Prerelease/Expans 2.001U (2 new golems, 19 new ships overall)

[x4000]

Note:  This prerelease is intended for both customers of the expansion AND customers of the base game.  Please see below for details.

The latest prerelease is available at http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001U.zip

That version is an upgrade from version 2.000, so you have to already have 2.000 (or greater) installed. Just unzip it into your game folder (usually C:\Program Files\Arcen Games\AI War\ unless you specified something else). Please make sure that your unzip process keeps the folder structure from the zip file, rather than just unpacking all of the files into the base target directory.

Expansion F.A.Q. Answers:
1. If you have the base game, and install this, you will go into trial mode of the expansion.  Feel free to explore the expansion that way, but if you want to go back to full mode without buying the expansion, simply go into Settings, Expansions, and turn off the expansion.
2. All upcoming prereleases for the next few months (until the expansion fully releases) will have a mix of both expansion and non-expansion content.  If you just want the latest non-expansion content, see #1.
3. If you want to preorder the expansion (and get your full license key), see this page.  It's $9.99 USD (or equivalent), and requires a valid copy of the base game to play.
4. If you want to know all about the expansion in general, see that same page.
5. PLEASE NOTE:  The new ships for the expansion are extremely preliminary at this stage.  They are fully functional when added, but they are not well balanced at all just yet.  The balance takes time, playtesting, and a fuller view of more of the ships.  So certain expansion ships are currently underpowered, while others are overpowered.  Your feedback on this is extremely valuable, as this is something we are adjusting at present based on community feedback as well as our own testing, but we don't expect to have things even close to perfectly tuned until sometime in December.  Our first priority is to get everything working and implemented, while honing the balance as much as possible, then to really heavily polish the balance once all the ships are in place.  Just FYI!
6. If you want to update an old savegame to the expansion, simply type "cmd:activate expansion 1" (without quotes).  This includes enabling the expansion ship classes, as well as enabling golems and other new capturables, although the population of those capturables is likely to be different from what it would have been if the expansion had been turned on from the start of the campaign given the same seed and other settings.  There is no way to disable the expansion for an existing game, however, so be sure not to save over your existing file if you want to go back to the non-expansion version of the game.

Steam/Impulse/GamersGate/Direct2Drive/etc F.A.Q. Answers:
1. This prerelease version is compatible with any other version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
2. If you use this with your Steam copy of the game, however, you will be asked to enter your AI War CD key (which Steam provides, but normally you do not have to enter), and also the integration with Steamworks leaderboards and achievements may be disabled.  So you may want to make a separate install of the preorder version if you use Steam, at least for the moment.
3. If you have preordered through Impulse, you should now have access to your beta key (as of 12/9).  They also provide direct beta downloads through their Impulse Client.
4. Steam will carry the expansion later on, and will have (probably beta-less) preorders, but they don't yet have that online.
5. GamersGate is also currently offering the expansion on preorder, and you do get a beta key, but you'll have to download the beta versions from our forums here.
6. Direct2Drive will be offering the expansion on preorder in a manner very similar to GamersGate, but they are not doing so quite yet.

What's new since 2.001T:
(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)

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-Ships that absorb lasers or dark matter now also attract the absorbed type of shots to themselves.  Enemy ships that are explicitly targeted onto another nearby target will successfully hit that other kind of target, but the targeting systems will be fooled into erroneously choosing the absorbtion type of ships when looking for best targets.

-A new set of Experimental Ship Fabricators has been added for both the base game and the expansion.  These are new capturables that are scattered around the galaxy map, a count of which can be seen in the Mission Summary in each campaign.  Generally there are 1 per human starting planet.  Each of these experimental ship fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Experimental Ship (which otherwise normally are not built at all, or the AI only builds, depending). These experimental ships are fairly expensive, but cost no knowledge to unlock and have very unusual special abilities.
   Players can see what kind of experimental ship will be produced at a experimental ship fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text.
   In the base game, currently the only experimental ship is the Anti-Starship Arachnid.  In the expansion, there are a variety of new experimental ships (detailed below).  Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.

-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Decoy Drone. Tough, armored vessel with no significant guns. Tricks enemy ships into targeting only itself when it is in range.

-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Speed Booster. Mobile ship that increases the speed of all friendly ships in the current system by a small amount. This effect is cumulative when multiple speed boosters are present.

-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Translocator. Mid-power teleporting fighter that fires shots that cause enemy targets to be teleported far across the current planet when they are hit.

-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): MicroParasite. Reclaims enemy ships it kills (reclaimed ships have health = half damage inflicted by reclamator). Very weak alone, but becomes significantly stronger when many are at the same planet.

-New Defensive Ship (expansion only): Zenith SpaceTime Manipulator. Stationary alien ship that increases the speed of all friendly ships in the current system by a large amount. This effect is cumulative when multiple spacetime manipulators are present. Beware the minor AI Progress increase if this is destroyed.

-New Regenerator Golem (expansion only):  Very little in the way of weapons, but is able to use its own health to resurrect allied mobile ships that are killed on the current planet. Resurrected ships are teleported back to the golem at full health at no cost beyond the health of the golem.

-New Cursed Golem (expansion only):  Cursed Golems continuously take passive damage and cannot be repaired by traditional means.  The only way for this golem to survive is to attack enemy ships, which recovers its health through vampirism.

-Four new cheats have been added for spawning broken or fully-functional versions of the new golems: busted curse me, curse me, busted its a troll, its a troll.  These only work when the first expansion is enabled for the current game.

-Shot effective damage is now capped at the max health of the target being shot at.  This prevents mirrors from being nearly so deadly against ships with very high attack values.

-New AI Ship (expansion only):  Core Warhead Interceptor. Advanced weapon insta-kills warheads (which explode without doing any damage or incurring any AI Progress increase).

-New Capturable Ship (expansion only):  Orbital Mass Driver. Advanced weapon sends projectiles stripped from an iron asteroid to deal heavy damage to starships and golems.

-In the expansion on difficulty 7 and up, the AI home planets and core planets (those next to the home planets) will now always include both an orbital mass driver and a core warhead interceptor.

-Ion Cannons no longer require supply.

-Warheads are now Mark V instead of Mark 0, and they are no longer immune to being insta-killed.

-A new cheat has been added for spawning armored missiles: armor em.

-The insta-kill message no longer appears until ships are actually being hit and killed, rather than appearing when they are being fired upon.

-Several new hotkeys have been added relating to control groups:
Ctrl+X+0-9:   Set control group and remove unit from its other control groups.
Ctrl+Alt+0-9:   Remove units from control group.
Shift+Alt+0-9   Deselected control group ships.

-Anti-starship arachnids have been on the weak side of things in recent times, and so have been given a significant boost (around 3x) against starships.

-New Experimental Ship (expansion only): Experimental Engineer Drone. Advanced prototype model that can regenerate itself as well as repairing other ships very quickly.

-Three new expansion-only ships have been added (difficulty 5 and up only): Astro Speed Booster Trains I-III.  Nearly-indestructible robotic courier.  Slightly damages nearby ships. More importantly, they provide a massive speed boost to all AI ships in the system and reveal any cloaked ships that come near. Destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them.

-Three new expansion-only ships have been added (difficulty 6 and up only): Astro Regenerator Trains I-III.  Nearly-indestructible robotic courier.  Slightly damages nearby ships. More importantly, is able to use its own health to resurrect AI mobile ships that are killed on the current planet. Resurrected ships are teleported back to the train at full health at no cost beyond the health of the train. They also reveal any cloaked ships that come near. Destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them.

-New expansion-only Caputrable Ship: Radar Jammer.  Causes all ships on the planet to have extreme trouble targeting at ranges greater than 1000.

-New expansion-only Caputrable Ship: Radar Jammer II.  Causes enemy ships on the planet to have extreme trouble targeting at ranges greater than 1000.

[HellishFiend]

Wow... Amazing update!

[I-KP]

Excellent stuff.

I was about to post an idea called the Brownian Noise Generator that caused ranges to drop to about 1000 due to wide band electronic warefare measures.  (May tweak it to nullify cluster and firepower boosting effects on the planet instead.)  Great minds think alike.  

Not so sure about the units that just re-hash what already exists (speed boosters x2, another parasite - why?!) as I prefer new content to be actually *new* but most of the rest looks good.

Chuffed that the Orbital Mass Driver made it through; will almost certainly make everyone's core raiding a bit more 'interesting'.

[x4000]

Wow... Amazing update!

Excellent stuff.

I was about to post an idea called the Brownian Noise Generator that caused ranges to drop to about 1000 due to wide band electronic warefare measures.  (May tweak it to nullify cluster and firepower boosting effects on the planet instead.)  Great minds think alike.  

Glad you like the new stuff!  This was definitely a huge one, for sure.

Not so sure about the units that just re-hash what already exists (speed boosters x2, another parasite - why?!) as I prefer new content to be actually *new* but most of the rest looks good.

First off, bear in mind that this release brings us to 100 total units for the expansion, which is the top of the range that I'd originally stated would be in there.  But, there's over 20 more units still on the slate for inclusion.  So, there are a number of "bonus" units such as the MicroParasites and Experimental Engineer in there.

- For the Speed Booster experimental unit, those are quite different from the SpaceTime Manipulators as they don't require supply and can be used in enemy territory.  They can also be broken up into multiple groups and used for multiple fronts, or just a single front.  They also don't have a high ongoing energy cost, or any knowledge cost, but you have to find them somewhere out in the galaxy.  They are two fairly radically different takes on the same basic premise (increasing speed of units), I'd say.

- The MicroParasite is basically a blend of autocannon minipods and parasites, which is a bit novel.  However, in terms of gameplay I agree it adds nothing new.  The reason for my including this is that some people simply really love parasites, and it's hard to get them to choose anything else (less a problem now that parasites have been nerfed, but still an occasional issue).  The leech starships, and now the microparasite and core leech fabricators, provide a way for players to potentially find parasites via exploration or tech unlocks in any game, regardless of what they start with.  That provides a way for those players to experiment more while still having access to a game mechanic that they love and "must have."  I almost always played French in Age of Empires III because I simply had to have the economic boosts, and that was really limiting; I did experiment and play with many other civs in that game, too, of course, but I was always mildly unhappy with all of them and would eventually go back to French.  That's a phenomenon I take great care to avoid in AI War whenever possible.

- The Experimental Engineer is something that is meant to be highly self-sustaining without being cloaked (although, I just realized that I left its regen rate off in the current release -- whoops, that will be in the next one).  It's also a way for players to sometimes get lucky and find high-level engineers at no knowledge cost to unlock them.  So, that can then free up knowledge, etc, for other purposes.  Again, providing more variety.

- With the experimental ships, some of those are also just intended to be "candy" units that are free in knowledge, but which cost you something in terms of AI Progress and exposure on the captured planet, etc.  I would class the Beam Starship in that way, as it brings nothing much new to the table, but players like the beam weapons and find it a very desirable starship.  And having a moderately-highly-powered starship for no AI Progress cost is attractive candy.  These serve the same basic function as "candy techs," which tend to cost 250 to 1000 knowledge and are kind of like impulse buys at the register.  They are cheap, so you can load up on them, but they might then preclude buying more expensive (and potentially more valuable) stuff further down the line.  So they become an exercise in evaluating short term rewards versus long term benefits.  A number of players had written in saying that they would specifically like to see more of those sorts of decisions, and I also thought it was a good idea.  Though, all of the candy (in terms of techs or experimental ships) does provide some good and fairly substantial benefit.  The trick is evaluating whether the benefit is enough to justify the cost in any given game.

There's definitely a purpose and reason behind every unit that I add through free DLC or the expansions -- given the vast number of units on the slate for potential inclusion, I am never scraping the bottom of the barrel or anything at this stage -- but some of them are a bit less obvious as to what their benefits are depending on your playstyle, as a few only help to round out or remedy specific other playstyles.  Hope that makes sense!

Chuffed that the Orbital Mass Driver made it through; will almost certainly make everyone's core raiding a bit more 'interesting'.

Oh, definitely.  I think that's a really cool one, and I really like having that be "anti big stuff," including both the starships and golems.  Definitely makes people think twice before just ramming their big stuff through a wormhole.  It also fits very well with the new Core Warhead Interceptor, which makes warhead use more challenging in some specific planets (and lightning warheads in particular being denied will make some players reevaluate those planets and the optimal strategy for them).  I used the mass driver shot and sound effect for the warhead interceptor too, by the way, since those are conceptually linked in many ways.

[Gomoto]

Only recently jumped onto the bandwagon. Already had a ton of fun with your fabulous game.

Sorry, that I do not post more about the game yet. Urge is to strong to return to my game. I have to develop a strategy to deal with the two Regeneration Trains sitting next to my home planet. And I thought I just hop to the neighbour planet and get rid of the enemy as usual. :-)

Regards
Gomoto

[Spikey00]

FYI:  ZenithSpaceTimeManipulator can be purchased in a base game (knowledge and in defense tab).  Missing localization is appended onto it.

EDIT:  Teleport Stations have a VS statistic vs unattackable Command Station (minor electric).

EDIT#2:  Oh, and I am also relatively happy with the current font (haven't checked out to see if colour grey is still hard to read).  (:

[Fiskbit]

Really impressive update. I have concern over one of the new additions, however:

Ships that absorb lasers or dark matter now also attract the absorbed type of shots to themselves.  Enemy ships that are explicitly targeted onto another nearby target will successfully hit that other kind of target, but the targeting systems will be fooled into erroneously choosing the absorbtion type of ships when looking for best targets.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this, this basically says that autotargeting gets it wrong (not just wasting the shots, but actually incurring a penalty in cases where the enemy ship gets more health from these shots) and manual targeting bypasses this. I understand the desire to make the absorption ability useful and have some sort of purpose, but one of the major reasons for autotargeting is to reduce the amount of micromanagement users have to deal with. Making ships fool autotargeting gives a significant advantage to users if they pause and then queue up an abundance of attacks, which strikes me as contrary to an important aspect of AI War that a lot of users appreciate. I think this will result more in annoyance than anything else.

[x4000]

FYI:  ZenithSpaceTimeManipulator can be purchased in a base game (knowledge and in defense tab).  Missing localization is appended onto it.

Oh, thanks!  Fixed for V!

EDIT:  Teleport Stations have a VS statistic vs unattackable Command Station (minor electric).

Yep, I haven't re-run any of the statistics yet, so those are outdated by a prerelease or two.

EDIT#2:  Oh, and I am also relatively happy with the current font (haven't checked out to see if colour grey is still hard to read).  (:

Very cool.  Still have some more tweaks to make to it, but they are getting more minor.  It seems to be doing a good job overall, I'm glad others agree!

[x4000]

Ships that absorb lasers or dark matter now also attract the absorbed type of shots to themselves.  Enemy ships that are explicitly targeted onto another nearby target will successfully hit that other kind of target, but the targeting systems will be fooled into erroneously choosing the absorbtion type of ships when looking for best targets.

Unless I'm misunderstanding this, this basically says that autotargeting gets it wrong (not just wasting the shots, but actually incurring a penalty in cases where the enemy ship gets more health from these shots) and manual targeting bypasses this. I understand the desire to make the absorption ability useful and have some sort of purpose, but one of the major reasons for autotargeting is to reduce the amount of micromanagement users have to deal with. Making ships fool autotargeting gives a significant advantage to users if they pause and then queue up an abundance of attacks, which strikes me as contrary to an important aspect of AI War that a lot of users appreciate. I think this will result more in annoyance than anything else.

I don't have any concerns about that aspect whatsoever, because the solution is not to micromanage.  Why is that not the solution?  Because by the time you finish trying to manually target ships, you'll have already lost the battle if that's your solution.  The solution in these cases is to include some other sort of ship in your mix that will autotarget the ships with absorption abilities, and then it will work itself all out on its own.  I'd also be concerned if the best solution to this sort of scenario was to switch to micromanaging, but I can't see that being a valid strategy at all.  My concerns would simply be if this is too unbalanced, making deflector drones in particular too powerful in big mixed-ship battles.

[Fiskbit]

Well, trying to manually target enemy ships would happen while paused, so the battle wouldn't already be lost. I still think that is unnecessary grunt work for what could be significant gain in the battle. Maybe you don't have the ships around to win the battle, but you have ones that can, for example, take out with lasers all of their cruisers that are protected by deflector drones. With autotargeting, your lasers hit the deflector drones, while micromanaging gets you a big gain here by taking out those cruisers. I don't think this is comparable to scouting, where micromanagement can get you farther than you can get without it, since here the scale is bigger and the stakes much higher. I don't like that this means you're entirely out of luck without micromanagement if you don't have the proper ship mix; micromanagement could potentially kill every other kind of ship in their fleet, while not micromanagement could leave the battle lost with their fleet unscathed.

If you have to have this feature in the game, I'd rather the micromanagement option simply not be available. It makes less sense given the justification of the attract ability, but I can't see any purpose to the feature unless you're trying to condone queuing up specific enemy targets, which is probably going to be tons of enemy ships of the same type. I can only see it being useful without micromanagement if there are attract ships guarding a particular target of interest (data center, etc), but in that case, I think you're intending that the player have a varied ship mix to deal with it in the first place, anyway.

[x4000]

Blah.  I see your point, when pausing enters the equation.  The problem with having the micromanagement option available is not that I wanted to make it possible, but that there is no non-CPU-intensive way to make it work without it.  Plus, when you give a ship an order, it is generally assumed that it will carry out that order.  Well, I can always return the "absorbs" abilities to the way they were before, but bear in mind that decoy drones work in this exact same way and I don't have any plans to change that -- everyone autotargets the decoy drone, rather than whatever else (although, in that case, they are actually damaging the decoy drone).

I suppose I could make it so that once a ship is firing at a decoy or something that it absorbs, it is "locked on" to that enemy ship and can't be given new target info by the player.

[Kjara]

Consider raid starships.  Its a huge boost to have them attacking the right targets(well it used to be, haven't tried them since the nerf).  If by microing them I can have them hitting turrets or force fields rather than wasting their shots on deflector drones (and since I'll have a max of 6 of them, its not that micro intensive).  On top of this, if I have prefered targets for all of my laser shooting units, will this attraction override the prefered unit choice?  If so, that seems wrong (since at this point its like I told my units to attack x, and they aren't doing what I asked), and if not, it seems that they will almost never be hit by any player who pauses and makes sure that all laser firing units have a prefered unit thats close around in the battle to avoid wasting shots on the drones.

Edit: Even if you do some sort of once they have a target they won't switch: It seems like you can always get around this using low power mode and then forcing them onto a new target once they power back up by abusing pause.

Edit2:I'd much rather seem them work like forcefields, and automatically pull in shots from those types from targets within a certain range.  (say they protect all units within 300-500 or so range of them, and any laser shots hitting targets within this range are actually applied to the deflector drone, healing and speeding up its attack)

Edit3: I'm really not seeing a different function between forcefield bearers and decoy drones really, besides the fact that the forcefield bearers are a bit weak in the fact they don't have nearly enough hps.  Both are designed to take hits for other units, just the decoy's do it better since they actually have hps?

[Fiskbit]

Chris: What about doing it more like coverage from force fields or counter-whatever turrets, where the game keeps track of whether a ship is under the protection of a nearby attract ship? Alternatively, Rev has suggested that decoys force all ships within range that are affected by their attract ability to fire on them (I guess then the search would be done by the decoy, not the ships that are firing). These might be CPU intensive, though.

The locking solution seems problematic to me because a player could potentially keep things queued such that a ship never has the opportunity to target a decoy in the first place. And what would happen if a player moved a ship out of range, queued up targets for it, and moved it back?

[Revenantus]

Alternatively, Rev has suggested that decoys force all ships within range that are affected by their attract ability to fire on them (I guess then the search would be done by the decoy, not the ships that are firing). These might be CPU intensive, though.

Essentially I was thinking that the decoy effect would be applied to all enemy units within a certain radius of the drone, similarly to how munitions boosting is done but instead a hostile effect. The affected ships while within this area cannot fire on anything but the decoy drone.

[x4000]

Chris: What about doing it more like coverage from force fields or counter-whatever turrets, where the game keeps track of whether a ship is under the protection of a nearby attract ship? Alternatively, Rev has suggested that decoys force all ships within range that are affected by their attract ability to fire on them (I guess then the search would be done by the decoy, not the ships that are firing). These might be CPU intensive, though.

Right, both of those are more CPU-intensive than they are worth.  Part of why counter-snipers and such work is that they are a much more rare ship.  With too many of those in battle, I wouldn't think the overhead would be worth it.  Yes, it works with force field bearers, but I'm not comfortable making that a much wider-used thing.

The locking solution seems problematic to me because a player could potentially keep things queued such that a ship never has the opportunity to target a decoy in the first place. And what would happen if a player moved a ship out of range, queued up targets for it, and moved it back?

Well, there is a certain amount of "best possible within limitations" to any such approach with general targeting.  Right now the targeting is super, super efficient when decoys are around.  Yes, the issues you note are indeed issues, but I don't know if I can do much about that.  I will have to look at the targeting code -- it may be that based on "secondary shots" (ships that are being fired at when the primary target is not in range), I can simply make it so that ship shots are redirected at the top secondary target (which would always be the decoy) if it is one of those attractor types.

If that's working the way I think I remember it does, then that might actually wind up being a solution to all of the above.  So perhaps there isn't an issue after all, but I'll have to check on it.