LINK

... albeit not of the most recent version.
But it explains the basics and includes tables with keyboard controls and cheat codes.

How odd... no manual on GOG?

Right. It's for version 4 of the game. But I could not find any PDF manual more recent. There also [url=http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=AI_War:Fleet_Command]this wiki page[/url], but it is also a little behind (version 6).

It makes more sense when you understand how much the game changes. When I first started playing (around the time Vengeance of the Machine was released), there were two 'mineable' resources you build ships from, Metals and Crystals. Since then they've done away with Crystals, which naturally changes everyone's strategy. That's just one chance I've noticed and for every one I notice there's probably ten major changes I'm just not hard core enough to be affected by. And this ignores the standard bug fixes.

So any manual GoG posts will quickly be out of date.

Good to know, I was wondering about that.

Yep, this is a game that's still being actively added to, though it's been sitting in its current version for almost a year. The developer originally started out with a PDF manual, but that was so frequently out of date that a site wiki was put up that can better react to changes made to the game.

The tutorial (yes, I know you hate tutorials) is basically the stand-in for the manual these days, and even the most basic questions are not sneered at on the Arcen forums. They're pretty friendly folk, and they know the game inside and out there.