How to play
Everything here applies to all six peoples. If you are choosing one, the peoples pages say what each is good at.
The shape of a turn
Nothing happens until you end the turn. Orders you give — building, assigning somebody to a job, sending a fleet — are queued and resolved together, so a turn is a plan rather than a race.
At the end of a turn: production is counted, food is eaten, power is drawn, construction advances, ships move, and anything that was going to go wrong goes wrong. Then you look at what changed and decide again.
Your first ten turns
1. Find out what the ground is worth
Every tile has a food potential and a mineral richness, and they vary a lot. A farm on poor soil is close to wasted. Look before you build: the tile panel tells you what a tile will actually yield if you work it.
2. Feed and power first
A colony that runs out of food starves, and one that runs out of power shuts down. Both failures cascade. Put a farm on the best soil you have and a reactor somewhere safe before you build anything clever.
3. Put trained hands where they earn most
Each unit has a trade. The right trade in the right building is worth half again as much as an untrained colonist in the same building. An engineer in a reactor, a scientist in a laboratory, an agronomist on a farm — and nobody idle if you can help it.
4. Research toward what you are short of
Research is one queue. Pick the thing that fixes your actual problem: more power, better farms, or the sealed habitation that lets you use the moon you are staring at.
Power, and what happens when it runs out
Every building draws from a shared grid. When demand exceeds supply, things shut down by class — research first, then industry, with life support and the core held longest. A brownout is not a game-over; it is a signal you have built ahead of your reactors.
A built worker with no current does not die. It stands where it is, goes dark, and starts again when the power comes back.
Unrest
Crowding, hunger and defeat all raise unrest, and unrest cuts everything your colony produces. It is held down by order-keeping buildings and by having enough room. Watch it before it is a problem rather than after.
Expanding
An unclaimed world becomes yours when you put somebody on it or build there. The hard part is not claiming it but making it survivable: hostile ground needs sealed habitation, and everything you put on a moon has to be supplied from somewhere.
Fleets and fighting
Ships are counters, built at a shipyard and grouped into fleets. When two hostile fleets share a sector they are locked into an engagement, which is fought on its own board — you deploy, then act one stack at a time. You can also break off, at a cost.
Saving
The game you are playing is written to its own slot at the end of every turn — in your browser, and on the server as well if you are signed in and have chosen to keep it there. You can turn that off in settings.
Playing signed out is playing properly: guest saves live in your browser and work exactly the same. An account adds save slots you can open on another machine.