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/AIWar2001T.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 2.001S:(Cumulative release notes since 2.000 are attached at the bottom)
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-A number of updates have been made to the localization text files to reduce redundant entries and thus both file size and the number of words needing to be translated by around 4,500 in the base game alone.
-Three new expansion-only ships have been added: Astro Turret Trains I-III. Tough but not nearly-indestructible robotic courier. Has heavier turrets than normal astro trains, and so poses much more of a threat. More importantly, they reveal any cloaked ships that come near, and they tend to disrupt player minefields. Build Counter-Dark-Matter Turrets to protect against them, destroy Astro Train Stations to re-route them, or attack them head-on. If destroyed, an individual astro turret train is gone forever, but its destruction comes at an AI Progress cost.
-The metal and crystal costs of light starships, flagships, zenith starships, and spire starships have now been reversed. This makes them cost much more metal than crystal, rather than the other way around. This provides an excellent counterpoint to many of the other starships and provides a good use for metal if it is too abundant compared to crystal in a campaign.
-The attack range and power of dreadnoughts have been doubled.
-New Starship (expansion only): Warbird Starship. Extremely fast starship with cloaking and a huge multi-targeting energy burst system. Great for clearing out hordes of enemy ships.
-New Starship (expansion only): Beam Starship. Fires very powerful high-range beam weapons that strike all enemy ships in a line.
-A new set of Experimental Starship Fabricators has been added for both the base game and the expansion. These are new capturables that are scattered around the galaxy map, a count of which can be seen in the Mission Summary in each campaign. Generally there are 1 per human starting planet. Each of these experimental starship fabricators, once captured, lets a human player build a single type of Experimental Starship (which otherwise normally are not built at all, or the AI only builds, depending). These experimental starships are fairly expensive, but cost no knowledge to unlock and are quite powerful.
Players can see what kind of experimental starship will be produced at a experimental starship fabricator before they capture it by hovering over it and looking at its hover text.
In the base game, currently the only experimental starship is the Bomber Starship Mark I. In the expansion, a new Beam Starship and Warbird Starship can also be found. Not all of the fabricators are in every individual campaign, of course, given the seed numbers noted above.
-It is now possible to put a single ship in multiple control groups.
Changes from prior prereleases.
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-Fixed the description text for core fabricators.
-The way that core fabricators are populated at the start has now been changed for the expansion, so that there are more core fabricators available and they are a good mix from the expansion and from the base game. This will also scale better with future expansions.
