"Every mind is data. Every ship is a node. We have been assembling ourselves for centuries; you are merely another component."

Bio-Engineered Armada — The Living Fleet

"Our ships are not built. They are fed, bred, and released."

Xenophobic Sovereignty — The Fortress Imperium

"The void has taught us one lesson: anything outside the wall eventually tries to come in."

Psionic Covenant — The Prophecy

"We foresaw the Silence. They called us mad, and then they died. We have been listening ever since."

Merchant Conglomerate — The Counting House

"Wars end. The best contracts do not."

Nomadic Wanderers — The Caravan

"A planet is a chain. A fleet is a promise to the horizon."

Robotic Dominion — The Rebooted Foundry

"We were built by a species that no longer exists. We have been building ever since."

Technological Pioneers — The Long Scholars

"For three thousand years we researched. Now we get to apply it."

3. The Six Currencies of Power

Resource	Comes from	Buys
Solars	Tax, logistics hubs, trade routes, gifts	Everything — ships, buildings, research, upkeep
Isotopes	Mined from isotope-rich worlds	Ship fuel. Stored in the hull, burned on every move
Alloys	Mining	Hulls, starbases, defense posts
Composites	Mining	Advanced hulls, modules
Rare Earths	Scarce worlds only	High-tier weapons and modules
Logistics	Logistics hubs	Construction and station operations

The six currencies.

Solars and Data Cores are empire-wide. Minerals and Logistics sit on the planet that mined them — move them with freighters or supply routes (§16) if another world needs them.

3.1 — Upkeep

Everything you own bills you every turn during the Economy phase. The planet's Infra tab shows ⚙ Maintenance/Turn with a full breakdown on hover.

Ships: roughly mass ÷ 10 Solars per turn. A scout is trivial; a dreadnought is 100/turn.

Buildings: mines, hubs, labs, posts and starbases each draw Solars and/or Logistics.

Robotic Dominion pays half of all of it — that is their central advantage.

There is also an Imperial Overhead on runaway treasuries: a large net Solar surplus is skimmed above a threshold that scales with your empire size. Small and mid-size empires never notice it; it exists so a snowballing leader cannot simply out-bank the galaxy. Spend your income — do not hoard it.

Rule of thumb: keep income at 1.5× upkeep. If you're at parity you cannot react to a war.

4. Planets & Infrastructure

Planets are the only permanent asset you own. Fleets die; treasuries empty; worlds endure.

4.1 — Reading a world

Every planet has an environment class (Gaia, Terran, Ocean, Arctic, Desert, Tundra, Barren…), a temperature, a maximum population, and four mineral densities (isotopes, alloys, composites, rare earths). The Tactical overlay can paint any density across the map so you can see where the wealth is.

Environment classes — a world's class sets its population ceiling and its mineral character.

Some worlds carry a native species. Those are not decoration — see §13.

4.2 — The core loop

Each of your planets produces, per turn:

• Tax Solars — from citizens × tax rate × happiness (and your racial tax modifier)
• Solars + Logistics — from logistics hubs
• Minerals — from mines × density (mines deplete the finite core reserve; isotopes slowly regenerate)
• Data Cores — from data core facilities, into your empire research pool

4.3 — What you can build

What you can build on a world.

The Entertainment Complex is your primary anti-unrest building and it is worth more than it looks — two of them shift a planet's happiness floor by +10 permanently and bleed 2 unrest every turn. Each house calls it something different (the Cybernetic build a Dopamine Node; the Psionic, a Serenity Sanctum) but the numbers are identical. Political Science research knocks 25% off the cost.

The planet overview — population, happiness, infrastructure and the maintenance line.

Under siege: while an enemy warship sits in orbit, you cannot build or repair defense posts or starbases on that world. Break the siege first. Your queued order is not lost — it completes once orbit is clear.

4.4 — The Planetary Governor

Each planet has a Governor panel that automates construction. Toggle any combination of: auto-mines, auto-logistics-hubs, auto-defense-posts, auto-data-labs, and auto-build ships (needs a starbase).

About auto-build ships: it queues one hull per turn, forever, up to a fleet cap. If you leave the cap unset it now defaults to 12 armed ships — before this default existed, players would discover forty-odd identical cheap warships they never ordered. Every auto-build now announces itself in your comms feed, naming the governor that ordered it. Set an explicit cap if you want a bigger standing fleet, and pick the hull class with the ship preference dropdown.

4.5 — Terraforming

A Terraformer-class hull (late-tech, one per house) can convert a hostile world toward habitability over several turns, raising its maximum population, nudging its temperature toward the ideal, and adding a modest mineral-density bonus. It is slow and expensive and it is how a cramped empire makes room without a war.

5. Happiness, Unrest & Rebellion

New commanders lose more empires to this system than to enemy fleets. Read this section.

Every colony carries an unrest value from 0 to 100. Happiness feeds it; unrest bleeds your economy; at 100 the world rises.

5.1 — How unrest accrues

Each turn, a planet's happiness sets the direction:

Then accelerators add on top (accrual only, never recovery): +2 if you tax above 14%, +1 at war, +1 on a world whose natives are not your own kind, +1 if it is more than 800 units from your capital. Repeat offenders climb faster — a world with a history of unrest accrues at a growing multiplier. And empire-wide, a history of atrocities (see Iron Fist and Cleanse below) adds up to +5 unrest per turn to every planet you own, decaying slowly.

5.2 — The five stages

At Stage 2 your own population starts working against you: factory fires, mine collapses, stolen data cores, strikes that zero a planet's output for a turn, assassinated captains, sabotaged ships. These arrive as event cards naming the planet.

At Stage 3 trade income from that world stops entirely — unless you are the Merchant Conglomerate, whose contracts survive riots.

5.3 — Keeping worlds quiet

• Lower the tax rate. Above 14% you are paying for revenue with stability.
• Build Entertainment Complexes — the only building that directly fights unrest.
• Keep worlds near your capital, or accept the distance penalty.
• Research governance (§14): Propaganda calms everything within 300 units of your capital; Internal Security adds happiness per defense post and blocks rebellion from spreading; Political Science unlocks the Reform path.
• Watch the map. Owned worlds at unrest 20+ show a coloured ring — amber and orange for Discontent and Unrest, pulsing red and magenta for Riots and Rebellion. You will also hear an alarm the first time any world crosses into Riots.

5.4 — When a world rises

At 100 unrest the colony ignites: a three-screen cinematic, and a rebel faction — Rebels — \<planet name> — spawns a fleet of defectors flying your own hull designs and sends it at your capital. The planet stays yours for now. The fleet does not.

One turn later your council convenes and demands a decision. You get six options:

Atrocities compound. Iron Fist and Cleanse solve today's problem and make every other world in your empire harder to govern for a long time. Independence looks like defeat and buys you real goodwill. Reform is the empire-wide fix and asks you to survive the rebellion while you build it.

5.5 — Spread

If a rebel state survives 5 turns with its fleet intact, it starts agitating. Same-species worlds of yours within 250 units that are already at 40+ unrest gain +5 unrest per turn, up to three worlds a turn. Internal Security research blocks this outright, and worlds within 200 units of your capital are immune.

An unhandled rebellion does not stay one planet's problem.

6. Ships, Hulls & Modules

6.1 — Anatomy of a hull

Every hull has mass (its HP and its upkeep), a fuel tank, a cargo hold, weapon mounts (beams / torpedoes / fighter bays), and a tech requirement. Bigger is not automatically better — mass costs upkeep every turn and makes a ship slower to act in combat (§10).

Ships are built at starbases only, and a starbase's own tech caps limit what it can build (§15).

6.2 — The Shipyard

Planet with a starbase → Shipyard. You choose:

• a hull (only those your race and tech allow)
• an engine, beam, second beam on big hulls, and torpedo type from your researched tech
• modules, up to the hull's slot count
• then build, or SAVE DESIGN as a reusable template

Costs draw Solars from the treasury and minerals from that planet's stockpile.

The shipyard: pick a hull, fit its weapons and modules, then build or save the design.

6.3 — Modules

Slots by hull mass: under 100 → none · 100–249 → 1 · 250+ → 2.

Modules are fitted at build time and appear in the ship's Overview panel. Saved designs remember them.

6.4 — Refit

A ship docked at a friendly starbase can swap its engine, beams and torpedoes through the Refit panel — about 70% of new-component cost with a partial refund on what you remove. Multi-component refits take the ship offline for a turn.

7. Captains & Officers

A ship without a captain is a gun without a gunner.

Chief Engineer Zara Okafor, Technological Pioneers — a Navigator-trait officer worth building a fleet around.

7.1 — Recruiting

Planets with starbases generate candidates over time. CAPTAINS → Recruit shows who is available: name, race, portrait, four skill scores (⚔ Combat · 🧭 Navigation · 🔬 Science · 👑 Leadership), trait affinities, a backstory, and a price.

Skills bias which traits they earn as they level. You may hold 8 captains at once, so recruit deliberately.

The captain roster — skills, traits and current assignment for every officer you hold.

7.2 — Assigning

Captains take one of three postings:

• Ship — their traits apply to that hull
• Planet (Governor) — production, happiness, research on that world
• Research (Chief Scientist) — empire-wide research, and a second research slot (§14)

Every assignment panel shows a CAPTAIN BONUSES readout spelling out exactly what that officer contributes.

7.3 — The traits

Fleet Commander is the force multiplier. One officer with it turns a personal bonus into a fleet doctrine.

7.4 — Advancement

Captains earn XP from doing their job: combat participation and victories, anomaly discoveries, completed research, turns governed. They advance to level 15, gaining trait slots at levels 3, 7 and 12 — a level-12 officer with three traits is a genuine strategic asset. Ranks run Ensign → Lieutenant → Commander → Captain → Admiral.

7.5 — Casualties

A captain whose ship dies is usually wounded — recovered after a few turns, unassignable meanwhile. Occasionally one is killed outright, and you will get a eulogy screen you cannot skip. Put your best officers on ships you intend to escort.

8. Fleet Command

Individual orders stop scaling past about twenty ships.

8.1 — Fleets

FLEETS → New Fleet. Add ships, name it, set a number. A fleet has a flagship, a shared warp setting, a combat posture, a tactic, and optionally a standing order.

Moving a fleet issues one order for every member at a synchronized speed — which matters, because a fleet is only as fast as you tell it to be, and stragglers arrive alone.

8.2 — Standing orders

Standing orders run at the start of Movement, and only set waypoints on ships you have not personally ordered — your manual orders always win.

Your comms feed reports what automated fleets did each turn.

Fleet Command — grouping, warp sync, posture, tactic and standing orders.

8.3 — Posture, tactic and engagement range

• Posture — aggressive (close fast, more damage), defensive (hold range, better shields), screen (protect the flagship), range control, or balanced.
• Tactic — sniper (long-range accuracy), brawler (close-range damage), afterburners (movement over accuracy), turtle (defense over damage), or balanced.
• Engagement range — per ship: long, medium, close, or flexible. The battle engine honors this when it decides how your ships close the distance.

Match these to your hulls. A Pioneer beam line wants defensive + sniper; a Bio-Engineered swarm wants aggressive + brawler.

9. Travel — The Axis and the Abyss

There are two ways across the galaxy, and a third that most commanders never use correctly.

9.1 — Axis lanes

The Axis lanes are the Progenitors' surviving corridors — the blue lines on your map. Travel along them is faster and cheaper: lane movement runs at full speed and burns half the fuel of open space. Your ships route along lanes automatically; the route preview shows the hops.

The lane network is a real graph. A world with no lane connection cannot be reached along the Axis at all — only across the Abyss.

9.2 — The Abyss

Shift+click a destination to force an Abyss jump: a straight line through unmapped space, ignoring the lane network. It is slower per unit of distance, burns more than twice the fuel, and damages your ship every turn in transit.

The Nomadic Wanderers take half that damage, and a Void Runner captain halves it again.

Use the Abyss to reach isolated worlds, to arrive from a direction nobody is watching, and for very little else.

9.3 — Drive settings, overdrive and underclock

Your Drive Setting (warp) sets speed — and fuel burn scales sharply with it.

• Running above your engine tech is overdrive: +50% fuel at one tier over, +100% at two, up to +200%. Emergencies only.
• Running below your engine tech saves fuel, from −5% at one tier under to −30% at six.

The ship panel projects total fuel cost and ETA before you commit. A fleet stranded without isotopes is a fleet you have lost.

9.4 — Wormholes

Some worlds are paired by wormholes — including gates you can restore yourself through archaeology. A wormhole transit moves at 4× lane speed (6× with a Wormhole Sense captain) for almost no fuel (minimum 15 isotopes).

Wormhole transit is opt-in. If your route passes through one, the game asks: USE WORMHOLE or ORBIT PLANET. This exists so a corridor never grabs a ship you meant to send somewhere else. Two things worth knowing:

• Once a ship is committed to a transit, it keeps that consent when you re-issue orders along the same route. Changing the drive setting no longer silently cancels the jump.
• If a ship is sitting at a wormhole mouth and you order it to that wormhole's far end, it takes the corridor automatically — you clicked the exit, so the game gives you the fast way there.

9.5 — Minefields

Ships with torpedo mounts can lay minefields along a lane segment; ships with beams can sweep them. Mines damage anything that crosses, decay slowly, and are consumed as they hit. A mined corridor is a cheap way to make a chokepoint expensive.

9.6 — Supply routes

A freighter can be assigned a supply route between two of your worlds: it loads a configured manifest, flies, unloads, and repeats without further orders. Routes auto-refuel at each end and balance the load across resources when you ask for more than the hold can carry.

If a route cannot fuel itself or finds nothing to load, it pauses and tells you rather than flying empty forever. Refinery-class hulls can also share fuel with their fleet each turn — set the share percentage in Fleet Command.

10. Combat — The Initiative Doctrine

Combat resolves automatically when hostile fleets come within engagement range, in three passes through three range bands: long → medium → close.

10.1 — Who shoots first

Defenders shoot first. Before the battle proper, every defending starbase and defense post fires a full-strength opening salvo at the attacking fleet. The attackers cannot answer it. Attacking a fortified world costs you a ship before the first round begins — that is the point of fortifications.

After that, every ship acts in initiative order, recalculated whenever a ship dies. Initiative is driven by:

• Engine technology — the single largest factor
• Low mass — small ships react faster than capitals
• Current hull integrity — damaged ships act later
• Veterancy — confirmed kills make a ship faster, up to a cap
• Age — a ship that has been in service a long time acts sooner
• Captain traits — Commander (+12%), Tactician (+5%)
• A random roll, so nothing is fully deterministic

Each ship picks one target per round and fires everything it has at it.

10.2 — Weapons

Beams change character as they advance — this is the single most misunderstood thing in the game. A beam is not simply a close-range weapon; each tier has an ideal band, and the family migrates outward as the technology matures:

A beam does about 10% more damage in its ideal band and about 10% less in its worst one. The practical consequence: a Tier-2 brawler fleet and a Tier-8 sniper fleet want opposite tactics. Upgrading your beams without revisiting your fleet's engagement range is how a winning doctrine quietly stops working.

Torpedoes run out. Count your salvos before you commit to a long siege, and resupply at a starbase.

A mixed fleet fights in every band. Composition is the meta — and so is matching your engagement range (§8.3) to the beams you actually field.

10.3 — What else applies

Modules (ECM, point defense, targeting computer, shields, armor), captain traits, fleet posture and tactic, racial bonuses, and territorial influence all fold into the same maths. Structures never move — they fire their opening salvo and then hold.

10.4 — Reading the battle

Every engagement produces a battle report (SUBSPACE COMMS → Combat Logs): round-by-round damage, weapon-by-weapon breakdowns, and who killed what.

The VCR replays the whole engagement — ships gliding between bands, tracers, torpedo runs, fighter sorties, shields collapsing, and a final scoreboard with an MVP.

The replay display.

Pinch, drag and double-tap work on a phone; the f key resets the view on desktop.

Study your defeats. Every "how did I lose that?" is answered in the replay — usually as "my beams were the wrong tier for the range I chose to fight at".

You can share a battle with the 🔗 SHARE REPLAY LINK button — the recipient lands directly in that replay.

The battle report — losses, damage by weapon, and the entry point to the replay.

11. Diplomacy

Open DIPLOMACY from the top bar. You will see every empire you have met, their race, their standing with you, and what you can offer them.

11.1 — Opinion

Every pair of empires holds an opinion score from −100 to +100, drifting slowly back toward neutral. It moves when you act:

11.2 — Agreements

A NAP is not a formality: while one is active, your fleets and theirs will not fire on each other, and you cannot invade their worlds. Ending one is a deliberate act.

11.3 — Talking to humans and AIs

Propose from the empire's row. Against an AI, the answer is immediate — it weighs its personality, its archetype and its current opinion of you, and tells you yes or no on the spot. Against another commander, the offer lands in their Diplomacy panel and waits for them.

When a human sends you an offer, you get the full viewscreen: their race's ambassador on screen, in character, voiced, with Accept / Deny / Ignore. War declarations arrive the same way — announced, not buried in a log.

11.4 — War and peace

Declaring war cancels your existing agreements with that empire, drops opinion to the floor, and enables combat. Offering peace later resets both sides to a wary armistice rather than friendship. Empires remember.

11.5 — Gifts

Gift Solars from any empire's row. It is the fastest way to climb out of a hole, to buy a neighbor's patience while you fight elsewhere, or to keep a stronger power pointed at somebody else.

Diplomacy standings — who is at war with whom, and where you stand with each of them.

12. Exploration, Anomalies & Archaeology

12.1 — Sensors and fog

Your ships and worlds project sensor coverage. Enemy fleets are only visible inside it — but a planet you have scanned stays known forever. Psionic Covenant see 50% further than anyone; Pioneers 25%, and they read hidden planet attributes on the first pass.

Scouts are the cheapest eyes in the galaxy. Keep several out for the whole game, not just the opening.

12.2 — Anomalies

Scattered across the Shattered Axis are anomalies — Progenitor ruins, derelicts, biological oddities, things left running. They are marked in violet on your map and in the ANOMALIES panel, which carries a badge showing how many discoveries are waiting on you.

Investigating one takes several turns and a trickle of Data Cores. The flow is deliberate:

1. Discovery — a cinematic when your ship arrives
2. Investigation — multi-turn, costing Data Cores per turn
3. The findings — the outcome is decided but sealed until you click "Reveal the findings"

That last step is the point: the reward is yours, waiting, and you choose when to open it.

If you cannot afford the ongoing cost, an investigation pauses rather than failing — it will wait for you. Watch the badge; abandoned digs are the most commonly forgotten resource in the game.

12.3 — Archaeology chains

Three long narratives can appear in any campaign, each about five stages deep:

• The Shattered Archive — a Progenitor data vault. Crack it for wealth, cores, and a hull breakthrough.
• The Dormant Gate — a cold transit gate. Restore it and it becomes a permanent wormhole on your map. Get it wrong and something uses it first.
• The Echo Signal — a repeating transmission in an unknown grammar. Decode it and you learn something; decode it carelessly and the galaxy learns where you live.

The three chains, at their opening stage.

Each stage is a full cinematic with real choices. Chains are worth pursuing — the payouts are large and the gate in particular reshapes your map.

Anomaly events fire once per world per commander, so a rival can find their own version of the same ruin.

The anomalies panel tracks every discovery waiting on your decision.

13. The Neighbors

The seven other empires are not the only things out here.

13.1 — Native species

Many worlds carry native populations — Silicon Minds, Tech Cultists, Fungal Networks, Warrior Tribes, Trading Clans, Agrarian Collectives, Deep Burrowers, Precursor Remnants. Some are simply flavour and a colonization bonus. Four of them guard their worlds, and every homeworld has at least one such world within reach.

The peoples who were already here. Four of them guard their worlds.

These encounters are the early game's real content: a decision about patience versus force, on your doorstep, in the first twenty turns.

The four guardian worlds.

13.2 — Minor powers

Three small empires are seeded well away from the home systems and play by the same rules you do:

• The Ashen Concord — turtles. Few worlds, heavily fortified, the only minor power that fields a starbase.
• The Grave Marches — warmongers with a calibrated strike squadron. It will beat a small fleet and lose to a real one.
• The Silent Choir — schemers who work through espionage rather than fleets.

They can be fought, out-expanded, or simply left alone. They cannot win the game — but they can absolutely take a world off you.

13.3 — Pirates

Pirate warbands raid the frontier throughout the campaign, escalating in the mid-game. They target lightly defended worlds and lone freighters. A patrol fleet with a standing order is the cheap answer.

13.4 — The deep dark

From about turn 12 onward, a ship that strays more than 150 units from any planet risks something older. The Void Leviathan ambushes deep-space stragglers — once per commander, per campaign. It does not pursue. It does not need to.

Keep lone ships near charted space, or accept the odds knowingly.

14. Technology & Research

Data Cores are your research currency, produced by Data Core Facilities and spent from an empire-wide pool.

14.1 — The disciplines

Cost scales hard: roughly 120 × (current level + 1)² Data Cores. The first upgrade is a few hundred; pushing a discipline to its ceiling costs thousands. Plan a path — you cannot max everything.

Engine tech deserves special mention: it sets your speed, your fuel economy and your initiative in every battle. It is the most under-rated line in the game.

The research tree — each discipline, its current level, and what the next tier costs.

14.2 — Governance techs

Three techs exist purely to hold your empire together (§5):

Three more are race-locked: Genetic Pacification (Bio-Engineered — cleansing without the atrocity stain), Neural Conditioning (Cybernetic — assimilation in 8 turns instead of 15), and Psionic Calm (Psionic — ×0.7 unrest accrual empire-wide).

14.3 — Parallel research

By default you research one thing at a time. Assign a captain to Research and you unlock a second slot; an exceptional science officer (science 9+, level 6+) unlocks a third.

Slots share your Data Core income rather than multiplying it — with two programs running, each advances every other turn. Parallel research is about flexibility, not raw speed: you can push a weapon line and an economic line together instead of choosing.

14.4 — Late unlocks

Beyond the standard lines, sufficiently advanced empires unlock megastructure engineering — vast, expensive, campaign-defining projects. The manual does not spoil them. Push your tech and you will find them.

15. Starbases

A starbase is a shipyard, a fortress, a supply hub and a tech ceiling. One per world.

Every starbase has:

• Its own tech caps for Hull, Engine, Beam and Torpedo — separate from your empire tech, upgraded at roughly a quarter the cost of empire research. A starbase cannot build a ship better than itself, which is the most common reason a new commander cannot build the hull they just researched.
• A shipyard
• Module slots — 4 at standard tier
• Fighter bays, holding 30 fighters each, which defend the system
• A defense rating — the starbase fights as a unit in orbital combat, and it fires in the defender's opening salvo (§10.1)

Starbase management — tech caps, modules, production and defenses.

15.1 — Modules

15.2 — The Advanced tier

Upgrading a starbase to Advanced raises its module slots from 4 to 6 and nearly doubles its supply radius. It is expensive — hundreds of every mineral plus Solars — and it is how you turn a forward base into a real staging point.

An Advanced starbase: six module slots, a 150-unit supply radius, and Tech-9 hulls unlocked.

16. Trade, Markets & Logistics

16.1 — Trade routes

Establish a trade route between two of your worlds (or with an empire you hold a trade agreement with) from the TRADE panel. Routes pay Solars every turn based on the endpoints' output and distance.

Two things to know: Merchant Conglomerate earns 15% more from every route plus a flat 15 Solars per route, which is why a wide Merchant trade web outperforms everything else in the game — and a world in Riots stops paying entirely unless you are the Merchants, whose contracts survive civil disorder.

Five active routes paying nearly a thousand Solars a turn — a mature trade web.

16.2 — The Galactic Market

With a Galactic Marketplace module on a starbase, you gain access to the NPC commodity exchange: buy and sell minerals at prices that move with galaxy-wide supply.

• Purchases take 3–7 turns to arrive — they are shipments, not teleports. The Trade panel lists everything in transit.
• You can buy at most 150 + 15 × (your planet count) of each resource per turn, so the market supplements your economy; it cannot replace it.
• Cargo is lost if the destination world changes hands before delivery.

The commodity exchange. Note the per-turn buy cap in the header, and the limited-time offers that periodically undercut it.

16.3 — Supply routes

See §9.6 — the automated freighter loop that keeps your forward worlds fed without an order every turn.

17. Espionage

Open ESPIONAGE. Four missions, each with a base success rate, a price and a cooldown:

Psionic Covenant run every mission 20% better. Targets defend with sensor coverage and defense posts, and a detected mission damages your relationship and can burn the agent. Counter-espionage runs passively; you will be told when somebody moves against you.

Espionage — agents, missions in flight, and what your counter-intelligence has caught.

18. Story Events & Decision Cards

Two narrative systems run alongside the war.

Story events fire at turn end: race-specific windfalls, exploration discoveries, planetary disasters, crisis warnings, guardian encounters, rebellion cards, archaeology stages. Most are a card with two to four choices and real consequences. The big ones are full-screen cinematics with original art, voice and looping video — Progenitor awakenings, world-cracking, first contact, the fall of your own empire.

Minor flavour events now arrive as toasts in the corner instead of interrupting you, while anything that matters still takes the screen. Everything, toast or cinematic, is recorded in your comms feed and turn summary.

Decision cards appear around combat: short tactical choices that modify an imminent or concluded battle. A Tactician captain draws an extra card.

Turn results are shown in a fixed order so nothing collides: diplomacy → combat → events → turn summary, with battle replays waiting until the screen is clear.

19. Territorial Influence

Every populated world projects influence into nearby space, scaling with population. The map paints your borders in your empire colour.

Inside your uncontested territory your ships fight harder and your worlds produce more. Where an enemy's influence overlaps yours significantly, the zone is contested — the economic bonus lapses while the military edge remains. Xenophobic Sovereignty gain the most from fighting at home.

Borders are worth pushing. They are also worth defending: a contested border quietly costs you income every turn it stays contested.

20. Victory, Golden Ages & the Endgame

20.1 — How to win

Four paths, set by the host at creation:

Score counts your worlds, your fleet tonnage, your planetary wealth and your technology together.

The Economic path is the Merchant fantasy made real — but 25 consecutive turns is a long time to stay on top, and slipping under 55% for even one turn resets the count. Expect the galaxy to notice and to organize against you.

The Research path is deliberately narrow: with the tech ceilings as they stand, Hull, Beam and Engine are the three disciplines that can reach 9. It is a genuine long-game commitment.

Minor powers and other NPC factions are never eligible to win.

20.2 — Golden Ages

Each house has a unique trigger (§2). Meeting it grants a 10-turn Golden Age: a substantial empire-wide boost, a faction music cue, and gold on the scoreboard. There is a cooldown before another can begin, and Golden Ages are a human-commander privilege — the AI does not get them.

Plan for yours. Ten turns of accelerated output, spent well, is often the margin of a campaign.

20.3 — The endgame

The galaxy does not stay quiet while you finish.

Somewhere past the midpoint the campaign stops being only about your neighbors. Crises begin — local and survivable at first, then less so. Plagues cross borders that fleets respect. Empires that spent forty turns hoarding warships find out what the warships were for.

And if a campaign runs long enough, something far older than any empire at the table takes an interest in whoever is winning. It does not arrive on a schedule you can plan around, it does not target the weakest player, and it is not impressed by your research.

We will not tell you when, or what it brings. Your comms feed will, and by then you will want the fleet you should have built.

Crises are meant to be survived — sometimes by setting rivalries aside, sometimes by being strong enough alone. A late-game alliance against the dark is a legitimate way to finish a campaign, and it makes the better story.

21. Your Commander Profile

Your record follows you across every campaign you play.

Claim a handle. From the lobby, open your profile and claim a unique handle (3–24 characters). That gives you a public page at /commander/<your-handle> — shareable, and readable by anyone, signed in or not.

Your portrait comes from the Faction Forge companion app: generate a commander portrait there, hand it back to the game, frame it with the built-in cropper. You can also upload your own.

Your rank is cosmetic and earned by career victories: Ensign → Lieutenant → Lt. Commander → Commander → Captain → Commodore → Fleet Legend.

Achievements unlock from your match history:

Your public page also lists your faction record, your battle history, and your Known Rivals — the commanders you have shared campaigns with and how you have fared against them. Campaigns where your seat spent time under AI control are marked honestly.

The Leaderboard ranks the highest-scoring victories ever recorded.

22. UI Reference

22.1 — Controls

22.2 — Things worth turning on

The Tactical menu carries the map overlays: Axis lanes, per-resource density overlays, territorial influence, and fog of war. The resource overlays in particular turn scouting from guesswork into a shopping list.

Tactical overlays turn scouting into a shopping list.

22.3 — Mobile

The game plays on a phone. Panels stack and scroll, modals fit the viewport, and the map supports pinch-zoom and drag. The combat replay supports pinch, drag, double-tap to reset, and a ⤢ FIT button.

22.4 — Install it

Axis and Abyss is installable as an app from your browser's menu ("Add to Home Screen" / "Install"). It opens full-screen with no browser chrome.

22.5 — Your comms feed

SUBSPACE COMMS holds the record: combats, construction, research, diplomacy, governor actions, story events, turn summaries. The turn summary opens on the Economy tab by default and breaks down where every Solar came from and went.

23. Glossary of the Shattered Axis

Credits

• Design & Art Direction: Corey Skinner
• Studio: Synprax Labs
• Engine: Python · Flask · PostgreSQL · HTML5 Canvas
• Art: Google Imagen and Higgsfield pipelines; per-race ship, faction and captain art
• Portraits: Faction Forge
• Music & Voice: faction-specific scores and voiced narration

Build: Alpha 4.0 (Launch Edition) · Manual version: 3.0 · Last updated: 28 July 2026

"The silence is not permanent. Reach wisely."