AI War

[Nathan]

I picked this up a few of days ago in the Steam sale (£3 for the game and 3 expansions!) and I love it. I was wondering if anyone else plays it.

The game is a space RTS with a heavy focus on the strategy. The objective is to defeat your two AI opponents' home planets. Their fleet outclasses yours and they usually have more ships than you too. As the game goes on and you destroy more of the AI, they get stronger and launch larger attacks on your planets.

There's loads of customization options that cater for most types of RTS player (I'm not sure how much is available without expansions as I bought everything at once) and average games last about 12 hours (I've been playing shorter games whilst I get used to it, so they've been about 6 hours). It plays a bit like Sins of a Solar Empire, but I've found there's a lot more room for strategy in the late game instead of just bashing your opponent with big fleets and hoping you win.

[^ban^]

I've played it, though your time estimates are *very* off for larger/more difficult games. The last game I played took some 70 hours for five of us to complete against a pair of level 8 or 9 AI, though I doubt I could manage against that level AI with how much time has passed since.

[Nathan]

Heh, for the time estimates, I was just going off what I've read/heard from other people. I'm guessing that could have been for 80 planets and level 7 AI.

So far I've been playing on low levelled AI as I get a hang of the game, but they don't seem to use much of the strategy the game is apparently good for. All I see so far is the AI massing units and then moving them to my planet. There have been times they had planets with lots of units sat there at one side of my little empire and they did nothing with them. Even when I attacked their home planet, they left the 3k or so ships doing nothing. Does it actually show a little more intelligence on higher difficulties?

[^ban^]

On higher difficulties it is almost impossible (and entirely pointless) to hold any planet that isn't a choke point because of the weird !@#$ the AI sends at you (mostly those damn trains).

[James]

Well, seems this topic is not about the A.I. Wars I thought it was going to be... I used to play a great one many many years ago which was a sort of 'robot wars' type thing in that you have a bot (called a bug) and used C++ to provide it's intelligence and then entered it into combat arenas where the task was to be the last one alive.

It's still around (though free now! I paid quite a bit for it back in the day) http://tacticalneuronics.com/Content%5Caiw3dnew.asp