‘AI War’s Fourth Expansion Beta Available Now For Pre-Purchase

Arcen Games are a hard-working bunch, that’s for sure. It wasn’t announced long ago, but the fourth expansion for their asymmetrical mega-scale RTS AI War: Fleet Command is now available to play, albeit in unfinished form. As per their usual M.O., they’re taking player feedback from an early stage to help guide the development of this new expansion.

Ancient Shadows is the title, and the big new twist brought in with this expansion is ‘Champions’. In what sounds like a rather Homeworld-esque twist, you can now opt to start the game as a nomadic faction of one of four races in an upgradable, modular super-ship. Through combat, it gains experience and more upgrade options present themselves. From the looks of the ship-builder screen (pictured below), it visibly grows over time, too. Beyond just being a fancy ship, it can travel outside of the usual bounds of the map and discover various NPC factions, which will offer missions and fill in yet more backstory lore.

As with the previous Light of The Spire expansion, Ancient Shadows seems to offer additional routes to victory through new mission objectives and interactions with neutral or friendly NPC factions. As with all AI War expansions, you can get a hands-on demo of this new content by running the updater in-game then grabbing the expansion installer from the official page here. The expansion itself will cost $5 when finished, but you can shave a dollar off that price if you buy in early.

Arcen Games have kindly given us a copy of Ancient Shadows for preview, and we’ll be digging into it soon to see how the new concepts and features are shaping up. The addition of a more mobile, aggressive approach to the game sounds like it might shake things up. It’ll be interesting in seeing how a match with a single ‘commander’ player with a base, and a flotilla of Champions works.