AI War 2:The Era of Discovery

Known Issues

• The lobby interface is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.

• Beam-weapon style shot graphics don't yet display, and a couple of AOE effects don't show quite correctly yet.

• Various bugs on mantis: https://bugtracker.arcengames.com/view_all_bug_page.php

• Balance needs a lot of attention, with your help.

• The tutorial is currently missing, as we need to redo it.

• Multiplayer is temporarily disabled while we focus on tightening up the single-player loop.

• There are still a bunch of ships that we either want to re-implement, or new ideas that we want to implement for the first time.

• There are a variety of ships/units that don't have proper graphics or reuse icons at the moment.

• There is not an in-game way to see and edit the control bindings yet.
  • But you can go into the created bindings file inside the PlayerData folder to edit them in a text editor.

What's this phase all about?

Initial thought process was described on Steam: "Retrieval of the Lost Arks" Plus an Essay, Apparently..

The short answer is that we hit a point where the game was fun, but super hard to balance. Rather than focusing on balance in a strictly-numbers sense, we thought it would be more interesting to add a procedural element into ships in order to make each game even more different.

Along with that, we realized just how important the factions are becoming to the game, and how they give more of a sense of life to what is going on. With that in mind, and the since-forever-even-in-AIWC requests of players to make each planet have more unique "terrain" (per se), we thought it was time to start implementing things a bit differently.

The TLDR is that we hit the point where it feels sufficiently like the first game in a really basic mechanics sense, and now it's time to make things unexpected again so that you have a really good sense of discovery.

Version 0.759

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

• All savegames are unfortunately broken because of the extreme number of changes that have been made to the structure of the game.
  • With a lot of the changes, old savegames would not have made much sense anymore, anyway. Goodness we will stop doing this at some point before Early Access!

• Adjusted the balance for Mark V, VI, and VII ships/structures. They were progressively getting weaker compared to their lower tiers, which generally increased at a higher rate.
  • Mark II is 2x as strong as Mark I, for instance, but Mark V was only 1.25x as strong as Mark IV. Now Mark V and up are each 1.5x as strong as the mark that came before them, which matches how much stronger IV is than III.
  • We can of course change this with ease again in the future, but it seems like a good plan for now.

• Metal costs for ships go up by 1.5x per mark level, rather than following the strength/hull power trend line. This makes mark II ships a particular value compared to mark I ships, incidentally. The deal of power-to-metal-cost ratio gets progressively worse as you go up in mark levels, but always remains quite positive (aka it's always a good idea to upgrade, but you get more bang for your buck upgrading something low than something high, assuming all else is equal -- which it is not, heh).

Ships Removed

• Tachyon Microfighters and Bulletproof Fighters have been removed as distinct entities. These will soon be things that are randomized variants or upgrades.

• The AIWC-style concept of mercenaries, which we've been calling Auxiliaries, has been removed for now.
  • This simply wasn't very exciting and felt like clutter at the moment. If late-game metal buildup becomes a problem again, we have some more flexible ideas for dealing with that.

• Advanced Factories and Advanced Starship Constructors are going away for now. We'll be bringing back a different mechanic in this general area, so stay tuned. There's a better way to do this, though.

Ships Reinvented

• Fighters, bombers, and missile frigates are the three core triangle ships... but only for humans, now! The AI and other factions no longer get them at all. The marauders have their own version of these ships as drones, which is actually pretty unique for them. But the AI and other factions use different ships as their baseline, now.
  • These ships (the base ones by the player, anyhow -- not the drone marauder-based ones) are now going to be getting some balance changes and new abilities really soon.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in the macrophage where they were not using their health_change_per_damage_dealt value, since it was spelled health_change_per_damage_dealth.

• Fixed a variety of other bugs where things were not acting as they were supposed to since the pivot. That said, undoubtedly broke even more things than we fixed.

• Fixed up a few ship ranges that were set to low or negative values because we couldn't properly see them before. The Arks all had very very short gun ranges, for instance.

• Probably fixed the bug with you being able to upgrade your home command station and thus lose the game instantly because of that.

Technical Jargon

• A new does_not_use_multipliers_from_mark_level tag has been added.
  • If this is set to true, then the mark_level="Mark5" (or whatever level) tags are just ceremonial -- they show up visually to show a player how scary the unit is, essentially.
  • Normally there are multipliers for the health, strength, shields, attack power, etc, etc that come from mark levels. This skips those, in other words.
  • The reason for this is that sometimes you have very unique entries at each mark level (such as with the Dark Spire) that you want to have display the mark level, but which in no way inherit stats. This way, instead of having to know the multipliers and then divide all your values by them, you can just set the stats directly.

• The option to hide mark levels on ship icons has been removed, since now you can just set them to be markless and set their stats to be whatever. It's much cleaner than having two ways to do one thing.

• The structure of how ship data is stored in xml for the game to read in has been overhauled quite a bit.
  • A lot of fields were previously wired up in such a way that they referenced other xml files extensively, so you'd have to know what a lot of hidden values meant in order to make sense of it at all.
    • Now this is done a bit, but only for things that are easy to remember (range) or not frequently used (engine health). Basically in places where this is easier to read for purposes of understanding a scale (is 100 a big number of a small number for this field? etc).
  • A lot of fields also were based around multipliers to unseen base values, again making it hard to know what the actual values would be.
    • In general, things are a lot more direct now. Higher mark levels still multiply a bunch of things in order to simply be descendants of the lower mark levels, but this is less severe of something to have to learn.
  • And lastly, ship systems (guns, etc) were stored in a separate file, then referenced. This had the advantage of fewer definitions (by a bit), but the big disadvantage of being harder to read a single ship or modify that ship.
    • Now the system entries are actually sub-entries of the ship nodes directly, so you can see everything about a ship right in one screen, essentially, and thus make changes way easier to it.
  • Overall these changes make it harder to make sweeping balance changes to the game (more repetitive work is required now), but it makes it far easier to modify individual ships, which is far more common of a task.
    • Basically we were not having many modders for ships, and even Badger and Chris were kind of shooting in the dark and Keith was mostly just basing his work around what was in AIWC lately, so the prior system wasn't really working out for practical purposes. The new system was designed to take what was good about the old system, make as few changes as possible, and become more usable.

• Made it much easier to see what sub-nodes are having xml issues when you're seeing xml errors from your modding.

• The properties on GameVersions are now different, since we're breaking old savegames anyway.
  • Rather than saying which versions are valid for the settings, world, and profiles, it now says which is the first one that was valid. Those markers can be moved around in the versions file as needed.

• All of the old serialization gates have been removed, and in general a lot of deserialization cruft that built up while we were not breaking savegames.
  • Kind of related, we made a tutorial on how to use serialization gates: AI_War_2:_Serialization_Gates

• The last inclusions of Power in the code are now gone. Also power distribution nodes.

• There are now some V1 and V2 copies of a few ship types that look pointless in the xml, but which are a chance to have multiple randomized variants on one team, coming up. This is particularly true for things like the Abomination, etc.

• There are also some faction-specific tagged versions of various ships that are copied now, too. The tags make it more obvious what the purpose is, and you can see that built_by="Unused" is being set to zero to make sure that these variants don't show up in player build menus or random AI waves.

• Build menus no longer have the same structure as before (with all the columns, etc), and are now defined on the ships themselves.
  • This makes it easier to keep track of where ships are used, although not what uses what ships. But that's fine, because we also don't want ships referenced in multiple files like this directly if we can help it (this again helps with modding, allowing modded-in ships to be inserted into build menus automatically).
  • Also worth noting, we've removed some build menus for things like specific AI types, since that concept would no longer work anymore. Rather than certain AI types preferring specific ship types, they'll be getting specific bonuses or penalties more frequently from the randomizer, soon.

• Mark levels and techs as they were previously defined in the xml and code have been removed. There's a new system that is a lot simpler that does the same thing on the front-end, but is less typo-prone, requires less xml in general, and will long-term be less bug-prone.

• The concept of a "shared cap" is now gone, since we no longer have to share cap between multiple mark levels.

• Added a new max_mark_level tag in the entity xml that lets us specify that the unit is only able to be upgraded to a given mark level and no further.
  • Most of the time, units can be upgraded all the way to mark 7, but it gets progressively more prohibitively expensive.
  • It's also worth noting at this time that the mark_level tag now means "first mark level." If something has a mark level of 2, then it will never be present at less than mark 2. This is mainly used by some minor-faction-specific ship variants.
  • Lastly, if something is set to be markless, then it can't be upgraded at all (mark-level-wise).

• Engineers no longer upgrade units, it just happens automatically (for the player). This was a waste of time for the engineers, and extra complications on our side, too.
  • This does create the common situation where you'll be in battle and can upgrade your units immediately to save their health or whatever, but this isn't the worst thing; lots of RTS games do this.
  • Player units are now automatically kept at whatever the highest mark is that their type has unlocked, whereas AI units start out at some mark level (from their planet mark level, or their wave mark level) and then never change it.
  • Note that this is a departure for structural-type buildings such as command stations. You can't have multiple mark levels of economic command station in the galaxy at once, anymore, for instance; they'll all share the highest mark, now.
    • Note that this does NOT affect the AI or minor factions; they can do what they like.

• In the test chamber, you can now specify a mark_level entry to choose what mark the ship is at. It will automatically correct itself to the nearest in-range mark level if you set something out of range for that unit.

Hey Testers! We Have Some Questions

• Questions for testers (now that we're breaking everything):
  • Is the Dark Spire Eidolon's lightning attack the eater of worlds? Aka does it do too much damage?
  • Do tractor beams work?
  • Does cloaking work? And tachyon beams?
  • Do any ships seem to have way too little health or attack or range?
  • Does engine damage and repair seem to work?
  • Does paralysis work?
  • Can command stations be upgraded?

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: The Pivot