Awesome little game! Just been playing through tutorials, really like it and 'RTS' isn't normally the kind of genre I'm into
Will have a try at the included campaign tomorrow, then maybe place an order. Nice work!
Great to hear! Thanks.
Quick question regarding attacking enemy ships - is it automatic? When I get in range, my ships seem to attack the enemies. Not 100% sure how it works, because the attacks seemed quite random. Even if I click an individual enemy ship, my ships tend to randomly attack stuff. Also, my bombers (I think thats what they were) seem to converge around the enemy ships but stop 'bombing' so frequently. Does it have a timer/cooldown or something?
Thanks in advance!
Great questions -- the attacking is automatic, although you can direct it. Most of the time when you give a direct attack order, your ships will kill that target almost immediately and then "spill over" to other nearby ships.
Let's say you have 200 cruisers selected and you tell them to kill a specific bomber, for instance. They all will, but the first four or so of those cruisers will have enough firepower to blast that bomber to smithereens. So as soon as their missiles are launched, then all the rest of the cruisers will see that the target is taken care of and will immediately find other, not-having-incoming-death targets. This happens within about 40ms of time, so all you see is yourself targeting the one ship, and then your ships shooting all kinds of stuff and blowing it all up. If you were to target your ships on a target that takes more than one volley to kill (like a force field, or special forces command post), you'll observe them all doing what you told them until they have done enough damage to kill it.
As far as which ships attack what, I can assure you it isn't random, although it's too fast to follow visually if there are a lot of ships on the screen. The ships actually have a highly-sophisticated targeting system (even your ships), which helps them to maximize damage to enemy fleets in range based on the mix of ships you and they have available. More on this in a second.
Before I finish those notes, to answer your last question: yes, there is a recharge time per ship. If you hover over the ship and look at the stats in the hover tip window, you'll see attack strength, range, and recharge time all as different values there. The bombers and cruisers are pretty slow on recharge but pack a real punch with each hit. Fighters are about average all around. Laser Gatlings and Autocannon Minipods fire multiple shots per second but do comparably little damage per shot; and so on. If you want to see the recharge bars (which are turned off by default, as they mostly just clutter the interface), you can turn them on through the Settings window.
Now, to circle back around to the question of which ships attack what targets and why, from my description above you might be thinking that this game essentially plays itself. If the ships are that good at autotargeting, what else is there for you to do, right? Well, that's not the whole story. See, each ship has a range, and your ships are only allowed to attack enemy ships that are within the range of where you put your ships. The enemy AI basically does a lot of tactical management of its own, but if you want your ships to have that sort of tactical intelligence you'll have to imbue them with that yourself.
A great tactician in AI War will be moving around groups of units, keeping artillery further back and having other ships in front to absorb the main waves; will do flanking maneuvers, create diversions, and will subdivide ship groups into smaller selections of complementary ships to be moved around in ways that maximize the amount of damage they can inflict while minimizing the amount of damage the enemy can inflict. As you can imagine, that takes quite a bit of skill, experience, and management to accomplish to a world-class degree. That's basically what would replace individual unit micromanagement from RTS games with smaller unit counts, and it's every bit as deep a tactical decision space as those other kinds of games.
Do you have to play it with that degree of attention to detail? Of course not. Very few players do, just as very few players micromanage their units in other RTS games with that degree of skill. I'm just point out that the depth is there, so you can go as deep as you are inclined to. If you prefer to just move around your fleets in one big blob, while focusing more on the grand strategy, economic, and logistical/unit-mix elements of the game, that's cool. Some people get really into the tactics, some into the economic optimization, others into the unit mix and logistics angles. Few people have the inclination or the multitasking ability to manage all of those in detail at once, and so that's where the automation takes over and helps out. I did a
blog post about this just today, actually. So anyway, the bottom line is that you should just play it the way you want to play it, focus on the stuff that is the most fun for you personally, and the rest will take care of itself if you manage it in broad strokes, depending on what level of AI you are facing off against (harder AIs require more of the player).
Anyway, that was probably more information than you wanted to know, but do let me know if you have any more questions.
