Arcen’s primary focus has still been on Tidalis since the release of our last massive 3.060 update to AI War: Fleet Command, but nonetheless a ton has been happening over the last few months with our massive strategy title. The AI has learned some new tricks, performance and balance are better than ever, Golems (from The Zenith Remnant) are vastly more useful, and we've laid the groundwork for a lot of features that we're planning on expanding over the coming months (auto-generated epilogues, AI Plots, and so forth).
Here’s the list of particularly notable features out of the typical-for-Arcen hundreds of changes:
-Major new Border Aggression behavior for the AI is the largest single new addition to the AI since Cross Planet Attacks were introduced.
-Four new Heavy Beam Cannons (Mark I-IV).
-Huge performance improvements for the largest battles, game loading, and more.
-Focus fire control node options added, along with other various new control nodes.
-Many various improvements to ship autofire targeting in general.
-Many significantly rebalanced units, including MLRS, Anti-Armor, Transports, Sentinel Frigates, Scout Starships, all melee ships, mines, all Golems. Many of these units are like all-new (and much more useful) ships.
-ClearType text is now used, resulting in vastly more attractive fonts.
-New AI modifiers for optional less-Tower-Defense-inspired gameplay for advanced players: No Wave Warnings, Cross Planet Waves
-New AI Plots feature for more exciting endgames: the first one, Avenger, is now available and more will come in the coming months.
-New lobby options for starting with a largely invisible galaxy which is only revealed as exploration is undertaken (normally you can see all the planets and their connections, just not any details whatsoever about the planets).
-Dozens upon dozens of other, smaller, balance tweaks, interface tweaks, and bugfixes.
Our next major version will probably be a couple of months out, as we're realizing that bi-monthly official releases simply fit our schedule and testing cycle better. New beta versions come out regularly a couple of times per week, so you can always keep up to date on the latest and greatest inwork features through the AI War forums or via the in-game updater.
In August we're planning on releasing a version that switches the game to prerequisite-less Unity 3D, and also adds a Mac OSX version of the game, along with some other updates that will be in tandem with that (better updater tools, etc). The second expansion for AI War is currently planned come after both Tidalis and Alden Ridge are released, which means most likely we won't see another full-fledged expansion for AI War until late Q1 2011 at the earliest. However, with the upcoming Mac version of the game, and all the huge updates that are always coming out as free DLC, there's certainly no risk of the game getting stagnant!
New to the game? You can download a trial version of the game. 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 see this post in the Arcen forums.
