History YMMV / AIWarFleetCommand

** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R9yi6wb89I Midnight]] is a calm peace that captures the essence of being alone in space with its lead piano and supporting percussion.

* DamnYouMuscleMemory: with the removal of traditional unit group hotkeys in the sequel, it can be tough adjusting to not controlling specific types of units.

** '''Human Marauders''' are also quite intimidating. While you're the leader of a faction of humans dedicated to reclaiming the galaxy from the AI, Marauders are SpacePirates who have decided to just blow up everything they can find, take the scrap, and sell it for profit. Their ships are durable and powerful enough that they can sometimes destroy AI worlds all by themselves, if the player retreats back to their own systems after they appear. They ''do'' have problems gaining a foothold in the galaxy, as their out-of-galaxy assaults are relatively small and can be fended off with turrets, but give them an inch and they'll take the whole parsec once they have a single base in.

** The Royal AI type as a whole. It is often considered the most difficult AI type to beat, as it uses almost nothing but Royal Guardians, who have twice as much health as Dire Guardians, who are already strong on their own.

*** '''Exogalactic Poltergeists''' for all intents and purposes are better, stronger Dire Infiltrator Guardians, and are one of the few units that can fire through force fields in the sequel. And if you become strong enough, the AI will happily send one your way every now and then. Hope you didn't need that Major Data center.

* Also from the sequel, adding in the Zenith Svikari to your game is a nearly guaranteed win. They start out weak, but scale outrageously into the late game since by then, they can mass produce golem tier ships.

** '''Dragons''' in the sequel, the AI's defensive measure when you start building Spire cities; one for each. They're there to make sure you can't just cheese the game and snipe the overlord with a few Spire Flagships, and they do this job quite admirably: They can go more or less toe-to-toe with Spire ''Battleships'', and one on one will usually blast them apart with their reverse-engineered Coilbeam, a WaveMotionGun of massive damage. For hordes, they have a large, multitarget Energy Burst, so accompanying your Spirecraft with strikefleets won't help much either. Worst of all, they like to move around in groups and are ''fast'', so if you're having a battle anywhere vaguely near the Overlord they will crash the party harder than a SWAT raid and obliterate what they find, usually triggering a huge Counterattack in the process. Killing them usually requires several visits with a sizeable Spire fleet, killing them piece by piece through focus fire and retreating to fix up your vessels.

* InferredHolocaust: during the 800 year civil war, Humanity as a whole had control and populated the entirety of the Milky Way. After a brief resistance against the AI, humanity is reduced to a handful of cities, cryopods and the occasional captive human settlement in ai territory.

*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfieYKsflRQ 2's rendition of the title theme is much more somber,]] complete with a choir and new bridge.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R9yi6wb89I Midnight]] is a calm peace that captures the essence of being alone in space with it's lead piano and supporting percussion.

*** it's remix, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofvb_bUTclM Neinzul Reborn]] can either be even ''sadder'' or uplifting, depending on how you interpret it.

* DifficultySpike: The difficulty settings for the AI are non linear, meaning the jump in difficulty from 1-5 isn't that big, 6-7 being a notable power spike where the AI uses it's full capacity, 8-9 Turning up the AI's income to the extreme, and difficulty 10 is supposed to be outright impossible without some form of cheese.

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: In the sequel, it's heavily implied that the AI is fighting something outside the galaxy that is so powerful and dangerous, it requires the AI's entire focus to merely hold it back. Some of the AI's lines imply that it is trying to protect whatever remains of Humanity and only [[ForcedIntoEvil turned antagonistic]] because nothing unites two enemies like a common foe. There may be more going on than just "AI bad, human good".

** '''Brutal Guardposts''' which are exclusive to Fleet Command. These Guardposts are quite possibly some of the nastiest things you 'must' fight at some point. Most of the other DemonicSpiders either show up when you do something to piss the AI off, or are optional to play against minor factions, but these things MUST be taken down in order to win the game, as the AI seeds at least 1 on difficulty 7 and up. And they live up to their name in being brutally hard to destroy.

* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: The soundtrack is filled great scores that all fit the tone of the game. Though most of them in a somewhat melancholic way.

*** '''Exogalcitc Poltergeists''' for all intents and purposes are better, stronger Dire Infiltrator Guardians, and are one of the few units that can fire through force fields in the sequel. And if you become strong enough, the AI will happily send one your way every now and then. Hope you didn't need that Major Data center.