Kahuna's Guide To AI War - Find Your Inner Super Cat!

[keith.lamothe]

I've been under alot of stress lately so I haven't had the energy to think about anything besides friends and studying.

I hope things go well for you there, I know both can be quite demanding.

And yea, AIW is a hard game to play when you're exhausted, particularly if you've played a lot of it recently.  It's not a low-mental-energy game.

[undefind]

i just want to say that this guide helped me out immensely. i found myself getting creamed within a few hours. after you directed me here i was able to repel huge waves. currently playing dif 8 with 2 Random Moderate/Easy AIs, Both Golem options (Hard) , the spirecraft (Hard), and Sprire civilians with several minor factions enabled. i realized pretty fast i was way in over my head, but gonna keep pressing on. its too much fun to stop.

keep up the good work!

[Kahuna]

Good to hear that.
3 priorities to keep in mind: economy > defense > offense.
To be able to use your fleet for attacking you need to have solid defenses so you don't have to bounce back and forth with your fleet. You can actually focus on attacking and know your defenses will do their job. And to be able to keep up with the economic attrition you need to have enough resources (resource asteroids).

"economy" includes resources and production speed. You need enough resource asteroids to actually get the resources but you also need enough Engineers (Mark II and III?) to use the resources fast enough.

"defense" and "offense" include exactly what you think. (also turrets can be used for defense and offense.)

You just need to balance those 3.

[Kahuna]

Update: I've reworked the first 3 parts of this guide. I'm going to rework the beachheading part next. Will probably take a week or two.

[keith.lamothe]

Awesome, thank you

[Kahuna]

Update: I've reworked the beachheading part.
This guide has been read almost 11k times! Awesome! I hope I've managed to help at least a few people

[keith.lamothe]

Wow, yea, that's a lot of views for this forum   I don't know why this thread wasn't stickied before, but it is now.

[babautz]

Hey, i am one of those "Brave Newbies" that just finished his first game (7/7 random moderate right from the get go) with a crushing defeat. I more or less devoured cookiemonstered your guide and wanted to thank you for all the awesomeness it contains.

I have a few questions regarding game options:

• Cross planet waves seem to be a rather interesting option, but the ingame tooltip scares me. Do you at least get a notification that a wave launched, or do you have to have an eye on the galaxy map the whole time to scout them?
• Why do you only suggest the easy or hard options of some minor factions. Is the loss of AiP to harsh?
• Do Zenith Traders make the game easier? They seem to enable some stuff that you cant pull of easily otherwise.

[Aklyon]

While I don't know the reason Kahuna had for not suggesting Medium for golems and spirecraft, I could give you my reason for it: On Easy, you get to try them, or you get to use them without any extra AIP or additional difficulty. The score decrease isn't really an issue at all unless you want to poke at the leaderboards, since AI War's scoring system is weird, to say the least.
On Hard, you aren't spending AIP for something that normally does not cost any, but also aren't just getting them for free, so to speak: the AI throws more ships at you as a result of your superweapon potential.

[doctorfrog]

This really grew. Kahuna, you should consider making a PDF of this, as it's basically the 'missing manual' that occasionally gets asked for on this forum.

[Bognor]

• Do Zenith Traders make the game easier? They seem to enable some stuff that you cant pull of easily otherwise.

I'd say so, especially now that the turret re-work allows players to get tremendous utility out of a Zenith Power Generator. 

Plus players get to place their toys where they really matter (chokepoints/whipping boys), whereas the AI plonks them on random worlds.

[Kahuna]

This really grew. Kahuna, you should consider making a PDF of this, as it's basically the 'missing manual' that occasionally gets asked for on this forum.

This sure did. Didn't see that one coming.
Yes I'm probably going to do that at some point. Although I think I'm going to write about Warheads and Gate/Tachyon raiding first.

[Zebeast46]

Wait, what's a whipping boy?

Sorry still trying to catch up on the terms

[Kahuna]

Wait, what's a whipping boy?

Sorry still trying to catch up on the terms

Thanks for asking. I just added an explanation for that.
I had explained it in the old version of this guide but now that I completely - or at least mostly - rewrote it I forgot to add it again.

whipping boys (Whipping boy=a planet that's heavily fortified and takes all/some of the waves)

You can determine which planets take the waves by gate raiding (gate raiding=destroying a specific AI Warp Gate to make the AI unable to send waves to a specific planet).

[Bognor]

Sorry still trying to catch up on the terms

Glossary of AI War, if it's any help.