Reminder: This blog has moved!

ArcenGames.com has been overhauled, and as part of that we've pulled both of our blogs (our News blog and our Games By Design blog) into the main site itself.

Please update your bookmarks, or your RSS feeds (although RSS subscribers from Games By Design should already find themselves repointed thanks to feedburner).

The new blog itself is on the main ArcenGames.com website, and combines the content from both prior blogs.  The RSS feeds are a bit better set up now, too:

If you want to get absolutely EVERYTHING (the equivalent of previously subscribing to both blogs), then here's your link for that RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGames.  That's a new url, so if you want that you'll need to subscribe to it fresh.

If you want just the main newsworthy stuff, not all the smaller product updates and minor sales and such, then the following is the RSS for you: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy.

Note that all previous subscribers to the Games By Design blog automatically are now getting the equivalent of the http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed, but under the name http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChristopherMPark-Blog, since that's what that particular RSS feed has been called since 2007.  You can either switch to the ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed or stay on ChristopherMPark-Blog, they are both the same and will both remain live.

Also, another cool feature!  If you want to subscribe to a particular category -- any category you see on our site -- you can now do so.  For instance:

- For this category: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/
-- There is this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/feed/

- And this category: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/
-- Has this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/feed/

And so on.  Pretty handy!

Reminder: This blog has moved!

ArcenGames.com has been overhauled, and as part of that we've pulled both of our blogs (our News blog and our Games By Design blog) into the main site itself.

Please update your bookmarks, or your RSS feeds (although RSS subscribers from Games By Design should already find themselves repointed thanks to feedburner).

The new blog itself is on the main ArcenGames.com website, and combines the content from both prior blogs.  The RSS feeds are a bit better set up now, too:

If you want to get absolutely EVERYTHING (the equivalent of previously subscribing to both blogs), then here's your link for that RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGames.  That's a new url, so if you want that you'll need to subscribe to it fresh.

If you want just the main newsworthy stuff, not all the smaller product updates and minor sales and such, then the following is the RSS for you: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy.

Note that all previous subscribers to the Games By Design blog automatically are now getting the equivalent of the http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed, but under the name http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChristopherMPark-Blog, since that's what that particular RSS feed has been called since 2007.  You can either switch to the ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed or stay on ChristopherMPark-Blog, they are both the same and will both remain live.

Also, another cool feature!  If you want to subscribe to a particular category -- any category you see on our site -- you can now do so.  For instance:

- For this category: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/
-- There is this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/feed/

- And this category: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/
-- Has this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/feed/

And so on.  Pretty handy!

Reminder: This blog has moved!

ArcenGames.com has been overhauled, and as part of that we've pulled both of our blogs (our News blog and our Games By Design blog) into the main site itself.

Please update your bookmarks, or your RSS feeds (although RSS subscribers from Games By Design should already find themselves repointed thanks to feedburner).

The new blog itself is on the main ArcenGames.com website, and combines the content from both prior blogs.  The RSS feeds are a bit better set up now, too:

If you want to get absolutely EVERYTHING (the equivalent of previously subscribing to both blogs), then here's your link for that RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGames.  That's a new url, so if you want that you'll need to subscribe to it fresh.

If you want just the main newsworthy stuff, not all the smaller product updates and minor sales and such, then the following is the RSS for you: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy.

Note that all previous subscribers to the Games By Design blog automatically are now getting the equivalent of the http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed, but under the name http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChristopherMPark-Blog, since that's what that particular RSS feed has been called since 2007.  You can either switch to the ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed or stay on ChristopherMPark-Blog, they are both the same and will both remain live.

Also, another cool feature!  If you want to subscribe to a particular category -- any category you see on our site -- you can now do so.  For instance:

- For this category: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/
-- There is this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/feed/

- And this category: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/
-- Has this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/feed/

And so on.  Pretty handy!

This blog has moved!

ArcenGames.com has been overhauled, and as part of that we've pulled both of our blogs (our News blog and our Games By Design blog) into the main site itself.

Please update your bookmarks, or your RSS feeds (although RSS subscribers from Games By Design should already find themselves repointed thanks to feedburner).

The new blog itself is on the main ArcenGames.com website, and combines the content from both prior blogs.  The RSS feeds are a bit better set up now, too:

If you want to get absolutely EVERYTHING (the equivalent of previously subscribing to both blogs), then here's your link for that RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGames.  That's a new url, so if you want that you'll need to subscribe to it fresh.

If you want just the main newsworthy stuff, not all the smaller product updates and minor sales and such, then the following is the RSS for you: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy.

Note that all previous subscribers to the Games By Design blog automatically are now getting the equivalent of the http://feeds.feedburner.com/ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed, but under the name http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChristopherMPark-Blog, since that's what that particular RSS feed has been called since 2007.  You can either switch to the ArcenGamesNewsworthy feed or stay on ChristopherMPark-Blog, they are both the same and will both remain live.

Also, another cool feature!  If you want to subscribe to a particular category -- any category you see on our site -- you can now do so.  For instance:

- For this category: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/
-- There is this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/aiwar/feed/

- And this category: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/
-- Has this feed: http://arcengames.com/category/gamedesign/feed/

And so on.  Pretty handy!

Steam Summer Sale 2014: Arcen Titles 25-80% Off (Ends June 30th)

Steam's annual summer sale is upon us, and Arcen is once again participating with significant discounts on our entire library of games. These discounts will run the duration of the sale, ending the morning of June 30th:

• The Last Federation -- 25% off
• AI War Collection, base game and all expansions -- 60% off
• Bionic Dues -- 50% off
• Skyward Collapse and Nihon no Mura expansion -- 60% off
• Shattered Haven -- 80% off
• A Valley Without Wind Dual Pack (1 & 2) and Four Pack -- 75% off
• Tidalis -- 80% off

Announcing AI War: Destroyer of Worlds

When in doubt, use bigger warheads.



AI War: Destroyer of Worlds, the sixth expansion pack for AI War: Fleet Command, focuses on two new optional features:

Nomad Planets introduces dynamic topology to AI War for the first time, giving the player new challenges and opportunities beyond the previously-static wormhole network. One of the Nomads also holds a secret weapon of truly dire power (that gives the expansion its title, hint hint).

The Exodian Blade is a powerful alternate way-to-win, but getting there is a multi-stage journey with a great deal of desperate fighting once things get going.

Beyond those two key features, this expansion also adds:
* 8 new AI types, from the humorous/annoying "Kite Flier" and "Cowardly" to the monomaniacal "Starship Fanatic" to the aptly named "Brutal". There's also "Mime". Never trust mimes.
* A new "Encapsulated" map style (screenshot).
* 4 new Bonus Ship Types, including the Neinzul Combat Carrier (with Beam Drones, Rail Drones, Spider Drones, and Grav Drones) and the Maw-gone-mad Powerslaver.
* 2 new AI Guardian types, including the Combat Carrier Guardian (so humans don't get to have all the ludicrous-drone fun).
* A new "Preemption" optional AI Plot that lets the AI start taking more direct action against you from the start.
* More awesome music from Pablo Vega! (that's still being worked on, but will be added for the official release)

A more in-depth look at the expansion can be found here.

AI War: Destroyer of Worlds is slated for official release in August 2014, and we'll be running a closed beta until then. If you're interested in testing and providing feedback on the expansion during the closed beta, please send me (keith.lamothe) a PM on our forums.

We'll be contacting the first wave of testers that have already signed up later this afternoon.

In other news, we've also added Steam Trading Cards for AI War. Enjoy!

AI War Beta 7.036-7.040 "Sanding Before The Storm" Released!

This one is more bugfixes and balance work. Important stuff, especially the metal/energy-related changes, but just polish.

What's more than polish is the upcoming expansion, which we'll announce with actual details tomorrow (Thursday, probably noonish eastern time).

We'll be doing a closed beta that will run until the expansion's official release (alongside the 8.0 offficial release) in early August. If you're interested in being part of the beta please PM me (keith.lamothe) on the forums.

Update: 7.037 is out with some text updates specific to the new expansion.

Update: 7.038 is out to hotfix some problems with unlocking the mkII/III versions of the bonus ship types from the new expansion.

Update: 7.039 is out to fix several bugs discovered early in the new expansion's beta, so the testers can proceed without them in the way.

Update: 7.040 is out with another batch of fixes for the new expansion's beta.

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 7.034-7.035 "When Cities Attack!" Released!

This one is mainly an iteration on recently-in-progress stuff:

- Hacking used to scale just with your hacking balance, but this could lead to hacks not getting more dangerous). Then it was changed to scale just with hacking-spent, but that got uncontrollably dangerous past a certain point no matter your hacking balance). So now it's something of a middle ground, with the balance reducing the response again but with a minimum response that increases with hacking-spent. Long story short you shouldn't be stuck with large hacking balances that you can't spend without the sky falling, but the response should also never be anemic. We'll see; more feedback is of course welcome (and needed).

- Spire Cities are now much more fearsome, to correct for years of numeric creep among non-superweapon units. This is one of those changes made easier by the recent global stat-downscaling. The AI looks pretty unhappy about this.

- Champion Alt-Progress is now much more streamlined in how you get new module/hull/mod-fort/etc unlocks: it just all comes through gaining levels now (which is done entirely through gaining knowledge), rather than needing to capture/hack certain things. This is a more passive approach, but ultimately the normal-progress approach of nebula scenarios to gain XP and unlocks is the "active" option, and alt-progress is just for folks who'd like to have their champion toys without having to go radically out of their way to get them. So we'll see how that goes. For any of you interested in the alt-progress approach to champions, please do let us know how it feels.

And there's a bunch of various bugfixes and smaller balance changes, etc, including fixing some bugs preventing the loading of some older saves (from 3.x or earlier days).

Update: 7.035 is out to hotfix a null-exception bug in last version's attempt to fix thing with exo ships with cloaked targets camping the cloaked target.

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.

TLF Version 1.024-1.025 Released (Disease Resistance)

Version 1.024 is out, and while it is small it does have some really notable balance shifts in there.  Specifically:

- The way that research and property development dispatches are handled, and the way goons are used up with them, is now daily rather than monthly.  This makes it a lot more fair to you when you stop at any given time (if you don't complete the research all in one go).

- You can't farm the AFA missions for Credit anymore, at least not to the degree you previously could.

- Selling prisoners and free return of prisoners now work properly in all cases, which is a pretty big deal in your favor.

- Races now do their ship upgrade research in a secondary tech line, making it so that they don't get bogged down that anymore.  This will put a lot more pressure on you, incidentally, on higher difficulties later in the game.

- Diseases are no longer so ridiculously insta-devastating to certain populations.  They can still be really harsh, and further tuning may be needed there, but this is at least a very big step in the right direction.  Diseases should be meaningful, but not quite so overdramatic as they were.

UPDATE: 1.025 is now out with some bugfixes, both from this past version and some prior ones.

--------------- What's With The Shift In Schedule This Week? ---------------

This week has been a bit crazy for me.  My sister got married this past weekend, and I've had some things related to that that I've been working on while she is on her honeymoon.  I'd rather not say what, as it's a semi-surprise.  Anyway, that has sucked up a huge amount of my time, and I've been taking some time off to help work on that.  It's not a long-term thing, obviously, but it's something that I wanted to take some time and do for my sister since there's nothing direly important in terms of short-term schedule right now (for once).

Also I've been working on design work this week for both the remaining parts of the first TLF expansion (measure twice, cut once), and for the upcoming 4x that we are (at least for the moment) calling Spectral Empire, to come out next April.

There's also just been some general boring business-related stuff that had stacked up that I have been getting taken care of, too.  So it's been kind of an off week for me, but that won't be the case next week.  Thanks for understanding!

--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been about a month and a half since launch, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here.  We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.

It won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes.

At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early June, with access to the current beta of the expansion.  The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in early July, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

AI War Beta 7.032-7.033 "Peaceful Interlude" Released!

This one takes a break from fixing The Bug (10/10 being winnable) so the changes already made in that direction can be evaluated. Instead the focus is on dealing with a couple other long-discussed requests:

- The main combat turrets have been switched from a galaxy-wide-cap on MkI/II/III and a per-planet cap on MkV to a per-planet-cap on MkI/II/III and a galaxy-wide-cap on MkV (and the newly-added MkIVs).
-- The MkI/II/IIIs now have a smaller cap, as a result, but the Spider and Sniper turrets have been given their own I-V lines, so between that and the MkIVs your chokepoint-defense potential hasn't been significantly nerfed (indeed, buffed slightly, from roughly 23k strength to roughly 24k strength)
-- And distributed-defense is now immediately possible from the beginning of the game, so long as you have the necessary metal and energy production.

- The health and attack stats (and armor and armor piercing) have been scaled down two orders of magnitude (divided by 100) to help with readablity and to pave the way towards later changes that will deal with some longstanding balance issues (mainly, that some superweapons are underwhelming because the normal units have gotten so powerful).

There's also some important bugfixes/etc. Including one hilarious one where capturing an AI HW would give you command of any future champ-nemesis exo spawned from there...

Update: 7.033 is out to scale some stats that I forgot wouldn't be automatically scaled with health and attack, etc (thus ending the Night When The Mines And Attritioners Rose In Terrible Wrath). Also fixed some bugs related to sniper/spider turret unlocks.

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.

TLF Version 1.023 Released (Uprisings)

Version 1.023 is finally out, and is a real whopper.  Hardcore fans in particular should be very pleased.

- A bunch of balance changes (in your favor) have been made to the various federation formation rules, so that in particular getting the federation started is not so hard.  Actually this one should make everyone quite happy.  But there are a variety of other things that are now easier in terms of attitude and influence in this regard, too, depending on the desperation of the race, for instance.

- There is a new "Join Federation When Militarily Supreme" way to get all of the races except for the Burlusts and the Thoraxians into the federation.  This one actually is comparably rare in terms of your being able to use it, I expect, but it's really great for when you can engineer the situation to meet these criteria.

- In general the Credit costs for getting races to join the federation have just fallen through the floor, to avoid late-game grinding.

- In place of the grinding (which was never intended, but just kind of a byproduct), there are now several new mechanics in place where non-federation races react to the existence of the federation.  In particular, this makes it a lot harder to just militarily roll the non-federation races once you get a sufficient mass of federation races.  Even better, it also puts a lot more strategy into which races you invite first, as the potential negative reaction of that race to not being in the federation is something that you can use either for your gain or that you have to work around.

- Overall the balance of the solar map has shifted away from bombing-heaviness and in to ground-combat heaviness, which was always the intent but lately had not been the reality.  This gives greater weight to races with higher ground combat strengths, which was the intent from the start -- so the Thoraxians and the Burlusts now live up to their reputations much better.

- A bunch of technologies now are available to more races, and a bunch of others are now gated by years into the game.  These things really change the early dynamic, because it makes it so that weaker races can't immediately compensate for underwhelming ground power (for instance) based on simply being technologically superior.  They can to some degree, but not to an extreme degree.  But the longer they survive, the more they are able to level the playing field with technology, which makes sense.

- The Thoraxians now have an "evolution" mechanic, where they get progressively stronger in terms of ground power as the game goes on.  Even from the start they are still the strongest at ground power, but it's no longer so extreme.  They also now have an even higher home-field advantage when it comes to ground combat, meaning the odds of them getting kicked out of the game early on in is very very low.

- Oh!  Also, there is a huge new mechanic for in combat where we are able to define complex shot behaviors through xml.  If you're into that sort of thing, you can do that as well and submit designs to us for potential inclusion in the game.  This lets us design much more interesting ship battles, in particular "boss like" battles.  Expect changes to the Burlust Duels in the future in particular, and a vast reduction in the use of homing missiles in the game.  The basic flagships used by the enemy have already been updated, and actually a new variant has also been added during this release (Model X2).

- And lastly, a number of improvements and adjustments have been made to bribe items, making them both more usable and better balanced.

--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me. It's been about a month and a half since launch, and it's clear we definitely have a winner here.  We're continuing to expand the improve the game via bugfixes, balance updates, and new content, and plan to do so for the foreseeable future.

It won't always be on a consistent schedule, but if you're familiar with our post-release support for AI War: Fleet Command over the past 5 years, that's basically the arc that we are currently expecting here unless something unexpectedly changes.

At present we are also working on expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope). The expansion for TLF is expected to be available for preorder through our site in early June, with access to the current beta of the expansion.  The actual full release of the expansion is expected to be in early July, on all the existing distributors that carry the base game.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

Bionic Dues Launches on Humble Store

A brief note that you can now purchase Bionic Dues from the Humble Store. It's available for $4.99 (50% off) for the first week and includes both a DRM-free copy and a Steam key. Discount ends June 3rd.

TLF Version 1.022 Released (What Lies Beneath)

Version 1.022 is out, and is comparably minor.  Still, a number of good things in here.

- First of all, there's some rules about alliance members that have been improved such that they will behave better towards one another.

- Fixed a couple of display bugs with showing RCI impacts and with showing the defender figures at planets.

- You now start the game with the larger number of tech unlocks even if you don't do the survey platform option on the first battle.

- The balance with outpost construction by players and resource gains from freighter distress calls, has been much improved.

There are a number of other things as well, some of which show up as minor items in the release notes, such as no longer baking the ship class stats into each savegame.  That's a minor thing on the surface, but it's something that is indicative of all the underlying work that went into this release.

In other words, the reason why this release is so small in surface features is that we spent the majority of our time doing plumbing, so to speak.  We've been getting things ready for an influx of new content in the expansion, we've been working on some cool new physics additions that will let us really do some new stuff with bullets in both the base game and the expansion, and so on.  That last is something that will be the ultimate solution to the Burlust duels being boring, for instance, but it's something that takes a lot of pipe-laying first.

The new bullet physics stuff is still ongoing, but the expansion-framework stuff is now complete, so that's a big thing off the list for us in the next month.  Lots of stuff still coming for the base game as well, though, of course!

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  We do have expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope) in the works at the moment (just internally for now).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

Arcen Soundtracks Now Available on Spotify

A good portion of Pablo Vega's OSTs have been added to music streaming service Spotify. Here are the albums that are currently available:

• A Valley Without Wind 2
• AI War: Ancient Shadows
• The Last Federation
• Shattered Haven
• Skyward Collapse
• Skyward Collapse: Nihon no Mura

Searching and selecting Pablo Vega as an artist brings up multiple individuals by that name at the moment, so for now it's probably easier to search for the music by album name. More albums coming soon!

TLF Version 1.021 Released (Of Armadas And Outposts)

Version 1.021 is out, and will make you very happy.

- The AI for NPC armadas on the solar map has gotten some substantial upgrades centering around allies helping allies.  If races are in the same alliance, they now have a number of behaviors that involve them sending ships to defend the planets of their allies that are under attack.

- When flotillas were removed, the logic for how many flagships would show up in a mission was changed around.  Overall this was a vast improvement, but there were a few edge cases where this actually exposed some other underlying issues (this is also related to armadas becoming fewer but with higher base power levels).

Anyway, what this version changes is how many flagships come into battles if it's not a "let's attack everybody at this planet" sort of battle.  In other words, when a race wants to oppose you during a quest, it doesn't send an enormous armada with 18+ flagships to do so; it instead sends a much smaller force that doesn't make your battle drag out forever (and also doesn't cause balance issues with the AI leaving itself undefended, etc.

- Other improvements to quest-related opposition armadas have also been made.  Previously there were cases where a quest would be canceled simply because there was no longer an opposition armada around for you to fight.  That can still happen if the opposition race gets completely wiped out -- and that's fine, that's actually proper.  But now if the race is still alive, they will instead dig into emergency squadrons or even spend economy RCI points in order to make sure that you have an opposition force to fight (while at the same time not just making it up out of thin air with no cost to the race).

- Outposts have had a ton of updates.  You can now capture or destroy them in one stage, rather, than requiring two.  Capturing or destroying them is now more involved and interesting of a battle.  A clever exploit involving repetitive cooperative construction of outposts, followed by stealing those outposts, has been solved.

- Two new dispatch missions have been added at the black market.  One lets you create outposts all by yourself without the help of any race, and the second lets you do research all by yourself without the help of any race.  There are downsides to this in terms of no credit/influence gains, and it taking longer, but this is something that players have wanted for a while and it definitely is a sensible addition.

- The research tech dispatch has been split so that you can only now (once again) research techs that race doesn't already know with the main version.  But there is now a second version where you learn a tech from a race that already knows it.  This is something that players have asked for for a while as well, and it also lets us make the influence requirements for this action be different from the main action.

- This is one of my favorites: you can now hire the relevant sorts of goons in the friendly actions window at planets, and on your outposts.  Boy does this save a lot of time!  Some folks had asked for something along these lines quite a while ago; apologies for taking so long to put in this.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  We do have expansions for both AI War and TLF (TLF: Betrayed Hope) in the works at the moment (just internally for now).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

AI War Beta 7.029-7.031 "Extermination Protocol MkII" Released!

This one continues progress towards fixing The Bug (10/10 being winnable) but also provides some significant quality-of-life improvements along with the quality-of-extermination ones. Specifically:

- Counterattack Guard Posts are no longer core-game. They're still available as an AI plot if you want them (and there's the AI type that gets a bunch of them either way), but their core-game role is now filled by Warp Relays, which can be very threatening but are much less likely to act as annoying speedbumps.

- The revenge exos launched by dying Core Guard Posts have been replaced by a different form of exo provoked by AI-Homeworld-assault that isn't as strict about when the player needs to switch back to defense. It will hopefully still fulfill the goal of making most AI-HW assaults a "multi-stage boss fight", but there won't be as many stages and it won't be as tied to your specific actions during the fight (so you're basically never motivated to "hold back" to avoid tripping the next "stage", etc).

And various other changes like some improvements to make out-of-memory errors less likely in intense gamestates, rebalancing Planetary Armor Inhibitors, giving Econ stations more energy production, and making interaction between Carriers and Mines far more... entertaining (previously Carriers had Mine Evasions, but on reflection it was realized they probably had all the evasion of a cow on rollerskates), etc.

Update: 7.030 is out to hotfix the Counterattack Guard Post's last gasp of revenge: ANY AI wave could go to ANY planet. Curious.

Update: 7.031 is out to shift the warp relays to a separate AI Plot (instead of being core-game) as the feedback on the idea rather changed once the feature was actually implemented. Also some superterminal rebalancing.

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.

TLF Version 1.020 Released (Piratical Influx)

Version 1.020 is out, and has a variety of things in there:

- Pirates have been really laying low lately, thanks to Piratical Exodus not being as common as it was before.  So there are now a bunch of new ways that pirates build up, and they are now even more of a presence in the solar system than they previously were.  They're an excellent destabilizing force. ;)

- Spreadshot and related things are now working better and more balanced, which we know was a big sore spot with people who wanted to play certain flagships, such as the Burlust Longships.

- We did a bunch of performance improvements that give us around a 12% gain when super-fast-forwarding on the solar map, and the gains are probably similar in combat as well.  These are really helpful in the late game when you're on a lower-end computer or doing the super fast forward in observer mode.

- When you hover over RCI values (either the under-the-planet overlay on the map itself, or in the planetary sidebar, or in the planetary details window) it now includes a listing of the specific effects of that RCI value.  That's a pretty huge amount of clarity added, and something that was a real bear for Keith to get in there because it aggregated so many things.  But now you have it!

Some other big-picture design stuff also continues, as does design and artwork for the upcoming expansion for the game.  But there's still lots of awesome stuff coming completely for free for the base game, so don't worry about that. :)

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least the rest of this month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  We do have an expansion for both AI War and TLF in the works at the moment (just internally for now).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.019 (Solar Wind)

Version 1.019 is out, and another biggie.  This one is more focused on a couple of key areas, though.

- The solar map balance, including the AI, has seen a huge number of improvements.  Races now act more like you would expect in terms of levels of aggression, and are more responsive to defending themselves when attacked, or proactively attacking when they declare war, etc.  Grace periods all still apply in terms of war declarations, but a race will no longer declare war and then keep all of its ships defensively sitting around.  That last was a rare case, but could happen.

- The other big thing to the solar map balance is a bunch of further refinements to the ground combat changes from yesterday.  These are not fundamentally changed for the most part, but there is now proper logic preventing the landing of ground troops when the space defenses at a planet are too high.  Like there was prior to last version.  Actually, that logic is now better and more flexible than ever, I think.  In the many, many (many) simulations I've run today, I've been quite pleased with what I've been seeing.  Incidentally, this also fixes the issue with the Thoraxians wrecking the entire solar system every game.  I'm a bit concerned about the Acutians at this point, but I'll have to do some further testing to be sure.  Right now the late game continues to have a very wide-ranging mix of races, so that's good.

- The events have had a ton of updates to make them more meaningful, more interesting, more balanced, and so forth.  This also makes the high and low RCI values more meaningful, incidentally, as that plays even more heavily into event selection now.  A bunch of the events have been updated in some way (20+), but there are a ton of events in general (around 60-70, somewhere in there), so more will be updated coming up.

- We cleaned up a lot of old stuff that just didn't need to be in the code anymore, and relating to some of that we found some bugs that we then fixed.  Hopefully we didn't introduce new bugs, but at any rate sometimes the best way to find that sort of thing is by a simple code review as opposed to front-end testing, and there was a fair bit of both today.

- One of the big things that was cleaned up was the concept of "flotillas."  This changed a LOT of code, so it may cause some bugs, but amazingly I have yet to find any.  I'm sure you will. ;)  Flotillas were something that were confusing for players, no longer needed in general, and which complicated the math for things like autoresolve and flagship seeding, among other things.  Clearing these things out makes the math simpler and thus easier to keep correct, and also makes things simpler for the player, while only removing something that was mostly not shown on the interface in the first place.  Transient bugs aside (knock on wood), this is definitely a big win.

Like I said, I've done a ton of testing and haven't been seeing any issues, but please do mantis any issues that you find.  Thanks, and goodnight!

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last few weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.018 Released (Treasure Trove)

Version 1.018 is out, and I hardly know where to begin, this one is so large.

- The way that races are born, mature, and die has been tuned quite a bit, and is more interesting and better balanced.  A lot of folks won't notice much effect from this directly, but it's a subtle thing that does have a big impact on the overall flow of the game when an organic population is trying to rebound from attacks for instance.

- There are a number of new political deals, including a way to finally stop the Andors from attacking someone, and options for Lauding or Denouncing other races to the friends of the race doing the speaking.  Very cool tools to have in terms of manipulating attitudes.

- The way that ground invasions and resistance fighters work has been heavily (heavily heavily) updated to bring all of that stuff together more.  It's still very similar to how ground invasions have worked recently, but killing armadas no longer kills ground troops that they landed, among other things.  Personnel transport production and other numbers have been tuned in light of the new changes, and there is now a home field advantage in ground combat when defending a planet of your own (which makes good sense).

- There are a whole slew of screens that now let you get at a bunch more detail info on just where a given multiplier came from.  Why the heck is the science rating of the Burlusts 41.37, for instance?  Hover over it and see.

- The way that armadas are constructed and improved has seen a huge adjustment as well.  Previously this was working like I wanted in terms of the general result, but there were odd edge cases where a race would basically build nothing for extreme amounts of time.  This was to do with the range of the math multipliers in use, and so this has been rebalanced completely in order to try to get something near the previous effect, but without the edge cases.

- Science and Manufacturing stuff had a ton of bugs, turns out.  A couple were obvious in the prior version, but others were more subtle and never were found before now.  Why?  The opaqueness of the multipliers.  The numbers were close enough to be plausible, even though they weren't correct.  Now that we all can see the breakdown of how those numbers are arrived-at, I was noticing a number of glitches that I fixed.  A couple of those glitches were things that had bubbled up to the attention of players in seemingly-isolated bugs, but really it was a symptom of one of those larger issues that are now resolved.

- There are two new buildings added to the game, which only show up right at the start on random planets, and which are destroyed if the planets get taken: The Ark and The Mire.  These basically give a boost to one race and a penalty to one other race.  This layers on top of all the other procedural circumstantial randomization, of course, but it's one way of helping to make sure that there is extra uniqueness from game to game, versus stronger races tending to dominate weaker ones unless they just happen to get a very unlucky planet.  Now there are more variables in play with these, and thus more variance.

I've done dozens and dozens of tests of this stuff, and it's feeling pretty darn good.  It's definitely a huge amount of stuff for one day, so there are likely some issues somewhere.  Apologies in advance, but I'm not pushing this into a beta branch because I do feel like this is an across-the-board better version than the prior one, and that's a big part of my criteria.

Some interesting notes: the Burlusts and the Thoraxians have reclaimed their rightful place as the most fearsome races in the solar system (the majority of the time).  Additionally, with the way that things build up now, there are fewer armadas, but they tend to be tougher.  This actually gives you more power to affect things through your missions, since taking out an armada or two means a bit more.  And with the shifts to birth/death rates, maturation rates, ground combat rates and mechanisms, science and manufacturing rates, armada construction and improvement rates, and personnel transport construction rates... well, the overall length of time with the games is feeling about the same as it was before, when I run it in observer mode.

Anyhow, I'm really pleased with how this turned out, if you can't tell.  Hopefully there aren't any major things you find overnight before I wake up, but anyway I'm off for the night.  I've been paying close attention to mantis, but if you've been putting responses in the forum on the last thread, I'm afraid I missed those today as (as you can tell) I was running about a mile a minute to try to get all this done.  If there's something important I missed, it was not intentional -- just shoot me a response on today's main forum post, and I'll do my best to actually read that thread this time around. ;)

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last few weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.017 Released (Back From A Long Quest)

Version 1.017 is out at long last!  Sorry for the delay with this one, but it's packed full of goodies.  There were a number of things that just needed more testing time internally, or to all be completed together, before we publicly released them.

So what's new?

- Well, there's a whole host of smaller bugfixes and improvements.  Several dozen things that players suggested, a lot of them balance or usability related.

- There's a new player-suggested dispatch mission type, where you get to provide tactical support for ground invasions in progress.  Beats just waiting around for the ground troops to do their thing on their own; now you can help speed them along if you have nothing else you'd rather be working on!

- The "betrayal from within federation" mechanic is now better balanced as well as vastly more clear what is going on and when.  The "grumbling" about you when you are low influence with a race is now something that you can recover from if you get them to like you, which is a pretty critical new thing.

- There are a number of improvements to the general mechanics of quests to make them more clear, and in a couple of cases more balanced.

- Six new quests have been added!  There are two main groups that they are in.  One group is just four different versions for the various RCI values.  Very powerful, though.  The other group is for these cool "joint missions" where you can have one or more races gang up on another for either a sneak attack of ground combat or bombing, making use of (and depleting) the emergency reserves from their planets.  It's a great way to build attitude between the collaborating races, while driving someone else into the ground.

- Auto-Resolve has seen a metric ton of updates, and now seems to give the sorts of results I would expect in all the test cases I have.  If you find any issues with it at this point, of course do let me know!

- The way that attitude and influence changes are both projected in "this is what will happen if you take this deal/action/quest" screens, and the after-action screens, is now vastly better.  This took me forever to get right, but it's a lot more condensed and clear now.  If you prefer the old way, though, which is more verbose (but too much so, in my opinion), then there are settings options that let you turn on the old way.

What took so long with this build?  Well, mainly it was a combination of the auto-resolve stuff (which mainly took a lot of testing and iteration), the attitude/influence stuff (same sort of deal with experimentation and testing, plus I kept making and fixing math errors), and some of the quest framework stuff that I had to add for the new quests in general (each time I add that sort of framework stuff, it makes future quests faster, but for now it still takes a while for each quest).

Anyway, I was the bottleneck with that one, and meanwhile Keith was working away on a whole host of things that make up that long list of other refinements.  My expectation is that we should be able to return to the more-or-less daily updates during weekdays after this one, but occasionally we'll have a particular set of features that will take some extra time (in this case, three workdays).

In an effort to keep my own sanity on the weekends, I'm going to also try to limit the main nightly releases to just Monday through Thursday, and then do a maintenance patch on Friday before midday if there is something that needs quick patching.  That way I'm not tied to the computer all weekend, which is something that (as you might expect) has a pretty negative impact on family time.  Anyhow, it's not like we'll be taking Fridays off, it will just make the Monday updates disproportionately large.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but since launch it has became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last few weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

AI War Beta 7.025-7.028 "Extermination Protocol MkI" Released!

This one focuses on polishing recently-introduced rough edges (mainly in terms of balance) and in general is the first step in a new effort to fix The Bug (10/10 being winnable). We don't want that setting to be an immediate "you die in the first 30 minutes, no questions asked" button, but things have clearly gotten out of hand.

Some other highlights:

- Hacking now has an extra source of suspense and challenge: once the hacking _stops_ there will be a rapid short-term post-hacking response from the AI proportional to how much you ticked it off during the hack. If you're adequately prepared this won't be too big a problem (though I hope it will add to the excitement). But if you've dug yourself too deep a hole... well, have fun with that ;)

- Carriers can no longer fly through your forcefields. They've come a long way from the super-cheesy "literally invincible, ignores forcefields completely" incarnation of old, and are now basically just a hyper-concentrated ball of death that can attack and be attacked in a very similar fashion as... well, a big pile of ships. Their attack is now more similar in potency to the ships inside, and is longer ranged (otherwise the larger forcefields and/or radar jamming really mess with them) but in general they won't just "cheat" their way through your defenses anymore. They'll just hammer them flat, unless you're adequately prepared.

- The alt-progress for champs no longer asks you to walk into the lion's den of pain just to make all the toys available. Previously you had to go to intensity 9, and if you followed the lobby's (bad, then) advice of setting a matching alt-nemesis intensity it was... well, varying from "interesting" to unwinnable.

- Salvage is now much less capable of making the Metal mechanic irrelevant for significant chunks of time (mainly this was a problem in superweapon games).

Update: 7.026 hotfix for several severe balance issues with the new hacking post-responses, and a few other fixes and changes that snuck in since 7.025.

Update: 7.027 just to do a quick balance iteration on the champion nemesis exos.

Update: 7.028 is another balance iteration on the champion nemesis exo stuff, along with a few other small changes from feedback during the week.

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.

TLF Version 1.016 Released (Finish Him!)

Version 1.016 is now out, and has a huge amount of refinement to solar balance, autoresolve, and combat balance.

The way that races get techs is also a ton more clear, which also should help further clarify the uses of raw resources for players, too.  In the past version there was unfortunately a very nasty bug that made the races really unwilling to fight one another aside from their outposts or if you asked them to, or a few other cases like honor responses or whatnot.  So that was really skewing things, and hence the earlier release today.

Took quite a while to find that, though, and in the meantime a lot of other things also got improved.  In my test observer games since all the stuff has been in, I've seen the Boarines sweep the solar system; the Burlusts do the same; the Evucks and Skylaxians divide it and then the Evucks wipe out the Skylaxians before getting stuck against Peltians with a bunch of manufacturing outposts for 100 years, and so on.  It's a lot more diverse, with the Skylaxians not just dominating everything anymore.

The early missions tend to contain spy probes, and in recent versions they were underwhelming as well as mildly glitchy.  Those have been really fixed up a ton to be more interesting and work fully properly.

There are also three new kinds of race actions, one of which is actually quite dangerous to you if you are having races in the federation really hate you for a long time -- they'll potentially withdraw from the federation over that, now, so you can't just leave your allies loathing you forever like you previously could.  That's a pretty huge shift in terms of the difficulty of the late game from a strategic standpoint, so that should be interesting to see how it plays out.  It may be too sharp of a fallout at the moment, but I suppose we'll see.

Obviously I had said that I was going to work on quests "unless something else came up," sigh, and things did.  Firstly when I went to work on quests, the broken stuff with spy drones and auto-resolve were staring me in the face.  Then there was the fiasco with races not attacking properly, and all the stuff I was doing to improve things in general while I hunted that down.  My roster is clear for the rest of the workday, though, so I'm going to focus my remaining time on quests (barring some other bug).

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but last week it became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come either tonight or tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.015 Released (Nuanced Bloodshed)

Version 1.015 is now out, and continues to refine both how the AI acts on the solar map, and how you can impact it.  You now have much greater power to mow down a bunch of AI armadas at a planet if you so desire, for instance.  And the AI now takes a much more self-preserving approach to a variety of situations in which previously it would just wantonly declare wars.

The Burlusts have also gotten a new unique tech/building combo kind of like what the Thoraxians have, and I think this is a pretty interesting addition.  I like these additions particularly because they stay with the planet even after the planet changes hands, so if a Burlust planet gets taken by someone else, then that other race gains the advantages of the new Warzone Ground Weaponry, for instance.

The planetary summary/details screen has also had an enormous overhaul in terms of organization and readability, and includes some bits of brand new information that you previously could not access, too.  I'm actually really surprised by how much these changes help even me understand what is going on at a planet.  This was the most-complained-about interface, and recently there were some really bad text-wrapping issues (there always have been, but recently even moreso), so I felt like this was something to address sooner than later.

And lastly (aside from a whole bunch of other handy dandy fixes), the other six races now have their race-specific "spreading" actions, joining the Andors and Thoraxians, which got those last version.  These really add a new element to choosing which races to add to the federation when, and I always love that sort of thing.

I didn't get to any new quests yet, but I am planning on working on those later tonight and then tomorrow as well.  For some reason I seem to be putting those off for a bit, but also there was just a lot of other stuff that needed to be done.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but last week it became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.013-1.014 Released (Love, Hate, And Challenge)

Version 1.013 is now out, and is kind of all over the place.  I went through our issue tracker and was just really in kind of hoover mode today, cleaning up all the little bits and pieces that I could easily deal with, rather than focusing on anything singularly big.  Makes it a relatively easier way to ease back into the week for a Monday, and I'm quite pleased with how much cleaner the result is, too.

There are a bajillion little fixes in here, but most notably there are a lot of solar map balance improvements, and some key clarity improvements.

You can now really tell what is going on with the fighting at a planet, for instance, in terms of what is going on day to day in the kills and losses (way to go Keith on creating this one).  In a bunch of other cases where you could previously not select a race as an option for some reason for a deal, but you couldn't tell why, it now lets you select that option in a redded-out fashion to see the explanation of why.  Just like the attack race options in the prior version, but now more widely applied.  Again awesome from Keith.

Another biggie from Keith was a whole slew of late-game performance improvements during fighting, particularly ground combat.  There was a savegame that I ran into where the performance was just chugging, and I was surprised nobody had mentioned that.  So we got that back to where it should be.

Keith and I were both doing a metric ton of balance items on the solar map, and really there are just too many things to mention there.  There's nothing singularly huge there, other than the "RCI values climbing on federation races" bug being fixed.  But the sheer volume of little things that prevent oddness or exploits or whatever else is something I'm pleased to have done with.  I realize that these things weren't at the top of anyone's priority list, least of all mine, but I think that when you look at them you'll probably agree it was good to take one of these days where we just focus on "lots of little stuff" rather than always delaying them to focus on the largest items.  Otherwise those tiny items just stack up and never get done, for one.

There are a couple of new features, though, which I'm quite pleased with:

Firstly, there are two new strategic difficulties above Hard, and Hard is also a bit more difficult than it previously was.  We had a number of comments that the strategic portion of the game was too easy, and that's fair enough -- we had balanced it to try not to absolutely crush people on normal difficulty level, and Hard wasn't enough of a jump upwards.  And really there need to be more gradations between "not getting crushed if you are new" and "getting crushed most of the time even if you are very experienced."  So hence we have Harder and Nightmare now. :)

There are also two new race-specific actions, one for the Burlusts spreading hate when not in the federation, and one for the Andors spreading love when they are in the federation.  These are pretty cool, as they provide yet another decision point on when you get who into the federation.  I have the "spread whatever" actions defined for the other 6 races as well, but I didn't have time to get them in to this release.  I'll get those in tomorrow.  You guys had been asking for more things that the races are getting themselves up to beyond just war, and these provide some interesting things that also play into your decisions about who goes into the federation in what order, which is a double-win as far as I'm concerned.  Or will be, when all 8 races have their "spreading" actions, anyhow.

And I promise I will be getting to more quests likely tomorrow and definitely the next day, too.  Those are a big thing on my list for this week.  I just needed to take today kind of as a break from the larger stuff and do some housekeeping.

UPDATE: 1.014 is out as a hotfix version.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but last week it became clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

AI War Beta 7.023-7.024 "So This Carrier And A MkIII Lightning Warhead Walk Into A Bar..." Released!

This one is kind of a beast. With TLF doing so well most of our time is going in that direction, but since it's doing well we also have a little time to spare for stuff like AIW. Which is nice.

The biggest individual thing is a major revision of the Alternate Champion Progress feature introduced in the previous non-hotfix release. I'd thought people who didn't want the nebula scenarios wanted a relatively low-impact version of the champion that didn't fundamentally change gameplay. Based on feedback it would appear I was wrong ;)

Anyway, this new iteration does allow that low-power, low-response option but you can also crank the intensity of the progress and the response up to levels where you're getting just as much power by late/end-game as you would with the normal progress mechanic. And probably just as much pain in return, we'll see how the balancing worked out there. If you're feeling cheesy or like providing the compensating challenge in some other way you can also crank up the progression and leave the response low or off.

Please keep the feedback coming; "champion revisions" won #2 on the big-items-for-8.0 poll and I'd really like to get champs to a place where they have a wider appeal.

All that aside, some other major changes in this beta release:

- Carriers are now always fully autotargeted, and damage to them is simply passed on to the contained units. This actually makes carriers way easier to deal with, so further balance changes are likely to come later, but most importantly this also makes them way less annoying to deal with, and thus makes the game more fun. It's very satisfying to see a wall of 1000-load carriers fly into the teeth of exo-class defenses and start melting.

- Lightning/Armored Warheads and Spirecraft Martyrs have been made essentially finite in damage potential now, though one may not normally think of "Ten Billion Damage" as "finite". Essentially these now spread X damage over all available targets rather than doing X damage to EACH target in range. More balance to come, I'm sure, but now these are at least theoretically capable of being balanced.

- Fixed a major bug in recent versions where the second AI player's threat/threatfleet/special-forces ships were often just stuck on worlds with no human presence at all. Also made several other important fixes and improvements to AI threat behavior in general.

- Reinforcements have had further refactoring, and now have a much more coherent sense of budget (i.e. not getting anything for "free"). Perhaps more importantly, any reinforcement strength "lost" to the various capping rules (which are there to prevent the AI just defensively stonewalling you when it's not a Turtle AI Type or whatever) is passed on to the Strategic Reserve (until it is full) and then towards augmenting waves. Neither use is particularly threatening in moderate doses (though if the redirect-to-SR thing turns into homeworld-stonewalling please let us know and we'll change that) but this way the "cost" of AIP no longer goes down when that cap is reached, etc.

- More Golem and Spirecraft balance changes; not as many as last time but we hope it helps move those towards where they need to be.

Update: 7.024 hotfix for several severe balance issues with warheads, and some other stuff that got fixed in the meantime.

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.

TLF Version 1.012 Released (War And Spies)

Version 1.012 is now out, and I have to say, I'm really excited about this one.  The biggest thing is that you can now tell why races are going to war when they do.  But you can also see a lot of things about why you can't get races to go to war when you would ask them to, AND there were bugs fixed that were preventing you from doing that when the races were just in an "uneasy truce" sort of state.

Also, assassinating hive queens is now made of awesome.  It really makes them hate you, but it removes all their protection from bombing.  So if you, you know, are trying to nuke them from orbit... well, before that was almost impossible.  Now you can make a desperate bid to do so in a four-year window, after which they're really going to hate your guts.

The Evucks also got a whole lot more interesting with this one, with five new political deals that you can do with them.  These new deals use the Evuck spy probes at other planets to cause turmoil that can be quite major.  These are kind of like the anti-Andors in terms of how they are useful in undermining other races, versus helping them.

I had been planning on adding some more quests today, but I wound up working on the Evucks stuff instead since that is always available (presuming friendliness with the Evucks) as opposed to a temporary thing that comes and goes.

But I also did make some extensions to the quests-related mechanisms, to better prepare for when there are more quests.  These are pretty important, because you were going to be frustrated with the lack of control over quests without these in there.  Firstly there are now (very cheap) diplomats that you can hire in order to make quests from certain races a lot more likely.  So if you want to help someone, get a diplomat and they become a lot more likely to ask you for help as compared to other races.

Additionally, you can now "reject" quests, which provides a third option other than just ignoring or accepting them.  This frees up a quest slot (you only have two) so that something new can come in over the comm link.  With an increasing number of quests planned for the future, this sort of thing is key so that you don't have to sit waiting around for new quests in an annoying fashion.  And the diplomats make it so that it's less of a roll of the dice which races are asking you for help.

Anyway, no new quests as-yet, but that's next on my list of things to do, because that will again really improve the player's ability to effect the solar system in really major ways, which is something I know is the #1 issue on the core community's mind.  As it stands, I think you have a lot of new tools in this release even without those quests, so that's pretty sweet.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but this week it's become clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come Monday.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.010-1.011 Released (Pacing And RCI)

Version 1.010 is now out, and has a ton of good stuff.  The biggest thing is that you now wield vastly more power on the solar map -- your actions matter more.  How?  The most of the simulation actions are slowed way down, so that your actions don't get washed away in the butterfly effect so fast.

Also, in particular the RCI values were kind of going nuts in a lot of cases.  I hadn't had time to look into that until tonight, and I wasn't really sure what was causing it, but I found the issue.  Really it was a combination of a lot of little things, but the biggest single factor was events like housing boom, which would just absolutely speed things along.

Overall the sense of "this stays where I put it, at least for a little while," is now higher.  I had planned on adding a couple of new features today, but between these above things, some performance improvements on the solar map, and a bunch of various balance tweaks and whatnot (seriously, the list is very long), it seemed clear what players were most interested in -- actually, the forumites have not been shy at all about letting us know what their priorities are, and there's even a poll now for it.  Also you can vote support on individual mantis tickets, if you didn't already know that.

UPDATE:  1.011 is now out, with some hotfixes to pacing versions that were still in the prior version (and actually worse in the case of the combat speed of NPCs, facepalm).  With the new version, I had an observer game go for more than 200 years, and only two races died, and the Thoraxians were making a valiant holdout but would likely die within 50ish years.  This might be too slow, we'll see, but it's actually a case where as the player you could have tipped the scales in a number of these situations now, which is kind of the idea.  Rather than the scales just tipping themselves superfast, it takes your intervention.

--------------- Ongoing Updates All This Month ---------------
The support of the community, and the growth of it, remain amazing to me.  I've been promising daily new features, but this week it's become clear that there are other things more on your mind.  Things like added interfaces, new AI behaviors and options, and things like that.  So, you know what?  I'm just going to go with that -- those count as features, really, in that they help to make the game more interesting and easier to understand and play.

So what else is going on?  Well, we're going to be working at this pace on the game for at least another month, which means that you're going to be seeing lots of good things coming.  If you've liked what you've seen in the last two weeks, you can imagine what another month of that will be like.  We do have two other things in the works as well, but we're not quite ready to reveal either one of them (although I am betting that most long-time Arcen fans can guess what both of them are).  Suffice it to say, neither one of these two other things are going to impact the general updates, improvements, and free additions to TLF that are coming over this month.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.009 Released (Merging Beta Branch With Official)

Version 1.009 is now out, and overall it is individually a small release.  But this is the first official update to include all the goodies from 1.005 onwards.  So for those not playing the beta branch, this new version is HUGE

For those who were playing the beta branch, this one mainly brings improvements to the NPC vs NPC battles getting stalemated in late game with the honorable races were the attackers.  We've gotten a bit derailed today, so no new features today, but I'll make it up to you as the week progresses. ;)

--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
All through this week we will continue releasing at least one new free feature every day of the work week, thanks to the overwhelming support this game has had.  This is far and away our best launch ever, and that gap keeps widening by surprising degrees.  We're extremely grateful to our ever-growing community for their support, as well as to the press for taking the time out to look at our stuff.  You guys are all awesome!

After this week, we'll see -- at minimum, we'll continue putting out at least one new free feature every week for at least a few months, if not longer.  A quest, a new weapon or ability, a new ship, a new action... something.  We'll vary it up, and make it fun.  I'm really excited about expanding the game even further, as large as it already is.  Right now we're doing that very fast in response to all the huge numbers of new players and all the things that a larger audience is bound to dig up in a game of this scope and complexity; once that settles down, we'll make it less intensive but still ongoing.

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater, or if you have Steam it will automatically update it for you.  To force Steam to download it faster, just restart Steam and it will do so.

TLF Version 1.007-1008 Beta Released (Solar Map Balance And Auto-Resolve Polish)

Version 1.007 Beta is now out, and focuses on moving things towards merging the beta branch with the official one.  This one is still just in the beta branch (which you can optionally download inside the game itself from the updater) rather than as a full version that everyone gets automatically updated to.  So you can update or not for this one, at your discretion.  When the beta branch is fully tested out, we'll push it out in the normal way -- hopefully either tonight or tomorrow morning, as I really want for everyone to be able to get these new goodies.

This version has a number of important bugfixes, and some rules changes to do things like make assassins less of a constant harassment, to remove the tax breaks and repeated false evidence exploits, trade route value reductions, and things like that.

This also includes a new Thoraxian-specific tech and building type pair, which makes them more unique (underground tunnels), and a bunch of revisions to orbital bombardment to slow that down in the early game but then let it speed up progressively via 5 new techs for that purpose.  There are also 3 new Peltian-only orbital bombing techs, which replace the previous invisible multiplier they had.

In general I spent a lot of time today running observer mode games and tuning based on the results.  For the past while, but in particular in the last release, the Acutians were just outstripping the entire solar system.  The Thoraxians were also remarkably ineffective lately.  With the changes in this version, I'm seeing vastly more variance in who comes out on top in a given game, and the Acutians no longer seem to have an overtly unusual advantage.

Beyond that, I finally got to circle back around to the auto-resolve stuff and clean up the variety of things that were still wrong with it.  There may be more, and I need to keep testing on that myself.   But the major cases that were just way off or throwing errors or whatever all seem to be fixed now.  Let us know if you see anything else!

UPDATE: 1.008 is now out with a few hotfixes that I wanted to get in tonight.  I forgot I had a podcast scheduled, so there was a limit to how much more I could do before that.

--------------- Ongoing Updates ---------------
All through this week we will continue releasing at least one new free feature every day of the work week, thanks to the overwhelming support this game has had.  This is far and away our best launch ever, and that gap keeps widening by surprising degrees.  We're extremely grateful to our ever-growing community for their support, as well as to the press for taking the time out to look at our stuff.  You guys are all awesome!

After this week, we'll see -- at minimum, we'll continue putting out at least one new free feature every week for at least a few months, if not longer.  A quest, a new weapon or ability, a new ship, a new action... something.  We'll vary it up, and make it fun.  I'm really excited about expanding the game even further, as large as it already is.  Right now we're doing that very fast in response to all the huge numbers of new players and all the things that a larger audience is bound to dig up in a game of this scope and complexity; once that settles down, we'll make it less intensive but still ongoing.

More to come tomorrow, or possibly later tonight if I have enough that it's worth pushing out.  Enjoy!

This is a beta update that you can optionally download through the in-game updater.  Steam will not automatically update it for you yet, as we don't think everyone wants that inflicted on them. ;)

AI War Beta 7.021-7.022 "Champion Alter-Ego" Released!

This one is fairly hefty, compared to other recent patches. After the April 18th release of The Last Federation and a week of heavy post-release support for that game (which is still very much ongoing, but not quite 100% of our time now) I finally had time to get 7.021 ready.

The most important thing here is definitely the new alternate-champion-progress lobby option, in response to "Revising Champions" winning the #2 spot in the Big Items For 8.0 poll.

Basically if you want to play with Champions but don't want to mess with nebulae (and their scenarios) just turn this on and your champions will gain their XP alongside your normal Knowledge gathering, and will gain new unlocks when you capture or hack Advanced Research Stations, Advanced Factories, etc.

I'm sure this needs further balancing and polish and perhaps isn't even the right tree to bark up, but recent discussion indicated it was worth a try. And even if this option is worked out perfectly there's probably other revisions needed for champions. Anyway, more feedback is very welcome :)

Other high points from the release:

• The AI (on Diff 7+) now has "overrun" logic to recognize when its normal-threat forces are way more than needed at a specific planet (even when there's still some human presence). It then leaves a goodly chunk to mop up and sends the excess after another target.
• Most of the Golems have been buffed to better fit their balance targets, so they should be more interesting to play with. Unless it's the AI with the golems. Then it's more interesting to play with.
• The Spirecraft Siege Tower and Spirecraft Ion Blaster have been reimagined as much more combat-effective ships.
• Fixed a couple of bugs that were causing Desyncs in multiplayer. Always a relief to nail some of those.
• The AI's Implosion Guardians (including the Dires) have been nerfed. And there was much rejoicing.

There's also quite a few other bugfixes and balance changes.

Update: 7.022 hotfix for a memory leak (that could cause out-of-mem situations) and a rare null-pointer exception (which isn't at all new, just now reported where I saw it).

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.