Dominion, siege and the Tithe

The war is a season long - eight ledger weeks - and all of this is in the game today: the score, the front, the yard’s guns, the fall and the Tithe.

Dominion - the weekly score

Every zone keeps a score per Compact, and four things move it: a convoy run delivered or lost there (the heaviest), an enemy pilot killed there (capped per pair per week), a Fallow culled there, and ore banked at its stations - counted at the sale, so a hold lost to a raider counts for nobody. At the week’s turn the top score past a threshold takes the zone; half of every score carries forward, so a Compact that stops showing up loses ground gradually. No one kind of play can take a zone alone. The chart names who holds every zone.

The front

A foreign empire opens one rung at a time: its frontier is open to anyone in a war week; each deeper rung only to a Compact holding the rung before it. Losing never locks you out of ground you could enter last week. The Slack, the season’s last week, shuts every foreign border.

Another Compact’s Shallows is never a battlefield: in a siege window you may transit it, and nobody fires there.

The window and the yard

A Compact holding another’s frontier at the settlement before the window may open a siege on that home, for two weeks that close on the calendar and on nothing else. Only then does the home’s shipyard take a foreign shot, in three layers:

1. Shield - refills on its own a minute after the last hit.
2. Batteries - untouchable under the shield; silenced one by one once it is down; back at the Ember.
3. Hull - untouchable until half the batteries are silent; repairs over two days.

One heavy garrison hull holds each home: foreigners on sight, never its own side, relaunched only from a full shield. The besieged Arms wing posts a relief writ, the attacker’s a war writ, both paid from the Compact’s purse.

The fall and the Tithe

At zero hull the yard has fallen - once a season, to the Compact that did the most damage, not the last shot. The fallen home stays its owners’ workplace: dock, sell, spawn; foreigners may only transit it until the Ember rebuilds everything.

From that Ember the loser pays the winner the Tithe: six per cent of what its pilots earn, for eight ledger weeks, taken after the assay duty and shown on the sale receipt. No duty, no Tithe; selling a hull is not an earning. It ends in the next Slack; the chart and the Circular carry the line while it runs. The three colonies.