AI War 2: The Spire Rises

The Spire Rises introduces the Spire race, with some factions helping you into open warfare, and others being quiet neighbors or in their own war. There are new units and arks, a ton of new turrets to defend with, and the insidious Scourge. There are new mechanics, and modular ships!Content Variety
This expansion adds a lot of welcome variety to every game you play, without being overwhelming. Thirty new kinds of turret make the various tech options more well-rounded, and make your own planets as well as enemy planets more unique and interesting. This doesn't increase the learning curve, since the normal method is to evaluate things as you go (rather than memorizing or coming up with a "perfect" meta) anyway.

Aside from the mass of new turrets, there are five new Arks that provide a variety of strange and interesting new abilities as fleet leaders. There are other new capturables to find in any campaign, and some fan-favorite strikecraft and frigates have been adapted from the original AI War into this game (and made even more interesting).

These aspects are part of any game once you have the DLC, and make the game a richer experience in general. There's also some new music! However, there are also several notable opt-in new factions:Option For Open War
The Fallen Spire faction is another fan-favorite adapted from the original AI War, but massively expanded and overhauled in this sequel. The core premise is that you shift from hiding and fighting from the shadows to instead growing an increasing number of large alien cities that work under your orders. As you grow your Spire forces, you can either choose to just augment a normal-style campaign, or you can build so many cities and have such massive armies that the AI starts freaking out and recalling its own super-units from its other war outside the galaxy.

Seeing your massive Spire ships in battle against the dismayed Exo War Units of the AI can be... extremely satisfying. A year on after this DLC's initial release, and there are some players who just don't want to play the game any other way -- which is great! All of the normal features of the game, including any mods and other DLC, are compatible with this style of powerful Spire/Human empire.

For other players, a Spire game is something to play every so often as a change of pace, or to mix and match. It's really not a rigid game mode, and allows you to push as far as you feel like going.

The Scourge
The Scourge are another optional faction that can be enabled via the lobby, or by activating a beacon in any game.

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).

Lore: The AI felt a need for a subsidiary force to wipe out small annoyances, and not need to bother its main Processors with petty things. The AI took various races they have conquered in the Arcenverse, twisted them by genetic engineering, and fused them into a new and powerful force to crush its foes. The primary races the Scourge use are the Thoraxians, the Peltians, the Neinzul, the Evucks,the Burlusts… and even Spire.Fallen Spire
The Fallen Spire are an optional faction that can be enabled via the lobby, or by activating a beacon in any game.

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.

Lore: The AI has crushed the Spire empire in their home galaxy. Some Spire units have landed in our galaxy and they can rebuild their empire and take revenge. The AI has captured a lot of Spire reactors and is experimenting to harness their power in cloaked research laboratories. There are also some hidden spire relics scattered about the galaxy from past battles.

Turrets Expansion
In the base game, a couple of weapon technologies are missing turrets, and the defensive options to both you and the AI felt quite limiting. The turrets introduced in The Spire Rises aim to fix this by adding in 30 new turrets to the game. Some highlights include the Acid Turret, a supportive turret that causes any enemy it splashes in acid to take more damage from every source, the Crusher Turret, which functions like a miniature black hole, the Counter Sniper Turret which can obliterate those pesky Sentinel Gunboats and the Mini Fortress which can challenge whole fleets of AI ships and come out on top.

Returning ships from Fleet Command

Veterans of the first game may recognize these ships, as they are among the most popular and remoriable units from Fleet Command. They have made the transition into glorious 3d, and are ready to destroy all that oppose them again!

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
Over the course of the Human civil war, many exotic and unique ships called Arks were developed and used in combat. Many were destroyed during the brutal infighting, others were scrapped by the AI, and a few were simply lost to time. Well some of the missing ones have been detected and they are still salvageable for use to fight against the AI. They may not be as powerful as when they were in their prime, and some of the technology required to bring them back to fully operational status is missing, but with enough investment, they can become the powerful ships they once were. They also bring some unique gimmicks to the table, not found in vanilla.

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
Several of the base game factions such as the Nanocaust, Macrophages and Marauders have new interactions with the Fallen Spire game mode. Whenever these factions are in play together, they may acquire some new spire themed units to empower themselves. Additionally, the Dark Spire aren’t… exactly happy that their Imperial cousins have arrived and may have some… shall we say violent opinions of them. We won’t spoil what happens, as that is best left for you to find out!The 2022 Update
With the release of Zenith Onslaught and the upcoming Neinzul Abyss being chock full of content, we felt that The Spire Rises needed a bit more to stand beside those peers, and thus the free 2022 update aims to fill out even more content for you to experience and enjoy! The most notable part of this update are the new “Player Type” options. These radically change how you play the game from the start, and can switch up your entire strategy from the get go. Additionally, there are some new Spire minor factions to add some more chaos to your games, and they can drastically alter the tempo of the game. Without further ado, let’s meet the meat of the product!New Player Types
With The Spire Rises, you’ll be able to play as 2 different empire types, those being the Ark Empire, and the Spire Infused Empire. Both require having a diverging mindset and strategies to be played effectively, as they redefine how you will play the game. This also opens up an avenue for more player types in the future, as well as give modders another toy to play around with!

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 Fal