Trade Hub

The Trade Hub is your empire's income engine and its cargo yard. Every level adds credits per day toward your fleet's upkeep, and cargo ships for shipping resources to another system, gifting them to a rival, or trading on the offer board.

Every owned system has one, and the credits it earns are pooled empire-wide.

What it does

Each level produces a fixed amount of credits per day, contributed to your empire-wide treasury.

Each level also adds cargo ships. A level 1 hub fields one, and the count climbs to 30 at the highest level. Cargo ships are not built and cannot be attacked; they are capacity the hub simply has, and an upgrade grants more the moment it completes.

Sending resources

Any system with a Trade Hub can ship palladium and iridium to another star, whether it is yours or a rival's. Sending to your own system rebalances; sending to someone else's is a gift. Either can be recalled while it is still flying out, and the cargo unloads back at the system it left.

Gifting needs a second system. An empire holding one star can rebalance nothing and give nothing away, so the Send Resources action only appears once you have colonised somewhere else.

With several systems selected, a shipment goes out from each of them and the amounts you set are what every source sends, drawn from its own storage and carried by its own cargo ships.

Every cargo ship carries 25,000 of either resource, and a shipment uses as many as it needs. The ships are occupied for the whole round trip, so a hub with three ships can have three shipments in the air at once and no more. Cargo travels four minutes per hex and reaches exactly as far as a fleet sent from the same system, which means the Command Center level that governs your send range governs cargo too.

The offer board

A system with a Trade Hub gets a Trade Hub button beside the Structures and Shipyard tabs, and it opens the galaxy's public offer board. A listing shows its terms, the poster's name and the system it ships from.

The board is filtered to what the system you are viewing from can actually trade with. Both halves of a trade have to fly, so an offer only appears when your system and the seller's can each reach the other, and the shorter of the two reaches is what decides it. Your own offers always appear, wherever you are viewing from. What is left is ordered by the best deal first, counting palladium and iridium equally, and the nearer system wins a tie.

Posting sets aside what you are giving. The resources leave your system the moment you post, and the cargo ships needed to carry them are reserved until someone takes the offer or you cancel it. Those ships are not available for anything else while the offer stands, so a hub with three ships and an offer holding two can send only one more shipment.

One system can hold five open offers at a time. A sixth is refused until one of the five is taken, cancelled or expires.

A trade is resources for resources. Each side of an offer can name palladium, iridium or both at once, and credits never enter into it. Taking one is first come, first served, and the board acts through whichever of your systems is currently selected. That system receives the goods and pays for them, so the offer's seller has to be able to reach it: if their Command Center range falls short, the trade is refused and you can select a different system and try again. Both halves travel as ordinary cargo, so each arrives when its shipment lands. Neither half can be recalled: the bargain was settled the moment the offer was taken.

An offer nobody takes stands for fourteen days, then cancels itself and returns everything it was holding. Cancelling early does the same thing immediately.

The escrow always goes back into the system the offer was posted from, not to you. So if that system is captured while an offer is standing, the offer closes and the goods it was holding land in the new owner's storage.

When a shipment cannot be delivered

A Resource Depot has a storage cap, and cargo cannot push a system past it. Whatever fits is unloaded; whatever does not is turned around and flown back toward your systems, preferring the one it left from if that system now has room, otherwise the nearest of your other systems.

That single bounce is the only second chance the cargo gets. If the system it lands at is also full, the cargo is lost even if another of your systems could have taken it. You cannot see a rival's depot before you send, so a large gift to a nearly-full system is a real risk. The report you get on delivery tells you what landed.

When the treasury runs dry

Credits are spent on fleet upkeep. If upkeep outruns your Trade Hub income and the treasury hits zero, every system is affected until credits recover:

• Ship production pauses. Every Shipyard queue holds where it is, empire-wide, and no new batches can be queued.

• Fleets fight and move at reduced effectiveness. Ships hit less hard and less often in combat, and travel slower between systems.

Keep Trade Hub income comfortably ahead of upkeep before you commit to a big fleet or an attack.

Costs and trade-offs

• The Trade Hub costs palladium and iridium to build and upgrade, like any other structure.

• It draws Energy each tick. Your Reactor has to keep up.

• In an energy deficit, credit income drops alongside your other production. A starved Reactor costs you treasury, not just minerals.