What's new in AI War: Ancient Shadows 8.000
Mar 20, 2015
- AI War's run from 7.0 to 8.0 took a long break during our development of The Last Federation, but still contained over 60 new releases in 425 days. Thanks to player feedback (some new, some from years ago) the game is now better than ever.
- Biggest on the radar is the addition of the new "hacking" mechanic which gives the player several abilities which can be extremely useful but also quite risky. Hack wisely, and you can turn defeat into victory. Hack foolishly, and you can turn humanity into hamburger. The idea came out of long discussions with players on improving the relationship between metal and crystal. Those two mechanics had become far too similar, and ultimately the idea of merging them in favor a new radically-different mechanic found a lot of support from the community.
- "Salvage" is another major new mechanic based on years of community feedback. Basically if you lost your whole fleet in an attack it could take a long time to rebuild but often there wasn't much actual danger. In a game where 8 hours is a "short" campaign, players don't want to be stuck spending real "wall-clock" time without much actual "game" happening. So salvage allows the AI to harvest the remains of your ships lost in its territory to build a "reprisal" force that threatens you after a fleet-wipe, and allows you to harvest the remains of AI ships lost in your territory to accelerate your rebuilding. This led to a somewhat bumpy ride balance-wise but it's shaken out pretty well by now and has significantly improved enjoyment of the game.
- Champions have also been the subject of quite a bit of player feedback since they were introduced in the fourth expansion. Some people really liked them, some people really did not. One of the biggest issues was how the nebula scenarios (the main way you could improve champions) were so disconnected from the rest of the game. So we've added an optional alternate way to improve your Champion units that's much more aligned with playing normally. There's probably more to be done on this topic, but what's been done thus far has helped.