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 Arcen Games have finally gone back to their roots and are designing a sequel to their classic 4x/RTS/Tower Defence/Risk/Extinction Simulator hybrid AI War. Renowned for its emergent AI and placed solidly into the top 50 strategy games of all time by Rock Paper Shotgun, the original AI War had a decent following among goons. AI War 2 promises to replicate the experience of an asymmetrical fight where long-term strategy is emphasised over tactics, while providing a much better UI and (amazingly for Arcen) spiffing new 3D graphics. Running a medium size development studio these days is a tricky business. Arcen have a bit of a habit of running themselves into financial difficulties every few years, and being completely honest about it. This tends to be because they take big risks on interesting game concepts that don't quite work out financially. In the seven years since AI War launched they came out with Shattered Haven, Tidalis, Starward Rogue, Bionic Dues, Skyward Collapse, A Valley Without Wind and The Last Federation, all of which kept them ticking over and taught them a heck of a lot about how to develop games. This past year has been fairly bad with the delays to Stars Beyond Reach, misjudgment of Release Raptor and poor sales for Starward Rogue. So now they've decided to fold all their experience and the studio's future into what fans have been asking for since roughly 2014, a sparkly new kickstarted version of AI War. AI War 2   The kickstarter is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii/description You may also be interested in the extensive design document (61,662 words and counting). I will now proceed to rip it off for the next several paragraphs. AI War 2 is the sequel to 2009's AI War Fleet Command. Like the original, AI War 2 is a real-time strategy game with elements of tower defense and grand strategy that pits you against a smart and deadly AI. Also like the original, AI War 2 is an asymmetric game. The AI does not play by your rules: it is much more powerful than you, has no supplies you can disrupt, and its resources are literally infinite. Your successes strengthen the AI's focus on you, requiring you to balance immediate needs against long term costs. For quite a long time, we have been talking about a “remastered” version of AI War: Fleet Command, which would have some various improvements over the original and yet be essentially the same game. This is not that remastering project! AI War: Fleet Command is a wonderful game, but it has a variety of complexities that are undesirable even to the most hardcore fans of the game, and it has a number of fundamental design decisions that limit the potential for future growth. The function of AI War II is to take the things we have learned while making AI War Classic, and to create a new experience that is a worthy successor and a jumping-off point for a new era of the game. The goals of this project are perhaps best summarized as follows:
For those of you wondering why this isn't in the kickstarter thread that I'm sure I saw around here one time, well I'm hoping that this thread will be fairly alive up until the alpha release in January. And also be a nice place to reminisce about... AI War Classic  I am, quite obviously, a fan of the original AI War. To the extent that I wrote an LP for it: http://lparchive.org/AI-War-Fleet-Command/ There are plenty of other goon fans as well, and even some who enjoyed the odd multiplayer game of seeing who could accidentally set off a nuke first: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/AWGC . Sadly we haven't really had a multiplayer game in a while as the netcode for the original wasn't great (and it requires the investment of most of a weekend), but hey that could all change when the new alpha comes out! If you have any fond memories of the weird things the emergent AI did in the first one, please do share. As a starter two lovely threads from the Arcen forums: War Stories and the classic This AI is Awesome RockyB fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 20:45
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Hot drat I didn't realize Arcen was doing a sequel, or that you'd finished the LP. Hopefully the new game has a bit less of a learning cliff, or at least a more usable UI. e. Whoops, your Kickstarter link has an extra period at the end. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii/description
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Oct 10, 2016 21:23
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I just noticed this today too. It's a shame they need to go to KS for it but since they've had something like three minor disasters in a row it's understandable. I like pretty much all the gameplay changes outlined in the design doc, especially merging and expanding AI personalities/subcommanders and turning the other major races into starting options with completely different ship sets.
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Oct 10, 2016 21:51
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Thanks for pointing out the link, trust me to manage to break the most important one. Some of the interface improvements I've seen so far seem to make it a heck of a lot easier to understand whats going on at a per-planet level, and hopefully the ability for the community to mod and set up custom scenarios will help towards getting people over that initial 'what the hell am I doing' hump.
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Oct 10, 2016 23:48
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What ya'll aren't fans of having to remember CTRL+Shift+U hotkeys to do standard tasks?  I hope the kickstarter does well for them, it doesn't look like a ton of money is flying in so far but I dunno what the typical KS curve is like these days.
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Oct 11, 2016 00:00
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Arcen is the games studio I love to hate, everything they make is so weirdly horrible... AI War is considered their best game, and I think it is a fun game, but it's dominated by some really questionable design choices like how the AI mostly interacts with you by sending waves of troops like in a tower defense that always go in a straight line towards your home base. Reading through this thread This AI is Awesome might make you think that the AI is the best in any game ever, but in reality the challenge of the game comes from the fact that the computer player just has many more units than you and when it decides to attack it does so by going in a straight line towards your buildings, not trying to avoid your mines or turrets at all. It also takes over 4 hours of real-time to build a fighting force that has any chance of making progress against the AI. The graphics are nice and clean pixel art, but just look at the menus, they are a total mess. The person that designed this game is totally out of control and should consider taking a graphic design course.  A Valley without Wind has some of the worst graphics I've ever seen in any video game and the gameplay is somehow even worse... All you do is wander around hideous randomly generated dungeons and upgrade your projectile weapons with no goal or end in sight. It seems like they wanted to make Terraria but just totally failed on every level.  They wasted all of their money making 'Starward Rogue', which is kind of like Binding of Isaac but uglier and extremely complex. I have no idea why they thought they were going to make any money off of this, it's seriously worse than those flash games on Newgrounds.  Their new game, 'In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor!' is some kind of cynical cash-in clone of Goat Simulator for Youtubers to make funny faces at, but I don't think it's going to work.  The thing that most of their games have in common is being overdesigned with too many broken/pointless features and randomly generated ugliness. I'm fascinated by everything they do, but at this point I'm not sure if I'd rather see them succeed or create another even more broken failure than what they've already made. Quellar fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 06:27
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Oh look, I get to do this all over again. Screw cool emergent things the AI did. Playing with goons was stupid and fun, so many memories. I will host again and ya'll better come back and not be sober.
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Oct 11, 2016 06:31
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It's a shame that Release Raptor got that judgement of a cynical cash-in, because that really wasn't the original intention. The devs have a decent view of it here: http://arcengames.com/time-for-some-straight-talk-release-raptor-is-being-pulled-and-refunded/ That said, Arcen do have a reputation for making shonky games. But that's a lot of the reason why people love them, because they take a risk on something different even if it doesn't really work. It wins them a fair few long-term fans, as well as a lot of people who dismiss them. The Last Federation for instance got pretty good reviews from a lot of people, despite it being something that didn't quite work for me. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:What ya'll aren't fans of having to remember CTRL+Shift+U hotkeys to do standard tasks? KeyBindings.jpg  "AI War 2 is an opportunity to rectify the first game's biggest flaw: usability." Dear lord I hope so.
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Oct 11, 2016 09:16
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The Last Federation was a weird mashup- a turn-based shmup. I think Chris kinda got obsessed with shmups and wanted to make more after TLF and that's what resulted in Starward Rogue, though I don't think anyone was particularly looking for that game. The game that got sidelined for Starward Rogue(Stars Beyond Reach) could've been really interesting but it still had a long way to go and I think Chris knew it and decided to shelve it. The cool thing about Stars Beyond Reach is that I always wanted a civ game that just played entirely with the tiles on the map instead of having separated out cities with their own management screen but Chris has a bunch of city-builder type stuff in it. I do think AI War 2 is kind of his 'welp, i'm out of money now' game, though the improvements seem good(especially the removal of the builders/mines/science lab micro).
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Oct 11, 2016 10:38
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Starward Rogue is actually really good for a not-Isaac.
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Oct 11, 2016 13:37
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I just can't support their games anymore. Their titles have so many pivots (including AI War) in their development that they've gotten to the point that what they announce and what they offer are two completely different things. A Valley Without Wind was originally an Actraiser/Simcity game that got rid of the Simcity aspect and turned into a huge mess trying to figure out what it wanted to be. It still didn't know what it wanted to be and they made a sequel based off the mess that wasn't any better. It was one of the most flimsiest platformers I played and didn't even deserve to be in the bargain bin area of a store. The Last Federation had a bunch of weird crap too that started to surface after playing it for a few hours. I praise the lead designer for trying new game mechanics and mashing two genres together but he can't make them work or fit together coherently. Its feeling like AI War was a one-hit wonder. I can't tell if its because he is listening to his fan base for ideas or he not learning from his mistakes. Entorwellian fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Oct 11, 2016 |
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Oct 11, 2016 17:01
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Yeah, i'm kinda hoping that a less ambitious and swervy game ends up working better, and having read the design doc there does seem to be a lot of definite improvements over AI War 1.
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Oct 11, 2016 17:14
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Cryohazard posted:Starward Rogue is actually really good for a not-Isaac. Uh no. It has even worse levels of "whoops lost enemy bullets in the background and MY OWN BULLETS and I got hit" that the devs never acknowledged as a problem and thus never fixed. It's the same Arcen of has good ideas but no project manager to tighten the game mechanics so much of the good is lost in a loose tangle of poor gameplay decisions.
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Oct 11, 2016 18:16
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I love Arcen almost unconditionally, and I hope this game gets done right. They've had a lotta swings and misses, and it's "ok, fine, we'll (I'll) make an AI War sequel now," which feels like it could go either way. Even a solid, well-made game isn't a moneymaker these days, so I imagine there's a lot of pressure to make something spectacular. Welp, time to back my first Kickstarter.
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Oct 12, 2016 16:04
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I think they've got a solid enough design document and enough heavily invested people screaming at them on the forums that they should be able to come up with something pretty decent. The fact they already have a working engine with some pretty impressive performance with masses of ships on the screen also gives me confidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLtDdZRq4Bk If you're interested in the more mathsy side of stuff section 2.a of the design doc where they work through a 10,000 ship engagement in AIWC and a 17,000 ship engagement using squads in AIW2 is a good read. Essentially they've got the number of CPU calculations down from 42 million to just over 2 million, and those can be multithreaded much better. Might even mean we can get rid of carriers and the chipper shredder entirely. With regards to the Kickstarter, it'll be interesting to see what kind of curve Arcen end up with. They came out with essentially no advertising for the first day and have managed to get 13% funded so far, I hope they get a nice swell of support rather just crashing.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:42
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Yeah, Arcen is one of the devs I can never get mad at. I've managed to pass on most of their questionable games, though I did enjoy TLF for what it was. A new AI War with better graphics and more usability though...  That's my Kryptonite, right there.
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Oct 12, 2016 19:27
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The one good thing that mighta come out of Release Raptor is that Chris Park got himself familiar with Unity and developing a 3D game.
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Oct 12, 2016 23:31
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So it seems like this is just barely limping along right now, they're sitting at less than 15% after what, about 3.5 days. Based on projections this is looking like it's not got much chance to finish unless they get some pretty significant help. Is Arcen all out of good will at this point?
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Oct 13, 2016 19:52
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Their games since AI war seem to be pretty dire, I can understand people not wanting to put money down before they get some reassurance Arcen isn't going to do something weird.
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Oct 13, 2016 22:03
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Dang, looking pretty dire. Got a pretty good jump the first day, but less than $10k total over the last five days. Hopefully they can get some bumps from elsewhere.
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Oct 18, 2016 05:10
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holy poo poo someone dropped five thousand on this already.
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Oct 18, 2016 05:21
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Yeah this is looking extremely dead. They're 25% of the way through already and still crawling along at 17%. :/
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Oct 18, 2016 05:25
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Heck yesssssssss hope it gets funded..
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Oct 18, 2016 21:27
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They just pushed a patch to AI war 1 with some very minor fixes, but mainly to advertise this kickstarted. I really hope Arcen gets some love right now, they deserve it!
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Oct 19, 2016 10:58
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Samopsa posted:They just pushed a patch to AI war 1 with some very minor fixes, but mainly to advertise this kickstarted. I really hope Arcen gets some love right now, they deserve it! Looks like I better drag my butt up and make a Kickstarter account. I was really hoping not to ever have to make one. quote:Fixed several bugs, some going back to the very beginning of the mechanic, where Exogalactic Strikeforces were not aggressive enough about spending their whole budget. Especially when the set of eligible ships is heavily restricted (e.g. the guardian-only or starship-only AIs). Was kinda hoping for a more substantial set of fixes for AIW, but all things considered they should probably focus on AIWII, Kickstarter or no Kickstarter. Man, if AI War II is a flop as a game or as a financial success, it's gonna break my heart. It's been better said in this thread, the indie market is not what it was when AI War first came out.
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Oct 19, 2016 19:02
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I wonder what they'll do if the kickstarter fails as hard as it looks like it's going to.
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Oct 19, 2016 19:58
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Lprsti99 posted:I wonder what they'll do if the kickstarter fails as hard as it looks like it's going to. Double post, but worth the bump. Turns out that this isn't necessarily do-or-die for Arcen. Wonder if they've talked to Paradox, it fits their general MO, and I feel like they might get more creative freedom than with other publishers, if it comes to that.
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Oct 20, 2016 09:06
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Quellar posted:Arcen is the games studio I love to hate, everything they make is so weirdly horrible... The AI is great because of the strategic elements, not the tactical parts. The interaction you have with it to control it's growth and how it responds to what path you take is why it's considered pretty good. Just saying the AI has more units than you and throws them in continuous waves is disingenuous and very misleading. UI is pretty bad though. quote:A Valley without Wind has some of the worst graphics I've ever seen in any video game and the gameplay is somehow even worse... All you do is wander around hideous randomly generated dungeons and upgrade your projectile weapons with no goal or end in sight. It seems like they wanted to make Terraria but just totally failed on every level. A Valley Without Wind does look bad, and I could never get into the gameplay, but it's hardly the worst graphics ever. Also you've described the kind of game it was trying to emulate so I'd say it was more not your game than a game without a goal. doctorfrog posted:Looks like I better drag my butt up and make a Kickstarter account. I was really hoping not to ever have to make one. They were up front that this patch was to try and get peoples attention on the Steam page in the hopes they'll read the news and see the Kickstarter announcement. That is why it's barebones and short. ---------------------- Three Moves Ahead had Chris Park on this week and it's a pretty amazing listen so I'd recommend everyone go listen to it. Even if you're not super interested in AI War he goes into a lot of detail about the risks and challenges in his other games, trying to get this game out there, issues other devs have faced that he's talked to, and just a whole slew of other stuff. Unfortunately I can't link to it because my work blocks the page but it's worth the google search and casual listen in the background if nothing else. nessin fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Oct 20, 2016 |
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Oct 20, 2016 16:22
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https://www.idlethumbs.net/3ma/episodes/chris-park-and-arcen-gamesquote:October 20, 2016 This week, Michael and Troy "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Goodfellow welcome Chris Park of Arcen Games back to the show. Arcen has recently posted their Kickstarter for AI War 2, followup to the original cult hit from 2009. Featuring asymmetric gameplay and unique strategy, AI War: Fleet Command was the first game to highlight Park's unique vision for gaming. Chris talks about the challenges Arcen has faced, the evolving game market, and what it means to make games with integrity. Also, be sure to stick around after the show for some brief announcements from the gang. Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/idlethumbs/episode-372-chris-park-and-arcen-games
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Oct 20, 2016 17:18
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The Kickstarter was relaunched with a reduced funding goal that it's already met. So... yay? Sort of? I started playing the first game again on difficulty 7 and I've put 20 hours into it in the last week. One of these years I'll get to try a coop run.
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Nov 19, 2016 21:46
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Back in the pre 4.0 days I did some co-op with a random person, and I just felt like I was letting them down for about 3 hours. Fortunately the single player has always been pretty engrossing, if thoroughly intimidating for a pretty long early period.
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Nov 19, 2016 22:24
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First start that got me to nope right the hell out: having an SF alarm post and a co-processor spawn adjacent to my homeworld. +35 AIP right out the gate? NOPE NOPE NOPE
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Nov 20, 2016 23:15
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Well, on the second attempt the funding went through: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1767690 Shame that they couldn't get enough for the 'full' design plan, but hey I'm happy enough to just get an updated engine. Roll on February.
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Dec 22, 2016 21:24
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I never got around to playing much of the first game (I have no loving idea what the hell I'm doing  ) but the concept seemed cool enough that I at least put in for a hopeful pre-order of the sequel.
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Dec 23, 2016 10:24
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