AI War 2: The Spire Rises (PC & Mac)

Content Variety

Option For Open War

The Scourge

• The Scourge provides a new way for the AI to be more active and attack the player in new ways. For example, they can build a few cloaked ships, then suicide them into your economic command stations behind your defenses.
  
• Give the player some juicy infrastructure targets that can be killed to weaken the enemy. It's always fun to destroy your enemies’ production facilities.
  
• The scourge's units can organize themselves into Fireteams, granting them unprecedented flexibility and the ability to coordinate their attacks across the galaxy. Fireteams were developed to power the Scourge, though they have now also been made to work for a number of other factions.
  
• A giant scary ship called the Nemesis can come around if you REALLY get into it with them, but running into Subjugators prior to that is bad enough.
  
• The Scourge are canonically allied to the AI, but you can have player-allied scourge or independently-teamed scourge (Marauders, Nanocaust and Scourge as a team is terrifying).

Fallen Spire

• The core of the gameplay is epic battles to capture the spire relics, and powerful ships and cities you get as a result.
  
• Get some Really Big Weapons that scare the mess out of the AI.
  
• Build entire spire cities of various complexities and styles, which upgrade as you build more cities and more structures.
  
• The AI now has a reason and ability to bring back extra-galactic forces from their mysterious "main war" to fight you and the spire openly.
  
• You have the freedom to push all the way to an alternative victory condition via this faction, or to just build up one or more cities and make use of the extra firepower.
  
• Experience the fallen spire on a gradient scale, doing some of it as you wish, not having to choose "completely fallen spire" or "completely not fallen spire."
  
• Let us explore a bit more of the spire lore than we have in prior games.
  
• Give players a chance to "smash the galaxy for fun and profit" by going for a mark 7 city, well above the mark 5 level that is needed for the alternative victory condition. At this point you're just rubbing it in, but it feels so satisfying to be the big one for a change.

Turrets Expansion

Returning ships from Fleet Command

• The Bombard fires off single shots at a very VERY slow rate… but whatever it hits isn’t gonna be there anymore!
  
• The Tackle Drone Launcher Frigate itself only has a modest weapon. But as its name implies, it shoots out Tackle Drones. These drones can grab hostile units and pull them to the edge of the gravity well, taking them out of the fight, or pull them right into your awaiting units to get blown up!
  
• Viral Shredders are a melee based unit that dish out a moderate amount of damage, but when they attack enough times, they replicate themselves for free. And then those fresh replications begin replicating themselves. And then THOSE replications begin replicating themselves. And then… you get the idea.
  
• Tesla Torpedo Frigates are slow, and have a rather lackluster weapon… But their main source of damage comes from their devastating Lighting Torpedoes they spawn for truly disgusting area of effect damage. Swarmer type ships shudder at the thought of engaging these bad boys!

Additional Arks

• Belle Prime is an ambush specialist, boasting a very large amount of cloaking points and a surprisingly weak weapon for its weight class… But its main strength lies in its ambushing capabilities, dealing large damage if it has just arrived on a planet and outright eviscerating anything that has just arrived on a planet it is at. This makes it the ultimate wave destroyer or hacking response exterminator.
  
• Grand Salvage is an absolute menace to groups of smaller ships, pulling them in magnetically and then crushing them with the power of artificial gravity. It also projects a stronger than average gravity field, ensuring most ships do not escape its wrath.
  
• Great A’Thomek functions as a tank for your entire fleet, drawing in fire from hostiles directed at your nearby ships with its attractant field, and shrugging it off with its defensive bonuses. This makes your fleet ridiculously hard to kill, outside of AoE weapons.
  
• Nodorion Tortid may just be an artillery piece at first glance, but it also comes equipped with an attrition generator, damaging EVERYTHING that’s mobile over time. While the attrition damage is quite slow, over the course of a battle, attrition damage can very quickly add up.
  
• Sol Ater has rather lackluster weaponry, but its main utility lies in its ability to more efficiently subvert AI firewalls whenever it hacks something, causing the AI to have a decreased response to your hacking.

Base Game Integration

The 2022 Update

New Player Types

• Ark Empire: The Ark Empire may be familiar to those of you who played the AI War during its earliest incarnations. Instead of having a Home Command Station, you are instead given an Ark and 5 shiplines of your choosing to begin your resistance against the AI. However, unlike other flagships, if your starting flagship reaches 0 HP, then it's curtains for you. This type of empire can be considered more challenging than the normal empire because even though you have a starting Ark, you don’t start with a world claimed and you will lack starting battlestations. This empire type can be used in multiplayer games for players who want to take a more supporting role instead of an empire building one.
  
• Spire Infused Empire: This type of empire is intended for those who dislike the relic chasing aspect of the basic Fallen Spire mode, as this type of empire allows you to build Spire related ships and structures without having to use artifacts to start building Spire cities. Although you are still restricted from just pumping out cities like no tomorrow, this “cutting out the middleman” aspect means you and the AI can get to blasting each other to pieces much faster than normal.

Modular Ships

More Spire Factions!

The Chromatic Horror

The Spire Dyson Spheres

What Else Is There?

• Minor Capturables can now be found around the galaxy, such as the Lost Energy Reactor, which boosts your energy by a minor amount. These small structures can provide a modest bonus to your empire, but also increase AIP by 1 upon death, making them almost inconsequential to lose.
  
• Several new mechanics are introduced in this DLC. Harmonic increases the damage of a unit if more of the same unit are on the same planet gravity well. Damage amplification increases the amount of damage taken by a target by either a base amount (+25 damage from all attacks) or a multiplier (attacks deal 1.5x damage against this target). Drone guns shoot out a controllable unit that attritions slowly over time, allowing for carrier type units. There are a few more, but that would require me to write an entire short essay.
  
• Doomsday approaches! Something is tearing the galaxy apart piece by piece, causing entire planets to be outright destroyed without any forewarning. This will over the course of the game cause the galaxy to shrink in size, and things may end up claustrophobic with you and the AI literally within spitting distance at one another. You don’t have to worry about any planets you control or the AI HW being destroyed during Doomsday, but careful consideration of your position should still be taken, as all planets will always be insured to connect to at least one other planet, meaning no, you can’t just get lucky and seal off a troublesome minor faction. This option is enabled in the General tab in lobby setup.
  
• More music, courtesy of the amazing and talented Pablo Vega, who has worked on prior Arcen titles, including AI War: Fleet Command! Hear the sheer awe inspiring Spire race’s testaments transcribed into music form! The Scourge also have their own sinister theme as well!

Added To The Base Game Concurrent With This Expansion

• “Fire teams” from the scourge were backported into the AI itself, and the scariest other factions, making the AI vastly smarter in general.
  
• Improvements to targeting and other AI efficiency and performance improvements benefit all the factions, expansion or otherwise.
  
• A major upgrade to the lighting and materials used in the game makes everything prettier. We had to retouch all of the existing ships and structures from the base game to make this happen.
  
• Loads of requested features, such as the ability to load quick starts (or even savegames) into the lobby for further customization before starting a new game.
  
• The Extragalactic War features that the AI brings out against the Fallen Spire are technically part of the base game, so that any other faction or mod can use them in the future if desired. We didn’t want to gate that off.

How Does This Compare To AI War Classic?