AI War is ridiculously unplayable

[GEastwood]

Every game I have played so far has had to be abandoned due to quite simply TOO MANY AI ships!

Even on difficulty level ONE with Lazy AI switched on, and defensive/passive AI styles chosen rather than aggressive styles I was on the receiving end of reprisal waves of up to FIFTY THOUSAND ships!
This number of ships against you would be quite simply impossible to win against IMO, and that's even WITHOUT the fact my computer just grinds to a halt and crashes at less than ONE TENTH of that number! So I cannot play this game, AT ALL, for both technical and difficulty reasons!

The latest game has just come to a total stop whilst trying to run a research redirector and sensor hacks which has resulted in the AI spawning a reprisal wave of over FIVE THOUSAND LEVEL IV STAR RAIDERS! 3000 it sent to the system the hackers are in, 2000 to a neighbouring system under my control. The AI progress is only at about 460 and the difficulty level is only 4! I mean WTF?!!!!!!! This is just bullshit to be brutally honest!

Needless to say my computer instantly dropped to 4 seconds per frame, yes seconds per frame NOT frames per second, and then hung. I don't even see the point of reloading the game as the same thing will surely happen again. And what's the point even of starting a new game if the same kind of 6 trillion ships vs your 1000 or so situation is going to arise again?

This is ruining what otherwise seems a wonderful game!

I wouldn't mind if there was a cheat to "remove ALL enemy ships" from a system - I'd be FORCED to use it not just to even have a hope of winning, but to be able to keep the game actually running!!!!! But despite there being almost every other cheat imagingable, "remove all enemy ships" is not one of them! PS/ And I mean "all SHIPS", not the enemy stations and research centres that I want to hack, no point in those vanishing too!

Anyone got any ideas how this game can actually be made even remotely feasable again?

[Mánagarmr]

If you're getting regurlarly stomped into your boot shafts by the AI, you are most likely not handling your most important resource, AI Progress, very well. The AI progress means that the AI is more aware of you and sees you as more of a threat. An AI progress of 460 is hardly "only". 460 is probably what you should aim for after having destroyed at least one homeworld and are already massing for the second one. An AI at almost 500 AI progress will murder you in short notice no matter what difficulty.


It's also very likely that you are pushing your hacking too far as well, leading to ridiculus reprisal waves.


AI war is not about conquering the entire universe. It's about making precision strikes, taking only what you need and making tough calls on what to take and what to leave/neuter. If you haphazardly run around taking system after system, hacking everything in sight, then yes, you are going to get absolutely murdered.

[Aklyon]

Well, 500 isn't too bad for a Fallen Spire campaign. But thats a different fight for the most part, otherwise I'd agree with Managarmr's post.

The AI progress is only at about 460 and the difficulty level is only 4!

Level 4 in relation to AIP means you will be getting attacked by mk4 ships at best. Its not an 'only' kind of thing, its a 'this is bad' thing.

Also while it probably won't help too much at the kind of point you pointed out, try adjusting the performance profile if the game gets lots of ships going.

[topper]

The hacking reprisal waves are exponentially bigger the farther you get down in HaP, right? So that is the main explanation for the 50k wave and it might be a possible balance issue on easy difficulties (like level 1 and 2), but it seems fair that the AI can beat you over the head if you poke it enough even on low difficulty. Having you lose the game due to computer issues is not the goal, so that is a legitimate complaint. The high number of ships may be due to your low difficulty level since at a higher difficulty you would have gotten fewer (harder) enemy ships.

If you start a new game, you could consider changing the game setup to have fewer ships to start with in the whole galaxy, and as Aklyon said, in game you can bump the performance profile down such that the game is not trying to render every frame and the simulation can continue moving forward at a better pace.

I hope the responses helped and you can adjust your playing style from typical RTS play to the play that is required to win AI War. If you feel like this is truly a game breaking bug of some sort, then feel free to post a ticket on Mantis.

[Aklyon]

From what I've played of diff 1, you can get killed by the AI there. But you aren't really fighting the ai as much as fighting its companions in hostility, with the ai pretending to be important. The waves will do crap all (if they even show up!), the planetary guards are all but nonexistant, but the more extra mechanics you add in that have their own difficulty scaling (hunter plot, FS attacks, dark spire, astro trains, exowave generating minor factions...), the more ships you have to fight. And if it actually has a chance to trigger, high AIP can still cause crushing blows in things like hacking responses.

Also, if you make it to normally-impossible levels of negative hap with cheats, it'll just throw out the other hacking responses and try to murder you with mass avengers, hehe.

[TheVampire100]

First: You must have a very old computer that your FPS drops that low. AI War isn't a very demanding on computer resources. You can also adjust the perfomance profile if you need to.

Second: Don't play too aggressively in this game. Thegameplay is mostly about action and reaction. You do something, the Ai reacts to it. Even the more passive Ai personalities WILL react to your actions somehow.
First, reprisal. Reprisal waves are waves that are made of the ships you lost in battles against the AI (however only on planets you don't own). So this means if you loose tons of ships in a fight the AI will of course counter with tons of ships (I really wish there was an AI plot that let's you deactivate reprisal for people who want a pre 8.0 experience). You can do this by not sending every single ship you have on a Ai planet. It would be advised to scout beforehand if the planet is
A) worth the effort
B) not too strong for you at the moment
C) well equipped against specific ship types you own.
If you target a plnet with a rail gun, you should for example not get all the ships into the system that the rail gun can one shot. You just feast the AI this way. If you don't want to conquer the gun you should just destroy it as first target anyway.
High cap ships are a very easy way to trigger high reprisal waves. Have you something like Laser gatlings?

And lastly, there is an option in the menu (before a game session) that let's you change the ship cap. You can lower the cap (less ships at the same time) which increases also the damge per ship (to compensate the numbers).
Hope this will help you. Don't give up on the game because you had a hard time first. AI War has a high learning curve and was designed as hardcore strategy game. It's hard to get into it but it's worth the effort.

[Mánagarmr]

First: You must have a very old computer that your FPS drops that low. AI War isn't a very demanding on computer resources. You can also adjust the perfomance profile if you need to.

Nah, to be fair, the level he's playing at (high AIP, running HaP in the ground etc) can spawn absolutely ludicrous amounts of ships, and that will bog a computer down new or old.

[legionof1]

Yeah, even my fairly powerful machine chugs a bit when things head upwards of 20k. Honestly its a cpu issue for ai war. To many objects(ships, turrets, etc) each needing at number of things done with it per cycle adds up when your in the ten of thousands of objects. And thats only one system, all the others in the map are still chugging away with there own drain on cpu. In other games that are more visually intense hundreds of objects at once is a worthy achievement. Even AI war has carriers and barracks to help manage cpu overloading issues. 


As to the op, unless your playing Fallen spire, around 200 AIP before you take the first homeworld is about where you want to be for an "easy" game. Likewise to hacking you need to be pretty conservative in what you spend. Of note in hacking is that HAP is not the most important number. The AI response value visible in the HAP mouse-over is.  Ai response over 250 is pushing it for most players.

Also as others have mentioned you may wish to switch to a lower caps to ease the chug factor.

Also i am curious as to what the 50k reprisal was made off. 50k worth of reprisal seems a bit outlandish in most cases.

[Cyborg]

This is an interesting report of a player's experience. The game is difficult and unfriendly to new players, and that's always been true, unfortunately. How many people start the game and realize they don't understand what's going on? Kind of sad, as it's one of my favorite games of all time.


To the original poster, keep your AI progress down and be careful with hacking. There are no free lunches in this game. Every advance you make has a consequence. Your goal is to minimize these consequences until you get to the enemy homeworlds. After you win your first game, it will all become clear, and you'll find yourself looking for a greater challenge with all the different expansions and options.


Additionally, you might want to turn down the ship count to low, and you may enjoy the fallen spire expansion because it gives you a story and goals. Sort of a guided tour that you can leave at any time.


Have fun. Read the tutorial in my signature.

[GEastwood]

Thanks for all your replies guys!

I'll try and clarify some of the points you'd queried about!

1) My computer is a six year old one - but even though that is a bit rickety in PC terms, it's a 2.8GHz quad core, it still handles Skyrim and Dead Island (though the old GPU starts smoking!). The OS is the old XP SP3 though. I have got a three month old machine I can try it on luckily!
2) I'm not really complaining about the tens of thousand of ships, I can always disable my own unit caps with the old cheats and have hundreds of thousands myself..... I'd love it! Quarter of a million ship battles! Woohoo! It's the PC not sharing the love thats the problem!
3) 460 doesnt seem that high an AIP..... I've had it up 1500! (and was only getting 10k reprisal waves at the time)  >D
4) Someone asked what ships the 50k wave I had was, it was Mark IV Parasite ships if I remember right, but the nastiest one has been the 5k wave of Mark IV Raider Starships! I mean, I can only have 12 Raiders - and only 3 of them Mk IV's!
5) My HAP was  nowhere near overspent, in fact the hacking that spawned the 5k Raider IVs was only the second "research redirection" hacking attempt in the whole game. However I was also keeping up a "sensor hack" in the same system at the same time!
6) About the point someone made about only capturing a few high reward systems - how do you get a decent number of research points built up from just a small number of systems? I've been needing them all! Every damn planet in the galaxy!  >D
7) Someone mentioned hi-cap ships, like "Laser Gatlings"..... hehe I had shit loads of those, and kept feeding them to the AI!!!!! 
8 ) I did indeed have a lot of the expansion stuff enabled!
9) Someone else mentioned carriers and barracks keeps the game speed up, well the AI was using lots of carriers, but not many barracks, and I was using transports to try keep the number of my ships on screen down, didn't really help unfortunately!

Is taking out all the AI's Warp Gates first a good tactic?

[Shrugging Khan]

I've played AIW on computers much older than yours, so that's not really an issue, unless...

6) About the point someone made about only capturing a few high reward systems - how do you get a decent number of research points built up from just a small number of systems? I've been needing them all! Every damn planet in the galaxy!  >D

This. You're doing it wrong, I'm forced to say. The only cases in which you'll end up doing anything like that is when playing the FS campaign, or when actively trying to kill your computer. AIW is generally more about guerilla warfare than about total conquest.

let me repeat it for emphasis: If you just conquer everything, the AI will kill you and your computer.

Is taking out all the AI's Warp Gates first a good tactic?

Yes and no. Take them out where they really bother you, sure. But the AI will still find ways to get its ships where it wants them, and when you have no Warp Gates left in the neighborhood, it'll just send them at you wherever it likes.

[Elestan]

3) 460 doesnt seem that high an AIP..... I've had it up 1500! (and was only getting 10k reprisal waves at the time)  >D
6) About the point someone made about only capturing a few high reward systems - how do you get a decent number of research points built up from just a small number of systems? I've been needing them all! Every damn planet in the galaxy!  >D

The answer is that you don't do much research; hoard your Knowledge like Ferengi latinum, and spend it only when absolutely necessary to accomplish a strategic objective.  Remember that Knowledge comes from taking systems (3000 each), and taking systems generates AIP (20 each), so every 150 points of knowledge you want to spend effectively gives the computer 1 AIP.  This can end up helping the AI more than you.
Conquering everything can work in the Fallen Spire campaign, but you need to have gotten the high-power resources that campaign provides in order to hold the line against the AI's forces.

5) My HAP was  nowhere near overspent, in fact the hacking that spawned the 5k Raider IVs was only the second "research redirection" hacking attempt in the whole game. However I was also keeping up a "sensor hack" in the same system at the same time!

I'm not a fan of the hacking response attacks myself.

Is taking out all the AI's Warp Gates first a good tactic?

As a blanket rule?  No.  That's a lot of AIP.  What most people do is take out all of the warp gates adjacent to their systems except for one, and then heavily fortify the system adjacent to the remaining gate.  This forces the AI waves to go on a totally predictable path, where they can be easily destroyed.  This is a bit too cheesy for my tastes, so I turn on Cross-Planet-Waves, which has the waves spawn back behind the AI's lines.

[Aklyon]

Hoarding K is a decent idea, although usually I spend what I have at the beginning on things I'd like to have, like spider turrets and some better harvesters.

[Mánagarmr]

let me repeat it for emphasis: If you just conquer everything, the AI will kill you and your computer.

I do like the computer part. Mostly because it's absolutely true xD

[Captain Jack]

Hoarding K is a decent idea, although usually I spend what I have at the beginning on things I'd like to have, like spider turrets and some better harvesters.

I go for Mk IV Scouts first off, then the Spiders/Gravity Turrets.