AI War 2

w game

A very fun and engaging strategy game with hundreds of hours of content.

This is a must play! Just give it a fair chance.

This is the Dwarf Fortress of the X4 Space Games genre. The depth of the content just keeps going and if you think something would be fun, cool or nice to add to the game, it's probably already part of the game in some form.

Losing is fun and figuring out how to not lose even funner.

Here’s a curious fact: look at the achievements and you'll quickly notice something funny. Only about 20% of players have unlocked even the easiest ones that pop up after ten minutes of gameplay. That means 80% of you bought this strategy gem and immediately decided: "Nah, not today, I have 200 other unplayed games anyway."

I get it. This isn’t exactly the kind of game that greets you with cinematic explosions or eye-candy visuals. The graphics are functional, like my microwave, practical but not winning beauty awards anytime soon. And yes, the UI might initially give you that "did someone spill spaghetti here?" feeling, but trust me, it's quicker to figure out than it looks, especially with the built-in help system ready to guide you (assuming you actually read it).

But jokes aside, the developer has poured genuine care into continuous improvements and expansions. Behind the awkward first impression lies strategic gameplay that can be deeply rewarding if you give it a fair shot. If you're among the majority who bought it but haven’t played yet do yourself a favor, spend at least two hours and see what you're missing. If you don’t own it yet, wait for a sale. It's definitely niche, but it's the good kind of niche.

Just remember: clicking "buy" won't magically grant you achievements. Trust me, I tried.

I loved the first one and I love this one too. There are some things I miss from 1 but in general I prefer the game play of 2; the UI is better, it looks better (and unlike many comments about the graphics I personally find the graphics effective at conveying information and the battles a joy to watch), and many aspects of game play have been streamlined for the better. The learning curve can be steep, as the concepts are likely to be highly novel for a majority of new players--at the very least, they certainly were for me.

If you have stayed away from this game because of the formidable reputation of its predecessor, this second iteration has a lower entry bar on account of UI improvements and the general streamlining of game play referred to above.

I love tug-of-war strategy games, and AI War 2 had the potential to deliver that experience—but it falls apart under its own weight, both figuratively and literally. What starts as a promising large-scale war quickly turns into a lag-ridden, unmanageable mess, with performance issues, lackluster progression, and an absence of meaningful player agency.

Major Issues:
Severe Performance Problems
Even on a high-end system, the game grinds to a halt a few hours in. CPU usage hits 100%, the game speed slows to a crawl, and eventually, battles devolve into frame-by-frame slugfests. In the late game, I found myself playing at 10% game speed, with battles taking literal hours due to thousands of ships endlessly respawning faster than they can be destroyed. This isn’t a war—it’s a frozen traffic jam.

No Tactical Feedback—Just Numbers
The beauty of a great tug-of-war game is watching your army evolve and adapt. You trial-and-error different unit compositions, fine-tune your strategy, and get that rewarding moment when you finally break through by deploying the right counter. AI War 2 strips that thrill away because you can’t see what’s happening. The battlefield is a chaotic mess of indistinguishable ships, and the only thing you can rely on is a combat report showing two numbers slowly decreasing. Since you can’t tell which units are performing well, there’s no informed decision-making—just randomly picking upgrades that make the number go up. The result? No sense of strategy, no excitement in watching your forces grow stronger, and no real engagement beyond passive number-crunching.

Messy Visuals, No Spectacle
For a game about grand space battles, there's surprisingly little to see. The sheer number of ships and effects on-screen make battles unreadable. Instead of watching an epic clash unfold, you’re left staring at a blurry, laggy screen, unable to tell what’s actually happening. A good tug-of-war game lets you sit back, observe the battlefield, and appreciate the spectacle—this game buries everything under a visual overload.

Inefficient Unit Scaling—Why Not Use the System That Already Works?
The game already has a system for merging ships into larger "single units"—for example, a single ship representing 76 smaller ships with multiplied stats. And this works! So why doesn’t the game fully commit to this system? Instead, it insists on rendering and processing every individual ship, tanking performance. It should take inspiration from Heroes of Might and Magic 3, where unit stacks represent numbers rather than overwhelming the battlefield with individual models. Doing this properly would fix both performance issues and battlefield readability in one go.

How This Could Be Fixed:
✔ Commit to the Ship Merging System – Instead of trying to process thousands of individual ships, fully embrace the "stacked units" approach that already exists.
✔ Better Tactical Feedback – Players should be able to see which unit types are performing well so they can make informed choices instead of just picking whatever upgrade makes your numbers go up the most.
✔ Optimize Late-Game Performance – The game needs serious optimization for long sessions; otherwise, it just becomes unplayable.

Final Verdict:
I wanted an epic tug-of-war, but instead, I got a slow, unresponsive numbers game where tactics or strategy do not matter. With better performance, more meaningful choices, and a clearer sense of the battlefield, AI War 2 could shine—but in its current state, it’s just frustrating.

❌ Not Recommended (unless you enjoy watching your CPU suffer).

this game is for sick freaks and i am that sick freak

One of those very easy to learn / get into, very hard to master things. On higher difficulty settings, you'll have to pull all the stops and use 100% of what you know, and if you don't know something, you are probably dead.

The game itself is very open to player customization, the best way to enjoy it is to customize your own difficulty settings for an optimal experience, as different campaign presets don't have everything. There are so many extra things that you could do in this game that you could have played this game forever and could have barely scratched the bottom.

Has some community mods that can add extra stuff in it too. Has a mod that the developer famously calls an "unofficial DLC" for the game.

Also I find it hard to call this an RTS game at this point, but it's a really well-made strategy game, it has something that none of the other strategy games have done before, this game might as well be it's own genre. Which is one of the reasons why it makes you keep coming back for more.

It's a pretty humble game and clearly a labor of love from someone who likes adding all his crazy ideas to his projects. Overall, I do not like it but if you don't mind the graphical style like I do then you'll likely get a good bang for your buck.

It is good

Great game

Good game, need to stick with it.

It is a very deep and genre-bending game. It has elements of grand strategy, real-time straegy, tower-defense, and some roguelike randomizations. The game can be customized in an absurd amount of ways to change up the gameplay, difficulty, etc.

Lots of great real-time strategy games have a campaign that is a series of fixed battles. Wouldn't it be fun if you could actually control the strategic situation in a game like Command and Conquer, choosing where the battles are fought and for what objective? You can do that here!

Have you ever played a grand strategy game like Europa Universalis and wished you could have tactical control of the individual units during a battle? You can do that in this game!

It really does blend the strategic and tactical elements very nicely for a challenging and tense experience with lots of interesting strategic choices to make.

My one criticism is that modern UI standards are out the window for this game, it seems to be all home-baked which is impressive in a way but also a hassle. Click a unit to select it. Want to see the details? Hold down 'C' and click it. Not so horrible, just tons of weird hotkeys and strange ways of using them that are unintuitive and hard to remember. I'm really looking forward to their next game and I hope the UI gets some love.

I like space fight:)

I actually really enjoy this game but i have one major issue, why is it so hard to know exactly how much metal you're spending, and it so stupid and frustrating when all of a sudden nothing will work all because you captured 2 planets back to back and immediately build mines just avoid that problem, what kind of sense does that make!?!?!? Now i have to restart all because there is no way to no how to adjust or destroy any units just so your metal income is positive/negative. oh yeah, the whole thing about you running out of metal and so it just back logs construction till you generate enough over time, if thats how its supposed to work then how the fuck does it just shut down after building a few extra buildings and won't let anything be built, sorry about this but that one little mechanic can just ruin an entire night of hard work and stop everything in its track, sorry but thats just dumb as fuck

It's honestly a crying shame that a game this original and distinctive should have lost money and disrupted the lead developer's life. The strength of his design is apparent in how willing a core group of supporters have been to keep the game updated half a decade after its release. I don't play this as often as I should, but its rhythm is like nothing else on the market. I blame the decline of the indie-games press between the release of AI War: Fleet Command and its sequel, but that's neither here nor there.

Play this if you want a game that only gets harder and never lets up until the great climactic final battle. The expansions are wonderful, but even the vanilla game has much to love about it. You will have to get over some cheap bits: The graphics are not top-of-the-line, and you'll never want to hear "It's either death or success!" again after three campaigns. But it's well worth the effort to acquire this taste. One day I'll go back and get serious about this game.

great

It's a fun game with the mindset of being Darksouls, but for real-time strategy.

A really unique PvE RTS with enough meat, challenge and reactivity to satisfy even PvP RTS players.

Good game, fun

amazing AI to fight against. great coop RTS game

Fun game, but I do not have friends to direct connect multiplayer to. Fix multiplayer to have actual lobbies, thx.

Tricky to play... but worth the effort

This game can be summarised as roughly:

A strategy game where you plan your next steps like in a puzzle, where the progression in a is similar to a roguelike, and the difficulty and playstyle of a session can be adjusted extensively to whatever degree you desire.

Make sure you read the things the game tells you, and you'll get the hang of it quite quickly.

If you want an easy and relaxed experience, you can have that. If you want it ridiculously difficult - you can have that too.

Everything is the same but also different

It was quite intimidating seeing the UI at first, but after the 20-30 minutes of OPTIONAL tutorials, I felt much less intimidated. There isn't a whole lot of lore, but what is there is great! The game isn't fast paced which i appreciate, the ability to pause gives you however much time you need to think about any decisions, and there isn't a ton of micro that keeps me away from other RTS games. I appreciate that the wiki is literally accessible from the menu, complete with strategy guides and every bit of info you could need! The unit variety is pretty good, with many different fleet setups possible, and the models are genuinely impressive, my favorite part of getting new units is just seeing the models! Another strength of the game is how customizable the game is, there are enough options to make your head spin, just about any setting can be changed to your liking! I also appreciate that many of the mods are also just in the game, waiting to be enabled if you are interested, i appreciate when the developers give tools and visibility to the modders, who add quite a bit of free content for everyone! I bought all the DLC and i enjoy all that they add, and of course the options let you only use the parts that you want to see! The other species have cool asthetics and mechanics to add, and with all the DLC there are many factions to choose from to make each game you play quite different, and the skill floor is very high. The depth is impressive, the AI seems to make good choices, and feels very fair compared to other 4x games on higher difficulties. Highly recommend to anyone that enjoys the theme and can get through the tutorial, after the tutorial the UI won't be intimidating and you can enjoy the struggle against the AI or powerful aliens and other oddities!

I've tried three separate times to get into AI War 2, and I've had to admit defeat. To be fair, I have never gotten much past the tutorial, but that's because the UI overall repels me. Nothing about it is intuitive, and my appetite for memorizing a game-specific way of thinking about using an interface just isn't big.

The problems start early with the third tutorial step, which is "hold Q to rotate the camera" Q? Ok. With a note longer than the tutorial about how this actually isn't a useful thing to do. Thanks?

Next step, "You may have noticed what appears to be some form of ship." I haven't. So I guess I'm stuck just clicking through the 10 or so objects I can find. Ok, finally found the ship. It has a wall of text stream-of-consciousness box of stats that mean nothing to me, but could at least be organized into a table or a column.

Next, "Right click on a drone to have the frigate attack it." Drones? Where? Nothing on the screen looks like a drone. Ok, time to randomly select things again.

Maybe there's a great game buried somewhere under the bad UI, the drab visuals, and the abstracted combat. And if you have a lot of patience and free time for that, great. I don't.