Some very limited first impressions, and general confusion

[Misery]

Okay, I got around to trying this out a bit, for a short time, to see what it was like.   To be honest, this is probably a bit too early for me to be jumping in, but... feh, I'll do it anyway.

I didn't really get anywhere though.  The biggest issue is:  I have no idea what I'm looking at.  The icons are WAY too huge.  Zoomed out to where I can actually see the battlefield (which is probably the only view I'll ever use, as with the first game), it's all... glowing, jagged clumps.  Zooming IN is usually not an option in my case, as I completely lose track of what's happening overall.  So that initial fight consisted of me randomly clicking stuff until all of the green blobs were eaten by the orange blob.

Of course for all I know there's an option somewhere to fix the icon sizes, but for the time being, yeah. 

Not that I actually know what I'm really supposed to be doing here.  The question:  What is and isn't available to do right now?  I'm wondering if anyone can give any tips as to some of the general basics to help with getting started here.  Yeah, I've played the original a lot at this point, but... that's not helping with this new one.   Granted, I didn't expect it to, this being an early alpha.  I always go into these expecting confusion, hah.   Just some general "starting out" tips is what I'm looking for here.   Granted, I may still get stuck anyway.

I normally don't get this lost when trying out alpha/beta games, but this is AI War:  definitely a different story than your average game.

[BadgerBadger]

Looking at https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:Earlier_Than_Earlier_Alpha_Play_Instructions might help you get started.

The icons are being totally reworked, hopefuly we get a build with a first pass at a new item system this week. Then there will probably be a few rounds of iterative feedback and redesign.

You can't really do too much at the moment. You can build fighters, bombers and missile corvettes. You can capture a planet, somewhat clumsily. You can build turrets. To my mind, the goal when trying AI War 2 at the moment is to just get a sense of what works and what doesn't so I can give useful feedback on the design, and also to look for bugs.

[keith.lamothe]

You can capture planets (right-clicking on a controller to give the kill order now works without messing with that toggle, btw), and you can take out the sensor scramblers (marked on the galaxy map) blocking your vision of the wider galaxy. If you keep doing those two things you can eventually find the AI master controller and kill it, winning the game. Though I'm not sure if it says anything when you win yet

In practice, I think you'll run into balance issues if you try to take the MkIV/V planets, and if your AIP gets much over 100, but I'm not sure at this stage.

[BadgerBadger]

Balance is definitely not there yet, which is fine. Balance won't matter till much further into the dev cycle, and we can adjust it via modding for the moment. When I do a full game and kill the Master Controller I had to mod things to make it doable; ark strength increase and build speed to be precise.

I'm planning on going through and killing the AI master controller again this weekend, not for fun per se but to check for bugs. If you approach AI War 2 as a game to be played, you're not going to find it too exciting yet. Think of it more as an AI War like sandbox with lots of bugs. Though there aren't that many at the moment outside of multiplayer that I've seen. Most of the problem areas need development work, not bug fixing.

[Draco18s]

Okay, I got around to trying this out a bit, for a short time, to see what it was like.   To be honest, this is probably a bit too early for me to be jumping in, but... feh, I'll do it anyway.

Things are definitely at the "pink slime" stage in the sausage factory metaphor.

[keith.lamothe]

I suspect pink slime might find that comparison offensive.