Greetings, Warmasters and Candidates! This is the newsletter for December 6th, 2022, the first December newsletter. This is actually our 1 year anniversary of being in Early Access. A lot has changed over this past year. And a new milestone has been reached even in this update with the start of the addition of the AI helpers finally in the game.
Artistic Update: Past and Present
A lot has changed even in the graphics over the past year. Here is an example of a few screen shots from a year ago, with the current ones first and what it was a year ago:
Quality of Life
As mentioned before, the idea always was to have AI helpers in the game since the game can get complicated. The first glimmer of these has been implemented in the Admiral AI. While the full capabilities of this has not been implemented yet, the Scout Duty command has now been hooked up.
The interface is on the Navigation screen and is very much a work in progress, so expect the graphics to be updated by the next release. If you create an Admiral AI on the asset screen, you can order it to do automated scouting duties via the Navigation screen. Simply click on the Admiral AI's Avatar in the upper right. A series of commands appear in the bottom right. Click on the Scouting Duty command, and the admiral will be given a message to change it's orders. It will then request a scout design if you haven't already created one. If you haven't, go to the quick designer, click on roles and select scout, then click defaults and then save. You just made a scout ship design. The admiral will now proceed to order up new scouts if he has money and you have a factory. Once those scouts are produced, it will start sending them on a sweeping patrol route. The route is still a work in progress, but it does work.
Expect more polish and more commands available by the next release.
Another quality of life update is that the lists in the game now behave properly. They no longer have some annoying glitches, that might make them disappear sometimes, or not always get to the end of the list. Thank you for your patience with this.
Short-term RoadMap
The Helper AIs will be expanded and the way to interact with them will be cleaned up. This should include any requests that are made to show up as objectives, rather than buried in the series of status update messages.
That's all for this update, stay tuned for more news next time! If you'd like to give Rank: Warmaster a try for yourself, pick up a copy on Steam and begin your conquest of Mars!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422270/Rank_Warmaster/