17 May 2026: Polish drop, maintenance rewrite, build queue, Vatari, Comms, Rename, & more
Maintenance damage is now annoyance, not attrition · Build queue can no longer "vanish" · Starting RP setting actually applies · Vatari Cult balance + cleanup · Comms badge fixed · Rename Server · News template fixes · New galaxy sizes
Maintenance damage: annoyance, not attrition
- Sprawl alone no longer damages ships. The old daily Unstable roll could destroy or damage ships purely because you owned more than twenty-five systems, even when your MP pool was perfectly in budget. That's gone. The Unstable flag still exists and the daily report still posts, but it never touches a single ship now; it just tells you what the empire looks like. Ship damage is gated entirely on actual MP overdraft.
- Damage, not destruction. When you are over your MP pool, affected ships take 1 HP per incident (2 HP when you're more than 200% over). A ship already at 1 HP can still die from a hit, but that's incidental: the goal is wear and tear, not attrition. The old "delete random ship outright" path is retired.
- Worst MP-cost ships get hit first. Maintenance failures target the highest-MP-use ships in your fleet first, ties broken randomly. The expensive hulls show the strain first.
- How many ships per incident. Roughly 1/4 of your active MP-using ships at the base rate, scaling smoothly with how far over your pool you are. 100% over the pool hits about half your fleet per incident; 300%+ over hits the whole fleet at the harder 2 HP rate.
- Random "time of day" scheduling. Maintenance breakdowns no longer all land at midnight. The moment you slide into overdraft, the game picks a random tick in the next ~24 game-hours to fire your incident, then reschedules ~1 game-day later with a few hours of jitter. Bad news now arrives whenever; the empire feels like it lives somewhere other than on a 00:00 cron.
- Crises are unchanged but never touch ships. System Crisis events keep doing what they did to structures, build queues, and morale; they were never actually damaging ships and they still don't.
Build queue: no more "ghost wipe"
- Build commits always. Previously, clicking Build when you couldn't afford the item silently refused and the queue row never appeared. Players read this as the queue wiping itself. The action now always commits the row, and the tick driver starts the head item the moment you can afford it: same "stalled" state that already existed for items behind the front of the queue, just consistently applied. You can queue twenty Hercules at zero RP; they roll into production one by one as RP comes in.
- Queue is only mutated by you, build completion, or a crisis. Running out of RP no longer touches the queue at all. The only mutators are now: you adding via Build, you removing via Cancel, the build completing (row reaped at spawn), the builder being destroyed (cleanup reaps the row), the builder being decommissioned, or a crisis at a damaged system (which already cancels + refunds).
Vatari Cult
- Start with 2 Crusaders. Was 1. Brings the Cult's opening posture in line with the design doc.
- Missionary Colony & Cult Temple correctly classed as Structures. They were sitting in the Ships section of the System Panel by mistake. Now in Structures where they belong.
Galaxy creation
- Starting RP setting actually applies. Operators picking 3,000 / 6,000 / 12,000 starting RP on galaxy creation: that figure was being stored but ignored by player setup. Every new player spawned with 6,000 regardless of the choice. The setup function now reads the configured value with a 6,000 fallback for legacy galaxies.
- New galaxy sizes. 1,000-, 3,000-, and 5,000-star options added to the System Count dropdown alongside the existing 100 / 200 / 400 / 600. Backend validation widened to match.
- "Realtime 60s" tick option. Joins the existing Fast 2s / Normal 5s / Slow 30s in the Tick Speed dropdown. Same wall-clock cadence as default production galaxies.
- Starting Units removed from the form. No longer configurable; new galaxies use the standard race starter loadout. Strips an option that was never meaningfully different across choices.
- Rename Server. New action on the Admiral galaxy detail page alongside Pause, Broadcast, and Delete. Two to sixty-four characters; takes effect immediately, no restart required.
Comms: read / unread on reports
- Badge clears when you open the Reports tab. The red dot on Comms was sometimes lit with no visible message: that's because reports (Daily Maintenance, MP Overdraft, Crisis, Intel) count toward unread but live in a different tab from Direct Messages. Opening Reports now bulk-marks the listed reports as read so the badge clears immediately.
- Per-row unread visual persists for that view. The reports you hadn't seen render with the unread indicator on the current view, so you can tell what's new. Next visit they show as read.
News template fix
- "Unstable Unstable Worldfleet" no longer happens. Two layers were both prefixing "Unstable " to the empire title: the title-formatter and the news-formatter, neither aware of the other. The news formatter now strips a leading "Unstable " from its input before deciding whether to re-prefix based on the unstable flag. Idempotent in both directions: it works regardless of which layer's prefix landed first.