W.E.B. — Rules Reference

The Galaxy Awakens

Aeons ago, a great galactic war shattered civilization across the stars. The conflict was so devastating that entire sectors were reduced to silence. Warp lanes went dark. Worlds that had once traded freely across light-years found themselves isolated, cut off from neighbors they could no longer reach. Over the millennia that followed, knowledge faded. Technologies were forgotten. The galaxy slid into a long barbarism, and the war that caused it passed out of memory entirely.

No one remembered the ancient highways between the stars — until explorers from a handful of resurgent civilizations ventured beyond their own systems and discovered something extraordinary: warp gates. Massive ring-like structures orbiting near every star, built by a forgotten race in an age no one can date. The gates were dormant but intact, connected to one another in a vast web-like network spanning the galaxy. With enough study, engineers learned that a ship equipped with a specialized warp field generator could activate a gate, opening a near-instantaneous corridor to the next gate along the network.

This discovery changed everything. Civilizations that had spent centuries rebuilding on single worlds suddenly had access to the stars again. But expansion brings need: the advanced industries and infrastructure required to sustain interstellar society demand far more resources than any one planet can provide. Minerals, population, production capacity — the hunger for growth is insatiable, and every neighboring system is a prize worth claiming.

You are one of these resurgent empires. Your scientists have cracked the secret of the warp gates, and your fleets are ready to push outward along the ancient lanes. But you are not alone. Other empires have made the same breakthrough, and they have the same ambitions you do.

Scattered among the stars you will also find independent civilizations — worlds that have rebuilt enough to field local defense fleets but have not yet unlocked the secret of the gates. They cannot project power beyond their own system, but they are far from helpless. Some may welcome you as liberators; others will fight to the last ship. How you treat them will shape your reputation across the galaxy.

And in the dark spaces between the civilized belts — the Dead Systems and drifting asteroid fields at the galaxy's edge — pirates lurk. These lawless fleets prey on any system rich enough to plunder, raiding along the warp lanes from hidden bases in regions too remote or too dangerous for legitimate settlement. They answer to no empire and respect no treaty (see Pirates). Left unchecked, a pirate armada can grow powerful enough to threaten even a well-defended frontier.

Victory

The war ends when one empire establishes dominance. There are three paths to victory:

• Galaxy Domination: Control a share of the galaxy's colonizable systems that scales with player count — roughly 50% in a 4-player game down to 35% in a 9-player game (about −3% per additional player). Your empire's reach becomes undeniable.
• Homeworld Capture: Seize 2 enemy home worlds in games of 4–6 players, or 3 enemy home worlds in games of 7+ players. Crushing your rivals at their seat of power breaks their capacity to resist.
• Victory Points: If neither of the above is achieved by the turn limit, the empire with the highest Victory Point total wins a marginal victory. VP are scored as: Home System = 10, Gaia System = 4, Other System = 2, plus 1 VP per 5 population (rounded up). Territory and population both matter — the most prosperous civilization outlasts the others.

Galactic Ranking

Win or lose, every finished game earns you a score based on how many players you beat. In a 9-player game, the winner beat 8 rivals and scores 8 points. Second place beat 7 and scores 7. Last place scores 0.

Bigger games mean bigger scores. Coming in 2nd out of 9 players (7 points) is worth more than winning a 4-player game (3 points). This rewards commanders who test themselves in the largest wars the galaxy has to offer.

Your Galactic Ranking in the Hall of Fame is your average score across all finished games. You need at least 3 completed games to appear on the ranked leaderboard.

Empires that are eliminated during a game are ranked by how long they survived — holding out to turn 20 places you above someone knocked out on turn 5. Empires that abandon a game (AI takeover) receive last place for that game, scoring 0 points. There is always something to play for, even when the war turns against you.

Vanquished — Defeat & Ship-to-Pirate Conversion

When an empire loses its last star system, it is vanquished. All of its surviving ships — fleets still in transit, raiding forces, stragglers at enemy systems — are absorbed by the galaxy’s pirate empire and drift toward the nearest Dead System or Asteroid Field. They raise the black flag and become part of the pirate threat.

Every surviving player receives an in-game announcement naming the fallen empire and the empire that delivered the killing blow. The vanquished player is locked out of the game — no orders, no map access — until the game ends. Once the game finishes, the full map is revealed and the vanquished player can review the final results.

Victory Rewards

Winners earn credits that can be used to join future games:

• Large games (9+ players): The winner earns 2 credits and the runner-up earns 1 credit.
• Smaller games (under 9 players): The winner earns 1 credit.

Skilled commanders can sustain their campaigns through victory alone. The bigger the war, the greater the spoils.

Strategy Overview — Explore, Expand, Secure

The early game is a race to explore the galaxy and expand your borders. Every habitable system you claim serves two purposes: it increases your production capacity (more factories building more ships) and it secures mineral income to feed those factories and keep your fleet supplied with Ion-9 crystals.

But production alone won't sustain a growing empire. You need a steady flow of minerals — the raw material behind everything you build and everything that keeps your ships in the fight. There are three sources of minerals in the galaxy:

• Habitable Systems (Planets A–E): Your primary mineral source. Each colonized world starts with some minerals on hand and generates more each turn through its minerals-per-turn rate. Higher-quality planets tend to produce more. Population not used for production automatically mines minerals, adding to the stockpile.
• Dead Systems: These blasted worlds carry no population and produce nothing on their own, but some contain mineral stockpiles — salvageable remnants from the ancient war. Claim a Dead System by placing a Starbase, and your ships can load the minerals. Once collected, the stockpile is not replenished — Dead Systems are a one-time windfall, not a long-term supply line.
• Asteroid Fields: Dangerous but rewarding. Freighters stationed in an asteroid field mine +1 mineral per turn each (up to their 3-mineral cargo capacity). The risk is real — ships take debris damage every turn — but a well-protected mining fleet can generate a reliable stream of minerals from a source that never runs dry.

Smart commanders don't just build fleets — they build supply chains. Use Freighters to shuttle minerals from mining systems and asteroid operations to your production centers and home world. A powerful fleet without minerals behind it is a fleet that will slowly starve.

1. System Types

The galaxy is made up of many different kinds of locations. Some are thriving worlds with populations and industry; others are barren wastelands or hazardous phenomena left behind by the ancient cataclysm. Understanding what you'll find at each type of system is essential before committing your fleets.

1a. Star Systems (Quality A–E)

Star systems are habitable worlds with populations, industry, and natural resources. Each is rated by quality from A (best) to E (poorest), which determines its population capacity, industrial base, and growth potential.

Interestingly, the most developed worlds are not always the richest in raw materials. Higher-quality systems spent centuries building up their infrastructure before rediscovering the gates — their mines are well-established but increasingly depleted. Lower-quality systems, while less developed, often sit on untapped mineral wealth that fuels rapid expansion for any empire willing to invest in their growth.

Most star systems you encounter will be controlled by independent civilizations — worlds that have rebuilt enough to field local defense fleets but have not yet unlocked the secret of the warp gates. Their reaction to your arrival depends on your empire's reputation (see Independent Systems).

1b. Home Systems

Every player begins the game with a home system — a Class B world that serves as the heart of your empire. Home systems are better-established than typical colonies, with higher starting population, industry, and planetary defense.

1c. Dead Systems

Scattered across the galaxy are worlds that bear the scars of the ancient war — planets blasted so thoroughly by the devastating weapons of those forgotten empires that they can no longer sustain life. Their atmospheres burned away, their surfaces reduced to irradiated glass, these Dead Systems are silent monuments to the destruction that ended the previous age.

• No population, no industry, no natural mineral production.
• Some Dead Systems still contain mineral stockpiles — leftover war materiel or salvageable debris from the old civilization. However, you must first claim the system by placing a Starbase before your ships can access these minerals. Once collected, they are not replenished.
• A Starbase is the only way to claim ownership of a Dead System, since there is no population to conquer or negotiate with.
• Dead Systems may harbor pirate fleets — scavengers lurking among the ruins (see Pirates).
• If two or more empires attempt to place a Starbase at the same Dead System on the same turn, all placements are cancelled and each Starbase is returned to its Freighter. No one claims the system.
• Precursor Archaeology: Dead Systems that harbor pirate garrisons are often the most promising sites — the pirates were drawn there for a reason. Once you defeat the pirates and establish a Starbase, your scientists begin excavating the ancient ruins in search of lost relics and forgotten technologies. Most digs take several turns, and there is no guarantee: some ruins have been stripped too thoroughly, or their secrets simply died with the civilization that built them. But when a dig does turn something up, the Precursors left behind remarkable discoveries — strange artifacts and reawakened technologies that can grant your empire a powerful advantage, sometimes fleeting and sometimes lasting.

1d. Asteroid Fields

Asteroid fields are resource-rich but dangerous locations. Fleets stationed there face ongoing hazards, and only Freighters can mine minerals from the debris.

Debris Damage:

Ships in an asteroid field take damage from collisions with debris each turn:

• Each affected ship is destroyed (one hull point or not, it's a debris strike).
• If a Freighter is destroyed, all cargo it was carrying is spilled and lost.
• Pirate fleets are immune to asteroid damage.
• Fleets that are moving through (not stationary) skip the per-turn 5% check, but still take the 5% arrival hit at their destination.

Freighter Mining:

Freighters stationed in an asteroid field automatically mine minerals:

• Each surviving Freighter with free cargo space mines +1 mineral per turn.
• Freighters whose cargo hold is full (3 minerals max per Freighter) do not mine.
• Mining happens after debris damage is applied, so only surviving Freighters mine.

Movement & Trapping:

Only Cruisers (CR) and Destroyers (DD) carry warp field generators powerful enough to activate the ancient warp gates. All other ship types (Freighters, Missile Ships) require a Cruiser to activate the gate for them. Novas carry a small generator that can only move themselves.

Combat in Asteroid Fields:

• Missile Ships are nearly useless in asteroid fields, raising their to-hit number from 5 to 10 (on a d10, essentially impossible). The iron-nickel cores inside tumbling asteroids generate chaotic, shifting magnetic fields as they spin. In a dense field, thousands of these rotating metallic bodies create an electromagnetic storm of overlapping anomalies that overwhelms missile guidance systems — targeting locks break within seconds, inertial navigation drifts wildly, and the missiles veer off course into the rocks long before reaching anything living.
• All other ship combat stats remain unchanged.
• Starbases cannot be placed in asteroid fields.

Pirate fleets may also lurk at asteroid fields. They are immune to debris damage and use asteroid fields as staging areas for raids into nearby systems (see Pirates).

1e. Nebulas

Nebulas are dense clouds of interstellar gas and charged particles that drift between the stars. Ships can pass through freely, but the electromagnetic interference disrupts targeting systems and makes sustained operations impossible.

• +1 to-hit penalty for all ships — targeting through the interference is difficult.
• No ambush allowed — sensor readings are too unreliable to set a trap.
• No Starbases can be placed in a nebula.
• All fire is resolved simultaneously — ships destroyed in a round still get to fire that round. Hits are pooled and applied at the end of each phase.
• Nebulas have no population, no industry, and no resources.

1f. Ion Nebulas

Ion nebulas are far more dangerous than ordinary nebulas. The intense ion storms surging through these regions disable ship shields entirely, stripping away the energy barriers that normally protect hulls from weapons fire.

• All rules from regular nebulas apply (no ambush, no Starbases, +1 to-hit, simultaneous fire).
• All ships are reduced to 1 HP regardless of their normal hit points. A single hit destroys any ship — Destroyer or Starbase, it makes no difference.

1g. Black Holes

Black holes are gravity wells of absolute destruction. Any fleet that enters a black hole is instantly and completely destroyed — ships, cargo, and all. There is no combat, no intel gathered, no survivors. Just total annihilation.

• Black holes are visible on the star map. Flying into one is entirely avoidable — and entirely your fault if it happens.
• Discovering a black hole (by having it on a connected warp lane) reveals its position permanently.
• There is exactly one black hole per galaxy.

2. Independent Systems & Diplomacy

Scattered across the galaxy are independent systems — star systems controlled by minor factions that are not aligned with any player empire. They have their own fleets, defenses, and attitudes. How they react to you depends on your reputation and a bit of luck.

2a. First Contact

When one of your fleets arrives at an independent system for the first time, a reaction roll determines how that faction feels about you. The result is permanent for that system and is specific to your empire — other players get their own separate rolls.

The reaction roll is a d10, modified by your current reputation:

* At Reviled reputation no d10 is rolled — every first contact is automatic hostility unless your fleet outnumbers the garrison 3:1 (intimidation auto-join), and Type A (Gaia) systems refuse to be intimidated regardless. See the full explanation under Section 2d — Reputation.

• Neutral — The faction tolerates your presence. Ongoing diplomacy begins.
• Join — The faction welcomes you and will transfer control of the system next turn.
• Rogue Join — The system’s civilian government agrees to join your empire, but the local fleet brass go rogue — they refuse to submit to your authority and break from their own government. You gain control of the system and its population next turn, but the NPC defense fleet remains hostile, operating as independent warlords who will attack your ships on sight. You’ll own the world but still need to deal with the mutinous fleet orbiting it.
• Hostile — The faction declares war on you immediately. Their fleet will attack your ships on sight.

2b. Ongoing Diplomacy

When an independent system is Neutral toward you, diplomacy is ongoing. Each turn that you have at least one ship stationed there, a diplomacy roll occurs automatically.

The system tracks a hidden diplomacy level (2–8) that shifts each turn based on a d10 roll:

• Effective roll = d10 + your reputation modifier (see the Reputation table below)
• A natural 10 shifts +2 (toward friendship) if you have no penalties; +1 if any penalty applies.
• A natural 1 always shifts −1 (toward hostility), regardless of modifiers.
• Effective roll of 6+ shifts +1 (improving relations).
• Effective roll of 1 or less shifts −1 (worsening relations).
• Everything else: no change that turn.

The diplomacy level has named stages so you can track how things are going:

• If the level drops below 2, the faction goes Hostile and declares war.
• If the level rises above 8, the faction joins your empire and you gain control of the system on the following turn. However, there is a 33% chance that the system's fleet defects to the pirates instead of staying under your command (a "rogue join"). You still gain the system, but the fleet is lost.

2c. Gaia Systems — Permanent Neutrals

Class A systems — known as Gaia Systems — are the rarest and most powerful independent worlds in the galaxy. They boast the highest population limits, the strongest industry, the most defense satellites, and the fastest population growth of any system type. They are major strategic prizes. They are also the only independent systems that diplomacy cannot touch.

The rules that govern every other neutral independent system do not apply to Gaia Systems. Every aspect of the diplomatic process — first contact rolls, ongoing diplomacy shifts, aggression ripple, pirate-fighting relation bonuses — is either fixed or skipped entirely for these worlds. Understanding exactly what that means is critical before you build a strategy around one.

First Contact: Always Neutral, Without Exception

When your fleet arrives at a Gaia System for the first time, no d10 is rolled. The outcome is determined before the dice even hit the table: the system is always Neutral. It does not matter how good or how bad your reputation is.

• An empire with Revered reputation does not get a chance for the Gaia System to Join.
• An empire with Reviled reputation does not trigger an immediate Hostile response.
• The Gaia System’s government acknowledges your presence and nothing more.

This also means that a Reviled empire cannot use overwhelming force to intimidate a Gaia System into submission. Even if your fleet outnumbers the Gaia garrison three to one, the defenders will not surrender. These civilizations are old, proud, and do not yield to tyrants.

Ongoing Diplomacy: Frozen in Place

After first contact, other neutral independent systems enter the ongoing diplomacy cycle — each turn you station ships there, a diplomacy roll shifts the relationship level up or down until the faction eventually joins or turns hostile. Gaia Systems are entirely exempt from this cycle.

• No diplomacy roll occurs at a Gaia System, ever.
• The relationship level never changes. It starts at Neutral and stays at Neutral.
• Stationing ships at a Gaia System has no diplomatic effect whatsoever.
• The relationship will not drift Warm, Cordial, or Friendly no matter how long your fleet sits there or how good your reputation is.
• The relationship will not drift Cool, Disgruntled, or Angry from bad luck rolls, because there are no rolls.

Immune to Aggression Ripple

When you attack a Neutral independent system, a solidarity ripple can spread to other neutral systems you’ve visited, dropping their diplomacy levels (see Section 2e). Gaia Systems are immune to this ripple. Even if you go on a rampage against every other independent system in the region, the Gaia System’s relationship with you does not change as a result.

Immune to Pirate-Fighting Bonuses

Destroying pirate fleets near a neutral system can boost that system’s diplomacy level by +1 as a reward for protecting the region (see Section 5 — Pirates). This bonus does not apply to Gaia Systems. Their relationship level is fixed and cannot be shifted upward by any diplomatic mechanism.

The Only Path to Control Is Conquest

Because diplomacy can never move a Gaia System’s relationship level, the system will never voluntarily join your empire. There is no diplomatic endgame here. The only way to take control of a Gaia System is to attack it, destroy its defenses, and invade.

1. Destroy the fleet. Gaia Systems have large NPC garrisons and can support up to 20 Defense Satellites — the highest of any system type. You will need a substantial combat force to crack their defenses.
2. Eliminate the Defense Satellites. D-Sats fire on attacking ships each turn as long as they survive. Bring enough firepower to eliminate them quickly.
3. Invade. Once all defending ships are destroyed, land your ground troops. Gaia Systems have high populations, so expect a tough ground fight.
4. Pay the reputation cost. Attacking a Gaia System that is Neutral toward you costs you one reputation step, exactly as it would for attacking any other neutral independent system. Plan for this before committing — if your reputation is already low, a Gaia conquest can push you into territory where other systems become even harder to deal with.

The One Exception: Cultural Hegemony

There is a single path that bypasses the conquest requirement: the Cultural Hegemony Tier 4 Political advantage card. When you complete this card, every independent system in the galaxy — including Gaia Systems — immediately joins your empire. This is the only diplomatic mechanism that can acquire a Gaia System peacefully, and it is deliberately rare and difficult to achieve.

Outside of Cultural Hegemony, military force is your only option.

About Gaia Systems

Gaia systems are rare survivors of the great war. They have turned inward to study the arts and the universe and desire to be left alone. They have built up large enough defenses to keep Pirates away and until recently — smaller feudal empires such as your own. They judge all smaller empires and are waiting for a peaceful and benevolent unifier. They will join that hegemony freely with a shared goal of unifying the galaxy under one Imperium of peace and prosperity.

2d. Reputation

Your reputation is a permanent, empire-wide score that tracks how you have treated independent systems. It is shown in the top bar of your player portal. Everyone starts at Neutral.

The pirates see things upside down. Where the independent races read your reputation as a measure of trust, the brethren of the Black Flag read it as a measure of how easy it will be to do business with you. The worse you look to the independents, the better the pirates like you — Menacing empires earn a +5 standing bonus in pirate diplomacy and Reviled empires earn a cumulative +10 (another +5 on top of Menacing), and both may climb all the way to Brother of the Black Flag. Honored empires carry a −3 penalty and Revered empires carry a cumulative −6 (another −3 on top of Honored); both are capped at Tolerated Patrons (Lvl 1). Climbing high with the brethren requires a willingness to keep your hands dirty in front of the galaxy at large; you cannot have it both ways.

What damages your reputation:

• Attacking an independent system that is Neutral toward you. Each attack damages your reputation by one step (e.g. Neutral → Questionable).
• Surprise attack on a Neutral human player. Attacking another player's fleet or system before declaring war on them costs −1 reputation step per pair per turn. Ambush orders are exempt (see Section 2i).
• Breaking a Non-Aggression Pact unilaterally (using End N.A.P. with no accompanying war declaration) damages your reputation by 1 step. The galaxy notes which empires tear up their own pacts.
• Declaring war on an empire you have, or ever had, a Non-Aggression Pact with this game damages your reputation by 2 steps. This applies whether the pact is currently in force or ended cleanly earlier in the game — coming back to attack a former pact partner is a galaxy-level betrayal.

What improves your reputation:

• An independent system joins your empire through diplomacy. When you keep a ship present and push a Neutral independent's diplomacy track to level 9, its council votes to join you — and your reputation improves by one step (e.g. Questionable → Neutral). An initial reaction roll of Join does not improve your reputation; only ongoing diplomacy counts.
  One step per turn, regardless of how many join: if two or three systems all vote to join on the same turn, you still only gain one reputation step that turn. The extra joins are still great — you get the systems, fleets, and population — but you cannot chain them for multiple rep tiers in a single turn.
• Destroying a pirate fleet: If your forces completely annihilate a pirate fleet in combat — not merely damage it, but wipe it out to the last ship — your reputation improves by one step. The galaxy takes notice when an empire has the courage to eradicate pirate scourges. This can only improve your reputation once per turn, no matter how many pirate fleets you destroy (see Pirates).
• Forming a Non-Aggression Pact with another human player improves your reputation by 1 step. Both signatories receive the bonus when the pact takes effect at rollover. Treaty-signers are seen as builders, not aggressors.
• These sources do stack in the same turn. A pirate-kill milestone, an NPC join, and a NAP signed on the same turn could move you up three reputation tiers at once. Only multiple NPC joins in one turn are capped.

2e. Consequences of Attacking Neutral Systems

If you attack an independent system that is currently Neutral toward you and score at least one hit, several things happen:

1. Your reputation is damaged by one step.
2. That system's reaction flips to Hostile — they will fight you from now on.
3. Any ongoing diplomacy with that system is destroyed (diplomacy level reset to Hostile).
4. Solidarity rolls occur at nearby independent systems (see below).
5. Diplomacy levels at all other independent systems you've visited may drop.

2f. Hostile Independent Systems

Once an independent system is Hostile toward you, there is no going back:

• Their fleet will attack your ships on sight every turn.
• Diplomacy is no longer possible with that system.
• Hostility is per-player — another player may still be Neutral or friendly with the same system.
• The only way to control a Hostile independent system is to conquer it by force (destroy all defenders, then invade).
• Hostile independent systems will command their nearby independent neighbors to set up ambushes along the warp lanes back from their territory. If you push a fleet through a hostile independent's space, expect to be ambushed when arriving at the next independent system over.

2g. Joining & Integration

When an independent system joins your empire (via a Join reaction roll or completing diplomacy), the transfer happens on the following turn:

• You gain full ownership of the system, its population, and its mineral stockpile.
• The system's former defense fleet is disbanded.
• If the join was earned through diplomacy, your reputation improves by one step. Capped at one reputation step per turn from diplomatic joins — see Reputation.

2h. Player-to-Player Communication

The sections above cover diplomacy with independent (NPC) systems. Diplomacy with other players is entirely up to you.

The Comms panel in the game UI lets you send pre-written diplomatic messages to other empires — Non-Aggression Pact proposals, threats, trade offers, and more. These canned messages are delivered when the turn processes.

For free-form, real-time conversation, W.E.B. can create a private Discord channel for your game where you can write your own messages, negotiate in your own words, and scheme to your heart’s content. See Appendix B — Discord Integration for details on how game channels work, who has access, and privacy policies.

2i. Player-to-Player Formal Diplomacy

Every pair of player empires has a formal diplomatic state, visible in the Diplomacy panel. The state changes at turn rollover, not instantly, so both sides have at least one turn's warning before a transition takes effect.

Actions

Cooldowns

Two cooldowns prevent diplomatic whiplash:

• After peace is agreed — neither empire may declare war again for 5 turns. The Declare War button shows the remaining turns.
• After a Non-Aggression Pact ends — neither empire may propose a new pact for 5 turns. The Propose N.A.P. button shows the remaining turns.

Cooldowns are shown on the Diplomacy panel and enforced server-side — the buttons disable automatically when a cooldown is active.

Surprise Attacks — Declare First or Pay the Price

Declaring war takes effect at the end of the turn, after combat resolves. That means the turn you queue a war declaration, you are still Neutral during that turn's battles. If your fleets attack an enemy system on the same turn you declare, the galaxy sees it as a Surprise Attack:

• You pay -1 reputation per combat event where you attacked a Neutral human-player empire (your Reputation worsens — see Section 2d).
• The victim and any third-party empires who have met you are notified — the galaxy remembers who struck without warning.
• Ambush orders are exempt — ambushes represent a pre-placed trap rather than a formal offensive, so they do not count as Surprise Attacks.
• Attacking a War target costs no aggression. Attacking an empire you have a Non-Aggression Pact with is blocked outright.

The clean play is to declare war first and attack the following turn: your declaration lands at rollover, the state flips to War, and from the next turn onward your offensives carry no reputation penalty. Surprise Attacks are available — they're not prevented — but they come at a cost that follows you across the rest of the game.

2j. Sending Minerals to Other Players

You can gift minerals to any met human-player empire directly from the Diplomacy panel. Each empire's card has a Send button; click it, enter an amount, and confirm. The transfer is queued as an order and resolves at turn rollover — you can cancel it any time before then.

How it works

• Minerals are drawn from your capital. If you lose your capital before rollover, the transfer is cancelled and nothing is sent.
• The recipient receives the minerals at their capital at rollover. If they lose their capital before then, the transfer is cancelled and you keep your minerals.
• Transfers are abstract — no freighter, fleet, or warp-lane route is required. Treat it as a diplomatic bank wire, not a physical shipment.
• Your maximum send is your capital's minerals on hand minus what your capital needs to feed its own production this turn. Minerals reserved for your own factories can never be gifted away.
• If you queue multiple transfers to different empires in the same turn, they all draw from the same pool — the Send form shows what's left after other pending sends.

Restrictions

• You cannot send minerals to an empire you are at war with. If war is declared between you and the recipient before rollover, the transfer is cancelled.
• You can only send to empires you have met.
• One pending transfer per recipient per turn — cancel the existing order first if you want to change the amount.
• If your capital has fewer minerals on hand at rollover than the amount queued (e.g. you spent them on production), the transfer is cancelled and nothing is sent.

Both sender and receiver see an event-log line after a completed (or cancelled) transfer. No mid-turn preview is shown to the recipient — they only learn of it when it arrives.

2k. Lifetime Credibility — Your Reputation Across All Games

Reputation (Section 2d) tracks how you have behaved in this game. Lifetime Credibility is a separate score that tracks how you have treated other human players across every game you have ever played. Other players see your tier next to your empire name in the Diplomacy and Comms panels — so if you build a reputation as a treaty-honorer or a serial backstabber, that reputation follows you from game to game.

Lifetime Credibility is only affected by your dealings with other human players. Independent (NPC) and Pirate interactions do not change it. Practice / solo games do not change it. Co-op alien invader games do not change it. Only ranked, multiplayer human-vs-human actions matter.

The Eight Tiers

Everyone starts at Pragmatic (0 points) — the neutral middle. Your points can climb up or fall down without limit. Long histories of good behavior build a cushion that absorbs occasional bad acts; long histories of betrayal take a long, slow climb to repair.

Color key: Green = above the neutral middle (you've earned trust) · White = Pragmatic, the neutral default · Amber = one step below neutral (Opportunist) · Red = two or more steps below neutral (Schemer / Treacherous / Diabolical). These are the same colors used in-game so you can recognize a player's standing at a glance.

What earns you Credibility points

• +1 — Forming a Non-Aggression Pact with another human player (both signatories earn the point when the pact takes effect at rollover).
• +1 — Finishing a game (natural game-end only) without ever declaring war on another human player.
• +1 — Finishing a game (natural game-end only) without ever firing on another player without first declaring war. Ambush orders are exempt — they do not disqualify you from this bonus.
• +1 — Finishing a game (natural game-end only) without ever breaking a Non-Aggression Pact.

A perfect pacifist who never declares war, never breaks a pact, and never fires without a declaration earns the full +3 end-of-game bonus in addition to any +1's they earned along the way for signing pacts.

What costs you Credibility points

• −1 — Declaring war on a player you never had a Non-Aggression Pact with this game. A clean, telegraphed declaration costs a single point.
• −1 — Firing on a human player's fleet or system without first declaring war (per pair, per turn). Ambush-stance fire is exempt (see Section 2i).
• −2 — Unilaterally breaking a Non-Aggression Pact (End N.A.P. with no war declaration).
• −3 — Declaring war on a player you have, or ever had, a Non-Aggression Pact with this game. The galaxy remembers who came back to attack a former pact partner.

War declarations are always either −3 (had a prior pact) or −1 (never had one) — never both. Breaking a pact and declaring war are separate actions: if you End N.A.P. one turn and Declare War on a later turn, you pay both costs (−2 then −3). Declaring war while still in a pact pays only the −3.

Where you can see it

• Your own tier: visible on your Portal Profile page, in your Diplomacy panel header right below your in-game reputation, and on hover over your own empire name anywhere in-game. The hover shows both your tier name and your exact point total.
• Other players' tiers: visible only in-game, as a chip next to their empire name in the Diplomacy panel and the Comms message headers. Hovering the chip shows their tier name and exact point total.
• AI-controlled empires (whether always-AI or human-then-AI-takeover) show [AI] instead of a tier — the rating system doesn't apply while AI is in control.

AI takeover details

If your empire goes inactive long enough that the AI takes over, the trust system stops counting individual actions for or against you from that point forward. Any Credibility points you earned or lost while you were still in control — signing pacts, breaking pacts, declarations of war, firing without warning — are kept in your lifetime ledger. The AI's later moves do not add or subtract anything.

However, the three end-of-game peaceful bonuses (+1 each) require you to finish the game yourself. If your empire is taken over by the AI at any point, you forfeit all three bonuses for that game, even if no warlike action ever occurred during your tenure. Finishing what you started is part of the reward.

3. Fleet Movement

An ancient, long-forgotten race once built a vast network of warp gates near the stars of every inhabited system. These gates are connected in a web-like pattern — the warp lanes shown on your star map. The gates still function, but they require a warp field generator to activate. Once a gate is powered up, nearby ships are accelerated along the warp lane to the gate at the destination star almost instantaneously. Most of the travel time is actually spent generating the warp field and activating the gate.

Movement is always one hop per turn: you pick a connected system and your ships jump there when the turn processes.

3a. Warp-Capable Ships

Not every ship carries a warp field generator. A valid move order requires at least one ship equipped with a generator to activate the gate:

3b. Destroyer Probes

Destroyers carry only a micro-scale warp field generator — not powerful enough for sustained gate travel. When a lone Destroyer activates a gate by itself (without a Cruiser in the same move order), it overloads its power plant to force the gate open. The surge generates just enough field strength to hurl the ship through, but the strain is catastrophic: the Destroyer's systems burn out shortly after arrival. In its final moments, the ship transmits a full sensor sweep back through the gate before breaking apart. This is a probe — a one-way reconnaissance mission:

• The Destroyer reaches the target system and burns up — it is destroyed before combat round 2.
• It transmits full intel on the destination system (fleets, owner, minerals, population) except the names of systems connected beyond it.
• The defending player is not notified of the probe.
• The probe does not engage in combat and is not affected by ambush.

3c. How to Issue Move Orders

There are three ways to initiate a fleet move from the player portal:

1. Move link: Click the "Move" action link on any system card where you have warp-capable ships. This opens the move modal with that system as the origin.
2. Dropdown menu: Click the menu icon on a system card header and select "Move" from the dropdown. Same result as above.
3. Drag and drop: Drag a CR or N ship chip from the ships section of a system card and drop it onto one of the warp lane pills (the destination system names shown on the card). The move modal opens with the destination and ship type pre-filled.

All three methods open the same move modal, where you choose exactly which ships and cargo to send.

3d. Cargo & Transport

Ships can carry cargo during movement. Each ship type has different capacity:

• Cargo must be explicitly included in the move order — ships don't automatically carry what's at a system.
• Use Load/Unload orders to transfer cargo between ships and systems before issuing move orders on the same turn.
• Population assimilation: Population unloaded into a system cannot work the turn they arrive — they spend that turn being assimilated into their new home. They will be available for production and/or mining on the next turn.
• The move modal shows how much cargo your moving ships can carry and prevents overloading.
• A Freighter that is placing a Starbase this turn cannot move or load any cargo — it is fully committed to the placement operation.
• Pirate raid lockout: Load and Unload orders at a system are blocked while a Pirate Raider fleet is over it with that system as its target. You can't lift minerals onto freighters to evacuate them ahead of a raid.

3e. What Happens When You Move

Movement is processed as Phase 3 of the turn, between the two rounds of combat. Here's the sequence:

1. Combat Round 1 — Your ships that are staying behind fight normally. Ships marked for movement do not fire in round 1 (they're preparing to jump). If enemies destroy all your staying ships, overflow damage hits the departing ships as withdrawal fire.
2. Movement — Surviving ships warp to the destination.
3. Arrival checks — If the destination is an asteroid field, each ship has a 5% chance of being destroyed by debris on arrival. If it's an independent system you haven't visited, a reaction roll is triggered.
4. Combat Round 2 — Ships that just arrived have arrival immunity: they cannot be targeted by normal fire (only ambush fire can hit them).

3f. Black Holes

If you move a fleet into a black hole, all ships and cargo are instantly destroyed. There is no combat, no intel gained — just total loss. Black holes are visible on the map, so this is entirely avoidable.

3g. Stranded Fleets

If all ships with warp field generators (Cruisers, Destroyers, and Novas) at a system are destroyed — whether by combat, debris, or withdrawal fire — any remaining ships without generators (Freighters, Missile Ships) are stranded. They have no way to activate the warp gate and cannot leave until a Cruiser arrives to gate them out.

3h. Active Warp Lanes (Starbase Network)

The warp gates of the ancients were never designed for individual ships. They were built as a permanent network — pairs of gates locked in a continuous resonance, the warp lane between them held open by a vast computer intelligence calibrating both ends in real time. When the ancients vanished, the calibration computers fell silent and the lanes collapsed back into dormant rings of metal — passable only by ships equipped with their own warp field generator.

A Starbase is the only modern structure massive enough to host the AI cores and reactor banks needed to wake a gate and hold it open. Activating a lane requires two of your Starbases in adjacent systems — that is, in the two systems sitting at opposite ends of the same warp-lane line on your star map. Starbases in systems that aren't directly connected to each other don't form a lane; only a pair of neighbouring Starbase systems does. When both endpoints of a lane are yours, the resonance is restored: the lane snaps alive, glowing on your star map in mint green. While that lane is active, any of your ships — in any combination, with or without a Cruiser — can travel along it freely. Lone Freighters, lone Missile Ships, mixed groups, anything goes.

• Same empire only: Both Starbases must belong to you. An ally's Starbase does not count.
• Snapshotted at turn start: Lane state is locked in when the turn begins. A Starbase destroyed in combat this turn does not break a lane until next turn. A Starbase placed this turn does not activate a new lane until next turn.
• Cargo rules unchanged: Freighters still respect their cargo capacity. Active lanes only remove the Cruiser requirement — they do not increase what a ship can carry.
• Ambush still applies: Defenders ambushing the lane still get their free round on incoming ships, exactly as with a Cruiser-led move.
• Black holes and Ion Nebulas cannot host Starbases, so no active lanes are possible there.

Enemy active lanes are rendered on your star map in red (visible only when both endpoints have been scouted). A red lane signals strategic threat: an enemy with a working Starbase logistics network can move freight and combat ships freely along it without needing Cruisers, and is dangerous. Cutting an enemy's network by destroying one of their Starbases will instantly collapse every active lane that depended on it.

Lore: A Cruiser can’t hold a gate open the way a Starbase can. What it carries instead is a tactical warp field projector — a clever hack that briefly tricks the gate’s beacon data into wrapping the Cruiser and any ships flying in its formation in a localized warp envelope. The lane never truly opens; the fleet just rides a temporary bubble along the same ancient routing. A Nova carries a one-shot version of the same hack, small enough to envelop only itself.

3i. Local Traders (Passive Mineral Flow)

Every inhabited system has its own merchant captains, bush pilots, and gray-market haulers. They don’t report to Fleet Command, they don’t take orders, and they don’t file manifests. Give them a safe warp lane and a buyer on the other side, and a handful of mineral crates find their way across every week. It isn’t a supply line — it’s a rumor that happens to be true. When fighting breaks out, they vanish until the shooting stops.

Once you have active warp lanes (see 3h above), local traders will automatically move a small trickle of minerals along each active lane every turn — no orders required, no cost, fully passive.

• Only on active warp lanes. Plain (inactive) warp lanes and disrupted lanes never carry traders. If a lane doesn’t glow mint green for you, it doesn’t trade.
• Home comes first. Most trader movement flows toward your home system — that’s where your empire’s commerce centers on.
• Running-low systems get help. Traders also redirect some minerals to systems that are burning more than they mine and have a low stockpile.
• Enemy ships block the lane. If an enemy fleet is at either endpoint of an active lane, no mineral moves on that lane this turn. The lane itself stays lit — ships still move through it normally — but the civilian traders wait out the trouble.
• Freighters still do the heavy lifting. Traders are a trickle, not a supply line. Freighters remain strictly better for bulk hauling and long-range moves. Traders just reduce the micromanagement burden on short, well-connected stretches of your empire.
• You can take manual control. Click the Starbase icon on any of your owned systems (other than your home) to open a trade-route panel and pick which neighbors that system sends a trader to each turn. The first time you change a checkbox, your empire switches to manual mode for the rest of the game — the auto algorithm stops adjusting routes for you and your stored selections drive every shipment from then on.

Losing your home matters. Trader flow is loyal to your ancestral home — the system you started the game in — not any re-anchored capital. If your ancestral home is captured, the entire Local Traders network goes dark for your empire until you recapture it. Freighters and other mechanics still work normally, but the civilian trade network stays loyal to the original.

4. Combat

Combat occurs when hostile fleets share a system. Each turn has two rounds of combat (Phases 2 and 4), with fleet movement happening in between. Understanding stances, firing order, and screening is key to winning battles.

4a. Combat Stances

Every fleet has a combat stance that determines when and how it fights:

• Conditional is the default for all fleets. Your ships won't start a fight on their own, but they'll fight back if attacked. Two Conditional fleets sharing a system will coexist peacefully.
• Attack requires you to select one or more enemy empires to target. You can set this via the Attack action on a system card. Your fleet will fire on all selected targets in both combat rounds.
• Ambush requires you to select one or more adjacent warp lanes to watch. Your fleet does not fire in round 1 — it waits. In round 2, if enemy ships arrive from a watched lane, your fleet opens fire on them. Warning: your fleet's firepower is split evenly across all watched lanes — the more gates you cover, the less damage you deal at each one. Watching a single lane concentrates your full ambush firepower on that gate.

4b. Turn Structure & Two Rounds

Combat fits into the broader turn sequence like this:

1. Phase 1 — Load/Unload cargo, place Starbases
2. Phase 2 — Combat Round 1 — Fleets fire; moving ships take withdrawal fire (see below)
3. Phase 3 — Movement — Surviving ships warp to their destinations
4. Phase 4 — Combat Round 2 — Fleets fire again; ambush fires; newly arrived ships have arrival immunity; invasion resolved
5. Phases 5–13 — Production, mining, growth, ownership changes, etc.

4c. How Firing Works

Each ship rolls a d10 to hit. If the roll meets or exceeds the ship's to-hit number, it scores a hit. Modifiers can make hitting harder.

To-hit modifiers (each adds +1 to the number needed, making it harder):

• Nebula / Ion Nebula: +1 (interference makes targeting difficult)
• Outnumbered 2:1: +1 (see section 4g)
• Ambush fire: +1 (firing from concealment is less precise)
• Asteroid field (Missile Ships only): +5 (Missile Ships need 10 to hit, nearly useless)

Modifiers stack, but the final to-hit is capped at 10. A natural 10 always has a chance to hit.

4d. Fire Order

Ships don't all fire simultaneously. They fire in a strict sequence, and hits are applied immediately — meaning early-firing ships can destroy enemies before those enemies get a chance to shoot.

The firing sequence each round is:

1. Missile Ships — fire first, can eliminate threats before they shoot
2. Starbases — fire twice (2 shots)
3. Cruisers
4. Destroyers
5. Defense Satellites
6. Novas
7. Freighters — fire last

4e. Screening Order & Damage

When your fleet takes hits, damage is absorbed by ships in screening order. The front-line ship absorbs all incoming hits until it's destroyed, then the next ship type in line takes over.

Hits are applied one at a time. Each hit reduces the front-line ship by 1 HP. When a ship reaches 0 HP, it's destroyed, and the next hit moves to the next ship in the screening order.

4f. Nova Instant-Kill

The Nova-class warship represents the cutting edge of military technology. Its anti-matter beam weapon is a breakthrough that will eventually make conventional armaments obsolete — a single focused beam can annihilate any vessel, regardless of size or armor. Military strategists agree that Novas will one day become the standard warship in every fleet. But that day hasn't arrived yet. The technology is still new, the beam targeting systems are unstable, and the anti-matter containment required makes them significantly more expensive to produce than conventional ships. For now, Novas are built for specialty roles — high-value strikes where one perfect shot can change the course of a battle.

In game terms: when a Nova scores a hit, it instantly destroys one random enemy ship, regardless of how many hit points that ship has. The target is chosen randomly from all enemy ships in the system (weighted by count).

• A Nova hit can destroy even a Starbase (10 HP) in a single strike.
• Target selection ignores screening order — any ship can be hit.
• Novas are hard to hit with (need 8+ on d10), but devastating when they connect.

4g. Outnumber Penalty

If your combat ships are outnumbered more than 2-to-1 by enemy combat ships, all your ships receive a +1 to-hit penalty (harder to land hits).

• Counted: Cruisers, Destroyers, Missile Ships, Novas
• Not counted: Freighters, Defense Satellites, Starbases
• The ratio must be strictly greater than 2:1 to trigger. Exactly 2:1 does not trigger the penalty.
• The penalty applies to all your ships for that round.

4h. Withdrawal Fire

When ships are ordered to move out of a system where combat is happening, they face withdrawal fire in round 1:

• Moving ships do not fire in round 1 — they're preparing to warp.
• Your staying ships fight and absorb hits normally (using standard screening order).
• If all staying ships are destroyed, overflow hits carry over to the departing ships.
• If staying ships survive, the moving ships escape unharmed.

4i. Arrival Immunity

Ships that arrive at a system during the movement phase (Phase 3) receive arrival immunity in combat round 2:

• Arriving ships cannot be targeted by normal fire in round 2.
• The only exception is ambush fire, which specifically targets arriving ships.
• Arriving ships also do not fire in round 2 — they're still settling in.

4j. Defense Satellites & Starbases

Defense Satellites (DS) are fixed defenses attached to a system (not a fleet):

• 3 HP, to-hit 5+, 1 shot per round.
• Only fire if the system owner has a fleet present.
• Cannot move, cannot ambush.
• Not counted for the outnumber penalty.

Starbases (SB) are the most powerful defensive unit in the game — massive orbital cities housing weapons platforms, command centers, repair bays, and the millions of crew and their families needed to keep them running. Constructing a Starbase is a monumental undertaking that permanently draws workers and their dependents away from the planet below.

• 10 HP, to-hit 3+ (best accuracy), 2 shots per round.
• One Starbase per system maximum.
• Costs 1 population from the system when built (crew, engineers, and their families relocate permanently to the station).
• Cannot be placed in nebula, ion nebula, or asteroid field systems.
• Cannot ambush, not counted for outnumber.
• Can be destroyed by a Nova instant-kill despite having 10 HP.
• Damage persists between turns. Starbases accumulate hull damage from combat hits and carry it across rounds and turns — they do not snap back to full HP at turn's end. Onboard repair crews mend 1 hit point at the start of each turn until the Starbase is back to full strength. A wounded Starbase still fights at full effectiveness — both shots, full accuracy, full firepower — right up until its last hull point falls.

Immobile platforms cannot initiate combat. Starbases and D-Sats are fixed installations locked to a system's orbital infrastructure — they cannot maneuver to engage hostile fleets. Enemy ships in the same system can simply keep their distance, staying beyond effective weapons range of stationary platforms. However, the moment an enemy fleet commits to an attack, they must close range and enter the platforms' engagement envelope — at which point Starbases and D-Sats fire back with full force. To dislodge an enemy fleet camping in a system defended only by fixed platforms, you must send in mobile warships to force the engagement.

4k. Invasion & Conquest

Invasion happens in Combat Round 2, but only when the system has no active defenses capable of firing at the start of the round. Specifically, an invasion begins when:

• The defender has no non-arrived ships (ships that just arrived this turn cannot fire and do not count as defenders).
• The system has no Starbase and no Defense Satellites.

If the defender has anything that can fire at the start of Round 2 — ships, a Starbase, or D-Sats — Round 2 is spent on normal combat. The invasion is deferred until next turn. Your fleet was engaged fighting active defenses and could not simultaneously bombard the planet.

Once the invasion begins, your ships fire at the system's Planetary Defense (PD) to take control:

Each PD unit has 2 hit points and must absorb that much damage before it is destroyed. Freighters deal 2 damage per hit — enough to take out a PD unit in a single shot. All other ships deal 1 damage per hit and need two successful hits per PD unit.

Not all ships are created equal when it comes to ground operations:

• Cruisers (A) carry dedicated orbital bombardment batteries designed to strike hardened planetary defense emplacements with surgical precision, leaving civilian infrastructure untouched.
• Freighters (A) — best invaders harbor multiple marine divisions in their vast cargo bays — trained ground forces who deploy via drop pods to neutralize PD installations from the surface. Each Freighter hit deals 2 damage, destroying a full PD unit in one shot. The fastest, cleanest way to take a planet.
• Novas (A) can direct their antimatter beam at pinpoint defensive targets from orbit. Devastating accuracy, zero collateral — though one wonders what happens to the planet if the targeting drifts.
• Destroyers (B) were built for ship-to-ship combat, not planetary operations. Their light weapons can be turned against surface targets, but they lack the targeting systems for precision strikes. Expect some stray fire hitting factories and population centers.
• Missile Ships (C) are the worst invaders in the fleet. Their long-range warheads were designed to track engine signatures in open space, not strike fixed ground positions. Against planetary targets they are wildly inaccurate, and when a warhead designed to kill a starship hits a city block instead of a defense battery, the results are catastrophic.

• Each PD unit has 2 HP. Damage accumulates; a unit is destroyed when it absorbs 2 total damage.
• When PD reaches 0, the system is conquered. PD resets to 1 and the system enters unrest under your control.
• Collateral damage from Destroyers and Missile Ships can destroy industry and kill population during the invasion. Cruisers, Freighters, and Novas cause no collateral damage.

4l. Special Terrain Effects

Nebula:

• +1 to-hit penalty for all ships (interference).
• No ambush allowed.
• No Starbases allowed.
• All fire is resolved simultaneously — ships destroyed in a round still get to fire that round (hits are pooled and applied at the end).

Ion Nebula:

• Same rules as nebula (no ambush, no Starbases, +1 to-hit).
• The intense ion storms in these nebulae disable ship shields entirely, reducing all ships to 1 HP regardless of their normal hit points. A single hit destroys any ship.

Asteroid Field:

• Missile Ships receive +5 to-hit (need 10 to hit — nearly useless). The spinning iron-nickel cores of asteroids generate chaotic magnetic fields that overwhelm missile guidance systems, causing targeting locks to break and munitions to veer off course into the rocks.
• No Starbases allowed.
• Debris damage applies to all ships each turn (see Asteroid Fields).

5. Pirates

Pirates are a hostile NPC faction that threaten all players equally. They cannot be negotiated with, allied with, or controlled. Pirate fleets appear in red on the map and in ship reports. There are two types of pirate activity: local pirate fleets that lurk in dangerous locations, and raider fleets that actively hunt player systems for plunder.

5a. Local Pirate Fleets

Pirate fleets may be present at Dead Systems and Asteroid Fields. There is no way to know whether pirates are waiting at one of these locations until you arrive. A typical pirate fleet consists of a Cruiser and a group of Destroyers. They will remain in the system and fight any player ships that enter.

Rogue NPC fleets (from failed diplomacy) may also end up joining pirate forces, merging into any existing pirate fleet at their destination.

5b. Pirate Raiders

Beginning in the early turns of the game, organized Pirate Raider fleets will begin launching raids from Asteroid Fields, targeting player-owned systems that have accumulated mineral stockpiles. Raids become more frequent as the game progresses.

Pirate Raiders appear as a separate fleet from any local Pirates in a system. You may see both “Pirates” and “Pirate Raiders” listed under Ships Present — they are tracked independently.

When a raider fleet enters civilized space, all players will receive a warning: “Traders are reporting a large Pirate Raiding fleet approaching civilized space.” If you have ships present at the asteroid field where the raiders originate, you will receive a more specific sighting report.

5c. Raider Targeting

Pirate Raiders will head toward the closest player-owned system that has a meaningful mineral stockpile. They move one system per turn along a direct path, avoiding Black Holes.

If the raider fleet arrives at its target and finds the minerals have been depleted (fewer than 5 remaining), it will redirect to the next closest eligible target. Systems that have already been plundered will eventually become valid targets again if no fresh targets remain.

5d. Plundering

If a Pirate Raider fleet has been at a system for at least one full turn (it cannot plunder on the turn it arrives) and there are no owner ships, Defense Satellites, or Starbases to oppose them, they will attempt to plunder the system instead of fighting.

The outcome of a plunder depends on your Planetary Defense (PD) relative to the size of the raider fleet:

If your PD equals or exceeds the raider fleet’s Destroyer count:

• Your defenders fight off the raiders — no minerals are stolen and the system does not enter unrest.
• Your PD still takes losses from the fighting (reduced by half).
• Production is disrupted for the turn due to the chaos of the raid.
• The raiders withdraw regardless.

If the raider fleet overpowers your PD:

• Minerals are stolen — the amount depends on how much the raider fleet’s strength exceeds your PD.
• For each mineral stolen, the raider fleet gains an additional Destroyer — hired mercenaries paid from the plunder. Smugglers, deserters, and desperate freelancers flock to any pirate captain who can pay, and stolen minerals are as good as currency on the black market. The fleet leaves larger than when it arrived.
• Your PD is reduced by half from the fighting.
• The system enters a state of unrest and loses all production for the turn.
• The raider fleet then withdraws, retracing its path back to its origin.

Blocking Raids with Fleet Defense

Stationing your own ships at a threatened system is the strongest defense against a raid. The rules are strict:

• Pirates cannot plunder on the turn they arrive — you always get at least one turn’s warning to react after a raider fleet drops in.
• Any surviving owner ships, Defense Satellites, or a Starbase at the system will block the plunder attempt entirely. The raiders sit overhead and try again the following turn.
• Only the system owner’s ships count. Friendly or allied fleets passing through do not defend a system against pirate plunder.
• Ships that arrive on the same turn as the plunder attempt do not block it — defenders must already be on station from a prior turn. Move your fleet in before the raider arrives, not the same turn.
• If you keep defenders alive for two full turns of blockade, the raiders give up and head home with nothing stolen. Combat still happens each turn — you don’t have to wipe the raiders out, you just have to survive.

You will receive a detailed report when raiders attempt to plunder one of your systems, whether they succeed or are repelled.

No last-minute evacuations: Once a pirate raider fleet has arrived over a system and that system is its target, Load and Unload orders at that system are blocked until the raid resolves. You cannot lift minerals onto freighters to evacuate them ahead of a raid — the minerals on hand are what the raiders have come for, and the raiders get a shot at taking them.

5e. Pirate Combat

Pirates fight using standard combat rules with some important differences:

• Ship capture: Half of all ships destroyed by pirates are captured instead — they are added to the pirate fleet and can be used against you in the very next combat round. Defense Satellites and Starbases cannot be captured.
• Cargo plunder: When pirates capture Freighters, they seize the mineral cargo. For each mineral captured, the pirate fleet recruits one additional Destroyer — mercenary crews bought with the stolen goods.
• No invasion: Pirates do not invade or take ownership of systems. They raid for resources, not territory. Planetary Defense may be damaged but the system remains under your control.
• Asteroid immunity: Pirate ships are immune to asteroid field debris damage.

5f. Raider Growth

The brethren do not breed in their lairs. Every Destroyer that flies the Black Flag was bought with someone’s coin, dragged out of a smoking wreck, or sailed home with a hold full of plunder. There is no quiet, automatic build-up between turns — the pirate war chest grows only when the galaxy feeds it. Three streams do that feeding, listed in order of how much they actually move the needle:

• Tribute and bribes — the primary engine. This is by far the largest source of pirate growth, and the one most under the empires’ own control. Every mineral pressed into a pirate captain’s palm is poured straight back into shipyards, powder, and fresh crews. The brethren do not save; they spend. Each Pay Tribute payment, each Bribe to Raid fee, and every peace offering swells the next raid that launches — often onto a neighbor, sometimes back onto the empire that paid. The galaxy that pays the most pirates is the galaxy with the most pirates in the air. (See 5i. Pirate Diplomacy.)
• Returning raids after a plunder. When a raider fleet finishes a successful plunder and warps back to its asteroid lair, its surviving ships and stolen minerals are folded back into the pirate reserve. The cargo hires mercenary captains from the lawless fringes — smugglers running from debts, disgraced naval officers, opportunists who will fly for whoever pays — and the survivors re-fit for the next contract. Each mineral that makes it home buys roughly one fresh Destroyer crew. Catch a raid on its return leg and you remove both the ships and the loot from the brethren’s books for good.
• Captured ships in combat. Half of all ships destroyed by pirates in a fight are seized rather than sunk and added to the pirate fleet on the spot. Defense Satellites and Starbases cannot be captured. This is a smaller stream than the other two in aggregate, but it can swing a single battle hard — a fleet that is barely strong enough to win can find itself losing as the brethren grow mid-engagement.

Two consequences fall out of these rules. First, raider fleets do not grow while sitting idle — if no one feeds them, they do not strengthen. Second, every raider you destroy before it returns home is a permanent loss to the brethren’s war chest, ships and loot both. Early-game raids are manageable threats; if the galaxy keeps paying, late-game raids can field substantial fleets that require coordinated defense.

5g. Defending Against Pirates

Effective pirate defense strategies include:

• Build a tripwire network. Station a Destroyer or Starbase in the systems one and two hops from your home world. Raiders move one hop per turn, so a sighting report from an outlying system gives you a turn or two of warning — enough time to recall your fleet, set it to Ambush, and make your home system a very unpleasant destination.
• Build up Planetary Defense. A PD force that equals or exceeds the raider fleet’s Destroyer count will completely block plundering and prevent unrest. Even partial PD reduces the amount stolen.
• Maintain garrison fleets. Even a small defensive force of ships or D-Sats will prevent plundering entirely, since raiders only plunder when no enemy ships, D-Sats, or Starbases are present.
• Intercept raiders in transit. If you spot a raider fleet moving through systems you control, you can position ships to engage them before they reach their target.
• Destroy returning raiders. Raiders retrace their route home. Engaging them on the return trip prevents their strength from being recycled into future raids.

5h. Rewards for Fighting Pirates

Empires that fight valiantly against pirate forces earn tangible rewards. The galaxy remembers those who stand against lawlessness, and independent systems take notice when nearby empires show the courage to engage pirates in battle.

Reputation Boost: If your forces completely destroy a pirate fleet — every last ship annihilated — your galactic reputation improves by one step. This applies whether the pirates were stationed at a Dead System, lurking at an asteroid field, or caught in transit. If they don’t survive the turn, it counts. This reward is granted once per turn regardless of how many pirate fleets you destroy.

Diplomatic Relations Boost: If your fleet deals significant damage to pirate forces during a turn, nearby independent systems that are currently Neutral toward you will warm to your empire. Their diplomacy level improves by one step as word of your campaign against the pirates reaches their councils. Only independent systems within a couple of warp lane hops of your battle sites are affected.

5i. Pirate Diplomacy

For all their bluster about answering to no one, the brethren of the Black Flag are merchants in the end. They have favored ports, captains they trust, and old debts they honor. An empire that approaches them with the right coin — and the right reputation — can buy a measure of peace, perhaps even a measure of cooperation. But every coin pressed into a pirate captain’s palm sails right back out as powder, sail-cloth, and crews. Tribute does not buy the brethren’s silence; it buys their patience, and pays for the next raid landing somewhere down the lane.

This section covers your standing with the pirates — how it is earned, what it grants, and what it costs.

First Contact

You begin the game with no relationship to the pirates and you will hear nothing from them until your ships have crossed paths with one of theirs. The first turn after any of these events:

• One of your ships ends a turn in the same system as a pirate fleet.
• A pirate raider arrives at one of your systems.
• An NPC fleet at a system you have visited or probed defects to the pirates as a rogue admiral.

… a contact message arrives from the Black Flag, and a Pirate Diplomacy panel appears at the top of your diplomacy view. Until first contact the panel is hidden — you do not yet exist to them.

Diplomacy Tiers

Your standing with the pirates is measured in diplomacy points. Every empire begins at 0. Crossing certain thresholds promotes you to a named tier with its own protections and privileges:

Points come from two sources: tribute (one mineral paid = one point, banked permanently) and reputation (your standing with the independent races shifts how the pirates see you — see below).

Reputation Caps Your Standing With the Brethren

Pirates respect outlaws and brawlers. They do not trust saints. The cleaner you look to the independent races, the lower the ceiling the pirates will let you climb to:

Reputation also adjusts your point total directly. The more feared you are, the better the pirates like you — Menacing and Reviled reputations grant a standing bonus toward your pirate diplo total, and Honored and Revered reputations carry a penalty. Your banked tribute is never lost when reputation shifts; only the displayed tier and the reputation portion of your total move.

If your reputation rises high enough to drop the cap below your current tier, the higher tier’s privileges are revoked at end of turn. Lower your reputation back into the eligible band and the tier returns to whatever your points support. (See Section 2d. Reputation for the full reputation chart.)

Pay Pirate Tribute

The Pay Pirate Tribute button on the Pirate diplomacy card opens a modal where you choose how many minerals to send. Each mineral paid is +1 to your pirate diplo points, banked permanently.

• Source. Tribute can only be paid from your original home system — the world you started the game on, even if you have since moved your capital. If your original home is lost or held by another empire, you cannot pay tribute.
• Production reserve is protected. The modal’s Available figure already subtracts what is needed to keep your home system’s production running this turn. You cannot stall production to bribe the brethren.
• One payment per turn. Pay the amount you want to pay; you cannot split it across multiple orders.
• Effects apply at end of turn. Tribute paid this turn does not protect you from a raid landing this turn — it sets your tier going into next turn’s targeting decisions.
• Mid-flight grace. If word reaches a raid in transit that its target has paid the brethren, the captain will swing onto a new heading rather than honor a void contract.

Of the empires that have not paid the brethren at all, those who have given the least are first to feel the brethren’s hunger. And when every empire has bought peace, the brethren turn back to the independents until fresh marks emerge.

Bribe to Raid

At Brother of the Black Flag (Lvl 3) you unlock the Bribe to Raid button: pay the brethren a small fee and the next pirate raid is redirected onto an empire of your choosing.

• Cost. The fee is computed from the current raid size at roughly one mineral per five raider ships. The exact cost is shown in the modal at the moment you open it.
• What a bribe actually does. A bribed raid is not a new raid. It is the brethren’s next scheduled raid, pulled forward and aimed at your chosen target. The raid after that one still fires on its normal schedule, so the gap between this raid and the next regular raid is larger than usual. Bribing buys timing and target selection — not extra pirate activity.
• Source & reserve rules. Same as tribute — minerals come from your original home system, the production reserve is protected, and the button is disabled if your original home is lost.
• Targets. Empires you have met. The brethren refuse to turn blades on a Brother of the Black Flag, so any target empire currently at Lvl 3 is greyed out in the dropdown. The Retired Pirate Empire Advantage card grants the same protection — a former captain of the Black Flag is never on the contract list, regardless of their current pirate-diplo standing.
• Reputation gate. Empires at Honored or Revered reputation cannot Bribe to Raid at all — the Council of Captains refuses their coin. “Your hands are too clean for our work,” the messenger replies. “Find another knife — or dirty your own.”
• Early-game lock. Bribes are unavailable until the brethren’s first two raids of the game have launched — those raids are reserved for the independent races. Early in the game, the brethren stick to the independents; they will turn their attention to empires soon enough. (No empire can plausibly reach Lvl 3 before then anyway, but the affordance exists for the rare edge case.)
• Once paid, a bribe is final. If your target reaches Lvl 3 mid-flight, is eliminated mid-flight, or your own empire falls before the raid lands, the brethren still complete the contract. Coin has changed hands; the work gets done.

The strongest practical reward for climbing all the way to Lvl 3: no other empire can bribe a raid against you. The brethren do not raise blades against their own.

Attacking Pirates in Their Lairs

The brethren take it personally when their old anchorages are violated. Combat with pirate fleets in their home turf carries a permanent diplomacy cost:

• In an Asteroid Field: −2 pirate diplo points per combat event. Asteroid fields are pirate homes — the Drift — and the brethren never forget who came hunting.
• In a Dead System: −1 pirate diplo point per combat event.
• Anywhere else (regular space, your own systems, in transit): no penalty.
• Ambush is exempt. An ambush leaves no witness reports. The brethren cannot pin the engagement on you, so no penalty fires.

The penalty applies to every player who participated in the combat, not just the empire that fired first. Two empires fighting the same pirate fleet in an Asteroid Field both pay −2.

At Lvl 0 or Lvl 1 you do not need to give attack orders to incur this penalty: pirates in their lairs are hostile on sight and will fire on you even at Conditional stance. Combat happens whether you wanted it or not, and the rule is “had combat with pirates,” not “chose to fight pirates.” Friendlier tiers (Lvl 2+) are spared this trap because the pirate fleet will not fire on them — combat only occurs if the player gave explicit attack orders, and the penalty applies for that choice.

Common Cause

If your fleet fires on another player’s fleet that the pirates are also firing on — and you do not trade fire with the pirates yourself — the brethren reward the courtesy with +1 pirate diplo point, capped at +1 per turn no matter how many qualifying combats you fought. The Council of Captains marks the shared target.

Practical access usually requires Lvl 2 standing or higher (otherwise pirates fire on your ships on sight and the “no exchange of fire with pirates” condition collapses). One useful exception: in a system where pirates are mid-raid, they fire only on the system owner. An opportunistic attacker showing up to fight that owner — not the pirate fleet — can earn the bonus even at Lvl 0 or Lvl 1.

Permanent Decay

Captains die. New captains demand fresh tribute. Every 8 turns, every empire’s pirate diplo points fall by 1 — a slow, permanent erosion that cannot be prevented. The brethren’s leadership is fractious; standing slips just by sitting still. Plan to top up your tribute periodically if you want to hold a tier long-term.

Starbases at Pirate-Held Dead Systems

At Marked Friendly (Lvl 2) and above, you may place a Starbase at a Dead System garrisoned by a pirate fleet without first destroying that fleet. The brethren let a Friend set up shop. (Previously this perk required the Retired Pirate Empire Advantage card; it is now folded into the tier system, and Retired Pirate inherits the ability via their Lvl 2 floor — see Appendix A.)

Reading the Pirate Diplomacy Card

Your total pirate standing is shown in white when nothing is shifting it. Amber means a transient modifier (usually your reputation) is dragging your total down; green means it is lifting you up. Hover the modifier list under the progress bar for the per-source breakdown and a “what if?” preview of how a reputation shift would change the picture. A red vertical line on the progress bar marks a tier border you cannot currently cross because of your reputation cap.

If You Reach for the Crown

6. Economy & Production

Your empire runs on three interconnected resources: population, industry, and minerals. Mastering the economy is just as important as winning battles — fleets must be built, systems must grow, and resources must flow where they're needed most.

6a. Build Points (BP)

Everything you build costs Build Points. Each BP requires:

• 1 population (workers)
• 1 industry (factories)
• 1 mineral (raw materials)

Your BP output at a system equals min(population, industry, minerals on hand), rounded down for fractional industry. All three resources are consumed equally — if you have 5 population, 3 industry, and 10 minerals, you produce 3 BP that turn.

6b. What You Can Build

6c. Mining

Population not used for production automatically mines minerals:

• Available miners = population − BP spent
• Minerals mined = min(available miners, system's minerals/turn rate)
• Mined minerals are added to the system's stockpile and available next turn.

Systems with high minerals/turn but low industry will stockpile resources quickly. Use Freighters to transport those minerals to your production centers.

6d. Population Growth

Population grows each turn based on system quality:

• Minimum growth is always 0.1 per turn, even at low populations.
• Population cannot exceed the system's population limit.
• Systems in unrest grow at only 0.1 per turn regardless of quality.

6e. Unrest

Systems enter unrest when conquered or when population significantly exceeds planetary defense. During unrest:

• Industry output is halved (rounded down).
• Minerals per turn is halved (rounded down, minimum 1).
• Population growth drops to 0.1 per turn.

Unrest clears gradually as you build up Planetary Defense relative to population. Keeping PD close to your population level prevents unrest from triggering.

6f. Production Disruption

Production is cancelled if an enemy fleet with ATTACK orders is present at your system and you have no defending ships, D-Sats, or Starbases. Your workers cannot operate factories under threat of orbital bombardment.

6g. Fleet Maintenance — Ion-9 Crystals

Every ship in your fleet is powered by Ion-9 crystals — rare, high-energy lattices refined at your home world's processing facilities. Ion-9 crystals degrade with each warp jump and every weapons discharge. Without regular replacement, a ship's power core loses output: targeting systems drift, shield generators falter, and weapons fire weakens. A fleet running on stale crystals is a fleet fighting at a disadvantage.

Ion-9 crystals are a stockpile resource — a discrete, per-system count that you produce, hold, and draw down. They are not automatically refined from minerals each turn. You must deliberately build crystals, just as you build ships, and store them at the systems where they are produced.

Producing Crystals

Crystals are produced through the Build modal at any original home system or Gaia (Quality-A) system you control. Each crystal costs 1 Build Point, drawn from the same pool you use for ships, PD, and industry upgrades. No other system type can produce or hold Ion-9 crystals.

Capturing an enemy's home system grants you crystal production there too — the new owner can build crystals on any captured original home, exactly as they would on their own. Existing crystal stockpiles transfer with the system on conquest.

Supply Cost

Each turn your fleet consumes a fixed number of crystals based on its size:

The cost increases by 1 crystal for every additional 50 ships. All ship types count toward this total — Cruisers, Destroyers, Missile Ships, Novas, Freighters, D-Sats, and Starbases.

Supply is all-or-nothing. Each turn the game sums your crystal stockpile across every system you own. If the total is at least the supply cost, you pay it and your fleet is in supply. If the total is less than the cost, no crystals are spent and your fleet goes unsupplied for that turn. There is no partial payment.

Combat Penalty

If your fleet is unsupplied (maintenance unpaid), all your ships suffer a 10% combat penalty (to-hit number increased by 1) until supply is restored. Ships with degraded Ion-9 crystals simply cannot aim or fire as effectively.

Stockpile & Deduction Order

Crystals are stored on the system where they were built. They cannot be loaded onto Freighters and cannot be moved between systems — the lattices are too unstable to ship. To keep a forward outpost stocked, you must build crystals there directly (which means it must be a home or Gaia system you own).

When the supply cost is paid, crystals are drawn down starting from the systems furthest from your original home system first, working back toward the core. This naturally consumes crystals at distant outposts before depleting your main reserve, and leaves your strongest stockpile defended at the heart of your empire.

Holding Multiple Producers

Any home or Gaia system you own contributes to your supply. If you control more than one — for example, your starting home plus one or more Gaia systems — their stockpiles are pooled for the supply check, and the deduction order described above governs which systems are drawn from first.

If you lose your home world entirely, owned Gaia systems can keep the fleet supplied. You can also produce crystals at any Gaia you hold, so a Gaia stockpile can serve as long-term insurance against losing your capital. If you control no home and no Gaia, your fleet will run dry and fight at reduced effectiveness until you recapture a producer.

Maintenance Reductions

Two effects can reduce your Ion-9 crystal cost below the standard table:

• Revered Reputation: When your reputation reaches Revered, allied traders and independent system councils begin routing surplus Ion-9 feedstock directly to your refineries. Your fleet maintenance cost is reduced by 1 crystal per turn (minimum 1). This bonus applies automatically each turn you hold Revered status and stacks with other reductions.
• Precursor Ion-9 Catalyst (temporary relic): A cache of ancient catalytic material discovered in Dead System ruins doubles the efficiency of your Ion-9 crystals, so each crystal powers 100 ships instead of 50 — effectively halving your maintenance cost. This bonus lasts 6 turns and then expires.

When both are active simultaneously, the Catalyst divisor is applied first, then the Revered flat reduction is subtracted, floored at 1 crystal.

Checking Your Supply Status

Your current crystal stockpile is shown directly on each home or Gaia system card — look for the Ion-9 crystal icon in the Economy stats bar. The system card also shows a usage line indicating how many crystals you spend per turn and roughly how many turns of supply you have remaining (which pulses Amber at 2 turns or fewer, and Red when you are out of supply).

Your per-turn supply cost is also displayed in the top bar next to your total ship count — for example, Ships 73 (2×crystal/turn) means a 73-ship fleet consumes 2 crystals per turn. The Ships Present box on every system card shows a small crystal icon next to each empire that is currently in supply, or a pulsing “–1 to hit” indicator if that empire’s fleet is unsupplied.

7. Ships Reference

Your fleet is composed of seven ship types, each with distinct roles. Understanding their strengths and limitations is the foundation of effective strategy.

Cruiser (CR)

The Cruiser is the backbone of every interstellar navy. It carries a full-size warp field generator — the only ship class powerful enough to activate the ancient gates for an entire fleet. Without a Cruiser, no fleet can move. With one, an unlimited number of ships can ride its warp field through the gate in a single movement order.

In combat, Cruisers are tough and reliable: 3 hull points absorb sustained punishment, and their twin-battery turrets hit on 5+ (60%). They sit in the middle of the screening order, shielded by Destroyers and Novas but protecting the Freighters and fixed defenses behind them. They can also ferry a single mineral in an onboard cargo pod — useful for topping off a system in a pinch.

When the fleet turns to ground operations, Cruisers excel. Their precision orbital bombardment platforms (Invasion Rating A) can knock out planetary defense installations with surgical strikes and zero collateral damage. A Cruiser over your world is both a shield and a scalpel.

Destroyer (DD)

Cheap, fast, and expendable — the Destroyer is the workhorse of the fleet. At just 1 BP each, Destroyers are built in volume and thrown into battle as the first line of defense. In the screening order they absorb hits before any other ship type, buying time for heavier vessels to fire.

Destroyers carry a micro-scale warp field generator — not powerful enough to gate other ships, but just enough to activate a gate for themselves alone. This makes them ideal for probe missions: a lone Destroyer overloads its power plant to force the gate open, hurling itself through in a blinding surge. The strain is catastrophic — the ship's systems burn out shortly after arrival — but in its final moments it transmits a full sensor sweep back through the gate: fleet composition, population, industry, defenses. The defending player never knows the probe was there. One ship sacrificed for intelligence that can change a war.

In ground operations (Invasion Rating B), Destroyers can manage rough surface strikes but lack precision targeting — a hit on 8+ with a chance of collateral damage to industry or population. Use them to invade only when better options aren't available.

Missile Ship (Mi)

Missile Ships carry long-range guided warheads and one critical advantage: they fire first. Before Starbases, before Cruisers, before anything else — Missiles launch. A coordinated salvo can eliminate fragile targets before they ever get a shot off, making Missile Ships devastating alpha-strike platforms in the opening moments of an engagement.

The trade-off is fragility. At just 1 HP, a single hit destroys them. And they carry no warp field generator — a Missile Ship requires a Cruiser to activate the gate for it. In asteroid fields, spinning iron-nickel asteroid cores create chaotic magnetic fields that overwhelm their guidance systems, raising their to-hit from 5+ to a near-useless 10.

On the ground they're the worst option (Invasion Rating C). Their warheads were designed to track ships in open space, not hit fixed ground installations — and a missed warhead can level a city block. Avoid using Missile Ships for invasion if you want anything left to conquer.

Nova (N)

The Nova-class warship represents the cutting edge of military technology — a breakthrough so profound that strategists agree it will one day become the standard bearer of every civilized navy. Its weapon: an anti-matter beam, a needle-thin lance of absolute destruction capable of annihilating any vessel regardless of size or armor. When a Nova scores a hit, the target is instantly destroyed — hull points are irrelevant. A single beam can vaporize a 3-HP Cruiser or even a 10-HP Starbase in one shot.

But the technology is still new, unstable, and expensive. Anti-matter containment systems are finicky (2 BP to build), and the beam's targeting arrays are maddeningly unreliable — the worst accuracy in the fleet at 8+ (30% hit chance). Novas also fire last among combat ships, meaning they must survive the opening volleys before they can return fire. And their targeting is indiscriminate: a Nova hit strikes a random enemy ship, weighted by ship count. You cannot choose the target.

Novas carry a small warp field generator — enough to move themselves through a gate, but not to carry others. In ground operations (Invasion Rating A), their pinpoint antimatter beams excel at neutralizing planetary defense with zero collateral damage.

Freighter (Fr)

Freighters are the economic lifeline of your empire. Their cavernous cargo bays can carry 3 minerals, 1 population unit, or 1 Starbase (mutually exclusive) — making them the only ship that can transport population to new colonies, deliver minerals to production centers, and deploy Starbases to claim Dead Systems.

In asteroid fields, Freighters become miners. After sitting stationary for one full turn, each Freighter with free cargo space extracts +1 mineral per turn — a dangerous but lucrative operation in the debris-strewn belts. Smart commanders build supply chains: Freighters shuttling minerals from asteroid mines and Dead Systems to home worlds and factories. A powerful fleet without minerals behind it is a fleet on borrowed time.

In combat, Freighters are nearly helpless — 1 HP, to-hit of 10 (10%), and they fire dead last. But the screening order protects them behind every other ship type, and they are excluded from ambush calculations. Lose a Freighter, though, and you lose its cargo with it.

Freighters are actually your best invasion ships (Invasion Rating A). Their vast cargo bays harbor multiple marine divisions, and their drop pods deliver precision landings on defense installations with zero collateral damage. Critically, each Freighter hit deals 2 damage to Planetary Defense — enough to destroy a full PD unit in a single shot. Cruisers and Novas only deal 1 damage per hit and need two hits per PD unit. When conquest is the mission, load up on Freighters.

Defense Satellite (DS)

Defense Satellites are immobile orbital platforms anchored to a system's gravity well. They cannot move, cannot be transported, and cannot participate in invasion or ambush fire. What they can do is fight. At 3 HP and a to-hit of 5+ (60%), a Defense Satellite hits harder and survives longer than most mobile warships — and they cost just 1 BP.

D-Sats are generated automatically when the galaxy is created, their numbers determined by system quality. You can also build more D-Sats using Build Points, up to the maximum for that system's quality class:

The pirate homeworld fields a formidable ring of 8. Once in place, D-Sats fire alongside the owning player's fleet — a permanent garrison that never needs reinforcement.

In the screening order, D-Sats sit deep behind mobile ships, meaning attackers must chew through your fleet before reaching them. Like all fixed platforms, D-Sats cannot initiate combat — enemy fleets can maneuver to avoid stationary defenses — but they fire back with full force the moment an attacker commits to an engagement. They are the silent guardians of your empire — always watching, always ready.

Starbase (SB)

The Starbase is the most powerful unit in the game — a massive orbital fortress with firepower rivaling entire fleets. At 10 HP, a to-hit of 3+ (80%), and two shots per combat round, a single Starbase can shred attacking fleets. It costs a steep 4 BP to build and consumes 1 population from the system during construction (the thousands of engineers and crew permanently stationed aboard).

Starbases are immobile — once placed, they cannot be moved. They must be built via a build order, then loaded onto a Freighter for transport and placement at their destination. Only one Starbase may exist per system. They are the only way to claim ownership of a Dead System, making them essential for accessing those irradiated mineral stockpiles left over from the ancient war. Because a Starbase is locked to its orbital position, enemy fleets in the same system can keep their distance and avoid engagement — but the moment they attack, they enter the Starbase's devastating weapons envelope.

For all their power, Starbases have a terrifying vulnerability: a single Nova hit — that needle-thin anti-matter beam — destroys a Starbase instantly, regardless of its 10 hull points. Every fortress, no matter how mighty, has a weakness.

Against ordinary weapons fire, however, Starbases are remarkably resilient. Hull damage accumulates between rounds and between turns — a battered Starbase does not magically heal — but the onboard repair bays mend 1 hit point at the start of every turn until the station is back to full strength. Throughout that recovery, the Starbase keeps fighting at full capability: both shots, full accuracy, undiminished firepower right up until its last hull point falls.

7a. Invasion Ratings

When invading a system, different ship types have different effectiveness against Planetary Defense. Each PD unit has 2 hit points and must absorb that much damage before it is destroyed. Freighters deal 2 damage per hit — the only ship type that can destroy a PD unit in a single shot. All other ships deal 1 damage per hit.

8. Turn Order

Each turn is processed in a fixed sequence. Understanding this order helps you time your actions — minerals unloaded in Phase 1 are available for production in Phase 5, ships that move in Phase 3 arrive before Combat Round 2 in Phase 4. Note that population unloaded in Phase 1 is not available to work that turn — newly arrived colonists need a turn to assimilate before they can produce or mine.

1. Phase 1 — Load / Unload / Place Starbases
2. Phase 2 — Combat Round 1 (withdrawal fire, then phased ship fire)
3. Phase 3 — Movement (fleets warp to destination systems)
4. Phase 4 — Combat Round 2 (ambush fire, then phased ship fire; invasion resolved)
5. Phase 5 — Production (build ships, PD, industry)
6. Phase 5b — Fleet Maintenance (Ion-9 crystals deducted from your stockpile, farthest systems first)
7. Phase 6 — Mining (unused population mines minerals)
8. Phase 7 — Population Growth
9. Phase 8 — Unrest Check
10. Phase 9 — Asteroid Damage
11. Phase 10 — Ownership Changes (NPC systems joining your empire)
12. Phase 11 — NPC Join Check (diplomacy results applied)

9. The Star Map

The star map is your primary strategic view of the galaxy. It displays all known systems, the warp lanes connecting them, fleet positions, and empire territories. Learning to read the map quickly is essential.

System Symbols

Each system is drawn as a circle on the map. Inside the circle, a letter or short code tells you the system type at a glance:

If you haven’t fully explored a star system yet, the quality letter may not appear. Star system circles also scale in size based on population limit — larger circles mean bigger worlds.

Circle Colors (System Ownership)

The fill color of each system circle tells you who controls it:

• Your empire’s color — a system you own
• Another empire’s color — an enemy-controlled system
• Muted blue-gray — an independent (NPC-controlled) system
• Very dark / dim — a system in the fog of war (unexplored)

System Name Labels

The name label below each system is also color-coded:

• Bright white — your system
• Red — an enemy-owned system
• Muted / dim — neutral, NPC, or unexplored

Home System Star

Home systems are marked with a five-pointed star outline drawn around the circle, in the empire’s color. This makes capitals easy to spot at any zoom level.

Warp Lanes

Thin lines connecting systems represent warp lanes — the only routes your fleets can travel. The galaxy is displayed on a sphere, so lanes wrap naturally around the globe with no artificial edges.

Fleet Orbit Dots

Small colored dots orbiting a system show fleets present there. Each dot represents one empire’s fleet at that system.

• Your empire’s color — your fleet
• Another empire’s color — a foreign fleet
• Red — pirate or hostile fleet
• Gray — neutral fleet

If a fleet has more than one ship, the count appears inside the dot.

Pulsing Threat Alerts

Systems under threat display a pulsing ring around the circle:

• Red pulse — hostile fleets (pirates or enemies) are present at this system right now
• Amber pulse — the system is threatened but no hostile fleet is on-site yet

Empire Borders

Soft, glowing colored blobs in the background show approximate empire territory. These borders connect your owned systems along warp lanes, giving you a quick sense of where each empire’s space begins and ends.

Fog of War

You can only see systems you have explored. Unexplored systems appear very dark and dim, with muted warp lanes. A system becomes visible when:

• You own it or have owned it previously
• It is adjacent to a system you own (you can see one lane away)
• You have probed it

Using the Map

Hover over any system to see a tooltip with details: system name, type, owner, population, industry, minerals, and your fleet composition (if present). The tooltip appears after a brief delay.

Click a system to select it. The selected system gets a bright ring highlight, and its detail card opens in the side panel.

Search using the search box at the top of the map. Type a system name and matching systems will highlight. Press Enter to jump to the best match and center the map on it.

Zoom with the +/− buttons, or use your mouse scroll wheel. Rotate the globe by clicking and dragging on empty space. The Reset button rotates back to your home system and restores the default zoom.

10. Missions

Missions are short-term objectives handed to your empire by one of four galactic factions. Completing them earns you ships, minerals, and Victory Points — and at the highest tier, permanent empire-wide bonuses that can swing the entire game.

Every game deals you up to 19 missions across four tiers:

Maximum mission VP in a game is 15 (5 + 10 from Tiers 2–3). Tier 4 awards no VP — the permanent reward is the payoff.

10a. Faction Types

Every mission is sponsored by one of four faction types. The type is shown by a colored dot on the mission card and dictates the flavor of the mission, the named faction sending it, and (at Tier 4) which permanent reward you can claim.

Each faction draws its named sponsor from a pool of in-game factions (e.g. the Iron Talon Marshals for Military, the Helion Conclave for Science). You see the faction name in flavor text; the colored dot tells you the underlying type.

10b. The 25 Missions

Reward abbreviations: CR Cruiser, DD Destroyer, FR Freighter, N Nova, Mi Missile, Min Minerals.

10c. Tier 4 — Legacy Missions (Exclusive Race)

Tier 4 is fundamentally different from the lower tiers. It is a race — the first empire to complete a Tier 4 mission of a given faction type claims that type’s reward, and no other empire can ever claim it for the rest of the game.

• Exactly 4 missions are dealt — one per faction type. Every player sees the same 4.
• The first Tier 4 mission you complete triggers that type’s reward. Your other 3 Tier 4 missions immediately close (status: “Path Chosen — you have claimed a different legacy.”).
• For every other player, the Tier 4 mission of that same type is locked out forever (status: “Another Empire has completed this path.”).
• In an 8-player game, at most 4 players can ever earn a Tier 4 reward.
• If multiple players complete different Tier 4 types on the same turn, all of them claim their respective rewards.

The Four Legacy Rewards

Conqueror’s Crown (Military) — Permanent. Every ship in your fleet, present and future, fires with +1 accuracy. Your battle-hardened crews have forged elite officers in the fires of conquest, and morale across your armada has never been higher. This stacks with all other to-hit modifiers (advantage cards, ship type bonuses, etc.). A natural roll of 1 on the d10 still always misses, regardless of stacked bonuses.

Cultural Hegemony (Political) — Permanent. Every Independent system you have already met, and every Independent you contact in the future, immediately begins joining your empire with their fleet (a positive Join event, not Rogue Join). This is the only mechanism in the game that can acquire a Quality A (Gaia) system without conquest — Cultural Hegemony overrides their normal join immunity (see Section 2c).

Industrial Supremacy (Trade) — One-time. 50 minerals and 50 Ion-9 crystals are delivered to your Home System, and 2 permanent industry slots are added. The new industry is normal — it still needs population and minerals to produce.

Dead System Network (Science) — One-time. The full galactic map is revealed: every star system, adjacency, system card, and defensive installation (Starbases and Defense Satellites) becomes visible. Fleet compositions remain hidden — revealed systems show "Deep space network — no ship data" in the fleet section, the same pattern used by Ancient Archives.

Reputation Gating — Cultural Hegemony

Cultural Hegemony is the one Tier 4 mission affected by your reputation. As your reputation worsens, the system requirement increases — and at Reviled, the mission becomes impossible:

This makes Cultural Hegemony a path that doves and statesmen can pursue but tyrants cannot. See Section 2d — Reputation for the full reputation table.

Galaxy-Wide Announcements

When a Tier 4 mission is completed, every other player in the game receives a turn report entry naming the empire and the legacy they have claimed. Once the announcement fires, that path is closed for everyone else.

Appendix A — Empire Advantage Cards

At the dawn of each game, fate deals you two Empire Advantage cards. You must choose one — and that choice will define your empire’s identity for the entire war. These are not minor bonuses; they are fundamental asymmetries that shape your strategy, diplomacy, and destiny. Choose wisely. There are no second chances.

Cards fall into four categories: Combat (red), Economic (amber), Intelligence (blue), and Command (purple). Each category reflects a different philosophy of empire-building. There are 18 cards in total.

Elite Troops

Card Text

Your planetary defenses are fortified — each PD unit takes 3 hits to destroy instead of 2. Your Freighters carry elite marines that deal 3 damage per hit instead of 2, making them the most effective invasion force in the galaxy. Upon capturing systems, the conquered population does not start the next turn in a state of unrest. Unrest is less likely and recovers faster when it does occur. Pirates plunder only half of the minerals.

Deeper Understanding

• Normal PD takes 2 hits to destroy. Your Elite Troops PD takes 3 hits — enemies need 50% more firepower to crack your defenses.
• Normal Freighters deal 2 damage per invasion hit. Your Elite Freighters deal 3 damage — enough to one-shot even enemy Elite PD (which also has 3 HP).
• When you capture a system through conquest, it normally enters unrest the following turn (population refuses to work, no production). Elite Troops completely negates this penalty — your troops are so disciplined that conquered populations fall in line immediately.
• Beyond conquest, random unrest events from other causes (pirate raids, etc.) are also less likely to trigger, and when they do occur, they resolve one turn faster.
• When pirates raid your systems, they steal only half the minerals they normally would. This stacks well with large mineral stockpiles.

Lore — “The Iron Legions”

Long before the warp lanes connected the galaxy’s great empires, your people fought a hundred colony wars across their home cluster. Generation after generation was forged in the crucible of planetary assault — orbital drops into hostile atmospheres, urban warfare through alien megacities, the grim calculus of occupation.

Other empires rely on automated defenses and orbital bombardment. Your soldiers do the work face-to-face. They’ve learned how to pacify a world in days rather than months, how to turn a conquered population into productive citizens before the smoke clears. Your planetary defense garrisons dig in so deep and fight so ferociously that attackers often break before the fortifications do.

Even the pirates have learned: raiding your worlds yields slim pickings. The garrisons are ready, the stockpiles are hidden, and the local population fights alongside their occupiers rather than against them. Your people have made an art of holding ground.

Nova Research

Card Text

Nova ships get a +1 to-hit modifier (d10), lowering the required roll by 1.

Deeper Understanding

• Nova ships normally hit on specific d10 rolls depending on the target (see the Combat section). This card lowers the required roll by 1, meaning your Novas hit more often in every engagement.
• This applies to all combat phases — whether your Novas are firing first in an ambush or exchanging fire normally.
• Novas are already the most powerful combat ship; this card makes them devastating. Even a small Nova fleet becomes a serious threat.

Lore — “Project Helios”

The anti-matter beam was the most destructive weapon ever conceived — a lance of annihilation that could crack a starship’s hull in a single discharge. But the technology was crude, wasteful. Most of the beam’s energy scattered into space, lighting up entire sectors with each firing.

Your empire poured three generations of research funding into Project Helios, a classified weapons program buried deep in an asteroid laboratory. The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: a junior physicist studying Precursor artifacts recovered from a Dead System. She discovered that certain crystalline lattice structures could focus an anti-matter beam with almost zero energy loss.

The result was terrifying. Where other empires’ Nova ships fire a blinding flash that might hit its target, yours fire a needle-thin beam of absolute destruction. Your Nova captains don’t hope to hit — they choose where to hit.

Bastion Protocol

Card Text

Starbase and D-Sat get a +1 to-hit modifier (d10), lowering the required roll by 1. Starbases have +2 hit points, making them significantly harder to destroy.

Deeper Understanding

• Both your Starbases and your Defensive Satellites benefit from the +1 to-hit accuracy bonus.
• Starbases normally have a base HP. This card adds +2 HP on top, making your Starbases require significantly more firepower to bring down.
• This is a defensive card — it doesn’t help your attacking fleets at all. Its value comes from making your systems extremely costly to assault.
• A system with a Bastion-buffed Starbase plus a few D-Sats becomes a fortress. Attackers need overwhelming force to crack it, buying you time to reinforce or counterattack.
• Consider building Starbases at key chokepoint systems where warp lanes converge — the card makes them nearly impregnable.

Lore — “The Doctrine of the Anvil”

Your empire’s military philosophy was born from necessity. Surrounded by hostile neighbors in the early expansion era, your admirals couldn’t afford to project power — every ship sent raiding was a ship not defending the homeland. So they built walls instead.

The Bastion Protocol began as a set of defensive engineering standards: reinforced hull plating, redundant shield generators, predictive targeting arrays that could track and destroy incoming ordnance before it reached the station. Over centuries, these standards evolved into a doctrine. Your Starbases aren’t just orbital platforms — they’re self-sustaining battle stations with armored cores designed to absorb punishment that would vaporize lesser structures.

“Let them come,” the old admiral’s saying goes. “The anvil does not fear the hammer.” Your enemies have learned the hard way that assaulting a Bastion station is like throwing ships into a furnace. The targeting arrays lock on faster, the guns hit harder, and the station is still firing long after it should have been destroyed.

Shield Harmonics

Card Text

Cruisers and Nova ships absorb 1 extra hit before being destroyed.

Deeper Understanding

• Cruisers and Novas each gain +1 HP, meaning they take one additional hit to destroy in combat.
• Destroyers and other ship types are not affected — only your capital ships (Cruisers and Novas).
• This is a straightforward but powerful durability buff. In a fleet-on-fleet engagement, your ships survive longer, which means they get more rounds of firing. The extra HP compounds — a ship that survives one more hit might fire two or three more times before going down.
• This card is excellent for aggressive, fleet-heavy strategies. It makes your attack fleets significantly more resilient when pushing into defended systems.

Lore — “The Resonance Discovery”

Standard shield technology works on a simple principle: a projected energy field absorbs incoming weapons fire until it collapses. Every empire uses the same basic design, and every empire’s shields fail at roughly the same threshold.

Your scientists discovered something different. By synchronizing multiple shield generators to oscillate at precisely matched frequencies, they created a resonance effect — a harmonic standing wave that reinforced itself. When one generator weakened under fire, the others compensated, pouring energy into the gap faster than weapons could drain it.

The synchronized shields shimmer with an iridescent quality that enemy captains have learned to dread. A ship wreathed in harmonic shields can wade through fire that would shred an unprotected vessel, absorbing hit after hit while its own weapons continue to fire.

Focused Beam Research

Card Text

All your Destroyers have a +1 modifier to hit, striking with surgical precision.

Deeper Understanding

• Every Destroyer in your fleet gets +1 to hit on all combat rolls.
• Destroyers are your most numerous combat ship — they’re cheap to build and you’ll have many of them. A +1 bonus across your entire DD fleet adds up to significantly more damage per engagement.
• This card is especially strong in the early game when fleets are mostly Destroyers, and remains relevant all game because DDs continue to form the backbone of your navy.
• Pairs well with aggressive expansion strategies — your cheap, accurate DDs can overwhelm NPC defenders and rival fleets cost-effectively.

Lore — “The Kessler Doctrine”

Admiral Kessler was a heretic. While every other military mind in your empire obsessed over bigger ships — heavier armor, more powerful Nova beams — Kessler argued that the future of naval warfare was the Destroyer.

“Give me a hundred precise knives over ten blunt hammers,” she famously told the War Council. She redirected your empire’s entire military-industrial complex toward a single goal: perfecting the Destroyer’s beam weapon.

Kessler’s program produced a focused-aperture beam with a targeting system so precise it could hit a specific hull plate from across a system. Your Destroyers don’t fire salvos and hope — they fire single, surgical shots that find their mark. A swarm of Kessler-doctrine Destroyers fills space with a web of perfectly aimed beams, each one threading through shield gaps and striking critical systems. Quantity has a quality all its own — especially when every shot counts.

Merchant Economy

Card Text

Freighter deliveries add 50% more minerals (minimum +1). A full freighter is worth more in your empire.

Deeper Understanding

• When your Freighters unload minerals at a system, the delivered amount is increased by 50%, with a minimum bonus of +1 mineral.
• Example: if your Freighters drop off 4 minerals in a single delivery, the system receives 6 instead (4 + 50% = 6).
• The bonus is calculated per unload order, not per individual Freighter. If a fleet of three Freighters carrying 6 minerals total unloads at once, the bonus is applied to the full 6 (bonus = 3, total = 9).
• The minimum +1 bonus means even a single mineral delivery yields 2. Small deliveries are proportionally more efficient than large ones.
• This only applies to Freighter unload orders — it does not affect natural mineral production from systems.
• The card rewards active logistics play. Players who efficiently shuttle minerals from rich systems (like Asteroid Fields) to industrial centers will get dramatically more value.

Lore — “The Guild Compact”

While other empires built warships, yours built trade routes. The Merchant Guilds were the true power in your civilization long before the first warp lane was mapped — vast trading houses that controlled the flow of every mineral, every resource, every finished product across your home cluster.

When the warp lanes opened and the galaxy beckoned, the Guilds saw not an empty frontier but the greatest marketplace in history. They invested heavily in Freighter technology: optimized cargo holds, mineral compression techniques, automated loading systems that could strip-mine an asteroid and have the cargo moving within hours.

A Freighter bearing your empire’s Guild insignia carries more than raw materials. It carries an entire logistical ecosystem — traders who know how to extract maximum value from every ton, compression technology that packs more into every hold, and trade networks that ensure nothing is wasted. Where other empires move rocks, your Guilds move wealth.

Industrious

Card Text

Systems with 4 or more factories produce +1 Build Point per turn (no extra minerals needed).

Deeper Understanding

• Any system you own with 4 or more Industry generates 1 extra Build Point each turn for free — no mineral cost.
• This effectively means those systems can build slightly more each turn than their mineral input would normally allow.
• The threshold is 4 Industry — lower-industry systems don’t benefit. This makes the card stronger on high-quality systems (A and B) that naturally have higher industry.
• Over the course of a game, that +1 BP per qualifying system per turn adds up enormously. If you have 5 qualifying systems, that’s 5 free BP every turn — equivalent to 5 free minerals of production.
• Encourages investing in factory construction to push systems to the 4-industry threshold.

Lore — “The Builder Caste”

Your people are born builders. It’s in the blood — literally. Three thousand years of selective social structure created a civilization where the most respected members of society aren’t warriors or politicians, but engineers and fabricators.

Your orbital shipyards run triple shifts around the clock. Where other empires lose efficiency to shift changes, maintenance downtime, and bureaucratic delays, your factories hum with a continuous rhythm of production. Quality never drops because the workers take personal pride in every hull plate welded, every circuit board placed.

Visitors to your industrial worlds describe it as almost eerie — the perfect choreography of thousands of workers moving in synchronized efficiency, the complete absence of idle machinery, the relentless pace that never seems to exhaust anyone. Your people don’t work hard because they’re forced to. They work hard because building things is who they are.

Asteroid Immunity

Card Text

Immune to asteroid damage. Mine 2 minerals per turn (instead of 1) for each freighter present.

Deeper Understanding

• Asteroid Fields normally damage ships that enter them. With this card, your ships take zero damage from asteroids — you can move through and station fleets in Asteroid Fields freely.
• Each Freighter in an Asteroid Field normally mines 1 mineral per turn. With this card, each Freighter mines 2 minerals per turn — double output.
• This makes Asteroid Fields go from dangerous hazards to your personal gold mines. You can park multiple Freighters safely and extract resources at twice the normal rate.
• Other players still take asteroid damage, so your Asteroid Fields are naturally defended — enemies need to accept losses to contest them.
• Strategically, this card incentivizes you to locate and control Asteroid Fields early. They become some of the most valuable systems on the map for you.

Lore — “Children of the Debris Field”

Your ancestors didn’t evolve on a planet. They evolved in the Shattered Ring — a vast debris field left behind when an ancient moon was torn apart by its gas giant’s tidal forces. For millennia, your people lived among tumbling rocks the size of continents, navigating by instinct through fields of spinning death that would pulverize any outsider’s ship.

What other species see as an asteroid field — a navigation hazard to be avoided — your pilots see as home. They read the spin patterns of thousand-ton boulders the way a sailor reads ocean swells, threading through gaps that close in seconds with a casual confidence that terrifies their passengers.

Your mining technology is equally advanced. Where other empires carefully extract minerals from a single asteroid at a time, your extraction rigs clamp onto multiple rocks simultaneously, processing ore at speeds that would be suicidal for anyone else. The galaxy’s asteroid fields aren’t obstacles for your empire. They’re the foundation of your economy.

Salvage Experts

Card Text

After surviving a battle where enemy ships are destroyed, gain 20% of total ship value destroyed as minerals. At your own systems, minerals are added directly. At other systems, requires freighters with available cargo space.

Deeper Understanding

• When you win (or survive) a battle and enemy ships are destroyed, you recover 20% of the total build cost of all destroyed enemy ships as minerals.
• At your own systems, salvaged minerals are added directly to the system’s stockpile — no Freighter needed.
• At enemy or neutral systems, you need Freighters with available cargo space present at the battle to collect the salvage. No Freighters means no salvage at foreign systems.
• The salvage is based on the total value of destroyed ships — destroying expensive ships (Novas, Cruisers) yields more than destroying Destroyers.
• This card rewards aggressive, combat-heavy play. The more you fight and win, the more your economy benefits. Wars partially pay for themselves.
• Tip: bring Freighters along with your attack fleets to capitalize on salvage at enemy systems.

Lore — “The Wreck Walkers”

Every battle leaves a field of twisted metal, vented atmosphere, and drifting hulls. Most empires see a graveyard. Your recovery teams see a warehouse.

The Salvage Corps evolved from your empire’s early days, when resources were so scarce that every scrap of metal was precious. Specialized recovery vessels would follow your war fleets into battle, hanging back at safe distance until the shooting stopped, then swarming the debris field with cutting torches and tractor beams.

Over centuries, salvage recovery became a science. Your teams can strip a destroyed cruiser to its frame in hours, sorting useful components from irradiated waste with practiced efficiency. Hull plating gets reforged. Intact circuits get repurposed. Even the exotic alloys in Nova beam focusing arrays can be reclaimed and recycled.

“War is expensive,” your Fleet Marshal once observed, “unless you’re shopping in the debris.” Your enemies have learned that defeating your empire in battle doesn’t just cost them ships — it funds your next fleet.

Galactic Spy Network

Card Text

Auto-plant spies at Independent systems whenever you have at least 1 ship over the system and is not given move orders that turn. Permanent intel even after withdrawal. 50% spy loss on ownership change. 50% chance gain a spy when you lose a system to another Empire. Your spies also report on pirate-diplomacy activity galaxy-wide — you learn the named details of every other empire’s payments, tier crossings, and bribes to the brethren. Your spies will alert you of all incoming Pirate raids!

Deeper Understanding

• Whenever you have any ship stationed at an Independent system and that fleet has no move orders for the turn, a spy is automatically planted there at the end of the turn.
• Once planted, the spy provides permanent intel on that system — you continue to see its status even after you move your ships away.
• If the system changes ownership (another player conquers it), there’s a 50% chance your spy is discovered and eliminated.
• This effectively gives you a free, passive intelligence-gathering network. Just by parking ships at Independent systems for a single turn, you build up a web of informants across the galaxy.
• The intel persists through fog of war — you’ll see fleet movements and system changes at spied systems even if they’re far from your borders.
• Works well with a scout-heavy early game strategy: send ships to many systems, pause for a turn, then move on. The spies remain behind.
• Pirate-diplomacy intel. Your network has ears in the Drift as well. Each turn, an event-log entry tells you when any other empire pays tribute to the pirates, crosses a tier threshold up or down, or bribes the brethren to raid a target — complete with names and amounts. Other empires only see anonymized rumors of these events; you see the ledger.

Lore — “The Whispering Web”

Your empire’s intelligence services don’t operate like other nations’ spy agencies. There are no dramatic infiltrations, no single master spies risking everything behind enemy lines. Instead, your operatives work like a fungal network — quiet, patient, everywhere.

Wherever your fleets linger, even for a single rotation, agents slip into the local population. They set up shop as traders, mechanics, bartenders — unremarkable people in unremarkable positions who happen to notice everything. They recruit locals with modest payments and smaller promises. They tap into communication networks with devices no larger than a grain of sand.

The brilliance of the Whispering Web is its persistence. Long after your warships jump to the next system, the agents remain. They report through encrypted subspace bursts disguised as background radiation — invisible to anyone not listening for them. A system you visited three turns ago still whispers its secrets to you.

Even when empires change hands, the Web endures. Agents go dark, wait for the occupation forces to settle in, and resume their work. Only the most thorough purges root them out — and even then, only about half the time.

The Web reaches further than the independents. Your operatives have followed the coin into pirate ports too — the dock-masters who tally tribute, the bookkeepers who record bribes, the crews who whisper over their cups about which captain is sailing for which patron. Every payment passed across a pirate captain’s palm is logged twice: once by the brethren, once by you.

Enhanced Sensors

Card Text

Your ships detect stargate activations on the far side of each warp lane. When ambushing, you may safely select all lanes — fire only splits across lanes where fleets actually arrive (not all watched lanes). Additionally, your ambush fire suffers no accuracy penalty since your crews know precisely when and where to expect arrivals. Ships normally immune to ambush fire (e.g. cloaked ships) retain their immunity.

Deeper Understanding

• Normally, ambush fire is divided equally across all watched lanes, even empty ones. With Enhanced Sensors, your fire is only split across lanes where enemies actually arrive. If you watch 4 lanes but enemies only come through 1, you concentrate 100% of your firepower on that gate.
• Normally, ambush fire suffers a +1 to-hit penalty (firing from concealment is less precise). Enhanced Sensors removes this penalty entirely — your crews know exactly when and where ships will emerge from the stargate.
• This means you can safely select “All lanes” without any downside — you get full firepower on whatever actually shows up, at full accuracy.
• If fleets arrive from multiple lanes simultaneously, your fire splits across only those active lanes (not all watched lanes). You still benefit from no accuracy penalty.
• Ships that are immune to ambush fire (e.g. fleets with Nebula Cloaking exiting a nebula) retain their immunity. Enhanced Sensors does not override other cards’ protections.
• All other ambush rules still apply: ambush fires in Round 2 only, cannot be set in nebula systems, and Freighters/D-Sats/Starbases do not participate.

Lore — “The Resonance Arrays”

Standard ambush tactics are a gamble. You pick the lanes you think the enemy will use, spread your guns across them, and hope you guessed right. Get it wrong, and half your firepower is pointed at empty space while the real attack comes from the other side.

Your scientists solved this problem by studying the subspace resonance patterns that propagate along warp lanes when a stargate activates. Every gate activation sends a distinctive energy pulse back along the lane — a signature your tuned arrays can detect in the seconds before ships emerge. Your ambush crews don’t have to guess anymore. They know exactly which gate is about to open, exactly when the first ship will materialize, and exactly where to aim.

The result is devastatingly efficient ambush fire. While other empires scatter their guns and fire blind into the flash of an opening gate, your crews are already locked on target, timing their volleys to the millisecond. Nothing gets through your lanes unannounced.

Ancient Archives

Card Text

Start with full intel on all systems within 2 hops. Get waypoint trails toward nearest Asteroid Field and Gaia System.

Deeper Understanding

• At game start (Turn 1), all systems within 2 warp lane hops of your home system are fully revealed — you see their type, name, and all details as if you’d visited them.
• You also receive waypoint trails — directional hints pointing toward the nearest Asteroid Field and the nearest Gaia System (the most valuable system type in the game).
• The 2-hop reveal gives you a massive head start on exploration. You can see your immediate neighborhood and plan your first several turns of expansion with full information.
• The waypoint trails don’t reveal the destination systems directly — they show you which direction to travel. Think of them as breadcrumb trails on the map pointing toward strategic objectives.
• This card is strongest in the opening turns and on larger maps where blind exploration is costliest. Its value diminishes as the game progresses and exploration fills in naturally.

Lore — “The Precursor Vault”

Deep beneath your home world’s oldest mountain range, your archaeologists discovered something that changed the course of your civilization: a Precursor data vault, sealed for longer than your species has existed.

The vault contained star charts — not of the galaxy as it is now, but as it was when the Precursors walked among the stars. Most of the data was corrupted beyond recovery, eaten by entropy over the eons. But the charts of your local region were still readable, preserved in crystalline storage matrices that defied time itself.

More intriguing were the navigation logs. The Precursors had marked certain systems with priority designations — resource caches and what the translation algorithms rendered as “garden worlds.” By cross-referencing the ancient coordinates with modern stellar cartography, your scientists identified probable locations of Asteroid Fields rich in minerals and Gaia Systems teeming with life.

The archives don’t provide complete maps — too much has shifted in the intervening millennia. But they provide something almost as valuable: direction. While other empires stumble blindly into the void, your ships launch with ancient wisdom guiding their course.

Nebula Cloaking

Card Text

Invisible in Nebula systems. Cannot fire or be fired upon. Full intel on all ships present while cloaked. Ambush immune when exiting a nebula.

Deeper Understanding

• When your ships are in a Nebula or Ion Nebula system, they become completely invisible to all other players. No one can see your fleet there.
• While cloaked, you cannot fire and cannot be fired upon — you are completely removed from combat. This means you can’t be attacked, but you also can’t defend or attack.
• While cloaked, you gain full intel on every other fleet in the same system — you can see exactly what ships everyone has there, even though they can’t see you.
• When you leave a Nebula system, you are immune to ambush at your destination. Enemies cannot ambush-fire on your arriving fleet.
• This card turns Nebulas into safe havens and forward observation posts. You can park ships in a contested Nebula, watch enemy fleet movements with impunity, and leave when the time is right — ambush-proof.
• Be aware: while cloaked you cannot claim or defend the Nebula system. You’re a ghost — present but powerless.
• Ion Nebulas (which normally scramble sensors) work the same way for you — your cloaking technology uses the ionization to your advantage.

Lore — “The Ghost Fleet Doctrine”

Nebulas are anathema to most navies. The ionized gas clouds wreak havoc on sensors, scramble communications, and play tricks on navigation systems. Standard military doctrine is simple: avoid nebulas when possible, transit them quickly when not.

Your engineers saw something else entirely. They discovered that your hull alloy — a composite developed centuries ago for a completely different purpose — resonated with nebula ionization fields in a peculiar way. Instead of reflecting sensor pulses, your hulls absorbed them, scattering the energy harmlessly into the surrounding gas.

The effect was absolute invisibility. Not reduced sensor signatures, not electronic countermeasures — true disappearance. A fleet sitting in a nebula becomes indistinguishable from the gas cloud itself. No scanner in the known galaxy can find them.

The downside was equally absolute: the same resonance effect that hid your ships also scattered your own weapons fire. You couldn’t shoot while cloaked. But your sensors worked perfectly — better than perfectly, in fact, since the nebula’s energy amplified your passive detection arrays.

“The ghost fleet sees everything,” the saying goes. “And nothing sees the ghost fleet.”

Appealing Race

Card Text

+1 to initial Independent System reaction rolls. +2 to ongoing diplomacy rolls. You begin the game halfway to Tolerated Patrons standing with the pirates — word of your charm has reached the Drift, and the brethren are inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Deeper Understanding

• When your fleet first arrives at an Independent (NPC) system, your initial reaction roll gets a +1 bonus, making positive first impressions more likely.
• Once diplomacy is ongoing, your species’ natural charm really shines: you get a +2 bonus to all ongoing diplomacy rolls, significantly accelerating the path to integration.
• You also start the game with a head start on pirate diplomacy — banked points equal to half the threshold for Tolerated Patrons (Lvl 1). One modest tribute payment finishes the climb to Lvl 1 and earns you raid immunity. Other empires need to pay the full threshold from scratch.
• The +2 ongoing diplomacy bonus is powerful over the course of a game. Independent systems progress toward joining your empire much faster than for other empires.
• The pirate head start does not grant raid immunity by itself — it shortens your path to it. Until you actually reach Lvl 1, raids can still target you. Pay tribute early to lock in the protection.
• This card rewards a diplomatic playstyle — building your empire through negotiation rather than conquest, with the pirates and the independents alike.

Lore — “The Golden Ambassadors”

Something about your species puts other races at ease. Xenobiologists have debated the reason for centuries — is it your body language, your vocal harmonics, the subtle pheromone signatures that even alien biochemistry seems to respond to? Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable: doors open for your ambassadors that remain firmly shut for everyone else.

Independent systems that would greet other empires with suspicion or hostility receive your envoys with curiosity and cautious optimism. Trade negotiations that would take other species months conclude in days. Even the most isolationist worlds find themselves warming to your overtures, as if some deep evolutionary instinct recognizes your people as… safe.

Word of your charm has even reached the Drift. Pirate captains who would shake down anyone else’s envoys instead pour your delegates a drink and ask after their health. “The pretty ones are easy to talk to,” the saying goes in the brethren’s ports. “Hear them out before you reach for the knife.” Your captains arrive at the Black Flag’s table with a measure of goodwill already extended — nothing earned, nothing owed, just an opening hand the rest of the galaxy will not be dealt.

Retired Pirate

Card Text

You begin the game at Marked Friendly (Lvl 2) with the pirates, and your standing with the brethren can never fall below this floor. You also begin with 10 points of banked tribute — old debts the brethren have not forgotten — trimming the climb toward Brother of the Black Flag. Pirate raids skip your worlds, pirate fleets will not fire on your ships, and you may build Starbases at pirate-occupied Dead Systems without first destroying the garrison. The brethren consider you one of their own — even should your empire come to dominate the galaxy, the Black Flag will not turn on you. Your Reputation starts at Dangerous (−2 to diplomatic rolls) and can never rise above Neutral — no matter what good you do, the independent races will never trust a former Brethren captain that far.

Deeper Understanding

• Tier 2 floor. You start the game at Marked Friendly, and your pirate-diplomacy tier can never drop below Lvl 2. Reputation deltas and standing penalties still affect your underlying point counters, but the displayed and applied tier is clamped at Marked Friendly. You inherit all Lvl 2 protections automatically: raids skip you, pirate fleets will not fire on you, and you may build Starbases at pirate-held Dead Systems without first clearing the garrison.
• 10-point tribute head start. You begin the game with 10 banked pirate diplo points — exactly at the Tolerated Patrons threshold. Combined with the Tier 2 floor, you only need to earn another 20 points (through tribute or a Menacing/Reviled reputation bonus) to reach Brother of the Black Flag, instead of the 30 every other empire faces.
• Path to Lvl 3. Pay tribute or earn reputation bonuses to push past 30 banked points and you reach Brother of the Black Flag with all its privileges — bribe-to-raid, active pirate defense in your systems, and immunity from being bribed against by other empires.
• Immune to the late-game crackdown. Other empires that grow too powerful become a target the brethren will cross any tier to break. Not you. The lifelong pact protects you even at the height of empire — the Black Flag does not raise blades against one of their own.
• Reputation starts at Dangerous, capped at Neutral. The −2 diplomacy penalty applies on all NPC rolls from turn 1. Worse, your reputation can never rise above Neutral — pirate kills and NPC joins still recover lost ground, but any event that would push you into Trustworthy or higher is silently dropped. The galaxy will never grant a former Brethren captain Honored or Revered standing.
• Strategic implication. The reputation cap means peaceful integration of independents is harder, and the maintenance / unrest perks of Honored and Revered are off the table for you. Conquering Independent systems by force or buying them with prolonged diplomacy at Neutral is the realistic path. In exchange, the pirates are a permanent ally rather than a permanent threat.
• Synergy with the tier system. The card’s Tier 2 perks — raid skip, no-fire, Starbases at pirate Dead Systems — are now the same effects every empire can earn by climbing pirate diplomacy normally. What Retired Pirate uniquely guarantees is that you start there from turn 1 with a head start banked, you cannot fall back to Lvl 0 or Lvl 1 no matter what happens, and you cannot be the target of another empire’s bribed raid.

Lore — “Drake Remembers”

You were once feared across a dozen systems. Before your empire discovered the warp lanes, before diplomacy and governance replaced plunder and intimidation, your people were raiders. Your ancestors boarded merchant ships, sacked orbital stations, and held entire colonies for ransom.

Those days are over — officially. Your empire has reformed, built legitimate institutions, joined the galactic community as a respectable power. But the pirate clans remember. Captain Drake, the ancient AI that coordinates the pirate empire’s endless raids, has your species flagged in its deepest protocols: “Do not engage. Former kin. Standing truce.” The Council of Captains will never raise a blade against you, and the brethren extend the courtesies due a Friend — their fleets stand down at sight of your hulls, their dock-masters wave your Starbases through to anchor at the old Dead Systems they hold.

This cuts both ways. Every Independent system in the galaxy also remembers what you were. Your ambassadors arrive at NPC worlds and find cold shoulders, locked doors, and trade terms weighted against you. No matter how many decades pass, no matter how many good deeds your envoys can list, the door to genuine trust never opens past Neutral. “Once a pirate, always a pirate,” they mutter, and they will not be moved.

And maybe they’re right. But when your fleets glide past pirate armadas without a shot fired, when Dead Systems other empires wouldn’t dare approach become anchorages for your Starbases, when the brethren stand by you even as the rest of the galaxy turns against your rising banner — it is hard to argue that the old ways don’t still have their advantages.

Advanced Starbases

Card Text

Dead Systems with Starbase gain +1 mineral/turn. Gain free probe reports every turn from any systems adjacent to your systems with Starbases.

Deeper Understanding

• Any Dead System you own that has a Starbase generates +1 mineral per turn. Dead Systems normally produce nothing — this card turns them into modest resource generators.
• Every turn, you automatically receive free probe-level intelligence on all systems adjacent to any system where you have a Starbase. This happens passively — no probe ships needed.
• The mineral bonus on Dead Systems incentivizes building Starbases at Dead Systems you control — turning empty territory into productive assets.
• The free probe intel makes your Starbases function as sensor platforms. Place Starbases at strategic locations and you get persistent, free surveillance of the surrounding area.
• This card rewards building Starbases widely, not just at your most important systems. Each Starbase extends your sensor network.
• Combines well with defensive strategies — your Starbases both defend key systems and provide early warning of approaching threats.

Lore — “The Sentinel Stations”

Other empires build Starbases as weapons platforms — floating gun emplacements to defend key systems. Your engineers had grander ambitions.

Your Starbases are engineering marvels — self-sustaining platforms packed with mineral recyclers, subspace telescope arrays, and autonomous maintenance systems. When deployed at a Dead System — a blasted, lifeless ruin that other empires write off as worthless — your Starbases can extract trace minerals from the debris field, recycling the remnants of whatever catastrophe killed the world into usable resources.

More impressively, each Starbase bristles with long-range sensor arrays that continuously sweep adjacent warp lanes. The data these arrays collect is equivalent to a full probe report — fleet compositions, system status, ownership changes — all gathered passively and beamed back to your command network in real time.

Your empire doesn’t just control the systems where your Starbases orbit. You see everything around them, turning each station into a node in a vast surveillance web. An approaching enemy fleet might pass through three or four sensor zones before reaching your borders — giving you ample warning to prepare your defense.

Call in a Debt

Card Text

Once per game: call in a Pirate reinforcement fleet of 2 Cruisers + (5 + 2 per turn after turn 2) Destroyers to a system where you are present. Fleet arrives next turn. This Pirate fleet will attack all ships except your own and cannot be moved.

Deeper Understanding

• One-time use — once activated, the card is spent for the rest of the game.
• You choose a system where you have at least one ship. The pirate fleet arrives there on the next turn.
• Fleet size scales with the game turn: 2 Cruisers plus 5 + 2×(current turn − 2) Destroyers. Examples: Turn 3 = 2 CR + 7 DD. Turn 5 = 2 CR + 11 DD. Turn 10 = 2 CR + 21 DD. The later you wait, the bigger the fleet.
• The pirate fleet attacks all ships except yours at that system. It treats every other empire’s ships as hostile.
• The fleet cannot be moved — it stays at the summoned system permanently, acting as a garrison that attacks anyone who enters.
• This is a devastating defensive or offensive tool. Use it to break a siege on your system, crush an enemy fleet at a contested location, or create an impregnable fortress.
• Timing is key: using it early gives a smaller fleet; waiting gives a bigger one, but you might need it before then. The strategic tension is real.
• The pirate fleet is a separate entity — it fires independently in combat and can be destroyed by concentrated enemy fire.

Lore — “Drake’s Marker”

Before you built an empire, before the warp lanes and the diplomacy and the grand strategy — you did someone a favor. A very dangerous someone.

The details are classified at the highest levels of your government. The official record simply notes a “strategic intervention” during the Pirate Consolidation Wars, when the scattered pirate clans were being unified under a single AI coordination network. What actually happened involved your special forces, a stolen encryption key, and a desperate rescue operation deep in hostile space.

Captain Drake — the ancient tactical AI that now commands the pirate empire — doesn’t forget debts. It can’t; debts are tracked in its core priority matrix alongside targeting solutions and raid schedules. Your empire holds the only outstanding marker in Drake’s ledger.

One transmission on a specific encrypted frequency is all it takes. Drake will marshal a personal fleet — Cruisers from the elite guard, Destroyers pulled from a dozen raid groups — and dispatch them to any system you specify. They’ll arrive fast, they’ll attack everything that isn’t you, and they’ll hold position until they’re destroyed.

It’s a one-time deal. Once the marker is called, the debt is paid. Use the marker wisely. You only get one.

Wormhole Technology

Card Text

Once per game: activate a permanent wormhole between any two systems where you have at least one Cruiser. The two systems become neighbors for all purposes (fleet movement, probe detection, map rendering). This connection is usable by all factions.

Deeper Understanding

• One-time use — once activated, the card is spent for the rest of the game.
• You must have at least one Cruiser in each of the two systems you want to connect.
• Both Cruisers cannot move on the turn you activate the wormhole. They must remain stationary while the wormhole forms. You can move them freely on subsequent turns.
• The wormhole creates a permanent warp lane between the two systems. It functions exactly like a natural warp lane — ships can travel through it, probes detect through it, it appears on the map.
• All factions can use it — this is not a private connection. Once the wormhole exists, any empire (including pirates) can move ships through it. Think carefully about what routes you’re opening up.
• This can be used to create strategic shortcuts across the map, connecting distant parts of your empire, bypassing chokepoints, or opening surprise attack routes.
• Defensive consideration: you might accidentally create a highway for your enemies. The wormhole benefits everyone, so plan accordingly.
• The wormhole is permanent — it cannot be closed or destroyed once activated.

Lore — “The Precursor Key”

In the cold vault of a Dead System orbiting a fading red dwarf, your archaeologists found it: a device of terrifying elegance, wrapped in stasis fields that had held for longer than your star had been burning.

The Precursors — that ancient, vanished race whose ruins litter Dead Systems across the galaxy — had mastered technologies that modern science can barely comprehend. Warp lanes, the galaxy’s great highways, are believed to be their creation. But this device was something more: a key to creating new lanes.

Your scientists spent decades studying the artifact, and their conclusions were both thrilling and sobering. The device could punch a permanent hole in the fabric of space-time, linking two distant points as if they were neighbors. A wormhole — stable, traversable, eternal. But the device would burn out after a single activation. The Precursors built it to last forever, but they built it to fire once.

Activating the device requires an immense energy anchor at both endpoints — only the reactor core of a Cruiser-class warship can provide sufficient power. The two Cruisers must remain stationary during activation, channeling their entire energy output into the forming wormhole. The process takes a full turn cycle, during which both ships are completely vulnerable.

The result is a shimmering tear in space — a permanent gateway that any ship from any faction can traverse. The wormhole doesn’t care about politics or allegiance. It is a door, and doors open both ways. Choose the moment wisely. The galaxy’s geography is about to change — permanently — and not just for you.

Warp Lane Disrupter

Card Text

Select a system where you have a Cruiser with no move order, then choose one of its warp lanes. When the turn processes, the targeted stargate is infected and the connection is destroyed permanently. Any fleet caught mid-transit across the lane loses its lead Cruiser and its move is canceled. The warp lane is gone forever. One-time use.

Deeper Understanding

• One-time use — once activated, the card is spent for the rest of the game.
• You must have at least one Cruiser at the activating system, and that Cruiser cannot have a move order this turn. If you add or edit a move order on that system after activating, the card activation is automatically canceled (the card remains available for later use).
• The Cruiser must survive to turn processing. If it is destroyed in combat before the movement phase, the virus is never deployed and the card is expended without effect.
• Resolution happens at turn change, before the movement phase. The targeted warp lane is severed permanently — no fleet, yours or anyone else’s, can ever transit it again.
• Fleet interception: if any fleet (yours, another empire’s, NPC, or pirate) had a move order crossing the disrupted lane this turn, that fleet loses 1 Cruiser (the ship generating the warp field) and its move is canceled. The remainder of the fleet falls back to its origin.
• Any lane is a valid target — natural warp lanes and Wormhole Technology lanes alike. The virus infects the stargate at the endpoint; once in, it cannot be removed.
• The map will no longer render the severed lane. Both systems’ adjacency chips retain the partner’s name with a red strikethrough and a tooltip explaining the severance — a permanent historical record of your act.
• Reports are generated for the activator, for any empire whose fleets were caught mid-transit, and for the far system’s owner (if any).

Lore — “The Lattice Virus”

It came to you in a sealed containment case, carried by a xeno-archaeologist whose name you were never told. She would not let the case out of her sight, would not let you photograph its markings, and she disappeared the moment the transaction cleared.

Inside, suspended in null-gravity and shielded by fields whose principles your engineers could only partly reconstruct, was a single shard of crystalline code. Not data — something older. Something written in the same substrate the Precursors used to build the stargates themselves. A virus. A key turned backwards.

Your scientists dared not fully reverse-engineer it. They understood enough to know what it did, and enough to know they should be afraid. Once deployed into a stargate’s lattice, the virus will spread through the gate’s core in seconds — every shred of its structural code rewritten into null-state, every anchor point to the adjoining warp corridor unraveled. The gate doesn’t explode. It simply ceases to be a gate. The lane it anchored collapses after it, unravels, and is gone.

This is the only one. There will be no second. Choose the target with cold precision — the virus will reshape the galaxy’s map, and whatever lane you sever will never be reopened by any hand, now or ever.

Appendix B — Discord Integration

W.E.B. integrates with Discord to give players a direct communication channel during active games. While the in-game Comms panel provides canned diplomacy messages delivered on turn boundaries, Discord channels allow free-form, real-time conversation between the players in a game.

How It Works

1. Link your Discord account on your W.E.B. profile page before joining a game. You only need to do this once.
2. When a game starts, if more than half the players have linked Discord accounts, the system automatically creates a semi-private text channel on the official W.E.B. Discord server.
3. Only players in that game (who have linked Discord) can see and post in the channel. Other server members cannot access it.
4. The bot posts a welcome message with the game name, player list, and a link to the game.

What You Can Use It For

• Negotiate non-aggression pacts, trade agreements, and ceasefires in your own words
• Coordinate joint military operations with pact partners
• Bluff, deceive, and engage in the full spectrum of diplomacy
• Discuss strategy and share intel (or disinformation)

Limitations & Policies

• Discord linking is optional. Players who haven’t linked their Discord account before the game starts will not have access to the game channel. Link your account before joining your next game to ensure access.
• Threshold required: A channel is only created if more than half the players in the game have linked Discord. In small games where few players have linked, no channel is created.
• AI takeover / departure: If your empire is taken over by the AI or you leave the game, you retain read/write access to the channel. You can still chat about the game with the remaining players.
• Auto-deletion: Game channels are automatically deleted 48 hours after the game ends. This gives players time to discuss the final outcome, congratulate the winner, and debrief — but channels do not persist indefinitely.
• Private games: When creating a private game, the host can check the “Create Discord channel” option to guarantee a channel is created regardless of how many players have linked Discord.

Privacy Notice

Notifications via Discord

Separately from game channels, W.E.B. can send you direct messages on Discord for game events — turn reminders, new turn results, diplomacy messages, and more. Configure which notifications you receive on your Profile page under Discord Notifications.

Appendix C — Carriers & Fighters

Full rules coming soon. This section will cover Carriers (CV), the Fighter pre-combat round (Round A), CAP/Strike splits, manual targeting, the Ion-9 crystal maintenance surcharge, Veteran/Elite progression, Starbase- and System-Fighter-Base-launched fighters, and the two new Empire Advantage Cards (Advanced Fighters Tech, Armored Carriers).

For now, the short version:

• Carriers (CV) are flagship-class command ships with a hangar bay for 10 fighters. Build cost: 5 BP. 10 HP. Fires one shot per round at 3+ (80% hit).
• Fighters launch in pre-combat each turn, split between CAP (defensive screen, intercepts incoming fighters) and Strike (offensive attack on enemy ships). Default 5/5 split; click a CV chip in Ships Present to reconfigure.
• Any ship hit by a fighter is locked out of firing in Round 1 and Round 2 of that turn's combat — a soft counter to Novas and other capital threats.
• Maintenance: each Carrier costs an additional +1 Ion-9 crystal per turn on top of normal fleet maintenance. Irreducible — not reduced by Revered reputation or the Ion-9 Catalyst.
• Only available in games where the host has enabled the Fighters & Carriers option at game creation.