Update #2: Challenging AI and Speed Boosts!

I'm happy to finally announce that the second major update to Automata Empire is live! While I originally intended to complete this update within a few weeks, it took 2 months. The update ended up being particularly large because of the scope of the changes I made to the enemy's AI, making it much more strategic while also making Hard difficulty harder and Easy difficulty easier. It took 2 complete rewrites of the AI code to get it right. I'll explain in more detail at the bottom of this post. I also spent the last several weeks doing major performance overhauls to eliminate lag when there are thousands of monsters moving around the screen, which will be especially important for multiplayer.

Here's what's new in this update:

• added a fourth "Challenging" difficulty option

• improved difficulty scaling so Easy is easier and Hard is harder

• AI is more strategic about achieving primary objectives in each game type

• AI uses A* path planning to build more intelligent road routes

• AI is capable of rebuilding missing or destroyed roads

• AI builds defensive walls around its taverns, castles, and flags

• AI counterattacks nearby threats to its bases

• AI stops moving units out of a tavern if its population gets too low

• AI can reinforce underpopulated taverns

• AI chooses better locations for taverns, catapults, armorers, and arsenals

• undead spawn rate increases with game difficulty

• adjusted rules for monsters' death by overpopulation so it happens less frequently

• made camera scrolling smoother

• added 50 new monster voice clips

• added sound effects for mouse clicks and building placement/construction

• achievement for exclusively controlling all 3 zones in King of the Plateau now awarded correctly

• fixed bug where monsters announced when enemy castles were under attack too

• players can no longer destroy their own flag capture zones in Capture the Flag

• catapulting monsters into an enemy catapult now deals it double damage too

• improved level load times

• improved the precision of each turn's duration

• many, many framerate and memory optimizations to reduce lag

• game no longer uses gigabytes of memory if left running for hours

• fixed several rare bugs that caused game to freeze or crash

Multiplayer

Now that the singleplayer AI is much smarter, the game runs much smoother, and my replacement computer is built, I'm finally free to finish multiplayer. Based on the feedback I was getting from players, these issues seemed more important to fix before releasing multiplayer, especially streamlining the game's performance. I'll need a few days to catch up with personal responsibilities that I've been ignoring since the game launched, but then I'll be fully committed to completing multiplayer and further performance improvements. A lot of the remaining work is in the user interface: letting people play with their Steam friends, giving people control over who can join the match, adding error messages for every conceivable connection problem, handling when players leave matches or get disconnected from the game, and making sure the server list scrolls and updates properly when there are lots of open games. I don't know how long this will take so I can't promise a specific completion date yet. Plus, after my computer fire before launch and a 7000 acre wildfire came within a few miles of my apartment this month, I'm wary of more unscheduled misfortunes in the future. You can get more frequent updates on multiplayer progress by following @Nonadecimal on twitter too.

AI: Behind the Scenes

For those who are interested in a behind the scenes look at the game development process, I