A briefing from the office of naval intelligence. Ten minutes now saves a battle later.
Read your dispatch (the Dispatch button). Look at the map. Tap a fleet, point it somewhere — an unclaimed planet is never a bad first thought, and your pioneer can settle one just by arriving. Pick something for your capital to build. Press Transmit FINAL.
That's a turn. You cannot ruin anything on turn one — the galaxy is big, everyone starts symmetric, and your empire survives to the end of the game no matter what happens. Fleets you forget keep following their last orders; planets you forget simply build nothing.
Everyone writes orders for the same turn, in their own time — over coffee, on a phone, at 2am. The turn resolves when every player has transmitted FINAL (or when the deadline passes, in deadline games). All orders execute simultaneously: nobody moves first, nobody reacts mid-turn. Then a dispatch lands in your inbox telling you what your empire saw.
This is the old play-by-mail rhythm. The game is designed to be played in minutes a day; the thinking happens while you're doing something else.
Cruise is free — every fleet moves up to its speed each turn (a fleet is as fast as its slowest ship). A sprint adds 2 hexes, burns fuel, needs Logistics I — and your drive flare is visible to everyone this turn and next. Asteroid hexes cost double; black holes are walls.
Movement resolves in six interleaved sub-steps, and whenever hostile fleets share a hex the engine checks postures:
| they ENGAGE | they HOLD | they EVADE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| you ENGAGE | both stop, fight | both stop, fight | they slip past if strictly faster, else fight |
| you HOLD | stop & fight | tense stand-off — no combat | no combat, they pass |
| you EVADE | you slip past if strictly faster, else fight | no combat, you pass | both pass |
Evade is about refusing contact — moving or parked. A parked evader that is strictly faster than every attacker in its hex refuses the fight by sliding one free hex toward its capital (once per turn, deterministic, never through a wormhole). Evicting a perched evader is therefore free — it leaves — but killing one takes strictly faster hulls, pinning it against its own capital, or a second fleet camped on the hex it would slide to. If it has nowhere legal to go, it fights. Withdraw is different: it's your fleet's pain threshold inside a battle — "pull out once we've lost 50% of hull" — and it's set per fleet on the order card. You can be brave on contact and careful in the fight, or vice versa.
Combat is one volley round per turn, then everyone reassesses. Damage carries bounded randomness (±10%) — enough that battles aren't spreadsheets, never enough that a bigger fleet should lose to dice.
Now the part veterans will care about — how stacked combat works:
Ship types beat each other in a quiet circle — cruisers break frigates, raiders punish the support train, screens protect it. The Ships button has the full table; you don't need it memorized to play turn one.
Modules customize ships: pick them when you build (armor for +6 hull, scanners for +1 sensor, cloak, siege troop pods — each behind a tech tier), or refit later by docking a turn at your shipyard. Cruisers carry two modules; most hulls one; pioneers none.
Two ways to gain a planet, and they are not interchangeable:
Planets build one thing at a time — ships at a shipyard, or structures (lab, battery, scanner, refinery). Repair costs a quarter of hull price and a full turn docked at a friendly shipyard; the turn spent docked is the price that makes field damage matter.
The map's terrain is public — every player has the same star charts. What moves on it is not. You see hexes within sensor range of your planets, ships, and held Beacons; allies share vision completely.
Scattered across the map are Beacons — the relay network this war is actually about. The banner shows how many your side needs.
There is no elimination. Lose your worlds and you are crippled, not dead — and a crippled empire with working sensors and a grudge has scouted, schemed, and talked its way onto the winning side of more than one war. The endgame is built so the loser of the big battle still has moves.
Diplomacy is real and enforced. Treaties escrow a bond from each side:
| treaty | bond | you get |
|---|---|---|
| Non-aggression | 10m each | the engine physically blocks attacks between you |
| Alliance | 25m each | NAP + shared vision + trade routes + co-occupied hexes + ally repairs + shared victory |
Proposals expire after 3 turns; if you both propose in the same turn, the handshake forms immediately. Breaking a treaty hands your bond to the victim, broadcasts the betrayal to every empire, and inflates your next bond by ×1.5 — forever, cumulatively. Betrayal is legal. It is never cheap, and it is never private.
Trade routes run between allied capitals and pay both sides. A hostile raider parked on the route skims 25%; a warship parked on it blocks it entirely (passing traffic doesn't interfere). No other resource transfer exists — you cannot bankroll a kingmaker.
Every warship carries a named captain, rank 1–5: +3% attack per rank, promoted for every two battles survived. They are small numbers and large stories.
When a ship dies, its captain may reach an escape pod — better odds at higher rank. The pod drifts toward friendly space with 3 turns of air. Any fleet in its hex may take them aboard: friends recover them, enemies capture them. Captives sit at a captor's planet as diplomatic currency — ransom them, trade them, or take that planet and liberate them at gunpoint.
Captain E. Ferro, pulled from a pod after the Battle of Threshold, reportedly asked for a fresh ship and the same heading. You'll meet someone like her. That's the point of all this.
Numbers in this briefing are current as of the engine you're playing. When the interface and this page disagree, trust the interface — then tell the Commodore's engineer.