The ground between the worlds

What the ground can be

• 

  The only ore there is

  Mineral belt

  Ore does not lie in one place, it lies in basins — and a mining station may only ever stand on one. Not "pays better here": there is nowhere else to put it. Which is why a particular cell can be worth more than a nearer one, and worth taking off somebody.

• 

  Wall you can clear

  Debris field

  Something was broken up here and never collected. Nothing stands on it until the wreck is hauled out, and hauling it out costs. A wall you may pay your way through is a different decision from a wall you cannot.

• 

  Permanent wall

  Gravity well

  Nothing is ever built here, by anyone, ever. It is the plainest entry on the map and the most valuable: a wall nobody can remove is what turns open space into a corridor, and a corridor is what makes a front worth holding.

• 

  Cover

  Nebula

  It blocks nothing and yields nothing. What it does is hide: a world sitting inside one is harder to read from outside, and the probes sent to look at it come home with less than their owner hoped.

• 

  One to a system, at most

  Science anomaly

  Whatever it is, it should not be there. It is the only ground a research station can stand on, and what that station does is speed the work on the worlds you already own in that system — in that system, and nowhere else in your empire.

What you can raise on it

Only ever on a cell you already control — building is not how you take ground. A cell carries three of them at most and never two of the same kind, and the three that pay a percentage can be levelled up. Every one of them works for whoever CONTROLS the cell, not for whoever paid: taking somebody's gate is the same thing as owning one.

• Outpost

  A fleet takes a cell; an outpost is what turns it into a frontier. Planted on ground you control, it projects a ring of its own — so an empire grows by taking one cell and then reaching from it, rather than by conquering every hexagon it wants to own. There is a limit to how many you may hold in one system.

• Mining station

  Only ever built on ore, and what it pays goes into the worlds you already own in that system — not into the cell it stands on. Nothing out here produces in the void: a station is a bonus on your planets or it is nothing.

• Jump gate

  One to a system, and it puts your colours on the galactic chart rather than the local one. It works for whoever holds its cell, not for whoever paid to build it — which makes taking somebody's gate a better idea than raising your own.

• Research station

  It cannot stand anywhere but on an anomaly, and there is at most one of those in a system. It speeds the research being done on your worlds there and does nothing for the rest of your empire — a reason to fight over one particular cell instead of counting cells.

• Defense array

  A wall you pay for once and that then holds by itself. Fleets that come for the cell go through its guns first, and the fight leaves a report like any other. It also stiffens the defences of your worlds in that system. Losing it destroys it — an array that survived every failed assault would make one cell unconquerable forever.

How a cell changes hands

And the other half of it is holding one. There are two ways, and they are not the same tool: a defence array is a wall you pay for once and that then stands by itself, while a fleet parked on your own cell is the only defence in the game that can move — it fights with whatever hulls you gave it, and you can always call it home.

1. 01

   Fly

   Ground is taken by a fleet, always — empty ground included. It is the same order either way, and it only reads differently: you claim open space, you conquer somebody's. What it cannot do is skip: the cell has to touch territory you already hold.

2. 02

   Fight

   If the cell is defended, the array and every fleet parked on it meet you as one force, and one commander leads each side. Lose and nothing moves — the wall holds and your fleet limps home. Win and the array is destroyed, the garrisons scatter, and a draw counts as repelled.

3. 03

   Wait

   Winning does not hand it over. A clock starts, and only the player you took it from can stop it by coming back — a third party who wants the cell has to take it themselves and start their own. Ground that belonged to nobody has nobody to cancel it.

What territory will never do

A system like this is defined by its refusals. These four were argued over, and they are the reason the map plays the way it does.

• It never blocks a fleet

  You cannot wall someone in. A trip is a departure and an arrival with a crossing in between — it passes through nothing, so no border can stop it. Being surrounded is a bad position, not a prison.

• Nothing out here produces in the void

  Ground never pays by itself. Every structure is a bonus on the worlds you already own in that system — so territory is worth exactly as much as what you have there to improve, and never a total counted across an empire. If holding ground paid globally, war would become a race for the largest number of hexagons and the shape of a territory would stop mattering.

• A world is never captured

  Neither is the ground it stands on. You can take every cell around someone's colony and still not own the colony. What territory decides is what a system is worth, not who lives in it.

• Attacking is the declaration

  There is no warning step and no paperwork. The first thing a war does is arrive. Two grounds are off limits all the same: an ally's, which the game refuses exactly as it refuses attacking an ally's planet, and anyone still inside their first days in a galaxy.