AI War:Choosing A Difficulty Level

How Do I Know What Difficulty Level To Play On?

First Game

For your first game, choosing a difficulty is mostly based on your experience with other RTS games, since you don't yet have much experience with this game (hopefully you have played through all of the in-game tutorials already at this point, though -- they are invaluable even if you are an RTS expert in general).

• If you have never touched an RTS game before, and you struggled with the tutorials, you should probably start with difficulty 1 or 2, which will be extremely easy and will give you more time to get used to the game.
• If you have never touched an RTS game before, but you were comfortable with this game by the end of the tutorials, you should probably start with difficulty 3.
• If you have played other RTS games, you probaly should be on difficulty 4 or 5 at the minimum.
• If you are very good at other RTS games, you should be difficulty 5 or 6 at the very least, and you might even want to jump to difficulty 7 right from the start from what we've seen with other players.

Always Play At Or Near The Edge Of Your Skills

The game is vastly more interesting when played at the edge of your skill level, because a lot of the interesting decisions from the game come from you having hard choices. If you play below your true skill level, the game will seem a lot less strategic and less interesting. So if you are relatively confident in your skills, try playing at the upper edge of what you think you can do. You might lose more, but you'll have a more fun time of doing it, and you'll learn more as you play, too.

How Do I Know If The Current Difficulty Is Too Easy For Me?

Once you have played at least one game, or are in progress on your first game, you will be able to better judge if the current difficulty level is too easy for you. In general, the difficulty level is fairly constant throughout the play of the game, so if it is too easy after you have played for an hour, it is not likely to get any harder as you go unless you make a lot of mistakes or the AI does something that really catches you off guard. So you might want to consider restarting with a higher difficulty level after that point if playing below your skill level bothers you.

Signs that the current difficulty is probably too low for your skills:

• You routinely have a large (hundreds of thousands) metal/crystal surplus.
• You don't find the Advanced Research Stations particularly attractive as a goal.
• The AI players never manage to destroy any of your planets.
• You don't find yourself ever struggling with resources or ship cap to defend yourself while also making an effective offense.
• Even with a high AI Progress level (above 600 or 700), you don't find the AI very challenging.

Again: Be Sure Not To Play Below Your Skill Level!

If the AI Difficulty level is too low for you, this is something you will want to correct! Only you know what you are capable of, and where "the limit" is for you will be different compared to other players. If you are playing on too easy a difficulty, it can be a lot like playing Chess against an average ten year old (not Josh Waitzkin or something). If the ten year old is your child, then that's interesting, but otherwise not so much. You'd wonder what all the fuss about Chess was -- it's not really a very strategic game, is it? But when you play at or above your difficulty level, it's a whole other experience.

This advice is true for pretty much all RTS games, of course, but I think it holds particularly true for AI War, since a lot of the strategic depth doesn't come out unless you are playing at a level where the AI is giving you at least something of a hard time.

That Said: If You're Getting Frustrated, Don't Be Embarrassed To Drop It Down A Notch Or Two

To use an analogy, when you take up a sport, you don't go straight to playing it at a college varsity level. Most new players to AI War prefer the 5-6 range to start out, even though the AI is not quite as smart there. This is a complex game, and simply having time to get used to all the mechanics, and figure out strategies, can be a real boon. And hey, the AI is still plenty smart at those levels, it's just not as devious as it can be.

In the end, this is not a competition. It's important to play what is fun for you, rather than just jumping straight into the harder difficulties that the longtime players advocate. It makes no sense to try to immediately compete with people who have logged hundreds or thousands of hours, unless that is fun. Depending on what strategy games you have played in the past, your transition to AI War's unique type of strategy might be faster or slower.

No matter what your past experience, as you play the further, you'll get a more intuitive grasp of how to protect yourself, what works and what doesn't, how to do a quick rush for early planets to protect your economy, and then how to shore up those planets without taking much while you protect those borders. You'll also get a sense for what's an acceptable one-time loss that you can easily absorb and rebuild, and what's something that is going to set you back so far that you're on the path to an eventual loss.

In short: there's no hurry! If you've bought the game, it's yours for life. It's a deep game that can last you many years if you want, so you can take it as fast or slow as tickles your fancy.

Galaxy Map Size Can Also Affect Difficulty And The Level Of Strategy Required

For more information on this, please see What Difference Does The Map Size Make?

Further Reading From The Community Wiki

All About Tweaking The Difficulty Level

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Is The Difficulty Really Constant Throughout A Game Of AI War?

Q: In the text above, it says that the game is supposed to be the same difficulty pretty much the whole time, and so if it is too easy after an hour maybe you should restart. Is this really true? It seems like the game is just easy at first and starts getting tougher and tougher once the planets start to fill up, waves get bigger and the AI's tech goes up... CPAs hitting, border aggression kicking in, etc.

A: The text above is right, but it's also misleading to some extent. It really boils down to how you play the game. If the game is vastly too easy at the start, its unlikely to get that much harder. That said, the first hour (or two, depending on how methodical you are) usually boil down to a land grab that is not particularly difficult (in a sense of your being on the edge of death), but which has far-reaching implications for the later game, hence still the need for strategy and intelligence all the way through.

In general, the likelihood of your losing to the AI goes up throughout the entire game, depending -- again -- on how you play. If you manage to turtle yourself and just hide most of your planets behind some bottleneck while you do some spot raiding, then that might not hold quite as true. Or if you throw caution to the wind and just try to capture stuff constantly while not paying enough attention to protecting your flanks, there will come a tipping point past which the AI brutally murders you.

In many respects, the AI Progress is pretty much a self-balancing thing, so that the difficulty adapts to how you play as you go. That said, it's not going to compensate for something that is orders of magnitude too easy or hard. If you play on difficulty 4 and you should be playing on difficulty 7 based on your true skill level, you'd have to be lobbing nukes around and generally running around making colossal mistakes to lose. On difficulty 1, you might not lose even then.

That said, the difference between 7 and 8, or even 6 and 7, is not so great that you'll have a completely lame time if you're playing below your skill level. The game will be more of a breeze, but the AI will still put up a fight. On the flip side, if you go to 7 when you should be on 6, or 8 when you should be on 7, things will seem to go sort of okay for a few hours, and then you'll just always lose when the mid-game hits, and rarely see the end game.

Not being immediately threatened in the early game is very different from there being no challenge, by the way. You're setting up very long term positioning and strategies, and so is the AI. You have to keep an eye on what you're doing and what they are, or else you'll put yourself in a bad position down the line.

So how can you really tell if things are going too easily in the early game? See the section below, which describes how the typical early, mid, and late games go, broadly speaking.

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Like Chess, A Game Of AI War Has Three Abstract "Phases"

Q: The game doesn't seem to have any literal "ages" or anything like some other strategy games do, but players talk a lot about the mid game and the late game and so on. What are those like?

A: AI War, like Chess, is perhaps best thought of in three distinct phases -- despite the fact that neither of these games has any literal dilineations (no "okay, the switch has tripped, so it's the endgame now!"), there are vastly different activities being undertaken in each of the three phases of both games (for Chess: opening, middlegame, endgame). We'll divide our discussion of AI War up in the same fashion

Opening

Human Activities

• Early Land Grab
• Early Scouting
• Early Defenses
• Early Economic Setup
• Trying To Determine The Type Of AI Opponent If Playing Against Random

No matter what your ultimate strategy is going to be during a given AI War campaign, most likely the opening phase of the game is going to be centered around a land grab where you try to take territory to improve your economy, while also trying to gate raid, put up defenses, and otherwise protect your home planet.

Advanced players will generally try to strike as hard and as fast at enemy planets as they can, disabling them before they have a chance to reinforce. This has to be counterbalanced against your need to defend yourself, which can be tricky depending on the map and the AI personality. That's part of why scouting is so important: it lets you identify targets of opportunity, as well as planets that will develop into serious threats if left unchecked, as well as learn about the opposing ship mix in general use, as well as attempting to figure out which AI personalities you might be facing off against.

All of those early information-gathering activities are critical to making good long-term decisions and ultimately crafting a victory. Which planets you choose to attack in the early game might not make a whole lot of difference to how hard the average early game will be, but it can be absolutely critical for how hard or easy the middlegame turns out to be.

Often there are high-level enemy planets right near your territory, and the choice at this stage is whether to attack them early (and thus be over-matched while the other nearby planets all get lots of time to reinforce in your absence), or to just go for the really easy captures and thus let the high-level enemy planets get the reinforcements (often which causes them to be a permanent issue for you for the rest of the game).

Counterbalanced against those concerns of the potential offensive threat of the various nearby AI planets, you have the issue of trying to take planets that will best serve your economy. That means taking planets that are rich and resources, sure, but it also means taking planets in a strategic fashion that they create bottlenecks that help protect your resources. If your planets are constantly losing their harvesters due to inbound AI aggression, then the middlegame is going to be much harder.

If you don't scout at this stage, then you're just playing blind, and that's never good. Ideally if you are on an 80 planet map, you'll get visibility into the nearest 10-30 planets, depending on the type of map and how much effort you put into it. There are so many other critical things to do in the early game (land grab and defenses most of all) that you'll often be too busy to pay much attention to scouting beyond the immediate area around your home planet. That's okay, because the main decision points at this stage of the game almost always involve planets that are 1-3 hops away from your home planet at most. First priority is to "secure your hinterland" and set up a platform for your expansion into the larger galaxy, and then you can make decisions about where to go in the larger galaxy later on.

Rate Of Human Expansion

During the first hour of a game, usually most players will be able to take 3-6 AI planets for themselves with some degree of ease. This is faster than at any other point in the game, but might be slowed down significantly if players decide to take on a high-level planet very early in the game. In the second hour, the players might then take another 2-4 planets on average, usually arriving at between 8 and 9 plants total by the time the opening phase of the game is done.

Of course that all varies by play style, and some players will prefer to be much more defensive and thus taking far fewer planets in total. Or players might find a snug little corner of the map that they decide to clear completely out and thus have a single incoming bottleneck to a smaller group of planets. The defensibility of that sort of bottlenecking certainly makes it a worthwhile thing to consider if the opportunity for that presents itself.

As with all the phases of the game, there isn't one right way to play, so expansion rates will vary quite a lot from player to player. The above is perhaps the average for someone who is neither a turtle nor a rusher, and who is playing against a fairly evenly matched AI opponent on a moderately-tough map, though.

AI Activities

During the opening of the game, the AI has pretty pitiful waves due to extremely low AI Progress. The waves will grow in size as the opening progresses, but overall they are small enough that advanced players can design automated turret defenses (maybe with a few mobile ships aiding on Free Roaming Defender mode) that will hold off most waves without any need to oversee the battles. Generally this would be incoming waves of a couple of hundred mark I ships in single player.

The AI is far from idle, however. Consider these just probing raids -- they are enough to make you have to spend metal and crystal on defenses, and they may cripple your economy a few times if you are not careful, costing you precious time/resources, but usually they aren't enough to really threaten a loss.

On the other end of things, the AI is also at its weakest point defensively, but it is also at its most concentrated. Depending on the type of map, there are likely only a few planets that are "on alert" thanks to being near your planets. The AI doesn't get very large reinforcements or very many reinforcement points at this stage of the game, but what they do get is likely to be pretty concentrated.

One effective strategy to intentionally prolong the opening of the game -- to your advantage -- is to intentionally put more planets on alert. Thus the AI feels like it has even more territory to defend, but it doesn't have the power to really defend it all quite yet. That can really buy you some time, which is helpful.

Time In Phase, What Causes Move To Next Phase

The amount of time spent in the opening phase really depends on the player and their play style. On average, it's usually going to last between one and two hours. But if the AI is of a very high level or a particularly difficult personality, that's going to make the opening phase shorter.

Generally it is to your advantage as a human player for the opening phase to last as long as possible. The opening pretty much ends when you hit an impasse and can no longer make a quick land grab in an effective fashion, and can no longer defend yourself completely on autopilot (unless you're really lucky or entrenched).

Risk Of Losing

This part of the game is when you have the least buffer between the AI and your home planet, but at the same time it's when the AI is the weakest. It's also the time when you have the least resources, but you also have the smallest territory to defend, which means that your resources can generally be spent more effectively. All of these factors usually cancel each other out in such a way that it's pretty hard to lose in the early game unless the AI opponent catches you just wrong, or a map is particularly brutal, or you're playing against an opponent far above your skill level.

Losses at this stage of the game do happen during normal play, don't misunderstand, but usually not unless they happen to have a big wave of bombers/tanks or ships that pass through force fields, and you happen to be really distracted or careless. In Chess, it would be rather like being caught in the Fool's Mate, the Scholar's Mate, or similar. It's actually easier for that sort of thing to happen in AI War than in Chess, as there are far more than just two common ways for that sort of early loss to occur, but the overall likelihood is still comparably low.

The opening of AI War is essentially your preemptive strike, and you have the definite advantage in your local neighborhood during this time -- but it's also easy to squander that opportunity if you don't make good decisions that set you up for later success. Despite having the advantage, there's nothing cavalier about this phase.

Chance Of Winning

At this stage of the game, you have basically no hope of winning. The AI outnumbers you by a vast amount, and if you try to go for an early victory against the AI (assuming you can even find their home planet at this stage in the game), your ships will be so outclassed that you likely won't make it even past their wormhole. Scratch that -- you'd never make it even past the "core" planets guarding their home planet with any force worth having.

If you even try to go for a win at this stage of the game, you're just wasting your time and squandering an opportunity to set yourself up for a more solid middlegame. The best advice here is typically to just not even worry about defeating the AI, and to just worry about setting yourself up for a later victory (along with making sure that you don't lose in the meantime).

Endgame

Chance Of Winning

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