Rush, Boom, Turtle: And Now for Something Completely Different

Has an unlikely developer stumbled on the best new twist to hit RTSes since Defense of the Ancients?
8/13/2009 6:27 PM | 1 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Anytime someone tells you that real-time strategy games are creatively stagnant, you can assume he doesn't know real-time strategy games. As long as I've been playing RTSes, there have been at least one or two exciting innovations every year. 2009 has already seen its share. For instance, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Swords & Soldiers, Demigod and Battleforge are all significant departures. But I think I've stumbled across this year's Really New Thing. There's a lot of 2009 to go, but I'll be surprised if anyone else twists the RTS formula this dramatically and this effectively. And I'm hoping it'll be the Next Big Thing, because it's big, different, entirely unprecedented and an exciting way to play an RTS. This must be what it felt like to play Defense of the Ancients back when it was a mod for Warcraft III.

Drum roll please...

It's called AI War: Fleet Command, and it's a very small game in a couple of respects. The first bit of smallness is the name, which is as unsexy and simply descriptive as you could imagine. The title implies sci-fi, which it is. But you can't be sure. It might as well come in a plain brown wrapper, with the title stamped on the cover in basic Courier font. The game is indeed about fighting a war against the AI, and you do indeed command a fleet. But neither of these expresses anything important about the game. It doesn't even have the self-aware irony of the upcoming Gratuitous Fleet Battles or the wonderfully perplexing cognitive dissonance of Sins of a Solar Empire. Furthermore, it even shares a name with AI Wars, a free-to-play strategy game that's been around for 10 years.

As if that weren't enough of a PR problem, AI War is not a very sexy game. It's clearly one of those garage-built labors of love, consisting of 90-percent design and 10-percent production values (frankly, I wish this proportion were true of more videogames). It was essentially created by a guy named Christopher M. Park who got three other dudes to help him with artwork and one other dude to do sound. Don't expect the artwork or sound to hook you. Don't expect flash, or even a good interface. Don't expect much in the way of atmosphere. Don't expect anything that looks too much fancier than the original Total Annihilation. If that.

But just as Defense of the Ancients was refined over the years, and eventually found ways into major releases like Demigod, Heroes of Newerth and League of Legends, I have high hopes that AI War is the start of something bigger than a single indie game. For lack of a subgenre as convenient shorthand to explain what it does, let me give you this: AI War is a grand strategic tower defense 4X RTS. How's that for a mouthful?

So let me explain

At first glance, AI War looks like a budgetware version of Sins of a Solar Empire. The map consists of nodes, each representing a planet, connected by a web of warp gates. You build fleets of hundreds of spaceships, which travel from node to node. But the actual gameplay takes place entirely within these nodes. That's where you build structures, mine metal and crystal, and fight battles. You spend knowledge you "mine" to unlock new ships and new buildings. Energy serves as your unit limit, so you build reactors in much the same way you'd build farms in another RTS. So far, it's pretty standard stuff. There's no reason to get all excited yet. You might as well play the non-budgetware Sins of a Solar Empire at this point.