Okay, who's *actually* used the doomsday device?

[x4000]

Yep, the fact that some people clearly seem to cheat is what makes it misleading, but that's a plenty few folks.  Then the other thing that makes it misleading is that the number of people who buy the game on sale and then still haven't got around to it yet drag down the numbers; if you look at how many people have got the "played one hour" achievement, it's pretty low for that reason I suspect.  I know that personally I have maybe 20 games on my steam list that I bought on sale but haven't had time to play yet -- but that I intend to play someday.

It's actually been pretty cool getting some notes on the forum from people saying "I bought this a year ago because I heard good things, but never played it until last week and now I'm hooked!" etc.  Somehow that's neater to me than just trying the demo and liking it and playing it; kind of like found treasure or something.

Lancefighter, I didn't know you were one of the ones that went that long before a win -- cool tidbit!

[BobTheJanitor]

I set off the doomsday nuke in one of the first tutorial maps. I don't know why. I had to leave it building overnight on maximum fast forward, because those maps only have something like 4 planets, with hardly any M/C per planet. It seemed amusing to me at the time. Stop looking at me like that.

[zebramatt]

I've only ever won one game!

[x4000]

I've only ever won one game!

You know... in the last year and a half, so have I!  I used to win a lot more, but not as much anymore.  I felt fine with all the losses, though, because they were always my team's fault; one of us -- often me -- would do something too risky, thinking it was safe, and then the AI would bite us.

[keith.lamothe]

Then the other thing that makes it misleading is that the number of people who buy the game on sale and then still haven't got around to it yet drag down the numbers; if you look at how many people have got the "played one hour" achievement, it's pretty low for that reason I suspect.

Yea, and the "Rainy Day Savings: 50,000 Energy" achievement is currently an automatically-awarded one when you start a campaign because your total output starts at (iirc) 124,000 and your energy use starts lower than 74,000.  That didn't use to be the case so some folks may have bought the game and played it in long-ago versions and not have that achievement, but in general the fact that steam only reports 52% of the playerbase as having that auto-achievement indicates that probably at least 40% of the people who've bought the game on steam have never played it on steam.  Some may have used the license key on a separate copy and played there, but I'm thinking that's a relatively small margin.

But a 50-60% play-rate is  actually pretty good compared to some numbers I've heard about other (even AAA) games

And I wonder how many of those 40% non-playing-ones were gifted the game by Vinraith (among others)

And I've only won one game in the last year too; played through FS during the holidays

[Coppermantis]

I've only ever won one game!

Same, actually. I came close on that 10-planet map, but then I accidentally overwrote the save file.

[x4000]

but then I accidentally overwrote the save file.

Because it was the only way to be sure?

Come on, someone had to make that joke.

[NickAragua]

Nope, never used the doomsday device. The AIs usually wipe me out before then.

I've never actually completed a game either, mostly because I get frustrated mid-game after the AI waves become unmanageably large and "non-wave activity" causes my defenses to collapse like a punctured submarine. Meanwhile, I've got the 35 hour campaign achievement.

[BobTheJanitor]

I've completed a few games, although I've noticed lately that I tend to get half way through and get distracted. Once I've taken all the nearby planets that are remotely useful and built up some fair defenses and done any gate raiding, I tend to hit a wall. I think I just don't like using transports to hop planets. Splitting up my empire just isn't that much fun. So as soon as I get to the point where I'm looking at the next useful planet being 3 or 4 jumps out, I lose all will to continue. Having to manage multiple fleets just seems too much like work, I suppose. Maybe this is a sign that I should just play on smaller galaxies. Or just learn to live with massive AIP inflation from always taking useless planets in a row whenever I want to get anywhere.

[zoutzakje]

that's pretty much what i do lol, taking useless planets in a row. always. this is also great for zombie bots I create from a botnet and for the dysons. This way they can get to every corner in my empire, instead of having to hop enemy planets (which they don't do).
funny to see that so many people play the game a lot, just don't complete many I always try to complete my games before I focus on another. have got most of any difficulty achievs and about 7-8 dif 7 achievs I think. gonna try vanilla 9 in a while
but I play games for achievs mostly so that's why. Lot of people don't care about achievs.

[mindloss]

now I play consitently minimum 8/8 in all games

I look upon your works, ye mighty, and despair.

When you said 7/7 was where the fun started, why play any lower?

I've been meaning to say something about this... I know it's partially a matter of preference, but I started at something like 3/4 and worked my way up from there, and had plenty of fun even in that first game. Also, maybe I'm an outlier, but I think the advice given wherever it is about "start on 5 or 6 if you're new to things, 7/7 if you're familiar with RTS" is more or less insane. I am an average-to-good game player, have racked up thousands of games of Starcraft, MOO2 etc, and found it challenging to beat my 3/4 the first time... and after hundreds of hours on this game, am still having a hard time on 7/7. Maybe I just happen to suck at this particular game, but if many people are reading and taking that advice, that might account for a lot of discouraged players (and 4.7% completion rate).

I know that personally I have maybe 20 games on my steam list that I bought on sale but haven't had time to play yet -- but that I intend to play someday.

Ditto. This was one of them, grabbed during that sale a couple months back on a whim. Finally I needed a change from Civ5 and Frozen Synapse and said "what the hell, let's check out AI wars" (I'd loaded it once or twice before and only made it about ten minutes before getting overwhelmed and giving up), and this time made it through the tutorials. By the time I finished my first game, I was hooked.

I've completed a few games, although I've noticed lately that I tend to get half way through and get distracted. Once I've taken all the nearby planets that are remotely useful and built up some fair defenses and done any gate raiding, I tend to hit a wall. I think I just don't like using transports to hop planets. Splitting up my empire just isn't that much fun. So as soon as I get to the point where I'm looking at the next useful planet being 3 or 4 jumps out, I lose all will to continue. Having to manage multiple fleets just seems too much like work, I suppose. Maybe this is a sign that I should just play on smaller galaxies. Or just learn to live with massive AIP inflation from always taking useless planets in a row whenever I want to get anywhere.

This is also very much my reaction. I've been completing and enjoying the 10 to 25 star maps much more -- in fact, the biggest I've actually finished might only have been a 25. I'll grant you it's a different game and I'm sure you do lose something that way, but I know that feeling of bogged-down-ness, and it's no fun stalling out halfway through a big campaign. [edit: this is of course a recurring issue in the 4X genre, and AI Wars handles it a bit better than most games.] I have the same problem not taking planets... I try, I really do... I always end up neutering it first, usually knowledge raid it after a while, and eventually get sick and tired of dealing with the constantly spawning little pissant AI fleets and just decide it's worth the 15 AIP to own the thing and grab more resources. I just haven't been able to adapt to the concept of jumping over planets yet. But then, I always prefer Pangaea maps in Civ too.

[Nalgas]

When you said 7/7 was where the fun started, why play any lower?

I've been meaning to say something about this... I know it's partially a matter of preference, but I started at something like 3/4 and worked my way up from there, and had plenty of fun even in that first game. Also, maybe I'm an outlier, but I think the advice given wherever it is about "start on 5 or 6 if you're new to things, 7/7 if you're familiar with RTS" is more or less insane. I am an average-to-good game player, have racked up thousands of games of Starcraft, MOO2 etc, and found it challenging to beat my 3/4 the first time... and after hundreds of hours on this game, am still having a hard time on 7/7. Maybe I just happen to suck at this particular game, but if many people are reading and taking that advice, that might account for a lot of discouraged players (and 4.7% completion rate).

I and the group I play with started with 3.0, which I'd say was about a full point easier than 4.0/5.0, thanks to some really cheesy things you could abuse.  I think I might've let someone talk me into agreeing to start on 6/6 for the first game, and it was pretty easy even having no idea what was going on.  We lost anyway, but there was no question about moving up to 7/7 after that, and we won our first game a couple tries later, and I think we might've briefly gotten up to 7.6/7.3 before the end of that version.  In 4.0/5.0 on the other hand, with the same group of people we did pretty terribly and lost the overwhelming majority of games for a very long time, even after resigning ourselves to going back down to 6/6.

Those were all mostly 4-6 player games.  When I started playing on my own a bit more and briefly with just one other person, I was surprised by how much incredibly easier it got.  7/7 with 1-2 players is nothing compared to 6/6 with 6, much less 7/7.  I'm decent but not particularly amazing at this sort of game.  I think it's just that I had it brutally beaten into me by enormous waves of thousands and thousands of ships in multiplayer, so I always expect and prepare for the worst in every situation now.  Whenever I play by myself and it sends ships at me, I always feel like, "Is that all?" and assume there must be a couple thousand more coming to kill me in my sleep.  Heh.

[mindloss]

Funny you should say that, because in the couple of multiplayer games I tried, it seemed way easier (with 2 or 3 people) than solo. Of course, I've got to admit this all fits with the hypothesis that I'm not terribly good at this game.

[keith.lamothe]

A properly coordinated, finely-tuned MP group should (in theory) be able to walk all over the AI.  With 6 players, for instance, once you get down to a single-wormhole chokepoint and have all players with a full cap of Riot mkIIs with tazers could create a permanent-paralysis zone to stop the guns of all non-para-immune parts of a wave, cpa, etc.  And you can pile _all_ those forcefields onto one point, repair or no repair, and so on.  And one player can do all the handling of that absurd defense with team control while the others go out and do all kinds of micro-tomfoolery on the offensive side.

But in practice the coordination usually isn't there   But I have heard from some MP trios that basically don't get a lot of challenge from the game unless they really jack up the difficulty (we're talking 9+ here, hybrids and such thrown in) because they've gotten so good with the division of labor.

[Nalgas]

A properly coordinated, finely-tuned MP group should (in theory) be able to walk all over the AI.

In theory.  In practice, we're out of tune and not terribly well coordinated.  I'm sure playing three hours at a time once a week helps a lot, after people have gotten home from work and are sitting around drinking beer.  "How do I play this game again and what does this button do?" are always good questions to hear over your headset when waiting for a save to load/sync.  And that's why we make a point of not saving when something important is happening/about to happen, because it takes a good 10-15 minutes to sort out what's going on each time.

I may be exaggerating a bit, and we do fine once everyone gets back into it, but definitely nowhere remotely near the level of what's theoretically possible or even what's practical.  Our big games seem to end up being more about having fun, while I save the harder stuff for the smaller ones or by myself.