Release notes here.
After three long years, we're finally at the point where we're ready to start showing this off to the press in a non-preview fashion. This build does still have some bugs and some rough edges, but they're minor in the main and we have a week to finish up that sort of thing along with achievements.
As a mostly one-man shop now (plus awesome volunteers who keep increasing in number) there's only but so much lead time I can give, and I wind up feeling like I want every last everything to be perfect. As it stands we have about a week until 1.0, and I'm really pleased with how things feel. Seems like our growing list of players are, too, from the sound of things. So that's good!
What's new in this build?
- We finally have AI taunts in the game! This was something people really liked in the first game (when the AI says something mean to you when it does something clever or you do something stupid), and that has returned in a major way. In the first game I think we had a dozen, maybe two dozen, taunts in total. Now there are over two hundred.
- Ships can now load into transports from other planets (traveling to the planet of the transport first of course).
- Awesome new quick start scenario by community member Nuc_Temeron. We love the clever things you folks think up, and are always interested in including things like this for players to experiment with.
- More tutorial tweaks, thanks to Puffin.
- Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet.
- A whole bunch of bugfixes, some of the most significant ones relating to the new ability to select and control fleets from the galaxy map. That should now work properly in all cases, and not have the selection/hover issues it did briefly.
- Also some bugfixes to the metal usage reports, so that's more accurate.
- The energy usage in the resources bar can now be clicked and gives you a detailed breakdown of where you're earning and spending energy! This is... a surprisingly big win, in terms of making it clear what the state of your empire is.
- Bunches of improvements to the "strong against" version of the R-click view, to make it more correct and clear.
- New icons for the tech menu!
- Lower difficulty levels (less than or equal to 5) now have a variety of things making them easier than before. There were definitely some complaints about it still being too hard at those lower levels.
- Also a fix to make dire guardians appear properly, and some of the guard posts on the planets that would have dire guardians no longer be hyper-aggressive towards you. So this should make deep-striking a lot easier in the late game in particular, and thus help with some of the difficulty that a few people were reporting.
More to come soon. Enjoy!
Reminder: Launch Is Coming Up October 22nd!
We're now in the process of tidying things up for the 10-year anniversary of AI War Classic appearing on Steam for the first time. We're getting really close! I understand a lot of you are really enjoying the game now, which is super duper awesome. If that's you, and you haven't written a review yet, would you mind just dropping a couple of brief thoughts on the store page for the game?
There's a sea of other indie titles out there now, and I'm anxious about my career to put it kind of frankly. Please be honest, obviously, but if you're enjoying the game it would really be a big deal to me personally if you'd let other people know; that stuff makes a big difference in our ability to get featuring on the store, in how people choose to purchase or not, and so on.
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
