AI War Co-op Diary 2

The line must be drawn here. This far, and no further!

Well, okay. Just a little bit further, if you really insist. Alright, look. Let’s forget the lines. Just stay on your side of the galaxy and we’ll stay on ours. Fine then. You stay on your side of my home planet, and I’ll stay on mine. I can move my ships if they’re bothering you? Or you could just wipe me out within ten minutes of our second co-op game on AI War.

The eponymous AI in this game isn’t quite clever enough to hold a conversation with, but if it was, I imagine that’s how it would have gone when Paz and I cranked up the enemy’s intelligence to 10, just to see what would happen. Destruction is a lot of fun when it’s happening to someone else, but a thrashing is far less appealed when it’s you that’s staring up at the heel of a very large boot.

In our first AI War diary, we kind of defeated ourselves. Mining resources dry within the first hour, then struggling to build even the small engineer drones used to make the ships you actually need. The deliberately obtuse enemy came and went, with barely the wit to stop its head banging against the floor when it was trying to tie its shoes, so this time we really wanted to see what an intelligent galactic army was capable of.

To be fair, we didn’t expect to be putting up much of a fight against the uber-smart AI in the first round, and indeed it was wise enough to jump on our homeworlds within seconds and cripple us both economically and literally. Turned down to a more reasonable 7.6 changed AI War from a high speed massacre and into more of a cut throat challenge, however, and though it was probably still set a little too high for fledgling strategists such as ourselves, the scope of intelligence on the AI’s sliding scale of 1 to 10 was very noticeable.

But we’ve had some practice ourselves, too. There’s no first task this time around. Instead, a flurry of construction begins now the importance of ensuring that first orbital command station has been driven home like a railroad spike through our skulls, and defensive turrets are brought into being. These stationary defences are great to protect your remote mining facilities, which all this construction hinges on, but primarily we’ve learned that mining a wormhole with them is a great way to at least slow an early invasion fleet.

Combinations of sniper turrets and the excellent tractor beam turrets are built around the wormhole mouths, but also as a defensive perimeter around the shielded orbital command station. A couple of games in, and the tower defence aspects of play can be seen evolving, quite organically, around your home system. A good distance from your command station – but still very close on a galactic scale – a semi-circle of tractor beam turrets are built, with their spheres of reach touching.