General Category > AI War

Learning the Game

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apophispro:
I started playing AI War about a month ago. Since then I've gone through the first three in-game tutorials and some of the fourth. I read the entire wiki, and I've watched every video tutorial I can find.

The problem is I really learn best by watching or by reading about what someone does and why in a narrative form. There is no material I can find that covers any of this.

The fourth tutorial didn't really work for me. I would do much better off of being able to watch a game being played (or at least the major points sped up and summarized in how they work) and then being able to just go off on my own and do it. With the whole system of trying to read about something and do it at the same time, I didn't really feel like I was learning much. I know there will definitely be players for whom the tutorial is exactly what they need, but I just don't really learn best that way.

It's a complicated game, and I think there should be more resources to help a player to learn it than there are. Every video tutorial covers maybe the first hour of the game at most, but that's not what I'm confused about. What I really need to understand is how the game lays out in the long run. If I do this in the beginning, what happens later? Why did someone prioritize doing this instead of that?

I feel like the tutorial doesn't really say as much as people are saying it does. It certainly guides you step by step through a game, but I want to see someone's strategy play out over time and how they handle everything. That's what would help me actually learn it. As I mentioned, the video tutorials only cover the beginning except one video on youtube about 3/4 player mid-game which just runs a huge amount of stuff off in 8 minutes. All of the wiki articles are just about individual things and how they work but doesn't really talk much about how they all fit together. The only one that really covers the game as a whole is the one that compares it to chess which is along the lines of what I'm looking for but is too abstract to really be helpful.

I think this seems like a great game, and I hope no one feels like I'm attacking it. I just think there should be a little more in the way of resources to help learn the game than there are. Maybe some articles that are 2-3 pages which each lay out how a different strategy would play out over the course of a game. A series of video tutorials that covered an entire solo game and summed up each hour of gameplay in about 10 minutes would be hugely beneficial just to really get to see how things play out and how an experienced player plays.

I know these aren't things that would take just an hour to develop, and I don't know if I'm the only one who has this difficulty. In that case it probably wouldn't be worth it to produce just for one player. However if there are more who are having or did have similar difficulties then more varied introductory resources might help the new players learn the game. It might even attract more  potential players to buy the game if they could get a chance to see the strategy of the game playing out in those ways.

Nodor:
While the After Action Reports can help you get a better feel for the game, the basis of the game is summarizable in three ships.

You start with 3 fleet ships.  The Fighter, the Bomber and the Frigate.  Fighters kill Bombers, Bombers kill Frigates, and Frigates kill Fighters.  These ships cost different resources, build at different speeds and have different energy costs.  They are different tools with different strengths and weaknesses. 

AI War is about finding the best way to counter the things the AI is throwing at you by exploiting the AI's weaknesses.  To kill AI fighters, you don't want to send bombers, you send frigates. 

Because the game is different every time due to RNG, different AI types, difficulty levels, expansion options, what you need to use to counter the AI changes from game to game.  The tactics don't change a lot.  (Counter bombers with fighters, keep ranged units at range, melee up close.) But the strategy around knowledge choices can be radically different.

zoutzakje:
welcome to the forums =)
to be honest, I was planning to record a full 7/7 game and post it in pieces on youtube and the likes, with strategic advice of course, just because I'm a big fan of the game and would like to get more people to know and like it. But I haven't even started with this yet, so it won't help you in the near future.
And summarizing each hour worth of gameplay in 10 minutes wouldn't help much (if it's even possible). campaigns can last many many hours and there is often to much going on in the galaxy to sum it up. my own campaigns always end with at least 15 hours on the ingame clock.

I too played all the tutorials, read the entire wiki and a whole lot of forum posts before I started playing the game. But to be honest, it was all to complicated and confusing for me understand very well. In my opinion, the best way to learn this game is to play countless of games yourself. Yes, you will most likely die and lose a lot at first, as did pretty much everyone else on this forum. Just consider it a learning progress.
don't underestimate the AI. Start with low difficulty (I personally started at 1/1, though that might be a bit too low. 5/5 should get you going nicely), play against easy AI types and try out all the different minor factions and AI plots 1 by 1, not all at once. that's what I did at least.
It'll take some time, but you will learn how the game works.

and if any specific questions about the game come to mind, feel free to ask. I'm sure there are plenty of people in this community who are willing to answer your questions about this game (including me).

I hope this helps a bit =)

apophispro:
Thanks for both of your input! Zoutzakje your idea for a tutorial sounds great. I'm thinking about at least writing a couple myself once I really get up and running with it.

I think your statement about ending with 15 hours and having too much going on is what really confuses me. I understand the interface and the basics of how to play. I have a decent idea of what everything does and is more or less used for. The problem is I really have no idea what to do with all of it.

I actually came up with basically the same plan you did. I want to play through everything turning on and off individual things with 5/5 AIs as well. I did start a game a couple of weeks ago on a 5/5 random easy AI. I realized later I should have hand-selected which AI it was so that I could start to understand their strategies. I also made the mistake of having the in-game AI identification turned off.

So I started the game, scouted the local area, made a few basic mistakes but nothing too bad (went scouting with a fleet at one point...definitely figured out why that was a bad idea), and then took a couple of local planets with strong resources. I wasn't really sure whether I should take all the planets surrounding my home planet, but I know that sort of strategy will come with time.

The issue is I hit that point and then I had no idea what to do. I'm sitting there with a 60-planet map, a few small planets that I've built defenses on, my ship caps maxed out, and no idea what to do next. There are all these things I've heard about as being important or necessary, but I don't know which I should go do or why.

For instance I know Advanced Research Stations are important because they give you new ship types, but I don't really have that internalized because I haven't encountered a situation where I need a new ship type. I know that would matter later in the game, but then I don't really know how that plays out. It seems like so many things that you do in this game are "for later" so it's really hard to play without a solid idea of how different decisions would turn out. I even went a few planets out with a small fleet to do a raid on a data center. That knocked my AI progress down to 15. At that point I was like ok my AI progress is really low now. That's a good thing because the AI won't do much to me, but now what do I do to the AI?

I seem to be at a point where I get to the end of the first phase, and I don't know where the game goes from there. Everyone says they play these incredibly long games that get so complicated, but the only thing I can think of is to maybe go find an ARS and take that. Maybe scout out where the AI core planets are. I have a general idea of where my objective is. I'm just not sure how the game is supposed to play out.

So that's really my current dilemma. What happens after I've scouted a few planets out, taken a couple of local planets, and built up some defenses? The chess article gives a lot of different things to potentially do, but I don't understand why I would do any of them or what impact they would have on the later game. Like I said in the first post, I'm really lacking an idea of the scope of the game in my head in the way that it plays out over time if I make one choice versus another. Not really in the sense of having developed my own strategy but just in the base very general sense of what to do, when, and why.

Diazo:
I think part of the issue is that this is a sandbox game. There is no right way to play.

If you gave every player the same game saved at game start everyone would play that map differently with different strategies.

The goal is to destroy both AI homeworlds, everything else affects how you do that.

You want to keep AIP low so the AI does not attack you as hard.
You want to take systems to increase you resource base to build a bigger fleet, but taking systems increases AIP.
You want to reduce the AIP via datacenters/superterminals/co-processors but is taking the territory you need to use/destroy those worth the reduction?
You want to capture ARS to give you another ship type to increase your total fleet size, but how many systems/AIP is an ARS worth to you?
etc. etc.

There is no right answer to these questions, every player on this board would give you different answers.

Do you play a low AIP capturing the absolute minimum number of systems?
Do you play a high AIP capturing a lot of systems but giving you more map coverage?

It comes down to trying stuff out. You will develop your own strategy as you go along.

D.

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