Sector Development

Sectors are not just numbers going up. Each sector follows a development path — a small skill tree — that forces meaningful choices as it grows. This page captures the direction and open questions around how sector development works.

Goal

Make developing a holding feel like building something with identity, not just filling a progress bar. Each holding should feel distinct based on the choices made during development.

Core Problem

If all sectors of the same type are identical, holdings become interchangeable. A level 10 extraction sector on every holding looks the same and plays the same. The game needs a mechanism that makes development choices permanent and identity-defining.

Working Directions

Sector Levels and Branching

Sectors develop through levels. At certain level thresholds a sector must choose a specialization branch. Each branch changes what the sector does going forward — not just how much it produces.

A rough example for an extraction sector:

Extraction Sector
  Level 1–9: produces raw resource, no external inputs required
  Level 10: choose a branch
    -> Deep Mining: continues producing raw resource, higher output, may unlock rarer variants.
                    No external input dependency.
    -> Refinery:    stops producing from the object. Consumes raw resource inputs (from any holding)
                    and produces processed industrial-tier resource instead.

Branches can extend further:

Refinery (level 10+)
  Level 15: choose a branch
    -> Heavy Industry:        consumes industrial-tier inputs, produces higher-tier manufactured materials
    -> Advanced Fabrication:  consumes industrial-tier inputs, produces components for shipbuilding
                              or specialist equipment

Deep Mining (level 10+)
  Level 15: choose a branch
    -> Mass Extraction:       high volume, standard quality, no external inputs
    -> Precision Extraction:  lower volume, unlocks exotic-tier variants, no external inputs

The key distinction at the branch point: Deep Mining remains self-sustaining — it draws from the object. Refinery and all branches derived from it are input-dependent — they consume resources that must be supplied from elsewhere in the player's network.

This structure means each sector has a development history. Two holdings with the same base sector type can end up producing entirely different things.

Reversibility

Branch choices can be reversed, but at a significant resource cost. Reversing a branch resets the sector to the branching point and requires re-developing from there.

This means mistakes are not permanent, but they are painful. The cost should be high enough that players take branching decisions seriously.

Fixed Slot Footprint

Each sector occupies one slot on the holding regardless of level. Slot count constrains how many sectors a holding can host, not how high any one sector can be developed.

This makes slot limits a real constraint on breadth. The slot decision is made when the player decides to dedicate one of the holding's scarce sites to a sector at all.

Depth still needs pressure. Higher levels can become increasingly expensive through resource cost, energy demand, upkeep, workforce requirement, logistics dependency, or branch-specific input demand.

A small asteroid with only a few slots forces a hard choice: dedicate one prime slot to extraction, spend another on defense, or give up one of those to local processing. Neither is strictly better — it depends on the object's resource composition and the player's strategic needs.

Larger objects have more slots and usually better slot-class distribution, but they still cannot do everything.

Technology can increase slot count or improve Slot Class, but Slot Class only changes output and does not change what a slot costs to use.

Slot Class and Placement

Slots are not necessarily identical. A sector's output can depend in part on the Slot Class it occupies.

Possible effect of Slot Class:

output multiplier for the hosted sector

This creates another identity layer. Two level-10 extraction sectors can still feel different because one occupies a prime slot while the other is built in a weaker slot on a worse object.

Consequences of Losing a Developed Holding

Because each developed sector occupies a scarce slot and branches represent irreversible investment, a highly developed holding represents significant accumulated effort.

Losing that holding to an enemy attack is genuinely painful — not just lost income but lost development history that takes time and resources to rebuild.

This makes defense investment feel meaningful. A player who develops a holding deeply has a strong incentive to protect it.

Stellar Object Specialization

Because slot counts are small on minor objects and Slot Class is limited, the resource composition of an object becomes critical to development decisions.

An asteroid with high occurrence for a specific resource and one excellent extraction slot is worth developing deeply along the extraction path for that resource. An asteroid with low or absent occurrence, or only weak slots, is not worth the same investment.

This means object scouting and valuation happen before development, not as an afterthought.

Open Questions

At which levels do branch points occur? Are they fixed (e.g. always at level 10, 15, 20) or different per sector type?
How many branch options are available at each branch point — two, three, or more?
What are the exact slot counts and Slot Class distributions per object type, and how much can technology improve them?
What is the cost to reverse a branch choice?
Do all sector types have branch points, or only certain ones?
Should Slot Class affect every sector type equally, or only the output of certain sector families?
What is the right escalating cost model for depth now that levels no longer consume extra slots?