What's new/different in the new expansion so far?
Frumple's link is good for explaining things, so I'll just give my impressions of what I've seen so far of them instead.
Dual AI types: Very cool, and you can set them to random individually of course. That can make...interesting combos, to say the least.
Subcommanders: Rude Gesture was hilarious/a pain in the arse to see in its original Mass-counter form. The others I haven't seen much of yet.
Dire Guardians: Can be problematic if a Lair is too closeby. Otherwise, in exowaves they are like spirecraft: Notable amongst the fleetships.
Types:
Chivalric & Bouncer: These two are nice. One literally so, the other one may or maynot be depending on what it placed there. Certainly points out just how
tiny damage wormhole posts do when you have a full power post shooting at you in a new system.
Artillerist: Bring lots of range. The AI certainly will.
Exotic: Fun. Instead of waves at a specific destination that will spawn straight in, you get to fight (slightly modified I think) exogalactic waves which come at you from AI space and don't have the restrictions a non-schizo normal wave has on being a single type +starship. You won't get anything absurd at the beginning, but you might want to pay a bit more attention to the waves incase the AI tries to sneak something difficult in.
Vengeful: Very interesting. When you blow up something important to it, it throws ships at you, with the amount scaling with AIP. Vengeful/Exotic can lead to a lot of ships at seemingly random times depending on where the vengeful spawn (or exowaves) appears at.
Vicious Exotic: I know its a more painful version of Exotic. I'd rather not try any of the Red-tier AIs on my own though.
Hunter Plot: Special Forces has a Hunter/Killer (or 2 if you turned it on for both) and a couple dozen high-mark guardians! (on intensity 4. On 10/10, you get the painfully painful pain of 5 H/Ks (1 per mark, x2 if you turned it up to
11 10 on both AIs) and ~160 guardians added to SF after a couple hours. Which individually respawn an hour after you kill them.)
Shark Plot B: Can speed up you losing if you happen to lose a significant number of planets at once. Or just make it more difficult for you to move forward.
Widow Guardian: Has a surprisingly large range on it for a buffed tractor guardian. Can cause a mess.
MLRS Guardian: So many missiles!
Infiltration Guardian: Sneaky. Not very effective vs Mil IIIs.
Shield Guardian: Its like a spirecraft shield bearer. But much less tanky.
Plasma Guardian: Great description. Not so great when you're trying to protect your stuff under forcefields.
Wheel Map: An interesting shape. Can you hold the center system? (More importantly, do you even want to?)
Core Turret Controllers: Not bad. Can be expensive in energy in bulk. But its core turrets with mini fort-style caps, is not exactly surprising. No Core HBC though.
Lightning Torpedo frigate: Not always the most useful, but they don't cost AIP like real lightning warheads.
Devastator: Previously did 2mil shield-ignoring damage with 10 second reload. Now do significantly less damage, but have half the cooldown, which helped a bunch. Slow.
Protector: Can counter anything with enoguh of them with the right module...until it runs out of ammo. Then it has to reload its countershots, becuase if it didn't it would be a bit too easy to keep all the damage ever (or a certain type) away.
Youngling Shrike: Used to come with the Combat Carrier, but that ship ran into usefulness issues. So you get its youngling type instead, its not bad.
Railpods: Yes.
Hydra: Not entirely impressive. But not bad either.
Showdown Devices: AI be angry you messed up its important stuff, and its coming to punch you out personally.
Oh yeah, and its also bringing every mobile AI ship left in the current map as backup.
All of them.