Question for Chris (if you have a second to spare that is)

[Hampsmaine]

I know you're a busy guy developing SBR and all, but I do have a question for you.  As a long time layman PC gaming enthusiast, I'm really quite impressed with AI War.  To be honest, it surprised the hell out of me.  It's just a kick ass game, and the minimalist graphics actually add to the charm, not subtract from it. 

And then I realized that something else surprised me: Why isn't this game even more of a hit than it already is?

So, as an enthusiast of the hobby, here is my question:

In retrospect, what do you think that you could have done differently from a marketing standpoint to promote AI War?  If you could have a time machine back to 2009, what would you do differently in that respect?

[Shrugging Khan]

AI War is pretty complicated, and really attractive only to a niche audience. By now, most members of that audience will have heard of it.

I don't think much could have been done. More marketing may have increased sales early on, but overall sales would've probably been the same.

[x4000]

Cheers!

It's a tough sort of a question -- the market was extremely different in 2009, for one.  So in terms of games that were indie and coming out then, aside from the "indie darlings" of the time, AI War actually was at the top of the class.  In terms of some of the darlings of the time, I think that AI War may ultimately have made more in the long run (hard to say, I don't know their current numbers).  AI War has grossed somewhere in the $1.5 million range, which has been enough to fund a lot of things for us, but it's the sort of thing that is way lower numbers than even a huge commercial "flop" like Alpha Centauri.

If I had to point to specific things that hold it back, I'd say:

1. The game isn't pretty.  With sexy visuals, it would pull in more people.

2. The game isn't exciting from the get-go for most people. In other words, like with Dwarf Fortress or a number of other niche games, you have to put in the effort FIRST and then you find out you really like it.  Being able to ease people into that with a "hey, I really like this and feel like I know what I'm doing!" from the start, and then transitioning into "oh man I LOVE this, and I had no idea what I was doing before" would be a much better arc in terms of new player experience.

3. Marketing-wise I had no money and it was just really a different time period.  If I had a time machine, I'd change a number of things with some of our other products, but AI War isn't really one of them.

4. I suppose the bigger question, in some respects, is: if I were to make an "AI War Reimagined" or "AI War The Sequel" now, knowing what I do now, what would that be like?  Honestly... I ask myself that question periodically.  Part of me would love a chance to rebuild AI War from the ground up as a completely new thing.  Someday I imagine that I'll do something like that, although I doubt I'll call it AI War because then that would get all sorts of expectations around it.

Ultimately AI War was a game I made for myself at the start, and my dad and uncle and his friend, and we played it for many months before I realized I had something that might be remotely sellable.  Remember: way different time period, in terms of PC games and indie games and so on.  So I didn't approach things from a standpoint of how new players would experience things coming in.  I dumped us right into the midlevel experience instead, because hey that's where we were. 

[Chris_Stalis]

As a fan, I've been thinking of this myself. Apologies for the comments being unsolicited, but I'd like to share them to get other people's reactions:

I think Chris' point 2 is kind of the biggest thing keeping people from realizing what this game is. Even keeping in mind Chris' design philosophy comments on the wiki of coming from a Starcraft RTS background, AI War is kind of the anti-SC in terms of RTS gameplay. It's designed to be paused, it's designed to hurt players that try to fight set-piece battles against the AI, and the "flow" of the game is geared way more towards grand strategy than "clicky-clicky" skills. It also has no PVP modes. Given how the entire RTS genre today is designed around first cloning Starcraft and only then making changes to the formula, most people who feel like they like RTS games would encounter this and feel more flummoxed than usual. I personally like AI War because I really hate the SC formula, so this "reversed" approach is much more to my taste.

If we compared AI War to any other "major" PC strategy title, it would actually have the most in common with the Total War series. Long term strategy, careful empire planning (even given the design goal of making the AI wallop on player "empires"), and the lack of "clicky-clicky" battle tactics means you'll have a lot of overlap in the interests of the two player bases. The key drawback is that Total War is a Starcraft/Civilization hybrid game. The only change to the SC formula is micromanagement and in battle resource management, while the defining borrows from Civilization are the city management and diplomacy functions. While a lot of TW (and even Civ) players are so-so on the city management, the diplomacy is often portrayed as the most crucial aspect of any game played. It's so crucial that most Civ mods that omit diplomacy only become popular if they're very, very clear about framing their scenario for why diplomacy is abjectly impossible. Since AI War doesn't include even a potential for diplomacy, Total War players will generally feel like something key is missing from the formula, even though they're totally aware of why it's not there. I also see this as why Last Federation had such rapid initial sales growth, because it melds the AI War philosophy of user interaction with that tantalizing diplomacy component.

As a result of this, I don't think the game needs an "AI War Reimagined" version. I think what it needs to do is distance itself as far from existing franchises as possible when being introduced to new players. I think the best way to do that is to stop billing it as a "4x/RTS hybrid". Most people I know think "4x" means Civ and "RTS" means Starcraft. Thus, when the two groups try AI War, they're both left feeling like something key to their demographic is missing (though I must strongly stress that it is not). What the game needs is a billing no one knows the meaning of, and thus no one makes any initial assumptions of. I think the best term for that would be "Real Time Chess". I know of no game that tries to bill itself this way. In terms of marketing territory, it's virgin ground. I also think it's so natural for the game based on the design philosophy and how the community discusses it that AI War could own this term without even trying.

PS: For the sanity of anyone who wants to respond to me directly, I'll go by "FanChris" in this thread so that real Chris can be addressed more properly

[Hampsmaine]

Thanks for the Replies.   

I do think that if anything, number 2 plus number 1. 

You know, it's interesting:  I think that the closest thing to AI War as far as a game would be Sins of a Solar Empire.  With that being said, Sins has more eye candy.  You can zoom in on an individual ship, and zoom out to see the entire system, and it's all in 3D.  I think that was partially what attracted me to Sins.  But after playing for a bit, I found myself basically constantly zoomed all the way out, where ships appear as 2D icons, much like in AI War.  It's just the most practical view to have to manage things.

But here is the kicker:  I found as I quickly learned how to play Sins that the depth I had hoped for wasn't there.  Don't get me wrong, Sins is a fine game - but in comparison, by depth and complexity, AI War blows it out of the water.

AI War has a 1990's flavor (a very good thing imo), and I mean this in regards to the development and ingenuity put into this game.  It's a damn good flavor if you ask me, and it's very rare now, and it's why I'm into indie games.  You just can't find it in the big shops.

Thanks!

[TheVampire100]

I think point 1 and 2 are the most major points here.
The visuals of a game don't make a game actually better (or at least not gameplay-wise) but they DO have a significant impact on sales.
When you look at a game you see visuals first and gameplay stuff second. It does not matter of it's a screenshot or a gameplay video, you will first see the graphics and this will settle your initial opinion of the game. It may sound ridiculous but a lot of people just buy games because they "look good" without even checking the features or details. Of the graphics don't suit you will skip a game.
And so sad it may sound, AI War has one of the poorest graphics to see in the game. That's mostly because Arcen games had to make it simple (with thousands of ships on the screen it would lag like mad if they all would have shiny graphics), so you see most of the time only the colored symbols. The actually game sprites can only be seen if you zoom drastically in the game and while you can see all the detailed graphics now it's horrible inconvient since you loose a lot of your planetary view.
You can also see a improvement curve on the sprites from the the base game and first expansions toward the later expansions. Especially the shiny Spire designs with their glowing look are beutiful to look at. But all this stuff never gets noticed in the actual game and the store screenshots rarely show anything of it.
Like I said above, people judge a game just because of this fact, won't buy it and may miss a game they really would've liked.

The second point is the actual gameplay. The game is slowly developing and it needs some time to understand all the stuff. My first games were typical trial and error and I got confused. I quickly lost my interest because you just want stuff to work in the first minutes and not after 2 hours. I came however back to Ai War and liked it how it worked. I appreciated that I could go with my own tempo and customize the game to my liking (something, that other strategy games really miss).
Like Chris_stalis fittingly said, this game is less "fast paced" Starcraft and more "layed back" Civilization. I actually never really got warm with Starcraft. I never got deep into the Zerg campaign and couldn't even reach the Protoss campaign. I skipped Starcraft 2 and hearing like a lot of people say it's more about how fast you can click instead of how fast you can think I'm not even sorry about it.
The strategy games I played were always a little "slow".
Some of my favorite strategy share some similarities with AI War.
The Earth 21xx series was one of my favourite games. I played never the 2140 part but I played all three 2150 games and the later 2160 (but I never really liked it). Simliar to AI War the game is about customization. Not in the way that you can change the settings of the campaign to your liking but instead you can customize your troops with different weapons, vehicles and other stuff. You cpuld even equip your buildings with turrets. This has somethign from AI War I think, you set your turrets directly at the base and you use your mobile force to eridcate the enemy. You also decide what you want to use. Plasma weapons for more raw firepower or instead rockets to penetrate energy shields?
Another game I liked was Thandor. It was a german RTS game and a major difference to other games was that you had a building perimeter where you are allowed to build stuff and outside of it it was impossible to build. That was mostly because there were no mobile building units, instead you just built where you wanted (Command station building on planet). To expand your reach you either had to build at the edges of your territory, therefor expanding it or you use a pioneer truck (colony ship) to create a new base somewhere afar.
The game also featured different marks of units that you could research.

In the end, since I came from slightly similiar games I liked I also liked Ai War. And I guess that's what a lot of other people did.

[Cinth]

3. Marketing-wise I had no money and it was just really a different time period.  If I had a time machine, I'd change a number of things with some of our other products, but AI War isn't really one of them.

If I had to venture a guess...  But what would you change      Yeah, you can shoot me later 

[Tolc]

Another game I liked was Thandor. It was a german RTS game and a major difference to other games was that you had a building perimeter where you are allowed to build stuff and outside of it it was impossible to build. That was mostly because there were no mobile building units, instead you just built where you wanted (Command station building on planet). To expand your reach you either had to build at the edges of your territory, therefor expanding it or you use a pioneer truck (colony ship) to create a new base somewhere afar.
The game also featured different marks of units that you could research.

Oh my god, yes. That game was amazing. I fondly remember the way you could customize your units to combine different chassis with different weapon systems, etc. I really need to see if I can get that to run on a modern system at some point (I think I still have an installation medium lying around).

And, yes. The hectic Starcraft 2 multiplayer put me off that game as well, even though I enjoyed the campaign immensely (the first one that is, haven't bought the heart of the swarm expansion).