AI War: Fleet Command

I totally lied about break time. I just finished a new campaign. This one was on the concentric circles galaxy map. I played two 7.6 AI types that send lots of big waves, but it was pretty easy because the planets were lightly defended. I left one warp gate and put a bunch of turrets there. I boomed my economy so I even had enough income for a SuperFortress from the Zenith trader.

I learned something about bugs in the game engine. Occasionally I’d notice that the AI hadn’t sent a wave in 30-60 minutes. I asked about this on the forum. Chris told me it might be the AI code crashing in the game. I checked the text files in the game directory and the RuntimeData subdirectory. Sure enough, they had a few date stamps with some runtime exceptions. I restarted the game and the waves came back. Keep that in mind if you think something feels weird, or restart the game more often during those 4 hour sessions.

For my next campaign, I want to try a 20 planet snake map to see if I can take each planet one by one. I’m going up to 8 difficulty too because I’m always maxed out on resources. I’m considering an ironman game as well. I still save scum most of my campaigns instead of letting myself lose.

Ok, so this is going to be a really, really dumb question I’m sure, but the Arcenwiki hasn’t helped me on this, and the in-game help didn’t seem to quite cover it in detail enough.

Is there a breakdown somewhere of what all the terms/abbreviations mean in the planet summary blurb when you highlight a planet on the galaxy map? Drives me nuts that I can’t just select a planet and then hover over the description blurb for tooltips that expand the abbreviations into full terms.

I think if you go to the planet itself you should be able to mouseover the individual structures on the right hand side list, even if you don’t have a presence there. This may change depending on your Fog of War settings.

Until I finish my current game I’m not patching up, which means I’m missing out on an amazing amount of content they’ve already added for the new expansion. Talk of story arcs ingame is intriguing me, I really don’t know what to expect.

Tim: Iron Man is the only way to play! :)

Three words: alternate victory conditions.

Oh, and really big ships, too.

Awww yeah.

New update that came out yesterday if anyone is interested:

Original: Arcen Games News Has Moved!: AI War Beta 4.065, "Defender Chronicles," Released!

This one is jam-packed with some pretty significant gameplay changes. First up is defender mode, from which this patch takes it’s name. I actually forgot to mention it in the release notes summary last week, but one of those patches actually improved some of the stuff about defender mode, in terms of the timing of waves, etc. Well, this patch changes a whole ton of stuff about it, to the point that defender mode is pretty much ready to go – pending your testing feedback, of course.

I should go on and mention at this point that we’re gearing up for an official release of what is now being called AI War 5.0, along with Light of the Spire, this Thursday or Friday if all goes well. Again, pending your testing feedback – so be sure to let us know about the most serious issues you want us to be sure to fix before 5.0 hits. We’re trying to weed out the trivial stuff at this stage, and are just focusing on those remaining pieces of polish that are actually really important for the next official.

Why the change to calling this release 5.0 instead of 4.4? Because so much has changed it’s really a whole new era compared to 4.021, the current official version. Almost every ship in the game has been rebalanced, tons and tons of new gameplay rules and mechanics have been added, and in general the “feel” of the game is as different from 4.0 as version 3.0 was from version 2.0. In general, I really feel like 5.0 combines a lot of what was best about all the past eras: the general difficulty of 2.0, the good parts of the pacing from 3.0 and 4.0, most of the rules shifts from 4.0, the sub-battlefields centering around forcefields and fortresses from the 1.0 era, and so forth.

But, back to the release at hand: some of the other significant changes I actually already alluded to. The way that AI forcefields and AI fortresses work has been really overhauled – much too many changes to list here, but the basic idea is that you have to get up close and personal with bombers with them, and that siege starships are relegated to a somewhat shifted role. In general, all of the ultra-long-range non-sniper stuff is now not so long range anymore. Still notable, but not in a way that combines all the sub-battlefields of a single planet into one giant melting pot.

AI Eyes have also been significantly redone in that you can’t easily snipe them in advance of killing the rest of the planet. It can be done, but it’s now got the same health and tedium as killing a wormhole command post. And, like the wormhole command posts, a similar more fun solution: kill all the guard posts, and the AI Eye dies automatically. This really encourages smaller raiding fleets, or groups of starships, rather than players just sniping the AI Eye before they roll in with their normal giant fleet. Accordingly, there will also be fewer AI Eyes scattered around in new savegames, too.

The fortresses and forcefields of the AI have also seen some seeding changes for new games, which will really change how some of the AI types feel personality-wise: more defensive or less, etc. And with the general effect of not having quite so many fortresses in many cases. Again, these only affect new savegames, since it affects stuff that would already have been seeded in existing saves.

In terms of bugfixes, there were some issues in the last version with ships overshooting wormholes, with group move, and with speed boosting. All of those should now be fixed, though the group move/speed boosting ones took quite a bit of changing the command structure for a number of gamecommands to get working. Oh, and there was yet another bug with AI maws permanently hanging on to some player ships. Fixed for good this time, hopefully.

Lastly, that command-stations-must-be-built-within-proximity-to-the-colony-ship thing, which most people found tedious and fiddly, has simply been removed. There are some alternate rules in place now whereby colony ships and mobile builders explode with the command station if it dies: that does a better job of meeting the original design goal of not letting the players just keep easy “spares” of colony ships right on their forward bases to insta-rebuild them, but it does so in a way that’s not mechanically annoying and that actually works.

Oh, and there are some awesome new modular ship module graphics by HitmanN. Check them out!

Anyway, so lots of new stuff here. Bear in mind we’re trying to wind down and keep the game as stable as possible, shooting for something that is basically as polished and balanced a version as possible of what we’ve got going here. This is probably the last pre-5.0 beta version that’s going to significantly alter anything beyond balance and bugfixes (well, and some art), but there’s still plenty left on our list regarding balance and bugfixes alone. As always, thanks for your support – and 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.

I’ve been patiently checking his website every other day. I’m waiting for the full release.

For this one, I was worried about the change to AI Eyes at first. But then he said there would be less of them. I realized a greater challenge with less frequency will be more enjoyable than what we have now.

Yeah, I stopped updating my current game because there was lots of changes and additions on a near-daily basis at one point. Amazing amounts of work being put in, but almost intimidating to someone who’s not used to it.

The game is inching ever so closer to version 5.0

Here is the latest update:

Original: Arcen Games News Has Moved!: AI War Beta 4.070 Released -- Release Candidate 1!

This one brings us very close to the next official release, which will be 5.0. The last major issue is one multiplayer desync that we’re chasing down. As soon as that is resolved, we’re pretty much ready to go. There are a few last things we intend to tweak and fix, but it’s expected that this is the last of the really large pre-5.0 betas. And boy is this one large.

This one includes the last of the major pre-5.0 rebalancing that we’re intending to do – although feedback on ship balance is still welcome, as if there are further tweaks that seem needed from player reports, we will make them even prior to 5.0. We’re just done with the balancing work we’re planning to do in the absence of further player reports.

The way that the AIs act around their own force fields is now a lot better in general, and so is their logic for how they act when there are a few player ships on their planets. Cross Planet Attacks have seen a pretty large overhaul, with some helpful new text messages on arrival as well as some helpful-to-the-AI new rules adjustments for them that allow them to look in new places to find the ships needed to free for the CPA event. Oh, and all CPAs are now twice as large, to make matters even worse. With the larger wave sizes, it only makes sense, as in recent iterations the CPAs were not at all the terrifying events they once were. Now they are again.

A large part of today was spent desync-hunting for that one main desync that people are experiencing. We haven’t found it yet, but we did find a number of other very obscure desyncs that hadn’t been reported yet, and those are fixed. Along with various other fixes resulting from the search, and also other little changes and fixes that were due to player reports, of course.

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 AI War Schedule For The Next Few Days

So what next? At the moment we’re not really looking for large numbers of refinement suggestions from players, as we’re trying to keep the number of potentially bug-introducing changes to a minimum. Our plan is to mostly leave the codebase as-is, aside from those few changes that we either feel are safe to make, or just absolutely critical to make.

That said, if you do have an idea, always feel free to share – they just go into the Considering or Minor Fix For Later or Feature For Later categories when we’re not in an immediate position to address them. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t interested, so keep firing away!

Meanwhile, what we are interested in for the short term are any last balance thoughts people have, any bugs that are critical to fix for 5.0, and most importantly any clues as to desyncs if you’re having them. And if you’re playing multiplayer on the latest betas without any desyncs, we want to know that too! When it comes to desyncs, there is very specific information that we need, so please be sure to read the desync reporting guidelines to make sure that we can make use of your report. We appreciate it! These are a specific form of bug that are very challenging to find, and thus require special reporting.

A Valley Without Wind Kicking Off
While we give this version of AI War some time to rest in player hands and make sure there aren’t any critical issues, when we’re not working on those last tweaks or the desync search, we’re going to be starting in on A Valley Without Wind work. A number of the music tracks are already done, and they are awesome. Keith got the basics of the engine stripped down and split out for us to build the new codebase on, and I’m really excited to get working on both the code for that along with Keith, and the art stuff in all my new 3D rendering tools.

I hope to have some very early screenshots in a week or less, and we’ll share some of the music at that time, too. We’ll also start doing some development diaries to talk about our progress on the game and specific topics related to that, since there’s been a lot of interest in that sort of thing. We’re still shooting for a first public alpha version sometime in March, but it could theoretically be earlier, or more likely later, than that. We’ll know more as we get closer to that stage.

Enjoy!

5.0 is finally out. I think it’s just heavy rebalance and enhancements.

There is a new campaign mode for Light of the Spire. I’ve been avoiding spoilers for it, so I’m eager to get started.

They also have a new website.

The new website seems very underwhelming. I kinda prefer the old one.

So Chris Park was kind enough to talk to me about how a couple of issues that have come up on QT3 (discount sales; pricing for indie strategy games) apply to AI War and Tidalis. It turns out discounting is very effective! - but more so for AI War than for Tidalis, which is actually the opposite of what I was expecting. On top of that, Arcen downright relies on discounts just to cover expenses. Being an indie isn’t an easy life…

Maybe I’m just dumb but how do you start a campaign in Light of the Spire? I can’t see it on the main menu.

In the match setup lobby thingy, there’s a tab with all the factions, planet-eating oddities & other cool stuff. It’s in that tab somewhere, and I’m guessing it’s called “Light” something, so you should probably look down by the “L”'s

“Fallen Spire”, IIRC.

Yeah, Fallen Spire (AI Options -> Minor factions to include).

I just finished a 30 hour Fallen Spire campaign in the expansion. Don’t enable a bunch of hard factions at high AI difficulty if it’s your first time through. I had hard-difficulty golems and Spirecraft, and advanced hybrid hives, with two 7.6 Mad Bombers. Then for fun I decided not to research MkIII ships.

There were so many high-powered strike forces attacking me that I barely had any time to do anything. But it was a great epic struggle and now I can put the game to bed until the next expansion pack.

I picked this up during the most recent Steam sale on a whim and initially I’m pretty impressed. I find most RTS micromanagement abhorrent so I’m glad AI War does away with almost all of it, and it certainly requires a different mindset than I’m used to. Anyone still playing this?

I’m still taking a well-deserved break due to the post above. I’ll pick it back up when expansion 4 comes out in Q2 2012.

I come back to it pretty frequently. It remains my favourite RTS particularly given the heavy emphasis on planning and scouting. Decision making at an overall strategic level is hugely important.