Core Concepts

Before the detailed chapters on fleets, combat, and economy, here are the building blocks of Nova in one place. Everything else is built from these.

Your starting position

Every commander begins identically:

Your home star also has wealth, so it earns income from the very first production cycle. The neutral stars scattered around you hold modest garrisons (a handful to a couple of dozen ships) and varying amounts of wealth — some are worth fighting for, some are not.

The 250-ship home garrison is Nova's standard default. The commander who creates a theatre can raise or lower the starting home fleet on the New game form — it is the same for every commander, so the opening stays balanced. The other opening values above are fixed.

Stars

Stars are the board. A star has:

• An owner — you, a rival, or nobody (neutral). A star can also be dead (destroyed).
• Ships — its garrison. Ships defend the star and are what you move around the galaxy.
• Wealth — the income the star pays its owner each production cycle. Wealth is recurring: the star keeps its wealth and pays it again every cycle.
• Factories — each factory builds one ship for the owner every production cycle.
• Shields — optional defences (probe shield, nova shield) you can buy for a star.

You grow by capturing stars (sending enough ships to take them) and by developing the stars you hold (buying factories so they churn out ships).

Commanders and your global stats

Some of your statistics belong to you, the commander, not to any one star, and they apply to everything you do:

• Treasury (credits) — your spendable money, pooled from all your stars' wealth. You spend it on factories, upgrades, shields, spy probes, and nova bombs.
• Range — how far, in parsecs, a single fleet jump can reach. A bigger range means you can strike more distant stars directly.
• Speed — how fast your fleets travel. Faster fleets arrive sooner — important both for attacking and for reinforcing.
• Battle power — your combat strength multiplier. Higher battle power tilts the odds in every battle your ships fight, attacking and defending.

Range, speed, and battle power can all be upgraded by spending credits (see Your Economy and Building). They are commander-wide: upgrade once and every fleet benefits.

Ships, fleets, and movement

Ships sit in a star's garrison until you send them somewhere. A group of ships in transit is a fleet. To move ships you launch a fleet from one of your stars toward a destination, choosing how many ships go.

• Ships only ever come from production (factories) or from moving them between your stars. There is no button to simply buy ships — you buy factories, and factories build ships over time.
• A fleet's travel time depends on the distance and your speed. Closer is faster; upgrading speed makes every trip shorter.
• A launched fleet can be recalled within 30 seconds of leaving — Nova returns its ships (or a probe/bomb's cost) — but only if nothing has happened at its origin star in the meantime. After that brief window the order is final, so still plan before you launch. See Recalling a fleet in Commanding Fleets.

The production cycle

On a regular clock — shown by the Next production countdown — Nova runs a production cycle across the whole galaxy. In each cycle, for every star you own:

• Each factory on the star builds one ship, added to that star's garrison.
• The star's wealth is paid into your treasury.

So a star with 3 factories and 12 wealth gives you 3 new ships and 12 credits every cycle. This is the engine of the whole game: capture stars, put factories on them, and your fleets and your bank both grow on every tick of the clock.

After each cycle the Comms feed posts a short personal summary of what you produced — for example "Produced 5 ships, +¢15 (2 stars)" — so you can see your economy growing at a glance. A cycle in which you produced nothing is left out of the feed. Each Comms line is stamped with a relative "X ago" time (and, because it tracks game time, it freezes while the theatre is paused) so you can see how recently it happened.

Tip: Early on, the biggest decision you make over and over is factories versus conquest — spend credits building up the stars you have, or save ships to grab more stars. Both are right at different moments. See the Strategy chapter.

Distance, range, and routing

Distance on the map is measured in parsecs. Your range sets the maximum length of a single fleet jump. To reach a star farther than your range, your fleet can hop through stars you own, as long as each individual leg is within range. Nova works out the shortest such route for you and previews it on the map.

Time compression and game length

Two settings, both chosen when a theatre is created, decide how the game feels:

• Game length — how long the theatre runs, in real hours (for example, 24). This is a real-world wall-clock duration: a 24-hour game ends 24 hours after it starts, full stop.
• Time compression — how much faster game time runs than real time. The game's internal clock — which drives production cycles, fleet travel, and the timing of battles — advances at the compression factor. At 1× game time is real time: a production cycle (one game-day) takes a real day, and a fleet might spend hours in transit. At 24× a cycle comes around once per real hour; at a few hundred times, every couple of minutes.

The two are independent. Game length is always measured in real hours, regardless of compression — turning compression up does not make the game end sooner, it packs more production cycles, travel, and fighting into the same real duration. A low-compression theatre is a slow, simmering campaign you check in on over days (much like the original Nova); a high-compression theatre is a brisk session where everything happens while you watch.

The creation form offers three ready-made pace presets that bundle a sensible length and compression — Quick game (1 hour, watch it live), Medium game (3 days, a cycle about every real hour), and Long game (14 days, a slow epic) — with Quick game as the default. You can always override them for any custom pace.

You do not have to calculate any of this while playing — the Next production and Mission ends countdowns always show the real time remaining. You do choose both values when you create a theatre; see Getting Started and the Web App chapter.

Pausing a game

Life happens — work, school, sleep. Any commander can pause the theatre so that, for the length of the break, nothing moves: fleets hold their position in transit, production stops, and the Mission ends clock freezes. Because the clock itself stops, the real-world deadline slides out by however long the pause lasts — a pause never costs you the game.

Pausing (and resuming) is a shared decision, so no single player can freeze everyone on a whim:

• Propose, then second. One commander proposes a pause from the status chip in the status bar — the chip reads RUNNING while the game is live and PAUSED · resumes in … while it is halted. Another commander must second it before it takes effect. Resuming works the same way — anyone may propose to resume, and a second applies it. The pending proposal, and a one-tap Second button, appear as a governance card in the Diplomacy panel's Global channel.
• It always comes back. A pause carries an automatic resume — either a duration the proposer set, or a safety cap — so a theatre can never be stranded paused, even if nobody is around to resume it. The PAUSED status chip counts down to that automatic resume.
• Orders wait for the resume. While paused you can study the map and plan, but you cannot spend: buying, building, and launching are disabled until the game resumes, because nothing can actually happen on a frozen clock. Plan during the pause; act the moment it lifts.
• Everyone hears about it. Every step of a pause or resume — a proposal, the second that applies it, a withdrawal, an expired proposal, or the automatic resume — is logged as a system line in the Diplomacy Global channel and notifies all commanders: an in-app message if they are watching the game, and a push notification if they are away. Nobody is left surprised to find the clock stopped or running again.

Talking to other commanders

Nova has built-in Diplomacy chat so you can coordinate, bluff, and negotiate. There are two kinds of channel: a Global broadcast everyone in the theatre can read, and a private 1:1 thread with each other commander (there are no group chats). New messages notify you — an in-app toast while you are watching, and a push notification if you are away. Chat works even while the theatre is paused, and pause/resume governance is logged in the Global channel. The full chat interface is covered in the Web App and Mobile App chapters.

Winning

A game ends one of two ways: when the Mission ends timer reaches zero, or early — the moment a single commander is the last one controlling any living star, having reduced every rival to zero. Either way the commander who holds the most living stars is the winner. Dead (nova-bombed) stars count for no one. This shapes everything: you can win by out-holding your rivals when the clock stops, or by knocking them all out before it does — and weakening a rival is, of course, an excellent way to take their stars. See Winning the Game.