New beta build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Finalizing_Multiplayer#Beta_3.602_Linesanity
Please bear in mind that this one has some known issues. If you have a bunch of problems, please use the most_recent_stable_beta to get the prior build.
If you have big cases of tons of beam weapons or chain lightning or tractor beams or tachyon beams (if you have those turned visible) in a savegame, then seeing how that runs for you in the prior version versus the new version would also be really interesting to me on a variety of hardware. Some folks were struggling before with ultra-many-tractors being shown, but that should be a thing of the past (knock on wood).
Overall this new build has a couple of small QoL improvements, mainly better hover and tooltips over wormholes, and then a tiny bit of balance (one unit -- electric bombers), and then everything else is bugfixing work / refactoring.
The way that we draw "ship to ship lines" like repair lines, claim lines, chain lightning, beam weapons, and so forth has been re-coded from absolute scratch. It was having performance problems before, as well as three interlocking pools that were really complicated for me to manage, as well as various bugs like some beam weapons or hacking lines not showing up in the past.
There are NEW bugs now, but these ones are at least in a simpler (from the outside, to manage) framework that doesn't require pools. It did require quite a lot of computer science / mental acuity testing on my part, which I may or may not have passed with various levels of success. ;) There's a list of known issues, most of which are cosmetic or minor QoL right now. I don't think any of the new issues are actually about correctness or performance, but fingers crossed. This is hot off the presses, and I've only been able to test it on so many scenarios.
I'm releasing this one now, despite knowing there are still some things wrong with it, because (as noted) those are mostly cosmetic, and I could really use the testing help from folks who are interested. I'll be banging on this more tomorrow to get the rest of this out. This is one of those things that affects both single player and multiplayer, but one thing that was part of my plan this week was to get a lot of multiplayer stuff shored up and to hopefully get us closer to exiting the beta branch for both SP and MP sooner than later.
Also, our timeframe for releasing DLC3 (aka NA) has been pushed back to January. There's an actual much more accurate description of what is in the new DLC there now, though: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/
This is going to be the final DLC, and it's a really big one. Some of the things that you may notice that have vacated from the old page description are roguelike stuff (that is out NOW, for free, in the base game instead!), and the Obscura (those got cut and replaced with a ton of other stuff).
My goal is to finish up all the kickstarter last items by sometime in November still, and so when the AI War 2 Complete Edition comes out in January, that should really be the complete thing. We will of course still have some bugfix releases, and the modding scene will hopefully continue to grow post-complete-collection, but I'll be working on some other projects. At the moment a smallish hex-based turn-based strategy game is sitting at the top of my interest pile, but I keep switching concepts, so we'll see what sticks. Part of my time will start going to that starting in November.
Anyway! In the short term, it's all AI War 2, all the time. Lots more to come soon.
Enjoy!