|
You are outgunned. You are massively outnumbered. You must win. These are your orders. Humanity has already fought its war against the machines and lost. AI death squads stand watch over every planet and every wormhole, the few remaining human settlements are held captive in orbiting bubbles, and the AIs have turned their attention outward, away from the galaxy, to alien threats or opportunities unknown. This inattention is our only hope: a small resistance, too insignificant even to be noticed by the AI central command, has survived. These are the forces you will command. The AI subcommanders will fight you to the death when they see you but your glimmer of opportunity comes from quietly subduing those subcommanders without alerting central processing to the danger until its too late. You do have a few things going in your favor. Your ships are much faster. You have safe AI routines to automate defenses and mining outposts. You have production techniques that can churn out fully-outfitted unmanned fighters in seconds. There will never be more than a few thousand of your ships versus tens of thousands of theirs, but through careful strategy you must somehow reach and destroy the heavily-guarded AI cores. Go forth into the galaxy, steal AI technology, recapture those planets you must in order to achieve your ends, and save what remains of humanity. But draw too much attention to yourself, and the full might of the AI overlords will come crashing down.   This game has a free demo, including tutorial. Get it either on steam or at the bottom of the page here: http://arcengames.com/ai-war/ What is AI War? The official genre is 'A grand strategic 4X tower defence RTS'. My personal answer would be the that's it's the asymmetrical 4X RTS that's stolen well over a thousand hours of my time since it was first released in 2009. Asymmetrical? Oh yeah. The best way I've heard it described is 'The AI plays Risk while you play AI War'. You aren't playing against an opponent who works the same way as you do, because let's be honest no strategy game in history had ever created an AI that can actually match a human player. Instead you have a tiny force in comparison to the AI, but by squeezing through the cracks in their defences and strategically taking planets you can fight off forces a dozen times your own size. This is a true strategy game while tactics on individual planets play an important role, it's just as vital that you correctly prioritise the planets you attack so you don't rile up the AI so much that they squish you. If this sounds interesting, I would highly recommend reading this article, which is a fantastic (if now somewhat out of date) explanation of the game design by the main developer. So, I said up there that I've poured well over a thousand hours into this game. That's not quite true. You see, since the 2009 release AI War has had six different expansions and over 270,000 words worth of patch notes. That's almost four average novels worth of changes. In fact, let me just put this here: quote:From maturity (version 3.0) to the 7.0 release is a period spanning three years from May 10th, 2010 to June 17th, 2013. The stats for this period: This is what keeps me coming back, the massive amount of support Arcen Games pours into the game combined with it's unpredictability and replayability. They really are some of the most responsive and active within their community developers I've ever had the pleasure to come across. So what is this LP really about? AI War has a grand tradition of After Action Reports, and in actual fact I've written a couple myself. But the game has just hit version 8.0, along with releasing its sixth expansion 'Destroyer of Worlds', and given all four novels worth of changes since its first release I figured it was about time to try and tempt some goons to give it a shot (or another shot). So this LP will be focussing mainly on keeping it light, explaining things as we go along, and maybe providing some strategic insights without getting too bogged down in the minutiae. This game is confusing, I have no idea what is going on! Welcome to your first 100 hours with AI War! It is without doubt one of the most complex games I've ever played that wasn't a straight-out grognardy war sim. Almost everyone bounces off it at first. The trick is that, as a new player, the first game you play should probably be a straight vanilla 5/5 difficulty with no special options turned on, and possibly even some of the more complex ship types (like tackle drone launchers) switched off. Each time you run into something new, you examine it and work out how to defeat it. Then next game you bump the difficulty a little. Then you add super-weapons like the golems, or the fallen spire mini-campaign, or zenith miners, or ... and pretty soon there's so much complexity that you're back to gibbering in terrified confusion again. It really is knowledge built up from dozens of games, encountering new things every time you play. The Arcen Games wiki is a fantastic resource for finding your feet, and I've pulled out a couple of the best pages in the list below. If you fancy having a play yourself these should serve as a far better introduction than I could ever give.
I especially recommend that last one by the way, it's a forum thread dating all the way back to 2009 which catalogues the emergent AI behaviour which makes the game so interesting. Anyway, without too much further ado, let's dive right on in to setting up this game. The Setup I'm really a kitchen-sink kind of guy, which means I turn on lots of optional extras. If you're interested in the exact setup I'm using, you can see the whole lot below. But don't worry, I'll explain these as and when we run into them.  I also tend to play mainly difficulty 9, two home-world starts with a small income boost. The 'normal' difficulty for this game is 7.0, which means the majority of the dirty tricks are unlocked at that point and the AI puts up a stiff but manageable challenge for someone who has grasped the basics. Beyond 7.0 things start getting rather tougher, with the AI getting far more reinforcements and unlocking some very dirty tricks (EMP guardians, warp gate guardians I'm looking at you) that often require significant Limburger to deal with. Winning on difficulty 10 is generally considered a bug, and after some recent wins the developers have spent a fairly significant portion of the 7.025 7.062 patches resolving that situation.  Above is the galaxy map in all its splendour. About 25% of this game is spent staring at this, trying to work out what you want to attack next or hoping that you can fling a fleet across five different star systems in time to rescue your embattled home-worlds. Each home-world you take at the start doubles all your ship and turret caps, as well as giving you a special toy in the form of an extra unlocked ship to build right off the bat. From a choice of around 60 I've gone with one of the new ships from the expansion which I've never played with before (The Neinzul Combat Carrier) and an old favourite from the last expansion, the Lightning Torpedo Frigate. You may also notice that I've chosen two home-worlds (circled in red) that are connected to each other, and in total only have three access points to other worlds. This is because the first rule of AI War is to keep your empire's exposed surface area to an absolute minimum. More access points means more lightly defended fortifications for thousands of AI ships to pour through. Choke-points are key, and many people prefer to use easier map types like the 'X' or clusters to help them. Personally I always play on realistic maps, which have lots and lots of random interconnections. Anyway, enough faffing around. Tune in next time for 'The first five minutes', whereupon basic home-world defence is explained and dramatis fleetship personζ are introduced. Thread Index:
RockyB fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Sep 13, 2014 |
#
?
Aug 19, 2014 20:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 05:59 |
|
|
RockyB posted:EDIT: D'oh. Shows how often I post new threads. Uh, mods, any chance you can change that tag? Thanks. Looking hella forward to this, I picked up this game recently but found myself a little shut down and wishing for a return to Master of Orion 1 after a few hours of play. The sheer amount of love poured into this game makes me super curious, though, so I've bookmarked the heck out of this thread.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2014 20:45
|
|
|
I'm really looking forward to this; my favourite type of LP to watch are ones where I would never be able to understand the tutorial for what is going on, never mind actual gameplay. Stuff like this, Balance of Power or Spacechem. This is gonna be fun.
|
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2014 22:23
|
|
|
I'm going to show you one of the most important, yet most boring screens you're ever going to see in this game. Look at that beauty. One second into the game, the very first thing you need to do is open up this panel and set up your empire's micro-management. You can choose if your ships auto-kite, the number of engineers and remains rebuilders to automatically maintain on each planet, the default behaviour of your military forces etc. Fortunately this screen has a 'Load from disk' button, which means we probably never have to look at this again.  This is one of our home planets. The greenish swirls with names above them are wormholes to other planets in this galaxy, the asteroids are metal harvesters and the cluster of strange shaped buildings under that blue circle are the sole surviving remnants of the human resistance huddled under a forcefield. Let's zoom in on that.  In the centre of your screen you will see a home command station. Every planet needs a command station, but the home command stations are special if the AI kills them, you lose. Having a command station gives you supply on a planet, which allows you the ability to build structures and take control of the local energy grid and resource harvesters.  Here you see the dregs of humanity. These guys are here for flavour really while they give you a small energy and metal income, they're mostly there for the AI to shoot. And if they got shot it hurts, as they increase your AI progress. There'll be a more in-depth discussion of what that means later, but for now let's just say that it measures how aware of you the AI are. The more aware they are, the more pain they bring.  A space dock. Now we're getting somewhere. Along with the starship constructor these are the main structures which pump out mobile units for you. Space docks create fleet ships: small, cheap ships which have high caps (a limit on the total which can be active at once). Starship constructors deal with much more expensive, much more powerful spaceships. Think little dinghies with machine guns vs. battleships. Anyway, let's have a look at what our spacedock has to offer at the moment.  From left to right there are some scouts, the standard 'triangle' selection of ships, and our lightning torpedo frigates. Scouts are vital for, well, scouting, and we'll be wanting to build these constantly. The triangle ships are your typical rock/paper/shotgun dynamic:
Getting the right mix of ships types to counter the 60-odd potential ship types the AI can throw at you is a big part of the tactical layer in AI War, at least when you're not just throwing everything together to make a 2,000 ship blob of doom. To give us a bit of mobile firepower to respond to any AI incursions, we want to get these space docks churning away as soon as possible. So, in the second second of the game another space dock goes up on each home-world and the four docks are set to auto-build a ship type each. These will keep on churning out ships for the entire game, stopping production when the ship cap is hit and restarting as ships are inevitably destroyed. Now that we've started building ships, it's probably time to mention the economy. There are four resources in AI War: Energy, Metal, HaP and Knowledge. Metal is an inexhaustible resource which is limited by extraction rate. It comes from metal harvesters, and you only get a few metal harvesters per planet. Metal is used for the up-front cost of units and can be stored, up to a limit. So in good times you can have a +10,000 metal/s economy, and then when your entire fleet wipes chew through your stockpile at -80,000/s rebuilding everything. Engineers are civilian ships which can be used to speed up the 'natural' building time of units or structures by splurging a stream of raw metal at them. Energy is how the on-going costs of all units and structures in your empire are accounted for, and is a hard cap on how many units you can have. Every planet you own can support one free energy collector, and up to ten 'dirty' generators which cost metal per second to run. Energy is a constant resource, so you either have enough energy or you don't. If you don't, for instance say the AI have just overrun one of your planets, then your forcefields are going down until you get your energy supply positive again. HaP are a measure of the holes you've found in the AI's firewalls. The more resources the AI brings to bear against you, the more holes are exposed. But once you use one, the AI patches it. Let's you do stuff like knowledge raiding, hacking irreplaceable buildings, temporarily blind the AI etc. We'll discuss this a lot more later. And, finally, knowledge. Consider this to be information and designs 'lost' during the war against the AI. Each planet recaptured has a limited amount of knowledge which can be extracted and turned into new blueprints for blowing things up. Speaking of knowledge, we've got 10,000 of it sitting in the bank just for starting the game. And between the two home-worlds, another 6,000 waiting to be unlocked over the next fiveteen minutes or so. Time for a shopping spree! Here's the current technology tree, along with what I consider some choice options.  Note that some options, particularly fleet ship upgrades, expand as we unlock new technologies from ARSes etc. But still, even now there's so much to choose from. Let's go with a fairly standard set of picks to start out with:
And that leaves me with 6,500 knowledge in the bank to spend at a later date. Wait, did I just say turrets? The third pillar of AI War, after a mobile fleet for attack and ensuring your economy is running, is defence. Now, you could use your fleet for this. But then you wouldn't be able to attack anyone. So we can build fixed defensive emplacements to help deal with any AI aggression. Turrets work the same as fleet ships they all have bonuses against specific ship types, different strengths and weaknesses etc. However in a recent change most turrets actually have per-planet caps, rather than galactic caps. So in theory you could fortify every planet to the max, with full defence in depth if you had unlimited energy and metal, that is. Which you really don't. So I've started ship and turret construction, unlocked some new toys etc. Time to unpause the game and let everything build. Around minute five, things are looking like this:  That's our two home-worlds on the left, Zivu and Dageo. Zivu is now looking something a little like this:  The list on the right-hand side of the screen displays all units and structures on the current planet, and you can see that there's a fair few turrets which have gone up. A brief glance at the metal income at the top of screen, which currently reads -22,514m/s, will show that I've absolutely tanked my economy by building everything at once. I always do this, even though it leaves me with loads of half completed turrets, because I'm an impatient git. Let's take a bit of a closer look at those defences.  Here's Dageo, with the ranges of all turrets displayed. You might notice we've got a bit of a ripple effect going on here, with clusters of 25 turrets between the wormhole exits and the home command station. We've also got lines of grav turrets and tractors between the exits and the command station to slow down any attackers, a set of infinite range sniper turrets off at the edge of the gravity well, and have reinforced our one starting forcefield with a further six just in case anything slips by. Oh, and there's also clusters of lightning and flak turrets under the forcefields unlike other turrets, whose firepower is decreased while under a forcefield, these are still 75% effective under one. At 5.01, a wave of 67 grav rippers is announced for Zivu. This is where the 'tower defence' aspect of AI war comes from one of the ways the AI is allowed to attack you is by sending in waves of ships to try and break through your defences. But why only 67 ships, when we saw earlier than there are currently 23,361 hostile ships in the galaxy? Because our AI progress is low, and as such only a tiny fraction of the AI's mind is focussed on us.  We are a pimple on a gnat's arse, and that gnat itself is beneath the notice of the elephantine war machine the AI currently has in another galaxy doing who knows what. But in time that pimple will metastasise until it consumes the gnat, then turn into some sort of vampire bat which can fly through the plaque clogged arteries of the elephant until it strikes at the heart. That metaphor got away from me. Next Time: When P.S That was an info dump, so anything you want clarification on speak up! I'm also happy to resize the timg'd pictures in the future, is you think the native 1920*1280 is a bit excessive. RockyB fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 00:06
|
|
|
Oh, I absolutely love this game! It's pretty tough to get into, but a few goons and I get together and play it every once in awhile. Once you get into it, it's like nothing else.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 02:43
|
|
|
Oh, this game. I'm in the same boat as the goon above, and I'm a little sad because we haven't played in a while, but my goodness this game is a fantastic multiplayer experience. You haven't played this game until six players are reacting to six different things all in service of the same medium-term goal. I really hope you see this LP through, because this game needs more love, and a good explanatory playthrough is just the way to show off its best features. Edit: I took a look at your options, and I'm so very excited. You have my favourite way to get yourself killed turned on. (And also a number of things that I have no idea whatsoever about, which is almost as good!) vdate fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Aug 20, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 03:21
|
|
|
If you've been playing for a while, I'd like to see some writeups on the way the game has changed and evolved over the years, like how there used to be an entire to-hit chance mechanics, or the (quite recent) removal of the crystal resource.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 03:23
|
|
|
e: Nevermind, sorry
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 04:50
|
|
|
OH poo poo, the new expansion dropped?! On one hand, I bet my saves are all broken. On the other? More AI WAR. Three words: Neinzul Rail Pods. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 04:53
|
|
|
AI War is on my list of games I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy if I could be arsed to get past the learning cliff; I've owned it for years and I've never gotten past the new game options. Following with interest, but...RockyB posted:P.S That was an info dump, so anything you want clarification on speak up! I'm also happy to resize the timg'd pictures in the future, is you think the native 1920*1280 is a bit excessive. Yeah, timg should be used responsibly. Once or twice for giant overview maps is good but making readers click every single screenshot just makes reading updates annoying. The usual suggestion is cropping down to a good size, and possibly playing at a lower resolution. Resizing might look good and might just be unreadable, depending.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 05:13
|
|
|
This game is tons of fun, just finished a coop 40 world campaign with hero ships. Was a blast.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 05:27
|
|
|
John Lee posted:If you've been playing for a while, I'd like to see some writeups on the way the game has changed and evolved over the years, like how there used to be an entire to-hit chance mechanics, or the (quite recent) removal of the crystal resource. I've been playing since version 3.0, but honestly so much stuff changes so often that you throw out the irrelevancies to cram in the new goodness. Just since the last major release, for example:
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 17:57
|
|
|
Arcen is really the best at reinventing stuff, aren't they? (I've only played a game and a half after the introduction of salvage, so my instincts are all off and I keep getting attacked at Bad Times from losing a fleet.)
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 18:15
|
|
|
Xerophyte posted:Yeah, timg should be used responsibly. Once or twice for giant overview maps is good but making readers click every single screenshot just makes reading updates annoying. The usual suggestion is cropping down to a good size, and possibly playing at a lower resolution. Resizing might look good and might just be unreadable, depending. Seconding this on the timg issue. Other than that, this sounds really intriguing and I might have to give it a try. I'll be following the thread!
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 19:03
|
|
|
I don't understand how people can play with space-trains. They're the most infuriating thing ever. TOOT TOOT NUCLEAR TRAIN COMIN IN TO YOUR HOMEWORLD BETTER PREPARE YOUR ANUS. I'm really curious to see the alternate campaigns like fallen spire, I've played a few games and had tons of fun but never worked up the courage to jump into a sub plot. Also drat you, I picked up destroyer of worlds last night. For those of you thinking about getting the game, the entire game+dlc is on steam for 6.80$ until the 25th. Utterly worth the price.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 20:47
|
|
|
 The enemy has arrived. I'll be playing in 1024*768 from this point onwards, as after a bit of experimentation it makes for far better screenshots. After coming in and shooting at one gravity turret, the AI all turn tail and flee. Huh?  Ohhh, let's talk about AI types. In the setup screen you can choose a variety of different AI varieties, to add a spicy little twist to your game. This wave of ships happens to belong to an AI which has been set up with a Mime type, and a Cowardly sub-commander. What does that mean?  Yeah, so the cowardly sub-commander means that the AI ships run away far, far quicker than normal when out gunned. Which, flying into a lead storm from almost 200 turrets, they certainly were. This means that rather than pressing their attack and getting killed the ships fly away to fight another day, becoming part of the free 'threat'. A quick word on threat. Any AI ship which is not aware of the player can be considered dormant. However if you go and wake them up, for instance by shooting too close to them or failing to kill them when a wave strikes, they toddle off to join the threat. These guys then hang around on an AI world close to your front lines and wait for a moment of weakness. This is all done off a rough 'strength' based system, which was recently updated to operate across a three-hop range. Once the AI are sure they outclass you on a planet, say if your fleet gets wiped out or another set of AI ships warp in as part of a wave, they then strike. Anyway, now that whole wave situation has been deferred it's probably time to see what's going on in the local neighbourhood. Let's send a single scout, all of which are invisible to the AI, to act as a picquet on the three planets next to our home-worlds.  Hmm, interesting. As expected, all three of the planets next to our home-worlds are lightly defended. Durxhua has all 63 known threat sitting on it, as that's where the wave retreated to. It also has an orbital mass driver, along with the usual selection of guardposts. Miknei in the middle has a fortress, which will make it a somewhat harder nut to crack. And Oorto up at the top has no special defences, but five metal harvesters compared to the three everywhere else. As such, it is currently a slightly preferential target. Now that the picquets are in place and feeding us back real-time information, let's see about exploring a bit further afield. I told the engineers to prioritise building scouts, so right now we've got 55 of them sitting on Zivu. And thanks to a useful alt-right-click menu, we can tell these guys to auto-explore.   The filters on the galactic map are pretty handy. Using these we can search for specific units, detected threat, known AI facilities etc. Without these, planning a 120 planet campaign would be considerably more of a slog. For now, we're just filtering based on the number of scouts on each planet. Hey, wait a minute. Didn't we start with 55 scouts?  Tachyon sentinels. That wily AI puts one of these next to every wormhole exit to catch scouts. Tachyon sentinels have the capability to de-cloak anything which isn't tachyon immune, which can put a real dampener on your information gathering capabilities. Thankfully scouts are cheap, and once destroyed the AI never replaces their tachyon sentinels. Hence the practice of 'tachyon drilling' to allow your scouts to reach further and further away.  Let's see what our first information gather excursion has given us, anyway. All those planets which now have numbers left of them, and the time since they were last scouted displayed on the right? We now know what structures the AI has there, and can prioritise them for our expansion plans. As a rough guide to what the numbers mean, here's my usual prioritisation list:
 In the meantime, we have a couple more waves hitting. Nothing the local turret defences can't handle, but I send the partially completed fleet over the meet them anyway. Here you can see a few AI fighters being restrained by some tractor beam turrets and then pummelled by the fleet well, that's one way to stop them running away at least.  The star of the fleet, however, is this chappie. Observant members of the audience may have noticed him sitting next to our space dock earlier. A few expansions ago, Arcen decided to add in a modular 'champion' ship which could earn XP, grow in size and unlock fun new toys. This champion did so by participating in a number of nebula scenarios with their own little story, helping various minor faction allies out and gaining even more toys in the process. It's also a lovely way to introduce the less strategy inclined to the game, as you can set them up as champion only players in the lobby and let them fly around the galaxy knocking off nebulae and reinforcing your attack fleets while you yourself get on with the dirty business of trolling the AI. Two years later, and people were getting a touch sick of playing the same ten nebula scenarios in every game. So Arcen gave us an alternate champion progress mechanism, where XP was gained gradually over time and capped by your current knowledge. There was much rejoicing, and champions now make a handy deep raider or fleet centrepiece without all that distracting helping people. I think this post is long enough for now, but tune in next time for the first tentative attacks on an AI held planet! RockyB fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 20:47
|
|
|
Munnin The Crab posted:I don't understand how people can play with space-trains. They're the most infuriating thing ever. TOOT TOOT NUCLEAR TRAIN COMIN IN TO YOUR HOMEWORLD BETTER PREPARE YOUR ANUS. RockyB posted:Omnipotent AI getting you down? Tired of getting beaten into a bloody pulp by your robotic overlords? Then it's time to give someone else a chance. Fastest game I ever lost. I spent the next 17 hours with spirecraft penetrators camped out in the DMZ to snipe any incoming nuke trains, except I couldn't even keep them in the DMZ due to the constant tachyon astro-train traffic blowing their stealth. In conclusion, screw astro-trains.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2014 12:42
|
|
|
Every time there's a new AI War thread, I reinstall the game and try to learn how to play it. And every time, it turns out there's been a a massive overhaul of the system, and the things I learned last time turn out to be obsolete. Well, time to blunder my way through another game, get frustrated and rage-quit for another 10 months!
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2014 21:16
|
|
|
I've tried to get into this game a few times unsuccessfully. Something always seemed to come up before I could really get into it; but has been sitting in my backlog for quite awhile. I'll be following this closely, maybe get me back into the mindset to dive into it. I'd also like to just say that from what little I did play I found the soundtrack really excellent. An odd observation maybe, but I think the title theme particularly gives off that desperate battle against a massive enemy vibe really well. Looking forward to this LP! letgomyAgo fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Aug 21, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2014 21:29
|
|
|
For those who haven't yet purchased the game at it's current ridiculously discounted price, here's the theme in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjgPwbl2lw Pablo Vega does write some nice theme tunes, although to be honest I prefer some of his atmospheric music more. This is a nice playlist for most of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpFffJ8O5R0. Oh, and for those who already have the game, here's the  victory music in all its glory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMh8mb8T5oQ  Right, where were we. Attacking Oorto, I believe. Above is our expeditionary fleet, with the champion in pride of place. We've got a full cap of MK I fighters, because they are extremely cheap and quick to build. And we've also got 40-odd bombers / missile frigates, and a couple of lightning torpedo frigs.  And here's the fleet a couple of seconds later after warping in to Oorto. As you can see the wormhole exit is just within range of the MRLS guardpost, which starts firing on our ships as soon as they enter the planet. First priority is to get my guys out of range, so they fly off to the south. Notice that the AI ships next to this guardpost are awake and aware of us, but the ones next to the home command station on the right of the screen aren't.  Right, now what has bonuses against heavy hulls? Bombers! The group of 37 bombers splits off from the main fleet to take care of the MRLS. The rest of the fleet is blobbed up and sent after the command station. You may also notice some missiles in the centre of the screen. These are being spammed out by our lightning torpedo frigates, and are very handy because they clog up the AI's targeting mechanisms. And, y'know, they explode. Barrelling down on the fleet you can see a solitary decoy drone, which is one of the fleet ships this AI has unlocked. The main type of the second AI is 'experimentalist', which basically means they get stuff like translocators, speed boosters and micro-parasistes to play with.  The champion wipes out the AI's command station and the warp gate and wormhole guardposts on this planet automatically die. This planet is now neutral, and if we had a colony ship here we could capture it. All the ships at other guardposts in the system have now woken up and are added to the threat, which at this point means they're going to come over and start attacking the fleet. More importantly though, my AI progress has just gone up by 20 for exploding the command station. So, AI progress. As I mentioned before, it's a rough indication of how aware of you the AI is. Think of it like a peace keeping troop deployment. You start off with a lightly armed foot patrol, which after a few 'accidents' expands to some dudes in a Humvee. Then tanks, and large scale troops deployments, and napalm. Eventually, if you rile them up enough, the AIs will start sending motherships and Hunter/Killers after you. This is roughly the equivalent of para-dropping a fully operation Nimitz class aircraft carrier into the local village pond. In game terms, what this means is that the strength budget the AI gets to allocate to waves and planetary reinforcements is increased. It also allows to the AI to unlock new toys different types of guardians every ~50AIP, upgrade it's standard ships to MK II at 210AIP, MK III at 710 AIP etc. Oh right, reinforcements. Let's talk about that. I said earlier that 'The AI plays risk while you play AI War'. The most obvious parallel is that the AI gets a certain reinforcement budget to spend on a ~5 minute timer. Any AI planet which is 'alerted', i.e. adjacent to a player world or which has a military presence on it, gets first choice of the new ships the AI warps in from their exo-galactic factories. This tends to mean a defensive 'crust' of ships forms around the edges of your empire. These ships are evenly distributed across all the guard-able structures on the planet, and the total number of ships the AI is allowed on a planet is something like 50*current number of guardposts. Oh, and remember these ships are dormant they will only toddle off to join the free-to-attack-at-will threat if you wake them up somehow. That was a very quick explanation, for a more comprehensive overview I'd strongly recommend this reading assignment.  Right, so the bombers are wiping the MRLS post. As expected, the newly freed ships are beelining for the rest of my fleet. Fighters are sent after the last remaining guardpost on the planet, the needler post up at the top which has a medium type hull.  And it's done. A few of the freed ships escaped, but so what. Total losses on my side: five fighters, two bombers. A more than satisfactory exchange rate for an entire planet. Oh, and who's this chappie who's just arrived? It's a colony ship! Time to build a command station and claim ownership of this world. Now, I've just splurged a little and spent 4,000 knowledge to unlock MK II military command stations. This beauty has translocating railguns, emits tachyon beams in case the AI decides to send in any sneaky raiders, and even gives all friendly ships on the planet a 50% attack boost. In other words, it makes a perfect centre-piece for a defensive chokepoint. I also get a free 'foldout' command station on both my homeworlds for unlocking this, which is very handy. I could also have gone for an economic or logistics command station, which would have provided a metal/energy boost or a speed boost for allied ships respectively.  After a little work, and engineering support half-inched from the homeworld, the defences are in place. Note that I've built my command station right over the wormhole back to my homeworld. The reason for this is that ships can't pass through hostile forcefields. So those forcefields will serve double duty of both protecting the command station and stopping any sneaky little blighters making their way on to my homeworld without having to batter down the front-door first. I've also used the handy line-place mode to stick 300 mines on the most likely path any AI attacks will take, i.e. directly from the wormhole exit to my command station. Oh, and lots and lots of turrets. Even with the new energy extractor on this planet, this many turrets is a severe drain on my energy reserves. However I intend for this to be one of my main defensive choke-points for a fairly long time, so it makes sense to keep it fairly heavily guarded. So, about 20 minutes in and we've taken and heavily fortified our very first planet. The fight-back against the AI is in full swing. In the background I've had a space dock with the 'batch auto-explore' control group option churning out scouts, which means we know a little more about our local environment. But for now the next priority is still to secure the two remaining entry points into our home-worlds. Next up: Tackling an Orbital Mass Driver RockyB fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2014 11:55
|
|
|
 This is Durxuha. It has an orbital mass driver. Think massive railgun which strip-mines the asteroid it's sitting on then sends off large projectiles at near relativistic velocities. This thing will quite happily eradicate starships, golems, guardians or anything large. Thankfully though our fleet only has one starship at the moment, in the form of our champion, and this beast can't fire on anything smaller.  As we can see, the OMD (which is sitting next to the Zivu wormhole) is completely failing to annihilate our fleet ships. So, let's see what else we have here. An exposed command station, which will be going down in about 20 seconds. A laser guard-post at the bottom of the grav well, and an anti-starship arachnid guardpost under a forcefield. Looks like this place was really looking forward to wiping out some starships, a shame we'll have to disappoint them.  Command station dies. Bombers bang on the forcefield and anti-starship arachnid, while missile frigates go to remove the laser guardpost. Oh, hello! We appear to have a visitor on one of our homeworlds.  Zenith traders. Gotta love these guys. While they have a 1% chance of selling the AI some defensive structures whenever they leave one of their planets, they also give us the option of purchasing some pretty sweet toys. We can buy ion cannons, counter-spies, super-fortresses, black hole machines, zenith power generators, planetary armour boosters, radar dampeners and even orbital mass drivers of our own. Because this is our homeworld, which hopefully very few AI ships are ever going to get onto, and because the trader goodies have fairly low caps, it makes sense to hold off on buying most of these until the trader is on one of our choke-point planets. The exception is the zenith power generator. These beauties produce 600,000 energy each, over and above what can normally be extracted. Because I'm using dual homeworlds I get the option to buy two, which is essentially four entire planets worth of energy without having to take the AIP hit of actually capturing the planet. For reference, that's 120 average starships or 24,000 fighters worth of energy.  The downsides of course are that these things are monstrously expensive at 5 million metal each. My current economy is at about 4,000 metal/s, so it would take me 21 minutes to build a single one if I devoted my entire economy to it. They also cause +10AIP on death, so they need to be placed on a very heavily defended world. Like, for instance, under the forcefields right next to my home command station.  Metal cost doesn't have to be invested up-front, it is instead slowly poured into structures and units as they are being built. So there is no up-front cost to me for purchasing the generator (unless one gets destroyed). Instead, what I'll do is put one into low-power mode so that it doesn't build at all. The other one goes into a special control group which I set to only build when there's more than a million metal in storage. That way it's not going to hamper my economy when I need to rush-build to replace ships. Also, you may have noticed that I was lying earlier when I said we'd probably never look at the CTRLs screen again. We look at it a lot. Likely this first generator will come online sometime around 2 hours into the game, at which point I will be able to spam out considerably more defensive turrets than before. For reference, if I was to build every single MK I turret with a per-planet cap it would cost me 297,600 energy. Which is almost exactly the amount I get from the 'free' per-planet energy collector.  Oh, you may also have noticed the funky little shattered pillar starbase which has shown up next to my home command station. This has come from the champion alternate progression, although normally you'd get these facilities for completing nebulae scenarios. This particular one gives a nice defensive boost to our homeworld, generates 100,000 energy, and also allows recruitment of some new, moderately powerful starships.  Anyway, let's get back to the action. The missile frigates have made mince-meat of that laser guardpost and the bombers have just terminated the anti-starship arachnid. Time to clean up the last AI remnants and hop a colony ship in. Now, that OMD has a nice property on it. It's 'Captured on planet ownership change'. Sooo, when I stick my military command station up right next to it I get myself a free OMD. Thanks AI, you just saved me 3.6 million metal! Positioning couldn't be better either, as my forcefields can now cover the wormhole to the homeworld, the OMD and my command station.  Lovely. The normal defences will be going up here, although I'm not going to bother with mines this time. I'm also going to spend some knowledge on Mk II forcefield generators, as you can never have to many forcefields. Oh and apparently I just unlocked a new champion hull size, sweet. The upgrades come thick-and-fast early game with alt-progression on, because it's catching up with the large pool of knowledge you start the game with.  In fact, I've also unlocked another racial form for the champion. This is a Neinzul champion, which gets access to a range of more offbeat modules at the cost of less overall slots. Speaking of modules, I have upgrade points to spend. Let's see what modules I have unlocked at the moment.  Hmm, nothing of major interest. I bump the shield and laser modules up to MK III (the highest a 'destroyer' chassis can mount), but otherwise leave the remaining three unlock points in the bank. More modules will unlock over time, and some like the translocator modules will be locked to a specific racial form. But for now, I'll just stick to my boring old human ship. Nothing wrong with lots of shields and lots of lasers.  Huh, was that only three minutes of gameplay? Oh well. Next time on AI War: When Fortresses Attack! RockyB fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 22, 2014 22:57
|
|
|
Thanks for this; it's getting me back into AI War (and buying the new expansions - I only had the first three before). One question; how do you balance construction priorities across your little empire? I find if I try to maintain a full cap of each ship type I have unlocked my economy is pretty much permanently tanked. And if I wait for the full ship cap to finish, then build the defenses I want, I think I'm taking too long to keep expanding.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 03:07
|
|
|
Add me to the list of people who grabbed this game because of this thread. SPPAAAACCCEEE TRAINS.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 05:36
|
|
|
Arcturas posted:Thanks for this; it's getting me back into AI War (and buying the new expansions - I only had the first three before). One little tip that I can give you is to look at the 'handicap' settings in the lobby - for this game I've given myself a 50% metal boost because otherwise the income is just a little too slow for my tastes. And, obviously, get yourself the harvester upgrades or appropriate command-station upgrades ASAP. Honestly though, in this game your economy should almost always be tanked. I'd certainly advise getting normal ships built at the start of game rather than starships (one bomber starship costs the same as 250 fighters), but once you've got a few hundred don't necessarily wait for full caps before attacking. Just remember that strategic expansion is far more important than speed of expansion - some players prefer to only take 8-10 planets on an 80 planet map, keeping the AIP as low as possible. Given a 10-15 hour game that's less than a planet an hour. Some spend the first couple of hours just sending out raiding parties from their homeworlds but not actually taking other planets. Generally it's not until around hour 10 that the AI hits its reinforcement cap on their alerted planets and you start getting border aggression, so if you don't have any auto-incrementing AIP sources on (say +1 AIP every 30 minutes, which I think is the default, or spire civvy leaders) then there isn't that much of a hurry. After capturing a planet I tend to just mass-build all the defences I want at once, which isn't the most sensible way to do it. To aid in this there's an option in the global controls called 'Pause all constructors', which will shut down your ship production entirely so that all the metal gets poured into your structures. But even doing that I have ten minute periods of just waiting around for the defences to build. That's the period when you use small raiding fleets or scouting parties rather than flinging everything out into the meat grinder.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 10:30
|
|
|
Interesting, another game with a continuous economy based around Metal  Based purely on the fact that it is a continuous economy yes you want to have your Metal tanked all the time because metal that is sitting in storage is metal that is not out there blowing up the enemy.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 12:05
|
|
|
The counterargument being that if there's a gigantic wave inbound to a place with insufficient forces to protect it, sometimes a reserve is nice so you can speed build defenses (through the magic of Engineer Drones and their ability to speed up building things).
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 12:34
|
|
|
Oh man, let me also encourage everyone to get this. AI War is a blast. It is complex, very strategic, and very hard; it is also immensely satisfying to win, even on difficulty 5 (easy) with everything on vanilla. Surprisingly, I'm not good at this game, but I'm looking forward to seeing how to play it competently. quote:Interesting, another game with a continuous economy based around Metal In the past, they did have Crystal, but it is gone now and I am very happy to see it disappear. I'm curious to see how useful hacking might be, and hopefully RockyB can show it off at some point in the future. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 14:23
|
|
|
Oh, hacking is immensely useful. You also get one HaP for every point of AIP you gain, so after taking Miknei I'll have 70 which is enough to start doing interesting things if I feel like it. Definitely a good call by Keith promoting this to a full resource and binning off crystal. Anyway, after starting all the turrets building on Durxuha I needed to wait ten minutes for the economy to get out of its -52,000 metal/s nose dive. Everything builds real slow when you've got a negative flow of that kind of magnitude. Unfortunately the AI had other ideas.  Remember those Halycon days about 20 minutes ago when waves were only 100 missile frigates strong? Yeah, that's what happens when you bump your AIP from 10 to 50 by capturing two planets. Because we haven't secured one of the three planets bordering our homeworlds yet, we're also getting a wave hitting Zivu through the Miknei wormhole. What are missile frigates weak against? Bombers. And they eat fighters for breakfast. So we want to retreat the fighters to Dageo, then the rest of the fleet can run defence on Zivu before moving on to mop up anything that's left on Durxuha.  Here's Durxuha seconds after the wave hits. Fortunately most of the turrets finished construction just before the ships got here, but I had to micro the engineers to get two of the forcefields covering the command station up. The other six are in various states of construction, but a half-built forcefield is naff all use to anyone. If you look down in the bottom-right corner you can see the no-longer red bordered icon which indicates that our OMD has just terminated a plasma siege starship with extreme prejudice. Give it another 10 seconds to reload and that flagship will be waving bye-bye as well. We'll come back to this group of missile frigates in a moment.   The battle for Zivu begins. This wave is slightly smaller than the other, but there are considerably fewer turrets in place on the home-world. What we do have, however, is a group of Neinzul Enclave starships. Hanging around safely far from the front line, these guys are blasting out a group of multiple different drone types every 9-10 seconds. These are perfect for clogging up the AI's targeting algorithm, in much the same way as lightning torpedoes. Sadly missile frigates are immune to AOE effects, which means the lightning torpedoe frigates sitting under the forcefields aren't anywhere close to as effective as normal.  Aargh, blasted cowards! The ones attacking Zivu have all run away to join the threat. That's going to make taking Miknei in a few minutes somewhat harder than it should have been. Oh well, let's redirect the fleet to Durxuha to help with the situation there.  Looks like the fixed defences on Durxuha are winnowing out the missile frigates somewhat. Soon the fleet warps in, and the majority of the frigates start fleeing in the direction of the Arkhag wormhole. In the end, of the 1,700 or so ships the AI started this battle with 900 were killed. The other 800 have retreated, with scouts indicating 760 of those are on Miknei. While cleaning up the aftermath, let's talk about two mechanics that it seems sensible to introduce at this point.  First up are remains, and remains rebuilders. To prevent massive micro-management the majority of structures in AI war drop remains. With the help of a handy fleet of rebuilders (my global controls state that each planet should retain at least five at all times), these can then be painlessly and automatically rebuilt. The screenshot shows a cluster of five sniper turrets remains that the rebuilder is homing in on. The reason I tend to stick my sniper turrets around the outside of the grav well is because the AI loves to send small parts of their forces off to attack them for some reason, so they make nice distractions.  Next up, let's talk salvage. Recently introduced, salvage is an attempt to shake up the 'attack → refleet for 30 minutes → attack' dynamic. Every time the AI loses a ship in your territory, you get metal added to your pool of salvage. That is then extracted by the local command station with varying efficiency. A Mil II command station like we have on Durxuha is only 8% efficient, while a home command station is 40% efficient. In theory then, it can make sense to have your homeworlds take the brunt of attacks. But that's rather a risky strategy. The flip side of salvage is that the AI gets it as well, and use it to send 'reprisal' waves at your defences. So if you lose a fleet worth 5 million metal, suddenly you're likely to find yourself with a rather strenuous defensive battle on your hands. And of course, you then get the metal from that wave to go towards your refleeting  This is the situation on Miknei. 760 threat ships sitting in a cluster right in the middle of the planet. Correctly, 760 mostly AOE immune threat. This is important, as it means we can't just throw some missiles through the wormhole to take them out. What we probably want here is lots and lots of bombers. So the engineers on Zivu are told to prioritise construction of those. We've now got a full cap of bombers and missile frigates. However we've also got some other new toys. We've added leech starships and flagships to our fleet, along with the Neinzul combat carrier bonus ship we chose right back at the start of the game. The combat carriers are essentially enclaves with a different selection of drones, popping out beam, rail, spider and grav dones rather than the standard missile/laser/needler damage dealers. Flagships are moderately powerful in their own right, but also give all ships within range of them an attack boost. The leeches are particularly nice because their shots do reclamation damage. Is a unit has more than half its hitpoints in reclamation damage at the points it is killed, we then get that unit for free. So we may end up with a few dozen more missile frigates than we started with, even though we're already at the buildable cap.  Here's our strike team then, moments after entering the Miknei system. The drones dash ahead of the main force, kept waiting by the wormhole. Let them take the brunt of the firepower.  Drones are everywhere, killing everything. Most of the enemy ships are retreating. Well, retreating from this planet. More than 700 ships are now attacking Dageo, my second homeworld.  The fighters I left at Dageo go down to a blistering missile barrage. In seconds I've lost the whole cap, almost twenty times more units than I expended capturing Oorto and Durxuha. Almost 400 drones are pummelling the dregs of resistance on Miknei while the rest of the fleet dashes for the Dageo wormhole, pausing only to wipe the command station on their way over there. The fighting on Dageo is fierce, but in the end no enemy ship escapes.   That just leaves the fortress on Miknei to deal with. Fortresses are nasty blighters, especially when under a forcefield like this one is. They fire plasma bolts that can wipe out 30 fighters per second, and reload every 6 seconds. Their key weakness however lies in the 'Polycrystal 0.01' attack multiplier. They can't do squat against bombers. So, with the drones tagging along to provide covering fire, our surviving bombers go and blast the hell out of that fortress and the special forces guardpost it was shielding.  Typically, seconds after the command station goes up on Miknei three more waves are announced. Missile frigates to Miknei, bombers and fighters to Oorto. However with plentiful turrets on Oorto and the majority of the fleet on Miknei, this shouldn't really be an issue. Because both homeworlds are accessible from Miknei, I've just slapped the command station in the middle and put a single forcefield over each wormhole. The best part about this planet though is that there's only one way the AI can get in. This means I can justify buying one of my favourite toys area mines. Bombers just melt when they run into these things.  As expected, all waves were dispatched fairly handily (apart from the cowardly fighters who left to go join the threat). I'm now also completely out of energy and can't build anything else. So, the first ~hour of the game has been spent securing my position on the map and setting up some defence in depth for my homeworlds. Next time, on AI War: Strategic Objectives and Data Centres RockyB fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 16:08
|
|
|
I recall an earlier LP of AI War, but I don't remember if they finished a game. Looking forward to more!
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 16:17
|
|
|
I really need to try this again. My single player games always ended with me kind of lost about where to go and how to progress beyond capturing a couple of planets, and my multiplayer was always beset by scheduling and internet issues (sorry everyone who tried to play with me). Looking forward to learning what the hell I'm actually supposed to be doing apart from pissing the ai off and getting smashed into oblivion.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 18:11
|
|
|
Seems like it's time for another oversized galaxy map. Let's see what out scouts have been up to. Ahh, much better than when we started out. Our cluster of five planets is displayed in green, with all scouted AI planets in red. Still a lot of unknowns out there, but at least we have some info to start working out where to go next. So, what are our objectives? Hmm, let's ask the game.  Primary objective: Survive. Seems sensible. There's also a lot of stuff in there about taking down the core shield generators. Think star-wars and the shield generator on Endor; in order to be able to attack the AI home command stations we need to destroy every shield generator network. We'll get back to that later. For now, we're probably more interested in the secondary objectives. Oh, hello! Looks like our scouts have found a data centre on Yarzarmas. Blowing up a data centre is one of the very few ways you can actually decrease your AIP, so let's make that our next priority.  The majority of our fleet is sitting on Oorto, up at the top of our empire. Yarzarmas is two hops away, which means we'll need to go through Boomquonxu to get to it. This is a problem, because Boomquonxu is a MK IV planet.  Planet marks are a good indication of how dangerous they are. They also indicate the mark level of the ships the AI reinforces that planet with so we're going to be running into a lot of MK IV ships here. In fact we don't really want an alerted Mk IV planet sitting next to one of our planets anyway so this makes it a prime target for neutering, i.e. removing all the guardposts to decrease the amount the AI can reinforce it by.  Let's send some scouts in to get a closer look at this place. Oh yeah, this is going to be somewhat of a harder nut to crack. Looks like 1,200 ships on the planet, with a large chunk of that being threat from the wave that escaped earlier. There are also six guardposts and three ion cannons, expensive toys which can instantly kill fleet ships of the same or lower mark. Oh, and these guys.  These are hybrid hives. Added sometime back in version 3, these are AI starships that have been 'melded' with small Neinzul hives that actually control the starship but behave as allies to the AI. The Hybrids have a much more aggressive outlook than the 'main' AI and are much more 'concerned' by your continued existence. In other words, they're a bunch of nasty little shi First thing we need to do is take down the tachyon sentinel next to the wormhole to Oorto. Easiest way to do this is to just warp in the fleet blob. We'll lose some ships to the ion cannons, but clear out some enemy units at the same time.  Tachyon is down. We're taking fire from the ion cannons and the several hundred fighters sitting next to the wormhole. Also note the blade spawner, which is a new ship type for the AI. In the end my forces retreat having lost around 200 ships, mainly bombers, and taking out only 100 or so of the enemy. But they'll all be rebuilt soon enough.  Now that the tachyon is down we can do something a bit more tricksy. Above is a raiding party comprised of one cloaker starship and six raid starships. Now the cloaker, as the name may indicate, is capable of giving stealth to nearby ships. And the raid starships are extremely fast ships which can shoot through forcefields.  Here's our raiding group sitting next to a completely oblivious pair of ion cannons. Seconds later they explode, while the raids make a dash for the exit. They can't be re-cloaked within ten seconds of firing.  For the next attack I'm going to send in the champion to take out the remaining ion cannon, as he's likely to take out a fair few ships as well while he's making a dash for the exit. Wait, what's this? Aargh, traitorous spire civilian leaders!  These guys. I prefer to use them over auto-incrementing AIP, as they give you a bit of a kick to expand but also some interesting strategic choices. Ten of these are seeded across the map at the beginning of the game, and every hour each one will raise AIP by one. There are two ways to deal with them. Liberate them, at which point they start to regularly decrease AIP by three, or blast them out of the sky. So far the only spire civvy leader I know of it on Plurinzor, the P6 planet right in the bottom centre of the galactic map. But it's three hops away from any friendly planet, so we'll have to defer our decision on him for now.  Champion takes out the ion cannon, then sits there and tanks the incoming enemy fire for a while. His special ability, which allows him to drop a temporary forcefield, helps with that somewhat. Looks like the threat fighters have moved on to another planet by this point, so all that's left are the local planet defences and the hybrids. After a sufficient amount of time for all the local ships to get distracted chasing my champion, the rest of the fleet warps in from the Oorto wormhole.  The champion is about to die, and he's run out of power to generate temporary forcefields. But he's taunted the enemy well away from my fleet's entry point, and thanks to a handy 'snap-back' warp drive will be respawned back on one of my homeworlds momentarily.  As the battle heats up, the AI gets an ill timed reinforcement wave and ships start pouring from the remaining guardposts. It also looks like the special forces have shown up to defend the planet. Special forces are a roving fleet of ships, especially riot starships, which the AI holds a couple of hops back from the human planets and uses to reinforce any planet which comes under attack. This special forces fleet appears to have a large number of blade spawners and tackle drone launchers, which are extremely nasty, so the remnants of the fleet retreats after taking down two missile guardposts.  Just in time for the fleet to be rebuilt, we get a couple of waves. The interesting one here is the one on Miknei, which is using cloaked ships. If we didn't have our Mil II station, we wouldn't be able to fire on these at all. Although as it turns out this isn't an issue just because they're stealthy doesn't mean that they won't blow the hell up when running into mines. Three seconds before this screenshot there were the best part of 300 ships here. Anyway the waves were taken care of handily, although I'm getting more and more annoyed by this cowardly AI who isn't letting his ships get smashed on my defences. Up to 1,500 threat now. And 2.5 million metal, so engineers are retasked to speed-build the zenith power generator and get me out of the constant low energy state.  Looks like Boomquonxu has calmed down a bit, there's only 270 ships there now that the threat and special forces have moved on. Time to move the fleet back in to attack. You may also have noticed the 'Neinzul Viral Clusters' which are sitting next to each wormhole. These are the signature of the viral enthusiast AI sub-type, which happens to be the secondary type of the second AI. They spawn viral swarmers when military ships get too close to them, nasty little blighters which self-replicate by damaging enemy ships, which can quickly get out of control if you don't have enough firepower to alpha them down.  Uh-oh, translocator eye? Yeah, we didn't see this in action last time because there were so many AI ships. Eyes are special structures that are only switched on when the human forces on the planet outnumber the AI 2:1. These serve to prevent the player from just steam-rolling a planet with a massive fleet blob. They have an absurd amount of health, which makes them impractical to attack directly without access to an artillery golem. Luckily though they die automatically once the last guardpost goes down. So, let's get rid of our fleet ships (especially the lightning torpedoe frigates their missiles count as units for ratio purposes) and come back with a fleet of low cap, high damage ships. Or in other words, starships.  33 starships start floating around under cloaker cover, picking off guardposts one by one. As mentioned earlier though, these replicating swarmers are a real danger if you let them get away from you. So a strategic retreat is sometimes advisable, especially when the special forces show up and start throwing their weight around.  Eventually the planet is neutered at the cost of great time and materiel. So many ships were lost, in fact, that at one stage the AI launched a reprisal wave against us.  That's a lot of fighters. Still, nothing the defences can't handle when bolstered by the currently sidelined fleet.  Oh. God. drat. -570,000 energy? No supply? Yup, that means that all my turrets and forcefields are offline. And what's causing this? Not one, but two AI beachheads. When this option is enabled, roughly 1/10 waves will get a beachhead structure which takes out all the supply on the target planet. That takes out the turrets but it also takes out the energy collectors, which can't work without supply. And no energy means no forcefields. With that 2,600 fighter wave hitting in 25 seconds I need to take these down ASAP to get my defences get back online.  The fleet on Miknei is split into two, and each half dashes for either Oorto or Durxuha. Oorto command station is being hit by a smattering of teleporting raiders, as it no longer has forcefield coverage. It's a military station though, it can take a little punishment.  The second beachhead goes down and turrets come back online. Unfortunately the missile frigates attacking Durxuha took out the energy collector, so until my engineers manage to rebuild it I'm doing this one without forcefields.  2,200 ships on Miknei. This is also our first introduction to AI carriers, which are essentially a way to limit the number of objects on the screen so lesser computers don't melt. Ideally there are about 1,000 free AI ships on a planet at once, with the rest in carriers which slowly release units as other die. However the carriers themselves gain all the firepower of the units inside them. Recently there was a change to the way carriers work. Before they spilled out their contents when destroyed, which then went into the chipper-shredder to keep the unit count low so instead of 1,000 fighters you ended up with 10 starships. Now damage is transferred to units inside the carriers, which is handy for us as it means that minefield all the carriers are flying into is real effective.  Anyway eventually that little situation is tidied up and the last guardpost on Boomquonxu goes boom, taking the eye with it. The way to Yarzarmas is clear. Our champion flies through the wormhole, popping the tachyon sentinel as it goes, and eliminates the data centre. -10AIP, which takes us to uh pretty much the same place as we were half an hour ago. Next Time on AI War: ARSes, the Botnet Golem and the Dyson Sphere RockyB fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Aug 24, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 10:20
|
|
|
Good lord this game looks busy.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 15:33
|
|
|
There's a reason I normally play it in 1920*1200, it makes it considerably easier to see what's going on. Aside from that, I think any game where you're throwing a few thousand independent units around on the screen is going to be pretty busy. That's why it's a good job it's real-time with pause, so you can micro the action to your hearts content.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 15:54
|
|
|
Nicely handled! Two questions: what is the warp relay being spawned there, and what's the keystroke to build mines in a line like that?
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 16:45
|
|
|
This is probably too much to ask and I realize that, but do you think you could annotate at least some of these screen shots to label what's what? There are so many ship types and facilities that some times even after reading the captions it's hard to tell what's what, especially in shots like the first planet screen of the last update. There are 27 AI unit types listed there, and I can tell what about four of them are.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 17:34
|
|
|
Yeah, as someone who hasn't played the game you might as well not have screenshots at all because I have no idea what I'm looking at 90% of the time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 17:48
|
|
|
Sindai posted:Yeah, as someone who hasn't played the game you might as well not have screenshots at all because I have no idea what I'm looking at 90% of the time. Sometimes I wish we could emptyquote. This is one of those games where I was always hoping to see a good LP. I picked up the demo a couple years ago, and just couldn't penetrate it, couldn't understand what I was doing or what I was supposed to do. A good LP always helps with that, but... I find myself STILL lost. I'm starting to see a LITTLE of the bigger picture, but the smaller picture is still completely incomprehensible.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 18:49
|
|
|
Yeah, fair point all. I've just been uploading raw screenshots mostly and the selected unit highlighting is a little hard to read if you don't know what you're looking for. I'm going back and slowly updating the old images, hope you like red circles and shoddy MS-Paint jobs! If there's any particular part which you think still needs further explanation, quote the image and I'll break it down even more if possible. Arcturas, you can do mine line-placement by alt+right clicking when building mines, that'll open up the context menu like below 
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 19:49
|
|
|
RockyB posted:Yeah, fair point all. I've just been uploading raw screenshots mostly and the selected unit highlighting is a little hard to read if you don't know what you're looking for. I'm going back and slowly updating the old images, hope you like red circles and shoddy MS-Paint jobs! What would really help me is if you could situate the battles for us so that there's more context. Otherwise it's a bunch of battles screens, which is exhausting, and also a little meaningless. A regional map highlighting the battle site, origin of attack(s), and a general description of what the challenge in the battle will be would be helpful. Also helpful would be an annotated system screenshot before / after the fight with arrows and poo poo like football commentators. It's hard to follow your strategy and tactics with only screenshots.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 22:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 26, 2024 05:59 |
|
|
Because AI war is a rolling game where you tend to be getting attacked on multiple fronts at once it's a bit hard to give a coherent overview without just dumping out the entire galaxy map every in-game minute. So far I'm probably only showing about half to a third of the AI attacks that are going on, in the interest of picking out the more important or interesting ones. Essentially I'm trying to give an overview rather than a minute-by-minute tactical account (because otherwise I'll burn out on writing stuff up looong before this is finished). That said, I'll start mentioning specifically when I context switch between planets rather than relying on the planet name in the top of the screenshot. Expect lots more galaxy maps, in other words. Anyway after our little misadventure neutering Boomquonxu (where most of the last posts action took place), let's just take a moment to chill out. Our first zenith power generator is online and has dealt with our electricity situation, so let's see what the scouts have to say.  The observant among you may notice that a P8 and three P9 tags have shown up to the north. After blowing up the tachyon sentinels on Boomquonxu our scouts were able to access that part of the galaxy, and they've found a very tasty little cluster of planets for us.  Udoniusma is the loner to the left-hand side, P9 because of the ARS sitting on it. ARSes are a 'vault of advanced AI technology', and upon capturing them we get 500 free knowledge and an entirely new ship type to build. ARS planets also always have A-network core shield generators seeded on them, and we need to destroy all but one of those before the network self destructs. Ifice also has an ARS, but even better it has the botnet golem on it. This little beauty can eat entire waves on its own, and is pretty much the most potent weapon you could hope to capture. Because not only does it annihilate waves, it also turns them into zombie ships which then turn right back around and attack the AI. I normally play with golems medium turned on, where repairing the botnet costs an extortionate +100 AIP. Five entire planets worth of AIP gain, that's how much of a beast this guy is and how much it scares the AI. However for the sake of completing this LP, rather than getting to hour twelve and losing, I've knocked the difficulty down to easy which means I can take this baby entirely for free. P.S, the shortcut / desktop icon for AI War? That's the botnet golem. It's that good. Savkeael is a slight step down, but still a tasty target because it has both a broken regenerator golem and an advanced starship factory. The regen golem will automatically rebuild any friendly ship which dies on the same planet, at the expense of its own health. This makes it fantastic for supporting a fleet when pushing into enemy territory, as with its 4 million health it can essentially rebuild 2,400 fighters at zero metal cost or travel time. As for the advanced starship constructor, in AI War you can only research ships as far as Mk III. Beyond that you need to steal one of the AI production facilities to get access to MK IV ships, so if we can appropriate this one that'll give us a leg up once we get around to researching MK III starships. Last in the little cluster of three planets we have Yarzon. Not only does the planet have a Mk V teleport raider fabricator on it, it's also home to the dyson sphere. The dyson sphere is an optional minor faction, essentially the invulnerable remnants of a long vanished alien civilisation. When first encountering it the dyson sphere will generate dyson gatlings which are hostile to both us and the AI. However if you free the planet from the AI by wiping out the command station it starts generating gatlings which are allied with you, and make a very handy roaming defence fleet which automatically patrol your worlds for you. Honestly, finding these last three clustered together like this was a fairly decent stroke of luck. Normally you'll find the dyson sphere and botnet golem miles away from each other, and I don't think I've ever seen the botnet spawn on a planet that also has an ARS. Anyway, we'll be focussing the majority of our expansion efforts over in that direction for a while.  Hmm, so what else is going on in the galaxy. Well, the cookie monster seems to be prowling through Boomquonxu. We'll probably discuss him later. There also appears to be a warp relay spawning on Boomquonxu. This is a new addition from the latest major release, essentially if you leave threat unmolested for too long it starts building a warp gate that will let it leap-frog over your heavily guarded choke-point and strike into your soft, under-defended underbelly. We should probably go and discourage that.   Other than that, it looks like a nomad planet has shown up and formed a wormhole link with Oorto. Nomad planets are new in the latest expansion, and I've actually never played with them before. But from what I can gather they bimble around the galaxy slowly forming and breaking wormhole links between previous unlinked planets. In other words, they have a nasty ability to let the AI bypass your carefully laid out choke-point defences. They also come with a new mini-campaign, which I might chase down later.  While we're thinking of tactics, it's probably time to spend some of the knowledge we've accumulated. Let's go for tier three metal harvesters, to give my economy that little extra fizz, along with MK II leech and MK I spire and Zenith starships.  I've now got a bit of a decision to make. We can either link the three high priority planets in with the rest of my empire or leave them out there on their own. Linking them means taking two additional planets, with the respective +40 AIP hit. Having said that they're fairly decent planets, with Boomquonxu having five metal harvesters and Sucje seven. What tips it for me though is that Sucje has both a MK V missile frigate fabricator and a spire civilian leader on it, and the fact that if I do this the friendly dyson gatlings will be able to patrol my homeworlds as well. So, in a decision I may well come to regret later, I commit to taking an additional five planets with the commesurate +100AIP impact. One of the great joys of AI war is you can't really know if this is a strategic blunder until you get to hour eight or nine, when that 40 AIP means the difference between comfortably handling a CPA or getting wiped from the face of the galaxy. Location: Boomquonxu  First task is to send the champion over from Oorto to Boomquonxu, under cloaker cover, to pop the command station. This should hopefully make the hybrids bugger off, once they realise that their 'defend this planet' mission has been a complete failure.  Next up, send the rest of the fleet in to cleanse the place of that sickly AI stench and remove the under construction warp relay.  After that, it's pretty much a matter of choosing where to slap the command station. This is going to be a lightly defended outpost, so the middle of the grav well is as good as anywhere. A few dozen of each turret type and a single forcefield ought to be enough here, there's nothing I particularly want to protect. This will likely end up as more of an easily rebuilt crumple zone to slow the AI's assaults. It also means Oorto only has two entry points now, so I can re-orientate some of my defences there. Oh, there's also an E network core shield generator here. These things are invulnerable while the AI command station is up, but seeing as we're now in control of the planet we'll have the fleet wipe it out. As the E network is a weak one, this will destroy all the other shield generators as well.  Location: Oorto    Oh, hello, what's this? Looks like our champion alternate progress has just unlocked some spire modular fortresses for us. These are extremely expensive defensive structures which can mount the same kind of modules as our champions, but based on our a mix between our normal turret technology tree and champion unlocks. They cost 1.8 million metal and 100,000 energy each, but we can pretty much afford that with the zenith generator up. For now I think we'll build one at Oorto and save the second to build at Savkeael when we take that. To give them a few more interesting modules to mount I unlock translocator Mk II and and rail cannon III modules in the champion unlocks, and retrofit the champion itself with some rail cannons. Location: Durxhua   Looks like the human resistance have shown up to help us with one of the waves. You can't see them, because they've spawned miles away at the edge of the gravity well and all the AI ships will be dead by the time they get anywhere. Still a little additional firepower never goes to waste, even if based on past experience they will end up filing through a wormhole single-file and straight into the AI firing squad. Location: Sucje   Right, let's deal with Sucje. Looks like a fairly standard planet to me, so it should be just a case of warping the normal fleet blob in.  A couple of minutes later and the planet has been taken. I'm kind of surprised that the enemy threat didn't take the opportunity to strike at one of my choke-point planets while the fleet was engaged, but maybe the mass of turrets was sufficient to discourage them. Anyway, command station goes up at the edge of the grav well, covering the Mk V missile fab, and the grateful liberated spire civilians instantly decrease my AIP by three and will continue to do so on the hour for however long the game lasts. Oh, and there's a C-network shield generator here that we can pop, nice. 2/5 networks down. State of the Empire  Next time, on AI War: Hack the Planet
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 00:19
|
|