Patch Notes

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.