Alliances & Trade

No empire thrives alone. Alliances provide strength in numbers, trade fuels growth, and espionage reveals your enemies' secrets.

Alliances

An alliance is a coalition of up to 30 players working together toward common goals. Alliances provide shared intelligence, coordinated defense, territory control, and a strong sense of community.

Alliance Roles

Alliance Features

Diplomacy

Alliances can establish formal diplomatic relations with each other. Diplomacy is alliance-to-alliance, not player-to-player — every member of an alliance inherits all of the alliance's current pacts.

Relation Statuses

Who Can Do What

Diplomacy actions are restricted by alliance role (see Alliance Roles):

• Leader, Officer, Diplomat — can propose, accept, reject, and break pacts on behalf of the alliance.
• Member — can read the current diplomatic relations but cannot change them.

How Proposals Work

1. One alliance's Diplomat/Officer/Leader proposes a relation (NAP or Ally) to another alliance.
2. The proposal appears as an incoming request on the target alliance's diplomacy panel, and the target's leader gets a system notification.
3. Their Diplomat/Officer/Leader accepts or rejects. Nothing happens until they accept — a one-sided "proposal" is not binding.
4. Once accepted, the relation is symmetric and both alliances see it as active.
5. Either side can break the relation later, which removes it for both sides instantly.

Rules & Limits

• You can't have two relations with the same alliance at once — break the current one before negotiating a new one.
• You can't propose diplomacy with your own alliance.
• NAP is enforced on attack, raid, and attack outpost missions. Spying and scanning are not blocked — you can still gather intel on a NAP partner, though doing so openly is a fast way to end the pact.
• Breaking a pact does not recall fleets that are already in flight or stationed — but it does re-allow hostile missions going forward.
• Fleets inside the same alliance are always treated as allied for the purposes of blocking attacks, regardless of whether a formal pact exists.

Territory Control

Alliances can claim sector control based on their presence in a sector.

How Territory Works

• Each colony in a sector contributes influence points to your alliance.
• Each outpost also contributes influence (less than colonies).
• If your alliance's influence in a sector significantly exceeds the next-strongest alliance, you claim control.
• Controlled sectors provide a production bonus to all alliance members' colonies in that sector.

Sector Stations

Some sectors contain neutral stations that alliances can capture, hold, upgrade, and fight over. Stations are alliance objectives rather than personal colonies: they create territory pressure, store shared resources, and become forward bases for coordinated operations.

• Capture — an alliance fleet can begin a capture attempt on an unowned station. Rivals can contest the attempt before it completes.
• Garrison — members can dock ships at an owned station. The garrison defends the station and can be repaired after fighting.
• Upgrades — owned stations can improve dock capacity, shields, defensive firepower, and storage.
• Supply and collect — logistics ships can move resources into and out of stations, making them useful staging points near contested space.
• Deep-space extraction — controlling enough stations in dangerous sectors can open access to special mining opportunities for the alliance.

Trade

The galactic market lets players buy and sell resources through market hubs located across the galaxy.

Market Hubs

Each spiral arm has market hubs — centralized locations where buy and sell orders are matched.

• Standard hubs - located in Sentinel zones.
• Frontier hubs - located in Open zones and riskier to reach.

How Trading Works

1. Research Market Access to unlock hub trading.
2. Move resources into a hub with Market Deliver missions, or use later trade research to create some orders directly from a planet.
3. Create sell orders — list resources you want to sell at your price.
4. Create buy orders — list resources you want to buy at your price.
5. When a buy and sell order match, the trade executes.
6. Escrow — resources and payment are held at the hub until withdrawn or used in another trade.
7. Pick up hub balances with Market Pickup missions when you want the goods back on a planet.

Trade Details

• Commission - the hub takes a consistent cut of every transaction.
• Galactic Exchange — advanced trade research lets you interact with hubs more flexibly, including remote order creation and cross-hub fills.
• Order limits — you can have a limited number of active orders at once.
• Minimum order — orders have a minimum resource quantity.
• Expiry — orders expire after a period if not filled.
• Tradeable resources — ore, silicates, hydrogen, alloys, and most rare resources.

Artifact Market

Artifacts can also be listed at market hubs. Listing an artifact reserves it, but the artifact still needs to physically reach the hub before buyers can complete the practical pickup flow.

• Seller delivery — list an inactive artifact, then send an Artifact Deliver mission to the selected hub.
• Buyer pickup — after purchase, the buyer sends a fleet to pick the artifact up from the hub.
• Cancelled listings — if an artifact was already delivered before cancellation, the seller must retrieve it from the hub.

Alliance Trade

Alliance trade is a private exchange board for alliance members. It supports resource offers and artifact offers, but it still uses real fleets: the filler pays up front, flies to the poster's planet, and returns with the offered goods if the route succeeds.

• Requires alliance membership and the trade research intended for alliance contracts.
• An alliance needs a Trade Hub before members can create alliance orders. Building that hub is restricted to the alliance leader or deputy.
• Because delivery is physical, cargo capacity, range, fuel, and security zones still matter.

Trade Routes & Logistics

Beyond the market, you can send resources directly between your own colonies using cargo ships. For manual one-time shipments, use the Transfer fleet mission.

Logistics Routes

Build a Logistics Hub to unlock automated logistics routes:

• Delivery routes — automatically send resources from one planet to another when a threshold is met.
• Return cargo — optionally bring back resources on the return trip (dual-direction routes).
• Activate/Deactivate — toggle routes on and off as needed.
• Routes execute on a schedule and the system tracks when each route last ran.

Espionage

Knowledge is power. The espionage system lets you gather intelligence on enemy empires.

Spy Missions

• Send Spy Probes to enemy planets.
• Probes attempt to gather intel — fleet composition, building levels, resource stockpiles.
• Intel quality depends on your spy technology versus the target's counter-intelligence.
• Better technology = more detailed and accurate reports.

Counter-Intelligence

• Research counter-intelligence technologies to detect and block enemy spying.
• Higher counter-intelligence reduces the quality of intel enemies can gather on you.
• Some research and buildings improve your defensive posture against espionage.
• Moon Sensor Arrays add active intelligence tools: fleet phalanx scans, activity sweeps, wormhole detection, and late-game spy sweeps.

Stealth

Stealth Ships are the hardest vessels to detect. They can operate in enemy space with minimal risk of discovery. The Stealth Field moon building can even hide entire moons from enemy scans.

Messaging

Players can communicate directly through the in-game messaging system:

• Direct messages — send messages to any player in the galaxy.
• Conversations — messages are organized into conversation threads.
• Player blocking — block unwanted messages from specific players.
• System messages — receive automated notifications about important events.

Leaderboards

Compete for galactic supremacy across multiple categories:

Leaderboards track both individual players and alliances. Where do you rank?

Tips for Social Play

• Join an alliance early. Shared vision alone is worth it — you'll see far more of the galaxy.
• Cluster with allies. Having allied colonies nearby means faster reinforcement and territory control bonuses.
• Trade what you overproduce. If your planet mix gives you surplus silicates, sell them and buy what you actually need.
• Spy before you fight. Information wins wars. Never attack blind.
• Coordinate attacks. A single fleet can be defended against. Three fleets arriving simultaneously cannot.