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.
- Arks are still only partly back, which means that also Chief Advisers are not used for now.
- 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!)
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
