I just bought AI wars, and I've spent most of the past couple days playing it (I live in China and we get a week off for Chinese New Year), and I'm really impressed. I stopped playing RTS games when I was about 12 or 14, because I was awful at them----at low difficulties, you just sit around building a horde of high-level troops, and then go stomp on their base, and at higher ones, they tend to come and do that to me while I'm still trying to figure out if I want pikemen or death stars. So I'm really pleased with difficulty five, which I've been playing against----it's slow enough to give me time to think and make some mistakes, but it still keeps throwing things at me I have to scramble to deal with.
I've been playing a 40-planet game, and I'm about 12 hours in (+ an hour or so I played, realized I'd made a big mistake, and went back to a saved game). I built myself a clump of fortified planets, and then went hopping across the galaxy and caught one AI homeworld off guard, which I managed to take down by transporting Mrk III/IV bombers around the map, along with all three marks of Raid Starship, so I was thinking it had been a fairly easy game, with me pretty much on the offensive the whole time. But then, by the time I managed to rebuild, the other one was ready for me----about 800 ships----so I went to get a few more worlds for research and fabricators and the human rebel colony, putting me up to 470 AI progress----and then I got a 1,400-ship Cross-Planet Attack. I went and grabbed the last Advanced Research Station while the timer went down, hoping to give it one more world to distract it (I think this worked), but it overran all my less-defended planets, and nearly got a captive colony on the world I'd used as a staging ground for the first homeworld, all without using half its free ships----and then, when I started moving ships in position for the last homeworld, another thousand ships poured into the fortress-world next to my home planet. This made for an enormous battle across three worlds as I learned the important of defense in depth. Anyway, I'm amazed how much variety and drama you can get out of a game where it seems like the rules give you control of everything----and on easy. It was definitely a great purchase. Plus, I've run into things I couldn't work out three times, and come to these fora, and got great advice from players, as well as fast responses from Keith and X himself. So thanks for that!
So now I've whittled the threat level down to about 900, and I think this time I really can mass my forces and hit the last homeworld. I think I want to try another "surgical strike" with only starships and Mrk III+ fleet ships, since I still have a lot of enemy ships running around free, and I have both a captive colony and the rebel colony deep in enemy space, so I think they need my Mrk Is and IIs---plus, they have a Mrk II ion cannon, and I'd like to be able to ignore it. And I have a fairly weak economy, having lost three remote worlds to the cross-planet attack, and I don't think I can afford to rebuild a really big fleet. So I think my plan to send in a relatively small fleet, take out a few guard posts, then rebuild quickly and repeat.
I wonder if anyone wants to give me some advice about my last unlock? I've managed to get 13,000 knowledge together from new worlds and raiding, and currently I only have fighters and bombers up to Mrk III, as well as Raid Starships (Mrk III), Leech and Riot at Mrk II, and Flagships. I'm thinking of going for any two of frigates, laser gatlings, cannon autopods, and Mrk II bomber starships. I'm tempted to go for gatlings and bomber starships, thinking that the gatling's sheer numbers will distract the defenders long enough for everything else to get something done----but maybe that's because I'm thinking of my first assault against 300 ships, where now I have more like 1,300 to cope with.
Thanks again for all the advice so far! I'm sure I'll be around here for months. Tho hopefully a bit less often; I think I'd really better take some time off now and go outside to make sure it's still there.
