Hey everyone! Here's a bit more information upon some of your questions in regards to, "Will the pre-release be compatible with my Steam version? What about distribution?" The FAQ is located below the information regarding our newest version, 2.001S.
What is in 2.001R? Check the topic below for the colour-coded sidebar! There are also some balances to the Raid Starship line, two other significant changes along wtih... rally posts, yes! Please see the information below!
http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2567.0.html
Topic: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,2581.0.html
Download: http://www.arcengames.com/share/AIWar2001S.zip
What's new since 2.001R:
-The planetary summary has once again been updated, to an even-more-readable colorized layout that makes finding ships easier than ever.
-The health of all the ships in the raid starship line have been reduced. Additionally, their general-purpose attack power has been vastly reduced, but their specialist attack power against force fields, turrets, and heavy defense has been doubled. Additionally, they no longer have a penalty against resources, constructors, or heavy defenses. The net effect of this is a nerf for how humans are able to use Raid starships (though keeping them very useful in many specialist roles), while boosting what the AI is likely to be able to do with them by a small amount (as the AI was previously not all that effective with them).
-Perma-cloaked enemy ships now show up as "Perma-Cloaked" on the galaxy map intel summaries. The only ship that is this way for AIs presently is Wormhole Guard Posts, which will be enabled even when cloaking is disabled in the lobby (perma-cloaked ships don't really function like other cloaked ships, and so don't count for purposes of that feature).
-When ships go through a wormhole into a planet, if they don't have other orders they tend to just sit at the wormhole and wait for more orders, fighting with whatever is there. That is great for most ships, but disastrous for scouts. Scouts in that situation will now flee to the outer border of the planetary area, where they are almost sure to be out of range of tachyon beams and thus can wait for further player orders in relative safety.
-A new ship has been added to the defensive tab: Rally Post. Allied ships that are sent to this planet will gather at this rally post. If there are multiple allied rally posts on a single planet, entering ships will pick one of them at random.
Steam/Impulse/GamersGate/Direct2Drive/etc F.A.Q. Answers:
1. This prerelease version is compatible with any other version of the game -- Steam, Impulse, whatever.
2. If you use this with your Steam copy of the game, however, you will be asked to enter your AI War CD key (which Steam provides, but normally you do not have to enter), and also the integration with Steamworks leaderboards and achievements may be disabled. So you may want to make a separate install of the preorder version if you use Steam, at least for the moment.
3. If you have preordered through Impulse, at the moment you still don't have your beta key. They will be providing beta keys and direct beta downloads through their Impulse Client very shortly (hopefully this week). They are not charging you any money until they actually have the beta keys live, just so you know!
4. Steam will carry the expansion later on, and will have (probably beta-less) preorders, but they don't yet have that online.
5. GamersGate is also currently offering the expansion on preorder, and you do get a beta key, but you'll have to download the beta versions from our forums.
6. Direct2Drive will be offering the expansion on preorder in a manner very similar to GamersGate, but they are not doing so quite yet.