The Bar along your top, from the right, details as follow:

System/time played, metal, energy, research points, hacking progress, aip, attack/threat/wave

Veteran players will note the lack of crystal, It was removed from game and simply piled into metal.

Metal is used to build things
Energy is used to power the things you built.
Research is used to unlock newer things to build
Hacking is used for a great many things and should be it's own guide
AIP is used to murder the player. (not joking, keep this one down if able)

Let's cover metal first, as the usual first order of business is to build a fleet.
Metal comes from 4 sources, in order of their reliability:
1) Command stations (usually not much, but higher mark econs can give a fair bit)
2) Metal resources node Harvesters
3) Salvage
4) Distribution Nodes

Command Stations all (except warp jammer) give a certain amount of metal per second. As they are required for harvesters to work and are how you gather salvage, these are the most reliable source of metal income, despite it often being a small amount.
There are 3 main types of command stations with 3 marks of each, plus a special warp jammer command station with only 1 mark

Ecomonic Command stations give the most metal per second and also provide a boost to energy, but are extremely fragile. They are barely better at salvaging than military stations, but only idiots and living legends should have them on the front lines.

Logistic Command stations are middle of the road for base metal per second but salvage twice as much metal from destroyed enemies as economic command stations. They also provide yours ships a substantial speed boost in system and slow enemy ships signifigantly. Their health is middle of the road, but still lags far behind Military command stations.

Military Command stations are the worst station for generating metal, and the worst for salvaging metal. That being said, they are _amazing_ at defending themselves. These are the station of choice for holding a point against repeated AI attacks.

Metal resource node Harvesters bring in metal from the resource nodes on a planet. The downside is that unless your empire is really large, your are usually better off spending the research upgrading command stations. Each one brings in 20/30/55 metal per second, depending on level of upgrades. Assuming you went with military command stations, the first upgrade will improve metal by 192 per second once they are all installed. that's equivalent to upgrading over 19 metal havesters, but the added defensive power makes up for the difference in most cases. Other command stations provide even more marked increases, so I generally advise people to stay away from upgrading metal harvesters.

Salvage: This is one of the new mechanices from Destroyer of Worlds. When the AI loses ships on a planet with a human command station, the system's salvage count goes up by an amount equal to the metal cost of the ship. that total then deteriorates at a rate of 0.5% per second. of that deterioration, your command station harvests a portion as indicated in it's description.
This deterioration rate has a hard lower limit of 100/second. The total salvage on a planet has a hard cap of twice the maximum metal you can hold at once. (typically 2-3 million)
This means that a logistics 3 station killing swarms of ai ships under constant attack can yield .3*.005*5000000 metal per second, or 7500 metal per second, but this is an absolutely ideal scenario that even really talented players need luck to generate.
I just wanted to make it clear, salvage has the potential to be the backbone of your economy, but the research cost of setting that up is often prohibitive.

Distribution Nodes: these can be destroyed to gain around 600K metal but increase AIP by 1. sometimes, you just need that extra boost right now.

Energy is used to power your fleet, your turrets, your forcefields, and basically everything that isn't a minefield.

It comes from very few places:
1) Economic command stations provide 10K/75K/150K energy each
2) Energy collectors (cap 1 per planet) provide 150K each
3) Matter converters (cap 10 per planet) provide 50K each but consume 200 metal/second
4) some capturable irreplacables can also provide energy, but generally speaking the above is it.

It is worth noting that since you get a "sub station" at your homeworld for free when you unlock more advanced stations, unlocking econ 2 ot 3 gives an immediate boost to energy, which can be used to counter a brownout if desperate.

All marks of fleet ships and turrets have the same energy costs (a fighter IV is same as a fighter I, a bomber IV is same as bomber I, and so on) so it makes sense to only ever build the most advanced turrets you are capable of. There is no reason to have a planet with 20 sniper mark I turrets eating 14K energy when you've unlocked snipers mark II. For fleet ships it's generally advisable to have all ships of all marks built or being rebuilt at all times, due to galaxy wide cap.

Starships are unique in this, the mark I versions often use only half the energy of higher mark variants. If I have to choose ships to not build to make up for lacking energy, lower mark starships are the first thing to go.

I generally advise players try to keep 150K energy surplus after they've taken a couple planets, just so that losing 1 energy collector doesn't shut down their force fields.

Research is, like energy, a resource largely limited by the number of planets a player has cleared.

You start the game with 10000 research. every planet (including your home) has 3000 more to be gathered by science vessels. That right there covers the basics of the topic.

Ways to gather research beyond the 3K per planet you take:
1) Spire Archives. There are usually 2 of these in any given game, they are always located 2 hops from the AI Homeworlds. These gather 5 research per second on their planet, but don't stop after the 3000 mark is hit, instead continuing on until you have gathered a whopping 9000 from that planet. The downside is, the AI wants to blow them up once you capture them, and AIP increases once that happens.
One way to mitigate this risk is to have a mark 2 science lab gather it's full 3k before building a command station on the planet, so the archive is immediately gathering into it's extra 6k and the ai has less time to kill it.
2) Research hacking. This is the replacement for the old mark 3 science labs, a hacker can build a knowledge hacker on an AI planet that begins harvesting the knowledge there. This will trigger a hacking response, which I don't think I'm going to go into detail about in this guide. Short version: AI starts spawning ships and if you do this too much, you will die.
Note that the research hacking consumes from the same 3K pool that you will gain if you conquer that planet, so you never want to research hack a planet you intend to later conquer.

Now that we've covered how to get this precious resource, how is it used?
When you select a science vessel, it has a number of tabs containing various unlocks. once research is spent on an unlock, it's gone for good.
In a normal game, you will not have enough reseach to unlock everything there is, so it's best to make choices carefully as you advance and find your needs changing to suit the current situations.
Knowledge is per player, meaning in multiplayer games you gain a great deal of diversity because each player can focus on different techs. In these games, it is especially important to communicate your plans with your team to avoid shared picks.

This deserves it's own guide, so forgive my brevity on the topic.

Hacking uses HaP (hacking progress) to achieve unique ends. Like every other resource, we will start with how it is gathered:

The only way to gain HaP is to increase AIP.

With that out of the way, here's the dirty details on how you can use my favorite resource:
Firstly, any hack you perform will cost 1.5 times as much to perform again. as an example, an exile locator hack costs 10 the first time, 15 the second, 22.5 the third, and so forth.
Second: there must be an intact AI command station on the planet you're hacking.
Hacking is performed by the hacker ship (found in the econ tab) building a structure that actually does the hack on a given world. these structures are cloaked, immobile, and have fairly low hp. They then start a countdown where you spend the HaP and get the benefit at it's end. If they get blown up with 1 second to go, you spend no HaP and get no benefit.
Finally: if a hacker completes it's task and has no new task it can start, it goes inert and stops prompting AI response. If there is a new task it can start, you have to manually delete it before it finishes again to make response stop growing (often the case with sabotage hackers)

Types of Hacks:

Knowledge hack: this starts gathering knowledge from an ai controlled planet every second and is fairly reasonably priced in terms of HaP. It caps at 3000 knowledge per planet.

Sabotage Hack: this destroys the nearest AI structure from a certain list of targets including ion cannons, raid engines, fortresses, forcefields, and a few other targets. If it's target would normally increase AIP on destruction, this will prevent that increase in AIP. There are usually several different targets for one of these in a system, so location becomes important. a mouseover of it will tell you what it has targeted.Takes 1 minute

Exile Survey Hack: this tells you how many hops away (0,1,2,3,4, or >4) the exile is located. Part of the Exodian Blade path to victory.Takes 1 minute

Sensor Hack: This hack takes 30 seconds to complete, lasts for 35 seconds (meaning once it's running you can keep it running until HaP runs out) and disables all AI tachyon detection in system while also giving all your ships cloaking. Your ships will still decloak when they fire, however. This is the one I use least, only used it one time on an AI homeworld.

Fabricator hack: Costing 30 HaP, this steals the designs for any fabricators/controllers in system allowing you to build those ships from normal spacedocks without needing to control the irreplacable. Takes 5 minutes and steals _all_ designs in the system at once, tho the HaP cost is paid for them individually (meaning 75 HaP if there are 2 in system, 142.5 if there are 3 in system).

Advanced Constructor Hack: takes 100 HaP and 15 minutes of time, this enables you to build mkIV versions of ships that you have unlocked mkIII technology for without having to control a factory/adv. starship constructor. It allows this for starships if you did it in a system holding the Adv. starship constructor, or for fleetships if it was a factory system.

Design Corruption: Takes 5 min and 20 HaP. This disables the ai from using any ships that where locally stored on it's backup in the system. Yes, that means you can make it stop sending swarms of bombards at you. Like the Fabricator hack, this does 1 simultaneous hack for all backed up ships in it's system, so against everything AI on a 10 planet map this will kill you.

Design Download: Takes 5 min and 50 HaP. This is similar to the above, but instead of taking ships away from the AI, it unlocks them for you.

Research Redirector: This allows you to choose the second or third design options from an Advanced research station. This hack costs 35 HaP and takes 10 minutes. Generally it is advised to slip a science vessel in and check the "ARS" tab of it to see what the other options are going to be, because when you hack one of these and pick option 1 anyways, it means the hack was a complete waste of your time and energy.

One Final Use:
Superterminal: when you take the superterminal, it now feeds on HaP. For this reason, I generally just shoot the darn thing after ~5 ticks. I personally find the other hacking options to be far superior to fighting a massive battle hoping to acquire a pittance of AIP reduction at a cost of never hacking again. This is the only use of HaP that does not require a hacker nor an intact AI command station.

I didn't originally intend to cover this, but I guess it needs done.

When you are hacking an AI planet, hostile ships start spawning there to try and deter your efforts. The response is varied based on your current amount of HaP as well as how much has already been spent during the game, but it shows you an expected response level in the tooltip when you mouseover it.

At the end of a hack, there will be a short burst of increased response, which will be warned about as the hack is ongoing in the incoming waves window, though this response will generally go to the planet on which the hack took place.

This short burst is what can kill you, because it is triggered after the HaP for the hack is spent, meaning it is often a fair bit meaner than the warning indicated.

If you do not elect to combat the spawning response ships on the planet you are hacking, They will join the general threatfleet shortly after you finish hacking.

It is also possible that the AI will detonate a tachyon warhead on the planet you are hacking in an attempt to find the device, but an easy counter to this is to have a few mk1 scouts stacked up near the device, since one of them should cloaking boost it making it survive undetected.

In extreme cases I have seen hacking responses trigger multiple exogalatic strike forces, a stack of over 50 hunter killers, and a few motherships. That being said, I was so far into the negative that the bar couldn't display the last 2 digits of my HaP for that. I was literally testing how bad it could be.

Worst I've seen in a normal game was a stack of 54 raid starships. Don't go below -100 HaP, it's a bad idea.

"Oh nifty, I can gain piles of metal salvaging ai ships? cool!"

pendulum swings both ways.
When you see a warning "AI 1 reprisal level 1" get your ships back home.
as your ships die on planets where the AI has at least 1 gaurdpost, the ai collects salvage. that salvage haunts you in the form of reprisal waves.
at level 1 I believe it is 1.5 times normal wave strength, and each reprisal level it gains doubles the previous strength.
so, reprisal level 6 is 24 times the strength of a normal wave. I've had that in a normal game, and it was _not_ pretty.

Thankfully, the ai no longer gains salvage for player missiles detonated on AI territory. I found that playing against a mime ai, it sent 53 armored warheads at me. Was patched within the day lol.

Missiles do not generate salvage for the AI or the player, in addition the things they directly kill do not generate any salvage count either.

Losing 3 raid mkI starships seems to be about enough to cause a level 1 reprisal, so the old tactic of "throw your fleetball at the AI and see what sticks" is no longer even remotely viable.

Strangely enough, this mechanic was actually designed to help the player. The concept is that you will kill the counterattack and use salvage from it to help cover the metal costs of rebuilding your fleet.

What I will say is this mechanic definitely changed how I use starships. I now near always try to get them out alive, as their salvage value is just too high if exploded on AI turf.

The core mechanic behind AI War: the most important number in your display.
This determines how badly the AI wants you dead.

It goes up when you destroy certain things. It goes up over time. It goes up when a child gets a new puppy.

You're on a clock, and anyone who says otherwise is probably working for the AI and should not be trusted.

This clock has a snooze button though, in the form of data centers that reduce AIP when they go kaboom.
There are also Coprocessors, but those are only worth the effort in perhaps half the games I play, as they are all or nothing and I play the "low AIP" strategy detailed below.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on the mechanic, but am going to make a few modernized statements since nobody's written about "typical AIP in a game" since 2011 and all sources I can find are deathtraps.

you gain aip mostly from taking over systems. each command station gives 15, the warp gates tied to them give 5, so you gain 20 AIP per system you take, generally speaking.

Using warheads also increases AIP, but it's better than losing the game.

Attacking and destroying posts on an AI homeworld also increases AIP, mostly increasing the AIP floor, making your efforts to reduce effective AIP less... well, effective.

Typical AIP over the course of a game falls into two broad categories:

High AIP: I don't know how high it goes but it's pretty much for people playing the fallen spire campaign as their road to victory. I never do this and thus am not qualified to write about it (please someone else write a modern guide on that)

Low AIP: This is my main thing. A low AIP game usually shuts off the AI core shield generators option, because that would force them to conquer more stuff before triggering endgame. When using this strategy the player wants to keep AIP below 150 until they have begun to destroy the first AI homeworld, and keep it under 250 for the second. Many older guides said 300-500 was appropriate, that is simply no longer the case except when going the high AIP route. For a low AIP game you
1) determine the fastest route to the AI homeworlds
2) determine how you plan to acquire victory (exodian, showdown, standard, nomad, etc.)
3) determine what you will need to make that goal happen
4) find where those items are hidden in the galaxy
5) take the ones within a couple hops of your path
6) destroy every data center within 3 hops of controlled space.
7) execute your endgame strategy