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/AIWar2001V.zipThat 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 2.001U:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Gravity Drill Station. A large station that bores a hole into the fabric of spacetime. So brutal is the rending of normal space that the effects radiated from this rupture dramatically interfere with most known forms of propulsion thus rendering any teleportation within the system impossible and reducing the speed of all vessels to 8. Generates free energy, metal, and crystal for the player holding it.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Black Hole Machine. Prevents all enemy ships (except scouts) from escaping from this planet through wormholes, though enemy ships can still enter through wormholes as normal.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Interplanetary Munitions Booster. Triples the attack of all allied ship in its planet, as well as adjacent planets.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Planetary Shield Booster. Triples the shield strength of all allied ships on the current planet, making them far harder to hit.
-New expansion-only Capturable Ship: Planetary Shield Inhibitor. Disables the shields of all enemy ships on the current planet, making them much easier to hit. Also disables enemy force fields.
-The internal logic for how AI players handle having many starships, and how they handle starships being disabled, is now much improved.
-Previously, AIs would often build far too many counter-snipers when threatened with any snipers. Fixed.
-New expansion-only AI type: Zenith Descendant. Aggressive AI that uses only Zenith fleet ships.
-New expansion-only AI type: One-Way Doormaster. Employs black hole machines on all of its planets, which makes each raid into its territory a one-way trip if the black hole machine is not destroyed.
-New expansion-only AI type: Peacemaker. Uses anti-golem, anti-starship, anti-warhead, etc, ships on all its planets.
-New expansion-only AI type: Experimentalist. Aggressive AI that uses a heavy mix of experimental ships along with its normal fleets.
-New expansion-only AI type: Golemite. Has fully-functioning golems on a great many of its planets. Since the AI Progress goes up greatly when these are repaired, care must be taken to destroy these all in one wave to avoid any such penalty.
-New expansion-only AI type: Radar Jammer. Employs radar jammers on all of its planets, which makes long-range ships very ineffective against it.
-New expansion-only AI type: Speed Racer. All of its mobile ships have been upgraded to move extremely fast.
-New expansion-only AI type: Starfleet Commander. Aggressive AI that uses starships heavily in place of normal fleet ships.
-New expansion-only AI type: Tag Teamer. A defensive AI whose guards are extra speedy and don't stay near their posts. This makes them more challenging to attack.
-New expansion-only AI type: Shield Ninny. Planets are all heavily defended, often with special boosters for allied shields or inhibitors for enemy shields, but this AI never launches waves at the players.
-New expansion-only AI type: Grav Driller. Aggressive AI with many gravity drill stations on its planets. Gravity Drills nullify teleporting units and majorly slow down all other units, but when captured provide free resources and energy.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-In the last prerelease, the Zenith SpaceTime Manipulator was incorrectly enabled for non-expansion use (with errors if the expansion was not on). Fixed.
-In prior prereleases, the list of AI types in the lobby, and the AI types chosen when a random AI type was selected, were not properly responding to the enabling/disabling of expansions. Fixed.
-An entirely new font is now being used compared to what was in recent prereleases; this one is much more readable.
The numbers are still being tweaked with that font, but it is already still much more readable.
-A great many of the larger ships, including starships and golems, are now immune to paralysis attacks.
-Ships that absorb lasers or dark matter now also attract the absorbed type of shots to themselves. This works similarly to how counter-missiles and related provide a protection radius, but instead of firing a counter-shot, these shots are drawn to the protecting ship and heal it.
-The decoy drone has been updated so that it now provides a protection radius like the absorption ships above, except that its protection radius is vastly larger, it affects all non-AoE/non-melee/non-Beam-weapon shots, and the shots that hit the decoy hurt the decoy instead of healing it.
-Grenade Launchers now only affect enemy units, instead of enemies and allies.
-In the last prereleases, the turrets were not properly being set as immune to munitions boosting. Fixed.
-Fixed a bug loading some old savegames with the new multi-control-group logic.
-The bug with the astro trains stalling out seems to be fixed, this was apparently an issue with ship commands from the AI getting backed up in too long of a queue, which is now solved.
