You still have that option; in fact, you can fight 3 or 4 cooperating AIs now if you want, or just one. It’s all in the game options. You can also fight AIs who are in a civil war.
This is not beneficial. The 1.002 release notes state: “Hacking a Tech Vault for science no longer increases the cost of the next upgrade”.
I don’t think so, but there are Dark Spire in AIW2.
Me too, whereas I love the original.
It needs work on the mechanics and UI polish, and some of the RTS fun is missing. I want attrition fights and warheads and starships back. The transport-centric hacking and objective sniping in AIW2 becomes tedious quickly. Cross Planet Attack waves that only build up threat are frustrating.
Oh, cool. I didn’t see that when I set up, it looked like you could only have one of each “type” of faction. I’ll have to look at it again. Glad I was wrong!
Edit: Yeah, just checked and that’s super easy to do, don’t know how I missed it. Maybe I’m remembering the beta and just never tried it in the release build.
Personally I prefer this game to the original, and I loved the original. I enjoy the fleet mechanic a lot and I don’t miss the micro in the original game. I would like a bit more control over fleet selection, but that’s coming in 1.04, as now ARS will grant you a choice of 5 ships.
Starships have been renamed “frigates.” I sometimes micro mine in a close fight.
I’ve had gigantic attrition fights, including the climactic fight in the game I just won (on difficulty 7). People on discord have been posting screenshots of insane huge attrition fights.
Personally I didn’t care for warheads, but someone is working on a warhead mod if that’s what you like.
I missed that! I thought that the upgrade costs were based on levels and wanted to leave the free upgrade till later. It’s great to know that the upgrade cost remains the same when we tech hack! Will sure help.
I am also sort of a Hack points hog. Because I keep my AIP so low, I conserve hack points until I can reveal the whole map, then I decide how to spend them, that was part of the reason I leave it till last also.
I think for my next game, I’ll go over 100 AIP and see how the game plays out.
1.005 Released!
Edit: The game got tougher!
Looks like a great patch! The tougher the better. :) But there are a couple nice buffs too. We now can choose from a menu of five ship lines when we hack an Advanced Research Station. And there’s a new ‘fleet capacity extender’ thing that lets us double the ship cap for one of our lines. Off to try it now.
Has anyone found any high level playthroughs? I’ve been looking but most are very basic or are beginner’s guides.
The latest patch is basically unplayable for me.
With AI level 6, the AI’s fleet strength is bumped up so much that I get counterattacked by strength 100 fleet! early on with just 50 AIP!
Also, key planets have stations with infinite ranged eyes that 1 shot your fleet carrier with upwards of 400k damage.
I think they seriously mucked up the difficulty scaling in the latest patch.
Edit: I’ll try out a difficulty 5 game and see if it’s the same. Most probably I’ll revert to 1.002 if even a difficulty 5 is unplayable.
I haven’t yet. I did learn a few things from the Nuc Temeron Let’s Play I linked upthread, but probably not enough to justify the multi-hour investment. I’d like to see someone walk through how they put together fleets, what synergizes with what, whether they micro fights, how they manage the economy, etc.
I haven’t seen anything like that yet, but I do agree that they went overboard with the nerfs. Already he’s planning a new 1.06 patch that relaxes some of the new rules, thank goodness. Also, while I love the new ARS-pick-from-5 system, it escalates in expense too fast. Supposedly he’s scaling this back for the next patch too.
I wonder what’s the balancing criteria. I do know that we’re not supposed to win at level 10 difficulty. But I had thought that 7 was fair game. But it seems like difficulty 7 is not supposed to be winnable regularly as well.
Edit: At difficulty 5, I’m seeing that the Threat Counter increases MUCH more slowly. So I guess difficulty 5 is the regular strength AI we’re supposed to play against then.
I’m starved for Spy points now. Both adding ship lines and doubling counts deplete spy points way too fast. Not much is left over for other things.
Again, too eager with the nerf bat. It’s not well thought of. I’m afraid it’ll not be the first game I may abandon due to nerfing like crazy in a Single Player game. The last one I abandoned was Starcrawlers, the constant nerfing left a bad taste in my mouth I stopped to let them decide how they wanted to balance… and never went back.
Edit: I truly think it’s a mistake to make the majority of your players look dumb and cater to the maybe 1 percent of the game population who put in 1000hrs so that they can beat the game at lvl 9 using some obscure hard to execute exploit.
Let most of the players have a decent game at level 6 or 7. Let the majority of the players win most of the time. Leave the 8,9,10 levels be the harder ones.
It reminds me of a Dungeon Master I had once, he enjoyed killing the characters so much and making everyone look stupid that everyone left the game. Nobody likes to be told they are stupid, there is no need to nerf so hard when players learned some of the game systems and managed to use them to beat the game.
Well, I hope you hang in there a bit longer. The fast-escalating hack cost is apparently a bug – someone has already posted a temporary fix on the Discord, which I downloaded but haven’t installed.
For what it’s worth, it might depend on your map seed. Yesterday I started one game that seemed very tough, but tonight I started a new one and so far it’s going great. It may be that I got a lucky start – three data centers close to my homeworld, ships that share the same weapons techs, plus the two AIs are busy fighting each other instead of me. I’ve captured two worlds and I’ve already got Mark IV ships.
Hmmm, the games I have played so far are just me vs the AI or me vs 2 AI’s. Having them fight each other randomizes to much for me. I’ll probably try out having the AI fight each other when I am more familiar with the ship types.
I think the biggest change is that the fleet retreat mechanism builds up the neighbouring planets’ strength even if nothing else changes.
I tracked how the neighbouring planets behaved and it seem that they grew by 2 strengths as I started hacking ARS and fleet doublers. It’s inexplicable, so I assume that there’s a variable that track how many times you added the ship lines and used ship line doubler.
@cicobuff Your screenshots are 45 minutes and 20 AIP apart! Incidentally, you can pick your home-world instead of always playing the default “Murdoch”.
I didn’t try 1.005 yet, but I’ve played mostly on difficulty 7 since release, and the AI’s strength-shifting behavior was always present. The AI will slosh around huge Strength numbers in response to my attacks and fleet movements, and I spend a ton of time trying to fish-out or mindgame the guards and Threat numbers into my favor, as well as abusing cloaked transports full of fusion units to safely whittle them down, especially against high mark planets. The CPA waves that build Threat and don’t attack can insta-kill you with Royal Stealth Guardians or similar when you’re disadvantaged and they get let off the leash, so they must be dealt with aggressively.
I can’t tell whether I’m just bad at this or the AI or difficulty or scenario is too hard (The Full Badger seems overwhelming, perhaps by design) or the game has issues and fundamental design elements that bother me. The transparency of the strength numbers both makes the game playable and reveals its behaviors and flaws.
@cicobuff New patch just dropped. It partly rolls back some of the nerfs, thankfully. Unfortunately, it has not yet fixed the exponential growth in ARS ship-line hacking costs; apparently that will be in the next patch. Patch notes here:
https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:_Pre-And-Post_Launch_Polish#Version_1.006_Freedom_Of_Fleet_Line_Combination
Yes, another point I noted was that it takes a far longer time for some of the battles to resolve. The nerfs and buffs affected the pace of the battles. I looked at the clock and it takes 2+ full minutes for the main fleet to have all the ships built!
But the time the first world is seized, it can be 8 mins have passed, depending on the distribution of enemy stations!
Edit: Apologies for the way I captured the screens. I just snapped right at the beginning and then tracked any changes. The increase happened after I took and hacked the ARS. So it’s not really 45 mins apart when the increase happened. The strength stayed the same for a long time.
I know, but I’m picking the Basic Quick Start 4, 2 lvl6 AI with Pirates and Resistance Fighters
Checking it out! =) Thanks
And now they’ve issued the patch for ARS hacking costs – and hacking costs more generally. Other promising tweaks. I’m looking forward to trying it tonight.