Provides hours of a solid strategic challenge. The enemy is overwhelming and will easily crush you if you are not mindful of the war you are waging. There is a steep learning curve, so this is not for casual gameplay, but if you commit to learning the system it is quite rewarding.

A solid investment of time and money, AI War did not dissapoint me. Best played with friends.

Difficulty wise, it's the Space 4X version of dark souls, but way harder.

It's the kind of incredible game a single person or small groups makes sometimes, where the learning curve is steep af, the market is a small niche and the difficulty is incredibly challenging, but for those who go through that and actually learn it, it becomes incredibly rewarding.

Love this game spent hours on youtube to learn this game and just in an hour fell in love with this game dev u did good i mean this game was made in 09 and is still great. one thing that sucks though is cant find a person to play multiplayer though.

It's old but it's DEFINITELY worth buying

AI War is an unending slog. There's a really intriguing idea buried in the guts, about controlling vast fleets and reestablishing an empire, but in the end trying to get at that idea is more trouble than it's worth. I spent far too much time trying different configurations and tweaking game options, and in every game eventually hit a wall where it just stopped being enjoyable.

The game is trying to be a hybrid of Homeworld and Master of Orion, but lacks enough depth in both empire management and fleet tactics to make that combination work. You can (and will) lose hundreds of ships in a single battle, but have to manually add every replacement ship type back into your fleet groups manually. There are dozens of different weapon types and ranges, but only a single "hold at this range" setting, and formations are apparently worthless, so the best you can hope for is to lump everything with a vaguely similar range into a giant ball and hurl it at objectives. There might be a way to create additional settings, but I never found them because the UI and documention is spectacularly cluttered and unhelpful.

In my final game the AI governing my units glitched out. My repair and construction units would no longer auto-repair or help in construction, ensuring that building replacement ships would take hours and I would have to manually repair every single ship after each battle. Reloading the game didn't fix the issue, nor did resetting the unit behavior options. So, in the end, I was defeated by the AI in AI War, because it just stopped working.

I have enjoyed games that are ambitious but flawed. Unfortunately, AI War is far more flawed than it is ambitious. Skip it.

love all of it....

This game plots you against 2 super powerful AI's, and starts you with one planet, one base, and you must build up from there.

So my 2 other friends and i have a fleet of over 3000 ships. We have captured 12 combined planets, and we are doing amazingly, when we find the husk of an ancient ship.
It calls to us, and asks us to repair it.
We start repairing it with everything we had.
10 minutes later, it gets fixed, and we get a ship called the 'Exodian Blade.'
The Blade shoots a laser that instakills most ships in its path. However, it is super, super slow.
We become greedy, and we start capturing planets, with the Blade singlehandley defeating everything on it.

But when one of my scientists conducts a survey and finds a strange subspace signal, the AI gets mad, and launches a full scale assault.

Even with the Exodian Blade, we couldn't defend forever.

We had lost all but 2 of our planets; only our capital and a far-off isolated colony remained.
We had repositioned the 300 ships left from our 3000 ship fleet at the capital.
When suddenly, my friend completes a nuke.
He had been building it all game.

We use the nuke, completely destroying every ship and planet except for one AI's home and our captial.
We track down the AI home, and send the Exodian Blade there.

Meanwhile, a devourer golem appears, which slowly moves and instakills any ships next it, at my capital.

Fast forward, I had kited the golem away, and the Blade arrived at the AI home.
We were surprised to see that there were only 300 ships there. Nothing that we can't handle.

Then we realize that we needed to destroy 13 different shield generators around the planet that protected the AI core.

"We can do that! We have the most overpowered ship in the game! We can just instakill them all," we all exclaimed.

"The most overpowered ship in the game" looked like crap to what came in next.

A exogalactic wormhole appears, and through it come 3000 different max level ships, ships with missiles, ships with integrated shields, ships we have never evever seen before.

It took a minute for the Exodian Blade, with 200 million hitpoints, to die.

We hadn't destroyed a single thing on the AI home planet.

We had lost on difficulty 'very easy.'

I cant even imagine what the highest difficulty level is like.

This game is the only game that can make you go from amazing to crap so quickly, and still be fun.
This game is the only game that makes losing fun.
This game is the spawn of Satan.
But it might have well been a gift from heaven.

Ai War: Fleet Command feels like playing chess - without knowing all the moves, and with a cheating opponent.

First off, the opponent doesn't really cheat, but it feels that way to a new player. The learning curve is extremely steep, which means you will probably only lose for the first few dozen hours of playing - unless you choose one of the very easy difficulties.

The main problem most people will have is the completely different playstyle. Yes, it is an RTS, it looks and even plays as a classic RTS, yet when you go out from your home planet lasers blazing, burning and capturing new resources, you will lose. Always. How discouraging, right?

The reason to this is asymetry. Your opponent does not share your options. He does not build, he has everything. You on the other hand have but a single planet. Why not crush you in an instant? Cause he doesn't care, you're not important enough to be crushed. However if you blow up a few planets of his.. he might as well decide it's time for the human remnant to die.

All this said, the game *punishes* you for capturing important assets - planets, technology, etc. Each time you do such an action, the ai gets more aware of your "threat", which will mean stronger and more frequent attacks. From now till the end of game.

In conlcusion, there seems to be two games hidden under this title:
First, a guerilla war, in which the player gathers strength and tries to avoid antagonizing the enemy too much in fear of brutal retaliation.
Second, the glorious moment when the carefully prepared guerilla finally decides to go on par with the ai and fight a full on war - no more hiding.

Replayability: High, assuming you don't mind defeat. There are plenty of ai structures, and only some of them are used on each map. Throughout the expansions, a lot more has arrived to make the game entertaining and keep the player busy.

Multiplayer: Brilliant. The player slots can be changed on the fly by the game host. Playing a single player game and having a friend who wants to join? No problem, open a slot for him, give him a planet and you're playing within seconds. He's leaving again? No big deal, just close his slot, grab his units and go on with your game.

You probably don't want to play this if:
- You dislike frequent losing
- You dislike slow-paced games
- You dislike games with a steep learning curve
- You dislike constantly analysing the situation and like to just order your units to go and pillage instead.

You probably want to try this if:
- You like complicated strategy games
- You like analysing the strategic situation a lot
- You like slow-paced strategy games, in which fortifications actually work
- You are a hard-core strategy game player and like a challenge
- You like dwarf fortress and space strategy games

At the time of Writing, I have over 1000 hours clocked in this game.
I have won four times on difficulty 7, once on difficulty 8. I got crushed in 3.5 hours on diff. 9
Any other strategy game I load up (against AIS), the results are a foregone conclusion. I will win.

It has taken me over four years and six expansions, over a thousand hours... AND I LOSE ON 9.

This game is not simple. it is not forgiving, and it sure as heck isn't easy to learn.

If you are all about grand strategy but micromanagement leaves a bad taste in your mouth, this may be the best $20 you ever spend. Get the bundle.