xtal said:

I see what you meant, Gregg. You really have to dig through the pages to find the better sale items. I thought the HUGE sales (75% +) were exclusive to what was listed on the front page ... that was foolish. ... AI War too, less than $5 for all its DLC, hey Borderlands isn't bad either, sure I already have it on Xbox but maybe I want to play it with my Steam pals ... frak me. Holding off as best I can.

Good luck with AI War. I sunk 26 hours into it (most of them were spent wrapping my single-threaded neanderthal mind round the tutorial campaign) and came away wondering how the hell I was supposed to manage tens of thousands of individual ships effectively. The level of control granted to the player is astonishing, as is the number of things you can automate -- it's possible to eliminate nearly all defensive and economical micro-managment -- but when it came to the actual attacking, sometimes across multiple planet systems, I just got so overwhelmed that I ended up lumping my ships together in one (or a few) giant Katamari-esque balls of laser death steam rolling anything that got in their way. That worked but it felt a bit cheap. I found that this 'tactic' was known as blobbing on the Arcen forums and Chris Park implemented enemy units to 'de-blob' your ball of laser death, and to great effect too. It was at this point I realised that for all the game's complexity and depth, ganking with a variety of ships was still a very effective tactic and arguably the only viable one, at least for me, for a game of this scale. My head doesn't multitask, it crumbles in plural so the less to manage the better!

Other than that I can't fault the game. There's so so much to it though. To quote Hailey's brother: ‘this is too big to get into’. There are moments when I want to return to the sprawling campaign I started but I haven't played it in months and you have to sustain your activity with AI War or else you forget the hot keys and interface and planet names and their locations and what you've got on each planet system and what your objectives are and what enemy waves are incoming and where. It's a heady experience.