AI War Steam sale - 50-85% off!

[Wingflier]

It's so interesting how different people can view the same game(s), to an extent that it's hard to believe they are from the same planet.

For example, I absolutely love SC2, and can't see how anybody would dislike it.  Likewise, I thought Sword of the Stars was the most garbage was of 20 minutes I've ever spent in my life.  Yet, I've met several people now, both in real life and online that like the game (I have no idea how).

I guess it all just comes down to taste.

[Vinraith]

I thought Sword of the Stars was the most garbage was of 20 minutes I've ever spent in my life.

Base game, or complete version? The original, base game wasn't very good. The complete version after all three expansions is my favorite 4X TBS game of all time.

[Wingflier]

Probably just the base game.  I mean you literally just built from a SMALL group of ships, then sent them in a certain direction, rinse and repeat.  Most of it was just sitting there waiting for your next turn, on and on ad infinitum. The graphics were terrible, the gameplay wasn't all that interesting, and it had all been done before.  I just didn't see the appeal at all.

[keith.lamothe]

I picked up SotS-complete in the recent steam sale and really rather like it, reminds me more of MoO1 than anything else, which is a good thing.  I seriously had to turn the "voice" volume down immediately, though; my initial impression of the demo way back when was ruined by the sound of the human voice for "design complete" or whatever

Anyway, it's very fun for me, my only big complaint is the feel that in combat my ships are performing with maybe 30% efficiency because I just can't tell them to do what I want them to do.  The only efficient method of fighting seems to be the "knife fight" because the AI ships just bumrush me and my heavy-beam ships (the ones further away from the furball) don't really seem to try to line up a shot unless I manually target for them.  It didn't help that they seemed to have a very, very large amount of point defense and could shoot down any number of missiles even with a full ring of light and medium defense satellites and my heavy-beam cruisers being stuffed with missile launchers for secondary armament.  Not complaining about the AI, though, as this particular tactic is probably it's main chance of success against me

Long story short: fun game, combat seems to lack UI "traction".

[Red Spot]

I'm sorry about that.  You say your connection gets dropped all the time? Seems like an odd problem if a large group of people are experiencing it, it surprises me that GPG wouldn't be more inclined to fix it.

The game tends to crash or trow me out or games, where my ping/Inet is more than fairly good.
You got it wrong with the number of people though, it happens only to a small group of people. At the moment I can only recall knowing about 2 other people with the same issue.
The only real advice I have been given is to upgrade my system .... I wont even go into that one.
Not sure iirc but GPG isnt used for SC2.

What did the patch change and the DLC do?

Not really sure, for all I know it could even fix my issue. Iirc it makes some changes to how the queue's work, so they work as they did in SC1.
The DLC, in a nutshell, makes SC2 feel more like SC1 by adding more of the SC1 units to SC2.

------
On the subject of LotS. Could you get it on Steam as pre-order?(not asking "if" we can cause I know we cant, but if you can get Steam to make it available)
I am more than willing to buy it already, but I also want to be a 101% sure I can register it in Steam and I want to pay via Ideal.

[Echo35]

I picked up SotS-complete in the recent steam sale and really rather like it, reminds me more of MoO1 than anything else, which is a good thing.  I seriously had to turn the "voice" volume down immediately, though; my initial impression of the demo way back when was ruined by the sound of the human voice for "design complete" or whatever

Anyway, it's very fun for me, my only big complaint is the feel that in combat my ships are performing with maybe 30% efficiency because I just can't tell them to do what I want them to do.  The only efficient method of fighting seems to be the "knife fight" because the AI ships just bumrush me and my heavy-beam ships (the ones further away from the furball) don't really seem to try to line up a shot unless I manually target for them.  It didn't help that they seemed to have a very, very large amount of point defense and could shoot down any number of missiles even with a full ring of light and medium defense satellites and my heavy-beam cruisers being stuffed with missile launchers for secondary armament.  Not complaining about the AI, though, as this particular tactic is probably it's main chance of success against me

Long story short: fun game, combat seems to lack UI "traction".

Absolutely LOVE MoO 1, but for whatever reason, I just couldn't get into Sword of the Stars. I dunno why, I just didn't like it. Maybe I need to play it again or something.

[TechSY730]

I picked up SotS-complete in the recent steam sale and really rather like it, reminds me more of MoO1 than anything else, which is a good thing.  I seriously had to turn the "voice" volume down immediately, though...(snipped)

Long story short: fun game, combat seems to lack UI "traction".

Wow. I'm impressed that you can give such a nice overview of your "competition". Shows good maturity on your part.  Then again, you are (presumably) an adult, so certainly hope you are by now. 

[keith.lamothe]

I wouldn't really consider AI War and SotS to be directly competing products.  And with the way sales seem to go nowadays it wouldn't be a mutually exclusive thing anyway

[LintMan]

Wow. I'm impressed that you can give such a nice overview of your "competition". Shows good maturity on your part.  Then again, you are (presumably) an adult, so certainly hope you are by now. 

How about this, then: Stardock sells SotS on their Impulse service, and their GalCiv2 is a much closer competitor to SotS than AI War is.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, and Valve sells Killing Floor on Steam, which is nearer to Left for Dead than SotS is to AI War.  In fact, Valve did a recent special with the Killing Floor folks to have the christmas special for that game unlock special stuff in Team Fortress 2.  At least that's my understanding, I've never played (and very probably never will) Killing Floor or any game like it

Anyway, yea, in general it doesn't seem like there's much feeling of competition between game developers at least in recent years.  There are exceptions (EA and Activision with the FPS titles, etc), of course.

[Wingflier]

SotS is turn-based where AI War is very much real-time strategy.  I consider them to be very much different games, even if the genre is related.

[Reality]

That does bring up one reason that seems to support the only-buy-really-cheap-games habit, at least for me: I have no guarantee they'll actually be stable.  Even with demos, there are sometimes crash/freeze/save-corruption/etc issues that don't show up until in the real game and turn out to be simply crippling to actual enjoyment of the product and the developers/publishers may or may not be in a position to remedy the problem.  If I've only paid $3 for the game, it's not that big a deal to me.  If I paid $30 it feels a bit harsher.

I definitely agree with this - I bought Metro 2033 in the last summer steam sale in one of the giant developer packs - I'd been eyeing it off for a while but I just can't bring myself to pay full AAA price for games anymore (espescially with steam inflating prices for those outside America). It turned it I couldn't get it past the loading screen once I upgraded to Windows 7, meaning it's essentially worthless to me. Glad I waited for a deal.

With A.I. war, I waited for a steam sale mainly because I always do so for indie games, because it's hard to judge their quality before playing them. Some are gems that I play for hours, others get less than 15 minutes. That said, after finishing the base game tutorial I went out and bought the two expansions straight away, not caring whether they were on sale or not, cause I could tell what a deal I was getting

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, that's a pretty reasonable approach when dealing with unknown quantities (both in "will it run?" and "is it any good?").  Thanks for the support, I hope you enjoy the games

[ZedF]

Wingflier, Echo35: The original SotS and SotS Complete are light-years apart in terms of feature richness, depth of economy model, and stuff you can actually do in-game. Keith is correct that it draws a lot of inspiration from MOO1 in many ways, and that this is a good thing. There is a lot of depth in there, without giving in too much to micromanagement hell (though there are a couple parts of the game that are a bit more micro-heavy than others.)

If you tried the original SotS and didn't care much for it, but thought there might have been a good game in there trying to get out, taking another look at the complete collection might be a good idea.

Anyway, it's very fun for me, my only big complaint is the feel that in combat my ships are performing with maybe 30% efficiency because I just can't tell them to do what I want them to do.  The only efficient method of fighting seems to be the "knife fight" because the AI ships just bumrush me and my heavy-beam ships (the ones further away from the furball) don't really seem to try to line up a shot unless I manually target for them.  It didn't help that they seemed to have a very, very large amount of point defense and could shoot down any number of missiles even with a full ring of light and medium defense satellites and my heavy-beam cruisers being stuffed with missile launchers for secondary armament.  Not complaining about the AI, though, as this particular tactic is probably it's main chance of success against me

Long story short: fun game, combat seems to lack UI "traction".

Glad to hear you are enjoying it.

Heavy beam ships do often need manual target designations. It also helps if you hit S for stop on them, this lets them devote thrusters purely to lining up those fixed beams.

Personally, I find that once you are used to moving ships about, using manual orders is best if you want precision control over where your ships are going. There are occasions where kiting from long range or engaging in battle passes rather than knife fights and furballs can be useful -- though not usually with heavy beam ships. Getting ships to go where you want them to go and turn where you want them to turn is largely a matter of (a) being familiar with the controls and (b) practice.

[Wingflier]

I'm of the impression that if you have to buy an expansion to make the game good, it's not a good game.  I made that mistake with the original Supreme Commander, which I found very underwhelming.  Forged Alliance, the standalone expansion for the original game, claimed to "fix" all the initial problems, and make it a lot better.  It was no surprise that it hardly fixed anything at all.