WIKI / GUIDE

Going off-world

The part the classics never tried. Leaving the planet is expensive, risky, and the only way to win the long game.

The Spaceport

Research Launch Pad Plans (Space branch), build the Spaceport, and you have a pad. Rockets are built per launch: an airframe (credits + metals), plus propellant scaled by your world's gravity. Earth pays the full fuel bill; the Moon pays a fraction of it. A Fuel Plant turning water into propellant keeps the pad fed.

Launch odds — and why test rockets matter

Launches can fail. Success starts at 60% and every banked launch-data point adds 12%, up to 95%. Cheap test rockets always bank a data point; real launches bank one only when they fail. Fly two or three tests before anything precious sits on the pad — the math pays for itself the first time a colony pod doesn't explode.

What a rocket can carry

Satellites — recon (reveals the whole map over that world), GPS, comms. Parked in orbit, working forever.
Cargo pods — move metals, water, or helium-3 between worlds. This is how a rich world funds a poor front.
Unit pods — put hardware on another world. The one that matters most: an MCV, because an MCV deploys into a Construction Yard anywhere flat — no build radius, no permission. That's a colony.

Founding the colony

Send a recon satellite first. Landing blind is donating an MCV.
Pod the MCV down near a deposit cluster, deploy, then solar → refinery → the loop you already know — under new physics: stronger or weaker sun, lighter gravity, and no air. Soft infantry can't serve off Earth; the Hardsuit Trooper is your infantry line out there.
Garrison early. Other commanders read a fresh colony as free real estate.

Why the Moon is the whole strategy

Its lift cost is a fraction of Earth's — the cheapest pad in the system. The foundry flies cheap.
It has helium-3, which exists nowhere else: premium trade good, fuel for the Tier-2 heavy lifter (double pods, no propellant), and ammunition for the top of the tech tree.
The Mass Driver flings cargo pods off the Moon with no rocket, no fuel, and no failure roll — electromagnetic freight on a cooldown.

Earth proves the colony; the Moon industrializes it; Mars finishes it. Travel takes real time (the tables have the exact numbers), so move hardware before you need it, not after.

Fighting across worlds

Invasions assemble in orbit and descend as a wave — the defender's radar gets a warning, so expect a contested landing. Hold a beachhead, deploy, and remember the defender's rule too: a world without your Construction Yard on it isn't yours yet. When the war goes truly late-game, the superweapons page is required reading.

REFERENCE GENERATED FROM LIVE GAME DATA — BALANCE v51 · 2026-07-28 · NUMBERS UPDATE WITH EVERY RELEASE