YMMV / AI War: Fleet Command

• Alternate Character Interpretation: 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 turned antagonistic because nothing unites two enemies like a common foe. Additionally, the AI has spared countless humans on planets, even though it could easily bombard them to death. There may be more going on than just "AI bad, human good".
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is filled with great songs that all fit the tone of the game (even if that means most of the songs are melancholy).
  • The title theme for Fleet Command is a short song, but no less epic. It can be heard in several other tracks.
  • 2's rendition of the title theme is much more somber, complete with a choir and new bridge.
  • Midnight is a calm piece that captures the essence of being alone in space with its lead piano and supporting percussion.
  • Voyage to Zenith serves as a reminder for how glorious the zenith were, before they became the shell of a race they are now. The sequel's version is remastered, sounding much sharper as if to show how powerful the Zenith originally were.
  • The Night Light puts the Spire in the spotlight, and gives you a sense of purpose to help them out, so you can annihilate the AI together.
  • Neinzul Lullaby makes you feel sorry for the little buggers, as they only live for a day before dying.
  • Neinzul Reborn, the remix of Nainzul Lullaby, can either be even sadder or uplifting, depending on how you interpret it.
  • For the Fallen was supposed to be used for Stars Beyond Reach, but was retooled to be the first song that plays when you achieve victory in 2. And when it ends, that's when a remastered version of the victory theme from Fleet Command starts playing
• Demonic Spiders: Quite a few. AI War is a game that takes pleasure in torturing the player.
  • Astro Trains stand out following update 6.006. The update is even called "The Pain Train" by the developers. Astro Trains - AI units that will rush back and forth through vast stretches of space to move between AI Train Stations - are very fast and Nigh-Invulnerable to boot, to the point where the Lost Superweapon Golem starships are considered one of the few ways to reliably destroy them. That or high-Mark Spire Implosion Artillery, which you have a limited supply of, particularly in the early game (and might not have at all, depending on what options you enabled at the start of the game). It isn't the fact that they're fast and insanely durable that makes them annoying, though. No, what makes them really annoying is what they carry. The ones that have guns are actually the least worrisome, since all they'll do is shoot your turrets a bit, and maybe inflict light damage on your ships. The ones that are the most annoying are the ones that apply a Status Buff to the AI or debuff your own units as long as they're in the system. Since the only real way to control where Astro Trains go is to destroy Train Stations, one or more of which might be deep in enemy territory, you can't really tell when one or more Trains is going to show up during a big battle and tip things towards the AI's side. There are also variants which use massive Tractor Beam complexes to kidnap huge numbers of your ships at once, which can be just as devastating. Notably, the sequel hit them with a pretty intense nerf, making all of them vulnerable sorts with important cargo to deliver rather than the indestructible death delivery systems they used to be; in particular, they're incredibly vulnerable to nucleophilic weaponry and have been known to suicide against turretwalls in player planets thanks to it.
    • The higher the intensity is raised, the worse the trains get. At 5, you get Cargo Trains, which are harmless by themselves, but as they run from station to station, the AI gains progress towards some nasty surprises, such as Superfortresses, Hunter/Killers, and Golems. And if you crank it all the way up to 10 (which is just asking for it) you can see the Nuclear Train, which will nuke any human planet it passes through.
    • The sequel makes all Astro Trains cargo trains, meaning every Astro Train must be intercepted if you want to stop the AI from summoning something powerful. That something in question varies based off of how many trains are required per project
    • At one train, the AI can build a Dire Guardian
    • At four trains, the AI can build a Hunter/Killer
    • At a variable amount of trains, the AI can build Prototype Guardians, which are basically heroic Dire Guardians, some of which can compete with Tier 1 Exogalactic units!
    • At ten trains and only on intensity 10, the AI can summon the Ravenous Shadow from the first game, which is basically a Devourer Golem!
  • 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 Demonic Spiders 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.
    • Wrath Lance Guard posts are infamous for this. They are the only unit in the game that "shoots" regardless of hostiles being in range, and those shots are beams of death that rotate around slowly. If this thing is seeded right next to the entry wormhole, say goodbye to most of your initial starting invasion.
    • Grav Reactor Guard posts function as a Black Hole Machines that fight back! If this thing is seeded particularly far away from your invasion points, you can't perform hit and run tactics on the AI Homeworld.
    • Hunter/Killer Factory Guard posts release a Hunter/Killer on you if you go onto a planet that's next to it or on the planet the factory is on itself. If you don't destroy it within 30 minutes, it'll send ANOTHER Hunter/Killer your way.
    • Raid Engine Guard posts. Take a Hunter/Killer factory Guard post and replace the Hunter/Killer with a wave of mk5 ships. And the timer for destroying it decreases from 30 minutes to 4. You better destroy this thing FAST or you'll be drowning in swarms of mk5 AI ships.
  • 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 Space Pirates 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. This is due to their budget mechanics, which makes them exponentially stronger for each planet they take.
  • The Dark Spire, if enabled, seeds Dark Spire Vengeance Generators throughout the galaxy. When ships (AI or human) are destroyed on a planet with a Vengeance Generator, it absorbs energy. After it absorbs enough, it generates several powerful, angry Dark Spire ships, which go on the hunt for anything to destroy. Doesn't sound so bad...until you find out that once a generator activates, it networks with other generators, meaning that they will all spawn ships at the same time. This escalates very quickly, and turns the war into a three-way fight. Things get even worse if you hack the generators to shut them down, steal their ship designs, or God forbid just to antagonize them.
  • The Nanocaust typically shows up later in the game compared to other factions, and for a good reason. Their Abomination ships have a more potent version of zombification that can quickly amass into a 300+ power fleet from the AI Sentinels. Attacking head-on will quickly see your ships convert into the Nanocaust, and they also have assembly centers that can pump out even more ships. They can even convert certain obscenely powerful ships, such as the Dyson Sphere guards, Dire Guardians, and even the Elderlings from the sequel. If they get their hands on any of the 3, you may as well just surrender.
  • Zenith Reprocessors, one of the most obnoxious ships the AI can unlock. First of all, they're bulky; they have not only a lot of health, but a hull type (Medium) that very few ships get significant damage boosts against. Also, they're invisible. They do solid damage, and get a massive 8x bonus against unusual hull types - and Heavy, which is one of the most common hull types. Finally, every ship they destroy can contribute to the AI's reprisal waves, even if they destroy it on your planet.
  • Spire Stealth Battleships are another cloaked killer. In addition to cloaking, they're tough as nails and they have radar dampening, making them irritating to kill off. They're difficult to defend against and have enough range to ambush you when you enter AI-controlled territory, but the real issue is when they end up in a threat fleet, when they're very good at slipping through your defenses to wreak havoc on your squishier systems.
  • Dire Infiltrator Guardians are the number one reason you don't leave an activated Dire Guardian Lair alone. They're invisible guardians with bonuses to stationary targets and immunity to forcefields. If you aren't paying attention to one when it spawns, it'll vanish into the galaxy, and you'll forget about it until it blows up something important, like your Advanced Factory or even your Home Command Station.
    • 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 (They were originally Tier 1 Exos, which meant that you are almost guaranteed to put up with them in an average game), the AI will happily send one your way every now and then. Hope you didn't need that Major Data center.
  • The Scourge in the sequel, a mixture of genetic and technological experiments the AI bosses around to deal with minor threats. Unlike the AI, they are an evolving threat that will snowball out of control if you don't keep it in check. Unlike the other minor factions, they don't require an opening or unleashing to do so, and they snowball very quickly. At any significant intensity they will force you to alter your playstyle to quicker, more invasive sorts so you can nip their facilities and try to slow them down even a little. And at high intensity? Intensity 10 Scourge is practically suicide even if you set the AI to Difficulty 1. It's very telling that a human-allied Scourge is one of the very, very few things that can trigger Extragalactic War task forces all by themselves.
  • Dragons in the sequel, the AI's defensive measure when you start building Spire cities or when the Dark Zenith invades; 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 forcing you to raid the Dark Zenith homeworld for their ship lines otherwise), 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 Wave-Motion Gun 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.
  • Venators from the Neinzul Abyss are ships that the AI sends if you use too much of a specific ship type. They all have decent hull strength but have utter obscene bonuses against the ships they are meant to counter. The Nadir Venator for example is the brutal counter against Spirecraft since it can only take 5% of its max health in a single attack while packing nearly 5 million health.
• Difficulty Spike: 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 its 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.
• Fan Nickname:
  • The Devourer Golem is affectionately referred to as the Cookie Monster, like any ravenous devourer would.
  • To a lesser degree, the Zenith Trader is given the moniker Zenith Traitor, due to an... interesting bug where the Trader sold stuff to the AI for an absurdly cheap price and with very little cooldown, making worlds look like a giant morass of troop accelerators, ion cannons and eyes, among others◊, making them a pain in the ass to attack.
  • Fleet Ball is used to refer to grouping all your units into one giant ball and using that to kill anything on a planet. Less often used is Doom Stack to refer to the same thing.
• Fridge Horror: The primary resource in the game is metal. Metal is collected by building mines on metal deposits, which are found in massive fields of derelict ships. These derelict ships were probably left there during the civil war between humanity or when the A.I.s began the war of extermination. Additionally, the highest number of metal deposits are found in the human homeworlds, which the A.I.s have yet to build a presence in and clear out/recycle the junk ships. You, and all other human players, are salvaging the burned-out husks of humanity's fleets to fuel your own war effort against the A.I.s.
• Game-Breaker: Seeker Turrets in the sequel, under certain circumstances. Their capacity to deal more damage the more mass their target has is fairly strong in itself, but has no actual cap. As a result, anything bigger than a frigate starts suffering under their fire; Guardians know pain, Dire Guardians can evaporate, and Extragalactic units get eaten alive. A Seeker Turret shooting a Flenser (which have the rough mass of a gas giant, according to their tooltip) is up there for the most damaging attack in the game.
  • 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.
• Goddamned Bats: Anything that teleports. If your command stations are unprotected by a forcefield, just a handful of AI teleporting raiders can snipe one command station after another, causing you to brown out on power.
• Inferred Holocaust: During the 800 year civil war, humanity as a whole had control over 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.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The lore of AI War is extensive and builds into Arcen's other games, but is usually glanced over in favor of duking it out against the AI.
• That One Boss:
  • Turn on the 'Avenger' option at game start. Avengers are moon-sized AI ships with all the firepower and durability that implies. When you take down the AI Home Command Station, an Avenger will spawn and head straight for your home system, at which point you will lose. Horribly. Oh yeah, and when you kill it? It blows up with the force of a nuke.
  • So you're firing up the Showdown Devices to shut down the AI's warp grid? Get ready to meet the Galactic Control Ships. There's two of them, and they are essentially Avengers on steroids. A Galactic Control Ship can tear through Golems, Spirecraft, and almost anything else you throw at it. And if (if) you kill it, it nukes the system it died in and every system adjacent to it. Have fun.
  • Thought you were safe in the sequel? This time, the Avenger and Galactic Control Ship combine as a concept to form Phase 2 of the AI Overlord, who will uproot itself from the galaxy and slowly charge towards your homeworld, swatting aside everything in the way. And the higher the difficulty, the nastier it gets in terms of health, damage and even range. Not to mention its arsenal is so massive it has a weapon for just about everything you can throw at it, along with a bunch of zombifying armaments to turn your own ships against you. And you cannot slow it down. It won't nuke the planet it dies on this time, at least.
    • The Galactic Control Ship now returns in the Neinzul DLC, and while there is one this time, it has a nasty new trick. When the Showdown is triggered, it will set every AI ship in the galaxy into Threat. This is essentially a CPA with all the AI's remaining forces, on top of the GCS nuclear explosion.
  • Any Extragalactic War vessel can act as one, being the AI's nuclear option if something has gone very, very wrong. Even the Tier 1 sorts already hurt like hell, and there's a whole selection of them that can make your life difficult. It's very lucky that you need to go out of your way to antagonize it to bring out anything above tier 3.
  • Nemesis: "A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent." Personified in this case by something that's the Devourer Golem's superpowered Evil Counterpart. It has the giant area-cleaning hyper-damaging Antimatter Jaws of the Subjugator, but given every possible boost the Scourge races can give it: Protection from distance, higher damage at a distance, higher damage if HP is missing, zombification, vampirism and a sidearm that can shoot through forcefields and paralyze structures. All punishing you for the crime of not trimming the Scourge while you still had the chance. Of course, if you've let them run so rampant that a Nemesis has spawned, you're already having pretty huge problems.
  • 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. There are also quite a few more infamous AI Types, mainly the Brutals:
    • If you thought each of the factions from the Demonic Spiders was bad, the Jabberwock AI has access to all of their ships, including a few sadistic twists, such as immediate access to Scourge/Spire hybrids and multiphase Guard Posts based off of Zenith Architrave units that can essentially go invulnerable whenever they feel like it. You're not picking a poison with this option, you are downing them all at once.