Imagine, if you will, the scene -
The AI fleet is there, beyond the tumbling wreckage from the battle at the wormhole mouth. It is black against the dim glow of distant nebulae, silent but for the hissing electromagnetic whisper of coded transmissions. It is vast, malevolent. It must be destroyed.
Our ships form up, advancing through the drifting debris. A low rumbling builds within the hulls of the missile cruisers as their quiescent autofactories come online, preparing to fabricate and assemble new ordnance; for now, the munitions bunkers are crammed full, the firing tubes loaded. Flickers of incandescent energy begin to crackle along the edges of the bombers' magnetic launchers, and among them lurk the restless fighters, dagger-like, pointed at the heart of the enemy. It is time.
Extreme range: the faint echoes of the AI's transmissions abruptly become a roar and its ships begin to move, all in the same instant, and then our first missiles are away. They arc through the void, our own little mechanical minds sent to slay their all-devouring brethren, and burst among the front lines of the AI's ships. The vast fleet continues its implacable advance, its host barely diminished by our distant salvo, and our fighters burst from our front lines, riding pillars of fire towards the enemy. The distance between the ships shrinks, dwindling; the AI bombers, maws glowing with the barely-contained hell within, take aim...
... and burst apart: turned from coherent entities into shattered wrecks in microseconds as the second missile salvo arrives. The cruisers are in range now, deadly accurate and unrelenting with the hammer-blows of their munitions. The bombers crumple and are consumed by their own fires and our fighters - almost missiles themselves - streak through the spreading ruin, navigational deflectors straining to push the wreckage aside. They whirl and tumble, nimble as dancers, exchanging spits of fire with the AI's own fightercraft, marred and scorched by the enemy's own bursting missiles but now they are clear! Open space, rapidly consumed, and then they are among the enemy's cruisers themselves. Now they are not dancers but butchers, vengeful wolves among the fold; they whirl and arc and ply their knives and by the dozen, by the hundred, the enemy cruisers die. The bursts and flares of this distant butchery is suddenly hidden from view, though: as the AI's own fighters sweep in, our bombers move up among the fleet. The shredded cruisers can loose no missiles against them, and one by one they vomit forth their plasma bombs into the faces of the AI fighters: deflectors fail, hulls burn through, and all that reaches our cruisers is a hail of semi-molten debris. The magnetic fields sweep it in and the autofactories feed hungrily, beginning to gain on the launch arrays as the firing slows.
The battle is over, the AI's fleet broken. Humanity may yet be overcome, our lights own lights among the stars snuffed out - but not yet. Not today.
- Or, at least, that's how I'd like things to go. The reality tends to be more like this:
... and blow our fighters to incandescent slag as our second missile salvo streaks past, battering a single AI fighter into ruins and lightly scorching the hull of another. The cruisers' autofactories turn out missile after missile, each of which is thrown in turn at the rapidly-closing AI fighters, which - unmolested by our bombers, which have been ripped into tiny pieces and spread across half a quadrant by the AI's own cruisers, quickly close the distance. Humanity falls back to an adjacent system, muttering darkly, and waits an interminable half-hour to build another fleet.
How is it that units decide what to fire on? I know that the first enemy into range is going to get a plastering from any weapon that can reach it, and rightly so, but after that I can't quite figure it out. I recall reading at some point that the focus in AI War was intended to be on the positioning of units and not micromanagement, but most of the time I end up pausing the game and queueing up a sequence of kills for each unit type just so that they'll fire on the type of ship I brought them along to take care of. Cruisers are a particularly prime example, as they seem to love happily blazing away at a handful of fighters when half a salvo would wipe out the five dozen bombers/infiltrators that are also advancing. I find it pretty frustrating and am curious how units make their decisions.
That said - thank you for the fantastic game, which you might as well have designed based half on my personal "things I'd like to see in a game" list and half on my "things that I never thought of but that I'd love if I saw them in a game" list. Hooray!
