Declared Wars and Broken Worlds

A new game is about to start, and it starts on three weeks of changes: close to three hundred of them, most of them fixes you will never notice.

The short version: nobody is at war until somebody declares it. Warships leave ruins you can take instead of craters you have to recolonise. The Mega Destroyer can now break a world apart. There are fifteen new worlds past Neptune, and some of them are hiding things. There is an open market. And Orbital now runs on your phone and your watch.

War is declared now

Every empire used to start the game at war with every other. Two fleets sharing an orbit on the first tick opened fire. The only way out was a non-aggression pact written into a trade deal, which needed a willing partner and a finished deal. The most common complaint about this game, that everyone starts at war, was a fair one.

Now peace is the default. Nothing shoots at anything until somebody declares war.

• Declaring is in the Trade panel, on the Standing tab: one row per empire, and a button. It takes effect immediately and it is public. The Herald, the game's newspaper, reports it.
• Declaring on a pact partner is allowed, and it breaks the pact in the same act. The Herald does not call that a war. It calls it a betrayal.
• Ending a war takes both sides. Standing down is an offer. The war carries on at full strength until the other side accepts. You can withdraw an offer, and it never expires.

That last rule is what makes the first one fair. If one side could leave a war alone, the cheapest move in the game would be to declare, fire everything, and step out before the reply landed. Now a war you started is a war you are in until the other side agrees to stop.

Everything that shoots follows the same rule: ships, station guns, flak, and sieges on megastructures. A neighbour's survey ship parked at your gate no longer grinds it down by accident, and a foreign freighter in your orbit no longer blocks your yard. Standings show WAR only for a war that actually exists. Everyone else is NEUTRAL.

Taking worlds instead of erasing them

Conquering a world used to mean destroying everything on it and then starting from nothing: bring a colony ship, found a city, build every building again. It made taking a world feel like a chore instead of a prize.

A city or station beaten down by warships now leaves ruins. The ruins remember every building that stood there. They produce nothing, fire at nothing, and hold no claim on the world. They sit there until somebody decides what happens to them.

• Seize. If your warships are the only ones at the world, you can rebuild it under your flag for 80 metal and 60 credits: a colony ship's price, without the colony ship. It comes back with every building one level lower (a level 1 building is lost) and a quarter of its hull, and repairs itself from there.
• Raze. The same force can clear the ruins instead, so nobody gets them.
• Retake. Your own lost city works exactly the same way. If you win the orbit back, you can rebuild what was yours.

Ruins never decay. Look for a small grey broken marker on the edge of a world, and open the world to see what is left and what it would cost. Two things wipe ruins out completely: an asteroid, and a Mega Destroyer. Warships leave something to fight over. The heavy weapons do not.

Losing, and coming back

• Losing your capital is an alarm now, at the top of your Situation Report (the list of things that need your attention), not a line in the log you might miss.
• An eliminated empire can come back. Found a settlement, or seize a ruin, and you are back in the game. The Herald reports the return.
• A game where everyone has fallen ends. If every empire is eliminated and nobody has a colony ship left to return with, the game closes with no winner instead of running forever.

The Mega Destroyer breaks worlds

Parked over a living world, the Mega Destroyer's strike still does what it did: after a 24-tick charge it burns the biosphere off the planet and every settlement on it dies. What is new is what it does to a world with no biosphere left.

A raw world is destroyed outright: one nobody terraformed, or one the gun already stripped. So a living world takes two strikes, and a raw one takes one.

A destroyed world stays on the map as a debris field. It keeps its orbit, its moons keep circling it, and ships parked there are untouched. Nothing can ever be built on it again, and it no longer counts as a world.

That last part is the point. Domination and the Senate are both shares of the map, so every world destroyed lowers the bar for everybody. On a 58-world map, an empire holding 34 is short of the 60% that wins. Destroy two worlds it does not hold and the same 34 is a win.

• The public warning says which strike is coming, sterilise or destroy, so the target knows what they stand to lose.
• A strike fires as ordered or not at all. If the world changes during the charge, the gun stands down instead of firing something nobody chose.
• The Sun cannot be targeted.

Both capital hulls are tougher: the Mega Destroyer goes from 4,000 hull to 6,000 and the Mobile Foundry from 2,600 to 4,600. And a finished Mega Destroyer is now actually a ship. In the last game two players paid for one and got an inert marker, because a finished slipway never became a hull. It now launches the moment the last load arrives.

Beyond Neptune

The map had six bodies past Neptune and a lot of empty board. It now has twenty-one. The fifteen new ones are real, and each one's description says who found it and how: Orcus and its moon Vanth, Ixion, Máni, Salacia and Actaea, Varuna, Aya, Varda and Ilmarë, Haumea's moons Hi'iaka and Namaka, Quaoar's moon Weywot, Eris's moon Dysnomia, and Makemake's moon, still unnamed after eleven years.

Past the planets the map now has three regions, drawn as bands:

• The Plutinos: Pluto, Orcus and Ixion, worlds that circle the Sun in step with Neptune, two laps for every three of Neptune's.
• The Kuiper Belt: the ring of icy dwarf worlds beyond Neptune.
• The Far Reach: everything past the Kuiper Cliff, a deliberate gap in the map. In the real solar system the number of belt objects drops sharply at about 48 times Earth's distance from the Sun, and nobody has worked out why.

Rocks and moons out there no longer each count as a system of their own, so the outer map reads as three places instead of nine stacked labels.

The outer system is also where the new discoveries are. None of them exist until a ship parks on the right world. Some are worth a long trip. At least one of them shoots back.

Fleets

• One icon. A fleet draws as its flagship with every other ship in formation beside it, one for one, in orbit and in flight. Click any ship and you have the fleet. It fights as that one icon, and it draws one trajectory line, not one per ship.
• Fleets fly together, at the pace of their slowest ship, and arrive on the same tick. Big fleets used to land smeared across several ticks, which is not what the order promised.
• A FLEET tab in the ship panel: every ship, the captain, where it is headed, its firepower, its health, and what it is doing.
• Intercept has its own button in the Orders grid: pick a target and your whole fleet plots a course to catch it. The target list has a search box and shows hostile ships in red.
• Focus fire spills over. A big fleet used to pour everything into one target and waste nearly all of it. In testing, a 68-ship fleet killed exactly one ship a tick. Now once a target has taken enough to die, the rest of the fleet's shots move on to the next one.
• Retreat goes home. A damaged ship falls back to the yard that built it, or to any port you pick with RETREAT TO, right under RETREAT AT. It used to run to whichever yard happened to be nearest.
• Battles resolve faster. The turn a large fleet arrives used to be the slowest thing the server did. It is about four times lighter now.

Trade, and an open market

Trade has its own icon now, with four tabs: MARKET, PRIVATE offers, your freight ROUTES, and STANDING, where wars and pacts live.

The Market is new. Until now every trade was a private letter to a named empire, which works when you already know who has spare metal and not when you just want to sell it. A market post is an offer to nobody in particular:

• Everyone sees every open post, enemies included, and anyone except you can take it. There is no war or embargo rule on the market.
• Up to five open posts each, and each stays up for 72 ticks.
• A post can be sold in lots: buyers take any whole number of units and pay their share.
• A public tape shows the deals that went through, and going rates show the low, middle and high of real recent deals.
• Take a post as it stands, or Counter it privately.
• Ships and worlds can be listed too. The first empire to claim a listing becomes the buyer and pays by freighter, the same as a private sale.

Starting resources are doubled, to 600 metal and 600 credits. And a player who joins a game already under way now starts with the same purse as everybody else. They were getting a third of it.

Routes got three fixes that matter:

• Supply routes to megastructure sites now actually load at the dock. They had been flying their loops and delivering nothing.
• Putting a loaded freighter on a new route no longer throws away its cargo.
• The Transfer Lanes upgrade (Propulsion 3) now really does speed up routes between capitals. It had done nothing since July.

And a recap of new prices from the last devlog, Orders of Magnitude: each warship class costs ten times the one below it, parts scale with the hull, capital ships pay upkeep, and Warp Gates are half price.

Orbital on your phone and your wrist

There is an Android app, in testing on Google Play. Ask in the Discord to be added. It is the same game as the website, so it updates the moment the game does.

Your phone can ring. Push notifications work in the app and in the game installed from Chrome. Every alert that could reach you on Discord can now reach your phone instead, or as well, with a separate switch for each. Some alerts come with buttons: RETREAT on a combat alert, YEA and NAY on a vote, REPLY on a message, ACCEPT and DECLINE on a trade. And once a turn, if anything happened to you, a one-line digest: arrivals, kills, losses, worlds claimed, ships built.

Two home-screen widgets: the map with your empire's status along the bottom, and a battle card showing what is burning and what is coming.

And there is a Wear OS app for your watch, also in testing:

• Tiles for your Empire, your Battles and the Senate. You can vote from the Senate tile.
• A watch face with the solar system on it: every system in its holder's colour and the planets where they are this tick, with room for eight complications.
• Twelve complications: your stockpiles, your income per turn, unread messages, ships, inbound threats, the next tick, and a ring showing how close you are to domination.
• The Porthole: watch the ships at any world your sensors reach, fights included.
• Orders: send a ship or fleet, retreat, set its stance, arm a detonation. Comms: answer wars, trades and messages. Yards: see every build queue and rush one.
• Battle Stations: while your ships are fighting, the battle stays on your watch face, and your wrist buzzes differently for a kill and for a loss.

Controls, quality of life, and fixes

• Rocks are not worlds. The game used to count mining rocks and Lagrange points (the balance points along a planet's orbit) as worlds and systems. It told one player there were 78 worlds and 45 systems when there were 45 worlds. The domination target was higher than the number of worlds that existed, so nobody could win by conquest. It counts real worlds now.
• Touch controls. On a phone, long-press one of your ships to start selecting. Tap to add ships, drag to draw a box, and tap a world to send them.
• Asteroids have their aim-and-fire controls in the world menu. You could build the thrusters and had no way to use them. The impact warning now sits on the world being hit, with its countdown.
• Performance. Zooming and panning no longer redraw the whole interface, and the fog of war is cheaper to draw.
• Orders that did not save. Setting a ship to MINED, or to detonate when a hostile enters orbit, showed an error and did nothing. Both save now.
• Smaller fixes:
  • Hit odds on the target card now include enemy flak.
  • Removing an item from a research queue no longer reshuffles the rest.
  • The build tooltip lists every factor in the price and shows the design's real stats.
  • Scrolling out of a world menu no longer throws the camera at the Sun.
  • Ships parked at the Sun orbit it again, and fold into its badge as you zoom out.
  • Megastructure research is marked as such in the tech tree, and tells you how to start building one.
  • Panels no longer stack on top of each other.

See you in the next game.