Patch Notes

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 hulls 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.