Colonies

Your colonies are how you turn star systems into income, ships, and tech. Without them, your fleets starve.

Planet classes

Every star system you scout will surface one of six planet types. The class drives habitability, the resource bonuses you’ll harvest, and how the system shows up on your map.

Founding a colony

When a fleet enters a star system, you can settle it. The fleet detaches a colony seed (one ship, plus a one-time settlement charge in minerals); the rest of the fleet is free to move on.

A new colony starts at population 1. From there, it grows on its own based on:

• The system’s base habitability (low/medium/high — shown in the system info panel)
• Building bonuses (greenhouses, hydroponics)
• Faction modifiers (the Nyx Collective gets +10% growth)
• Adjacency to friendly colonies (small bonus from logistics chains)

Population caps are determined by buildings — without housing infrastructure, growth slows and eventually stops.

Every system you control carries an ownership marker tinted in your player colour, so you can read the shape of your territory — and spot a rival’s borders — across the galaxy at a glance.

What a colony does

Each turn, a colony:

1. Produces resources based on its terrain bonuses, buildings, and population.
2. Pays maintenance for itself and any units stationed there.
3. Advances production queues (one building or unit at a time per slot).
4. Updates happiness based on services, garrison, and recent events.

Drop the maintenance bill below the income line and you have a viable colony. Drop the population above zero and you keep it.

On the map

Colonies and their key structures are drawn straight onto the galaxy map, tinted in the owner’s faction colour so you can read the board at a glance:

• A colony marker sits on every settled system.
• Small badges appear when a colony has built one of its signature structures — a mining station, a research laboratory, or a shipyard.
• The system you’ve currently selected is framed by a slowly rotating highlight ring, so it stays easy to find even when you zoom out.

Prefer a cleaner board? The map’s layer control lets you hide structure markers (and the other overlays) whenever you want.

Specialisation

Generalist colonies underperform. The best players pick a focus per colony and build around it:

• Industrial — orbital foundry, recycling plant, deep-core mining. Outputs minerals and ship-build speed.
• Research — research lab, university, biological-survey post. Outputs research and rare-resource discovery.
• Defensive — garrison barracks, planetary shield, sensor array. Cheap to maintain, hard to crack.
• Population — habitats, hydroponics, immigration office. Grows fast and feeds the rest of the empire.

A four-colony empire of specialists out-produces a six-colony empire of generalists. Pick a role per colony and commit.

Building queues

Each colony has one production slot by default — research-tech upgrades let you add a second. Each slot processes one item at a time: a building, a ship, or a research project.

You can queue several items deep. The queue advances each turn — every building and every ship class has its own construction time, measured in turns, that the colony works through one turn at a time.

Strategy: Always have something queued. An idle colony is wasted income.

Costs are paid up front when you confirm the order — once a build is in the queue, a later resource shortage won’t cancel it. If you can’t afford the cost, the order is rejected and nothing is taken from your stockpile.

Defending colonies

Every colony has a built-in garrison — a small permanent defence force that engages attackers before the colony falls. Garrisons grow with population and with defensive buildings (planetary shield, ground militia, orbital defence).

When an enemy fleet enters the system:

1. Combat triggers between the attacker and the garrison plus any friendly fleets in the system.
2. If the defenders win, the colony is unaffected.
3. If the attacker wins, they can occupy the colony — taking its income, blocking its production, and slowly converting its loyalty.
4. You can liberate it later by re-taking the system. Loyalty resets but population may have declined.

Strategy: Don’t leave a colony with only its garrison if you suspect attack. Station a defensive fleet, or research Shield Harmonics for the planetary-shield building unlock.

Happiness

Each colony tracks happiness from 0 (revolt) to 100 (joy):

• High happiness produces small income bonuses and faster growth.
• Low happiness drags production and triggers events (strikes, riots, secession threats).
• Garrisons and entertainment buildings raise happiness; tax raises lower it.

Most factions can ignore happiness if their colonies are well-fed and well-defended. The Nyx Collective trades a baseline happiness penalty for raw research output — pick your trade-offs.