AI War: The Light of the Spire Expansion Now Available as Game Hits Version 5.0

The Light of the Spire
Arcen Games is proud to announce the release of AI War: The Light of the Spire, the game's biggest expansion ever. Available now for $10 through ArcenGames.com and coming soon to digital distributors.

The expansion is packed full of new additions.  The "Fallen Spire" campaign brings in-game linear story elements to the title for the first time, and culminates in a whole new way to win. Players with minutes instead of hours should take to the new Defender Mode, offering bite-sized timed games against crazy AI aggression.

Light of the Spire also brings 180 new ships, including the powerful "Spirecraft" vessel class which stands as the second largest unit class in the game. New music from composer Pablo Vega, new AI types, map types, bonus ship classes, minor factions and quite a bit more packs the expansion to the brim. Prepare for a new war!

More information and a trailer can be found here, along with a comprehensive feature list: http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-spire



AI War 5.0
Arriving alongside the LotS expansion is AI War 5.0, a massive update free to owners of the base game. Version 5.0 refines the title by taking the best of all past versions and blending them into the definitive AI War experience. While the game will continue to grow and evolve, 5.0 now serves as the foundation for the future.

With this update, nearly every combat ship in the game has been rebalanced in an effort to integrate all the new units added over the past year. Golems have been completely revamped and the AI have received major intelligence upgrades such as more proactive retreats, a network of core shield generators, and the new "stalking" mechanic where it lies in wait until the player is at their most vulnerable.

Players should also be pleased with significant adjustments to overall difficulty and the shortening of the early part of the game -- allowing you to "get to the good part" faster. Not to mention tons of performance improvements, as well as more of a general accessibility regardless of what level of player you are.

Interested parties can read all the additions, improvements and changes in massive detail here: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_5.000_Release

Updated Demos
Demos of both AI War 5.0 and Light of the Spire can be downloaded here: http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-downloads

The demo can be unlocked into the full version of the game with a purchased license key.

About Arcen Games
Arcen Games entered the PC indie scene in 2009 with their cult classic AI War: Fleet Command, which was named the 40th best-reviewed PC game of the year by MetaCritic.  Their second year was a busy one, seeing the release of The Zenith Remnant, the first full expansion for AI War; Tidalis, an innovative block-based puzzle with casual appeal and hardcore depth; and Children of Neinzul, a micro-expansion for AI War with all profits benefiting the Child's Play charity, of which Arcen is a platinum sponsor.

Light of the Spire is Arcen's first release of 2011, but fans of the company are also excited about the upcoming procedural adventure game known as A Valley Without Wind.  Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles.

Check Out Our New Look!

Notice anything different?  The site has gone through a major overhaul.  It's a platform shift to Joomla from just raw PHP, it includes a ton of visual upgrades, and it's organized way better.  In general, it's just more functional, easier to get around, and more attractive.  Not to mention long overdue!

My personal blog has also undergone a transformation, and is now called "Games By Design."  We'll be doing development diaries there as we work on A Valley Without Wind, so watch that space.  That's where I generally talk about in-depth game design stuff in general, actually, but it's been a bit quiet the last few months because things have been so busy.  Hopefully as AVWW progresses, other team members will also be able to contribute there.

Speaking of AVWW, there's a new preview page up for it.  Later this week our goal is to have the first in-game screenshots posted, but the three images that are posted in that preview are all in-game art assets just shown out of context.  We'll be sure to put up some forums for pre-alpha discussion about AVWW soon, too -- though there's a lot with that game we're not quite ready to share, we'll be opening up more and more over the coming weeks and months through the development diaries.

Stay tuned!

AI War Beta 4.073 Released -- Release Candidate 4!

This one has another handful of maintenance fixes.   We're mostly laying low on AI War while we wait for players to be able to test for really serious issues (so that we don't introduce more in the meantime!).  So far, no reports of any desyncs since a few versions back, which is seeming very promising. 

If all goes well, we could still be on schedule for a release on Monday, but a lot of that depends on whether any reports of serious issues come in over the weekend from players.  Fingers crossed!

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 4.072 Released -- Release Candidate 3!

This one is small, but exciting.  We may have finally found that phantom desync!  For anyone who has been having any multiplayer desyncs in the last week, we'd love to hear from you if your issues seem to be gone, or especially if you get a new desync with this version.  Fingers crossed!

A short list of other fixes are also in this version, so see the release notes for details.  We're pretty much done with changes we're going to make pre-5.0 unless there are still desyncs around or other critical-to-enjoyment issues are found.  Right now the known issues list is pretty much devoid of those, so we're keeping our list of changes to a minimum to avoid introducing any new issues at the last second.

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 Official 1.016 Released, Along With Official Release Of Tidalis Lite!

Tidalis Official 1.016
This release doesn't include any new content, but it really improves the game in general. The biggest change here is an upgrade of the Unity 3D engine (which powers Tidalis) from version 2.6 to version 3.1. The number of improvements in the Unity engine between those two versions is nothing short of staggering, and that alone fixes the unable-to-set-screen-resolution issues on OSX, as well as making performance better in general. It also resolved some annoying font wrapping issues that were caused by the Unity 2.6 engine.


Going along with that, for AI War 4.0 we had to develop out a new, higher-performance rendering pipeline to go on top of the Unity engine; the rendering pipeline we'd been using in Tidalis just wasn't nearly fast enough to handle AI War. Tidalis is a much lighter-weight game visually compared to AI War, but even so we've backported the new pipeline from AI War to Tidalis, and the result is a puzzle game that runs even smoother, and which will run well on even slower hardware. Great news for netbooks and older laptops.

Another huge mechanics addition is the addition of a second keyboard player. Previously, Tidalis supported one mouse player and one keyboard player. Now it supports one mouse player and up to two keyboard players, all on one computer. This is particularly useful for those players who are mapping gamepads to the keyboard keys. It also increases the game from being up to 2 player local (6 player online) to being 3 payer local (6 player online), although it's still a maximum of two actual game boards in local or online play.

Aside from all of the above, there are also a small number of general polish bugfixes.

Tidalis Lite
The other big news is that we've introduced Tidalis Lite, a scaled-down web version of the game that players can enjoy for free. Tidalis Lite is an interesting experiment for us.  It's not a demo -- we already have one of those -- and yet it's not quite a full game, either.


We took the idea from the iPhone space, where paid full versions and free lite versions are the norm.  People are free to enjoy the lite version of a game as basically a bite-sized experience that stands on its own, or if they like it enough and want more, they can move up to the full version.

Heck, if you aren't sure after trying the lite version, you can try out the full demo.  The lite version and the demo version have a lot of overlap in what they give away for free, but there's quite a bit that is only in one version or the other.  The lite version is the quickest, easiest way to dip your toes into the game: it's only a 6.7mb download, assuming you already have the unity web player (which is tiny, too).

Tidalis 1.016 Full Installer Links
Don't yet have Tidalis, or haven't yet tried the demo?  You can now get the full 1.005 installer from our Download Tidalis page, rather than starting with 1.000 and upgrading after the fact.

Tidalis 1.016 Manual Patch Links
The in-game updater should work just fine for anyone with an Internet connection, but if you'd like a patch that you can manually apply, here are the links for that. Bear in mind that you must already have version 1.005 or later of the game for these patches to work -- they are not cumulative for versions older than 1.005.

• Windows 1.016 Patch
• Mac OSX 1.016 Patch

AI War Beta 4.071 Released -- Release Candidate 2!

This one is just a small maintenance patch to fix some crash issues in RC1.

AI War Beta 4.070 Released -- Release Candidate 1!

This one brings us very close to the next official release, which will be 5.0.  The last major issue is one multiplayer desync that we're chasing down.  As soon as that is resolved, we're pretty much ready to go.  There are a few last things we intend to tweak and fix, but it's expected that this is the last of the really large pre-5.0 betas.  And boy is this one large.

This one includes the last of the major pre-5.0 rebalancing that we're intending to do -- although feedback on ship balance is still welcome, as if there are further tweaks that seem needed from player reports, we will make them even prior to 5.0.  We're just done with the balancing work we're planning to do in the absence of further player reports.

The way that the AIs act around their own force fields is now a lot better in general, and so is their logic for how they act when there are a few player ships on their planets.  Cross Planet Attacks have seen a pretty large overhaul, with some helpful new text messages on arrival as well as some helpful-to-the-AI new rules adjustments for them that allow them to look in new places to find the ships needed to free for the CPA event.  Oh, and all CPAs are now twice as large, to make matters even worse.  With the larger wave sizes, it only makes sense, as in recent iterations the CPAs were not at all the terrifying events they once were.  Now they are again.

A large part of today was spent desync-hunting for that one main desync that people are experiencing.  We haven't found it yet, but we did find a number of other very obscure desyncs that hadn't been reported yet, and those are fixed.  Along with various other fixes resulting from the search, and also other little changes and fixes that were due to player reports, of course.

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.

The AI War Schedule For The Next Few Days

So what next?  At the moment we're not really looking for large numbers of refinement suggestions from players, as we're trying to keep the number of potentially bug-introducing changes to a minimum.  Our plan is to mostly leave the codebase as-is, aside from those few changes that we either feel are safe to make, or just absolutely critical to make.

That said, if you do have an idea, always feel free to share -- they just go into the Considering or Minor Fix For Later or Feature For Later categories when we're not in an immediate position to address them.  But that doesn't mean we aren't interested, so keep firing away!

Meanwhile, what we are interested in for the short term are any last balance thoughts people have, any bugs that are critical to fix for 5.0, and most importantly any clues as to desyncs if you're having them.  And if you're playing multiplayer on the latest betas without any desyncs, we want to know that too!  When it comes to desyncs, there is very specific information that we need, so please be sure to read the desync reporting guidelines to make sure that we can make use of your report.  We appreciate it!  These are a specific form of bug that are very challenging to find, and thus require special reporting.

A Valley Without Wind Kicking Off
While we give this version of AI War some time to rest in player hands and make sure there aren't any critical issues, when we're not working on those last tweaks or the desync search, we're going to be starting in on A Valley Without Wind work.  A number of the music tracks are already done, and they are awesome.  Keith got the basics of the engine stripped down and split out for us to build the new codebase on, and I'm really excited to get working on both the code for that along with Keith, and the art stuff in all my new 3D rendering tools.

I hope to have some very early screenshots in a week or less, and we'll share some of the music at that time, too.  We'll also start doing some development diaries to talk about our progress on the game and specific topics related to that, since there's been a lot of interest in that sort of thing.  We're still shooting for a first public alpha version sometime in March, but it could theoretically be earlier, or more likely later, than that.  We'll know more as we get closer to that stage.

Enjoy!

AI War Beta 4.069 Released!

This one has yet more polish, mostly fixes and balance updates.  Once again, the list is fairly lengthy and is quite all over the place, so it's difficult to summarize without just restating the entire thing.  Here are a few particularly notable items, though:

Desync handling is now way better.  It logs some important data to the host's machine, and most importantly whenever a desync or a "waiting for players" message is shown (and those are not the same thing), a chat message is sent out explaining what is going on.  If it doesn't say desync, it's not a desync!  There has been a lot of confusion about that in the past, with players calling ordinary connectivity problems desyncs at times, and so this should help sort out that confusion and lead people to the correct line of inquiry for resolving their issue.

There are three new cheats for spawning ships under your control, and some of them allow you to get ships you can't get any other way.  We use these internally for testing, of course, but they're also fun so we make them cheats that anyone can use.

Cutlasses, vampires, viral shredders, and rams/mini-rams all have been rebalanced somewhat.  Also, a number of the older AI Types have been updated to include automatic unlocks of some of the newer ship types that fall under their purview (parasites for the feeding parasite, etc).

All of the remaining art changes for Light of the Spire are also now in place.  The Fallen Spire mobile military ships now actually have proper far zoom icons for themselves, and the far zoom icons for every ship in the expansion have been tweaked at least to a small degree, adding polish and clarity.  They really do look a lot better, now.

Oh, and Cross Planet Attacks weren't being scaled down with the lower ship caps.  As Keith put it, "odd that it's taken so long to notice."  But that was making the CPAs way more dangerous on anything but high ship caps, comparably speaking.  Now it's all equivalent, and less CPU/RAM-melting on the lower ship caps in the first place.

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 4.068 Released!

This one has a long list of small tweaks and fixes, some more notable than others.  It's all over the place, so it's quite hard to summarize -- it's also really late at night.  Between those two factors, I'll mostly leave you to read them on your own.  A few things to bring to your attention:

The wormhole/resource point seeding is different from 4.067, and consistent with prior saves again.  Clarifications about that available here, for the curious/concerned.

In addition to the code changes, all of of the zoomed-in art for the spire ships in this expansion and the base game is now updated to have nice glows, etc.  It looks way better in game.  Changes to the far zoom icons are still coming.

A lot of GUI issues with textboxes, etc, were fixed.  That's another really notable thing in this one.

We're really winding down on what we're going to do pre-5.0 at this stage.  We're trying to do as little as possible that will risk further bugs, and so a lot of smaller things in the idea tracker have gotten archived for later.  There are still more balance/bugfix things to do, and there's the far zoom icon stuff in terms of the art, but other than that we're mostly to the point where if there aren't any major issues found, we'll be hitting 5.0 release candidates on Monday, going through a few days where Keith and I try to touch the code as little as possible while people make sure it still seems okay to them, with then us pulling the trigger on the official version on Wednesday or so.  Fingers crossed!

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 4.067 Released!

Well, nuts -- we'd hoped to have code/art files for the 5.0 version of AI War, plus the first official version of Light of the Spire, ready either today or Monday.  But, as of today we discovered a couple of major bugs in the current betas, and so we need to take a little more testing time.  We're still expecting to have the new official version ready next week, though.

The big bugs in question were twofold:

First, there was a bug with the random number generation, and actually that was a multi-part bug, too.  One part goes all the way back to pre-1.0, as long as AI War has been around.  But actually, that one was less severe than the release notes perhaps make out, because we found some other bugs that were much more recent (as in, the last two months or so) that were actually the main culprits.  All of the above are fixed now, but, we really want to have some more time with this in player hands to make sure that we didn't introduce any new issues.

Secondly, there was a very recently introduced issue with forcefields and targeting for stuff that is unable to damage forcefields.  That fix uncovered a nest of other minor issues with targeting forcefields in general, most of which were very longstanding, so we fixed them all and are now hoping that didn't lead to anything more crazy.  Again, a big part of why we want more testing time with this one.

Another big change in this one, to game feel anyway, is to the AI retreat logic.  It's been a longstanding rule that the AI was not allowed to retreat if fewer than half of its units had been on the current planet for less than 30 seconds.  That was originally preventing the AI from running back and forth between planets willy-nilly, but in the year and a half since that rule was put in place, the AI has evolved substantially so that it already won't be so flighty.  All that recent stuff with the stalking planets, for one example among several.  At any rate, that retreat cap was actually preventing the AI from being as responsive as it otherwise could have been, and let it fall into a few gap-in-the-wall type exploits that it otherwise could handily avoid or mitigate.

The retreat embargo time limit is thus now 3 seconds instead of 30, which should really make an enormous difference in how the AI acts... all over the place.  During waves, threat attacks, when you attack the AI, etc.  Let us know how it seems.

Human Resistance Fighters got hit with the nerf bat and are more sane.  So did defender mode as a whole, actually.  If it weren't for the preceding paragraphs, the defender mode changes actually would have been our marquee announcement with this new version.  As Keith put it, in the recent versions starting a defender mode was as good as sending a notice to your next of kin.  Now it's a lot more balanced: still tough, but way more interesting.  See the release notes for more details.

There's some other really key stuff in this one, too.  Reclamation got a major buff, and some bugfixes.  People should be a lot happier with that again (it reclaims stuff with full health of damage dealt, rather than half, now, for instance -- in light of the other recent nerfs, this makes sense and it allows us to avoid some complexity in the code that led to the bugs in the first place).  Manufactories now have their input/output inflated.  AI Eyes have a bugfix that will prevent them from being seeded so much as they were in the last version.

There's also don't-automatically-assist-expensive-stuff logic in for engineers that can be adjusted, but defaults to a value that really will help players avoid accidentally tanking their economy.  Auto-FRD, etc, works on allied planets now.  When playing with random AI types, it will now almost never give you two identical types.  Numerous fixes with rebuilding of energy reactors.  Et cetera.

Along with all the various changes, I'm also working on improving some of the art from Light of the Spire.  In this post are a few examples, but more is coming.  The first image is the shard, the second is the shard reactor, and the third is the Starship Dissassembler.  All of the spire ships are going to be upgraded with glowy halos, which really make them look a ton better when shown on black backgrounds (as happens pretty much all the time in the game).  And the color masks are way better, too, as you'll notice with the few examples in place so far.

Enjoy!  Oh, and here's the release notes.

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 4.066 Released!

Polish incoming. As promised, this one is mostly about bugfixes and balance tweaks.  The biggest group of rebalancements is in the Fallen Spire campaign, which now has to cope with largely-immobile forcefields (even moreso in this release).  Fortunately, with some shifts to the Shards themselves, that problem should be handled -- but let us know what you think.  As sort of a sly concession to the desire for mobile forcefields, the range on the riot starship shields has gone up rather substantially.  So that's one other option for the shard retrieval teams, too.

Zenith Beam Frigates got a major rebalancement, Raiders got a minor tweak.  The higher level siege starships now got the intended buff that is equivalent to their mark I brethren.  The AI will now be allowed to have half the prior number of Spire Blade Spawners, Spire Maws, Spire Stealth Battleships, and Spire Tractor Platforms per guard post.  Minor factions, zombies, and AI ships that have not yet "settled" are no longer subject to the recent "AI ships won't move when under a forcefield" rules, which fixes a number of issues where far too many ships could stack under a single forcefield, etc.

Other than that, it's a lot of other smaller tweaks and fixes reported by players.  More coming soon, especially now that the main bulk of my work on the Tidalis Lite beta is through (at long last).  That's a free web-based version of Tidalis, and we think it's seriously cool -- check it out if you haven't seen it yet.  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 Lite -- First Beta WebPlayer!

Big news!  We've been talking about doing a web-player version of Tidalis for a long time, but it's always been "sometime in the future."  Well... the future is now!

Tidalis Lite is an interesting experiment for us.  It's completely free, and basically a scaled-down version of the full game.  It's not a demo -- we already have one of those -- and yet it's not quite a full game, either. 

We took the idea from the iPhone space, where paid full versions and free lite versions are the norm.  People are free to enjoy the lite version of a game as basically a bite-sized experience that stands on its own, or if they like it enough and want more, they can move up to the full version. 

Heck, if you aren't sure after trying the lite version, you can try out the full demo.  The lite version and the demo version have a lot of overlap in what they give away for free, but there's quite a bit that is only in one version or the other.  But the lite version is the quickest, easiest way to dip your toes into the game: it's only a 6.7mb download, assuming you already have the unity web player (which is tiny, anyway).

Do note that the current version of Tidalis Lite is still a beta.  We won't be fully announcing this via press release until early next week, and in the meantime there might be some bugs.  We'd love any help and feedback folks can give us in the bug-hunting department for this.  As always, enjoy!

Click here to play Tidalis Lite in your browser.

AI War Beta 4.065, "Defender Chronicles," Released!

This one is jam-packed with some pretty significant gameplay changes.  First up is defender mode, from which this patch takes it's name.  I actually forgot to mention it in the release notes summary last week, but one of those patches actually improved some of the stuff about defender mode, in terms of the timing of waves, etc.  Well, this patch changes a whole ton of stuff about it, to the point that defender mode is pretty much ready to go -- pending your testing feedback, of course

I should go on and mention at this point that we're gearing up for an official release of what is now being called AI War 5.0, along with Light of the Spire, this Thursday or Friday if all goes well.  Again, pending your testing feedback -- so be sure to let us know about the most serious issues you want us to be sure to fix before 5.0 hits.  We're trying to weed out the trivial stuff at this stage, and are just focusing on those remaining pieces of polish that are actually really important for the next official.

Why the change to calling this release 5.0 instead of 4.4?  Because so much has changed it's really a whole new era compared to 4.021, the current official version.  Almost every ship in the game has been rebalanced, tons and tons of new gameplay rules and mechanics have been added, and in general the "feel" of the game is as different from 4.0 as version 3.0 was from version 2.0.  In general, I really feel like 5.0 combines a lot of what was best about all the past eras: the general difficulty of 2.0, the good parts of the pacing from 3.0 and 4.0, most of the rules shifts from 4.0, the sub-battlefields centering around forcefields and fortresses from the 1.0 era, and so forth.

But, back to the release at hand: some of the other significant changes I actually already alluded to.  The way that AI forcefields and AI fortresses work has been really overhauled -- much too many changes to list here, but the basic idea is that you have to get up close and personal with bombers with them, and that siege starships are relegated to a somewhat shifted role.  In general, all of the ultra-long-range non-sniper stuff is now not so long range anymore.  Still notable, but not in a way that combines all the sub-battlefields of a single planet into one giant melting pot.

AI Eyes have also been significantly redone in that you can't easily snipe them in advance of killing the rest of the planet.  It can be done, but it's now got the same health and tedium as killing a wormhole command post.  And, like the wormhole command posts, a similar more fun solution: kill all the guard posts, and the AI Eye dies automatically.  This really encourages smaller raiding fleets, or groups of starships, rather than players just sniping the AI Eye before they roll in with their normal giant fleet.  Accordingly, there will also be fewer AI Eyes scattered around in new savegames, too.

The fortresses and forcefields of the AI have also seen some seeding changes for new games, which will really change how some of the AI types feel personality-wise: more defensive or less, etc.  And with the general effect of not having quite so many fortresses in many cases.  Again, these only affect new savegames, since it affects stuff that would already have been seeded in existing saves.

In terms of bugfixes, there were some issues in the last version with ships overshooting wormholes, with group move, and with speed boosting.  All of those should now be fixed, though the group move/speed boosting ones took quite a bit of changing the command structure for a number of gamecommands to get working.  Oh, and there was yet another bug with AI maws permanently hanging on to some player ships.  Fixed for good this time, hopefully.

Lastly, that command-stations-must-be-built-within-proximity-to-the-colony-ship thing, which most people found tedious and fiddly, has simply been removed.  There are some alternate rules in place now whereby colony ships and mobile builders explode with the command station if it dies: that does a better job of meeting the original design goal of not letting the players just keep easy "spares" of colony ships right on their forward bases to insta-rebuild them, but it does so in a way that's not mechanically annoying and that actually works.

Oh, and there are some awesome new modular ship module graphics by HitmanN.  Check them out!

Anyway, so lots of new stuff here.  Bear in mind we're trying to wind down and keep the game as stable as possible, shooting for something that is basically as polished and balanced a version as possible of what we've got going here.  This is probably the last pre-5.0 beta version that's going to significantly alter anything beyond balance and bugfixes (well, and some art), but there's still plenty left on our list regarding balance and bugfixes alone.  As always, thanks for your support -- and 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 4.064 Released!

This one simply has a laundry list of bugfixes and balance tweaks, as we push onwards toward having the new version release-ready.  It also has a very cool new forcefield hit effect animation by longtime community member Hans-Martin Portmann, which adds to his long list of graphics submissions (he was responsible for our original explosion improvements back in the 1.301 days, for example).

The biggest fix in this version is to an issue that could cause a lot of AI ships to show up as invisible in far zoom mode in the last version if you were on a planet where the AI was still in cold storage.  But, there were also a bunch of interrelated bugs with speed boosting, gravity effects, and group move that are from the last few versions and which are now fixed, too.

The biggest balance change is to the fortresses and superfortresses for the AI players.  They are no longer mobile, but in the case of the regular fortresses they now have slightly more health but substantially less range.

There's a fair list of other stuff in this one, too, but it's all just small miscellaneous stuff.  Important, but difficult to summarize -- check out the release notes if you're curious!  More stuff is coming next week in terms of polish, and then we'll be all set for AI War 4.4 and Light of the Spire.  We'll be doing a Tidalis official release next week, too.  Then we're finally going to be ramping up real development on A Valley Without Wind! We're quite excited about that, and about the state that AI War is in (or almost in), too.  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 4.063, "The Praying Mantis," Released!

Massive is the word for this release.  We're trying to get both AI War 4.4 and Light of the Spire in a release-ready state by sometime next week, so it's pretty much bugfixes and polish all the way down on this one.  The list of stuff in even just this release alone is pretty crazy long, though.

One particularly notable thing is that the in-game windowing system is completely rewritten from scratch using our own methods rather than the built-in windowing that comes with Unity 3D.  This way is a lot more flexible and solves a ton of flicker-related bugs, but if you see any new issues cropping up with windows in the UI, this is why.  So far we've seen nothing, but you may want to keep an eye out.

Science Labs Mark III have been completely reworked in their mechanics so that they are now a quicker, more intense, much more dangerous affair.  The Zenith Trader is now a much more elusive visitor, making him harder to capture wares from as a human (but he's actually a little less stingy than before with the AI).  We also fixed some stuff with regard to panning the screen by edge scrolling with the mouse.  And some stuff with animations going incredibly too slowly when you're using +10 speed.  And some stuff with military and nonmilitary ships not being able to be selected at the same time.  And that "phantom ships or health bars" issue is finally fixed.  Some tutorial-related bugs from the prior version, too.

Also of major note is that the AI's behaviors while "stalking" a player planet have been much improved.  They react better to the player building structures on their planets in general, too.  Forward sniper nests on AI planets will be a lot less effective, now.  Along with this, a lot of firepower fixes have been made, so that the AI also is better about deciding to attack rather than always letting it go so long while stalking you.  And actually, the advanced hybrid hives now have a lot more aggressive options now, too.  When you see "Defensive Hybrids Are Mobilizing" in the late game, it's time to scramble for some defenses of your own!

A goodly number of ships have been rebalanced moderately to significantly (laser gatlings, grenade launchers, etc), but perhaps the most welcome here is the marauders, which are less deadly now.  Still interesting, just not so you-die-now early in the game.  Scouts also got some buffs since they were hurting lately, and transports will also get brutalized less.  And scout starships now have a major speed boost going up in their ranks, making them finally more interesting to unlock when not facing counterspies.

A new ammo type has been added, with a new sound effect: Fusion Cutter.  See the release notes for details, but it's basically separating out the vampires and viral swarmers from the cutlasses and similar.  This is basically a buff for cutlasses, wasps, and spire blades, and not much of a change except in name of their ammo type for vampires and viral swarmers.

There's also a new base game achievement.  And literally dozens of other small items not mentioned here.  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 4.062 Released!

This one is a maintenance release with some fixes relating to ship speed.  No crashes or anything, but it was annoying enough we wanted to go ahead and have this out for players.

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 4.061 Released!

This one is chock full of changes, once again -- mostly of the internal RAM/CPU efficiency-improving kind.  This is both good and bad: good because the memory and processor use is better than ever, and bad because with this many changes throughout the codebase, there are bound to be some bugs that get found related to this conversion that get found over the next few days.

To wit: in the 4.060 version, in the tutorials apparently player and AI troops were best buds and didn't want to shoot at each other anymore, despite whatever orders from you or the AI overlords.  That's fixed in this release, but that in turn required a rather large rejiggering of the tutorial innards for handling the AI player, and so there might be some lingering issues there.  For the longest time during my testing with them, I couldn't get the AI ships to stop killing each other and ignoring the player.  Go figure. 

Again, there aren't any known issues at this time relating from any of this, but I'm just saying to be extra on the lookout over the next few days.  So why go through all this hassle and so forth?  Well, savegames now load faster, as well as those RAM and CPU improvements.  In one test save that was using about 1200mb of ram, our 4.060 release reduced that by about 40mb, and our new 4.061 release reduces that by a further 20mb.  The general savings with the new version will be about 2mb per 10,000 ships in the game, so this is an even bigger benefit to the largest games out there.

There are also benefits in this one to help out with memory load in large battles, and particularly on large maps in general.  Whew.

Aside from performance improvements, there are a number of other notable things.  A lot of the ship short/wave/type names have been tweaked to be clearer and more consistent with their full names.  Core Missile Guard Posts got a needed buff.  The alert colorization from the prior version actually works now.  Scout speed has been made constant regardless of combat style.  The yellow color of the player in the tutorials is now brighter.

And... the balance of player speed versus AI speed has been really redone.  Previously, players just got a silent double speed versus what the AI has.  The idea was to make logistics less painful for the human players, without making the AI able to rush the player planets too fast.  The downside was that this really was a great advantage for players in AI territory in particular, really hurting the need for tactics beyond just kiting and blobbing. 

This release, therefore, removes that silent bonus -- and instead gives a double-the-speed-of-allies ability to all the human command stations.  That retains the bonus on your planets, but makes losing a command station even more of a bad thing, along with making AI territory back into a more fair fight.  Oh, and the AI home command station now also has this ability, meaning you're at a disadvantage there.

Last, but definitely not least: we finally found and fixed that "most games on the scoreboard show as incomplete even when completed" bug.  Thanks for your patience with that one!  The nature of our testing was such that we weren't likely to find it: it mainly occurred when you won with a lower score than you'd previously had with that game (not just from save-scumming -- the adjusted score can fluctuate downwards as well as up).  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 4.060 Released!

Happy New Year!  The first release of the new year is a good one, but it really revamps the savegame format, so make sure and don't save over your existing savegames for a little while if you want to be sure not to lose them.  Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to actually test your new saves now and again, to make sure you don't play for six hours and then find out the progress all got corrupted or anything.

Not that I really expect a lot of problems with the new savegame format -- it seems to work very well in my testing -- but with any change that is so substantial, that's something to be wary of for a little while.  Why such a big change?  Well, the new savegame format takes a lot less RAM to create, which is useful for a lot of reasons, but particularly useful for savegames where there is already really high RAM usage. 

Actually, RAM usage, and to some extent CPU performance, have both been big targets in this release.  In general the RAM usage is maybe 40MB lower in big saves, and a number of CPU-hog in-game scenarios (such as FRD defenders against thousands of enemies) are now substantially more efficient.

Coming along with these efficiency changes are a number of internal changes for the way that the AI tracks data, which not only makes that faster, but also more correct in a lot of cases.  A number of minor edge cases AI scenarios now work better, which is great.

Event attacks have been redone a fair bit also, to allow for more ships in a more sensible pattern, and a few other rebalancements like scout starships and teleport raiders are also in.  Plus some fixes and improvements to harvesters and manufactories.  Oh, and the alerts in the upper left of the screen are now handily colorized, too.  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.