At A Glance

- Space-based RTS, single player or up to 8 player co-op.
- Powerful emergent AI that retreats, probes defenses, and surprises even veterans with intelligent tactics.
- 30,000+ ships at a time on 10-120 simultaneous planetary battlefields.
- Different Every Time: 16 billion procedural maps, each with specific units. - A focus on deep strategy with nearly no micromanagement.
- PC Gamer UK (November 2009): AI War breaks most of the genre's rules. Which is precisely why it's incredible... This out-of-the-blue one-man passion project is one of this year's finest strategy games. (More Press & Player Reactions)

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.

Want to read about all the features in extreme detail? You can of course try the demo of the game to make sure that you know what you're getting, but the (more or less) full feature list is also now available on the AI War wiki. It's a ridiculously long list, but that just goes to show how much is packed into this game. Even more is in the first expansion, and more comes out regularly as free DLC.

Other popular resources for figuring out if this game is for you are Fast Facts: AI War in 2 pages or less, which is sort of a cliff notes explanation of the game, or the more exhaustive Like Chess, A Game Of AI War Has Three Abstract "Phases" explanation of the game, which should give you a good idea of whether you might enjoy this game as your next long-term hardcore strategy staple if you're a grognard.

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).

Older Trailers

AI War: Fleet Command Trailer 2 - Download High Quality Trailer 2