Update On Children Of Neinzul Donations For Child's Play

As of December 30th, 2010, we have so far raised and donated $10,529.71! We didn't quite hit our goal for the year, but we did raise a substantial amount of money -- and also, bear in mind that a lot of the money generated in 2010 is actually paid on "net 30" or "net 60" terms to us, meaning that money generated in 2010 will still be arriving as late as February 2011.

Given that foreknowledge, it looks like we will be very close to our goal by the end of January or February. We'll keep posting monthly updates on how the donations are doing, so check back even in 2011!

More About AI War: Children of Neinzul and Child's Play
When you purchase AI War: Children Of Neinzul, you're not only getting an exciting new expansion, you're also supporting an important cause. Arcen Games has partnered with the Child's Play charity, pledging 100% of the profits from sale of Children of Neinzul (excepting any taxes and distributor fees) to helping sick kids in need.

The staff at Arcen has long admired the work done by Child's Play, and we're very excited to finally be able to contribute in a substantial manner. Our goal was to raise $14,000.00 USD for Child's Play in 2010, but even after 2010 all of the proceeds from this micro-expansion will continue to be donated to the charity.

At the moment, this micro-expansion is available directly through the Arcen Online Store ($3.99 USD), as well as through Steam, Impulse, and GamersGate.

AI War Beta 4.059 Released!

We're still on holiday break until the 3rd, but this new release has some maintenance fixes.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.058 Released!

We're still on holiday break until the 3rd, but this new release has some updates that we'd been working on before the holidays that we finished up today, and some other fixes.

Included in this one are, most notably, six new AI types for the Light of the Spire expansion.  That makes a total of eight for the expansion, which is going to be the final tally -- the focus was mainly on other kinds of features.  This also adds in 24 new achievements, 23 of which are for the new expansion and one of which is for the base game.

Additionally, we fixed that longstanding-since-Unity-porting bug with the trial mode not always being recognized until a restart of the application after an expansion was disabled or validated.

Lastly of major note, there's also a new ability on almost all self-attritioning units where they now won't self-attrition when in low-power mode.  For golems, Neinzul Younglings, etc, this is a pretty major change.

And there were actually a couple of other small fixes, see the release notes for details.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.057 Released.

This one is another tiny maintenance release.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.056 Released.

This one is a tiny maintenance patch.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.055, "Intra-Galactic," Released!

Well, it's that time of year again, where the Arcen staff takes the better part of a week off to spend time with family, recharging, etc.  Good times!  So it's going to be rather quite on the release front around here for a bit, but lots of good stuff is coming, as I noted yesterday.

I didn't manage to triage all the issues in mantis like I'd hoped to do this week, but we got the actual count of unfiled/confirmed/feedback issues down to 288 from over 500 on Monday, so I'm feeling really good about that.  There's still more to do before LotS and AI War 4.4 are released in mid-January, but overall things are looking really clean and polished.

So, today's release is a big one, sort of a holiday parting gift from us.  And boy is it an exciting one!

The biggest news from this release is the new Intra-galactic warp gates.  Be sure to check those release notes for the full details, but these basically let you warp ships from certain kinds of constructors across the galaxy to a location of your designation.  So you've got a fabricator or an advanced factory in some backwater hole, for example?  In the past you'd have to periodically manually transport them to the front lines, a hassle which made those constructors almost useless for practical purposes.  Now you just throw up an intra-galactic warp gate at your target planet, and that's where they pop out (paralyzed at first, but that wears off pretty quickly).  This is a feature that should make a lot of people's days right there by itself.

But wait, there's the proverbial more!  Tired of having your ships swallowed by Maws and never given back?  That's fixed -- and, now you can see exactly how many ships you have in maws, and what their cumulative remaining health is.  No more wondering.

You can also upgrade command stations in-place now, and things go a lot more smoothly vis-a-vis harvesters and reactors, etc.  Control group icons on the planetary summary are finally legible again!  Spire civilian leaders are a lot better balanced!  Range circles are less intensive on the GPU!  Force fields won't accidentally stall out while building anymore -- and EMPs work properly on force fields again!  Tachyon drones and decloakers have much better tachyon ranges!  Etherjets have much better tractor ranges!  Man that's a lot of exclamation points!

Oh, and fortresses have been completely overhauled.  Been giving them a miss for a while -- and/or not been feeling all that threatened by the AI fortresses lately?  Both of those end with this release.  Likewise, counterspies and ion cannons have their teeth back when it comes to scouts and similar, while spider turrets and sniper turrets are useful against raid starships again (and there was much rejoicing).

I'm really pleased with how much we were able to get done despite the holiday rush, but as I've noted plenty more is coming.  Probably this is my last missive for the next three or so days, though, and releases will be spotty and smaller for a bit after that.  Our normal programming returns on January 3rd.  Happy holidays, everyone!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Upcoming Development Schedule, Alden Ridge Renamed!

More AI War updates coming tomorrow, and then that's going to be the last batch of stuff for a while.  We're going to only be having spotty hours here and there between December 24th and January 2nd, so don't expect much in the way of releases there (though I imagine there will be a couple of smallish ones).  We'll mainly be recharging and spending time with family.  When we return, we'll have another week or two of AI War stuff, I suspect, for then having a LotS / AI War 4.4 release in mid-January.  The official Tidalis update will also be around that point, too.

Then we'll be off to work on Alden Ridge -- although, that's actually not the name of that game anymore.  We're really combining the projects of Alden Ridge and A Valley Without Wind (though mostly keeping to the gameplay of Alden Ridge and combining that with the themes and story -- and some gameplay -- of AVWW).  In any case, I felt the stronger of the two titles was A Valley Without Wind, so that's what the combined project will wind up being called.

It's going to use an art style that is all-new and not what is shown in the screenshots from either Alden Ridge 2008 or the old AVWW mockup images.  It's going to be prerendered 3D, with some pretty cool visuals in HD.  I look forward to sharing it with you in January, but if you're curious as to my general 3D art style, you can see a lot of examples of that here.  A lot of that is older, and of course it's largely side-views whereas AVWW will be all top-down, but that's the general idea of what the various components like grass, trees, etc, will generally look like.  Minus fancy effects like global ambient occlusion and anisotropic filtering and similar, which really don't work in a game like what we'll be doing.  In other words, look at the models, not the Vue-based atmospheric blending.

Anyhow, A Valley Without Wind is really an exciting project for us, and it's going to combine the best of the ideas from Alden Ridge 2008, the old AVWW design, and some new stuff we've come up with more recently.  I'd rather not get into specifics now because it's early days yet on that project and a lot is likely to change as we get down to the actual implementation (as should happen with our development style), but we're really feeling good about the direction is taking, and we think people will be really excited to see the alpha version when we make that public in March or April. 

In the meantime, once we're really getting full into development on that, we'll post periodic development diary updates for both what we're doing with the design of the game, as well as with screenshots and probably occasional videos so that you can see what the early versions look like.

Most of our changes are to play to our existing strengths: our knowledge of procedural content and dynamic systems; our past experience with creating wide-ranging player choice with sandbox-style environments with overarching goals; the sort of art, as pictured here, that I've been working on as a hobby since 1998, rather than the sort that requires staff that we can't presently afford; the sort of content that doesn't require a level designer, but instead which relies on programming to create emergent effects.  That sort of thing.  We think it's going to be our most exciting title to date.

Stay tuned!  And: happy holidays, as well!

AI War Beta 4.054 Released!

This one is, predictably, pretty sizable.  Seems like most of our new versions lately have been.  At any rate, there's another big laundry list of bugfixes and balance tweaks.

One of the biggest changes in this one is to what happens when you lose a command station: now you lose all your harvesters on that planet, and all your reactors as well.  That's a much more harsh penalty, which somewhat brings back the feeling of what it means to lose a planet that used to be in the game... oh, back in the 1.0 or 2.0 days.  In the past we often made it "feel important" to lose a planet based on making them slow to rebuild, but that just felt slow and un-fun.  Now it retains the speed while having more of a penalizing kick, which some players had been asking for.  This also means that players can't get sneaky and put energy reactors on enemy planets in supply, which we're also happy about.

On the other hand, mark I-III reactors and also harvester exo shields now leave remains when they are destroyed, so that remains rebuilders can come through and automatically rebuild them if they are lost.  This helps make retaking a planet less of a chore, and it also makes rebounding from raids where you didn't lose a planet that much faster, too.

Mark I and II force fields got a notable buff for both players and AIs, which players had been wanting.  Some guardians and some spirecraft got some various buffs, and gravity drills now retain their teeth when in the presence of speed-boosting ships.  Gravity turrets now are more effective, as are multi-stacked force fields.  Distribution nodes give you waaay more resources than before.

Another notable change is the complete re-balancing of harvester exo-shields.  In some ways these have been made more powerful and useful, but in other ways they are now more harshly penalized (the ongoing resource cost of them is way higher).  This basically brings them back more in line with their original pre-2.0 design, which only through accident had we strayed from, while at the same time making them less fiddly to use.

Lastly, Hunter/Killers are once again temporarily gone from the game.  Well, they are still there, but nothing spawns them anymore.  The logic that was spawning them has now been put to use spawning carriers instead, which is inherently balanced and a lot more appropriate in many various ways.  Players should be pretty happy with this shift in the main, though we understand some will miss the idea of H/Ks in an abstract sense.  Fear not: they will return, just in a different form a good while later.  We ran out of time for them in this release cycle (still so much to do, and dwindling time because of the holidays, etc), but they're high on our list to do some interesting stuff with in the coming months.  Of course, if you want to make sure that they do (or do not) make an appearance sooner than later, be sure to register your votes in mantis so that we'll see the collective will on the vote tallies page.

That's it for today -- enjoy! 

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.053 Released!

This one is another big multi-day cumulative release.  There's been a number of bugfixes as part of it, and turrets have had a first pass of rebalancement done to them, which should be welcome.  Hunter/Killers have also been toned down a bit (firing shots 1/3 as frequently should be helpful).

There is really just a ton of miscellany in here.  Mining golem timers are lowered thanks to their recent changes.  Fixed various tooltips that were a bit off.  Buffed a number of experimental units a bit.  Hybrid module rebuilding has been hit with the nerf stick (they can't do it if they've been hit in the last 30 seconds).  Marauders and resistance fighters don't spawn more frequently with AIP increases any longer.  Improvements have been made to the Resource Flows tab of the Stats window.  That sort of thing.

Additionally, a few graphical/visual things have been done.  The "niche images" are helpfully shown in more places, and the icons in the intel summaries are finally colorized again.  The latter of these has been much-anticipated by players for a while now.  Anyway: enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Steam Holidays Sale - 50% Off on Arcen Games Titles

All of Arcen Games titles are 50% off during the Steam Holidays Sale!

Happy holidays from the Arcen Games team!

Tidalis Beta 1.012 (Bugfixes, Release Candidate 2)

This release brings us closer to the next official release, which will hopefully be tomorrow if all continues to look well with this new version. The manual has had some minor tweaks, and more importantly a fairly major (but also somewhat rare) graphics issue from the post-engine-upgrade betas has been fixed

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

Tidalis Beta 1.011 (Bugfixes, Release Candidate 1)

This version fixes a few minor graphic glitches that have crept into the recent betas since the engine upgrade. It also fixes a longer-standing bug with the fullscreen/not-fullscreen button not changing the resolution properly.

With these fixes now in place, this is all of the known bugs of any seriousness now fixed. Thus this is basically "release candidate 1" for the next official update, and we'd love to have feedback from folks on how it's looking for them. Assuming that all still seems well in a day or two, we'll do our next official release of Tidalis, so that all players get the benefits of all these bugfixes and engine upgrades!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.052 Released!

Today I have absolutely no time, so I'll just leave you with the release notes for this one.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Tidalis #2 On Tom Chick's Games You Should Have Played This Year

Tom Chick, taste-maker PC games reviewer also to be found on SyFy channel's blog Fidgit, has recently been posting his 2010-in-retrospective posts.  The most recent, Ten games you should have played in 2010, held an excellent surprise for us: Tidalis in the #2 spot.  "The thinking man's Bejeweled 3," indeed.  His original review of the game was here, at Gameshark.

For that matter, yesterday Chick had a list called The ten most overrated games of 2010.  Starcraft II took the #1 spot on that list, which we won't comment on either way (it's really a different sort of RTS from AI War, anyhow), but in his notes about other games that should have gotten more attention that were instead overshadowed by Starcraft were both AI War and Gratuitous Space Battles (another big friend of Arcen) having had "great expansions."  Awesome -- as you'll recall, Chick was a big fan of the original AI War all the way back circa version 1.013 or so.

AI War Beta 4.051 Released!

For being our second release of the day, this one isn't small.  It's yet another balance/bugfix release, since we're solidly in that polish mode for the game. 

This one focuses on minor factions more than anything else, and pretty heavily re-imagines the circumstances under which both marauders and resistance fighters will show up, as well as how formidable they are once they arrive (aka, way more formidable now).  The marauder buzzbombs aren't even suicide units anymore!

In terms of new features, both the rebelling human colonies and all the various types of fabricators now have foldouts in multiplayer (little copies of themselves for the non-capturing player, which are indestructible and invisible-to-the-enemy but which die if the central structure is killed).  This means that when one player captures a fabricator or similar, the entire team gets the benefit of that, as has long been the case with advanced factories.  In the past we hadn't had it work that way because of a desire for having per-player specialization, but in the end that just made fabricators less worthwhile in multiplayer, or encouraged players to micromanage them and gift them back and forth (micromanagement = yuck).

The other big thing in this version are a number of new in-game notices that clarify a few situations.  For one, it's a common question that players get caught off-guard not realizing that something like AI Eyes have the warp gate ability, and so get waves on a planet they thought was safe.  Nevermind that they could have just checked the Hostile Wormholes overlay on the galaxy map, this clearly needed to be made more clear.  Now whenever you're in a planet, if there's anything that lets the AI launch waves (or reinforcements, which was another point of occasional confusion when players captured a planet while still having a special forces guard post alive, etc), there are now counts showing that in the upper left of the screen.

There's a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff, too.  No more players farming AI Eyes or SuperTerminals.  No more AI beachheads getting launched against player homeworlds.  And so forth.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.050 Released!

This one is another really long set of release notes, partly because it's been several working days since we've done an AI War release -- just due to timing, other obligations, the Tidalis updates, etc.  But we've been working on AI War all throughout that time, too, which makes the list longer-ish, though not as huge as some of the recent ones.

Anyway, the big thing here is the rebalance of the bonus ships, especially a lot of the Neinzul stuff but also Spire stuff and base game stuff.  Additionally, the experimental anti-bottleneck/anti-giant-fleet feature from the last version has been removed, as it just wasn't working out.  Thanks for all who tested with that and offered feedback!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Tidalis Beta 1.010 (Bugfixes, And Fanfare-Disable Option)

This release has a number of bugfixes in it, for stuff that has been working suboptimally since all the recent upgrades of the Unity engine, our drawing mechanics, etc.  This should take care of nearly all the issues we're aware of at the moment (with a question mark on one issue, further testing needed), which is a great feeling.

This one also includes a new settings option which allows for the chain and combo fanfares to be disabled. This is useful for those players who want to hear the regular sound effects, but who don't want the fanfares overlaying the background music. The much-rarer fanfares, such as the line/board clear fanfares, are still played when this option is on.

Also, just as an aside, I'd like to note that the 1.009/1.008 versions had one of the funniest bugs associate with them that I've ever seen.  It seems that if you would play for a while, then go back out to the main menu, sometimes the seafaring ship on the title screen would be... flipped upside down, like it had capsized.  The technicalities were that some internal pooled texture objects weren't correctly remembering that they had been flipped, so it was entirely a huge coincidence that this could happen, but the end effect was something that looked hilariously intentional.  This definitely goes in the annals as one of my favorite bug reports ever.


This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

Update On Children Of Neinzul Donations For Child's Play

Progress, progress, progress!  As of December 14th, 2010, we have so far raised and donated $8,097.29! Bear in mind that the money that was generated in November via distributors like Steam and Impulse won't reach us until the end of December, and we can already tell that our total donated is going to increase substantially again at that time.

We look like we'll be close to hitting our goal for the year at this rate, but even if we don't hit the goal by the end of December, it looks like we will by the end of January. We'll post monthly updates on how we're doing towards our goal, so check back!

More About AI War: Children of Neinzul and Child's Play
When you purchase AI War: Children Of Neinzul, you're not only getting an exciting new expansion, you're also supporting an important cause. Arcen Games has partnered with the Child's Play charity, pledging 100% of the profits from sale of Children of Neinzul (excepting any taxes and distributor fees) to helping sick kids in need.

The staff at Arcen has long admired the work done by Child's Play, and we're very excited to finally be able to contribute in a substantial manner. Our goal is to raise $14,000.00 USD for Child's Play in 2010, but even after 2010 all of the proceeds from this micro-expansion will continue to be donated to the charity.

At the moment, this micro-expansion is available directly through the Arcen Online Store ($3.99 USD), as well as through Steam, Impulse, and GamersGate.

Tidalis Beta 1.009 (Bugfix)

This one is a bugfix version intended to fix a crash bug present in the prior version

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.049, "Firepower," Released!

It's 2am and I've stayed up far later than I should have to get this release ready, so for the most part I'll just leave you with these massive release notes.  Suffice it to say, this release is really exciting, and normally I'd write a pretty huge summary of the changes.  The short short version is:

"Firepower" display is now used in place of ship counts for a lot of things in the game, to better represent threat, etc.  A couple of new cheats.  A lot of balance tweaks.  Fixed a very important bug that was causing skyrocketing threat recently and in general had been a bug since 3.120 or before.  Introduced new Hunter/Killers in high-threat/attack situations to help performance and consolidate AI ships in a similar manner of carriers/barracks.  You will fear these, but your CPU/RAM will love them.  Spirecraft nerfs and buffs.  New AI anti-extreme-blobbing/bottlenecking mechanic similar to the anti-ultra-deepstriking mechanic.

See release notes for details.  It's a lot of stuff.  The firepower stuff in particular is preliminary, so not everything is valued properly with that -- feedback very welcome there, but I won't be on much over the weekend.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Tidalis Beta 1.008 (Unity 3.1, Second Keyboard Player, Bugfixes)

Has it really been three months since our last Tidalis update? Sure looks like it. The last update for Tidalis was uploaded two days before my son was born, so that fits. To say that a lot has happened in the intervening time, both for me personally and for Arcen as well, would be a massive understatement.

One of the big things that's happened for Arcen since the last Tidalis release is that we ported AI War over to the Unity 3D engine. Specifically, a newer version of the Unity 3D engine than Tidalis has been using. That engine upgrade is faster, less buggy, and all around better -- but it was also a huge undertaking just to get AI War upgraded to it and fully stable. We wrestled with an intermittent sound-related crash issue for OSX for a couple of months in the newer version of Unity, and that was a big part of the reason for the delay of upgrading Tidalis.

Now that we've got our engine level code for Unity 3.1 to a rock-solid place with AI War, we've backported it all to Tidalis. This includes an enormous number of under-the-hood changes to our sound, music, and graphics pipelines. The game will access data off the hard drive much less frequently, the graphics rendering is amazingly faster, and parsing of things like savegames and level files is 10x or more faster (though that's not super important, given those already parsed in less than a second, anyway).

Of course, with any major upgrade such as this, there is the risk of introducing new bugs -- hence why this is a beta update rather than the next official. If things go well with people who test the beta, then we'll update the official version in the next few weeks. This version includes a small number of bugfixes from reports of issues on 1.007, too, so that's another incentive to try the beta if you had one of those few problems with the prior version.

Also in this version: support for a second keyboard controller. This also means that you can map two gamepads to keyboard controls and thus control the game comfortably with two gamepads for two players (using external gamepad mapping software that ships with most modern gamepads -- not the game directly, to be clear). It also means that, technically, you can have three players per computer during network play: two on keyboard/gamepads, and one on the mouse. We're still calling it a 1-4 player game, but technically you can now squeeze in up to 6 players if you are so inclined.

That new extra-keyboard-player feature is our free DLC for the next official update, and it's some rather heavy-lifting code-wise, so there's a possibility that might have introduced some new issues, too. But in our internal testing, we're not aware of any issues from this or the engine upgrade, at this stage.

If you do run into any bugs, please let us know in the Tidalis section of our new Idea Tracker. But, good or ill, we'd like to hear how the new version is doing for you. If there are issues, we can correct them, and if it's doing great for you we'd also like to know that, so that we can gauge how comfortable we are with the new release in terms of readiness for an official update that would go out to all customers, not just those interested in helping us beta test.

As always, thank you for your support and help!  Here are the full release notes.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 1.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 1.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.048 Released!

As expected, this one is mostly just to fix some bugs in the prior version.  It also improves sniper turrets, spider turrets, and how firepower ratings are calculated.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.047 Released!

This one is another long list of bugfixes and balance changes.  There is still more to be done, but we're making our way steadily through pretty much all the bonus ship types to tighten them up, linearize their stats between mark levels a bit better, and otherwise make them more sensible and better to play with.  This one touches a dozen or more bonus ship types out of the 54 currently in the game, so it's a significant chunk of work just from that angle.

Another big thing in this one, though it's not particularly visible to players, are the enormous number of internal changes that have been made, which cumulatively help to improve RAM and CPU usage, leading to longer times between Garbage Collections.  How significant the benefit will be for you will depend on your specific setup in your campaign, etc.  But it definitely seems to help, and was something that needed doing.  The side effect of this, though, is that we might just have introduced a whole raft of new bugs: we're a month away from the next official release, so it seemed a good time to do that, since, as I noted, it really did need to be done at some point.

We're expecting to do at least one more release today, but if there are any bugs that result from this that are critical, we'll do more than one release to fix those up more quickly; that's why we didn't release this last night.

And of course there's a ton of other general bugfixes, and general balance fixes.  The reclamators were pretty broken in the last release, and now should work much better.

There's still a lot more that we're working on at the moment, though, such as some AI-siege-related code to help with the framerate when the AI is in a big siege against you, and some changes to make superterminals and AI Eyes no longer be "farmable," and yet more changes to help make Maws work better (though there are a number of fixes/changes to Maws in this one, too).  And some changes to carriers are coming.  I wanted to get all that stuff in this release, too, but at some point I had to just put out a new version so folks could get the existing fixes and start testing the new stuff.

Exciting times all around, though, for advanced players in particular at the moment: the game's getting a lot better balanced at the upper end of the spectrum.  More to come soon!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.046, "Megaton," Released!

Good lord, this one is full of win.  There's so many various bugfixes and balance tweaks that again we'll just hit the highlights here, so be sure to read the release notes if you're wanting details.

The three current weakest bonus ship classes in the game should now be pretty exciting to use: Autocannon Minipods, Zenith Chameleons, and Tachyon Microfighters have been majorly buffed.

The most destructively-unbalanced type of unit has now seen a large number of changes: that would be parasites and leech starships.  The reclamation ability is now shiplevel-limited, and reclamators have to do a certain damage threshold on a target ship before a reclamation event will take place.  And all mark V ships are blanket non-reclaimable now, which had always been the intent but was spottily implemented in the past. On the plus side, their shots have become more focused and a lot higher-DPS, and they now are much more intelligent about actually targeting ships they can reclaim.  The end result we're shooting for is something that's fun and powerful, but not able to bypass advanced factories or large portions of the economic.

This one's huge: Advanced Research Stations should now be at the top of everyone's wishlist even more so than before.  Now when you capture an ARS, you not only get a new bonus ship type, you also get the mark II of that bonus ship type unlocked for no knowledge.  When you run across a new bonus ship type late in a campaign, we were realizing that just having the mark I of that bonus ship type made the ship type look lame in comparison to the mark II/III ships (or greater) you'd likely be fighting against.  This lets players experiment a bit more freely, and get a better sense for the things they might want to unlock III/IV from.

Speaking of unlocking mark III/IV fleet ships, those now cost an additional 1000 knowledge compared to before.  Partly this is in counterbalance to the above change, but also it's in response to the fact that III/IV are unlocked together.

And speaking of mark IV ships, those and mark V ships are now a lot cheaper in terms of metal/crystal.  They are now only 6x and 10x that of a mark I ship in their line, rather than 8x and 16x.  This also means that mercenaries are now only 60x a mark I ship's cost, rather than 80x.

Another pair of huge changes is to the engineers and Mobile Repair Station.  Engineers now take quadruple damage while in enemy territory, which makes them fine for use in protected beachheads, but very poor for use in the middle of battlefields where shots are flying.  Similarly, Mobile Repair Stations now have to spend 60 seconds recharging after moving before they can do any repairs.  So you can't just scoot them along with your fleet, constantly repairing anything that gets hit.  Instead, take it to a safe place on the AI planet, deploy it, and then retreat your damaged ships as desired.  These changes help to avoid some of the more exploitative uses of these two ships on offense.

Core Shield Generators, after much heated (and partially unfortunate) debate, have been made an optional feature that is default-on, but which won't be in existing saves.  Any existing saves that already have them will have them removed.  But there is now a new maintenance command (see the release notes) for turning them back on if you like them.  CSGs turned out to be more about player guidance and intermediate goals as far as why we kept them.

As for the deepstriking nerf we'd originally been aiming for with CSGs, there's a major new mechanic the AI now has.  Essentially, when it notices your military ships straying more than four planets away from your (or neutral/ally) territory, this causes the AI to really freak out for a while and start churning out ships to attack you.  Think of it like having four or five stars in Grand Theft Auto or one of those sorts of games.  Once you finish your deep raid, things go back to normal -- if you survive.  Note that most players only raid about four planets out anyhow, since that's the effective limit where transports can make a round trip, so it's just on one-way transport trips or long-range starship raiding where this would even be a thing.  It just makes that sort of ultra-deepstriking a lot more balanced and interesting, without removing it as a valid tactic.

We also fixed a number of targeting bugs, and made it so that ships with regen/vampirism can actually be properly killed by autotargeting (which needs to overkill them to make up for their abilities, and now does).  Attritioners are more awesome, wasps and spire blades are no longer stats-destroying or annoyingly explodey, and ships with zero engine health are still allowed to hobble along at an achingly slow pace, rather than being entirely stalled -- thus circumventing some trouble with certain AI ships "pinning" player ships in a can't-move-and-can't-be-repaired paradox.

And... other various stuff.  Those were the highlights, amazingly. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.045 Released!

This one is a much larger bugfix/balance release.  The asteroid seeding is a lot better now (only in new campaigns or savegames being upgraded to include asteroids for the first time, though), and there are a couple of new cheats (handy for us for testing), and the core shield generators have a few more kinks worked out of them.

Also, the wave size scaling by tech level has been adjusted in a nontrivial fashion, and a huge number of data centers are no longer seeded (as well as being cut out of existing savegames that are upgraded).  These changes are also intended to provide more fluid, less exploity-if-you-do-the-right-thing play.

And, of course, a dozen or two of other miscellaneous items.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.044 Released!

This one is a smallish bugfix update.  Though, it does also include some wicked-awesome new galaxy map filters for finding critical stuff on the map.  Seriously, I don't know why those were never in there before now.  Anyway... enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.043, "The AI's Revenge," Released!

Uh oh.  The name pretty much gives away what this one is about.  A lot of various AI behavioral changes (all as part of the base game) in this one make the AI smarter and more fearsome.  Additionally, a new set of five units have been added to the base game: Core Shield Generators Group A-Primary and Groups B-E Secondary.  These are scattered around the galaxy and now must be destroyed before you can even dent the AI's home planet guard posts or command stations.

The purpose of the Core Shield Generators is to provide a more multi-stage game, where it's not all-or-nothing at the AI home planets alone.  It also makes you take a bit more territory than some players might have previously done, but for many players it actually won't impact their playstyles at all.  For details, be sure to check out the release notes, which also include a lot of the rationale behind that.

On the flip side, the AI waves have had yet more fixes, and so the schizophrenic waves aren't so overblown as they recently have been, even in the prior release.

And beyond the above, a pretty huge array of bugs and balance tweaks have been put in.  It's several page's worth, so pretty difficult to summarize.

Oh, and there is a new "Mobile Military (Firepower)" filter option in the galaxy map.  That's a pretty cool addition that makes it much easier to size up your forces versus an AI opposing force.  Unit counts only go so far, especially with all the supersized units around these days.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Arcen Games has THREE titles in the Top 100 Indie Games Of The Year!

Great News!

AI War: Fleet Command, AI War: The Zenith Remnant, and Tidalis have all been voted into the Top 100 Indie Games Of The Year! Thank you so much for all your support and votes.

Now, in order to get to the next round (TOP 10) we need people to get back on and vote some more. Luckily, you get up to THREE votes in the Top 100, so that works well for us. Here's what to do:

1) Follow this link:
http://www.indiedb.com/events/2010-indie-of-the-year-awards/top100

2) Scroll down the page some until you get to "Top 100 Release Indies
of 2010". Click on "Real Time Strategy", and a list of games should
come down.

3) The first TWO games you should see are "AI War: Fleet Command" and
"AI War: The Zenith Remnant". On the left of each game, there is a
button that says "VOTE". Click on those for each of these games.

4) Next, click on another category that says "Family". There you will
see "Tidalis" is the only game in that category. Click on "VOTE" on
the left of this game.

And that's it! The voting polls will be up for the next 15 days, so be sure to vote soon, and spread the word!

Thank you so much for all your support, we couldn't have done it without you!

~ The Arcen Games Team

AI War Beta 4.042, Light of the Spire Coming In January, Tidalis Update Coming, Alden Ridge News

This release includes a lot of highly anticipated fixes to the way waves have been working recently.  The core higher-difficulty-than-in-the-post-2.0-versions new style of waves are still there, but there were a number of glitches in recent versions that were causing occasional tiny waves, occasional monstrous waves, and in general counterattacks that were absolutely brutal.  My favorite was the wave of nearly 700 thousand beam frigates incoming.  That's like casually unleashing a fleet of Death Stars, good grief.  At any rate, this release brings the salve.

A cool new pair of features included are new Garrison-related control nodes that are part of the base game and which add some interesting new guard-style functionality for the human players.  The general idea is pretty powerful, and allows you to set up certain concentrations of ships on planets, with reinforcements being continuously re-added as the garrison numbers drop.  Automation, as usual, rocks -- you have Keith to thank for this one.

Another important thing is that the game now makes it clear when waves (or Cross Planet Attacks) are triggered by a ship -- guard post, raid engine, scrap wave, or otherwise.  This should substantially help reduce confusion about the deep raids into player territory when players accidentally set off a counterattack guard post, for example

And, of course, there are a myriad other bugfixes and tweaks in this one.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Light of the Spire: Officially Launching In January
Now to the other news: the Light of the Spire expansion, which is currently in beta, is being pushed back until January.  As anyone who has toured the idea tracker can attest, this will be a good thing.  The expansion is (nearly) functionally done, minus a few last small features, but it's still in need of a lot more polish than we can do on short notice.  More to the point, it's in need of a lot more player-testing than can occur even if we did solve all the immediate balance/bug items right immediately.

With the recent (and ongoing) discount promotions, sales are up and we're not in a position anymore where we have to get this out this month, which is a good thing.  We're known for our commitment to quality, and honestly it's a relief not to have to rush this one out the door.  This is our best expansion yet by far, and it would be a shame to have the official release marred by some temporary issues that we can just as easily spend this month polishing out instead.

Of course, it's already available in beta format, and you can expect the frequency of bugfix/balance/small-content releases to keep coming hard and fast until it does officially release.

Other Upcoming Stuff
There's also a Tidalis update in the works that will bring it up to Unity 3.1 from Unity 2.6, along with various other improvements.  That will be out sometime in December.  And development on the new and improved Alden Ridge is also likely to start during December. 

We're expecting to hit public alpha on Alden Ridge sometime in March, if all goes well.  Man oh man am I excited about a lot of the stuff with that -- we'll be doing development diaries about it even before alpha so that players know what's coming.  The expectation is for that game to turn into as sprawling and as frequently-updated a game as AI War has been, but that all depends on player reception to it.

I've long said we wouldn't be able to maintain more than one game with the frequency of AI War updates, but by using a back-and-forth approach I think we actually will be able to do so.  If the period during which we were focused on Tidalis is any indication, that won't harm AI War at all, and it should work pretty smoothly from our end if we handle things sensibly.

Exciting times!

Arcen Store Cyber Monday 60% Off Sale!

Hot on the heels of the Steam Indie Puzzle Pack sale, which has now closed, we have another deal for you: anything you want from the Arcen Games Store for 60% off!  Now through December 1st, to give stragglers time to get in their orders.  Now's your chance to pick up some excellent deals!

Steam One Day sale - Indie Puzzle Pack

Tidalis is a part of Steam's Indie Puzzle Pack, a one day sale. At the time of writing this there is only 14 hours remaining to get this sale.

5 great games for 5$: Grab them while it's hot! http://store.steampowered.com/sub/6791/

AI War Beta 4.041, "The Reincarnate," Released!

Good lord.  This release is probably the longest list of release notes we've ever generated for a single day.  And it's not just a lot of little stuff -- though there are a ton of small balance tweaks and bugfixes here.  There's some really heavy-hitting changes for both the base game and Light of the Spire.  And for The Zenith Remnant, come to that (Whaaat? A nearly year-old expansion got major new features?).  To business:

Starting a new campaign?  First thing you might notice is that you  now get about twice as many possible starting positions as before.  This is useful for a number of reasons, but the most central is this: you don't have to click through as many maps to find one on it with a ship type you're looking for.  Given how many ship types are in the game if you have the base game and all expansions (53 in all, for those curious), this makes it vastly easier to find the type you're looking for.

Next up, also for the base game, are a number of changes to how human ships target enemies on AI planets.  In short: there will be less stray fire that enrages AI outposts you aren't yet ready to face, but at the same time making it so that things are still just as autofire for anything of the AI that's already been "enraged."

Another even more major change to the AI is how the AI breaches wormholes.  Actually, this is a whole host of interrelated changes, making the AI do a better job of using intel in a more human-like fashion, leading to more intelligent breaches that are more likely to crush you and not at all likely to have the "trickle effect" that players can take advantage of to destroy the forces of an otherwise-untenable AI world.  You can still blow the AI command stations early and sometimes you might be able to get some interesting results from doing so, but it shouldn't feel like an exploit anymore to do so.  And you're a lot more likely to regret it now: having a high threat hanging around out in the galaxy until you avert your attention or divert your fleet elsewhere (only then to have that threat come crashing down on you) is the new order of business.

Next up, for The Zenith Remnant: the golems have all been enormously rebalanced (beefed up), and are no longer a default-on feature of that expansion.  Rather, there are now three new Minor Factions called Broken Golems Easy/Moderate/Hard, which have various different styles of play for the golems, to hopefully meet the full range of player interest.  Fair warning: the hard minor faction for this isn't yet fully implemented, so it's actually identical to Easy right now. The golem waves for that minor faction are having to wait until a later release, we ran out of time!  The overall effect of all these golem changes is to make them more exciting and interesting, no matter what your preferences or skill level, and to make them wholly more relevant than they've ever been in the past for advanced play.

Similarly, for Light of the Spire, there are now three new Minor Factions called Spirecraft Easy/Moderate/Hard, which give a similar sort of tastes/difficulty spectrum to the Golems ones in TZR.  Same as with the golems ones, the hard minor faction is not yet fully implemented and currently works the same as easy.  As with the golems, the spirecraft/asteroids are now removed from the base game of LotS, and instead come in these three optional flavors that you can choose from (or ignore entirely, if that's your preference).  It's a much superior system to what we were doing before, and there's been a lot of anticipation for these changes to both golems and spirecraft on our forums already.  Oh, and spirecraft can now be repaired, which many people will love, I'm sure, as well. :)

And... well, there were a ton of other smaller changes, too.  Fallen Spire fixes and balance.  Frigate balance.  Enclave starship gun removal.  And so on.  Enjoy!

As a reminder, tomorrow and Friday are a holiday here in the US, so we won't be around much, if at all.  If there are any egregious bugs, we hope to fix those in the evenings, but otherwise we're going to be relaxing and visiting with family before plunging back in with a vengeance next week.  Happy Thanksgiving, all!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.040 Released!

This release doesn't quite make the Light of the Spire expansion "feature complete," but it does come close.  This version adds the last 3 classes of guardians, now bringing the total number of ships in the expansion up to 180, and so we're calling it at that as far as ships go.  We'd thought we might do two more classes of spirecraft, but there's just no time -- we need to get to polishing and balancing what we already have, and there's more than plenty here already (more than in any other expansion we've done, by far).

By the same token, the Constructor mode is also being cut from the expansion, as it was pretty similar to the Defender mode anyway, and we could use the extra time to get Defender mode better polished.  We are still planning a few more AI types (perhaps four, but no promises on that), and of course the usual accoutrement of achievements related to plots, minor factions, and AI types.  And there's still that spirecraft/golem rebalance, and the related minor factions, that need to be added as well.  Beyond that: it's polish time.  Bugs and balance issues, beware.

This version actually includes a wide range of bugfixes and balance tweaks already, come to that.  Also the actual unique far zoom graphics for the various spirecraft, which is a welcome change.  That's all the far zoom graphics in place except for the larger fallen spire ships, all of which are currently just using the fleet starship graphic as a placeholder so far.

And there are music tracks coming, by the way -- more than just the one listed on the wiki.  Pablo tells me he's aiming for 8 tracks of 5-6 minutes long, and so far he's already finished and mastered 5 of them.  He's got a really cool musical theme going for the spire that I think folks will really like.

Oh!  I almost forgot.  Also new in this version 4.040 is a new ship for the base game: redirection rally posts.  These work sort of like the preexisting rally post (now called mobile rally posts), except that they allow the setting of gather points, which can redirect incoming ships from one planet to another.  Using this new ship you can quickly set up chains of redirection for ships (rather than having to go back and repoint all your space docks), and you can even set up circular loops that make for cross-planet patrol paths, etc.  Pretty cool stuff.  This is the free DLC for November, but more stuff will be coming in December (so be sure to vote in the poll for what you'd like to see -- at the moment it's at the idea nomination stage).

Enjoy!  Lots more tweaks and such coming tomorrow.  Just a reminder that Thursday and Friday are a holiday here in the US, so we won't be doing much on those days.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.039 Released!

This release brings us very near to the end of the content-addition phase of the Light of the Spire beta, and into the polish/balance/bugfixes phase.  Since Keith is done with the Fallen Spire minor faction, he's already into the polish phase, but I've still got another three classes of guardians and another two classes of spirecraft to go, along with some smaller misc stuff like a few more AI types and the achievements.

So what's new this time?  Well, primarily it's about spirecraft:  a whopping seven new classes of spirecraft (5 marks each, so 35 ships in all) have been added to the expansion today.  That's in addition to the 3 existing spirecraft classes, so now we have 10 out of the 12 planned classes in place.  The remaining two will be added tomorrow.

But that's not all in this one!  Also of huge note is a new LotS AI Plot, called Beachheads.  We weren't sure we were going to add any AI Plots at all, but this player suggestion was just too cool to pass up.  It's an interesting occasional-siege-breaker type of maneuver that can optionally be added for the AI, and it should make for really interesting required defensive setups.

There is also a new Spire Archive ship that provides a cache of knowledge if you capture and hold it from challenging planets (either the homeworlds or the adjacent planets).  This provides a new decision point for players regarding to the AI-homeworld-adjacent planets, which previously were almost always "don't touch them!"  However, this also has another, subtler effect: it makes the tiny maps a bit easier by providing a way of getting another 24k knowledge than could previously be found on those small maps.

In addition to the above major new features, this release also has a wide range of bugfixes and balance tweaks, including a bunch of balance shifts to the Fallen Spire minor faction story campaign.

One note: major balance changes are coming for golems and spirecraft.  In the meantime, however, some of the spirecraft are waaaay overpowered (most the new ones), while others are underpowered (most of the three preexisting ones).  Mostly this is to your benefit in the interim, so enjoy -- the upcoming changes, hopefully which will be in place by the end of Wednesday at the latest, should get the balance for those in the ballpark of right, while also making those massive ship classes as exciting as they always should have been.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

AI War Beta 4.038 Released!

This release is a ridiculously massive one; two days' worth of stuff is a ton in Arcen land.  The big new stuff here is twofold: the last of the episodes for the Fallen Spire minor faction scripted story campaign (say that five times fast), and the first of the new Spirecraft ships.

For the Fallen Spire scripted story campaign thing, we can now comfortably reveal a particularly salient thing about it: it's an alternate way to win.  Normally games of AI War are won by destroying the AI home command stations, right?  Well, with the Fallen Spire campaign you have the option of pursuing all 10 episodes and winning via a... different mechanism.  That's all we'll say for now, to avoid spoilers. 

Of course, even if you want to try for a traditional kind of victory, you can still use the Fallen Spire minor faction.  You can pursue just a few episodes and get some benefit from that, or all the way up to episode 8 and get a much larger boost on your way to a traditional victory.  The in-game story makes all of this clear as you pass through each "firebreak," as we call them.

This is really cool and really different for the game, almost like building a whole new game into the larger game of AI War.  We hadn't wanted to say too much about the alternate-way-to-win thing unless we couldn't pull it off, but as of this release that's all in place.  And now, again to avoid any spoilers, that's all I'll say about that.

The other big thing, I already mentioned is the first of the Spirecraft.  All those asteroids that we seeded into the game last week were useless until now, but now you can build Spire Mining Ships (from the CONST tab), and in turn those can build mining enclosures that produce one or more spirecraft.  The first three classes of spirecraft are Shield Bearer, Ram, and Martyr -- but we hope to get 9 more classes in place by the end of Tuesday, if all goes well.  There are five marks of each kind of spirecraft, so that's 15 ships so far, and another 45 coming.

The spirecraft already in place are cool ones, but I will say this: don't use up all your high-level asteroids if you're in a long-term campaign that you'll still be playing on Monday and Tuesday and after.  Some of the coolest spirecraft are still coming, not that the ones already in aren't cool too (the shield bearer one is particularly exciting, I think -- well, so is the Martyr actually).

And, of course, this release also has various bugfixes and balance tweaks.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

It Rocks When Indies Cooperate

The article UK Dev Gets Off Arse - Makes Indie Portal on Spong talks about showmethegames.com, something that Arcen -- and 19 other indie developers, including Positech, 2D Boy, and many others -- have been quietly working on for the last month or two.  Time flies, I forget exactly how long it's been.

And I really shouldn't say we've all been working on it, as it's mostly been Cliff Harris, whose idea it was in the first place.  The rest of us made our contributions, fiscally and otherwise, but Cliff did all the heavy lifting and he blogs here about why he created the site and what he hopes to eventually accomplish with it.

Quoth Cliff:

Now I know what you are thinking, “why haven’t I heard about it then?” isn’t it usual form for me to go on a publicity blitz? When am I going to punch Keith Vaz on live TV? The whole point of SMTG was to prove 2 basic concepts:

• You can get almost 20 indie game developers to co-operate, and actually pay money into a mutual project
• You can make advertising work for indie developers, it we club together. (this is why we tested it as an ad-driven site at first)

I think the amount of success for the various indies in the first run of this probably varied, but it's early days yet.  I also think that the amount of success for most of us with this made it close enough to cost-neutral (if not generating a return for some of us) that it's worth future investment and investigation.  I don't share the anti-big-portals sentiments that some indies do, but that doesn't mean that an indie collective that is controlled by indies isn't attractive.

As an early experiment, Show Me The Games has been a success, I think.  We -- that is to say, Cliff -- has in my mind proved out that the basic concept can work.  And we had 20 indies buying into this without squabbling of any sort, which is another miracle.  It's a really good group of folks with games on that list, so that's certainly part of it.  Now all that remains to be seen is where we take it from here!