AI War 2 v1.022 Released! "Slaying The Asymptote"

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Release notes here. All the achievements are now live on Steam, and we've also fixed up the build speed changes that were really bugging people in the prior build.

What's new?

• All 139 achievements are now live on Steam, so you can check out what those look like.
• The build speeds for higher-mark ships last build were sloooow. Way more than we meant to, because of a kind of hilarious bug (in a masochistic kind of way). Ships just reeeeally didn't want to finish building, and would get progressively slower as they nearly finished themselves. Not only did we fix that, we also rebalanced the build speed stuff in general.
• After you win the game, the AI ships now go braindead. This feels way more satisfying and like you've actually won the game. The other factions that exist, if there are any (Macrophage, Nanocaust, whatever) will still do their thing and may be something you want to continue fighting if that's the sort of thing you're into. You've won, but it's fun to see how the AI is its own beast compared to the other factions.

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

[kasnavada]

The build speeds for higher-mark ships last build were sloooow. 
Marks 1-3 for fleets not on friendly planets build at full speed. Slowdown is 1.25x at mark 4, 1.5 at mark 5, 1.75 at mark 6 and 2.0 at mark 7. On the previous patch it was something like a 7x slowdown.

That sounds better, but I still don't get the problem that this modification is supposed to be solving. Frankly, I feel it's a modification of "just because".

I mean, there are already more ships as you level-up, which brings the total rebuilding time higher, and the game pushes you toward building 2 fleet as large as possible thanks to AI Eyes limiting you to 2 fleets, and often deep into enemy territory (so highest level fleet + full fleet extender). Therefore a maxed fleet already takes a LOT of time to rebuild in enemy territory. With 2 mobile factories it was already hard to keep up with your ship being destroyed. And the game does pushes you toward rebuilding into enemy territory.

In practice, if you do multiply the number of factories and engineer, you get limited by metal anyway (and, you can do just that). The only thing this modification do is force me to L, move my fleet to a group of planets I own so they repair faster and then go back and U instead of just going to a neighbouring neutered planet to rebuild. Yay micro. Or not.


By the way:
- there REALLY should be a move option where the fleets automatically L / start moving once loaded / U when at destination,
- there is a bug when loading : the ship count shown on the minimap are : 10, 20, 30, 50, 70, 80, 700, 800. I do think that there should be some ship counts between 80 and 700.


On a side note, the starting fleets feel bad to me, as there are a lot of spread in ship types. Example:
Default fleet:
- V-wing (generalist)
- fusion bomber (fusion)
- concussion corvette (concussion)
- forcefield Frigate (forcefield)

Default battle station is gravitic, so:
- grenade turret (spash)
- concussion turret (concussion)
- ambush turret (ambush)

Default turret is pike, so disruptive.

Out of the 10 technologies the starting set-up is spread over 6 techs. It's about the same for all other options too. I strongly feel like the ships on starting fleet / defenses should be paired somewhat tech-wise between your defense option and the offense option and specialize you, especially the default one (IE : default fleet only has ships / turrets of 3 different tech types).

That said, that's probably open to debate.

All 139 achievements are now live on Steam, so you can check out what those

That's cool !

[BadgerBadger]

The problem that's trying to be solved is that previously your factories could produce units faster than the AI could kill them. So under the right circumstances you could win literally any battle as long as you had enough money, and getting a ton of money was very doable.

[kasnavada]

I don't really see how it's an issue, but... if I were to solve this, I'd propose introduce a cumulative speed penalty like building a ship line ships take longer the more ships you build in a short time frame - 2 minutes for example - and you have to stop building ships to resume this.
- From 0% of a fleet cap to 50% of a fleet cap, ship build speed is untouched.
- From 50% to 100%, ship build speed takes 10% longer.
- For every 20% after this, ship build speed penalty doubles. So 20% for 100-120, 40% for 120-140, 80% for 160-180 and so on. You could write a "supply lane emptied" warning or something - after all it makes sense than even if you have endless metal, you still need to shape then into parts.

If you stop building ships, and wait for 2 minutes, the penalty resets. Of course, ships like autobombs must be excluded from this mechanic.

Numbers probably have to be tweeked a bit (maybe the bonus should decay rather than being reset), but... this should have next to no impact on current gameplay. And, the difference is that the proposed change aimed to prevent player from building fast. While the goal of your modification ain't to prevent players from building fast, it's to prevent players from building forever. This prevents player from building forever, and doesn't prevent them from building fast.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

Some data.

From something here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=22364

Specifically:

I think about the reinforcement speed due to some cases I've seen where it'll go from losing pretty hard to winning trivially, just from spamming more ships at the thing. You can essentially get to a point where the health-per-second you add into a fight outpaces the AIs DPS, because you're building MK6-7 units for cheap.

Take a MK1 Vanguard for instance. It has 24k health, and costs 4,500 metal to build. A Factory outputs 2,000 metal per second. So roughly every 2 seconds, a unit with 24k health comes out, meaning this single Factory is outputting 12k health-per-second into a battle.

Now a MK7 Vanguard. MK7 has 4x health, and the cost does not increase, so that Factory outputs 48k health-per-second by itself. Add in a Combat Factory or two (which level up and output more), some more Factories, Engineers, and it gets pretty darn high.

A single Military World, and the starting Rejuvenator Combat Factory leads to something like...8,000 just from the Factories, then 2,000 from the 10 Engineers from Rejuvenator, so 10,000 total metal per second, at only MK1. If it was MK3, the Rejuvenator is doubled, and the Engineers are tripled, from doubling their speed then increasing cap by 50%.

That'd then result in 10,000 from Factories, then 6,000 from Engineers, so 16,000. That's 8 Factories output, so...96k health per second, if building MK1 Vanguards. For MK7 Vanguards, 384k health-per-second. For reference, the Overlord Phase 2 is 280k DPS, not including the Overdriver which isn't really able to be counted.

That's just one Combat Factory and one planet. The Vanguard is admittedly an extreme ship to use, but it highlights fairly well I think how nuts it can be. Of course, this is draining metal, though I've seen people with insanely high storage and income. That isn't including ships regenerating shields, or Engineers repairing for a fraction of the cost (shield repairs are free, and hull is half cost - with units being usually 2/1 ratio, this means the cost to repair is usually a third of the cost of a new one). It also isn't including drones, or zombifying anything.

Hence the comment on the Counter-Attacks never triggering, or when they actually do, being game ending. If you have enough metal lying around, you can slap the planet to death.

With the current setting, in a save I have lying around, a 600+ Strength Fleet was rebuilt from 24 Strength (Golem) in around 6 minutes on an enemy world.

[kmunoz]

I don't really see how it's an issue, but... if I were to solve this, I'd propose introduce a cumulative speed penalty like building a ship line ships take longer the more ships you build in a short time frame - 2 minutes for example - and you have to stop building ships to resume this.

For myself, I'd resist any solution that's overly gamified. The above solution is the exact opposite of how the real world works: production over time increases speed and efficiency, and stopping production reduces it on restart. That's how it's been since the dawn of the industrial revolution. It would feel very, very weird to do the opposite of that, especially when the implemented solution is more realistic (complexity increases build time).

Yes, AI War 2 is more game than sim - well, all game, no sim - but still... for me, the above proposed change would feel like a bridge too far.