Author Topic: AI War 2 v2.047 Released! "Perks By Another Mother" (Read 4777 times)

x4000 · « **on:** May 21, 2020, 10:18:35 pm »

Only a day later, but this is a big one! Full notes here.

What's new?

First off, Badger found a bug in some of the fire teams code that had been leading them to be less efficient with their forces (using overwhelming force where it was not needed). This was actually a really cool behavior in the Nanocaust, and the "Nanocaust Deathballs" are both menacing as well as fun and engaging to avoid, so we've left that behavior for them.
But for all the other factions and sub-factions that use fireteams... watch out! As Badger puts it: I'm not sure how impactful this will be, but the answer might be "Very", at least for any faction that had enough ships to be overkilling their targets significantly. There are lots of potential cases. Where the Hunter has just broken through a chokepoint and now has its pick of weakly defended economic planets, it's now going to be a lot scarier.
Next up, mobile forcefield generator ships are now a lot more useful since they no longer come with the damage penalty. This mostly helps you.
...but AI forcefield generators now in general no longer have the penalty at all, for the (relatively) rare cases when they do use a forcefield. Both of these things bring this part of the game more in line with AI War Classic.
You can now have up to 40 ship lines per fleet, rather than 5. Also, swapping ships between fleets on the same planet no longer destroys the fleets. Your ability to customize fleets is now far greater.
Raiders have gotten a buff, but no longer have the one-off "super-charges the rest of their fleet" ability, since that was out of place on its own with them, and way too powerful to have on random ships you can find now that the fleets can be arbitrarily large.
There is a brand new structure that you can find and hack in new campaigns: the Fleet Research Station. It allows for you to get new, advanced fleet-bonus-giving large ship lines if you hack them AND pay an AIP penalty.
There are currently six of these types of ship lines, and they open very new kinds of play and synergies in these large fleets. If some of them seem expensive for what they are, bear in mind that you may not be considering just how impactful they can be if you have a truly giant fleet. All of these things give fleet-wide buffs ranging from the raider-style speed boost, to attack and defensive boosts of various sorts.
We will likely explore the concept of these sorts of fleet-wide perk-centric ship lines through FRSes more in the future, either through future free updates or in DLC, or both. But basically this gives the sort of flavor I was thinking of with what fleet EXP upgrade perks would once have given... but still minus the grind, and now with potentially even more power as well as more flexibility. You may not use these much, depending on your playstyle, but they should hopefully be the sort of thing that is a cool and incredibly helpful tool to use a minority of the time. I really enjoy mechanics like that, where they aren't mandatory for play but are things that are killer if the circumstances are right.
Plus some bugfixes and other tweaks!

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

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

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. For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect. Go figure. Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews. 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

Lord Of Nothing · « **Reply #1 on:** May 22, 2020, 04:29:27 am »

Now this sounds really cool. (Plus the fireteam changes might really help the Imperial spire resolve games faster...)

Spook · « **Reply #2 on:** May 22, 2020, 06:29:16 am »

Would eyes require a rework, now that fleets can be this large?

kasnavada · « **Reply #3 on:** May 22, 2020, 06:54:38 am »

Little bug : capturing the new ship lines don't give AIP.

x4000 · « **Reply #4 on:** May 22, 2020, 01:05:37 pm »

Eyes do need a rework, there's discussion here: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view.php?id=23206

And thanks for the note on the AIP thing not kicking in!

x4000 · « **Reply #5 on:** May 22, 2020, 01:16:31 pm »

Thanks!

* Fixed a typo in the hack for claiming the new Fleet Research Station ships that was not charging you their AIP properly.

ANGRYABOUTELVES · « **Reply #6 on:** May 24, 2020, 06:25:22 pm »

I'm disappointed at how boring the fleet booster effects are. They're just multipliers to basic stats; damage, health, shields, it's so boring I don't even want to use them. I expected weird stuff like the old raider, effects that could really change how an entire fleet functions. Every ship moves at X speed if they aren't faster than X like the old raider, or every ship gets cloaking or vampirism or zombification or metabolize, or a flat HP/shield boost so swarmers get really tanky, or fleet-wide shield penetration, just weird effects that make you think about how best to use them. And it would probably be hard to balance, but it would be way more interesting and fun than 1.5x damage or 1.5 hull or even, woah, 1.5x damage and 1.5x hull at the same time!

I hope that this sort of thing is what you already have planned for the future and these effects are basically placeholders for the weird, cool, hard-to-balance effects that you're currently playtesting. The entire rest of the combat system is so intricate, with so many different effects and ship stats and niche interactions that I can't imagine you're satisfied with how little thought the fleet booster wings take to use.

x4000 · « **Reply #7 on:** May 24, 2020, 08:42:18 pm »

I think there's a place for exotic things as well as the good old staples. Having an extra tanky fleet hardly strikes me as boring. These are in no way placeholder, but they are definitely less esoteric and the more low hanging fruit out of the sort of things we might get up to. This was kind of an initial selection of fleet boosters to show the concept in action and give you some basic starting points to use. But it's not the end of the concept.

The first AI War had ships like munitions boosters and similar, and some of these fill a similar role. That's less exciting than something that fundamentally changes the nature of a fleet, but a lot of people really loved and made huge use of munitions boosters.

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