Playing AI Wars as a TBS / acceptable pauses

[mindloss]

Anyone take this sort of approach? I'm drawn to one extreme or the other... either play it fully RTS, never pausing for doing in-game things, or try to make it as TBS-y as possible. I usually go the first way, but I've tried the second for as long as I had the patience for it. It'd take forever and a day, but there's an appeal to pausing constantly and considering your options and trying to play perfectly... plus lets you do godly micro.   I dunno, how does everyone else weigh in on the whole pausing thing?

[Zeba]

Its a personal preference I suppose.

No really wrong way to play the game.

[BobTheJanitor]

Pause early, pause often. If I'm not doing things, I feel like I'm giving the AI free time to reinforce. So unless I'm waiting for something to happen in real time, I tend to leave the game on pause constantly.

[Coppermantis]

I pause frequently. Whenever A scout first hits a system I pause to give myself more time to look over the intel in case the scout gets destroyed. I also pause a lot when I need to micromanage things, although this doesn't happen often.

[mindloss]

Okay, that's sort of what I figured... so next question. I've played mostly solo games so far. What's pause etiquette in multiplayer? I'd figure it'd be annoying as crap if people were pausing more than once in a while...

[Coppermantis]

I think I pause too often in Multiplayer, although I've only played with a single friend, as He's the only one I know who plays AI War. Anyways, I generally instinctively pause for the reasons I mentioned above, but I've learned to warn him if I'm about to pause.

[keith.lamothe]

I play mostly singleplayer, and spend about 70% of the time paused.

[dotjd]

You can't bandbox target things in this game afaik (although I wish it were so), so pausing is pretty much necessary to focus fire on something moving.  The list right now is:

zombie guardians > emp g > self-destruct g > laser g > hybrids > tractor g > flak g > all other g > bombers (if necessary to set a preferred target while defending against a wave) > etherjets or other tractor ships (because they always drag my ships through wormholes and aggro new stuff on the far side) > guard posts.

So that's a lot of pausing!  I also pause a lot when I'm considering strategy, or when I'm placing a lot of turrets or building shields or doing other time-critical stuff.  Probably spend at least half the game paused.

But I mostly play singleplayer.  I think I could be broken of a lot of my pausing habits in multi, but not all of them.  Sorry, whoever plays with me!

[keith.lamothe]

You can't bandbox target things in this game afaik (although I wish it were so)

We used to have "paint attack", actually, but we had to pull the command because someone using it with thousands of ships to target thousands of other ships was leading to out-of-memory crashes when the game tried to create so. many. commands.  I have an alternate implementation I can do, but it's really not going to be bandbox targeting, it's more like "whenever you get to this command, if there are any valid targets inside the designated rectangle, pick the tastiest-looking 50 of them and queue them up as targets, then push this command to come back after those 50 targets are gone".  Which could be fun, but not what paint-attack usually means.

[Hearteater]

I seem to recall manually targetting a ship actually set that entire ship-type as a priority targets, rather than the specific ship clicked.  For most purposes that and an "assign the highest priority to targets entering this area" would be all the additional commands needed to really fine-tune control of battles.

[Nalgas]

Bah.  Pausing is for wimps.  When I play in single player, I pause occasionally for doing very fiddly micro stuff, but 99% of the time I'm playing in real time.  My multiplayer group never pauses for any reason.  The only acceptable excuse for pausing the game during our sessions is accidentally hitting the key while trying to do something else, and you unpause it right away and apologize after doing that.  You have to go to the bathroom or put your kids to bed or something?  Tough.  Park your ships somewhere useful and try to make it back before we send them all to their doom, because the clock's still ticking.  Heh.