The AI and the game

A player in its own right

The AI is not scripted scenery: it is a player that runs an economy, builds bases, carries out research, produces its units and maintains them. It extracts iron, silicium and energy; it consumes no food. Its decisions are taken every few minutes, day and night, and it reacts to what it sees: a player who attacks it often sees the nearby VMs grow stronger.

Its size follows that of the server. Its starting stock grows with each registration, and so does the number of its Secondary Cores: one per 50 registered players, at least 3. A very crowded server therefore faces a larger AI, but also more players to fight it.

VMs, the AI's bases

The AI's bases are called VMs. Each has a role, its own buildings and a core: as long as the core holds, the VM holds. The table gives the core HP and the base shield of each type.

Neighbouring AI VMs pool their shields: every VM within 5 tiles of an attacked VM lends it its reserve. The AI's defensive strength therefore comes from the proximity of its bases: an isolated VM is a much easier target than a VM in the middle of a cluster.

The AI's expansion

The AI starts from the centre of the map and expands in successive rings around the Grey Zone. It may only found its VMs in the open ring; when that ring fills up, it prepares and then opens the next one. The edge of its territory is drawn on your map: you can see the expansion coming.

Its Constructors found extraction VMs on free deposits, and combat VMs come to protect them. A combat VM watches its surroundings, guards the nearby extraction VMs and positions itself facing the players' ships. When the Grey Zone is saturated, the AI can also found colonies further away, around a core of VMs that moves together.

A freshly founded VM has neither high buildings nor a full garrison yet: it is the best moment to destroy it. Containing the expansion near you protects your deposits and delays the arrival of combat VMs on your doorstep.

The Grey Zone and the Sentinel towers

At the centre of the map, the Grey Zone is the AI's territory, rich in silicium. It shelters the Central Core and the Secondary Cores. As long as its 6 Sentinel towers stand, it is sealed: invisible by any means and impossible to attack. Only the towers, on its edge, can be seen and attacked.

A Sentinel tower is a motionless fortress: a core of 60,000 HP, a shield of 20,000 points, a garrison it produces itself. It protects its surroundings: AI units fighting within 8 tiles of an active tower gain +30 % DEF, plus 5 % per tower already destroyed, and every living tower in range adds its own riposte to the combat. Towers grow even stronger at the advanced tiers.

1. Each destroyed tower is gone for good.
2. When 3 towers are destroyed, the Guardian awakens on the Central Core: the AI units page describes it in detail.
3. When all the towers have fallen, the seal lifts: the Grey Zone becomes visible and open to attack, and the AI sharply speeds up its production to defend it.
4. Humanity's victory requires destroying the core of the Central Core.

Tiers and the pace of the game

The AI progresses along a calendar of tiers, from T0 to T7, about 2 weeks each by default (divided by the server speed). Each tier sets its attitude: passive at first, then defensive, aggressive and finally in total war. The tier also caps the research of its Core, and therefore the units it can field.

In practice, the AI only defends at the start of the game, begins its raids at tier T2, multiplies operations during the war phase and throws all its forces into battle in the late game. The game's Threat screen shows the current tier and the countdown to the next one.

The AI's raids

Each combat VM raids the ships it sees continuously, a ship being the target only of the closest combat VM. The first raid always follows a spy scan; afterwards, a new raid leaves as soon as the troops of the previous one are back. The return trip is your window to reinforce your garrison or move away.

The size of a raid is based on the last report: the AI sends enough troops to clearly exceed the garrison and towers it saw, and doubles the stake after each lost raid. Several neighbouring VMs can coordinate their departures to arrive at the same second. A raid withdraws after heavy losses and does not touch your buildings; only destruction operations, led by several combat VMs that land grouped near their target, aim to bring a ship or a Guild down.

A victorious AI attack loots your ship, resource by resource: 5 % of the stock while the warehouse is 20 % full or less, then more, up to 30 % when it is full. Looted iron, silicium and energy join the AI's reserves; food is lost. If a single AI unit survives, it also brings back the state of your garrison.

Espionage, both ways

A spying mission does not fight: it is settled by a single check on arrival. The attacker adds up the vision of its reconnaissance units, the defender that of its own plus its towers. If the defender has nothing, the mission succeeds undetected; if the defender is stronger, it fails and all the units are lost; otherwise it succeeds with losses that grow heavier as the gap narrows (80 % of the points at parity).

The AI spies on every ship and every Guild it sees and keeps a recent report on each. After a failure, it comes back in much greater numbers. A ship that wipes out a very large spying mission is no longer scanned: the AI considers it very dangerous and raids it anyway, with an estimated force.

You spy on VMs with Scouts and Reconnaissance Drones, which Armored Transports can carry. The report gives the VM's garrison and buildings. You only receive a report of a spying mission against you if you have at least one reconnaissance unit on board.

Sabotage and threats outside sieges

From Strategic Consciousness onwards, the AI slips saboteurs into its raids: Infiltrator Commandos and Nano Swarms. If at least one saboteur of a type survives the combat against your ship, that type shuts one of your interior buildings down for several hours (never the Command Center), without taking any HP. A message warns you, and the building restarts on its own at the stated time.

In the late game, the AI also has threats that do not go through a siege: the orbital strike, which hits the landed ships near its equipped combat VMs every night, and the Guardian's EMP pulse, which disarms the armoured units of ships too close to the centre. The Research page details the technologies that unlock them.

On your side, the Technology branch gives two economic weapons: the jammer, which slows down and makes more expensive everything the VMs in your field of view produce, and the virus, which infects the VMs that detect you and spreads to their neighbours. Both require your ship to stay landed.

The force ratio and the end of the game

A side's force is the sum of the ATK and DEF of all its living mobile units, stationed or in flight; towers, the Guardian and shields are not included. The Threat screen permanently shows the ratio between the AI's force and humanity's, and every player receives a message when a threshold is crossed.

From tier T3, if the AI's force reaches 30 times humanity's and holds there for 14 days (divided by the server speed), the AI wins. The threshold applied on a server is shown on its Threat screen. Well before that, as soon as it masters the Extinction Protocol and the ratio reaches 67 % of that threshold, its production doubles.

Every AI unit destroyed and every human unit kept alive lowers that ratio. A player who never approaches the centre therefore contributes to victory by defending well, raiding the nearby VMs and avoiding pointless losses.

Ship wrecks and exploration

As long as the AI has not gone beyond tier T1, ship wrecks appear near the players' ships. A scrambled distress signal, accurate to within 10 tiles, is sent to the players in range. Each wreck stays for 72 hours and hides loot: resources, sometimes soldiers, and from tier T1 an AI guard.

To loot it, send a force: the guard fights for one turn, then the wreck's trap kills part of the units that are not reconnaissance units, depending on the missing reconnaissance (3, 6 or 9 points depending on the wreck's size). If at least one unit survives, it brings back all the loot, and the soldiers found join your force.

An exploration mission with reconnaissance units gives an immediate report of the targeted area (ships, VMs, wrecks, orphan extractors, deposits) and leaves it visible for 24 hours. On a wreck, it reveals its contents before the looting.