Haven't had much time to look into this until now, but I managed to track down and fix the issue... was with Unity and a corrupt font, UNCL.ttf in my case. I just got downloading Wasteland 2, which uses Unity, and the beta of which I played back in June, no issues and no major changes to my system since then. Tried to boot it up, got the initial splash screens and logos, and then straight back to desktop with the same error message as AI War gave me, same folder named the date and time, and same error messages. So, I figured the issue was with Unity itself, and not just the specific game. I probably have quite a few Unity games, and now I've got some free time, I'll probably want to play some of them. Googled the main error messages, and went through some posts about others having a similar issue. Deleted the font file, and AI War and WL2 load fine now.
Just in case anyone else has the issue, the error log had "AIWar.exe caused an Access Violation (0xc0000005)" and then UNCL.TTF was at the top of the stack. If you do have something similar, apparently windows likes to hide font files, even with "Hide protected system files" unchecked. Google around and there's solutions for using cmd line to make them all visible.
Edit: I attached the error stuff to the first post, so you can look at that for an example of the messages.