One shared galaxy, built in the open. Here's what you can command today — and the course we're charting from here.
One galaxy some 20,000 light-years across — thousands of procedurally-generated systems and named worlds any commander can claim. Scout rivals, strike their fleets and colonies, and carve out a corner of space that's yours.
No two planets play alike. Size, climate, arable land and the ore buried beneath decide what a world is for — a lush breadbasket, a scorching ore-jackpot, a frozen frontier outpost. You specialise your colonies instead of building the same optimal world twice.
Settle planets, mine their ore, and terraform hostile worlds. Every colony grows and eats — farms feed your people, and lush worlds ship their surplus to barren mining rocks that can't feed themselves. Colony breakdowns show happiness and population limits at a glance.
Many worlds are home to an indigenous people — frost-mind researchers, reactor-tuning ember-folk, ocean-dwelling workforces and more. Colonise their world and they live alongside your own, each thriving in its own climate and boosting your colony — but terraform it for your people and you push them out. Keep it their way, or make it yours.
Governing many worlds strains your administration — spread too thin and happiness dips across your whole empire. Research Civics and build a Seat of Government to raise how many colonies you can run well, so a strong, compact empire outperforms a sprawling one.
A hex tech grid you pan and zoom, with seven branches that unlock in real time and an illustrated icon on every technology. Queue up to five techs, watch live progress and finish times, click a distant tech to auto-queue its whole path — or switch on auto-research and let the labs run themselves.
Design your own vessels — pick a hull, fit its slots with weapons, engines, scanners, colonist berths and cargo, and watch it rotate in 3D. There are no preset warships — you draw up your own first blueprint, and research unlocks new hulls and modules to fit.
Every hull is a size class with three slot pools: exactly one engine, external weapon hardpoints, and internal module bays. Shields are a module you fit and power, and guns draw from the same budget — so a freighter can't bristle with cannon, and every warship is a set of trade-offs you balance.
Build warships — corvettes to dreadnoughts and titans, in a rock-paper-scissors matchup — and group them into named task forces you split, rename and command as one, with round-by-round battle reports.
Crossing the galaxy is a real commitment. Fit different engine types — thrifty warp coils for the long haul or thirsty antimatter drives for raw speed — and treat fuel as range. A grouped fleet shares tanks and moves at its slowest ship; bring a Tanker and it refuels your warships mid-flight, extending your reach into open space.
Load minerals and fuel into cargo holds and haul between worlds — or set standing supply lines that run freighters on a loop automatically, topping up a hungry colony from a rich one. Escort them, because pirates hunt a laden convoy and its spilled cargo drifts where it falls.
Space itself is worth working. Survey asteroid belts and gas clouds, set prospectors mining on an automatic loop, and plant permanent Extraction Outposts on the richest fields — then guard them, because a laden miner is exactly what pirates come for.
Pirates are the galaxy's ever-present threat — roaming raider fleets, hidden strongholds, and named Warlords whose sieges grow as your empire does. Fend off raids on your colonies, intercept them in open space, and storm their dens for tiered loot. Persistent Nemesis Lords escape, nurse a grudge, and return angrier.
A second tech tree fuelled by Xeno Fragments torn from pirate wrecks: cloaking fields that move a whole fleet unseen and decloak into a first strike, deployable space mines, EMP weapons that collapse shields, and boarding craft that seize ships.
Vision is something you earn. Every colony sees only a short way on its own — build and upgrade a Deep Space Array, then research sensor tech to widen how far you watch for rivals and incoming raids.
Hold your worlds against raiders and rivals: orbital defense platforms, upgradeable for heavier guns, and planetary armies raised from your own population — ground troops that defend where orbital defense can't. A live Defense readout on every world shows exactly how safe it is.
Set a fleet to patrol a colony and it defends itself — flying out to intercept inbound raids and hunt pirates within its scanner range, then returning to refuel, repair and rearm. Cautious by design: it only picks fights it can win, and holds when it's out-gunned.
Strike pacts with rival commanders — non-aggression treaties and shared vision across the galaxy — form alliances, and choose when to honour them or break them and face the fallout.
Play unfolds in seasons. A five-pillar Empire Score ranks every commander across might, wealth, science and reach, with live leaderboards — and a Hall of Fame that immortalises each season's champions when the age ends.
A cinematic colony view — your planet ringed by live readouts, ships in orbit, an orbital shipyard you build from — plus mail, friends, galaxy chat, and a community forum built right into the game where you pitch features and watch them pick up Planned / Building / Done tags.
A guided path through the galaxy — and always a reason to check back. New commanders get first-hour missions that teach the ropes by doing: scout a world, mine an asteroid, clear a pirate den, run your first supply line. Beyond that, a growing ladder of milestones and repeatable contracts hands you a next objective and a reward for it — including nyxium, the prestige material you can't simply mine. Daily quests refresh to give the regulars a reason to return, with a bigger prize for a good week's work, and a new leaderboard pillar ranks the galaxy's most accomplished commanders.
As your empire grows, expansion should add strategy, not paperwork. Set colonies to develop themselves toward a goal you choose — an extraction hub, a fortress, a breadbasket — and they queue the right buildings on their own. Then take it further: a one-use prefab fleet where each ship carries a pre-built mine, farm or power plant, so you can drop a fully-working extraction colony onto a rich, finite world, mine its veins dry, and move the armada on to the next strike.
The galaxy stops being empty between players. Rival AI empires settle and grow like commanders of their own — building worlds, fielding fleets, pushing their borders outward — each with a character: some trade and prosper, some conquer, some scheme. War them, ally them, bribe them, or open trade routes and grow rich together — a galaxy that lives whether or not anyone else is online.
And the frontier gains a shape. Opportunist pirates harry the undefended near home; rival empires hold the settled middle; and out past the edge of civilization lie the Pirate Warlords — a lawless power ruling the deep wild. Push outward, tame the frontier, and the season's great question sharpens: can you reach the Outer Rim and break the Warlords who rule it? Capture worlds instead of only razing them, and fight battles that resolve even while you're offline.
Distinct species with their own strengths, looks, and playstyles.
Building on today's pacts — a relationship ladder, passage and trade deals, and the reputation you earn across the galaxy.
For the wanderer: chart deep-space anomalies, uncover ancient sites, and refine exotic materials found only at the galaxy's edges.
Player-driven exchanges to trade goods, ships and blueprints with other commanders — alongside the trade routes you'll run with friendly empires.
Galaxy-wide threats that rise above the pirates — the kind that make old rivals set their wars aside.
A dedicated desktop client, so SpaceCiv lives on your Steam shelf.
Always a next objective → the living galaxy → the Outer Rim
A roadmap, not a contract — priorities shift as we learn what makes the galaxy fun.