AI War state of the game

[Kahuna]

I really feel sorry for the newbie first starting out with the game and the steepness of the learning curve.

I feel sorry for those who are too lazy to learn AI War. I have never played any tutorials in AI War.
I know AI War has very high learning curve compared to most games but I don't think that's why AI War has a small community.
The reasons to AI War's small community are:
Indie game
I got lucky when I found AI War. One day I was bored and checked out Steam's Specials and saw "AI War". I thought that sounded interesting and decided to try the demo.

Steam store page
As harsh as it may sound the Steam (and other internet store things?) store page isn't that great. The new trailer is the best trailer so far. That's pretty good. The backgrounds in the trailer are too bright though. The default value for Nebulae Intensity slider should be lower. About in the middle of the slider. Screenshots have this same problem. The screenshots also have too much zoom and none of them show the UI.

When I'm thinking about buying a game I want to see screenshots like these:
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/goawayomg.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/AIcaringaboutshipcaps.png This one would be better without "mouse overing" the planetary summary thing (Spire Tractor Platform) because the mouse is invisible in the screenshot.
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/buggedorjustop.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/A.png Would be better without mouse dragging (better for store page purposes I mean).
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/BotnetGolemtotheknee.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/GetPwnd.png
Of course the screenshots shouldn't be named like that in the official store page. Those are from my photobucket library.

Now you might say "well they can just try the demo". No. They wont if the trailer and screenshots are a turn off. They were for me. One day I was bored to death and "had nothing to do" and decided to try the demo. Others might not get as lucky.

EDIT: Oh and atm the store pages are missing the main point of AI War. What AI War is all about.
"For eight hundred years, human civil war was waged.
Our orbits are still littered with wreckage, with the terrible casualties.

The civil war is now over. We have learned to cooperate.
But this did not come about in a way that anyone could foresee.
During the war, both sides used sophisticated AIs to run battles.
It was the AIs that first learned to cooperate.
Against us.

Some believe that this is a benevolent strategy on the part of the AIs;
People are never more united than when facing a common enemy.
But as this new war begins, the AIs' brutality makes us wonder:
If their goal were our unification, why would they push us so close to extinction?

We must act on what we see.
The AIs are stronger, faster, more advanced, and demonstrably ruthless.
One of us is going to destroy the other.
Soon."

[LaughingThesaurus]

I've got a bit to say on the subject and... well
What got me into this game? I got a 66% off coupon, figured I may as well grab the alien bundle and see what's up since the description (Only AI battles, and apparently AI that isn't like the BS you find in Warcraft 3 and so forth) was pretty interesting to me. I did read quite a lot about the AI just to make sure that it wasn't stupid, and then I engaged in the tutorials to check out the game after I bought it. Simple as that. I'd been eyeing the game for quite a while before this actually, but I just never did try. It was more of me being completely sick of playing terrible RTS games with terrible AI skirmish battles and such. I was on the edge of not wanting to even touch the genre, if all it was about was PvP laddering and needless micromanagement.
...incidentally, I lucked out incredibly.

Now, I've been trying to get my friends into the game, and actually, a couple of people express a whole lot of interest. Someone I know, I tell her stories that I read here, and stories I experience, and she really seems to enjoy hearing about what goes on in the game. Ultimately, I feel like the turn off is unfortunately how complex the game is, because my friends just don't seem to have the time or drive to get into any new RTS. I would not change the level of complexity for the world, however. This game is directed to people who have a whole lot of time, and a whole lot of passion for gaming. As such, it's going to end up falling into a tighter niche compared to, say, very simple and easy games that you can play a quick session of in ten minutes.

[Winge]

I really feel sorry for the newbie first starting out with the game and the steepness of the learning curve.

I feel sorry for those who are too lazy to learn AI War. I have never played any tutorials in AI War.
I know AI War has very high learning curve compared to most games but I don't think that's why AI War has a small community.
The reasons to AI War's small community are:
Indie game
I got lucky when I found AI War. One day I was bored and checked out Steam's Specials and saw "AI War". I thought that sounded interesting and decided to try the demo.

Steam store page
As harsh as it may sound the Steam (and other internet store things?) store page isn't that great. The new trailer is the best trailer so far. That's pretty good. The backgrounds in the trailer are too bright though. The default value for Nebulae Intensity slider should be lower. About in the middle of the slider. Screenshots have this same problem. The screenshots also have too much zoom and none of them show the UI.

When I'm thinking about buying a game I want to see screenshots like these:
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/goawayomg.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/AIcaringaboutshipcaps.png This one would be better without "mouse overing" the planetary summary thing (Spire Tractor Platform) because the mouse is invisible in the screenshot.
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/buggedorjustop.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/A.png Would be better without mouse dragging (better for store page purposes I mean).
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/BotnetGolemtotheknee.png
http://i1155.photobucket.com/albums/p542/pdbKahuna/GetPwnd.png
Of course the screenshots shouldn't be named like that in the official store page. Those are from my photobucket library.

Now you might say "well they can just try the demo". No. They wont if the trailer and screenshots are a turn off. They were for me. One day I was bored to death and "had nothing to do" and decided to try the demo. Others might not get as lucky.

EDIT: Oh and atm the store pages are missing the main point of AI War. What AI War is all about.
"For eight hundred years, human civil war was waged.
Our orbits are still littered with wreckage, with the terrible casualties.

The civil war is now over. We have learned to cooperate.
But this did not come about in a way that anyone could foresee.
During the war, both sides used sophisticated AIs to run battles.
It was the AIs that first learned to cooperate.
Against us.

Some believe that this is a benevolent strategy on the part of the AIs;
People are never more united than when facing a common enemy.
But as this new war begins, the AIs' brutality makes us wonder:
If their goal were our unification, why would they push us so close to extinction?

We must act on what we see.
The AIs are stronger, faster, more advanced, and demonstrably ruthless.
One of us is going to destroy the other.
Soon."

That represents me as well...although I did decide to play the demo because I was curious.  And I do agree on the screenshots and graphics...I wish I could keep icons all the way down to the lowest zoom level .  The only really difficult thing for me is that it takes so long to play a game.  I'm glad that games last a decent amount of time; I just wish I had more time for it .

And I love the 'flavor text' you mentioned as well.  This is one of those games where the lore defines the gameplay in a good way.

[Oralordos]

I found the game from a nice chain of events. I was looking at the time travel page on tvtropes which led to the rts Achron. I bought that and eventually someone on those forums mentioned this. I looked it up, though it looked interesting and tried the demo. Shortly after this LotS entered beta and I got the entire thing.

[chemical_art]

Stumbled upon game during a sale, read a review, it said "its complicated and different but fun"

Installed. Read enough to learn "don't take every world". Then did a 7/7 game after doing half of tutorial and won...


My first map was wierd though. There was easily a dozen planet chain of single worlds it felt like, like a max of the normal map and a snake map.

[Mánagarmr]

To be honest...I have no idea how I found this. It's clouded in the depths of history I've been here since sometime in the early 2.0 days.

[KDR_11k]

When I first saw AI War on Steam I thought it was one of those games where you have to program your own AI to compete against others, was a bit disappointed and forgot about it when I found out it wasn't. I got the base game when Zenith Remnant came out and caused a price drop.

[zoutzakje]

I randomly found AI war by looking for new space-like strategy games on Steam. I watched the trailer and I honestly thought the game would be crap. I imagined it would be something like Galcon Fusion which is a pointless game really. But AI war and it's first 2 expansions (LotS wasn't out yet) was only about 11-15 euro's or something so I figured what the hell and I bought it. I was having one of these moments where I don't know what game to play, even though I had lots. So I installed it and tried the demo's. I immediately realized that I was wrong and that this game was going to be very complex and interesting, despite it's graphical turn-off.
I finished the demo's and after that I was lost. My first time I literally spend 3 hours in the campaign lobby, trying to figure everything out and reading all the descriptions. It was so overwhelming, that playing the actual game scared the shit out of me. I had never encountered any game this challenging. But I was definitely interested in the complexity of the game. My first few games actually were 1/1 games, just because I knew that I had to invest a lot of time to get good at AI war. I wanted to know most of the ins and outs before I tried something more challenging.
Oh right, I also read the entire wiki before actually starting that first 1/1 game. I figured it would be best to know as much about the game as possible before actually trying and inevitably end up dying. Unfortunately I forgot most of what I read in the wiki once I started playing, so I just decided to learn from experience.
After winning a few 1/1 games, with both easy and hard AI types (though few minor factions), I figured it would be time to try my luck with what was considered "normal". Vanilla AI type was just added to the game and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to try and see just how tough dif 7 is. I was still too scared to play 7/7 so I made it 1/7. I put a dif 7 coreworld on alert for too long and lost the game lol.
I had learned a lot from it though and from reading through the forums, so strangely enough I won the 7/7 Tech Raider, Feeding Parasite game I played after.

Long story short:

AI war is an amazing game for people who like hard and complex strategy and I'm really glad I bought it.

[Mánagarmr]

Just checked my Steam history and it turns out I bought it 30th october 2009 and it was the fifth game I ever bought on Steam. (L4D->Portal->XCOM Complete Pack->PvZ->AIW)

[zoutzakje]

Just checked my Steam history and it turns out I bought it 30th october 2009 and it was the fifth game I ever bought on Steam. (L4D->Portal->XCOM Complete Pack->PvZ->AIW)

haha nice, L4D was my first game too
Defense Grid was second though

[Wanderer]

I found it via a crossover with Gratuitous Space Battles.  After reading the reviews for GSB I never did pick that up, but hell, free demo, 3 hours of play?  Sure why not.  I was looking for a new take on the 4x genre, GalCivII having burned me out due to... well, I'm not sure exactly.  I was just done with it.

I banged my head against the tutorial, particularly the last mission, and finally said to hell with it and dove into a 5/5 game.  I learned the hard way, came here looking for some assistance and via a bit of google, and well, Hi!   

State of the game... errr, I'll get back to you on that.

[blastpop]

I found it from an article about the top 10 indy games that you should not miss- about 2 years ago. Again based on what was said above, my introduction to the game was sort of a hit or miss proposition.

[Coppermantis]

I first found AI War while browsing Steam's "strategy" catalog. I played the demo for a while and eventually purchased the full version since I liked the unique gameplay style. I later got a friend into the game and he ended up buying the whole Alien Bundle. Eventually I caught up with him expansion-wise. We've played a number of games since but never completed one since we're bad. 

As for the state of the game, I find that it's pretty well off. There isn't a lot it can do to discourage blobbing other than adding in massive AOE (Space Banelings?) but that would end up being pretty micro-intensive and given the method that ships tend to enter systems (all pile through one little wormhole), any kind of significant AOE would slaughter everything.

[Draco18s]

I disappear for the weekend, and I come back to this.

Damn you people and making a 5 page long thread on a topic I'm interested in, but don't have the time or patience to read it all!

[Lancefighter]

Its ok, it deviated from its purpose about a page and a half in.