Hello, I recently bought AI War and all the expansions on Steam. I completed the beginner and intermediate tutorials and I'm now partway through that Beginner Game script. It has not been too difficult so far, though there have been some surprises.
My background in strategy games is mainly Rise of Nations, though I was never at the expert level there. I also have a bunch of experience playing tower defence flash games, and a bit of experience with Go. My first impression of this game could be summed up with fascination and counter-productive absorption. I'm hooked, big time.
At first I was put off not by the graphics, but rather by the "cheating AI" part (if they sent everything they had right off the bat, the AI would have orders of magnitude more force and would be invincible). But two things make me forgive this - excellent strategy material, and a game lore that makes the "cheating AI" problem consistent and reasonable anyway. I actually find the lore kind of interesting. The rogue AI thing is of course very old and stale in media, but I like the "it's already come and gone" feel, it's different.
This game puts an emphasis on strategic principles I don't usually experience in such an emphasized manner. In Rise of Nations, you are eventually going to conquer everything anyway, and at the very minimum you should conquer anything the enemy was slothful enough to let you take. Rise of Nations is a game where failure to take any opportunity to conquer something is punished harshly, and this habit takes some time to get rid of.
At first it was quite bizarre, let me tell you, to be in the position of seeing so many planets waiting to be conquered, but knowing the AI would punish me for doing so. In this Beginner Game script, you can actually take Mk4 planets with just all Mk1-2 ships and starships plus a couple mobile repairs, if you pay attention to attack radii and use group attack move and such. This script is against a couple weak-personality difficulty 6s and I will assume that you could not push Mk4 planets around so easily on higher difficulties, at least not without severe AIP retaliation.
Overall this is very interesting stuff and I'm actually looking forward to my first loss so I can start to grasp the more advanced aspects of this. I have a question: what difficulty level do people tend to play on? What would one expect from difficulty 10? How much can the game's difficulty vary when adjusting for AI difficulty level? How much of the change in game difficulty is due to improvements in AI behaviour, or in blunt stat boosting and more ships and such?
Thanks very much.
