Colonies

Status: draft v0.2, 2026-11-09. Act III of the player arc (GAME-DESIGN.md §5). Defence rules in COMBAT.md §7; the tax and security engine in SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md. Numbers are shapes, not balance.

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1. One colony per planet

A colony sits on a planet. One planet, one colony, and whoever got there first owns it.

A system has several planets, so a system usually holds several colonies owned by several different players. They are neighbours. They trade with each other, undercut each other, and one of them is in charge.

It is not a city builder: no population, no happiness, no tile grids, no surface management. The decisions are which planet, what you specialise it as, and how you get on with the neighbours.

2. Planet size is the whole land market

Slots are a property of the planet, not of the player. A bigger planet has more slots. Nothing you do, build or train will ever add one.

• Every planet has at least enough slots for a complete T1 line: forge, factory, market. No claim is a dud — whatever you take, you can run a real business on it.
• Starting regions are small planets. The space a new player can reach easily is all modest.
• Large planets are rare, and the largest are very rare indeed.
• First come, first served. There is no bidding, no auction, no reset.

Three things follow, and they are the reason this is the right model:

• The map has real estate, with genuinely unequal plots, and everyone can see which ones are good.
• The best plots are far away, which pulls expansion outward and makes scouting a profession before it is a hobby.
• Taking a big planet is permanent and public. You now own a thing other people wanted and cannot have. Everything interesting that follows is downstream of that sentence.

3. Slots force the trade-off

The only hard decision in base design, and it is a good one:

Defence competes with production. Every slot given to turrets and shields is a slot not making anything.

A heavily defended colony is poor. A rich colony is soft. A big planet lets you be somewhat less miserable about it, which is exactly why big planets matter.

What fills the slots:

Forge	Raw → intermediate
Factory	Blueprint + intermediates → ships, modules, structures
Market	Buy and sell orders, open to whoever you allow
Storage	Holding what you are not currently using
Defence	Turrets, shields — the toughness from COMBAT.md §7
Port	Docking, repair, respawn

Production lines scale. Spend more slots on forges and you refine more in parallel; spend them on factories and you fabricate more. Specialisation is not a label you pick, it is what you spent your slots on, and it is visible to anyone who looks.

4. Colonies do not produce resources

Nothing is extracted at a colony. Ever.

Raw material arrives one of two ways:

1. Somebody flew out and mined it (GATHERING.md).
2. You bought it, through a buy order on a market.

There are no extractors, no drone bays filling hoppers while you sleep, no passive income of any kind. A colony is a workshop and a shopfront, not a farm.

This is the most important rule in the document. It means:

• Every atom in the economy was mined by a person. Supply is bounded by how many people are actually out there flying, so the economy breathes with the playerbase instead of inflating forever.
• An industrialist needs miners, and miners need somewhere to sell. Neither can quietly become self-sufficient, so trade is structural rather than encouraged.
• Nobody gets rich while logged off. Wealth tracks activity, not seniority, which is pillar 6 with teeth.

5. Who runs the system

The Empire does not govern frontier systems directly. It appoints the most influential colony to run each one, and deals only with them.

5.1 Influence

Influence is the tax you pay. One number, recomputed every cycle, and public.

Tax is a rate on revenue (SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md §2.2), so influence is simply a measure of how much money a colony takes in — from selling what its factories build, from the sales tax on its market, from everything it does. Earn more, pay more, matter more.

We do not need a separate term for being a trade hub. Centrality pays for itself: a colony everyone buys and sells through collects more market tax, which is revenue, which is tax, which is influence. The busiest market in a system becomes its government through the ledger, with no extra mechanic to balance.

Influence is the tax paid. Not the revenue it was computed from, not a formula over it — the credits that actually reached the Empire.

There is nothing to weight and nothing to tune. Whatever the tax rate applies to, the amount that lands is the number.

The most influential colony is put in charge by the government. Not elected, not conquered: appointed, because it is the one the Empire finds worth dealing with.

So a system can change hands without a shot fired. Out-earn the incumbent and the government simply starts dealing with you instead. That is conquest available to someone who never fits a weapon, and it is the strongest non-violent career path in the design.

One rule stops incumbency becoming permanent: tax the controller merely collects and remits on its neighbours' behalf never counts as its own revenue — the Empire takes it in full. Only what the colony itself earns is taxed. Without that, a controller would book its system's whole bill as revenue and buy its own re-appointment forever — the chair would never change hands again.

5.2 Protection is a subscription, not a decree

No one holds a switch over the system. Each colony buys imperial protection for itself, and the Empire charges what patrolling the region costs and splits that bill between the subscribers in it: more neighbours subscribing means a smaller share each, and every neighbour who stops paying makes the bill worse for the ones who stay.

Full safety then takes two things at once:

• Coverage — every revenue-earning colony in the system is subscribed. That is the bar; nothing less will do.
• The Imperial Ring — a radius in jumps. Inside it, full coverage is genuine safety. Outside it the navy arrives too late, and full coverage buys partial loot at best.

Which gives four states and no others:

State	Condition	What it means
Safe	Full coverage, inside the Ring	The navy answers fast. Cargo can be lost; hulls are recovered.
Contested	Partial coverage, or full coverage outside the Ring	Partial loot for everyone here — including the colonies that did pay.
Lawless	Nobody subscribes	Nobody is coming.
Core	Imperial, unconditional	The Empire keeps order whether anybody pays or not.

A holdout is everyone's problem. One revenue-earning colony that refuses drops the whole system from safe to contested, and the subscribers end up exactly as exposed as the colony that refused. That is deliberate: safety here is a collective action problem, and it makes neighbours political actors. Leaning on the holdout, subsidising their share, or paying their subscription outright are all legitimate moves — a colony may pay another colony's bill, and that is where the local politics actually lives.

A colony earning nothing is not counted at all. It owes nothing (§5.3), so it appears on neither side of the fraction. A dormant squatter on the worst rock in the system can neither block full protection nor be shaken down for it.

The consequence is worth stating plainly: a busy system is harder to keep fully green than a quiet one. More colonies share the patrol bill, but full protection also needs all of them paying at once, and unanimity gets dearer to hold with every subscriber added. Trade therefore spreads out across systems small enough to stay unanimous instead of piling into one mega-hub — the same rule as ECONOMY.md §2.2 seen from the other side: safety and wealth cannot occupy the same place.

The controller keeps the job that is left, and it is administrative: the Empire bills each colony its own share, the controller collects and remits the total in full, keeping nothing, and has no veto, no discount to hand out and no way to buy or sell its neighbours' safety. A cut for the chair would be revenue, would inflate the controller's own influence, and the chair would never change hands again.

The rate curve, how distance from the roads makes the subscription ruinous out on the frontier, and how the Ring itself moves: SECURITY-AND-SOVEREIGNTY.md.

5.3 Tax is a rate on revenue

No revenue, no tax. A colony that takes nothing in owes nothing, at any distance from anywhere.

The same rule decides who is counted: a colony owing nothing is excluded from its system's coverage (§5.2), so idleness neither pays for protection nor stands in the way of it.

This matters most for new and small players: you can hold a planet in a dangerous system and owe not one credit until you start actually earning. Failure is cheap. Starting is free.

6. The galaxy starts occupied

The ring of systems just outside the Core is not empty. NPC colonies hold it, loyal to the Empire, always paying, always safe.

They are the scaffolding of the early game:

• A new player has somewhere to sell, somewhere to buy, and a working economy to learn in from the first minute.
• Those systems are safe because every NPC colony in them subscribes, not because of a rule, and the Core behind them stays the free imperial berth every new pilot starts from.
• Those colonies sit on small planets and are deliberately beatable.

And then they lose. As players build, produce and trade, they out-influence the NPC incumbents and take the systems over. The NPCs fade out of the inner ring as the players arrive.

This is the best onboarding this design can have: the game is already alive when you get there, and the civilisation you inherited was visibly built by somebody else. Act III opens here, by out-influencing an NPC and taking a planet from the state.

7. Command mode

The colony screen is the home screen of the check-in loop, and the most-looked-at surface in the game. Everything on it is a queue with a timer:

• What is refining, what is being built, when each finishes
• What sold on your market, and what tax it earned you
• What arrived, what left, what got attacked
• Where your influence stands against your neighbours

Target: thirty seconds to read and re-queue, one-handed. If a player cannot empty and refill their queues while waiting for a kettle, this screen has failed and the game with it.

Queues run for days. Absence costs idle capacity, never assets.

8. Colonies die, and that is the design

A colony cannot be moved. It is permanent until destroyed or abandoned.

Rare deposits deplete and resurface elsewhere in unsafe space (ECONOMY.md §2.2), and colonies cannot extract anyway — so a colony's value is its position in a trade network, not its proximity to a rock. Which means:

• When the mining moves, the haulers reroute, your market goes quiet, your centrality falls, and your influence with it.
• A controller can lose a system to the slow fact that trade stopped coming.
• Ghost towns are real places with visible history, and their ruins are somebody else's income (GATHERING.md §7).

You cannot have a rich, safe, permanent home. The rich places move, the safe ones are expensive, and nothing you build stays central forever.

9. Implementation notes

• A colony is a row on a body, plus its module rows. Queues are started_at + duration, materialised on read (ARCHITECTURE.md §1.2). Nothing ticks.
• Slot count is a pure function of the planet, derived from the galaxy seed. It costs nothing to store and can never drift.
• Influence is a sum over the tax ledger per colony per cycle, excluding tax merely remitted on a neighbour's behalf. A small aggregate over a small set, run in the same daily sweep that bills tax.
• A market is the orders table scoped to a colony. No second market system.
• Defence resolution reuses the combat function (COMBAT.md §9): a colony is a fleet that cannot move.

10. Open questions

• [ ] How often does control change hands? A daily recompute could make control flap between two close rivals. Hysteresis — the incumbent holds unless clearly beaten — is probably necessary.
• [ ] Can the controller evict a neighbour, or only out-compete them? Eviction is a huge power and a huge grief vector. Leaning no: the pressure available is economic — undercut them on the market and out-influence them for the chair.
• [ ] Should the controller ever keep a capped surcharge on its neighbours' tax? Today it collects and remits in full and keeps nothing; a cut would count as its own revenue and inflate its own influence, so any case for one has to be made against that.
• [ ] A holdout leaves the system at partial loot (§5.2): what may the other colonies do about it? Paying their subscription is settled as allowed, and buying them out is just a purchase. Whether a majority may force coverage, or expel a colony from the system, is open — and both are grief vectors.
• [ ] Exactly how rare are large planets, and are the largest discoverable before you get there? If a deep survey can reveal one, prospecting for real estate becomes a profession of its own.
• [ ] Can a player hold colonies on several planets in the same system, stacking their own influence? Probably yes, and it is how a determined player takes a system outright.
• [ ] What happens to a colony whose owner never returns? The lapse cycle covers taxed systems; an untaxed, unproductive colony owes nothing and may sit there forever. It probably needs a dormancy rule or the map slowly fills with abandoned squatting.

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Changelog

• 2026-11-09 — v0.1. One base per system, slots forcing specialisation, no upkeep because system tax scaled with what was built, Core unclaimable, command mode as the check-in home screen.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.2. Rewritten to Jonathan's model. One colony per planet, several per system, slots determined by planet size on a first-come-first-served land market with large planets rare and starting regions small. Defence competes with production. Colonies extract nothing — every raw material is mined by a player or bought on a market. The Empire appoints the most influential colony to run each system, influence being output plus trade centrality, so systems change hands commercially rather than militarily. The controller alone decides whether the Empire is paid, which makes the system safe or unsafe for everyone in it, and levies the local rate on its neighbours. Tax is a rate on output — no income, no tax. NPC colonies hold the first systems and are progressively displaced by players.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.3. Influence is simply the tax a colony pays, not a weighted formula. Centrality needs no separate term: a busy market earns more, so it pays more, so it matters more. Added the rule that a controller may not count tax it merely remits for its neighbours as its own income, without which incumbency would be self-perpetuating.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.4. Influence stated precisely: it is the tax paid, the credits that actually reached the Empire — not revenue, not output, not a formula over them. The gross-versus-net question is void.
• 2026-11-09 — v0.5. Tax base is revenue — the credits a colony actually receives, market sales tax included — everywhere the word "income" or "output" carried it. The controller no longer sets a local rate: the Empire bills every colony directly and the controller collects and remits in full, keeping nothing, so no share of its neighbours' tax becomes its own revenue; a capped surcharge is recorded as an open question instead. NPC colonies placed in the ring of systems just outside the Core, which is where Act III begins, and the Core left unclaimable.
• 2026-11-10 — v0.6. Protection is a subscription each colony buys for itself, the Empire splitting the patrol bill between the subscribers, so each share falls as neighbours join and climbs as they leave; §5.2 rewritten around that. A system is fully safe only when every revenue-earning colony subscribes and it sits inside the Imperial Ring — the radius in jumps that pushes out with a colonised edge and pulls back when it thins — giving four states: safe, contested, lawless, core. The controller's pay-or-refuse switch is gone: safety is a collective action problem, one holdout drops everyone to partial loot, any colony may pay another's subscription, and a colony earning nothing is excluded from the count entirely. The consequence is recorded as one more reason safety and wealth cannot share a place: a busy system is harder to keep unanimous than a quiet one. The controller keeps only the administrative counterparty role, collecting and remitting in full.