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 2.621

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

• It is now possible to set up material swaps on a list of images related to a given button, which in turn lets us make the glows more intense or even different colors.
  • We're now using this for the buttons in the lower left corner of the main view, so that as you hover over them it's super clear what you are hovering over. This feels far more interactive, and has a lot more in common with what we are doing with other buttons elsewhere in the game.

• Added a new "pre-canvas LDR camera" that makes sure to do a no-algorithm tonemapping from the HDR range to the LDR range.
  • This essentially does add an extra compositing step, but makes it so that anything that might peek into the HDR range from things like hovering over certain faction icons can't possibly interact with the new bloom effect that is used for buttons.
  • Because we have a number of special extra cameras for things like the effects where we have not scouted or don't have current intel, this was the cleanest way to make sure that nothing else goes wrong.
  • Thanks to NR SirLimbo and Puffin for reporting.

• The asteroid belt ring that goes around the playing area on planets has been updated so that it has full lighting effects on it, with a dark side and a light side that also matches the direction of the sunlight hitting the planet.
  • On dark starfield backgrounds, you'll mostly just see the brighter side of these asteroids, but you'll still finally be able to see them.
  • On light starfield backgrounds (lots of nebulas), you'll mostly see the shadowed side, which then looks a lot like before.
  • On areas of transition and contrast, you still have something to visually pick out in either situation.
  • Thanks to a lot of folks for reporting this over the years. I tried this a while ago and couldn't get it to look acceptable, but this time it worked out.

Revised Key Scenes

• The victory screen has been completely overhauled in terms of the visual background style, and the fonts used, and the composition of where text is, etc.
  • The overall color scheme and the visuals are based on what the main menu has been for the last few years, except it's more dramatic than before in the sky and the lighting.
  • We were fond of that old main menu screen, and so wanted to keep it around in some fashion, but also to make it more dramatic in a way that is fitting for a victory screen.
  • We were NOT fond of the old victory screen visuals, so those are just tossed out.

• Fixed a typo in the victory text.
  • Thanks to Venger for reporting.

• The loss screen has been pretty cool for a while, and it was based on an even older version of the main menu (go figure), but it still needed some work.
  • First of all, the armada in the background has been repositioned and also doubled in size, to better fit with the composition of where the AI overlord is located and not distract from certain other elements of the image.
  • Secondly, the background visuals are far more vicious and red and angry, and have even more visual interest, in terms of how and where they are positioned.
  • Thirdly, the blue planet now has an even stronger glow off its atmosphere, but more pale and more in the background.
  • Fourth, the lens flare and glare has been turned off of the bloom effect being used here, to keep things more consistent with the rest of the game.
  • Lastly, the text has been moved around a fair bit, and the fonts changed and button repositioned, etc. It's more similar to the loss screen, but not the same.
  • This screen is not the super most legible text, just by nature, but it's at least attractive now and it definitely is readable. But if any screen is going to cause a bit of eye strain while reading, it's this one. We figure that's okay, as you don't really need to read the parts that would be at all that way, anyhow.

Beta 2.620 Hotfixes

(Released October 24th, 2020)

• Fixed an error in the most recent beta where the lobby was broken if you didn't have DLC2.
  • Thanks to cml and UFO for reporting, and Puffin for pointing us to where the issue was.

• Fixed a known issue from the last beta where the settings and chat visible buttons in the lower left corner of the main screen were not working.

Beta 2.619 Quality Of Life And Polish

(Released October 23rd, 2020)

Since there are many visual changes in progress, to save confusion this is only on the beta branch on steam and gog right now.

• Marauder Outposts now have more health

• The faction list of the Esc menu is improved. It is now sorted for easier reading, and the 'allegiance' section of the Esc menu is color coded and simplified.

• Updated the galaxy map camera view to now use a 4-camera stack instead of a 3-camera stack. The new camera on the stack is just for rendering the space background, and it now uses a field of view of 60 rather than 40 so that it has the proper perspective and scale on those background starfields and nebulas versus seeming super zoomed-in. The field of view of the map parts itself remains at 40, to avoid distortion on them.
  • Thanks to Puffin Emeritus for suggesting.

• Harmonic turrets must be fully constructed in order to apply their "Strengthen other harmonic turrets" buff. Turrets under construction no longer count, and neither do remains
  • Reported by ArnaudB

• Updated Harmonic mechanic to be able to increase per Mark. Harmonic turrets gain 10% of the original value per Mark.

• Vengeance Generators now prioritize other VGs close to deploying ships when sharing energy. The goal is to get multiple battles going at once. Also improve the hovertext for VGs with some colour
  • Thanks for GreatYng for prompting

• Astro Trains guards now spawn pre-stacked if appropriate

• Add a new setting to not show the Dotted Lines between player planets and AI planets without wormholes. I like being able to see the colour gradient better.
  • Off by default

Journal Tweaks

• The game now does a better job of telling you when journal entries appear through their Chat text

• When there are new journal entries to read the "Journal" tab on the sidebar now changes colour to make it easier to notice

• Add a few journal entries for the astro trains

UI Reskinning Part 1

• Textboxes throughout the game now go to an ellipsis if there is not enough room for their contents, rather than looping to a second line in a strange way. This rarely came up because of character limits.

• When you go from hovering over a textbox to then clicking it, it no longer flashes a different color for a moment.

• Designed some new UI shaders that allow for us to use HDR blooms on icons.
  • Added a post-processing stack bloom item on the GUI-layer camera that is specifically for anything that is still in the HDR range when it is post-processing there.
  • This should not apply to anything except the UI itself, since everything else should have been mapped back down to the LDR range by the tonemapping prior to now.
  • At any rate, this then lets us use, very selectively and carefully, some glows on icons and similar in the UI and have that behave properly and give a much better sci-fi effect.

• We've been working on this all week, but at this point the various UI elements are about... maybe 1/3rd updated to a new and improved style.
  • The escape menu, and all of the popup yes/no windows, are all done. The main menu buttons area is done (but not the actual main menu scene in the background or the angled-buttons stuff).
  • New font selections for headers and buttons are done, but they're not universally applied everywhere yet.
  • The bottom-left corner buttons and timer on the main view is fully updated, but the sidebar and resource bar and selection windows and such are not at all.

Version 2.618 Astro Reserve Tuning

(Released October 21st, 2020)

• Add some warning text to the X map saying it has balance issues

• Fix a bug where ai-allied factions like the scourge or marauders weren't correctly allied to things like Astro Trains. This was causing a number of issues, like 'Astro Trains never spawn'

• CPAs will group-move more often
  • Suggested by Crabby on steam

• Change the way Threat numbers for the resource bar are counted.
  • AI and AI-aligned factions (Instigators, CPAs. Not AI-Allied Marauders or the like) are the only factions that now count as Threat.

• Add an Experimental setting under "Game" to allow Hunter ships required to go after a specific faction to go through other factions on the way
  • The most usual case was if you owned the center of an Octopus map, and the AI homeworld on one of the legs was building up Threat against a Nanocaust on another leg. The AI really didn't want to send attack you with its Anti-Nanocaust ships, so they would just sit around.
  • I'm not sure how well this works, and whether it has potential problems, so I'm making it an opt-in setting to get feedback.

• AI Reserves ships now attrition much more slowly
  • Attritioning is done as a neat thematic, and also to make sure that the reserves will die if they can't get back to their wormhole, but it was going much too quickly
  • Thanks to GreatYng for pointing this out.

• Fixed an issue where command stations and NPC fleet leaders could be seen to be in the new "stationary flagship" mode.

• The new "stationary flagship" status now defalts to off, and for all savegames prior to this one will have them all set to off.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage, Metrekec, Smidlee, Asteroid, TechSY730, crawlers, and others for weighing in on this.

• For the included "Extended Ship Variants" Mod:
  • Fixed the Oculus not having a limit on the damage modifier, which meant that it could deal an amazing 1430x damage to them (assuming the 2.5x multiplier based on time also applies). A single Oculus Mark 7 could do 926,640 points of damage - per shot (120 x 5.4 x 1430).
  • Found by ArnaudB, when his Spire Great-Shield Emitter got eaten in an instant.

• For the included "Extended Ship Variants" Mod and the Fallen Spire version as well:
  • General Change: The AI ship group weight of all variants was reduced by 50%. So now they should be spending much less budget on them, and more on base variants
  • The Void Bomber's full-invulnerability fortification effect has been nerfed
    • It now only applies to shield, and reduces damage to 0.1% (so only 1 in 1000 points of damage applies). Shields were also buffed from 250 to 500 points.
    • Hull was increased from 500 to 2500 to resist at least a bit of fusion damage, which (along with melee) is king against them
    • The defense buff now activates at a range of 350 instead of 1000
  • The Vex Guard had its cost increased: AI Budget cost up a quarter from 80 to 100, Metal cost from 4500 to 6500 and Energy cost reduced from 800 to 500
  • Also from a discussion with ArnaudB on Discord.

• For the included "Extended Ship Variants Fallen Spire" Mod and the Fallen Spire version as well:
  • Buffed the EMP Missile Frigate up again, increasing its paralysis potential
    • The description now (accurately) states that it has 10 shots (instead of 5, it always had 10), but it now also gains 2 shots per mark level beyond 1 for a full 22 at Mark 7. This is because, as fights expand, more missiles will inevitably get shot down.
    • The maximum amount of targets hit per EMP missile is 7 instead of 5
    • EMP Missiles have an albedo of 0.6 instead of 0.3, making them immune to most tractor beams (if not all).
    • The base cap has been increased from 1-2 to 2-3 ships, or from 2-3 to 3-4 ships in the Frigates-With-Support fleet template.

Astro Train Buffs

• Astro trains mark level goes up based on the number of trains spawned. When they begin spawning stronger variants the mark level resets to 1.
  • Previously the astro trains had just taken on the mark level of the AI, which meant it generally stayed low all the time.

• The astro trains can now have Guards; each train can have some Guards who will deploy when there are enemies, and will return to the train when there are no longer enemies
• Astro Trains can get more guards when they reach a Station. They also can heal a bit on reaching a station.
  • Guard strength increases based on trains killed (regardless of who killed the trains)
  • Guards are intended to make trains a bit harder

• Astro Trains can spawn stronger variants after enough trains have been killed by the player

• The largest balance change is letting the train mark level increase more readily. Guards are intended to be a bit of extra cool/flavour with some balance impact.

Version 2.617 Calming For The Nerves

(Released October 16th, 2020)

• Should now be a new Journal message for AI Relic Trains.

Quality of Life Improvements

• 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
  • The old style version is still available as an option.

• There is a general problem with "churn" in ships and stacks being so fast that if you have many ships selected it was almost impossible to remove a status effect based off of a simple toggle.
  • Our overall logic was "if at least one of the selected items doesn't have the status, then add the status." But this gets intensely confusing, and we introduced transports that is part of why we made L be load and U be unload.
  • So let's revisit our older standing orders, too, because this is just problematic with trying to toggle them.
    • G is no longer "toggle group move" it is now "Enable Group Move"
      • You now have to use Ctrl+G to remove ships from group move. None of this toggling business!
      • Additionally, on the interface for the game where it shows the icon under selected ships, right-clicking that button now removes, while left-clicking enables. The tooltips are updated to say all this.
    • The same exact setup is now true for "Stop To Shoot Mode" and the K key, including its button and Ctrl+K and all that.
    • Exact same thing again with "hold fire/disable" functions and the N key, and Ctrl+N, the interface button, etc.
    • Ditto again for Pursuit mode and the V key.
    • And a final ditto for attack-move mode and the X key.
  • This is something that has been reported since at the very least February, and even before that, apparently. Somehow or other this still frankly just slipped past our attention. The amount of information overload that we sometimes face is kind of intense when it comes to bug reports.
    • But with that said, holy cow this was incredibly annoying. There's nothing like pressing a button and not having it do what you want to induce rage. We just don't really use these options all that much, or when we do they are with only one fleet selected, and it was working well in single-fleet situations. Something about multiple fleets in one selection was particularly throwing this off, but it's hard to be sure of the exact full reasons.
    • At any rate, we're glad to have it fixed now, and thanks to folks for bringing this up again so that it finally registered in our attention properly. This feels like a major frustrating oversight.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage, Asteroid, Arides, and TechSY730 for reporting.

• The escape key no longer clears your selected ships and fleets. There really was no good use case for this, and it was annoying to at least some folks.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.

• If you are on a map that is large enough that you can zoom out so far that the "Icons By Planets Hides At Distance" setting kicks in (default is 1.5, but you can change that up to 10 if you prefer), then now it will still show any fleets or other on-galaxy-map-units that you have selected. Later we can customize other display modes to show things in this scenario in various ways.
  • Thanks to Asteroid for suggesting.

Stationary Flagship Mode

• New setting in the Ship Controls section of the controls: Hold To Give Orders To Stationary Flagships
  • Normally flagships that are unarmed will not listen to any orders that you give them. This is because usually you select their entire fleet, and you mean 'everybody but you.'
  • However, there are times when you definitely DO want to give them orders to move somewhere, perhaps transport some ships for you, and holding down this key while giving those orders will make them listen to you.
  • The alternative is to take them out of stationary mode, but this is far simpler. Movement orders on the galaxy map screen are always obeyed.
  • Default keybinding: control key.

• The pre-existing "Flagship Movement Mode" option in the fleet options panel is now renamed to "Flagship Roaming" for the sake of clarity.

• A new "Flagship Orders" option in the fleet options panel has been added.
  • It is either "Follow All Orders" or "Stationary Flagship Mode".
    • Unarmed flagships are by default stationary, while armed ones by default will follow all orders.
  • Description in the tooltip:
    • Some flagships are meant for fighting, while orders meant for hanging back. How far back is up to you.
    • When this is set to 'Follow All Orders', it acts like any other ship in your fleet. This is great for Golems and Arks. Not so hot for unarmed transports.
    • When this is set to 'Stationary Flagship Mode' mode, the flagship will just sit there and ignore all orders you give it. The assumption is that the orders are meant for the rest of the fleet.
    • To override this while staying in stationary flagship mode, hold Control down while issuing orders to the flagship. It will follow them as if this mode was not even on. This is perfect for rapidly giving different orders to your unarmed transports and the rest of the fleet they are supporting. Movement orders on the galaxy map screen are always obeyed.

• If a flagship is in this new stationary mode, then they will show up with the "guard" shield icon behind them, which we don't really use for other purposes much.
  • This should help players who are jumping right into this new version realize that something is going on when their ships are not listening to them.
  • When Ctrl is held, then this shield status icon goes away and whatever the normal status icon would be appears. This is immediate visual feedback of what is happening, and also lets you check to see that your flagship is indeed in pursuit mode or what have you.

• When a flagship is in the new stationary mode, and you are not on the galaxy map (where that is irrelevant), the tooltip for the flagship now shows "Stationary Flagship Mode!" even in the super brief tooltip, and then has more details if you go to medium and then full detail.

• This whole thing with the flagships sometimes rushing to their deaths has definitely been one of the most singularly-annoying things since we introduced the concept of fleets, way back in the middle of Early Access.
  • At first, more fleets than not had big weapons (Golems and Arks), so it seemed like less of a thing. But over time, it has become more and more annoying.
  • This was something we have thought about for a long time, but for whatever reason we never could come up with a good solution for it despite how much it annoyed us directly, let alone player reports.
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage, nas1m, Asteroid, and others for contributing to this discussion since last December, and then more acutely more recently when this solution was arrived at.

Bugfixes

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

• Fix a typo in the AIP hovertext in the resource bar
  • Thanks to Puffin for reporting

• Don't let Exos sync with a wormhole invasion if the AIP is too low for wormhole invasions
  • Thanks to NRSirLimbo for reporting

• Fix a bug where the AI was telling you where its major structures are, even on unexplored planets
  • Thanks to TechSY730 for reporting

• Add some defensive code to the DoOnAnyDeath code path for the player
  • Problems were reported here in several multiplayer games.

• Fixed a bug in the nanocaust where any savegames that included them and which were from version 2.614 would fail to load in 2.616.
  • Thanks to Cyborg for reporting, although we also ran into it ourselves.

• It turns out that in some older savegames, we already had the wrong data types on certain other objects, such as having DoomData on certain ships.
  • We fixed this in later versions of the game and had them become more strict with how they are loading the related data in order to now allow for this sort of wrong data to persist, but in turn this made some older savegames (from the 1.3x timeframe and prior) unreadable.
  • For those older savegames, we've now relaxed the restrictions to allow for the bad data to be read in, and it will throw a warning message as you load those saves but should still actually get them open properly (the example save that we have now loads fully).
  • Thanks to Strategic Sage for reporting.

• Fixed an exception that could happen in certain circumstances after failing to load a bad savegame.

• Further updates: after a savegame with old bad data is loaded in, it now discards that old bad data after it loads it. This has no effect on gameplay, it was data that wasn't being used anyhow. But this does make it so that if you save it in a newer version of the game and then try to load the NEW save, you aren't just right back in the same boat with it not loading the save because of that bad data.

• Updated the TimeBasedPool class to no longer expand, but rather to start large and just use the parts that it needs, throwing any excesses away if there really are any that are that far out of bounds.
  • There was an exceptionally rare exception that could happen when shutting down the game or going to the main menu out of the game with the way it worked before, but much more common was some extra slowness in how it was having to resize arrays to handle those events in general. That is all faster now, and can't have that sort of exception.
  • Thanks to Endovior for reporting.

• Also put in some changes to further distance ships from pooling, and somewhat start a road toward prepping them more for the new style of PKID generation.

• Fixed a cross-threading exception that could happen in UpdateEntitiesShownAtPlanetDirectly() if you were on the galaxy map view and a ship died at just the wrong time.
  • Thanks to UFO for reporting.

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