Since January, Arcen’s focus has shifted from large-scale development
of AI War to our other upcoming titles -- with AI War, our intent had
been to simply maintain and refine the existing game, while adding a
handful of exciting new features every month as free DLC. As you may
imagine, therefore, we were quite surprised to realize that this new
version, 3.060, is the largest monthly update we’ve ever done.
There aren’t many huge single features here aside from the new Riot
Control Starships (which introduce modular ship design to the game).
However, the number of small refinements are just staggering (the
release notes are over 10,000 words), and we’ve made a number of
significant performance improvements, too.
Here’s the list of
particularly notable features out of the hundreds of changes:
- Simple Formation movement, as well as arc-movement.
- New, modular, riot control starships.
- Many various performance improvements.
- Manufactories now auto-manage themselves by default.
- Transports are now extremely more useful.
- Astro Trains are now much less fearsome.
- Cleanup drones can now remove mines (even perma-mines).
- Gate-raiding is now cheaper in terms of AI Progress.
- Hit chance logic is slightly simplified to avoid player confusion.
- New screenshot key (F12).
- Control nodes and rally points now knowledge-free.
- Option for historical autosaves.
- Dozens and dozens of balance tweaks.
- Other various bugfixes and small changes.
A big part of the reason for the impressiveness of this update is Keith
LaMothe, Arcen’s new part-time programmer, who joined the team in
January. Keith is tasked with keeping AI War growing and improving
while Chris Park, AI War’s lead designer and (previously sole)
programmer is working on Arcen’s other upcoming titles. Of course,
Chris still plays AI War several hours per week and so can’t help but
make some weekly changes to the game himself, and is still very much
involved in Arcen’s ever-growing forum community, and overall design of
AI War.
Arcen is quite pleased to see that AI War’s playerbase continues to grow
so steadily ten months after the base game’s initial release -- we’ve
seen a 300% increase in total customers since AI War 2.0 -- and in turn
we’re making the continual refinement and feature-growth of the game an
ongoing priority beyond the smaller monthly DLC releases that had been
planned. A second paid expansion for the game is also still planned for
late this year.
Next month’s free DLC will include more player-requested changes, as
well as our first work on new endgame scenarios and auto-created
epilogues, both of which should really take the late stages of the game
to new heights.
New to the game? You can download
a trial version of the game, or purchase a license key to
unlock the full version. If you already have the game or demo
installed, just use the “Updates” button inside the game to get the
latest patch. For complete release notes, please see the “Updates”
button inside the game, or visit the Arcen forums.
Files:
- The official installer can be found via one of
our mirrors.
- The raw full files of 3.060 in a zip can be found
here: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar3060Full.zip
-
The manual patch of 3.0 to 3.060 can be downloaded from here: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar3060Patch.zip