Oct 30, 2012

Community Announcements - ISOTX Community

For the final part of this art inspiration series, I’d like to take you to the higher altitudes of the continent. The snowy mountains of Atelia are challenging to traverse and aside from the native Atelian nomads, only the high stakes gamblers, the barons, come there to check on their mining operations, which are often of dubious legality. Well, them and the marauders keen to raid said mining operations!

The final concept art for the Atelian areas, an icy dig site, was made with the use of several reference images, creating one “cool” piece of art.
<img src="http://www.isotx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/blogSnowDig.png" alt="" />

<h2><span style="color: #cccccc;">Tournament</span></h2>
It’s your last chance to <a href="http://igmarauders.isotx.com/game.php?/tournament">sign up</a> for the Halloween tournament which will start today! Make sure you get in since it’s going to be a very special explosive unit pool!

<h2><span style="color: #cccccc;">Halloween Black Market</span></h2>
We’ve already enabled you to buy spooky Halloween outfits for your avatar, in the avatar editor. But we will also have a Halloween <a href="http://igmarauders.isotx.com/game.php?/blackmarket/">Black Market</a> offer tomorrow to spice things up even more!
<img src="http://www.isotx.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/battlefield.png" alt="" />

Oct 29, 2012

AI War Beta 6.003-6.004 - more module fort turret varieties, spire shard changes, special force tweak, and other changes

AI War: Fleet Command - Josh "Spikey00" Y.

<a href="http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_features.php"/><img src="http://arcengames.com/img/side_aiwar.png"</img></a>
AI War <a href"http://steamcommunity.com/app/40400">Steam community hub</a>
<i>AI War <a href="https://www.facebook.com/AIWarFleetCommand">Facebook page</a>
Arcen Games' <a href="https://www.facebook.com/arcengames">Facebook page</a>
Tidalis <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Tidalis">Facebook page</a>
A Valley Without Wind <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/A-Valley-Without-Wind/164979970229916">Facebook page</a>
Our <a href="http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php">community forums</a></i>
Report bugs and suggestions on <a href="http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/">MantisBT</a>
<a href="http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_irc.php">AI War web IRC</a> / irc.appliedirc.com / #aiwar
<b><a href="http://arcengames.blogspot.ca/2012/10/ai-war-beta-6003-fortress-size-it.html">Please see the original post here</a></b>
<b><a href="http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Current_Post-6.000_Beta#Release_6.003_Fortress-size_It">Changelog may be found here</a></b>

This one greatly expands the module variety available to modular fortress owners in champion games. Every module that can be unlocked on a champion now has a mod-fort equivalent (fortress modules only go up to MkIII though). The pre-existing mod-fort modules are still unlocked via their related turret/starship/etc research, but the newly added ones are unlocked when any player-controlled champion in the game has unlocked them.

Speaking of champions, the "you must be within 20000 range of the dying unit to get XP for it" rule has been removed: you still have to be on the same planet, but the fine details don't matter. Hopefully this will reduce the field of OCD behaviors slightly ;) Overall it wasn't a big deal since most XP comes from winning nebulae (and everyone gets that), but it should please some players.

And speaking of modules: AI-controlled Spire Corvettes will now be much scarier because we fixed a bug that was keeping their modules at MkI. Watch out for the high-mark ones.

Speaking of Spire stuff, the Shard-recovery chases in Fallen Spire have been revised again to not be so intense early on (where you don't have very far to go anyway) but still have the full force (or more) of the recent speed increases in the later stages (where you'll be more prepared).

The Ancient Shadows bonus ship far-zoom icons (i.e. the representation you see almost all the time) have been redone by long-time community member HitmanN. Same with the Spire champion far-zoom icons. They look much better, in my opinion :)

Fixed a basically-since-forever bug where Defender mode would sometimes not launch waves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it happened when you rolled both AIs as types that don't send waves. Computers think they're cute like that, doing what we say and not what we mean.

Special Forces now "breed" much more slowly, but have a higher possible population (both the rate and the cap scale up during the game with AIP, etc). It's been amusing to see the "intergalactic sentry eye" effect as it's been called, but not actually the intention there ;)

And a few other changes.

Update: 6.004 hotfix to fix bug in the last version that changed the color of your ships in the planetary summary.

<i>If you are looking for people to play AI War with, give the latest <a href="http://steamcommunity.com/app/40400/discussions/0/882962698518931451/">AI War Meetup Sortie Fall 2012</a> a look!</i>

<i>This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that <a href="http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_buy.php">here.</a></i>

Oct 29, 2012

AI War Beta 6.003-6.004 - more module fort turret varieties, spire shard changes, special force tweak, and other changes

AI War: Fleet Command - Josh "Spikey00" Y.

AI War <a href"http://steamcommunity.com/app/40400">Steam community hub[/url]
AI War Facebook page
Arcen Games' Facebook page
Tidalis Facebook page
A Valley Without Wind Facebook page
Our community forums
Report bugs and suggestions on MantisBT
AI War web IRC / irc.appliedirc.com / #aiwar
Please see the original post here
Changelog may be found here

This one greatly expands the module variety available to modular fortress owners in champion games. Every module that can be unlocked on a champion now has a mod-fort equivalent (fortress modules only go up to MkIII though). The pre-existing mod-fort modules are still unlocked via their related turret/starship/etc research, but the newly added ones are unlocked when any player-controlled champion in the game has unlocked them.

Speaking of champions, the "you must be within 20000 range of the dying unit to get XP for it" rule has been removed: you still have to be on the same planet, but the fine details don't matter. Hopefully this will reduce the field of OCD behaviors slightly ;) Overall it wasn't a big deal since most XP comes from winning nebulae (and everyone gets that), but it should please some players.

And speaking of modules: AI-controlled Spire Corvettes will now be much scarier because we fixed a bug that was keeping their modules at MkI. Watch out for the high-mark ones.

Speaking of Spire stuff, the Shard-recovery chases in Fallen Spire have been revised again to not be so intense early on (where you don't have very far to go anyway) but still have the full force (or more) of the recent speed increases in the later stages (where you'll be more prepared).

The Ancient Shadows bonus ship far-zoom icons (i.e. the representation you see almost all the time) have been redone by long-time community member HitmanN. Same with the Spire champion far-zoom icons. They look much better, in my opinion :)

Fixed a basically-since-forever bug where Defender mode would sometimes not launch waves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it happened when you rolled both AIs as types that don't send waves. Computers think they're cute like that, doing what we say and not what we mean.

Special Forces now "breed" much more slowly, but have a higher possible population (both the rate and the cap scale up during the game with AIP, etc). It's been amusing to see the "intergalactic sentry eye" effect as it's been called, but not actually the intention there ;)

And a few other changes.

Update: 6.004 hotfix to fix bug in the last version that changed the color of your ships in the planetary summary.

If you are looking for people to play AI War with, give the latest AI War Meetup Sortie Fall 2012 a look!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 6.000 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 6.000 or later, you can download that here.

Oct 29, 2012

Hurricane Sandy Is Landing, Muse Team Out of Power

Guns of Icarus Online - [Muse] awkm

Hey everyone,

Thank you for your patience and support during this rough launch window. It already started off pretty crazy with Total Biscuit's great video coverage on the game pushing a huge influx of players into our servers. What we've managed to do to combat the lag is to increase overall power for our database servers by several folds.

Unfortunately, I can't get you all the details because our engineers are without power right now. Hurricane Sandy is tearing up the Northeastern seaboard here in the US so there's not a whole lot of support we can offer. We have a few guys in Taiwan that will brace for impact when they wake up but our team is short-staffed and there are still a lot of things to fix.

So thanks again for your support and patience through this. We'll be back at 120% once the storm subsides a little bit more. And to our friends in the area, stay safe and stay dry!

Eric