Fresh, unexpected impressions from a new player

[BobTheJanitor]

Oh, also stop watching B5 after season 3.5 - although the rest in B5 doesn't retroactively destroy the show like BSG did for some;)

SILENCE!

Ok yes, after the big climax in three, things do change a bit, but it's by no means worse. Some of the best moments are in season 5. It was always intended to be the story of a lead up to a war, being in the war, and then the aftermath and recovery from the war. Did you stop reading The Lord of the Rings right after Frodo dropped the ring in the volcano?

[Red Spot]

Lol, 1 page of a topic here goes from 'hi, new here', to BSG, B5 to LotR

I like the Simpsons 

[Shrugging Khan]

I'm having a LOTR week at the moment.
Shit is awesome! Go Tolkien! Gotta read those books again one day.

OT: AI War is just about one of the only games I forgive its lack of realism. Anything else pulling stunts like "maximum speed in space" would have been kicked off my HD long ago.
Well, except homeworld maybe.

[CoyoteTheClever]

The graphics in this game really grew on me after a while. I like how imaginative the ships and various setpieces look. They don't look like standard space game fare. Even the patterns ships make when you mass a huge amount of them together is elegant, or the layouts of the randomly generated planets. It should be clutter, and in any other game it would be, but it all looks very elegant (A lot of this is due to the great zoom mechanics and the genius of having unit graphics being different on different levels of zoom). You can compare it to a game like Distant Worlds where they clearly had more money spent into the art department, but how everything looks together isn't as elegant and thus it ends up looking like a lower quality production. The fact that the game can use 2d Sprites -and- 3D models for ships and still look good is another testament to how clever the art was done.
 
What could use a revamping is making higher level ships feel bigger and badder by changing their special effects. I don't want a puny little green laser on my Space Plane Mk4, I want it to be big and violet! Or something like that. Explosions could use some love too.

[Panopticon]

Something you have to realize about Grand Strategy games like AI War is the scale of the game demands at least a certain amount of abstraction. So distances, scale and all kinds of other effects simply defy realism if you want to have a game that is fun to play. So sure, the parallax starfields aren't realistic. They do add a pleasing depth to the playing field though. It's just a trade-off that has to be made. I'd rather processing power not be wasted on things like making sure that the rounds a fighter fires come exactly from the ports of highly detailed weapons arrays.

Also, some people love the end to BSG. Others hate it. You'll never know which one you are until you watch if for yourself. Opinions lol.

[TechSY730]

Lol, 1 page of a topic here goes from 'hi, new here', to BSG, B5 to LotR

Welcome to the average level of focus of threads on this forum. 

[hullu]

Oh, also stop watching B5 after season 3.5 - although the rest in B5 doesn't retroactively destroy the show like BSG did for some;)

SILENCE!

Ok yes, after the big climax in three, things do change a bit, but it's by no means worse. Some of the best moments are in season 5. It was always intended to be the story of a lead up to a war, being in the war, and then the aftermath and recovery from the war. Did you stop reading The Lord of the Rings right after Frodo dropped the ring in the volcano?

Well, definitely the most interesting part of the book trilogy was over very soon after that precise moment.

But then again, I'm an actionman!

This derailroad is going places...

[Draco18s]

The ending was awful, and actually retroactively makes the rest of the show less enjoyable by dispelling any illusion that the writers ever had a plan, or even a vague notion of what they were doing. I couldn't agree more with Wingflier, stop while you're still enjoying it. It only ever goes down hill.

Oh, now I'm going to have to go watch the last episode so I can know why I wasn't watching it.
Thanks!

[Vinraith]

The ending was awful, and actually retroactively makes the rest of the show less enjoyable by dispelling any illusion that the writers ever had a plan, or even a vague notion of what they were doing. I couldn't agree more with Wingflier, stop while you're still enjoying it. It only ever goes down hill.

Oh, now I'm going to have to go watch the last episode so I can know why I wasn't watching it.
Thanks!

You don't even need the whole final episode for that, try the last 30 minutes or so. Hell, the last 10 would probably do it.

[Draco18s]

The ending was awful, and actually retroactively makes the rest of the show less enjoyable by dispelling any illusion that the writers ever had a plan, or even a vague notion of what they were doing. I couldn't agree more with Wingflier, stop while you're still enjoying it. It only ever goes down hill.

Oh, now I'm going to have to go watch the last episode so I can know why I wasn't watching it.
Thanks!

You don't even need the whole final episode for that, try the last 30 minutes or so. Hell, the last 10 would probably do it.

Yeah, well, they download in full episode increments.

[Echo35]

Just play the Battlestar Galactica board game.  It's phenomenal.

That too. <3 Exodus.

[Nalgas]

The ending was incredible.

If you go by the literal definition of "impossible to believe", I completely agree.  I didn't particularly like it, but I certainly didn't hate it as much as the people who think it ruined the entire series retroactively.  I'm glad I watched the entire series through to the end, but it kind of lost something somewhere in the middle when it became more and more obvious that they were just making it up as they went along and didn't bother resolving something like 80% of the things they brought up earlier on.  If nothing else, I'm happy I kept watching just because that means I didn't miss The Song, which is so goddamned catchy that it got stuck in my head for at least a week afterward, to the point that I think an entire sub-section of my brain is permanently dedicated to it.  Heh.

[Wingflier]

The ending was incredible.

If you go by the literal definition of "impossible to believe", I completely agree.  I didn't particularly like it, but I certainly didn't hate it as much as the people who think it ruined the entire series retroactively.  I'm glad I watched the entire series through to the end, but it kind of lost something somewhere in the middle when it became more and more obvious that they were just making it up as they went along and didn't bother resolving something like 80% of the things they brought up earlier on.  If nothing else, I'm happy I kept watching just because that means I didn't miss The Song, which is so goddamned catchy that it got stuck in my head for at least a week afterward, to the point that I think an entire sub-section of my brain is permanently dedicated to it.  Heh.

"The Song" scene near the end was probably my favorite part of the entire series.  I actually loved most of the series, even with all its flaws, but the way they ended it was actually so terrible that it could ruin 4 seasons of what was enjoyable moments for me (yes, it was that bad).  I know exactly what happened, they started asking people in the forums what they wanted to see in the last episode assuming that human beings, known throughout the universe for being the most fickle creatures imaginable (especially in this society), would have any idea of what they actually wanted.

Spoiler:
And when they decided to launch the ships at the sun, that's when the entire show was ruined retroactively for me.

I was actually shocked that such a good show could end that badly, almost as if it was done on purpose.

[Vinraith]

I know exactly what happened, they started asking people in the forums what they wanted to see in the last episode assuming that human beings, known throughout the universe for being the most fickle creatures imaginable (especially in this society), would have any idea of what they actually wanted.

More and more shows are running afoul of that problem. Giving the creators of a show direct access to instantaneous fan feedback can be absolutely disastrous if said creators can't hold on to their own vision of the show in the face of it. It's not that listening to fan feedback is a bad thing, but you can't let your audience run the show for you, they've no idea what they actually want. I'm entirely convinced, for example, that this is what happened to Heroes.

This is a problem in other media too, it's even destroyed a few otherwise promising games. One of the great things about AI War, actually, is that Chris has so successfully managed to balance the integration of player feedback and ideas without allowing that to compromise his own vision of what the game should be.

Hey, look at that, I brought the tangent back around to being on topic. 

[Echo35]

The ending was incredible.

If you go by the literal definition of "impossible to believe", I completely agree.  I didn't particularly like it, but I certainly didn't hate it as much as the people who think it ruined the entire series retroactively.  I'm glad I watched the entire series through to the end, but it kind of lost something somewhere in the middle when it became more and more obvious that they were just making it up as they went along and didn't bother resolving something like 80% of the things they brought up earlier on.  If nothing else, I'm happy I kept watching just because that means I didn't miss The Song, which is so goddamned catchy that it got stuck in my head for at least a week afterward, to the point that I think an entire sub-section of my brain is permanently dedicated to it.  Heh.

"The Song" scene near the end was probably my favorite part of the entire series.  I actually loved most of the series, even with all its flaws, but the way they ended it was actually so terrible that it could ruin 4 seasons of what was enjoyable moments for me (yes, it was that bad).  I know exactly what happened, they started asking people in the forums what they wanted to see in the last episode assuming that human beings, known throughout the universe for being the most fickle creatures imaginable (especially in this society), would have any idea of what they actually wanted.

Spoiler:
And when they decided to launch the ships at the sun, that's when the entire show was ruined retroactively for me.

I was actually shocked that such a good show could end that badly, almost as if it was done on purpose.

They did intentionally do the exact opposite of what everyone wanted, and wrote it on the fly, so the "They didn't plan it all out" criticism is exactly correct. They did that on purpose