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Auto Warz — War & Combat System Design

Document Type: System Design Version: 0.1 Status: In Progress — design agreed, numbers not yet set Last Updated: 2026-09-03 Phase: Phase 2 — War Update Author: Solo Developer Parent Document: [01_Master GDD](<../01_Master GDD.md>) Related Documents: [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>) · [33_Mothership & Fleet Design](<./33_Mothership & Fleet Design.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) · [14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance](<../Content/14_Win Conditions & Faction Allegiance.md>) · [15_Ship & Army Points Design](<../Content/15_Ship & Army Points Design.md>) · [04_Data Dictionary](<../../05_Reference/04_Data Dictionary.md>) Supersedes: the Unwritten/06_Combat & War System Design stub

Table of Contents

Purpose of This Document

This document defines what war is in Auto Warz: how it is created, joined, fought, resolved and ended. It does not cover how material reaches the front — that is [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>) — nor how ships and motherships are built — that is [33_Mothership & Fleet Design](<./33_Mothership & Fleet Design.md>).

Six documents linked to a combat document that was never written. This replaces that stub.

The Constraint That Decides Everything

A factory game is a legibility loop. The pleasure is: I built a system, I can see it running, I can see where it is failing, I fix that part. Every satisfying moment in the genre is a diagnosis.

Under a formula like win_probability = player_apr / (player_apr + enemy_apr), defeat tells the player exactly one thing: your number was smaller. There is nothing to diagnose and nothing to fix except make more. The factory receives no feedback from the war at all, which for a game whose thesis is "build the machine that wins the war" is close to fatal.

So the requirement is not "is combat fun to watch". It is:

War must return a diagnosable failure back into the factory.

Everything below follows from that sentence.

The resolution is that space is a war decided by supply. Not a supply problem with risk attached, and not a battle. A war whose outcome is driven by sustained delivery, so that losing sounds like this:

Your ammunition line delivered 40 a minute. The front consumed 60. On the eleventh minute your fleet stopped taking damage.

That is a factory diagnosis. It points at a belt. It arrives from the war layer with no battle engine underneath it.

What was rejected, and why

Rejected Reason
Full combat simulation (block-level damage, Empyrion-style) Not mainly scope, though it is a second game to build, balance and network under authoritative host. The stronger reason: it would make ship design a spatial skill, and this game's skill is systems throughput.
First-person or piloted combat Breaks the disembodied command intelligence premise in [01_World Bible](<../../05_Reference/01_World Bible.md>), and hands the outcome of a supply war to reflexes.
Pure APR formula, no ship editor The war teaches the factory nothing.

What a War Is

A war is a separate shared instance, hosted by a player or a dedicated server.

Worlds are private and parallel. A war is the only shared place. Many private worlds plug into one war through their gates.

ACCOUNT (you)
  level · cosmetics · Engineering Research · designs · faction reputation · motherships
      |
      +--> YOUR WORLD  (your galaxy, your save, you host; friends may visit)
      |       your factory · your planets · your power grid
      |       +-- THE GATE  -- feeds the war
      |
      +--> A WAR  (a separate shared instance)
              battlefield · terrain · fronts · participants · derelicts
              +-- your faction's FORWARD DEPOT   <-- every friendly gate arrives here
              +-- your mothership, parked at the front

You do not join a war. You join a world, build a gate, and travel to the war.

Consequence: scale

A war lives in an instance that somebody hosts. A four-person listen session has small wars. A community headless server has large ones. A global persistent war would need the funded community server already listed in [02_Scope & MVP Document](<../02_Scope & MVP Document.md>).

The scale of your war is the scale of your server.

The Three Timescales

Three nested layers, three cadences, three different things deciding the outcome. Collapsing them is what made earlier discussion of this system confusing.

Layer Duration Decided by Automation ladder
The war Hours to days. Faction versus faction, negotiated terms, players join and leave. Which fronts you can sustain at all Strategic: standing commitments
The front Tens of minutes to hours. A contested node with a standing supply demand. Throughput. Can you keep refilling? Logistical: the mothership and the depot
The engagement Minutes. A specific clash at a front. Loadout, position, and what is in the magazines right now Tactical: fleet stances

Supply matters at the front layer, not inside an engagement. An individual clash is decided by what the ships are carrying when it starts. Whether you can fight the next one twenty minutes later is decided by your factory.

That gives fast battles and long wars at the same time, without contradiction.

War Declaration & Terms

A war is created with a terms sheet, agreed before it opens and visible to every participant.

Term Notes
Duration How long the war runs. May be extended by agreement.
Location Which node on the galaxy map. Decides the terrain, and therefore the character of the war.
Victory condition One of the standard conditions below.
Participating factions Which factions are involved.
Who may join Open, invite, or faction members only.
Fleet Power cap Optional. Admission control: a fleet above the cap cannot enter.
PvP flag Whether player fleets may engage each other, or only faction AI.
Hardcore Off by default. On means fleets can be annihilated rather than disabled.

Location being a negotiated term is deliberate. Fighting beside an asteroid field means local refining and cover; fighting in open space means clean supply and nowhere to hide. Choosing the battlefield is a strategic decision made before a shot is fired.

Hosting a War

War lives on Progresses while you sleep?
Player-hosted (listen) The host's machine No. The host logs off and everything freezes exactly where it is.
Headless-hosted A server Yes

Offline continuation is a headless-hosting property. A player may log off and leave their fleet fighting under automation, protected by their retreat doctrine (see [33_Mothership & Fleet Design](<./33_Mothership & Fleet Design.md>)). This is the largest single payoff of the automation ladder:

The reward for good automation is that the war continues while you sleep.

Joining a War

  1. You are already in a world: you have a factory and you have built a gate.
  2. You pick a faction, or remain independent, which is the mercenary path.
  3. A war exists at a node with published terms.
  4. You commit. Your mothership travels there, burning transit fuel. Your gate links to your faction's Forward Depot.
  5. You are in the war. Leaving means travelling home on the fuel you reserved.

Everyone who joins a war has a world, a factory and a gate — mercenaries included. A mercenary is not a player without production. A mercenary is a player who fights for someone else's cause for pay.

Admission control

Account data (mothership designs, Engineering Research) lives on the account and, without a central service, cannot be cryptographically verified. Verification is not the mechanism. Admission is.

The war host validates arrivals against the terms: Fleet Power cap, module allowlist, hardcore flag. A player with an impossible mothership is simply never admitted anywhere. Your own world is your business; the war is where other players are affected, and it is the only checkpoint that needs to be strong.

The Forward Depot

Each faction in a war has one Forward Depot: a large structure on the battlefield with its own supply umbrella, larger than a mothership's.

It is the receiving end of every friendly gate

This is what makes it the war's objective rather than a convenience.

A gate in your world has no destination of its own. It arrives at your faction's Forward Depot.

Every gram of material any member of the faction sends arrives there. Which means:

  • Lose the depot and the faction is cut off. Gates have nowhere to arrive. Nobody can deliver anything until a new depot is established, and everyone falls back on whatever is already in their own mothership.
  • The depot area is worth holding, worth attacking, and worth screening.
  • A faction can deploy a replacement depot at cost, so losing one is a catastrophe rather than an instant loss — unless the victory condition says otherwise.

It holds only what was delivered

The depot conjures nothing. Its stock is the faction's delivered material, and it can run dry. If the faction stops feeding it, or the front consumes faster than the gates fill it, everyone starves together. That is the individual supply failure at faction scale, and it produces the same diagnosis:

The depot ran dry because the faction's gates delivered 400 a minute and the front burnt 600.

Free draw

Anyone in the faction, including hired mercenaries, draws from the depot without paying. There is no currency at the depot, no price list, no receipts. Take what your faction has.

Freeloading is handled socially rather than mechanically: contribution is tracked and shown on an in-faction board, and factions can eject members. For a co-operative game this is both sufficient and more interesting than a rule.

Two layers of supply

Scope Role
Forward Depot Faction-wide Shared and strategic. The lifeline.
Mothership Personal Tactical. What survives losing the depot.

Attrition Resolution

An engagement resolves as attrition over time, not as an instant probability roll.

APR becomes a rate

[15_Ship & Army Points Design](<../Content/15_Ship & Army Points Design.md>) currently defines APR as an input to win_probability = apr / (apr + apr). That formula is removed. Under this design:

APR is a rate, not a probability input: ships destroyed per tick, and supply consumed per tick doing it.

Attrition maths does the rest. This closes OI-202 through OI-206, which were all questions about a formula that no longer exists.

Supply modulates it

Combat power at a front is fleet APR modulated by supply satisfaction: how well supplied that fleet actually is over a rolling window. A well-built fleet at 40% supply fights like a much smaller one.

Per participant, never per side

Each player's ships fight at their own supply level. Enemy fire is distributed by position and exposure, not by ownership.

This matters for one reason above all others:

It is the only version where helping your ally is visible.

You reposition your mothership so their ships fall inside your umbrella, and their rate of fire climbs back up, on screen, in seconds. Pool supply across a side and that generous act disappears into an average. It also keeps the diagnosis personal: in a fight with four other people you can still see that your line was the short one.

Critical Modules

Attrition does not chew a hit point bar. It rolls module knockouts, weighted by exposure — how much armour and structure sits between a module and the hull surface.

Module lost Consequence
Bridge No orders. The ship goes adrift.
Reactor Everything stops.
Engine It cannot withdraw. The frightening one.
Drone pit (mothership) No supply delivery. The umbrella exists and does nothing.
Umbrella emitter (mothership) No supply at all.
Storage The stock inside it is lost.

Three things this buys at once. Armour coverage becomes the point of the layout, so the mothership build matters without a damage engine. "Removed from the war" becomes diegetic: not HP reached zero but your engine is gone. And it is cheap: one weighted roll, not a voxel grid.

Position, and What It May Never Decide

Manual fleet movement is allowed. Orders are RTS orders — move, engage, hold, screen, break off, dock — never piloting.

Position matters for four things, none of which need reflexes:

  • Being inside or outside the umbrella, which is supply
  • Focus fire, concentrating kill rate on one target
  • Screening, putting armoured hulls between a threat and your soft ships or your depot
  • Retreating, which is the tactical verb the whole model hangs on

And one rule governs all future combat mechanics:

Supply sets the magnitude of attrition. Position sets its distribution.

Supply decides how much damage you deal and how long you last. Position decides who takes it. If position ever becomes more decisive than supply, the game has quietly become a battle game and the factory has stopped mattering. Test every new mechanic against that line.

Battlefield Terrain

The simulation plane is flat. No vertical axis. Terrain is therefore 2D regions, which is cheap to build and readable to fight in.

Terrain affects supply and position. It never affects aim.

Region Effect
Asteroid field Slows drones, so supply throughput drops. Provides raw material for mothership refining. Cover.
Gravity well Shortens command range, raises fuel draw. Fighting close to a mass costs upkeep.
Nebula / dust Cuts sensor range. Enemy composition is unreadable until you are committed.
Debris field Cover, plus salvage from older wars.
Radiation zone Damages exposed modules over time, so armour coverage matters with nobody shooting.
Stellar wind Drains accumulators, disrupts drones.

The nebula is worth special attention: because it cuts sensor range, fleet automation rules stop firing correctly inside one, which forces manual control. That is a terrain effect that changes how you play rather than applying a penalty, and it gives automation a permanent weak spot instead of a ceiling.

Salvage

A destroyed escort becomes a derelict: a physical object on the plane holding a fraction of its build materials.

  • A ship fitted with a salvage module can work a derelict. While working it is slow and exposed.
  • Salvaged material goes into the mothership's stock, where production modules can refine it into ammunition.
  • Both sides race for the same wrecks, so the centre of the battlefield is worth contesting. Without this, both sides have every reason to sit at maximum range.
  • Your own destroyed ships feed the enemy.

Your enemy's wreck becomes your next magazine.

Guard rail, per [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) §12b: salvage recovery is well under 100%, and specifically low enough that it supplements the supply line and never sustains it. A war that feeds itself is a war the factory has stopped mattering to.

After a war, the battlefield is a field of derelicts left in the world. That is the Salvagers' economic reason to exist, and it feeds [28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path](<../Content/28_Restoration - Third Endgame Path.md>).

Defeat

Two different things, and conflating them causes confusion.

Personal defeat is withdrawal

Your retreat doctrine fires, or you order it. Your mothership goes home. You lose the node and everything you spent getting there. You keep your fleet.

Ships and motherships are handled differently

Mothership Escort ships
Destroyed? Never (except hardcore). Crippled, recovered, or stranded. Yes
Disabled Critical module lost, must withdraw Critical module lost, goes adrift
Left in a hot zone Cannot happen; it withdraws Finished off
Abandoned Recoverable Becomes a derelict, salvage for anyone

Escorts are never recovered. They are left where they fall. Recovery exists only for the mothership, which is what makes recovery significant rather than routine.

Rule: a ship is disabled, never deleted. Only hardcore deletes.

Stranding

A mothership that cannot withdraw is stranded, not destroyed. Three exits, and they map onto three kinds of player:

  1. Engineer your way out. Refine local material into fuel, slowly. This is what the mothership's production modules are for.
  2. An ally recovers you, which costs them fuel, so rescue is a genuine favour with a price.
  3. Pay for recovery.

Victory Conditions

Set in the terms. All three require someone to attack, which is deliberate.

Condition You win by Why it forces combat
Hold Holding the contested node for the agreed duration The holder wins at expiry, so the other side must come and take it
Depot Destroying or capturing the enemy Forward Depot You have to reach and break it
Attrition Pushing enemy Fleet Power below a threshold You have to actually destroy ships

Why there is no Contribution victory

A condition of "whichever faction delivered more" was considered and rejected. If delivering alone wins, the dominant strategy is never to fight, and two factions farming quietly beside each other is not a war.

The builder still wins, but not by definition. They win by being the reason their side could keep fighting when the other side ran dry, and that shows up in reputation and in the salvage they carry home.

Credits & Faction Growth

Destroying an enemy ship yields credits. Credits are a combat reward, and the only combat reward. They are not money: nothing is bought with them during a war, and the depot has no prices.

A kill's credits split two ways:

Share Goes to Spent on
Faction share The faction's upgrade pool. Persists across wars. Depot storage, umbrella radius, gate throughput, repair speed, faction research slots
Personal share You. Must be spent at settlement or lost. A share of battlefield salvage, mothership repair, a rare-material shipment home

Which gives three reward channels across two activities:

Activity Earns Nature
Delivering goods Contribution A permanent score feeding reputation and level. Not spendable. Also literally what fills the depot.
Killing ships Faction credits Collective upgrades that outlive the war
Killing ships Personal credits Material that comes home, or is forfeited

Both roles come home with something material. The builder brings salvage and rare material earned by being present. The fighter brings salvage and repairs bought with kills. Nobody goes home empty because they chose the wrong job.

Factions persist

Faction upgrades outlive a single war, which makes a faction a long-lived entity that grows from its members' fighting. That is a reason for loyalty and the social spine of a community server.

Guard rail, extending the account-research rule:

Faction upgrades improve capacity, never capability.

Depot storage, umbrella radius, gate throughput, repair speed. Never a weapon a new faction cannot have. Otherwise an established faction becomes unbeatable and a server closes to newcomers.

Why hire a mercenary

Under free draw, supply costs a mercenary nothing, so their pay is a share of the salvage plus reputation. The employer's incentive is sharp: a hired mercenary's kills upgrade your faction.

Presentation

The simulation is flat. The presentation is the existing camera.

Space combat runs on a 2D plane with no vertical axis. Every readable fleet game does this; Homeworld is the famous exception and is famously hard to read. Flat halves the pathing, the UI, the maths and the player's cognitive load, and it makes manual movement comfortable.

Rendering uses the rig already in src/world/CameraRig.gd: perspective, 75° FOV, fixed 50° pitch, zoom 5 to 40, yaw orbit. It costs almost nothing, it makes space look like the same game as the planet, and it supports the verbs a commander actually has.

2D battle, rendered in 3D.

Open items for this document are tracked in docs/open-items.md, area war.

Open Questions

  • Attrition tick rate and the shape of the supply-satisfaction curve
  • Module knockout probabilities and how exposure is computed from a layout
  • Depot storage capacity, umbrella radius, and the cost of deploying a replacement depot
  • Credit yield per kill, and the faction/personal split ratio
  • Terrain region sizes and effect magnitudes
  • Whether faction AI fleets use the same supply model as players, or an abstraction

Revision History

Version Date Changes
0.1 2026-09-03 Initial. Supply-decided attrition, three timescales, war terms and hosting, the Forward Depot as gate destination and war objective, per-participant attrition, critical modules, terrain, salvage, defeat and stranding, victory conditions, credits and faction growth, flat simulation with the existing camera. Replaces the Unwritten/06_Combat & War System Design stub.