The Galaxy & Travel

The map has three zoom levels. Zoom out and you see a galaxy: a spiral of star systems, gold stars marking rare Aurium-eligible systems and red marking the galaxy's single core system (the richest, most contested ground in the whole galaxy). Click a system and you see its orbiting planets — rings mark which are already colonized, a gold halo flags an Aurium world. Click a planet and it spins like a globe, carved into territories — roughly 24 to 32 per planet, each with its own resource-yield profile. Coordinates are simply (galaxy, system, planet).

Distance, and therefore travel time, is strictly hierarchical.Moving between galaxies is vastly more expensive than moving between systems within a galaxy, which is itself much more expensive than moving between positions within one system.

A fleet's travel time is its distance divided by its slowest ship's speed— meaning composition is a speed decision. Escorting a slow siege hull on a raid slows the whole fleet down to that hull's pace.

Your fleets start able to roam freely anywhere inside your home system. Reaching other systems in your own galaxy requires researching the Interstellar Drive at a Research Spire; reaching the galactic core or another galaxy requires the further Deep Warp technology. Both are real, expensive, one-time research projects — the first jump is a genuine milestone, not a formality.

Overlaid on the galaxy map are warp lanes — the fixed, always-visible network connecting nearby systems — and jump gates: eight per galaxy, sitting at the busiest lane junctions, each starting out held by a neutral Custodian garrison. Capturing a gate is a straight fight — no shield blocks it, no loyalty is involved, and it's fully telegraphed to whoever holds it.

Only an alliance can actually hold a captured gate.A solo player can crack one open (and gets full credit for the fight), but the capture only sticks for an alliance. Once a gate stabilizes, holding it gives your alliance two benefits: shorter routes whenever hopping through two held gates beats a direct flight, and extended sensor coverage around the gate's neighborhood. Nobody is ever slowed by a gate they don't hold— gates only ever shorten the holder's own routes. A gate has no loot and mints no season points; the reward is purely logistics and intel.

A colony's own planet-square (its base territory) can never be lost except by losing the colony itself. Every planet also has many other territories with their own yield profile — some favor alloys, some crystal, some rations, some isotopes, and a rare few carry an Aurium node.

You can claimany unclaimed territory you can reach (same reach rule as fleets) for a flat resource cost, lifting your colony's production. Each colony can hold up to four claimed territories beyond its base (five total), and claiming has diminishing returns: your first extra claim adds a lot, your fourth adds much less — so grab the richest ground first, and only bother with a marginal fourth claim if it carries an Aurium node.

If the territory you want already belongs to a rival or is NPC-guarded, you don't claim it, you contest it: a real combat mission, fully telegraphed, blockable by an Emergency Shield or protection exactly like any raid. The node changes hands only if you win. Losing a contested claim stings far less than losing a colony — nothing in the territory layer can ever take a colony away from anyone; only conquest does that.

Each galaxy has exactly one World Boss— a single heavily-garrisoned hostile fleet that never sits still. Left alone, it relocates to a new planet roughly every five game-hours, favoring the busier, more populated systems in the galaxy without ever being guaranteed to land on one — and it never spawns inside a system one alliance already dominates outright, so the fight can't become a free gift to whoever already controls the neighborhood.

Attacking it holds it in place.Any strike against the boss within a short window of its last hit defers its next scheduled move — so a boss under sustained fire stays put long enough for a real siege, rather than roaming away mid-fight. It can't be pinned in one system forever, though: that grace period only defers a move a limited number of times before it relocates regardless.