BETA AI War 2 v0.857 Released! "The AI Strikes Back... Hard"

[x4000]

Release notes here.

Reminder: to play the beta, 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 pre-fleets version of the game.

If you don't know what I'm talking about regarding fleets, then reading this link is a really good thing to do or you are likely to be mighty confused.

So what's new in this build?  This is obviously an incremental one, headed towards the non-beta full release of 0.900 that we're aiming at in the next... weeks?  That timeframe is unclear, and will be based on testing feedback, which has been rolling in well so far; but there will be loads of incremental beta releases during this period.  Anyway, what's new:

• This one makes the AI way harder by fixing a variety of bugs and adding a variety of new behaviors.  Thanks, Badger!


• The galaxy map bloom is less, and can be tweaked now.


• A flagship of yours getting crippled actually has some consequences now.


• Your energy going negative now causes construction to halt, and anything that you don't have the energy to run can be STARTED in construction but won't actually complete.


• Wow the amount of balance changes here, particularly to AI stuff.  Here was Puffin's side of things to make things feel more balanced with the higher-tech stuff that players now have available all the time.  The AI wasn't keeping up!


• Puffin also adjusted a lot of your flagships to be stronger now than they were, but it depends on the type.


• Economic command stations can now have multiple energy collectors again, which is a pretty big deal now that you need energy properly!


• A variety of bugfixes from Badger and WeaponMaster really clean up a number of annoying issues or strange galaxy seeds.


• I spent a goodly while trying to fix the lobby, and made a few things mildly better, but didn't really fix it.  I've got a much better idea of how to redo it from scratch (which was already planned), though, now.  I guess I'm doing that sooner than planned!


• I'm in much better health now, thanks to everyone who was asking after me -- that meant a lot.

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 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

[BadgerBadger]

Hopefully the Hunter Fleet should actually be doing things now. And the Civil War should be more interesting too.

[zeusalmighty]

4 way civil war with Dark Spire at 10 makes for a very lively galaxy. I had scoutted debug all to witness it in action, but the galaxy never felt more in peril.

One mark 5 planet got wiped out by the dark spire and now is throwing itself againt the HW (damn that dark spire ward)
Funny enough though, the dark spire turn into hostile zombies due to the Parasitic AI type so they still put up more of a fight on the HW than I would have thought

I'm pretty safe for now, but ultimately the Dark Spire is going to dominate this galaxy. Wish I could get a ward on my HW, might be able to weather the storm lol

[x4000]

That sounds so freaking cool.

[BadgerBadger]

It makes me really happy to hear that it's going so well!

[Draco18s]

"The AI Strikes Back... Hard"

You don't say. Finally took a peek at what's been going on and...

Dang. I take 3 planets (90 AIP total) and the AI sends about 400 raiders at me.

Now, I intentionally sat back and wanted to see how my defensive fleets could deal with this.

They could not. It wasn't even a contest. They chewed through one planet, then my home system's defenses pretty much with impunity.

I could have brought my mobile fleeto bear on them at any time (they were only 2 hops out and I was using logistical stations) but I wanted to see where this would go. In the end my defensive fleets took out about maybe a quarter of them before my Ark was destroyed.

Also, with the way fleets rebuild their units, those units do not get added to my selection automatically (even if the commanding unit is in my selection), leading to having to regularly hit M in order to keep my entire mobile fleet selected (esp. since those smaller units don't inherit orders).

[BadgerBadger]

Depending on the strength of the battlestations/citadels, that might be exactly what one would expect. Building military stations seems to be an important part of your defenses. Logistical and economic are much weaker.

[Draco18s]

I'll definitely give those a shot.

Game is definitely going to need a (near) scripted campaign to get us old fogeys playing correctly again.

[x4000]

Game is definitely going to need a (near) scripted campaign to get us old fogeys playing correctly again.

Campaign is perhaps a strong word, but there are a number of things that I'm planning on adding where you can select from... um... non-sandbox-but-still-freeform guided missions?  I have no idea what to call that.  But basically, in the lobby you'd select from something like "Standard AI Battle Plan Adviser," or "Minimum Planet Capture AI Battle Plan Adviser," or "No Adviser" or something along those lines in order for it to just do like now (still having the Intel on the sidebar, but no guides on how to play).

This way you can "just play the game" without going into tutorials that are separate (though those would still be there), but it will help to steer you toward some general objectives based on the playstyle that you indicated you wanted.  And people could make their own of these with a fair bit of ease (relatively speaking), so if someone wants to make a special Adviser for how to win via exploiting the civil war between AIs, they could do that, too.

Of course then we have the problem of inappropriate advisers for the given scenario (civil war adviser when there's no civil war??), but one thing at a time.

Anyway, my goal is to make it so that there are some advisers giving you short-term options for middle-term goals, and you can defy them if you want, but it gives you a probably-reasonable thing to do for the bulk of cases for the playstyle you selected.  Or you can just turn the whole thing off and play like now, where it's all "Go Win The Game, Good Luck" and gives you intel but no real direct advice.

That's the plan, anyway!

[BadgerBadger]

I had a suggestion some years ago (damn it's been a long time) where the AI would tell you things like "Hey, my Threat Fleet is going to attack Murdoch, since it's not defended enough" if you asked for it. Stuff like that could be added.

[x4000]

That would be pretty darn cool!  And... yeah, whew, it's been a while indeed.