AI War 2:The Paradigm Shift

Known Issues

• Any bugs or requests should go to our mantis bugtracker
  • If you need to submit log files, those can generally be found under your PlayerData folder in the folder your game is installed in. The most relevant one is called ArcenDebugLog.txt. You can send us the whole thing, or just strip out relevant parts.
  • In rare cases, mainly if your entire game crashes (that almost never happens), we will need your unity player log. That gets overwritten the next time you run the game after a crash, unlike the other log. These can be found here:
    • Windows: C:\Users\username\AppData\LocalLow\Arcen Games, LLC\AIWar2\Player.log
    • macOS: ~/Library/Logs/Arcen Games, LLC/AIWar2/Player.log
    • Linux: ~/.config/unity3d/Arcen Games, LLC/AIWar2/Player.log

• Multiplayer is in public alpha, as noted below. There is a detailed multiplayer guide that we are working on building up.

• Feel free to join discussions on discord!

What Does Multiplayer Alpha Mean?

Please see this link for details on multiplayer. This wound up taking up too much space in this document, so all of the multiplayer-relevant bits have been moved to the other page.

What's this phase all about?

Multiplayer is fully playable at this point, but still has a variety of glitches and doesn't have all of the features that we intend to have in the long term. So hence it still being in alpha status. But we greatly welcome folks to play, and hopefully give us reports on what is going wrong if something does go wrong.

We expect to be to a fully-polished non-beta status for multiplayer in November or December, if things continue as they have.

Our second expansion for the game, Zenith Onslaught, has a whole heck of a lot of it completed, but still needs more doing. Badger has done all of his parts for it, and has retired like Puffin before him, so at this point we are down to basically a one-person show again (me, Chris) on bugfixing, finishing multiplayer, finishing my parts of DLC2, and finishing the last of the kickstarter obligations. So if the schedule slips some, it's likely because I had trouble juggling that, or wanted extra time to make things truly shine, whichever. But at the start of this phase, things are feeling very positive.

Version 2.617

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

• Fix a bug where the AI Reserves journal message was playing incorrectly when loading a sufficiently old game save.
  • Thanks to Metrekec for reporting

• Add a new Galaxy Map Setting to change how the links look. Instead of using Red for "these two planets are hostile" or Blue for "these two planets are friendly", the game can now show a color gradient between the faction owners

Version 2.616 Stop Printing Money, AI!

(Released October 14th, 2020)

• Grappler Guardian balance updates from zeusalmighty, for those new units that come as a unique thing in the new AI Reserves mechanics Badger added yesterday.

• Added a new Dire Singularity Guardian by zeusalmighty, for basically boss-level seeding in the new AI Reserves mechanics.

• Fixed an issue where black hole generators that were not also on a ship with a gravitic core of some sort would not work.

• Fix a bug where the scourge were spawning unlimited builders
  • Thanks to a number of people, including Sombre and ArnaudB for reporting. Thanks to Badger for fixing even after retirement.

• Fix a bug where right-clicking a journal entry could cause an Exception
  • Thanks to Ahnold for reporting. Thanks to Badger for fixing even after retirement.

• You can read all about The Badger And Puffin Legacy, if you like. Puffin retired earlier this year, and Badger is retiring now, so this is a good time to pay some respects.

• The reinforcements seem to have a math bug in them, so we put in extra detail and formatting in how we export them.

• Fixed a math bug in reinforcements that was basically "printing money" once the game really got going, and would let planets of the AI reinforce almost infinitely.
  • We're not sure if this is fully a new bug, but it has certainly found new expression in the new reinforcement logic.
  • This may have been an older bug that was somewhat suppressed by the old reinforcement logic, or it's a brand new typo, but because of how much code has changed it's hard to be sure.

• For the first time, we now have a way for the budgets of the AI to dump their details to log files. What we found was a bit surprising and definitely horrifying.
  • First of all, for quite a long time, apparently the logic for partially-neutered planets has been horribly wrong.
    • If a planet was neutered down to 1 reinforcement point, then the budget would be 5% of usual, no problem.
    • If a planet had not lost any reinforcement points, then the budget would be 100% of usual, no problem.
    • If a planet had lost some reinforcement points, then the budget would... be multiplied by whatever the number of reinforcement points are.
      • So, you killed reinforcement points down to 4 left out of 7 original? Congrats, the cap is UP by 400%.
      • The correct number should have been 57% of normal, and now that works properly.
  • Then there was a really harsh AIP multiplier that was being applied. It was adding far too much based on whatever the budget was, and larger budgets were more affected.
    • Now it only adds budget for each AIP above 100, which is softer to begin with, and then it also only adds it based on 10% of the current running total, rather than on the entire running total.
  • Finally, there was a portion that was added based on time (number of 10 minute increments).
    • This was also too harsh. This is now based not on the running total of budget, but 1/10th of it, instead. Making this also a much gentler slope.
  • None of these were new errors, but they were showing up now more because the reinforcement logic calling these budgets was so much more effective.
  • Without these in place, AND with the above actually-charge-me-the-budget fix in place, now reinforcements happen at a rate we would expect.
  • Thanks to ArnaudB and Crabby for the saves where we could verify it, and others also for reporting.

Prior Release Notes

AI War 2: Sunset of The Badger Era