Arcen Games News Has Moved!

Saturday, August 11, 2012

AI War Beta 5.058 "Further Shadows" Released!

This one is the first substantial content addition since the initial beta release of our new AI War expansion pack, Ancient Shadows.

This update adds a second scenario that can be seeded in a nebula, beginning the move towards much-needed variety for the champions' "offroad" exploits. This scenario introduces three new splinter factions (one zenith, one neinzul, one spire) with 16 units between them. A couple new champion hull types are possible as rewards (no, not larger than the ones previously available, but we're getting to that), and 5 new scenario-unlocked module lines for champions are available. Not all champions can use all modules, but it won't give you a module line you can't use at all.

Many long-time members of the Arcen community will appreciate one particular fix: the bug that caused a "ghost" of a unit's build queue to sometimes draw just a little below it is now gone. Finding the greater-than sign that needed to be greater-than-or-equal-to took 3 hours, so be happy! ;)

There's also a variety of other bugfixes and some balance changes (notably to part of the AI's reinforcements logic, since reinforcements have been so low lately).

Update: 5.059 hotfix is out to fix a bug in the 5.058 reinforcements changes that caused AI reinforcements to go Stark! Raving! Mad! Thanks for letting us know about that one, though the AI looks sad now.

Update: 5.060 hotfix is out to fix a variety of bugs (some recent, some longstanding. Nothing critical, but some moderately severe (for Fallen Spire particularly) wanted to get these out before starting on any bigger chunks.

Enjoy!

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

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

AI War Ancient Shadows Beta/Preorders Begin!

Version 5.052 begins the public beta for Ancient Shadows, our newest expansion to AI War.

We waited longer than usual to start the preorders and public beta for Ancient Shadows because we wanted to get the anchor feature to a playable state, and it's pretty complex under-the-hood.

So, what's the anchor feature? Champions! A bit of background: neither Chris nor I have been all that happy with the way RTS games usually do scripted campaigns or hero units. The concepts are quite compelling, however, so it's a matter of finding a different way. In the Light of the Spire we did the Fallen Spire stuff as our take on dropping a scripted campaign into our emergent-campaign world of AIW. It was a pretty huge hit. Well, in Ancient Shadows we're doing Champions as our take on bringing hero units into AIW.

Basically, with the Ancient Shadows expansion, you can now set a player to the "Champion" role and instead of a home command station and all the usual stuff a player starts with they get a single modular ship. But what a ship. At the beginning it's basically a super-starship that's pretty powerful but nothing world-shattering. But it can gain experience, and with experience it can upgrade modules.

***IMPORTANT NOTE: you CAN use champions in singleplayer. The easiest way is to set your player role to "Normal+Champion" and it will give you both a home command station and a champion

More importantly, the champions can travel to new parts of the galaxy that no normal ship can get to, and interact with the splinter factions of Humans, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire that are found there. Successfully helping a splinter faction can (among other rewards) unlock whole new lines of modules and even new and bigger hulls that your champion can switch to. For the lore-inclined among you, these "offroad" scenarios also reveal more of the backstory through journal entries.

There's still quite a lot more variety planned for the champions (more module lines, more champion hulls, more splinter factions, etc), and plenty more in other expansion features:

* Modular fortresses! (the Human-tech variant is added in this update; Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire variants to come, probably via reward from an offroad scenario)
* 9 new bonus ship classes (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* 3 core AI guard posts and one new minor faction (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* New AI types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* New Map types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* A large amount of new music (to be released when the expansion fully launches, you'll need to download the final installer to get the music, it won't be delivered via update).

All that's still in the works, of course, but we wanted to get the public beta going so interested players could start experimenting with the new toys :)

Once you've updated to 5.052 (or whatever the latest beta version is when you read this) you can use the Ancient Shadows installer from here and demo it in trial mode or go ahead and pick up a license key here.

The expansion is priced at $4.99, but you can pick it up for $3.99 (20% off) during the preorder period!

Update: 5.053 hotfix is now out, correcting a problem with loading a few textures on OSX and making it a bit clearer how you can add a champion player to the game (particularly in singleplayer).

Update: 5.054 hotfix is out to fix a fairly critical bug where some champion-related data was not being cleared between games (leading to unhandled exceptions in some cases, MP desyncs in others, bad stuff), and also improving the champion-related UI a bit. Going to try something tomorrow to deal with the moderately intractable lobby-UI confusion going on right now, but wasn't time for it for this release.

Update: 5.055 hotfix is out to fix a couple of unhandled-exceptions bugs (one that could happen very occasionally when respawning a champion and rebuilding its modules and another related to creating a saved modular-fortress design) and a nasty data-not-getting-cleared bug in the lobby. Sorry for all these edge-case-ish nasties, but thanks very much for finding them. That's what beta is for :)

Update: 5.056 hotfix is out to add a "Normal+Champion" role because the previous model of requiring "1 Normal Player + 1 Champion Player" for using champions in a singleplayer was... really, really bad. I should never have expected that to fly, sorry ;) The old champion-only role is still available because it does have uses (more than one champion in singleplayer, and champion-only players in multiplayer) but its tooltips and related text have been changed to make it a lot clearer that you should use Normal+Champion if you're trying to use champions in singleplayer. 5.056 also has a bugfix and a few key UI-clarity improvements related to building and upgrading champion modules. Thanks for the ongoing beta feedback!

Update: 5.057 hotfix is out to fix a few unanticipated side-effects of the new Normal+Champion role. Nothing catastrophic this time, but wanted to get those and a few other important champion changes out before the evening to allow for testing. Thanks for the testing!

Monday, August 6, 2012

Busy Schedule For The Remainder Of 2012

If you've been keeping an eye on the forums and/or the Games By Design blog, you'll know we've been planning quite a bit for the second half of the year. A new AI War expansion, completely redone art for A Valley Without Wind, and the reveal of our latest title Shattered Haven.

AI War: Ancient Shadows Beta Incoming
Beta and pre-orders are imminent. I can't give an exact date (or rather I don't want to provide one and have something come up after that ends up changing it), but those looking for the first taste of the fourth AI War expansion won't have to wait much longer. Take a peak at the Marauder Starbase if you haven't yet.

We're hoping for the beta to last around two months and then have an official release for Ancient Shadows alongside AI War 6.0 sometime in October.

Friday, August 3, 2012

AVWW Post-Release 1.204-1.205 "Bubbles 'Round The Campfire" Released!

This one is continuing our trend of adding a new spell and other new tweaks each week while the game is undergoing its art revamp for the next few months.

Since I was out on vacation last week, I obviously didn't add any new spell last week. So this week there are two! Campfire is a new trap-type spell, which players have asked for for a while. Rising Bubbles is kind of a similar idea, except the bubbles float upwards -- and you can jump onto them like a wooden platform, if you want!

Rising Bubbles is particularly interesting to me because it can be used both in a movement/logistical sense, as well as for combat purposes. There are a lot of spells that we have that are affected by gravity in the downward direction, but this is one of the first that we have that actively floats upwards instead.

Also included in this release are a huge number of new player-made room templates. BenMiff has created another whopping hundred room templates, and Lavacamorada has also added 10 really cool room designs. A huge thanks to both of them!

More to come next week. Enjoy!

UPDATE: 1.205 fixes a minor-but-annoying bug in the prior version.

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Monday, July 30, 2012

AI War Beta 5.051 "Optical Repair" Released!

This one starts our response to the winner of our first "Aim the nerfbat (AI-side)" poll. The landslide winner was the AI Eye. Curiously, the main call was not so much for the eye to be made less strong but to be made less monotonous and frustrating. As one player put it: fighting the first one is fun, and the second one, but by number five... not so much. So we've started adding new kinds of Eyes (and renamed the original to something less alliteratively alienating). More to come on that soon, but we wanted to get the other pending changes out sooner than the rest of the eye work could be completed. Speaking of the other stuff:

So, there was this little innocent change in 5.050. The one where I fixed the longstanding bug where a unit's repair-speed-multiplier was increasing the amount it repaired per time-unit, but didn't increase the cost proportionately to maintain the same cost/hp ratio. It was kind of necessary for balance as "activating" (repairing) a golem with an MkIII engie instead a MkI engie was pretty intensely different in a non-intuitive way since construction multipliers (used for assisting space docks, etc) increased both speed and resource consumption to maintain the same cost ratio.

So, innocent change, right? Not so much. Since MkI Engineers had a repair multiplier of 6 all of a sudden basically everyone was paying at least 6 times as much as they were used to for their repairs. This was particularly brutal with golems. Anyway, a lot of changes have been made to bring repair back to a less "dude, where did my economy go?" situation. Please let us know if it still feels off. But also bear in mind that econ has been a lot stronger in recent months due to changes to harvesters, energy, etc.

There are also several changes to clean up some backporting-related leftovers. Most notably, Chris took the whole sprite object pooling thing back out but did a much better job than I did when I attempted it. The result is a pretty startling graphical performance gain in some tests. How much it helps in your specific case... well, we'll see. But the memory-related crashes when the sprite-pool being too big and the performance problems when the sprite pool being too small shold be gone now. If you see any more crashes or other potentially-backporting-related problems, please let us know so we can deal with them. The sooner Chris can move on from that side of things, the more cool stuff will result ;)

Enjoy!

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

Thursday, July 26, 2012

AI War Beta 5.050 "Botnet Escape" Released!

This one responds to most of the remaining feedback from the last round of polls. Specifically:

The Zenith/Spire starships got their long awaited promotion into two new separate lines of starship. The Player Home Forcefield Generator got grav and tachyon coverage (and two semi-related issues with home defense were addressed). The Spire Stealth Battleship was made a little easier to catch (mainly this helps handle AI-controlled ones), and Spire Shield Guard Posts won't take so long to kill. And there was one other...

Ah, yes, the Botnet Golem. Long believed to be the most overpowered unit in the game, things weren't looking good for the Botnet. But thanks to some players reminding us how much fun that overpowered golem is, a (hopefully) better solution was reached: the botnet has retained all its power but is now its own minor faction. It functions basically as before but now we can balance it separately from the rest of the golems.

There's also a few other changes and fixes (golems/spirecraft exos are now more aggressive in general, notably), so look at the notes if you're curious :)

Enjoy!

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

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

AI War Beta 5.047-5.049 "Archived Memory" Released!

This one is mostly a quick release to get a fix to some recent memory/performance problems out along with an advanced setting slider to help players directly experiencing those problems see if the sprite-pooling (or lack thereof) really is the cause.

Also a significant rework to the Spire Archive, which won the most recent "Worst Unit" poll. We'll be dealing with the other winners from that poll and the two nerf polls soon too, but we wanted to get that sprite pooling thing out sooner than later so we can get feedback and see what else needs to be done on that side of things. There's a couple miscellaneous changes in there too, and if you like Zenith Electric Bombers you'll like that they're now immune to instakill (Ion Cannons = Now Sad).

Update: 5.048 just removes an optimization in 5.047 that was causing something very like a memory leak. Sorry about the goof there.

Update: 5.049 fixes a problem with the new Spire Archive seeding logic where it was trying to put them on invalid planets (rather, planets that would be valid later but weren't at that point in the process). This would cause starting a game to fail when it happened, so wanted to get the fix out now.

Enjoy!

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

Saturday, July 21, 2012

AI War Beta 5.046 "The AI Is Not Amused" Released!

This one deals with the resurgence of a most bothersome bug (for those not following the link, it's a joke about people beating 10/10). On higher difficulties the AI will now be harder to "put to sleep" with AIP reduction. The AI will now be more clever with the schizo-wave modifier and still send homogenous waves some of the time because they're sometimes more effective (particularly pure-bomber and pure-frigate, depending on circumstances). Reinforcements have been buffed a bit as experience since the big reinforcement-system overhaul has shown what I expected: too few reinforcements now that it's actually paying for everything. A few other things.

Oh, yea: Core Guard Posts. Those are going to hurt more now. They're still pretty quick to kill if you have a lot of firepower (indeed, the core spire shield guard post had its health cut nearly in half, and almost all of the others don't even have 10% of that), but they will take a much more serious bite out of your attacking force in the process. One of the main ideas behind the Core Guard Posts to begin with was to have a kind of "multi-stage boss battle" at the end of the game. Well, now it will be harder to gun them all down in one go ;)

The combination of the above will probably render 10/10 basically impossible to actually win in the absence of a lot of player cheese. But I thought that after the last time I buffed 10/10, so I'm figuring someone will prove me wrong :) If, on the other hand, I've made things too excruciating, please do let us know. Balance is an ongoing process :)

There's also the much-requested slider for controlling the intensity of the new nebula/planet/etc backgrounds, and a memory optimization that may significantly help people running insanely big scenarios squeeze in under the memory ceiling for longer.

Enjoy!

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

Thursday, July 19, 2012

AI War Beta 5.045 "It's Full Of Something Other Than Stars!" Released!

This one is a major upgrade to the game's visual fidelity (one of the big pieces of free content in 6.0 that's for everyone, not just those getting the Ancient Shadows expansion). There's also another hotfix to try to deal with the performance problems some people have been seeing since 5.042.

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.

AVWW Post-Release 1.201-1.203 "Entropic Leap" Released!

This one is our first post-1.2 beta update and it's largely responding to bug reports and feature suggestions from the past several days. Many thanks for the feedback!

But Chris also added a new monster (the Entropic Esper) and two new spells (Leaping Death and Flower X). The game should probably drop a lot of anvils on you if you rely too heavily on flower-power, but I'm not sure that was implemented.

Update: 1.202 is out now as well, and it fixes a fairly critical bug in 1.201 where interior generation would just kind of call it a day halfway through and not seed unimportant things like some doors, secret mission entrances, npcs into rescue-npc missions, etc.

Update: 1.203 hotfix is out too, and it fixes a bug that can cause doors/vents/holes to not seed in destroyed rooms in some cases.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 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 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

AI War Beta 5.043-5.044 "A Dubious Honor" Released!

This one answers the results of our sixth "Worst Unit" poll. Our "winners" were the Zenith Reserves, the Decloaker, the Captive Human Settlement, and the Spire Armor Rotter. Everyone give them a hand! Hmm, they don't seem amused. But at least they'll enjoy the buffs!

We've also dealt with a couple longstanding player annoyances in this version:

Special Forces guard posts are no longer autotargeted so you don't have to worry about your ships (or minor faction friends) shooting them up and causing the +1 AIP per SF post. Another change was necessary to prevent that from being cheesed (to drain off AI reinforcements), but that's done too.

Now when the AI buys new stuff from the Zenith Trader, the resulting structures will not generate AIP when killed. So the AI can still replace warp gates and plant black hole machines and such with the trader, but it won't cost you AIP to take those trader-bought ones out. To compensate, there's a new item in the trader's AI-only shop. It's fairly nasty, but I'm sure the players will be the better judge of that.

And there's a few other fixes and balance changes in there.

Update: the 5.044 hotfix is out now, with a change that we hope will help with the performance problems people have been seeing in 5.042+. If it doesn't we'll need to do something more drastic.

Enjoy!

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

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

AI War Beta 5.042 "Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain" Released!

This one contains a lot of engine improvements backported from AVWW. Rendering is now more efficient, and in theory a lot of the textbox issues should be dealt with now.

There's also a bunch of little fixes to recent stuff like the energy rework, drones, and the line-place context menu. And some balance changes to carriers and turrets that should make defense a little more pleasant from the human perspective.

But (and here's the reason for the release name) the majority of the work that's gone into this release isn't even in the notes or visible in the game, because it went into the framework for the major feature of the upcoming expansion. Still not ready to talk about it, but it's coming along 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.

Friday, July 13, 2012

AVWW 1.2 and AI War Expansion 4 News as Steam Summer Sale Rages

The Steam Summer Sale is on! All of our currently released games and expansions are on sale for the duration of the event.

Here's the breakdown:

Other great indies on sale:

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

AI War Betas 5.036-5.041 Released!

Catching up on some recent updates to AI War. Sorry about not mentioning them on the blog before, I (Keith) am new to actually pushing these updates out myself :)

In chronological order:

5.036 had several important enhancements to AI viciousness to ~~retaliate for~~ celebrate a recent 10/10 victory, and also added a bunch of brand-new "drone" ships that are exclusive to the neinzul enclave starship but require turret research to unlock. There were also some important changes to scaling in multi-HW games, and some general bugfixes and balances

5.037 was basically bugfixes and balance. Some for stuff added in the previous version, some more longstanding.

5.038 answered some very longstanding player-convenience requests. Namely, it made human fortresses, forcefields, and command stations all drop remains and thus be automatically rebuildable if you had Remains Rebuilders on duty (with a new rule to prevent exploitation of the command station rebuilding, but removing some older less-intuitive rules). More bugfixes, too.

5.039 was just bugfixes and a quick change to make Remains Rebuilders work outside supply so the 5.038 changes would work as intended, since no major exploits seemed obvious.

5.040 followed up on a lot of feedback we've received on the energy model over the past couple years. The new model isn't perfect, but it does involve a lot less micro and feedback is very positive thus far. More balance and a bugfix, too.

5.041 is just one feature I was in the middle of and wanted to get out there before shifting into higher gear on the ongoing expansion work, but if you've ever used (or wanted to use) mines in a serious capacity you'll be happy about it: the ability to place a straight line of many units of the same type (optionally packing them as tightly as the game would allow, particularly nice for mines).

Enjoy!

These are standard updates 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: Ancient Shadows Teaser / Q&A

To stave off the inevitable questions, and because we're not that cruel:

Is This The Fourth Expansion Pack For AI War: Fleet Command?

Yes.

When Will The Expansion Be Coming Out?

In all likelihood, October.

When Will The Beta/Preorder Process Start?
"Soon." In the past with our AI War expansions, we set the game up for pre-order as soon as we were adding the first ships into the game. This time we've taken a different approach, and there will be substantially more content available from day 1 of the beta (which all preorder customers get access to).

What Will The Full Price Be?
$4.99 USD, the same as our other full expansions are currently priced.

But The Other Expansions Started Out At A Higher Price
Yes, originally The Zenith Remnant and Light of the Spire were $9.99. Ancient Shadows will have a bit less content than those two expansions due to starting at the lower price point. However, we feel that the content represented here is exciting enough to make this expansion more than hold its own if you're trying to choose between this expansion and one of the others.

What Is The Focus Of The Expansion?
Every expansion up until now was focused on a single alien race (zenith, neinzul, and then spire). When we released the "Alien Bundle" last year, we also mentioned that that marked the end of the alien-themed expansions. Thematically, this expansion returns to all three alien races plus the humans themselves.

Will There Also Be Updates For The Base Game?
A few. It's more along the lines of what changed between AI War 2.0 and The Zenith Remnant (3.0), but still good stuff. The game has been slowly refined since Light of the Spire came out in early 2011, and our opinion is that it's not in need of another major overhaul like we saw with 2.0 or 4.0.

Will This Impact Development Of A Valley Without Wind?
It hasn't so far. ;) We're going to be exerting a more concerted effort to go ahead and get this thing finished once we open it up for preorders, so that will in fact pull Keith away from AVWW for about half his working hours for the next month or two of development. Chris's focus will remain almost solely on AVWW during this time period, although he'll be supporting Keith with art and some other related things for AI War 6.0 and Ancient Shadows.

What's The Feature List?
We'll have more information on this sort of thing for you later! Right now we're playing this a bit close to the vest (uncharacteristically for us, I know).

Anything Else You Can Share?
Well, here's a graphical preview of some of the ships!