The contested front goes from two maps to four, arranged in a diamond between the two bases. Pushing through the middle is no longer enough: now there are flanks, a northern border and a prize sitting in the centre of the board.
The two new sectors
Alcyone Veil is a cold stellar nursery on the northern border. Its sky debuts a hero spiral galaxy, blue and white, with a cyan veil crossing in front of it — hence the name. It is the front’s pantry of fragment energy.
Crucible is the centre of the diamond and the only route to the station. A hot iron nebula, amber shot through with blue. It is the richest sector in the game and also the best defended: whoever holds it splits the front in two.
| Sector | Position | Richness | Dominant material |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeta System | Coalition flank | ×1.0 | Balanced |
| Alcyone Veil | Northern border | ×1.2 | Fragment energy |
| Crucible | Centre | ×1.8 | Quasicrystal |
| Earendel | Axios flank | ×1.4 | Balanced |
Procedurally generated skies
Sector backdrops no longer come from a third-party pack: there is now an in-house generator that builds 4096×2048 panoramas from a palette and a seed.
The generator itself mattered less than the quality rules that came out of looking at it in the game rather than in an image viewer:
- Stars are not scattered evenly across the sky. There are few of them, and they are seeded where the gas is. That fine grain that looks like a million stars is dust inside the nebula, not loose points.
- Real emptiness: nearly half the sky is black, in large regions. Dimming everything uniformly only produced a murky soup.
- Galaxies are feathery: a perturbed spiral built from noise, a second harmonic and dust lanes.
- Mean luminance between 25 and 35 out of 255, so ships don’t fall into silhouette and engine and laser glows don’t get swallowed.
Enemies that belong to each map
Every sector used to deploy the same ladder of NPCs. Now each map has its own mix, and two of them have creatures you won’t see anywhere else: the Custodian Star in Alcyone Veil and the Custodian Executor in Crucible, the toughest thing on the front.
Both are radial hulls with no nose, so they rotate slowly around their axis of symmetry. It is pure client-side dressing: the server decides the firing arc on its own and combat never notices the spin.
Rebalancing a wider front
Doubling the number of maps doesn’t inflate the economy, because the bonus pool is global and gets divided among the contested sectors. Two numbers still needed adjusting: the pool rises from 10% to 12%, and the conquest margin goes from 50 to 60 war points. With players spread across twice as many sectors each one sees half the traffic, and at the old margin a quiet sector changed hands over a handful of asteroids.
