The decisions aren’t really tactical unit placement ones in AI War. It really is a different experience than most other space conquering games. There’s some micro you can do with pushing your ‘blob’ in terms of ranges and expected attack vectors, but the game is about the strategic decisions primarily.
Yeah it’s about which planets you push your blob to. If you take them all over in order like Risk, the AI will get wise and eventually start to roll over you.
It also sucks / impossible to move the blob around to defend, so there’s the tower defense aspect.
You might be. The pace and complexity is low enough that it kind of feels like you’re pushing a huge blob of ships around even when you micro.
But what micro there is significantly affects the effectiveness of your fleet.
Certain weapons work extremely well against certain targets, and extremely poorly against certain other targets.
Different enemy types prioritise killing different kinds of your stuff.
Different units have very different movement speeds.
Different weapons have very different ranges.
Which basically means you can position yourself to take less damage, position yourself to do more damage, herd the enemy into manageable chunks, make sure they hit your stuff with the wrong weapons, make sure you hit their stuff with the right weapons, and make sure you don’t just have a rapidly dying blob of uselessness that mostly can’t shoot at all and only at the wrong things.
Understanding how to micro isn’t difficult. Check the wiki for ship info, pay attention for a couple of fights and that’s pretty much it. Actually doing it isn’t difficult either. You can pretty much set your own pace and the default is sufficiently placid that a doped sloth can keep up. Anti-StarCraft-but-still-micro isn’t a half bad description of it, I think. Because it’s just as important, but… Like I said, a doped sloth can keep up.
This game just has “it” for me. Not sure what that is, but it really grabbed me. I guess I like the melding of grand strategy, tower defense and on top of this, the pace is relaxed. It just kinda works as a package.
The 4.0 public beta is coming out in 1-2 hours. This is a huge update and also a port to the Unity engine.
I’m tapping my foot and waiting impatiently for it.
It’s worth noting that the Unity version of AI War will be going live on Steam and all other digital distribution platforms tomorrow. This is a free upgrade for anyone who currently owns AI War and represents a substantial reworking and rebalancing of basic game mechanics, as well as plenty of new content. Furthermore, the new 100% for-charity expansion Children of Neinzul will be going on sale at all the same distributors tomorrow, which adds new units, optional factions and AI types to the game.
Expect miscellaneous sales on Arcen products, as well.
Yay, thanks for the news Otagan. I’ll buy the expansion immediately. :)
Man, the Unity engine port is sooo much smoother than the SlimDX version. The games really come a long way in terms of polish and presentation, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
There are so many changes… including stuff that seems to have been removed. Where are the auto Engineer makers? Am I missing something?
The control nodes are now in the CTRLS button at the bottom of the screen. Much easier to read and get to!
The main two things that were removed were the graphs, and some of the advanced context menu stuff from the post-3.120 betas. Other stuff is just better organized, or superceded by a more robust feature in a few cases like the control nodes (or the mission summary becoming the Objectives tab).
It’s definitely different, and it’s definitely an adjustment, but we had a corps of 95 players giving us beta feedback and we’re confident it’s the best version of the game ever.
I’d agree with that heartily. The game just “feels” better, it’s a pile of little changes (and some bigger ones thrown in), but taken all together it really just creates a better experience, IMO.
The new 4.0 version is quite nice. It takes a great game and makes it even better.
At the risk of sounding like a gushing fanboy even further, I have to say this, if you like strategy games you owe it to yourself to at least check out the AI War demo and put in the time neccessary to really understand what’s going on. It’s a very rewarding strategy experience, but it does take some learning.
And even after you have it figured it out, the AIs will still gleefully crush you like a bug.
I have a confession, I played the tutorial, loved it, played a game and got about 6 hours into it and got so damn nervous that the AI was going to attack that I kept coming up with excuse after excuse for not getting back and loading up my save game.
It really is a great game, but the talk about how the AI was so awesome scared me. I know I’m a wimp. Some point I’ll fire it back up and take it like a man.
Weird but true.
Well, you can always play on a lower difficulty or with cheats, etc. But I hear where you’re coming from.
Generally speaking, most of the time the AI won’t outright kill you early in the game, though it does happen (during beta we had a LOT of losses for players in the first 30 minutes, but that was due to transient balance stuff in the beta, heh). I designed and largely coded the game, and I’ve lost the last 7 out of 8 games on difficulty 7 – never until 10-13 hours in, though. Maybe that doesn’t sound encouraging, but the main point is that I had a blast each time – when victory is assured, everything just feels rote and uninteresting. When I’m actually challenged, it’s more exciting and I don’t really mind if I lose.
That said, if you play on something like difficulty 4 or 5 at the start, you ought to be able to do some good old comp-stomping with a bit of challenge but nothing particularly taxing. Or, if you want difficulty 1, you can just roll the AI and it’s doing intentionally stupid things at every other turn. ;) Then we get those who like difficulty 10… and never win in an even match, but seem determined to try. There’s a difficulty there for everyone, I think.
If you’re curious about a lot of the flow of the game, I wrote a (fairly long) wiki article about that, which might set your mind at ease some: Like Chess, AI War Has Three Abstract “Phases.” Basically, if you play a chess grandmaster, you’re still not going to lose in 10 moves, right? Unless they get you on fool’s mate or scholar’s mate, which most people recognize (though I got caught by that in a tourney, once, I’m ashamed to admit – overzealous). But in most games, they’re just going to slowly grind you down and maneuver until the checkmate comes. In the meantime, you’re watching what they are doing and learning, and actively having a chance to struggle and see if you can turn the situation around. Playing at or slightly above your skill level in AI War is kind of like that: it won’t zerg rush you, it will just wait for the opportunity to end it decisively.
Meanwhile you’re having (hopefully) a grand old time keeping it at bay, pursuing your own goals, etc. And when you lose one way, hopefully that same way won’t happen again, so it gets better every time. I lost 7 different ways in my last 8 games. ;)
Anywho, it’s a good sign that it’s late because I’m rambly, but those are my thoughts. Glad you enjoyed the demo and the tutorial, at any rate. You might check out the new ones, I redid all the tutorials MASSIVELY and they’re a lot better and more updated than before. A lot of the tricks of advanced players are in there now, so you don’t have to go to the wiki to know about things like Free Roaming Defender mode, etc.
Thanks for your support!
Steam version’s updated.
I’ve been meaning to do an AAR for an AI War game. I’m far from being a veteran, so I’ll play a game first then do an AAR. It needs doing :)
God, this update is awesome looking.
Yeah, I got it too. I would’ve bought it anyway, so the money going to charity is just icing on the cake.
Ill be picking up the CoN expansion when I get home. I really love this game, just wish I had more people to reliably co-op with. Since I am at work and have to wait to get home to see, I tried searching around YouTube for a video showing off the new in-game graphics.
Anyone want to post a helpful link so I can see what I am missing out on for the rest of the afternoon?