Hi,
Sorry to hear about your troubles with the manual package. The problem you are having looks like it is because you have renamed manual update files for The Zenith Remnant. For these, if you leave them as the original filenames, they should work fine. For the Zenith one, the main thing is that it must start with "Zenith" as in the original.
For the base AI War ones, it must start with "AIWar". However, depending on what version of the game you were previously playing on, you may need other intermediary AI War packages. The AI War 3.120 manual update files don't include everything back to every prior version; and in the case of that specific manual update, it's actually not really a manual update package, but just a simple zip file with the contents in it; sorry for the confusion on that one.
Best thing with the AI War 3.120 is probably to just install it from the setup file if you are not using the in-game updater (which, actually, is the far easiest thing). Otherwise if you miss some versions in the middle, you'd have various missing graphics. For the Zenith thing, as long as you have the filename start with "Zenith," then that should work fine.
Apologies for the confusion; we're in the process of updating our installer/patcher components for the second time, to make it easier and clearer.