Chris here. I’m going to keep this brief and try not to be annoying! First up: if you didn’t already know, we’re running a kickstarter for the sequel to AI War, and that’s a pretty big deal to us.

If you have not already, please consider signing up for the Headtalker campaign for AI War II. The true power of this thing has only really become apparent to me today, and it’s pretty awesome.

Briefly:

If 500 people sign up — and there are 71 on there as of the time of this writing, including myself — then a big social media blast goes out. I guess kind of like a Thunderclap?

It tracks the amount of reach that we have on social media based on this, and basically it can be a way to get in front of a LOT of people. Out of just 71 people signed up so far, that gives us a potential reach of 960 thousand people.

Bearing in mind that a ton of those people will have zero interest in this, it’s still a lot more targeted than advertising in some ways, and it’s also not costing us anything (or you much time).

Given our current backer counts, less than a third of you would need to help out with this for a big blast to go out.

And actually you can recruit other people as well if you like who are not backers of the project — you never know if your friend’s friends are strategy enthusiasts, even if that friend is not.

As with this kickstarter campaign itself, if the target is not hit, nothing happens. So if we don’t get 500 people signed up, then the whole thing doesn’t happen. Even if you have a small twitter following or just a few facebook friends or a small group on linkedin or whatever else, that still is valuable in that it helps us reach that count of 500 people.

Thank you for reading!

That was annoying, and I apologize for that. To make it up to you, I’ll give a few more tidbits about Reverse AI War, which I teased in update #8.

Basically:

It’s a much smaller and shorter game, and made for serial replayability. Ideally games are 5-25 minutes long, depending on the complexity of the scenario you set up. I’d estimate 15 or 20 minutes on average.

I doubt it would be multiplayer, but who knows. Probably that would just be irritating to play with others, though, to be honest.

The game is set in the Arcenverse, in the timeline after Bionic Dues and Release Raptor, but long before AI War, The Last Federation, Stars Beyond Reach, or Starward Rogue.

You play as the AI at the end of Earth’s history in this game. You may remember from the lore of Raptor that basically some humans got left behind on Earth while the rich and the upper classes fled to the stars.

The AI eventually chases the humans out into the galaxy, as we clearly see in the first AI War. However, before it can comfortably do that, it needs to take care of the planet that we both came from.

The overall idea here is thus that you’re trying to kill the last of the humans remaining on earth. It really gives you a perspective of the sort of vaguely Risk-like experience that the AI has in AI War, but on territories on earth instead of planets and solar systems in space.

As with AI War, the AI (you, this time) have vastly superior resources to your foes, but also some weak spots. This game is also a David and Goliath simulator… but this time you’re Goliath tasked with destroying David?

If that sounds easy, then you’re forgetting the core weakness of the AI: blindness. You don’t know WHERE all those pesky humans are. You thus want to do various things to draw them out, including letting them take some territory from you in order to expose themselves. Mwa ha ha, they think they’re so sneaky…

…of course, the more you do that, the more you actually do risk that they pop up in surprising force and destroy your quantum computer, thus ending you. The other risk is that they escape into space, meaning that you’ve failed in your chief objective.

Overall I think it’s a really fun concept, and it’s simple and short and yet has good strategy to it. As I mentioned before, I hope to have a WebGL online demo you can play by the end of November.

Depending on how things progress with this kickstarter, I might be convinced to give out copies of this to all backers above some certain tier… ;)

That’s all for now! Sorry for being annoying about the Headtalker thing, but if you can help out with it it is definitely appreciated. And hopefully the Reverse AI War details make up for it.

Cheers!

Chris