AI War: Fleet Command

Tamren - I've completed an AI War campaign tutorial and I am all caught up with stuff. You game for game?

I tried a campaign from a cold start and puttered around a bit. Smashing enemy command centres seems pretty straightforward so far...

Not sure how coop is supposed to work, but I'm game. PM me if you see me online.

Just started a two-man game with Tamren. Turned off all the expansions as not to make it too complicated. So far we have locked down three backyard areas with good chokepoints. Now will be the time to explore out into the galaxy to find targets of opportunity. Can't wait to secure a nice high level factory. I love me some level four ships.

Was a lot of fun. The AI pushback is incredible. Looking forward to seeing some of the vaunted AI smartness.

Tamren wrote:

Was a lot of fun. The AI pushback is incredible. Looking forward to seeing some of the vaunted AI smartness.

Yeah. That pushback might jump in intensity too.

Also the soundtrack is the most odd in a game. From metal-head guitar riffs to classical dalliances.

Tamren - my Steam is down. How you doing?

That sounds awesome. The size/length of the games is always impressive to me. Keeping those waves at bay must require (and this is an approximate estimation) roughly 1 bajillion turrets.

Myself and Tamren just got a 15-hour play time achievement in AI War. We are now only moments away (relatively) from fragging one of the two AI homeworlds. All hell is gonna break loose when that happens. Current AI progress is at 600 and change. This figure means we get invaded by fleets of 1,500 to 2,000 on a regular invasion basis.

The 'type' of game we are playing is the vanilla version - all the expansions and crazy game-type options are disabled. I do plan on another match only this time with everything turned on which will make an almost entirely different game. There will be caravans selling ships, giant Death-Star type husks waiting to be rebuilt, human rebellions, etc.

Oh, and we are playing with the AI's 'Eye' builders. The ones that build zombie versions of the small ships. But you know what? Those are easy to deal with compared to the vampire ships. Gawd! I hate those things. Oh, you got shields? Too bad. You got tractor beam turrets? Ha ha! Is that your home command station? Yum yum. Agh!

But we have the technology, mainly spider sniper turrets that can reduce engine speed to eight or lower. It's Spiders Vs. Vampires and the arachnids will not be going hungry tonight.

Michael wrote:

That sounds awesome. The size/length of the games is always impressive to me. Keeping those waves at bay must require (and this is an approximate estimation) roughly 1 bajillion turrets.

Yup. I've got several hundred turrets built at my 'punching bag'. That's the fortress-wall system where the AI throws itself against to try to destroy one of us. Currently it's my home system. It got too dicey to split my turrets up so I pulled back from the previous 'punching bag' to my home and now all of my turrets are concentrated there.

I'll post some screen shots of my defences.

It just occurred to me how dense the in-game lingo is. If you have no knowledge at all of something like SC2 and you tune in to one of the tournament matches you will find it incomprehensible.

"Looks like he's going for a two rax proxy rush opening with only two in gas so he is investing heavily in tier one and- OH NO DTs IN THE MAIN" etc.

If you were to listen to me and Strangeblades on Ventrilo it would sound a lot like this.

"Damn these Vampires!"
"Ooooh, anti-starship arachnid fabricator"
"I'm going to invest in some Spider Turrets"
"Awesome, my spire starship can buff beam cannons!"
"Cross planet attack coming in 10"
"Mmm delicious logistics"
"Do you have tachyon missiles set to autobuild?"
"Oh sh*t they have an Eye, pull out!"

It doesn't help that the in-game star systems are named things like Yunrin and Futetherbark. So we constantly stumble over names when we tell each other whats going on.

We just reached an interesting milestone in that we have our home systems tucked away in a little corner of the universe while we are out rampaging. We secured a little A-shape of star systems outside of one AI cores house and were just gathering tech and building up a fleet for the final push.

Spires, eh? Wasn't that in an expansion? You sure you guys have all that stuff turned off?

You know, I like this game, but I suck soooo badly at it. It is hard to emphasize how badly I suck at it. But I have that problem with all RTS games.

garion333 wrote:

Spires, eh? Wasn't that in an expansion? You sure you guys have all that stuff turned off?

Hmmm. We have spire starships but the Light of the Spire expansion is disabled (unchecked.) At least I think it is. I'll have to check my default settings when I get home from work, more work and lastly other more work.

Strangeblades wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Spires, eh? Wasn't that in an expansion? You sure you guys have all that stuff turned off?

Hmmm. We have spire starships but the Light of the Spire expansion is disabled (unchecked.) At least I think it is. I'll have to check my default settings when I get home from work, more work and lastly other more work. :(

Well, I've never played without some or all of the expansions, so it's possible that the expansion added more Spire stuff. There's so many units and cool things in this game I can't keep the expansions and vanilla straight.

garion333 wrote:
Strangeblades wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Spires, eh? Wasn't that in an expansion? You sure you guys have all that stuff turned off?

Hmmm. We have spire starships but the Light of the Spire expansion is disabled (unchecked.) At least I think it is. I'll have to check my default settings when I get home from work, more work and lastly other more work. :(

Well, I've never played without some or all of the expansions, so it's possible that the expansion added more Spire stuff. There's so many units and cool things in this game I can't keep the expansions and vanilla straight. ;)

You got that right. Have you seen all the options you can flick on? Wow. There's several RTS games in AI War.

Strangeblades wrote:

You got that right. Have you seen all the options you can flick on? Wow. There's several RTS games in AI War's menus. :)

FTFY.

These expansions are CRAZY. I loaded up a singleplayer game using an "X" galaxy. In this configuration the stars are set up in a big X shape, with each point of the X splitting into another X and so on. I started in one little branch of the galaxy and quickly took over the next system over, which is a hub connecting to 6 systems.

And that was when the game kicked me in the nuts. All of the systems around me are level 2-4. There is only ONE single level 1 system in this cluster. In that system? An Eye, a Fortress, a Level 4 Ion Cannon. And something called a gravity shredder that reduces the speed of all of my ships to almost nothing.

I haven't given up, but this is going to be an uphill battle, to say the least...

Tamren wrote:

These expansions are CRAZY. I loaded up a singleplayer game using an "X" galaxy. In this configuration the stars are set up in a big X shape, with each point of the X splitting into another X and so on. I started in one little branch of the galaxy and quickly took over the next system over, which is a hub connecting to 6 systems.

And that was when the game kicked me in the nuts. All of the systems around me are level 2-4. There is only ONE single level 1 system in this cluster. In that system? An Eye, a Fortress, a Level 4 Ion Cannon. And something called a gravity shredder that reduces the speed of all of my ships to almost nothing.

I haven't given up, but this is going to be an uphill battle, to say the least...

I know, I know. Isn't this game awesome?

If you folks are ever up for another participant in your battling, I really want to try out the multiplayer and getting some advice from more experienced parties would be great. I recently failed on difficulty 5, pushing all the way to the AI homeworlds but every fleet I sent was stopped dead by Nairnzul cockroaches that would spawn in the hundreds around one particular post.

Hey Tamren. You up for getting our ships shredded by the AI? (again?) I need to take a Skyrim break

Spoiler:

I'm sorry OK?! Skyrim has got me by the balls!

Oh sure. I've been distracted too.

This is one of those times when I'm like "WHO WANTS TO PLAY AI WAR" and then realize my nights are accounted for until like next week. I'm pseudointellectual397 on Steam.

Still haven't play this aside from summer/winter Steam achievements. You guys are making it sound fun though.

It is fun. Especially when the AI goes on a rampage after we, oh, I don't know, kill something it loves and parade its body before the crowds.

AI War got some love from Total Biscuit (Cynical Brit).

The AI War part is at the 17 minute mark. If you ever wondered why this game is appealing check it out.

Been playing some more AI wars on my own. This time using an X shaped map and all expansions turned on. Zenith remnant pretty much adds a bunch of different ship types to up the variety. Children of Neinzul does the same, but is a much smaller expansion. Light of the Spire however is very very cool. It adds a ton of things to the game and even offers a sort of "campaign" mode that gives you alternate win conditions.

Playing on an X shaped map is also interesting. The stars are set up as branching X shapes. Each point on the X splits into four, giving the map a branched shape that converges on the central checkpoint. It plays very differently from a traditional map because if you can fortify the central star you can divide the AI's forces. In my current game I just finished taking over half the galaxy.

I probably would have played a different map, except I discovered that one of the systems (which I picked as my home) was called Boatmurder.

Bahaha, nice. I think I would enjoy an X map as I like being able to take easily defensible chokepoints. That's usually my first step on any map, it's busting out of my turtle shell afterword which I'd hard.

Here is the map seed for my Boatmurder campaign. Set the map type to X and 60 stars. Boatmurder is the system in the bottom right with the autocannon ship. Its hard to miss as the only system with 7 wormholes.

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IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-KR46ST9QMWY/T_3aTcJTCuI/AAAAAAAAAa8/AgiCQghijvQ/w427-h573-k/Capture.PNG)

Woohoo. New AI War stuff and it looks big.

From the Arcen blog:

To stave off the inevitable questions, and because we're not that cruel:

Is This The Fourth Expansion Pack For AI War: Fleet Command?
Yes.

When Will The Expansion Be Coming Out?
In all likelihood, October.

When Will The Beta/Preorder Process Start?
"Soon." In the past with our AI War expansions, we set the game up for pre-order as soon as we were adding the first ships into the game. This time we've taken a different approach, and there will be substantially more content available from day 1 of the beta (which all preorder customers get access to).

What Will The Full Price Be?
$4.99 USD, the same as our other full expansions are currently priced.

But The Other Expansions Started Out At A Higher Price
Yes, originally The Zenith Remnant and Light of the Spire were $9.99. Ancient Shadows will have a bit less content than those two expansions due to starting at the lower price point. However, we feel that the content represented here is exciting enough to make this expansion more than hold its own if you're trying to choose between this expansion and one of the others.

What Is The Focus Of The Expansion?
Every expansion up until now was focused on a single alien race (zenith, neinzul, and then spire). When we released the "Alien Bundle" last year, we also mentioned that that marked the end of the alien-themed expansions. Thematically, this expansion returns to all three alien races plus the humans themselves.

Will There Also Be Updates For The Base Game?
A few. It's more along the lines of what changed between AI War 2.0 and The Zenith Remnant (3.0), but still good stuff. The game has been slowly refined since Light of the Spire came out in early 2011, and our opinion is that it's not in need of another major overhaul like we saw with 2.0 or 4.0.

Will This Impact Development Of A Valley Without Wind?
It hasn't so far. We're going to be exerting a more concerted effort to go ahead and get this thing finished once we open it up for preorders, so that will in fact pull Keith away from AVWW for about half his working hours for the next month or two of development. Chris's focus will remain almost solely on AVWW during this time period, although he'll be supporting Keith with art and some other related things for AI War 6.0 and Ancient Shadows.

What's The Feature List?
We'll have more information on this sort of thing for you later! Right now we're playing this a bit close to the vest (uncharacteristically for us, I know).