REVIEW : AI War 2: Zenith Onslaught (PC)
The most crafty and acclaimed artificial intelligence in strategy games has continued to evolve over the past year, with many major updates culminating in our recent Paradigm Shift (tutorial and overview videos included in the link). AI War 2 is a grand strategy / RTS hybrid that reverses many of the conventions of both genres. Take territory without drawing attention, build your empire with care, and adapt to an ever-evolving galactic battlefield.
The Zenith Onslaught expansion is packed with features. From ‘little’ details like powerful new elite Cruisers that you can place in a new slot in your fleets, to global realms like the Dark Zenith and the Zenith Architrave, this expansion is packed with new tools to use and new enemies at their best. . Wormhole drills let certain AIs change the map topology, while Nomad Planets change the map topology themselves as they roam. The Zenith miners consume entire planets and there are many Golem variants. There are also options to make some of the new factions allies and tackle the AI together.
Multiplayer co-op has been complete with features for months but is still being tested. The original intention was a simultaneous launch with Zenith Onslaught, but the new, highly multithreaded shared simulation approach took longer than expected. Feel free to join and share any feedback! The multiplayer in this game required some new design work that we hope will be useful to other developers; once we get past the latest bugs, we hope to present our findings so that other games in other genres can take advantage of our work to make self-correcting mod-safe multi-threaded complex simulations of arbitrarily large dimensions a reality. We do not expect more than 1-2 months of MP beta as the number of bugs is decreasing with weekly updates.
Let’s go into some of the latest mechanics. Prior to this expansion, the world was made up of a set number of planets linked by a network of wormholes, with each planet having anywhere from one to six node ties to another. As a result, traversing the cosmos became a game of chess. You may choose where to push, where to stop, and where to exert power. Since the planets were static, you could develop your poor economic stations in isolated areas with few defences or establish chokepoints to entice the AI.
With the arrival of Nomad planets, all of this changes. If this option is allowed in the settings, one to ten planets will become Nomad planets. They will begin to roam across the galaxy every few minutes, changing their structural makeup as they break away from neighbouring planets and establish relations with others. This adds a new layer of strategic depth. The one planet you thought didn’t need defences because it was isolated is suddenly connected to the Nomad planet, enabling an incredibly clever AI to exploit it and blitzkrieg through it.
Aside from AI, the world of AI War 2 contains a plethora of other sub-factions. Some are robotic bugs attempting to eat metal, others are wandering pirates in search of fast loot, and the majority are simply cogs in the system assisting the AI in making your life more miserable. Zenith Onslaught adds three additional minor factions to further complicate an increasingly chaotic galaxy.
The Behemoth Zenith Miner is the first. A probe will be sent to a random planet every twenty minutes or so. The Zenith Miner is scouting for its next planet to devour with this probe. The Zenith Miner will appear after a countdown and destroy all defences on the planet before parking on top and drilling into it. It is your or the AI’s responsibility to kill it before it destroys the world. When the earth is consumed, it is gone for good. Remember how I said that by travelling around, Nomad planets would make the galaxy structure more dynamic? The Zenith Miner, on the other hand, does so by absolutely removing planets: nothing is left behind.
The Zenith Architraves are the next faction to appear. There are tribes of the larger Zenith species that have developed themselves in the galaxy. They have their own agenda and will usually not bother you unless you get in their way.
The player can use the confusion to slip past AI planets that have been damaged by their war, but they must be careful not to get caught up in it: the same rule applies to AI. You can hack the Zenith Architraves to steal their ship designs or make temporary peace with them, but they are difficult to hack due to their territorial nature. Overall, I adore this faction because it breathes new life into the galaxy and gives the impression that things are happening even though you are not present.
The final faction to be introduced in AI War 2 is the Dark Zenith, a sign of such absolute desperation and risk that even the AI can sweat while dealing with them. The Dark Zenith can conquer the galaxy at a specific time and wreak havoc in it. Anything in their way will be consumed: the player, the AI, and the minor factions. The AI will summon its most powerful ships yet to fight back, and the player will need to refine their fleets and economy to survive what could be called an End Game crisis.
The only way to beat them is to hack their homeworld, but this is a very risky course of action, and it is sometimes better to finish off the AI when it is distracted by the Dark Zenith.
REVIEW : Elite Dangerous: Odyssey (PC)
