AI War 2 v1.018-1.021 Released! "Methodical Achievement"

[x4000]

Release notes here. This one is pretty huge! And it does finally have achievements -- 139 of them -- although not all of them will be visible on Steam for a few days.

So what's new?

• Achievements come with a few caveats, such as not having an in-game list to view them yet, and not all being visible on Steam. More things coming soon, and details on all that are in the release notes, but suffice it to say that this is build one of several that are rolling these out. Anything you achieve in this build onwards will be logged locally and later synced to Steam, though.
• Fixed several bugs, the most exciting of which was a crash with Marauders.
• Added a new "Methodical Pursuit Mode" that, holy cow, is ridiculously better at fighting than the old style. AI ships and yours and allies all now use it by default. Badger thought this up, and had a very interesting save where a player ally faction would mostly die against the AI on a weakish planet without this on, but handily win with it on. That's enormous!
• Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time. This is to make it so that your ability to field a refleeted giant-strength force isn't just going up crazily as your mark levels increase. You can always offset this time with engineers, but they are finite and cost you extra resources (mainly energy -- not anything extra in the long term of metal flows). This should keep the mid and late game balance a lot better versus players just having lots of insta-fleets over and over again.
• Increased most Frigate durability 50%. That's worth a line on its own, since some folks have been really wanting Frigates to feel more powerful and separate from the smaller strikecraft.
• Cloaking has been enormously rebalanced, though the mechanics themselves have not been particularly changed. But this being underwhelming in both your and enemy hands was a theme, and with various player suggestions Puffin has put together what I think is a really notable rebalance to this to make these a lot more interesting.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

We're also really keen on your feedback in general, as the last couple of releases hopefully demonstrate. Achievements are creeping up my shortlist on things to do, thankfully, now that a lot of the rest of my shortlist is cleared out. I then need to really get a move-on with the first alphas of the multiplayer for people to playtest. One thing at a time!

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence. At the moment we're sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, and have been for the last three days, which feels really good. If you've been playing the game and enjoying it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options. You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back. Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc. Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page. If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games? It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen. Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

[Draco18s]

Just to keep everyone in the loop, I'm slowly grinding away at the Steam backend for the achievements, folks.

I got 45 or so of them added last night (without images) and will have more time to knock a bunch out on Friday and then Monday (this weekend looks booked). They won't show up until I hit publish, so you won't see them until I'm done.

[RockyBst]

I'm sure someone may have reported this already on Mantis, but I just started a new game and chose the metal harvester upgrade...


E: Also, I managed to unlock three achievements on my very first kill of the game, an AI sentry frigate. Seems a touch excessive, hope you're not wearing out those typing fingers!

[kasnavada]

Player units start to take longer to build as their Mark increases. Not an increase in cost, just in production time. This is to make it so that your ability to field a refleeted giant-strength force isn't just going up crazily as your mark levels increase. You can always offset this time with engineers, but they are finite and cost you extra resources (mainly energy -- not anything extra in the long term of metal flows). This should keep the mid and late game balance a lot better versus players just having lots of insta-fleets over and over again.

That's an horrible modification, really.

It now takes dozen of minutes to rebuild a fleet outside of your territory, for no reason at all, and the impact if felt in the first hour of the game. Just upgrade a fleet to level 4, double its capacity and enjoy netflix.

[tadrinth]

Does AI difficulty affect map generation?  I'm pretty sure it heavily affected seeding of AI units during map gen in AIWC.  That means changing the difficulty after you start the game is going to be quite a bit different from if you'd set that difficulty before you start. 

I'd rather make it easier to override the difficulty for a quick start than the new behavior of allowing achievements if you up the difficulty right after the game starts.

[x4000]

Hey folks!

Random notes:

1. All the achievements are on Steam now.

2. If you got something like "Teach a Man to Fish..." from killing an enemy, that's a bug for sure!

3. The modification to build times to take longer is something we realize people hate, and we're trying to do something better for a release today.  If people super-hate even that, we'll just go back.  But we think we can find something cool to get at the original purpose rather than something that pisses people off.  But that's been duly noted, and we appreciate the feedback.

4. The ability to load a quick start into the lobby and then further customize it is something I hope to do in general, and that may then make us change the whole "first 60 seconds" thing with the AI level changes.

5. The map generation is actually shockingly little-affected by AI type difficulty.  If the highest AI type is less than 5 then some extra goodies seed, and how many wormhole sentinels there are is higher or lower based on the AI difficulty at each specific planet, and there are a few scary things like troop accelerators/fortresses/superforts/dire guardians/ombs/ion cannons/black hole machines that get seeded more if the difficulty is 7+ or less if fewer than 3.  But really it's surprisingly little.  Most things instead develop over time as the AI starts building up their stuff.

[tadrinth]

Okay good to know on the diff -> map gen thing.  IIRC, in AIWC it affected the number of Brutal Pick Core Guard Posts on the AI Homeworlds and that could be very significant (*cough please don't bring back Wrath Lances cough*).