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 via the Updates window in version 2.201 of the game. Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab. If you do not already have 2.201 installed, you can manually get that here:
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2988.0.htmlExpansion 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 2.201:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-Ships that are in cold storage were previously not being drawn at all when the players were looking at them with hidden scouts or with complete visibility turned on. Now these ships are shown with a black border.
-Engineers Mark I and III, and cleanup drones and remains rebuilders, all now have longer ranges for doing their repairs.
-Engineers now will not to auto-assist constructor queues that have only maxed-out ships in them, or that are otherwise un-assistable, unless the player has explicitly assigned them to that constructor.
-Previously, if players had energy less than zero, then various services would shut off. Occasionally it seems that builders will let energy accidentally go to -50 or so, and other minor events can also cause this very temporarily, which would cause (essentially) brownouts. In order to smooth this out (and because this new logic makes more sense in terms of a power grid anyway), the threshold for "negative energy" has now been changed to -30,000. The only way players would ever get energy that is this negative is if they lost an energy reactor. Having a zero or less balance of will still prevent new ship construction as before, but it won't cause brownouts until this more extreme threshold is passed. This retains the general character of the risk of losing reactors, without having small events cause such major fluctuations.
-Previously, via gifting ships it was possible to send yourself or allies into negative energy balances. Fixed.
-The game now buzzes if players try to gift a ship that cannot be gifted, to give some feedback rather than silently failing.
-Previously, the game would silently fail to unpause ships if there was not enough energy to unpause them. Now the game plays the buzz sound effect. Hovering over the ship shows how much energy it takes to unpause it, which should make the source of the issue much clearer to players having a trouble with it.
-The health of Mark I engineers have been reduced by about 60% to reduce their power when in the hands of the AI.
-Previously there were a few situations were it was possible for players starting a game, or joining a game late, to not get their starting allotment of metal, crystal, and knowledge. All fixed.
-Astro Train Stations no longer provide a force field effect.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-In recent prereleases, the lobby field for the map seed was accepting one too few characters. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a very slight chance that a raid engine might be placed directly adacent to a player home planet. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a bug with how AI engineers were trying to escape to command posts when under attack. Fixed.
-Ships that were being protected by a force field or other protection source now detect more quickly when that source is no longer valid, thus resolving some "unhittable" situations.
-The Zenith Trade Ships were causing just a ton of strangeness for a couple of players -- the AI Progress was getting sent way down because of all the useless stuff the AI buys, and then the
useful stuff that the AI buys is in way too much supply also. Now this has been changed so that the AI Progress never gets reduced by the trade ship, but the AI will also only make purchases about 1% of the time compared to what it previously did. This should make the Zenith Trade Ships a lot less extreme in their effect on the game.
-Marauders and Resistance Fighters now have infinite engine health in order to prevent them from getting stranded way out in the middle of nowhere by ion cannons and the like.
-Cold storage ships no longer show up as blacked-out unless the debug mode (F3) is turned on.
-Devourer Golems, Zenith Trade Ships, and Mining Golems are all now immune to force fields, making it so that they cannot be trapped by clever players trying to slow them down. They also now have immunity to mines.
-The minor faction and ai modifier listboxes in the lobby have been made a bit wider to prevent horizontal scrolling.
-Previously, the enemy counts on the galaxy map, the plantary summary entries, and the minimap blips, were all not working correctly when players had a cloaked scout on an enemy planet in cold storage (or complete visibility turned on). All fixed.
-Previously, EMP Mines and area mines were showing an insta-kill message instead of the "you have flown into a minefield" message. Fixed.
-Previously, the new cold storage logic was interfering with the strong/weak ship data export. Fixed.
-The Mining Golems and Rebel Human Colonies now only appear around ever 5 hours each, instead of every 3. They also now give 90 minutes and 120 minutes respectively before they are failed, rather than 60 minutes and 45 minutes.
