Contents

Are The Basics Like Other RTS Games?
How Do I Learn Play / Play Better?
What Are The Ships Like?
How Do I Defend Myself?
How Do I Attack My Enemies?
What Sort Of Resources Are There?
How Does Fog Of War Work?
How Do I Win?
How Do I Lose?
Are There Any Unique Strategies Compared To Other RTS Games?
What's The Benefit Of Cooperation?

Are The Basics Like Other RTS Games?

In general, the mechanics of AI War are pretty conventional within the RTS genre. You collect resources, build ships -- both stationary "building-style" ships as well as mobile ones -- and you prepare for and engage in battles. Genre standbys such as control groups, minimaps, and hotkeys are alive and well here. We made AI War so that it would feel "familiar" to genre veterans (primarily because we're genre veterans ourselves).

Of course, we've also added some new conveniences to make things even easier than ever before -- you do command an awful lot of ships in this game, and a much larger space to manage than most other games, so we've made some great tools to help you manage it all. Intel Summaries, the Planetary Summary, in-game peformance stats, a Find interface on the galaxy map, and quick-buttons along the bottom of the screen are new usability improvements found only in AI War.

Beyond these basics, however, the first thing you need to know about the game is that it's not a true RTS except in its controls. One reviewer described the game as "a grand strategic tower defense 4X RTS," and that's about as apt a description as we can think of. AI War is essentially the first game of a new strategy subgenre, and you'll be lost if you don't start out with the in-game tutorials. Fortunately, the tutorials are a load of fun, and the intermediate tutorial lets you play through a whole game while just giving you overall goals and pointers as you go. The AI War fanbase has quite a lot of RTS veterans in it, but also a lot of people who generally prefer turn-based stragegy titles, or who have been tired of RTS for a decade or more. So if you've been looking for something different from "yet another RTS clone," AI War is the game demo you want to try.
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How Do I Learn Play / Play Better?

The primary way to get started is to play the in-game tutorials. The three basic tutorials are designed in such a way that they can be a person's first introduction to the RTS genre, but they also don't belabor the point. If you're a very experienced RTS player, you'll make it through these tutorials quicker, but you'll still learn a lot of useful stuff about this specific game. For non-RTS players, these first tutorials will cumulatively take about an hour; for those familiar with the genre, it will take about half that long.

After you're through with the basic tutorials, it's highly recommended that you play the simulated campaign via the intermediate tutorial. This campaign takes around 3 hours, so it's much shorter than a regular game of AI War, and it gives you advice and teaches you effective strategies while you play. If you later find yourself stuck or just want some general advice, there is also an online Manual / FAQ Wiki with very detailed information about the game (as well as player-shared stragies in our Community Wiki), as well as online Video Tutorials to help.
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What Are The Ships Like?

It's a really good thing that we made the basics so conventional, honestly, because the actual content of the game is highly original -- there's a lot of new ships to learn here, and that will take some time even though the game is great about unobtrusively reminding you what everything does. The benefits of ships with cloaking are probably obvious, and you can probably guess at the difference between space tanks and lazer gatlings (things tend to sound like what they are in this game), but the strategic milieu is different from most other games in the RTS genre simply because it's set in space and we had to get creative to keep things interesting.

In a terrestrial RTS you have units that fly, units that don't, naval units, units that are ranged, seige units, and so forth. In AI war you have ships that have faster or slower movement or firing rates, ships that are cloaked or not, ships that fire missiles versus those that use lazers, ships with high shields or armor, ships with shield/armor piercing abilities, ships that are cheap and therefore great in swarms of literally hundreds or thousands, ships that are more expensive and have multi-targeting abilities to take out opposing swarms, ships with greatly varying firing ranges, ships that are specialized against certain other classes of ships, seige-type ships that are good against infrastructure and other high-value targets... and the list goes on. There are also ships with many special abilities, such as teleportation, vampirism, reclamation, and more.

In any given game, you will start out with the four basic military ship types of Scout, Fighter, Bomber, and Cruiser. You then get to pick a fifth "bonus" type from a selection of over two dozen. In a multiplayer game, each team member will have a different bonus type. Over the course of the game, your team will get up to five more shared types. The AI will also start with a limited number of bonus ship types, and will gain more over the course of the game. So there's plenty of time to get used to each ship in your current campaign before new ones get added to the mix.
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How Do I Defend Myself?

Well, there certainly are a lot of options in this regard, but you can't do everything and still field a strong offensive force, so you'll have to mix and match and experiment to find what you like best. Certain technologies -- fortresses come to mind -- cost a lot of knowledge and so tend not to appear until fairly late in the game.

Of course, if you're over-eager, you can unlock the first level of almost any of the dozens of technology branches right at the start of the game, since you start with a lot of knowledge. Unlocking a single expensive ship simply comes with what economists call an "opportunity cost" (you lose out on all the other things you might have spent that knowledge on).

Perhaps the simplest way to defend yourself is just by keeping a substantial fleet at each of your vulnerable planets. But this tends to be less cost-effective than putting in turrets and other defensive cannons and fortresses, which are much more powerful for the amount of metal/crystal you spend -- the tradeoff being that they are immobile. On higher difficulties, you will also want to have all the mobile ships you can build on offensive duty, whenever possible, so the turrets are invaluable for freeing up your mobile forces for attacks. There are dozens of types of turrets that can be unlocked.

Another way to defend yourself is via Force Fields. All non-cloaking ships in the game are equipped with shields that make it more difficult for low-energy shots to strike them (shots lose energy as they travel based on the range rating of the firing ship), but those shields are never perfect. Force Fields provide a fixed "bubble" of protection. Friendly ships inside the bubble are completely safe, free to fire out at nearby ships at will. Most enemy ships can't penetrate the force fields physically or by firing. But as they fire at the force field, it will weaken and eventually break. The starting force fields create a rather small and weak bubble of protection, but more advanced force fields can be unlocked.

One very important technology is Tractor Beams. As you might expect, tractor beams reach out and grab nearby ships, preventing them from moving (though they can still fire). The basic tractor beam turret can grab a few ships at once, and upgraded models can grab more. These are particularly useful for preventing enemies from slipping past your massed armies or turrets (as incoming waves are wont to attempt). You can't be everywhere at once, so it's a good idea to try to keep the enemy where your forces are strongest. A few ships, like raiders, are immune to the pull of tractor beams, however.

You can also build cloaked Mines as a defensive measure. These will damage any enemy ship that flies into them. They are extremely effective at destroying low-level ships, but they are moderately expensive and need to be replenished after each wave of enemies is taken care of (since exploding destroys the mine in addition to damaging the other ship). Mine Layers can automate the rebuild process, but they must be unlocked. Used effectively, mines can be a lifesaver, but used without restraint they can tank your economy. Be judicious! Also: on higher difficulties, watch out for mines on enemy planets. They can be quite devious about boobytrapping wormholes.

A very specialized unlockable technology is Tachyon Beam Emitters. These turrets are only useful for "tagging" cloaked ships, making them partly-visible (and thus succeptible to attack) for a short while. Normally you'd have to wait for the cloaked enemy ships to fire on you (since this drops their cloak for a short while), but tachyon beam emitters let you decide when and where the fight will take place. Cloaked ships normally can't be grabbed by tractor beams, either, but tagged ships can be, making these two technologies great in combination.
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How Do I Attack My Enemies?

If you thought there were a lot of options for defending yourself, that's nothing compared to the variety that awaits you for fleet-building purposes.

The Space Dock builds most of your fleet ships. The Scout, Fighter, Bomber, and Cruiser are always available to be built here, along with your chosen "bonus" ship type and up to five other ship types (out of a pool of over two dozen) that can be unlocked throughout a campaign. The Space Dock can build three technology tiers of each ship type, but the second and third tiers first have to be unlocked via research (which costs the Knowledge resource).

The Advanced Factory cannot be built, but can only be captured from enemy AIs. Use these factories to build Mark IV versions of any ships for which you have already unlocked the Mark III version. The challenge is that if you lose an advanced factory, it can't be rebuilt. There are a limited number of these on the map, so defend them well!

Starship Constructors can be built at any time, and produce the strongest units in the game. Each starship is very expensive, though, and you can only build a limited number of each. Even the smallest starships are forces to be reckoned with, and can provide the backbone of an otherwise smallish fighting force. The highest-level starships, which have to be unlocked, are behemoths that can take hundreds of smaller ships to fell.

As for the actual mechanics of attacking your enemies, this is where wormholes come into play. All of the planets on the galaxy map are chained together into a network of wormholes, which provide instantaneous transport between wormhole-adjacent planets. Of course, it takes a good while to traverse the actual gravity well around each planet, so it's not as if you can move ships around the galaxy map with impunity. You'll need to exercise careful planning in where you put your constructors, where you put your defenses, and where you station the various strike groups of your fleet.
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What Sort Of Resources Are There?

Metal and Crystal are gathered from Junk Piles and Crystal Deposits by their respective harvesters. These are the building materials used in making ships -- some ships require more of one resource or the other, and so the availability of each resource early in the game may impact your ideal ship mix.

Manufactories are a specialized kind of resource production ship, which let you turn 12 Metal per second of income into 8 Crystal per second of income (or vice-versa). Depending on what ships you choose to specialize in, and depending on the level of relative wealth at your captured planets, you might find yourself with an excess of one resource or another; in that situation you can use Manufactories to exchange one income type for another (at a fairly stiff exchange cost as noted).

Knowledge is obtained by positioning Science Labs at a planet, and is used for unlocking new technologies. Regardless of how many science labs you place at a planet, you can only learn 2,000 points worth of knowledge from it. You can send multiple science labs to a planet to accelerate your learning, but once you've exhaused the knowledge at all your planets you won't be able to do any more upgrades until you take some more territory. Choose your upgrades wisely so that you don't put yourself in a position where you are well defended but too poor to mount an effective attack on any neighboring planet! (Don't worry about it too much at first, of course: that sort of conundrum is something only more advanced players will run into on higher difficulties).

Energy is generated via reactors, which are built using Metal and Crystal like all other ships. Each ship in your fleet (including building-style ships) consumes a certain amount of energy. If you run out, you can't build any more ships without first creating another reactor. If some of your ships are destroyed, you gain that energy capacity back and can build more ships again. There is no limit to how much energy you can produce except how many reactors you can afford.

However, the efficiency of each extra reactor beyond the first at a planet (per reactor type) goes down significantly, so you will want to build only one reactor per type any given planet if you can manage it. This gives you a strong impetus for spreading your reactors out, but be sure to protect your reactors carefully -- if some are destroyed and your net energy rate goes negative, not only will you not be able to build any more ships, but certain base functions will also go offline until a zero or positive energy balance is restored. Tractor beams, force fields, and tachyon beam emitters are all among the ships that will cease functioning in those cases.
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How Does Fog Of War Work?

You can see everything (cloaking aside) on planets at which you have ships. You can send ships through a wormhole to any planet, regardless of whether or not you currently have visibilty there. You can see the ownership of planets that you have scouted, but if ownership should change while you are away, you wouldn't see that without re-scouting.

The primary duty of scouts is not to wander the gravity well of planets, but rather to pop into planets to see what is there, catalogue it all for the Intel Summary on your Galaxy Map, and then move on to other planets to see where ideal targets might be. The secondary duty of scouts is to accompany your strike groups onto enemy planets, because only with scouts present can you see enemy stats in the Planetary Summary of planets your team doesn't control.
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How Do I Win?

The players all win if they are able to locate and destroy the two Home Planet Command Stations controlled by the AI players. These planets are extremely well defended, however, so it will take quite some time until you are strong enough to mount an effective assault.
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How Do I Lose?

The players all lose if all of their Home Planet Command Stations are lost (there is one of these per player). If you lose your Home Planet Command Station, you can never rebuild it (same goes for the AI players), but if some of your allies still have theirs you aren't out of the game. You can still build ships and fleets, unlock technologies, and do everything as normal. If you've lost too much to be effective, your allies can give you some of their own ships to manage -- two heads are better than one, after all, and teamwork might just turn the tides and give you the strength you need to retake the planets you previously lost.
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Are There Any Unique Strategies Compared To Other RTS Games?

Yes, there are many! Some of them are hard to describe if you've never played the game, but others are easy enough to understand: wormhole defense is a critical element of this game, involving cutting off ingresses as well as boobytrapping common routes. Another very common way of protecting planets is via offensive gate-raids, wherein your ships make a (potentially suicidal) rush to destroy the enemy warp gate on a neighboring planet.

Enemy Ion Cannons often create difficult-to-pass planets, and a variety of strategies can be used against them, such as ion smashing, ion flooding, and ion capturing. There are a variety of sneaky techniques for scouting, as well as ways to create beachheads in enemy territory. You can steal knowledge from enemy-controlled planets, or provide cover to bombers or other powerful ships so that they can make precision strikes. There are ways to flank and draw out enemies, ways to set up guard perimiters, and many, many other techniques (some yet to be invented, we're sure -- strategy players tend to be a clever bunch, and our players have already invented dozens of strategies we never thought of when designing the game).
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What's The Benefit Of Cooperation?

You can choose to play this game by yourself (we certainly do quite freqently), and you'll find a rich, engaging experience against tough AI opponents. It's an awesome game this way, and honestly most of our players play solo, as is the case with most strategy games. However, there's nothing quite like the excitment of successfully executing joint maneuvers with your friends. In a multiplayer game of AI War, the AI players ramp up in difficulty based on the number of players. At the very start of the game, this doesn't make a significant difference for how you choose to take planets around you -- each player can mostly do their own thing if they so desire.

But before long you'll find yourself up against odds that no single player can handle. Only through teamwork, concerted strategies, and effectively massed and divided forces will you be able to take enemy planets. Similiarly, some of the waves of enemy ships will be too much for one player to defend against alone. Players will need to organize their defense in tandem, donating ships where needed and perhaps even building specialized defenses for those players who otherwise would go without.

If you want to play multiplayer on the harder difficulty levels, learning to work as an effective team is probably the most important skill there is. Other RTS games emphasize player v. player battles among semi-anonymous ladders and leagues online. With AI War, we wanted to provide an experience that emphasizes the exact opposite -- our modern armed forces are successful precisely because they train their soldiers and commanders how to work as a single unit, and we thought it was about time that a strategy game let friends experience something of that in their living rooms.
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