AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish

Known Issues

• Any bugs or requests should go to mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php

• Multiplayer is disabled until post-1.0 while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop (more info here).

What's this phase all about?

The game is solid at this point and something we're really proud of and that players are having fun with. But inevitably, the more people we have playing it, the more things get brought to our attention to refine and make as smooth and fun as possible. This is basically a period we've set aside for doing that sort of thing, rather than focusing on any major new content drops or other major new features.

There may still be the odd major new thing, who knows -- sometimes the volunteers or modders wind up creating something and we're certainly not going to turn that down! But by the start of this phase the game was mature and really huge already, so focusing on polish seems like the way to best serve the largest group of people.

Version 1.004

(Not yet released -- we're still working on it!)

• You are no longer allowed to hack an ARS for a ship line if that fleet already has the ship line
  • If there is any way to merge ship lines then people will want full ability to merge/split ship lines, which is not something Chris wants to allow. So for consistency's sake, this is being removed.

Bugfixes and Polish

• Toggling objective importance is now done with a Right Click. Left click keeps the old behaviour (usually centering you on the planet in question)
  • This was suggested by a few people on discord I think? I don't remember who

• Death effect damage is no longer a strangely high number. Actually, this change allows for a lot more diversification in how effective units are at applying it. The start of this is done, with more tuning to follow.
  • This is most likely a somewhat large shift in the balance of it, which feels a tad necessary? Quite a few stories of mass hordes.

• Fix a null reference when calculating energy usage
  • Reported by Edmaniac

• Fix a bug in the experimental pursuit mode implementation that could potentially issues in "normal" mode where your units would not shoot at things properly.
  • Reported by a number of people

• Structures that are under construction shouldn't generate AIP anymore if killed
  • reported by Chthon and zeusalmighty

• Fix a null reference related to the Spire Objective
  • Thanks to donblas for reporting

• Add a Tip to explain about automatically building engineers and factories and so on.
  • From a comment by donblas

• Fix some confusion about killing reconquest command stations if you haven't paid the AIP price for that planet yet. It now correctly charges you AIP and lets you scout. The tooltip for such a reconquest command station tells you what's happening
  • Thanks to zeus for reporting

• Fix a bug where the Destablilize Exogalactice Wormhole hack wasn't correctly killing the wormhole
  • Thanks to GophTheGreat for the bug report

• On particularly large maps (> 120 planets), increase the places that Officer Fleets are allowed to spawn

• Fix an exciting bug where AOE shots with > 10 potential targets were doing 10% damage to each potential target. So if there were 20 targets each taking 10% damage, that's 200% of allowed damage done. 50 targets would be 500% damage.
  • This was particularly obvious for high-mark siege frigates
  • Thanks to Puffin for reporting

• Fix a bug where AOE shots were doing too much damage when hitting a multiple stacks
  • Reported by Puffin

• Fix a bug with the tooltip on Alarm Posts; it was backwards
  • Thanks to Democracy for reporting

• Allow marauders to build outposts if the significantly outnumber the enemy; this prevents a single cloaked ship from stymying them.
  • Thanks to Vault for reporting

• Make the Cloaking hovertext a bit more obvious with colour

Instigator Polish

• Instigators now have a permanent notification (like wave notifications)
  • Note this reuses the Wormhole Invasion icon for the notification for the moment
  • Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid

• Instigators no longer show a Cumulative Effect, just a description of what the effect does and how many times it has fired.
  • The units for Cumulative Effect weren't meaningful to anyone who wasn't a developer, and it just confused people

Balance Tweaks

• Ships unloaded from a transport now have a delay before firing
  • Hopefully should make the "Unload units, snipe target, load again, run away" strategy less OP. Further changes may be necessary.

• Different AI Difficulties now increase the mark level at different AIP amounts. As a result of this, different AIs can be at different mark levels.
  • Suggested by Ovalcircle

• The Hunter and Warden fleets now get decloaking ships, in the hopes of preventing permanent scouting by cloaked units
  • From a discussion on discord I think?

• Buffed Astro Train durability and damage a bit.

• Increased self construction rate of Turrets.

• Beam Cannon reload time 4s -> 6s, damage 1,810 -> 1,500.

• Gave Forcefield Frigates the same priority as Forcefield Generators.
  • So the AI will ignore it in general if there are unprotected targets to go after.
  • Might cause a weird thing with Siphoners, but see how it goes?

• Increased Hull Tech cost by 2,500.

• Increased durability of things like Raid Engines, Alarm Posts, Data Centers, and Co Processors.

• Major Data Center only reduces AIP by 60, and increases by 90 on death.

• Increased chance of wormhole Tachyon Sentinels.

• Doorkicker Starting Fleet now has Pulsar Tanks in place of MLRS Corvettes, and Vanguards in place of Grenade Launcher Corvettes. Also removed 1 of the starting Siege Frigates.
  • This Fleet had an issue in that it had crazy synergy, with it being mostly Splash and Heavy Tech, plus not really fitting the Doorkicker name much. Both Pulsars and Vanguards have Doorkicker like abilities, and since these units can properly attack single targets, 1 Siege Frigate can be safely removed without impacting the Fleet too much, as these were apparently their own issue.

Economy And Engineering

• Drastically reduced the assist construction and repair rate of Engineers.
  • It was possible for these to eventually end up assisting Factories to absurd amounts - actually a good bit more than the Factory.

• Metal Harvesters income 80 -> 60, amount gained per mark 40 -> 30.

• Economic Command Station income gained per mark 400 -> 150.
  • While the player does have less income, the rate at which it can be spent is also much lower, so it's likely the player would start to noticeably lose a battle and retreat a good while before depleting their reserves.
  • Also, while we don't want people to be sitting around for ages waiting after a fleetwipe for it to replenish, it was also rather silly that you could do things like, to quote someone "Bleed out the praetorian guard by slapping it with wads of cash".

• Reduced energy cost of Turrets a bit.

Eyes

• Eyes can now be triggered by the number of fleets on a planet, not just the number of ships
  • This makes Eyes pretty useless against minor factions. Unclear what (if anything) should be done about that.
  • Thanks to a number of people for requesting, including Asteroid.

• Eyes are now MK7.
  • Mostly important for the Ion Eye.

• Tripled range of Plasma Eye.
  • Is now planet wide range, like the Ion Eye. No more sneaking about out of range.

• Plasma Eye damage tripled, max targets hit before spreading damage reduced to a third.
  • Means it can focus a lot more on single targets than before.

• Ion Eye now works on albedo of 0.4.
  • Yes, this means it can target most Frigates now. Eyes check Fleets, and not units, so this is possible. Also lets it target a few more Strikecraft.

• Ion Eye now has splash damage on each shot. Radius of 1,000, hitting 5 targets.
  • Done this way instead of just increasing shot count, as that many shots could be a bit too bright and painful to look at. Simple enough to change.

Flagships

• Greatly reduced Transport Flagship priority.
  • AI should focus more on killing the actual combat units around rather than chasing an unarmed ship and getting shot to bits during it.
  • Combined with the far weaker Engineers reducing the fleet replenishment rate to more...reasonable speeds, hopefully this prevents a lot of attritioning?

• Reduced durability of Transport Flagships.
  • Mostly applicable during deepstrikes.

• Differentiated the Transport Flagship types:
  • Normal ones are the same (including the above).
  • Cloaked ones are now a good bit slower.
  • Fast ones now have less health.

Hacking

• A variety of bugfixes and improvements to the internal hacking logic.

• Flagships now move much more slowly when hacking
  • Thanks to Lord Of Nothing for reporting that you could just run away from the nanocaust hack response

• Increased Cost of Intra-Galactic-Coordinator Hack (120 if owe AIP, 60 without).

• More hacks now have an escalating cost to them (1.2x what it was last time).

• Shortened and cheapened the Ion Cannon and Mass Driver hacks.

• Increased cost of Grant Ship Line and Grant Tech hacks.

• Hopefully improved the difficulty of the Super Terminal.
  • This seriously'll need more feedback. There are so many variables in it that whatever test games Puffin has is probably missing something else.

• Reduced cost of Convert ARS to Science.

• Some minor duration changes to a few.

• Added Exo-Waves on completion to a few hacks.

• Increased response strength of quite a few AI hacks.

Version 1.003 Sortable Objectives

(Released October 28th, 2019)

• Fix a bug where ARS hacks were allowing you to get 7 ship lines instead of 6
  • Thanks to Vault for reporting

• Fix an OBOB where we were reporting inconsistent stack numbers in the hover entity info text
  • Thanks to yupyip for reporting

• New installations of the game now save 3 autosaves instead of 1
  • Suggested by yupyip

• Flagships in Hold Fire Mode no longer deploy drones
  • SUggested by CWW256 on discord

• Clicking on an Objective will now tag it with an Importance. Clicking once makes an Objective High importance, putting it at the top of the displayed list. Clicking again will make it Low importance, putting that objective at the bottom. Clicking a third time makes it Normal.
  • Suggested by Greeniguana

• Add some defensive code to hoverEntity and fix a possible null reference
  • Thanks to kerzain for reporting

• Tutorial 4 now mentions you can hover on the AIP amount on the top bar for some more information.
  • Thanks to Potkeny in Discord for suggesting.

• Grant Technology hack now mentions not increasing the cost of unlocking it with Science.

• Hack Intra-Galactic Coordinator and Hack Global Command Augmenter now note exactly what the reduced cost is if you have paid the AIP cost for that planet.

Visual Polish

• Science resource bit at the top now has the same blue colour for all the amounts, rather than being a light green, so it's consistent with every other mention.

• Metal section of the top bar now has actual proper colouring.

• Cost to fully extract all the science from a planet is now in green, like most hacks are.
  • Thanks to GophTheGreat for suggesting.

• Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.
  • Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.

• Sabotage Hack now mentions it doesn't cause an AIP increase for destroying structures which would normally do so.
  • Thanks to Ranakastrasz for reporting.

• Improved the Experience tooltip information to have the correct logic and perhaps read a little bit better.

• The "Ally to AI" setting description now explicitly says that all player-allied factions are also allied.
  • From a discussion with Astra on discord

• Knockback now has the correct unit in the tooltips.
  • Thanks to Chthonic_One for reporting.

• Hacking resource hovertext on the top bar now has the hacking point amounts in green rather than a red.

• AIP hovertext on the top bar has some minor colour additions, as well as an explanation of what the AIP Floor actually is, as well as stating reduction is never wasted.
  • Thanks to Nuc_Temeron, Halfshell cat, right01, amblingalong and Pexpy in Steam Discussion for prompting this.

• Raid Engines now show on the galaxy map.
  • Suggested by gigastar in Discord.

• Hunter Waves option is renamed to Threat Waves, and description updated to be clearer.
  • They never actually joined the Hunter Fleet immediately - they were threat, so it was rather in error.

• Added some information about how threat is generated, and it eventually joining the Hunter Fleet to the info displayed by hovering over the top bar area.

Balance Changes

• Decoy Drone damage halved, tripled build time, health reduced 25%.
  • Puffin was finding these were a bit absurd in extended practice. More testing required.

• Grant Technology Hack cost increased to 20.

• The Engineer and Factory changes from previous, as those were missed.

Version 1.002 ARSes, Instigators, and Tech Vaults, Oh My

(Released October 25th, 2019)

• ALL of these changes are thanks to Badger and Puffin. Chris was working on the world's longest AMA for some reason: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/dmhlu6/ama_i_am_chris_park_founder_of_arcen_games_and/

• Add some new Quick Starts by community member zeusalmighty

• Experimental Targeting Change
  • Under Galaxy Settings -> Units there's now a setting to enable/disable a new pursuit mode.
  • This mode makes ships prefer to kill all nearby units before moving on; hopefully it will make Drones less apt to go aggro guard posts everywhere.
    • Looking for player feedback on this
    • This also will affect the way AI ships will fight, so I'm loooking for feedback on that aspect as well

Balance Changes

• Transport Flagships now cost very little energy.
  • This was originally so they would be hurt more by Nucleophilic units, but you can usually just micro them around and that's...not really fun or interesting. So just greatly reduce it, since you were otherwise being penalised for using the custom ones.
  • Thanks to Asteroid and seemingly others for bringing up.

• The Human Resistance Fighters now help less often in battles, so it feels more rare/special when they do. They also can't go back to a planet for at least 15 minutes after their last time there.
  • I forget who asked for this (sorry). They used to attack about 60% of the time, now it's more like 30%

• Macrophages now need more metal to do things on Hostile To Players Only mode. Also decrease base telium income when that telium has harvesters on the map; harvesting should be the primary form of income
  • Thanks to zeus for suggesting

• Crippled flagships now have a 5 minute delay until they are eligible to be repaired. This is to make crippling a Bigger Deal in battles where you might have engineers
  • Note that taking the crippled flagship out of combat (ie to another planet where there are no enemies) will reset the repair delay
    • From a discussion about flagships on discord

• Engineers and Combat Engineers have less health, and are also much higher target priority for the AI.
  • From discussion about support fleets on discord.

• Combat Factories are much higher priority for the AI.
  • From discussion about support fleets on discord.

Bugfixes

• Fix a few problems with quickstarts
  • Thanks to Arnaud for reporting

• Fix a bug where the Dark Spire could give errors after it has killed all the players and AIs in the game.
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for bringing about the triumph of the Dark Spire

• Fix a strange null reference exception in some findHumanKing code in the game lobby
  • Spotted by Nuc_Temeron on stream

• Fixed Mini Cluster Bombs being swappable. Woops.
  • Thanks to Mayheim on Steam for reporting.

• Launching with OpenGL instead of DirectX11 can be problematic for some people, so on GOG the default launch is now DirectX11. On Steam it still shows you the option of which you want, but starts with DirectX11 as the default.
  • Thanks to Ronin Storm and Pheespud for reporting.

Polish

• Replace a few mentions of FRD with Pursuit Mode in the Settings
  • Thanks to Volatar for reporting

• Fix a typo in the Auto-Kite setting
  • Thanks to Thotimx

• The button in the lower left that just said "Coming Soon" now says "Chat Menu. Coming Soon" so it's clear what it is.
• Include mention of the shortcut for toggling between the galaxy map/planet screen in the tooltip for the planet name in the top left.
• Improve the tooltip for the clock to mention the buttons that control game speed
• Add more colours to the incoming wave tooltip
  • From a remarkably uncivil and poorly written screed on Steam

• Fix a typo in the explanation for the Praetorian Guard
  • Thanks to unicurse for the bug report

• The 'Threat Detail' window available when you click on the Threat icon in the resource bar now shows threat in traditional Strength units (with the raw value divided by 1K).
  • Thanks to Thotimx and Puffin for pointing this out

• The 'Threat Detail' window now shows the total visible hunter/warden strength in the galaxy

• Fix a bug where Nanocaust ships were winding up being counted as Threat incorrectly

• Improve the colouring in the science tooltips
  • Thanks to yupyip for reporting

• Some tutorial improvements. Includes a bunch of colour.
  • Thanks to yupyip for pointing it out.

• Fix a typo in the AIP history display when claiming structures

• If a wave is against a minor faction that owns a planet, the game now tries harder to show the faction name in the tooltip.
• If a wave is not against a player planet, the icon will turn grey more consistently.

• Alarm Posts now show up on the galaxy map.
  • Pretty neat idea.
  • Thanks to Jaridan on Steam for suggesting.

• Add some colour to the counterattack notification hovertext to improve readability.
  • Thanks to yupyip for the suggestion

• Fix a typo in the hacking description for local watch hacks
  • Thanks to Volatar for the bug report

• Show better colours for zombies in tooltips
  • Thanks to yupyip, Apthorpe and darkarchon

ARS Changes

• Improve the 'cant hack due to too many ship lines' message for the ARS hack to explicitly call out which fleet you are using, and mention that the hack is done by the closest flagship
  • Some people on Steam were finding this confusing.

• Fix a bug where custom fleets couldn't hack ARS for more ship lines
  • Thanks to zeus and Chromatism for reporting

• Fix a bug where Lone Wolf Fleets could hack ARS
  • Thanks to AnnoyingOrange for reporting

• Fix a bug where things like Hydra Heads were being counted as ship lines for the purposes of an ARS hack
  • This bug has popped up in so many places, fixing it is like, well, killing the heads on a hydra
    • Thanks to yupyip for reporting this one

• ARS Reroll hacks cost less Hacking Points but have a stronger response

• ARS to Science conversion hack now grants more science

• ARSs are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time
  • A small nerf to ARS hacks, given that every other changes constitute a buff to the player

Instigator Changes

• Some nerfs to Instigators; decrease their power and make the bases spawn less frequently

• Fix a bug where Instigator Bases weren't correctly tracking their cumulative effect
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting I look at this

• Fix some punctuation issues with Instigator Base descriptions

• Instigator bases now report how many times the effect has triggered

Tech Vault Changes

• The "Turn Tech Vault into Science" hack now grants a bit more science

• Add a "Reroll Tech granted by Tech Vault" hack

• Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade
  • It seems like everyone wants this

• Tech Vaults are now owned by AI factions, so hacking them will increase AI hacking response over time
  • A small nerf to Tech Vault hacks, given that every other changes constitute a strong buff to the player

Version 1.001 Official Game Launch!

(Released October 21st, 2019)

• Add some Tips with a brief explanation of what the AI sub-fleets (Warden, hunter etc) do.

• The first time you click the Single Player menu (after this build), it gives you a modal prompt asking you if you'd like to do the tutorials first, or if you'd like to just play. This should help prevent people from missing that there are tutorials.
  • We did NOT add the tutorials to the Single Player menu, however, as that just gets very cluttered and makes the whole menu harder to read.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.

• The Tutorials button on the right side of the main menu is now colorized and flashes very subtly every half second between two almost-identical colors. This should be much more noticeable without being obnoxious, and without cluttering up something like the single-player menu.
  • Thanks to Asteroid and Badger for inspiring this change.

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug where the hovertext for a command station in the sidebar reported the wrong number of turrets
  • Thanks to Wurfell on Steam for reporting.

• The AIP history for games begun from Quick Starts will now show AIP change from you as from your username, not "Puffin"

• Fixed a rare exception that can happen in EmitOnAOEParticles.
  • It will now log more info, and just do so silently, and not actually impede play like it previously did.
  • Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.

Polish

• Super Terminal now mentions the Exo-Galactic Strikes.
  • Thanks to kocur4d for prompting.

• Don't let the AI launch mini-waves after exploration/watching hacks
  • It was confusing. Thanks to Puffin for report.

• The Metal launch option on OSX has been removed, as that was still launching under OpenGL anyway.

• Non-Steam builds no longer try to log into Steam and complain in the log if they can't, and nor do they show "Not logged into Steam" on the main menu.
  • This gave the impression that the Steam client was required, when it definitely in no way is. These behaviors do still exist for Steam copies of the game, but just so that you can tell if you're not logged in right for whatever reason.

• Improve the Instigator Base description to explicitly state that the base effect ends with the death of the base
  • Suggested by Apthorpe and Echthelon

Balance Tweaks

• The Dark Spire Ward now instantly blows up any DS ships that enter the planet. The Ward's description has been updated to match
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for the report.

• Doubled range of Devourer Golem.
  • Thanks to Badger for bringing up the Devourer.

• Doubled drone count of the basic Combat Factory.
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.

• Repair units now repair shields at the same rate as hull.
  • Outdated change from when personal shields cost metal to repair.

• Tweaked cost of Dire Guardians.

Golems and Arks

• Armored Golem damage 1,000 -> 2,000, Sabot damage 2,000 -> 3,000, range 8000 -> 10,100.

• Cursed Golem damage 700 -> 1,250, Sabot damage 1,500 -> 2,000.

• Black Widow Golem speed 600 -> 1,000, damage 200 -> 350.

• Artillery Golem damage 100,000 -> 200,000.

• Botnet Golem damage 450 -> 2,000, shots per salvo 50 -> 80, can only target mobile units, can't target high mass targets, costs 50 AIP to capture instead of 20, and is a Lone Wolf like the Hive Golem.
  • AI Botnet Golem has a lower chance to spawn on AI planets as well.
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting.
  • Note existing ones will still have their Fleet, and will kind of look a bit odd in the Intel Tab saying it's a Lone Wolf, even though it's still got a Fleet with it. New ones will be normal.

• Standardised AI Golems to be 3x the durability and damage of a player Golem.
  • They were pretty close as is, apparently.
  • Also gave them proper costs now.

• Rorqual Hegira damage 3,000 -> 7,000, now takes half damage for 5 seconds after using a wormhole, does bonus damage to shields and also has vampirism, similar to the Siphoner unit.

• Thanatos single shot weapon damage 6,000 -> 12,000, Parasite Bolt damage 600 -> 900.

• Ark One damage 350 -> 1050.

• Orchid damage 7,000 -> 14,000, repair rate increased 50%, repair range doubled.

• Gryn damage 6,000 -> 16,000, increased fleet unit construction rate 33%.

• Ark AIP cost reduced from 20 to 15.

• Reduced AI counterattack bonus for crippling some player Fleet centerpieces.

Starting Fleets

• Mass Combat Engineer starting Support Fleet design now uses the Rejuvenator Combat Factory instead.
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty for suggesting replacing this, as it was really unappealing.

Version 0.954 Hacking Log!

(Released October 18th, 2019)

• When you click on the Hacking icon in the resource bar you get a history of all the hacking points you've spent.
  • Nota Bene: This will only apply to hacks you do after you install this patch

• Tweak the helping hands tooltip to mention leaving the marauders their own planets
  • From a conversation with Genrazian

• For the hover planet info, explicitly call out if taking the planet would cause AIP, and show the AIP in Red to make it stand out. Also more explicitly call out minor faction owners
  • From a conversation with Genrazian

• Fix a bug where the game was showing incorrect colours for enemy strength on galaxy screen if the planet was owned by a minor faction.
  • Thanks to Genrazian for reporting

• Fix a bug where having partially claimed or hold-firing flagships could prevent building things
  • Thanks to listsandlists for the bug report

• Fix a bunch of typos all over the place
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for hunting!

• Fixed a bug where the tooltip for GCAs was lying to you about how many turrets they granted
  • Reported by RockyBst, Democracy and probably others

• Tweaks to the Helping Hands quickstart to make sure the Nanocaust is your ally
  • Thanks to Puffin for the fix and Genrazian for the impetus

Version 0.953 Hotfixes For Certain Linux + Hardware Combinations

(Released October 17th, 2019)

• On Vulkan on Linux in certain circumstances, there was some form of shader error in the Amplify Bloom rendering. That issue should now be fixed.
  • Thanks to eldaking for reporting.

• Just like windows has launch options allowing you to select between OpenGL and DirectX11, Linux now lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Vulkan - Experimental, and macOS lets you choose between OpenGL - Preferred and Metal - Experimental.
  • This needs testing, and is a Steam client update only, not actually a change to the game.

• Completely rebuilt the asset bundles and their projects to be based on Unity 2019.1.7, same as the main project has been for some time, and to make sure that they explicitly have Vulkan and Metal shader support built into themselves now that the game supports those new platforms.
  • This should hopefully solve the issues that we were still seeing with a few people using Vulkan on Linux, as well as potentially some "shader not compiled for this platform" issues with OpenGL on Linux for certain ships that were compiled against an older version of Unity.
  • This MAY also fix the Gyrn refractive glass not appearing in-game on any platform, although we haven't test this yet. It may be that we need to write our own shader for that, or update the one from Circonia Studios that we were using previously. Most likely it was an issue that was coming across because of different unity versions, though, we're not sure.
  • Thanks to eldaking and Badger for reporting.

• Tutorial fix from Craig.

• Enable strength icons with borders on the galaxy map. (I find it makes a big difference in readability when they overlap links of a similar color.)
  • Thanks to Asteroid for implementing!

• Updated a whole bunch of our shaders that were not going to properly work with Metal or Vulkan simply because they were being compiled with exclusive platforms set to directx11 and opengl.
  • These should now work, and include things like the icons for ships, and many of the ships themselves. But it hasn't been tested yet. It certainly won't hurt anything, anyhow.

• The Ciconia Studio glass shaders that we were using for the Gyrn bubble have been updated to their latest version, which should provide better compatibility and hopefully have those actually show up again in-game.
  • Why those were showing up in the prep projects but not the actual game is something of a mystery. If this doesn't work, we'll just have to create our own refractive shader with rim lighting, but we'd rather not waste the time if this simple update works. Please do let us know!

• Fixed one backer name in the credits (Kevin A Munoz), which did not translate over well into pure basic-ascii characters when we ran it through a handy processor (https://pteo.paranoiaworks.mobi/diacriticsremover/) to get rid of unicode characters not supported by our fonts.
  • If other folks find that their name got a bit mangled, please do let us know! There were SO many people's names that it was impossible to go through them all manually.

• Completely redid the shaders for the Gyrn glass bits so that it uses a refractive shader based on Amplify Shader Editor and thus should actually render in these newer unity builds.

Version 0.952 A Little Help From Scary Friends

(Released October 16th, 2019)

• Create a tip that points to the instructions in the wiki for how to create your own planet name list. I figure people will want to do this at some point.

• Spelling/grammar and clarification improvements to some tutorials.
  • Thanks to Craig and Badger for pointing things out.

• We FINALLY have all of the kickstarter and backerkit backers thanked in the credits for the game. It's... um... a lot.

• The credits screen has been split into three scrolling panels, rather than one giant one that scrolls everything. It's also now in two columns rather than three.
  • The left column is the same as it was before.
  • The center column now has just the top kickstarter backers, aka those at Mark III or higher levels of backing. That's the first 784 people, all backing at $44 or more.
  • The right column now has the Mark II and down backers, which is the remaining 2,264 people out of the 3,048 total backers.
  • These splits make it so that the scrollbars are actually sensitive enough that you can find what you're looking for. AND we alphabetized the backer names in each category, so that if you know your category you can find your name now.
  • Yeah this isn't really a top priority for the game in some ways, but it's a matter of showing respect for the people that made it possible in the first place. There are other kickstarter rewards for specific tiers, and some kickstarter stretch goals, that will happen post-1.0. But this is one of those basic "this needs to be in there for people on day 1 of launch" things.

New "Helping Hands" Quick Start

• Added a new Quick Start to the Basics category, called Helping Hands. This really weighs the settings in the players favour, and is intended as an easy to win scenario that just lets you experience things with little stress.
  • Badger came up with this.

UI improvements

• Some changes to the out-of-date planet info representation
  • Thanks Asteroid

• Some changes were made to make sure a player knows which Flagship is hacking (and doesn't try to make that flagship leave the planet)
  • Put in a line between the Hacker and the Target to really remind the player visually that the hacker is bound to the target (a great suggestion from Asteroid)
  • Add some text to the Hacking Notification reminding the player that the hacking flagship can't leave the system.
    • Thanks to a bug report from kmunoz

• Improve the hacking resource bar tooltip to show the number of hacking points spent per AI faction and the number of hacking points that will increase the hacking response level
  • This is something people have wanted for a while

• Rather than confusingly opening a multiplayer submenu with little "coming soon" tooltips, the multiplayer button on the main menu now pops up a lengthy text note directly from Chris which explains the backstory and what is coming and a bit about the development process that led us here.
  • Big thanks to Craig for suggesting this.

Debugging improvements

• Add a debug setting for showing an entity's world location.

• Add a debug command to give all your fleets 1K Exp. Good for impatient people.

Bugfixes

• Tweak the "level up" message for Planetary Fleets
  • Suggested by ArquebusX

• Fix a nasty bug where the AI killing stacks could cause counterattack strength to increase enormously
  • Thanks to RockyBst for the bug report

• Fix an off by one error when showing the "What Level a Fleet will level up to next" message in the Fleet tab

• Extra defensive entities seeded for the AI (like Golems for the Golemite) now patrol their planets in an imposing fashion, instead of just sitting in one spot.
  • Only affects new games

• Fix a null reference exception when scrapping a command station
  • Thanks to Asteroid for reporting

• Put in some extra debug handling in HandleLODsAndShipPartAnimations for a crash that could apparently happen during one of the tutorials for some people, and also put in extra debugging logic so that if it does happen again we'll know more precisely what the problem is. It should also no longer halt gameplay in general if such an error does happen.
  • Thanks to Craig for reporting.

• Fixed a bug that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer, related to GameCommands being null.
  • This is probably a problem with how GameCommands are being used somewhere, and might rear its head in the form of some desyncs in multiplayer when we get back to reimplementing that. Just one more reason why the desync auto-repair work we have planned is going to be so essential. It's hard to know if a bug like this comes from something a modder was doing, or a mistake on our own part, or what; but either way, the game needs to be resilient to that in both single player and multi player, and that's a good example of why our upcoming hybridized approach to lock-step versus sync-correcting the game (RTS versus action game styles, blended) is going to be well worth the wait.
  • Thanks to Craig for reporting.

• The game will prioritize Combat Fleets over Support Fleets when choosing the hacker. It will only use support fleets when there are no combat fleets on a planet
  • Thanks to Craig for reporting.

Tutorial tweaks

• Tutorials no longer display 'homeworld under attack' notifications, which aren't pertinent to any existing tutorials.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting

• Autobuild settings no longer apply to tutorials; this is mostly so developers can test tutorials the way a new player would see them

Minor Faction Threat Interactions

• Some minor factions generate Threat that winds up just annoying players, in particular Anti-AI zombies.
  • Add an XML field that can be applied to any Faction that says 'any threat provoked by this faction will just go back to sleep once the enemies are gone'
  • Current factions with that field:
    • Zombies
    • Devourer
    • Dyson Sphere
    • Macrophage

• Note that putting this field on the Human faction would make for an entertainingly confused AI, like fighting Guy Pearce from Memento.

Balance Tweaks

• The AI's planetary reinforcement cap can now increase as AIP increased (otherwise planets never really got stronger than they are at the beginning of the game except if Threat or subfleets wander through).
  • At difficulties <= 5, no change. At 6, the AI gets a 10% power increase per 100 AIP. At 7, 20%, difficulty 8-10 a 30% increase.

• Cost of hacking Global Command Augmenter if you haven't paid the AIP for the planet reduced from 120 to 60.

• Cost of Reroll ARS reduced from 80 to 20.

• Add a setting to control AIP generation from allied factions
  • When you have allied factions like the Marauders or Nanocaust, when they kill command stations and so on it generates AIP. This is a balancing mechanism to keep these games from being too easy.
  • This can now be disabled mid-game. Disabling this makes the game much much easier, but should help in making some beginner-level quickstarts

Version 0.951 Hotfixes

(Released October 15th, 2019)

• Fix typo in metal popup window

• Don't let structures generate energy while you are still building them

• Fix galaxy map possible/incoming wave animation being displayed for links between the AI and another faction than the player, even for unknown worlds and during map generation.
  • Fix from Asteroid

• Fix null Reference when holding R on the C-view of a fleet you haven't captured yet. As a side-effect, the units highlighted in the R-view are now the ones on the currently selected planet, not necessarily the one the unit being viewed is on.
  • Fix from Asteroid

• When attacking an AI homeworld, killing all the guard posts is enough to cancel the counterattack, you don't also have to kill the AI King
  • Reported by zeusalmight and Nuc_Temeron on Steam

• Further differentiate the lower AI difficulties by increasing their overconfidence ratio a good amount
  • This should make them much more willing to attack and fail.

• Internally improved some of the documentation on why the sound effects play quite like they do when there's a voice effect and a sound effect playing at near the same time. This should solve some confusion that devs and modders could have.
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

OS Compatibility

• We've disabled "graphics jobs" in unity, as that may have been causing some problems on a very few machines (certain older intel cards, mainly not windows boxes).

• We've updated linux to now default to using Vulkan rather than OpenGLCore.
  • Vulkan is only able to be triggered by directly having it be the default, and not by the command line, so this is how we had to do it.
  • On linux, you can use the command line -force-glcore to make it use OpenGL again if Vulkan is giving you trouble. But now you have a choice about it.

• On OSX, we now support Metal, although it still uses OpenGLCore by default (and actually in this case we can't give any definite assurances that Metal will work completely correctly).
  • But if you want to give it a shot for whatever reason, you can enable that with force-gfx-metal in the command line to make it use metal instead of the default OpenGLCore. Previously that command line prompt would fail.

• More info: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html

Audio tweaks

• Fix a bug where the 'ai wave arrives' taunt wasn't being played for some code paths
• warden and hunter only taunt when they think they will win.
• Correctly play the AI killed your command station taunt (the game will 80% of the time choose a taunt and 20% will choose the old 'planet lost' audio).
• Don't spam the game with 'player command station under attack' notifications
• Don't play more than one 'player ship constructor killed' message per planet per attack. This taunt currently only triggers on the death of a Factory. Previously you could get 3 taunts from the 3 factories on a military command station planet, which seemed a bit excessive especially since you also usually get the taunt for the command station too.
  • Possibly these messages should be changed to be for the crippling of a combat factory instead of killing a factory.

• Adjusted the AI taunts so that a specific taunt group can't play more frequently than every 30 seconds, as opposed to every 4.

Version 0.950 First Press Build

(Released October 14th, 2019)

• More work on adding support for numStacksKilled when handling death effects. Should get most everything now
  • Including Dark Spire, Metabolization, Zombification, etc...

• Slightly tweak the Dyson Antagonizer warp in time

• The Dyson Antagonizer now prefers to spawn on lower mark planets until the AIP is reasonably high
  • This behaviour now matches Instigator Bases

• If you have a fleet in Load Mode but some elements of that fleet are on remote planets, those elements will try to find the Flagship and load themselves, instead of just sitting there
  • Badgers are very lazy creatures and don't want to click more than necessary

• Non-Combatants like Engineers and Transports no longer cause Guard Posts to release their ships
  • So if you have a fleet in Transport mode with all ships transported, flying through AI planets should no longer cause the AI to generate Threat. I believe this was really confusing players, since the game encourages Deep Striking, but Deep Striking was releasing tons of Threat from planets you never attacked

• Add a quickstart from community member Nuc_Temeron.
  • His description:
    • In this scenario there are two level 7 AIs (Thief and Ensnarer) with Shark B enabled, which gives the Hunter fleets a quick surge of strength whenever you lose a base. Defend your territory well! You will have to depend on your allies, the Human Resistance Fighters (Intensity 8), to overcome these greedy swarms! The AIs are also supported by shipments from Astro Trains at Intensity 8 so you can't stay on defense for long.
    • The Macrophage has also infested this zone at Intensity 6 and is hostile to all.
    • The player starts with the Doorkicker Fleet, the Minelayer Battlestation and the Overloader Combat Factory in an 80-star Octopus zone.

• Some Tutorial tweaks from Puffin

• Add a new Watch planet hack; this works only with local hackers and on planets without enemies. It's much cheaper, but the vision only lasts until the AI recaptures the planet

Newly integrated AI taunts

• 16 for AI Destroys player Command Station.
• 13 for AI Destroys Player Golem.
• 5 for AI Recaptures Planet.
• 9 for AI Sends Wave.
• 2 for Player Frees Dyson Sphere.
• 10 for Hunter Fleet Arrives.
• 8 for Overlord Transforms.
• 12 for Player Claims Flagship.
• 10 for Player Claims Golem.
• 14 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (High Mark Planet).
• 16 for Player Destroys AI Command Station (Low Mark Planet).
• 5 for Player Destroys Warden Fleet Base.
• 4 for Player Finds AI Overlord.
• 5 for Player Fortress Destroyed.
• 12 for Player Home Command Station Under Attack.
• 7 for Player Stationary Constructor Destroyed.
• 19 for AI Launches Counterattack.
• 14 for Warden Fleet Arrives.
• 1 for Warden Fleet Retreats (unused for now).
  • This is a total of 174 voice lines in 18 categories!
  • Thanks to Nathan Frisson for his awesome job voicing the AI in these clips; to a variety of players and staff for contributing fun lines for him to say; to Pablo Vega for processing this out so that he sounds wonderfully menacing, as well as splitting the files, removing mouth sounds and breaths and so on that would make it not sound like an AI; to Badger and Puffin for selecting the best takes and organizing them properly so that we could get them into our sound pipeline; and to Badger for actually wiring up the parts of the code that trigger these.

• This obviously needs additional testing; if you think a line should be playing and it's not then a mantis report + save game would be appreciated!

• There is now a dedicated audio bus to the AI taunting you, and it has its own gain settings and so on that are a bit louder than the "routine voices" that you hear elsewhere.
  • This also now will let us mix the AI voice in however we choose to do so.
  • We have a separate voice mixer for the AI voice lines now, and since those are much more complicated in terms of effects we have those coming in as a barely-compressed PCM stereo track. Downsampling, adaptive sampling, and/or mono makes it muddy fast.

Bugfixes

• When unloading ships from a Transport, they inherit "time spent on planet" from the Transport so you can't cheese First Few Seconds On Planet bonus effects
  • Thanks to Smaug on Steam for reporting and Puffin for testing the fix

• Remove some outdated text in the Scouting objective tooltip
  • Thanks to Telkir for reporting

• Prevent Astro Train objectives from leaking the location of trains you shouldn't be able to see

• Fix a bug where for non-AI homeworld planets, the AI was spawning extra Guard Posts instead of Dire Guardians
  • This should make things much more interesting. Note that dires are still limited to high mark planets

• Fix an Off by One Error when the game was telling you what level a fleet was
  • Reported by Ozone

• Fix a potential null reference when ships would try to join the Praetorian Guard (ie the AI overlord is being attacked)
  • Reported by Ozone

• Fix a bug where the "metal income per planet" display was showing inaccurate information

• Fix a problem where it was much harder than necessary to maneouver flagships in tight spaces. If you wound up clicking on an allied unit the flagship's rebuild metal flow would make it try to assist, which is ... unhelpful.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for the bug report

• Fleets in Load Mode no longer deploy drones. This enables you to sneak combat factories past high-mark planets without the drones triggering lots of threat
  • Requested by overzot on steam

• Fixed a bug where the visual line for ships claiming other ships was not displaying. Turns out an image that was once white that we were using as part of its material got changed to black at some point, thus making it effectively invisible because of the math of how the shader was run.
  • We took this change to go ahead and make the claim lines more attractive in general, and they now have a cyan-greenish look to them, but double-beamed, so that they look kinda like the repair lines but still distinct.
  • Thanks to WeaponMaster and BadgerBadger for finding this.

• Added in an OnLoad from savegame fix that should prevent stationary ships from being twitchy and thinking they should pursue you. This bit is untested.
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• The game no longer gives a harmless "Could not do Shutdown for network, the engine network interface was null" message if the game is shutting down prematurely for whatever reason.
  • Thanks to eldaking for reporting.

• Fixed a minor issue where the game was reporting that your target framerate and vysnc count were being set right before they were, rather than right after. If it was failing, you'd have had no idea.

• The game now logs the system info about itself far earlier in the load process, to help with cases where potentially we're unable to load things for some reason; we'll still get the system info in the debug files from now on.
  • Thanks to eldaking for inspiring this change.

• The game's bootup log now is all-inclusive about all the steps that it takes, inside ArcenDebugLog.txt, so that in the event of a problem we now find out when that happens.
  • This makes for a much longer log every time you start up the game, but it's not something that is visible to players unless they go into their debug logs for whatever. And the information from it is definitely useful.

• The game now logs what version it is on as soon as it can, but NOT before it can (heh), which it was temporarily doing on an internal build when we started logging system data really super early.

• Added a new DoNotShowAndAlsoDoNotSendToUnityLog verbosity level that lets us skip showing certain things in the unity log but still send it to the ArcenDebugLog.txt file. This is a big deal for us in terms of not having our unity editor logs flooded with stuff that we'd want to collect in a bug report but don't need to see every last time.

• Fixed a variety of selection issues on the galaxy map with fleets not always deselecting properly and instead sometimes being additive, etc.
  • It's actually a number of bugs all in one, because basically there was some older per-planet logic that was still being used here (and on planets) from back when cross-planet selection was only kinda-sorta a thing. Now it all works consistently galaxy-wide, or at least should. But if you see any remaining (or new) bugs, please let us know.
  • Thanks to OzoneGrif and Asteroid for reporting.

• Previously, hitting the escape key would just clear your selection on the current planet. Now it clears the selection on all the planets, as it should.
  • We didn't see the "when a fleet traverse a wormhole, it's selection is lost. This issue only occurs if the selection was made in the planet view. If you select the fleet on the galaxy map, it works correctly." issue, but probably what it really was was the above one. Or something fixed in the batch right before that. If it's still something anyone else sees, please let us know.
  • Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.

• Fixed an issue with the planet links where their collision capsules were intersecting with the collision boxes of planets and ship icons on the galaxy map.
  • This was having the effect of making it so that quite often you couldn't select specific ships except at certain zoom levels, or couldn't click planets or ships reliably in general (zoom level and scale of icons did play a role here also).
  • Basically, the solution was to make it so that we first raycast to find ONLY the planets and ships/fleets, if there are any under the mouse cursor. These use one set of physx layers.
  • Only if we don't find anything with that first raycast do we then do a second raycast against the new physx layer that the links now use. Now it doesn't matter if the capsules for the links overlap with planets or ship icons (no way to stop that, really), because it will ALWAYS give preference to the other icons first, and only go for the links between planets if the icons fail.
  • Thanks to Smaug, I-KP, and Pat for reporting.

UI improvements

• Clicking on the Energy Usage bar now gives detailed feedback for what is consuming your energy (broken down by fleet) and what planets are generating the most energy
  • Requested by darkarchon

• The Tooltip for Tech Vault objectives now list which ship lines will benefit from hacking the tech vault
  • Badgers are very lazy creatures

• For the Flagship/GCA objectives, show the count of ship lines before listing the ship lines so I don't have to count them
  • Badgers are very lazy creatures

• Improvements to the R-Click "Strong Against" view:
  • Fixed damage bonuses listed in this view not always matching the mirror "weak against" view.
  • Show only units you discovered on the map, leading to a lot less clutter early-game.
  • Sort units that are in the same system as the friendly unit you're examining at the beginning of the list, and bold them.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for the code and kmunoz for the bug report

• CPAs always now give 10 minutes warning; given how impactful they are, a long warning period is justified. Previously they were getting less warning time than a regular Wave by default

• When a Fleet levels up, only say "Some ship types may level up with the fleet" if the fleet actually contains ship lines that will level up
  • This was annoying Badger, since most ship lines don't level up anymore but the game made you think they did.

• New icons for the Tech Menu!
  • Thanks Asteroid!

• Better alignment for hotkey indicators on standing order buttons and for the icons in the build sidebar
  • Thanks Asteroid!

Changes for lower AI difficulties (<= 5)

• There were some complaints that there wasn't enough differentiation between high and low mark AIs, so we're making some changes to make lower mark games have an easier feel in a number of ways
• Seed extra ARSs and Tech Vaults in the galaxy
• Seed more low-mark planets near the player
• Nerf AI income
• Nerf AI defenses
• Make the Hunter and Warden fleets dumber by allowing them to trickle into a battle piecemeal instead of waiting for reinforcements
  • Prompted by a discussion with hazxan on Steam

Version 0.900 Custom Fleets With Empty Slots

(Released October 11th, 2019)

Balance Improvements

• Instead of spawning instantly, a Dyson Antagonizer now warps in over time, giving the player a chance to destroy it before the Sphere gets Antagonized.
  • Requested by zeus almighty. You'd think he could have just struck it with a lightning bolt or seduced it in the form of a goose...

Tutorial and Tips Work

• Added a new "Tutorial 99", which is even in its description just a note to be sure and check out the "How to Play" section of the game and other resources.
  • Since various people seem to miss those other resources but easily see the tutorials list, having this always be the last tutorial in the list no matter how many other tutorials we add seemed like a good idea.

• Also got rid of the "Example Tutorial" that was junking up the tutorials screen, since now there are plenty of much more involved examples that are also actually fully-functional tutorials.

• Add a Tip under the Modding section to explain how to make your own Quick Starts

Bugfixes

• Fix a bug where units sometimes were waiting out of range instead of closing to firing distance
  • Reported by kmunoz and Telcontar on Steam

• Fix a bug where flagships could just wander away from where you told them to go
  • Reported by kmunoz.

• Fixed a rare nullref exception that could happen in the wave notifications.

• Fixed a really rare nullref that could happen in Network.OnClient_SendClientBatchToServer.
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• Put in some extra debugging to fix ships not rendering right in some rare circumstances and thus causing a cascade of all things not rendering. Now it should fail gracefully if it fails at all, and give us more information on where it failed, then let you keep playing without making everything disappear.
  • Thanks to OzoneGrif for reporting.

"Custom Fleets", Aka The Remedy For Control Groups

• Fixed things up so that fleet flagships can be constructed from the build sidebar, or other self-constructing means. This was never possible before in the engine, turns out.

• There are 9 possible fleets that you can create at any of your command stations, now. Each one has 7 empty ship lines in it, and they are 3x cloaked, 3x velocity (fast flagship), and 3x workhorse (normal flagship).
  • These can be constructed at any point and you can start putting some of your specialized ships into them via ship swapping. The interface makes this clear and suggests it, as well. Basically for people who wanted to pull aside just their melee ships or cloaked raiders or whatever, now you can do that; this lets you control "sub fleets" in effect, by splitting your existing ship lines among more fleets, exchanging empty slots for ship lines you find elsewhere.
  • This was something that Chris went back and forth on a lot of times in terms of how to handle control groups that were more specific than 1+ fleets at a time. Ultimately the display and automation benefits of having control groups always stay linked to just 1+ fleets outweighed the benefits of changing that; but in order to allow for players to have smaller custom fleets as they may desire, activated by control group as they may desire, here's this new feature.
  • This is, of course, in addition to the hotkeys for quickly selecting units of specific criteria a while ago (cloaked units, melee units, whatever). This is for when you want to make a permanent or semi-permanent sub-grouping of ships for whatever reason (of which there are many valid ones to have).
  • Thanks to a lot of people, including Nameless Terror, ulu, Asteroid, and others for inspiring this change.

UI Improvements

• Standing order buttons now display their key shortcut on the button itself, provided it can be expressed in a single letter (so X and V are displayed, Delete isn't).
  • Implemented by Asteroid

• Science bar now has icons for the various techs.
  • Implemented by Asteroid

• Wave progress indicator on galaxy map links now animates smoothly instead of once every second. (No associated visual at the moment, Chris didn't find the proposed particle effect good enough.)
  • Implemented by Asteroid

• For all mobile flagships and citadels (not lone flagships, though), there is a new "Flagship Movement Mode" in their fleet status window.
  • Your flagships are usually precious enough that you don't want them to roam around in pursuit mode or attack-move mode. HOWEVER, you will often want to set them into those modes in order to make any ships they construct pop out in those modes.
  • When this is set to"Stay Put Unless Direct Order", it acts as you might expect and causes the flagship to ignore things like Pursuit mode, but for ships it creates to be put in that mode (and obey it).
  • When this is set to "Roam If Instructed" mode, the flagship will pursue when in pursuit mode, attack when in attack-move mode, and so on. This can be useful for Arks and Golems in some cases, or even for things like Combat Factories (on peaceful worlds).

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: The Refinement of Fleets