Colony Conquest
This page explores whether players can capture other players' holdings and, if not, what attacking them achieves instead.
It does not describe final game behavior. It captures the current direction and unresolved design choices.
Goal
The goal is a conquest model that:
- makes attacking another player's holdings meaningful and rewarding
- preserves the value of long-term investment in development
- prevents the game from being dominated by a single powerful empire that simply absorbs everything it defeats
- creates interesting decisions for both attackers and defenders
Current Direction: No Colony Capture
The current direction is that colonies cannot be captured or taken over by another player.
A colony represents years of in-game investment. Allowing another player to simply own it after a single successful attack would make that investment feel worthless and would remove the incentive to develop deeply.
Instead, attacking a colony damages or destroys its infrastructure and creates opportunities for the attacker to extract value — but does not transfer ownership.
This model means war has different goals than in most strategy games. The attacker is not fighting to own the colony — they are fighting to profit from its destruction or to force a costly rebuild that weakens a rival.
Attack Models
Resource theft
The attacker steals stored resources from the colony during the attack. Infrastructure remains intact. The colony survives structurally but loses its stockpile.
This is the raid model. It rewards attackers who want recurring income from the same target rather than a one-time payoff. A well-timed raid against a colony that has accumulated a large stockpile can be highly profitable.
It also creates interesting defender decisions: store resources and risk them being stolen, or spend them immediately on construction and risk building slowly?
Bombardment and debris
The attacker destroys infrastructure. Destroyed infrastructure leaves a debris field that can be harvested — by the attacker, the defender, or any third party who reaches it first.
This is the bombardment model. The attacker profits from the destruction, but only if they can harvest the debris before it disperses or before rivals get there.
The debris field mechanic creates secondary gameplay: after a major battle or bombardment, the debris field becomes a contested resource that other players may race to collect. A headhunter might be contracted specifically to harvest a debris field.
Importantly, the more developed the colony, the larger the debris field. This creates a perverse incentive: heavily developed holdings are the most valuable targets. This is strategically rich — it means industrialists who build too visibly, without military protection, are attractive targets.
Holding Vulnerability by Type
Not all holdings need to behave the same way under attack.
One direction: vulnerability decreases as investment deepens.
| Holding type | Behavior under sustained attack |
|---|---|
| Claim | Can be expelled — the player loses the claim entirely |
| Frontier | Can be heavily damaged; infrastructure partially destroyed |
| Colony | Cannot be taken; infrastructure can be damaged, resources stolen, debris created |
This creates a clear spectrum: easy to dislodge at the claim stage, harder to dislodge at the frontier stage, impossible to permanently take at the colony stage — but always costly to attack and defend.
Strategic Implications
Development is protection
A colony that cannot be taken is a permanent strategic asset. An attacker can damage it repeatedly, but the defender always retains ownership and can rebuild. This means deep development is a long-term investment worth making, even though it comes with the risk of being a valuable target.
War is about economics, not ownership
If you cannot capture a colony, the goal of war shifts: - Attacker goal: extract value (raid stockpiles, harvest debris), weaken a rival's economy (destroy infrastructure), deny a strategic position (blockade a gateway, force defensive investment) - Defender goal: protect stockpiles (spend resources before they can be stolen), repair infrastructure quickly, outlast the attacker economically
This is a more interesting war model than simple conquest because it rewards strategic thinking over raw military power.
The rebuild cost
An empire that has been heavily bombarded must spend time and resources rebuilding. During that rebuild period, their production is reduced and their military capacity may be strained. This is the lasting damage war does — not permanent loss, but sustained economic pressure.
Open Questions
- Should debris fields be permanent until harvested, or do they decay over time?
- Can a debris field be contested — two fleets racing to harvest the same field?
- Should resource theft scale with fleet size (more ships = more resources stolen), or be fixed per attack?
- What determines whether an attack succeeds or fails? Fleet strength comparison, infrastructure defense bonuses, or something else?
- Should a player be able to abandon a holding voluntarily — deliberately demolishing infrastructure to deny the debris field to an attacker?
- Are there any circumstances under which a colony changes hands — for example, if a player is permanently inactive?
- Should smaller holdings (claims, frontiers) have their own distinct theft and damage mechanics, or do the same rules apply at every tier?