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/AIWar2001ZL.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 will be disabled by default.
New: To enable steamworks integration with the beta versions, simply run the game with the command line argument "steam" (no quotes). If you put the argument in correctly, you'll then see your Steam interface pop up correctly.
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 2.001ZK:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-The Auto AI Progress and AI Modifiers settings have moved from the Game Options tab of the lobby to a new AI Options tab in the lobby.
-A new "Minor Factions To Include" setting has been added to the AI Options tab of the lobby, allowing players to select one or more minor factions to use.
-The Ctrl+Alt+F8 output now also creates a new AIProgressIncreases.txt file, which lists all of the possible sources of AI Progress increase and decrease.
-Previously, the tooltips in the lobby were often jittery at the edge of the screen. Fixed.
-Three new cheats have been added to the base game to trigger the three new minor factions in the base game: Spawn Angry Colonists, Spawn Vagabonds, Spawn The Conners.
-Four new cheats have been added to the expansion to trigger the four new minor factions in the expansion: Go Go Trade Pact, Spawn Miners, Calling Mr Miles, Invoke Unicron.
-Several efficiency improvements have been made with regard to ship aggregations on the main simulation thread.
-Larger selection circles are now drawn for oversized ships such as fortresses and golems.
-New Minor Faction: Human Marauders. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space and will occasionally raid human or AI planets via traditional propulsion methods. Unlike pretty much any hostile threat, these don't always come through wormholes, in other words.
-New Minor Faction: Human Resistance Fighters. Pockets of human allies still live in deep space around AI planets; when they see you attacking the AI, sometimes they will reveal themselves and join you.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Marauder Buzz Bomb. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space will occasionally send these automated bombs at human and AI settlements to destroy what they can so that they can escape with the resulting scrap. The buzz bomb explodes on contact with its target, dealing area damage. If the planet is cleared of enemy forces, the marauders will remain in place as guards against all comers. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Marauder Dagger Frigate. Hostile human vagabonds who live in deep space will occasionally send these extremely long-range frigates at human and AI settlements to destroy what they can so that they can escape with the resulting scrap. If the planet is cleared of enemy forces, the marauders will remain in place as guards against all comers. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Resistance Fighter/Bomber. Pockets of human allies who still live in deep space around AI planets will occasionally send these versatile fighter/bomber hybrids to aid you in the fight against the AI at their local planet. If the planet is cleared of AI forces, the resistance fighters will remain as guards against future AI incursions. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Resistance Frigate. Pockets of human allies who still live in deep space around AI planets will occasionally send these very long-range frigates to aid you in the fight against the AI at their local planet. If the planet is cleared of AI forces, the resistance fighters will remain as guards against future AI incursions. They won't attack any AI ships that human players must normally manually target.
-The new colors on the planetary summary were making it easier to see categories of ships, but harder to see ship shapes themselves, and particularly hard to see local versus ally versus enemy colors. The old type of color scheme has been returned to for the default, but now when the planetary summary is moused-over, it switches to the new color scheme to provide the best of both worlds: easy category visibility as well as easy icon/team visibility, depending on the context.
-Previously, only AI ships were showing up in the icon row on the intel summary. This has now been changed so that it also displays ships belonging to minor factions and human players. This makes it far easier for players to inventory their own planets as well as inventorying enemy planets.
-New Minor Faction: Zenith Devourer. The nigh-indestructible Devourer Golem makes its way slowly around the galaxy, absorbing all of the non-core mobile military ships on planets it visits in order to power and repair itself. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Devourer Golem. This nigh-indestructible Golem makes its way slowly around the galaxy, absorbing all of the non-core mobile military ships on planets it visits in order to power and repair itself. It's attack power is so high that it will insta-kill most ships, but it will only attack non-core ships that are both mobile and which have attack power. The only way for those ships to survive is for them to flee to another planet until the devourer has moved on.
-PermaMines now have 2 billion health instead of being truly invincible. This makes it so that they can die in nuclear blasts and such.
-New Minor Faction: Zenith Miners. Every three hours or so, a Mining Golem will appear from deep space, and will spend time consuming a planet unless it is destroyed before it complete its task. The destruction of this planet may prove advantageous or not, depending on where it lies, but the usual AI Progress increases do apply if it is an AI planet. If one Mining Golem is destroyed, the Zenith miners will simply send another one at the next allotted time. Only works with galaxy maps with 30+ planets.
-New Minor Faction Ship: Mining Golem. This golem is sent from deep space for one purpose: to consume the planet it is heading toward. It will fire on human ships that approach it, but it emits a signal that tricks AI ships into ignoring it as harmless. It takes it quite a while to reach the planet, but as soon as it does, it causes a blast the same as if a nuclear weapon had been set off -- destroying all the resources and most ships, and making the planet unable to sustain supply.
-The Leech Starship has all-new graphics, and the Raid Starship graphics have been much improved.
-The Leech and Raid Starship lines have now been split, so that there are three in each of two lines, rather than them being a shared line. The Raid Starships are now much faster and hard-hitting against single targets, while the leech starships are now much weaker but strike many more ships, tagging them all for reclamation as soon as any ships finishes them off. The caps for all of these starships has also been cut in half, as they are individually now far more useful than they previously were.
-The health of parasites and core leeches has significantly increased.
-The logic for cross-planet attacks has been majorly updated so that it is more consistent between single-player and multiplayer. Also, all AI types now do cross-planet attacks, whereas previously the turtle types would not -- since CPAs are from more than one AI type at a time, this only makes sense. Lastly, cross-planet attacks are more than three times less frequent than before, but they are
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-AI SuperTerminals no longer interfere with supply, as this made them far too hard to use.
-The lobby checked listboxes have been replaced with custom versions that are considerably less buggy than the built-in .net framework ones when using nonstandard fonts. This new version also allows players to scroll the listbox when disabled, so that non-host players can scroll the options while in the lobby.
-The AI Progress cost of destroying MkI and MkII Radar Jammers were previously reversed. Fixed.
-Previously, the control node was showing up erroneously for the engineer techs. Fixed.
-Previously, Zenith Autobombs were emitting a bunch of grenade-size explosions to no effect as they passed over enemy ships or were close by to their target. Fixed.
-Previously, Zenith Autobombs often had trouble hitting moving targets. Fixed.
-Fixed several bugs with the counts of allied ships in the galaxy map in recent prereleases.
-Fixed several bugs with the galaxy map ship counts and how they were omitting certain ships such as experimental and golems.
-The mark numerals are now omitted from golems and experimental ships.
-Mass Drivers will now do a better job of targeting only the ships that they can really hit.
-Ships in general are now better about never targeting enemy ships that they do no damage against.
-The reclamation shot no longer has to be the last shot in order for the reclamation to happen.
-The expansion-specific "stealth leech starship" has been turned into the new "leech starship mark II" that is available for base game customers.
