This AI is awesome.

[x4000]

Thanks, Garrett -- things are going pretty well for us with the recent 2.0 release and so forth.  I might even be able to quit the day job, come to that.

Now that would be excellent. Kind of the thing most of us dream of.
Hope it keeps on going well. Less time at your job means more time for A.I, so it's good for both sides. 

Yep -- more time for AI War, and more time for the other titles we have planned, too.  Lots of stuff in the pipeline, and I hope to get it out earlier than my projections (with a huge eye towards quality, making sure that everything gets the attention it needs).  But mainly, working one job instead of two will speed things up either way, compared to what it would have been.

[Baleur]

I'm still surprised how LITTLE attention this game gets..
You guys should put together a new trailer, focusing entirely on the strongest aspect, the AI (its in the title, after all).
Like a 5min video / trailer showing off how the AI thinks, reacts, and what it does. Even on a site with as many immature noobs as Gametrailers, it could generate huge sales by focusing on something that pretty much every other AAA title has failed at, the AI. I'm sure alot of people are willing to give up a bit of gfx, for an AI done right.

The problem is, and the reason i wasnt interested in this game until 2.0, was because most people (and i, back then) dont even know what makes this game special.
At first glance it does just appear to be one of the dozens of wannabe indie games, that utterly fails after a month or two. Thats because its not easy to portray AI or hour-after-hour gameplay strategy easily in a trailer.
Though as i said it should be attempted by you guys. Maby almost like a History Channel esque battlefield strategy walkthrough, but from the AI perspective.

Once people who dont know anything about this game other than some mediocre screenshots actually find out whats so great about it, they'll flock to it like they flocked to Galciv2, Sins or Sword of The Stars.

[SonicTitan]

Just got schooled by the AI for the first time - not a loss, but a huge tactical error that couldn't have been anything other than deliberate.

The AI was amassing a 300 ship cross-planetary attack. I pulled most of my fleet back to my home planet and went on buffering defenses while I waited. Just as the timer went off, I saw that a base next door was being attacked by about ten ships. Like a nimrod, I throw my whole fleet into the wormhole, thinking that this is where the attack is coming from. I mop up the ships and that's that. Until 150 ships warp into my home planet and start shredding my defenses. Meanwhile my fleet is next door, as far away from the wormhole as I can get. I'm a little spooked, actually.

Speaking of all of this, is there any way we can see which wormhole cross-planet attacks are coming from, or do they not work that way?

[Snowman]

Hi Sonic Titan,

you have to research the advanced warp sensor. That will colour the wormhole, through which the attack will come, red.

[carlosjuero]

Hi Sonic Titan,

you have to research the advanced warp sensor. That will colour the wormhole, through which the attack will come, red.

Hrm - I thought that wormholes connected to scouted enemy systems were already red? The sensor (when researched and built) makes the worm hole flash yellow from what I recall of a short 3 hour session last night.

[x4000]

A bit of confusion here about Advanced Warp Sensors, I think.  Basically, they alert you to incoming waves only, not cross-planet attacks.  When zoomed in, the wormhole itself (not its text or icon) looks reddish instead of red when there is a warp coming through that location.  On the minimap, the wormhole blinks as whatever color it would already be.

With cross-planet attacks, here is a bunch of information on how those work, which is a bit different (and therefore not detectable by advanced warp sensors, since warp is not being used): http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War_-_Cross_Planet_Attacks

Hope that helps, and cool story, SonicTitan!

[Rifleman]

I was playing on 2001zl and a devourer golem got stuck on a planet with an advanced research station. I was thinking that I would never be able to capture the planet after that.

I was checking back and forth on it, and the turrets would knock the golem down to about 98% then some ships would attack and it would destroy them raising it's health back to 100%. After a while I checked again and more turrets were firing on it, and no ships were attacking it. After about a hour or so the AI finally destroyed it.

Their tactic wasn't working against it, so they changed up the plan.

[RCIX]

Waaaaaay back (pre-2.0 days) i primarily used starships for conquest, before long any planet i came across was flooded with Anti-Starship Arachnids. Only minorly annoying, but still smart i suppose...

[RCIX]

Not purely an AI story, but:

2 turtles, ~160 AI progress. I got a boatload of goodies built on my gateway planet, so i want to get those built (if i can build them all i'm confident turrets could wipe out just about any size incoming ships). Problem? there's a rebel colony that appeared on a heavily armored IV planet along my path, and i'm not sure if i could build enough of my goodies let alone wipe out the command station on that planet in time.

I'll just have to let them die

Oh well, the I will be unstoppable when i get these goodies online! i could wipe out a mining golem in like 5 minutes with sufficient firepower or something
(Black hole machine, shield booster + inhibitor, radar jammer... the works)

[Temper]

This AI is awesome, and I was wondering if the Factions were as awesome as the AI?

[Minty]

Temper, the Factions are more like little side quests or random encounters (From a roleplaying analogy), rather than whole additional chunks of AI.

The freedom fighters and marauders spawn ships that attack the AI or BOTH sides, respectively, sometimes to no effect, sometimes being a force to be reckoned with, depending on where and how many spawn.

The Rebel settlements spawn invisibly every few hours on a random planet, and give a countdown. Once the countdown's run out, if the player *doesn't* own the planet by that time, the invisibility's dismissed, and the AI is free to attack. Saving the settlement gives access to some truly evil ships, failing ups the AI progress by a hefty chunk.

There's various active golems too. From the trader, through the devourer which instakills virtually all mobile military ships in a wide radius, to the miner, which destroys whole PLANETS, as if a nuke went off, the Dyson Sphere, etc, etc..

[pierre dupon]

I don't really have a story so much as a little tactic the AI developed against me. Basically they would send etherjets to the wormhole, drag a ship back onto their own world to get individually slaughtered by turrets. I first saw this and thought "why didn't I think of that?" 
I love it when that happens, especially given that it probably wasn't programmed specifically to do that (was it?). Emergent behavior FTW!

[x4000]

I don't really have a story so much as a little tactic the AI developed against me. Basically they would send etherjets to the wormhole, drag a ship back onto their own world to get individually slaughtered by turrets. I first saw this and thought "why didn't I think of that?" 
I love it when that happens, especially given that it probably wasn't programmed specifically to do that (was it?). Emergent behavior FTW!

That one happens to have been explicitly programmed by me, but it was always a favorite of mine.

[Voodoomancer]

The freedom fighters and marauders spawn ships that attack the AI or BOTH sides, respectively, sometimes to no effect, sometimes being a force to be reckoned with, depending on where and how many spawn.

The Rebel settlements spawn invisibly every few hours on a random planet, and give a countdown. Once the countdown's run out, if the player *doesn't* own the planet by that time, the invisibility's dismissed, and the AI is free to attack. Saving the settlement gives access to some truly evil ships, failing ups the AI progress by a hefty chunk.

Evil indeed. I was playing the other day, and liberated a rebel settlement. About 30 minutes later all the AI systems less than 6-7 jumps out where in ruins, as hundreds of rebel fighters and bombers had spread out and decimated most of the AI mobile military. Gave me an easy passage through some systems to assault a chokepoint lvl 4 system.

Marauders, on the other hand, are just mean, with exeptions. In that same game I was launching a strike on an AI planet with raptors, and I'd barely made it out of the wormhole when marauder buzz bombs came, well, buzzing in. So I had the raptors hang back cloaked and watched and laughed.
It's fun watching 2 of your enemies tear at each other, and then mob up the leftovers afterwards. 

[RCIX]

This is more of an "what was the AI thinking?" post. It just decided that it should send electric shuttles to me in a wave. 9 of them. lol...