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. If you don't yet have 2.201 or greater, you can get 2.300 (the last full package released) here:
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,3029.0.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: 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 2.300:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-The savegame and loadgame windows have once again been made wider.
-It is now possible to simultaneously select multiple savegames at once in the save and load windows for purposes of deleting multiple saves simultaneously.
-The actual attack range of both electric shuttles and lightning turrets was far less than they were showing as their range circle. Fixed.
-The effective range of armored missiles has been doubled, making them more effective.
-The attack range of electric shuttles has been tripled, making them more useful in general as massive-but-weak-powered area damage.
-Previously, structures larger than 120 radius did not show a circle around themselves when cloaked or under force fields; players could only tell if they were protected when looking at them very zoomed out. Fixed.
-Now the game will autosave as Autosave_AfterGameOver.sav after a game over has been reached, rather than overwriting Autosave.sav. This lets players continue past a game over if they wish, without risk of losing their prior autosaves.
-Starships, marauders, golems and resistance fighters will now patrol around at random if they are AI-controlled and without any targets to attack. This makes them less predictable, and keeps them from "clumping" and thus becoming easy targets for area damage attacks.
-Previously, the selection hotkeys (B, D, S, O, etc) were working on both ships belonging to the local player, as well as the ships of disabled players. This was confusing and could lead to input errors, so it has changed to just cylcing through ships belonging to the local player.
-Previously, the planetary summary would often start as one long row and then jump to its correct size when loading a game. In a super-rare case, this could even cause it to overlap the score. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a bug in the second tutorial where if the science labs were sent to another planet and actually made it there before the player hit enter, the tutorial would get stuck. Fixed.
-Previously, it was possible for some game input to erroneously reach the game when the game did not have input focus, or when the game loading window was showing. Fixed.
-Previously, hosting a multiplayer and then immediately switching to being a client of another game could cause a crash. Fixed.
-Previously, ships heading for a transport or a wormhole would collision-detect in advance (as is appropriate with a move order) and select new destinations adjacent to their true target. This caused some slowdown with wormholes and a ton of slowdown with transports, and was undesirable in the first place because the collision detection is not even needed or correct. Fixed.
-Previously, command stations that are attacked on planets that used to be the AI's home planet were giving the wrong warning message. Fixed.
-Spokes maps are particularly vulnerable to supply, so all AI players now get a core force field covering all of their command stations in that map style -- this adds some challenge back, and essentially deepens the scenario as a counterpoint to how you can take advantage of them with supply denial.
-A warning message is now shown whenever a devourer is one one of your team's planets, or on an adjacent planet to your team.
-The colors for wormhole text now show properly for allied and local-controlled planets.
-The names of planets in the galaxy map are now color-coded in the same manner that wormhole text is colorized for planets.
-The tooltip on the tachyon warheads was indicating that their effect only lasts for 30 seconds, when the effect really lasts for 5 minutes. Fixed.
-Previously, when the host of a multiplayer game quit back to the main menu, it was not completely shutting down the server process -- this would leave "phantom" games in play that could cause issues. Fixed.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-Previously, marauders would attack zenith traders. Fixed.
-In past prereleases, ships that were under construction were not gaining any protection from things like force fields, counter-snipers, etc, until their construction was complete. Fixed.
-With some of the new, very high costs of ships via traders, the metal and crystal and energy costs could overlap in the hover tooltips. Fixed.
-Minor faction ships are now treated as "blind" as far as human players go, so that minor faction ships don't inadvertantly do a lot of recon for human players.
-Engineers that were assisting allied queues were still charging the ally rather than the controller of the engineer, even though it was reporting it the correct way in the inflows and outflows. Fixed so that the controller of the engineer is now properly charged in order to match the outflow amounts.
-The starting scores were not previously showing up correctly. Fixed.
-Previously, there was a crash when converting some games to the expansion.
-In the last few prereleases, cross-planet attacks were broken because of cold storage. This should now be fixed.
-In the last few prereleases, certain savegames from one prerelease could cause a corrupted game on load. Fixed.
-In recent prereleases, it was not possible to group-move or attack-move to a transport. Fixed.
-Previously, self-building ships that were paralyzed would never become unparalyzed. Fixed.
-Previously, cloaked ships were being shown during game syncs. Fixed.
-In recent prereleases, too many ships were being shown in the strong/weak data. It is now back to just showing the fleet ships.
-In recent prereleases, right-clicking enemy ships in the planetary summary was not cycling through the ships if they were in cold storage. Fixed.
-Right-clicking minor factions ships in the planetary summary was not cycling through the ships. Fixed.
-The Devourer Golem now does a better job of closing distance so that it can use its multi-shot ability more.
-Previously, command station home cores could sometimes be spawned in a black hole or asteroid belt, and they were also being spawned when the game was lost. Both fixed.
