Why, hello there!

[Shrugging Khan]

So I've been gone from the forums for a while, because there were no new updates over a long stretch of time and oooh, shiny! I'm impossible to distract. Yeah, right.

But now, on my routine check for all things new and newly made better, I noticed that there's actually been a wave of new updates for AIW! So I go and play, and notice that it's really been a while. So it's off to the forums to me, to ask for advise and...bugger me, the forums are more active than when I left them!

Makes me curious, all this. Has it been this active all the time over the past half year, and I just didn't notice, or has there been some new spark to ignite the flames of Human VS AI Warfare? (Meaning, new content or a new updating doctrine for AIW?)

PS: Just to make it a little more gameplay relevant; does anyone have a mathematically or otherwise logical system for assigning planet priorities?

[Wanderer]

PS: Just to make it a little more gameplay relevant; does anyone have a mathematically or otherwise logical system for assigning planet priorities?

Personally:
P9: ARS, Botnet Golem, SuperTerminal
P8: Anything with two (useful) fabs.  Anti-starship spiders don't count.
P7: One fab
P6: Anything I left a note on that wasn't obvious.
P5: Data Center.
P4: The Datacenter you've got to kill all 4 of to get the bonus.

-- Side notes:
P0: Avoid like plague.  Watch for alerts, SF Alerts, etc.
P1: Be aware of problem.  Black Hole machine, etc.

P2/3: Only usually in early game to prioritize high mineral locations I want to control quickly.

[keith.lamothe]

Welcome back!  A few days ago I remembered some forum threads and wondered if we'd see you around again.

There was a long lull in AIW updates for about... half a year, as you say.  Just one here and there.  I'm not thinking that the recent rate will be maintained since I tend to only work seriously on AIW about one day a week (I was doing that on several of the previous weeks too, just on much more under-the-hood stuff), but it will probably be a lot more regular than it was the last several months.

There's not any one driving thing behind it, but one of the things I am particularly interested in doing is making the Hybrids more interesting.  I taught them a few new tricks in 5.021 but no one has run into them yet, it seems (some are trying, it's just later in the game).  I tested them pretty thoroughly several times to make sure it worked, but perhaps folks are more efficient at killing hybrids on sight than I thought

[Spikey00]

Heh, I recently came back too after since getting back together with friends to do a fiver since a couple years.  It seems the frequency for updates has increased recently, but obviously more sparse than in full production mode of AI War.  The new content (i.e. expansion) will be during Q2-3 of this year, after Arcen's done with AVWW.

[pallenda]

I never been that vocal on the AIW forums, but I kinda also just came back to AIW in the past few weeks.

... and actually played some AIW yesterday, after looking for tuts and reading the AIW forums.

The main reason I came back was that I bought Sins during the xmas sale at steam, I tried it out and while it was nicely made for me the 3d was in the way and I found the pirate raids to be so annoying. The only way I found to get rid of them was by adding bounty on opponent. Din't like that game mechanic at all.

So while trying to figure out how to beat/work around that I kept saying to myself: "Even if I wasn't good at AIW atleast I knew where I could improve".

Had bought the last two expansions but never played them, I tried a normal AI 7 random easier yesterday and just couldn't stop plyaing, untill I lost.

The day before I tried the new Defender mode but failed to pick more than one planet. That went VERY bad hehe. Yesterday I tried again and beat a AI5 Denfender 45mins where I took 12 planets. Great fun.

Now I just need to learn all the icons by heart, spend a long time here and there looking for where the shields were that made a structure invulnable.

Sorry OP, not trying to highjack thread.

[Shrugging Khan]

This thread was meant to be hijacked, by whatever

Well, happy to hear that there's still a constant effort made to refine and improve AIW! I'll make sure to stick around. Can't wait to get home and play another round of Hybrid cuddly hug  Victim...gotta start stocking up on basic turrets again.

My priority system is
Crystal + Metal Income (+ Metal & Crystals saved due to local power production) divided by 40.
So, a 2 Metal 3 Crystal planet provides 100 resources, divided by 40, equals 2.5. Rounded down to 2. Makes it a priority 2 planet.

The same planet with a human settlement adds 90 resources points, makes it 190 / 40, makes it 4.75, ergo a priority 5.

Fabricators, Factories, Processors, Golems, Zenith Power generators and similar items get instant priority 9. I actually made some calculations, and it turns out that they are all worth more than 360 resources 

[zoutzakje]

funny to see that every1 is using different ways to prioritize their planets
my personal way of "P-ing" planets is as follows:

P9: Dyson sphere, Botnet Golem
P8: ARS
P7: Advanced factory
P6: Cursed Golem, Hive Golem, any fabricator useful to me
P5: Armored Golem, Black widow Golem, any less useful fabricator
P4: Artillery Golem, Regenerator Golem
P3: High resources, good asteroids, Zenith energy reactor or zenith reserve
P2: Data Centers
P1: Co-prosessors
P0: Super Terminal

A planet that hasn't got any of these, doesn't get a P from me

[BobTheJanitor]

The main reason I came back was that I bought Sins during the xmas sale at steam, I tried it out and while it was nicely made for me the 3d was in the way and I found the pirate raids to be so annoying. The only way I found to get rid of them was by adding bounty on opponent. Din't like that game mechanic at all.

Yeah, I bought that during the sale as well, and I also wasn't overly fond of that mechanic. It turns into a money sink. Also the tech trees seem a bit overwhelming. And I have trouble babysitting my shipyards, since I can't just put them on loop-build everything. Basically I liked the graphics, and I like zooming in to get pretty cinematic views of ships blowing each other up, but outside of that I wanted everything to be more like AI War.

[keith.lamothe]

I ran into SoaSE before I ran into AIW, and I really wanted to like it and did get about 20 hours of decent entertainment from it.  But ultimately it works better as a competitive game than solo/co-op.  I can't remember the last time I played a competitive video game.  Mario Kart?

[Shrugging Khan]

There are only three Sci-Fi Strategy games I find to be worth my time.

Star Ruler, for complex ship designs, newtonian physics, and a sense of scale.

Master of Orion 3, for one of the best macro-management systems ever.

And AI War, for what's probably the most intelligently crafted game in the entire bloody genre, with what's probably the best AI in any game yet.

[PokerChen]

My priority system, where the upper echelons overwrite lower eschelons.

(Important player goals are coloured brown)
P9 - ARS, Dyson, AI core worlds
P8 - Factory IV (perhaps blade spawner V, beam frigate V, etc.), Titantites and Adamantites.
P7 - most fabricators. Golems.
P6 - AI reductions.

(Important AI defenses are coloured green)
P5 - AI Eyes, super-fortresses, Black-hole generators (big road-blocks, do not enter without prep)
P4 - Raid engines, Fortresses covering ingress points, etc. (medium road-blocks, to tactically destroy, but not critical if entered accidentally)
P3 - Lone fortress, Ions of mark III or IV.

(Resource notables, coloured blue)
P2 - Planets with 6-8 m+c
P1 - Planets with 4-6 m+c
P0 - Planets with 0-3 m+c

[Catma]

Yeah, I bought the game over the steam holiday sale also. I bought a big pile of small games and I must say, most of them turned out to be excellent buys. AI war is going to give me hundreds of hours of fun though. I actually only bought the base game at discount, but the full price for the expansions is definitely deserved.

Zharmad, I really like your system that makes use of color. I didn't like the fact that the priority markers increase on a spectrum, instead of brightness or notability scale. I also like GUDare's idea of using P0/P1 to mark problem planets.

[Bognor]

Well for something completely different:

P0 - Planet I'll need to travel through but which isn't worth capturing
P1 - Planet I intend to capture first
P2 - Planet I intend to capture second
P3 - Planet I intend to capture third
 .
 .
 .
P9 - Planet I intend to capture ninth

Obviously that comes after extensive scouting, which is how I start my games.  To help make sense of the map I use the "Detected core shields generators" filter on the galaxy map, which shows ARSs as A and advanced factories as B.  Intermediate targets are chosen based on golems, fabs, ZPGens, difficulty to capture, number of bordering worlds, and so on.  I don't care much about metal or crystal as I use EcoIII command stations.  Data centers and co-processors don't need priority indicated as I just check the galaxy map with the appropriate filter from time to time to see what I can take out.

[PokerChen]

While we're here, I'll also explain some of the relevant key-bindings in galaxy view that might be helpful.
In situations where priorities conflict or are shared between similar objects, it's worth having keys to find exactly where something is.

tHe general scheme is ctrl and the initial of the thing you're looking for:
AIP-reducing structures : ctrl-a
(advanced) Research Stations: ctrl-r
Golems: ctrl-g
Spirecraft asteroids: ctrl-1 through ctrl-6.
etc...

Both detected threat, and power management should definitely be on your shortcut if you don't have them yet. I use ctrl-t and shift-~ (increase power) /ctrl-~ (decrease power) Move "find science lab" from ctrl=t to something else, say alt-s.

I don't know if it's intentionally designed, but I'm glad that almost everything I need is on the left side of the keyboard in terms of initials. ^.^ I actually use grid-keys for games like Starcraft because no sane person should fly their fingers across the board just to call psy-storms.