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

AI_War:Fleet_Command

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.

AI_War:Fleet_Command

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

Endgame

AI_War:Fleet_Command