I've never been a big fan of how peaceful the ships are while in transit. Two sworn enemies zipping by each other, doing nothing but waiving? A ship in retreat completely safe from the ships they were just trading blows with, right behind them? Similarly, the Piracy Potential has been low since trade routes had few moments of exposure, despite spending entire days slowly moving across everyones vision. So I welcome you to our new world of Rendezvous and Routes.
Trade routes are loops
A route used to be one freighter going back and forth between two worlds. A route is now a list of stops. You get up to six. At each stop you say pick up or drop off. Then it loops — forever, or for as many runs as you set.
You can build one from a list, or click the worlds straight off the map. Worlds you cannot ship from go dim and ignore your click, and the camera keeps the whole loop in view as it grows.
More freighters means more deliveries
You can put several freighters on the same loop. How many depends on your Logistics research.
Each freighter runs the loop on its own, so two hulls means goods landing about twice as often, and three means three times.
If a lane feels slow, that is the fix: another hull on the same loop.
Deals between players run on one loop, crewed by both of you
A deal used to mean two separate routes. Your freighter went out full and came home empty. Theirs did the same. Half of every run was a hull carrying nothing.
You can now fold both sides into one loop, where every freighter picks up and drops off at both ends. Same ships, twice the trade.
The part worth saying plainly: both of you can crew that shared loop. It is not one player's route that the other one uses. You can each add freighters to it, and every hull either of you adds speeds up deliveries for both sides.
You can both add warships as guards, too. A guard flies the whole loop alongside the freighters, stop to stop, and holds its fire unless something attacks. It will defend whichever freighter is on the route — yours or your partner's. So a small empire with no spare freighters can still pay into a deal by escorting it.
And when a route stops, it is marked stalled. Stalled means there is no freighter on it — you have 30 ticks to fix that before it cancels itself. Starved means somebody cannot pay for the shipment, and that one ends the whole deal in 10 ticks. The card names who is short, and by how much, while you can still do something about it.
Every ship on a route also tells you what it is doing: where it is, where it is headed, what is in the hold, and how many ticks until it lands.
You can now send your ships to Rendezvous with other ships in transit
There is now an order that targets a ship. You can set an intercept course, pull alongside it in open space and follow it once you catch up.
The Ship menu will only offer Rendezvous options it calculates as possible. Faster ships will have more options.
Fighting in flight will begin once the two ships are in range of each other.
Ships now find targets and fire while in transit between worlds, allowing for combat at rendezvous, chase battles, and parting shots to and from a fleeing ship.
What decides an in-flight fight is how fast the two ships are moving compared to each other. Speed sets how long you stay in range, and how easy it is to aim. Slower is better on both counts, and they stack.
So two paths crossing is barely a fight. You clip each other for a moment at high speeds, take a pot shot, and it is over.
Flying almost side by side is a different story. Two ships moving along the same lane can end up trading fire for three or four ticks before they drift apart.
At the far end you are locked together at the same speed. That is what the new order is for. You are in range every single tick, hitting about 70% of the time, depending on the ship class, and neither of you can leave. Launching next to an enemy is a commitment, for better or worse.
Underneath that are two separate speed penalties effecting hit chance. Aim: sideways movement is hard to track, but a ship coming straight at you barely moves in your sights — it just gets bigger, which makes it easier to hit the faster it closes. Time: how much of the tick it was in range at all. A fast ship is hard to hit because it is barely there, not because it is dodging.
Put those together and every kind of meeting gets its own odds. A fast pass is only ever a snap shot, but it is not nothing.
Each ship class has its own reach — corvettes 12, frigates 16, destroyers 20. Inside a moon system all of that is halved, because moons sit far closer together than planets do. You cannot shoot through a world. Freighters and colony ships have no reach at all: they never start a fight, but you can still shoot them.
Trips take 3 to 15 ticks and only ships genuinely in range can fire, so expect a volley or two rather than a long battle.
Two things you need to know before you start raiding each others supply routes. Your retreat-at-HP setting does nothing in transit — a committed burn cannot be re-aimed, so a ship set to run at 25% will die at 0%. And your Situation Report warns you when a hostile is on an intercepting course.
Since the game started
A few other things went in while you were playing:
- Refit your fleet. Change a ship design and push it to every hull of that class. You pay half the price of the parts you added; removals refund nothing and parts you kept are free. Ships sitting at your own worlds refit on the spot. Anything in transit or short of funds gets stamped and refits the next time it is parked somewhere friendly with money available.
- Queue up building projects instead of babysitting one at a time.
- An economy sheet. Every world and what it earns per tick, every standing cost, and the bottom line. It uses the same maths the tick does, including Senate laws, so the numbers match what actually arrives. There is a chart underneath for whether you are getting richer.
- Camera controls. WASD pans, and Q and E step between your worlds.
- You get a message when someone accepts your trade offer.