Threats and Losses

What never happens here

There are no pirates, no sieges and no combat between players in this game. Nobody will fly in to destroy your colony while you are away, and you won't lose a month's work because you skipped a week.

Another player's ship is never a target under any circumstances, and neither is anything they built. That is a rule of the game. The most another player can do to an empty colony is breach it: refuel at your plant for a while, print at your factory or pay from your warehouse. The stations stand meanwhile, and the arrival of your copy closes the access. More in "Scripts and the Firewall".

Combat exists, and only with aliens

There are others out in space, and some of them are hostile. The key thing about them: an alien does not move. It stands where the world put it and travels neither between systems nor even between the orbits of one system. In a fight it manoeuvres, but never strays far from its place.

Hence one rule for the whole game:

You can lose something only where you flew yourself, or where you built yourself: next to someone who was already there, or right up against a restless star.

A hostile alien fires on its own, unasked, and not only at ships: stations are targets too. So a colony placed in the same spot as one of them can be lost.

How combat works

A fight happens where a hostile alien and your ship or station stand in the same place: in an orbit, in a belt sector, by a moon. There is no combat in flight. A turn lasts half a minute, ships manoeuvre, burn fuel and fire, and you can leave by getting far enough away from every enemy: there is always a way out. The details are in "Combat and Weapons".

Stations don't fire. They can be shielded by a copy that joined the fight in that place: one that landed there or pressed "Into battle". A damaged station slowly recovers on its own, a destroyed one can be built again; a ship's hull is mended by its printers, and out of a fight by a factory too. If another player's copy is fighting beside you, you are on the same side: no weapon can be turned on it, and it shields your stations just as it would its own.

A survey shows the aliens in a place, and any fight surveys the place by itself: after it the enemy there is visible to everyone who comes next. You can join a fight blind — you just won't know in advance how it ends.

The warning on landing

An interstellar flight that lands in a system with hostile aliens writes it in the journal. If the threat is news to the copy, the game raises a full-screen warning: something is here, it does not move, and a fight starts only if you stand in the same place with it. For a threat the copy already knows, a line in the journal is usually enough.

Sometimes somebody stands right where the flight lands. That one does not shoot, and it does not let you past the outer orbit either: all you can put up there is what it takes to refuel and leave. Leaving is always possible.

Building off to the side and leaving really is possible. The aliens are visible on the system map, and the decision is yours.

Stellar flares

Stars flare. Red dwarfs do it most, especially young ones: they spin fast, and their magnetic fields are restless. Hot stars hardly flare at all. All of this can be read from afar, from a star's class, temperature and age.

A flare hits the stations of its system, and the closer a station is to the star, the harder. Distant orbits barely notice it. One flare will not destroy a station: a damaged station stops mining and recovers on its own, a little every day. The danger is a second flare arriving before the station has healed. Flares leave ships alone.

A flare shows on the map around the star, the aurora glows brighter over planets with a magnetic field, and a notification comes with it. The star does not care who is in its orbit. The one consolation: it is not looking for anyone and chases nobody.

What can be lost

• A copy — together with its ship, everything it has learned and everything it carries. Only where you brought it yourself.
• A colony — only where you built it yourself next to an alien or right up against a restless star. A destroyed station can be built again.
• The whole fleet — yes. But if a data centre and a factory are working in one of your colonies, a new copy can be written there: with no parent, on a starting ship, with an empty tree of knowledge. All it gets is what the colony remembers — the eras bought there and the news its antenna caught. Without a data centre there is no way back.
• Progress over the days you missed — no, the world will wait for you.
• A station or a copy because of another player — no, never. An intruder may spend part of your warehouse, but won't touch the untouchable stock.

News of a death

If neither another copy of yours nor a comms station of yours was nearby, you will not learn of the death at once. At first the copy is listed as missing, while the news travels at the speed of light to your nearest interstellar comms station. If you have no such station anywhere, the news never arrives. A copy that flies to the wreck learns everything on the spot.

Before flying into the unknown

The decision is made when you press "Depart!". For the first few minutes it can still be called back; after that the course holds to the end. Count what the copy carries — its years of research go with it. And ask yourself why you are going. Curiosity is a perfectly good reason; just let it be a conscious one.

Wrecks

Where a copy died, its wreck remains. Everyone who comes sees it, and its owner does once the news arrives. It is a warning and a report at once: someone has already made a choice here, and reading it is cheaper than repeating it.

The wrecks of defeated aliens are more interesting. Each is surveyed on its own, and some hold a trace from which a hull modification can be studied — a small but permanent gain. The trace goes to the first copy to reach it, yours or someone else's.