AI War Beta 4.037 Released!

This release is another biggie.  Where to even begin...  Well, for one thing the Fallen Spire minor faction has seen yet more updates, balance tweaks, and bugfixes, and now also has episode 8 in place.  Getting near to the end on that story-based campaign arc, now!

There are also six new map types for the Light of the Spire expansion, based on three different overall algorithms.  These all create some really different sorts of situations compared to what we've seen in the past (the new maze maps are my favorites).  The new maps also continue the trend of having maps without any confusing, long-range overlapping lines.

The final three bonus ship classes have also now been added for Light of the Spire: Maw, Blade Spawner, and Armor Rotter.  I think the Maw is my new favorite bonus ship class, but actually a number of the new LotS bonus ship classes really vie for that.  Speaking of, we've toned down the Stealth Battleships and the Tractor Platforms, which were weapons of doom in the last version.  There are probably still a huge number of balance issues with the new bonus ship classes, but we'll be working on those -- with your help and feedback -- over the next few weeks.

Yet another new Light of the Spire feature is in place: a new minor faction called the Spire Civilian Leaders.  It's a fairly simple concept, nothing like the Fallen Spire, but I think it leads to some really interesting strategic choices.  There are only a few minor factions that I personally turn on in every game (Traders, Resistance Fighters, Marauders), but I think the Civilian Leaders might be another one that is always-on for me.  Of course, some of the more specialized minor factions are interesting for variety, but I also like having ones that I can always use if they match my personal preferences.

We also have some cool fan-created art by HitmanN for three of the guard posts, one of which is shown to the right.  They're updated versions of the originals I had done, and these add quite some cool effects.  This isn't the first time we've included fan-created art in the game; we're really fortunate to have such a talented, generous community!

In addition, of course, are some other random bugfixes and balance tweaks.
Coming up soon, we'll have the new Spirecraft in place, as well as some new Guard Posts and Guardians, and that's the biggest things remaining on our list aside from the Fallen Spire completion.  Well, and Constructor mode.  And possibly another couple of minor factions if Keith has time, but no promises there.  And a couple of other small random goodies from my end.  This is really a huge expansion!

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

AI War Beta 4.036 Released!

This release is a maintenance patch for a few issues with the last patch that we wanted to resolve before our next full release tonight.

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

AI War Beta 4.035 Released!

This release is pretty darn huge.  The main draws are episode 7 of the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction campaign-within-a-campaign, and the 30 new ships (5 each in 6 new bonus ship classes) for players and the AI to enjoy.

There will be 9 new bonus ship classes in all in this expansion, the first 6 of which are now in place in a very rough-draft sort of fashion.  They need polish, balancing, and testing -- that's coming from our end, but of course the reason we're putting it out there now is because we'd love to know what you think. 

All of the spire bonus ship classes are larger-than-average and with half-sized ship caps or even far lower.  Some of them are, for most practical purposes, starships, despite not being called that.  When you see some of the biggest spire ships (at the end of the Fallen Spire arc), you'll know why these are the "small fleet ships" of the spire.  Their biggest ships make Golems look small.

With these new spire bonus ships and their caps, they follow the pattern of the Zenith Electric Bomber or Sentinel Frigates.  This means that in the hands of the AI, at present, they will sometimes be overpowered same as those other two ship types.  I have an idea for resolving that with all of the ships of that pattern, so over the next week or so as that gets put in place, hopefully that will reduce some of the woes of the electric bombers and such as well.

There were various other notable balance tweaks and bugfixes in this one, too.  Space planes are pretty much reinvented, for instance, and scouts got a major boost.  Also the wave sizes of the aggressive AI types have been heavily nerfed (they were excessive).  And one more whack at that sound issue on OSX.  See the release notes for the miscellany on this one, and descriptions of the new bonus ships.

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.

2010 Indie Of The Year Awards

Greetings Arcen fans!

We wanted to take a quick moment to let you know that three of our games are on the selection list for the 2010 Indie Of The Year Awards. The selection is very simple, as it's up to the fans to get the games to the next Top 50 round! All you have to do is go onto www.indiedb.com, and vote for your favorite Indie games of the year before November 30th. If you could take a moment of your time and go on to vote for our games, we'd really appreciate it! Here are the links to our games:

AI War: Fleet Command - http://www.indiedb.com/games/ai-war-fleet-command
AI War: The Zenith Remnant - http://www.indiedb.com/games/ai-war-the-zenith-remnant
Tidalis - http://www.indiedb.com/games/tidalis

If you're already a member of IndieDB, then sign in first before you vote. Otherwise, you can vote as a guest too (although sometimes it will make you wait 3 minutes between votes if you're a guest).

Be sure to click on the link, go half way down the page and click on the green button that says "Vote for this indie: In the 2010 IOTY Awards". You can only vote for each game once, but be sure to vote for all three games.

As always, thank you so much for your support! Check out the awards video as well, you might see a game you recognize on there!

~ The Arcen Team

AI War Beta 4.034 Released!

This release brings more bugfixes and balance goodies, as well as episode 6 of the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction campaign-within-a-campaign.  It's late and it's been a very long day, so for now I'll just refer you to the release notes above.  There's a lot of changes in this version, but they're all over the place in terms of what they alter, not really clustered on anything specific.

Starting tomorrow, we're going to be pushing through the last of the new ships for the Light of the Spire expansion.  "Last of the ships!?" I hear some folks exclaim.  "We were promised 100+ ships, and so far there's only been about 50 added."  Indeed.  My goal is to add about 130 new ships this week, which are all laid out and which the art for about 70% of are now done.  There's been a ton of art, design, and underlying-engine work to get it to this stage where now we can quickly implement the majority of the ships in a playable fashion in the next four days.

Then the next few weeks after this will be spent on balance, fixes, and polish rather than new content, which I know some folks are really looking forward to as much as the new content itself.  Exciting times, there's a lot of cool stuff -- a huge portion of it player-suggested as usual -- heading your way soon

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

AI War Beta 4.033 Released!

This release includes some bugfixes and balance fixes, as well as episode 5 of the Fallen Spire story campaign.  The Fallen Spire story is really coming together at this stage, and this also has a lot of refinements to the prior episodes.

Also of significance is that the model for how big waves are has been completely redone.  Fear the high AI Progress -- for real this time.  In general this is attempting to bring back some of that "high AI Progress is super bad" flavor from AI War 2.0 and prior, while removing the insane difficulty of the earliest waves in the last few betas.

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

AI War Beta 4.032 Released!

This release adds a bunch of stuff.  For the base game, that includes a number of balance tweaks to make the Heavy and UltraHeavy hull types not quite as hard-countered by bombers and the like, and some performance tweaks.  It also has some minor interface tweaks and extensions, as well as a few other balance changes to the higher-level starships (spire and core, mainly).  We also made major changes to the sound effects part of the engine in hopes (once again) of nailing that elusive OSX bug.  And we upgraded the game from Unity 3.0 to 3.1.

For the Light of the Spire expansion, there's a ton of stuff here: more balance changes and improvemetns have been made to the Fallen Spire story-driven minor faction, and episode 4 of the Fallen Spire is now also in place.

Additionally, 35 new AI Guardians (5 marks each of 7 new guardian types) have been added for LotS: Carrier, EMP, Self Destruction, Special Forces Rally, Vampire, Warp Gate, and Zombie.  Some of these are tough enough that they only appear on higher difficulties, and fairly rarely there.  In all, this nearly doubles the number of types of Guardians from the base game.

Also for LotS, six different kinds of asteroids are now seeded throughout the galaxy in the following order of rarity (from least to most rare): Reptite, Pysite, Xampite, Ebonite, Adamantite, Titanite. You can't do anything with these quite yet, but they'll be useful very soon for creating the Spirecraft ships (those "larger than a starship, smaller than a golem" ships).  Start staking out your Titanite now! ;)

Oh, and there are tons of new graphics for the Light of the Spire stuff.  All of the Fallen Spire ship graphics are now in (though some of the far zoom icons are still temporary), and various other ships as well.  In the base game, even the existing Spire Starship has been upgraded to use the new visual styling that will be common for all the Spire ships.   See to the right for what that looks like -- it's even cooler in-game, on a darker background.

Now that a lot of the art stuff has been worked out (since I'm doing all the art on this one -- using ZBrush, Photoshop, and a Wacom tablet, and in some cases Groboto, if you're curious), the actual new ships will be coming through quicker.  Coming up with a compelling art style, and figuring out the specifics of ZBrush, which I'm new to, took more of this week than I'd planned on, but the results are well worth it as you can see above.

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

AI War Beta 4.031 Released!

Today's release has yet more Fallen Spire minor faction stuff, basically adding a third "episode" to the story progression of that minor faction.  We won't say anything more about that, for risk of spoilers, but it's cool as always with the Fallen Spire work. :)

Also notable in this release is a new Ship Design screen on the Controls screen, for better modular ship designing, as well as smaller savegame files (and possibly a fix to that pthread_getschedparam OSX issue we've been chasing).

Beyond that, there are a few bugfixes and balance tweaks (Raid Starships should be useful again, Avengers are tougher, etc).  Other parts behind the scenes have still been inwork and aren't quite ready for release yet, but more is coming!  The first of the Spirecraft, including their unique (and as-yet unrevealed) new method of being built, are both coming soon.

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

AI War Beta 4.030 Released!

Today's release has a number of important bugfixes from the prior version, including a fix to the AIs only getting the basic triangle ships to start out in new campaigns.  It also fixes a longer-term issue with the AI Carriers, um, never appearing and always being barracks instead of carriers.

More exciting is a bunch of new stuff for the Fallen Spire minor faction, which is basically a scripted story-style campaign within the larger campaign.  This fixes a number of bugs in the first version of the Fallen Spire minor faction, and adds more content onto it (previously we were only about 10% done with the story events in this, now it's a bit further along).

Additionally, there have been numerous rebalancements including to some of the guardians, the superfortress, colony ships, armor ships, shield bearers, and hybrids. 

A bunch of other design/art/coding/music work has also been ongoing behind the scenes, with results that are not yet ready to be made public.  But soon!  The art for some of that new stuff is already in place, if you're looking for clues as to what they will be...

More to come tomorrow.  Enjoy!

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

AI War Beta 4.029 Released!

This update has a goodly bit of stuff in it.  First off are a mix of bugfixes and balance tweaks for both Light of the Spire and the base game, most notably relating to bomber starships and turrets.

Secondly, the first version of the Fallen Spire minor faction for LotS is now in there.  As we've noted in the past, this is one of the major anchor features of this expansion, and it's sort of a scripted sequence of events that you can go through to achieve... well, that's secret.  At the moment, only about 10% of the events are in place, and only a few of the new specialized ships relating to this story-based minor faction are in place, but a lot of groundwork is done for how to create the rest of the events and ships related to this.  This one is really exciting, but we're being careful to avoid spoilers on what the actual events entail.  Stay tuned on this one!

Lastly, four new core AI guard posts have been added for LotS:  Booster, Cross Planet Attack, Heavy Beam, and Raid Engine.  All four of these basically add variety to the end-of-game scenarios (most specifically the CPA guard post is wildly different), which has been a long-term goal for the game for a while now. Because of the comparative rarity of AI Core Guard Posts (they only show up on the AI homeworlds), we won't be adding too many of these in this expansion, though -- more focus will be going into the regular Guard Posts (mark I-V) that show up on all the AI planets randomly, as variety is even more critical there (in one sense).

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

AI War Beta 4.028 -- The First Light of the Spire Beta -- Released!

This update fixes a few small things for the main game, and then includes the first of the new content for Light of the Spire!  Also, preorders are now open for Light of of the Spire (it's a full expansion, so $9.99).  Right now it's just available through the Arcen store, as is generally the case during our preorder/beta periods, but in December it should be available through all the usual suspects that carry AI War products.

The Spire are coming...
Ravaged by their recent encounters with the same AIs that pushed humanity to the brink of extinction, the Spire are an alien race that have also been all but destroyed. However, while the AIs were successful in their surprise attack against the Spire, the Spire are far more powerful than even the AIs seem to have realized. The Zenith were broken-down and ancient when humanity encountered them, but the Spire were at the height of their deadly power until quite recently.


Now the splintered remains of their race are regrouping, and entering the galaxy with a vengeance. Their attitude toward humanity, who after all spawned the AIs that harmed the Spire so, is unclear. Proceed with caution.
If you'd like to read about what features have been implemented or announced so far, please see this page on the wiki.

This Expansion Is Still In Beta!
Beta means it's not finished, and that you should expect bugs and balance issues until it gets out of beta. But we're making it available to folks early, because there's already some seriously cool stuff in here that we think you'll enjoy, and we'd also love feedback on it all. Light of the Spire will be released in the first week of December or thereabouts, so the development time schedule is very short on this one -- we're leveraging a lot of groundwork that we put in place in 4.0, as well as picking the features that go into this very carefully, in order to make this possible.

But, even so, we're obviously concerned about scope creep and want to avoid having to go back on a feature we promise. So with that in mind, we're being rather uncharacteristically secretive about the features in this expansion until they come out. Basically, the only stuff we'll talk about in concrete terms in advance are things we know we can without a doubt accomplish in this timeframe. Stay tuned over the next three weeks or so, and all will be revealed as that time passes. If you want to wait until after that period to order or preorder this one, we quite understand. We think you'll agree that this is the best expansion yet to AI War when you see it, though. Again: stay tuned!

Key Features That Will Be Coming
* 100+ new ships, including new "spirecraft" ships (larger than starships, smaller than golems).
* 2 new campaign types: Defender and Construction.
* Exciting new Fallen Spire "minor" faction.
* New in-game music tracks.
* Other new stuff not yet revealed. :) 

What's In This Beta Version For LotS So Far?
The exciting new Defender mode, as well as the Vanilla and Everything AI types make their debut. As a warning, Defender mode is extremely preliminary, so will probably need a lot of tweaking to be in balance. But it's pretty fun already, if you like getting beat up. ;)

Also bear in mind that we do still need to teach the AI a few new tricks for this mode. It's not used to working on a timer, it's used to thoroughly crushing you. When it's on the clock, it needs to do a better job of prioritizing your quick defeat, rather than obliterating every last trace of you.

In short, if you play with too few planets the AI will crush you; too many, on too short a time schedule, and it won't have time to crush you so you'll likely win despite the thousands of high-level ships slowly scouring you from the galaxy. We'll be working on that in future releases, but for now we suggest you use maybe 4-5 planets as perhaps a sweet spot. Or, feedback on what seems to work best (and what doesn't) is also welcome. Part of the point of the beta, after all

More to come soon!

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

AI War Beta 4.025 Released!

This update fixes a few small things, among them perhaps the most hilarious bug we've yet had.  In the prior beta version, the Mark I scouts basically "went postal" and suddenly had guns.  About half the time they'd attack, giving themselves away and getting themselves quickly killed (while stirring up potentially massive numbers of AI ships that would then counterattack the player), while the other half of the time they'd, you know, actually do their real job and scout.

Unintended hilarity aside, this release also makes the Neinzul Clusters a lot less nasty (no more translocation shots), and makes the Raid Starships have a much more unique niche (armor piercing galore against regular fleet ships, which finally gives a mobile counter to armor ships in the default always-available ships -- previously only the fixed-position laser turrets were a good armor ship counter).  Oh, and we fixed a small possibly-it's-a-tiny-memory-leak bug that might have been related to the issues that some folks were having on OSX.  Fingers crossed there.

Seem like a small update?  Indeed, it is.  Most of our work has been going into some not-yet-revealed updates that will be coming out tomorrow for the first public beta release of the new Light of the Spire expansion.  We're not normally very secretive, but in this case we kind of have to be because we don't want to promise something that it turns out we can't deliver in our ultra-aggressive timeframe for that expansion (that sucker goes official in a month and needs to be packed to the gills with awesome stuff you want by then, on a scale equal to or greater than The Zenith Remnant, as well as stable).  Needless to say, we expect LotS to be a pretty epic expansion, but we have to play it carefully and not promise anything that turns out to be infeasible in the timeframe we have.  So stay tuned. :)

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.

Update On Donations For Child's Play, Arcen Financials, Light of the Spire, Alden Ridge News

It's that time again!  As of October 31st, 2010, we have so far raised and donated $1,640.80 for the Child's Play charity via sales of our Children of Neinzul micro-expansion for AI War -- and that's just with preorders! Bear in mind that the money that was generated in October via distributors like Steam and Impulse won't reach us until the end of November, and we can already tell that our total donated is going to massively increase at that time.

We look to be well on our way to hitting our goal of $14,000.00 for the year at this rate (just with what's already been generated, but not yet made it to us, we look to be around 2/3 of the way there!). We'll post monthly updates on how we're doing towards our goal, so check back!

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

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

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

A Quick Note On Our Finances
It's true that there was recently a lot of press about our financial difficulties, and it's also true that while the release of 4.0 has been a solid step in the right direction for us, that doesn't solve everything.  We've had loads of people telling us we should "put an end to that charity thing" and look after our own finances first.  If we go out of business we won't be able to help the charity any longer, whereas if we get stronger and bigger we later can do more for charity.  Our answer is, simply: no.

On the surface that seems like solid advice, but we're not keen to start going back on our word just when things get rough.  The charity micro-expansion has been a boost to us in terms of visibility and press, so it's not like it's completely selfless at this stage, if that makes those worried about this feel any better.  But even if that wasn't true, we wouldn't want to cut this off, as we deliver on what we promise and we're not about to start taking money promised to sick kids just to help ourselves.  I'd rather go out of business.

And To Address A Couple of Misconceptions About Our Finances
First of all, some folks seem to think that our financial troubles were because of the Child's Play expansion.  Others think that it's because AI War was a failure.  Neither of these are true.

The whole point of the Child's Play expansion was that it took maybe a man-month to create, and then the result of that generates a lot of money for charity.  So far so good, and a man-month of time, while nontrivial, also isn't the cause of our problems.  And having that month back, or having the revenue from Child's Play for ourselves, while it certainly wouldn't be unhelpful, also wouldn't solve our problems.  The gap between prosperity and financial ruin is not nearly so narrow as this.

Regarding AI War itself, some folks feel like it was a failure and thus recommend ways for us to change it or whatever based on that belief.  I assume those same folks haven't seen the financial numbers that were at PC Gamer: fact is, AI War is one of the most successful indie games of the last year.  It's not Minecraft, but it's still in the top 1% financially for the indie scene.  I wish AI War was better-known, of course, and the version 4.0 has gone a long way to make it more accessible, but at the same time AI War is not really related to our troubles, either.

So What Were The Problems?
Only a few people have really understood what the problems were that led to our financial issues.  I think my posts were a bit over-long on the subject.  They boil down to four things: 1) trying to do too much; 2) jumping into an unfamiliar, overcrowded genre; 3) the worst slump in indie game sales in a decade, apparently; 4) my own poor marketing for Tidalis.

In other words, we spent a lot of money to make Tidalis, and had a much larger staff than in the past (a whole five people).  Assuming that Tidalis did remotely close to AI War, this would have been fine.  The problem was, we released it right during a huge slump for the industry in general, and the PC indie scene in particular.  Bad timing for us.  I keep up with a number of indies, and a lot of them that have been in the business for a long time talk about it being the worst few months for sales that they've seen in literally a decade.  It's not just us that's hurting.

But, our big mistake was having quite so much riding on Tidalis.  We tried to do too much, we packed so much awesome into it that it took us a lot more time and manpower than we'd initially expected (and the porting between engines in the middle, while necessary, also didn't help).  Given the largely glowing reviews that touch on only a fraction of the content in Tidalis, it's clear we could have put in 1/4 of the content or even less, and it still would have been very well received.  For the casual genre, it's clear we went overboard to the point that it's actually overwhelming some of the casual audience with how much is in there.

Not that I wish we had done less on Tidalis, but perhaps for launch we should have done less, and then built upwards from there if the game caught on.  If it didn't catch on, the loss would have been smaller.  That's what we've done with AI War (and, heck, that's what's going on with Minecraft), and it's worked very well for us.  This build-a-big-thing-and-then-pray strategy was a really bad idea (and my messing up the marketing didn't help).

Lessons Learned / Plan of Action
1. We're still working to promote Tidalis, and we think that it can be successful over time.  That hasn't changed.

2. We're working on a new for-pay full expansion to AI War, called Light of the Spire, to be released in the first week of December.  It's using a lot of the groundwork that we put in for 4.0, which is why we're able to do a full expansion in such a short period of time; we've been thinking on this for a while, and getting things ready.  Clearly there's still a big appetite for AI War stuff, and we've got some seriously cool ideas for this one, too.

3. Alden Ridge Arcade is dead, and we're going to reinvent Alden Ridge itself from what it was going to be.  No more hand-crafted story or levels -- instead, we'll be going procedural, which is something that we're very good at from AI War.  We're also going to be releasing an public alpha of Alden Ridge in the first quarter of next year, which we're pretty sure the finances will let us do, and then if that takes off we'll build that game upwards from there.  If it really takes off, which we suspect it might (that's a seriously cool game, and a lot of people are waiting for it), then we'll probably develop it over a span of years, with lots of free updates as well as paid expansions, essentially like we've been doing for AI War.

4. Cayenne and A Valley Without Wind are also off the table for now, as both of them are huge projects with a lot of hand-crafted content.  It's just not a good idea for us at this time, and we just don't know how to go about that sort of thing in a successful manner yet, it seems.  We'd need an enormous cash buffer before I'd be comfortable taking on a project like either of those.  All that said, we're instead planning to wrap a lot of the gameplay ideas from both of those into Alden Ridge, possibly as expansions to that core game, possibly as just part of other core experience over time.  There's a ton we'll be able to do with the Alden Ridge engine, if people are interested, like what we've done with AI War.  And if people aren't... we'll do something else.

5. We're also going to be working with a smaller team for a while.  Right now, it's just Pablo (music), Keith (programming/design), and myself (programming and design, as well as everything else, including art).  Phil is currently working on other projects, and Lars has a demanding day job anyway, so fortunately that works out, but we do hope to be able to work with them (and get me off of art) in the future.  Though, if AI War 4.0 is any indication, people have been really happy with the art I've been doing, as the 4.0 changes were all me.

In short, we aren't out of the woods yet, but this past week has been hugely positive for us and things are definitely moving in the right direction at long last.  And we've managed to do that while still supporting charity in a major way, which is the best part of all.

AI War Beta 4.024 Released!

This update is focused on balance changes.  The big thing that has changed is the cost structure of higher-mark ships.  They are now significantly and predictably higher-cost than their lower-level counterparts, which means two things: the lower tier ships are once again more useful (due to a better cost-to-benefit ratio), and the late game requires a more substantial economy than in recent versions. 

That last is important, because in the process of making the early game economy more robust and manageable for players, we also inadvertently made the late-game economy kind of a non-issue.  Well, now the player economy will have to keep growing throughout the entire game if they wish to sustain massive high-level fleets.  This also heavily nerfs the mercenaries, since they're correspondingly more expensive.  Some of the mark I starships, fleet ships, and turrets are actually a bit cheaper than before, though, along with all this.

Additionally, player home command stations got a buff to not be so fragile, and the AI now gets their own fortresses that are a lot more powerful in light of the increased firepower that the players are carting around.  Oh, and cutlasses are no longer death on wheels (or, I guess, death wheels).

And lastly... Mark V Fighters.  At long last, after countless requests.  And we threw in Mark V Bulletproof Fighters and MicroFighters, as well.  Enjoy!

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

AI War Beta 4.023 Released!

This update has a wide variety of fixes and updates into it.  It also has the first beginnings of the upcoming Light of the Spire expansion in it, although you won't be able to see or enabled (even in trial mode) those new additions just yet.  Later this week it will open for trial and preorders with the extremely early version of it!

Other notable new stuff in this version includes making the game much more playable with a 600px high resolution (which is technically below the minimum we supposedly support, but it's nice to have it playable on more widescreen formats than before).  There are also a number of new threat-related options for defining when you want to be alerted about danger at specific planets.  Guardians, fortresses, and beam cannons also got a heavy dose of rebalancing.

Along with this were a lot of bugfixes, and also a change to hopefully prevent the OSX version from crashing if it encounters the pthread_getschedparam that some users have run into (more details on that in the release notes).

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