look at some ways to help deal with the problem, like contextual right-click menus, etc.  Obviously a lot of potential to mess things up there, but worth investigating.

[x4000]

New version is out: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,4042.0.html


Also, Vince, to your questions/comments:

The super terminal is the one you are thinking of.  Destroying it doesn't cause the AIP to go up, so that must have been something else.  It is very hard to use at the moment, and that is something we are evaluating.  That is the sort of ship that can be really abused if we are not careful, so I erred on the side of making it too hard to use rather than too easy, and now we're trying to optimize based on player feedback.  Step 1: the explanation is at least simpler.

Many thanks on your kind words, as well.  I doubt that Arcen will keep up anything resembling this pace of updates for 10 years, but hopefully we can keep putting out a monthly DLC and ~yearly expansions and such for another 4-5 years at least.  I definitely want this to be the largest strategy game around by a longshot when I'm done with it.  And even after that 4-5 year period, though I don't know where I'll be with it, I'm not expecting to just give it up or anything.  So my hope is to be actively involved with it in some manner for around 10 years or so.  Of course, to be clear, no promises -- if the playerbase packs up and leaves tomorrow, then very few changes would happen after that, just whatever I'd need to do to make it last for myself and my own play group.  Expansions are costly, and we can't do them if no one wants them.  

But, so far, our playerbase has been growing and growing at an increasing rate, even now 10 months after the game originally came out.  So I'm not terribly worried about it losing too much traction any time soon, there are still a ton of people who have never played AI War who would probably enjoy doing so, and there are still quite a lot of fans who are interested in more DLC and expansions, so that's all good.  If there are still things to do for the game, and fans are still interested, then I imagine we could see expansions and DLC beyond the 5-year mark.  It's not like I have a plan to just stop making the game at some point in the future, but I figure that past some certain point, it will be basically as complete as I can make it, and hopefully so utterly massive by that point that anyone who wants to play will have just an incredible amount of content they can enjoy.  We'll see where it all goes, but I think it looks quite favorable so far!