This might be a decent source of material, if a bit old:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13491.msg153119.htm . And of course the classic 'This AI is awesome' thread.
Alright, I promised I'd pull out some bits and bobs you can potentially use. These are from random posts, the LP on LP-Archive and my AARs:
I have met the enemy, and he is a mini-fortress:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,16172.msg178867.html#msg178867Sooo, Mimes.
I was not expecting that.
Super-Terminal Rebalancing:
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,16265.msg179842.htmlp.s, for those wondering:
Why yes, that is 76 million threat mere seconds before my game desynced and crashed.
Cheese.png - This was back before the carrier changes when we still had the chipper shredder mechanism in place, and didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped -
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13934.msg158445.html#msg158445A tale in three screenshots.
Yes, chase that champion ... ignore the cloaked martyrs floating just off the port bow.
EDIT: <Chipper Shredder Stuff> Uh, did I just spawn myself a threatball full of max level guardians?
Regen Golems -
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,13000.msg145421.html#msg145421So, the new regen golem is awesome. Perhaps a little too awesome, considering I just saw one crank out a botnet golem for about 40% of its health.
Remarkably good trolling - (Somewhere in All Creatures Great and Small)
By the way, when did tractors start dragging away mobile rally points to other planets? That is really irritating.
That's a remarkably good troll on the AI's part. Fixed in 7.021, regrettably.
From somewhere in the LP:
So, AI progress. As I mentioned before, it's a rough indication of how aware of you the AI is. Think of it like a peace keeping troop deployment. You start off with a lightly armed foot patrol, which after a few 'accidents' expands to some dudes in a Humvee. Then tanks, and large scale troops deployments, and napalm. Eventually, if you rile them up enough, the AIs will start sending motherships and Hunter/Killers after you. This is roughly the equivalent of para-dropping a fully operation Nimitz class aircraft carrier into the local village pond.
Zombie Redirection: First mentioned
http://lparchive.org/AI-War-Fleet-Command/Update%2016/ , I'm sure there's somewhere else further on in the LP where I use it against a CPA or something like that. Pull the two together, maybe with an explanation from someone else as this is quite a common technique.
From that same page on the LP:
I see AI War as a rogue-like RTS. Just like in a dungeon crawler there's a theoretical 'end goal' that you're striving for. But the real meat of the game is in working out the interlocking systems, figuring out how to overcome the challenges, and once you've done so then handicapping yourself or adding extra difficulty to see if you can do it all again.
For reference, I've only ever won one difficulty 10 game. In order to do so I exploited at least three different loopholes or inconsistent behaviours which have now been closed. It was done just after the introduction of salvage, which has now been balanced / nerfed fairly heavily. And at one point I ran out of tactical options so hard that I had to put the game on pause for a week until the developer added black-hole immunity to the Mk V spirecraft jumpship just for me. Which I then exploited the hell out of. Other tactics that have worked in the past are choosing an X-map and turtling up behind a massive checkpoint, exploiting Martyrs and lightning missiles so hard that they got redesigned, and adding as much positive cheese in the lobby as physically possible.
The best part about the game though is that when you're playing at this kind of difficulty you can get an almost dungeon-master relationship with the devs, if you want. As an exercise take a look at the 7.0 patch notes, especially around the 7.021 release when I was last really active. In particular, the line 'Now when launching a CPA, if it empties the galaxy of all guard ships and Strategic Reserve ships and STILL does not have enough to fill the specified number of ships, it starts freeing Special Forces ships for the attack.' As one of the devs is keen on saying, 'And they say AI War doesn't have PvP...'
The great Neinzul Lightning Warhead [strike]Robbery[/strike] Translocation (from All Creatures, and I think it's mentioned in the LP somewhere too)
Uh, there's a Mk III lighting warhead here from the neinzul rocketry corps. It's just kinda ... sitting on the planet next to the Cenurin wormhole, doing nothing.
Yup, that's a spirecraft translocator herding those lovely immobile Neinzul rocketry corps lightning warheads into position.
Exhibit B
Exhibit C.
Problem solved. Turns out I didn't need the Martyrs after all. Ahhh, just a shame that bug got fixed so fast.
I like to imagine that the AIs use their hyper-advanced technology to open a miniature wormhole just behind my ear so they can whisper taunting insults to me. But they're too honourable to send a lightning warhead through it.
That...went more smoothly than I might have expected. I was kind of figuring 'smashing a planet into an AI core' would perk the AI's attention a little more than that. I mean, granted, that was still completely absurd, but it's interesting that the AI STILLdoesn't seem to consider you its main priority.
At this point I think you could consider the AI as having a fairly significant case of Alzheimers. We've been poking holes in its memory by taking out data centres, scrambled it's brain by removing the co-processors and then did a super-terminal hack on top of that. That has left it with a vague idea that something is wrong (~200 AIP floor), but not fully aware (~460AIP).
Dodgy number crunching (you might want to check this, or maybe do something similar for other achievements):
http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,18227.msg195949.html#msg195949First Victory: 3.8% of players
Rarest Achievement: They're just bigger targets, you know - win against Starship Command on diff 9 plus - 0.4%
10.5% of the players who have completed the game have the rarest achievement. I'd wager that if you actually added everything together, seeing as nobody really plays that many games, 1/5-1/4 of the people who have won the game once have also won against a rare/dangerous AI type on 9+.
This is a game that has a lot of experts.
Edit: Also, 21% of people who have ever won a game have the double godlike achievement for beating two AIs on diff 10. Even I don't have that ('cos of a bug).
I do have four others, but honestly I've already spent quite a while pulling stuff out for now. So I'll just mention them briefly:
The 10/10 AAR in general, under the title of something something 'The Bug is Real'.
Lyudmila from the AAR, because damn if I didn't love cheesily circle kiting that little cursed golem back when it only cost 10AIP to repair before the big rebalance.
Something about the tactic of using a spire jumpship to cross the entire planet and unload ships on different sides, tying up the threat essentially forever as they chase them from side to side. A significant if micro-intensive reason why the new 'move on' logic was implemented I think.
Maybe something about the Mk V spirecraft changes (i.e. the spire transport and it getting upgraded so I could get across a blocking HW).
Of course there's plenty of other great AARs out there, especially the older ones where the game was completely different. Also seconding a vote for ride the lightning. Highlighting one every five days or something like that would be a great idea.
