To colonize is to fly a fleet to an empty coordinate and raise a new world on the spot. It gives you one more eye, one more line of production, one more shipyard. It costs a sum of seed capital that sinks, the fuel for one launch, a voyage that holds a fleet slot, and one more light from then on. This page does not tell you whether it is worth it; it only lays out the rules.
A site has to fall inside the sight of one of your worlds, and a colony's own array counts too. It cannot be too close to your own worlds, and must be farther still from anyone else's. A home world starts with no array; at the first level its sight still does not reach the nearest legal distance, and only the second level gives you your first legal site.
How many colonies you may hold is set by the highest array among all your worlds, colonies included: the second level gives you your first slot, and each level after that adds one more, up to a cap. And the array is the only building that shouts your position, so every extra colony slot leaks your coordinates farther.
The sensor array — the farther you see, the louder you shout →Every civilization is born on the same spiral, laid outward from a fixed origin; later arrivals land on the outer turns. A birth spot is guaranteed a gap from every existing home world, and that gap is the floor on the distance to your nearest neighbour's home world, not the typical distance: that home world will never be closer, and is usually farther.
The galaxy has an edge. Every world lies on the same plane, and the region where a colony can be founded is a disc that grows with the number of registered civilizations and never shrinks; a colony order aimed outside it is refused at launch. Everyone competes for the same open sites inside it. The site nearest you is also your neighbour's nearest, and whoever arrives first chooses first.
The seed capital has to arrive in one trip, carried by a single fleet in the holds of its transport whales. Each colony costs far more than the last, and the price is set by how many colonies you hold when the fleet arrives: send two at once and the second pays the higher price. Load past the fleet's capacity and the order is refused at launch. Bring too little and you find out only on arrival, when the whole fleet bounces home with its cargo.
Colonizing is a launch like any other: the world it leaves from burns fuel for it, and the fleet holds one of your concurrent fleet slots on the way. Fuel is always paid by the world a fleet leaves from, so sending ships out of a new colony, even just home, is a new launch the colony pays for itself. If the seed sank in full and you carried nothing beyond it, the ships that hauled it are stuck there until the colony saves up the fuel.
Fuel first, and a fleet slot — the turns page →At launch the server checks only two things: whether you have the ships and the matter (fleet slots, capacity, fuel), and the fixed public boundaries (aiming outside the disc, aiming at your own world). Everything else waits until the fleet arrives, and is judged against you and the map as they are at that moment.
Fail any check and the whole fleet bounces home, cargo and all; the fuel is already spent. The bounce carries a single reason, checked in a fixed order: colony allowance, seed capital, sight, site. The first three concern only you: on arrival your allowance was full, you had brought too little, or the site lay outside the sight of all your worlds. They wait for arrival because each can change in flight: an array may have just finished upgrading, or your colony count may have changed. None of them says whether the spot is empty.
Only the fourth, an invalid site, concerns anyone else, and it folds three cases into one: a world already there, too close to your own world, too close to someone else's. It is checked only on arrival on purpose: if launch checked it for you, every refused order would be a free probe of the map. A bounce means no combat and no contact, and you learn nobody's name. The verdict means something under one condition only: the area looked empty in your own sight and was far enough from your own worlds, yet the site was still ruled invalid. Then either someone else's world you cannot see lies nearby, or someone colonized the same spot in the same turn: when two players land on one spot together, only one founds it and the other also gets an invalid site.
"Looked empty" can itself be wrong. Your star list shows only the nearest batch first, and the rest come a page at a time. Pick a site before paging through it all, and the world you run into is usually one that was not on the page.
A colony ship headed for a coordinate that is already taken appears in that owner's incoming-fleet warning. The warning never states a mission; what the owner sees is a fleet coming at them, and once it enters the circle they can read clearly, they also learn who sent it. On arrival the ship only bounces, with no combat, but until then the owner cannot tell a raid from a bad aim, and may already have prepared for a fight or evacuated.
Two layers of warning — the detection page →A successful colony turns that coordinate into one of your worlds. It lands with a single extractor at the lowest level and a trickle of output; the other two lines start at zero, and the whole colonizing fleet stays on as its garrison. Like any world, it has its own upgrade slot and shipyard, and once its array is up it is one more eye: its sight joins yours, and you can pick sites farther out from it.
The seed capital sinks into the founding and never becomes the new world's value; only what you carried beyond it stays as its stock. That stock is liquid: it glows, and it can be plundered. From this moment you have one more light: the world's buildings, its garrison and the liquid on its surface all count toward its brightness.
A colony cannot be destroyed or taken; the worst it suffers is being raided again and again. It stops being yours only if you abandon it yourself. The slot frees up, and the next colony's seed is priced by how many you hold at that point, but its buildings and everything you did not move out are gone. If the world you abandon held your highest array, your allowance drops with it: the colonies you have stay, but as long as your count is at or above the new allowance, you cannot found another until another array climbs high enough. A home world cannot be abandoned. It has to be emptied before you can abandon it; the conditions are on the score page.
How a score falls — the score page →