INTRO:
It is not often that an RTS game has a convincingly challenging single-player experience. Veteran players may eventually notice the holes in the A.I. scripts that run his/her computer-controlled opponents and exploit them.
A.I. War is not such a game. It offers very challenging A.I. opponents, while making sure that the player would not get an upper hand without considerable opportunity costs. However, as a consequence, A.I. War also comes with a dauntingly steep learning curve.
PREMISE:
Humanity’s penchant for civil war and yet their laziness to wage it have come back to bite them in the ass, if the game’s premise is to be simplified into a sentence. To be more elaborate, after some time of waging war, humankind has decided to let artificial intelligences do it for them instead. This was, as is typical of such sci-fi stories, a bad idea.
The A.I.’s have banded together to turn against their creators, driving humanity to near-extinction. After having reduced humanity to the point that the A.I. considered it to be a negligible concern, it became near-dormant in known space, content to let local automation of its force handle any uprising while it does something else somewhere.
This premise is utilized to give the player a few relatively easy early hours into any session. However, as the player progresses and takes away territory from the A.I., it gradually “wakes” up, becoming more aggressive and putting more options on the table to put down the uprising.
To put it simply, the game’s premise is merely an excuse to justify the challengingly complex gameplay. This happens to be a tradition that Arcen Games would follow for its later games.
GAMEPLAY - OVERVIEW:
In any game session, whether it be single-player or co-op with other players, the main opponent that any player faces is the A.I. The player starts out with his/her homeworld, which has a home command station that the player must not lose. This is easier said than done, of course.
This homeworld is located within a galaxy of sorts, with practically any other planet under the control of the A.I. The player has the objective of locating the A.I.’s own “homeworld” and destroying the command core that houses most of its in-galaxy computers. By default, each A.I. ‘player’ has one such world.
Destroying the A.I.’s heart is easier said than done; the A.I. heavily defends its cores. To overcome the A.I.’s core defences, the player must wrest particularly important planets from the A.I. and use their assets to bolster his/her own forces for an eventual strike on the cores.
Yet, the A.I. will not take kindly to this encroachment. It is languid at first, but as the player takes more planets, it becomes angrier. Thus, the game becomes more difficult, even as the player gains more assets.
A.I. PROGRESS:
The game and the developers make it clear that one of the most important elements of gameplay is “A.I. Progress”, which is depicted via a counter that is always visible on the player’s screen. In-game parlay shortens this term to “AIP”, which this review will use for the sake of brevity.
AIP is the main measure of aggression from the A.I. The player increases AIP by hitting AIP-increasing assets of the A.I., or by simply being around for a time, if the player has enabled automatic progression. The game makes use of it in many calculations, such as how often the A.I. launches attacks against the player and how severe each attack is.
There are several thresholds for the AIP counter, some of which are not immediately known to the player. The ones that are told to the player are the thresholds after which the A.I. will “upgrade” all of its new units to the next “mark”, making them tougher.
The ones that are not told to the player are that for every 100 points of AIP, the A.I. unlocks a new unit for its own use. This can be an unpleasant surprise for unknowing players.
There are also other hidden thresholds, namely those that enable more A.I. scripts. For example, after breaching a few hundred on the AIP counter, the A.I. gains the ability to release defensive garrisons to be folded into an attack force.
Indeed, as the AIP gets higher, the game becomes exponentially more difficult. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to control its rise. Furthermore, many successful strategies that also happen to provide satisfying experiences also require the player to repress the AIP counter.
Many things increase the AIP counter, but fortunately, most of them are within the player’s control. The most common causes of AIP increases are the player’s conquests of planets, which the player must do in order to increase his/her military assets. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to make such decisions very carefully.
Some causes are not in the player’s control, but interestingly, the player can choose to disable these before the start of any session. However, the player will have to get deep into the options for the setting up of a session, though this is made easier thanks to tool-tips that pop up to describe them.
Sometime during the beta period of the game, there was a measure that was introduced into the game to foil players who learned how to game the system of AIP. This is the “AIP Floor”, which is the minimum amount of AIP that the player will have to deal with. No amount of reduction can reduce the effective AIP below this, though any excess reduction would absorb future increases in gross AIP.
Yet, the player cannot game the Floor system either. The game tracks the total gross amount of AIP that the player has accrued and uses it to calculate the Floor; the higher the gross, the higher the Floor is.
There are also other things that increase the Floor, which may catch the player by surprise if he/she has not been paying attention – which is difficult because there are so many other things that the player must keep an eye on.
STARTING A SESSION:
Starting a session is itself a big task. The player has many options to go through, from the size of the galaxy and how the planets are connected to each other to the types of A.I. opponents.
Interestingly, the only significant option that the player has to alter the AIP system right from the start is the rate of automatic progression of the counter. Players who want a sense of urgency with their experience may want to have some of that.
Procedural generation scripts govern the creation of the galaxy that the player will play with. There are options that the player must set though, such as the number of planets and the kind of wormhole connections among them; the scripts do the rest.
The game presents the galaxy to the player after it has generated it. The player can reset it, but if the options have remained the same, the game simply presents the same galaxy again. To get a “new” galaxy, the player has to re-“seed” the map.
Some options for wormhole connections cause the galaxy map to look messy. This is especially so for the so-called “realistic” options. There is a handy tool to “untangle” the map for easier viewing, but even this tool cannot solve certain messes that cause the connection lines to overlap.
The player’s starting region of the galaxy is also shown. The player can pick any of these planets in order to gain its associated early-game advantage, which is depicted via icons. This advantage comes in the form of a “bonus” unit (more on this later) that is already unlocked for manufacture. The player may also want to consider the defensibility of possible homeworlds, namely how many other planets that they are connected to.
The player can choose to have more than one homeworld. Homeworlds typically have a lot of resources, in addition to granting a bonus unit each. However, losing just one causes the player to lose the session. More importantly, the A.I.’s initial level of aggression is proportional to the number of homeworlds. Therefore, taking more than one homeworld is very risky.
(There may be an issue with the user-friendliness of picking homeworlds. The game does not inform the player that if he/she does not make a choice, the game would randomly pick one of the possible homeworlds for him/her. To make a choice, he/she must left-click on the icons for a homeworld such that its icon turns into the color that is associated with the player.)
Considering all of the above, the player is already faced with decisions that incur considerable opportunity costs and risks during the moments of starting a session. This is in addition to the indecision that may arise from deciding whether to make a session easier (which may lead to feelings of inadequacy) or harder (which gives rise to worries that the player may be biting off more than he/she can chew).
There is one option that may seem misleading though. Through this option, the player is allowed to determine which among the many so-called “bonus” units would supposedly be in play during a session. This option actually determines the types of units that the player gets to use, and not the A.I. The A.I. has its own set of rules concerning “bonus” units – something that is not told to the player in-game.
SETTING-BARRED CONTENT:
Certain pieces of content are placed behind certain options for starting a session. Enabling these options allow the player to get at said content, but with the catch of adding challenge to the session. Fortunately, the game does disable these options by default, so newcomers can experiment with these options on their own.
An example of such content is a couple of special units that are associated with the human resistance. These ships are more durable than most others, but generally pack low damage-output-to-HP ratios, which is a rare combination among other ships.
These ships are only available for the player’s use if he/she has enabled the option of human uprisings, which has the potential to rile the A.I.
UNITS – OVERVIEW:
Anything that is controlled by the player or the A.I. is considered a “unit”. The immobile ones are usually structures or posts, whereas the mobile ones make up fleets. There are more intricacies about how the game, or rather, the A.I., considers which are units and which are not; the player may well have to learn them the hard way.
For example, on the A.I.’s part, it considers both turrets and ships with offensive capabilities in its planetary systems as “units”, but ignores units that have been designated with the role of scouts.
Each type of unit has its own idiosyncrasy, which the player must know in order to prevent nasty surprises as well as coming up with a counter against it when it is under the control of the A.I. Yet, there are several dozen different types of units in the game, and the A.I. may use a randomized selection of these. Therefore, the player may have to do some research.
This research is made a bit easier by the tooltip that appears whenever the player hovers the mouse cursor over a unit, but the tooltip display also has its own problems, chiefly a jumble of text with the barest of order in its arrangement.
Units that happen to be ships can be widely categorized as “starships” and “fleet ships”. Starships, due to the virtue of their size and mass, are immune to many de-buffs. Fleet ships are the meat of the fleet, and they are generally faster than the lumbering starships.
UNIT CAPS:
A limitation is imposed on the player so as to give the A.I. a clear, seemingly unfair edge. This comes in the form of restrictions on the number of units of any one type that the player can have. To be clearer, each type of unit that the player can build has its own cap. This cap is imposed on the unit all over the galaxy, so the player has to decide whether to concentrate their numbers for use in main fleets or split them for use in detachments.
Keeping track of where these numbers are spread out can be a problem though. They may be spread all over the galaxy. Fortunately, to know where they are without searching each planet for them, the player can use a tool in the Galaxy View, which will be described later.
Generally, more powerful or more versatile units are subjected to stricter caps. However, there are a few exceptions. For one, the highest mark (more on marks later) of the Engineer unit happens to have a higher cap than its predecessors.
Anyway, the A.I. itself is not subjected to the limitation of caps, meaning that it can field hundreds of powerful units or hundreds of weak ones at its whim. Part of the challenge of the game is dealing with such unpredictability on the part of the A.I., though it may seem like an artificial challenge.
(That is not to say that the A.I. does not have limitations on the number of units that it can control. It does have rules on these, which will be described later.)
UNIT MARKS:
The types of units in the game are further categorized according to series. Each series of units starts with a basic Mark I type, which is typically cheaper than the subsequent ones but is apparently weaker.
However, that is not to say that later marks are merely up-gunned and up-armored versions of the earlier ones, though they are generally always stronger and more expensive. Later marks may have capabilities that the previous ones do not have, thus making them completely different units.
This can add to the burden of keeping the capabilities of each unit in mind, and can lead to unpleasant surprises for players that struggle to do this.
For example, the Raid Starship, which is one of the most useful units in the game due to its tremendous speed and ability to bypass force fields and even armor entirely, starts with a mark that does nothing more than its series’ signature abilities.
The later marks gain special abilities that make them far more useful. Mark II and later Raid Starships are completely immune to Missile-type attacks. Players who do not know this may well lose Mark I ships incessantly until they realize that they are not suitable to be grouped together with their more advanced marks.
The game designates Mark IV units as “Advanced” units, though that these terms are interchangeable may not be immediately clear to the player.
Anyway, advanced units are not unlockable through the usual system of spending Knowledge (more on this later), but have to be obtained by capturing a planet with an Advanced Constructor. There is one type of Advanced Constructor for fleet ships and another for starships.
The player must retain control of any Advanced Constructor that he/she has captured in order to be able to build Mark IV ships. This is easier said than done, because the A.I. is more than likely to attack them in order to deprive the player of this option. The A.I. itself is not subjected to this limitation, of course.
There is an option to obtain the ability to build advanced units without the need for Advanced Constructors, but this concerns the recently added hacking mechanic that will be described later.
In addition to holding Advanced Constructors, the player must unlock all previous Marks of a unit series before he/she can unlock Mark IV ones. This is a heavy choice to make, because the Knowledge for unlocking these units could have been spent elsewhere.
Similarly, the game designates Mark V units as “Core” units, supposedly because these are units that tend to appear in the core-worlds of the A.I. Anyway, these are more powerful and expensive than their predecessors. Most importantly, they are immune to reclamation attacks (more on these later).
However, they have even more special prerequisites. To obtain them for manufacture, the player must capture so-called “Core Fabricators”. Each Core Fabricator allows the creation of the Mark V type of one series. Fortunately, the player does not need to unlock earlier marks, which give Core Fabricators their own appeal that is separate from that of the Advanced Constructors.
Wresting control of Advanced Constructors and Core Fabricators is not easy, because these tend to be seeded on planets that are particularly well-defended.
Managing the different Marks of one series is part of many successful strategies, which is something that the game does hint at during its tutorial.
FLEET UNIT ROLES & THE BASIC TRIANGLE:
Any series of units has a role in warfare; this role is generally shared by every mark in the series.
There are many roles, but there are three basic ones, which the game’s tutorial barely mentions (though third-party documentation does highlight them). These roles are personified by the Fighter, which is meant for fast strikes and interception, the Bomber, which is meant for assault, and the Frigate, which is meant for long-range bombardment. It so happens that the player has these units by default – and so does the A.I.
These three units are considered as the basic triangle of offensive-capable ships. There are other units with different roles, and most of them are considered to be “bonus” units, to use the game’s own jargon.
BONUS FLEET UNITS:
Any offensive-capable fleet units that are not the members of the basic triangle are considered in-game as “bonus” units. Before starting a session, the player can decide which bonus units that he/she may be able to use throughout the experience – however, the A.I. gets a random selection regardless of the player’s choices. This has been mentioned earlier.
Anyway, some of these bonus units may be hybrids of the basic triangle. For example, the Anti-Armor is a hybrid of the Bomber and the Frigate, but is more fragile than either, thus requiring different tactics to use effectively.
Then, there are units that are intended for support; these are rarer, because they may empower otherwise vulnerable units. For example, Shield-Bearer series exudes force fields, which shield other units in their range without reducing their firepower like static force fields would.
After these, there are units that do terrifically special things. Chief amongst these are the Parasite series, which have capabilities that concern a minor yet important game mechanic that will be mentioned later.
Next, there are units that can seem completely different from the rest. There are teleporting-capable ships, which can be used in many cheesy ways, and cloaked ships that can pass through force-fields. Incidentally, the more versatile or cheesy a unit is, the smaller its cap is.
However, it has to be noted here – again - that the A.I. does not have limitations that are as stringent on fielding such units. It can field dozens to hundreds of them, which can seem overwhelming if the player is unlucky enough to face these. There are ways to deal with them of course, but it can be unpleasant for newcomers.
STARSHIPS:
Starships are vessels that are generally bigger and tougher than fleet ships. They are also immune to many de-buffs and special attacks, which is something that the game will inform the player about. The game will also inform the player that they are some of the costliest units with the lowest caps around.
Indeed, it may seem tempting to field Starships into their own tough little group, or use them as meatshields to absorb the opening salvoes of a battle. However, there are clever nuances that are built into the minor mechanic of repairing units that discourage this; this will be elaborated later.
Yet, the same nuances also mean that the use of most Starships is purely a matter of choice. This seems to be the case for Starships that can be considered “vanity” items. One example is the Spire Starship, which has a powerful energy beam emitter that can do a lot of damage to a row of targets, but actually cannot contribute much to a heated battle between hundreds of units.
REMARKS ON FLEET & RAID STARSHIPS:
Despite what has just been said about starships, there are a couple of series of Starships in the base package of A.I. War that are next to indispensable.
The first is the Fleet Starship series. With its ability to buff the attack rating of dozens of other ships – with the highest marks being able to buff hundreds - it is practically a must-have in order to make a fleet more efficient. The most perceivable balancing design is that the buffs from different marks of Fleet Starships do not stack, but players can still manage the distribution of buffs by splitting fleets into detachments and re-distributing the Starships.
Next, there are the Raid Starships, which have been mentioned earlier. They are practically quintessential for deep strikes, because they happen to be blazingly fast, bypass force fields and are immune to missile fire (at least for Mark II and onwards). They pack a lot of firepower too, making them all but indispensable in assaulting planets with Eye defences (more on these later).
It would appear that Arcen Games condones their designs and has not deemed fit to nerf these otherwise very useful Starships.
RECONNAISSANCE & SCOUT UNITS:
The game frequently reminds the player of the need to perform reconnaissance, which is just as well considering that hitting planets and conquering them comes with many serious opportunity costs.
Not every unit can gather intel on planets that are not under the player’s control. Although most military units can give the player sight of such a planet, only units that have been designated as scouting-capable can provide intel in the galaxy view (more on this later). Moreover, only these can provide persistent intel, if the player can have them stay in hostile territory without them being discovered. Having them hide is made easier by their ability to cloak themselves indefinitely.
It so happens that the player has the Mark I variants of these series of units unlocked by default, which is convenient. However, their unit caps are small, so if he/she wants more to be planted onto planets in order to provide constant intel, he/she will have to spend Knowledge to unlock higher marks.
Interestingly though, the highest marks of the scouting units have very different capabilities compared to the lower marks. For one, the lower marks are able to boost the cloaking of other cloaking units, whereas the highest marks (Mark IV) cannot, but this is compensated by their ability to retain their cloaking indefinitely, whatever happens.
Anyway, as mentioned already, the reconnaissance of enemy planets are provided by scout units. This is a must-do early-game because all planets that are not under the player’s control are hidden to the player’s eyes.
As long as a scout unit can stay in a planet without being detected, i.e. without its cloak being compromised, it can give intel on the planet for the player. In fact, experienced players would likely attempt to seed planets with scouts in order to track the movement of enemy assets.
Losing scouts on a planet that has already been visited by any scout earlier does not mean that the player becomes completely blind to whatever happens on it. The presence of structure-type units is still known to the player, and if they are somehow removed without the player’s direct involvement, he/she can know this.
Speaking of blindness, to prevent the player from using certain units for cheesy reconnaissance, namely teleporting-capable units, these units are permanently afflicted with the “Blind” de-buff status. They are not able to provide any view of the planets that they are in at all. This is an understandable balancing design.
ENGINEERS:
Engineers are units that the player would use to do most of the repairing and building work that is needed to maintain and expand his/her assets.
The player starts with the Mark I variant, which, interestingly, has a far lower unit cap than its higher marks. This may well shoe-horn the player into unlocking the higher marks.
Considering the work that Engineers do, the player may be tempted to bring them along to support fleets. However, there are measures that the game has against this strategy – measures that are not always told clearly to the newcomer.
The ones that are clear are that Engineers cannot initiate building projects on their own while in planets that are not under the player’s control. Builder units are needed for that, namely the Mobile Builders, and these do nothing else other than enable construction.
The ones that are unclear are that Engineers take extra damage from attacks when they are brought into enemy territory. This can be an unpleasant surprise when the player learns this. Furthermore, the A.I. is likely to target Engineers when they are in hostile territory.
Nevertheless, this is not likely to deter the wily player from exploiting the teleportation capability of Mark III Engineers.
(It is worth noting here that the expansion, The Zenith Remnant, would nullify this exploit.)
ARMOR TYPES:
During the development of the alpha and beta versions of the game, the armor types of units are rather simple: Light, Medium and Heavy. They proverbially exploded into a dizzying array of armor types, which practically turn the design philosophy of “rock-paper-scissors” on its head.
To elaborate, the armor types of the basic triangle of fleet ships would be mentioned as examples. The Fighter understandably has the “Light” armor type, which generally makes it vulnerable to the Missile Frigate, which has bonus damage multipliers against the “Light” armor type. The Bomber, in turn, is the natural enemy of the Missile Frigate, because it has bonus damage against the Frigate’s “Artillery” armor type (for which few unit types are equipped to deal with, actually). Finally, the Fighter is the enemy of the Bomber, because it has damage bonuses against the latter’s “Polycrystal” armor type.
There are many more armor types, such as the “Neutron” type for Engineers and “Scout” for scouts (of course).
One of the most noteworthy armor types is “Command-Grade”, which only very few units other than Command Stations have. Furthermore, the Bomber series is one of very few units in the game with a positive multiplier against the Command-Grade armor, making the bomber all but indispensable against such targets – some of which can be stupendously tough, such as the lightly armed but virtually invulnerable Wormhole Guard Post. (There will be more on Guard Posts later.)
ARMOR RATING & PENETRATION:
Further making the concept of armor more complex, certain units have armor ratings. Armor typically reduces incoming damage, to a minimum of 10% of the attacker’s gross damage. This makes higher armor ratings more effective against hard- but slow-hitting attackers, but not so much against those that can sustain a barrage. (Unfortunately, the 10% minimum is not explained in-game.)
Then, there are units with attacks that ignore certain amounts of armor. For example, the notorious Raid Starships have tremendous armor penetration such that no armored unit is safe them.
DAMAGE TYPES:
In addition to armor types and bonus (or penalty) multipliers against certain armor types, there are also damage types – or “ammo types”, to use the game’s own jargon. These can make A.I. War’s “rock-paper-scissors” system even more complex.
For elaboration, the already-used example of the Raid Starship would be used again. Raid Starships of Marks II and higher have immunity to missile ammo. This means that missile-firing ships, which are generally effective against ships with “Light” or “Ultra-Light” (which the Raid Starship has), are useless against these marks of Raid Starships.
There are even units with auras that confer immunities to certain damage types. For example, certain Marks of the Fort defensive structures grant immunity to Dark Matter attacks onto units in their vicinity – which in turn make Infiltrator units quite useless when assaulting force fields and guard posts that are protected by such structures.
SPECIAL ATTACKS:
In addition to armor and damage types, there are also “special attacks”. These concern minor game mechanics that can still play a tremendous role in influencing a player’s playstyle.
There are special attacks that are easy to understand. For example, there are units that hit their targets instantly, such as Sniper Turrets; many other units do not get the same convenience.
Then, there are ones that are difficult to understand, yet these have the most contribution to the gameplay of A.I. War. Chief amongst these is Reclamation attacks, which will be described shortly.
RECLAMATION:
Reclamation is noteworthy because it practically gives wily players a way to circumvent the need to unlock higher marks of most fleet ship series. The most notable units that can perform reclamation are Parasites.
Before getting too far ahead, units with reclamation attacks apply a special counter to their target when they manage to hit it. This counter collects the reclamation points that the target accumulates when it is damaged by units with reclamation attacks. The points that are garnered are generally equal to the damage that is done, but more points are gained if the attacker is of a higher mark than the victim.
If the counter breaches past 50% of the victim’s total hitpoints, it is marked for resurrection as a unit controlled by the attacker’s owner upon its death. Furthermore, any more points that it obtains beyond this threshold spill over to nearby friendly units with counters of their own.
All these are not told to the player, unfortunately. This means that a player may have to realize the hard way that Parasites are not effective if used against enemies with higher marks and Parasites will not attempt to concentrate fire if left to choose targets of their own (they are by default made autonomously aware of the 50% rule), among other things.
Anyway, additional units that are obtained through reclamation can be of marks that the player has yet to unlock, or even bonus units that the player does not have. This means that reclamation is a way to use the A.I.’s advantage of being able to use more bonus units than the player against the A.I. itself.
The reclamation counter happens to be reset if the victim leaves the planet that it obtained the counter, so wormhole connections can be used as a counter against reclamation. (This is not told to the player, unfortunately.)
Considering all of which has been mentioned above, reclamation is an interesting minor game mechanic. However, many of what has been mentioned are not told to the player in-game, and instead have to be learned from third-party sources.
IMMUNITIES:
Having mentioned armor types, damage types and special attacks, there is the gameplay element of immunities next. Simply put, immunities render a unit impossible to be harmed or affected by any of the attacks mentioned above.
However, some of these immunities concern gameplay elements that are not in the base game, such as Black Hole effects. Players who are still playing the base game are still able to see these, which in turn may give rise to an impression that the base game has more to offer. Yet, in actuality, this content is locked away in the expansions.
REPAIRING, BUILDING & SUPPLY:
For the player to be able to repair or build anything on a planet, the player must need to have supply coming into the planet’s system. Supply is emitted from planets under the player’s control; there does not seem to be any other method of obtaining supply.
This means that if the player wants to resort to rushing an A.I. planet by swamping it with turrets (which is a cheesy but effective tactic), he/she can only do so on a planet that is adjacent to his/her own.
A planetary system can only provide supply when there is a planet. This is something that is told to the player, but only comes into practice if the player dares to play at higher difficulties. A reminder about it can be rather harsh.
Veteran RTS followers may be amused – or irked – that repairs cannot be used as a cheesy method of increasing the staying power of units. Units that have just taken damage cannot be repaired for several seconds. In other words, repairs are quite useless in heated battles.
However, a structure that is being built can continue to be built after it has just taken damage. This can be exploited for cheesy turret-rushes.
On the other hand, the auto-building behaviour of Engineers is suspended if their building target has just been damaged. The player may need to manually queue up their building targets, which can be tedious.
KNOWLEDGE, METAL & CRYSTAL:
The main value of any planet that the player obtains is the bank of knowledge that it has. This is a finite resource, because every planet has a finite deposit of knowledge. Knowledge is needed to unlock units for the player’s use.
Knowledge can be gained by conquering a planet and siphoning its knowledge out, but of course this will certainly anger the A.I. The other method involves the hacking game mechanic, which is complicated enough to warrant its own section. Regardless, this method also comes with its own risk.
Such risk-versus-reward designs for knowledge makes it a more interesting resource than metal and crystal, which are practically interchangeable and are not functionally different from the resources that have been seen in so many other RTS titles.
Speaking of crystal and metal, certain planets have formations of crystalline rocks and space debris that can be mined for them. Some others are next to devoid of them, reducing their value. Anyway, metal and crystal are needed for building and also repairs.
It so happens that repairs and building consume the same amount of resources when enacted on a unit. To elaborate, the costs to repair a unit by a percentage of its hitpoints are the same as the costs to build a unit by that percentage when it is being fabricated.
Therefore, the player may want to consider this when thinking of meat-shield tactics. Fortunately, to assist the player in doing this, there is a tool in the options menu that allows the player to set the threshold costs at which repairs would take place. However, this tool only works for Engineers, oddly enough, where there are other units that are capable of performing repairs.
ENERGY:
Another reason to capture planets is to obtain them as sources of energy. Every planet can support the presence of one Energy Collector structure, which produces this resource for use by units.
Almost every unit requires Energy to perform at its fullest. Running out of Energy causes units to malfunction; force-field-generating and cloaking units are often the first to fail, quickly followed by the weapons of offensive-capable units. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to keep energy sources alive – the A.I. certainly will attempt to destroy them whenever it can.
The player can build Converters instead of Collectors to generate energy, but these can drain away the player’s economy if he/she is not careful.
Interestingly, the player can deactivate units in order to suppress their energy consumption. However, as long as a unit exists, it will consume energy. To free up its energy consumption, the player must have the unit destroyed – usually by scuttling it. Unfortunately, this is not covered in the tutorial.
A.I. GARRISONS, GUARD POSTS & EYES:
The A.I. may start off languid, but it does have pre-existing defensive assets that prevent it from being surprised too much. Incidentally, in the base game, some of these assets are irreplaceable.
These irreplaceable assets are mainly Guard Posts, which are nastier than their name suggests. Armed ones can ruin small strike-forces quickly, while some others are stupendously tough, such as spire shield generators. They may also have force fields protecting them.
Some other Guard Posts protect the A.I.’s command station in the system from destruction, yet knocking them out often involves nasty consequences. For example, the Warp Counterattack Post summons an attack wave on a sensitive planet of the player’s upon its destruction. This wave happens to appear at the edge of a planetary system, and not the wormholes, which means they can circumvent the player’s defences.
Then, there are the garrisons. Every guard post and the command station in an A.I.-controlled planet can periodically bring in its own defensive garrison of units, which by default is deactivated. When the garrison is attacked, the garrison comes online to defend the posts. If the player resorts to overwhelming force to assault a system, all of the garrisons come online.
Garrisons are also tied to the mechanic of “threat”, which will be described later.
Perhaps the defensive assets of the A.I. that are the most contentious are the “Eyes”. These come online when the player resorts to numerical superiority to take a planet. Their capabilities are often devastating enough for the player to reconsider this tactic.
Apparently, Eyes are intended to counter players that resort to rushes when the AIP is still too low for the A.I. to maintain a sizable garrison.
These Eyes are very tough to destroy, being just as tough as Wormhole Guard Posts. However, they can be destroyed by knocking out all (non-Wormhole) Guard Posts in the system. This is easier said than done, more so when the player needs to use only a handful of units. It can even seem like a slog, especially if certain guard posts are placed behind barriers of their own.
Eyes also inadvertently make the Raid Starship even more valuable than other units.
THREAT:
One of the means that the A.I. uses to cope with the player’s forays into its territory is to maintain fleets of activated ships. Then, it parks these close to the player’s holdings, ready to use them for assaults at any time that is inopportune for the player.
However, the A.I. cannot have so many ships activated at any one time. The number is dependent on the AIP counter; the lower it is, the fewer ships that it can keep activated. If it has reached this limit and activates more ships, e.g. to defend a guard post, the excess ships may well stall and become defenceless. The A.I. would have to de-activate ships elsewhere to free up the space.
The above-mentioned designs are not clearly explained to the player, unfortunately, beyond a brief mention in the tutorial that as the AIP increases, the A.I. uses more ships. Fortunately, the player can view the ever-present threat counter, which can show the distribution of threatening ships across the galaxy if the player has intel on the planets that they are stationed on.
By default, the A.I. builds up threat by conserving garrison units that have been activated by the player’s forays into its territory and have survived the encounter. These former garrisons are clustered together into groups in some of the A.I.’s planets, whereas back at their planet of origin, new units would be summoned in to replace them. In other words, if the player ticks off one too many planets, a large amount of threat can be built up from the released garrisons.
At higher AIPs, the A.I. can even release the garrisons of planets at the rear at will and form threat groups with them, among other ways. Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to keep AIP low in order to limit the A.I.’s options.
ATTACK & REINFORCEMENT WAVES:
In addition to building up threat, the A.I. can initiate attack waves against the player, or summon waves of reinforcements to bolster its defensive garrisons. The severity, frequency and nuances of these waves depend on the AIP. The difficulty rating that the player has set for each “player” on the A.I. team is also a factor, perhaps more so.
The most common attack waves are the “regular” waves. These occur almost like clockwork, seemingly uncontrolled by the A.I. These waves can only be initiated on the player’s planets that are next to an A.I. planet that still has a Warp Gate.
However, the other attack waves are much different. Some of them are not well-explained to the player, such as the Cross-Planet Attack wave. It is only through research on the game’s designs that the player would know that these waves have the A.I. summoning Carriers that harbour many units at randomly picked planets under its control. The A.I. then adds the Carriers to the Threat pools.
The player can unlock units that give better advanced warnings of attack waves, but for reinforcement waves, the player may need to seed enemy planets with scouts.
HACKING:
One of the less-refined mechanisms of the game is hacking. To cut Arcen Games some slack, it is relatively new compared to other aspects of the game, but it also seems to be a half-hearted attempt at giving the player some supposedly covert alternatives to attacking the A.I.’s holdings outright.
Hacking is performed via the Hacker unit. It can be snuck into enemy territory, in order to deploy similarly cloaked devices that steal things from under the A.I.’s nose, or sabotage its assets. Unfortunately, this is not always true in practice.
In order to prevent the player from resorting to hacking too much, the player must keep an eye on the so-called Hacking Progress Balance counter. This counter increases by the same amount when AIP increases. The counter is spent whenever the player successfully performs hacking work, which becomes costlier as the player repeats it. Ostensibly, the A.I. would know what’s up when the counter goes into the red and reacts very nastily to the hacking.
However, the tutorial does not clearly tell the player that the A.I. will respond to hacking even when the counter is positive anyway. Similarly, that the severity of the response depends on the difference between the counter and the current AIP is not told clearly to the player either.
In other words, the player may have to learn the hard way that it is best to perform hacking only when the Hacking Progress counter is close to the AIP or more.
In any case, the A.I. will not take kindly to the hacking attempts. This undermines the concept that hacking is supposed to be a covert action in the first place.
Moreover, the game does not make it clear that the rating of hacking response actually refers to how fast the A.I. escalates its aggression. Given enough time, even for very low net difference between the hacking progress balance and the AIP, the A.I.’s aggression can become overwhelming. This can be seen through very long hacking processes, such as downloading designs from the A.I.’s backup servers. Learning this the hard way can be an unpleasant surprise.
Anyway, the A.I.’s response to hacking can be amusing the first time around. It summons in so-called “zombie” ships out of nowhere into the planetary system with the hacking device. “Zombie” ships have capabilities much like regular ones, with the addition of immunities to many things. However, the A.I. has completely no control over them. If they are not able to immediately find targets, they may linger around the galaxy, perhaps even appearing in a player’s system somewhere hours later.
However, as the A.I.’s response becomes more severe, it starts to deploy more options. It can send additional attacks waves outside of its usual schedule – even stack its usual ones on top of these waves – and send out Raid Starships that zero in on the player’s homeworld, among other nasty things that would teach the player not to rely on hacking too much.
On the other hand, the player may well be discouraged from resorting to hacking in the first place.
(Incidentally, the developer is planning to revamp hacking to be more lucrative for use at this time of writing.)
HOTKEYS:
Although many commands in the game can be performed through on-screen buttons, the player may want to use hotkeys for them instead. Unfortunately, as there are so many commands in the game, it is not likely that the player has enough keyboard buttons for all of them. There are button combinations that make use of the Shift and Ctrl keys, but they can pose ergonomic problems.
These concerns are not an issue in single-player of course, because of the convenience of the pause button. However, pausing is not as convenient a tool in multiplayer sessions, at least not without consensus on the part of the players.
A.I. PLAYERS:
Before starting any session, the player can pick the types of A.I. opponents. The player has to face at least ‘one’ player, or ‘two’ at most. For all purposes, any two A.I. players are practically the same; the player will see them using their assets in unison, as if they are the same player. Picking two A.I. players to fight makes the game more difficult of course, because the A.I. gets more options, such as more attack waves that it can summon, and the player needs to sweep both A.I. homeworlds to win the session.
Speaking of options, the player will always have to face A.I. types with their own idiosyncrasies and advantages. For example, the Fortress Baron A.I. often has Forts guarding its territories. Strangely enough, there is not an option for a vanilla A.I. type with no advantages, at least in the base game.
MULTIPLAYER:
Multiplayer in A.I. War is strictly a co-op affair; no player can take on the role of the A.I. Playing cooperatively does not make the game easier either; every player that is added to the roster increases the initial level of aggression on the A.I.’s part. Therefore, the players need to work together to adapt, especially when the AIP counter is common to all of them.
There can be a sense of satisfaction of having been able to overcome the A.I. together, though this requires players to band together for many hours, even for sessions that have been designed to be shorter than most.
DOCUMENTATION & THIRD-PARTY SOURCES:
One of the consequences of the game’s massive complexity is that there is a lack of complete documentation. There are downloadable manuals and in-game tutorials that had been updated a few times, but they only teach the basics of the gameplay.
Then, there are the third-party sources. Players who depend on these to compensate for their lack of knowledge about the game – and the lack of official documentation – may be surprised to know that even though the game does have its ardent fans, the third-party sources tend to be behind by many months. The official forums are also a mess of many topics, some threads of which have been running for years.
Granted, the game is hardly high-profile. Yet, because of this, it will be difficult for a newcomer to learn about the gameplay of A.I. without doing that the hard, painful way.
GRAPHICAL DESIGNS - FOREWORD:
To its credit, the graphical designs of A.I. War are satisfactorily functional and mostly user-friendly. Unfortunately, its attempts at artwork are dismal.
(It may be worth noting here that Christopher Park, who is the founder of Arcen Games and thus the person that conceived much of A.I. War, is the one who worked on the game’s early graphical designs. Unfortunately, the commendations and reservations that would be mentioned below would suggest that he is better off doing the programming work. Former Arcen employee Philippe Chabot contributed too, but A.I. War’s artwork remains hideous. With Daniette Wood joining the team though, A.I. War’s artwork may improve in the future.)
PLANET VIEW:
There are two main screens that the player would be looking at: the Planet View and Galaxy View. The Planet View is where the player would be spending most of his/her time in.
In this view, the player can see the units – player- and A.I.-controlled – that reside in the system. If the player has zoomed out far enough, the player would see icons that represent the units. Furthermore, the more important a unit is, the bigger its icon is. The biggest tends to be the command station of the planet’s owner; destroying this removes the owner’s control of the planet.
Shots that are being fired by units are simplified to simple lines and circles when the player is zoomed far out in planetary view, which is certainly handy when gauging the ranges of particularly long-ranged units. However, sniper shots are not visible in far-out zooms, which can be frustrating.
The icons for units and their shots are visually varied enough to make it easy to know the composition of forces within a planet. That is so, unless the units happen to be clumped together into a jumbled mess.
Zooming in narrows the player’s view of the planetary system, which is usually not desirable. The game could have been better off with a minimap of sorts.
Moreover, zooming in reveals the less-than-practical transition between icons and sprites. More often than not, when this occurs, the player can barely see the sprites of small units. The game does attempt to mitigate this by drawing faint circles around units, but the circles can be hard to see when they lack contrast with the background art for planetary systems.
Zooming in further would reveal how ugly some of the artwork can be. Although some ships do look impressive, such as the Fleet Starship, others can look hideous, such as the missile frigate, which resembles a bug more than it does a space-ship.
GALAXY VIEW:
With a tap of a button, the player can switch from planetary view to galactic view. The player will be doing this a lot, because the A.I. will take advantage of any laxity on the player’s part.
The Galaxy View can only show so many things. That is perhaps its reason for the inclusion of a tool to search for specific things, such as units of a specific type. This search can be done via an extensive drop-down list, which may lead to even more lists, or a textbox that receives text input. This is a very handy tool, but it also highlights how daunting the game is.
There are certain important things that the View does show all the time. Chief of these are the number of enemy units in any system. Others include icons for A.I.-controlled planets that have been alerted to the presence of the player’s territory; these planets will get more reinforcements than others. The Galaxy View also flashes the icons for planets that are at risk of attack waves, among other important notifications.
SOUND DESIGNS:
The sound effects in A.I. War are not always pleasant to listen to. Most of the gunfire in the game can sound cheesy and even irritating. At best, they are functional enough to inform the player that something is going on. Indeed, the sound effects that the player would appreciate the most are the aural indicators that something is going down, such as the ominous blare that indicates an incoming warp counter-attack.
Pablo Vega happens to be the composer of the music, which is perhaps the best of A.I. War’s sound designs. Most of the tracks are composed with orchestral instruments, chief of which are piano and cello. They can sound a bit melancholic and even forlorn though, so the player may want to be wary of any possible issue of depression that they might have.
VALUE OVER TIME:
It is worth noting here that A.I. War had a long time in development, during which it changed tremendously in terms of sophistication.
Moreover, after the release of the vanilla package of the game, and even after the release of the expansion packs (which come with price tags), new content pieces are still added to the game. These include additional bonus units that mix up the gameplay and additional optional challenges, such as the troublesome yet amusing Astro Trains and Exo-Galactic Strikeforce events.
Therefore, A.I. War packs quite a lot of value for its asking price – if complex challenges are what the customer is looking for.
CONCLUSION:
With its very deep complexity and ever-lurking challenge, A.I. War is not a game for the meek. Indeed, all of the things mentioned above would require the player to be very determined to learn the many twists and bends (even more are introduced with the expansions). Yet, for players who are seeking RTS titles with complexity that they have never experienced before, A.I. War might satisfy them.
In other words, A.I. War is very much a specialist game. For those who like it though, A.I. War is a game of high value, with updates to the base game still being introduced to change the gameplay and more likely than not, make the learning curve steeper as well.