AI War:The Zenith Remnant

What exactly is added via The Zenith Remnant expansion?

A: The short explanation is that the expansion is focused on adding more grand strategic variety to the game, and more variety in general. Or, put another way, making each game more varied and having more unique things to find and do throughout the galaxy. But that's more than a little vague. Here's, specifically, what the expansion adds:

New Bonus Ship Classes

The base game of AI War includes about 25 "bonus" ship classes beyond the base fighter, bomber, frigate, scout quartet that is in every game. The Zenith Remnant adds another 14 classes. Here is a list of them, along with what they add to the game in general:

• Zenith Bombardment Ships (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These ships are wicked expensive, but are also extremely long range, moreso than anything in the base game on both counts. They pack with a big punch, too. They have only moderate hull health, so if you bring them into too close of combat they won't fare well, but from a distance these guys are absolutely unmatched.
• Zenith AutoBombs (I-IV variants)
  • These units are unique in that they are suicidal, and die on impact, dealing area damage. In many ways, they are like miniature, AI-Progress-free lightning warheads.
• Grenade Launchers (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These are something of a fan favorite, as they can be deadly against masses of ships. They launch mid-power grenades over a medium distance, and the grenades explode and deal area damage to enemies. These are less potent per-impact compared to AutoBombs, but they also don't have to be rebuilt constantly. Combined with a good set of complementary ships, these can really wreak some havoc.
• Zenith Electric Bombers (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These huge bombers are almost like starships, they have so much health and attack power. They have a cluster penalty, which encourages using only around 8 or so per planet, per mark level of the bombers. Thus several small squads of these can be set up and used, and they can do the job of a vastly larger fleet of normal bombers. These things can be an absolute terror in the hands of the AI, too.
• Sentinel Frigates (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These are the most powerful and expensive snipers you could imagine. Like the electric bombers, these have a cluster penalty. In the case of this unit, the penalty is steep enough that it is wise only to have 2 sentinel frigates per planet. These aren't hugely useful on offense in most cases, but having these spread around your planets on defense can provide a huge amount of security. These also include an onboard advanced warp sensor, which gives you all the benefits of knowing exactly which wormholes AI ships will be coming through without actually having to spend the knowledge on the standalone advanced warp sensor.
• Zenith Mirrors (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These are one of the more bizarre and fearsome ships in the expansion, depending on what sort of ship mix you and the AI has. These tiny cubes have incredible health, and a fairly middling main attack, but they have the special ability of not only amplifying incoming firepower against themselves, but also reflecting it back against the ships that are firing on them.
    • This has two effects: first, it makes most ships prefer not to shoot the mirrors if there is any other choice, since it can be self-suicide, and this thus gives the mirrors a free hand to use their main weapons to do a lot of damage earlier in large battles; and second, at the end of a battle it means that many types of ships will find themselves exploding in the face of their own firepower from the mirrors (which are also damaged by shots they reflect).
    • Mirrors are not all-powerful, though -- certain types of shots, such as missiles, they are unable to reflect. So they are very weak against missile-heavy opposing ship mixes, while they absolutely cleave through more laser/shell/energy weapon ship mixes.
• Zenith Paralyzers (I-IV and Core variants)
  • On the surface, these ships actually seem pretty weak. Their main attack is pretty fast, but also pretty pathetic, and their Strong Vs stats show them as strong against almost no other ships. But, these have a unique ability: their shots inflict short-term paralysis on the ships they attack. The more they concentrate fire on a ship, the longer it will be paralyzed. That makes these ships immensely helpful in a support role, when combined with other ships in various mixes. The effect of that paralysis attack (which works on anything that could be paralyzed by an EMP) is not to be underestimated.
• Shield Boosters I-IV variants)
  • Strong fighter in its own right, it also gives a 2x shielding bonus to nearby ships on your team. These are basically the opposite of Munitions Boosters from the base game: rather than increasing your outgoing firepower, they greatly increase your ships' shields, thus making them harder for enemy ships to hit.
    • There are actually cases where 30+ bombers have a hard time taking out an otherwise-unprotected command station simply because it was being boosted by several shield boosters. This then provided the opportunity for reinforcements to arrive, kill the bombers, and provide time for a proper force field to be rebuilt, rather than the planet being lost. These things are equally valuable on infrastructure defense and on the front lines.
• Zenith Beam Frigates (I-IV and Core variants)
  • Beam weapons were introduced new in this expansion, and were a fan-favorite request. These frigates fire high-range beam weapons that damage all enemy ships in a line, which is a completely new kind of area damage for the game. The auto-targeting even aims at ships in the back of a group, to maximize the number of ships being skewered by the beams.
• Zenith Chameleons (I-IV and Core variants)
  • These ships have a completely unique form of cloaking: they make themselves look like ordinary space junk whenever they are not moving. They can't move or fire while camouflaged, but neither can they be hit. And when they stop moving and firing, the camouflage instantly. Tachyon beams are useless against these since they aren't using traditional cloaking, and their main weapon systems are that of pretty solid bomber technology, about on-par with regular bombers or slightly better. Just having double the number of bombers normally at your disposal is valuable enough, but having this sort of stealth ability is even better.
• Zenith Polarizers (I-IV and Core variants)
  • Normally, shields on ships help to deflect shots. The polarizers turn this idea on its head: not only do they fire straight through ship shields, their damage output is dependent on the shielding of ships (including any boosts made by shield boosters). Not only does this make the polarizers a natural counter to ship mixes with shield boosters in them, it also provides a surprisingly quick way to take down many highly-shielded targets that otherwise die slowest among most ships.
• Zenith Viral Shredders (I-IV variants)
  • Melee ship that generates build points as it attacks, spawning a free copy of itself when enough are accumulated. This replication costs a portion of the replicator's health, and will not happen below a certain percent of health. Also, when there are more shredders of a specific level than the natural ship cap on a single planet, the build points required to replicate will increase exponentially. These are something of a Von Neumann machine, which has been a quite popular idea and mechanic with more hardcore sci fi fans.
• Impulse Reaction Emitters (I-IV and Core variants)
  • Attacks with ammo that reacts with enemy energy sources, doing much higher damage to ships with higher energy use. Most fleet ships have relatively low energy usage, which means that the impulse reaction emitters aren't all that handy in a big battle of small stuff. But what tends to have high energy costs are the more valuable support ships: starships, engineers, heavy defenses of various sorts, constructors and resource ships, transports, and so on. The impulse reaction emitters excel at killing those sorts of specialized targets.
• Acid Sprayers (I-IV and Core variants)
  • Most of the Zenith ships have organic components, as the Zenith aliens' technology is based around that for the most part. These acid sprayers were developed as a specific counter to that sort of technology. Their short-ranged acid attacks are excellent at dissolving organic components, making them a natural counter to most Zenith technology.

New Golems

The massive new golem ships were a new feature as of The Zenith Remnant in general. This expansion added 7 golems that could be captured and rebuilt by the human players, as well as 4 golems that are used exclusively by the four minor factions added in the expansion. Golems are a pretty hefty topic, so they are covered in way more depth on the Golems wiki page.

New AI Special Weapons

One aspect of the AI War universe that was only explored to a small degree in the base game was the idea of specialized AI weapons that would be on specific AI planets. Examples from the base game include Super Fortresses, Captive Human Settlements, and more semi-common weapons like Ion Cannons. Certain of these weapons are mostly limited to use by a specific AI type, but there is always a small chance of them showing up on a planet or two in any game. One huge focus of The Zenith Remnant was to add vastly more content of this sort, making for hugely increased variance in campaigns played using the expansion compared to just the base game. Here is a list of them, along with what they add to the game in general, broken out into various sub-categories by general function.

Situational Awareness AI Weapons

Situational awareness refers mainly to scouting further than just to the planet that you directly plan to attack, and keeping an eye on effects that might come from adjacent planets instead of just the planet you are currently on. Thus one planet can be something of a "modifier" to the planets around it, and having a more accurate picture of the neighborhood of a potential target is suddenly much more relevant than in the base game.

• Alarm Posts
  • When an AI Command Station is destroyed on the alarm post's planet, or an adjacent planet, all of the guards at the current planet will desert their posts and go on the attack. If the alarm post itself is attacked and destroyed, there is only a 50% chance of it alerting the guards.
• Special Forces Alarm Posts
  • When an AI Command Station is destroyed on the alarm post's planet, or an adjacent planet, all of the "special forces" ships in the entire galaxy will turn aggressive and attack the humans. If the alarm post itself is attacked and destroyed, there is only a 50% chance of it alerting the special forces ships.
• Raid Engines
  • Launches brutal waves against its own planet or any adjacent planets, if those planets are not controlled by AI players, or if the human players have a significant fleet there. If human players don't have warp sensors on these planets, the waves may well arrive unannounced. These waves arrive around every four minutes, contain a broad mix of AI ships, and use the tech level of the planet if that is higher than the current wave level for the controlling AI player.

Other New Ships Available For Direct Unlock By Players

These ships are unlockable at any time, in any game, through either command stations, starship constructors, or similar. They provide more options for players in fleet customization during any game, to let the players better adapt to the many new possible scenarios that the expansion sets up. Here is a list of them, along with what they add to the game in general:

• Cloaker Starships (I-III variants)
  • Very fast starship that cloaks other ships near it, even if those other ships normally do not have cloaking. This has been put to excellent use for everything from sneak attacks to knowledge raid blitzing, and so forth. They are pretty hard to use effectively for most new players, honestly, but these are something that a lot of expert players really adore.

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