ARES AI, alliance transfers, and the Eidolon's Dark Star victory arrive in the v2.1 update
ARES AI Is Live
The AI has been rebuilt on the ARES decision model, and it's now on for every AI player by default. ARES opponents expand harder, defend their important worlds, keep research moving, and commit to a war instead of drifting between targets. They hold a besieged home world instead of retreating from it, build combined-arms fleets that counter the ships they've seen, intercept raids, and send relief to allied worlds in team games.
Each ARES seat plays a strategy. The default is Wolfpack: three equal combat fleets in the early game, no static defenses, and after 20 minutes the packs merge into one fleet. On top of that, each AI draws a rush, boom, or turtle style that shifts a handful of its build and research priorities.
ARES also plays by the fog of war. It attacks the enemy home it has actually found, and its decisions don't use information it hasn't seen. Turn off home-planet victory and it stops treating your home world as its first target, going after worlds that cut your territory apart, isolated worlds, and rich economies instead.
Prefer the old opponent? Each AI slot in the lobby has an AI profile button that switches between ARES and the classic AI.
Factional Victory
The Factional Victory option in the lobby now spells out what each faction has to do to win. The first player to complete their faction's objective and hold it through the countdown wins, and in team games the whole team wins with them. Lose the objective and the countdown starts over.
TEC
Arm a Novalith Cannon with Planet Cracker Warheads and use it to finish off 5 enemy planets. One set of warheads fired again and again will do it, but if the Novalith is destroyed, its kills go with it.
Advent
Fit a Telepathic Amplifier to 3 Dreadnoughts, bring them to a star, and keep all 3 alive there for 15 minutes.
Vasari
Load Departure Supplies onto 3 Anarkrul Wanderers or Sularkon Tyrants, bring them to a star, and keep all 3 alive there for 15 minutes.
Eidolon
Turn a star into a Dark Star, then survive 5 more minutes. More on that below.
Harbinger: The Dark Star
The Eidolon now have a victory condition of their own, and it ends with a star going dark. The new Stellar Shrouding Beam, fitted to the Anrakhazh Scion, pours the Scion's corruption into the heart of a fully corrupted star. Shrouding takes 15 minutes, and the Scion has to channel the beam the entire time with its weapons offline. It will need an escort.
As the shroud spreads, rifts tear open: one jump out at half progress, two jumps at 80%, and across the whole system once the star goes dark. Each rift sends escalating waves of attackers that cost the Eidolon no Fleet Supply. Every other player is warned the moment shrouding begins, so don't expect to be left alone. If the channel breaks, the shroud holds for 5 minutes before it starts to unravel, and any Eidolon Scion can resume a paused shroud.
To feed it, every star type can now hold planetary corruption, and Propagate Mode reaches stars, so a Shrouded world can pour corruption into the star of its own gravity well.
Anrakhazh Scion Rebuilt
(Requires Reinforcements and Harbinger)
The Eidolon command ship is now a finished warship, rebuilt as a shield platform rather than a hull tank. Shields go from 5850 to 11000 and armor from 3820 to 5000, while hull drops from 8500 to 6000. It now carries antimatter and a hangar of five to ten strikecraft squadrons. It also costs more, takes longer to build, and uses 150 supply instead of 100.
It brings four new abilities:
- Entropic Beam Drains the Scion's corruption while charging to power up a single massive beam.
- Continuity Field Greatly raises the chance that nearby ships return as a Phase Echo when destroyed.
- Mass Summoning Warps your ships within 5000 of a target point in a nearby gravity well to the edge of the Scion's own.
- Phasic Wave Banishes enemy ships in a cone into a deeper layer of phase space, disabling them and loading them with corruption.
There are also eight new items, including the Temporal Echo Device, which makes Continuity Field duplicate a unit whenever it triggers a Phase Echo, plus four new research subjects, new voice lines, and new ability effects.
Advent Unity Reworked Around Range
Unity abilities no longer need dominant culture. Chastise, Resurrection, Sacrifice, and Sanctify drop that requirement, and every Unity ability now works from a Unity range measured in AU. The Focus planet track adds 5 AU per level (up to 25 AU at level 5), Battle Meditation adds 10/15/20 AU, and the Deliverance Engine's culture spread adds 10 AU. Clairvoyance isn't limited by Unity range.
Alliance Transfers
Allies can now trade resources, exotics, planets, items, and influence from the start of a game. Every faction charges a 10% tax on resource transfers. Offers show both gross and net values, and an accepted offer keeps the rate it was agreed at.
Economy and Pirates
Scuttling now gives a full refund while a unit is still under construction and half once it's complete. Exotics follow the same rule. Pirate incursions have been cut in half, with smaller first waves, slower growth, and total raiding supply down from 650 to 325. NPC garrisons at outposts away from home now hold their guard mission, so raids can't pull them off station.
Balance
The Eidolon get more expensive at the top end. All five capital ships take longer to build and cost more, as does the Zhaltharien Anathema. The Thalkerin Revenant's Dark Shell and the Lakhaziel Archon's Neural Overcharge and Vortex Missile Salvo have been toned down.
Elsewhere, Advent Progenitor Mothership Shield Regeneration has been retuned, TEC Sordid Intel and Vasari Shock and Awe both move up a tier and cost more, and the Vasari Pilot Cloning Bay now needs its own blueprint research but grants an extra squadron. For DLC owners, the Takadaran Command Fortress can now build capital ships, except the Marza Dreadnought.
Interface and Quality of Life
Watching a replay now shows a new observer panel: a ranked player list with score, planets, fleet supply, and capital ship counts, team totals, a planets-over-time chart, and a readout of what each AI is currently trying to do.
The lobby remembers your player slot setup per map, including teams and each AI's faction, difficulty, and behavior. Unit descriptions for the TEC, Advent, Vasari, and every Command Ship have been rewritten, and build tooltips now lead with the unit's role. Interceptors are now called Fighters. Turkish can now be selected in the language settings.
Harbinger owners also get three new tutorials covering Planetary Corruption, Ship Corruption, and Cloaking, along with three new Eidolon player portraits.
Performance and Stability
The AI does far less repeated work, working out things like fleet strength, enemy strength, and safe routes once per decision pass instead of once per candidate. Windows on ARM launches again, fixing crashes on Snapdragon X laptops and under Parallels on Apple Silicon. Emoji in save names and mod folder names no longer break the game, and resizing the window during a load no longer crashes or hangs. Corruption propagation is now deterministic across clients.
Modding
The ARES doctrine lives in player_ai.uniforms, with roughly 1,040 lines of authored values. ARES personalities come in two kinds, strategies and styles, and Trident and Dominate ship as additional strategies alongside Wolfpack. Mods can now declare the DLC they need, and the JSON schemas have been regenerated to reject unknown keys, so VS Code flags typos instead of silently accepting them.
Note: the old single refund fields have been replaced by separate under-construction and complete values, so mods that set them will need updating. Full details are in the changelog.
ARES has been a long time coming. Thanks to everyone who played the opt-in builds and sent us feedback along the way.
