General Update On Progress
over 4 years ago – Fri, May 15, 2020 at 08:34:03 PM

Chris here!  Some backers had requested an update through kickstarter (cool new feature), so here I am.  There's nothing earth-shattering to share in terms of milestones-hit, so this will just be a general update on where we are with things.

Buried far in comments in various places over the last while, there was a lot of information that you might have missed about backer reward status in particular, so I'm going to lead with that this time (and collect it all into one place, finally).  For timelines and other general news, be sure to keep reading in this post.  

I know these posts are long, but just skim headers to see what is of interest to you rather than trying to read the whole thing.

Backer Reward Statuses

• Copy(ies) of the Game: You should have had these for years now. If not, you can get your copy on backerkit, or message me and I'll get you sorted.  If you just comment publicly, I can't click your profile to figure out exactly who you are, just FYI -- kickstarter is funny that way.
• GOG Copy of the Base Game: If you don't have one and you want one, you'll have to message me.  We did the GOG Connect thing a while back, but that was time-limited.  If I had realized it was that way, I would have just gotten keys for everybody to be simpler.  Sorry about that.
• Copies of Expansion 1: This first expansion is free for backers, but future DLC will not be.  I talked about why in the last update.  In backerkit, you have both a Steam key and a GOG key for this one.  To use the GOG key, you'd need a GOG copy of the base game.  With the expansion, we handled this like I wish we had handled the base game.
• Copies of Other Games: If you backed at a level where you got copies of the original AI War, or Bionic Dues, or Skyward Collpase, The Last Federation, Stars Beyond Reach, etc, then you've had those keys since early 2017.  They're in backerkit.
• "Basic Goodies": Wallpapers, etc.  Those are all in backerkit, and have been for about a year, maybe two.  Your name in the credits and your badges on the forums have been in for a long while, too.
• Game Soundtrack: For those who got this as a reward, the base game version is on backerkit and has been for maybe a year, but the soundtrack for the first expansion is still something we need to get on there.  I don't have an ETA on timing, as I'm the only staff member now and myself and others working with us are juggling a lot of things at once.
• Art-Related Backer Rewards: Arks, Fortresses, Gold Mercs, etc.  There are I think two that are quasi-oustanding in terms of wanting a bit more done, but I've spoken to everyone and we're in some form of email communication in most cases.  But the vast majority of this is done and integrated into the game.  Most of it was over-delivered in terms of having interesting unique gameplay tied to the art that was not promised, but which makes me happy.
• Name a Planet: We included this on the backer survey, and got a lot of good results, but we also got a lot of "tell you later" or "not sure yet."  Sigh.  So I'm going to have to follow up with a lot of people at some point.  We also have made it so that there are many different naming patterns in the game for planets, and I want to do something special for the kickstarter ones.  Basically I'd like for a few kickstarter planet names to pepper into any map, kind of like how we do for Murdoch as an in-joke to the first game.  Since this will likely annoy some players, we'll also have an option for turning this off.  But it should be the most special way of handling kickstarter backer planet names that I can think of, and is something I'll circle back on later this year after multiplayer.  Wrangling everyone's final responses is the most time consuming part left with this one.
• Text-Based or Design-based Mercenary Stuff: Naming or designing a mercenary outfit,in other words.  These are now called Outguard, and I haven't fulfilled this reward for anyone yet.  Outguard have been continuing to evolve in terms of how you call them and what they can do, and I have some more plans for things to add to them post-multiplayer, probably.  So I've been waiting for all that to settle down before reaching out to you folks.  It should give you the most options to choose from and use your creativity with when it arrives, versus jumping on completing this too soon.  Thanks for your patience!
• Design and Name an AI: I have not done this yet.  We have a ton of AI types already, and for a while there, there were not too many permutations with existing game mechanics that we had not already explored.   At this point, we're extending some of those mechanics and so later this year it should be more ripe for you to be able to do something interesting and new.  Thanks also for your patience in this  crowd.
• Cyber Cipher: This is the "mysterious message from the AI's intranet."  We didn't really have a mechanism for lore-based reveals until very recently (this past week!), and even now that's something that I'm expanding.  The new Journals feature is one great resource for this, but there's also the possibility of doing essentially a bestiary that you can access via the main menu. Once I have all of those bits as fleshed-out as I think will be useful for modders and those people who are writing some lore on a volunteer basis because they love that sort of thing, then that will probably be a good time to circle around with the folks with this backer reward.  That should give you maximum flexibility in how your reward is fulfilled.
• Player-Triggerable Taunts: We haven't done any of these yet, or approached any of the backers about this yet.  I just have added in the ability to have cheat codes and commands to the game, which is an exciting new feature, and will be the basis for how we trigger this sort of taunt. At some point before the end of 2020, I plan to collect a list of the taunts that people want, plus write some general ones that we want to have for people to use in multiplayer (I'm thinking of how things worked in the old Empire Earth and Age of Empires games), and then I'll get those to a voice actor and have them handled.  The general framework is finally there for this, at any rate.
• AI Taunts To The Player: So we worked with most of these backers, and did a TON more than we had promised.  We let most people contribute half a dozen or a dozen, rather than one, and the result was largely really good.  I will say, there are a couple of people who felt like there was something they really wanted to have in here that didn't make it in, and we'll circle back around with them and get another round of recording to the voice actor for those.   That will probably be the last round we offer for getting items in for this, so we'll probably wait until we have our own new set of AI taunts that we want for DLC2 ready and get all that put in at once to the voice actor.  A lot of the taunts that are funny really turned out to grate on many players, so we had to gate those behind an "enable funny lines."  Essentially people felt it was a mood-killer.  I don't mind having more funny lines, but just be advised that they will be gated behind that toggle.
• Mayhem Consultant: This was for the dedicated hour of modding assistance.  To be honest, I'm not sure if we've delivered on this or not.   We've been helping a lot of people with mods, and a lot of people who were doing mods have then turned into volunteers of some degree.  Last I spoke to some of these folks, they wanted to wait until post-1.0 before working on their mods, or they had life events going on, but now a lot of mods are getting larger and more mature, so I may need to circle back around.  At some point I'll just reach out to these folks individually again and make sure that they feel like they've gotten the attention they need.

And that's it!  So we're coming along pretty darn well with this.

Stretch Goal Status

• Music Stretch Goal: that was delivered a couple of years ago, and is part of the base game.
• Spire Stretch Goal: we took this in a different direction, much more fleshed-out and exciting.  That's the Fallen Spire campaign/faction in the first expansion (which backers get for free because it includes stretch goal content).
• Nemesis Stretch Goal: we took this in a different direction, much more fleshed-out and exciting.  That's the Scourge faction in the first expansion (which backers get for free because it includes stretch goal content), and that does indeed have a giant ship in there called the Nemesis.  But it's SOOOO much more than what we promised, and all out of the brain of Badger.
• Interplanetary Weapons Stretch Goal: This one is not done yet.  Honestly, we've been struggling with a way to make this cool.  We have several ideas in a working document that are pretty neat, but the concept as we described it during the kickstarter campaign just feels very underwhelming when you put it into the larger context of how the game now exists.  My main goal for these is to actually give you some new ways to defend territory that change the feel of the game if you choose to use them.  Versus it just being "more of the same" and kind of mixed in.  I think some of the ideas we had are getting there, but I'm not planning on implementing it until sometime after multiplayer and probably DLC2 are done.  Since this was promised to all the backers as a stretch goal, and because we can't give away DLC indefinitely without really running into trouble, this will be one of the many free content updates to the base game when it arrives.
• Solar Systems Stretch Goal: We didn't reach this stretch goal, just in case there was any confusion.  Honestly, I'm glad we didn't -- it would have been a nightmare and probably would not have felt good in terms of how the design itself fits with the rest of the game. We got to do far more interesting things instead.

Delivery On Kickstarter Promises In General

• Game itself: It evolved a lot and was really late, but it's complete and compelling and people overall are really happy with it.  I consider this fully delivered, in a single-player sense, although I and the volunteers are still doing and adding more because... well, Arcen has always been about over-delivery, I guess.
• Arks as a concept: This really didn't work out in practice like I thought it would.  I've had a few ask about this, but basically they are still in the game, but just not so central as they once were.  In the end these are more varied and sometimes more powerful.  If you want to read more on that topic, I did a larger writeup here.
• AI Quality: Ironically, I can take almost none of the credit for this, but it's vastly better than in the first game.  Well, I suppose when it comes to the ship targeting lists I can take a lot of the credit there.  But my role overall was mostly infrastructure-related, making it possible to have highly-performant AI agents with arbtirarily-long processing times that wouldn't tank things.   Keith also did a huge amount in that particular area, while also implementing most of the original baseline AI code.  Badger was the real superstar, though, coming in as a volunteer and adding major new concepts like fire teams, and in general outdoing Keith or I.  He's been a volunteer in general, but then a core contractor on the first and second DLC.
• Multiplayer: This is by far the largest thing that we promised but have not delivered upon yet, and it has a certain subset of people pretty annoyed.  If I'd been a backer, I'd have been in the particularly-annoyed crowd, since historically I only play most strategy games for the co-op.  So I feel your pain  on that, and in the prior update I talked a lot about plans on this front.  We'll talk about this in more depth in its own section below.
• Learning Curve: It's definitely a lot easier to get into than the first game, and Steam reviews seem to bear that out.  It's still steeper than we'd like, but there's a certain minimum requirement from folks to take an interest and understand it.  I think we're pretty close to that level, but between the ability for anyone to make a tutorial that they can share, youtubers giving guides, our own wiki and in-game tips, and so on... I think we're basically in a pretty good zone.
• Modding: We did hit our target with this, and there are tons of things that people are able to mod without any involvement from us.  In other cases, we've worked with players and said "hey, do you just want source access and to add your tweaks directly, if you're going to be doing all that?"
• Game Scope: Honestly this isn't something we made very many explicit promises on, and those we did make were pretty conservative.  Overall we were trying to hit the baseline of being as large as the first game (minus expansions).  By the time we FINALLY hit 1.0 for this sequel, we felt it was a fair estimate to say that this sequel is as large as the first game plus its first two expansions.  When we hit 2.0 of the sequel, and added in the first DLC which you folks got for free, we shifted our estimate to being equivalent to the first game plus four of its six expansions.  We're waaaaay over in terms of meaningful content, and largely that is thanks to Badger and Puffin, to be honest.  They were our two key volunteers for most of the last couple of years, and the two contractors working along with me on the first DLC.  Puffin has since retired, but Badger and I are still working on things.

Multiplayer!

If you weren't here for backer reward status updates, then this is probably what you were here for. I've written about this off and on on Steam forums here.  And then I explained our alpha to beta to release process here, as it relates to multiplayer.

What am I working on with multiplayer at the moment, and in the recent past?

• The new plan for multiplayer involves using several technologies that are new to me (new parts of GOG Galaxy and Steamworks), and that part is  going well.  I have built a lot of the interface around them, but have more to do.
• It also involves a new form of desync-repair that I am essentially having to invent from scratch (it's not something other RTS games have, to my knowledge), and that is good on paper and partially implemented.  
• I've been spending a lot of my time lately identifying areas that will clearly be a problem for multiplayer, and then re-coding them to be multiplayer-friendly.  That's actually a pretty huge topic in and of itself, but I'm pleased with the progress on that.  Basically the idea is to keep desyncs small and from causing cascading rolls of needed-corrections that will sap your bandwidth.  
• I'm also looking at bandwidth-reducing strategies in general, but having to balance that against parsing-speed strategies.  These latter two things are my main focus in the next couple of weeks, and then I'll be back on.
• I also need to get the latest version of the Forge Remastered code integrated as the third style of network transport, but that shouldn't be too bad.  But that would be what you'd use if you were on a LAN or didn't want to use the Steam or GOG Galaxy clients.  One of the latter two is what you would use if you wanted easy connections across the Internet, with robust NAT punchthrough.
• We did our own experiments with NAT punchthrough and similar, with the help of one of our longtime fans/friends/backers Admiral, and basically there are a lot of technologies that are available, but in the end sometimes there's no way to make it work but relay servers.  Which are prohibitively expensive, and that's why it's a great idea to use a big service like Steam or GOG for purposes of that sort of thing.    And then for our standard totally-no-platform-affiliation multiplayer code, it's just focused on either LAN play or port forwarding.  You really should use either Steam or GOG Galaxy so that you can get updates for the game, anyway, since it's a huge game.
• One of the interesting challenges right now is entity creation, which at the moment we allow a variety of places to do independently.  It's possible that those being created wrong may cause a lot of cascading sync issues, which will sort themselves out but cause a spike in bandwidth needs while doing so.  There are a couple of strategies I'm planning in order to optimize that, but the more I've been thinking about this specific issue, I think I want to actually see it breaking in the wild and how much of a spike there is  before I commit to any given solution.
• There's a lot of UI changes that also need to happen for multiplayer.  The lobby had to have a TON of changes made to it in the last couple of months to add some new single-player features, but also to make it multiplayer-compatible.  On the surface it doesn't look much different, but under the hood it is VERY different.  That's all pretty much done.  The stuff for chat is all in place now, initially thanks to Quinn.

So what's the upcoming schedule?

Well... I don't want to over-commit by giving specific dates.  Honestly a lot of my daily schedule has been heavily co-opted by covid-19. My kids are home from school and require a lot more time and attention.  My wife -- I got remarried in March! -- is a physician, and there's a fairly heavy emotional/intellectual load that we're both processing related to all of this.  Pandemic and school-from-home was not something I ever saw on my radar for this year as being something that might slow me down, but here we are.

With all of that said, please take the following with grains of salt:

1. Essentially I need to get the remaining UI and data bits handled, the remaining integration with Steam and GOG and Forge done, and then see what happens.  No desync repair on the first alpha version of multiplayer, let's just see what happens.  I bet things spiral out of sync hilariously fast, and you can't really play that, but it will be interesting to have some test reports on connection speeds and other bits.  This seems plausible to have done in the next month, two at the most. new surprises notwithstanding.  This would be the earliest form of alpha.

2. After that, the next major milestone is the desync self-repair, where it corrects things as it finds them wrong.  The trick with this is doing it in a way that is as minimally-invasive as possible.  For instance, a malware scanner on your computer is very useful, but the amount of processing power it expends slows everything else down.  We don't want to have that sort of effect here.  We know we're going to be generating bad data pretty constantly between the machines because of the multithreaded nature of the game, but the scanning and detection AND the transfer-and-sync code all needs to be lightweight enough or background enough that you hopefully never notice it.  I've been mulling this for about two years, and periodically breaking out legal pads to scribble on, but it's a big job.

3. After that, and kind of alongside that, there's fixing whatever bugs we're finding that are multiplayer-specific.  A huge amount of the codebase is just inherently multiplayer-friendly, which is great, but there may be unexpected things we have to restructure a lot in order to causing desyncs too frequently.  The less correction-data we have to handle, the faster things run.  Unlike the first game, it won't be halting you when it detects a desync and making you disconnect and reconnect. Fun fact: all action/FPS games exist in a state of constant desync, which they are using prediction and reconciliation to handle while still making them kinetic and immediate.  We don't have quite that level of problem, thankfully, but we do have a LOT more data to check.

4. Anyway, at some point things will be playable to the point where there's little oddities but they resolve themselves pretty quickly.  Depending on the severity of that, we're either into beta or we're fully done with multiplayer.  There are certain small oddities in a semi-synced game that are impossible to get rid of (see: every FPS game ever), but there are larger ones that will cause network lag spikes that need to die a fiery death.  Having people playing real games in real world conditions and sending us some form of logs from slow periods that they experience will be pretty critical during this time.

5. Before calling multiplayer fully done, of course, there's some remaining features to add for it.  The ability to gift fleets back and forth, probably.  The ability to add in another player late to the game, ideally.  The ability for two players to control one empire.  A few other things.  But mostly we've made all of the big UI elements multiplayer-friendly already, so people can set priorities on intel centrally, they can all modify the lobby together, and etc.

The goal is to have multiplayer and DLC2 launch around the same time, perhaps in August.  Seems reasonable for the moment, but this year has been full of surprises so far.  Fingers crossed.

After Multiplayer And DLC2?

I honestly don't know, at this point.  Other than finishing the last of the backer rewards and that last stretch goal, of course.  Badger and I both have a lot of ideas for what could be a killer DLC3, but it depends on where our heads are both at at that time, and how the game is earning at that point.

Despite the kickstarter, I'm still out of pocket personally for something like double the amount of the kickstarter in order to bring this to market.  Until roughly 1.0, the game hasn't paid the monthly bills at all.  Since then it's done so, barely, but I'm not sure if that's going to be something I can rely on.

It might be that AI War 2 has several more years of life in it, with the help of 2-3 DLC per year and enthusiastic players enjoying a mix of singleplayer and multiplayer.  I'm really not sure.  Or it may be that games that are niche to this level just can't fly but so high on the modern storefronts.

If the latter turns out to be the case, then I'll probably start making games that are cross-platform and also not "living products."  The sort of thing that is smaller, but focused and fun, and which can at some point be stamped "complete" and shipped out to all the three PC platforms and the major consoles, hopefully in a bunch of languages.  

Localization support and console support really would require a publishing partner for those bits, as well as a game that doesn't really change much once it is completed.  So pretty different from a lot of what Arcen has made in the past.  But I do have a lot of ideas that I think a number of you would be interested in; others not as much for this specific audience.

My intention isn't to drift too far, but I also have to be realistic.  For now I try not to get too fixated on the question.  I did two recent videos on some of the stuff that I was exploring back in 2017.  I don't know that I plan to go back to the ideas of horror or not, as my head isn't really there anymore, but I do want to do something in beautiful 3D.

• Something with orbital mechanics and spaceship combat inside that is one thing on my mind.   
• Educational games for kids made in conjunction with educators so that maybe they can be actual games and actually educational are another.  Two of my neighbors are teachers both independently interested in the idea, which has been on my mind for at least the last six years.
• The "Reverse AI War" or "Kill Tim" idea is still something I'm very fond of, with the concept of an isometric view of a city and YOU being the AI trying to wreak havoc inside the city and escape before you're found out.
• And honestly I have a big long document with dozens of other ideas, some of which strike my fancy more than others.

For now, I keep coming back to the same things: AI War 2.  Multiplayer.  Then we'll see.  I can't make decisions in advance of data I don't have.  I think that's kind of the reality for all of us in 2020 now, isn't it?

By the by -- I've mentioned this elsewhere, but haven't made any kickstarter posts since I got married.  I decided this last year, but rather than expecting my wife to be the only one to make any sort of name change -- not really fair to an established physician with publications -- I thought it would be a good act of solidarity and family unity if I also changed mine.  So I'm Chris McElligott Park now, and she shares the same double last name.  Our respective stepchildren then share at least one name in common with both of us, and for her patients she can still be "Dr. McElligott," although I'm sure she'll get plenty of "Dr. Parks" inadvertently.  She was surprised when I brought up the idea, and never in the past had I ever entertained the idea of changing my name, but in this case it seemed really fitting.  Kickstarter won't let me change my name, though, so I'll always be Chris Park on here. ;)

More to come soon.  Hope you and yours are safe and healthy.

Cheers!

Chris

v2.001 Released! "Expansion 1: The Spire Rises!"
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 08:28:20 PM

Chris here!  As a kickstarter backer, you should already have an email that includes your Steam key AND GOG key for this first expansion.  Future expansions won't be free for kickstarter backers, but this one is; it includes a lot of stretch goal content and some backer rewards.

If you don't have your email, you can also just login here on backerkit and get your keys that way.

Why Is This Expansion Free For Backers?

The base game of AI War 2 evolved a LOT from our initial kickstarter.  We essentially "failed upwards" repeatedly until we had a product that was late, but huge and very much something we were proud of.  Since launch, we've expanded the base game even further for everyone, and in general it's a much larger game than we had ever promised.

BUT.  Despite being very satisfyingly large, it didn't include all of the specific features that we had promised to you.  As had originally been stated, some of the stretch goals were going to have to be post-release content.  

That's where this expansion comes in: it's also huge, and so in our current position it only makes good sense to release it as paid DLC rather than another free update -- as far as the general market goes.  The game is not financially supporting us, even in the vastly scaled-down form we now exist, so we can't release all the content for free forever like some mega-successful games have done.  Would that we could.

But obviously, given the nature of backers, and that these were features already promised to you... of course we're going to deliver on that!  So it's a paid expansion, but one you get for free.  Hopefully this doesn't offend anyone who isn't a backer and has to buy it; it doesn't mean we like them any less.

With all that out of the way, here's the announcement from Steam:

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Retrospective Time!

The first expansion for AI War 2 is out!  It's time for a little retrospective of how things have been going since the October 1.0 launch of the base game.

Base Game Updates

Put  most simply, we've had 47 patches to the base game since 1.01, which is  about one every 3 days.  There have been a few of those that were just  little hotfixes, and some were on the beta branch temporarily, but most  of these were quite substantive.

The largest of these was v1.3, The Grand New AI,  on January 10th, which we called "almost a sequel in terms of how much  it adds."  That's a huge read on its own, so I won't recap it here, but  suffice it to say it added a ton of content and a complex new  intelligence to the AI.  Some of that (like the awesome fire teams  mechanic) was us backporting work from this new expansion to the base  game.  Other bits were just us updating the base game.

I'm  actually struggling a little bit on how to even describe what has been  happening in the base game, because there's no singular improvement.   It's just been relentless evolution and refinement on basically every  front.  We've had a lot of really involved testers, and some of the  first large-scale mods (Civilian Industries, Galactic Conquest, and  others), and a number of those modders have also been contributing code  or ideas to the main game itself.

We also continue to have a  healthy number of volunteers who pop in and out and make various  additions.  Things I really wanted, but which kept sliding down my own  todo list, like the ability to load a quick start or savegame into the  lobby for further customization. Dominus Arbitrationis and StarKelp have  been the two most active on that sort of front. Heck, StarKelp has kind  of adopted the Macrophage faction from the base game and has been  adding cool new features to them.

Anyway, the release history is  long, and public, and has a lot of detailed writeups already.  Suffice  it to say, things have been VERY active.

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Expansion 1: The Spire Rises

The  base game was already huge, and something that we considered to be on  par with AI War Classic and maybe... two of its six expansions?   Something along those lines, although it's apples to oranges since the  content in AI War 2 tends to be so much more versatile and involved.

I'll skip summarizing what is in this new expansion and just let you read about that on its own page, so instead I can speak a little more broadly here.

The  very short version is that we now consider AI War 2 plus this expansion  to give parity to be equivalent to AIWC and four out of its six  expansions.  Wowzers.

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AI Goes Up To 11

The Scourge are a faction born out of the desire to fulfill the Nemesis kickstarter stretch goal in a more... entertaining and robust fashion. That's just how Badger,  the mastermind behind this race, is.  The original concept was one large  ship that harasses you mercilessly; that's still here, but instead we  also get a faction of multi-racial slaved warriors doing even more  involved and interesting stuff.

Being able to set the scourge as  your ally is one of the things that amuses me the most.  Just last  night, StarKelp was playing in that fashion and watching the AI Hunters  duke it out with human-allied scourge.  The result was a galaxy mostly  swept clean by the scourge, and then an amusing of AI-on-AI tag in the  ruined wasteland as the hunter fled around the galaxy, fighting as  needed, and the scourge split up and chased them, occasionally seeming  to have a small group pause and catch their breath on the safety of his  home planet.  The fact that things like this can exist inside the  game... that makes me really happy.

The really key testers for the Scourge were zeusalmighty, Astillious, Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong, and Ovalcircle.

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Going Into All-Out War

The Fallen Spire, the other big faction in this expansion, were again to satisfy a kickstarter stretch goal,  but in a more-fun way.  We didn't get as much into the  scripted-campaign territory (that's just not personally as high on my  list), but we did build out the citybuilding to a ludicrous degree.  And  we then built out the AI forces to a ludicrous degree, giving them the  ability to pull back in Extragalactic War units from "whatever it is  they are fighting outside the galaxy."  Those two big expansions of the  content for this faction are just how I think about things. ;)

We've  been really fortunate to have some huge-fan Fallen Spire players from  the first game, such as Matt "Vinco" Taylor, show up to test things and  let us know where we were failing in this expansion.  Things like the  relics having a stronger response or phasing in and out of reality came  about because of him, and so much of the citybuilding balance and the  effectiveness of the Imperial Spire in the alternative victory condition  were thanks to feedback from Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong.

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Looking To The Future

There's  more that we could do with the fallen spire, and we do plan on that,  but it's already a really solid and huge thing that is a fun new way to  play the game.  The amount of core content that we wound up adding was  far above what we initially planned, so certain things like journals or  multiple loadouts were pushed until later because there are just only so  many hours in a day.

The nice thing is that some of those  features can double as work for expansion 2, so as we enhance things  we'll continue backporting not just to the base game, but also the first  expansion. For now it's kind of a matter of balancing that against my  goal to finally get multiplayer going fully.

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The Sheer Volume Of Turrets

Soooo...  this was not really planned at all, but is one of these things that we  added in because somebody (Ethan "DEMOCRACY" Wong in this case) had a  great idea and we wanted to do it.  He basically observed that in the  base game, there are not all that many turrets, and they are not spread  evenly among all the technology lines (because how could they be).

Looking  at the base game, I see there were 11 combat turrets, plus orbital mass  driver and ion cannons as major combat turrets. Then we had a further 2  non-combat turrets in the form of  tractor and tachyon turrets.  And  that was it.  Out of the 11 combat turrets, one of those was also  curiously larger and scarier than the rest, with a higher cost and much  lower unit count.

Democracy thus made a big ol' table for each  tech, with columns for regular combat turrets in each row, and then one  larger-than-average turret in each  row.  Working with Puffin, and then  getting some assists in new code from Dominus and Badger and myself,  plus a whole heck of a lot of new art on my end, and we wind up  with THIRTY freaking new combat turrets in this expansion.  It's  madness.  They're so much fun and so varied, too!  The first game never  had anything like these.

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Game Mechanics For All

We  wound up adding new game mechanics to support the scourge, the spire,  the turrets, and the new arks -- yes, there are five new arks as well in  this expansion. In a lot of games, you'd see that sort of stuff gated  off if you don't buy every last expansion, and so if you're a modder you  have to think about what expansions the player does and does not have  if you want to allow them to fully use your mod.

I'm not a fan of  that.  We build all the new mechanics into the base game so that any  mod can use any mechanic, and the modder never has to worry about what  expansions you have unless they are explicitly setting out to mod  expansion content.  This keeps things going along really well,  mods-wise, and lets you consider our expansions on their own merits  individually without having to wonder if they block you from getting  some mods you want.

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The Sheer Volume Of Art

Oh,  yeah.  One of the things that we recently did for the base game was  massively upgrade the lighting, and add a lot more pleasing detail onto  many ships.  That required me to go through and touch basically every  ship and structure in the base game, which was a great result but super  time consuming.

We also added some VERY large new ships for the  Extragalactic War feature, which is something I wanted to be in the base  game so that any expansion or mod can trigger those guys.  Right now  mainly only the Fallen Spire trigger it, but it shouldn't be a feature  that is limited to them in the long term.

After all was said and done, the art asset bundles for the base game are about 1 GB.

Looking  to the first expansion, then, the total amount of art wound up being...  714 MB.  That's absolutely insane, but shows just how large some of  these factions are, not to mention all the turrets.

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Hey, Multiplayer!

We  haven't forgotten about that!  In fact, we've been coding in  preparation for it from day one, and have continued to make some  revisions to things to make things easier to implement there.  Balancing  things out with such a small workforce has been hard, but now the turn  for this aspect of the game has come.

To make things as easy on  players as possible, the plan is to try to use three different transport  layers to allow for playing multiplayer in any of three fashions.

Firstly,  we'll have some general basic networking based on Forge Remastered.   There's some light NAT punchthrough in there, which is a big feature  that we said we wanted for this game, but it's only going to work but so  well.  You ultimately need relay servers and such, and that's expensive  to set up and maintain-forever.  But this would be the  absolutely-no-DRM-or-service way to play multiplayer, and probably the  ideal way to play via LAN.  So here we are with this.

Secondly,  we'll implement Steam networking as another transport layer.  The game  code is all the same either way, but then the code and networks that is  transmitting the data of the game is different in these cases.  This  should be the most seamless experience for Steam players who want to  play via the internet.  Steam has relay servers, NAT punchthrough, and a  bunch of other things that a small group of people can't hope to match.   So we'll just use theirs! But locking you into this wouldn't be cool,  hence other options.

Thirdly, we're going to implement GOG  networking as the last transport layer.  This one works very similar to  Steam's, has all the same cool functionality for bypassing firewalls  without a hassle to you, and even has some inter-connectivity to Steam  players.  The only real downside in the short term is that it doesn't  have Linux support (since the GOG Galaxy client doesn't support Linux  yet).  When they have it, we'll add it.

None of this means we're  going to have matchmaking, because for games that last a long time that  just doesn't make any sense.  But for connecting with your friends via  your platform of choice, this should make it so that you can just  connect and play.  During the next few months I'm definitely going to be  wanting to have a variety of testers to help us iron out the bugs and  find network load bottlenecks, etc, before we move towards calling this  "true multiplayer support."

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Beyond Multiplayer and DLC 2

Badger  and Puffin and I have some things that we'd like to do for a DLC 3, and  there are always new ideas coming up in general.  This project has been in work since 2016, and we could probably spend another four years on  it and still never run out of ideas we want to work on.

What  happens long-term is still... something that remains to be seen.  When  multiplayer and the other base game features come out around the same  time, that will finally discharge the last of the kickstarter  obligations.

What happens after those obligations are finally met  is... up to the market, really.  At the moment, AI War 2 doesn't fully  pay the bills, and it never has.  It is close to doing so, and  our hope is that with expansions and related promos and so on it will  start doing so.  In the current climate on Steam, back catalog sales  drop by roughly half basically every year, which was income we used to  rely on.

I still feel cautiously optimistic despite having to  take on debt to cover half of my expenses last month (and having had to  take on debt to a greater or lesser degree for 33 out of the last 36  months), but I figured it was worth noting.  Everything we've been  accomplishing lately has been on a shoestring, despite such a successful  1.0 launch.

That sounds glum, but I'd rather give you an honest  appraisal than potentially have some surprise after we get into summer  if things are still on a downward-trending or flat trajectory.  We're  hoping that paid DLC and the free multiplayer update will reverse or at  least delay that trend.  There's more that we want to do beyond the  "minimum required to finish this  up."

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The Very Short Term Future

The  Scourge are very battle-tested at this point, but we're sure that with a  large influx of new players we'll find more things to fix or improve.

The  Fallen Spire also feel quite polished at this point, but it's hard to  know if it's balanced well for all difficulty levels.  So we'll probably  have a lot of tweaks regarding that.  Our testers were all pretty  skilled.

There are things we'd still like to add to the Fallen  Spire, and we'll probably do that while also getting started on the beta  version of multiplayer. But for now we're going to stop working all the  nights and weekends.  We can get plenty of done without that, now that  we're past this initial milestone.  Badger is already digging well into  DLC 2, to make things easier on himself schedule-wise later.  So the  hope is for us to not really hit a crunch period again like we've had  the last month.

One of the shortest-term things is that we want  some more varied and descriptive icons for some of the new turrets and  ships, and so that will be coming out later today.  There just wasn't  time, we were all falling asleep in our chairs.

Lots more good  stuff to come soon!  We're really proud of what has been accomplished in  the last few months, and we hope that you get a lot of enjoyment out of  it.

Thanks for reading!

Chris

v1.3 Released! "The Grand New AI"
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Jan 11, 2020 at 05:09:24 PM

If you've been in the forums, you know that we've been in an opt-in beta period for the last... goodness, has it been three weeks?

Release notes start here and then keep going here, here, here, here, and finally with today's last bits here.  That's almost 15 thousand words of text, 29 pages in a word document.  So let me try to break that down so you don't have to read every last bit.  There's so much in v1.3 that it almost feels like a sequel in some ways, which is how we like it.

First Up: AI Defenses

This is probably the part of the new version that is most going to shock you when you load up a new campaign in particular.  The AI is... well, scarier.  They have more strength in more places, more variance in how they place things, and so on.

At a quick glance, it looks like the game got harder (and for a while in the betas that was empirically true).  But we've spent a lot of time trying to dial that back with the 1.3 build in particular so that it looks scarier and gives a more varied challenge, but isn't actually baseline harder (except difficulty 10).

The really key thing to note about the AI defenses on each planet is that, while they may be numerically a lot stronger than they once were, they are also more spread out -- most of the time.  This means that -- most of the time -- you can divide them up and attack them piecemeal, which is something we dearly missed from AI War Classic.  That's now back, and we're really excited about it.

But we actually went further than that and also made it so that there are now legitimately some "hotspot" planets that ARE harder.  They don't seed very frequently on low-and-middling difficulty levels, and they don't seed very near your starting position, but this is another cool thing we were missing from AI War Classic.

In Classic, sometimes you would run into a planet that was an unusually high mark, or that had a giant forcefield, or a superfortress, or whatever.  We have had things like that in this sequel for a really long time, but the planets still somehow felt... homogeneous after you got enough hours in the game.  So now the AI sometimes wormhole-camps its guard posts, sometimes masses them into a giant bundle that you have to take on at once, and other fun challenges.  These sorts of exceptions really add some flair and excitement.

Beefing Up AI Intelligence

This is I suppose more of an item related to offense, except it also applies to the warden and the praetorian guard, both of which are defensive in nature.  So I guess this is just a general thing.

First of all, Badger invented this handy new thing called "fire teams," which are sub-groups that the AI factions can order around independently.  They can merge and split and coordinate and pincer and fake you out and a whole bunch of other things.

Basically something like the hunter fleet used to be a monolithic entity that came after you.  It was smart and huge and scary... but it was all in one place that you could keep track of.   It was hard to always predict what it was doing, but it could only be thinking of one thing at a time and so you could make some pretty accurate guesses based on its singular positioning.

None of that works anymore, because now the hunter fleet will fragment itself to pursue multiple goals at once.  So will marauders, and a bunch of other factions and parts of the AI.  You may still have a very good idea of what some part of the body of the hunter is thinking... and then be surprised that it was holding some substantial reserve well out of your viewing range, waiting for the opportune time to catch you off guard.

The cliche thing at this point would be to say "clever girl" with a picture of the three raptors.  But that's just one part of fire teams.

Oh, hey -- almost forgot.  We also made the subconscious mind of AI ships (and your ships in "pursuit mode") a whole lot smarter.  You can trust your pursuit mode ships to take care of business much more efficiently now -- to the point that battles they lost on their own in the past they now win.  Of course, that works against you just as frequently as for you...

Parallelism And The Lack Of Brain Function

Right, so we discovered something kind of crazy in this series of builds.  You know how you can fast-forward time up to 10x, and it doesn't cause any extra CPU load?

Well... that was true, but it didn't speed up the "cognitive functioning" of the higher-level AI.  Basically if you divide the intelligence for units and factions into subconscious/autonomic and conscious levels of thought... the subconscious/autonomic parts were as smart as ever on 10x difficulty, but the conscious thought of any faction that wasn't controlled by a human was incredibly hobbled.

This had to do with how we schedule some of the multithreading of background functioning for factions to support their "conscious thought" without eating CPUs with limited numbers of cores if you have many many factions at once in a big game.  It was a complicated technical issue, but essentially meant that for some relevant reasons that we can't break without breaking future multiplayer support, at 10x speed the AI was only getting a chance to even try to think consciously every 60 realtime seconds instead of every second or so.

We had reports of people who beat difficultly 10 AIs by largely playing on 10x speed, and exploiting the fact that they could issue a ton of micromanagement commands and just fight the subconscious of the AI before it even consciously realized they were there.

The first solution to this was for us to look at our architecture and see if we could squeeze out more parallelism.  A lot of us have quad-core computers with hyperthreading (so 8 virtual cores), or even just dual-core computers with 4 virtual cores.  The odds of any player having a single-core computer is vanishingly small, though there are some players in that boat.  There's an option to turn off PFP (Parallel Faction Processing) if you need to, but for most computers you should get a performance boost or at least be performance-neutral with the way it is currently.

Major Performance Improvements

Right, so this is no small thing.  Even for those who have opted into the beta are in for a bit of a shock with the very latest build.  All throughout these last three weeks we've been squeezing more performance out of the game, but in particular we've been able to make a ton of strides in the last day.  Some of the savegames we were seeing that had 10% of normal speed on my quad-core now run easily at full speed.

Half on the subject of performance but half on simulation correctness, we found that our pooling of game entities was causing huge numbers of bugs that popped in and out of existence and not actually making things faster anymore.  This was originally intended to help performance back before unity introduced their time-sliced garbage collector, and it did work very well.

We pool a TON of things in this game, and all of that is an enormous benefit to performance in general, garbage collector aside.  But the actual pooling of entities -- ships and structures -- had to go.  It was causing problems on the background "faction consciousness" threads and often leading the AI to give wrong orders or even sometimes give orders to YOUR ships because of the nature of pooling.  All of that is solved now.

In the process of investigating this, we also really wanted to cut down on certain kinds of "game commands" that the background factions were sending that really didn't need to be there.  Game commands are multi-player compatible ways for the faction consciousness threads (and human players) to give orders to ships above the in-simulation subconscious/autonomic commands that ships handle on their own.  Keeping that smaller reduces the CPU load in single player, and will reduce the network load as we work in multi-player.

Also on the subject of performance, now that the AI is using more turrets than it used to (that's part of the general new defensive strategies that the AIs use), their turrets were... an annoying performance drain.  Normally we just stack mobile units if there are too many of them, or they go into guard posts as reinforcements, etc.  But none of that can happen for turrets, which are stationary.

To combat that issue, we made all of the AI turrets into Great-Turrets, which are about 5x stronger and costlier than the human counterparts.  In existing savegames from older versions it automatically strips out 4/5ths of the turrets to make sure you don't get absolutely wrecked.  But this minor consolidation keeps performance thrumming along as well.

So Many Balance Changes!

Beyond great-turrets and fire teams and how the AI fortifies its own planets, a lot of other things have evolved here.

One of the most recent favorites of mine is that dire guard posts on the homeworlds of AIs now cost AIP to destroy, and the overlord itself costs less than before.  But as an added bonus, you now get a ton of science and hacking points from destroying the overlord -- who is also now stronger, to properly meet the threat of the late-game fleets you can easily muster these days.  All of this makes for more dynamic escalation in multi-AI games in particular, but also even with just a single AI.

The way that player ship caps are calculated is also more consistent in terms of what you can expect with each mark level that you increase.  You get a much more consistent number of frigates added, for one thing.

We also very harshly changed how the growth curve went for individual ship strength as mark levels went up.  The multipliers were getting higher as well as the base attack power, meaning that in some cases a ship that was mark 7 could just evaporate its mark 5 opposite numbers.  Now things remain more stable all the way through mark 7, having a more linear growth rate.

A ton of ships individually got balance tuning based on feedback, far too many to mention.

We also revised and improved the way that planets are spawned in terms of the mix of mark levels (ratios based on difficulty) in the central areas of the galaxy (meaning between the player and AI homeworlds, not physical center).

We also made the "neutering" of AI planets into something VASTLY more powerful that you can do, as it much more sharply curtails what sort of reinforcements they can get there.  We also entirely block reinforcements on AI planets if they are outnumbered 2:1.  So that's majorly in your favor, and a great new tool.

On the flip side, AI planets left to their own devices now have a much larger cap of ships that they can store up if you leave them alone for tens of hours.  Those of you who like to capture entire galaxies (not the normal way to play the game!) will have some interesting new challenges, but it should still be possible on the typical difficulties for that sort of thing (5 and 6).

Oh!  And in map styles that are really cramped -- mazes or snakes, for instance -- you now get a much kinder seeding of the early-game tools you need (Global Command Augmenters, etc).  Lest you think that all the seeding improvements we made were in favor of the AI.

New "Adaptive" AI Type!

This is something people have been asking for for a while.  Rather than fighting against an AI that works one way for the whole game... what if the AI kept switching up its style and you never knew what it was?  That sounds... terrifying.  But you guys wanted it, and so we added it.  Good luck with that. ;)

There are 15 new achievements in place relating to the five difficulties of adaptive AI types, so there's more to hunt.

Max Game Speed Of 5x

In the past, you could make the game run at up to 10x realtime speed.  This was useful when the game was chugging (which it does a lot less often now), or when you just wanted to get past a certain slow section.  I myself tend to play on 3x or 4x speed normally and just pause frequently.  I dunno why, it's just my personal taste.

The problem with going above 5x is that a lot of things start to break down.  We start running into the sorts of problems that you normally see in physics simulations that have very fast-moving objects and no continuous collision detection on.

Even at 5x, your minefields are a lot less effective, and ships with shorter ranges will get off fewer shots against enemies.  A lot of that is simply unavoidable without increasing the CPU load dramatically in order to achieve that 5x speed boost, which of course would defeat the whole purpose.

We looked at how people were playing and various scenarios run repeatedly at different speeds, and decided that 5x was the maximum at which the simulation really still resembles itself.  So that's the new cap, if anyone is wondering why.

SO MANY Interface Improvements

Tooltips alone have gone through so much.  Rather than having just "regular tooltips" that show a lot of info, and "full tooltips" that show even MORE, we now have three levels and the default is vastly more brief.  It's surprisingly easy to use and makes the game so much more approachable. But all the information is still there at your fingertips.

A lot of interfaces now show you vital info like ship strengths or more about what will be improved by a tech,

Back To The Subject Of Difficulty

So is the game harder now than in the prior builds?  ... Depends on what difficulty you're playing at.  Difficulties 9 and 10 are likely going to be vastly harder than before, while 5-7 should be about the same, and less than 5 probably will look fancier in terms of enemy movements and positions but not actually be much more challenging.

But you probably will have to use more of your gray matter in order to deal with more varied situations on average, more of the time, so it should in general be an even more interesting experience at most every difficulty level.

We kind of tilted some of the ship numbers in your favor a bit in order to make it so that all the new AI intelligence doesn't just overwhelm you, and that may make some older savegames extra hard, it's hard to be sure.  And in some cases you may say "you call that tilting strength in my favor?" ;)  And to that we mainly say "you should have seen it before during certain points of the beta."

What can sometimes look very intimidating is something you really can just go in and dismantle piecemeal, because you have the superior ability to field replacement craft, among many other advantages.  Big thanks to all the people who were helping us out so much during the beta with their thoughts on everything, as that helped us shape things out to be a lot more interesting without being brute-force harder.

And Hundreds Of Other things

• Lots of bugfixes and balance tweaks detailed in the full release notes.
• Particularly a bunch of improvements for xml modders.
• You can now hack GCAs in order to re-roll their options (thanks donblas!).
• Nanocaust construction centers and Marauder Outposts now warp in over time (a short time interval, like 30 seconds to a minute) rather than warping in instantly. This gives their enemies a bigger window to counter attack in.
• Add the "Extreme" category of Quickstarts, with 2 default, 1 nearly default, and 2 bonus scenarios.
• Allied Marauders are back to killing command stations by default, but with a setting to disable it. This is a no-longer-basically-cheating version of "minor factions don't cause AIP increases". Allied Marauders always kill warp gates though. If this works then I'm going to deprecate "minor factions don't cause AIP increase" since that's too cheaty for my tastes.
• Add a "Select all non-flagship military on planet" selection option.
• Added "Remove Unlock Variance in Capturables" option. This option removes the random ranges ships and turrets can be found with, fixing it at a constant average. (Thanks donblas).
• Maps now default to having 7 FCEs instead of 11 (there were just too many before).
• Some updates to the Octopus map generator from Tadrinth.
• Added some more tips, including explanations of Wave, CPA, etc.

More to come soon!

Please Do Report Any Issues!

If you run into any bugs, we'd definitely like to hear about those.

The release of this game has been going well so far, and I think that the reviews that folks have been leaving for the game have been a big help for anyone passing by who's on the fence.  For a good while we were sitting at Overwhelmingly Positive on the Recent Reviews breakdown, but there have been a lot fewer reviews lately and so that has definitely had a material negative effect.  Go figure.  Having a running selection of recent reviews definitely is helpful, but at least we have a pretty healthy set of long-term reviews.  If you've been playing the game and enjoying  it, we'd greatly appreciate it if you'd drop by and leave your own thoughts, too.

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

Problem With The Latest Build?

If you right-click the game in Steam and choose properties, then go to the Betas tab of the window that pops up, you'll see a variety of options.  You can always choose most_recent_stable from that build to get what is essentially one-build-back.  Or two builds back if the last build had a known problem, etc.  Essentially it's a way to keep yourself off the very bleeding edge of updates, if you so desire.

The Usual Reminders

Quick reminder of our new Steam Developer Page.  If you follow us there, you'll be notified about any game releases we do.

Also: Would you mind leaving a Steam review for some/any of our games?  It doesn't have to super detailed, but if you like a game we made and want more people to find it, that's how you make it happen.  Reviews make a material difference, and like most indies, we could really use the support.

Enjoy!

Chris

AMA today with Chris over on reddit /r/Games!
about 5 years ago – Thu, Oct 24, 2019 at 09:59:57 PM

Chris here!  There's an AMA over on reddit that just went live, and I'll be around over there to talk for the next long set of hours and a last set of responses tomorrow.   So if you see this note late, never fear and feel free to stop by!

AI War 2 Launches On GOG! Claim your copy in the next 2 weeks.
about 5 years ago – Wed, Oct 23, 2019 at 02:22:37 AM

Hey folks!  I wanted to let you know that AI War 2 is now available on GOG, as of today!

The game is set up to have GOG Connect, so that if you've registered your Steam key you can also get a GOG copy for free.  This only lasts for the next two weeks, so if at all possible I encourage you to go ahead and register that if you want it.

The GOG copy is identical to the Steam copy -- neither have any DRM.  But you can use either the Steam client or the GOG Galaxy client to have updates auto-delivered to you.  If you prefer to have an offline installer for whatever reason (it seems less convenient to me, but that's a matter of personal preference), then GOG also provides those for you.

As updates to the game happen, you'll either need to use the Steam client or GOG Galaxy client to get them, or redownload the entire giant offline installer from GOG if that's really the way you want to go.  None of these platforms require online access for you to simply play the game, and you can copy the files out of Steam or GOG directly and put them on a thumb drive or whatever you want, freely.

Both Steam and GOG Galaxy will have achievements integrated in the next three weeks, but that's the one bit of online-tied-in functionality and completely optional.  You'll still be able to do achievements locally in the game without using either of those clients.

If you wind up missing the GOG Connect window, I can send you a key for GOG (just message me privately), but it's kind of a pain and there are a lot of you, so if you don't mind using the GOG Connect functionality that would definitely save me some time as well as getting you the game on all platforms so that you have choice in the future about what you want.

Exciting times!