Empire Automation
Automation lets you set up standing orders that your empire carries out on its own — shipping resources between your planets, keeping a shipyard or building queue topped up, or refilling your droid workforce — without you clicking through every planet yourself. Once a rule is authored, the server checks it on its own schedule and fires it whenever its conditions are met, even while you're logged out.
Automation is a convenience layer, not a shortcut. Every action a rule performs goes through the exact same checks a manual action would — if you couldn't afford it, don't have the ships, or don't have queue room, the rule simply skips that attempt and tries again later. Automation can't do anything for you that you couldn't already do by hand.
The Automation Screen
The Automation screen is organised into two tabs:
Rules — the standing orders for whichever planet you currently have selected. This is where you view, create, edit, enable, disable, and delete rules, and where you see each rule's current status: whether it's on cooldown, ready to fire, paused, or recently fired.
Activity — a running feed of what your automation has actually done across your empire: which rules fired, what they did, and when. It's the place to check when you want to know whether your standing orders are actually working as intended.
Unlocking Automation
Two separate investments gate automation, and they scale two different things:
Research unlocks the feature. Researching the automation technology is what allows you to construct the automation building described below in the first place. Beyond that first unlock, continuing to invest in this research is an open-ended grind: every additional level shortens the cooldown before your rules are eligible to fire again, empire-wide. There's no cap on how far you can take it — it simply keeps getting more responsive the more you invest.
The Automation Core is a building you construct on each planet you want to automate. A planet with no Automation Core runs no rules at all, no matter how far your research has come — research only grants the permission to build it, and the building is what actually switches automation on for that planet. Upgrading a planet's Automation Core doesn't change how often its rules fire; instead, it raises how many rules that planet can run at the same time, up to a fixed ceiling. Because the Core is a per-planet building, you invest in it separately on every planet you want covered — there's no single empire-wide building that automates everything at once.
Put together: research makes every automated planet's rules fire faster, and each planet's own Automation Core level decides how many rules it can juggle simultaneously. The two investments are independent, so a heavily-researched empire with a low-level Core on a given planet gets fast but narrow automation there, while a high-level Core with modest research gets broad but slower automation.
If a planet's Automation Core is missing or gets downgraded, its rules pause — they simply stop firing until the Core is restored. Nothing already in flight is affected: fleets already dispatched and items already queued by a rule complete normally, exactly as if you had sent or queued them yourself.
Rules: Conditions and Actions
A rule follows a simple shape: when something is true, then do one thing.
Conditions watch your empire's state — a resource stockpile above or below a certain amount, a storage bin nearing capacity, a droid count, or a build or shipyard queue sitting empty. Most conditions watch the planet the rule lives on, but a rule that ships resources somewhere else can instead watch the destination planet — letting you build a rule that reacts to a shortage elsewhere just as easily as one that reacts to a surplus at home.
A rule isn't limited to a single condition. You can combine several checks into one rule and choose whether the rule needs every one of them to be true at once, or whether any single one of them is enough to trigger it — giving you rules that fire on a combination of circumstances rather than just one signal.
Actions are what the rule does once its conditions are met. A rule can either dispatch a shipment of resources from its planet to another one of your planets, or keep a queue moving — topping up a shipyard order, pushing a building upgrade forward, or refilling your droid workforce — so that queue never sits idle waiting for you to notice.
Empire-Wide Rules
Most rules live on a single planet and act only from that planet. For logistics that would otherwise mean authoring the same rule on every planet, you can instead set up a single empire-wide rule that automatically gathers surplus resources from every eligible planet in your empire into one chosen planet — typically your capital. Any planet that later gets its own Automation Core is picked up automatically, without you having to go back and author anything new for it.
An empire-wide rule still draws on each contributing planet's own capacity to automate — a planet without its own Automation Core, or one whose rule capacity is already full, simply doesn't participate until that changes.
Cross-References
- Buildings — the queue an Automation Core competes for, and where you construct it.
- Research and Tech Tree — leveled research and how it unlocks new capabilities over time.
- DROIDs and Workforce — the workforce automation can help you keep topped up.
- Fleets and Missions — the underlying dispatch mechanics an automated resource shipment uses.