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 or greater of the game. Just open the game and you can quickly download the prerelease through the updates tab. Alternatively, this particular cumulative release can also be manually downloaded from here (in case you were having trouble with permissions with the updater in 2.201):
http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2300.zipExpansion 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: Steamworks integration should turn on automatically in the latest beta versions, but if it doesn't you can enable it manually: Dimply 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 2.202:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
-------------------
-The prereleases are now able to autodetect when Steamworks is supposed to be turned on, rather than requiring the "steam" command line argument to force them on. The command line argument is being left in place in case users need to force it on, however.
-Steam achievements will now automatically resubmit on game start if they were previously logged locally, but failed to get to Steam for whatever reason. This should both resolve this particular issue, and should also allow players to play the game offline, get some achievements, and then have those achievements actually be logged when they next play the game online via Steam.
-If AI War was launched with command-line arguments, and then the updater is run, the game will be restarted with the same command line arguments after the update is complete.
-The new updater now runs in UAC mode, to allow updating the game when it is installed in the Program Files folder or other OS-protected folders.
-Advanced Factories and starship constructors now use different icons from space docks.
-3 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new minor factions.
-4 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new expansion minor factions.
-42 new achievements have been added to the base game relating to the new expansion AI types factions.
-The game now uses an averaging process for determining the "center of mass" of units on which the camera is to be centered. This affects centering the camera on a group of selected units, centering the camera on all friendly units when switching to a new planet, and similar. Before it was a literal center of a bounding box of all the units in question, which could lead to a camera view in the middle of nowhere if units were spread very far apart. Now it will trend the camera toward the largest concentrations of units.
-Previously, when switching to a new planet the camera would center on enemy command stations (even if the enemy command station was not visible). Fixed so that it never centers on enemy command stations.
-Previously, when selecting both science labs and advanced research stations together, the tech menu would not show. Fixed.
-Previously, when an etherjet was trying to move and got stuck on the edge of a force field, its tractored cargo would keep moving. Fixed.
-Previously, sometimes the planetary summary would show a blank space instead of a zero for a ships that was no longer present. Fixed.
-Previously, group-move commands would not function with any ships with move speed less than 6. Fixed.
-The effective ranges of all the gravitation turrets have been increased by 2000 each.
Changes from prior prereleases.
-------------------------------
-Mining Golems and Rebel Human Colonies will now do tend to spawn more in range of the human players (in the case of mining golems, 0-5 hops away from human planets, in the case of rebel human colonies, 4-5 hops away). If it's not possible to be in the range noted, then they'll spawn at the nearest possible approximation of that range.
-In past prereleases, it was sometimes possible to get a desync immediately after loading a very old multiplayer game for the first time (saving it and then reloading it would fix it). This is now fixed.
-The bonuses of fighters against bombers were a little strange in the last prereleases. Fixed.
-Fighters now have a bonus against marauders to make marauders easier to defend against.
-The target point of ships in FRD or attack-move mode was not properly being set to the location of a rally post when rally posts were used. Fixed.
-Previously, marauders were affecting where the camera was positioned when centering on "friendly units." Fixed.
-For a good number of prereleases, there has been a target-selection bug that has caused all sorts of various issues for player ships that were not in FRD mode. Fixed.
-The way that ships target enemies with teleportation when in FRD mode is now much improved.
-Previously, engineers were sometimes able to assist other ships when paused.
-Previously, there was a bug with ships firing off (ineffective) shots way too early on planets with an enemy radar jammer. Fixed.
-The counts of dangerous enemy ships were previously missing from the command stations button listing. Fixed.
-The acceleration rate of ships is no longer explicity defined per ship. Instead, the current effective speed of the ship determines its acceleration rate, which makes ships accelerate uniformly when group-moving, amongst other similar benefits.
-In the last few prereleases, command stations have been counting as scouts in the galaxy map filter (O). Fixed.
-The count of enemy units in the global summary button was off in the last few prereleases. Fixed.
-Marauders will now only appear half as frequently as before.
-Previously, Resistance Fighters were never spawning. They now should.
