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 energy fragment.
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 | Energy fragment |
| Crucible | Centre | ×1.8 | Quasicrystal |
| Earendel | Axios flank | ×1.4 | Balanced |
Every sector has a sky of its own
No backdrop repeats. Each map gets its own panorama, with its galaxy, its nebula and its palette, and they all follow the same rules:
- 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. A sky filled edge to edge turns into a murky soup.
- Galaxies are feathery: frayed arms and dust lanes, nothing like a textbook spiral.
- And the whole thing stays deliberately dark, 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 Custodians. 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 — as anything without a bow or a stern should.
Rebalancing a wider front
Doubling the number of maps doesn’t inflate the economy: conquest bonuses come out of a shared pool divided among the contested sectors. Two numbers still needed adjusting.
The pool rises from 10% to 12%, and the margin needed to take a sector goes from 50 to 60 War Points. With players spread across twice as many maps each one sees half the traffic, and at the old margin a quiet sector changed hands over a handful of asteroids.
