AI War Ancient Shadows expansion to add massive modular Champion battleships

Look at that picture. Look at the lasers! That's AI War, a massive, cerebral 4X space strategy wargame about building thousands of robots and waging war on super smart AI enemies. The upcoming Ancient Shadows update will reduce that chaos and let you roll with a monstrous starship that can gain experience and level up as it obliterates all incoming enemies.

Let's let Erik of Arcen Games explain: "With the Ancient Shadows expansion, you can now set a player to the "Champion" role and instead of a home command station and all the usual stuff a player starts with they get a singe modular ship. But what a ship. At the beginning it's basically a super-starship that's pretty powerful but nothing world-shattering. But it can gain experience, and with experience it can upgrade modules."

These megaships can travel to distant corners of the universe that no other ship can reach, where a series of splinter factions (Humans, Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire) enjoy a quieter existence. You can help them out for new modules, and build even bigger bits onto your doom vessel. Here are the main features:

  • Modular fortresses! (the Human-tech variant is added in this update; Zenith, Neinzul, and Spire variants to come, probably via reward from an offroad scenario)
  • 9 new bonus ship classes (coming soon, not implemented yet).
  • 3 core AI guard posts and one new minor faction (coming soon, not implemented yet).
  • New AI types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
  • New Map types (coming soon, not implemented yet).
  • A large amount of new music (to be released when the expansion fully launches, you'll need to download the final installer to get the music, it won't be delivered via update).

If you own AI War you can download a demo of the expansion from the Arcen games site . If you like it, you can pre-order now at a reduced price and gain instant access to the betam version, which will be updated as new features are added and the expansion is polished up for full release. Find out more about Eternal Shadows on the AI War site .

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.