Incredible game, my favorite RTS of 2009. Forgot it was 2d after less than a few hours
I first heard about this game in a review for PC Gamer magazine. When reading about it I thought it seemed like an ok game and that it might be worth a try. But the screenshots turned me off. They showed large amounts of red lines covering the screen, it looked like an enormous mess. The text under the picture read. "It looks much better in action." I decided I'd rather not see a screen full of red lines whether they were 'in action' or not. However recently I saw AI War: Fleet Command on sale at D2D for 20 bucks(CAN) plus it's expansion AI War: Zenith Remnant for 10. Good price so I thought I'd check it out. One thing that relieved me was that those red lines I saw only appeared when you hold the control key, the lines showed where your units were heading. Anyway enough of an introduction, let's get to the actual game.
Graphics: 8
Sound: 7
Gameplay: 10
Replayability: 10
Multiplayer: 9
Innovation: 9
AI War is a game where you play humans far into the future. I'm not sure how far but I know it's at least 800 years. Multiple human factions have devised an incredible smart AI to use against eachother to control their fleets for them and manage many other things. However while the humans were at war the AI became self-aware, not unsimilar to The Terminator movies. 2 of the AI's from the factions decided to join sides and fight against humans and it didn't take long before the AI soon nearly completely wiped them out, leaving only a few. The AI decided that the few remnants of humans were not enough to cause a threat so they leave them be and set off to conquer elsewhere, apparently in another galaxy as well.
This is where one of the cool and dynamic parts of the gameplay come to play, the AI Progression Level. Since the AI considered your remnants of little threat they leave you with the little equipment you have left which consists of a Space Station, Space Dock, a scout, a Mark I forcefield which surrounds your buildings, and a Mark II power generator (I'll get to the 'Marks' soon.) I've played this game so much but my memory is a little wonky so I can't remember exactly what you start with, plus I click the build button for buildings without reading the names so often now I may get some structure names wrong.
When starting a new game you have a fair wealth of options. Firstly there is only one general 'mode' of playing. Which is similar to what could be considered a skirmish mode. There is no story campaign, multiplayer does exist and is build into the main campaign. I think it's called a campaign but it's not an actual story, it doesn't need one though because this game is 'that' good. :) Anyways on the main menu you click 'Host New Campaign' or 'Join Multiplayer Campaign.' You can also load a previous saved game. Don't let it fool you, the Host New Campaign also let's you play singleplayer or COOP of up to 8 players. Mind you there is no player versus player games, coop only. At first I thought it would be cool to play against friends or my brother, but now I realize it's better with coop only. Then and again though the thought still enters my mind of vs.
When setting up a new game you have many options, since I play with the expansion if you don't have it the following options may not be true to your game. The options include number of planets (between 10-120) map style (the way planets are laid out and connected, difficulty, team colors, handicap, several options you can add to your game to make it more dynamic, such as a merchant who travels the galaxy planet to planet who you can buy very expensive wares from, such as giant insta-kill ion cannons and huge energy factories. You can add human resistance who's fleets sometimes appear to aid you when you're fighting the AI, even a giant alien ship thing which devours anything it comes across as it moves from planet to planet. There are a wealth of options to customize your game however you wish.
There are quite a few difficulty options to choose from. A difficulty scaling from 1(sandbox) to 10(doom). And AI style options which you can randomize from an easy one or a moderate one or a hard one or choose yourself which tactics the AI will use. Also it's important to know you always face 2 AI opponents, you can never have more or less. However it will scale in difficulty depending how many players are fighting against it. Which also reminds me you cannot add a computer(AI) player to help you, it's you by yourself or a real flesh and blood friend.
The game is technically 2D. When I first started playing (I started with the tutorials and heavily recommend everyone to play through ALL of them) It was obvious that ships were flying in a 2D space, you couldn't rotate and see every angle of them like games such as Sins of a Solar Empire. However there is a wealth of good reasons why I don't go play that game instead just because it's 3D. (I played that game a lot since it was released and own the Entrenchment expansion as well.) When you zoom into certain structures or your ships you can tell they have a cartoony quality to them. Mind you they don't look heavily cartooned they just have a certain quality. However certain buildings have been re-textured since release, such as your Space Stations and your Orbital Stations. And now they look much more realistic. They look almost 3D like this, but not quite. But other buildings such as the energy factories look much more cartoonish, but I have high hopes that maybe one day they'll have everything redone the same way they did the stations, but still the game doesn't even really 'need' that, it's great how it is but of course I welcome improvement.
Anyways I was starting to talk about AI Progression and got off-track. When you start up a new level you start with several buildings, mildly protected. The AI controls nearly every other planet in the galaxy besides yours. However don't let this overwhelm you. This isn't like a regular RTS, the teams aren't technically fair, but if you scale the difficulty right you'll feel fairly comfortable. There is only one team you can plays as technically, which is humans. The AI use the same ships as you, however there are ships called 'bonus' ships. When you choose a start location when creating a level you also start with a unique bonus ship. This also makes gameplay more diverse. There are a great many bonus ships and the AI will always have a greater variety of them than you. I read somewhere that it's possible to play over a hundred hours of gameplay and still find a bonus ship you've never seen or fought before. Cool. So when you start with your small base, surrounded by the AI planets first thing you should know is that the only way to get from planet to planet is through wormholes. You can press TAB to go from planetary view to galaxy view where you can see every planet on the galaxy, however many planets you have set it for when you created the game. However depending how you set the fog of war you won't be able to see the AI or their main bases of operation, which are very important. You achieve victory by destroying the two primary bases, one held by each of the AI. This would be like Sky-Net to those familiar with Terminator. These bases will be very heavily fortified however and it will take you time before you have the forces to even attempt to take it out.
So when you start your game one of the first things you should do is send one or more scouts to as many planets as you can. Unlike many other RTS's you really should know what's at a planet before sending a fleet there are taking the planet. Strange as it may sound you should not take control, or capture, every planet you lay your eyes on. Different planets have different values, generally how many metal and crystal mines there are, which are your primary resources. You also use energy but this is produced by your energy factories and used by ships, buildings, and various other things. Well one of the first things you want to do after sending scouts out is fortifying the wormholes around your base, which most likely lead to AI bases. I've never found a planet not controlled by the AI but if I'm not mistaken I think it's possible to find one or more controlled by humans who you can help out to recieve benefits, such as new ships.
Another thing to note in this game is you can get pretty big fleets, depending on your metal, crystal, and energy. I believe you start with 50,000 of each and since the basic fighter only costs 100 metal and 100 crystal you can start building quite a few right away. The other main ships you can build Heavy Bombers and Long Range Frigates and of course scouts. You also can build whichever bonus ships you chose when starting a new game and also several capital ships if you've built a factory for that. Another important but very limited resource is Knowledge. You use knowledge to unlock technology from a tech tree of sorts. There are many things to unlock and very limited knowledge so you must choose wisely. You start with 10,000 knowledge which is enough to choose a few techs to start with but the only way to gain more knowledge is to send a research facility to any new planet you come across, of course it should be cleared of enemies who will attack or, though you can research a Mark II research facility with more armor, but generates half the research per second. Also each planet only hold 2,000 knowledge. So once you've collected all the knowledge from a planet you cannot get anymore and must find a new planet to reap from. Some of the things you can research are better ships. Such Flagships, which are stronger than your usual Light starships which are like a capital ship. Mark II and III fighters, bombers, scouts, frigates, and whatever bonus ships you've unlocked. Many different new types of turret defenses, better capital ships, all sorts of things. The game was designed also so that no ships go obselete. In many RTS's when you come up with some new heavy infantry the light infantry is cannon fodder. In the game say you've just researched a Mark II fighter, well the Mark I fighter will be weaker, however there is a unit cap on each unit. So if you have 150 Mark I fighters and have reached the unit cap for them, you can purchase an additional 150 Mark II fighters, and after that an additional 150 Mark III fighters. I can't remember the exact units caps for the fighters but they're all different for each kind of unit. But after that you'll have 450 fighters, where had you not researched the new Mark II-III you could only get 150. This is true for all units you can get. They all have individual unit caps so the only way to get a maximum size fleet is to get the maximum of each Mark of unit. There are some units with no cap however, such as Mercenaries, which you can get from a Mercenary Outpost if you build one. However mercenaries are much more expensive version of your fighter, bombers, frigates, but are the same strength but with no unit cap. So you must decide if it's worth it or not. In the end I believe you can get up to 30,000 units in the galaxy at a time, or even 90,000 I've heard. That's pretty impressive, even though they are 2D.
My goodness, I've forgotten I was supposed to be talking about AI Progression again. Well AI Progression is the level of threat the AI sees you to be. It starts at ten and increases incrementally over time depending how you set it when starting a new game. It also increases whenever you do anything to threaten the AI. Such as destroying their buildings or launching warheads at them. It can also decrease if you destroy one of their information storage banks. AI Progression is very important because if you raise it too much too quickly the AI will simply send a large fleet after you and wipe you off the map. You must keep it as low as possible, which will cause you to take only planets you really need, or are of value due to their location, such as next to your home planet, or have a good wealth of resource mines on them. This also encourages strategies such as sending a strike force to an AI controlled planet and only destroying one or two buildings to either inhibit them or benefit you. An example of this would be if there were an AI planet that going through it was the only way to get closer to the AI main base, however it held an ion cannon which insta-kills most of the units in your fleet, one at a time whenever you try to get through. Then you might want to send in a specialized strike team, such as a fleet that that cloaks so that they can sneak past the enemy and get right to the ion cannon and destroy it so your main fleet can quickly pass through the planet. This way the progression doesn't increase as much as if you were to destroy everything around that planet, thereby buying you more time to prepare to destroy the AI.
Man I'm getting a little tired of typing and it seems like there's infinitely more things I could type about relating to the game. I might have to make things a little more brief from here on.
The AI is very smart in this game also. It thinks carefully and... I don't know how to explain it exactly, but once you play it, depending on the difficulty and strategy level you set for it when starting a new game, you will feel like you're playing against a very smart opponent who will often surprise you.
This game just has so much to it. It feels somewhat familiar to a general RTS in terms of you build buildings, and a base, collect resources and such. But at the same time it so much bigger, the scope is huge and you really have to plan everything out. It's important to scout all the planets you can. Because if your scouts find one of those data storages of the AI or any other important buildings it will be very beneficial to send a strike force to take it out.
The game reminds me of several games mixed together, it seems like the perfect mix. If you've ever played a game and felt you wished it had a little of another game in it, that's kinda what this game does. (Does, not feels like.) The battles and travel between planets feels kinda like Sins of a solar empire. Moving ships around and some other complexities feels kinda like Galactic Civilizations only real-time, base building feels not unsimilar to games such as Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, etc, only not so simplified. And has the strategy of a grand strategy game such as Hearts of Iron.
One of the other brilliant things about this game is that its seems like there's so much to it, so much depth, and get so little micromanagement or other things that tend to only get in your way. Since this game was made by a gamer just like us, it feels like it gets everything right. All these new innovations in the game feel like it's something I would have done. They are fixes that have been needed in RTS's since they were created.
Anyways there is so much more I could type but I'm running out of brain power and must finish. However I highly recommend everyone to play this game especially if you like RTS's, turn-based strategy, grand strategy. Pretty much any kind of strategy. This game has a homemade feeling to it, which at first I wasn't sure about but now I dig. The music sounds like it was made on an electronic keyboard and reminds me of old school stuff like NES and Sega Genesis. The interface font is a little off but I don't even notice anymore. Little things like that. But in my opinion it's like homemade pie fresh from the oven: once you've had that you can't appreciate the store bought stuff as much. And even though it's classified as an Indie game, it doesn't feel entirely like one, not to me anyways. It feels like a solid RTS. This game is fairly cheap, very fun and well made, play this game. Period.
http://arcengames.com/