AI War: Fleet Command?

[Zewp]

So, what's the Codex's consensus on this? I bought it during a Steam sale for dirt cheap last year but I never got around to playing it. Is it worth playing?

I would play it myself to figure it out, but I don't really want to take the time to learn the game and all its mechanics if it's just going to suck.

 

[attackfighter]

I bought it thinking it was turn based... to my dissapointment it's not

I don't understand how they could make a complicated space empire game with a focus on AI ability into an RTS, it's totally innapropriate

 

[Ashery]

I picked it up around its initial release, so my memory's a bit fuzzy (and some mechanics may have changed completely in expansions/patches), but I at least remember enjoying the time I spent with it. It's definitely worth the time if you're looking for a non-fps co-op game.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I had some fun with it, but stopped playing after a while. Might have just not been in the mood for it though, I definitely stopped before I felt like I had a good grasp of how to play, but was enjoying testing stuff out.

 

[DakaSha]

It's an amazing game and attackfighter is a sack of shit

 

[Misconnected]

I don't understand how they could make a complicated space empire game with a focus on AI ability into an RTS, it's totally innapropriate

Perhaps that explains why AI War isn't that game.

AI War is a RTS game through and through, and a very old-school one at that. Old-school as in back before developers realised micro was something they should encourage and reinforce. AI War does have meaningful micro, but only sporadically. And if that was all there is to it, it wouldn't be a fantastic game. It's not all there is to it, though. AI War has three twists: extreme scale, asymmetry and amounts of playing pieces.

The game is genuinely asymmetrical. AI and human players use much the same playing pieces. But they play by two quite different sets of rules. Human players play by a set of rules you'll be familiar to from other old-school RTS games. The AIs, however, aren't allowed to throw whatever they have at the puny humans. Nor do they need to carefully build up their strength. The AIs start the game with many, many times the resources needed to annihilate all trace of their human opposition. But they can only deploy their stuff according to a kind of "proportional response" rule. As human players grow more threatening, the AIs grow more able to crush them. Until at some point, the humans either over-reach and get destroyed, or the AIs get destroyed by the humans.

The scale is many, many, many times greater than what you may have seen in very large-scale RTS games like Total Annihilation, Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire. In fact, it's so large that between it and the AIs "proportional response" rule, it gives rise to a genuine element of Grand Strategy. You're not trying to conquer every system in the galaxy, because even if it wouldn't release the restrictions on the AIs, it would take far too long and benefit you very little. Instead you scout the galaxy, plan which systems to take and when, which to raid, and which to avoid entirely.

The amount of playing pieces in the game is staggering. On the most basic level there's a rock-paper-scissors mechanic going on you'll be familiar with from myriad other strategy games of all types, and on top of that comes several tech levels. At this point, the playing piece count is about what you're familiar from from other RTS games. However, on top of all that comes a pile of a couple of hundred different types of playing pieces that mostly fall outside the basic rock-paper-scissors mechanic, yet have a far, far more elaborate counter-counter-counter-counter-etc-ad-fucking-infinitum mechanic going on.

AI War isn't just a truly original RTS game with fuckloads of depth to explore, though. It also has the best RTS AI there is. Part of the explanation for that is no doubt that the AI is mostly unburdened by resource-related concerns. But it's not just that the game is designed to work for the AI. The AI is really fucking good at both selecting which playing pieces to use, and using them. I've played many, many RTS games over the years, probably all of the best of them. And I have never seen a RTS AI that was anywhere near as competent at using its stuff as this AI is. If you give it the least bit of time to react, it will drop the ultimate counter on you every time. If you let the AI scout you (and often you'll have no choice) it will correctly identify and hit your weak points every time. If it can trap or isolate parts of your forces, it will. It will even bring the cheese, like say, dropping big-ass shields behind your main force while you're on the offensive, so you can't protect your nice, soft bases while the AI raids or nukes the shit out of you.

Of course, all of this is customisable, and I haven't even mentioned all the expansions. If you want you can play tiny matches with no more playing pieces than StarCraft and a retarded AI. Or you can play fucking huge matches against AIs so hard that you cannot possibly beat them, and with myriad factions and weird shit going on - like near-invulnerable balls of doom that randomly travel from system to system and eats every ship they come across. Or viciously hardcore inhabitants of a Dyson Sphere that you can ally with if you manage to carefully avoid pissing them off. And many, many other things.

AI War is pretty like week old roadkill. But pretty much everything else about it is 50 kinds of blow-your-mind brilliant. If your inner graphics whore can cope, and you're prepared to read up a bit on how all the shitloads of stuff in the game works, then AI War may very well turn out to be one of the best games you'll ever play.

 

[TripJack]

It's a novel little RTS. Some love it some don't.

Personally I'm in the first category. I love AI War, and I love Arcen. They are some of the coolest indie devs around. Actually they are some of the coolest devs around period. They take player input, whether on their forums or bug tracker, more seriously than any other developer that I know of.

One thing I really like is, as misconnected mentioned, the customization available at game creation. There are a ton of options that you can set, allowing for each game to be fairly unique in difficulty and play style. Speaking of difficulty, you can make it as fucking brutal as you want. Winning against level 10 (max difficulty) AIs is not intended by Arcen to be possible. When someone reports a win of this kind to them, Arcen considers it a bug and releases a patch to try and make sure it doesn't happen again . Even with a moderate ai type and difficulty level, it is easy to get penetrated in all holes by this game if you play carelessly.

Another great feature is the tooltips. Yes the tooltips. If every game had Arcen-quality tooltips, the world would be a better place.

 

[HardDeck]

Bought it with the 3 dlcs for less than 5$,,, for this price it's a great game. Like the music very much. Now i'll wait for the newest dlc to drop price below 1$.

I bought it thinking it was turn based... to my dissapointment it's not

You can pause the game by pressing P. Consider this game RtwP.

I only wish the game had some kind of MP lobby so you could play with others and not only LAN and direct connection.

 

[Zewp]

snip

Wow, thanks for the post. Sounds like just my kind of game. I'm especially curious to see the AI in action. AI that uses guerilla tactics sounds pretty awesome. It might just scratch the RTS itch that Sins of a Solar Empire left me with.

Seeing as it was the new DLC on Steam that led to me creating this thread, how does DLC work in co-op? Can players without certain DLC packs play with those who have them? I'm going to buy the new DLC regardless, simply because it's so cheap, but I'm just curious how DLC affects co-op.

 

[TripJack]

As I understand it, players in a game must have all expansions that are enabled by the game host. Expansions can be enabled and disabled freely.

 

[DakaSha]

snip

Wow, thanks for the post. Sounds like just my kind of game. I'm especially curious to see the AI in action. AI that uses guerilla tactics sounds pretty awesome. It might just scratch the RTS itch that Sins of a Solar Empire left me with.

Seeing as it was the new DLC on Steam that led to me creating this thread, how does DLC work in co-op? Can players without certain DLC packs play with those who have them? I'm going to buy the new DLC regardless, simply because it's so cheap, but I'm just curious how DLC affects co-op.

The player uses guerilla tactics vs a much stronger ai. the point is that you are smarter but weaker

 

[Misconnected]

Wow, thanks for the post. Sounds like just my kind of game. I'm especially curious to see the AI in action. AI that uses guerilla tactics sounds pretty awesome. It might just scratch the RTS itch that Sins of a Solar Empire left me with.

TripJack is right about the DLC thing.

DakaSha is right that you got the guerilla tactics backwards. Very sorry I mislead you, it was definitely not my intention.

Human players start from a position of not having anything worth speaking of, and having to take every last resource they need from the AIs. The AIs start with pretty much every resource in the entire galaxy, but have extreme constraints on what they're allowed to do with their massively overwhelming force. Every time a human nabs something from an AI, the AIs get permission to use a few more of their resources against the humans. Humans can't do a single thing without suffering immediate retaliation roughly proportional to the combination of everything all human players have done to all AI players up to that point.

The AIs can't use guerilla tactics, at least not on a grand scale. It's against their rules. Humans, on the other hand, can't really do anything else on the grand scale. Humans have to try to figure out exactly what they need to steal from the AIs to be able to kill the AIs, and they have to consider whether they can do so without pissing the AIs off so badly that the AIs engage in total war against all humans, and whether they can take the necessary resources fast enough to strike at the AIs before the AIs engage in total war against all humans. Because eventually that's exactly what the AIs will do, even if all human players take no action against any AIs.

Being a human player in AI War is kind of like being a kid armed only with a loincloth and some seriously big balls, in a lair full of slumbering monsters. As things are, there's no way in hell you can hurt them in any meaningful way, and sooner or later they're going to wake up feeling peckish. So you need to engineer the situation to the point that you can not only kill a monster, but kill all of them at pretty much exactly the same time, and you have to get it done without waking any of them, and before they wake up by themselves. Reading this, I realise it doesn't sound a hell of a lot like Grand Strategy. But it is a pretty fair description of AI War's Grand Strategy element and it very much is Grand Strategy.

When I was talking about the AI being good, I meant that, within the confines of the rules the AIs play by, it is very skilled at playing AI War. It understand when and where to position fleets for maximum effect, and what individual fleets have to be composed from to do the whatever the AI needs them to. It understand the kind of inspired stunts that skilled human players tend to pull in emergencies, like redeploying a building that's going to be destroyed anyway, in such a fashion that it delays the enemy sufficiently to sneak a raiding force around the enemy's back and cripple his infrastructure. Or combining a bunch of radically different playing pieces into what functionally becomes an ultra-deadly fleet of cheese even though it technically isn't a fleet at all, and sending this improvised ball of doominess up the ass of an unsuspecting enemy.
The AI isn't human, obviously. But it often plays more like a half-decent human player than a lot of humans do. And that is a very, very special experience. AI War's AI quite literally will do stuff you wouldn't even consider a possibility as a reasonably competent and experienced player. It will surprise the shit out of you in very, very clever ways, rape you horribly while doing it, and also teach you to think outside the box in your approach to the playing pieces. It won't do so with long-term strategy, because the rules it plays by doesn't allow that sort of thing (humans are, of course, under no such limitations). But in more immediate terms, it plays with the degree of skill and seeming ingenuity that you absolutely don't expect an AI can be capable of. Like I said, it's pretty damn special. But it doesn't have anything much to do with guerilla tactics.

 

[Zewp]

Ah, okay, I think I understand it a lot better now. So basically set yourself up to take the enemy down in one shot, but not to 'wake' him up before you're ready to finish him off.

Sounds absolutely amazing. I suspect this might just be the type of game that could provide one of the most satisfying gaming experiences ever. Got a week off before my varsity exams start, so starting tonight I'm going to start playing this and see how far I can get.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Fired this back up again. Ran the tutorial this time, now realize a ton of shit that was over my head before, will probably start playing this again. I do wish the UI made it a tad easier to find your ships and move them about. It's very easy to have half your fleet scattered in some random system because you forgot to select a few ships before moving onward, or because it got rebuilt somewhere you forgot you had a queue running.

 

[DakaSha]

I honestly never had any problem with the ui and im horrid at managing shit. *shrug*

 

[Average Manatee]

The AI War UI is one of the best I've seen for any RTS once you fully understand it. You can assign all units to be automatically rebuilt. You can assign structures to pop out your forces in the correct control group. You can have them automatically set up on patrol groups, or ferried to the front. You can set units to automatically kite shorter ranged enemies, to automatically focus on a specific type of enemy you hate, and without such an order they automatically target whatever they have the best damage bonus against. You can build units that capture other units, then have the captured units automatically moved to a specific holding area to be repaired and await you to figure out what to do with each type. You can build buildings to automatically convert one resource into another if you run out (at a deficit though, so you can still crash your economy quickly). You can set units to automatically focus fire or to concentrate on 1v1ing the unit type they most excel against. There's literally almost no micro required beyond figuring out what AI unit type you want dead the most and assigning a unit to prioritize it.

The number of minor factions do a great job of spicing things up, from repairable uber units lying around, to other factions that have been captured by the AI and work against you until you rescue their planet (multiple types, actually), to other human settlements, marauders, or resistance forces, to an entirely outsider race that is to the AI what the AI is to you (but, suffice to say, the process of summoning them isn't easy).

The devs are amazing about constantly improving their game. Major game mechanics get overhauled or new ones get added on a semi-regular basis between expansions, while a few new units isn't unexpected either. There's been a ton of "which unit/mechanic (out of dozens nominated) sucks the hardest and could use an update?" polls/discussions going on and in as little as a week changes for a large batch of the top voted topics get patched in. And when someone beats a 10/10 difficulty AI, you can bet a cool new AI trick is going to show up. Nothing is withheld from owners of only the base game or older expansions if it is applicable to them.

Ah, okay, I think I understand it a lot better now. So basically set yourself up to take the enemy down in one shot, but not to 'wake' him up before you're ready to finish him off.

Not quite. Lore-wise the AI is a galaxy spanning empire and it's only devoting the bare minimum to take you out while it fights much bigger threats. It's always awake, the overlord AI just isn't caring about the insect buzzing around an unimportant backwater galaxy, while the AI of each system is self-contained and only defends + rises up for periodic triggered response if you do something bad.

There's actually 2 AIs at all times (think of it as 2 different species of the same one, which can have different abilities and tactics), and you need to kill them both to win. Doing that at the same time is damn hard, usually you need to destroy one's main warp gate, regroup, then destroy the other's. In the meantime both AIs still have full access to your galaxy and are probably sending 2x as strong waves as they were before, nevermind that the final battle for each AI warp gate alone is often a huge challenge in and of itself that may require multiple waves of every unit you can muster.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The part of the UI that bugs me is gathering/finding your ships. Because of the caps, utilizing all your ships is incredibly important, and I'm constantly finding ships on random ass planets I haven't need them on for a long time. Browsing through every planet you have to find the 30 swarm fighters that got left behind on Planet J 20 minutes ago because their engines were fucked when you moved everything else is annoying. Engineers and mobile builders get lost in the same way pretty easily.

The gameplay is great, though I wish the AI was a little LESS good at exploiting how fucknig annoying it is for them to hop from system to system destroying vulnerable shit instead of actually having to fight anything ever, since you can't use that strategy on them at all. There's shit I still don't understand as well, like the point of the warp jammer station (since they can just send shit into the system anyways, even while not on alert) or how the fuck you're supposed to stop a fleet of hundreds of bombers from destroying a base when you can't possibly destroy that many ships before they fire a volley without putting 10 planet's worth of defenses there, and that volley will destroy any structures instantly. I'm guessing you need more convoluted defenses like a logistics base far away from the wormhole or something. Or to just luck out and get high level ships that actually stop bombers.

 

[Average Manatee]

The part of the UI that bugs me is gathering/finding your ships. Because of the caps, utilizing all your ships is incredibly important, and I'm constantly finding ships on random ass planets I haven't need them on for a long time. Browsing through every planet you have to find the 30 swarm fighters that got left behind on Planet J 20 minutes ago because their engines were fucked when you moved everything else is annoying. Engineers and mobile builders get lost in the same way pretty easily.

Scrapping them and rebuilding is always a solution. With the Neinzul Enclave Starship (after the buff) I've been just running around with my mobile space docks terrorizing everything, replacing it the second it's destroyed. Also, engines were made to auto repair fairly recently. Takes a few minutes to get from 0 to 100%, but more than enough IMO. This was actually a large nerf because AI was really easily crippled with engine damage.

Engineers and mobile builders really aren't supposed to be in combat zones unless you are trying something funny. If you just need to get them past a few AI planets to build on a really important planet you have cleared, load them in a transport. If you just want to repair units in the field, get a mobile repair stations (now permanently cloaked). If you want to build turrets and stuff in enemy systems, then you'll have to be careful and keep a cloaking starship near them all the time.

There's shit I still don't understand as well, like the point of the warp jammer station (since they can just send shit into the system anyways, even while not on alert)

Warp Jammers are great for preventing waves that send a fleet of hundreds of bombers from destroying a base. Small stuff wandering into your border systems can generally be taken care of with a handful of sniper/spider turrets on the edge of the system. Basically you put Warp Jammers to make sure that all the big waves (well, the non-special ones) are funneled into your system with 1000 turrets and lots of ships, rather than the opposite end of your system where they rampage through half your planets before you stop them. In general though destroying the warp gates on the other side is nearly as good, so it's a decision to be made of not paying AIP for destroying warp gates vs knowledge cost (which is basically an AIP cost since it requires you to take systems to get it).

TBH I haven't really used them, instead simply using the map architecture to funnel units and save on knowledge. But I could see it being essential on some of the ultra-connected maps like crosshatch (AKA hell on earth).

or how the fuck you're supposed to stop a fleet of hundreds of bombers from destroying a base when you can't possibly destroy that many ships before they fire a volley without putting 10 planet's worth of defenses there, and that volley will destroy any structures instantly. I'm guessing you need more convoluted defenses like a logistics base far away from the wormhole or something. Or to just luck out and get high level ships that actually stop bombers.

Gravity Turrets. Tractor Beams. Gravity Turrets. Lots of engine damage (Spider Turrets, Riot starships, etc). Gravity Turrets. Warheads (last resort, but 1 AIP to not lose the game ain't a bad deal). But mostly Gravity Turrets.

Also, get used to the fact that rebuilding a few edge bases really isn't a big deal. If you just have to build a command station again you can get it done in about 15s with engineer support without even a dent in your economy.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Reading the wiki has helped me realize how warp gates work and the point of jammers. In particular, the way special forces work, which wasn't covered in the tutorial at all and is vaguely described in the tooltip (and is pretty frigging important imo.)

The engines thing isn't a matter of the ships not being able to gather up eventually, it's that they get lost. I attack a system, some shit flies into mines and loses engines, then I get attacked elsewhere and move my fleet to defend. 15 minutes later I've forgotten about the 50 ships sitting in the wrong system because they showed up to defend a place 3 minutes after the fight is over when I sent my fleet to gather up elsewhere. Basically I just wish your control groups would apply to units on all planets, it would makes things 10 times easier, since you could simply command your group to gather up, and they'd fly in from wherever they are.

 

[TripJack]

6.0 has made warp jammers quite a bit more useful. They now prevent adjacent AI worlds from going on alert unless you attack them.

 

[Average Manatee]

The engines thing isn't a matter of the ships not being able to gather up eventually, it's that they get lost. I attack a system, some shit flies into mines and loses engines, then I get attacked elsewhere and move my fleet to defend. 15 minutes later I've forgotten about the 50 ships sitting in the wrong system because they showed up to defend a place 3 minutes after the fight is over when I sent my fleet to gather up elsewhere. Basically I just wish your control groups would apply to units on all planets, it would makes things 10 times easier, since you could simply command your group to gather up, and they'd fly in from wherever they are.

Which becomes rather a problem as soon as a space dock pops out fighters 10 systems away and they start flying into other AI systems trying to get to your target. Then you set off multiple raid engines and lose the game instantly.

Really, just scrap them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Starting to get the hang of this I think. I think I was really overvaluing the importance of having choke points and defending all of my bases. This time I was pretty lax with security except at the really important places, and actually used transports + colony ships to set up shops a few planets away from my others. Seems to be working out pretty well, I feel like I got kinda screwed for the map setup (lots of hard bases, no chokepoints, important shit is really scattered/in bad spots) but I'm still doing better than I usually am; I've gotten my hands on a factory and a couple useful fabricators and the AI is still level 1. And thanks to scouting everything I'm on my way to pick up some ARS and knowledge without bumping the AIP at all if I hop around carefully and grab some data centers. Once that is taken care of I've got a particularly nasty but profitable base to crack (fucking thing has 2 spire archives and 2 fabricators, defending all that is gonna be a bitch) and then maybe I'll do the coprocessors. It'll be a total fucking pain if I do though, they're really fucking scattered, and I have a fucking gravity drill and enemy territory dividing them into 3 separate locations. Mind you, just waltzing through enemy territory is easier than I'd assumed this whole time. Provided there aren't any eyes or superforts to worry about.

Zenith bombardment frigates seem kind of overpowered. Between them and Mk4 heavy beam cannons it seems I can crack pretty much anything. That fucking cannon does enough damage to kill even eyes and wormhole posts in a reasonable amount of time. Like 5.2 million damage a shot or something. Crazy. Radar dampening fucks them both over of course, but almost no ships seem to have that feature, and a system with no ships is no threat.

 

[Livonya]

AI War is a great game. A great strategy game that is really well designed. The core premise is really important because it prevents the human players from feeling like the AI in AI War cheats. Most RTS games don't work long term against the AI because they rarely remain challenging once the player gets over the learning curve. But AI War avoids the entire issue, by changing the relationship of the competition. Fun, interesting and unique game.

 

[desocupado]

I'm playing this stuff, and it's quite good. It requires some thinking on the strategic layer, and like the poster above said, avoid the problems with giving the AI and the player simmetry.

Just a word of warning, the game changes radically with every patch. I firstly not removed from inventory version 3.0. Ship caps were more than double than now, the damage and health values were a lot smaller too. Then I not removed from inventory version 5.0, and LOTs of stuff changed. Ships added, ships rebalanced, new constructions, etc. And finally I bought the game, and got the latest patch, still within 5.0 and I still saw several changes, buffs to turrets, different way of knowledge gathering outside your planets, ship damage values...

If any of you are interested, the bundle with 3 DLCs is 17 bucks on steam.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Try playing it co-op, I tried it a couple of times. We never won against the AI because some asshat always conquers random worlds and when I get annoyed I star re-naming every system, thus angering a few players who refuse to say the names aloud.

The mood and atmosphere in the game is also great which is important to me since I always hated that generic excel feeling of games like Space Empires. It has great music which enhances the the feeling of mankind's desperation in it's final fight.