Author Topic: First impressions of a new player  (Read 3739 times)

Offline Kez

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First impressions of a new player
« on: September 12, 2016, 04:11:06 pm »
Hi,

 I know that all the hype nowadays is on AI War II, but maybe a new player experience on AI War I could still be a valuable thing.

 First a bit of background : I was a RTS player at the time of Starcraft I. Nowadays I am more of a casual player with a preference for slower pace games (turn by turn, eventually with a time limit like multiplayer games of Wesnoth). Oh and I played quite a lot of tower defense in the last few years.
 I am pretty sure I first heard of AI War due to the blog on the AI design in it (I am a programmer). But I think that at that time there wasn't a Mac OS X version of the game, and I bought it only a few month ago when I found it on GOG.

 Well, back to the present, this summer I began to play : first doing the tutorial (win), then a first against two easy AI on 5 and 6 (quickly lost), then a second one against more aggressive AI on 6 and 7 (lost after something like 40hours real time) and now I am on my third game against the same AI (2 hours game time, the double real time and a much better position).
 Here are my impressions :
- the game feel too easy until you go too far without enough power, too easy like almost boring, and then crushing you without mercy, I don't mind being crushed, but I prefer when it comes after a fair quantity of fighting and struggling to stay on board => that's why I choose to go for aggressive AI despite all the advices to begin with defensive ones, I feel the aggressives ones give a bit more feedback about your "place" in the game which is usefull (and they are less boring) ;
- getting infos was quite difficult on the beginning, I like to read manuals and docs, but I didn't found one in my game folder and the wiki wasn't very well organised (much better now thanks to pumpkin) ;
- at least on my computer the game isn't stable enough : I have errors messages in the log about files missing quite often, it freezed a couple of time with full CPU on the setup game screen when using the untangle function and the one I am the most angry : a display bug when musing in the preferences screen make me unable to go back to my game losing 10 or 20 minutes of play, something I absolutely hate (and the reason why I am not playing since it happened a week ago) ;
- I like to plan my game from the galaxy map screen, but we don't get the notifications there, that's too bad :-(


I kinda like the game, but the stability issue is quite annoying for me. Yes I know : I need to go talk about that on the technical support forum...



Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: First impressions of a new player
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2016, 01:59:52 am »
AI War is an acquired taste and it definitely takes a while to get into its mindset. Whether this is by design or just a result of it's gameplay I can't really tell. But it's very possible to end up in "unwinnable, but not lost" situations that are frustrating.

As for getting information on the game...well in this case that's what the forums are for.

Never heard of your particular stability issues. I think Keith or Chris can chime in on those.

Also what notifications are you talking about that you're not getting on the galaxy map? I thought wave warnings and similar things were supposed to render on top of the galaxy map.
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