The general strategy of AI Wars is similar to other 4Xs, in which you explore, expand, exploit available resources, and exterminate the AI. However, the game breaks most of the tropes and expectations of the RTS and 4X genre in which expanding too much too fast will cause the AI to focus on you and destroy you, along with other mechanics unique to the series. You must play at a relatively good speed before the AI builds up an offensive fleet to crush you, but you must also play smartly if you want to avoid the AI from focusing on your recent victories against it. The game heavily focuses on the tactical battles, both offensively and defensively, and being extremely deep while with relatively streamlined gameplay loops. It is best to discard any preconceived notions you may have from prior space sim games as they will most likely hinder you, rather than aid you.

*Note* This game has been compared to Stellaris often, but in-fact this series started in 2009. Please do not come into this game thinking that this game is anything like Stellaris, as the majority of the gameplay is focused on tactical and strategic combat, with far more depth, emphasis, and complexity on the tactical scale. While the game has Stellaris like analogues (stuff like fleet strength, which is actually a fairly standard thing in Space 4X/Civ/Sim games), these are to give the casual player leeway into familiarising themselves with the surface gameplay before getting in deeper. Building your fleet comp like Stellaris or any Space 4x is important, but so is tactical placement of turrets, structures, and strategic placement of planet types on the galactic map.

*IMPORTANT NOTE* The AI in this game is actually COMPETENT. Even on lower difficulties when the AI will intentionally make mistakes, it is perfectly capable of defeating you. It does not cheat, or spawn units randomly. Every action the AI takes is deliberate and abides by it's own rules (budget and spending it). IT IS NOTHING LIKE STELLARIS and will MURDER YOU if you drop your guard and under-estimate it. Too often has this game been compared to Stellaris. AI war 2 is not to be compared to Stellaris and AI war, and it never will, and never has tried to become/copy Stellaris. It is its own unique identity and is proud about that. If you apply Stellaris logic to AI War 2, that is a good way of getting yourself killed.

To start, you can pick from the quickstart menus, which offer campaigns and scenarios tailor made by the Devs, or you can create a custom game (standard game much like Stellaris or Civ), where you can tweak almost everything, from the amount of capturables, to the factions that populate your galaxy. After selecting your map type, and a start position that you like, you can proceed to the faction screen to select the type of AI you wish to play against, the factions that may appear in the game, as well as the loadout for your starting fleet. You are able to choose from two battlestations, which have a unique loadout of turrets that can be further expanded by stealing blueprints from AI structures called Turret Schematic Servers, or TSS, as well as Other Defensive Schematic Servers, called ODSS. You may also choose your starting fleet, which dictates your starting offensive capabilities. Over on the last tab, is the galaxy balancing tab. This tab allows you to tweak various behaviours of allied factions, enemy factions, extra difficulty challenges, how much resources are on the map, as well as the balance between units. Don’t like having large ships? You may tweak bombers and fighters to be stronger. Want more powerful large ships? You can also tweak them. The game however, is balanced around the default settings with the AI on Difficulty 7 on Full Ensemble. After you are satisfied with the settings, you can launch directly into the game.

*NOTE* While the game defaults to "easy" on Difficulty 5, at a high enough AIP, difficulty 5 will still kill you. If you really want a sandbox experience, play on 1.

Within the game itself, you have 3 major objectives:

1. Capture more ships to build offensive strength
2. Capture more turrets to build defensive strength
3. Kill the AI

To accomplish these objectives, you must capture more ships and turret designs in order to strengthen your capabilities. Ships may come with unarmed transports, which were abandoned during the human retreat to the homeworld, or are stolen from an ARS. All ships within the galaxy are randomized, so you never receive the same ships in every campaign. The abandoned fleets however generally follow a theme, hosting ships that use the same technology, or compliment each other in some way. Turrets come with your starting battlestations, but are mainly obtained by stealing them from TSS. These turrets can be hacked to give all battlestations/Citadels and planets the same defenses, or can be hacked for 3x the amount to be given to a single Orbital Fortification (Battlestations, Citadels).

The AI Homeworld cluster and defenses have an estimated fleet strength of 300, increasing as the game goes on. So in general, you want to make sure your final fleet is capable of defeating at least 300 strength of ships defences and ships, as well as have turrets that are capable of handling what the AI throws most of the time at you. You also want to research multiple technologies and obtain ships and turrets in said technologies, as each technology has pros and cons, which may allow the AI to hard counter your build if you use only one technology (monotech). After obtaining the requisite power as well as intel on the AI Homeworld clusters, it is time to launch the attack. You must first destroy the Dire Guard Posts of all of the planets of the Homeworld cluster, in order to render the AICS on the AIHW vulnerable to attack. After destroying the AIHW, the AI Overlord (Phase II) will start its offensive, for a final showdown with the human fleet. It will beeline straight for your HW, so during this portion, it is vital you retreat and start fortifying for the final wave.

*IMPORTANT NOTE* If your techs do not synergize, you can refund them at the cost of 5 HaP. However, HaP cannot be refunded and can only be generated by taking more planets or destroying certain structures.

General Tips

1. Don't attempt to conquer everything, only capture planets that have something important/you need, or have strategic value. A planet that has a Zenith Power Generator or a fleet, worlds that serve as a chokepoint or worlds directly adjacent to your home world are good for example.

2. At certain AIP points, the AI "techs up" its units, so that the Warden Fleet, Hunter Fleet, and waves will be one level higher. This is a major buff to the AI's strength, so be careful about increasing the AIP too much too quickly. You can tell when those points are by clicking on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen.

3. There is a cap to how strong the Warden Fleet can get. Once it reaches that cap, any resources devoted to the Warden Fleet instead adds to the reinforcement budget. If you see planets spike up in strength over a short period of time and no/very little AIP has increased, it's probably because the Warden Fleet is at its maximum capacity. Start grinding down the Warden Fleet to reduce the reinforcement budget to normal strength.

4. The Hunter Fleet however, has no strength cap, so it is best to engage it whenever possible, Before the Hunter Fleet just steamrolls you into oblivion with a giant deathstack.

5. Neutering planets refers to killing everything on an AI planet except for the Warpgate and Command Station. This makes the planet almost harmless to travel through, and heavily cripples the AI’s ability to reinforce that planet by limiting both its reinforcement budget and reinforcement capacity.

6. Cross Planet Attacks are best dealt with piecemeal. You don't want to have a sudden rush of AI units barge into your homeworld while you're dealing with something else on a different planet. Generally, the units from a cross planet attack will wait outside one of your planets, and once they have amassed enough units or feel confident enough to take on your planet they will charge all at once. While they are gathering, find the planet they are on and kill off as many as you can. While this will typically cause them to retreat and go to a different planet, it's better to deal with that threat a little bit at a time.

7. Find and hold (by default) both Major Data Centers for a HUGE AIP reduction.

8. Reconquest waves happen once you cross a certain AIP threshold. You can click on the AIP icon in the resource bar at the top of the screen to see what that point is.

9. Spending Science on ship upgrades is more useful early than on economics

10. ARSs and Tech Vaults are very strong early-game objectives

11. Strength does not consider unit counters. 500 pike corvettes have more strength than 300 v-wings, but since v-wings counter pike corvettes, they'll win, despite having an inferior strength value. Carefully consider if you can win against the AI even if your strength is higher than it's.
AI planets Have 4 stages of alert, which dictates how much the AI will reinforce those planets.

Early Game

Starting off, you have the following objectives:

1. Survive
2. Strengthen your starting fleet
3. Strengthen your defences

Your first moves are to survey your surroundings and take note of which planets are easily defensible (one wormhole connection only), and which ones have loads of resources on them (lots of asteroid mines, abandoned fleets, advanced research stations, turret schematic servers, Zenith Matter Converters, Zenith Power Generators, etc). The Intel tab here is extremely useful as it lists all of those goodies in a nice little list for you to read and see where things are rather than having to search all over the map for them.

The next order of business is to capture the surrounding planets. The player is guaranteed to start with 1 abandoned fleet, 1 TSS, and 1 ARS nearby. Capture these planets by destroying the AI Command Stations (AICS), and then building your own command stations on them (CS). There are three types of CS, which are Logistics, Economics, and Military, each with their own distinct function. It is up to you the player to choose the station that best fits your current needs based on your situation. A Logi station is a good compromise between defensive capabilities and economic benefits, as it starts and will receive 8 turrets from all TSS hacks, and comes with a larger planetary defence fleet.

You generally want to get at least two lines of ships and turrets from the ARS and TSS respectively. Depending on the scenario, you will want to prioritize capturing more ARS planets to strengthen your offensive capabilities, or TSS planets to strengthen your defences. Note that capturing a planet with an ARS or TSS reduces the hacking cost by half, and halves the provoked AI response, making it far easier and safer to obtain new ships and turrets.

After capturing your first planet, you will notice that destroying an AICS reveals more of the map. This is called scouting, as you obtain Intel of the map by destroying more AICS. The closer to unexplored territory the destroyed CS will be, the more chances that surrounding planets will be explored. This does not mean you should destroy every planet nearby. Generally you have to capture around 4 to 8 planets in order to have the resources to comfortably hold off the AI.

As you destroy and capture more planets, you will notice more and more AI ships fleeing from your fleet. It is generally wise to try to prevent the escape of these ships as these ships later join together to form the Hunter Fleet, which is the AI’s offensive fleet. You will also note planets adjacent to the planets you attack start raising their alert levels. This is also important as it dictates how much reinforcements the AI will send to said planets in order to strengthen their defences.

By the end of the early game, you generally want to have a combined fleet power of 100 offensively, and about 50 strength of defences on each planet (assuming they are logistical planets). If you are running into trouble defending your planets, or suffering from metal drain, it is highly advised to level up the first few planets directly with science by 1, and to level up the homeworld by 2. Levelling up a planetary fleet will level up all structures and ships built and stationed on a planet, which includes asteroid mines.

*Note* units and turrets under planetary force fields deal only half damage. Some units such as Force Field Frigates (FFFH) have the “Hardened Force Field'' trait which allows units being protected to deal full damage.

Mid-Game

After obtaining a comfortable amount of ships and turrets, it is time to start going on the offensive. By now, you should have generated about 80 to 120 AIP, and the AI has reached the 2nd tier of technology. This means all future ships that the AI builds will be at tier 2, and means the AI will be stronger on the offensive and defensive if given enough time to build up. At this time, you should seek to further take more planets, with important strategic resources such as neutral structures, ARS, TSS, and abandoned fleets.

For the mid game, you want to at least invest in two weapon technology up to the 2nd rank, 3 if you have the science. You should also start investing in economic and defensive technologies such as Turrets and Force Fields, as during this time, the AI will be alerted to your presence and committed to attack offensively. It is during this time when the Warden and the Hunter fleets will actively engage you in battle.

Your objectives for the mid-game to the end of it are to:

1. Generate enough science to obtain the 3rd and 4th tier of technology to strengthen your strongest ships/turrets.

2. Hack 2 or 3 more TSS/ARS in order to strengthen your fleet.

3. Capture major structures to reduce the AIP and strengthen your economy.

4. Expand towards the AI to reveal the Homeworld cluster.

As mentioned before, generally by this time, the AI will be alerted to your presence. This is when you must proceed with caution. It is around this time, that the Warden and Hunter fleets emerge and intervene. The Warden is the AI fleet responsible for defending the AI planets when they are under attack. Their general strategies are to fortify a planet by positioning a fleet on said planet, or they will join in the fight with local forces to ambush you. The Hunter at this time will also start surrounding your planets, biding their time and probing your defences. If the Hunter Fleet notices that it can overwhelm your defences 3 to 1, it will generally join in the offensive. This can be especially deadly if you are unprepared for it. With all that in mind, you should take care to upgrade your fleet into one strong enough to take on the Warden Fleet + AI defences (so generally about 300), as well as amass enough turrets to defend against Hunters and Warp Waves (generally about 100 to 200 strength wise if on logistic planets).

At this time, it might be advisable to dedicate a planet that is purposefully under-strength in order to bait the Hunter Fleet into attacking it, losing ships as it attacks, or set up choke-points with your battle-stations and their turrets. These choke-points will isolate the Hunter Fleet movement, prevent them from joining up with each other, and allow you to hunt down the Hunter Fleet without risk of escape. If the wardens are giving you too much trouble, look for Warden Fleet Bases on the map. These fleet bases serve as rallying points, shipyards, as well storage for the Warden Fleet. Destroying these will cripple the Warden Fleet’s ability to rebuild and field units near sectors of the galaxy, which allows you to slowly chip away at the Warden Fleet piecemeal within a local region.

*Note* The AI Warden's Fleet budget never goes down, just allocated elsewhere. Striking down a Warden base basically cripples the Warden Fleet's ability to reinforce or operate near that area, which may help open up further planets to your attacks.

During this time, you will also start to notice AI planets with large defensive structures such as mass drivers, Ion Cannons, Eye turrets, and Fortresses. These will make it harder to destroy the defenders, and generally should be targeted first before they melt your fleet. Eye turrets especially are dangerous as they start at Tier 5, and have an invincible force field around them until there are at most 2 guardposts left on the planet.

*Note* During this time, you may find it hard to maintain enough energy to build all the turrets and ships you have captured. Consider saving energy by removing turret amounts on planets of low importance (unused logistics planets, planets with all hackables hacked). This will in turn give the AI something to throw themselves against and allow you to use that energy elsewhere.

Some other methods of maintaining energy and an good economics are to:

1. Secure easily defended planets (planets with only one wormhole), to become econ stations, and secure the only planet that wormhole leads to to defend it.

2. Secure a sector of easily defensible space near your HW (your starting sector), and defend areas at the chokepoints with military stations

3. Upgrade your logistics stations several times to boost their power and metal output (as they are the cheapest to upgrade and a good middle ground in defences vs econ).

4. Transform unused fleet transports into energy tankers which give an instant boost of 400k of energy for 30 HaP

5. Secure neutral structures such as Zenith Power Generator or Ancient/Lost Energy Generators which will give alot of energy, but raise AIP if destroyed by the AI.

End Game

This is it, you are nearing the homeworld cluster, planets will start regularly having defensive strengths of 200 to 300, large defensive structures such as Eye turrets become more prevalent. To destroy the AI once and for all, you must destroy the AI core known as the Overlord. For the Overlord to reveal themselves, you must destroy the AI Homeworld’s CS. To do that, you must first destroy the dire guard posts on planets surrounding the AI Homeworld. These Tier 7 planets are known as the “Bastion” worlds, and collectively these planets plus the Homeworld are known as the Homeworld cluster. When you first arrive on a Bastion World, the AI automatically techs up to the 2nd tier of technology if it has not earlier, and once you land on the AIHW, it will level up to the 3rd tier of technology.

Protecting the AIHW, is the Praetorian Guard. This fleet is made up of Tier 6/7 units, and they patrol worlds 3 jumps away from the AIHW. These units are aggressive and courageous, and are extremely dangerous. They will warp in at the most inopportune time, so it is advisable to cripple them before attacking the HW cluster. Dire guardposts, are stronger than regular guardposts, but also incur 8 AIP points when destroyed. You will have to destroy all of them plus the ones on the AIHW in order to render the AIHW’s CS vulnerable to attack. At this time, you want to have amassed a fleet of about 200 to 300, and have at least 100 defensive strength (assuming logistic stations). It is also at this time that is advised that you obtain MK-IV fighters/bombers/strikecrafts and MK-V Frigates/Arks/Golems as that is the sweet spot in terms of stats per science cost. You will need these MK-IV and MK-V crafts in order to deal with the MK-VII crafts you will be seeing on the regular that forms the Praetorian Guard.

After destroying the AICS on the HW, the AI Overlord will spawn from the remains of the CS. It will be immune to attack until it leaves the bastion worlds, after which it will make a straight beeline towards your HW. The AI Overlord is extremely deadly against ships as it can convert them to be friendly to the AI, and has a massive amount of shielding that regenerates. You will want to fortify several worlds along the way with turrets and military command stations. As turrets cannot be converted to the AI's side, they are extremely valuable and the optimum method to deal with the Overlord. As the AI Overlord is always a giant ship with heavy armour, high energy cost, and high hull strength/shields, it is recommended that you obtain weapons that counter those traits. Some units include Gunbots, Eyebots, Nucleophilic Turrets, anything with Pike as a prefix, and ships such as assault frigates, bombers and stingrays to deal with the heavy shielding.

Turrets/Placement Strategy

The general strategy for turret placement is to spread the turrets out so that they have maximum coverage, cover each other in their lines of fire, and try to cover the wormholes as well as the structures they are protecting. In general, this means you want to avoid placing them right on top of turrets, but instead in between the structures and the wormholes. AI units will generally stop and fight your turrets, or bypass them entirely for another wormhole or other targets, and thus its best to space them out so as to not be destroyed together or for enemies to slip through. To complement this, use minefields to damage and paralyze enemy ships along vectors of attack, and station gravity generators and tractor beams near wormholes between your turrets and the wormholes to slow them down.

You will also generally want to place turrets at a point where all wormholes of the system must pass through to get to your command station to guarantee overlapping lines of fire. Thusly, the optimal placement for your CS should be either on the edge of the gravity well (system map), on top of a wormhole leading to an important structure on the other side (Economic Station, MDC), or on top of a strategic structure (MDC, Zenith Generators). Afterwards, you should draw a line from each wormhole to the CS, and place most if not all of your turrets at a point where all three lines are within range of the turrets. Ambush turrets are an exception and can be placed near wormholes to take advantage of their 12x bonus damage against newly arrived enemy ships. Another thing you want to keep note is the attack patterns of some turrets. Beam turrets hit everything in a straight line, so you want to line those up along the vector line from the wormhole to your CS for max damage. Infinite range turrets such as sniper, counter sniper, and spider sniper turrets can be placed at the end of a gravity well for safety, in a ring around the gravity well to slow down the AI, or near your other turrets for maximum cover fire.


An example of orbital defences defending a planet leading to the HW.

Advanced Strategies

Raiding:
Raiding is a good strategy to slowly pick off guard posts and other important AI structures such as blackhole machines, orbital defences, CS, instigator bases, and so forth, without alerting the whole AI fleet at once. The general strategy is to assemble all of your fastest ships into a small fleet, or micro raid specific units such as Raid Frigates by selecting them via the Planet tab. The Planet tab shows all ships and units on a certain planet, and organizes them by faction. You can select the Raid Frigate (Frigate Icon with a small eye under it), and then Ctrl+L click on the wormhole to go to the adjacent planet. Once on the adjacent planet with just these ships, you can then right click to target the priority target that you want destroyed. As these ships usually have low HP, their rated combat strength is quite low compared to most ships and do not provoke a large response. Their speed, DPS, and cloaking allows you to destroy important targets and get out.

Beachheading/Turret Pushing:
Beachheading is a good strategy if you have the metal and energy to spare, and is generally a good way to establish a foothold on planets that are heavily defended. What you want to do is to bring your battlestations and citadels with you, and heavily invest in the engineering, turret, and metal generation techs. After saving up enough metal, you want to invade the AI planet with your mobile fleet and battlestations. Set your mobile fleet to stop and attack in order to force them to stay close to your battlestations and fight defensively, and then start building turrets where your fleet is. To distract the AI, you can also build other cheap defensive structures such as Tractors on the other side of the planet to divert forces. You can control the engineers manually by double clicking on one, and then right click on a turret being built to build it even faster. Do this until all your turrets are built, and enjoy the fireworks. Turret pushing is another name for beachheading in other RTS, and can be done with lower ranged turrets by progressively placing them closer and closer to the enemy fleet as the enemy fleet is pushed back.


Reverse Beachheading/Kidnapping
Kidnapping is a strategy involving using tractors offensively. Tractored units will be dragged alone with the units tractoring it, and will even follow it through wormholes. Any unit that is tractored, even melee, will be able to shoot and damage the tractoring unit no matter how far away it is. With this in mind, ensnarer battlestations can tractor a few hundred ships at a time. You can use this to thin out doomstacks waiting on a heavily defended planet by popping in through the wormhole, teleporting back, bringing along a hundred or so enemy strength with you into your carefully prepared turret setups. This is extremely useful if you managed to let the warden fleet build for too long, or if you woke up enough sentinel units to become a hunter fleet.

Using Vision as a Manipulative Tool
As mentioned before, the AI Hunters and Scourge will attempt to hide on planets you do not have vision of. This can be exploited however, provided you have sufficient amounts of spies or logistics stations in place. By carefully planting spies on planets, you can control which planets the AI Hunters and Scourge will attempt together at. This can be used to easily force them into a corner so they can’t easily escape, or make them take a longer time to reach one of your worlds when they do decide to attack. However, make sure not to completely view all or almost all planets. In that case, Hunter will simply then return to camping near you instead of far away.

Hot Dropping Mil CS (A pro gamer move)
If AIP isn’t a concern, or you want to take the planet anyways, an ideal method of invading is by building a Mil CS on the world you are attempting to take. When attempting this, make sure you have a plan on where to place your Mil CS so it doesn’t immediately get sniped by infinite range units, or cover it with mobile force fields if you have any. When you have everything planned out, snipe the AI CS, rush build your Mil CS, and upgrade it as much as you can. A mk5 Mil station provides a powerful combat boost to all friendlies and additionally is fairly tanky itself and can dish out punishment on its own.

Hammer and Anvil
The Hunter Fleet is a slippery foe. It will always try its best to stay out of sight until it is ready to strike. It will also coordinate with the Warden to possibly ambush you if you accidentally stumble upon them on a heavily defended chokepoint. However, since it flees from areas that you have vision on, it is viable to try to corral them by stationing turrets or other vision giving structures/ships/spies upon planets to manipulate their movement. The Hunter Fleet will also always flee towards the planet that has the least amount of strength. Meaning that if it has a choice between a military station with less fleet strength than your fleet, and your offensive fleet, it will choose to try its luck with the planet. With this in mind, an advanced strategy is to use battlestations and citadels to fortify planets in order to corral the Hunter Fleet into attacking a planet and thinning itself out by surrounding it.

There are many ways to play this wonderful game, and no guide will do this unique game justice. I hope that with this guide, newer players will achieve a picture or an idea of how the game should go, how many planets to take, what to aim for, and so forth. It is my wish that these ideas become a framework to expand your gameplay upon, and ease you into this Marianas trench of a game, rather than restrict you.

Good luck!

More resources:

Fleet/Ship/Structures guide
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2490284094

Unit prefix guide
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2485471535

How the AI works
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2489385764

Tips from the Developers
https://sp.zhabite.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2491137660

Beta version of the community made strategy guide from which this guide was made from (WIP)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pfUfEHVKXqGvrhUW44s8urShOCwUUGzQwWZBjbNaPu8/edit?usp=sharing