Recent Posts

11

Starward Rogue / Forums sunsetting - please visit us on discord!

« Last post by x4000 on May 19, 2021, 02:02:11 pm »

These forums were the mainstay of Arcen's community for pretty much a decade.  When I first heard about discord, I didn't like the format.  Then people eventually got me to move there, and pretty much all activity has moved there.  These forums are old and dusty, and nobody really comes here anymore.

Well, we do have tens of thousands of views a month, but nobody posts, so I am guessing that is a combination of bots/crawlers and people finding answers to old qusetions.  We don't plan on taking down the forums, because of the fact that they are such a great archival tool, but we also don't want to chase spammers endlessly here, or have people mistakenly arrive at this location and wonder why the community is a ghost town. 

The community is thriving!  It's just here now: https://discord.gg/arcengames

Edit: you may need to use this invite link: https://discord.com/invite/5g9ETKn

12

AI War Classic / Forums sunsetting - please visit us on discord!

« Last post by x4000 on May 19, 2021, 02:02:02 pm »

These forums were the mainstay of Arcen's community for pretty much a decade.  When I first heard about discord, I didn't like the format.  Then people eventually got me to move there, and pretty much all activity has moved there.  These forums are old and dusty, and nobody really comes here anymore.

Well, we do have tens of thousands of views a month, but nobody posts, so I am guessing that is a combination of bots/crawlers and people finding answers to old qusetions.  We don't plan on taking down the forums, because of the fact that they are such a great archival tool, but we also don't want to chase spammers endlessly here, or have people mistakenly arrive at this location and wonder why the community is a ghost town. 

The community is thriving!  It's just here now: https://discord.gg/arcengames

Edit: you may need to use this invite link: https://discord.com/invite/5g9ETKn

13

AI War II / Forums sunsetting - please visit us on discord!

« Last post by x4000 on May 19, 2021, 02:01:41 pm »

These forums were the mainstay of Arcen's community for pretty much a decade.  When I first heard about discord, I didn't like the format.  Then people eventually got me to move there, and pretty much all activity has moved there.  These forums are old and dusty, and nobody really comes here anymore.

Well, we do have tens of thousands of views a month, but nobody posts, so I am guessing that is a combination of bots/crawlers and people finding answers to old qusetions.  We don't plan on taking down the forums, because of the fact that they are such a great archival tool, but we also don't want to chase spammers endlessly here, or have people mistakenly arrive at this location and wonder why the community is a ghost town. 

The community is thriving!  It's just here now: https://discord.gg/arcengames

Edit: you may need to use this invite link: https://discord.com/invite/5g9ETKn

14

Website Support / Forums sunsetting - please visit us on discord!

« Last post by x4000 on May 19, 2021, 02:01:13 pm »

These forums were the mainstay of Arcen's community for pretty much a decade.  When I first heard about discord, I didn't like the format.  Then people eventually got me to move there, and pretty much all activity has moved there.  These forums are old and dusty, and nobody really comes here anymore.

Well, we do have tens of thousands of views a month, but nobody posts, so I am guessing that is a combination of bots/crawlers and people finding answers to old qusetions.  We don't plan on taking down the forums, because of the fact that they are such a great archival tool, but we also don't want to chase spammers endlessly here, or have people mistakenly arrive at this location and wonder why the community is a ghost town. 

The community is thriving!  It's just here now: https://discord.gg/arcengames

15

AI War II / Zenith Onslaught Hype Thread

« Last post by Wingflier on May 18, 2021, 02:05:40 am »

Okay, I know I'm a little late for this now, as I've we've only got T-15 hours left until release, but I'm super excited for this expansion.

I finished a campaign with my friend about 9 months ago, and this is when multiplayer was still technically in alpha or early beta, but it seems like there's been a metric TON of changes since then, and the expansion is about to bring even more.

So glad you guys are still working on this game. By the time I wake up tomorrow it'll basically be out. Can't wait!

16

AI War II / AI War 2 -- v2.999 DLC Eve

« Last post by x4000 on May 17, 2021, 11:51:01 pm »

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.999_DLC_Eve

(Reminder that if you have trouble with the build, you can always go into betas and choose most_recent_stable to go one build back. This is how I sleep at night after making some major changes.)

Lots of last minute fixes and tweaks, a lot of them the sort of thing where we went "how did none of our testers find this?" But Democracy and some others ran a long game last night and found a whole crop of new bugs, so those got squashed.

Speaking of bugs, a not-so-new bug from the last few weeks has been making multiplayer just miserable for the clients, and I could not figure it out for the life of me. After chasing it for a long time, and getting lots of reports that I couldn't replicate, I was finally able to replicate it. Once it was replicatable, its days were numbered. It turned out to be three complex bugs in one, but they're all fixed now and so the client experience is a lot more sane. No more disappearing fleets and units.

On the DLC2 front -- hey, that launches in about 11.5 hours from now! -- there's some really cool new additions as well, with some last minute new controls to allow you more control over targeting crashing nomad planets or zenith miners. These are semi-wildcard type aspects of DLC2 when you enable them, so the ability to use hacking points to turn them to your advantage (rather than having no choice but to fight and defeat them if they were unfavorable to you) adds a lot of new strategic options for advanced players in particular. For casual play, it still adds options, but it probably won't be game-deciding at that level.

SirLimbo's mods got some updates as well, and Tzarro helped us find a ton of typos that are now fixed, most in the base game. Oh! There's two new fun cheat codes for DLC2. One to get all Zeus's cruisers, and the other to spawn a Miner Probe.

Titan Edition and DLC2 arrive super soon. Enjoy!

17

AI War II - Non-Urgent Discussions / Outer Galaxy Threads

« Last post by t4r0n on May 06, 2021, 04:43:36 am »

I love the idea that the AI is currently fighting outer galaxy factions and thus does not pay attention to the humans. I would be cool to see maybe in a future expansion that the AI and humans ally against some bigger external threat - like in that one Star Trek TNG episode where the borg and the humans fight species 8472 to prevent extinction.

18

AI War II / Re: Beta 2.813 Golem Relations

« Last post by carldong on May 05, 2021, 11:13:02 am »

Scouts in AIWC served a dual role of revealing new planets (exploration) and giving persistent vision by being stationed on a particular planet (picketing).  Spies fulfill the picketing role, but are less critical since logistics and military stations provide vision on adjacent planets (and can be hacked to provide more hops of vision).  You have to clear out special anti-spy structures in order to safely picket some system.

Exploration is still triggered automatically whenever you take AI systems.

Oh, I see. I thought only Logistical stations provide vision. I guess that was an ancient version.

19

AI War II / Re: Beta 2.813 Golem Relations

« Last post by tadrinth on May 04, 2021, 01:10:07 pm »

Scouts in AIWC served a dual role of revealing new planets (exploration) and giving persistent vision by being stationed on a particular planet (picketing).  Spies fulfill the picketing role, but are less critical since logistics and military stations provide vision on adjacent planets (and can be hacked to provide more hops of vision).  You have to clear out special anti-spy structures in order to safely picket some system.

Exploration is still triggered automatically whenever you take AI systems.

20

AI War II / 2.815 Polishing And Bugfixing

« Last post by x4000 on April 30, 2021, 08:01:56 pm »

New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#2.815_Polishing_And_Bugfixing 

We are back from beta, and this new version includes a lot of polishing and bugfixing, improvements to the bastille turret, and many various items for our DLC2 testers to bang on.  This also has another raft of multiplayer fixes, although thankfully the number of those required is going down quite a lot.   We seem to have slain both ghosts as well as the creeping command lag, and the new MP issues reported were actually all related to DLC2!  So that's a nice thing to be whittling down so far.

During this beta period, we've increased energy requirements quite a bit for superweapons, and also scaled back the number of ship lines you have access to.  Officer fleets no longer come with free ship lines, but also now cost much less AIP to capture.  ARSes and similar have slightly fewer choices, but the ODSS in particular now has a better balance of choices rather than giving you too many redundant ones.  There's a Goldilocks Zone of "just enough choice but not too much" that we're trying to hit, and we seem to be quite close, if not there.

As part of the beta process, the AI got some new anti-spy buildings for its highest-mark planets, so you can't just spy on them with impunity in those areas.  We also took away the mechanic that caused the AI to automatically mark up to mark 3 by the time you attack their homeworld; if you want to run a low-AIP game, you can now do that.  The mechanic still remains on difficulty 10, but we decided it was needlessly punitive (not the original intent at all) on lower difficulties than that.

There are a number of new hotkeys that are default-unbound that you can use for things like selecting-only-turrets or for placing half or a third of a cap when you click.  Thanks to donblas on those.

AI homeworlds and bastion planets now have special icons and styling that make them easier to spot.

Enjoy!