It has been two and a half years since I purchased AI War..

[Volatar]

It has been two and a half years since I purchased AI War, and the real reason that I purchased it has finally come to fruition.

I finally was able to show the game to my dad. He now wants to play it with me at our next opportunity.

This is why I bought the game. It is now finally happening.

Thanks Chris for making the ultimate family LAN party game. 

[Ranakastrasz]

Yea, Lan party is so much fun here, especially when someone makes a mistake (counter attack), or learns something new about how evil the AI can be. (etherjets?)

[Volatar]

Played for 3 hours with my dad tonight. He quickly learned the basics and towards the end of it we mobilized a combined 1000 ship fleet to capture our first ARS.

Much fun was had. 

[x4000]

Awesome!  That's the real reason I made the game, too -- for me to play with my dad.

Glad to hear that others are also having that experience!

[Cydonia]

Wow cool!
I'm still failing at making my friends play this game, but I'll succeed at some time, I'm sure 

But first I have to get used to the game again, haven't played in quite a while... hope I find something nice on the meeting grounds

[Volatar]

Ok, so I have to tell these stories. 

Last night we finally got all three of us together for a game. Fired up a Maze map with the Fallen Spire campaign active and a 6 and 7 AI.

We captured a few planets, everything was going fine. Then, not knowing what would happen, we brought a fleet in to an enemy planet to hold it just long enough to investigate the second subspace signal.

Then the chase began... and the AI response totally caught us unprepared, lost us the chase, and we were then totally crushed.

After that I read the entire walkthrough on the FS campaign, because I like to have an inkling on how to prepare for things  The FS campaign seems to be a very different way to play the game, taking the AI on in full frontal war rather than the classic, guerrilla war the base game plays like. I explained this to my dad, and he decided that he likes the FS campaign and wants to play that way.

So, this morning we fired the game up again. X map type, again a 6 and a 7 AI. We gave ourselves handicaps though, which turned out to be a dumb idea (rolling in resources, no need for choices).

The game didn't last long enough for it to matter though. My sister built her fleet, and seeing that we were already in the process of taking a world, took her entire fleet to help us, leaving her home world undefended except for about 10 turrets.

Of course, when she arrived with her fleet, a wave triggered. She then had to run back to defend her world.

She didn't make it in time.

Losing her home planet would not be an unrecoverable loss, though the ~70 ish AIP hurt.

However, she, in her infinite wisdom, and against my express instructions, had built two nuclear warheads at her homeworld.

Hitting AI tech level II less than an hour in the game is.... not a good idea.

We will be trying again this evening, with no nuclear weapons. 

[Cydonia]

Nice story, can't wait have have my own stories to tell

The upcoming game... are you talking of this?
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9614.0/topicseen.html

[Volatar]

So, I hit a bit of a wall with my family. They want to play, but have realized just how long a whole campaign is.

Now I could use some tips. What are the ways that I can reduce the length of a game of AI War while still maintaining the strategic depth and fun?

[x4000]

Well, first, about the length thing: that's something that can be a barrier or a draw.  With a boardgame that requires setup and teardown time, a longstanding campaign is a drag because you have to keep setting up your position every time you want to play.  But with a game like AI War, even if it takes 15 hours to play a campaign... who cares? 

My wife and I played maybe twice a month on average for a while there, an hour or two at a time, and it was plenty fun and fine.  We always remembered what was going on in general, and could quickly recall the details by looking at the map (especially with the ability to make notes).  And it felt fun and epic because we weren't just playing random new maps each time, we were playing one long and drawn out campaign that was interesting even more because of how long we were stretching it out.

Put another way: your average RPG (FFX, for instance) takes a lot longer than even the longest AI War campaigns.  And for my wife and I, it took us between 2002(ish) and 2007(ish) to actually beat FFX.  We'd come to it a few times a year, and we remembered the story and in general what we were doing, and it was a blast.  We just weren't in a hurry, and there wasn't particular time pressure.  The game would still be there waiting for us whenever we wanted it, and we completed it as we had time and felt interested in doing so.  A single campaign of AI War can be completed like that if desired.

------------

That said, you asked for tips:

1. Play with 40 planets.  No fewer, or things start getting less strategic.  It also doesn't get any shorter below that.

2. Consider putting the AI on a higher difficulty than you're really normally comfortable with, and then give yourself a positive resource handicap.  You'll have a more intense experience, but you'll always have lots of resources to deal with them, and thus you'll constantly be making progress out.

3. The blitz combat speed is another way to accomplish the same thing in #2 but without the game thinking it's a cheat.

4. Disable the core shield generators and astro trains, and don't play with mining golem, hybrids, the spirecraft or golems, or rebel human colonies on.  Those all take longer.
4.a. Playing with the dyson sphere, human marauders, zenith trader, and human resistance fighters are all good options that don't really make it take longer but add some twists.

5. Be aggressive.  Take planets early, overextend yourself a bit, and deal with the consequences.  If that means you need to play DOWN in difficulty a bit to compensate, then so be it.  I play on straight difficulty 7 all the time, because that's how my team likes to play.  If I were really focused and trying to minmax, I could play higher, I'm sure.  Even difficulty 6 is a pretty cool challenge, but doing diff 7 with handicaps for yourselves is better.

6. Play with a map where you can get a safe corner of 6-8 planets with one bottleneck.  Phase 1 is securing that, phase 2 is then expanding outward as little as possible so that you can get the ARSes and then get the AIs themselves.  That saves you a lot of back and forth on defense, and a lot of time taking larger numbers of planets that you might not actually need.

7. If they are new, consider playing on a map that is not too hard to read -- not like Realistic.  Simple or Hubs or similar is a good idea.  Or X.

That's pretty much what I can think of, but I imagine others have some ideas.  There's also Defender Mode in the Light of the Spire expansion, but honestly I don't think it's remotely as fun or strategic.  It was something people specifically asked for, specifically for shorter games, but it just doesn't compress well to that.

[zoutzakje]

I'm not to sure about golems or spirecraft. It's true that they take time to build, but once you have them, they can be a great help and speed things up. A single artillery golem really helps killing an AI eye quick, while it would be very troublesome without them. the botnet can clean out entire worlds all by itself, in mere seconds. Of course you'd have to play on easy then, medium and hard spirecraft and golems do take a lot more time.
Or just play a 10/10 crosshatch game against 2 Raid engine AI types... then your game will be over really quick hahaha

[x4000]

That's a really good point: playing with easy golems or spirecraft would massively speed up the game.  I'd not thought about that, I was thinking of medium/hard only (I tend to forget easy exists).  Easy golems doesn't mess with balance too much, though it does make things easier for the player than not playing with them on.  Easy spirecraft, though, I wonder; that seems like it would be destabilizing, but I've not tried it.

[Volatar]

Thanks. Really, I am going for a shorter game so that they get the full campaign experience in a compressed space to "get them into" the game fully as they don't have the advantage of having played through the Intermediate tutorial. Once we win one I expect that they will be fully willing to play a full game.

[x4000]

Makes sense from that angle, for sure.