This one contains many visible changes but mainly a lot of behind-the-scenes changes in preparation for the upcoming "Vengeance of the Machine" expansion (more details to come on that fairly soon).
Some of those changes are peeking out from behind the curtain: the AI's Guardians are now becoming another source of variety between games (i.e. Replay Value). So we're revising the existing guardians to be more notable so that you'll care whether the AI rolled Laser Guardians or Artillery Guardians or Special Forces Guardians (or all three) or whatever. Right now there are only 19 guardian types to choose from (Tachyon Guardians are separate) so there's something like a 40% chance in any given game that one guardian type will be in the initial 3 picks for both fo the AI players. That's not too bad, as far as variety goes, but one goal of the expansion is to add substantially to that guardian variety. We'll see!
Other notable changes include some significant follow-up buffs to the Enclave after its recent re-imagination, fixes for some longstanding (mainly edge-case) AI behavior quirks, and an increase in the number of rolls of tissue paper used to armor Advanced Factories.
Update: 6.027 hotfix to get some for-next-expansion stuff back behind the scenes (sounds of something being hit with a cane). "Shoo! Shoo!"
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
Senin, 06 Mei 2013
Senin, 29 April 2013
AI War Beta 6.024-6.025 "The Squeaky Wheel Gets The Buff (or Nerf)" Released!
This one ... does a lot.
In this release we're mainly we're answering a recent community poll by making its top results more attractive places to spend Knowledge (though the Raid Starship actually got its treatment for this in 6.023). Specifically:
1) Turrets in general. The combat stats are something of a sidegrade, though on the buff side of that line. The main thing here is bringing their K costs down (as well as making them more regular across different turret types).
2) Command station upgrades (like the MkII Economic Command Station, etc) now also provide a hefty bonus to your homeworld in the form of a foldout that provides the same benefit as the unlocked station. These are cumulative, so unlocking mkII and mkIII military command stations and mkII logistical command stations will put both a mkII military, mkIII military, and mkII logistics foldout on your homeworld. Incidentally, that gives everything on the planet a +100% to firepower and completely negates AI cloaking on that planet (both from the mil III) as well as slowing down enemies (from the log II) so that might not be a bad idea. If it didn't cost an arm and a leg in Knowledge, that is.
3) The Mobile Repair Station has taken over the Enclave Starship's role of fleetship production in the field (which incidentally makes that a base-game ability now, for the two of you who don't have CoN), been officially renamed the Mobile Space Dock, and come down from 4000 to 3000 Knowledge.
4) Speaking of the Enclave Starship, it needs to stop winning these polls ;) So it's been reinvented a bit. As mentioned above it no longer builds fleet ships in the field. It also no longer builds its unique-to-the-Enclave drones in the normal fashion, but instead generates them automatically much like a Spire Blade Spawner or Tackle Drone Launcher. The result is something much easier to use for just getting stuff dead and something much closer to the original "carrier" inspiration behind the Enclave Starship. K costs have also been adjusted to match most of the other starships.
5) The MkII Transport is now the Assault Transport. Basically the MkI Transport does such an exemplary job in the "Ship Bus" role that there wasn't much reason to spend 4000 Knowledge on a better transport. So the Assault Transport now provides several new tactical options through: cloaking, guns (that get stronger the more ships are loaded in the transport), instantaneous unload, more durability, and not delaying the first shot of unloaded ships as long as the MkI does. We'd also toyed with the idea of it dropping a shortlived forcefield on death, but that seemed a bit too gimmicky and a bit too easy to cheese (without still more gimmicks to prevent the cheese). Knowledge cost is now 3000.
A pretty good haul of buffs for the human side, eh?
Well the AI isn't happy. Not a bit.
A few key improvements to carrier/cpa logic should help make those more "interesting", and the AI's response to Knowledge Hacking has been... augmented, you could say. You won't notice much difference in the first K hack, and maybe a minor difference in the second hack, but from there on it can get considerably more dicey. None of this "9 Knowledge Hacks on Diff 10" shenaniga-tomfoolery, to use an example which is obviously hypothetical and not at all related to a recent AAR win.
Also we've tuned the recent Starship buffs back a bit as they were very much getting into the territory of overshadowing fleet ships despite the lower "total" available. This set of changes is relatively mild and some people think more tuning back is necessary, but some don't, so we'll see.
Based on a lot of thought and player feedback that the game was simply being too nice on this one point, Advanced Research Stations no longer grant mkII of their bonus type for free. Instead they give 500 bonus Knowledge immediately upon capture. Also, though not for strictly-related reasons (having more to do with not saddling mkIII price balance with the adv-factory question) mkIII fleet ship cost has come down from 6000 to 4000. The result is that if you normally unlock mkIII of every ARS bonus type you'll see absolutely no difference in total K expenditure (-500 + 2500 + 4000 vs 6000), but that if you don't it's something of a nerf.
The release contains a few other changes as well, notably the addition of a couple control toggles that should make life more pleasant for people wanting to "automatically dump any resources over 1.5M metal+crystal into mercenary production (or building that fort or trader toy, or whatever)" or "don't let cloaked or immobile AI units prevent automatic harvester rebuilding".
Update: 6.025 hotfix to fix a bug preventing most foldouts from spawning in multiplayer.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
In this release we're mainly we're answering a recent community poll by making its top results more attractive places to spend Knowledge (though the Raid Starship actually got its treatment for this in 6.023). Specifically:
1) Turrets in general. The combat stats are something of a sidegrade, though on the buff side of that line. The main thing here is bringing their K costs down (as well as making them more regular across different turret types).
2) Command station upgrades (like the MkII Economic Command Station, etc) now also provide a hefty bonus to your homeworld in the form of a foldout that provides the same benefit as the unlocked station. These are cumulative, so unlocking mkII and mkIII military command stations and mkII logistical command stations will put both a mkII military, mkIII military, and mkII logistics foldout on your homeworld. Incidentally, that gives everything on the planet a +100% to firepower and completely negates AI cloaking on that planet (both from the mil III) as well as slowing down enemies (from the log II) so that might not be a bad idea. If it didn't cost an arm and a leg in Knowledge, that is.
3) The Mobile Repair Station has taken over the Enclave Starship's role of fleetship production in the field (which incidentally makes that a base-game ability now, for the two of you who don't have CoN), been officially renamed the Mobile Space Dock, and come down from 4000 to 3000 Knowledge.
4) Speaking of the Enclave Starship, it needs to stop winning these polls ;) So it's been reinvented a bit. As mentioned above it no longer builds fleet ships in the field. It also no longer builds its unique-to-the-Enclave drones in the normal fashion, but instead generates them automatically much like a Spire Blade Spawner or Tackle Drone Launcher. The result is something much easier to use for just getting stuff dead and something much closer to the original "carrier" inspiration behind the Enclave Starship. K costs have also been adjusted to match most of the other starships.
5) The MkII Transport is now the Assault Transport. Basically the MkI Transport does such an exemplary job in the "Ship Bus" role that there wasn't much reason to spend 4000 Knowledge on a better transport. So the Assault Transport now provides several new tactical options through: cloaking, guns (that get stronger the more ships are loaded in the transport), instantaneous unload, more durability, and not delaying the first shot of unloaded ships as long as the MkI does. We'd also toyed with the idea of it dropping a shortlived forcefield on death, but that seemed a bit too gimmicky and a bit too easy to cheese (without still more gimmicks to prevent the cheese). Knowledge cost is now 3000.
A pretty good haul of buffs for the human side, eh?
Well the AI isn't happy. Not a bit.
A few key improvements to carrier/cpa logic should help make those more "interesting", and the AI's response to Knowledge Hacking has been... augmented, you could say. You won't notice much difference in the first K hack, and maybe a minor difference in the second hack, but from there on it can get considerably more dicey. None of this "9 Knowledge Hacks on Diff 10" shenaniga-tomfoolery, to use an example which is obviously hypothetical and not at all related to a recent AAR win.
Also we've tuned the recent Starship buffs back a bit as they were very much getting into the territory of overshadowing fleet ships despite the lower "total" available. This set of changes is relatively mild and some people think more tuning back is necessary, but some don't, so we'll see.
Based on a lot of thought and player feedback that the game was simply being too nice on this one point, Advanced Research Stations no longer grant mkII of their bonus type for free. Instead they give 500 bonus Knowledge immediately upon capture. Also, though not for strictly-related reasons (having more to do with not saddling mkIII price balance with the adv-factory question) mkIII fleet ship cost has come down from 6000 to 4000. The result is that if you normally unlock mkIII of every ARS bonus type you'll see absolutely no difference in total K expenditure (-500 + 2500 + 4000 vs 6000), but that if you don't it's something of a nerf.
The release contains a few other changes as well, notably the addition of a couple control toggles that should make life more pleasant for people wanting to "automatically dump any resources over 1.5M metal+crystal into mercenary production (or building that fort or trader toy, or whatever)" or "don't let cloaked or immobile AI units prevent automatic harvester rebuilding".
Update: 6.025 hotfix to fix a bug preventing most foldouts from spawning in multiplayer.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
Selasa, 23 April 2013
AI War Beta 6.022-6.023 "Honored Bugs" Released!
This one congratulates the 4 winners of our recent "bug of the year" poll by... well, exterminating them. Sometimes it's tough being the winner.
#1 was a longstanding-but-not-really-noticed-until-recently problem in the mapgen logic causing all Advanced Research Stations, Fabricators, and various other (though not all) capturables to seed only on planets controlled by the first AI player. Normally this didn't matter a whole lot, but if the first AI happened to be a really annoying type (Scorched Earth, notably) the pain was... noticeable. Anyway, several bugs were involved but mapgen is now more equitable in that regard.
#2 was another longstanding problem with how the preferred-target rules (where stuff you give a direct attack order to should prefer to shoot things similar to the designated target) worked when attacking Hybrids. It turns out that the problem basically applied to anything with a modular forcefield and there were also some problems with focus-fire and preferred-targeting in the general case. Normally I wouldn't have spent hours chasing something like this down because I perceive other things as being more important to the community, but the poll was helpful in correcting that perception. So this stuff is quite a bit tidier now. Not a great time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.
#3 turned out to not even be a bug: complaints that nothing was happening to go with the "Defensive Hybrids Are Mobilizing" message that can show up when you have Advanced Hybrids on and a CPA or exo or such happens. In the test case I saw the defensive hybrids were indeed switching to offensive types, but they still didn't have enough firepower to think they had a chance so they continued not-attacking. That's by design, as otherwise they just all charge to their deaths (more than usual, I mean). Nonetheless, this "mobilization" mechanic has been beefed up to be more noticeable. Maybe not such a bad time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.
#4 was updating the turret types to work nicely with ultra-low caps by changing them to have base caps divisible by 8. Rounding up all the stats for those into the newer more cap-oriented model took time, but it's done now. Which is good, as there's noises being made about rebalancing turrets in other ways. We'll see.
There are several other bugfixes and balance changes in this release. Notably, the exponential scaling of wave size with AIP on Diff 8+ has been removed after several months of feedback on it, and balance iteration continues on the nebula scenarios.
Update: 6.023 hotfix to fix an unhandled-errors bug in the last version with auto-load.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
#1 was a longstanding-but-not-really-noticed-until-recently problem in the mapgen logic causing all Advanced Research Stations, Fabricators, and various other (though not all) capturables to seed only on planets controlled by the first AI player. Normally this didn't matter a whole lot, but if the first AI happened to be a really annoying type (Scorched Earth, notably) the pain was... noticeable. Anyway, several bugs were involved but mapgen is now more equitable in that regard.
#2 was another longstanding problem with how the preferred-target rules (where stuff you give a direct attack order to should prefer to shoot things similar to the designated target) worked when attacking Hybrids. It turns out that the problem basically applied to anything with a modular forcefield and there were also some problems with focus-fire and preferred-targeting in the general case. Normally I wouldn't have spent hours chasing something like this down because I perceive other things as being more important to the community, but the poll was helpful in correcting that perception. So this stuff is quite a bit tidier now. Not a great time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.
#3 turned out to not even be a bug: complaints that nothing was happening to go with the "Defensive Hybrids Are Mobilizing" message that can show up when you have Advanced Hybrids on and a CPA or exo or such happens. In the test case I saw the defensive hybrids were indeed switching to offensive types, but they still didn't have enough firepower to think they had a chance so they continued not-attacking. That's by design, as otherwise they just all charge to their deaths (more than usual, I mean). Nonetheless, this "mobilization" mechanic has been beefed up to be more noticeable. Maybe not such a bad time to be a Hybrid, I suppose.
#4 was updating the turret types to work nicely with ultra-low caps by changing them to have base caps divisible by 8. Rounding up all the stats for those into the newer more cap-oriented model took time, but it's done now. Which is good, as there's noises being made about rebalancing turrets in other ways. We'll see.
There are several other bugfixes and balance changes in this release. Notably, the exponential scaling of wave size with AIP on Diff 8+ has been removed after several months of feedback on it, and balance iteration continues on the nebula scenarios.
Update: 6.023 hotfix to fix an unhandled-errors bug in the last version with auto-load.
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.
Senin, 22 April 2013
Last Call for Steam Savings and IndieFort Bundle
Just a quick reminder that both the AI-war featured IndieFort Spring Bundle and the major Steam discounts on our full library of titles are available for just a few more hours, so act quick if you haven't already!
Plenty of new coverage to share as well, including some in-depth interviews Chris took part in last week:
Co-Optimus: Indie-Ana Co-Op - Q and A with Arcen Games, Part 1 -- Part 2
Sortiv: The next strategy game from �A.I. War� Developer Arcen Games: Skyward Collapse
IndieGames.com: Arcen announces two new games, 75% off library until tomorrow
OMGeek: Two Uniquely Thematic Titles From Arcen Games Coming This Year
BeefJack: Arcen Games Introduces Skyward Collapse
6AMING: Skyward Collapse Announced
TechnologyTell: Shattered Haven Review (4/5)
Sale Coverage
Invision Community: Arcen Games Catalog Steam Sale and IndieFort Spring Bundle
VG247: Shattered Haven, AI War, Tidalis and more on sale
Z-Giochi: Arcen Games Library Discounted for a Week (Italian)
Joystiq: IndieFort Spring Bundle on GamersGate; Arcen's library 75% off on Steam
Plenty of new coverage to share as well, including some in-depth interviews Chris took part in last week:
Co-Optimus: Indie-Ana Co-Op - Q and A with Arcen Games, Part 1 -- Part 2
Sortiv: The next strategy game from �A.I. War� Developer Arcen Games: Skyward Collapse
IndieGames.com: Arcen announces two new games, 75% off library until tomorrow
OMGeek: Two Uniquely Thematic Titles From Arcen Games Coming This Year
BeefJack: Arcen Games Introduces Skyward Collapse
6AMING: Skyward Collapse Announced
TechnologyTell: Shattered Haven Review (4/5)
Sale Coverage
Invision Community: Arcen Games Catalog Steam Sale and IndieFort Spring Bundle
VG247: Shattered Haven, AI War, Tidalis and more on sale
Z-Giochi: Arcen Games Library Discounted for a Week (Italian)
Joystiq: IndieFort Spring Bundle on GamersGate; Arcen's library 75% off on Steam
Selasa, 16 April 2013
Valley 2 Official 1.004 "Endless Lightning" Released!
This one addresses two minor issues, and a third issue that could make the end of the game excessively hard to complete under certain circumstances (on higher difficulties in particular).
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!
Enjoy!
This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!
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