AI War: Fleet Command 8.0 Trailer

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.com/ai-war-fleet-command-8-0-trailer/

AI War: Fleet Command version 8.0 is set to launch August the 18th (so two Mondays from now), alongside its sixth expansion, Destroyer of Worlds.  One of the best-reviewed PC games of 2009, AI War has continued to grow each year with new expansions, new free content, and continual refinements to the deep strategic gameplay it already boasted.



What's new this go-round?  Well, the release notes from version 7.0 to 8.0 are over 29,000 words long.  It's quite a lot!

Here are a few key changes:

• Linux support comes to AI War!


• Hacking is now a primary resource, seen up on the top bar.  There are also new forms of hacking.


• Crystal, on the other hand, has been removed from the game.  All metal now, baby.  (There were many detailed discussions about the need for this with fans).


• Tons of refinement has been made to how the AI manages its resources and how it reacts to various things that you do.


• An entirely new way of playing with Champions has been added -- a free new feature for a previous expansion!


• Spirecraft, Golems, and Warheads have all been rebalanced.


• AI Carriers now work entirely differently; they pass damage to the ships within themselves, among other changes.


• Turret caps have been revised heavily, so that their main lines are now per-planet caps rather than global, which allows you to better defend on multiple fronts.


• And a whooole bunch of other stuff.

Version 8.0 won't officially launch until the 18th, because we're still in final polish mode for these new features and changes.  However, the current steam version, and current official version in our own updater, are already updated to (at the time of this writing) version 7.055, which includes all of the changes noted above (just minus the last bit of polish we still are working on).

Enjoy!

[Castruccio]

Well that's the best trailer you guys have ever done.  It can be hard to understand what the AI voice is saying at times, but this is superb.

[x4000]

Thank you very much!  This has been my project for the last couple of days.   The AI voice is me, heh.  It was hard to find a balance between robotic and understandable, but I think I did about a Bane-level job, and much better than Soundwave.

[Cinth]

Hey now! Soundwave is awesome.

[x4000]

I adore Soundwave!  I actually want to figure out how to replicate a voice like that, I think it's great.  But you have to admit, he's bloody hard to understand.

He's probably my second favorite Decepticon, though, behind Starscream.  And maybe Astrotrain.

You know the astrotrains in AI War... the purple astrotrains... that wasn't a reference or anything, surely!?

[Cinth]

Aye, Starscream.  I actually had a Starscream way back when... sigh.  Though, Devastator was awesome.

Soundwave's voice was done through a vocorder.  I've never had issue understanding Soundwave and his original VA was the best!

[x4000]

TIL!  Very cool to know.

I have a couple of Starscreams, and one Soundwave.  No Devastator, though... :/  He is another that is truly awesome.  I had him as a kid, but it was the G1 version, and all his parts basically fell apart when you stood him up.  You had to kind of lay him down to put him together from the other robots, and just leave him laying there.

There are some new ones that I'm told really do him justice -- for the sweet low price of $450 or so.  Wowzers.

[Cinth]

I only had a SS and a SW.  I don't have anything like that anymore, moving around a lot tends to make one pare down to things that are easily packed and moved.

Edit: These web issues are getting increasingly annoying.

[Coppermantis]

That was awesome. Agreed that the AI voice is a little hard to understand--I think if it were slower, it would be better--but in general it was really impressively done.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Nicely done.

As the others, I'd prefer if the AI voice was more understandable. These are presumably state of the art AIs, which makes their use of inferior voice communications, that are hard to understand, hard to understand. 

Apart from that quibble, having the trailer end with the destruction of a command station and the AI declaring it insignificant is great - but I think the AI's voiced "Insignificant" really ought to be boosted in volume for the trailer, as it makes a fitting end for the trailer and is easily missed right now.

[x4000]

Thanks guys!

On the note of the website thing: https://status.rackspace.com/index/viewincidents?group=22

Apparently rackspace's particular server set that we are on is under malicious attack of some sort.  They've been working on it steadily, but don't have an ETA on a fix yet.  Bah!

[Salamander]

I like the trailer a lot, I'll have to show people who ask me what the game is about. 

And I loved the original Soundwave too! That voice was too cool!

I put it up on my Enjin wall. Hoping more ask me about it.

[Kahuna]

I can't understand half of what the AI is saying in the trailer. The voice is too distorted and fast.
Still by far the best trailer by Arcen.. and you actually show actual gameplay at the end.. that's really good. "Gameplay trailers" that don't show gameplay make me want to strangle puppies.

[Aklyon]

It fades into being more decipherable in the middle of the trailer and then fades back out into garblygarble towards the end.

[wwwhhattt]

Just thinking about the quotes, in RPS's bit about the expansion Adam Smith writes that AI War is ""One of those games I suspect other studios would have tried to emulate if they could work out how." I'm not sure you could put that in without sounding horrifically smug, I just thought it sounded really cool.

(And then RPS predicts that AI War will start to infect other games, teaching them to plot your doom)