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The Admiralty (a side to command)

Everything so far built a galaxy to travel through. The Admiralty adds a galaxy to command: it turns the player's own side into a small strategy game - worldlets to mine, platforms to build, fleets to raise and order, a tech ladder to climb - all run from a console on the bridge.

Skip this page freely. A pure trade-and-story universe never needs it. And like every chapter, you add it one piece at a time, and it is playable after each step. You never write it all at once.

What the player does (read this once)

So you know what you are building: the Admiral rides a camera high over the system - a god's-eye 2D map of everything on their side - and commands by clicking things on it.

  • Click a worldlet to build on it. First an HQ, then an Extractor - and ore and gas start flowing.
  • Click a platform to run it (raise a fleet at the Shipyard, research at the Lab).
  • Click a fleet to order it (escort, patrol, strike, hold, salvage, withdraw).

The galaxy you wrote is the board. Now let's put a game on it, one step at a time.

Step 1 - give them something to mine

Nothing to mine, no economy. So start with a ## Worldlets chapter holding one resource world. Use the same three-part shape as everything else - a heading with a (key), a --- fence of facts, and a line of prose:

## Worldlets

### Cinder World (cinder)
---
Yields: ore 8
Reserve: 4000
---
A cracked, mineral-rich ember of a world. Miners love it; nobody else does.
  • Yields is per minute, per Extractor: ore 8 means one Extractor here pulls 8 ore a minute.
  • Reserve is the total before it runs dry. Leave it off (or write unlimited) for a world that never empties.

That's it for step 1. There is no Admiral console yet - just a world waiting.

Step 2 - switch the game on, and play it

Add an ## Admiralty chapter. You can leave its fence completely empty - every setting has a sensible default:

## Admiralty
---
---

Now play it. Pick your universe from the dropdown and look at the bridge: the Admiral console is there. Open it and you will see your home system from above, your worldlet out on the ring, and a resource ticker reading zero.

Try the loop:

  1. Click the worldlet, click Build HQ. Wait for it to finish.
  2. Click the worldlet again - now Build Extractor is offered. Build it.
  3. Watch the ticker: ore starts climbing.

That is the entire foundation. Everything below just gives it more to do.

The one rule that will bite you

An HQ plus the first Extractor costs more ore than the player has income to replace at the start. If your starting ore can't buy both, they get stuck with no way to earn more. The shipped default (300) clears it - if you lower Start ore (in step 6), keep it above the cost of HQ + Extractor.

Step 3 - more worlds to mine

One world is thin. Add a couple more types - a gas giant, a settled world - so different systems feel different:

### Veiled Giant (veiled_giant)
---
Yields: gas 10
Reserve: 6000
Palette: base #2c4a8c, clouds #b8c4e0, bands 3.7
---
A banded gas giant, its high winds rich in fuel-grade volatiles.

### Haven World (haven)
---
Yields: crew 2, ore 2, gas 2
Reserve: unlimited
---
A small settled world. People, modest industry, and somewhere to come from.
  • Palette is optional - it paints the planet (base colour, cloud colour, and bands for a gas giant's stripes). Skip it and you get an engine default.
  • The home system always gets one worldlet so the player can always start. Elsewhere they appear by chance (the Worldlet chance dial in step 6), or you pin one to a place as a Landmark with Kind: worldlet.

Step 4 - give the fleets captains

Fleets need someone to command them. Add an ## Officers chapter - the Academy roster. Their Values use the same reputation poles as your clans (people), and they shape the fleet: by-the-book burns less fuel, resourceful salvages richer, fearsome fights farther out.

## Officers

### Commodore Ansel Vale (vale)
---
Title: the Quartermaster
Values: by-the-book 40, honest 30, kind 10
Face: male
Scene: off_vale_hail
---
Ran the academy's logistics course for a decade and the lanes know it.
Fleets under Vale come home fueled, patched, and on schedule.
  • Title is the honorific; Face picks a portrait; Scene (optional) names a dialogue hail so players can talk to the captain.
  • Captains grow with service - one kept in the field deepens the strengths you wrote them for. Which is why losing one hurts: a fleet's flagship can fall, and its captain's escape pod has only a short window to be rescued before they are captured or lost.

Play it again: build an Academy and a Shipyard, then click the Shipyard - your officers are offered to commission. Raise a fleet, then click its ships to give orders.

Step 5 - add a tech ladder

A ## Research chapter gives the Admiralty something to work toward at a Lab. Each milestone names its Branch, what it Costs, its Time, any milestone it Requires first, and what it Unlocks in plain English:

## Research

### Expanded Silos (eng_silos)
---
Branch: engineering
Costs: ore 120, gas 40
Time: 40
Unlocks: storage 500
---
Bigger tanks and deeper bunkers - the stockpiles hold more.

### Refined Extraction (eng_refining)
---
Branch: engineering
Costs: ore 180, gas 90
Time: 60
Requires: eng_silos
Unlocks: extraction 25%
---
Better drills, hotter crackers. Every extractor works a quarter again as fast.

Unlocks understands three phrases: storage N raises the caps, extraction N% speeds every extractor, and requisition <item> adds hardware to the catalog. Chain milestones with Requires: to build a ladder climbed one rung at a time.

Step 6 - tune the dials (only if you want to)

The whole game above ran on defaults. When you want to reshape it, the ## Admiralty fence takes dials - all optional, each line skippable:

Economy pace: standard    // brisk | standard | epic - scales the dials below together
Worldlet chance: 30%      // chance a NON-home system holds a worldlet
Start ore: 300            // opening stockpiles (mind the warning in step 2)
Start gas: 100
Start crew: 40
Storage: 600              // per-resource cap; Refineries and Research raise it
Command points: 3         // how many fleets at once; Sensor Relays add more
Fleet gas burn: 2         // gas per minute a fleet burns on an active order
Requisition budget: 800 credits   // starting funds for the Requisition catalog
Build model: menu         // menu (instant) or fabricator (a builder ship flies out)
Skirmish pressure: border // where border raids come from (border, or none)
Skirmish interval: 240    // seconds between border raids
MIA timer: 300            // rescue window for a downed captain's pod, in seconds
Relay rate: 50%           // income a Relay Gate keeps paying from a system you left
Research pace: campaign   // how quickly the tech ladder is meant to be climbed

The Admiral commands from the overseer: a detached camera over a system-wide 2D map where you select objects to act (worldlet build, fleet orders, platform actions). The older tabbed "bridge" console has been retired.

Mode — one dial for the mission's shape

Mode picks the kind of mission and sets sensible defaults for the dials below (any dial you set explicitly still wins). It's the keystone the Open Universe foundation grows on (see FOUNDATION_PLAN.md). Author it in a mission-level ## Scenario chapter — so a story universe needs no ## Admiralty block at all:

## Scenario
---
Mode: story
---

(Mode: is still accepted inside ## Admiralty for older universes.)

Mode Admiral RTS Economy Skirmish For
sandbox on standard border today's living universe (default)
skirmish on brisk border a punchy 1–3 h RTS
war on epic border a long, multi-side war
campaign off epic off a persistent single-ship epic
story off standard off a bounded 1–2 h narrative

campaign/story switch the admiral economy off entirely even if a Worldlets chapter is present — so a story mission can reuse the universe without the RTS. An unknown or omitted mode is sandbox. (More of the mission shape — hostile side relations, victory/defeat conditions, which subsystems load — folds into Mode in later phases; today it drives the admiral/economy/skirmish switches.)

Victory & defeat (via quests + the Mode default)

Victory conditions are authored as quests, not a separate config block — a quest with Win: yes that completes ends the game in victory (Lose: yes in defeat). The war Modes also come with a built-in default so a PvP match ends on its own.

  • Last side standing (skirmish/war default) — a player side is eliminated when it holds no Headquarters (conquest); when one side remains it wins. No authoring needed; it just works in skirmish/war.
  • Decapitation quick-win — a side's first HQ is its capital, tagged with a <side>_capital role. Capturing/destroying it is a normal quest:
# [Take the Orion capital](win_decap)
When: destroy 1 orion_capital
Win: yes
  • Conquest as a quest — to make "wipe out a specific side" an authored objective (not just the automatic last-standing), hook the war-state milestone signal:
# [Break the Orion Concord](win_conquest)
When: signal eliminated_orion
Win: yes

The war-state watcher fires eliminated_<side> when a side loses its last HQ (and last_side_standing when one remains); When: signal <name> completes the quest via the quest driver's generic on_signal hook. - Story / objective wins — any quest with Win:/Lose: (reach a sector, recover an item, etc.) ends the game, so a story mission's victory is just its final quest.

Under the hood a war-state watcher emits side_eliminated / last_side_standing (and mirrors them to the quest quest_signal hook); game end sets the shared UNIVERSE_GAME_OVER.

Economy pace — one dial for game length

Base resources accumulate slowly on purpose (an anti-snowball economy: single-digit per-minute yields against 60–400-ore platforms, capped by Storage). Rather than hand-tune Yields, Reserve, Storage and Start separately, pick a pace — it scales all four together (as multipliers on whatever you authored):

Pace Yield Reserve Storage Start For
brisk ×2.0 ×2.0 ×1.5 ×1.5 a punchy ~1-hour session
standard ×1.0 ×1.0 ×1.0 ×1.0 today's balance (default)
epic ×1.0 ×5.0 ×3.0 ×1.5 a long / persistent game

brisk speeds the whole curve; epic keeps the same per-hour ramp but makes finite worldlets last far longer and lets you bank much more for late infrastructure. You can still set explicit Yields / Reserve / Storage / Start values — the pace scales those. An unknown pace (or omitting the line) is standard.

It's multi-side, for free

Everything on this page is written once and runs for every player-commanded side your universe fields. Field two player sides and each gets its own Admiral, stockpiles, fleets, and research off these same chapters - you don't duplicate anything, and you don't name a side anywhere in them. Whether those sides are allies (a co-op war) or rivals is set where the universe defines its sides, not here.

The platforms (the fixed kit)

You don't write the platforms - they are the standard set the Admiral builds from. Knowing what each does helps you tune your yields and dials around them:

Platform What it does
HQ The hub. The first build; unlocks the rest.
Extractor Pulls a worldlet's Yields into the pools. The income.
Refinery Boosts its worldlet's extraction and adds storage.
Academy Lets you commission officers into fleets.
Shipyard Where fleets form; also the research site.
Lab Research slots - one project per Lab at a time.
Sensor Relay Adds a command point and charts the neighbouring systems.
Depot Supplies fleets operating away from home.
Bastion Draws and holds border raids - where the fight lands.

Next: The complete example - the whole Silver Reach in one listing.