BETA AI War 2 v0.850 Released! "The Arrival of Fleets"

[x4000]

Release notes here.

To play it, you MUST go into your Steam properties for the game, go under the Betas tab, and choose the "current_beta" option.  Otherwise you're going to be stuck on the much-older (heck it's been a month and a half now) version of the game.

Soooo... I'm a little stuck as to what to even say, here.  Here's what this is, in a nutshell, I guess:

• The game was feeling stagnant (to me personally) for a variety of reasons, and I wrote up a big document about what I intended to do to fix that.


• I figured that an initial proof of concept would take "a week," and in an ideal world it might have been possible.  But that's obviously not what happened.


• Instead of a small proof of concept, we actually doubled down on a lot of the most interesting things going on in the new build, and that document I originally linked doesn't even convey the full scope of what has already changed.


• This also actually slaughtered a ton of bugs and to-dos and complaints from mantis and the steam forums, so good stuff all around.


• Hooray!  Month and a half well spent.


• That said:


• We're missing some things again, like tutorials, quick starts, and a fleet management screen.


• Also I hate the icons and the ships tab, functionally and visually.  This is not new.


• There's probably a ton of bugs, given only three of us have been testing this at all, and we haven't even tried to test all the parts that are here.

Why should you play this new build?

• If you don't mind getting your hands dirty and want to help us refinement (bug reports, please!).


• If you already mostly know what you're doing with the game, and are just ready to play the next phase of it.

Under what circumstances should you NOT play this new build?  It's under the BETA tab for a reason:

• If you just want to play a game that is polished and doesn't have any blatantly missing pieces, I'd advise waiting for 0.900.


• If you have an allergy to bugs, and/or the thought of losing your savegame repeatedly prior to 0.900 bothers you, then I'd wait.


• If you have no idea what you're doing and would like some form of tutorial, then this absolutely isn't for you yet.

What's Actually New?

• I just... this is where I struggle.


• Most everything is refined.


• The release notes are over 20k words long.


• The initial document describing what is changing and why was 12k on its own.


• Control groups are gone and fleets are in, and fleets are awesome and a player-side thing.


• The docks tab is gone and a new fleets tab is in.  That one is only partially implemented.


• The way techs work is completely redone, and is way better.


• The way hacking and planet capture work are way better.


• Many bugs were fixed, and achievements (not yet on Steam, but local at least) have been added.


• There were a variety of AI improvements, and mapgen got a whole heck of a lot of overhauling.


• Your ability to field a large force of spaceships, and to customize what sort of defenses your planets have, is through the roof compared to earlier versions of this game or the original game.


• Transports are gone, but all your mobile flagships (Arks or Golems) now can do that.  Press L to load and U to unload.


• Factories (formerly docks) are now incredibly automated, and the whole concept of things like build queues, rally points, and so on are all gone.  It just does what you want, now, without you having to tell it how.  You more or less tell it how by what you build and where you put things.


• Scouting has been completely revamped from the ground up, and there's a "hard mode" for that if you want.  It's mostly automated and thus serves the role of gradual-information-dispensing that it was always supposed to.  There's no way for you to cheese or grind it anymore.


• The way AIs defend their planets is completely different, and each planet is much more of a puzzle box for you to solve.


• There are way fewer capturables around the galaxy in a types-of-things-to-hack sense, like for instance Design Servers and all that sort of thing are gone.  This might seem alarming.  Even after writing the original big document, it alarmed me.


• But the reality is that there is more to capture than ever before, in the form of partially procedurally-generated FLEETS of ships that each dramatically improve your offensive or defensive (or both!) power.  It's shockingly gratifying as a way to grow in power, and the galaxy is absolutely littered with these things.  You can really field quite the force, now.


• The way the AI buys stuff is completely different (from how it worked before and from how it works for you, too), and it's way more effective and scary and interesting.


• Your risk of losing very early into the game because you left your king (in a Chess sense) undefended is higher than ever, especially if you play with many factions on.  Your risk of losing in the middle and late game is also a lot higher.


• In general things happen faster (not in a reaction-time sense, but in a not-waiting-for-things sense), and you're both more powerful and more exposed at all times.  Games that are won are likely to be several hours shorter, and I expect that games that are lost are likely to be even shorter compared to their counterparts in earlier versions or the prior game.


• There are literally dozens of new ship variants and new ship types.  It's actually kind of absurd how much new stuff there is.  The sense of discovery, even for me, is notable as I look through the galaxy.  That new stuff isn't marginalized, either, which is doubly cool.  You'll actually be seeing it with frequency, just not all in one big ugly soup.


• A bunch of stuff that took two or three steps (like colony ships!  hackers!  etc!) has been simplified a lot to just be one step.  Efficiency!  Let's get on with it.


• Savegames are vastly smaller in size, but actually have more data in them.  We're using a completely different format.


• The tutorial is disabled right now because we have to completely go in and redo how that works.


• If you're interested in our most immediate todo list, here it is.  Though some of that is misleading, because some of that stuff we might not wind up doing until after 1.0 or even at all.  I'm really not sure the hyperspace stuff is a good idea.  That applies to several things on the list.  But it's a working list.

Badger and Puffin and I would all love to have your thoughts on this, as we've been working on all sorts of various elements of it.  The absolute scale of this game has been rather staggeringly shoved in my face as I've undertaken this rework, but rather than stop with half measures and just implement band-aids, I've been going for the full deal fix as I see it.  So hence a month and a half rather than a week.

What Now?

What happens next is that we finish up some of the interfaces, decide whether or not to do some of those items on the todo list or leave well enough alone, fix a bunch of bugs and balance things that you guys toss at us, and then we'll ditch the beta status and go back to main steam branch builds when we hit that massive 0.900 build.  That will basically be this version, but fully finished and polished and with tutorials and all that jazz.  Think of this as kind of the needed preview version, and also a way for us to get a bunch of bugs out of the way (thanks to you finding them) without us inflicting them on people who just want to play the old version of the game.

Remember way back a year or so ago when we did "The Pivot," and that was the largest change in the game that I thought it was going to have?  That brought us mechanically back toward the first game in a huge number of ways.  It also started a bunch of people asking if this game was just a reskin or what.  This new version, the arrival of the Fleets concept, basically is 2.0 of the concept of The Pivot.  Mechanically this takes us actually really far from the first game, and anyone asking about reskin status at this point after seeing any of the ui I will seriously wonder about.  But gameplay-thematically and game-flow-wise this is taking us way back toward the first game, back to what I loved about it in its earliest days.

In a lot of respects, at this point the amount of content is so astounding thanks to things like procedural fleets that I'm feeling like the smartest way to reach 1.0 from here is to focus on polishing the mechanics and interfaces, fixing bugs, getting multiplayer in, and in general going for something tightly polished (and still huge) versus dripping with even more new mechanics.  We can save that stuff for post-1.0.

In the shortest term, my goal is to get to a really stable and awesome 0.900 build, which should be the best version of AIW2 to date, and potentially better than any of the AIWC builds.  We shall see.  The proof is in the pudding, and today you guys finally get to actually get to taste things.  Hope you 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 be much more detailed than a thumbs up, 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

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

AI difficulty is one thing I'm very unsure of, as most of my games were cancelled due to major bugs appearing. Feedback on that part would be very useful.

I don't think there are many notable things I would like to do, except perhaps a bunch more mercenary groups, at least enough so you have a fair bit of variety each game instead of being guaranteed about 80% of them.

[beginattackrun]

This is definitely exciting. I've been following the release notes somewhat religiously and .850 looks like it's going to have a lot of cool stuff.

One thing I've been wondering about is fleets, since I haven't encountered a clear explanation of the concept despite hearing a lot about them. Could someone summarize how they work?

[Cyborg]

Getting a warning on requested attributes.

[Vinco]

Downloading NOW!

[WeaponMaster]

I'm going to be busy for the next 2 weeks, but it'll be good to get back into debugging things after that. One of the things I'm wondering about is how my anti clumping changes will work now that things have changed.

[Vinco]

Overall, the new paradigm is interesting.  I've got quite a bit of learning to do.  A few thoughts:

1)  More decloaking would be nice.  I keep getting lurkers at my planets
2)  Semi-related to #1 - I'd like a better way to move battlestations around.  The revealer battlestation is the best decloaker I have by far, but it won't band-select with my attack fleets to accompany them.
3)  Research is gained slowly, and it seems like there's too little research gain compared to the amount of research that can be used once you have more than the starting fleet.
4)  The turret building only where battlestations go is odd.  I think I understand the logic, but having buildings linked to getting fleets there rather than just having fleets seems like excess micromanagement.

More thoughts later.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

1)  More decloaking would be nice.  I keep getting lurkers at my planets

Should have Tachyon Arrays and/or Sentry Frigates, and I'm leaning towards Combat Factories sometimes having a Combat Sentry Frigate as well as Combat Engineers.

2)  Semi-related to #1 - I'd like a better way to move battlestations around.  The revealer battlestation is the best decloaker I have by far, but it won't band-select with my attack fleets to accompany them.

I'd believe this is due to it being considered a non-combatant. They should be selected if you hold shift though, or use the Fleets sidebar (hold shift and rightclick all that you want). Could possibly give Battlestations weaker guns than Citadels, so they are proper combatants.

3)  Research is gained slowly, and it seems like there's too little research gain compared to the amount of research that can be used once you have more than the starting fleet.

Hm, okay. This was something said before this update as well. I'll keep it in mind. Now we can actually set the science per planet properly, so should be an easy fix if needed.

[Vinco]

I was able to build a tachyon array at my home planet only.  No sentry frigates available to me yet.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

They're only available to specific Command Stations.

Tachyon Array: Home, Military, Logistical

Sentry Frigate: Military, Logistical

Simple enough to change, though.

[Vinco]

I actually didn't think to try a non-economic station...  Too accustomed to AIWC, perhaps.

[x4000]

The economic command stations I explicitly didn't give the ability to fully defend themselves because I felt like that would be a welcome tradeoff with them.  Essentially that they should be the things that... you know what?  Changes inbound:

* Re-wrote the economic command station description:
** Economic variant of the planetary command center. If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet.  This variant gives greatly improved metal and energy output, but lacks the ability to directly defend itself very well.  It doesn't even have any means of decloaking enemies directly.  Planets with these should either be protected by a powerful citadel or battlestation, or so far back from the front lines that they are safe.

* The matter converters and energy collectors were higher on the logistical command stations, and now that has been swapped with the economic command stations.

* Logistical command stations now come with 20 mines built in, and also two focused gravity generators.  More stuff to help them be more tricky and dangerous directly.
** They also now get 2 forcefields while the military variants only get 1 instead, swapping those two.

* Re-wrote the logistical command station description:
* Logistical variant of the planetary command center.  If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet.  This variation is by far the best at finding cloaked enemies, tractoring enemies, and even laying traps (mines!) for enemies.  Beyond that it's kind of a halfway point between the military and economic drives of its peers.  They also get two forcefields where their peers only get one, and way more engineers.

* Military command stations now get 5 beam cannons and 15 ambush turrets, making them by far the most able to defend themselves without the help of a battlestation or citadel.

* Re-wrote the military command station description:
** Military variant of the planetary command center.  If this is destroyed, you lose control of the planet.  This variation is by far the best at defending itself, and perfect for dangerous border planets.  It also gets the most factories, making it probably the best way to resupply your fleets near the front lines.

[RocketAssistedPuffin]

Agreed on the Economic Command Stations, and essentially everything else.

[MaxAstro]

AAAAA it's finally here so much hype!!!

...I won't have the chance to play it until tomorrow.  T_T

@beginattackrun: I'd suggest playing the beta.  Fleets are hard to describe, it's probably better if you see them in action.  From what I understand of the changelog, you really can't miss them. 

[x4000]

One thing I've been wondering about is fleets, since I haven't encountered a clear explanation of the concept despite hearing a lot about them. Could someone summarize how they work?

Basically...

1. The way the AI uses its ships is no different.  They don't use "fleets" in the sense that you do.  Yes they still have warden and hunter fleets and so on, but that's different.

2. The AI does use ships differently now in general, but that's unrelated to "fleets" as you have them.

3. You no longer have global or per-planet ship caps for anything.  Note that in prior versions of this game and AIWC, that was the way ALL ship caps were, but now nothing works that way.

4. You have four basic kinds of fleets: mobile (combat or support), battlestation (basic or citadel), lone wolf, and command station.  ALL of your ships go into a fleet of one of these categories, and your ship caps are always specific to the fleet in question.

5. Mobile combat fleets are completely made of up mobile ships like strikecraft (formerly fleetships) and frigates (formerly starships), and they are centered around a giant unkillable centerpiece (an Ark or a Golem).  If the health of the centerpiece, aka flagship, drops below 10% then the fleet can still fight but it can't get reinforcements anymore.  This is called "crippled" status.  The flagships cannot die.  Ships from the fleet also can't function on planets further than 1 hop away from the centerpiece.  Also, the flagships can act as transports for any and all ships in their fleet.  Just press L and U.

6. Factories (formerly space docks or starship constructors) no longer have queues or any direct controls at all (WTF, right??).  Instead they build ALL of the things for all fleets within 1 hop of them, all at once.  So long as the target fleet isn't crippled and the factory isn't in hold fire mode.  So refleeting is kinda automatic, so long as you put your centerpiece where it should be.

7. Want to hack?  Mobile fleet centerpieces can do that.  Want to capture a planet?  No need for a colony ship, the mobile fleet centerpieces do that also.  WAnt to rebuild remains?  The command stations do that, no worries.  Science?  Command stations just grab that for you, too.

8. Mobile support fleets are just like the combat ones, but typically have... non-combat stuff.  Like engineers or factories or whatever that you can bring with you out into the hostile territories.

9. Battlestations mostly build things that can't move (aka turrets and minefields), but the battlestations themselves can move.  They are slow and cumbersome and it's not meant for you to be moving these around a ton.  But think of these as mobile caps of turrets and mines and tractors and whatever else.  You can stack them on planets, or use them in enemy territory for a beachhead, or whatever.   A planet of yours without a battlestation or citadel is probably pretty vulnerable, so where you choose to put these is important.  You can move them between planets specifically so that you can easily reconfigure your empire as needs change.

9. Citadels are just battlestation fleets that have a freaking (formerly called) fortress at the center.  So these things are extra powerful on their own.

10. Lone wolf fleets are the most rare, and are just Big Powerful ships that act on their own.  One-man armies, so to speak.  The spire frigates are the only kind of these you get right now.  They are terrifying, and work like other centerpieces (getting crippled, never killed), but they don't have any attendants with them.

11. Command station fleets are inherent on every world that you control.  Depending on the type of command station you build, you get a certain number of engineers, decloakers, forcefields, and so on.  So choosing economic, military, or logistical matters a lot more than the direct ship now.  These fleets just kind of barely do enough of a job to hold the planet against ultra-weak attacks, although they're great for agumenting the various kinds of battlestations.  If you're feeling gutsy and want the resources, then go economic.  If you're trying to blockade the enemy, then go for logistical.  If you're trying to project force outwards and keep your forward fleets really refleeting fast, then go military.  You can switch these at any time and there's no cap per type.

12. There's a fleets sidebar tab that shows you each fleet you have and its status, and there are a variety of things you can do with the fleets as well like rename them or upgrade the fleet itself by one mark level (both coming soon).  Sometimes when you hack certain things, it adds to the ship cap for the hacker fleet, like giving it a sweet new wraith unit that you can build in it from then on, or whatever.  Fleets gain EXP, although that's not really shown in the interface right now.

13. Choosing the right fleets to capture and to use for any given job is by far the biggest part of where your brain activity is going to be headed from now on.  There's no longer any concept of "unlocked ship types" in a global sense, and so techs work completely differently, too.  There are many fewer techs, and they benefit ships in a variety of fleets based on the types of ships.  There are tons of more variants of ship types, and individual fleets have a lot of... personality... because of that.