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Version 5.052 begins the public beta for Ancient Shadows, our newest expansion to AI War.
We waited longer than usual to start the preorders and public beta for Ancient Shadows because we wanted to get the anchor feature to a playable state, and it's pretty complex under-the-hood.
So, what's the anchor feature? Champions! A bit of background: neither Chris nor I have been all that happy with the way RTS games usually do scripted campaigns or hero units. The concepts are quite compelling, however, so it's a matter of finding a different way. In the Light of the Spire we did the Fallen Spire stuff as our take on dropping a scripted campaign into our emergent-campaign world of AIW. It was a pretty huge hit. Well, in Ancient Shadows we're doing Champions as our take on bringing hero units into AIW.
Basically, with the Ancient Shadows expansion, you can now set a player to the "Champion" role and instead of a home command station and all the usual stuff a player starts with they get a single modular ship. But what a ship. At the beginning it's basically a super-starship that's pretty powerful but nothing world-shattering. But it can gain experience, and with experience it can upgrade modules.
***IMPORTANT NOTE: you CAN use champions in singleplayer. The easiest way is to set your player role to "Normal+Champion" and it will give you both a home command station and a champion
More importantly, the champions can travel to new parts of the galaxy that no normal ship can get to, and interact with the splinter factions of Humans, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire that are found there. Successfully helping a splinter faction can (among other rewards) unlock whole new lines of modules and even new and bigger hulls that your champion can switch to. For the lore-inclined among you, these "offroad" scenarios also reveal more of the backstory through journal entries.
There's still quite a lot more variety planned for the champions (more module lines, more champion hulls, more splinter factions, etc), and plenty more in other expansion features:
* Modular fortresses! (the Human-tech variant is added in this update; Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire variants to come, probably via reward from an offroad scenario)
* 9 new bonus ship classes (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* 3 core AI guard posts and one new minor faction (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* New AI types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* New Map types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
* A large amount of new music (to be released when the expansion fully launches, you'll need to download the final installer to get the music, it won't be delivered via update).
If you are looking for an AI War, give the latest AI War Summertime Sortie 2012 Bulletin a look!