Dominion, siege and the Tithe

The war is a season long - eight ledger weeks, each turning at Thursday 00:00 UTC - and all of this is in the game today: the score, the front, the Sentinels, the Citadel’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 (three times per pair per week at most), a Fallow culled there (worth more the deeper the sector), 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, unless a lit Sentinel stands over it (below). Half of every score carries into the next week, so a Compact that stops showing up loses ground gradually; a new season wipes every score. Each input is capped per zone per week, so 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 first two rungs are 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. Every week but the Slack, the season’s last, is a war week; the Slack shuts every foreign border.

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

Your Compact’s own Shipyard in its Tin Hollow is a place to wake after a death - for its own pilots only, and only while no foreign front can reach that sector. A Sentinel is never a place to wake.

Sentinels

Every sector a Compact owns has a Sentinel: a berth for that Compact’s pilots and nobody else’s, two main guns, and a lock on the ground. While it is lit, a foreign Compact that tops the score there still does not take the sector - unless it silenced that Sentinel the same week. A Sentinel is never captured, only silenced, on the Citadel’s clock with one layer:

1. Lit - the shield takes foreign fire in a war week, and only from within 1 km of its guns; it refills on its own a minute after the last hit. At zero it locks.
2. Reinforced - nothing lands until the Stand: the first 18:00 UTC at least eighteen hours after the lock, never on the Reckoning day (Thursday), never on an evening its own Citadel stands.
3. Stand - sixty minutes with the hull open, and every ship berthed there is put out. Hull to zero and it is Silenced until the week’s turn, to the Compact that did the most to the hull. Hull still standing at the end of the hour: held, whole again, and a day’s Respite in which its shield cannot be touched.

One Compact holds at most two Sentinels locked on a spine at once; its fire at a third soaks into the shield. When a foreign Compact takes the sector, the Sentinel is Doused - berths shut, guns cold, never turned on its owners - and lights again the week they work the ground back. A sector a foreign Compact already holds is guarded by nothing: a third Compact takes it by score alone. The Slack releases every lock.

A Sentinel’s state can be read from a distance. Lit: a beacon in its Compact’s colour and four open, bright mouths. Reinforced: the same under a shell that wraps the whole hull. Stand: a red beacon beating twice, mouths shut and dark. Silenced: the beacon out but for a flicker, the hull scorched, sparks now and then. Doused: no light at all, not even the emblem, the hull cold blue-grey.

The window

The siege window is the two weeks before the Slack. A Compact that holds every rung of another’s spine down to its Shallows, without a gap, has a window on that home. Front and window are read at each week’s turn and nothing inside a week closes one - not a concession, not a hull.

In a window at most 35 pilots of one attacking Compact stand in the home at once; the next one in waits for a seat. Besiegers berth at none of the home’s stations, and an owner shot in the last eight seconds cannot berth either. A new pilot of the besieged home who has never warped comes out in the Shallows instead.

The Citadel on the clock

Only in a window does the home’s Citadel take a foreign shot, and it falls by the clock, not by the size of the fleet:

So an undefended Citadel falls on the third evening at the earliest: the shield, then the batteries, then the hull. The batteries are the Citadel’s four quarters and reach 10.2 km; a silenced one comes back only at the Ember. A battery’s rounds, like a Sentinel’s, land on your hull in full - the hull phase’s armour is only against guns you can break off from.

One heavy garrison hull holds each home: foreigners on sight, never its own side. A wreck relaunches when the shield is full again, or when a Stand opens. While a window is open the besieged Citadel posts a relief writ and the attacker’s Citadel a war writ - three kills each, paid from the Compact’s purse.

The fall and the Tithe

At zero hull the Citadel has fallen - once a season, to the Compact that did the most damage across the window, not the last shot. The fallen home stays its owners’ workplace: dock, sell, wake there. Foreigners may only cross it, and no shot lands either way, until the Ember - the close of the window’s last week, as the Slack opens - rebuilds the hull, the batteries and the garrison.

From that Ember the loser pays the winner the Tithe: six per cent of what its pilots earn - ore, salvage, writ pay, and credits handed over by other pilots - 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 as the next Slack opens; the chart and the Circular carry the line while it runs. The three colonies.