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.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Monday, May 12, 2014
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
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.
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.
Monday, May 5, 2014
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.
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.
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.
Friday, May 2, 2014
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.
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.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
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. ;)
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:
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.
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.
Monday, April 28, 2014
TLF Version 1.006 Beta Released (Besieging And Federating)
Version 1.006 Beta
is now out, and is another wonderfully vast 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 tomorrow or the next day, as I really want for everyone to be able to get these new goodies.
This version includes a whole lot of changes to how NPC vs NPC battles take place at planets, when one is besieging another. This should result in much more pleasing results, but let us know what you think. There are also some changes to where races will sometimes capture outposts rather than destroying them, which is also a nice (player suggested) touch.
Golly, there's also a bunch of new stuff relating to attitude shifts and influence shifts in various specific circumstances relating to certain hostiles alliances in particular. Members of some hostile alliances can get disgusted with other members of their alliance and break away, which means that -- if you manipulate the attitudes to make this happen -- you can engineer the fall of an enemy alliance without having to resort to genocidal violence. That's a nice new option. ;)
---------------Federating ---------------
The Federation Points system that I tried out last version were a fiasco, and a great example of why I wanted to do it as a beta branch. Those have been removed, and a whole mess of other changes have been added relating to federating:
1. The general influence and credit costs for the standard routes of convincing races to join existing federations have gone up pretty much 10x. You can't just speed through that anymore. But! Before you cry foul, keep reading.
2. Depending on what races are already in the federation, the influence requirements go either up or down. So it can be either utterly ridiculous requirements for you to directly add them, making that impossible, or it can be something that goes back down to previous values, depending on the makeup of your federation. That's pretty nifty. But it's still not enough, so again keep reading.
3. There are now two new ways to get races into the federation.
3.a. If a race is getting beaten to a pulp by a non-federation race, then they suddenly become really open to the idea of the federation. The credit costs are a lot lower, as are the influence requirements. So you can opportunistically get races in this way.
3.b. If a race has an RCI value of -2000 or worse (the specific RCI category that is required varies for each race), then they will absolutely have the lowest possible thresholds for credit to join a federation, and they only require -200 influence from you, which is obviously pathetically low. So! This makes a non-influence, non-attitude way of getting races into the federation: if you can figure out a way to make their key RCI value go all the way down to Scarytown levels without them catching on that it is you (and thus hating you more than -200), then you can get them into the federation in a very dubious fashion.
4. But wait, there is still more! Previously, the only real ways to get races to have attitudes that are better towards one another were through trade routes and gifting of techs. Trade routes are cool, but they are basically risk-free (there is practically no opportunity cost to them), and they are also extremely finite, so not something that you can stack at all).
This release adds FIFTEEN new buildings that are all aimed at passive attitude shifts from other races toward the race that owns the building. The races will not build these on their own, it's all at your discretion via Property Development. My favorite bit about these new buildings is that they all have pros and cons -- some races are happy with each building to varying degrees, and others are unhappy with them to varying degrees. Because of that interesting opportunity cost, you can stack these a lot more than you can the trade routes and it still works out well (in my testing so far).
5. And this is the last thing: previously, there were reports of essentially an exploit where you could federate and then just snap up non-spacefaring races as soon as they became spacefaring. First of all, on hard strategic difficulty, time-until-spacefaring was getting longer instead of shorter, which is now fixed. Facepalm. But even more key, the races that are non-spacefaring start getting pretty miffed when you federate without even bothering to help them get spacefaring tech first. Their attitude toward the federation races steadily drops, as does your influence with them. I like this because it is absolutely sensible as a reaction from them, and it neatly nips that particular exploit off.
--------------- 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 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. ;)
This version includes a whole lot of changes to how NPC vs NPC battles take place at planets, when one is besieging another. This should result in much more pleasing results, but let us know what you think. There are also some changes to where races will sometimes capture outposts rather than destroying them, which is also a nice (player suggested) touch.
Golly, there's also a bunch of new stuff relating to attitude shifts and influence shifts in various specific circumstances relating to certain hostiles alliances in particular. Members of some hostile alliances can get disgusted with other members of their alliance and break away, which means that -- if you manipulate the attitudes to make this happen -- you can engineer the fall of an enemy alliance without having to resort to genocidal violence. That's a nice new option. ;)
---------------Federating ---------------
The Federation Points system that I tried out last version were a fiasco, and a great example of why I wanted to do it as a beta branch. Those have been removed, and a whole mess of other changes have been added relating to federating:
1. The general influence and credit costs for the standard routes of convincing races to join existing federations have gone up pretty much 10x. You can't just speed through that anymore. But! Before you cry foul, keep reading.
2. Depending on what races are already in the federation, the influence requirements go either up or down. So it can be either utterly ridiculous requirements for you to directly add them, making that impossible, or it can be something that goes back down to previous values, depending on the makeup of your federation. That's pretty nifty. But it's still not enough, so again keep reading.
3. There are now two new ways to get races into the federation.
3.a. If a race is getting beaten to a pulp by a non-federation race, then they suddenly become really open to the idea of the federation. The credit costs are a lot lower, as are the influence requirements. So you can opportunistically get races in this way.
3.b. If a race has an RCI value of -2000 or worse (the specific RCI category that is required varies for each race), then they will absolutely have the lowest possible thresholds for credit to join a federation, and they only require -200 influence from you, which is obviously pathetically low. So! This makes a non-influence, non-attitude way of getting races into the federation: if you can figure out a way to make their key RCI value go all the way down to Scarytown levels without them catching on that it is you (and thus hating you more than -200), then you can get them into the federation in a very dubious fashion.
4. But wait, there is still more! Previously, the only real ways to get races to have attitudes that are better towards one another were through trade routes and gifting of techs. Trade routes are cool, but they are basically risk-free (there is practically no opportunity cost to them), and they are also extremely finite, so not something that you can stack at all).
This release adds FIFTEEN new buildings that are all aimed at passive attitude shifts from other races toward the race that owns the building. The races will not build these on their own, it's all at your discretion via Property Development. My favorite bit about these new buildings is that they all have pros and cons -- some races are happy with each building to varying degrees, and others are unhappy with them to varying degrees. Because of that interesting opportunity cost, you can stack these a lot more than you can the trade routes and it still works out well (in my testing so far).
5. And this is the last thing: previously, there were reports of essentially an exploit where you could federate and then just snap up non-spacefaring races as soon as they became spacefaring. First of all, on hard strategic difficulty, time-until-spacefaring was getting longer instead of shorter, which is now fixed. Facepalm. But even more key, the races that are non-spacefaring start getting pretty miffed when you federate without even bothering to help them get spacefaring tech first. Their attitude toward the federation races steadily drops, as does your influence with them. I like this because it is absolutely sensible as a reaction from them, and it neatly nips that particular exploit off.
--------------- 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 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. ;)
Friday, April 25, 2014
TLF Version 1.005 Beta Released (Holy Smokes It's Big )
Version 1.005 Beta
is now out, and is monstrously, wonderfully huge. This one changes so many things that we're releasing it only as a beta version (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 it's fully tested out, we'll push it out in the normal way.
This version has auto-resolve for battles, as described a couple of days ago. However, it is hot off the presses and I have not yet had a chance to do much testing with it in enough varied situations, so that's a big part of why this is a beta build.
Other notable stuff:
* The least-popular mission types have all been heavily revised in ways we think you'll like.
* Solar map performance is vastly better in the late game.
* There is a new "Federation Points" system, which again I've not had sufficient time to test the balance or clarity of, because auto-resolve was taking so long. This new feature is huge, and helps to give games a more natural arc. Federation Points basically keep track of how much a race likes the idea of the federation.
* There are also some important bugfixes.
All through next 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 (tonight there's a bunch of stuff at once in one day because several of the features were THAT large, but normally that won't be the case). 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 next week, 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 soon. 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. ;)
This version has auto-resolve for battles, as described a couple of days ago. However, it is hot off the presses and I have not yet had a chance to do much testing with it in enough varied situations, so that's a big part of why this is a beta build.
Other notable stuff:
* The least-popular mission types have all been heavily revised in ways we think you'll like.
* Solar map performance is vastly better in the late game.
* There is a new "Federation Points" system, which again I've not had sufficient time to test the balance or clarity of, because auto-resolve was taking so long. This new feature is huge, and helps to give games a more natural arc. Federation Points basically keep track of how much a race likes the idea of the federation.
* There are also some important bugfixes.
All through next 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 (tonight there's a bunch of stuff at once in one day because several of the features were THAT large, but normally that won't be the case). 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 next week, 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 soon. 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. ;)
The Last Federation 'Second Chance Sale' on Bundle Stars
The Last Federation's release week has officially concluded, but those who missed out on the 25% off discount still have a chance to pick up the game at its reduced launch price of $14.99.
We were a little late to the party in regards to getting TLF up on Bundle Stars, and our delay is the latecomer's gain. The store is essentially offering a second chance sale that doesn't end until May 2nd -- a launch discount so nice, they ran it twice.
Here's what the press is saying about the game:
"For fans of space-faring simulation games, it's more or less a must."
8/10 – Richard Nolan, Strategy Informer
"Arcen Games nailed it with this game."
TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit
“A revolutionary twist on the 4X legends of yore.”
8/10 (Editor's Choice) – Jonathan Lester, Dealspwn
"A true masterpiece to behold."
8/10 – Callum Shephard, Starburst Magazine
"An exceptional game and quite possibly the best one Arcen Games has released to date."
9/10 – Vincent Paone, Dad's Gaming Addiction
The strong launch means a lot more to come for the game moving forward (beyond what Chris has already detailed). We'll have new details to share very soon. Thanks again to everyone who has made this such a successful release for us!
We were a little late to the party in regards to getting TLF up on Bundle Stars, and our delay is the latecomer's gain. The store is essentially offering a second chance sale that doesn't end until May 2nd -- a launch discount so nice, they ran it twice.
Here's what the press is saying about the game:
"For fans of space-faring simulation games, it's more or less a must."
8/10 – Richard Nolan, Strategy Informer
"Arcen Games nailed it with this game."
TotalBiscuit, The Cynical Brit
“A revolutionary twist on the 4X legends of yore.”
8/10 (Editor's Choice) – Jonathan Lester, Dealspwn
"A true masterpiece to behold."
8/10 – Callum Shephard, Starburst Magazine
"An exceptional game and quite possibly the best one Arcen Games has released to date."
9/10 – Vincent Paone, Dad's Gaming Addiction
The strong launch means a lot more to come for the game moving forward (beyond what Chris has already detailed). We'll have new details to share very soon. Thanks again to everyone who has made this such a successful release for us!
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