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/AIWar2001ZA.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 2.001Y:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-New expansion-only ship: EMP Mine. Enemy ships coming too close to these invisible traps will incur heavy damage. If the ship triggering the mine survives, it will also be paralyzed for 60 seconds. The mine is also destroyed in the process. These are particularly useful for stalling out large incoming vesseles that don't have mine avoidance.
-New expansion-only ship: Area Mine. Enemy ships coming too close to these invisible traps will incur heavy damage. The explosions from these mines also effect other enemy ships that are close by. The mine is also destroyed in the process. These are obviously useful for taking out groups of ships, but they are also useful for hitting ships that have Mine Avoidance -- those ships can still get caught in the blasts of area mines that are triggered by another ship.
-Some internal performance improvements have been made to the simulation logic in a variety of areas.
-Mine remains are now practically invincible to conventional attacks, since those were far too micromangement-intensive in the past to be a valid way to play. Additionally, this prevents remains from accidentally being destroyed by area attacks or other means.
-New ship: Cleanup Drone. Removes exploded enemy mines and turrets, to prevent them from being rebuilt by enemy mine/turret layers. Previously this was accomplished with engineers (once those engineers had finished with anything else that they considered a higher priority, which caused some challenges), or via manual targeted. Now, having a specialized unit dedicated to cleanup makes it much simpler to clear exploded enemy mines without any micromanagement.
-The following ships now drop remains on their destruction in the same manner that mines always have: advanced warp sensors, tachyon beam emitters and stealth tachyon beam emitters, and all turrets. Consequently, all of these ship types are also now immune to reclamation.
-Mine Layers have been renamed to Remains Rebuilders, and now are a general purpose rebuilder for any ship types that leave remains. They also now only will rebuild ships that were owned by the player who controls the rebuilder, rather than also working on allied ships. These have been moved to the Economy tab, instead of the Defensive tab, along with Cleanup Drones.
-Remains Rebuilders now have cloaking, making them easier for players to keep alive (and more devious for when the AI has them, incidentally). They also now have 100k more health. They also no longer require unlocking, and thus no longer have any associated knowledge cost now that they are more of a general-purpose ship. Their ship cap has also been raised about 3x.
-Ship Remains that belong to AI players, but which are not on AI planets, now automatically explode -- thus saving players the trouble of creating cleanup drones to clean them up manually.
-Previously it was possible for Remains Rebuilders to send a player into negative energy through their rebuilding. In recent prereleases, they were also doing their rebuilding for free. All fixed, and now they are not instantly rebuilt, either, but rather are kicked off so that they then construct themselves over time for an ongoing resource cost as with every other aspect of the new economy. For the first time ever, this also applies to the AI when it is rebuilding ships -- thus the AI Remains Rebuilders are not nearly so threatening as mine builders used to be, since they can't just instantly respawn large numbers of ships.
-Previously, large numbers of mines and remains (as in, 50,000+) in the game could cause significant slowdown. This has now been fixed so that they cause almost no performance impact whatsoever, except right after the game is loaded (since there are extra messages being sent to the AI, and the save files themselves are larger).
-Ships that are self-building are no longer cloaked while under construction (if they have the cloaking ability, previously that would be engaged while they were still under construction, which was erroneous).
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-In the last prerelease, the niche text overlays for ship icons were showing incorrectly offset to the side.
-In 2.001 prereleases, there have been a number of internal math errors that affected the precision of collisions for things such as mines. These are now fixed, which makes mines vastly more likely to be triggered than they were in recent prereleases.
Updates in 2.001Z:-Since remains and their cleanup and rebuilding are now so important, when Cloaking is disabled in the lobby options here is now a non-cloaked version of the Remains Rebuilder that players and AIs will use, and a non-cloaked version of the Cleanup Drone that players can use.
-All ships that are immune to reclamation now have a strong attack penalty against the Raid Starship line, and Parasites.
-The movement speed of all parasites has been nearly doubled.
-EMPs and Area Mines now cost 4k knowledge instead of 3k as in the past prerelease.
Updates in 2.001ZA:-Infiltrators no longer absorb dark matter (and that ability has now been entirely removed as redudnant with the counter-dark-matter flares).
-When lasers are fired into the area around a deflector drone, their power is now reduced to 1/4 of normal, but otherwise they are no longer redirected or absorbed or anything of that nature. That also means that deflector drones are no longer immune to lasers, though they are quite resistant to them.
-Several bugs from the last prerelease have been fixed relating to remains.
-Fixed a multiplayer desync bug from the last prerelease.
