[img]http://filesmelt.com/downloader/Splash1.png[/img]
[b]AI War: Fleet Command[/b]
A colossal scale RTS game, developed by a new small Indie company, Arcen games (I wonder if he was ever charged for that >.>).
AI War is a Co-Operative Multiplayer RTS, with support for up to eight players. The 1-8 players are faced off against 2 AI enemies of varying difficulty. The players are treated as major underdogs at the start of the game, often at severe disadvantages even later in games.
AI War supports multiple thousands of active ships in combat at the same time. With over 40 different ship classes, each with four upgrade levels, Mark 5 Core AI-only ships, astro trains (oh god no), and other special surprises throughout the game, it is estimated a player will on average still not have seen all the content in 100 hours of playtime.
[media]http://www.arcengames.com/lightbox/AIWar1301/MassiveBattle.jpg[/media]
Shiny Space Battle are goooood.
Games start with players choosing home planets, giving them their position in the galaxy, and their starting bonus ship.
[media]http://www.arcengames.com/lightbox/AIWar1301/Lobby.jpg[/media]
They then fight the AI across the map, trying to gain Advanced Research Centers (Give new bonus ships to capturing player), Advanced Factories (Allow construction of Mark 4 ships), and destroy Data Centers (Lowers AI agression).
AI does not attempt to do normal human mimicry, like decision trees, but rather works off of emergent intelligence and data miner tactics.
[media]http://www.arcengames.com/lightbox/AIWar1301/LinesOfShips.jpg[/media]
[quote="Arcen Games"]What Makes AI War Unique?
AI War is an entirely unique large-scale RTS with aspects of TBS, tower defense, and grand strategy. It features single or cooperative play with as many as 8 humans against a pair of powerful, intelligent AIs. These AIs are driven by an AI Progress stat that players contribute to through aggressive actions such as taking control of planets and destroying key units, forcing tough decisions regarding which targets are worth capturing or destroying. Human fleets are usually several thousand ships in size or larger, with games often featuring 30,000 units at any given time across galaxies of anywhere from 10 to 120 planets. Some games have reached as many as 90,000 units!
Despite this, players retain powerful control over their fleets in a macro-sense, ignoring painful micromanagement present in other games in favor of actual tactics like flanking. Meanwhile, ships themselves attempt to target enemies as intelligently as possible so the player can focus on the tasks that really matter. Scouting also plays a major role in the game, supplying an intel 'snapshot' about important capturable units, enemy fleet sizes, and planet ownership. Designed by RTS veterans and backed by strong, responsive support on the official forums and elsewhere, AI War is an exciting and refreshing experience.
Campaigns
Cooperative Campaigns: There are no traditional skirmish or scripted-campaign modes. Instead, 1-8 human players cooperate in one of the 16 billion procedurally-generated campaigns against two deadly AI forces that have taken over the galaxy. Your collective mission is to locate and destroy the enemy homeworlds before they destroy all of your team's homeworlds. Your team succeeds or fails as a group: no one is ever "out" early, with nothing to do.
Multiple realtime battlefields: Each campaign is split into many battlefields -- the gravity wells of 10-120 planets. The galaxy map is always accessible by simply hitting the tab key, and is managed in realtime just like all your battlefields. Each individual system is immense: if you don't zoom out, to scroll from one side of a single battlefield to the other would take over 9 minutes.
Lengthy Games: Games are meant to be played with friends over an extended period of time, often 7-12 hours on even the smaller 40 planet maps. Throughout the game technology levels are always changing, new ship types become available, certain locations evolve as key battlefields, and you must work to protect your flanks even as you press further out into the galaxy. It's easy to see the 4X influence here.
Game Scale / Ships & Technologies
Over two dozen military ship classes, with more than two hundred ships in all, divided into four technology tiers and several specialized groups (such as defensive structures and turrets). In-game hover-tips make this easy to learn, but hard to master.
Every Game Has A Different Unit Mix: Each game starts you out with only five military ship types (one that you get to choose, plus four basic types that are always available), and you'll unlock up to five more ship types through capturing Advanced Research Stations from the enemy. Even with eight players, you won't see anywhere close to all of the ship types in any single game!
There are also several dozen non-military ship types, starships, and turrets that are available in every game. Many of these also have to be unlocked, so there are a lot of different ways you can grow your civilization.
Vast Numbers Of Ships: On an average dual core computer (for the host -- single cores are all that are needed for other players), the game can easily support several tens of thousands of units (including several thousand in battle at once) without a stutter. Most campaigns start with more than 20,000 units on the map. Broadband connection required for Internet play.
Energy, Metal, Crystal, and Knowledge are the four resources you must manage. An unusual twist is that Knowledge is finite and can only be increased by taking more territory -- so "turtles" must be prepared to break out of their shells in order to gain access to higher level ships!
Per-Ship-Type Population Caps: Each individual technology tier of each ship type has its own population cap. So to continue expanding your fleets, you need to both increase your technology levels for each ship type, and you need to find and unlock new ship types. This takes some planning -- you can't just "spam" any single unit, and also you can't disregard your older, weaker, ships. Deciding where to put your best ships and where to use your older, weaker, rejects is part of the challenge (and something real military commanders would have to contend with, by the way).
Capture Enemy Technology: To keep expanding, you'll need to capture Advanced Research Stations, which unlock new ship types, from the AIs. You'll also want to capture Advanced Factories, since those are the only way to build your highest-tier (Mark IV) ships. There are a finite number of Advanced Factories, so if they all get destroyed, you'll be limited to Mark III ships and below -- guard them carefully!
Innovative AI
Ten AI difficulty levels and Twenty-Six AI types. There is also an underlying difficulty scale based on how many human players are in the game -- a level seven AI presents approximately the same challenge no matter how many players are present. Some of the AI types include specialized ships or even superweapons that change the entire feel of the game.
Multithreaded host: The AI routines are run on the game host only, in a separate thread, to allow keen AI intelligence (based, unusually, on modern data mining techniques) without ever slowing the game down. This is a huge improvement over the way AI is handled in many RTS games (AI is typically a key factor in slowing down large games because of how closely it is tied to the main game processing -- not so, here).
Distributed AI Intelligence: Most RTS games basically feature player v. player modes, with the ability to have AI players take the place of human ones when the need arises. These AI players tend to try to emulate what a human would do as closely as possible. AI War is built around an entirely different concept -- more closely resembling actual battlefield opponents. Rather than mimicking a single central intelligence, the AI simulates the effect of intelligence in each individual ship, guided into battle by several sub-commanders of varying skill. Overarching strategies used by the AI are actually emergent behavior (as happens with large groups of people working toward a common goal). The unique structure of this system makes for AI opponents that are inherently more varied and effective than the purely rules-based AI in most other games.
Game Flow and Objectives
Planet Defense and Beachheads: Offensive and Defensive initiatives are both extremely important to your success in this game, and each has a distinctly different feel. In defending your planets from the waves of enemy ships that are warped in from outside the galaxy, you will augment your mobile forces with turrets of many varieties, tractor beams, tachyon beam emitters, force fields, and so on -- this is where you can see the Tower Defense influence on the game. Success in the late game depends on properly diverting the oncoming waves until they can be destroyed. By contrast, offense revolves around advance scouting, smart targeting of key enemy command posts, and effective tactical positioning.
Secondary Objectives: Your primary objective is to find the two AI homeworlds and destroy them. If you can do this without completing any secondary objectives, go right ahead -- but on all but the easiest difficulty levels, this probably isn't possible. In order to secure your victory, you'll need to weaken the enemy by taking out their data centers, and strengthen yourself by capturing their factories and research stations. You might even find captive human settlements that will help you if you save them, amongst other surprises hidden out in the stars.
Other
Multiplayer Savegames, Co-Op Drop-in/Drop-Out: Unlike many other recent RTS games, AI War supports multiplayer savegames. Completely unique to this game is that it also supports hot-rejoining for players who are dropped due to connection issues, power loss, computer crashes, etc.
A Manage Players interface also allows for players who permanently leave a game to be replaced or disabled, with their ships divided up among the remaining players. Similarly, if you want to add a new player to an existing game in progress, you can do so.
Powerful Interface: The minimalist interface for the game nevertheless provides a number of extremely helpful buttons directly in your HUD. It's easy to find specific ships, to manage build queues (and even to set them in a repeating loop), and to see a myriad of statistics detailing the performance of yourself and your teammates (normally this information would be restricted to after win/loss in other games of this genre).
Configurable Game Start Options: Hate mines, or ships with cloaking? Tired of EtherJets swooping into your planets, grabbing your ships with tractor beams, and carrying them off for destruction? It's simple to turn them off -- the AI players adjust their strategies automatically. Tired of facing orderly waves of ships? Try the "Schizophrenic" AI modifier. Alternatively, double or halve the number of incoming enemy waves with other AI modifiers. You can also adjust the combat style so that it is faster-paced (for advanced players) or regular speed (for new players, TBS fans, or those who like to micromanage ships in battle).[/quote]
As noted, the game has online, but at the moment, no master server or matchmaking. It is however noted that average games stem 7-10 hours, and as such, normal matchmaking would be quite gimped. There is however, a master server and the like planned for...
[img]http://filesmelt.com/downloader/Splash2.png[/img]
The first expansion, [b]Zenith Remnant[/b].
[quote="Arcen Games"]In a broad sense, here's what will definitely be in the expansion:
* 80 to 100 new ships, including:
* At least 12 new ship classes with a variety of abilities.
* At least 6 massive "Golem" ships.
* At least 5 new "capturables" other than Golems.
* Several new ships for allowing players expanded ways to control fleets.
* At least 4 new map styles.
* At least 12 new AI Types.
* A new, neutral minor faction in the galaxy: the Zenith Aliens (NPCs).
* 30-40 minutes of new in-game music tracks.
* At least two universal new AI ship subsystems (like Astro Trains).[/quote]
This includes a ship designed by even your truly :D
I have tried the new xpack and bought a key myself. But here is something to grab attention for those starting to dose off.
[media]http://www.arcengames.com/lightbox/Zenith/Golems.jpg[/media]
Yes, that is there real size. Really. The motherfuckers are Golems. Bigass neutral ships procurable by either you or the AI.
Other new ships already designed and in the trial Xpak include:
Zenith Bombarder, an artillery piece really.
[img]http://www.arcengames.com/img/Zenith/Bombardment_01.gif[/img]
First AOE attacker, the Zenith Gren Launcher.
[img]http://www.arcengames.com/img/Zenith/GrenadeLauncherAnim_01.gif[/img]
And finally, this game's Petard, the Zenith Autobomb.
[img]http://www.arcengames.com/img/Zenith/Autobomb_01.gif[/img]
[b] Networking[/b]
Because of the lack of Master Servers or Matchmaking. Several alternatives have been setup for getting games setup.
There are Hamachi Channels, namely "AI War: Fleet Command X" (Replace X with numbers 5-9, channels 1-4 are full already.)
There is the IRC channel, accessible from the website, or because this is Faecpawnch and you're all lazy, here's a quick link: [url]http://arcengames.com/irc/aiwar_irc.php[/url]
Steam Group:[url]http://steamcommunity.com/games/aiwar[/url]
Download the Demo (or do awesome stuff and buy a Key :D) here: [url]http://www.arcengames.com/aiwar_buy.php[/url]
Hope to see you in game!
We should set up a game
Fuck this is so awesome.
That it is
[quote]
targets are worth capturing or destroying. Human fleets are usually several thousand ships in size or larger, with games often featuring 30,000 units at any given time across galaxies of anywhere from 10 to 120 planets. Some games have reached as many as 90,000 units!
Cooperative campaigns: There are no traditional skirmish or scripted-campaign modes. Instead, 1-8 human players cooperate in one of the 16 billion procedurally-generated campaigns[/quote]
holy fuck
Too bad I played this game when I was sick (headaches, tired, feeling shit) and now I can't shake that feeling when I want to play the game :saddowns:
Next preview of the Xpak is out, you can find the golems now. :D
sounds nice
Downloading the Demo
[editline]09:20PM[/editline]
and it's only 14€
This looks like gigantic clusterfuck.
Well, I always wanted to get into the game. It's kind of hard though and confusing.
Seems cool, but it seems too hard and confusing to me ^^
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