Stellar Frontier: RTS
Commander's Field Manual

The setup screen

Mouse

Getting hit off-screen now flashes an attack ping on the minimap — Backspace jumps the camera straight to the most recent one instead of hunting for the under-attack banner's few-second window.

Keyboard

Gathering

A Worker mines at 10/second up to a 10-unit cargo hold — one full load is exactly one second of uninterrupted mining. Every match opens with 300 ore banked and three guaranteed home ore nodes at 350 ore each (1,050 total) at a fixed distance from your base, whatever the map size. Beyond those, the map hides resource caches — 360 units each of ore, crystals, or radioactives — that only appear once a unit's own sightline has crossed them; once found, a cache stays revealed for the rest of the match even if you never return.

When a node runs dry, the worker mining it rolls onto the nearest discovered node of the same commodity instead of stopping — preferring one that isn't already saturated. Only when nothing qualifies within reach does it fall back to idling in place, so an idle-worker check (`) is still worth a late-match habit.

Hovering any resource in the topbar reads its live flow, not just its stock — whether it's climbing or draining and roughly how fast. A commodity flashes red when it's both net-negative and something currently running (a fuel-burning station, a charging Antimatter Gate) actually depends on it — a warning worth acting on before that thing stalls, not after.

Supply

Every unit costs supply, checked against a soft population cap. A Command Center grants +10; a Habitat adds +8 for a cheap 75 ore. Queued (not yet trained) units already reserve their supply cost, so you can't stuff a production queue past the cap. Losing a Habitat can leave you legally over cap — nothing already built is lost, but new production simply blocks until you rebuild the housing.

Recycling

Any completed unit or building (except your Command Center) can be broken down for a partial refund of its resource cost, plus 100% of anything physically sitting in its hold or buffers at that moment.

Battle wreckage

Nothing is a total loss on the battlefield. Every kill — combat or a Helium Bomb blast — deposits 80% of the dead thing's own cost as a matured, minable wreck site after 45 seconds (extended by further nearby deaths, capped at 150 seconds total). Deaths within 140 units of an existing pending site consolidate into it rather than opening a new one. Wreckage is neutral — whoever gets a worker there first keeps it, regardless of who won the fight.

• The 80% return only applies to commodities the current world actually deposits naturally — a Strategic-tier cost (AI Cores, Antimatter, Plasma Torpedoes) is never recoverable this way on any world.
• Once a site's total accumulated value clears 300, it also forges a bonus dose of metals, electronics, or relics — 15% of the value above that threshold, capped at 40 units — regardless of what the world naturally deposits.

The combat triangle

Three units form a genuine rock-paper-scissors loop — not a single hard counter — and the bonus is a flat amount added to the attacker's base damage, not a percentage:

Non-combat & support

Combat roster

Veterancy

Every confirmed kill counts toward a unit's own record — only role:combat units (plus a Worker fighting on direct order) can earn it; turrets, buildings, and unarmed support never rank up. Three ranks, each layering the same compounding bonus:

The bonus is permanent and survives repair — only losing the unit outright, or recycling it, erases it. Pulling a bloodied army back to heal and re-field it beats re-buying it from scratch, for both sides equally.

Odyssey freight & strategic tier

The Helium Bomb

Unarmed and harmless until you flip it to armed. Once armed, three things can set it off: being hit at all (instant, no fuse), an enemy unit or building coming within 15 units (lights a 4-second fuse), or your own "Detonate Now" command (also lights the fuse). An unarmed bomb can be freely moved, shot, or ignored with zero risk.

Sixty seconds after detonation, the crater matures into a real, minable 400-unit deposit of a randomly chosen raw commodity — including spice or relics, which nothing else on the map can ever produce. Ordinary battle wreckage from anything the blast killed stacks on top of this, unaffected.

The Plasma Rig

An Odyssey building, not a unit, but described here alongside the resource loop it feeds: a Plasma Rig is a perpetual, never-depleting mine for exactly one commodity, chosen with a weighted roll biased toward whatever real deposits sit within 280 units of where you place it (never a guaranteed dud — even barren ground has a small floor chance at anything). A pre-placement survey gives you a richness read:

Every 6-second dig cycle rolls a yield tier — low ×1 / medium ×2.4 / good ×4.5 / overwhelming ×9 against a base of 6 units — but a genuinely barren (0 richness) spot can never roll the top two tiers at all; only a well-scouted, resource-dense placement can. Each dig also burns 1.4 radioactives (halved to 0.7 while you're banking any ice at all), and the whole thing draws 16 Power and stalls the instant its 120-unit output buffer is full — someone has to keep hauling it.

Repair, in the field

Two separate healers, both free of resource cost — only time:

• Mender — passive, 6 hp/second to everyone in its 110 radius, whatever order it's currently running. Never heals itself, never a building still under construction. Drops to 1.8 hp/s off the Odyssey power grid.
• Worker repair job — 4 hp/second, must be within 24 units, capped at 2 workers per target. Auto-assigns to your own zone's most-worn building or unit first (right-click a damaged friendly with workers selected to assign it directly).

Skirmish roster

The Odyssey industrial chain

Power feeds every factory; factories feed each other in a fixed dependency line. All of it is Odyssey-only.

Power

A Grid Substation (180 hp, 60 ore + 30 crystals, 10s, no tech required) is a cheap relay, not another plant — 0 Power granted, and it draws a small load of its own once active. Built within a real source's on-grid band, it becomes a second, shorter-range anchor point that nearby factories can measure their own grid distance to instead — one hop only, it can't chain through a second relay — so an expansion doesn't have to buy a whole fuel-burning station just to escape the distance tax.

The power grid

Power is a live flow, never stockpiled — recalculated fresh every tick. A consumer's draw is taxed by distance from the nearest active source, scaled against that source's own range:

If total draw exceeds capacity, every consumer throttles by the same fraction at once — never "some run, some stall." Electrifying a Command Center, Barracks, Star Dock, or Habitat (a toggle, once the grid exists) adds up to +30% production speed or supply housing, scaled by however much headroom the grid actually has. Banking any amount of ice at all halves every factory's non-energy inputs, the Rig's radioactive burn, and fuel consumption grid-wide — at a running cost of 0.1 ice/second for as long as it lasts.

Logistics & freight

A Logistics priority cycle button (Normal → High → Low) on any factory or fuel-burning power station weights the same nearest-first auto-haulage scan every building competes on: High halves its effective distance and raises its hauler/server cap from 2 to 3, Low quadruples its effective distance with no cap change. Useful for telling your haulers which end of a spread-out colony actually matters right now.

Freight Lanes automate the run itself: assign a parked freighter at a Spaceport to a standing route to any other world you hold, and every ~10 seconds it moves its assigned ships' combined cargo capacity of whichever commodities you've filtered in, treasury to treasury, with no further input from you. A lane-assigned ship is a real, physically parked investment — it's excluded from a bulk fleet jump while committed to its route, so pulling it back off the lane is a deliberate choice, not automatic.

Radioactives fund Assault, crystals fund Bulwark and Logistics — so a world's deposit mix (a crystal-poor world, a radioactive-poor one) quietly tilts which doctrine is the easier commit. Both Tier-3 capstones additionally require a completed Arsenal on top of the Refinery itself — the same building that gates the Tier-3 unit roster.

The Odyssey tech tree

Researched at a Datacenter, paid for in gathered commodities (no separate research currency), and timed rather than instant — a high-tech world (data rating 10) researches at double speed; a frontier rock (rating 1) at half.

The damage pipeline

A hit's final damage is a flat base (plus any triangle/building bonus), then seven multipliers applied in order:

1. Base attack + bonus vs. this specific target type + bonus vs. buildings, if applicable
2. × the attacker's Assault doctrine multiplier
3. × the defender's Bulwark doctrine multiplier
4. × the attacker's veterancy rank (up to +19.1% at rank III — see §04)
5. × the defender's veterancy rank (up to −16.9% at rank III)
6. × the attacker's commander (faction) damage trait
7. × the attacker's own terrain (+15% from high ground)
8. × the defender's guard aura, if any — 0.82 inside a friendly Aegis unit's bubble, 0.8 inside an Aegis Bastion's (never both at once — only the nearest aura applies)

There is no separate armor-mitigation step anywhere in this chain — it's flat bonuses, then straight multiplication, then the result comes off HP. Only role:combat units rank up through veterancy — turrets, the Bastille, and the Aegis Bastion hold ground on hp and ammo alone, never leveling up (see §05).

Targeting & stances

• Auto-acquire defaults to the nearest enemy in range; the Breacher instead prefers any building over a closer unit.
• Anti-dogpile spreading — once two or more enemies sit within a local band, a unit fans onto one of the three nearest instead of everyone locking the single closest target, softening pure focus-fire snowballing.
• Target stickiness — a unit keeps its current target as long as it's still alive and in range, rather than re-evaluating "nearest" every tick, which is what makes the spreading above actually hold.
• Hold Position (H) only changes what happens when the target is out of range — the unit stands fast instead of chasing. It still fires immediately on anything already in range; it does not make a unit passive.
• Move orders ignore every enemy unconditionally, letting you pull a unit through a fight untouched. Attack-move does the same, except anything that enters range along the way gets engaged before the unit continues.

Formations

Selecting several units and giving a move order arranges them: Grid (a simple block), Line (abreast), Wedge (a spearhead or a chevron), or Circle (a ring). The leader is whichever unit you selected first — Ctrl-click a unit already in the selection to promote it to the front. A formation moves at its slowest member's pace, and separated clusters of units arrange themselves as nested groups rather than one line stretched across the map. F holds the current shape in place at a fixed anchor.

Any shape other than Grid also ranks its followers by weapon range, automatically: short-ranged units (Bastion, Skiff) take the most forward slots, long-ranged ones (Lancer, Breacher, Colossus) trail behind, and an unarmed support unit (the Mender) sinks to the rearmost slot of all — no manual reordering needed. The leader's own slot is untouched by this ranking; it's always whichever unit you promoted.

Right-click a friendly unit with a mixed selection to have the rest form a protective escort ring around it that follows wherever it goes — useful for keeping a Mender or a Colony Ship safe mid-march.

The opponent doesn't pick a faction directly — it's fixed by its world temperament instead: a Rusher plays Syndicate, an Economist plays Miners, a Balanced opponent plays Frontier, and a Technologist also plays Syndicate. See §10.

Terrain

Map size & resources

Large and Gigantic maps also seed a mirrored belt of full-size deposit clusters out in the contested middle — one extra belt per size step — instead of just stretching the same near-base economy across more empty space.

Fog of war

Two kinds of knowledge, tracked separately: what's visible right now (live, recomputed every tick) and what's ever been explored (permanent, never resets). Charted surface deposits near each base are shown from the start — prior map knowledge, not battlefield intel — but hidden caches out in the contested middle stay invisible until a unit's own sight crosses them, at which point they're revealed for good.

The nine worlds

Odyssey adds two further worlds, both pickable as your own starting world too: Kybernet (Tech Hub, Technologist temperament — a small, teched-up elite army and the only archetype that ever fields a Colossus) and Verdani (Agri-World, Balanced temperament, a calm, low-industry neighbour) — see §12.

Difficulty

AI Strategy

World temperament

How it actually plays

• Scouting has two different memories. Terrain and resources it has ever seen are remembered forever. Everything about you — army size, composition, position — is re-derived live, every think-cycle, from only what it can currently see. The instant your army leaves its sight, that intelligence is gone.
• Counter-building reads the whole roster, not just the triangle — and difficulty sets how often. Easy never counter-picks at all (a learnable, exploitable army); Medium reconsiders roughly every 3rd unit it completes; Hard, every 2nd. Inside the triangle it's a hard counter (Skiff answers a Lancer-heavy army, Bastion answers Skiff, Lancer answers Bastion); outside it, every unit has a documented cost-efficient answer — mass Skiffs against a Breacher, Dreadnought, Wraith, Colossus, or Leviathan, Lancers specifically against a massed Aegis. It reads a wall of static defense the same way it reads an army: spot more than three of your turrets/Bastilles/Batteries and it specifically starts building Breachers.
• A wave that's been ground down below 40% of its original size retreats rather than feeding survivors to a lost fight — unless it's a timeout/desperation wave, which never retreats.
• Fortifications line up toward the map's geometric center, not specifically toward your base — on an asymmetric map this heuristic can be read and exploited. Once it has a Foundry standing, its turret line mixes in Bastilles too.
• On Hard specifically, every third wave targets your worker line instead of your base if it can see one, and a small decoy no longer pulls its whole army home (only a proportionate slice does).

The final 5 minutes flip the elapsed-time readout to a countdown alongside a live two-sided score bar, so a score-decided ending is never a surprise. Past the time limit, the match is scored rather than left hanging: banked, unspent resources count at only a quarter of their value, while everything actually built — every unit and building's own cost — counts in full, and a fielded combat unit counts for 1.35× its cost on top of that. A stockpiling turtle cannot out-score an opponent who spent what they gathered. An exact tie favors the defending player. The post-game screen states plainly which way the match actually ended — elimination, or the clock — with the full bank/army/structures breakdown whenever score was the decider.

Starting out

Pick your starting world from a card row of all 11 (or click 🎲 Random) — Kybernet and Verdani included, not just the 9 Skirmish worlds. Clicking a card starts the campaign immediately, so there's no separate reroll limit: back out and pick again for a fresh draw. You begin with 500 credits and a single Colony Ship on that world — no base yet. Deploy the ship (an instant action, validated against its exact current footprint) to found a complete Command Center plus three free colonist Workers. Every other world is already running in the background with its own AI faction developing on its own timeline — a genuinely living galaxy, not a static map waiting for you to arrive.

Universal credits

A separate pool from any single world's ore/crystals/radioactives economy — credits fund only the meta-layer: jump fuel, market trades, and diplomatic tribute. Earned from passive colony income and from selling on the market.

Jumping between worlds

Requires a completed Spaceport at your current world (tier 1/2/3 carries 12/24/40 supply-points of cargo capacity per jump; upgrades cost 250 then 500 ore). A jump is free to any world you've already discovered or still hold a foothold on; a genuinely new destination costs roughly 340–650 credits depending on distance, discounted 15% at a tier-2 Spaceport and 30% at tier 3 (whichever of your pads on the launching world is highest tier). Arriving somewhere with no Spaceport of your own drops you at a hand-picked spot, snapped to a coarse grid — this is not pixel-precise placement.

Background colonies

A world you're not currently standing on keeps running at full simulation speed — gathering, building, researching, fighting, and drifting diplomatically exactly as if you were there, just computed in fewer, bigger batches. Each qualifying building (everything except the Turret, capped at 6 per world) pays 0.3 credits/second — up to 108 credits/minute from a single well-built colony. You'll get a toast if one is attacked, turns hostile, or is lost outright.

A Command Center's Standing Orders panel sets policy for while you're away: an auto-sell floor per commodity (25-unit steps) sells any surplus above it into that world's own market — real slippage/glut pricing, additive on top of the passive income above — and a worker-headcount target (0–20) queues one fresh Worker at a time from the colony's own stockpile whenever it's short and its queue is empty, so an unattended colony keeps growing instead of idling out.

Diplomacy

Every neighbour holds a stance from −1 (hostile) to +1 (allied), opening at a Cordial 0.35 with a guaranteed 7-minute grace period. From there it drifts toward a target set mostly by how depleted their world is — but a neighbour that's genuinely developing its own industry and research is calmer about it, and every kill of their forces sours the relationship immediately regardless.

A tribute payment (200 credits, rising steeply each time you pay one on the same world) snaps a souring neighbour back to Neutral for two minutes — a stopgap, not a subscription. Once you have an Antimatter Gate charging anywhere, every neighbour's target stance is dragged toward outright war as the charge climbs — a paid tribute cannot hold that off. How fast a grudge fades is part of a world's personality too: a soured stance recovers faster on a patient world than an aggressive one, and how long it keeps treating you as an active aggressor swings from roughly 17 minutes (an Aggressive-strategy Warlord world on Hard) down to about 2 (a patient trading world on Easy) — a charging Gate still provokes for as long as it charges, regardless of any of that.

Goodwill runs the other direction too: gift any commodity you're holding 25+ of to build lasting goodwill toward Allied — it caps out short of an instant alliance and fades over a few minutes without upkeep, so one big dump can't buy friendship outright. An occasional timed favor request (a specific commodity, a 90-second window) pays a steep credit premium plus a bigger goodwill jump if you fulfill it. Once a world reaches Allied, its market's buy-side spread tightens the closer to full alliance you get — cheaper to trade with, not just safer to stand next to.

Once hostile, waves scale with how bad things have gotten: a freshly-turned neighbour probes with a handful of units every 30–45 seconds; a fully hostile one commits its whole available force roughly twice as often. If it ever spots your charging Gate, every wave redirects there instead of your base.

A living galaxy

Worlds don't just wait for you — a neighbour that develops enough industry and research on its own eventually plants its faction's flag, and the single most-developed one periodically colonises whatever unclaimed, unheld world sits nearest to it. Left unattended, territory quietly shifts on the starmap over the course of a long game, independent of anything you do.

Observer Mode

Press O (or the topbar's 🔭 Observe button) to step outside your own seat and watch the galaxy run: fog lifts on whichever world you're looking at, the starmap becomes a free camera jump to any world — discovered or not, no fuel, no Spaceport, no change to your real seat — and Space cycles every base on the spectated world, a neighbour's included. A live stats panel reads the spectated world's archetype, strategy, diplomatic stance, army composition by owner, buildings, supply, and resources — data the engine already computes, just newly surfaced. Mouse and keyboard orders are disabled while observing (it isn't your world to command); Esc or a second O returns you to normal play exactly where you left it, and nothing about a spectated world's simulation changes because you looked at it.

Milestones

• Worlds held — a firework for each new high-water mark of simultaneously-held worlds, up to all 11.
• Capital — upgrading any Command Center to a permanent Capital (400 ore, doubles its HP).
• Antimatter Gate — any of your wonders anywhere in the galaxy reaching full charge.
• Domination — pacifying 4 of the 11 neighbours: razing a Command Center with no colony ship left to re-found it marks that world Conquered for good — it can rebuild and defend itself, but its stance can never be dragged back to war again, and it quietly pays you a small annuity (0.1 credits/second, ~6/minute) for as long as you hold it. Pacifying one world echoes a bounded, temporary chill onto its still-free faction-mates; holding an Allied world does the reverse, warming its faction-mates a little in return.
• Total domination — pacifying all 11.

The market

Every commodity in the game is tradeable. Raw deposits price by local abundance (as cheap as 0.6× base where a world is rich in it, as steep as 1.5× where it has none); manufactured goods price by that world's industry rating instead. Trades execute in 25-unit lots, each nudging the price a little further — a large dump or buy re-prices itself as it goes rather than clearing at one flat number. Beyond the single-lot button, Sell ×4 (100 units) and Sell All quote their real proceeds before you click, and a trend glyph on each row tells a brief price dip apart from a deep, slow-draining glut.

All three scale their fleet sizes, quotas, and clocks by the Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty picked at setup, and all give a short prep phase before the mission proper begins.

• Autosave — written every 12 seconds, and again whenever the tab hides or closes. Skirmish and Odyssey each keep their own slot, which is exactly what the setup screen's Continue buttons resume. The last two generations are kept, not just one — a write interrupted mid-save falls back to the previous good one automatically instead of losing the slot outright.
• Save / Load — an explicit backup to a .json file on disk, capped at 8MB. Loading auto-detects whether a file is a single-world Skirmish or a whole Odyssey galaxy from its shape.

Every load is treated as untrusted input: out-of-range numbers are clamped, unrecognized entity or commodity ids are dropped, and a version mismatch — even a newer one — is rejected outright rather than guessed at. There's no migration path across a version bump, so a save from a materially different build simply won't load. Scripted Operations can't be saved at all; leaving one mid-run abandons the attempt.