Patch Notes

Fly the camera close to a fleet in the Star Systems View and the blips become ships. Until now that was a Human and Knosson privilege — this release brings in the Sharne line, from the smallest gunship to the command ship, plus the first Derulon ship.

Six ships modelled

• Sharne — Dark Omen Class Gunship, Blood Skimmer, Midnight Class Destroyer, Mortis Spyre, and the Carrion Class Command Ship.
• Derulons — the Dak-nuul Class Mothership, the largest ship modelled so far.

Scale you can read at a glance

• Ships are sized against each other, not drawn to fit a box. Every ship is modelled at true relative scale across all four fleets, so a Dark Omen next to a Carrion looks exactly as outmatched as it is.
• Same rules for every galaxy. Models are shared by all galaxies and load instantly — no downloads, no install, nothing to enable.
• Nothing is lost if a ship has no model yet. Unmodelled types keep their blip and behave exactly as before. Selection, targeting, orders and combat are untouched — this is a visual layer only.

New roadmap objective: a 3D model for every ship

• Sixteen of the game's 130 ships are now modelled — 12% of the way across the six playable races.
• Humans lead with six, then Sharne with five, Knossons with four, and the first Derulon.
• Next up: opening the Feon-Tar and Vatari Cult fleets, then working down each race's line. The roadmap tracks the count as it climbs.

Nothing to do — open a system with Sharne ships in it and fly the camera in.

Yesterday's Standing Update gave veterans raids, reputations, and a faction title worth fighting for. Today's release is for the commander who just arrived. Season 0: The Imperial Foundation is a ten-mission story campaign that takes you from your first mine to your own capital ship — and ends by pointing you at everything the galaxy has waiting.

A summons from the Court

• Meet the Liege. Older than any of the six powers, the Imperial Court no longer rules — it recognises. Complete your first commission and the Court reveals itself on your Factions screen, gold seal and all.
• Ten commissions, three acts. Act I founds your industry: mines, a shipyard, your borders, your first warship. Act II takes you into deep space: surveying, an Advanced Shipyard, defensive batteries. Act III makes you a power: a capital ship, ten systems under your flag, and one final choice — declare an Ally, or declare an Enemy. The galactic war begins either way.
• Every commission pays. RP rewards climb from 2,000 to 40,000 across the campaign, with equipment rewards along the way — and every completion builds your record with the Court.
• Progress that counts twice. The Liege's demands are things a real empire does anyway — nothing on this list is busywork. Build the mine because the Court asks; keep the mine because your economy needs it.

The tutorial hands you in

• Finish the tutorial, receive the summons. New commanders who complete the tutorial are met with their first Imperial commission — one click and you're reading the Liege's opening demand.
• Skipped the tutorial? The campaign's first chapter sits on every commander's Mission Board from day one, wearing its Season 0 episode marker. The Court is patient.
• New objective kinds. The campaign introduces commissions that track what you construct (built after you accept — the Court pays for new steel, not old), the systems you hold, and the stance you declare. Progress for each shows right on the briefing.

And when it's done

• The Liege's final decree says it best: "The Court has no further demands, Commander — but the factions of this galaxy have noticed you. Their contracts are on your mission board; your standing with each of them starts now." The Imperial Foundation ends where the Standing Update begins.

The biggest missions drop since the board went live. Faction standing stops being a number on a page and becomes the key that opens — and closes — contracts. Missions can be shared with your allies. And for commanders who earn a faction's complete trust, there is a new tier of work: three-system pirate raids, a military title with real teeth, and a fleet on call.

Standing runs the mission board

• Every contract shows its Rank. Mission cards and briefings now state the rank in plain words — Rank 1 through Rank 10 — your at-a-glance read on how hard the job is.
• Boards run three times deeper. Each faction now keeps fifteen contracts posted at all times — five starter jobs (Ranks 1–3), five mid-tier (4–6), four veteran (7–9), and one elite Rank 10 — with every mission type always represented. Whatever your standing, there is always work.
• High-rank work must be earned. Rank 5–10 contracts now require standing with the issuing faction: 50 for Rank 5, rising by ten per rank to 100 for Rank 10. Build your reputation with a faction and their serious work opens up.
• You outgrow the milk runs. As your standing climbs past 50, the faction stops offering you its smallest jobs — at 50 the Rank 1 postings disappear, and by 90 all of Ranks 1–5 are behind you. At standing 100 a faction's board shows Ranks 6–10 only. The faction trusts you with serious work now; the small contracts are left for newer pilots instead of being mopped up by veterans.
• Declaring a faction your enemy still zeroes your standing with them — and now that standing is worth something, think twice before you burn it.

Share missions with your allies

• Bring up to four friends. The holder of an accepted mission can share it with up to four mutual allies. A shared mission lands straight on the ally's Accepted Missions list — no confirmation needed, because there is no downside: it doesn't use one of their three mission slots.
• Fight together, get paid together. On kill contracts, kills by anyone in the group count toward the objective. On completion, the RP and equipment rewards divide evenly across the group (any remainder goes to the contract holder) — but every participant earns the full standing gain. Sharing is how your allies build reputation with factions they can't yet work for directly.
• Hand down the big jobs. A standing-100 commander can take a Rank 10 contract and share it with allies who can't even see it on their board.
• One hard rule: a mission cannot be shared with a player who has the issuing faction set to Enemy. The faction refuses to pay its enemies.

Mission reports in your Comms

• Every completion is now documented. Finish any mission — solo or shared — and a Mission Complete report lands in Comms → Reports for every participant, listing the rank, the faction, and exactly what you were paid, including how a shared reward was divided.
• Ambush contact alerts now have their own report filter too.

Destroy contracts pull level with Ambush

• The same enemy fleet, on their ground. Destroy contracts now mirror the ambush party exactly — the same mix of light, medium, heavy, and super heavy ships at every rank, with each class line dug into its own system. A Rank 10 destroy order is 125 ships across four battle lines, identical to a Rank 10 ambush; the difference is you go to them.
• And they pay 20% more. An ambush comes to you; a destroy contract makes you cross the map and dig the enemy out. That travel carries a permanent 20% pay premium — and a destroy contract is now guaranteed to pay at least 20% more than a same-rank ambush, whatever class of ship it sends you after.

Loot with a signature

• Each mission type now has its own equipment profile. Destroy and ambush work skews toward weapons and armour, deploy contracts toward drives, protection details toward armour, recon toward utility systems — with the issuing faction's own specialities still showing up in the mix.
• Surveys are the tech line. Half of all survey equipment rewards now come from sensor and stealth technology: interdiction systems, targeting computers — and for the first time outside story missions, cloaking devices can drop from survey contracts. If you want to run dark, fly surveys.

Ambushes bite back

• Rank 5+ ambushes can send a second wave. Forty-five minutes after first contact, if the raiding party is still alive in your system, there's a one-in-ten chance reinforcements answer their distress call — half the surviving strength again, in heavy metal. The newcomers are not on the contract manifest; they are pure trouble. Clear the field, or risk fighting two.

New: RAID missions

• Pirates have dug in. Raids identify three neighbouring unclaimed systems and fill all three with entrenched pirate crews — Human and Sharne raiders — at strength beyond anything a Rank 10 ambush throws at you, plus defence stations and orbital batteries on top of the fleets. The target systems are marked on the galaxy map and named on the contract.
• Three levels. Level 1 is a hard fleet action. Level 3 is a war: hundreds of ships per system behind layered defences.
• Standing 100 to sign on. Raids only appear on the board once a faction trusts you completely — but sharing works exactly as on any mission, so you can bring up to four allies regardless of their standing. You can take one alone. It is not recommended.
• Everyone is paid in full. Unlike ranked contracts, raid rewards are not split — every participant receives the entire payout: triple RP against the value of the garrison you destroy, plus a crate of equipment (20–30 items of one kind and a smaller cache of something rarer, scaling with the level). Raids pay no standing — at 100, you have nothing left to prove.
• A raid ends when the systems are cleared. Every pirate ship, battery, and station destroyed or captured — by anyone on the contract — closes it out.

Standing 100: Strategic Military Partner

• A title with teeth. Hold standing 100 with a faction and you are named their Strategic Military Partner — shown on the faction's page, and carrying two hard benefits.
• +25,000 MP capacity. Your military-points ceiling rises by 25,000 while the title is held. Stacked with a top rank and high morale, that puts a 150,000-point fleet within reach.
• Reinforcements on call. Once per week you can call in a faction reinforcement wing — 5 super heavy cruisers and 10 support ships of the faction's own race — delivered instantly to any system where you have forces, under your command, yours to keep.
• Strictly earned, strictly held. The title exists only while your standing sits at exactly 100. Slip below — even by abandoning a single mission — and the benefits are withdrawn until you climb back. Declare the faction your enemy and it is all gone at once.

Fixes

• You can declare war on the pirates again. Setting Pirates — or any faction — to Enemy was being blocked for high-rank commanders by the "pick on someone your own size" rule, which exists to protect new players, not institutions. Factions and pirates are now always fair game.

The Galactic News feed has been rebuilt from the ground up. The AI-generated artwork is gone — every picture in the feed is now pulled from the game itself, so a story looks like it belongs to your galaxy instead of a stock illustration.

The picture is now the subject

• Factions fly their own flag. A story about a nation shows that nation's flag. Commanders who have never designed one get a distinct flag generated from their colours, so no two empires read the same.
• Ships show the real ship. When a story is about a vessel — a new class detected, a fleet logged inbound — you see that ship straight from the registry, alongside its attack, defence, and hull rating.
• Colonies and yards show the real structure. Colonies, refineries, and shipyards render from the actual build art, tinted in the owner's colours.
• Battles show the battle. Combat reports carry real captured footage of solar-view fighting — units, tracer fire, and wreckage.
• Fleets on the move — commissionings, mobilisations, mass jumps — get a fleet-in-space backdrop rather than a bare badge.
• Wire and flavour pieces sit against real nebula skies captured from live systems, stamped with the broadcasting channel's callsign.

Crisis alerts, themed

• Viral outbreaks show a colony under a green biohazard wash.
• Logistics and trade strikes show a refinery under a red alert wash.

Less noise

• Morale bulletins no longer flood the feed. Empire-mood swings were being reported on every little shift; now only a small share of them make the news. The morale effects on your empire are unchanged — you just aren't reading about every wobble.
• A channel badge on every story makes the source clear at a glance, colour-coded per network.

Critical hits — every gun has a chance now

• The maximum roll always draws blood. Each shot rolls an attack value from half your attack rating up to the full rating. Roll the exact maximum and the shot punches straight through the target's defence and applies the weapon's rated damage — no matter how heavily armoured the target is.
• Nothing is untouchable any more. A super-heavy that small guns simply bounced off can now be worn down by weight of numbers. It is a slim chance — a 35-attack corvette crits about one shot in nineteen — so it takes a real swarm to grind a capital ship down, and a stand-up fight between matched fleets plays out exactly as before. But "invulnerable" is gone.
• It applies everywhere combat resolves, including manual fire from the bridge. Line up the shot yourself and your crits land the same way.

Positioning sharpens up

• Weapon range now tracks your target. The initiative bonus for fighting inside your weapon range applies against the ship you are actually engaging, not just any hostile that happens to drift nearby. Pick your fight and the range advantage follows it.

Fleets arrive with intent

• Reinforcements land as formations. In the solar view, a wave that jumps in together now arrives as tidy same-type groups instead of scattering across the system — a fleet reads as a fleet the moment it drops in.
• Raiders come for your holdings. Hostile arrivals break from their entry point and make straight for your ships and structures, rather than drifting into an idle orbit. When something jumps into your space, it means business.

New formation orders

• Wall. Box-select your ships and form a Wall — up to five ranks high, widening into columns as the group grows. A broadside presented face-on.
• A proper V. The V formation now opens into a real arrowhead for larger squads, instead of collapsing into two parallel columns behind the leader.

More units in 3D

• The modelled fleet keeps growing: the Knosson Orka and Draconis join the roster alongside the Viken, each lit by the star it flies under.

Ships are becoming ships

• Fly the camera in, and the blip becomes the ship. In the solar system view, ships now carry full 3D models. From tactical range you keep the clean shape-coded markers; close the distance and the marker cross-fades into a plated, textured hull hanging in space. Pull back out and the readable battle view returns.
• Lit by their own star. Units catch the light of the system they fly in — a red dwarf paints them red, a nebula tints them — with a true sun side and a night side. Shadowed faces fall to near-black, the way things do in space. No two angles look the same.
• They fly like they mean it. Units point their nose along their course, so a squadron in formation reads as a squadron, and a fleet burning for a jump point looks like exactly that.
• Inspect the real thing. VIEW a ship and you now orbit its actual model, not a stand-in.

The first units

The registry is being modelled ship by ship, starting with the human fleet. In this update:

• Celestia Long Range Corvette (and the ECG Celestia variant)
• Hercules Class Escort Frigate
• Rapier Gunship Mk IV (and the Defector Rapier)
• Dirac Class Strike Cruiser
• Widowmaker Class Battle Cruiser

Ships without a model yet keep their markers at every range — more units, and the other races, arrive in the coming updates.

Small changes

• Call signs, decluttered. The full class name that appeared under a selected ship's tag has been retired — it added noise without adding much. The three-letter call sign stays, and a ship's class still reads at a glance from its marker shape.

A black hole in every galaxy

• One system per galaxy has lost its star. In its place hangs a singularity: a white-hot accretion disk cooling to deep red at the rim, a halo of starlight bent around the event horizon, and a slow stream of debris spiralling in and vanishing. The planets still orbit it. It is never Sol, and your scanners are useless there. Nothing returns from beyond the event horizon.
• Ice belts. Around half of all asteroid belts carry glittering ice among the rock. Watch for the glints.
• Weather in the nebulas. Systems inside a nebula now fly through drifting cloud banks, and your ships and planets pass in front of and behind them.
• Exotic stars. Roughly one system in a hundred now hosts a compact exotic star. Pulsars sweep twin lighthouse beams across their systems; neutron stars burn tiny and brilliant.

Bot commanders go to war

• Bots now have a temperament, picked when one is added to a galaxy. Defensive bots only ever retaliate. Stalkers choose a victim, quietly mass their fleet inside that player's own home system, and declare war the moment the maths favours them. Warmongers declare on several players at once and pour waves at their systems until somebody breaks.
• They fight like players. Bots rally their fleets, plot multi-hop courses across the map, pick weak systems to hit, rebuild their losses and come again. Declaring war on a bot now cuts both ways: expect an answer.
• They build like players too. Bots expand straight toward the 25-system ceiling, spread colonising craft across every shipyard they own, raise Capital Ship Drydocks to grow their fleet capacity, and stand up Operations Centers to keep their supply lines healthy.

Read the battle at a glance

• Shape-coded targets. In the solar view, ship blips now carry a silhouette by class: triangles for light and medium cruisers, squares for heavy, special and command ships, hexagons for super heavies, circles for everything else.
• Bigger call signs. The three-letter tags over every ship are larger and easier to read at a glance.
• Click to identify. Select any ship and its full class name appears under its tag, friend or foe.

Civil structures now quell crises

• Security answers uprisings. A Security Facility, Security Outpost, Hall of Justice or Discipline Hive in a system cuts an uprising from a day to an hour and blunts the damage.
• Operations answers logistics. An Operations Center, Complex, Nest or Umbral Operations Hub does the same for a logistical breakdown, and your build queue survives intact instead of being cancelled.
• Medical already answered plague, and still does. New: the Vatari Holy Shrine now steadies a system through logistical collapse. The Cult has no answer to plague or revolt, and never will: clone-flesh has no medicine, and the faithful do not admit to doubt.

The Mission Economy

• Bounties now track what you actually kill. Destroy and Ambush contracts price their reward from the ships on the kill list: 90% of a Light Cruiser's value, 50% of a Medium, 30% of everything heavier. A dozen heavy cruisers finally pays like a dozen heavy cruisers, and farming trivial kills for flat payouts is over. Every open contract on every board has been repriced the same way.
• Ten ranks of Destroy. The ladder now climbs from a single bounty all the way to contracts demanding 80 to 100 kills across several ship classes at once. The harder the roll, the bigger the hunt, and the pay follows the targets.
• Ten tiers of Ambush. Five new tiers above Black-flag: Overrun, Onslaught, Warfleet, Armada, and Annihilation, whose bait draws a 125-ship raiding party of every class at once into your space. Top-tier defences pay over a million RP when the raiders fly expensive metal.
• Pirates fly Human and Sharne ships. Raiding parties now field units from those two navies only, so what jumps into your trap is something you can read at a glance and price in your head.
• Ten ranks of Deploy, honest pay. Deployment contracts scale from a single courier posting to holding 40+ ships, Super Heavies included, across four or five named systems at once. Pay runs a flat 3,000 to 30,000: you are moving ships, not losing them, and nothing pays less than it costs to bother.
• Protect pays triple. Garrison work was underpaid for the hours it asks; its ladder is now 12,000 to 42,000.
• Boards flow again. Some factions' boards had jammed above their five-contract cap and stopped posting entirely. They are trimmed and cycling, and completed contracts free their slots properly, including several old ones that had been stuck since before the completion rule shipped.

Mission board

• Dismiss. When another commander completes a contract you were also flying, you can no longer finish it, and now you no longer have to live with it either: a Dismiss button clears it from your board with no standing penalty.
• The staples stay stocked. Every giver's board keeps its essentials posted: when someone springs the last ambush, a new one arms; peaceful givers keep survey and reconnaissance work up, military givers keep hunt contracts up.
• Wedged boards fixed. Some givers' boards had silently filled and stopped posting new contracts. They are flowing again.

Polish

• A typography pass across news articles, mission text and ship descriptions.
• Want a galaxy of your own? There is a new private server request form on the site.

Ambush missions — set the trap in your own space

• A new contract type on the Mission Board. The factions are done chasing pirate raiders across the sector — so they're bringing them to you. Accept an Ambush contract and the giver's signals division seeds the open freight bands with a forged cargo manifest: a rich, under-escorted haul, staging in your territory. The raiders jump in to collect. Be waiting.
• The fight comes to your door. The pirate party lands in a system you control — where your ships are if you have them, your defences if you don't, your home space as the last resort. You'll need to hold at least one system for the trap to work; the briefing says so before you commit.
• A few minutes' warning. The manifest needs time to circulate. After you accept, a dispatch lands — “The Bait Is Taken” — naming the system the raiders have jumped into, and the briefing counts down to contact. Harder contracts give less notice.
• No clock. Ambush contracts never expire — but the raiders don't leave either. They sit in your system trading fire with whatever lives there until you deal with them.
• Destroy or capture. A raider you board and claim counts toward the contract the same as a kill — and the ship is yours to keep. Prize crews are a valid strategy.
• Five tiers, and the top pays like it should. Tier 1 is a nuisance raid: 5 light cruisers for 200,000 RP. By tier 3 it's a forty-ship raiding company. Tier 5 is 10 Super Heavy Cruisers with a pair of heavy escorts — 900,000 RP, the richest standing contracts on any board, because this time the battleground is your own space and your own fleet is the collateral. Faction standing and mission XP climb the same ladder.
• One crew per raiding party. Each party flies a single race's warships, so a fleet reads as one gang — and they are genuinely warships now. Freighters, repair tenders and survey ships no longer moonlight as pirates (the same screening applies to the pirate nests your explorers stumble into).

Living mission boards

• The boards had gone stale — badly. Once a giver's board filled, nothing ever cleared it, so the generator quietly stopped posting. Some galaxies hadn't seen a fresh contract in months. That's over.
• Completing a contract clears it. The first captain to collect on a faction posting takes it off the board, and the giver posts a fresh one in its place. Anyone else already flying that contract when it closes still finishes and still gets paid — only new takers are turned away.
• Bigger boards. Each giver now keeps up to five contracts posted at once, up from three — with Ambush contracts in the rotation from day one.

Fleets arrive in formation

• Hyperspace arrivals land as a battle group. A fleet that jumped together used to scatter across the entire system on arrival — and every observer saw it somewhere different. Arrivals now land together at a real, shared position: the same spot for every player, still the same spot when you come back tomorrow, no more ships teleporting the moment you order them around.
• Ready to fight from the moment they land. Because arrivals now hold real positions immediately, the weapon-range initiative bonus applies from their first exchange — no warm-up move order required.
• Your transit line draws instantly. Order a jump or plot a course and the line appears on the galaxy map immediately, instead of on the next map refresh.

A real flight model — your ship, your hands

• M on the bridge now takes everything manual. One keypress moves the helm and fire control to your hands; press it again and the autopilot takes back the con. In manual, target locks are for your targeting computer only — cycle hostiles with T/Y all you like, the ship keeps flying wherever you point it.
• A throttle. ↑/↓ runs your engines from all-stop to flank speed. Connect to a parked ship and it is genuinely parked — no phantom drift, a still debris field, engines at idle. Open the throttle and the hum spools up with it.
• A stick. W/S pitch, A/D roll, Q/E turn — with real inertia: rates ramp while held and coast when released, like something with mass. Full six degrees of freedom: pitch through the vertical, fly a loop, fly inverted. Space has no up.
• Your flying is real. Throttle and heading write genuine movement orders — every other captain watching the system sees your ship fly what you fly. Lock a target in auto mode and the chase is real too.
• Honest instruments. Identical units now read identical speeds (the old readout was, frankly, making numbers up), a locked target's SPD comes from its actual course, and distances across the solar view now read in light-seconds — kilometres never made sense out here.
• The trigger always answers. Space with no firing solution still sends a volley down the boresight — and spends the round. Guns cost charge whatever you point them at.
• H hides the entire HUD for a clean glass cockpit. Press it again to bring the panels back.

Every race shoots in its own colours

• The default hull weapon is now a machine-gun tracer burst — twenty to thirty fast bolts with a tight spread, replacing the old single red flash. The colour follows the hull that fires it: Humans and the Vatari Cult burn red, Knossons green, Feon-Tar purple, Sharne orange, Derulons yellow. A captured hull keeps its maker's guns.
• Equipped lasers still fire their item colour as beams, and defence platforms still fire cyan — so at a glance you can read who is shooting, with what, from where.

Weapon range — positioning starts to matter

• Every armed hull now has a Weapon Range (600 light-seconds across the board for now — per-gun ranges are coming), shown on the unit's stats.
• Fight inside your range and you fire half again as often. A ship with a known position, with a known hostile inside its gun range, gets a 1.5× initiative bonus every combat round. Range is a benefit, never a blocker: ships without positions fight exactly as before.
• Move orders pin down the whole battlefield. The first tactical order in a system gives every ship there a real, shared position — from that moment, every observer sees the same fleet layout.
• See your reach. The new Gun Range toggle draws a hairline red circle at each selected ship's range.

Fleet tools on the left rail

• Select your ships and a toolbar docks above the solar controls: the Gun Range toggle, and a Formations button that fans out five orders — V, both diagonals, a sphere, and a three-line convoy — oriented to the way you're looking, tight enough to fly as one wing. One click, one order, the fleet forms up.

A camera that goes where you look

• Free pan at last. Middle-drag or arrow keys slide the view across the system; the mouse wheel now zooms toward your cursor, so aim-and-zoom takes you anywhere without touching a pan key.
• F flies, nothing snaps. Focusing your fleet is a smooth 600 ms glide that keeps your viewing angle; clicking a planet or the sun flies you there (the little info card that used to pop up is gone — it earned nothing).
• Panning lets go. Focused on a planet and want out? Just pan — the camera detaches instead of snapping back like it was glued.
• Drags can't be stolen any more. Selection boxes that died halfway, rotations that suddenly “clicked” the sun and dived into it, gestures interrupted the moment a notification appeared — all one family of input bugs, all fixed. Your drag finishes where you release it, every time.

Missions, on the map

• Systems with open contracts now wear a mission badge on the galaxy map — the giver's initials in their colour (or a count when several givers post there), visible from mid-zoom. Click it and the Mission Board opens already filtered to that system, with a chip to widen back out. No more cross-referencing the whole board against the map.

Under the hood

• The galaxy map's data engine was rewritten. Identical information, computed ~24× faster server-side, fetched on smarter schedules — the multi-second stalls on big galaxies are gone, and your browser stops re-downloading a megabyte of unchanged map every few seconds.
• Firefox commanders get their frame rate back — nebulas on the galaxy map are now painted once and reused, instead of being redrawn from scratch sixty times a second.
• Docking looks like docking. Ships now zip into their carrier when they dock and emerge from it when they launch — no more materialising from hyperspace at the system's edge.
• Arriving fleets scatter naturally — a hashing quirk could arrange a newly pinned fleet into a suspiciously perfect five-armed spiral. The galaxy is not sending you ninja stars; it never was.
• The bridge faces the way you're flying. Connecting to a moving ship now points you down its actual course instead of a direction it abandoned minutes ago.
• The solar view's left rail was regrouped — camera, then intel, then modes, exit at the bottom — and the galaxy-wide system search no longer pretends to work inside a solar system.

Manual Fire Control — pull the trigger yourself

• M on the bridge takes your guns off the automatic queue. Each Space press fires one gun at your locked hostile, resolved on the spot with the automatic round's odds plus a +10 initiative edge for hands-on fire control. A three-gun cruiser gets three trigger pulls before the recharge reloads the magazine; a slipped firing solution sprays wild tracers but still spends the round.
• You'll feel every shot. Cannons fire from your own cockpit with recoil, scaled to the range of the target — point-blank brawls read differently from long-range sniping. The weapons bar counts your remaining rounds, then flashes CHARGING until the magazine is back; hold Space and the ship fires the instant it's ready.
• Fire Control keeps the log. Engagement announcements — weapons free, weapons returning to automatic, reloads — now land inside the Fire Control feed instead of popping toasts over the action.
• The ship hands back the con. Weapons return to automatic fire when you leave the bridge, disconnect, or go five minutes without a shot — firing extends your session.

Sub-light movement — your ships, where you put them

• M in the solar view moves your fleet, Homeworld-style. With ships selected, a placement reticle drops onto the system plane: aim with the mouse, hold Shift to raise or lower the mark into the third dimension, click to commit. A course line runs from your formation to the mark with live distance and arrival time, and the ecliptic grid lights the sector under your reticle.
• Positions are real now. For the first time, every player sees your ships in the same place. Move your battle line to the far side of the sun and everyone watching that system sees it happen. Ships you haven't ordered anywhere keep their patrol drift; jumping to hyperspace clears a ship's movement orders.
• Fleets fly together. A group order keeps formation on the way in and settles the wing around the mark — no more thirty ships fighting over one point in space.
• Engine trails behave. Wakes stay attached to the hull, draw smoothly at the tail, and retract when a ship parks.

Nebulas — the galaxy gets weather

• Coloured nebulas now drift across the galaxy map, named in the classic style and glowing in their own hues. Every galaxy carries at least three; operators can seed more.
• Fly into one and the sky changes. Systems inside a nebula get a full Homeworld-style sky: aurora sheets in the nebula's colours wrapping the whole system, with the void showing through the thin patches.
• A real starfield behind everything. Every system — nebula or not — now has a proper pinpoint starfield behind its planets. Look closely: it was never actually there before.

Homeworld-style controls in the solar view

• Left button commands, right button flies. Drag a box to select your ships — they keep green brackets until you deselect. Shift-select adds to the selection, double-click grabs every ship of that class, and the camera orbits on the right mouse button.
• Right-click a hostile to attack it with everything you have selected. Hold Ctrl for the targeting reticle: click one hostile, or drag a red box over several, and your ships split the targets between them.
• Control groups. Shift+1–9 stores the selection, 1–9 recalls it, F focuses the camera on the selection.
• On phones, touch does what you expect. One finger pans the view — no more accidental selection boxes on mobile.
• Hold Tab for the command reference anywhere in the Solar System view — bridge commands on the bridge, fleet commands on the overview. Release to dismiss.

Every weapon is now a laser or a missile

• Lasers have colours. Equip a Particle Beam Laser and your ship fires violet; a Long-Lance Plasma Driver burns green; Mark-series gun batteries glow amber. Your strongest equipped laser sets your beam colour in the Solar System view and on the bridge. Nothing equipped fires the classic red (orange tracers on a miss); defence platforms fire cyan. Every ship with an attack carries the default laser, so upgrades stack on top.
• Missiles fly like missiles. Ordnance weapons launch visible rounds with smoke trails that arc across the system, slower than beams, in salvos true to the launcher: a Cyclone Torpedo fires one heavy round, a Hydra Pod ripples out four, a Saturation Pod six. Misses sail past and fizzle; hits detonate on the mark.
• Reduced-motion respected. If your device asks for reduced motion, combat stays beams-only.

Bridge: command the whole fleet from one chair

• F — focus fire. Every ship of yours in the system that can hurt your locked target is ordered onto it, in one keypress. The Fire Control panel shows your standing ORDERS line, and fleet pills carry an amber dot while a ship holds an order.
• P — fleet target prioritisation. A seven-slot menu: damaged units, system defences, weakest targets, constructions, interdictors, jump gates, or same-class duels. Pick with 1–7 or click; Esc closes. The whole armed fleet in system adopts the doctrine.
• Target the planets and the sun. T/Y now cycles past enemy ships into the system's worlds, sorted by orbit, with the star last. Lock a planet and your bridge ship flies there and parks in orbit outside moon range; lock the sun and it holds station outside the corona. The locked world appears in the targeting computer and wears the target box in the scene.
• Direct orders for everyone. Direct-target orders are no longer restricted to commandships — any armed unit can hold one.

Fixes from your reports

• Transport Authority jump gates finally open for business. Faction gates demanded a formal alliance the Authority never grants, so nobody could use them. They're now the public infrastructure they were always meant to be — any captain in good standing can transit gate-to-gate in a single hop. Make an enemy of the Authority and your access is revoked. (Player-built gates keep their owner-and-allies rules.)
• Group jumps stopped rejecting healthy fleets. Selecting the same ship twice — easy to do picking a fleet plus one of its members — made the whole jump fail as “unavailable” even though every ship was fine. Jump errors also now tell you the actual reason instead of a wall of database text.
• The Comms unread badge tells the truth. Reading your reports only cleared the newest page, so a deep backlog kept the badge counting thousands forever. Opening Reports now clears the lot.
• Feon-Tar can read their own economy. The RP dossier only counted income from systems you own — and the Lost own nothing by design. It now reports the yield from wherever your collectors actually are, claimed or not.
• Launch All / Recall All show up in foreign systems. Your carriers answer to you wherever they're parked; the buttons no longer hide outside your own space.
• Ghost ships exorcised. Destroyed ships no longer linger in the solar view after the wreck settles, and a ship you've claimed in battle changes sides on screen immediately instead of haunting you as a hostile.
• Build errors talk like people. A refused build order now says why — limits, requirements — instead of “Internal error”.
• State of the Nation numbering straightened out. Sections run I through X in order; no more duplicate section V.
• “An unnamed polity is now a…” news retired. Empire tier announcements no longer publish for empires that haven't finished forming, and the broken headlines have been cleaned out of the archive.
• Kycer Corvette description corrected to quote the ship's actual hyperdrive range.
• The Resource Finder finally does its job. Auto-explore units (the Resource Finder and the Ki Thur Class Explorer) now genuinely wander: an idle probe picks a system within its jump range — preferring space it hasn't charted — jumps there on its own, and files a probe report the first time it visits somewhere new: resource yield, remaining reserves, and who holds the system. Reports arrive under Comms → Reports → Intel. Probes respect your arrangements — one that's docked, in a fleet, on an autopilot course, or stuck under an interdictor stays put.
• The Kiban knows what it is. Its description called it a Command Ship, but the hull has never carried tactical command — that's the Asona XB511's job. The text now says so (and the sentence that trailed off mid… is finished).
• No more teleporting fleets. Coming back to a backgrounded tab (or any long pause) made moving ships lurch instantly down their course and gave fresh move orders a head start. The movement clock now snaps cleanly instead of overshooting.

Solar System Bridge — first-person combat

• Step onto the bridge of your own ships. A new first-person HUD sits over the 3D Solar System view. Press C to cycle cockpit views across your ships in the system and watch combat unfold from the bridge in real time.
• Targeting computer, Fire Control feed, structure targets. The bridge displays whom you're locked onto, who's firing back, and a hit-shake jolt whenever your hull or shields take damage.
• Diplomacy stance feeds the contact panels. Enemy ships route to the HOSTILE list, allies to FRIENDLY, everyone else stays neutral in the scene with blue brackets — what counts is who you've marked, not who's marked you.
• Mobile too. A dedicated navigation toolbar (Back · Scan · Bridge), trail-fade artefact fix, and an idle-fade on the bottom controls so the view doesn't get crowded on phones.
• Desktop chips. New Bridge Link (eye/iris) and Exit chips on the map controls — visible only in Solar mode.

Crises scale with how far past your Tier you've grown

• One system per day → up to ten. Used to be a single system crisis per Unstable day, no matter how far over your Tier allowance you were. Now: for every 10% over Tier, one more system can go into crisis on a successful daily roll, capped at 10 systems per day. A Tier-5 Imperium running 50 systems can lose up to 10 in a single GST day; one running 28 systems risks two.
• Lower-tier Unstables finally feel it. A Tier-3 Hearth-Concord pushing past its allowance used to be marked Unstable but never actually suffered. Crisis pressure now reads against your own Tier ceiling, so the warning has teeth at every tier — not just at the top.
• Feon-Tar pressure now uses fleet value. Aligns crisis odds with the tier title shown in State of the Nation, instead of the unrelated MP figure that used to drive it.

MP overage v2 — RP bleed replaces destruction

• Going over the pool no longer kills ships at random. Instead, you bleed RP per hour proportional to the overage. Healthy → no cost. War-burst zone → sustainable for a multi-day campaign. Extreme → arrears spiral into permanent paralysis.
• New MP card shows the band you're in, your current bleed rate, and how close you are to the next band — with cleaner copy across the labels and band table.

Balance

• Knosson Advanced Recycling Station: 70% → 40%. Stacked Advanced recyclers were effectively printing RP. Still meaningfully better than the basic 30% tier shared by Humans, Sharne, Derulons and the basic Knosson station — just no longer outpaces the mining economy.
• Super Heavy Cruiser self-repair recalibrated. Less degenerate; still tough.
• Defence Stations get the ARGUS Tactical action. Five race units now have access.
• Scan rebalance. 20% of scans return nothing, combat outcomes rank-gated, Vatari combat scan swapped to Osgul, and base RP rewards dropped 60% to match the rebalanced loot.

NPC behaviour

• Bots fight back. When you set an NPC as enemy and have units in space with them, they respond at a skill-tier appropriate level — no more sitting ducks.
• Pirate raids vary. Pirate spawns can now appear as any race's light cruiser, not always the same unit.
• Placeholder NPCs don't issue missions. Pirates and the Vatari Cult never had any to give — the faction board no longer lists their empty headers.

Story & missions

• Chapter 4: Find the Defector. Crown intel now narrows the hunt to three candidate systems with the real Defector Rapier guaranteed to be in one of them. No more scouting every neutral system blind.
• Reserved names enforced at signup. “House Veliro”, “HCG Strike Force” and friends can't be claimed by players; existing stale NPC diplomacy rows have been backfilled so old relationships clear up.

Loot Run actually trades up now

• Loot Run pays double items. It used to hand out the same items as Standard but with no RP, so there was never a reason to pick it. Now Loot Run grants twice the items in exchange for forgoing the cash — the gear-hoarder option it was always meant to be.

The Comms badge tells the truth

• No more phantom unread count. The Comms indicator could show a number with nothing to read in any tab. A direct message from someone you hadn't added back was being counted but never surfaced. Those conversations now show up in your Messages list, so opening them clears the badge.

Nation income reads true

• “Mined · Day” replaces “Yield.” The State of the Nation figure is what your miners actually pull from your systems each day, not the systems' raw yield rating. Same number under the hood, clearer label — and it correctly reads zero when you hold systems but haven't deployed miners yet.

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. For example, “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 unit 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 unit" 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 units (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 units 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 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 units) 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 units 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 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", fitting 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.