Artificial Defense is a one man made, real time strategy orbital-shooter game in an artificial, virtual reality setting. You are the machine, a mighty computer-system defending its servers against swarms of intruding creeps.
Short Action description
Firing off miniguns, launching Hellfire missiles, dropping incinerating Hades-Bombs and colossal asteroids, deploying mighty railgun and acid towers and spawning your own Intrusion Counter Measures (ICMs) to reconquer corrupted databases and firewalls are just some of the actions players can take while fending off the creeps. Earn RAM and upgrade your arsenal and hardware-level. Start as an analog punch-tape system and evolve into a quantum A.I. mainframe.
Artificial Defense has 3 major game mechanics
1. Offense
There are 21 offensive weapons available, reaching from outdated flintlocks, over maverick-missiles to devastating meteors and neutron-bombs. You can switch between three pre-loaded weapon categories and launch the installed weapons every few seconds. Each round you fire costs you RAM and each weapon type has its own unique cooldown so you must choose wisely and adapt quickly to different situations. But beware, aiming requires some skill. Creeps are moving targets and your projectiles need some flight time before impact. You can unlock and install new weapons in the uplab.
2. Defense
There are 21 defense towers available, reaching from pistol-sentry-towers, over incinerating flame-throwers to powerful long-range railgun towers. In addition there are 7 production towers which produce your main resource: RAM (Random Access Memory). Yes, building up a small RAM economy is very important, in order to keep your system routines running. Towers must be deployed by an expensive capsule drop and you have to find the sweet spot between the right amount of resource production towers and the performance of your defense perimeter. You can unlock and install new tower versions in the uplab.
3. Conquer
Spawn Intrusion Counter Measures (ICMs) in order to conquer corrupted system-structures like databases, honeypots and firewalls. Databases e.g. spawn datablips, which carry valuable data and head for your backup-devices. Every datablip successfully arriving at its destination releases a certain amount of RAM, so you should do your best to protect those important but vulnerable convoys.
More details
RAM
There is only one single resource in Artificial Defense called RAM. It is used during the defense gameplay to pay for your actions and after shutdown to upgrade your arsenal in the uplab menu screen.
Upgrading
After you initialize a system shutdown you will be redirected to the score board. You will be rewarded with a certain amount of RAM based on your performance, which you can use in the uplab to upgrade your offense, defense or hardware level. There are 49 individual upgrades by the way, so you should be busy for some time.
Systems and Challenges
There are 7 unique systems in the game. Their color indicates the difficulty level starting from blue, over green and red to black. Every system comes up with an unique music-track and 7 different challenges, which you should try to complete during the standard gameplay, in order to get a massive RAM boost and to unlock user rights for the next system (next level access).
Hardware
Apart from the offense and defense equipment you can upgrade your hardware level, which determines your initial system integrity (health) and your ICM capabilities. You start as a punch-tape machine and need to invest RAM to evolve into more powerful systems like: tube computer, microchip system, quantum computer, molecular computer, A.I. mainframe.