Game features:
• Cooperative RTS game (1-8 players) with numerous unique ship types.
• Challenging AI in 26 styles, many with unique superweapons.
• Insanely high unit counts: 30,000+ ships in most games.
• Lengthy campaigns featuring 80+ simultaneous planetary battlefields.
• Different Every Time: 16 billion procedural maps, each with specific units.
• A focus on deep strategy that you don't get in most RTS games.
What Makes AI War Unique?
AI War is a 2D space RTS game, built using a 3D engine. You will often want to use this to zoom out and get a birds-eye view of the battlefield. Especially because the smaller ships move fast. This isn't your grandfather's molasses-filled space sim. The feel of gameplay is unlike any other RTS game out there; in addition to all the expected RTS activities, you also need to do a lot more advance planning and exploration. Also, our AI uses unique new methods to achieve some pretty impressive results.
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 80-120 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 battlefield 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 10-12 hours on even the smallest (80 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.
Game Scale / Ships & Technologies
Over two dozen military ship classes, with nearly 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 other 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 army, 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. 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.
Other
Multiplayer Savegames: 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.
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, or those who like to micromanage ships in battle).
