Patch Notes

Tell us what's broken (or what you wish was there)

• Report Issue button in the top bar. The small triangle/exclamation icon next to Logout opens a Subject + Description form. Send it, the team gets it. We may reply via the email on your account.
• Don't put passwords or payment details in the body. A reminder appears inside the modal. The body field caps at 5,000 characters with a live counter.
• What we capture along with what you wrote: your account, in-game username, which galaxy you were in, and your browser user-agent string — strictly for triaging. No game state, no chat, no credentials.

Solar System view toggle on the System Panel

• New planet-ring icon button in the System Panel header. Sits next to Set Destination — one click toggles the in-system 3D Solar System view on or off without leaving the panel.
• Stays in sync. The button glows cyan whenever the Solar System view is open, including when you opened it via the map or closed it via Esc.
• Desktop only. Hidden on phone-sized viewports — the 3D view needs a real screen.

Pick how a contract pays out

• Boon picker at accept time. Every contract now asks you to choose one of four reward shapes when you take it on: Standard (40% RP + all items + a sliver of standing), Loot Run (all items, no RP, no standing), Mercenary (all RP, no items, no standing), Diplomat (no RP, no items, 110% of normal standing). Same mission, four reasons to take it — gear hunters skip the cash, cashflow players skip the loot, faction grinders skip everything else for the bar push.
• Mission XP is always paid. Whichever boon you pick, finishing the contract still earns the same rank-based XP. The boon shapes the loot, not the personal progression.

Faction-flavoured loot pools

• Every faction now drops their own kit. HCG contracts pay in weapons and interdictors. Derulon Trade Alliance pays in hyperdrives. Church of the Vatari pays in armour. Sharne High Council pays in hyperdrives and command kit. GTA in drives and utility. The Lost in scavenger drives and utility. Crown of Caradon in command and boarding. Working for a faction now builds a flavoured arsenal — switch your contract source and your loadout slowly shifts with it.
• Items now scale with mission rank. Rank-1 contracts roll on Common/Rare. Rank-2 on Rare/Very Rare with a small Common floor. Rank-3 climbs into Very Rare and Exotic territory. Story chapters keep their existing Exotic-at-milestone ladder.
• No more duplicate-spam. The specific item you get is picked at payout time, weighted heavily against copies you already own. The same contract delivered to two different captains gives two different items. Stockpiles of the same Hydra Missile Pod are over.
• Item quantities scale 1–10. Replacing the old fixed “0–2 items” roll. Hard rank-3 contracts can pay out a full bag.

Mission shape and pay

• Difficulty ladder, baked into the RP table. Hardest to easiest: Protect > Destroy > Locate > Survey > Deploy. Rank-1 contracts pay 1k–4k, rank-2 3k–7.5k, rank-3 5.5k–14k base RP. Deploy spikes at rank 3 because it goes multi-system.
• Multi-objective contracts at higher ranks. Rank-2 destroys and protects can have 1–2 objectives. Rank-3 deploys, destroys and protects can have 2–3 — e.g. “Deploy 3 Heavy Cruisers across 3 different systems.” Locate and Survey stay single-objective by design.

Story chapter payouts caught up

• Season 1 chapters rescaled. The 20-chapter Season 1 arc used to pay 100–2,500 RP per chapter — less than a random rank-2 generic contract. Now it pays 4k–23k along a clean ramp, with Exotic milestone chapters (5, 10, 15) spiking ~50% higher.
• The finale earns the word. The closing three chapters now pay 100,000 / 140,000 / 185,000 RP. Crown Above Caradon is the biggest single payout in the game.

Board polish

• Reward row pinned to the bottom of each card. Cards in the mission grid now line up cleanly — the RP & loot summary sits at the foot of every card regardless of how long the description ran.

If you get hit, we tell you

• Email alerts on combat and incoming fleets are now universal. They used to be a Private-and-above feature; Cadets relied on Discord alone. Reversed — every account, every plan, gets the same notification feed. A Cadet who gets attacked and never finds out can’t even decide whether to upgrade.
• Discord delivery was already universal for everyone with a webhook set, and nothing changes there. The email channel now matches it.
• Daily reports already worked across all plans — this brings the real-time alerts in line.

Bigger payouts, bigger investments

• Trade ratios reshaped. Every trade ship used to carry the same flat trade ratio of 1. Now there are three tiers: a base of 1.5 for most freighters, a 3.0 tier for the heavy haulers (build cost over 2,000 RP), and a small lower tier for Derulon entry traders (Trade Capsule at 1.0, Skorcha Trader at 1.2). The Kur-Baal Freighter is a deliberate race-flavour outlier — despite costing only 1,200 RP it pays at the 3.0 heavy-hauler rate, because Derulons are a merchant culture and their mid-tier freighter is worth as much as another race’s heavy.
• Build costs doubled where the ratio rose. Every trade ship whose ratio is now above 1.0 had its build cost doubled, so the up-front RP investment matches the new payout curve. The Trade Capsule (still 1.0) keeps its original 150 RP price — it’s still the entry-level starter trader.
• Human freighters consistent with the rest of the fleet. Falcon and Michigan used to have a trade ratio but were quietly flagged as not commodity traders, while every other race’s freighters had both flags set. That mismatch is fixed — Human trade ships now behave identically to every other race’s in commodity-trade logic.

The pathfinder no longer leaves the journal lying around

• Autopilot now lands where you sent it. The course plotter used to occasionally hand the autopilot a route that didn’t actually finish at the destination — or whose middle legs weren’t in jump range from each other — so a ship would set off across the galaxy and then halt at an intermediate system. The pathfinder was leaking dead-end attempts into its result while it was still searching for the real route.
• Same algorithm, fixed plumbing. Greedy best-first with backtracking is still how the plotter chooses each hop; it just no longer commits forward steps to the output until the full path is found and ends at the destination you asked for. Dead-ends are also now remembered properly, so the plotter doesn’t pick the same bad branch twice in a row.
• If no route exists, you get a clean error. Worst case, the plotter now returns a clean “No route to destination within current range” instead of a stub course that strands the fleet halfway.

The dead zones are closed

• Galaxy generation now guarantees full connectivity. The random scatter in galaxy generation used to do two bad things: drop the occasional single star into a 60+ LY dead zone, and (rarer but worse) leave whole clusters of stars sitting hundreds of LY out from the main galaxy. A starter Crusader, Drone or Nester couldn’t reach either kind. Two new generation post-passes close both gaps:
• 1. Tighten outliers. Any single star whose nearest neighbour is more than 39 LY away is snapped along the line toward that neighbour to land at exactly 35 LY. Run until no isolated stars remain.
• 2. Bridge disconnected clusters. Any cluster of stars not reachable from the main galaxy by 39 LY hops is translated as a rigid body toward its nearest main-galaxy partner, so the closest cross-cluster gap closes to 35 LY. The cluster keeps its internal shape — the 9 stars stay 9 stars in the same arrangement, just docked onto the map. Run until the whole galaxy is one connected component.
• Threshold: 39 LY. Comfortably inside the 60 LY minimum jump range every starter ship now has (since the starter-range bump on 22 May). Outliers snap to 35 LY, leaving headroom.
• Existing galaxies have been retroactively fixed. Both passes ran once on every live galaxy as part of the update, and the precomputed adjacency cache that drives the autopilot was rebuilt afterward so the nav system sees the new coordinates immediately. Map shape and named systems are preserved, in-flight courses self-recompute, surveys survive untouched. If a star you remember being on the far edge has slid inland, that’s why.
• Idempotent and safe. A galaxy where every star is already reachable is a no-op for both passes.

One click. The whole fleet on the way.

• The Preacher is no longer just another mid-cruiser. Pick a Preacher in the system view and click Call the Faithful. Every active ship you own across the galaxy plots a multi-hop autopilot course to that Preacher’s system — one click instead of dozens. The faithful answer the bell.
• Real hyperspace travel, not teleport. Ships obey the usual jump-range, jump-speed and routing rules; the Rally just queues the courses for you. A ship eight hops away takes eight hops to arrive. Existing hyperspace courses, trade runs and auto-explore orders are replaced by the new rally course.
• What doesn’t answer. Structures (immobile), ships docked inside carriers (their carrier rallies for them), ships you’ve loaned to other players, ships in the middle of an active jump, and story-locked mission ships. Everything else heads for the rally point.
• Costs and cooldown. 500 RP per rally. 24 game-hours of cooldown on the Preacher who sounded the call. Run multiple Preachers in your empire to stagger the bells.
• A generic capability under the hood. Rally is a unit-type flag, with a per-type label override. The Preacher invokes it as Call the Faithful; future race ships that adopt the capability can be labelled differently (a Knosson herald-ship could ring it as Summon the Fleet, a Sharne war-drum as Sound the War-Drum) without any further code changes. Same mechanic, race-flavoured name.

The Hallowed answer

• Holy Shrines now do something. Click a Holy Shrine in the system view and choose Blessings. Three blessings are available; each one costs 1,000 RP and locks that shrine for seven days. Build more shrines, get more blessings.
• Litany of Mending. The Hallowed sing the long prayer over your wrights and menials for a day and a night. At each of four bells — six hours apart over a 24-hour window — the litany crescendos and every hull in the system is mended a little further (+1 HP per bell, up to its maximum). The work the engineers do under the chant stays done.
• Dig Deeper. The slaves dig deeper, and find new veins. Some prayers are heard more clearly than others — a random 10,000 to 60,000 RP is added to that system’s reservoir for your refineries to mine out. Permanent — what is uncovered is yours. Pour it into your richest mining system or breathe new life into one that’s nearly tapped.
• Crusader’s Anointing. Every friendly ship in the system gains +2 veteran ranks (capped at rank 5). Crews remember the blessing in every fight thereafter. Permanent — bringing two systems’ worth of ships up to full rank can take weeks of combat XP. A blessing does it in one click.
• News and treasury. Every blessing is announced in your empire’s news feed and deducted from your RP balance. Cooldown shows inside the modal so you always know which shrines are ready and which are still recovering.

A guided start for new commanders

• New players can opt into a step-by-step tutorial. A small card in the corner of the screen walks you through the early game one move at a time — reading your resources and the galactic clock, finding your way around the map and the system panel, transforming your first Deliverer into a Colony, building your first Refineries, sending your other colonizers out to claim more systems, the top bar (Nation, News), and Maintenance Points. It is the fastest way to learn how a galactic empire actually runs.
• Opt in on the race-select screen. When you set up in a new galaxy there is a single Play the New Player Tutorial toggle. Tick it and the tutorial runs; ticking it locks your race to Humans for that galaxy, since the walkthrough is written around the Human starter fleet. Leave it off to drop straight into free play.
• Skippable at any point. Change your mind mid-tutorial and you can dismiss it — it never blocks you from playing the game your own way.

Hold systems, earn XP

• Every system you own now pays XP on each resource tick. 200 XP per system, awarded alongside your RP. A faster-ticking galaxy therefore ranks you up faster — the rate is per tick, never averaged out — so the pace of the game and the pace of progression move together.
• Your Empire Tier caps how many systems count. Tier 1 covers 5 systems, Tier 2 covers 10, on up to 25 at Tier 5. Hold more than your Tier allows and the extra systems pay nothing — until you advance a Tier. Advancing needs both the territory and the rank, and rank comes from XP, so the whole thing is one connected ladder rather than a runaway snowball.
• Over-expand and your empire turns Unstable. Claim past the system ceiling of the Tier you actually hold and you tip into instability — exposed to crisis events — until you either shed systems or rank up into the Tier that supports them. Previously this only triggered at the very top (25 systems); now it is enforced at every Tier's ceiling.
• Every commander starts on Tier 1. A brand-new player is a Consortium of Worlds (or their race's equivalent) from their first login and earns ownership XP for their first five systems straight away.

Each race shows its own tier ladder

• The Nation page now lists your own race's Empire Tier ladder. It used to show the Human titles for everyone — a Vatari Cult commander correctly saw "Coven" as their current title, but the ladder beneath it still read Consortium of Worlds → Imperium. Every race now shows its true progression: Coven → Crusade → Inquisition → Theocracy → Hallowed Sacrament for the Vatari Cult, and the right ladder for Knossons, Sharne, Derulons and Feon-Tar.

Feon-Tar — fleet, not territory

• The Feon-Tar progress on total fleet value. They hold no systems by design, so their Tier — and their passive XP — are keyed to the combined build cost of their active fleet instead of system count. Tier names run Starwake → Void March → Host → Exodus → Nomadic Imperium, and the per-Tier XP payout matches the territory races' so no race is left behind.

Notifications & Alerts

• A new Notifications & Alerts panel on the Nation page, set per galaxy. Switch it off and that galaxy goes silent — no emails of any kind. Switch it on (the default) and you get combat and incoming-fleet alerts plus a daily report.
• A daily empire report — a commander's dossier — drops into your inbox at a clock time you choose, in your own timezone. It's a sectioned briefing: Standing (your Tier, rank, and exactly how much XP to the next rank), Standing Orders (your next objective), then Territory & Treasury, fleet composition, what was built that day, and who you fought. It reads like a status report landing on a ruler's desk — and an Unstable empire is flagged at the top in red.

Discord

• Get your alerts in Discord. Create a channel only you can see — your own private server takes ten seconds — add a webhook to it, and paste the webhook URL into the Notifications panel. Combat alerts, fleet warnings and the daily report then arrive as Discord cards. Email and Discord are independent: run either, both, or neither.

Email alerts now actually arrive

• Combat and fleet-arrival emails were silently failing. Three separate faults in the alert path meant a galaxy never managed to send a single game email — the recipient was never resolved, a permission check looked for a setting that did not exist, and the combat scan queried a column by the wrong name. All three are fixed; game-event emails send.
• The dark email theme is readable everywhere. Some mail apps — Apple Mail on iOS especially — were dropping the dark background or auto-converting the colours, leaving light text on white. The emails now declare themselves as a dark theme and carry their backgrounds in a form every client honours, so they render dark and legible as designed.

• Joining a galaxy works on the first attempt. A timing race during login could leave the first join stuck or bounced back to the connect screen, needing a second try. Sorted — the handshake now completes cleanly the first time.
• Jump from the 3D Star Systems view returns you to the map. Starting a jump (or plotting a course) while inside the 3D system view used to close the panel but leave the 3D scene up, with no star to click. It now drops you back to the galaxy map in targeting mode, ready to pick a destination.
• A cleaner launch-screen colour picker. The race-setup colour grid had thirty-odd swatches with many near-duplicates. It is now a tidy set of eight hues — purple, pink, blue, cyan, green, red, orange, yellow — in two bright tones each, laid out eight on top of eight.
• Live chat polish. The unread indicator on the chat button is now a clear dot that no longer hides in the button's corner, and it stops reappearing after a refresh when there is nothing new to read. Hiding the chat is still remembered between sessions.
• Starter ships reach further. Every race's starting ship now has a jump range of at least 60 LY. The Nester, Settlement Drone and Crusader were stuck at 40–45 and left new Derulon, Sharne and Vatari Cult commanders without the reach to spread out and claim systems.

Trade with yourself

• You can now set up a trade route between two of your own trade stations. Open Trade Agreement on a station and "Yourself" appears in the partner picker — choose it, then pick another of your stations as the far end. The trade ship shuttles between them and both drops are credited to you, so a self-route pays you at each end. (You'll need at least two trade stations built for the option to appear.)

Allied routes pay double

• A trade route between two mutually-allied players now pays 2× on every drop. On an ally route you collect the drop in your system and your ally collects theirs in theirs — and each of those is doubled. The route delivers twice the RP overall versus running it solo, so there's a real, shared reward for setting up trade with an ally rather than only with yourself. Self-routes and non-ally standings are unaffected.

Faction NPCs at rank 100

• HCG, GTA, Church, The Lost, Sharne High Council, Trade Alliance, House Veliro are now seeded at rank 100 in every galaxy. They were sitting at rank 1 like a freshly-incorporated player, which let small empires read the world incorrectly — a faction is an established power, not a rookie. The rule is enforced by a trigger on the player table so it survives future seed-code changes and applies automatically to new galaxies.

Destroy missions — spawn the actual class the mission asks for

• "Destroy 3 × Medium Cruiser belonging to Trade Alliance in Xi Gate" had no ships to fight. The mission generator was correctly recording the target ship class on the objective, but the spawner only looked at the unit-type id (which is left blank for class-based objectives) and fell back to "the most common ship the faction already owns" — usually a Trade Ship, not a Medium Cruiser. Two failure modes followed: either the wrong class spawned (and killing them didn't tick the objective, because the engine matches on class), or nothing spawned at all (if the faction had no fleet at the moment of accept). Both cases left the player walking into an empty system.
• The spawner now respects the requested combat class. When the mission says "Medium Cruiser," the spawner now picks a Medium Cruiser the faction already owns; if they have none, it spawns a Medium Cruiser of the faction's own race (Kain Class Cruiser for the Derulons, etc.). Only when the mission has no class restriction does it fall back to the old "any hull" logic. Existing in-flight destroy missions on every running galaxy had their fleets topped up by the migration, so the broken ones are completable as of this patch.

Star Systems View — a new zoom tier

• Press + once more past system focus. Once you've zoomed into a system on the galaxy map and the System Panel is open, one more + cross-fades the 2D map out and drops you into a 3D scene of that system. Press − or Esc to come back out. Next / Previous on the System Panel swap the 3D scene to the next system without dropping back to the map.
• The star and planets are real. Every system has a generated set of 1–12 planets sitting on visible orbit rings, plus its star at the centre. There are 14 star types (red / orange / yellow / white / blue dwarfs through supergiants, plus brown dwarfs, neutron stars and pulsars) and 31 planet types — terran, lush, ocean, desert, ice, lava, gas giants, ringed giants, asteroid belts and more — each with their own colour and (eventually) texture. The data is generated once at galaxy creation and is the same for every player; planets drift slowly along their orbits in real time, inner planets faster than outer ones.
• Units are visible too. Your ships and everyone else's drift around the star as small coloured circles (your faction colour for yours, the other player's flag colour for theirs). Each carries a 3-letter type tag underneath — HER for Hercules, MAG for Magnus Corvette, VYP for Vyper Interceptor, and so on; the catalog now has a real 3-letter label for every unit type instead of placeholders. About 80% of ships ride the trade plane just above/below the ecliptic; the rest roam off-plane. Structures sit pinned to a planet's surface.
• Click a unit, read its health. Click any ship or structure and a small green / red HP bar appears under its label — green for hits left, red for damage taken. Click empty space to clear. No popover, no zooming around: the click is just "tell me about this".
• Drag the mouse to orbit the system. Default cursor is a pointer hand. Hold the mouse button and drag: the cursor goes to grab and the camera rotates freely around the star. Release and the cursor returns to pointer. Mouse wheel zooms in / out within sensible bounds; the orbit is pan-locked so the star stays centred.

Live combat, lasers, explosions, fly-ins

• Combat is rendered. While in 3D, every couple of seconds the client pulls the system's recent combat log and draws lasers between attackers and defenders for real hits (thick red beams) and tracers for shots that missed (thin orange streaks toward a random enemy). A tick's worth of fire is smeared across the next ~2 seconds so a big battle reads as a continuous exchange rather than a strobe.
• Destroyed ships explode and vanish. When a combat event flags a ship as destroyed (or the next polled unit list shows it gone), an orange explosion sprite blooms at its last position and the blip disappears. Mass-casualty events stagger the explosions across ~1.2 seconds so they look organic, not synchronised.
• Reinforcements fly in. Any new ship that appears in the system between polls jump-arrives along a fixed entry trajectory and eases into place. Squadrons / wings / flotillas owned by a player with a Carrier-class ship in the system instead spawn from the carrier's position and fly outward into the cloud.
• View a single ship up close. The popover on a ship has a VIEW button that flies the camera in and locks onto that ship. While locked, you can mouse-orbit around it (placeholder cube for now — proper 3D models come later); the ship rotates slowly and fires a short cyan pulse from its nose every second or so. Press the × in the top-right or hit Esc to come back to the system overview.

Combat tick deadlock — fixed

• Game clock could get stuck during ship-capture combat. When two players with capture-capable hulls (Hercules-class frigates, for example) fought each other, the combat resolver tried to write a "claimed" outcome to the combat log. A check constraint didn't allow that value, so the entire combat tick rolled back on every attempt and the in-game time froze until the players left the system. The constraint is now widened to permit "claimed", and combat proceeds normally including boarding captures.

Maintenance damage — annoyance, not attrition

• Sprawl alone no longer damages ships. The old daily Unstable roll could destroy or damage ships purely because you owned more than twenty-five systems, even when your MP pool was perfectly in budget. That's gone. The Unstable flag still exists and the daily report still posts, but it never touches a single ship now — it just tells you what the empire looks like. Ship damage is gated entirely on actual MP overdraft.
• Damage, not destruction. When you are over your MP pool, affected ships take 1 HP per incident (2 HP when you're more than 200% over). A ship already at 1 HP can still die from a hit, but that's incidental — the goal is wear and tear, not attrition. The old "delete random ship outright" path is retired.
• Worst MP-cost ships get hit first. Maintenance failures target the highest-MP-use ships in your fleet first, ties broken randomly. The expensive hulls show the strain first.
• How many ships per incident. Roughly 1/4 of your active MP-using ships at the base rate, scaling smoothly with how far over your pool you are. 100% over the pool hits about half your fleet per incident; 300%+ over hits the whole fleet at the harder 2 HP rate.
• Random "time of day" scheduling. Maintenance breakdowns no longer all land at midnight. The moment you slide into overdraft, the game picks a random tick in the next ~24 game-hours to fire your incident, then reschedules ~1 game-day later with a few hours of jitter. Bad news now arrives whenever — the empire feels like it lives somewhere other than on a 00:00 cron.
• Crises are unchanged but never touch ships. System Crisis events keep doing what they did to structures, build queues, and morale; they were never actually damaging ships and they still don't.

Build queue — no more "ghost wipe"

• Build commits always. Previously, clicking Build when you couldn't afford the item silently refused and the queue row never appeared. Players read this as the queue wiping itself. The action now always commits the row, and the tick driver starts the head item the moment you can afford it — same "stalled" state that already existed for items behind the front of the queue, just consistently applied. You can queue twenty Hercules at zero RP; they roll into production one by one as RP comes in.
• Queue is only mutated by you, build completion, or a crisis. Running out of RP no longer touches the queue at all. The only mutators are now: you adding via Build, you removing via Cancel, the build completing (row reaped at spawn), the builder being destroyed (cleanup reaps the row), the builder being decommissioned, or a crisis at a damaged system (which already cancels + refunds).

Vatari Cult

• Start with 2 Crusaders. Was 1. Brings the Cult's opening posture in line with the design doc.
• Missionary Colony & Cult Temple correctly classed as Structures. They were sitting in the Ships section of the System Panel by mistake. Now in Structures where they belong.

Galaxy creation

• Starting RP setting actually applies. Operators picking 3,000 / 6,000 / 12,000 starting RP on galaxy creation: that figure was being stored but ignored by player setup — every new player spawned with 6,000 regardless of the choice. The setup function now reads the configured value with a 6,000 fallback for legacy galaxies.
• New galaxy sizes. 1,000-, 3,000-, and 5,000-star options added to the System Count dropdown alongside the existing 100 / 200 / 400 / 600. Backend validation widened to match.
• "Realtime 60s" tick option. Joins the existing Fast 2s / Normal 5s / Slow 30s in the Tick Speed dropdown. Same wall-clock cadence as default production galaxies.
• Starting Units removed from the form. No longer configurable; new galaxies use the standard race starter loadout. Strips an option that was never meaningfully different across choices.
• Rename Server. New action on the Admiral galaxy detail page alongside Pause, Broadcast, and Delete. Two to sixty-four characters; takes effect immediately, no restart required.

Comms — read / unread on reports

• Badge clears when you open the Reports tab. The red dot on Comms was sometimes lit with no visible message — that's because reports (Daily Maintenance, MP Overdraft, Crisis, Intel) count toward unread but live in a different tab from Direct Messages. Opening Reports now bulk-marks the listed reports as read so the badge clears immediately.
• Per-row unread visual persists for that view. The reports you hadn't seen render with the unread indicator on the current view, so you can tell what's new. Next visit they show as read.

News template fix

• "Unstable Unstable Worldfleet" no longer happens. Two layers were both prefixing "Unstable " to the empire title — the title-formatter and the news-formatter, neither aware of the other. The news formatter now strips a leading "Unstable " from its input before deciding whether to re-prefix based on the unstable flag. Idempotent in both directions: it works regardless of which layer's prefix landed first.

Ship Market — new feature

• New top-bar Ship Market panel. Browse every active ship-for-sale listing across the galaxy from one place. 50 cards per page, paginated, sorted newest-first. Each card shows the actual ship (with its name, rank, XP, equipped upgrades), an HP bar, the seller, the maintenance cost, and a green price. Buy buttons grey out when you can't afford the ship.
• List a ship from any broker station. Walk a ship into a broker's system, hit Sell Ships on the broker, pick the ship and set a price. After listing the ship is free to move anywhere — the listing follows it. Unlist whenever you want, from anywhere; no return-to-broker requirement.
• Buy from anywhere. Purchase fires regardless of where you (or the ship) are right now. The ship's experience, rank, custom name, current damage, equipped items, and even mid-hyperspace state all transfer with it. If a Falcon you bought is two-thirds through a hyperspace leg at the moment of sale, it lands at the original destination — under your flag.
• Reciept on both sides. Seller and buyer each get a news entry with the ship details and price. Sales of 150,000 RP or more get a galaxy-wide "Major sale" headline that everyone can see.
• Brokers take no commission. The seller pockets the full sale price. Brokers in Epoch 2 are listing services, not retailers — they exist to host the market, not to skim it.
• Enemy and race lockouts. Listings authored by your enemies (or whose authors mark you as enemy) are hidden from your view and blocked at the purchase action — no API hack around the UI. Race-locked unit types (the same race only share profile, e.g. some Misc-class hulls) are hidden from buyers of the wrong race.
• Loaned ships can't be listed. If a ship was loaned to you, it stays with the original owner's flag at the asset level — you can fly it but you can't sell it out from under them.

Stations: trading posts vs ship brokers

• Two roles, two UIs. Trading Posts (Trading Post / Cerberus Trading Station / Trading Spaceport) are trade-route endpoints — they host Trade Agreements and the cooperative trade-ship loop. Broker stations (Ship Broker Station / Broker Facility / Starship Dealer Spaceport / Bartornaw Ship) are ship-market endpoints — they host listings. The two are now properly separated; a Trading Post no longer shows a Sell Ships button, and a Broker Station doesn't show Trade Agreement buttons.
• Independent positive flags, not exclusive. The split is driven by two existing unit-type columns acting independently: fld_is_trade_station identifies trade-route endpoints, and the combination of fld_market_commission > 0 + fld_berth_size > 100 identifies real ship-bay brokers. A future "mega-station" that legitimately did both would light up both UIs.
• Sell from the broker. Click Sell Ships on a broker, pick a ship from your eligible roster in that system (icon, name, class), continue to the price screen, confirm. Already-listed ships and out-of-system ships are filtered from the picker.

Decommission & maintenance

• Command units can now be decommissioned. The block on retiring an Aurora / Hercules Command Frigate is lifted. The combat-block (you can't decommission anything while a system is under attack) stays in place as the meaningful safety net.
• NPC empires are exempt from MP churn. Maintenance Point overdrafts, the daily wear-and-tear from being Unstable, and the daily crisis dispatcher all now skip NPC players. NPCs don't run economies, so destroying their ships or rolling crises against them produced churn without any narrative payoff. The relevant tick phases — mp_destruction, recompute_unstable, unstable_maintenance, crisis_roll — were all patched in one go.
• Capability-flag resync. A small backfill brought every active unit's per-instance capability flags (interdict, cloak, command, multi-target etc.) into alignment with its type's authoritative value. Fixed cases like a Judicator Class Interdictor having its Interdict button greyed out despite the type clearly being an interdictor — the per-instance flag had drifted because hand-seeded units skipped the canonical insert helper.

UX polish

• Ship and broker pickers throughout the trade and market flows are now click-the-whole-row instead of click-a-radio-dot, with a cyan-tinted highlight on the selected row. Same UX across the Hyperspace Jump, Trade Run, List for Sale, and Sell Ships modals.
• Broker rows in the listing picker now show the broker's unit icon, not a generic tile.
• The Market overlay header shows your RP balance and your MP free / pool at all times so you can browse with both budgets in mind. Per-card MP cost flips red when the purchase would push you into MP overdraft.
• Trade Agreement modals fixed: the "Set Up Agreement" button no longer stays greyed out after you pick a station, and re-creating an agreement on a route you previously cancelled now works cleanly (the partial-unique-index change).

Trading — new feature

• Set up a trade agreement at any of your trade stations. Trading Posts, Cerberus Trading Stations and Trading Spaceports now show a Trade Agreement action. Pick a partner from any ally-or-neutral player who also owns a trade station, then pick one of their stations as the destination. The picker shows the actual station icon, direct LY distance, and an estimated jump count at 40 LY range so you can compare routes at a glance.
• Assign trade ships to a route. Every Trade Ship class (Falcon, Michigan, Vernaylon, Keshana, Charon, Skorcha, and the rest — twelve playable hulls in total) now shows a Trade action. Pick an agreement and the ship auto-plots a course to source, then to destination, then back, forever. No further input needed — it just runs the loop.
• Cooperative RP gain. Each hyperspace jump earns the ship light-years × the unit type's trade ratio (1.0 by default). When the ship arrives at either end of the route, the owner of that station is paid the carrier amount in full — not the ship's owner. Your trade ship literally earns RP for your partner half the time, and theirs earns for you. It's a genuinely two-sided alliance mechanic.
• Jump-gate hops earn nothing. Routing through a gate skips the light-years between two endpoints, so the gated hop contributes 0 RP. The surrounding hyperspace hops still pay normally. Honest slow travel is the productive activity; gates are still useful but they don't fast-track trade income.
• Live readout on every station. The Agreements button on each of your stations opens a portfolio view — every agreement you own, its partner, ship count, direct LY, lifetime RP delivered to you and lifetime RP delivered to the partner, plus a live In flight row when a ship is mid-route with a carrier balance.
• Voluntary teardown forfeits the carrier; involuntary breaks don't. Cancel an agreement or end a single ship's run yourself and the ship loses whatever RP it was carrying — that closes the "bank and reassign" exploit. If the agreement is broken from the outside (partner declared enemy, station destroyed), the carrier is preserved on the ship and pays out on its next completed run under a future agreement.
• Strategic risk. Trade ships are slow, lightly armed, and traceable on the map. Interdiction pauses a run; combat destruction loses the carrier with the ship. Long routes pay more but cross more territory.

UI polish

• Previous-system icon on the System Panel, to the left of the existing next-system chevrons. Cycle backwards through systems you have units in — same wraparound as Next.
• Focus-on-system icon removed from the System Panel header — the click-to-recenter affordance was redundant with click-on-system on the galaxy map.
• Transit hex ship list redesigned. Clicking an in-flight hex now shows each ship as icon plus three stacked rows — name, ETA, and (when on multi-hop autopilot) the purple Course: destination line. No more cramped one-liners with overflowing text. The course line is omitted entirely when a ship is on its final approach leg, and the Cancel Course button is hidden in that case rather than greyed out.
• Course lines on the map no longer brighten when stacked. Ten freighters running the same route used to draw ten overlapping dashed lines, burning the path to white. Edges are now deduplicated — each segment paints once at its brightest course's alpha, regardless of how many ships share it.
• Trade and agreement modals match the Jump modal sizing. The earlier draft used a smaller compact font; everything is now wrapped in the same roomy-modal type scale as Jump, Dock, and Loan.
• Course-preview disclaimer on the new-agreement modal: "Estimated jumps based on a 40 LY range. Total LY is the crow-flies distance — actual hyperspace miles travelled may be higher. Trade ships pay the station owner on arrival; jump-gate hops earn 0 RP."
• Nation page no longer scroll-jerks on desktop. The faint blueprint grid behind the dossier was being painted across the entire page height with a soft radial mask — every scroll frame triggered an offscreen mask recomposite. The grid is now viewport-anchored (painted once, GPU-composited) and the dossier subtree localises its repaints with contain: layout paint. Drag the scrollbar and it tracks smoothly now.

Critical bug fixes

• System Panel internal error — a stray pair of double quotes inside a SQL comment was closing a PHP string mid-query, breaking the system_units endpoint and triggering an internal error every time the panel opened. Quotes removed; panel loads again.
• Set Up Agreement button no longer stuck greyed out. The agreement-create modal was looking for the confirm button by the wrong selector, so clicking a station never re-enabled the action. Fixed to use the correct id, and the same fix was applied to the Assign Trade Run modal.
• Trade payouts on multi-hop routes. Trade ships on long routes (multiple hops within their jump range) accumulated zero RP. The tick phase order had trade running after the autopilot relaunch, so by the time trade looked at the ship it was already mid-jump again and the intermediate landing was invisible. Reordered to run trade between hyperspace arrivals and autopilot, so the per-jump accumulator sees every landing. Routes like Iota Hub → Imperius Near (488 LY, ~12 hops) now bank RP on every leg.

Course Plotting & Autopilot — new feature

• Set any system as your destination. Open the system panel, click the new ⊚ Set Destination button in the header. Your target is remembered until you pick a new one.
• Auto-route from the jump screen. When you trigger a Jump with a destination set, the map highlights your target with a pulsing purple bracket. If it's out of single-jump range, a purple line draws from your source to the first waypoint inside your range circle, with a clickable ring labelled Auto-Pilot to <destination>.
• Engage autopilot in one click. Pick either the first waypoint or the final destination from the jump screen. The confirmation modal tells you you're starting an autopilot — ships jump leg-by-leg until they arrive.
• Live route on the galaxy map. Ships on autopilot trail a dashed purple line through their remaining legs, drawn in the same style as the green hyperspace transit lines you already know. Other players can't see your plotted course.
• Cancel any time. Click your in-flight transit on the map, then Cancel Course. The current leg completes; the ship lands at its next waypoint and stops — no further auto-jumps.
• Group autopilot. Multi-ship selections plot one shared route, using the slowest ship's speed and shortest ship's range for every leg — same fleet-physics as a manual group jump.
• Pre-computed nav data under the hood (a faithful port of the Epoch 1 model) — multi-hop routes resolve instantly, the tick loop never recomputes distances.

Critical bug fixes

• Mission board fixed. The Missions endpoint had been returning Server Error for every player on every galaxy since the previous deploy — a stray quote character in a database comment broke the file load entirely. Live again everywhere, no data loss.
• Hamburger menu now works on Patch Notes, Lore, every per-race page, and the legal pages. The button was rendering but the click handler wasn't loaded on those pages. Mobile users can navigate around the site again.
• iPad command-strip swipe. The top bar on iPad now lets you drag left and right to reach buttons that fall off the right edge — same affordance that phones have had for a while. iPad-sized viewports were previously treated as desktop and missed the scroll fallback.
• Mobile / iPad Play button no longer hangs on a blank tab. On touch devices, the dashboard now uses same-tab navigation to launch into a galaxy. Earlier attempts at the placeholder-window trick failed because mobile browsers background the dashboard tab the moment a new tab opens, throttling the join-token request indefinitely.

UI polish

• System Panel header buttons (Designate Capital, Set Destination, Next System, Focus, Close) are now proper SVG icons that inherit the race-theme colour instead of unicode glyphs that rendered grey on some browsers.
• Cancel Course confirmation uses the in-game themed modal instead of the browser's native confirm dialog — same chrome and feel as the rest of the game's prompts.
• Equip / Unequip errors now show as in-game toast notifications instead of the browser's native alert dialog.

Critical bug fixes

• iPad Play button now actually launches the game. iPadOS and iOS Safari were silently blocking the new game tab because the join token request happens asynchronously — the popup blocker treats anything after the wait as "not from a user click". The dashboard now opens the new tab synchronously the moment you tap and navigates it once the token is ready. Same fix benefits Android Chrome's strict pop-up mode.
• Mission "Report Complete" stuck-state fixed. Faction-board missions like Standing Picket and Flag the System were silently slipping past their internal deadline and refusing to close — the modal would read "9 / 3 Special Cruiser" with the objective clearly met, but Report Complete kept saying Mission Incomplete. The expirer that closes lapsed missions wasn't wired into the new per-acceptance deadline column. It is now, and stuck missions resolve correctly.

Missions

• Deadline policy rewritten. Most NPC missions (destroy, deploy, locate, survey) now ship without a deadline — the previous "every mission has a 60-minute deadline" generator was the root cause of the stuck-state above. When a deadline is attached, it's drawn from a small, recognisable pool — 12h, 48h, or 72h — so the cadence is learnable. Protect missions always carry one (that's how they work).
• Time Remaining on the board card and briefing modal — counts down live so you can see at a glance when a deadline mission is about to lapse. No deadline shown means no deadline, full stop.
• Existing accepted missions authored under the old "always deadline" rule have been backfilled to no-deadline, except Protect missions and story-pack chapters — those keep whatever bespoke deadline their author set.

Mobile & iPad

• Hamburger menu restored on Patch Notes, Lore, every per-race page, and the legal pages. The button had gone missing on subpages so mobile visitors could navigate into them but not out.
• Pop-up blocker compatibility (see above) means the dashboard Play / Join flow now works the same on phone, tablet, and desktop.

Marketing site

• Race name titles in each per-race hero are now significantly brighter — white text with a race-coloured neon halo, instead of the dim tinted fill that was hard to read against the dark backdrop.
• Feon-Tar background rewritten to match the Epoch 2 canon — natives of the Milky Way's outer rim, lost their fleet capital in the first decade of the Vatari War. The old Epoch 1 framing is gone.

Big new things

• Capital World designation on every system panel — the new crown button. Designate one of your owned systems as your empire's capital. +50% structure bonus, crisis immune, units fight better defending it. One per game.
• House & Nation rename — set or change both from one modal on the Nation page. Each name has its own 24-hour cooldown.
• Twelve-template flag designer with horizontal layouts, lock-in option, and a galaxy-wide news article when you unveil it.
• Twitch-style live chat overlay on the galaxy map — messages linger 45 seconds, panel fades when quiet.
• Ship upgrade slots populated across every race — Light/Medium/Special/Carrier/Bomber/Dropship/Support/Command Cruisers get 2 slots; Heavy and Super Heavy get 3.
• Empire Tier news — when your empire crosses into a new tier, the diplomatic registry files it as soft civic news ("The Nation of Belchlings is now a Sovereignty"). The old per-rank achievement-style article is gone.

Nation page

• Rank panel with XP-to-next-rank progress bar, last-24h breakdown, and 7-day sparkline.
• Empire Tier ladder showing per-race titles (Humans, Knossons, Feon-Tar, Vatari Cult, Sharne, Derulons).
• Military section: flagship card, force-composition bar by RP cost, fleet experience histogram, per-class breakdown table.
• Numeral style toggle — three pills under the rank ring let you pick Digital (terminal LCD), Numerals (Roman), or Old World (Arabic-Indic ٠-٩).
• XP guide modal — click the ? in the rank panel to see exactly how XP is earned and what each source pays.
• Separate RACE + CAPITAL rows in the identity header. Rank and Empire Tier panels now stand equal-height.

Tactical & combat

• Carrier auto-launch is more careful — fighters only scramble when there's a visible enemy in the system that you have declared enemy on. Stale one-sided diplomacy rows and cloaked ships no longer trigger false launches.
• Group jumps now travel together. When you select multiple ships, the slowest ship's speed determines arrival and the shortest ship's range gates the destination. No more fast ships outrunning the squadron.
• Jump-gate group jumps now bypass the range gate when both source and destination have a matching jump gate — same behaviour as single-ship gate jumps. The cross-galaxy reposition you'd expect.
• Misses hidden in combat logs — both Comms → Combat Log and Tactical View's live feed. Data is still recorded; we just don't clutter your screen with every dodge.
• Launch All / Recall All Fighters on every system panel (next to Install Upgrades) and inside Tactical View (under Orders). One click, no modal. Works across every carrier you own in the system.
• Every race's command ship now opens Tactical View. Previously only Humans and Derulons could — the other four races' command vessels missed the flag.
• Crisis Zone marker on the galaxy map for any system you own that's in crisis — pulsing orange ring, kind-specific label (UPRISING, VIRUS OUTBREAK, LOGISTICAL COLLAPSE). Other players can't see your crises.
• Capital ring on the map in your nation colour, visible from medium zoom.

Missions

• Mission Board's top-left filter now reads "Accepted Missions" with race-colour theme.
• Re-accepting after abandoning now works. Previously the button silently did nothing if you'd ever abandoned that mission.
• Deploy and Locate missions now complete properly when you hit the requirements. A timing bug was rejecting completion right after acceptance.
• Faction news v2 with original cover art for each story category and safer fallback when tokens can't resolve.

Tech tree

• Damage stat now shown on every unit card.
• MP cost shown on every unit card.
• Tech tree overlay now correctly sits above the live chat.

Comms

• Messages and Reports tabs now properly separated. Intel / MP overdraft / crisis / maintenance reports live only in the Reports tab. Only real DMs appear in Messages.
• The "Intel Reports" pseudo-contact at the top of the contacts list is gone.

Account / onboarding

• Join-game limits removed. Every plan can join unlimited galaxies. Plans now differentiate on hosting (only Admiral hosts), notifications, and the Season Pass.
• Galaxy delete in the Admiral dashboard now uses an account-password confirm modal instead of the old "type the galaxy name" prompt.

Bug fixes

• Galaxy session isolation — your login no longer bleeds between galaxies when you have two open in the same browser. Each galaxy gets its own scoped session cookie.
• Mass-dock destroyed-unit handling — clean toast ("Cannot complete action — unit has been destroyed") instead of opaque 500.
• Blank RACE field on the Nation page fixed.
• Capital news headlines use neutral civic language ("capital seat") instead of "imperial capital" — fits all six races.
• Empire Tier ladder correctly shows per-race titles instead of defaulting to the Human ladder for everyone.
• Cumulative ATK/DEF removed from Military section — they weren't meaningful at a fleet level.
• Nation page Yield/Day now reflects actual mining output (system reserve depletion, miner presence) instead of the theoretical maximum.

Small things

• Nation moved to the leftmost slot in the top navigation.
• Removed the ⚔ glyph from the Tactical action button for visual consistency with sibling buttons.
• Capital-related news articles ship with original cover art.