General Category > AI War Classic - Ongoing Games

It Begins - Community Relay Game

(1/1)

Fiskbit:
So here's how it works: games are handled like a relay, with one or more people starting a game and posting it, followed by other players continuing the game and then posting their own saves from later on. Effectively, these are community games played by an abundance of people in a sort of pick-up-and-play fashion. Hopefully we won't get too many people posting saves that start from the same spot; it'd probably work best if people post to 'check out' a save, letting everyone know it's currently in use. That said, if you do this, please actually follow up with an updated save in a reasonable amount of time. :) Also, names can be changed via the Manage Players menu, if people feel the need.



The game as it stands: We're up against two 8.6 Mad Bomber AIs. They've been keeping the pressure on with raids that include large numbers of bombers and some bomber starships, but cruisers by the home command station and a few hundred fighters have kept the bombers and starships at bay, respectively. I've researched mark II and III fighters, in addition to raid starships and harvester exo-shields. Expansion is proving difficult as I attempt to keep up defense on the homeworld, which is costly. Afrvubo, to the east, is not very populated and would make a good first target, but it has 5 bomber starships guarding the wormhole, which is going to be difficult to overcome. Overwhelming them with fighters is probably the way to go when the attack is finally made.

Note that the exo-shields are all currently paused to minimize resource drain, and a mark III reactor would probably be a good investment soon. Regarding scouting, I've managed to find a data center 3 hops away, and the homeworld is bordered by a IV world to the west, unfortunately.

Have at it!


[game version 1.999A or better required for this save]

Kjara:
Can't play at the moment(perhaps not for a bit, my gaming comp is currently quite broken), but Just wanted to chime in that I was always huge fan of civ 4 succession games.

For more organizational comments: Are you looking for more of a succession game(with a more limited number of players (and often, but not required to be a set roster), but anyone can chime in with ideas/suggestions--usually had a [24 hour got it/48 played it + writeup deadline] before skipping people), but basically just passing the save), or more of a community game(where more than one person plays the save for a set amount of time, then people discuss the merits of each, and all play from whatever is the group consensus of the best position--aka like best ball in golf).

In the either case(but more so in the only one plays per segment), it usually works best to post and discuss before playing each segment(including the first--doesn't have to happen for this game, but just in general).  One option would have been to post a map, and have people discuss what starting planet to start with and how we wanted to focus our initial research given what we know about the ai types/what unique unit we will be starting with.

For example, I like the fighters for the starships, but focusing so heavily on fighters seems somewhat suboptimal against two ai types that love bombers.  Would have thought that fighters II + cruisers II might have been better to allow us to leave the cruisers I to defend while we take cruisers II on the offense to the east.
I'm also wondering at the choice of spiders(Haven't loaded the save, I think we have spiders?)--or was this chosen more for location than for unique unit?  To get the discussion started, want to share your reasoning for these two? 

Also, how resource rich are afrvudo, achban, and pihdre?  Would it be worth skipping over afrvudo(and perhaps leaving the command center/gate there at least for a while) to take either achban or pihdre first for more knowledge raiding options?

The other thing that should prob be discussed upfront is playing policy/style.  In my opinion, games like this tend to be more fun if people make mistakes and we have to recover(or not) from them.  Thus its usually best if people try not to reload from what turns out to be a bad decision (aka don't reload 10 mins back if you get raided more heavily in a planet then you were expecting to build a bunch more turrets there).  I know some people have different ways they like to play games (and the saves aren't set to be "hardcore" for a reason), so this is obviously open for discussion.  I've found that if we have to recover from mistakes it tends to lead to more discussion/improvement of play by those involved (and theres really no way to prevent someone from doing it, its more of an attitude that we have, that if someone makes a mistake we talk about how to avoid it in the future,and how to recover from it rather than being more abrasive about it).  Remember, losing is fun (couldn't resist) :).

Edit: oh yeah, the last policy situation is how do we want to handle patches for games in progress.  Not a huge deal, but should either agree to upgrade as we go, or play at patch it was it was started as.  I'd suggest for now a upgrade as we go(considering the frequency of updates).  But eventually we may want to migrate the other direction.  It always sucks to have a nice strategy worked out, and then have it be broken by some patch change :).

Fiskbit:
Well, I don't want to set much in terms of rules on how people do this. Much of the thinking behind this is that it supplies something people can pick up, play, and then repost so that the game eventually winds up getting finished and that you can follow to some extent as it goes along. AI War is a game of interesting decisions, and I think the interesting decisions resulting from starting up at a random point in a campaign that someone else has been playing previously are pretty appealing, especially combined with the fact that it lets you probably avoid the start of the game (which isn't necessarily the most appealing part of the game to everyone). This also lets you play something substantial for a few hours while still making a real contribution to a game if you don't want to commit to a whole campaign. I'd love to see games geared toward multiple players, too; would work great, especially for those of us on IRC who could just play an ad hoc mid-campaign game when people have an hour of free time.

If people want to do it more in-depth where there's a real community effort to every leg of the game, then they're certainly welcome to it. If they just want to pick up, play, and put up their updated version for someone else to do the same to later, that's great, too (and more in line with what I'd been expecting initially). The former is probably more than I'd be willing to do, myself, in a game I'm participating in, but I'm sometimes rather lazy and also often busy with other things. :P I'm also interested in just grabbing a save at some point and playing, putting up a new save when I'm done. I look forward to the interesting circumstances it'll put me in that I likely wouldn't be in if I'd been playing from the start myself.

Regarding my choice of fighters, I chose them because of the bomber starships, cutlasses, and cruisers that mad bombers like to send. Honestly, even mark I-III, I wish I had even more of them. Mark II cruisers don't seem all that necessary at the moment because mark I is capable of taking out the bombers being sent against me quickly enough. The raid starship is there much for it's ability to take out things underneath forcefields, which I've been seeing on enemy worlds. The special ship is deflector drones, a ship type I much love and which is pretty powerful in general against mobile military units. It's also rather fast and has a large range and high ship cap. It's definitely a good bonus ship type. :)

In this game, I have a lot of interest in getting the worlds next to the homeworld because of the buffer it'll create; mad bombers in particular are AIs I'm not comfortable having direct access to the homeworld. If you want to skip over one of those worlds in a game that's less structured like I had been expecting this one to be (though again, it's okay if it's different!), do so and make a note of it in the thread and/or on the galaxy map for that planet and hopefully people will respect that if they consider it viable. :)

As for making mistakes, I think it's great if we have to recover from mistakes and think it's wise to encourage people not to try to play optimally through reloading. Regarding losses, if someone is able to get the game to continue, then I think it should continue, though perhaps with losses noted in the thread. I think it'd be unfortunate for playing that's less skilled than necessary for the campaign to make the game halt in its tracks for those who'd like to see it continue.

Regarding patches, one of the awesome things about AI War is the fairly frequent updates and additions. As long as an update doesn't 'break' the in-progress game, I think that playing it on the most recent version is the way to go.

Sound good?

Kjara:
Ah, I don't have as nearly as much experience, I would have expected more bombers from a mad bomber ai type :).  Considering the unit mix you are describing (plus the fact that bombers are a bit less dangerous than they used to be), it sounds like fighters are the way to go.

Totally fine with a more laid back style for at least the first few games.  If people want to start something more structured they can, no need to force anyone into it.

Haven't even tried that unique unit yet, so I can't comment (was basing my spider comment just off the little picture), but only having two adjacent worlds sounds like a good thing if you want to seal off all entrances to your homeworld.  I've been tending towards more of a raid based style of game play, so I love starting with something like raiders or infiltrators.

With game ending mistakes, should either let them start over at least once from the previous person's save, or let someone else pick up the save.  That way people arn't discouraged from stretching up to a difficulty a step or two above what they are comfortable with.

All in all, sounds good, just wanted to get the expectations out there :).

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