I just finished up my first real game of AI War since the initial release, playing with a friend and using 4.022. We had originally tried the game at release, but the game speed was slowing down massively as time went on and the number of ships grew, until things pretty much got unplayable. With 4.0 we decided to try it out again, and it seems to have improved quite a bit. We were able to finish our first game, 60 planets with a Shield Ninny and a Camouflager both set on 7. Both of us are pretty much complete newbies to the game though, not having played but briefly at release, so we are both effectively newbies.
We managed to win after eight hours of playing, with an AI progress of 170 right before offing the second AI. We took fourteen planets near our home sectors, which established a reasonably tight perimeter of only three wormholes out into AI territory. With a mark IV scout we scouted out the rest of the galaxy, and we used transport ships to ferry our fleets to capture another five advantageous planets which got us resources like research stations/AI progress reduction processor thing that spits out enemies/mark V factories. The five planets ourside our main territory got us close enough to the AI homeworlds that we were able to transport our fleets there to take them out. The final map ended up looking like this. The first AI homeworld is the empty P9 planet in the upper right.
I had a question about waves. My understanding from reading was that they can only happen to a planet of yours adjacent to an AI planet containing a gate. Multiple times, we had announced waves come from gates that lead to AI planets that had been gate raided. I don't mean that the wave was announced and then we killed the gate either. These gates had been downed for a long time.
One time, the announced target of the wave was two jumps away from any AI planets. This was a surprise, as the wave notice was 60 seconds, the target was our very lightly guarded interior sector of our core fourteen planets which held our advanced factories, and the wave was 800 ships large. I thankfully had my main fleet close by and was able to get there just in the nick of time. The wave didn't start from a gate, but way in the lower right corner of the sector.
Is my understanding of how waves work incorrect, is this a bug, or is this some special action of the Camouflager AI?
What is the consensus on golems? Our map had an armored golem, a regenerator golem, and a black widow golem. The only one we captured was the armored, as it was on the way to the AI home planets, and the planet also contained that processor thing that spews ships and decreases AI progress. The golem seemed decent enough, though not as impressive as I might have hoped for the giant 600,000 power cost. The AI double reinforcing if you brought him into a sector seemed like kind of a bummer though, and made me not really want to attack with him much. I mostly kept him around our frontier sectors to assist turrets in holding off raids.
I did have one crash, which I suppose isn't bad for eight hours.
There were a few minor graphical glitches. Occasionally when moving troops though a wormhole I would see little phantom unit circles (but no unit or unit graphic) and health bars in the center of my screen. I think these are just the units moving though the wormhole, but it confused me for a second.
All in all though, it was fun to finally play a game. I'll be interested in playing a bit more and learning about the game.
