AI War 2:Pre-And-Post Launch Polish

Known Issues

• Various bugs on 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 0.901

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

• 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

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.

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