A.I. Tech

A.I. Tech decides how many fleets you can have out at the same time. Every level you research gives you one more fleet slot. That is the whole of it. It does not make your ships hit harder, fly faster or last longer in a fight.

Effect

Your fleet slots are your A.I. Tech level plus one. With no A.I. Tech you get one fleet. At level 5 you get six. At level 12 you get thirteen.

The number covers your whole account, not each planet. Owning six planets does not give you six fleets. That is why the Fleets page says "Fleet command across all planets" and why the counter reads the same wherever you look at it.

What uses a slot

Anything you send out takes one slot, whatever it is:

• Attack, including joining somebody else's group attack
• Transport, Deploy and Fleet Save
• Espionage probes
• Harvest
• Colonization
• Group Defend
• Deploying a Hephaestus platform, and moving or docking one that is already out there
• Daily missions. Sending the same mission five at a time costs five slots, not one.

Some things cost you nothing:

• Missile strikes. Missiles are not fleets and never touch your slots.
• Ships parked at home.
• Fleets other people send at you, and defenders other people send to you.
• A Warp Gate jump needs a free slot to start, but the jump takes five seconds and hands the slot straight back.

A slot stays busy for the whole trip, not just the way out. An attack holds one until the fleet is back home. Deploy is the exception, because the ships stay where they land, so the slot frees up on arrival. Cancelling does not free a slot either. It turns the fleet around, and you get the slot back when it lands.

When every slot is busy the game just stops you. The Dispatch Fleet button goes dead, missions show No Fleets instead of Start, and anything else you try comes back with "No available fleet slots".

What it does not do

A.I. Tech puts no limit on how big a fleet is. You can load every ship on the planet into one fleet if you want to. What stops you is the ships sitting on that planet and the hydrogen sitting on that planet, because the trip burns fuel before it leaves. That is the hydrogen you are actually holding, not the size of your Hydrogen Storage.

It also does nothing at all in a battle, whatever the in game blurb about ships in battle suggests. No part of combat reads your A.I. Tech level.

Researching it

A.I. Tech needs a Research Lab at level 1 and nothing else, so you can start on it right away. You upgrade it on the Research page like any other tech. Tech belongs to your account rather than to a planet, so you research it once and every planet you own gets the benefit.

It costs no ore at any level, only crystal and hydrogen. Level 1 is 400 crystal and 600 hydrogen, and every level after that doubles both numbers.

Cost per level

Level	Crystal	Hydrogen	Fleets
1	400	600	2
2	800	1,200	3
3	1,600	2,400	4
4	3,200	4,800	5
5	6,400	9,600	6
6	12,800	19,200	7
7	25,600	38,400	8
8	51,200	76,800	9
9	102,400	153,600	10
10	204,800	307,200	11
11	409,600	614,400	12
12	819,200	1,228,800	13
13	1,638,400	2,457,600	14
14	3,276,800	4,915,200	15
15	6,553,600	9,830,400	16
16	13,107,200	19,660,800	17
17	26,214,400	39,321,600	18
18	52,428,800	78,643,200	19
19	104,857,600	157,286,400	20
20	209,715,200	314,572,800	21
21	419,430,400	629,145,600	22
22	838,860,800	1,258,291,200	23
23	1,677,721,600	2,516,582,400	24
24	3,355,443,200	5,033,164,800	25
25	6,710,886,400	10,066,329,600	26

There is no cap. The table stops at 25 because nobody is close to it. Taking it all the way to level 20 costs 419,430,000 crystal and 629,145,000 hydrogen in total.

Things that need A.I. Tech

• Advanced Research Communication Network needs level 8
• Foundry needs level 10
• Zeus Class needs level 12

Tips

• The early levels are some of the cheapest useful research in the game. The first few cost less than a single ship and they pay out for as long as you play.
• Count what you really run at once. If you farm five missions a day and still want a fleet free for a transport, you need six slots.
• Return trips catch people out. Six slow transports out and back can hold every slot you own for hours.
• Keep a slot spare when you think an attack is coming. You cannot fleet save without one.