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 Arcen Games have finally gone back to their roots and are designing a sequel to their classic 4x/RTS/Tower Defence/Risk/Extinction Simulator hybrid AI War. Renowned for its emergent AI and placed solidly into the top 50 strategy games of all time by Rock Paper Shotgun, the original AI War had a decent following among goons. AI War 2 promises to replicate the experience of an asymmetrical fight where long-term strategy is emphasised over tactics, while providing a much better UI and (amazingly for Arcen) spiffing new 3D graphics. Running a medium size development studio these days is a tricky business. Arcen have a bit of a habit of running themselves into financial difficulties every few years, and being completely honest about it. This tends to be because they take big risks on interesting game concepts that don't quite work out financially. In the seven years since AI War launched they came out with Shattered Haven, Tidalis, Starward Rogue, Bionic Dues, Skyward Collapse, A Valley Without Wind and The Last Federation, all of which kept them ticking over and taught them a heck of a lot about how to develop games. This past year has been fairly bad with the delays to Stars Beyond Reach, misjudgment of Release Raptor and poor sales for Starward Rogue. So now they've decided to fold all their experience and the studio's future into what fans have been asking for since roughly 2014, a sparkly new kickstarted version of AI War. AI War 2   The kickstarter is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii/description You may also be interested in the extensive design document (61,662 words and counting). I will now proceed to rip it off for the next several paragraphs. AI War 2 is the sequel to 2009's AI War Fleet Command. Like the original, AI War 2 is a real-time strategy game with elements of tower defense and grand strategy that pits you against a smart and deadly AI. Also like the original, AI War 2 is an asymmetric game. The AI does not play by your rules: it is much more powerful than you, has no supplies you can disrupt, and its resources are literally infinite. Your successes strengthen the AI's focus on you, requiring you to balance immediate needs against long term costs. For quite a long time, we have been talking about a “remastered” version of AI War: Fleet Command, which would have some various improvements over the original and yet be essentially the same game. This is not that remastering project! AI War: Fleet Command is a wonderful game, but it has a variety of complexities that are undesirable even to the most hardcore fans of the game, and it has a number of fundamental design decisions that limit the potential for future growth. The function of AI War II is to take the things we have learned while making AI War Classic, and to create a new experience that is a worthy successor and a jumping-off point for a new era of the game. The goals of this project are perhaps best summarized as follows:
For those of you wondering why this isn't in the kickstarter thread that I'm sure I saw around here one time, well I'm hoping that this thread will be fairly alive up until the alpha release in January. And also be a nice place to reminisce about... AI War Classic  I am, quite obviously, a fan of the original AI War. To the extent that I wrote an LP for it: http://lparchive.org/AI-War-Fleet-Command/ There are plenty of other goon fans as well, and even some who enjoyed the odd multiplayer game of seeing who could accidentally set off a nuke first: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/AWGC . Sadly we haven't really had a multiplayer game in a while as the netcode for the original wasn't great (and it requires the investment of most of a weekend), but hey that could all change when the new alpha comes out! If you have any fond memories of the weird things the emergent AI did in the first one, please do share. As a starter two lovely threads from the Arcen forums: War Stories and the classic This AI is Awesome RockyB fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Oct 10, 2016 |
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Oct 10, 2016 20:45
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Thanks for pointing out the link, trust me to manage to break the most important one. Some of the interface improvements I've seen so far seem to make it a heck of a lot easier to understand whats going on at a per-planet level, and hopefully the ability for the community to mod and set up custom scenarios will help towards getting people over that initial 'what the hell am I doing' hump.
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Oct 10, 2016 23:48
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It's a shame that Release Raptor got that judgement of a cynical cash-in, because that really wasn't the original intention. The devs have a decent view of it here: http://arcengames.com/time-for-some-straight-talk-release-raptor-is-being-pulled-and-refunded/ That said, Arcen do have a reputation for making shonky games. But that's a lot of the reason why people love them, because they take a risk on something different even if it doesn't really work. It wins them a fair few long-term fans, as well as a lot of people who dismiss them. The Last Federation for instance got pretty good reviews from a lot of people, despite it being something that didn't quite work for me. Gwyrgyn Blood posted:What ya'll aren't fans of having to remember CTRL+Shift+U hotkeys to do standard tasks? KeyBindings.jpg  "AI War 2 is an opportunity to rectify the first game's biggest flaw: usability." Dear lord I hope so.
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Oct 11, 2016 09:16
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I think they've got a solid enough design document and enough heavily invested people screaming at them on the forums that they should be able to come up with something pretty decent. The fact they already have a working engine with some pretty impressive performance with masses of ships on the screen also gives me confidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLtDdZRq4Bk If you're interested in the more mathsy side of stuff section 2.a of the design doc where they work through a 10,000 ship engagement in AIWC and a 17,000 ship engagement using squads in AIW2 is a good read. Essentially they've got the number of CPU calculations down from 42 million to just over 2 million, and those can be multithreaded much better. Might even mean we can get rid of carriers and the chipper shredder entirely. With regards to the Kickstarter, it'll be interesting to see what kind of curve Arcen end up with. They came out with essentially no advertising for the first day and have managed to get 13% funded so far, I hope they get a nice swell of support rather just crashing.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:42
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Well, on the second attempt the funding went through: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcengames/ai-war-ii-0/posts/1767690 Shame that they couldn't get enough for the 'full' design plan, but hey I'm happy enough to just get an updated engine. Roll on February.
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Dec 22, 2016 21:24
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