Ship Lists Now On The WikiIt's been on my to-do list for a while to make a full list in the wiki of the ships in AI War. Recently I did that for
the expansion, but now I've also done that for
the base game, sans descriptions for most of the ships.
The Latest Ship CountsThe fact that there are 122 ships in the expansion should come as a surprise to no one, as that was one of the bulleted items on our list. But it's been a long time (maybe since 2.0 ) since I last counted the number of ships in the base game. Upon initial release of 1.0, there were about 198 or 196 -- something like that -- ships in the game.
Between 1.0 and 2.0, exactly 50 ships happened to be added to the game, bringing it up into the 240s.
And that was the last time I did any counting, I'm pretty sure of it. Well, I counted again today, and the total is now 293 as of version 3.120. That does not include the control nodes or the modules for the modular ships -- or even cheesier stuff like the remains for the various turrets, or whatever. Including that sort of thing would have inflated the number by another 40-60 or so above even the 293 that I consider to be actual valid ships.
So, putting that together with the expansion, we're up to a whopping 415 ships in the game. I wouldn't be at all surprised if we see another 50 ships as free DLC by the time the next expansion comes out, and the next expansion is likely to add somewhere in the 100-200 ships range, so by the middle of 2011 we're going to be pushing towards a total of 600-700 ships in this game.
Growing Faster Than ExpectedHoly cow! My ultimate goal was to hit 1000 ships or so over the course of about 5 years and 5 expansions, but we're already at 415 ships after just the first year and the first expansion. To say that this game is growing more and more quickly than I ever imagined would be a huge understatement.
And here's why: you guys. I could never have come up with all the ideas that are represented in this game. I did come up with the majority of them, and refined pretty much all of them to at least a small degree during the process of implementation or after, but you guys have done at least as much refinement of every idea I had in here through your suggestions and feedback. Some of the ship classes that I initially designed for the 1.0 version of the game are a far cry from those initial designs now -- much more balanced and interesting and varied.
Looking to the FutureAI War has grown a ton, but there's still a lot more to do, too. The forums are practically bursting over with ideas, as everyone knows, and it's to the point where we have to do those community polls for the DLC, as you also know. Of course, each time we do an expansion we'll also churn through a lot of features more rapidly, adding huge bunches of them instead of a steady-but-significant trickle as we do with the DLC. Keith and myself both still have tons of ideas for the game, but that's nothing compared to the huge firehose of quality ideas that the community continuously submits.
In summary, I guess I'll just say that I'm blown away by you guys. Every game developer gets tons of suggestions, but somehow the suggestions here seem to be of an unusually high quality. We're all making this game together, and I think it really shows.
