I'm a friend who's never heard of AI War. Convince me to back in 3 sentences.

[NickAragua]

Hey, want to play an RTS with huge battles, lots of ship types, coop and pause/save anywhere? (That last bit should work great for dudes with kids)

[chemical_art]

I got tired of playing strategy games where I was measured by speed of mouse clicks and always had to play multiplayer. A strategy that focused on a few dozen units and had one set meta that had no choice of difficulty. So I picked one  that had a ton of difficulty settings (The best AI I have ever seen) and tens of thousands of units so I could tailor it to my taste.

[kasnavada]

(stuff)

One (possibly dumb) question. This applies very well to AI War "1":

An asymmetrical RTS, where the enemy could crush you in an instant - but you're so puny it can't be bothered.  Quietly become strong enough to assassinate the AI core before it realizes how dangerous you've become.  Capture territory, steal technology, hack for information... but you need to be careful, because every action you take makes the AI more aware of you, and brings your death that much close.

I think it applies very well because the AI controls litterally the map, and can crush you.

But, what is the "main plan" of the AI(s) in AI war 2 ? We've got bribes of it around the forum, and the design document, and I feel it would change the description quite a bit if one could describes what happens a bit... "better".

Example:
AI was was an asymetrical RTS where AIs control all, and you start small, from fear of being destroyed. The first game was about staying low, taking over it guerrilla-style, then throwing everything out in a colossal final battle. Second game is about the AIs coming back, with a vengeance, and it knows what you can do this time.

Not sure about the underlined part. Because if I'd present the game as its story, I'm not sure what happens (I don't need details details but I don't think I've got enough).

[PokerChen]

Imagine a galactic-scale RTS where our mission is to stop a powerful AI from consuming everything in its pursuit of a supreme goal.  We begin from a position of near defeat, salvage what remains of a fractured humanity, and slowly build towards a final assault on the AI homeworlds before it becomes fully aware of our capabilities.  The game itself draws a brilliant continuum between grand strategy and fleet tactics, which you use to overcome  multiple threats controlled by different models of AI intelligence, and defeat/bypass the varied fortifications defending enemy territory.

[combatwars]

If you've ever played Skyrim and loved modding, you'll remember those long hours you've spent playing the same few hours of the beginning of the story only to restart your save either because of new or better mods, or because your save was corrupted. Well, AI War is kinda like that, except you'll spend hours rebuilding your fleet multiple times and learn to fear the alert that comes up when an exogalactic strikeforce is aiming towards your home system before it wipes you out. When you've been decimated, you'll let out a defeated huff at the hours you've spent in that save before restarting again because those gosh darn aliens got something coming for them and you're not giving up until you win...at least once for the love of god...pretty please?

[tombik]

Remember in all of the RTS games, AI pretends to play as humans?

Think about what would happen if a game decides to forgo this pretense, and actually supports it via its lore.

An asymmetric war against an almost invincible AI, whose only pretense is behaving like it did not see you.

[Mánagarmr]

Remember in all of the RTS games, AI pretends to play as humans?

Think about what would happen if a game decides to forgo this pretense, and actually supports it via its lore.

An asymmetric war against an almost invincible AI, whose only pretense is behaving like it did not see you.

I like this one.

[keith.lamothe]

Winning is a bug.

[Captain Jack]

Winning 10/10 is a bug.

Fixed!

[Stormking]

The one game that let's you feel like a general concerning himself with strategic decisions, instead of a sergeant micro-managing troops.
Against a foe who is just as sly as you are.
In space.

[Yavaun]

I can subsume what my friend told ME to make me buy the game:
It's 4X co-op done right. No PvP balance crap taking the flavour out of your big guns and lore but actual asymmetrical balance made for fighting an AI which does exactly what you'd want a decent AI opponent to do: Flood the universe with millions of units (literally, our games don't end under 3m destroyed ships) and feed them to any player cunning enough to survive the assault. And yeah you can do all that in co-op spawning right next to eachother and attacking / defending every planet as if you were one.
All of this is kept fresh by the exhaustive 4X-like progressions through your tech tree (if you keep capturing stuff).

And then what I stayed for:
The sheer infinite amount of content and customization options. 300hours in and I still haven't seen all ships and minor factions or beaten all the AI types and I still find game settings I'd like to try.

[Misery]

No PvP balance crap taking the flavour out of your big guns and lore but actual asymmetrical balance made for fighting an AI which does exactly what you'd want a decent AI opponent to do: Flood the universe with millions of units (literally, our games don't end under 3m destroyed ships) and feed them to any player cunning enough to survive the assault.

I'll just chime in for a moment here and say that I like this one a lot.

[Clasmir]

Clasmir to a friend:

"Hey, when's the last time you've played a game where you felt really proud of winning? You felt like you were chipping away at something that has better tactics than you? Remember the first time a "Game of Thrones" lead character died but you kept coming back for more? That will be you with this game."

[dfinlay]

It has an official, publically viewable design philosophy.

Seriously, I have pitched it to a friend that way and it worked in getting him to try it, though ultimately he kind of bounced off of it. (he and I have had several conversations about how more games should do that in the past).

More seriously:

It's the only RTS I know that was built from the ground up for solo and co-op play and so it actually has a proper progression curve for that, rather than just the standard "versus mode against bots". It also has a brilliant AI, highly customizable difficulty (all the way up to FUN and a bit beyond) and a huge amount of variety. Plus, a strong contender for best game soundtrack I know.

That said, if recommending AI War, I would also warn them that the UI is a bit opaque and that games tend to go on for a really long time, often without immediate feedback on whether you did anything wrong. These are, I think, the two main reasons that most of my friends I've recommended it to in the past have bounced off of it.

[Blahness]

So I guess the question here is, what does AI war do that other games don't?

They allow you to fight tactically against a smart and scary opponent that's stronger than you, make decisions that matter and have thousands of ships to control when most games give you only dozens. 

Maybe present it as a challenge.  The focus is on beating the AI - they have rules made clear to the player, and the player has to abide by those rules and overcome the AI despite how strong and omnipresent they seem.  They get a lot of scary defenses, but you get a ton of cool tools to try to overcome them with.

Every game is different - rather than having different resource locations, every single game is wildly different.  Different AI, different planets, different random events, and so on.



I do think one thing AI War and many other games have had trouble with in the past is getting people into the game in a way that doesn't completely overwhelm them with choices.  New players (and some people in general) don't like making decisions when they're somewhat uninformed, so giving players starting scenarios (and making them opt-out) can help a lot in giving players direction and experimentation.  Telling people what the rules are, what's generally right, what's generally wrong and so on up-front is huge, and will give people like youtubers something to showcase.