Those of you who have been living under a rock or avoiding the Indie games scene may have missed the gem AI War, released by Arcen Games; ran by a rather pleasant old chap. It's an RTS meets Tower Defence game, with a bit of grand strategy and 4x thrown in for good measure. There's also a rather expansive demo available here.
The basic premise of the game is the last stand of humanity against a vastly superior force. Long story short: we took over the galaxy, civil war, both sides made emergent AI Commanders and then the two Ais teamed up. The game has no pretense of being fair: you start off with one planet, the AI has the rest of the Galaxy. You have limited resources, the AI does not. You have access to three tiers of ships, the AI has access to two additional tiers above these.
“But Kronic!” I imagine you cry “What do we do? This game is silly with such odds!”
Man it up, you buggers. The only reason you aren't already dead is because the AI doesn't even consider you worth it. You're so worthless that killing you isn't worth the resources. The AI is “distracted” by an out-of-galaxy threat, and this is your one hope. Playing this as a traditional game, taking every single planet, will just get you slaughtered. As you do more and more silly things in your futile attempts at resistance your “Threat” level increases. At low threat, you'll only be attacked by Tier 1 scout waves, once in a while. When it hits Tier 3, they're matching your highest commonly available troops in ability, whilst being generally able to field more than you can. Did I need to remind you there are two tiers above this?
The AI itself is seemingly pretty basic at lower levels, but this is purposefully designed: AI difficulty is set between one and ten, with six being recommended for an average RTSers first game. The moment you reach level 7 though, the AI becomes un-bound, and the full Emergent Code comes into play: it will adapt, probe, deceive and generally screw with you, and you will hate it. And love it. And hate it.
Games become a careful risk/reward ratio between whether to capture a planet or just isolate and bypass it, dealing with any straggling units that turn up. Your eventual objective is to destroy both of the AI's Home Command Centres, and naturally, you want to destroy them as soon after one another as possible: killing one, as with many actions, will raise your threat, in this case by an ungodly amount.
Your unit count is separated by ship and tier: for example, you could have 300 first tier fighters, 300 second tier fighters and 180 third tier fighters; but not 500 third tiers. This means you'll be using low tier troops throughout the game, leading to choices on where to focus resources. In addition to your usual starting “Core” ship types, you'll have a random extra type chosen at startup available, plus a chance to attain more as the game progresses.
Research is also handled differently; each planet has a fixed limit on the Research you can get for it. This forces expansion to continue upgrading, but at a choice: do I create a bridgehead in the AI's system to protect my Research Stations till they have the research, or do I take the planet and gain yet more threat? Naturally, you won't be able to get everything you want.
Which brings me onto my favourite thing regarding this game: it is built from the ground up to be played cooperatively, from one player through to eight. This allows each player to specialise appropriately, and the AI likewise scales to match. Large games can frequently become hectic, but due to the way the game works, even battles with tens of thousands of ships run smoothly on a half modern PC.
The game itself is near infinitely variable. I'm still running into ships I've not seen 3 months into the game, there are a couple of dozen AI roles which affect how they play, there are minor factions you can add, especially if you have the Zenith Remnant expansion, the worlds are generated by random seed, so there are millions of variants and I've not even covered a tenth of the features.
As of right now, it's on sale at GamersGate for under twelve quid, and that's with the expansion pack bundled. There's the aforementioned Demo will let you get a feel for the game before buying it, there's no intrusive DRM, just a Serial Key check to unlock the game; fully portable for USB Dongle gaming and generally awesome.
Buy it, or go sodomise yourself with a rake.
Oh, and lemme know if you're interested in mkultiploxor; all skill levels wanted.
The basic premise of the game is the last stand of humanity against a vastly superior force. Long story short: we took over the galaxy, civil war, both sides made emergent AI Commanders and then the two Ais teamed up. The game has no pretense of being fair: you start off with one planet, the AI has the rest of the Galaxy. You have limited resources, the AI does not. You have access to three tiers of ships, the AI has access to two additional tiers above these.
“But Kronic!” I imagine you cry “What do we do? This game is silly with such odds!”
Man it up, you buggers. The only reason you aren't already dead is because the AI doesn't even consider you worth it. You're so worthless that killing you isn't worth the resources. The AI is “distracted” by an out-of-galaxy threat, and this is your one hope. Playing this as a traditional game, taking every single planet, will just get you slaughtered. As you do more and more silly things in your futile attempts at resistance your “Threat” level increases. At low threat, you'll only be attacked by Tier 1 scout waves, once in a while. When it hits Tier 3, they're matching your highest commonly available troops in ability, whilst being generally able to field more than you can. Did I need to remind you there are two tiers above this?
The AI itself is seemingly pretty basic at lower levels, but this is purposefully designed: AI difficulty is set between one and ten, with six being recommended for an average RTSers first game. The moment you reach level 7 though, the AI becomes un-bound, and the full Emergent Code comes into play: it will adapt, probe, deceive and generally screw with you, and you will hate it. And love it. And hate it.
Games become a careful risk/reward ratio between whether to capture a planet or just isolate and bypass it, dealing with any straggling units that turn up. Your eventual objective is to destroy both of the AI's Home Command Centres, and naturally, you want to destroy them as soon after one another as possible: killing one, as with many actions, will raise your threat, in this case by an ungodly amount.
Your unit count is separated by ship and tier: for example, you could have 300 first tier fighters, 300 second tier fighters and 180 third tier fighters; but not 500 third tiers. This means you'll be using low tier troops throughout the game, leading to choices on where to focus resources. In addition to your usual starting “Core” ship types, you'll have a random extra type chosen at startup available, plus a chance to attain more as the game progresses.
Research is also handled differently; each planet has a fixed limit on the Research you can get for it. This forces expansion to continue upgrading, but at a choice: do I create a bridgehead in the AI's system to protect my Research Stations till they have the research, or do I take the planet and gain yet more threat? Naturally, you won't be able to get everything you want.
Which brings me onto my favourite thing regarding this game: it is built from the ground up to be played cooperatively, from one player through to eight. This allows each player to specialise appropriately, and the AI likewise scales to match. Large games can frequently become hectic, but due to the way the game works, even battles with tens of thousands of ships run smoothly on a half modern PC.
The game itself is near infinitely variable. I'm still running into ships I've not seen 3 months into the game, there are a couple of dozen AI roles which affect how they play, there are minor factions you can add, especially if you have the Zenith Remnant expansion, the worlds are generated by random seed, so there are millions of variants and I've not even covered a tenth of the features.
Buy it, or go sodomise yourself with a rake.
Oh, and lemme know if you're interested in mkultiploxor; all skill levels wanted.
