AI War: Fleet Command

I was looking through the changelog for this. Is it where they boosted the income you get from command stations?

No, it’s where it went from an absolute economy to flow based. Once upon a time, you could only lay out new turrets you had cash/resources to afford. Then it changed to flow based and you could lay out way more than you could afford. The nothing would build, it’d all come to a halt. Then you’d have to go turn off one-by-one all the turrets you’d over built. It was a pain in the ass and I stopped playing.

I’m in the minority apparently though about the economy changes.

Oh okay. I didn’t play before that change. The old way does sound pretty streamlined, but there are so few strategy games with rate based economies that it’s nice to have another one.

I don’t know, the old economic system sounds pretty terrible to me, but different strokes and all that :) I don’t know if I could handle AI War without a flow based eco. Stuff still builds while you’re out of resources, it just assigns those resources to your projects as soon as it comes in. It’s far less micromanagement than having to wait until you have a specific number of resources and then building your structure/unit/whatever.

You queue up so much stuff in this game that the old model sucked. When you’re running tight you just pause the factories for a while.

The problem with the old model is that you might want to build an extraordinarily expensive item - like, say, a capital ship - and also have a factory looping to build fighters up to the population cap so you have reinforcements ready as soon as your fighters on the front lines take any losses. However, the capital ship might never get built because it cost a heap of money but your resources would all get spent on fighters. If you were building a bunch of things simultaneously - and you’re almost always building a bunch of things simultaneously in AI War - then the most expensive ones would get built last, or might never get built at all, until you went back and canceled order for the less-expensive things that hoovered up your resources.

In the flow-based model, you can queue up a bunch of stuff and have everything proceed at a crawl, but you find out about the problem immediately rather than an hour later when you realize your starship hasn’t popped out because you’ve never had the 100k metal to launch it from the factory for the past hour.

Queueing up stuff only to have it fail to build was a problem in BOTH models. The flow-based model was picked because it’s easier to understand whether you can actually afford to build everything you’ve currently queued up; if your flows are positive, then all your projects are going to complete on time.

The flow-based economy also allows for the addition of items that cost more than your maximum allowable stockpile. A number of Zenith ships and stations cost considerably more than you are ever allowed to accumulate at any given time.

Roving merchants. Oh yes. Buy now, slowly build later.

My problem specifically related to turrets. I’d conquer an area and spam out 100 turrets…and bury my economy. And you have to (at least then) turn off every single damn turret one at a time to get your economy working again. It required a change in the way I planned/played.

Don’t build 100 turrets at once.

rolls eyes Yea, that’s why it required a change in how I played. I already said I was in the minority in that I didn’t like the change. I loved knowing if i had X minerals I could plop down Y turrets and it was a done deal. After the economy change, I couldn’t do that. I didn’t like never really knowing just how much I could throw down without screwing up my economy, felt frustrated, and stopped playing. Though by then I’d gotten my money’s worth, so it wasn’t exactly the economy thing that got me to stop, but more than I’d spent a ton of hours on the game already.

I felt the original economy where turrets were out of pocket and ships were sort of flow based was the right mix. I get why it changed, but I didn’t have to like it.

I ran the beta update for the Zenith expansion and now I can’t get past the economic tutorial. It tells you to build two science labs near the existing science lab, which I did, but I now cannot progress in the tutorial.

Have to say, I’ve had the demo for a couple weeks, and I am just not seeing the fun here.

Build turrets. Move blob. Repeat. Yawn. So what?

It’s weird, it doesn’t even feel like “spaceships” for some reason. Maybe because most of it actually ends up being building turrets everywhere, the fleetblob is a comparatively small part of the action. Turrets are boring if I’m not whizzing past them in a first-person cockpit view.

Generally it just feels like generic RTS click-drag to grab a blob, click over there to make them go, then go click around to take care of stuff to make bigger/better blob. If the AI smarts is all about how it reacts to and interacts with the blob and turret defenses - and I don’t really see what else it might be - then I just find myself not caring very much how smart it is, because I can’t find anything engaging in the tools on my side that allow for interesting choices and configurations for me. I know, different ranges, different weapons … it just seems very bland.

Coreander: How did you find the difficulty? Were you just taking planets with your blob, building turrets, and moving to the next planet?

The AI is all about how it responds to your presence - it’s been a long time since I read any nitty-gritty with how the combat AI does its thing, and so much has changed recently - and if you were just doing that then the AI should’ve stomped you fairly quickly, depending on the difficulty setting and the particular AI types you were up against.

I really need to do an AAR, don’t I :(

I think you have to make sure you build two of the basic science labs, not the level 2 or level 3 labs. I first built the level 2 labs and the tutorial didn’t advance. I then built two of the basic labs, and the tutorial did advance.

So Cutlasses (a melee ship) can go through Force Fields. Ooops. A wave of them on my homeworld… I didn’t realise quite how much of a threat that was.

YOU HAVE FAILED :(

Fun is subjective, so it’s sort of difficult to point out where the fun in the game is. As much as I enjoy the game, I recognize that it will not be to everyone’s tastes.

AI War is not really a game about individual space battles, but more about the strategic choices that lead to those battles. From the very start of the game when you pick your starting system and the associated bonus ship, the game challenges you to make choices that will significantly impact the rest of the game.

So, for me, the fun is: 1) in exploring the galaxy to get the lay of the land so to speak; 2) evaluating the information my scouting reveals and formulating a plan of attack; 3) executing that plan and revising it as neccessary.

Sometimes the plan works, sometimes the plan doesn’t. Sometimes the plan fails so spectacularly that when the AI counterattacks it sweeps through your planets like an avenging angel. But that might just be me, because I’m not very good at the game. =)

Oh yeah, and to JM: that happened to me yesterday at like the 30 minute mark. It was a painful learning experience. The ships that can go through force fields always seem to catch me off guard.

It was an interesting experience. It was a Mad Bomber AI so the waves were interesting to begin with, and I think the other one was counter spy - lots of tachyon stopping me from getting lots of info. I was kinda hemmed in, one Mk III planet I could take but two MkIVs besides that.

Fun times.

Yeah, I don’t see how you could do much if you were right next to two Mk IVs and a Mk III. Just a single Mark IV would make me nervous.

Damn, a bug in my latest game stopped any waves from happening. “FailedAssertions AILoop” in groups of two, on a regular basis. Would send the save over but it’s a Steamcloud save so god knows where it ended up.

I had installed the beta patch so maybe that’s the problem, will test tomorrow.