Auto Warz — The Gate & War Logistics¶

Document Type: System Design Version: 0.1 Status: In Progress — design agreed, numbers not yet set Last Updated: 2026-09-03 Phase: Phase 1 — Space Update (the gate itself). War logistics in the Phase 2 War Update Author: Solo Developer Parent Document: [01_Master GDD](<../01_Master GDD.md>) Related Documents: [31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>) · [33_Mothership & Fleet Design](<./33_Mothership & Fleet Design.md>) · [25_Power System Design](<./25_Power System Design.md>) · [21_Drone Logistics Design](<../Logistics/21_Drone Logistics Design.md>) · [19_Transport & Logistics](<../Logistics/19_Transport & Logistics.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) · [04_Progression & Rewards](<../../06_Outpost/04_Progression & Rewards.md>)

Purpose of This Document¶

Worlds are private and parallel. A war is a shared instance. This document defines the only thing that connects them: the gate.

It covers how a gate is built, powered and upgraded, what it costs, how many a player may have, how material crosses it in both directions, and what contribution means.

The Rule This System Exists To Satisfy¶

An earlier formulation said the front had to be in the same universe as the factory. That was too strong. What it was protecting is this:

The path from factory to front is a physical channel with finite throughput and real latency. It is never a transfer menu.

Same universe was one way to satisfy that. A gate is another, and a better one for a game where each player has their own world.

The Gate¶

A gate is a large, expensive building in the player's own world. It is a genuine late-game factory milestone, not a convenience.

Property	Notes
Throughput	Units per second across the link. Improved by Mk tier and Engineering Research.
Latency	Transit delay. Material does not appear instantly at the far end.
Power draw	Continuous while open. See below.
Direction	Bidirectional. Material out, salvage and rare material home.
Footprint	Large. TBD.

Because throughput is finite and visible, the war's central failure is legible in factory terms:

Your gate pushed 40 units a minute. The front consumed 60.

Same sentence as an individual supply failure, but the bottleneck is a single object the player built, rather than a freight route drawn across a galaxy map. Easier to build, easier to read, easier to optimise.

Gates Are War Slots¶

One gate, one concurrent war. Maximum three.

The number of wars a player can fight is not a rule in a settings file. It is a thing they built, which is the answer this game gives to everything else.

Two things give the cap teeth without it feeling arbitrary:

Cost escalates steeply. The first gate is a real milestone. The second is much worse. The third is enormous. Three concurrent wars is an achievement, not a default.
Power. Running three gates at load is a grid problem long before it is a material problem.

The hard cap is three. Your power grid decides whether you can really run three.

Gates are powered down between wars, so they are only a burden while in use.

Power Holds the Gate Open¶

This is the mechanic that connects the planet layer to the war layer with a wire.

An open gate is a continuous draw on the home grid. No power, no gate. Nothing crosses, and critically, the mothership cannot withdraw.

The gate is open or closed, never partial, consistent with [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) §8: partial power does not exist. It therefore carries a power priority in the shedding order, and that priority is a decision with real stakes:

Give the gate top priority and brown out your own factory, or protect production and risk the gate closing on your own fleet.

What this unlocks¶

Accumulators get a named purpose. A reserve sized to hold the gate open long enough to withdraw. Enough charge to bring them home. That is a specific engineering target rather than a generic buffer.

A new retreat-doctrine trigger: gate power margin below a threshold, withdraw now.

Planet defence now matters to the war. Aliens or scavenger machines hitting your generators can drop your grid, close your gate, and strand your fleet on the other side of it. That chain of consequences crosses three systems and the player can follow every link.

Guard rail¶

A closed gate strands, never destroys. Stranding already has three exits (see [31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>) → Defeat). And the UI must warn early: a gate stability readout and a predicted time to close, so nobody loses a fleet to something they had no chance to see coming.

The Receiving End¶

A gate needs a destination. It does not have one of its own.

A gate arrives at your faction's Forward Depot.

Every gram of material any member of the faction sends arrives at the same structure. This is what makes the depot the war's objective rather than a convenience: lose the depot and every gate in the faction has nowhere to arrive. The faction is cut off until a replacement depot is established, and everyone falls back on whatever is already in their own mothership.

There is no private arrival point and no way to route material directly to your own mothership from home. Everything lands communally and is distributed from there. Under free draw that is consistent rather than restrictive: the depot is the faction's warehouse, and the mothership is what you carry away from it.

How Material Actually Moves¶

There is no choice between active and passive contribution. It is the same automation ladder the rest of the game runs on.

Tier	How material reaches the depot	Costs
Haul it yourself	Load a freighter or the mothership, cross through the gate, unload at the depot, return	Attention, and a round trip
Standing route	Assign freighters to a repeating run: load from a named silo, cross, unload, return	A logistics module and research
Direct feed	Plumb a belt straight into the gate. It flows continuously at gate throughput.	The most infrastructure, and no attention at all
Outpost trickle	Point a completed outpost's locked output at the depot. It flows with no factory involvement at all.	Outpost Mode progression, earned elsewhere

The gate starts as a door you carry things through, and ends as a pipe you plumb into.

That is Genesis carrying ore by hand until belts exist, replayed at war scale. It also settles the builder's version of the nothing to do once it is set up problem: early war is hauling, late war is plumbing. A new player's first war is physical and busy. A veteran's is a throughput number they tune.

Passive delivery, not passive accrual¶

The distinction that matters:

Passive delivery exists, in three forms: a belt plumbed into the gate, a standing freighter route, and the Outpost Mode trickle. Build it once and material flows without you.
Passive accrual does not. Nothing is contributed by merely producing, or by owning something productive. Contribution counts only what arrived at a Forward Depot.

The Outpost Mode trickle¶

[04_Progression & Rewards](<../../06_Outpost/04_Progression & Rewards.md>) establishes that completing an outpost locks in its output and unlocks "a passive resource trickle that runs continuously", described there as an ongoing contribution to the supply chain. That mechanic predates this document and stands.

Reconciled against the war layer:

Outpost Mode is a passive source of material, not a passive source of contribution.

The trickle produces goods. [04_Progression & Rewards](<../../06_Outpost/04_Progression & Rewards.md>) already routes outpost output to one of three destinations — self-supply into your own factory, fulfilling another player's request, or the open market. A fourth destination is added: a Forward Depot. Goods that arrive there count as contribution exactly like anything else that crossed a gate.

So Outpost Mode is a legitimate way to support a war without touching your factory, and it does not break the rule, because the trickle still has to arrive somewhere.

Rate, not stock¶

Outpost progression is account-scoped, and worlds are separate. That creates a tension with [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) → advantage carried between worlds is capacity, never stock: an account-level pile of goods flowing into whichever world you open would be stock crossing worlds.

The resolution is to take the vault's own word literally. A trickle is a rate:

An outpost grants a delivery rate, not a stockpile.
Nothing accumulates while you are away. There is no banked pile to draw down.
The rate is pointed at one destination at a time.

So what crosses between worlds is a rate you earned, which is capacity, and the principle holds unchanged.

Uptime follows the destination¶

A rate only flows while something is running that can receive it, which follows directly from the world and session model.

Trickle pointed at	Flows when
Your own factory	Only while your world is loaded, because a world that nobody is hosting is frozen
Another player's request, or the open market	While that destination's host is running
A Forward Depot on a headless war	Continuously. The war is running whether or not you are.

So a headless war is the only destination that runs around the clock, which gives Outpost Mode a strong reason to point at a war rather than at home, and gives the war layer a supply source that holds up overnight.

Yes, this means an outpost provides passive contribution in the ordinary sense: point it at a depot and material arrives while you are asleep. What it is not is a wallet. Nothing accumulates undelivered, and the rate serves one destination at a time.

The reward scales with presence, not with automation¶

A delivery is worth the same to the faction however it arrived. The delivering player's personal return scales with presence and risk.

The faction receives full material value in every case, because it really did arrive and it really does feed the front. What changes is what the player earns from it.

Presence is a property of the player, not of the shipment.

Player state	Faction gets	Player earns
Present — gate open, mothership deployed, you are playing	Full value	Full return on everything, trickle included
Absent	Full value	Reduced return

Delivery method does not enter into it. Hauling, routing and belt-feeding all pay the same, and a trickle pays full while you are present and reduced while you are not.

Methods pay the same deliberately. Scaling the reward by automation tier would punish the player for automating, which contradicts [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) → manual first, automation is built: automation buys back attention, never power. Hauling already has its own advantages — no infrastructure needed, and a hand-flown run can dodge interception — and it does not need a payout bonus on top.

Being present is not free, which is what makes it the right thing to reward. To be present your gate is open and drawing on your grid, your mothership is deployed and exposed, and you spent transit fuel to get it there. Idling at a war to farm the multiplier costs all three. Presence is the risk.

Reduced return applies to: research points, the personal spoils share at settlement, and experience and reputation credit.

Two guard rails.

The multiplier must sit well above zero. If pointing a trickle at a war is not worth doing, the mechanic is dead and Outpost Mode loses its connection to the war layer.

And contribution itself is recorded at face value, tagged by how it arrived. The board shows delivered while present alongside delivered by trickle rather than deflating the total. Contribution is a measurement and a measurement should not lie; the reward is what scales.

What happens when you log off: the gate runs on charge¶

This follows from two rules already set, and it is the most consequential interaction in the document.

Your gate is powered by your world's grid. Your world freezes when nobody is hosting it. So logging off does not simply pause your involvement — it removes the power holding your gate open.

The resolution uses something already designed: accumulators.

Player state	The gate	Your fleet
Present	Powered by the live grid	Resupplied at gate throughput
Logged off, world frozen	Runs on accumulator charge until it drains, then closes	Resupplied while charge lasts, then falls back on mothership stock
Logged off, world headless-hosted	Grid keeps running, so the gate stays open	Uninterrupted resupply

Which produces a genuine factory-side decision with a number attached:

How long your fleet can fight while you sleep is bought with accumulator capacity.

"Enough charge to bring them home" stops being a phrase and becomes a build target. And a player who runs their own world on a headless server gets uninterrupted supply, which is a real advantage honestly paid for in hardware.

Set the retreat doctrine's gate power margin trigger to withdraw before the charge bites, or wake up to a stranded mothership.

Which is what the outpost trickle is actually for¶

The trickle does not pass through your gate. It flows from the outpost to the depot independently, so it is unaffected by your grid, your accumulators or your bedtime.

The trickle is the delivery channel that survives your logout.

Your gate closes when the charge runs out. Your trickle keeps the faction fed overnight. That is its niche, and it is the reason to point one at a war rather than at home.

(Not to be confused with Passive Field Data in [08_Research Tree Design](<../Content/08_Research Tree Design.md>), which trickles research points from running buildings. That is research, not contribution, and the two are unrelated.)

Material is spent, not lost¶

Consumption is the engine. If nothing is spent there is no supply pressure and the model collapses. But three things keep it from reading as loss:

The player controls the tap. The gate pushes only what they choose to push, at the rate they choose. Nothing drains automatically.
It is spending, not losing. The factory exists to make war materiel. Ammunition being fired is the product working.
What comes back is what the world cannot make.

A war is a trade: your common output for their rare output.

Contribution¶

Contribution is what your gate delivered to the Forward Depot.

Not an abstract score. A measured record of goods — x iron, x ammunition — that the player can watch, trace back to a production line, and improve.


Scope	Personal and permanent. Account-scoped.
Feeds	Faction reputation, player level, the in-faction contribution board
Spendable?	No. It is a record, not a currency.
Also is	Literally the depot's stock
Sources	Anything that crossed a gate: hauled, routed, belt-fed, or an Outpost Mode trickle pointed at the depot

The contribution board is the social mechanism that handles freeloading under free draw. People notice who is carrying.

What Comes Home¶

The gate runs both ways. War zones hold material a player's own world cannot produce, which [01_Master GDD](<../01_Master GDD.md>) already promised as the reason to go to space at all.

Comes home	Source
Salvage	Worked derelicts, and the share bought with personal credits at settlement
Rare material	Found at the war, or bought at settlement
Faction upgrades	The faction share of kill credits. Persist across wars.
Reputation, level	Contribution and participation

Does not come home
Personal credits	Spent at settlement or forfeited
Depot stock	Belongs to the faction, at the war

The Macro Loop¶

your factory produces
   -> gate pushes into the war
      -> the war consumes it, and yields rare material, reputation, faction growth
         -> gate brings material home
            -> better factory, and a bigger gate
               -> bigger wars

The same loop at every scale, and the progression spine for the whole game.

Interception¶

Because material physically crosses and then physically moves at the war, supply runs can be intercepted.

Raiding enemy hauls is a strategy that needs no new systems.
Escorting your own becomes a job, which finally puts Freighters and Frigates in the same place doing complementary things, and gives Fighters something to hunt that is not other Fighters.
It makes the automation tiers a genuine trade rather than a straight upgrade: a direct belt feed is efficient but predictable, while a hand-flown run can dodge.

Persistence & Scope¶

	Scope	Notes
The gate (building)	World	It is a building in your factory
Contribution	Account	Permanent record
Faction credits	Faction, persists across wars	Capacity upgrades only
Personal credits	War	Spent at settlement or lost
Depot stock	War	Dies with the war
Salvage and rare material brought home	World	It is now material in your factory

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

Open Questions¶

Gate throughput, latency and power draw per Mk tier
Gate build cost, and the escalation curve for the second and third gate
Whether a gate has a mass or volume limit per crossing as well as a rate
Accumulator sizing guidance for the withdrawal reserve
Whether the direct belt feed has a throughput penalty relative to hauling, or only a predictability cost
Cost and lead time to establish a replacement Forward Depot
Whether the Outpost Mode seasonal contribution boost (up to x2 in week 1) applies when the trickle is pointed at a Forward Depot
The size of the reduced-return multiplier for absent players. Well above zero, but by how much
Accumulator drain rate while holding a gate open with the world frozen, and therefore how much battery buys an hour of overnight supply
Whether contribution feeds research points at all. The vault's RP sources are Science Drives and Passive Field Data; a contribution-to-RP link is assumed by the reduced-return rule and needs confirming, probably in the economy document

Revision History¶

Version	Date	Changes
0.5	2026-09-03	Presence is a property of the player, not the shipment: a trickle pays full return while present, reduced while absent, and delivery method never affects payout. Added the gate runs on charge: logging off freezes your world and therefore your grid, so the gate holds open on accumulator reserve and then closes. Overnight fighting time is bought with accumulator capacity. The trickle bypasses the gate entirely, making it the channel that survives a logout.
0.4	2026-09-03	Reward scales with presence, not automation. A delivery is worth the same to the faction however it arrived; the player's personal return is reduced only for trickle deliveries made while absent. Hauling, routing and belt-feeding pay identically so that automation is never punished. Contribution is recorded at face value and tagged, never deflated.
0.3	2026-09-03	Added uptime follows the destination: a trickle only flows while its destination is live, making a headless war the only around-the-clock destination. Confirms the outpost does provide passive contribution, while remaining a rate rather than a wallet.
0.2	2026-09-03	Reconciled with Outpost Mode: the trickle is a passive source of material, not of contribution, and gains a Forward Depot as a fourth destination. Recorded as a rate, not stock, so account-scoped outpost progression does not breach capacity crosses, stock does not.
0.1	2026-09-03	Initial. The gate as the physical channel between a private world and a shared war, gates as war slots capped at three, power holding the gate open, the Forward Depot as the universal receiving end, the three-tier delivery ladder from hauling to plumbing, contribution defined as delivered goods, and the macro loop.