Shattered Allegiance DevLog

DevLog 10: Crime, Plagues and Meteors in the Fragile Allegiance Remake

2026-10-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

In Fragile Allegiance, not every threat came from a rival corporation. Your own colonists would steal from you, go on strike, or run off with a ship, and a virus outbreak could empty a colony. Over the last weeks I reworked these events, along with accidents like radiation leaks and ruptured pipelines, into incidents that you actually have to respond to.

The Idea

I want running a colony to be about more than ore and power. There are people living there. They get unhappy, some of them turn to crime, and accidents happen. The buildings that deal with this, like Security Centres and Medical Centres, should be worth the space they take, and how you treat your colonists should come back to you later.

When something does go wrong, I want you to have a real choice with a cost attached, and not just a message saying you lost something. The right answer shouldn't always be obvious either. Paying usually costs more but is safer, the free options are riskier, and sometimes the best call is to just let it happen.

Incidents Are Decisions

When something goes wrong in one of your colonies now, the game pauses and shows a popup with a few options. The first option is always to let it happen. The others cost money, need a certain building, or carry some risk.

For example, if someone steals credits from a colony you can accept the loss, pay for a security sweep (which needs a Security Centre) and hope to catch the thief, or seal the colony down for a few days. A sealed colony gets angrier, and the lockdown can turn into a firefight. If a worker strike breaks out, you can let them strike, raise wages, or send in security.

If you can't afford an option or are missing the building it needs, the popup tells you exactly what's missing, in red. Some responses don't resolve right away either. You might fund an investigation and only hear back a few days later.

I should also say that not every option is as safe as it sounds. Some of the cheap choices have a hidden chance of going wrong. I'm not going to say which ones.

The Criminal Underworld

Unrest has always been the thing that drives crime in a colony. The remake uses the same unrest levels as the original. A mildly unhappy colony gets strikes and theft. A very unhappy one gets deserters, stolen missiles and stolen ships, and at the top you start losing blueprints.

What's new is that every colony now has a hidden number of criminals. It grows with unrest and population, and the criminals push unrest further up on their own. So a colony that gets out of hand tends to get worse unless you do something about it. The only thing that reduces their number is a Security Centre with officers in it, and even then a few are always left over. You never see the count directly. You only see what they do.

Security officers can also uncover a plot before it happens. If they do, you get a PLOT UNCOVERED popup and can order arrests. If the arrests work, unrest goes down. If they fail, the theft still happens and some of your officers don't come back. A Security Centre without staff will never find anything, so it's worth keeping it staffed.

Stolen Ships

Only idle ships sitting in a colony can be stolen. If a theft succeeds, you'll see the ship take off and fly out of the colony at high speed, and then it's gone. There's no explosion. It just disappears.

Four Kinds of Virus

Virus outbreaks now come in four strains. Two of them are fairly mild and two are deadly. The worst one, Necrotic Plague, can't be cured at all.

A Medical Centre gives you two ways to respond. You can import medical supplies, which is expensive but always cures a curable strain. Or you can order a quarantine, which is free but might fail. If it fails you take the full death toll and a lot of unrest. With a deadly strain, even a successful quarantine means sealing off part of the colony with people still inside.

Outbreaks never kill the whole colony, though. The death toll is capped at 90% of the population, so a plague hurts a lot but always leaves survivors. Most outbreaks are random, but the virus missile isn't. If someone hits you with one, it always starts a deadly strain.

Meteors

Meteor showers don't have a popup. Instead you get a warning 30 to 50 days in advance, shown as a countdown on the HUD, and it turns red a week before impact. That warning is your preparation time.

When the shower arrives, real rocks fall on the colony and mostly hit buildings. Your PDC turrets will try to shoot them down, so a colony with good point defense comes out of it much better than one without.

The Federal Transport

The Federal transport visits every year. It arrives on June 1st and leaves on July 10th, with a warning on June 20th that it's leaving soon. While it's docked you can click it to trade.

And the AI?

At the moment, AI colonies don't run unrest or crime at all, and they don't get random events. Incidents only happen to you. It's something I'll probably revisit later.

What's Next

Most of this is in place, but the numbers still need a lot of tuning. Next I want to play longer games and see how often these incidents actually show up, and whether they feel fair. As usual, the roadmap has the rest.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 09: How the AI Corporations Think in the Fragile Allegiance Remake

2026-09-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

This one is long and fairly technical. Game AI is the part of this project I enjoy most (it was the topic of my thesis), and the rival corporations changed a lot over the last few weeks. In DevLog 06 I wrote about the HTN setup and fleet rallying. This post goes further into how the AI decides what to do, how each faction is different, how it designs ships, and how I test all of it without playing a thousand games myself.

What I Want from the AI

The rival corporations are your main opponents, and I want two things from them that pull in different directions. The fights should be fair, and the games should still be hard.

Fair means the AI plays by the same rules you do. It shouldn't have access to any hidden information. It should only know what its sensors and ships can see, the same as you would in its place. It pays for everything it builds and has to manage its money. Higher difficulties don't give it bonus income or let it see more than you do. I'm honestly not sure whether the original AI cheated. Either way, I don't want mine to.

The easy way to make an AI challenging is to let it cheat, so without that the challenge has to come from it playing well. It should expand at a good pace, keep its economy healthy, build ships that make sense against yours, and attack when it's actually ready instead of throwing ships at you one at a time. Most of this post is about the pieces that make that happen.

I also want each corporation to have its own personality. After a few games you should know that one of them tends to dig in and defend, and another one comes at you early, and plan around that. And the AI should react to what you do. If you build your fleet a certain way, it should notice and adapt, like a human opponent would.

Getting all of that to hold up over a long game is the hard part, which is why the last section of this post is about testing.

How the HTN Planner Works

In DevLog 06 I introduced the HTN (Hierarchical Task Network) planner. Here is how it is actually put together.

The Layout

Every AI player is made of several agents, and each agent owns a list of tasks:

AI player
├── Strategy agent (one per player)
│     DeclareWar, SueForPeace, PickWarTarget, BuySciTek
├── Fleet agent (one per player)
│     FleetColonize, FleetDefend, FleetIntercept, FleetService,
│     FleetRally, FleetFormGroup, FleetAttack, FleetAdvance,
│     FleetScout, FleetPatrol
└── Colony agent (one per colony)
      SellMinerals, BuildResponseFleet, BuildBuildings, BuildVehicles,
      BuildMissiles, BuildSatellites, LaunchMissiles, LaunchSatellites,
      IncreasePower/Air/Food/WaterProduction

The strategy agent decides who the AI is fighting and what it researches. The fleet agent moves ships. Each colony runs its own agent that builds, sells and launches from that asteroid, so a corporation with five colonies has five colony agents working in parallel.

The Design

A task has four parts:

Preconditions that must all be true before it can start. FleetAttack needs an idle combat ship, a hostile asteroid in range, and a consolidated fleet.
An action, which is what the task actually does when it starts, like ordering ships to a target.
Rules that must stay true while the task runs. Most tasks only check that the player or colony is still alive. If a rule breaks, the task fails.
Finish conditions that decide when the task is done. LaunchMissiles, for example, stays active until the launch queue is empty.

Each task moves through a few states: not started, in progress, complete or failed. When the AI thinks, each agent walks through its task list. If a task is in progress, the agent checks its rules and finish conditions and stops there. Otherwise it tries to start the next task. If the preconditions fail, the task is marked as failed and the agent tries again later.

The task list is written in priority order. For the fleet agent, colonizing and defending come before rallying and attacking. But the starting point rotates a little each time the agent thinks, so a task near the top that keeps failing doesn't stop the ones below it from ever running.

The idea of an HTN is that a big task can be broken down into smaller ones until you reach actions that can be carried out directly. The planner supports that kind of compound task, and DevLog 06 described it that way. In practice, all the tasks the AI uses right now are simple ones, and the chaining happens through conditions instead: one task's action changes the game state so that another task's preconditions become true. Each task stays small, and it's easy to test on its own.

An Example Chain: Going to War

Here's what a war looks like from the AI's side, task by task:

Threat builds up. Hostile actions against the AI raise its threat value toward you, and so does having your colonies close to its own.
DeclareWar starts once threat is over the doctrine's limit, the AI has enough ships and missiles, and it isn't already at war with you.
PickWarTarget chooses which enemy to focus on, since it might be at war with more than one player.
BuildVehicles runs in the colonies with a shipyard. With a war target set, the AI designs counter-ships against what it has seen of your fleet (more on that below). If a larger enemy fleet shows up near one of its colonies, BuildResponseFleet jumps in to build defenders there.
FleetFormGroup puts idle ships into groups, if the AI has a working Command Centre.
FleetRally runs while the fleet is still spread out. It picks a safe asteroid near the front and sends the ships there.
FleetAttack can only start once enough of the fleet has gathered, so it takes over from FleetRally at that point. It sends the ships that can reach the target from the asteroid where most of them are waiting.
FleetService pulls damaged or low-fuel ships back home for repairs and fuel, and FleetDefend sends ships back if one of its own colonies comes under attack.
SueForPeace starts if the war goes badly and the AI has lost too many of its colonies.

None of these tasks knows about the others. FleetAttack doesn't call FleetRally. They only share the game state, and the conditions decide which one gets to act.

How Often It Thinks

How often the AI thinks depends on difficulty. On Casual it thinks every 5 game days, on Normal every 2, and on Hard and Extreme every day. Hard and Extreme differ in other ways: on Extreme the AI holds a grudge longer (threat toward a rival cools off half as fast), and it's allowed a few more mines and turrets per colony. None of the levels give the AI extra money or information.

The AI reads its information from the same game state the rest of the game uses: asteroids, ships, balances, diplomacy and shipyard queues. There's no separate copy of the world for it, so the rule about hidden information has to be enforced in each task. When a task looks at enemy ships or asteroids, it should only consider what the AI has actually seen or surveyed.

Doctrines

Until now, every AI corporation played the same way. That made them predictable, so each faction now has a doctrine. A doctrine is a set of values that the task conditions read. Changing a few numbers changes the personality quite a lot.

Meridian Syndicate, "Merchant Prince". Slow to go to war and quick to ask for peace. It needs more threat and more ships before declaring war, and it sues for peace once it has lost a quarter of its colonies. It builds extra mines, puts research first and keeps a larger cash reserve.
Helios Combine, "Long-Haul Strike". Builds cruisers with torpedoes, missiles, fuel modules and fast engines, so it can hit you from far away. It also runs two colony ships.
Kessler Holdings, "Iron Line". Defensive. Extra turrets, more missile silos, armored battleships with point defense. It waits until 90% of its fleet has gathered before attacking. When it finally comes, it comes with nuclear missiles.
Vantor Dynamics, "Hammer". The aggressive one. It declares war at half the normal threat with only two ships, attacks when 40% of its fleet has gathered, and keeps fighting until its ships are down to 25% health. It only asks for peace after losing three quarters of its colonies.
Pallas Collective, "Swarm". Frigates with jammers and scanners, three colony ships, and missiles like Vortex, Scatter and Virus.

Every doctrine describes ships by role (gun, torpedo, armor and so on), not by specific items. The AI fills each role with the best item it has unlocked, so its ships get better as it researches, in the same way yours do.

Declaring war is a good example of how the numbers plug in. The strategy agent tracks a threat value toward each rival. War is declared when threat reaches 80 times the doctrine's war multiplier and the fleet is big enough. So Vantor, with a multiplier of 0.5, gets there at 40, while Meridian needs 120.

I also added rivalry pressure. Colonies within 120 units of a rival's colony slowly raise threat toward that rival. Before this, first wars tended to start somewhere around day 800 to 1000, and it varied a lot depending on the map. Neighbors should get on each other's nerves sooner than that.

Designing Counter-Ships

This is the part I'm happiest with. Every 10 days, the AI looks at the warships of the player it's at war with. It only sees ships near its own colonies or its own fleet. For those ships it records their average armor, evasion, health and damage reduction, which weapons they carry, and how big the groups are. It remembers each sighting until that ship is destroyed.

Then it designs a ship against that profile. It starts with an empty hull, reserves bomb slots for hitting colonies, and fills the rest one hardpoint at a time, each time picking the weapon or module that increases firepower × effective health the most against what it has seen. It does this with the actual combat rules: hit chance against evasion, armor as a percentage damage reduction, point defense against homing weapons, EMP jamming, splash damage against groups, and limited ammo.

So if you rely on missiles and torpedoes, point defense becomes worth more to it. If you fly in large groups, splash damage scores higher.

To choose between hulls, it uses Lanchester's square law. In a fight where everyone can shoot at everyone, a fleet's strength grows with the square of its size. That means two cheap ships are often better than one expensive one, so the AI scores each hull as strength divided by cost squared, adjusted by the doctrine's hull preference. Without intel on your fleet, it falls back to the doctrine's standard design.

Not Going Bankrupt

Ships have upkeep, and the AI could end up building more ships than it could afford to keep. Now every purchase goes through a budget check.

The AI keeps a reserve of 10,000 credits plus 180 days of the difference between projected upkeep and income. Projected upkeep includes ships already queued in its shipyards and the new ship it wants to buy. If it doesn't have a colony ship, it also keeps money aside for one. A purchase is only approved if the AI still has that reserve afterwards.

When money gets tight, the AI switches its focus to the economy, even during a war. It stops building warships, skips optional Sci-Tek, missile and satellite purchases, and sells surplus ore. It still builds colony ships and scouts.

Colonizing Better

The AI used to pick colony sites badly and sometimes kept sending ships back to a site that had already failed. Now it avoids asteroids with high radiation, prefers surveyed asteroids with ore, and then picks the closest. Colony ships get the best fuel module, and their reach is based on fuel instead of scanner range.

A new colony also follows a build order now: radiation protection first if it's needed, then sensors and refueling, ore storage, a Gravity Nullifier so the asteroid doesn't drift away, housing, and turrets if enemies are close.

There's also a new FleetAdvance task. Idle warships move forward to the colony with refueling that's closest to the enemy, so the AI's fleet slowly creeps toward the front during a war instead of sitting at home.

Letting the AI Use Everything

It turned out the AI was missing a lot of the game. Life-support buildings were looked up wrongly, so it never built them. It never built a Ship Yard or a Weapons Factory. Checking whether it could buy a missile actually charged it money every time it checked.

After fixing that, each AI has its own Sci-Tek unlocks and uses every missile and satellite type it has unlocked. It builds landing pads, repair, screen generators, ore teleporters and Gravity Nullifiers. Damaged or low-fuel ships go home for service. And if it has Asteroid Engines, it now points them at the nearest colony of the player it's at war with.

Keeping the AI from Slowing the Game

The AI runs inside the game's per-day update. That update is spread over several frames: once it has used more than 4 ms in a frame, it stops and continues on the next frame. So even when several AI players think on the same day, the game shouldn't stutter. I also log a warning if the planner takes more than 2 ms, so I notice when something gets expensive.

Testing with Autoplay

Changing AI behavior is risky. A fix in one place often breaks something somewhere else, and I can't play a full game after every change. So I built an autoplay mode.

In autoplay, every player is controlled by the AI, including the slot that's normally yours. It can run from the Unity editor or from the command line with options for seed, speed, number of days and number of runs. It can also run headless, without cameras, UI or audio, and as fast as the computer allows. A game ends after 3,000 days or after 300 days of stalemate.

During a run it records a timeline every 10 days, a log of events and a summary. A small script reads the results and checks a list of things that should always be true:

every game finished
no AI went bankrupt
every faction built a colony ship and expanded
every faction still alive holds at least two colonies
no colony was lost twice without a known attacker
every missile launch had a recorded outcome
colony point defense fired when it was attacked
at least one fleet attack happened, the first one by day 900, and some bombardment damage was done

It uses three fixed seeds, so if something fails I can run the exact same game again and look at what went wrong. In autoplay the AI is also never allowed to actually go bankrupt. If its balance goes negative, it's reset to zero and counted as a failure, so I can find the cause instead of just watching a corporation disappear.

What's Next

The doctrines are still first drafts, and the numbers will change. Now that autoplay exists, I want to use it to compare the doctrines against each other and see whether any of them is clearly stronger. Next month I'll probably go back to the player side of things. You can follow along on the roadmap.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 08: Ship Combat, Point Defense and Captains in the Fragile Allegiance Remake

2026-08-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

Ship combat got a lot of attention this month. Before getting into the changes, I want to explain what I'm aiming for.

What Combat Should Feel Like

In Fragile Allegiance, most of the fighting happens over colonies. Ships and missiles attack, turrets and point defense answer. In the remake I want you to have more control over those fights. You should be able to step in during a fight and decide what your ships shoot at, and those decisions should matter.

I also want equipping a ship to be a real choice. If one loadout is always the best, ship design stops being interesting and every fleet looks the same. So every weapon should have its own job and its own weakness. A railgun hits hard and can't be shot down, but it's slow to fire. A torpedo can destroy a ship in one hit, but you only get three. Point defense barely scratches a ship but saves you from missiles, and an EMP does no damage at all but can silence the enemy's best ship for a few seconds. The right loadout should depend on who you're fighting and what they're bringing.

For that to work, the rules need to be clear, so that when you lose a fight you can tell what to change. You also need to be able to see what's happening. If you can't tell which ship carries which guns, or why your missiles didn't get through, the choices don't mean much.

I also wanted ships to be more than a set of numbers. That's where captains come in, near the end of this post.

Guns on the Hulls

Ships now carry visible weapon models on their hardpoints. Every tracer, missile and railgun shot comes out of the muzzle of the gun that fired it. This sounds like a small thing, but once you can see which ship has which guns, a fight becomes much easier to read.

I also desynchronized the weapons. Before, a group of ships would fire at the same moment, which looked mechanical. Now each weapon's first shot is delayed by a random amount, and reload times vary a little between shots. A fleet in combat looks more like a fleet now, and less like one ship copied six times.

The Weapons

Here is what's in the game at the moment:

PDC. A short-range point-defense cannon that fires bursts of 6 tracers. Low damage, mostly there to swat down missiles.
Twin PDC. Twice the tracers per burst, faster rounds and more damage. Expensive compared to the PDC.
Railgun. Hits very hard, never runs out of ammo, and its rounds can't be intercepted. It needs a bigger hull and charges for 3 seconds before firing, with a glow you can see building up. If the target dies while it's charging, it keeps the charge and picks a new target instead of wasting it.
EMP. No damage at all. A hit jams the target's weapons for 5 seconds. After the stun wears off, the ship is immune to EMP for the same amount of time, so two EMP ships can't lock an enemy down forever.
Missiles and torpedoes. Missiles are homing and come in a 12-round magazine. Each hit is light, but you fire a lot of them. Torpedoes have the longest reach of any ship weapon and can destroy most ships in one hit, but only carry 3 shots. Point defense can shoot down both. They also look different now, so you can tell what's coming at you.
Bombs. The ship flies over a colony building and drops them straight down onto it, damaging everything in the blast.

The EMP stun was 100 seconds at first, which was far too long. I cut it to 10 and then to 5. It's one of the numbers I'll keep watching.

Armor as a Percentage

Armor used to subtract a flat amount from every hit. That meant weapons with small hits, like PDCs, did almost nothing against an armored ship, and armor penetration decided which weapons were worth taking. Railguns had by far the most penetration, so against armor they were the obvious answer.

Now armor reduces incoming damage by a percentage, up to a maximum of 60%. It works the same way against every weapon, so armor penetration is gone. A heavily armored ship takes less damage from everything, but nothing bounces off it. So every weapon stays useful against armored targets, and you pick based on range, ammo, rate of fire and what the enemy can shoot down.

Point Defense That Works

This was the biggest fix. Point defense used to only fire during a ship's attack window, which was open roughly a third of the time. The rest of the time, incoming missiles were simply ignored.

Now PDCs track incoming missiles and torpedoes all the time, and they go after the one closest to impact first. A hit destroys the warhead early. They only care about projectiles heading for their own ships or colony, so they don't waste fire on missiles flying somewhere else.

Missed tracers also behave better. About half of them graze the hull and glance off, and the rest fly past and keep going.

Focus Fire

By default, ships shoot the closest enemy ship. That's usually fine, but sometimes you want everything on one target. So now you can left-click an enemy ship to mark it, and every one of your ships at that asteroid will shoot it first. Right-click clears the mark. Bombers keep bombing buildings either way.

This replaced the old ATTACK button in the colony view. The marked ship gets a red targeting reticle, and any ship that has taken damage shows a health bar that goes from green to amber to red.

If you hover over one of your own ships, a tooltip shows what it's doing ("Engaging" or "Under fire") and a row for each weapon: ready, firing, reloading, charging, out of ammo, or offline because of an EMP.

Evasion

Every ship now has an evasion value. It comes from the hull, the modules and the captain, and it's always between 5% and 85%. Every attack's chance to hit is reduced by the target's evasion. EMP shots also have to hit now, so a fast, evasive ship has a real chance of dodging a stun. You can see a ship's evasion in its detail panel.

Captains

This is the part I'm most curious to see in play. Every ship now has a captain, and captains gain experience from combat. Hits, EMP jams and missile interceptions give a little experience, and kills give a lot.

Captains are promoted through naval ranks, starting at Lieutenant Commander and going up through Commander, Captain, Commodore and the Admiral ranks, all the way to Fleet Admiral. That's 10 levels in total.

Each promotion improves the captain's accuracy and evasion by 1%, and raises their reaction speed. Reaction speed affects how fast weapons reload and how fast a railgun charges. A fresh captain is actually a bit slower than the base numbers, and a fully promoted one is about 30% faster.

To keep veterans special, there are limits on how many captains you can have at each senior rank. There are 16 Commander slots but only one Admiral and one Fleet Admiral. If the next rank is full, the captain waits with "NO OPENING" until a slot frees up, for example when a senior captain's ship is destroyed. So losing your Fleet Admiral's ship actually hurts.

Captains don't exist in the original Fragile Allegiance. Most of the remake tries to stay close to the 1996 game, but this is one of the places where I wanted to add something. Ships in the original are interchangeable, and I wanted a reason to care about the ones that survive.

What's Next

The AI fights with the same ships and weapons, and it now designs its ships around what your fleet looks like. That deserves its own post, so the next devlog will be a deeper look at how the rival corporations think. You can follow the rest of the progress on the roadmap.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 07: Designing a Remake with the Original Game as the Spec

2026-07-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

In Fragile Allegiance there is a well-known tactic where you fire a dozen cheap missiles at an enemy colony. Most of them are only there to absorb the anti-missile fire, so that the real warheads behind them get through. It feels like an exploit, or something the designers did not intend. But this is exactly how the original game works, and it is one of the reasons people still play it thirty years later.

Details like this are the reason I design the remake the way I do. People sometimes ask how I'm rebuilding Fragile Allegiance, and the answer is that I don't have the source code. What I have is a decompilation project that analyzes the 1996 DOS version instruction by instruction and documents what it finds. I think that is even more useful. The decomp is my game design document.

The Original Is the Spec

This changes the design process. Instead of first asking "what would be fun?", I always start by asking "what does the original actually do?". Then, as a separate question, I ask "should I keep it?".

Every system in the remake is checked against this. The two random number streams that generate the universe. How asteroids are created. The ten ores and how they are distributed across the field. How mines extract them. When the decomp showed that the original's RNG behaves in a certain way, I reproduced the same behavior. The goal is that the asteroid belt you survey in the remake is statistically the same belt that K240 players remember.

The Faithfulness Policy

The rule I decided on is: the mechanics are faithful, the presentation is mine.

Faithful means the simulation layer. The universe generation, the ore economy, the life-support math and the missile logic. These are the physics of the game, and I try to port them as carefully as possible.

Mine means the interface. The original runs on a 640×480 DOS screen, and copying it directly would not work well on a modern monitor. So I redesigned it in the same spirit as the original: a fictional in-game operating system ("FMC OS") with a 90s terminal style, Orbitron and Rajdhani fonts, and gold on black.

When the two conflict, I choose the original. A lot of the strange things in the game are what make it good: missile-first strategies, sabotage agents, cheap missiles used to absorb anti-missile fire, and traders that are worth befriending because they sell specific items. That depth is why the game still has a following, and I don't want to remove it. If all of that is removed, what is left is a generic 4X game with the Fragile Allegiance name.

Decisions That Shaped the Code

Three technical decisions came directly from this approach:

Custom game clock. The original updated the whole world on its own rhythm. Unity's Update() is not really a game loop, so I built my own. It has a per-frame Tick() and a per-second TickPerSecond(), and the work is spread across frames with a time budget so a busy asteroid belt does not cause stutter. The game runs on game time instead of frame time, like it did in 1996.
ScriptableObject state machine. The player flow (colony view, asteroid field, build, launch) is a data-driven state machine. Adding a new screen means adding a new state asset instead of rewriting a controller.
HTN planner for the AI. The rival corporations plan what they do: colonize, attack, defend and patrol. They make decisions one game-second at a time, and the goal is that they only use the same information you have. I don't want the AI to cheat.

Lessons from the Decomp

Some things I have learned from working with the decomp during the last months:

The original did not tell you everything about your economy. The life-support math for air, food, water and power had quirks that the manual never mentioned, and the decomp found them. Whether I keep a quirk is always a design decision. Some of them are balance and some are bugs. I kept the ones that make the game feel like Fragile Allegiance.
Reverse engineering is slow work. Every claim in my design documents has a status: confirmed, hypothesis or "?". When new analysis shows that an old conclusion was wrong, I update the documents the same day. If you design on top of things that are only half true, the remake slowly turns into fan fiction.
Playability can be better than in 1996. Range-select in the sidebar, hover fixes and a tutorial are not against the spirit of the original. I think they are things many of the original players would have wanted.

What's Next

Now that the faithfulness side is clear, the next posts will go back to the systems you will actually use. Probably a closer look at the economy that the decomp revealed, and how the roadmap priorities compare to what the original game really does.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 06: AI Fleet Intelligence & Deep Space Operations

2026-06-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

Say you have turned your main production asteroid into a fortress. The missile silos are loaded, point defense is online and a large fleet is in orbit. It feels safe. Then your scout sees movement at the edge of the sector. The enemy is not attacking the fortress. They have added extra fuel tanks to their ships, flown around it, and they are about to attack the small mining outpost you built last week that has almost no defenses.

That is the kind of AI I want. An AI that does not just send ships at your strongest point, but looks at the map and attacks where you are not looking. To make this possible, I spent the last month replacing the old fleet AI dispatcher with a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner.

The HTN Planner: Thinking in Steps

The old AI was mostly simple "if this, then that" scripts. An HTN planner works differently. It takes a high-level goal and breaks it into a tree of smaller steps until the steps are actions it can actually do.

For example, the AI might start with a Complex Task like "Destroy Player Colony". It can't do that directly, so it splits it into sub-tasks: "Find Colony", "Assemble Fleet" and "Attack". If "Assemble Fleet" fails because the ships are spread out, it is split further into "Choose Rally Point" and "Move Ships". In the end these become Simple Tasks, which are the actual orders the AI gives to its ships.

Before and during each step the AI checks that the plan still works. If you destroy an important ship while the fleet is gathering, the "Assemble Fleet" condition fails. The AI does not continue with a broken plan. The task is dropped and the planner creates a new plan based on the ships it has left.

This means you will not just see enemy ships arriving one at a time anymore. You will see fleets that gather, move together and change their plans when you disrupt them.

Survey Tools and Fog of War: No Cheating

A smart AI is not very useful if it can't see the map. This is where the new deep-space systems come in: Survey Tools and Fuel Tanks.

One thing I really don't like in strategy games is an AI that always knows where your hidden bases are. So my rule for this game is that the AI should not cheat. It should follow the same fog of war rules as you do.

Information is not free anymore. If you want to know what minerals are on an asteroid, or if an enemy has built a colony there, you have to send a ship. The SurveyTool module can be installed on any hull. When a ship with the module arrives at an uncharted asteroid, it starts a SurveyVehicleMission that takes between 10 and 20 in-game days.

The AI does the same thing. Its FleetScout task sends idle scout ships to the edges of its known space to gather information. So when you destroy an enemy scout you also make the AI's planner blind in that part of the map. If the AI has not surveyed your colony, it can't target it. This means hunting enemy scouts is a good way to hide your expansion.

Fuel as a Strategic Constraint

Every ship has a base range that depends on its internal fuel. The new Fuel Tank module increases that range a lot.

This creates a difficult choice in the Shipyard. A frigate with armor and weapons is a dangerous interceptor, but its short range means it has to stay close to home. If you want to reach across the sector or attack deep behind enemy lines, you have to replace some of those modules with fuel tanks.

The AI understands this too. It plans interceptions (FleetIntercept) and patrol routes (FleetPatrol) based on the range of its ships. If it detects a hostile fleet moving toward one of its colonies, it sends the closest combat ships that have enough fuel to reach the intercept point.

The AI is now a lot harder to play against, and I think it is also more interesting.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 05: Modernizing the Command Interface

2026-05-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

This post is a bit different. Usually I write about what you will do in the game, like commanding fleets, designing ships or handling diplomacy. This time I want to write about how you will do it, because I spent the last few weeks rebuilding the whole user interface.

Think about a normal situation in the middle of a game. You are managing three colonies, a fleet is on its way to intercept an enemy, a diplomacy proposal is waiting, and the power grid on your main mining colony is about to fail. If the UI is slow or the information on screen is not up to date, the game stops working. You end up fighting the controls instead of the enemy.

The MVVM Refactor

The game shows a lot of information at the same time, and the old UI did not handle it well. So I removed the old UI systems and moved everything to an MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture using Unity's UI Toolkit and VisualTreeAssets.

In non-developer terms this means that what you see on screen (the Views) is now separated from the game simulation (the Models). They communicate through a layer in the middle (the ViewModels).

For example, when one of your ships takes damage, the game logic doesn't need to find the health bar and tell it to update. Instead the health bar is "listening" to an Observable<T> property on the ViewModel. When the ship's armor value changes in the simulation, the Observable fires and the health bar updates through its Subscribe() callback. Nobody has to remember to connect these by hand, and forgetting to do that is a common source of UI bugs.

Shared Top UI and Kahn's Algorithm

The MVVM architecture made it possible to build the new Shared Top UI. The global HUD elements, like your credits, the current date and notifications, are registered through a ServiceLocator so they can be accessed from any screen.

The systems also need to start in the right order. All the UI services, and the other game systems too, register themselves at startup. Then I use Kahn's Algorithm (a topological sort) to resolve the dependencies between them. If BudgetUI needs the Players and GameDate systems before it can draw anything, the sort makes sure those systems are initialized first.

The result is that the important information is always visible at the top of the screen, whether you are looking at a colony, the sector map or designing a destroyer in the shipyard. Also, no system tries to draw before the systems it depends on exist.

There is also a new notification system. When a neutral faction contacts you, or an AI fleet changes its behavior, a small notification slides into view. Because of the MVVM structure the notifications are lightweight and don't interrupt what you are doing.

Why Rebuild It Now?

Rebuilding the UI architecture in the middle of development is painful. But it had to be done. The original games used mostly nested menus and static screens. For the remake to feel like a modern game, it needs overlays that update in real time, data binding, and UI code that is separated from the game logic.

This should mean fewer bugs when I add new features, and a smoother interface when the game is released. It is easier to do it now than a year from now.

What's Next

Now that the UI architecture is in place, I'm going back to the tactical layer. The AI fleets are getting an upgrade so they move around the sector in a smarter way.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 04: Corporate Diplomacy & Hostile Takeovers

2026-04-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

Say you have been building a strike fleet of destroyers and siege bombers just outside the sensor range of a rival's main ore processing colony. You are waiting for the right moment to attack. Then a transmission comes in from the faction you are about to attack. They are offering a non-aggression pact and some credits, "in the spirit of mutual corporate interests."

Now you have a choice. You can accept the pact, take the credits and send your fleet somewhere else. Or you can accept the pact, take the credits and attack anyway.

In many strategy games diplomacy is mostly a number that shows how much the AI likes you. I wanted it to be something you actually use, and something that has consequences if you abuse it.

First Contact and the Diplomacy HUD

During the last month the core diplomacy systems started working. The first thing you will notice is the new Shared Top UI and the notification system.

When you make contact with another faction, either because your ship entered their sensor range or because they contacted you, they are added to your Diplomacy Contacts. Messages now come through a dedicated HUD notification system instead of generic popups, and they are sorted by type. A neutral notification might be a trade offer or a pact. A red one means someone has declared war on you.

The goal was to make it feel like a corporate command center, where you keep track of your relationships with the other factions.

The Mechanics of Betrayal

So what happens if you accept the pact and then send your bombers anyway?

In the original Fragile Allegiance you could break treaties, but it didn't always have much effect on the rest of the game. In the remake I added attack penalties that are tied to two values: Standing (how much they like you) and Trust (how reliable they think you are).

Every time your weapons hit something that belongs to an AI faction, the game checks if you are at war with them. If you are not, you immediately lose Standing and Trust.

They will also complain about it. The complaints are rate-limited, because otherwise every hit would send a new message to your inbox. When a complaint is sent, you get an official "Notice of Hostility" in your diplomacy thread that tells you to cease fire.

If you continue, your Standing will eventually drop below a threshold and they will declare war on you. The other factions will also see that you don't keep your agreements. Trade stops and defensive pacts are cancelled, and you might end up fighting on several fronts because nobody trusts you enough to stay neutral.

This is why you can make war declarations. If you want an enemy colony, you can formally declare war first. The defender gets some time to prepare, but your reputation with the other factions stays intact. You have to decide if the surprise attack is worth losing everyone's trust.

AI Proposals and Responses

Diplomacy works in both directions. The AI factions have their own goals and they will contact you with proposals.

Every in-game day each AI evaluates the situation and decides if it should contact you. First it compares its fleet strength to yours. Then it takes your Standing and Trust into account, which depend on how you have behaved so far (for example unprovoked attacks or pacts you have kept).

Based on this it might:

Ask for a ceasefire if it is losing a war against you and wants to save what it has left.
Demand tribute if it is stronger than you and your Standing is very low. If you don't pay, it declares war.
Offer a non-aggression pact if you are at peace and your strength is similar.
Offer a surplus trade if it has too much of a mineral (Iron, Olivine, Thorium) and sees that you have the credits to buy it.

When you send a proposal to an AI, it uses the same logic in the other direction. It looks at your fleet strength, whether you have kept your agreements before, and its own goals before it answers. It is not a random dice roll.

What's Next

The basic diplomacy is now in place, but it also needs to be connected to the economy. Next I want to look at how trade works together with diplomacy, and how economic pressure could be used to win a war without firing a torpedo.

Signing out,

Jari

DevLog 03: Designing the Corporate Fleet

2026-03-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

In the last post I wrote about how fleets move. This time I want to write about what they are made of. In Shattered Allegiance "an enemy Destroyer" does not tell you very much.

Here is an example of why.

Your scout frigate detects an unknown contact at the edge of sensor range. The signature says it is a Battleship-class hull. You have three destroyers in orbit, which is enough for most threats, but a battleship is a different problem. You need to know what it is carrying.

When your sensors get a proper lock, the loadout is revealed. It has railguns on every hardpoint. Before you can pull your destroyers back it is already in range. The first volley destroys your lead destroyer and the second one badly damages another. A few seconds earlier this was a fight you could win. Now you are trying to save what is left.

The hull class only tells you what the ship is built on. The loadout tells you how dangerous it is, and often you only find out after you have already committed. The same is true for your opponent.

The Five Hulls

Why five hulls? With three (light, medium and heavy) each class would have to cover too many roles and the differences would get unclear. With seven there would be overlap, and it would be hard to tell what the real difference is. Five gives each hull one clear role: expansion, scouting, flexible combat, heavy combat and support, and maximum firepower. When you see a ship on sensors you know what kind of problem it is, even before you know the details.

Every ship starts as an empty chassis in your orbital Shipyard. The hull decides the basic stats: structure, base armor, speed, maneuverability and, most importantly, the number of hardpoints. Everything else is your choice.

Colony Ship. The only ship that can land on an empty asteroid and start a new colony. It is big, slow and well armored, and it has no weapons. This is on purpose. In the original games the colony ship had a small weapon, and players sent colony ships to every empty asteroid without any escort. Without weapons, expanding becomes a military decision. You have to send combat ships with it, and those ships are not defending your other colonies while they are away. This means you can't fill the map with outposts for free. When the colony ship arrives it drops a seed pod that becomes your first Core Hub. You should protect it well, because losing one is expensive.

Frigate. Fast, cheap and fragile. Frigates survive by avoiding hits, because they don't have much armor. In the early game they are used for scouting, skirmishing and harassment. A frigate with Survey Tools and Fuel Tanks can travel far outside your borders and map enemy mining operations without firing a shot. A frigate with point defense and Evasive Thrusters is a missile screen that can move quickly to where it is needed. Same hull, but a very different ship.

Destroyer. The backbone of most fleets. Destroyers have a good balance of speed, armor and firepower, so they are the most flexible combat ship in the game. A destroyer with armor-piercing cannons and a reinforced hull can hold the line against cruisers. A destroyer with only point defense turrets can stop most of an incoming missile salvo.

Cruiser. This is where ships get expensive. Cruisers are slower than destroyers but have much more structure, heavier armor and enough hardpoints for a mixed loadout. They are the first hull where you can realistically fit both weapons and fleet support systems. A cruiser can stay behind your formation as artillery and shoot defense platforms, or it can carry alloy armor and cannons and stay at the front of the battle line.

Battleship. Battleships are so expensive that building one means you are not building other things. You are betting that one ship is worth more than several smaller ones. They are very slow and can't avoid anything, but they have the heaviest armor in the game and can carry enough weapons to destroy a squadron or a colony in one volley. The question is if it survives long enough to fire.

The hidden cost is time. While your shipyard is building one battleship, your opponent can build three destroyers. When the battleship is finally ready it is very dangerous, but until then you are three ships behind. It is a bet on one big ship instead of many small ones.

Early concepts showing the varying scale of the corporate fleet.

Weapons: Four Ways to Ruin Someone's Day

Weapons go into hardpoints. Utility modules go into separate internal slots, so you don't have to choose between a railgun and a deflector shield. You can have both. This also makes it possible to build very specialized ships. For example, a frigate with no weapons and two survey modules is a useful ship and not a mistake.

Combat is not only about comparing damage numbers. Gun crews need time to get a lock, the rate of fire changes under pressure, and every shot rolls against the target's evasion. Mostly it is about bringing the right tool for the job.

There are four main weapon types:

Point Defense turrets target incoming missiles automatically. A fleet without them usually dies to the first salvo.
Bombs drop straight down and destroy buildings on the surface. But the bomber can't defend itself well against interceptors.
Homing torpedoes can follow fast frigates, but they are slow enough to be shot down.
Beam weapons like the Railgun hit instantly. They are good against slow and heavy ships before those can retreat.

You can't counter everything at the same time. Your loadout is your answer to what the enemy is doing.

The shipyard interface. Weapons fill visible hardpoints while modules occupy internal bays, so you see your loadout take shape.

Utility Modules: The Dilemmas of Design

Weapons destroy things. Modules decide how a ship works, and I think this is the most interesting part of ship design. Here are two examples of the choices you will make.

Armor or shields Alloy Armor removes a flat amount of damage from every hit. Deflector Shields absorb a percentage of the damage. This means neither one is always better. Flat reduction works well against many small hits, like point defense fire or rapid cannons. Percentage reduction works better against a few very big hits, like railgun volleys. If the enemy uses railgun cruisers, a fleet with mostly armor will lose. You only know which defense is right if you scout the enemy first.

Fuel tanks Every ship has internal fuel that limits how far it can travel. External fuel tanks increase that range. In practice fuel works like an invisible border for your empire. The trade-off is that fuel tanks help you reach the fight, but armor and shields help you survive it. A scout with fuel tanks can map three times as many asteroids, but if it is caught it dies immediately. Every slot used for range is a slot not used for survival.

Five Example Builds

The same hulls can be used in very different ways. Here are some examples.

Deep Space Scout. A frigate with no weapons and Survey Tools and Fuel Tanks in every slot. It travels far outside your borders, maps the sector and avoids fights. It is cheap and easy to replace, and it is probably one of the most useful ships early in the game. The weakness is that anything that catches it will destroy it.

Point-Defense Interceptor. A destroyer with point defense on every hardpoint and Evasive Thrusters. Its job is to stay between your big ships and incoming missiles and shoot them down. The problem is that PD turrets don't shoot at ships, so in a fight against a direct-fire fleet it doesn't help much.

Artillery Cruiser. A cruiser with railguns on every hardpoint and Reinforced Bulkheads. It stays behind your formation and shoots defense platforms and capital ships while your screen protects it. But it has no missile defense, so if a salvo gets past your screen it takes full damage.

Siege Bomber. A battleship with bombs on every hardpoint, Alloy Armor and Reinforced Bulkheads. It is slow and vulnerable on the way, but if it reaches orbit over an enemy colony it can destroy every building on the surface. The whole fight is about whether it gets there or not. Bombs can't target ships, so if an enemy fleet catches it during the trip you lose a very expensive ship.

Line Breaker. A destroyer with torpedoes on every hardpoint, Alloy Armor and Deflector Shields. It is fast enough to reach a cruiser, tough enough to survive the approach and strong enough to threaten ships twice its size. It works best in groups. Torpedoes are the slowest warheads in the game though, so a point defense screen can shoot many of them down. It has to get into range before too much of its payload is destroyed.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shipyard

Because ships are built from parts, you can adapt to what the enemy is doing. If a rival keeps firing missile barrages at you, you can change your production to point-defense interceptors. If they build big and slow battleships, you can build fast frigates with homing weapons that stay outside the battleship's firing arc and slowly destroy it.

But changing production takes time. You can't switch from PD destroyers to torpedo frigates the moment you see a battleship. There is a delay between knowing what the enemy is building and being able to respond to it. So the main question is whether you build general fleets that handle most threats reasonably well, or specialized fleets that are very good against one threat. The answer depends a lot on your scouting. If you see the enemy fleet early, you have time to counter it. If you see it too late, you have to fight with what you have.

I'm in the middle of balance testing right now. Mostly this means watching one side get destroyed because I gave a battleship too many armor modules. The numbers will definitely change, but the idea will stay the same. You are not choosing from a list of pre-made units. You design ships to answer the threats you face, and your opponent does the same.

This is why I like the moment when the sensor lock finishes and you see what the enemy cruiser is actually carrying. Sometimes it is good news. Usually it is not.

Stay vigilant.

Jari

DevLog 02: Fleet Command & Missile Systems

2026-02-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

Say you have six destroyers guarding your main mining colony. Your scanners pick up an enemy group coming toward you: three cruisers, a battleship and some frigates, about four minutes away. At the same time your own ships are spread across three asteroids doing supply runs. You need to get them together and meet the enemy before it is in range.

That situation is not scripted. It is the kind of problem that happens naturally in this game, and most of the last month went into giving you the tools to deal with it.

Fleets That Move Like Fleets

The fleet system is built around one simple rule: ships travel together, or they die alone.

In most RTS games a group move order works more like a suggestion. The fast units arrive first, the slow units come later, and the group arrives in pieces. Then the player has to move the stragglers back into place. This works on a ground map. But in space a ship that arrives alone is usually a dead ship, so in this game fleets stay together. Another interesting thing is what this does to scouting. Sending a frigate ahead is now a decision you make on purpose, because you have to take it out of the fleet. It doesn't just happen because one ship is faster than the others.

When you group ships into a fleet (any idle ships at the same asteroid) they become one unit. The first ship you select becomes the Flagship and gets a marker, so you always know which ship is leading. After that they move together.

The fleet moves at the speed of its slowest ship. This is a real cost. If you add a battleship to a group of frigates you get a lot more firepower, but the whole fleet slows down to the battleship's speed. You can't have both. This means you have to think about what you put in a fleet instead of just adding everything to one big group.

Before leaving, the ships move into a V-shaped wedge with the flagship at the front. They don't start moving until every ship is in position. The wedge also matters in combat, because incoming missiles hit the lead ship first. The flagship takes most of the first volley while the ships behind it are protected. So the choice of flagship is important, and it should probably be something that can survive a lot of damage. When the fleet arrives it goes into a synchronized defensive orbit around the asteroid.

When two fleets fight, ships choose targets based on their weapons. Point Defense shoots at incoming missiles, beam weapons target big and slow hulls that are easy to hit, and homing warheads go after the fast and evasive ships. You don't control individual guns. Your decisions are about what is in the fleet, where you send it, and if the fight is worth taking at all. I think that is where the interesting decisions are in this kind of game.

If a ship is destroyed, runs out of fuel or you split it off yourself, the fleet adjusts. If only one ship is left, the fleet disbands automatically. You can also select some ships from a fleet and they will break off as a new group in the middle of an order.

So back to the six destroyers. You box-select them, press form fleet and give one move order. They leave from their own asteroids, form up during the trip and arrive at the intercept point together. One order instead of six.

(Mockup) Fleet deployment panel showing ship grouping, flagship designation, and formation status.

The Missile Launch Sequence

Fleets are one way to attack. The other way is to skip the ships and use missile silos.

This is what happens when you order a missile strike. You open the targeting screen, select a warhead and mark a target on the enemy colony. The game spreads the missiles across your working silos and they launch.

Right now there are three warhead types, and each one gives the defender a different problem.

High Explosive. Wide blast, moderate damage to buildings and cheap. This is the standard missile. If you fire enough of them, even a well-defended colony will lose some buildings to the missiles that get through.

Incendiary. It spreads on impact, kills people and leaves fires that block repairs and construction. It doesn't destroy much of the industry, but it kills the people who work there. A colony can survive an incendiary strike with all its buildings intact and nobody left to run them.

Nuclear. The biggest blast, the most damage, the highest cost and the slowest flight. The slow flight is important because it gives point defense turrets more time to shoot it down. Launching nuclear missiles is a gamble that enough of them get through to destroy the colony.

Each warhead has a different cost, blast radius and speed, so the right defense depends on what is coming.

The silo doors open and the missile is launched vertically. Then it turns toward its target and fires its main engine. It climbs away from the asteroid and starts flying across the map.

The flight path is not only there to look nice. It works as a timer. From the angle and speed you can estimate when the missile will hit. If you are the defender, you have a short window to decide if you can move a fleet there in time to help shoot it down. The time between "launch detected" and "impact" is where the defender gets to make decisions.

When the missile comes down, the target colony's point defense turrets start firing. If they have enough turrets, your missiles might be shot down before they hit. You will see your salvo get smaller and hope that enough of them get through. The missiles that hit destroy everything in their blast radius. That Solar Generator the enemy spent five minutes placing is gone. The Shipyard with three destroyers in the queue is now a crater. Their power is below demand, the water pumps are about to fail and people will start dying. All of that from a few missiles fired from the other side of the map.

(Mockup) Prototype of the missile launch confirmation screen, hooking into the targeting event system.

(Mockup) Visualizing the projected trajectory and estimated time to impact during the targeting phase.

What's Next

Ship design. The five hull classes are implemented, but weapons and modules need their own post. That is the next one.

Signing out, Jari

DevLog 01: Initial Comm-Link Established

2026-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

Greetings, Commanders.

Your colonists don't care about your grand strategy. They care about air, water and food. If the power grid dips, the water pumps go offline. Then the crops die and the air purifiers start to fail. People die, the rest get angry and go on strike, and production stops. And this is usually the moment when a rival corporation's missiles arrive at the colony you spent two hours building.

Everything in the colony is connected. This is what I liked about Fragile Allegiance and K240 in the 90s. Those games understood that logistics is a big part of the war, and a broken supply chain can kill you faster than an enemy battleship.

That is the game I'm making. It's called Shattered Allegiance, and it is a spiritual successor to both of the originals under a new name.

Why This, Why Now

The 90s had a lot of strange and ambitious strategy games, and most of them disappeared. Publishers followed trends, studios were bought, and some sub-genres died without getting a sequel. The "colonize asteroids and fight other corporations" RTS was one of them.

K240 came out in 1994 and Fragile Allegiance in 1996. Gremlin Interactive was absorbed not long after, and that was the end of the series. There were no remasters or re-releases. Nothing for twenty-five years.

I think that is long enough.

(Prototype) Early missile and launch system prototyping.

What's Already Working

I'm building this alone in Unity. This is what works right now.

Procedural asteroids. Every asteroid is different. Each one has its own shape and its own mineral distribution, so some are worth claiming and some are not. After a while you learn to tell the difference.

The life-support web. Air, water, food and power are each produced by a specific building. Your population uses them and you can only store a limited amount. What makes it dangerous is that they depend on each other. Power runs the water pumps and the air purifiers, so if power output drops below demand the whole chain stops working. One failure leads to the next one. The original games did this well and I want to keep it.

Resource chains. Ore does not turn into credits by itself. You mine it and stockpile it, and then you sell it or ship it to a colony that needs it for construction. Also, ore prices change over time. If you can afford to hold your ore when prices are low and sell when they go up, you can fund a war that your rivals can't afford.

The Hard Part

What is not done yet is combat. Fleet movement, ship design and missiles are all in development right now, and I will write about them in later posts. The foundation (asteroids, colonies, life support and resources) is now stable enough that I can start working on the part where things explode.

Many indie developers wait until the game looks good before they show anything. I understand why, but I prefer to show the work in progress. If you are interested in how the systems of a game work, I think you would want to see it too. That is what this blog is for.

What You Can Expect

I will post about once a month. Each post will be about something concrete: a system I built, a design problem I'm working on, or something that works or doesn't work yet. I'm not going to hype it, and I'm not going to ask you to wishlist anything.

If you played K240 or Fragile Allegiance, you probably understand why I'm doing this. If you didn't, welcome. It's a small corner of strategy games, and it has not had a new game in a long time.

The Roadmap shows the full plan.

More soon.

Jari