Rifts & Fleet

Dimensional rifts are tears in space that spill Vorgon swarms into the sectors your dwarves explore. Where a Raid is something that comes to you, a rift is something you go to: a deep, deliberate, turn-based dungeon you assault from the Fleet & Rifts panel with a custom-built fleet.

Rifts are discovered by Expeditions — the chance is stage-scaled, 0.22 + 0.07 × (stage − 1), so a rift surfaces on 22% of successful Stage-1 pushes rising to 50% by Stage 5 (it was a flat 10% in earlier builds). The rift appears in the sector that was explored. Once found, a rift sits and waits. You engage it on your own schedule.

Combat is manual, turn-based, and initiative-ordered. Since v0.15.0 “Mostly Harmless” it plays out as a cinematic battle scene — your fleet and the enemy line up in two columns across a starfield, unit sprites front and centre, your ability choices along the bottom, and fire VFX on every volley. It still pauses the idle game while you fight: nothing back home ticks forward until the dive is resolved, so you can take your time on every decision. Tap any unit mid-fight to open its Overview dossier.

The Loop #

Each rift is a 10-level dungeon, but you only dive one level per run:

dive a level  →  fight D waves  →  beat the mini-boss
      →  take the level's ship part  →  unlock the next level

A rift tracks levelsCleared from 0 to 10. Clearing the current level’s mini-boss bumps that counter and opens the next level for your next run. Clearing level 10 fully clears the rift. You can stop at any depth and come back later — progress is banked on the rift itself.

The 10-Level Descent #

The ten levels of a rift get progressively deadlier and progressively more rewarding. Each level is a self-contained dive: you stage your fleet, descend, fight through the waves, and either clear the mini-boss or pull out.

Deeper levels mean:

• Tougher enemies (level depth multiplies enemy strength — see scaling below).
• Better loot (rewards scale with depth).
• Rarer ship parts (the rarest part type, the Bridge Module, only drops from the deepest levels).

Because each level is run separately, you can grind a comfortable level for parts and loot before committing to the next.

Difficulty #

Effective difficulty is additive:

D = Flagship Level + chosen Tier (1–5)

Flagship Level #

Your Flagship Level is your career power rating across all rift combat. It grows with total Fleet Experience (FXP):

Flagship Level = 1 + floor( sqrt( totalFXP / 100 ) )

The more FXP you bank over your career, the higher your baseline difficulty floor — and your reward ceiling — climbs. (See Rewards, FXP & the Flagship below.)

Difficulty Tier #

At staging you also pick a 1–5 difficulty tier. Higher tiers mean harder fights and richer payouts:

So a Flagship Level 3 captain choosing tier 2 Stonehelm fights at D = 5.

Waves = D #

Each dive runs D waves — a minimum of 2 and a hard cap of 8 (waves = min(8, max(2, D))). The final wave is always a mini-boss. Per-group swarm size grows each wave, and deeper waves can field up to 3 Vorgon groups at once.

Scaling #

Enemy strength scales with both D and level depth from a baseline of ×1.0 at D2, level 1.

enemyMult ≈ 1.0 + 0.06 × (D − 2) + 0.22 × (level − 1)

Rebalanced toward the player (live on main). enemyStep was cut from 0.18 → 0.06, flattening the per-tier ramp so a mid-difficulty dive now plays close to what the lowest tier used to feel like. It landed alongside a big player-offense buff — see Player-Offense Buffs below.

All of these are first-pass pre-1.0 numbers and will be tuned.

Player-Offense Buffs #

Rifts were made markedly less punishing by buffing everything you field. These apply on top of crew, talent and equipment scaling, and live in data/combat/combatConfig.json:

Combined with the gentler enemyStep, your fleet hits harder and lands more of its shots than in the pre-rebalance builds.

Your Fleet #

You fight with two unit types side by side: cheap, expendable drone swarms and powerful, dwarf-crewed capital ships. Drones screen and chip; capitals do the heavy work.

Drones — Cannon Fodder #

Drones are swarms, fabricated cheaply at a Sector Station from resources. Each drone unit carries a count that is both its firepower and its durability:

• Damage = per-ship attack × count
• Durability — incoming hits reduce the count

So a swarm gets weaker as it takes losses, and a swarm that survives the dive returns to your stockpile. The four starter swarm roles:

Drones are meant to be spent — they screen your capitals and grind down enemy counts while the big ships land the decisive blows.

Race drones. Beyond the four starters, every race sector you own reveals a research branch whose capstone node unlocks that sector’s unique race drone (all research-gated). There are eight — one per race sector, with Krikkit granting two:

The Duplicator Drone (formerly the Repair Tender) no longer patches hulls — it clones allied ships to rebuild thinned swarms. Its ability Duplicate Swarm (and the trained Mass Duplicate) rebuilds an allied wing’s count, capped at its deployed size. The mechanics are unchanged from the old repair role; only the lore and naming have shifted.

The Bulwark Cruiser also gains a new Guard Capital ability (see Combat Flow & Abilities) that lets it throw itself in front of a chosen capital ship and soak the hits meant for it.

Capital Ships — Main Combatants #

Capital ships are dwarf-crewed individual units with an HP (hull) pool, built from typed ship parts plus Credits at a Sector Station and crewed by several dwarves. They are the core of any serious fleet.

Firepower rebalanced (v0.15.0). Capital guns were reworked twice: an across-the-board pass doubled every class’s firepower, then the Forgehammer Corvette was tripled again to make the cheap starter hull viable. These are the current live base-attack values (before crew, talent and equipment scaling):

Capitals are no longer static lumps of parts: each ship earns its own XP and levels from combat, banks talent points to spend in a per-class talent tree, and carries four slots of equipment. See Capital Ship Progression and Capital Equipment below. The alpha trio above are your starter squad — every race sector beyond home fields its own four-role capital squad.

Crew Power

A capital ship’s attack and hull scale with its crew. Each crew dwarf contributes by rarity, multiplied by ×1.5 if they are a Pilot class, and by a health factor:

crewPower    = Σ ( rarityValue × (1.5 if Pilot) × healthFactor )
ship attack  = baseAttack × (0.6 + 0.4 × crewPower)
ship hull    = baseHp    × (1 + 0.1 × crewPower)

Bigger and better crews make markedly stronger ships. When you build a ship, idle dwarves are auto-assigned — Pilots first, then highest rarity — so your best available crew mans the hull.

Ship Parts & Building Capital Ships #

Capital ships are built from five typed ship parts. Parts are non-sellable build materials banked to your home asteroid (see Resource Catalog).

Where Parts Come From #

Clearing a level’s mini-boss drops exactly one typed ship part — once per level, per rift. The part type is fixed by the level you clear:

Note that Bridge Modules only come from levels 8 and 10 — so the Khaz-Doom Dreadnought, which needs a Bridge, demands serious deep-rift clears.

Sector-Gated Capital Squads #

New in v0.15.0 “Mostly Harmless.” The three alpha dwarf hulls above are your starter squad. Every race sector you conquer fields its own themed four-role capital squad, so your fleet grows more exotic the deeper into the galaxy you push.

The roster is 31 capital classes in total: the 3 alpha dwarf ships (Forgehammer Corvette / Anvil Destroyer / Khaz-Doom Dreadnought, a legacy line with no role tags) plus 28 race ships — one of four roles in each of the seven race sectors (Beta → Theta):

Each race hull gates twice: you must own its sector and have the previous sector’s ship at Level 3 before you can fabricate it — so squads unlock in step with your frontier, not all at once.

Each race ship carries its own innate abilities (from its class definition) and a six-node passive talent tree — the active-ability capstones are exclusive to the original three dwarf classes (see Talent Points & Per-Class Trees).

Capital Ship Progression #

Capital ships are now persistent veterans. Each ship keeps its own combat record between dives, growing more capable the more rifts it survives.

Capital XP & Levels #

Every capital ship accrues its own experience in battle — separate from career FXP and the Flagship Level. A ship earns XP by helping kill the enemy:

per Vorgon group the ship helps destroy = group threat tier × 5
clear bonus (on a won dive)             ≈ D × level × 3

XP and levels persist on the ship and carry across dives — a hull that has fought through many rifts is far stronger than a freshly built one. The ship’s level is derived from its banked XP:

Capital Level = 1 + floor( sqrt( shipXP / 50 ) )

Each level grants the ship 1 talent point to spend.

Talent Points & Per-Class Trees #

Every capital class — all 31, the three dwarf hulls and the 28 race ships alike — has its own distinct talent tree, and every individual ship spends its own points independently, so two Destroyers can grow into very different builds.

The branch keys in the data are offense, defense and command (with the Corvette adding a subterfuge branch and healers a support one):

• offense — boosts attack %, accuracy, crit chance.
• defense — boosts hull %, damage mitigation.
• command — boosts initiative and other support stats.

Most nodes are passive stat boosts. Spent talent points are permanent — there is no respec.

The three original dwarf classes are the richest trees and the only ones that unlock active-ability capstones through talents. The 28 race ships have six all-passive nodes each (two branches, paired by role: dps & support = offense + command; tank = defense + command; healer = defense + support) — their active abilities are innate to the hull, not talent-unlocked.

The dwarf-class capstones:

(The Corvette’s subterfuge branch also unlocks extra actives — Repair Limpets, Cloak and Napalm Missile — making it the most flexible starter hull.)

Fleet-Panel UI #

Since v0.15.0 the Fleet & Rifts panel is split into four tabs that hide anything you haven’t unlocked yet, so it stays readable in the early game:

Each capital ship card shows:

• A Level badge for the ship’s current level.
• An XP progress bar toward the next level.
• A 🎓 Talents button that opens that ship’s talent tree for spending points.
• An ℹ Overview button that opens its dossier.

As with the combat numbers, capital XP and talent values are first-pass pre-1.0 numbers and will be tuned.

Capital Equipment #

New in v0.16.0. On top of crew and talents, every capital ship carries four typed equipment slots filled by procedural gear that drops from rifts.

Each capital has one of each slot; each fitted item multiplies or adds to a stat:

Every item rolls a tier (1–7) and a level (1–20, +8% magnitude per level). The seven tiers and their base multipliers:

Where gear drops, and how good it is, scales with your fleet’s power. A rift run computes a power level P = floor(sqrt(fleetPower / 40)):

• Boss / level-clear drops (60% chance) centre on tier 1 + floor(P/2) with no tier cap — only bosses can hand you Mythic and Exquisite gear.
• Per-wave drops (5% chance) and expedition drops (8% chance, only if you own a capital) are biased a tier lower and hard-capped at Rare.

All equipment magnitudes and drop rates are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned.

Combat Flow & Abilities #

Every round, all combatants are placed in an initiative queue — your drones, your capitals, and the enemy Vorgon swarms act in initiative order.

• You drive every player turn: pick Attack, an ability, and a target.
• Vorgons act by behavior: they focus DPS, focus the lowest-health target, or try to break your tank. A unit that is taunting draws their fire.

Capital Abilities #

Capital ships unlock abilities by class — bigger classes get more:

Hold the Void is your control tool: it pulls enemy fire onto a sturdy ship while reducing the damage it takes, buying your DPS room to work.

Talent-Unlocked Capstones

Beyond the class-default abilities above, a ship that invests deep enough in its talent tree unlocks an active capstone — and the capstone varies by class:

Guard Capital (Bulwark drone)

The Bulwark Cruiser drone gains a new ability, Guard Capital (cooldown 3). For 2 turns the Bulwark wing intercepts every Vorgon hit aimed at a chosen capital ship, absorbing that damage as losses to its own count instead. It is a true damage redirect/absorb — the guarded capital’s hull is shielded entirely while the guard holds. If the Bulwark wing is destroyed, the guard immediately lapses. Pairing Guard Capital with a fragile-but-valuable Dreadnought lets your cheap screen literally take the bullet for it.

Reading a Unit: Tap for its Dossier #

New in v0.16.1 “The Guide.” Stop guessing what a ship — or an alien capital — actually does. Every unit now has an Overview dossier.

In a rift battle, tap any unit — your drone wings, your capital ships, or the enemy — to open its Overview panel: live stats plus a full ability list. Out of combat, the ℹ Overview button on the Fleet roster (Fabricate and Capital Ships tabs) and on the Rift loadout screen opens the same dossier for your owned ships and drones, so you can compare a wing before you commit it.

The dossier shows a stat grid (wing size / hull / attack / accuracy / mitigation / initiative — plus Level, Crit % and Crew for capitals, and any fitted equipment), then an ✨ Abilities section. Every ability lists its real numbers as chips:

• 💥 damage multiplier, 🔥/☣ damage-over-time (%/turn × turns), 💫 stun chance & duration, buff/debuff deltas, 👾 summon counts, …
• 🎯 hit chance — computed the same way the engine does (clamp(5, 100, accuracy + 15)), so it never lies.
• ⏱ cooldown in combat turns.

Crucially, these chips are generated from the same game data the engine reads (abilityFormat.js), and an audit test forbids stat numbers in ability descriptions — so the prose is pure flavour and the chips are the truth. Hover a chip for the full breakdown.

Mid-targeting is unchanged: while you are aiming an ability, tapping a unit still picks it as the target — the overview only opens when you are not selecting a target.

Vorgon Capital Ships #

New in v0.13.0. The previous milestone, v0.12.0 “Capital Ascendant”, gave your fleet leveling capital ships. This release answers them: the Vorgon now field capital battleships of their own — named, single-hull warships that anchor a rift’s deadliest waves.

Where an ordinary Vorgon group is a swarm — a count that is simultaneously its firepower and its health pool (see Rifts & Fleet) — a Vorgon capital is a single combatant. It has one hull (HP) pool, an optional shield layer stacked on top, and a flat per-strike attack. It does not get weaker as a number ticks down; it fights at full strength until its hull is gone. Killing one is less about attrition and more about chewing through a wall.

These capitals do not show up alone. They arrive screened by swarm escorts, and like every Vorgon they scale with difficulty D and rift level depth exactly as the swarms do — so the same hull is a speed bump on a shallow tier-1 dive and a brick wall deep in an ancient rift.

All numbers below are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned.

The Roster #

Four capitals make up the v0.13.0 enemy lineup. Hull and Attack are base values at the ×1.0 baseline (D2, level 1); Shield is the absorbing layer on top of hull; Threat Tier drives the XP and FXP your fleet earns for the kill.

👻 Vorgon Phantom — A fast cloaking raider. It is the only capital with no shield, lightly armoured (mitigation 3) and the squishiest hull of the four, but it is slippery and high-initiative (initiative 8, accuracy 78), so it acts early and hits often. It jams your targeting and corrodes your hulls. It is never a boss; it shows up as a mid-wave elite that warps in to screen a swarm.

🛸 Vorgon Warbringer — A Vorgon line battleship: shielded, heavy guns, and able to call in escort swarms mid-fight (Summon). It is the boss of the gentlest rifts and an elite in the deepest ones.

🔱 Vorgon Harbinger — A heavy assault dreadnought built to break a fleet’s anchor. Its breakTank behaviour and Stun-Blast disable your wings, it breaches tanks, and it reinforces relentlessly (Summon + Broadside). Tougher hull and shield than the Warbringer.

🐲 Vorgon Leviathan — The apex of a Vorgon incursion. A 1,400-hull, 300-shield monster whose telegraphed Void Lance can gut one of your capitals in a single blow. Its focusLowest behaviour hunts your weakest unit, and it enrages below a third of its hull (see below). The biggest payout in the game drops from its wreck.

Loot on Defeat #

Each capital banks a fixed haul to your home asteroid when destroyed (on top of the usual depth-scaled rift loot):

First-pass pre-1.0 values — expect tuning.

Who Fields Whom #

A rift’s sector tier decides which capital anchors the final-wave boss, which swarms escort it, and the per-wave chance of a mid-wave elite capital warping in to screen the swarm:

So the Leviathan is exclusively an ancient-rift boss, the Phantom is never a boss (only an elite in safe/dangerous rifts), and only ancient rifts can throw a Warbringer at you mid-wave. On the final wave the boss is joined by a screen of escort swarms; on regular waves, the elite (where its chance is non-zero) rolls in to reinforce the swarm.

Shields: Absorb First, Hull Second #

A shielded capital carries two pools. Every point of damage drains the shield before it touches the hull:

incoming damage → shield (until 0) → hull

So a hit larger than the remaining shield spills the overflow into hull; a hit smaller than the shield is fully soaked. The shield is not a one-time barrier — at the end of each round it regenerates back toward its maximum:

shield = min( maxShield, shield + shieldRegen )   // each round

First-pass pre-1.0 values — expect tuning.

That regen means a half-hearted assault never gets through: if you cannot out-damage the shield in a round, it simply heals back up and you make no progress on the hull. Two counters exist:

• Shield Breaker — a player ability shatters the shield to 0 and suppresses its regen for a few rounds, opening a window to pour damage straight into hull. While suppressed, the end-of-round regen step is skipped entirely.
• Damage-over-time (burn) bypasses shields and ticks directly against hull, making DoTs unusually valuable against these walls.

(The Phantom carries no shield at all, so none of this applies to it — its thin hull is exposed from the first shot.)

Enrage — the Leviathan’s Last Stand #

The Vorgon Leviathan is the only capital that enrages. Once its hull drops to or below 35%, its attack is multiplied by ×1.6 for the rest of the fight:

if hull / maxHull ≤ 0.35:
    attack ×= 1.6

The damage you have done is what arms the trap: the closer the Leviathan is to death, the harder it swings. Plan your healing and your Status & Needs buffer for a brutal final stretch, and burst it through the enrage window rather than grinding it out.

The 0.35 threshold and ×1.6 multiplier are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned.

How Capitals Scale #

When a capital is instantiated for a wave, its hull, shield, shield regen, and attack are all multiplied by the same enemy-scale factor the swarms use — driven by effective difficulty D and rift level depth:

scale     = (1 + 0.18 × (D − 2)) × (1 + 0.22 × (level − 1))
hull      = baseHull   × scale
shield    = baseShield × scale
regen     = baseRegen  × scale
attack    = baseAttack × scale

A mid-wave elite capital is fielded at ×0.8 of that scale — a slightly weaker version of its boss-tier self. Mitigation, accuracy, and initiative are not scaled; only the pools and firepower grow. The scaling knobs (enemyStep 0.18, levelStep 0.22) are shared with the swarm scaling documented under Rifts & Fleet, so a deep, high-D ancient dive can put a Leviathan well north of its 1,400 base hull in front of you.

Scaling constants are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned.

Vorgon Abilities & Telegraphed Attacks #

New in v0.13.0. The Vorgon no longer just trade basic attacks with your fleet. Capital Vorgon — and a handful of elite swarms — now cast cooldown-gated abilities: concentrated broadsides, hull-rotting corrosion, system-jamming countermeasures, ion stuns, reinforcement summons, shield reweaves, and the dreaded charged Void Lance. Learning to read these is the heart of Rift Combat 3.0. (For the wider system, see Rifts & Fleet.)

When it is a Vorgon group’s turn, the AI doesn’t always reach for an ability. If a group has any ability off cooldown, there’s a 60% chance (ENEMY_CAST_CHANCE = 0.6) it casts instead of throwing a basic attack — otherwise it just shoots. So even a fully-loaded Dreadnought mixes specials with ordinary fire; you won’t eat a stun every single turn.

The Ability Roster #

Every Vorgon ability lives in vorgonAbilities.json. Cooldowns are counted in the caster’s turns; damage and DoT multipliers are applied on top of the caster’s normal attack power.

All of these are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned. Accuracy, multipliers, cooldowns and summon counts are taken straight from vorgonAbilities.json and are not yet balanced.

The Telegraph Mechanic — Void Lance #

The Void Lance is an overload-type ability, and overloads work differently from everything else: they take two turns to resolve, and that gap is your window to fight back.

1. Charge turn. Instead of firing, the Vorgon winds up. A ⚠ warning is posted to the combat log — “…is charging Void Lance — brace, or stun it to cancel!” — and the ship is flagged as charging. It does nothing else that turn.
2. Release turn. On its next activation the charge releases — “☄ …unleashes Void Lance!” — and the ×2.5 blast lands on one of your units. With a base 85% accuracy it almost never misses.

The whole point of the telegraph is counterplay. While a ship is charging it is committed and exposed, and:

A STUN landed on a charging Vorgon CANCELS the Void Lance entirely.

If you stun the charging ship before it fires — with a Stun Blast of your own, an Uplink ion proc, or any trained stun passive — the charge is disrupted (“✨ …'s charged attack is disrupted!”) and the blast never goes off. The ship simply skips its turn and the wind-up is wasted. A charging capital that takes a stun loses both its turn and its big attack, so save your hardest crowd-control for the moment you see that ⚠.

Note that an overload also goes on its full 4-turn cooldown the moment it begins charging, so cancelling one buys you a long reprieve before it can wind up again.

Other Casts #

The remaining abilities resolve immediately on the turn they fire:

• Corrosion Cloud / Targeting Jam / Stun Blast all hit one of your units — a debuff applied to a chosen wing or capital. Corrosion stacks a damage-over-time tick that eats hull every round until you cleanse it (see Status & Needs for how affliction-clearing works); a jam is a temporary firepower/accuracy cut; a stun makes the wing skip its next turn outright.
• Call Escort is cast on self and adds a brand-new swarm group to the current wave — its size scales with run difficulty rather than being a flat 14, so a deep dive can see a much larger escort drop in. Burn down summoners fast or the wave never stops growing.
• Hardlight Fortify is also self-cast: only a Vorgon capital actually banks the +200 shield (swarms have no shield pool), but any caster gains the +3 mitigation buff for the duration, making it briefly far tankier.

Elite Swarms Cast Too #

Casting is not limited to lone capital bosses. Some elite swarm groups carry an ability of their own (declared in their abilities list in vorgonFleets.json) and roll the same 60% cast chance each turn:

So a wave of Bulwarks will steadily smear your wings with corrosion, and a Dreadnought boss wave layers stuns on top of its crushing basic fire. Treat any group with a special as a priority target — a swarm that can cast is worth far more dead than its raw count suggests.

Status Effects on Your Fleet #

The Vorgon don’t just shoot — they debuff. Alongside raw damage, their swarms and capitals carry afflictions that turn your own fleet against you: silencing a wing’s turn, eating its hull over time, or blunting its guns. Every one of these can land on both your drone wings and your capital ships, so no part of your fleet is immune. (See Rifts & Fleet for the core combat loop.)

How each one bites #

• Stun drops a flag on the unit; when the initiative queue reaches it, that turn is simply burned (advance() logs the unit “is stunned — skips its turn”). A stunned Dreadnought is a Dreadnought that does nothing — brutal when you were about to fire a capstone.
• Corrosion is resolved in endOfRound(). For a wing it removes a fixed number of ships per tick; for a capital it removes a fixed amount of hull per tick. It runs for a set number of turns unless you scrub it early — and it ends instantly if the target dies.
• Jam stacks a debuff onto the unit’s buff list with a sub-1 attack multiplier and a negative accuracy bonus (the implementation’s fallback values are ×0.6 attack and −15 accuracy when the Vorgon ability doesn’t specify its own). Effective wing/capital accuracy and damage are recomputed from these each turn, so a jammed wing both misses more and hits softer until the debuff times out.

All of these afflictions, and every number below, are first-pass pre-1.0 values and will be tuned.

Counterplay: Cleanse & Shield Break #

Two starter abilities are your answers — one defensive scrub, one offensive opener. Both are starter abilities on their respective wings, so you have access to this counterplay from your very first fabricated fleet.

Purge Protocol — your cleanse #

The Duplicator Drone (healer wing) carries Purge Protocol as a starter ability. It is a single-target scrub that strips corrosion, jamming, and stun from one allied unit in a single cast.

Under the hood cleanseUnit() zeroes the unit’s stun, deletes any active corrosion, and drops every jam-style debuff (the negative-attack / negative-accuracy buffs) from its buff list. One cast can wipe a stacked-up unit clean — un-stun a frozen capital, halt a hull-melting corrosion tick, and restore jammed guns at once. Hold a Duplicator in reserve specifically to answer Vorgon debuff telegraphs.

Shield Breaker — opening capitals #

The Fighter Wing (DPS) carries Shield Breaker as a starter ability. It fires a volley that shatters an enemy capital’s shield and suppresses its regeneration, prying open the window where your burst actually lands.

breakEnemyShield() sets the target’s shield to 0 and flags its regeneration as suppressed for the ability’s duration. While that flag holds, the shield stays down and cannot tick back up, so every hit your fleet throws bites bare hull instead of being soaked. Fire Shield Breaker, then dump your big single-target strikes (Alpha Strike, a capital’s Alpha Run, a Broadside) into the open window.

The tactical loop #

The three tools chain into one rhythm. Watch the Vorgon, then:

STUN to cancel an enemy telegraph (skip their turn before the big hit)
  → CLEANSE to scrub stun / corrosion / jam off your own units
  → SHIELD-BREAK to drop a capital's shield + regen
  → BURST into the open hull while it's exposed

• Stun is your interrupt — landing it on a winding-up Vorgon (via your own debuff abilities) cancels its turn outright, the same skip-a-turn mechanic the enemy uses against you.
• Purge Protocol keeps your own fleet acting — a stunned, corroding, or jammed wing is dead weight, and one cleanse buys it all back.
• Shield Breaker turns a tanky Vorgon capital from a damage sponge into a kill, because the shield can’t regenerate while broken.

Crews knocked out by a corroded-to-zero capital hull still flow through the no-permadeath pipeline — see Status & Needs. Manage the afflictions and they never get that far.

New in v0.13.0 (Rift Combat 3.0). Latest documented release was v0.12.0 “Capital Ascendant”. As above, all afflictions, cooldowns, and ability values are first-pass pre-1.0 numbers and will be tuned.

Per-Race Gate Fleets #

New in v0.14.0 — “The Restaurant at the Edge of the Sector.” The Vorgon are no longer the only thing waiting in a rift. The home galaxy’s eight sectors are each fronted by a rift gate crewed by that sector’s race, and fully clearing a rift now rolls to break through to the next sector (50% at Alpha, halving per tier, floored at 10%). See Sector Expansion & Rift Gates for the unlock loop.

There are seven race rift rosters. The Vorgon roster (above) gates Beta; v0.14.0 adds six new ones — each a full enemy fleet of swarms plus two named capital flagships (a wave-5 boss and a mid-wave elite) and its own ability deck. Every roster runs the familiar 5-wave structure and scales with D and rift depth exactly as the Vorgon do.

Unlike the Vorgon capitals, these race flagships are shieldless — pure hull — so Shield Breaker does nothing against them, but they hit harder and harder the deeper the sector. Base hull/attack are at the ×1.0 baseline (D2, level 1):

Each gate fleet brings its own ability deck (improbability deflectors, planet-forge breaches, committee swarms, silence-fields, tidal corrosion, supernova-bomb protocols), so expect different telegraphs and debuffs per race. The deepest rosters also field the largest waves and the richest loot multipliers — see the Rift tiers table.

All race-fleet values are first-pass pre-1.0 numbers and will be tuned.

Crew Casualties & Retreat #

Casualties #

If a capital ship’s hull hits 0 mid-dive:

• Its whole crew is injured through the no-permadeath pipeline — Downed → Injured with a heal timer. Severity (minor / moderate / severe) scales with depth and difficulty. See Status & Needs.
• The ship itself is lost — unless it is insured.

Capital insurance. A capital ship below Level 5 is auto-insured for free: if it goes down, you get its parts back instead of losing the hull. Veteran ships (Level 5+) can be covered by a paid policy costing 1,000 FXP. Insurance saves the ship; the crew still rides the injury pipeline either way.

Surviving ships pull back with their hull restored at the end of the dive, and drone survivors return to the stockpile. There is no permanent death, but losing a Dreadnought’s worth of parts and sidelining five dwarves to the infirmary is a heavy price.

Retreat & Flee #

You may withdraw at any time. All survivors — drones and capitals alike — pull back safely, but you take no loot. Retreating is the smart call when a dive is going sideways: a lost ship costs far more than a skipped reward.

There are now two ways out:

• Retreat (whole fleet) — the existing option. Every surviving unit pulls out together and the dive ends.
• Flee (single capital, NEW) — on its own turn, a capital ship can jump out of the rift alone, keeping all its accrued XP and returning at full hull, while the rest of your fleet fights on. Use it to save a battered veteran without abandoning a winnable fight.

If a single-ship Flee (or successive flees) empties the battlefield of your units, the dive resolves as a withdrawal — no loot, exactly like a Retreat, rather than counting as a wipe.

Rewards, FXP & the Flagship #

Loot #

Loot scales with D and level depth (rewardStep 0.25) and banks to your home asteroid. The level’s ship part drops once per the table above.

Beyond the guaranteed level part, each wave you clear rolls its own salvage, and every wave has an 8% chance (wavePartDropChance) to cough up a bonus ship part or a piece of capital equipment (capped at Rare on a per-wave roll). An end-of-wave salvage list shows what you picked up.

Fleet Experience (FXP) #

FXP is the currency of fleet progression. You earn it by fighting:

per Vorgon group defeated   = group threat tier × 8
completion bonus (on clear) ≈ D × level × 2
on a wipe                    = half FXP

So even a failed dive returns something, and clearing a deep, high-tier level pays out handsomely.

What FXP Does #

FXP feeds two systems:

1. Flagship Level — raises your base difficulty floor and your reward ceiling via the 1 + floor(sqrt(totalFXP / 100)) formula. Every point of career FXP makes future rifts both harder and more lucrative.
2. Skill trees — FXP is spent in per-role skill trees, granting passive stat boosts and active abilities for the drone roles (Bulwark Cruiser, Fighter Wing, Duplicator Drone, Uplink Frigate).

Together these mean a veteran captain fields tougher fleets against tougher rifts, harvesting rarer parts to build bigger ships — a self-reinforcing loop of escalation.

See Also #

• Combat Overview
• Raids
• Expeditions
• Sector Stations
• Resource Catalog
• Status & Needs