Difficulty for newbie?

[hilariouslijah]

Hi people of the Arcen forums. I have just finished running through the tutorials of AI wars, and I think I have a reasonable grasp of the basic concepts. However, I am completely stumped by all the starting stuff... . Does anyone know what levels would be good for me to start with?
P.S: I still want a bit of a challenge, just not a complete nightmare

[Lancefighter]

Heres the thing - You will lose. Repeatedly. Understanding loss is the first step towards not losing.

I personally do not recommend playing the game under difficulty 7.  Other than that, dont enable any lobby options, pick a 40-60 planet map that doesnt look too confusing, (can recommend clusters, those are usually nice and easy to read, though on smaller maps can get a little weird). I wouldnt enable anything else in the lobby (other than all of the expansions, because those just open up ship types). This *shouldnt* be too nightmarish, though just the sheer amount of distinct things to keep track of can get pretty high. Below difficulty 7 the AI has some pretty big blinders on, so I would generally equate 7 with the 'normal' difficulty of any other game. Above 7.. well, there gets to be varying degrees of 'hard', and it starts scaling up kinda quickly.

Mostly, learning AI war is going to take time. If you have a strong strategy game base, it might take slightly less time, but its still going to be quite a few campaigns. My only real advice here is to remember to use all of your resources as you get them - Metal and knowledge do nothing sitting in the bank. But those arent your only resources. Ship caps and time should be used as much as possible as well. Fleets should be busy and turrets should be plentiful.

Remember that you can pause (default keybinding p, may want to check settings to disable pause filter and music stop) at any time to look at the situation. Usual reason I suggest this is to get acquainted with the hull types of the AI's shiptypes, and what will deal with them. 


edit - it occurs to me this was posted in strategy discussion.. Sadly this area is kinda barren. I would probably recommend posting in Ai war general for the most part

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome to the game and to the forums   If you want a simple beginner setup, there's a "Setup Script" dropdown along the left side of the screen when you first enter the new-game-lobby.  If you set that to "Beginner Game" it will set up a difficulty-6 game for you and you can just hit Start Game.  Or pick a Homeworld first and/or adjust options from there, of course.

[Draco18s]

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend anything below 6 for a new player.  It gets really easy down below that, but on 6 the AI has some teeth.  It should give you a few lessons to learn before you hop up to diff 7 for the full shebang.

A key lesson to learn is that you can't simply conquer everything (although it's fun to try).

[Ucchedavada]

As somebody who only recently managed to get into AI War after bouncing off a couple of times, I'm going to suggest turning off most of the expansions, and leaving on at most Zenith Remnant for the first several games. The amount of fun that each expansion introduces was/is pretty overwhelming to me, and caused me to get lost in the game before.

[Draco18s]

Or at least turn off the minor factions, superweapons, and plots that those expansions offer.  The map types, individual fleet ships, and AI types are worth keeping.

[hilariouslijah]

Thanks guys, level 6 sounds good and I'll definitely go for that one. Also, does anyone know what AI types would be good to choose? Thanks for the swift replies .

[Lancefighter]

Of late I've been playing all of my games against vanilla AIs. I just tend to scale the difficulty through plots instead of ai type.

[Aklyon]

Vanilla is a nice ai type. Simple, no specialties, just the AI, your difficulty settings, and any options you have enabled.
Probably not the best idea to mess with dual ai types the first time or so, but if you want to, chivalric is probably the least threatening to add on.