Gameplay thoughts from a newer player

[lanstro]

Hi

I've been playing AI War vanilla for the last few weeks with 2-3 friends.  We've put in about 30-40 hours now into about 6 games, at difficulties ranging from 1 (quickly abandoned) to 7 to 9 (which we're doing well on) to 8 with 2x waves (probably the most fun setting), mostly on 40 planets realistic with all ships enabled.

First of all - I'm very impressed that this has essentially been a 1 man project and well done and thank you for making this fun game.

For those of you who don't want to read a long post, skip down to the end for my gameplay suggestions.

On the AI and the gameplay in general, I'm sorry to go against the flow, but it just doesn't seem like it's anything amazing.  My friends and I have played a range of strategy games so are familiar with the genre, and we think the AI and the gameplay experience can do with more tweaking to make this good game great.  The game mechanics makes the AI very predictable (namely: gate/command center raiding to limit the wave entry points, and the game announcing where and when a wave is going to hit), and the AI does not attack the humans back frequently enough.  I do note that the last complaint is largely ameliorated by 2x waves.

My biggest gripe, however, is that even on difficulties 8 or 9, it feels like the human players can only really lose if they screw up.  That is, they lose because they raided a high mark planet too early, or they forgot about an incoming wave, or they took too many planets/got the threat too high, or they underestimated a cross planetary attack, etc.  Losing because the AI pulled some amazing unforeseen move just doesn't seem possible, because you KNOW that the AI can only attack by waves, by CPAs or by trains/special forces.  Waves can be funneled into your deathtrap of doom, waves and CPAs you get ample warning for, and special forces attacks are easily scouted and then later stopped by raiding. 

Now I'm not denying that the AI does do a reasonable job with micromanaging its troops (eg etherjets) or that the AI does occasionally pull surprising moves (we were hit with a cloaked strike on our mark IV factories yesterday).  However these 'surprising' moves are few and far inbetween and the game feels rather static and the AI far too passive.  The overall 'feel' is that the humans will inevitably grind their way to a win unless they do something stupid.  The AI never does anything that MAKES you come at it.  The next move is not dictated by the AI.  The ball's always in the players' court.

The game's still fun for us for now because we're still learning and seeing new ships and new uses for them, and we just like playing co-op games.  But at this stage it seems like the core gameplay will become predictable quickly.  The strategic thinking required of the player is the most attractive feature of the game, but it just seems like the game doesn't throw up interesting or difficult strategic decisions often.  It's usually pretty obvious which order you should conquer planets, which one you should make your 'whipping boy', whether to go for the adv research center or save the human rebels, etc etc.  And because the AI is so static, getting wrong a strategic decision without an obvious 'right' option isn't punished.

You might say that the right answer is to bump the difficulty further up, or to play just the technologist AIs.  But I don't think that's a good answer.  Yes, we would lose under those conditions.  But not because the AI got any smarter and learnt new moves, or because we make the wrong strategic decisions.  It'd be because the AI will roll over us with brute strength.  The better way to make the game more challenging is by tweaking the game mechanics and improving the game as a whole.

My suggestion for improving the gameplay experience is therefore as follows:
1. don't show the wave attack location or a countdown timer for waves/CPAs, but let scouts warn you about AI ship spikes on planets.  Perhaps introduce a new tech or unit or other game mechanism where you can 'hack' into one of the AIs and see where or when it plans on attacking
2. nerf the gate raiding strategy: killing the gate should make attacks from the planet less likely, but hardly impossible
3. increase the number of cross planetary attacks (and decreasing the size of each attack)
(1-3 will force players to make a choice between obtaining natural chokepoint planets to lessen the risk of attack, or not pushing for the natural chokepoints but keeping the AI progress down.  It'll of course also make everyday life much more dynamic.)
4. tie the troops spawned by a planet to its mark level.  It's currently too easy to ignore a mark 4 planet by just sticking a few towers on the wormhole leading into it, and then gate raiding it in the midgame.  A scary mark 3/4 planet nearby should be a scary source of waves that the player must go after and clear out at some point in time, not able to be just ignored.  Then, as the AI threat goes up and passes through each mark level, the AI's weak planets upgrade to that mark level.  (eg if the AI threat goes past the threshold for mark 2, all of the AI's mark 1 planets upgrade to mark 2).
5. change the role of data centers slightly.  Instead of placing them at the start of a game, let the AI be able to over time build them.  Every time it completes one let its AI threat level go up by say, 40.  It then is up to the player to go after it to get rid of it. 
6. let the AI build special forces guard posts, train stations and the modified data centers over time (up to a cap).
(4-6 will force the players to go after the AI, that is, the AI will force the next move in the game, rather than the player.)

These changes should make the game much less predictable and increase the number of strategic decisions the players have to make during the course of a game.  I'd need to drop down a few difficulty levels to survive if these changes were all made, but it'd be well worth it I think.

Thanks for reading
Lanstro

[keith.lamothe]

Thank you very much for your thoughts; you aren't the only one to feel it's too ball-is-always-in-the-players-court; that's basically one of the core implications of the design; the standard set of options puts you in a position where you aren't forced to do much, and can take your time.  Many (most?) of us enjoy it this way

However, this game is one with a great many options to help satisfy a wide range of players; a couple that we've already added during this prerelease cycle may really appeal to you:

No Wave Warnings - what it says on the tin
Cross Planet Waves - basically makes warp gates irrelevant, it just spawns the waves on an AI planet (usually not adjacent to your planets) and they make their way to you via open space
(turn off) Show unexplored planets - you start not knowing the structure of the galaxy, and have to explore each new planet by sending a scout through the wormhole

Also, while you don't want a brute-force steamroll, you may want to crank up the Auto-AI-progress-per-time-interval options to taste.

I'd be interested in knowing your followup feedback after an 8/8 game with those options against some moderate/harder AI types

[keith.lamothe]

Oh, and if you want some endgame spice, turn on the Avenger plot for both AIs.  Just save before you blow up one of the AI Home Command Stations

[allmybase]

To the original poster, I sort of see what you're getting at. After you get really used to how the AI generates attacks, then it is mostly a player-controlled game.

However like keith was saying, many of your suggestions can be emulated already by using the pre-release in game options - hide the waves, cross planet waves makes it so gate raiding is useless and also you don't know when they're coming.

Also if you've tried the game on difficult 10 setting, you'd realize that there are TONS of mkIV planets, I started out bordering 3 of them. When you try the highest difficulty setting you begin to realize that your previous strategies just don't work anymore - you can't ignore the MKIVs because there are just so many of them, and especially early on this is devastating as it's hard to find resource planets.

There is also a lot of granularity in the game based on the AI types you pick. For instance if you pick double trainmasters, you suddenly have a monster of a game, or double special forces captains. Or you like the whole surprise thing, you can pick double backdoor hacker so they can always warp a wave right into any of your planets regardless of gate raiding. Even double homeworlders provides an interesting twist because there are so many human captive settlements, making planet taking very strategic oriented.

Also like keith was saying you can always increase the passive AIP. That forces you to get off your butt and get out there. Also a lot of the minor factions force you to get off your butt like rebellions, devourer golem, mining golem.

[SmileyFace]

Welcome lanstro! I'm quite new to AI War, too

All of your suggestions can be met with existing options, to my knowledge. CPA waves, in particular, will solve many of them. As for the AI "forcing your hand", try a +1/2 AIP increase every 5 minutes or something to your taste. You will then have to move fast or eventually stalemate or lose.

For suggestion 6, the expansion takes care of that. In the expansion, the AI can occasionally build new structures through a special unit, so the landscape will change so to speak.

Other than that... I have no suggestions. AI War is an entirely player-centric experience and due to its design, it can't be anything else. I see a strong part of the appeal of AI War being that players drive the game. It's a fairly uncommon design philosophy in games but it makes a lot of sense. Why should a computer decide my goals for me and tell me what to do next? I might want to do something else today, and since a computer doesn't care either way, why not give me that choice? I find this much more fun, even if it feels like a bit of a sandbox compared to the usual "first do this, now do that" structure.

[keith.lamothe]

All of your suggestions can be met with existing options, to my knowledge.

Well, not quite all of them, "4. tie the troops spawned by a planet to its mark level..." doesn't really happen early game, as far as waves spawned (the reinforcements spawned are tied to mark of the planet, but those are defensive).  It would be interesting to look at an option that would auto-release X percent of each AI reinforcement (only every Y reinforcements, probably) so you'd have a big wide-front mixed-mark "wave" coming at you every now and then... but that would probably be more intense than most players would want to handle.

I'd like to hear lanstro's feedback on using the other suggested options before looking at adding that or other "player-is-really-asking-for-it" options, but we can if desired

[WinterBorn]

[snip]
 It would be interesting to look at an option that would auto-release X percent of each AI reinforcement (only every Y reinforcements, probably) so you'd have a big wide-front mixed-mark "wave" coming at you every now and then... but that would probably be more intense than most players would want to handle.

Oooh An option to release a percentage of units from all the AI planets at the same time would be very interesting
20,000 AI ships 5% = 1000 ships all starting at different distances from the human frontier. If nothing else it would help slow crust formation on the alerted planets. Of course for the crust planet ships released you would have virtualy no warning  

[keith.lamothe]

Ah, I meant percent of a given reinforcement, rather than all ships on all planets (that could kill your framerate even worse than it would kill your planets).  Ever watch an AI planet for a while and see a bunch of ships and turrets and whatnot pop out of nowhere?  That was a reinforcement; I'm saying that a certain percent of the ships added in one of those could be immediately freed to go after you, rather than clinging to a guard post.

And perhaps it could be set up so that if a planet is at/close-to it's "cap" that instead of redirecting those reinforcement checks to other planets (and thus building up tons of crust on them too), it would just release all of those (or more realistically just a higher percent of those, and reinforce fewer other planets).  This would obviously be a niche-option (and perhaps later an AI type), as balancing will be tricky and the no-warning nature of it would be off-putting to much of the player base.

[RCIX]

Welcome lanstro, we're always glad to hear new player's thoughts on how the game feels (the community)! if you have/get the expansion, then you can turn on the Zenith Trader (which is actually kind of in need of balance discussion for the player side) which allows the AI to do things like rebuy Warp gates, purchase high-level forcefields, and buy Ion cannons.

If you pick a Tag Teamer AI (this one might be from the expansion, not sure), then you'll often get unannounced ships trickling in from nearby planets. most of the AI ships will charge you when you go to attack a planet as well, which i devastating if you're not prepared for it.

However, this game is one with a great many options to help satisfy a wide range of players; a couple that we've already added during this prerelease cycle may really appeal to you:
[snip]
Cross Planet Waves - basically makes warp gates irrelevant, it just spawns the waves on an AI planet (usually not adjacent to your planets) and they make their way to you via open space

Who knew? i must have been playing with a special prerelease from the future all this time then

[FrostyThePyro]

Ah, I meant percent of a given reinforcement, rather than all ships on all planets (that could kill your framerate even worse than it would kill your planets).  Ever watch an AI planet for a while and see a bunch of ships and turrets and whatnot pop out of nowhere?  That was a reinforcement; I'm saying that a certain percent of the ships added in one of those could be immediately freed to go after you, rather than clinging to a guard post.

And perhaps it could be set up so that if a planet is at/close-to it's "cap" that instead of redirecting those reinforcement checks to other planets (and thus building up tons of crust on them too), it would just release all of those (or more realistically just a higher percent of those, and reinforce fewer other planets).  This would obviously be a niche-option (and perhaps later an AI type), as balancing will be tricky and the no-warning nature of it would be off-putting to much of the player base.

I used to think thats what CPA were, when a planet got a large enouph build up  of ships it would just let them go.  I was wrong of course but still.  as for making them not offputing, just have a warning when a planet gets close to its "max load"  something like "[planet name] is reaching a critical mass, prepare for assault in"  Then you could either go in with your own ships to prune it down, or build defences at adjacent planets.

[ShadowOTE]

Actually, that would be a neat game option. It would certainly make late game challenging, in a different way

[lanstro]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I wasn't aware of some of the changes in the pipeline, and yes they do sound very attractive and we will be making use of them when we finish our current games. 

As for raising the aip, we usually do play on 1 ai progress per 5 mins (apart from one game where I accidentally had that at 10 per 5 - that was hectic!)  However that's not really what I meant by the AI making you go after it - what I was getting at is that the strategy chosen by the player is rarely changed by a move pulled or threatened by the AI.  And that is what makes it a predictable, static experience.  You generally know what your team is going to be doing for the next 2-3 hours, and that plan is very rarely changed.  The things that do make it change - eg finding a rebel colony that you have to rescue, finding a planet with a mark 4 factory, etc, are because of a feature of the map that was generated than because the AI did something or is threatening to do something.  Yes it's very enjoyable to lay out a grand strategic plan for winning.  But come on, it's not that hard when the AI is so predictable and just sits back and lets you do it.  It'd be more enjoyable to see your plan tested by a crafty AI which disrupts it, understands your moves, counters them, and forces you to make hard choices.

To put it another way - if this AI really was smart enough to wipe out almost all of humanity, you'd think that it'd learn by the time that humanity took back half the universe that perhaps the strategy it had employed up to that point was no good.

Actually I just had a thought - what about an option where the AI changes personality at certain points in the game?  (either randomly, or maybe after it loses a mark 4 planet, or maybe after a failed CPA, etc)  That'd certainly make it slightly less predictable!

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, personality-change does have potential, but it would have to be fairly restricted since a lot of personalities are defined by the structures they have on many/all of their planets.  Would it tear down the old ones and immediately build the new ones?  Just leave them as-is?  Leave the old and build the new (one-way-doormaster->attritioner->stealthMaster, shudder) Etc.  There'd be a bunch of transition problems like that.  And I don't think it would really do much better at forcing your hand than picking some suitable personalities at the beginning.

As for the AI making a move to disrupt what you're doing (or, at least, a move with the secondary result of disrupting what you're doing), I think no-wave-warnings and cross-planet-waves will give you more of a feel of that.  We also plan to try out some new mechanics that might help there, though obviously we're trying to not disrupt the more "lets-the-player-take-their-time" experience for those that want that.

[ShadowOTE]

Maybe not for main AI types, but for other game settings, like no CPA warnings or double wave intensity it could work really well.

[Doddler]

I really do enjoy AI war so don't get me wrong, I'm not harping on the game because I think it's bad, much the opposite, I do it because it's really good and there is a lot of potential for it to be even better.

I do strongly agree with the original poster.  The AI is quite docile and is very rigid in the way it reacts to player moves.  The game doesn't have a lot of forward momentum as a result, the choice of what happens and how it happens is really entirely up to you.  The game would be perfectly content if you just sat there and did nothing for hours on end, nothing would really change.

By and large there's no real struggle against the AI.  The AI has no real means to overpower you and you have no real means to limit the power of the AI against you.

Aside from your direct actions against the AI, the AI only has two methods in it can attack you.  It launches regular wave attacks, and every 3-5 hours or so it sends out a rather large cross planet attack.  But even these aren't really interesting.  Both are scheduled, the AI doesn't use them in a reactionary fashion, they aren't used as part of a plan, they just happen.  The strength of the waves aren't even in the AI's court, they're based on AI progress, which is a value that you control, not the AI.

Even if the AI is an entity that spans the galaxy, it doesn't really have a galaxy wide presense.  Attacking an AI world, sometimes ships on that world will react to your presense, but the AI doesn't make a concerted effort to counter your moves.  In fact, unless you're fighting a Tag Teamer AI type, the AI often won't even move ships to attack your forces within a system until you threaten the command center.

The AI literally makes ships out of nowhere, which works thematically but it also means you can't get a one up on the AI.  Your actions cannot harm the AI, the AI is invlunerable to harm.  You can't really go out of your way to stop certain AI behavior, the AI will do what it does more or less without reguard to what you do.  It is interesting that everything you do is for your own personal use, rather than attempting to hamper the AI ability to stop you into the ground, but it also makes the game a lot less personal. 

After playing the game for a while, you don't feel the AI is an opponent.  You're really playing the game against yourself.  It's like playing a game of chess, where one player starts normally and the other has pieces aranged out on the board seemingly at random.  The opponent doesn't make moves.  It will take your pieces if you move them in a position that it can attack you, but otherwise, it does not make moves.  The ball is always in your court, and more often or not you can use your advantage as the only active player to force the opponent to make bad moves.  It's a neat thought puzzle, but it doesn't feel like a real game unless the other player is going to have to start moving their pieces on their own.

I do a lot of things to make the game feel like I'm in danger of losing to something that isn't completely my own fault.  I play on cross planet waves, and I turn off wave warnings.  I play on grid style games where centralized defense is rarely possible, and I play against AI archtypes that are agressive in nature.  Still, the AI has a very finite scope in which it can make decisions against you, and has no thought beyond decision making for individual ships (and to be fair the AI control of individual ships is really good), but if you play the game well, winning should be a foregone conclusion.  And playing a game for 10-20 hours when you already know the outcome is a difficult proposition!

I really ranted it up, I should think of some solutions to some of these problems a bit later.