AI War 2:Pre-Early Access Polish

Known Issues

• The lobby interface is currently temporary, and undergoing a complete overhaul.
  • It's suggested that you use the quick start option instead.

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

• Balance needs a lot of attention, with your help. Please tell RocketAssistedPuffin if you find anything you think needs changing.

• The tutorial is currently not as comprehensive as it could be.

• 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 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?

We are nearing the point where we're ready for Early Access, and so we're focusing on polish and bugfixing. As well as finishing the graphics for the existing ships. More content will be added during Early Access, but right now it's all about polishing what is there.

This also marks the start of the press preview period, so hopefully those folks bear with us on the rough edges they get caught on in this pre-Early-Access state.

Version 0.782

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

• Auto-kiting now defaults to on. Note that this won't update existing settings you have, though.
  • Thanks to Bobtree for suggesting.

New/Improved/Fixed Settings Options

• Fixed an issue in the entity hover text where it would show the strength as the underlying number and not the ui-formatted number if you had "Show Entity Strength when hovering" enabled in the settings menu.

• Added options for 144, 100, and 75 target fps in the framerate option.
  • Also updated the description for that dropdown:
    • Please note that this is NOT the same as setting a refresh rate on your monitor. Mostly.
    • If you set VSync or Half-VSync, then indeed it will limit to those and you will likely see terrible performance. Using vsync is a really bad idea, in that it really causes issues with variable-length frames, and will make your game choppier.
    • Assuming that you are using any other options in this list, it is telling the game to 'try to run at about that framerate.' That won't actually mean the game runs at that framerate, but it will mean that the game tries to not run on average MORE than that framerate. For one example, you don't need the game running at 300fps for no reason and having your GPU fan going nuts. On the other hand, if the game gets choppy when above 60fps for you on an older machine, you might want to cap it at 60fps. If you wish to set this to match your monitor refresh rate, that is fine, but please bear in mind that the non-vsync versions of this are very very much 'weak suggestions for maximum framerate,' and not any sort of hard limiter.
    • Looking for excellent technology to eliminate screen tearing without eliminating game perforamnce? The things to look into are GSync and FreeSync.
  • Thanks to Vellsi for reporting.

• Added a new Tooltips section to the settings menu, and a new "Automation" section as well.

• All of the settings window options now have full descriptions and fully legible names.

• The "Keyboard Move Speed" game setting now actually works in the new cameras! When we coded in the new cameras we forgot to hook that up.
  • Same for "Mouse Edge Move Speed," "Mouse Grab Drag Speed," "Keyboard Zoom Speed," and "Mouse Zoom Speed."
  • Thanks to Kahuna for reporting.

• There is a new Tooltips-section setting in the settings menu that allows you to adjust the size of "general tooltips," aka not the ones that are for planets or units.
  • This was surprisingly challenging to implement well, but we got it done! Basically this not only makes it smaller, but also lets the word-wrapping work well on the shorter space while still using the same horizontal space. This actually makes the tooltips even more space-efficient, because with more space before they have to wrap, they take up even less vertical room.
  • The default size of these tooltips has also now been updated to be 0.8 instead of 1.0, since they were oversized for pretty much everyone.
  • There is also now a "Ship/Squad Tooltip Scale" option in the same category that is for the ships/squads/ship-types.
  • And another one called "Planet Tooltip Scale" that is for the planet tooltips on the galaxy map.
  • Thanks to ZED for reminding us about this.

Bugfixes and Technical Bits

• Fixed a bug where your starting forcefield would brownout right at the start of the game. Oops!
  • Thanks to Puffin for reporting.

• Hid a variety of unused camera options in the settings menu, since they were cluttering things up and not used by the new cameras at all (and not intended to be used by them).

• Fixed a bug where "StringHidden" type settings were still showing up visibly on the settings interface.

• Fix a few bugs related to Superterminal Hacking, thanks to Vellsi
  • The Superterminal now dies on AI command station death
  • Superterminal hacks no longer finish instantly
  • Superterminal hacks now decrease AIP instead of increasing it. Whoops.

• There are new methods that make it more concise and easier to remember how to open settings by their string name. All of the existing code has been updated to use these.

• The way that the tooltip positions are calculated is now more accurate in terms of them not going off the side of the screen but also them not getting strangely blocked by being NEAR the edge of the screen.

• The way that the positions of the planet and entity tooltips are calculated is now a lot more accurate, so they no longer blip around.
  • Also fixed up the sizing of all tooltips so that they react with proper speed to text size changes inside them.

New Quickstarts

• "Time is Running Out", using the Quadratic AI type, Risk Analyzers and Astro Trains - also includes Reconquest waves. Uses the "Rorqual Hegira" Ark.

• "Security Alert", using the Special Forces Master AI type, with Base Orientated Warden, Kamikaze Hunter, Threat Waves, Dark Spire and Devourer Golem. Uses the "Gryn, the Voidhome" Ark.

Version 0.781 Destruction Diversity

(Released October 9th, 2018)

• Some improvements to the tutorial. More needs to be done, but this is a start
  • Thanks to Sheepdog on youtube for the critique, and Eric for transcribing the comments.

• Fixed an issue where, under certain circumstances, the tooltip for the sidebar would flicker like crazy.
  • Huge thanks to RabidSanity and Vellsi for finding a foolproof way for us to reproduce this so that we could fix it!

Rules Adjustments

• Allow marauders to be more aggressive about joining in-progress battles.
  • Previously the marauders would just compare their strength with "All marauder-hostile units on the planet". Now they will also check for their strength against the planet owner and all units hostile to the planet owner separately.
  • Lets imagine a case where the Marauders have 4k Strength, and the planet in question has 3K human and 2K AI strength in combat. Previously Marauders would have checked "4K < 3K + 2K, so don't attack". Now they will check "4K > 3K" and "4K > 2K", so they will be allowed to attack. This is only available to Marauder factions with > 5 intensity.

• Cross planet waves no longer tell you the warp gate they are spawning from or the planet they are attacking

• Astro Train Depots now spawn hourly, and trains spawn every half hour (isntead of a 10 minute interval for both spawns). Also trains will not start spawning immediately after a depot spawn, but will instead wait a few minutes.

• When ships/structures are destroyed to a neutral status (aka metal harvesters, Arks, etc), there is now a cooldown period before they can be reclaimed. This period is a minimum of 30 seconds, but if there are a ton of enemies on the planet it gets longer and longer until it is 70 seconds before claiming can be started. The top time is hit when enemy mobile military strength on the planet is at least 4.
  • In the tooltip for an entity that is claimable, it now shows how long the remaining time is that it is blocked from being claimed, if it is blocked.
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle for reporting how metal harvesters would just keep getting destroyed over and over again, pointlessly distracting the AI.

• When brownouts happen, they now last for a minimum of 60 seconds. You can no longer just scrap a bunch of stuff to get the power back on to your bubble forcefields.
  • In the tooltips it now says how long you have left in the brownout before your forcefields are restored, to help you know not to engage in that pause-and-scrap behavior (and to anticipate when power will be back).
  • This was a good example of behavior that was "optimal, but cheesy" with pausing and scrapping, and which bypassed the point of brownouts in general. Now there's substantially more risk there, and the AI actually has a chance to exploit that weakness.
  • Additionally, since this is a 60 second timer AFTER you get your energy balance back positive, it's encouraging rapid-building of new generators (although... you may still wind up needing to pause and scrap, that won't negate the brownout and that's no longer so super-optimal).
  • Thanks to RocketAssistedPuffin and folks on Discord for suggesting.

UI Improvements

• Added ability to delete saves from in game load and save menus
  • Thanks to Mac for reporting on Discord

• Added ability to delete campaigns recursively (Deletes the campaign and all associated saves)

• Made all buttons on Load Game screen the same size and properly aligned
  • Thanks Mac on Discord

• Improve Instigator Base tooltips to fix a few problems. Add a new Instigator Base type that increases AIP
  • Thanks to JAlfredGoodwin and Vellsi for the bug reports

• If a ship dies to remains, or dies to a neutral status instead of really dying, then the tooltips now say that.
  • Thanks to BadgerBadger for suggesting.

Balance Tweaks

There's a general focus on diversifying what gets a bonus against what. A look through and creating of lists concluded that this was sorely needed - Concussion and Pike Corvettes were indeed countering almost the entirety of the game. Hopefully this is a noticeable improvement.

• Concussion units get their bonus against Armor of 50mm and less, down from 80.

• Auto Bombs get their bonus against Armor of 40mm or less, down from 80.

• Auto Bomb detonation radius increased from 500 to 600.

• All Fleetships previously with 60mm Armor now have 50mm, excluding the Fusion Bomber (60), Metabolizing Gangsaw (60), Space Tank (120), Vampire Claw (40mm), Sentinel Frigate (60), Inhibiting Tesla Corvette (60), Etherjet (40).

• Fusion Bombers now get a damage bonus of 2x against anything with 40,000 shields and above, against the hull only.
  • So the damage that bypasses the shield is boosted, but nothing else.

• All Pike units now gain their bonus for high hull percentage only against the hull. Requirement is now above 75% remaining hull, instead of 80%.
  • This was causing them to get this bonus against units that are mostly shields, for essentially the entirety of their health.

• MLRS Corvettes, Turrets and Guard Posts now get their bonus damage against units with 30% or less remaining hull health, up from 20%.
  • Fairly minor boost for how little it'd appear.

• Sentinel Frigates now have albedo of 0.7, and engine gx of 14.
  • More suiting to what seems like a "vanguard military scout" themed unit, and gives them two new weaknesses.

• Metabolizing Gangsaw hull health increased from 3500 to 4200.

• Drone Armor Ship has 40mm Armor, up from 30.

• All Starships have greatly increased health, and most have increased costs as well, excluding Raid Starships.
  • Includes some of the Mercenaries - War Harvesters and War Siegers.

• Warbird Starship damage increased from 170 per missile to 200.

• Assault Starship damage increased from 2720 to 4000, but the damage bonus increase per mark is lowered from +1.5x to +1x per mark.

• Siege Starship no longer spreads damage out, and instead hits 5 targets for full damage. Damage reduced from 9000 to 3000, damage bonus against bubble forcefields increased from 10x to 20x to compensate.
  • Should temporarily solve that bug where they weren't getting the bonus at all. Should also be a bit more interesting instead of ridiculously specialised.

• AI Forcefields only have their shield points reduced from 1,000,000 to 750,000.
  • Obnoxiously long to kill.

• Spider Guardian now has multiple shots per salvo.
  • I mean really, a debuffer that only affects one fleetship at a time?

• All existing Spider units now have a maximum engine stun of 17s, and level up such to reach it at Mark 7. Dires have the maximum stun possible. They also all affect engine gx of below 14.

• Guardians have a vast array of changes - too many to list. Stats have been moved around, creating new weaknesses and removing old, Vampires gain more life, Heavy Beams self damage less, etc. Also includes health decreases to most.

• Guard Posts are the same.

• All turrets have had metal cost increases, some only about 20-33%, some fairly major (due to being strangely undercosted, far beyond normal).

• Fleetships energy cost is generally increased and standardised - 175 for caps of 180, 500 for caps of 60, and 1000 for caps of 30.
  • Please note that this may cause a brownout upon save loading - though I doubt it...seems everyone had too much.

• Dark Spire have had stat changes as well, plus some health and damage shuffling.
  • Why was a weak manifestation far more durable than the terrifying manifestation? What a strange race.

• Nanocaust have also had stat changes. No health or damage though.

• Fortresses now do 1000 damage per missile, and fire 16 per salvo instead of 10. Oh and you get 2 per mark instead of 1.

• Mines and Area Mines have had their damage halved, but gain a 2x damage bonus against units with at least Mass of 5tx, and at most 50mm armor, respectively.
  • Meant to help differentiate them a bit.

• Both Astrotrain Types have a health boost so they aren't as easy to kill when one accidentally bumbles through your forces, as well as Armor increased to 120mm.

• Almost all turret armor values reduced to 50mm to follow the Concussion changes - Beam Cannons up to 120.

• Auto Bomb damage up from 130 to 210.

Version 0.780 Just Some Cleanup

(Released October 5th, 2018)

• Fixed an issue in the prior version of the game where at certain aspect ratios (16:9 included, unfortunately) the load game screen would show hanging off the side of the screen. Same with the quick start screen.
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• The "color picker" tool now uses the newer, prettier style of interface.

• The "character biographies and recent history" screen now uses the same UI as everything else rather than that horrible white one.

• The load game interface now has a toggle button on it that lets you switch through sorting the savegames in a campaign by name (default), campaign time, or date modified.
  • Thanks to Badger for suggesting.

• If you had more than 9 notifications showing at once, then in the prior version of the game the second row would overlap the first. Fixed!
  • Additionally, now it only wraps the notifications to a new line after it runs out of space. This was harder to implement than you might think, but it generally means that you can have 18-20 items on a single row depending on your screen aspect ratio.
  • The ongoing message display and debug message display both now bump downwards if need be to allow for this.
  • Thanks to HeartHunter7 for reporting.

• Fixed a visual bug in the color picker where the selection box for the right-hand (trim) color was way too large, looking quite strange. Not sure how we missed this one for so long!
  • Thanks to Badger for reporting.

• The density map type has been disabled for now, as it was no longer generating maps for some reason.

• The savegame menu has now been updated to be a match to the recently-reworked load menu.
  • Clicking on savegame names in the list now properly populates the textbox at the bottom.
  • Trying to save over an existing savegame name now gives you a yes/no prompt letting you know that's what you're doing.

• The settings menu has been updated to the new visual style, while having a minimum of rewrite to its general code.
  • We've added a new ability for us to have the "old style" control creation process happen inside a "new style" prefab window at a point of our choosing. We can only do this in one area per window, but it's quite useful for cases like this particular one.

• The basic text font used on old-style pages is now updated. This includes the settings menu and lobby, mainly.

• The graphics for sliders (used on the settings window) have been updated dramatically.

• The borders for textboxes have been made more clear, which also helps set them apart from buttons better.

• The visuals for dropdowns and the last of the buttons have been updated to the newer style. This again just affects the settings and lobby pages.

• In general cleaned up some of the formatting on the settings screen so that it looks a lot nice.

• Fixed an issue (with TextMeshPro) where dropdowns would show blank text if popped open inside a scrolling area.

• Improved the descriptions of some of the game settings, and the displayed names for them and their categories. Still more to do, though, to make them truly clear across the board.

• The settings menu now shows no more than four decimals behind the float sliders.
  • Thanks to dv for reporting.

Version 0.779 Quick Starts

(Released October 4th, 2018)

• Completely redid the logos on the main menu. They are no longer 3D objects, but instead are world-space ui elements with PBR textures. They have materials set up for themselves, and new lights set just for them, and they no longer suffer from the strange clipping and aliasing issues that they previously had.
  • Thanks to Mckloshiv for reporting we still had an issue.

• The visual styling for buttons is now completely different, and in keeping with the new visual theme that was added a while ago in the main HUD.

• The add/edit profile screen no longer includes the ability to select a default Ark, since that was completely unused anyhow.

• Ships/structures that have been destroyed and turned into remains no longer consume any energy.
  • Thanks to HeartHunter7 for suggesting.

• The lobby screen now includes, literally, an apology notice. It's still under construction, but will be done prior to Early Access.

• There is now a resume button in the escape menu.
  • Thanks to Dominus Arbitrationis for reporting.

• The hacking line items are now substantially taller, allowing for more sane-looking spacing between each one. Mercenaries, too.

• The sizing and spacing of items in the left sidebar for objectives is now far better. It takes up more room, but is now actually legible.
  • Additionally, categories that are empty no longer show up at all.
  • Also also, fixed the bug with collapsing categories not actually hiding the items inside them.
  • Also also also, there is now colorization on pretty much all of the category items to make them easier to visually parse.

• The load savegame window has been completely redone in the new style of the ui.
  • It also now has two columns: one on the left, which has the campaigns, and one on the right, which has the savegames.
  • Savegames are now individual rows, showing the basic info on them in an easy to read format, and the extra data in a tooltip.
  • The sorting of savegames is also now simply alphabetical, so you can actually find what you're looking for!

• The graphics for the textboxes and buttons have all been updated to match the newer GUI style.
  • A few out of date windows, like Save Game, Settings, and Custom Game still use old-style buttons, though.

"Quick Starts" Now Available!

• The game now has an official Quick Start option. This works by loading existing savegames that are placed in the new GameData/QuickStarts folder (even categorized by subfolder so there can truly be a ton of these in there).
  • All of the parameters are fully baked in, including things like difficulty and the number of human players, so there is a limit to just how flexible a given savegame can be.
  • THAT said, the starting planet is randomized every time, as is the map seed; so the planet layouts, and all that other stuff with what is seeded on each planet, is different every time. It's basically like going in and hitting random seed and then generate on the galaxy map, and throwing a dart to see what your starting planet is.
  • Thanks to having the ability to categorize these into folders, this is probably flexible enough for our purposes of letting players get into the game quick and explore things. If they really want a lot more customization, the list kind of keeps expanding until you wind up recreating a scaled-down version of the lobby itself. So at that point, they should just graduate to the lobby from quick starts.

• There are now 5 different quick start scenarios available, each with detailed descriptions on them if you mouseover them.
  • Two are very basic vanilla scenarios, while three of them are varied multi-faction situations.

Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug where, since the automatic strength calculation work was put into place, parasitism, zombification, and metabolization were not working.
  • Thanks to zeusalmighty, HeartHunter7, and BadgerBadger for reporting.

• Fixed ALL of the issues relating to the mouse being over some non-tooltip part of the GUI, and you using the mousewheel and it causing the planet view or galaxy map to zoom.
  • This also fixes the issue when you're mousing over a dropdown and trying to zoom with that.
  • This WAS working, a while back, at least in cases like the sidebar. But upgrades to the ui system and the underlying unity system broke it. The new fix should be future-proof, knock on wood, as it is no longer timing-sensitive.
  • Thanks to Kahuna for reporting.

• Fixed an issue where modal popups were not visible when triggered from certain windows that were saying "suppress all other windows." Load screen, for instance. Now the modal popups push past even those kinds of screens.

• The little notification indicators at the top of the screen FINALLY no longer have the overlap that makes them largely illegible.
  • Additionally, their background has been updated and they now are more legible thanks to not being on a partially transparent background.
  • Thanks to Ovalcircle and many others for reminding us about this one.

• Fixed the color picker window examples all just being big boxes since the icon rework.

• Fixed an issue that could lead to flickering in various tooltips.
  • Please let us know if you still see that in the sidebar, though.

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: The Era of Discovery