At a glance
Your sensors no longer reveal the galaxy forever. In the latest Deep Space Empires development build, your empire records where it has travelled, what its sensors can see now, and where foreign contacts were last detected.
Strategic space now supports unexplored, explored, and currently visible sectors. Fleets and stations can disappear from live sensor coverage without being erased from your intelligence history, while ship power and long-range sensors are becoming meaningful parts of strategic command.
- Strategic sectors can be unexplored, explored, or currently visible.
- Celestial discoveries remain known after leaving sensor range.
- Fleets and stations can leave last-known contact markers.
- Active ship and station sensors contribute to strategic visibility.
- Detection, loss, and reacquisition events can appear in Communications.
Three states of space
Every empire now develops its own view of the galaxy. Unexplored sectors represent space your empire has never brought within long-range sensor coverage. Planets, asteroid fields, stations, fleets, and other strategic objects remain hidden.
Explored sectors contain space your empire has previously observed. Permanent discoveries such as planets, stars, nebulae, and resource fields remain part of your strategic map, but changing information is no longer guaranteed to be current.
Visible sectors are covered by an active sensor source. This is where your empire receives live information about fleets, ships, stations, and other detectable activity. The galaxy remains persistent beneath these visibility states: discovery determines how much of the existing universe each player is allowed to see.
Contacts don't vanish. They go cold.
Losing sensor coverage no longer means losing every trace of a contact. When a detected fleet or station moves outside current visibility, the strategic map can retain its last-known position as a muted historical marker.
Selecting a last-known contact reveals limited intelligence such as its type, last-known owner, coordinates, observed position, and time since detection. It does not expose current hull, shields, cargo, movement orders, or operational status, and it cannot be commanded or treated as a confirmed live target.
If your sensors detect the same contact again, current information replaces the stale marker at its newly observed position.
Power has consequences
Long-range sensors are becoming part of ship and fleet management rather than a passive map statistic. A fleet's strategic sensor radius is currently determined by the strongest active scanner among its powered ships. As fleets move, their coverage reveals new sectors and adds those discoveries to the empire's persistent intelligence.
Turning off a ship's main systems removes its sensor contribution and reduces its energy signature. This creates the beginning of a tradeoff between awareness and concealment: a powered fleet can observe more of the surrounding galaxy, while a powered-down ship becomes harder to detect but loses access to active systems.
Stations are being connected to the same model. Completed stations can carry their own sensor range, sensor strength, energy signature, and systems state, allowing infrastructure to contribute to regional awareness.
Intelligence at a glance
First detection, loss of contact, and reacquisition can create persistent entries under the Sensor filter in Communications. Repeated map refreshes do not generate duplicate events when nothing has changed.
Sensor events can include the contact type, event time, map coordinates, and a direct action for returning to the relevant strategic sector. Compact HUD notifications provide a faster version of the same information without interrupting fleet movement, colony management, or tactical operations.
Built for a larger galaxy
Strategic intelligence is being developed alongside viewport-based map rendering. The client requests map information around the camera instead of treating the entire galaxy as one permanently active scene.
Fog, celestial objects, fleets, stations, and historical contacts can then be prepared specifically for the area a player is viewing. A persistent galaxy may eventually contain enormous amounts of territory and activity, but the client should only render the information needed for the current view.
Currently in development
Strategic fog of war, persistent exploration, sensor-powered visibility, and last-known contacts are active in the current local development build. Visual presentation, detection balance, notification timing, and sensor values remain under testing.
Combat and territorial conflict are still later systems and should not be inferred from the presence of contact intelligence.
What comes next
The next development passes will test discovery while fleets move between sectors, refine the appearance of unexplored and visible space, improve live and last-known contact markers, and tune ship and station sensor values.
The strategic map is becoming more than a collection of objects and coordinates. It is becoming a record of what your empire knows, what it once knew, and what may have changed beyond the reach of its sensors.