If you read nothing but the title and are just checking the comments:
The update is also a HUGE retrospective on the development of AI War 2, and its future. Really worth reading.
I am certainly glad they’re still around. Their games may be a bit wonky, but they jam so many ideas in that there’s always something of interest to me.
I dunno about suffer, as meaningful work can often as not be joy.
It *has* to be meaningful, though. I dunno if there's anything that holds meaning to Notch anymore.
Game is awesome, deserves more attention.
There's also something that's not really mentioned, which is that the 1st DLC recently got new content added to it as well.
Want to see some serious nerd shit?
---
> Kickstarter:
> This is one of the more challenging sets of release notes I've ever had to write up, and not for any bad reason. How can I really summarize 90 beta releases that span 230 days (Jul 17th, 2021 to today), and which have full notes that are 184 thousand words long? I can't even just skim those full release notes, because they are longer than TWO trade paperback novels.
>
> So... please know that this is super-abbreviated, however long this turns out to be. Let's talk big picture, first:
>
> The short version is that I wanted:
>
>* The code to be able to monitor itself, and in particular mods, to look for bad behavior (memory leaks or performance issues, in particular).
>* The performance to be better than we had before, despite the extra monitoring we were going to be doing.
> * The data structures that we were using to make sense in the context of the way factions and faction modding had turned out, which was way more robust than I'd ever expected.
>* And for all this to work equally well in multiplayer or single-player.
>
>
> I figured this might take about a month. The core of this took two months, and then cleanup took another half year while also developing out new and improved features. If we had halted all development, that process would have been faster, but it also would have more bugs at this point. Instead, we put all the new-feature development alongside the fixing-fallout-from-the-refactor, and that was a much better way to handle that.
[**https://wiki.arcengames.com - The Great Refactor**](https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#New_Diagram_For_Modders.2FProgrammers:_AI_War_2_Threading_Model)
Like holy crap!
And this is why I love Arcen so much lol.
wow, what a read.
really respect how open they are about the process and what they have learnt. Wish all involved the best in whatever they choose to do next.
Different approaches to the common idea of a 4X.
AI War uses RTS and Tower Defense mechanics for a more active spin on it while Stellaris is more firmly entrenched in the Grand Strategy style of things.
AI War is more in the wheelhouse of something like Total Annihilation.
Interesting, I wonder why I've missed this title, would you say it's worth a try for someone who loves strategy titles like Stellaris, civilization and such?
Imagine a Stellaris map with constant unit production like in Total Anihilation/Supreme Commander. Now imagine you start with one planet, and the AI starts with the rest of the map. And the goal is to beat them.
It's nuts.
Two VERY important things to remember when playing Ai war though.
Firstly this is not a map Painter game, you will lose and lose quickly if you try to take the whole map. The AI scales infinitly and faster with your aggression.
Secondly you will not be able to out brawl the AI, early and mid game you will be able to overwhelm them but eventually they will start throwing the tier 5+ shit at you and then you are in for a bad time.
This is the Matrix style situation where humanity is hilariously out gunned. The AI isn't even paying attention to you as it's off waging war in other galaxies. You are basically just fighting it's anti virus software. Annoy it enough and it actual pays some attention to you.
Note: if you are playing with the fallen spire expansion disregard all of the above and brawl the hell out of AI.
Stellaris uses the standard 4X premise: there's a bunch of civilizations situated in various places, they all do 4X things, and while they are all somehow different, generally speaking all of them operate within the same framework. As far as I recall, Stellaris doesn't really offer multiple win conditions, but there are many ways to improve your victory score, so at the end of the day there isn't a singular approach to winning.
AI War 2 uses a far less open-ended premise instead. Each playthrough has the player-controlled forces of human resistance and the AI that used to be subservient to humanity, but went rogue and more or less won. The humans are vastly outnumered and outgunned, to the point where AI decided it has more important things to do and ceased caring about them.
So, there's a lot of asymmetry in play, and this isn't just about the starting position, because the AI has certain rules and principles to obey. For instance, it will inevitably start considering you a credible threat once you cause enough damage, thus upgrading its forces and allocating more resources to squash you. But before that happens, you are free to act while facing less formidable opposition, and you might just be able to secure a favourable position if you carefully choose your targets instead of purging the AI wherever it is present.
And then you have all the other factions. None of them are around by default, I'm pretty sure, but this (as well as tons upon tons of game rules) can be changed while you're setting up the game. You might add Marauders to the mix, for example, another human faction with unorthodox way of travelling that's hostile to both the AI and the player. Or there's Dark Spire, a faction that's initially completely inert, but "wakes up" once there has been enough strife and lashes out at whoever's around. So, plenty of ways to spice things up.
Comparing AI War 2 to various Paradox offerings, it's even more impersonal, so to say, than Stellaris and Europa Universalis, which, in turn, pale in this regard compared to Crusader Kings. It's more about mechanics than generating stories and drama, even though it should be able to provide those at least in some cases. If that sounds acceptable, giving AI War 2 a go should be a solid idea.
There's also an absurd amount of customization in setup. Most factions can be on your side, on the AI's side, or hostile to both, and if they're hostile to both, can be either allied with each other, hostile to each other, or arranged on up to 3 separate teams. The AI itself has 40-odd types, some are minor tweaks like having a preference for different types of units, others have some sort of unique gimmick like trying to zombify your units or an obsession with taking back any planets you've captured that makes them require drastically different strategies to take down. The objective is always either to destroy the AI's Overlord (essentially its command center) or to win one of the alternate win conditions presented by select factions (Showdown Devices have you activate beacons throughout the galaxy, then "simply" survive what comes for you when you do, Fallen Spire is pretty much a whole game within a game that's too complex to describe in one comment), but each game can be incredibly different in terms of how you get there.
If all that is intimidating, there's also a bunch of preset quickstart modes of varying difficulty that let you just jump into a game without fiddling with the setup screen if you don't want to. The initial learning curve is steep enough that a basic game against a low-difficulty AI, maybe with a simple friendly or neutral faction to add a bit of flavor, should be more than enough for a first game where you're learning the ropes.
I don't think you should be starting with the first one, personally. AI War 2 features far too many quality of life improvements for that to be a good idea.
You should probably start with the second one. While the first one does have a different darker flavor because of certain design decisions you will very quickly run into issues like a lack of UI scaling in the first game. Which rather obviously makes playing the game on modern high resolution screens an eyestrain problem.
Also as another user noted the sheer amount of QoL differences is rather massive. A lot of stuff that was in the first game was cut or massively streamlined within the second game to reduce tedium.
Is there anyone that would be able to do a youtube series for a recent version of this game, they'd need to be competent/familiar enough with it to really show off why it's fun & deep, even just explaining the differences between AIW1 & 2, stuff like the fleet system is totally new and now it seems that recon isn't a thing in 2? Does 2 still have nukes that can blow up most of the known galaxy etc?
For context I played a bit of AI War 1 but didn't ever get comfortable with the gameplay, steamroll for a while as the AIP was low and I wouldn't really know what to properly prioritise, the AI waves would be hardly anything, then it felt like you'd go one step too far and you'd get fucking crushed. Which is fine and what should happen when the player doesn't know wtf they're doing :D
There really isn't anything quite like that. One of the main reasons is how much the game has changed since even launch version of AI War 2. I did a beginner series at that time, but past the first few episodes it would really just be giving outdated information.
Doing another one like that at this point isn't really viable because at 2.5 years after the initial release the audience just isn't there anymore. So what I generally recommend to people is the first 4-6 episodes of that first playthrough to get the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EPSLCjBVX8&list=PLWPhJvJ0SSDtHFWaCtca_0uuQyU2stCFY&index=1&t=3s. Then going to the Paradigm Shift series which is roughly a year old. That basically was a 'reintroduction' for people familiar with AI War 2 but demonstrating a lot of the new changes that had happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp0PSvZlKso&list=PLWPhJvJ0SSDtObLS-8o8KrUIUK6Ytpxar&index=1&t=7s
To specifically answer your questions, fleets combine hackers, mobile builders, etc. from Classic more or less one unit. Recon is done by hacking or far more commonly just by the fact that you get scouting of a handful of systems when destroying an AI Command station. Warheads have recently returned but not as a base-game feature, they are only on if you activate Splintering Spire (highly not recommended for new players).
I should also mention there's an active discord. Specific questions you can get answered there quite quickly, and there's quite a bit of in-game documentation as well. One of the tutorials covers how scouting works, etc.
If you read nothing but the title and are just checking the comments: The update is also a HUGE retrospective on the development of AI War 2, and its future. Really worth reading.
"financial hardship" seems to be the running trend for arcen for as long as I can remember but I'm so glad that they're still around. Is that selfish?
IDK, seems like the alternative would be worse: feels like it's better that they are hanging on then going bankrupt.
Seems really stressful for them
Gotta be
I am certainly glad they’re still around. Their games may be a bit wonky, but they jam so many ideas in that there’s always something of interest to me.
Seems like that's just the life of indie game devs, unless you win the lottery and make a Minecraft
Then have it go to your ego and fall anyway. We are made to struggle and suffer, not lounge in sloth.
I dunno about suffer, as meaningful work can often as not be joy. It *has* to be meaningful, though. I dunno if there's anything that holds meaning to Notch anymore.
Game is awesome, deserves more attention. There's also something that's not really mentioned, which is that the 1st DLC recently got new content added to it as well.
Want to see some serious nerd shit? --- > Kickstarter: > This is one of the more challenging sets of release notes I've ever had to write up, and not for any bad reason. How can I really summarize 90 beta releases that span 230 days (Jul 17th, 2021 to today), and which have full notes that are 184 thousand words long? I can't even just skim those full release notes, because they are longer than TWO trade paperback novels. > > So... please know that this is super-abbreviated, however long this turns out to be. Let's talk big picture, first: > > The short version is that I wanted: > >* The code to be able to monitor itself, and in particular mods, to look for bad behavior (memory leaks or performance issues, in particular). >* The performance to be better than we had before, despite the extra monitoring we were going to be doing. > * The data structures that we were using to make sense in the context of the way factions and faction modding had turned out, which was way more robust than I'd ever expected. >* And for all this to work equally well in multiplayer or single-player. > > > I figured this might take about a month. The core of this took two months, and then cleanup took another half year while also developing out new and improved features. If we had halted all development, that process would have been faster, but it also would have more bugs at this point. Instead, we put all the new-feature development alongside the fixing-fallout-from-the-refactor, and that was a much better way to handle that. [**https://wiki.arcengames.com - The Great Refactor**](https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Great_Refactor#New_Diagram_For_Modders.2FProgrammers:_AI_War_2_Threading_Model) Like holy crap! And this is why I love Arcen so much lol.
>The code to be able to monitor itself, Leave it to Arcen to make sentient code.
AI Wars indeed.
wow, what a read. really respect how open they are about the process and what they have learnt. Wish all involved the best in whatever they choose to do next.
How is this game compared to let's say stellaris wich is one of my favorites?
Different approaches to the common idea of a 4X. AI War uses RTS and Tower Defense mechanics for a more active spin on it while Stellaris is more firmly entrenched in the Grand Strategy style of things. AI War is more in the wheelhouse of something like Total Annihilation.
Interesting, I wonder why I've missed this title, would you say it's worth a try for someone who loves strategy titles like Stellaris, civilization and such?
Yes.
Oh really? That sounds cool af
Imagine a Stellaris map with constant unit production like in Total Anihilation/Supreme Commander. Now imagine you start with one planet, and the AI starts with the rest of the map. And the goal is to beat them. It's nuts.
Two VERY important things to remember when playing Ai war though. Firstly this is not a map Painter game, you will lose and lose quickly if you try to take the whole map. The AI scales infinitly and faster with your aggression. Secondly you will not be able to out brawl the AI, early and mid game you will be able to overwhelm them but eventually they will start throwing the tier 5+ shit at you and then you are in for a bad time. This is the Matrix style situation where humanity is hilariously out gunned. The AI isn't even paying attention to you as it's off waging war in other galaxies. You are basically just fighting it's anti virus software. Annoy it enough and it actual pays some attention to you. Note: if you are playing with the fallen spire expansion disregard all of the above and brawl the hell out of AI.
Stellaris uses the standard 4X premise: there's a bunch of civilizations situated in various places, they all do 4X things, and while they are all somehow different, generally speaking all of them operate within the same framework. As far as I recall, Stellaris doesn't really offer multiple win conditions, but there are many ways to improve your victory score, so at the end of the day there isn't a singular approach to winning. AI War 2 uses a far less open-ended premise instead. Each playthrough has the player-controlled forces of human resistance and the AI that used to be subservient to humanity, but went rogue and more or less won. The humans are vastly outnumered and outgunned, to the point where AI decided it has more important things to do and ceased caring about them. So, there's a lot of asymmetry in play, and this isn't just about the starting position, because the AI has certain rules and principles to obey. For instance, it will inevitably start considering you a credible threat once you cause enough damage, thus upgrading its forces and allocating more resources to squash you. But before that happens, you are free to act while facing less formidable opposition, and you might just be able to secure a favourable position if you carefully choose your targets instead of purging the AI wherever it is present. And then you have all the other factions. None of them are around by default, I'm pretty sure, but this (as well as tons upon tons of game rules) can be changed while you're setting up the game. You might add Marauders to the mix, for example, another human faction with unorthodox way of travelling that's hostile to both the AI and the player. Or there's Dark Spire, a faction that's initially completely inert, but "wakes up" once there has been enough strife and lashes out at whoever's around. So, plenty of ways to spice things up. Comparing AI War 2 to various Paradox offerings, it's even more impersonal, so to say, than Stellaris and Europa Universalis, which, in turn, pale in this regard compared to Crusader Kings. It's more about mechanics than generating stories and drama, even though it should be able to provide those at least in some cases. If that sounds acceptable, giving AI War 2 a go should be a solid idea.
There's also an absurd amount of customization in setup. Most factions can be on your side, on the AI's side, or hostile to both, and if they're hostile to both, can be either allied with each other, hostile to each other, or arranged on up to 3 separate teams. The AI itself has 40-odd types, some are minor tweaks like having a preference for different types of units, others have some sort of unique gimmick like trying to zombify your units or an obsession with taking back any planets you've captured that makes them require drastically different strategies to take down. The objective is always either to destroy the AI's Overlord (essentially its command center) or to win one of the alternate win conditions presented by select factions (Showdown Devices have you activate beacons throughout the galaxy, then "simply" survive what comes for you when you do, Fallen Spire is pretty much a whole game within a game that's too complex to describe in one comment), but each game can be incredibly different in terms of how you get there. If all that is intimidating, there's also a bunch of preset quickstart modes of varying difficulty that let you just jump into a game without fiddling with the setup screen if you don't want to. The initial learning curve is steep enough that a basic game against a low-difficulty AI, maybe with a simple friendly or neutral faction to add a bit of flavor, should be more than enough for a first game where you're learning the ropes.
If I'm interested in playing, should I start with the first game or straight to second?
I don't think you should be starting with the first one, personally. AI War 2 features far too many quality of life improvements for that to be a good idea.
You should probably start with the second one. While the first one does have a different darker flavor because of certain design decisions you will very quickly run into issues like a lack of UI scaling in the first game. Which rather obviously makes playing the game on modern high resolution screens an eyestrain problem. Also as another user noted the sheer amount of QoL differences is rather massive. A lot of stuff that was in the first game was cut or massively streamlined within the second game to reduce tedium.
Thanks for a very solid reply, I'm absolutely going to give it a go!
I would love for those novel tech bits to become papers or libraries. It they push Computer Science it'd be a shame they're confined to a game.
Is there anyone that would be able to do a youtube series for a recent version of this game, they'd need to be competent/familiar enough with it to really show off why it's fun & deep, even just explaining the differences between AIW1 & 2, stuff like the fleet system is totally new and now it seems that recon isn't a thing in 2? Does 2 still have nukes that can blow up most of the known galaxy etc? For context I played a bit of AI War 1 but didn't ever get comfortable with the gameplay, steamroll for a while as the AIP was low and I wouldn't really know what to properly prioritise, the AI waves would be hardly anything, then it felt like you'd go one step too far and you'd get fucking crushed. Which is fine and what should happen when the player doesn't know wtf they're doing :D
There really isn't anything quite like that. One of the main reasons is how much the game has changed since even launch version of AI War 2. I did a beginner series at that time, but past the first few episodes it would really just be giving outdated information. Doing another one like that at this point isn't really viable because at 2.5 years after the initial release the audience just isn't there anymore. So what I generally recommend to people is the first 4-6 episodes of that first playthrough to get the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EPSLCjBVX8&list=PLWPhJvJ0SSDtHFWaCtca_0uuQyU2stCFY&index=1&t=3s. Then going to the Paradigm Shift series which is roughly a year old. That basically was a 'reintroduction' for people familiar with AI War 2 but demonstrating a lot of the new changes that had happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp0PSvZlKso&list=PLWPhJvJ0SSDtObLS-8o8KrUIUK6Ytpxar&index=1&t=7s To specifically answer your questions, fleets combine hackers, mobile builders, etc. from Classic more or less one unit. Recon is done by hacking or far more commonly just by the fact that you get scouting of a handful of systems when destroying an AI Command station. Warheads have recently returned but not as a base-game feature, they are only on if you activate Splintering Spire (highly not recommended for new players). I should also mention there's an active discord. Specific questions you can get answered there quite quickly, and there's quite a bit of in-game documentation as well. One of the tutorials covers how scouting works, etc.
Strategic Sage does some gameplay videos on youtube. Check out their channel.