Arcen Games News Has Moved!: October 2012

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

AI War Beta 6.005 "Burning The Candle At Both Ends" Released!

This one answers the results of our three recent polls on which units most need rebalancing (in both directions, for player and/or AI).

Congratulations (and changes) thus go out to: the Tackle Drone Launcher, "Mysterious" Colony Ship (nebula unit), Zenith Bombard, Teleport Raider, Infiltrator, Superfortress, Zenith Power Generator, and Champion Drone Bays. Racking up that much infamy isn't easy, so give them a hand folks.

We also incorporated new far-zoom icons for LotS, like we did with Ancient Shadows a couple versions ago. Thanks again to long-time community member HitmanN for those.

Speaking of ship icons, the planetary summary sidebar's been changed to render those in a manner more consistent with the rest of the game. Previously they were losing some clarity, and I think they look better now.

We also fixed a few bugs in this one, including one that basically broke the Doom Accelerator modules in the last couple releases. Oops! Well, taken care of now.

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.

Monday, October 29, 2012

AI War Beta 6.003-6.004 "Fortress-size It" Released!

This one greatly expands the module variety available to modular fortress owners in champion games. Every module that can be unlocked on a champion now has a mod-fort equivalent (fortress modules only go up to MkIII though). The pre-existing mod-fort modules are still unlocked via their related turret/starship/etc research, but the newly added ones are unlocked when any player-controlled champion in the game has unlocked them.

Speaking of champions, the "you must be within 20000 range of the dying unit to get XP for it" rule has been removed: you still have to be on the same planet, but the fine details don't matter. Hopefully this will reduce the field of OCD behaviors slightly ;) Overall it wasn't a big deal since most XP comes from winning nebulae (and everyone gets that), but it should please some players.

And speaking of modules: AI-controlled Spire Corvettes will now be much scarier because we fixed a bug that was keeping their modules at MkI. Watch out for the high-mark ones.

Speaking of Spire stuff, the Shard-recovery chases in Fallen Spire have been revised again to not be so intense early on (where you don't have very far to go anyway) but still have the full force (or more) of the recent speed increases in the later stages (where you'll be more prepared).

The Ancient Shadows bonus ship far-zoom icons (i.e. the representation you see almost all the time) have been redone by long-time community member HitmanN. Same with the Spire champion far-zoom icons. They look [i]much[/i] better, in my opinion :)

Fixed a basically-since-forever bug where Defender mode would sometimes not launch waves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it happened when you rolled both AIs as types that don't send waves. Computers think they're cute like that, doing what we say and not what we mean.

Special Forces now "breed" much more slowly, but have a higher possible population (both the rate and the cap scale up during the game with AIP, etc). It's been amusing to see the "intergalactic sentry eye" effect as it's been called, but not actually the intention there ;)

And a few other changes.

Update: 6.004 hotfix to fix bug in the last version that changed the color of your ships in the planetary summary.

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.

Thursday, October 25, 2012

AI War Beta 6.002 "Better Than A Stick In The Eye" Released!

This one finally gets around to adding some more AI Eye variants to round finish response to the Eye winning a community poll back before the beta of Ancient Shadows. There are several new devious toys in there, providing varying degrees of "I do not want to make this angry, ever". Also, the AI homeworlds now get versions of eyes with a few important special characteristics (though their main functions are no more powerful than normal eyes).

The Deepstrike-response mechanic has also been overhauled, and should now be harder to just brush off for a few cases where it wasn't particularly threatening.

Rounding out the release are a few bugfixes and balance changes, and a couple new surprises for avid knowledge-raiders.

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.

Shattered Haven Playable Tomorrow at GameCity

Monday, October 22, 2012

AI War Beta 6.001 "There's Always At Least One" Released!

This one is mostly a bunch of bugfixes to deal with things that made it into the 6.0 official. None of them really critical, though the scapegoat bug (i.e. the AI finds a way to counter the Martyr) was pretty hilarious, and these are good to get fixed in any event.

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.

Friday, October 19, 2012

AI War 6.0 and Ancient Shadows Expansion Materialize on Steam

All AI War products on sale until October 26th to celebrate launch.

Arcen Games is pleased to announce the launch of AI War 6.0 along with the game’s fourth expansion Ancient Shadows, available now on Steam.

Among several other content additions, Ancient Shadows brings Champions into the fray. These behemoths can be upgraded, gain EXP, and lend powerful aid to your main forces. They also possess a unique power that allows them to explore entirely new parts of the galaxy where the AI cannot reach.

Splinter factions dwell in those backwater nebulae. Some are hiding. Some are plotting. Some have gone totally insane. It is there, in the shadows, that your champion can find relics from the ancient race which constructed it. What power awaits? And at what cost?

Along with the aforementioned modular fortresses, Ancient Shadows packs in 9 new bonus ship classes, 2 new AI types, 2 new map types, and a whopping 98 minutes of new music by AI War’s composer Pablo Vega as well. For the full list of features, please see the Ancient Shadows page on the game’s wiki.

The new content also significantly expands the co-op friendliness of AI War by allowing new or novice players to jump in and control a subset of the main player’s units – whether it be a portion of the fleet or the champion itself (or both).

Coupled with the expansion is the latest version of the base game: AI War 6.0. The sheer volume of 6.0's changes defies summation, but some of the high points include a rewiring of some of the core mechanics such as the ability to hack the AI, a redone Energy system, variable difficulty levels for several minor factions and AI plots, redone starfield backgrounds, a substantially “smarter” AI, improvements to balance, substantially reduced RAM usage of the game (great for when playing with really huge numbers of ships in particular), and a whole lot more.

Most, if not every single one, of the aforementioned items has our community’s prints all over them. AI War simply wouldn’t be where it is today without its players.

To mark the releases, a new trailer has just been launched for the game. We highly recommend giving it a look as it’s the first one in AI War’s four year history that we believe actually nails the overall feel of it.

AI War: Ancient Shadows will be offered at $4.99 regularly, with a 10% discount bringing it down to $4.49 through the next week. AI War itself, its first three expansions, and the Alien bundle containing both the base game and trio of expansions are also on sale during the launch period at a stout 75% discount.

About AI War

AI War is a one-of-a-kind strategy game that plays like an RTS but feels like a 4X. With tower defense and grand strategy bits, too. You'll be wanting the demo to really know what we mean, there's nothing else on the market remotely like this.

More specifically, this is a game that you can either play solo, or in 2-8 player co-op. You always play against a pair of AIs, and you can configure an enormous amount of things about the experience. The AI is very excellent, and also an entirely unique concept. The longer you play, the more the AI will impress you, which is kind of backwards from most strategy games, right? We named this "AI War" for a reason.

"You are outgunned. You are massively outnumbered. You must win." These are your orders.

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.

AI War's third and largest expansion Light of the Spire marked Arcen's first release of 2011, with the rest of the company's focus being devoted to their most massive project yet: A Valley Without Wind, which released in 2012. The remainder of 2012 is a another busy time for the team, as they ready AI War's fourth expansion Ancient Shadows, A Valley Without Wind 2, and their recently announced top-down survival game Shattered Haven for release over the coming months.

Originally a one-man shop, Arcen Games has grown to have half a dozen part-time or fulltime contributors to its various titles. For all the latest news, media coverage, and some of our other musings, follow us on our developer and individual game pages on Reddit, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter; as well as Arcen lead Chris Park's Games By Design blog.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

AI War Beta 5.096-5.097 "Release Candidates 1-2" Released!

This one is the first release-candidate for our 6.0 release. In other words: this _is_ 6.0 (aside from the new Ancient Shadows music, that comes Friday) unless we get a report of a critical bug that must be fixed before the official release.

This one adds 25 champion-related achievements, fixes a bunch of unit description-text errors, and adds unique images for mkII through mkV of most champion module lines (thanks to HitmanN, again, for all the champion-module art!).

There's also fixes to a few bugs that came to my attention since the last release, and a balance change to the champion-nemesis thing from the previous release.

Update: 5.097 hotfix (i.e. Release Candidate 2) is out to fix a bug in the last version that caused the available-modules buttons to not show on the ship-design screen at all. There's always got to be something, I suppose.

Enjoy! And let us know if you find any problems!

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 5.095 "Apply Core Sanding Machine" Released!

This one is VERY near the end of our polishing the game to get it ready for 6.0. I still have some achievements to add, a bunch of text fixes to make, and a couple other not-really-game-logic things to change, but other than that, we're there. Unless there's something horribly broken in this version; so let us know if you find something! In my testing it's working rather well.

Several champion-related enhancements are in this one, specifically:

- It's now much easier to update your champion to use newly unlocked higher-mark versions of the modules it's already using.

- If the players have champions, the AI now gets some special "nemesis champions". The bulk of that work was stolen shamelessly from the Heroic AI type, but combined with the (also shamelessly appropriated) Strategic Reserve logic to produce something very different without adding much complexity to the code (kind of important right now). The end result is some fairly nasty guards on the AI homeworld to prevent an easy assassination by well-built player champions. You can still do that kind of assassination, but you'll either need to bring in some really heavy guns in addition to your champion or raise AIP enough that the AI is (thematically speaking) putting its resources into other ways to kill you and doesn't have as much to spare on its nemesis fleet.

- The costs of mkIV and mkV module upgrades have been reduced so that you can max out more module lines in the endgame, and thus have more flexibility in what you use.

- Nebulae will no longer spawn duplicate scenarios if there's nothing left to spawn in them, since they just don't make sense if they happen more than once. Many maps don't have more than 9 nebulae anyway, but if you do those extra ones will just be empty (until/unless we define more scenarios, that is). But if you really want those additional scenarios there's a chat-line command (non-cheat) to re-enable the old behavior. It's mainly for you beta players who got used to it ;)

And there's a few other changes in there, all in the notes.

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.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

AI War Beta 5.094 "Apply MkIV Sanding Machine" Released!

This one is near the end of our polishing the game to get it ready for 6.0. There's one more chunk of changes I want to get in before calling it a release candidate.

So this one's basically bugfixes and some balance, including many smaller suggestions from our players that I hadn't gotten to until just now. Please hammer away on it and tell us if anything breaks.

One notable change is that champion respawn is no longer completely free; it now requires a small amount of capacitor charge to happen and completely discharges the capacitor. The end result is that "dying" twice in row (or once, after totally draining the capacitor on abilities) will cause about a 20 second delay before respawning again.

It's been a long road since 5.0, and even since the start of the Ancient Shadows beta, but we're almost there.

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.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

AI War Beta 5.093 "Apply MkIII Sanding Machine" Released!

This one continues the process of polishing the game up for the 6.0 official release. Bugfixes and balance, basically, but it's pretty important stuff.

Most significantly, the nebula scenarios have been adjusted in a few ways that should make them more enjoyable, and perhaps a bit easier. You can now get repair and module-construction-assistance from allied large starbases (the ones with "large" in their name). Also, The scaling (with champion count, scenario win count, and largest champion hull size) in base-vs-base scenarios is now a bit less intense due to being additively applied instead of multiplicatively, and now applies to allies as well as enemies (just less-so).

As previously mentioned, the official release date for Ancient Shadows is the 19th, which is next Friday. So we're really just in bugfix/balance/polish (and fixing up the tutorial) mode on AIW right now, so please do let us know if you find something wrong :)

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.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

AI War Beta 5.091-5.092 "Apply MkII Sanding Machine" Released!

This one contains several relatively small changes. Some are important fixes, some are just polishing up for the official release.

Perhaps most significantly, military command stations have been reworked into a substantially more powerful unit in their own right. Their actual contribution to a main-chokepoint defense isn't much changed (which is to say, it's still really powerful thanks to the planetary munitions boost), but their ability to hold off small attacks on otherwise unsupported planets is much better. Combined with the new miniforts, you can defend a satellite world fairly well without devoting any global turret or fleet cap to it. Even that will still crumple pretty fast under anything like a serious AI assualt, however, which is how it should be.

Many players have been asking for another warp gate to move newly-built player-controlled "nebula ships" to a better starting position, and this release ties those production facilties into the starship constructor warp gate since the ships are basically just (sometimes smallish) starships built from a different tech base. I could also just add a dedicated new gate type if this doesn't work out but wasn't sure having it on the buy menu sometimes and not other times would work right given the nature of the circumstances you'd need one.

Also, a fairly nasty bug involving the CTRLS window thinking you were discarding changes by opening it has been fixed. Those of you bedeviled by it can enjoy the game again now ;)

Update: 5.092 hotfix is out to fix a couple nasty bugs in the last version. One caused unhandled errors when a CPA launched, the other prevented group-move from working when giving an order to move to another planet. There's also some important changes to nebula seeding in there that I think will help overall.

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.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

AI War Beta 5.090 "Fish Or Cut Bait" Released!

This one continues addressing issues that were a high priority (for the timeframe of the upcoming official version) for our community in this poll. This time:

The #1 request was that free threat not camp on a wormhole forever if the planet on the other side was too strong for it to consider attacking. Fish or cut bait, the saying goes. Now a ship that's still alive 30 minutes after being freed will switch to an alternate "threat fleet" behavior and coordinate with other such ships. The behavior is somewhat similar to the special forces behavior except that it's primarily offensive in nature, looking for an opening where it can do something other than park on a wormhole.

The #2 request was to do something about the vast challenge-disparity between defending at a single chokepoint and defending multiple ingress points. A single chokepoint will probably always be easier to defend, and that's fine, but the difference was larger than it needed to be. So now the max time the AI can wait between waves (and thus how large those waves are) goes down somewhat with multiple ingress points (max effect at 4+ target planets).

The other side of that issue was the frustration of trying to have "satellite" worlds on high-difficulty games. Basically you had two choices: pull turret and/or mobile cap from your main defenses to cover the "islands", or accept that the islands would die when tripped over by a few wayward AI ships. And pulling stuff from your main defenses could be... contraindicated by the difficulty level. So we've added a new "Mini-Fortress" unit that has a small per-planet cap but no global cap. So defending your satellite worlds with miniforts does cost metal, crystal, and energy but it doesn't pull any potential unit-cap away from your main defenses.

There are several other items from the poll that we hope to get to soon, but those were the highest priority ones, and most of the rest of the time that went into this release was used on fixing a laundry list of bug and balance issues. Some of them are fairly important; for one, I think several of you will appreciate units no longer moving slightly when given an attack order against something already in range (thus no longer resetting any ability/reload counters on fortreses, zenith siege engines, etc).

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.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

AI War Beta 5.089 "Apply Sanding Machine" Released!

This one addresses a number of issues that were a high priority (for the timeframe of the upcoming official version) for our community in this poll. Specifically:

Engineer logic for picking what targets to assist first. Mostly this relates to repair order, but also somewhat to build-assistance. Let us know how it feels now, and what else would improve the default logic.

Rebuilder logic has also been redone. Prioritization wasn't really a problem here, but a number of changes over the years had resulted in a fairly pants-on-head behavior for these. Basically each rebuilder could rebuild something once every ten seconds, but most players couldn't tell because a pile of 20 would all try to rebuild the same one. One rebuilder would succeed, the rest would wait a second or two until they could retarget. And then retarget all onto the same one. And one would succeed... and so on. The recharge time paled in comparison to the "waiting in line" time. Also, FRD rebuilders tended to "yoyo" back and forth between targets and their FRD point. Now they're much better at spreading out across the available target remains, and will yoyo much less frequently. Partly this is because their recharge time is now 1 second. That may be more of a buff than intended, please let us know if it makes things too easy (probably not) or what else would improve their logic.

Fabricators and Advanced Factories will now avoid seeding near wormholes, much like human home command stations. The longstanding bug of always-2-spider-V-fabs has also been fixed, and in general fabs are more likely to be Core fabs, since there are more different types of those to go around variety-wise.

Another one that's been very popular for a long time: teleporting units now use their normal engines (which have been upgraded somewhat, for the ones that used to be glacially slow) when given a group-move order. This is one I didn't even think could be done and thus didn't feel a lot of motivation to deal with, but it showing up towards the top of both the mantis votes and the 6.0 poll helped there ;)

Please keep the feedback coming, the official 6.0 release isn't very far away and we want it to be as solid as possible.

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.

Monday, October 1, 2012

AI War Beta 5.088 "Strategic Reserve" Released!

This one deals with several longstanding requests that have been at the top of the mantis voting for a while:

1) Now the game will tell you what the local time is, and how much real time you've actually spent in that particular game, when you mouseover the in-game clock. Note: the "how much real time you've actually spent in that particular game" timer will only be correct for game started in this version or later, as it doesn't know how much real time has elapsed in older saves.

2) It's now possible to have auto-FRD on but still have some units ignore it, by using the new per-control-group controls on the CTRLS window. You can also have it only auto-FRD those control groups you designate, if you prefer a more targeted use of the feature. It also allows more granular use of the Auto-Kite behavior, since some people have asked for that.

3) The shard seeding in the Fallen Spire campaign no longer pays attention to how much territory you've conquered. Generally this makes things easier, but from the feedback I've been seeing other recent changes should more than make up for any decrease in that part of the challenge, since it hasn't been the really killer part of it anyway.

Also, not from the mantis voting but from more recent feedback, we've added another tool to the AI's arsenal: the strategic reserve. This functions mainly as a homeworld defense force but is less susceptible to baiting than other defensive mechanics. In general this should help prevent cases where it feels like the homeworld is underdefended, but without piling tons of ships on it all game. Balance feedback is, of course, welcome.

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.