Skip to content

Auto Warz — Mothership & Fleet Design

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 mothership as mobile depot and route). Fleet combat 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>) · [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>) · [30_Ship Construction System](<./30_Ship Construction System.md>) · [15_Ship & Army Points Design](<../Content/15_Ship & Army Points Design.md>) · [21_Drone Logistics Design](<../Logistics/21_Drone Logistics Design.md>) · [24_Module System Design](<./24_Module System Design.md>) · [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) Partly supersedes: the Unwritten/05_Spaceship Design & Building System stub (the editor half; construction remains [30_Ship Construction System](<./30_Ship Construction System.md>))

Table of Contents

Purpose of This Document

This document defines the mothership, the escort fleet, and how supply reaches individual ships at a war. It is the tactical counterpart to [32_The Gate & War Logistics](<./32_The Gate & War Logistics.md>), which covers how material reaches the war in the first place.

The Mothership

The mothership is a mobile depot. It is to space what Genesis is to the planet.

It is the player's own forward warehouse at a war: a large object with ports, storage and a footprint, which means the entire existing logistics vocabulary — ports, silos, filters, the priority waterfall — extends into space without inventing a second grammar.

The supply chain reads:

your factory -> gate -> faction Forward Depot -> your mothership -> your ships

You plumb one thing, not a hundred ships.

It cannot be destroyed

Except in hardcore. The mothership is crippled and forced to withdraw, or stranded. The reasoning is the same anti-softlock logic that makes Genesis indestructible: losing your depot, your fleet's supply and your foothold in one event is an unrecoverable state.

Escort ships, by contrast, can be destroyed. That asymmetry is deliberate:

The fleet is what you risk. The mothership is what you protect.

Over months that makes the mothership an attachment object, and the asymmetry is what earns it that status.

The Two-Tier Build

The vault already has a precedent: buildings have fixed module slots, not freeform stacking. The same distinction applies here.

Build rule Judged by
Mothership Freeform-ish assembly from a kit of parts Capacity, umbrella reach, docking throughput, survivability
Escort ships Class chassis plus module slots. Mix and match set pieces. Kill rate, upkeep draw, retreat speed

The reason for the split is important: the mothership is judged by throughput, not by combat. A factory brain can meaningfully evaluate a warehouse layout, so freeform building is legitimate there. Freeform building for combat ships would require damage simulation to mean anything, which is explicitly out of scope (see [31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>)).

What escort layout controls

Layout decision What it sets
Weapon count and type Kill rate, and ammunition draw per tick
Reactor choice and placement Fuel draw, and catastrophic-loss chance if exposed
Armour coverage Repair-kit draw, and survival time while undersupplied
Thrust to mass Retreat speed — how much of the ship you save when you break off
Hangar capacity Converts supply into power at the best rate, with the worst dependency

Retreat speed is the insurance stat. A player who designs cautiously plays differently from one who designs greedily, and that difference is legible without a single line of block-level damage code.

Hull Space Is the Whole Game

Every mothership build is a fight between six claimants on the same hull:

Claimant Buys
Armour Survival, and protection for whatever sits behind it
Storage How much supply you can hold, measured in units via unit_size
Docking bays How many ships can resupply at once
Logic modules Automation tiers
Fuel tanks Range, and therefore which wars you can reach at all
Production modules Field refining and assembly

The constraints must be spatial and real, or a single wiki layout wins forever:

  • Armour on the hull protects what is behind it, so interior arrangement matters
  • Umbrella emitters need external mounting, so they compete with armour for hull surface
  • Docking bays need hull edge access
  • Storage wants the core

That is genuine layout tension with nothing simulated underneath it.

The Two Radii

Two concentric circles doing different jobs.

What it is Beyond it
Supply umbrella Where the mothership can deliver The ship runs on what is in its magazines
Command range Maximum operating distance for that class The ship is out of contact and must return

Naming. Command range was called control tether in the first draft. The new name says what the range actually is: the distance over which orders reach. The two radii now pair obviously — supply reaches this far, orders reach that far — and it matches the [01_World Bible](<../../05_Reference/01_World Bible.md>) framing of the player as a command intelligence whose signal Genesis follows.

The umbrella is a battery, not a circle

The supply umbrella is the drone round-trip range from the mothership's pit.

Not an arbitrary radius. It is tuned by drone battery research, extended by better pits, and reduced when the pit is damaged. Every number already exists in [21_Drone Logistics Design](<../Logistics/21_Drone Logistics Design.md>).

This also matches the planet: [00_Canonical Design Facts](<../../04_Project Management/00_Canonical Design Facts.md>) §3 states that power is area-based rather than port-based. Space supply is area-based for the same reason.

Overlapping umbrellas

A ship draws from any friendly mothership whose umbrella covers it, nearest first. So helping an ally is geometry: you move your mothership near their fleet and their ships start drawing. Multi-player supply falls out with no trade screen and no negotiation.

Each mothership sets who may draw: nobody, squad, faction, anyone.

The Fleet Is Anchored

Escort ships are anchored to their mothership and move relative to it. Move the mothership and the formation comes with it.

This halves the micromanagement problem before it exists: manual orders become local adjustment inside command range, not driving twenty ships across a map.

The umbrella moves while supplying. Repositioning the depot mid-engagement is the primary tactical verb.

Ship Classes

Seven classes, differentiated by role in the attrition economy rather than by combat archetype. This resolves the disagreement between [01_Master GDD](<../01_Master GDD.md>) and [02_Scope & MVP Document](<../02_Scope & MVP Document.md>), which listed different sets.

Class Role Upkeep Command range
Fighter High kill rate, swarm High ammunition draw Short — needs the mothership close
Frigate Balanced escort, the workhorse Low Medium
Cruiser High kill rate, heavy Punishing fuel and repair draw Medium — straying hurts most
Carrier Force multiplier; drones are a consumable Very high Medium
Freighter Carries supply. Zero kill rate. Low Long — that is the job
Mining Vessel Produces supply at the front. Zero kill rate. Low Long
Scout Reveals. No combat. Near zero Very long

The Scout is the class defined by not needing supply. It operates far outside the umbrella by design, which is why it appears in [02_Scope & MVP Document](<../02_Scope & MVP Document.md>) as an early ship: the first ship a player ever launches is a non-combat one, and that is correct.

The Two Fuel Budgets

What it is Known when
Transit fuel Distance on the galaxy map, out and back In advance, exactly
Operating fuel Spent at the front: station keeping, repositioning, charging drones Only as it happens

The pre-commit check, shown before the war is accepted:

transit out + operating reserve + transit back  <=  tank capacity

So overreaching is a choice rather than an ambush. And:

The mothership must never spend the fuel it needs to get home.

Reserve that, and pushing deeper means deliberately spending the return trip. Fuel stops being a duplicate of ammunition and becomes the thing that decides how far you can commit.

Tank capacity is therefore a headline stat, and it gates distance without artificial level locks. Far wars are reachable only by motherships built to reach them.

Distribution: Drones

Supply reaches individual ships exactly the way it reaches buildings on the planet. The mothership carries a drone pit; drones carry cache boxes of supply to ships. Pit, cache boxes, packing station, packing module, battery range, charge time — all reused from [21_Drone Logistics Design](<../Logistics/21_Drone Logistics Design.md>) with no new mechanics.

Drones get shot down. A contested umbrella chews through drones and cache boxes, so the harder the fight, the worse the automation performs. That is self-balancing: automation degrades exactly when pressure rises, without nerfing it.

The Automation Ladder

The mothership is live supply and demand management, and the automation must be built.

Tier What you do Costs
Manual Open the mothership panel. Ships request, you allocate, live. Your attention, constantly
Standing orders Priority waterfall across ships and squads. Fill the cruiser first, overflow to the fighters. A logic module in a hull slot
Rules Keep fighters above 60% ammunition. Prioritise lowest supply. Cut off anything outside the umbrella. More modules, more hull
Autonomous Set intent — hold, push, withdraw — and it manages itself. The most hull, the deepest research

Two things make this more than a convenience ladder.

The automation is physical. Logic modules occupy hull slots, competing directly with armour, storage, bays, tanks and production. A heavily automated mothership is a lightly armoured one.

Automation is faster but dumber. Manual allocation is optimal, because a player can see the fight and the rules cannot. What automation buys is not power, it is attention — and attention is the scarce resource, because the factory is still running and there may be a second front.

Manual first, automation is built. Automation buys back attention, never power.

The pressure that makes automation necessary rather than optional comes free: the game never pauses. You cannot manually manage two fronts and a factory in real time.

Retreat Doctrine

Standing withdrawal conditions the player sets, and the mechanism that makes offline play safe.

Trigger
Hull integrity below a threshold
A critical module lost
Ammunition below a threshold
Fuel reserve breached
Elapsed war time
Fleet losses above a percentage
Ally umbrella lost
Gate power margin below a threshold
Manual override, at any time

A player may log off and leave the fleet fighting under automation, protected by these rules. On a headless-hosted war the doctrine fires at 3am and the mothership is at the staging point when they wake up — or stranded, depending on how well they set it up.

Fleet Automation & Radar

The same ladder, applied to movement rather than supply.

Tier What you do Costs
Manual Direct orders: move, engage, hold, screen, break off Attention
Stations and stances Assign each ship a station relative to the mothership, and a stance. Since the fleet is anchored, a formation is a set of relative offsets. Minimal hull
Sensor doctrine Rules referencing what radar sees: point defence forward if fighters detected inside X; keep unarmoured ships on the far side from the nearest threat; any ship below 40% hull returns to rear station A radar module plus logic modules
Autonomous Set intent. It handles stations, targets and withdrawals. The most hull, the deepest research

Radar has two properties worth designing: detection radius, and resolution — whether you can tell a Cruiser from a Freighter at that distance. Resolution feeds the commit decision, because engaging without knowing enemy composition is a real gamble.

Nebulas cut sensor range, so automation rules stop firing correctly and fighting inside one forces manual control. Automation gets a permanent weak spot rather than a ceiling.

Manufacture Aboard

Allowed, and bounded. The mothership is a forward field refinery.
Can Assemble the three war consumables (fuel, ammunition, repair kits) from delivered intermediates
Can Refine raw material delivered to it — from asteroids, Mining Vessels, or another player — at a worse conversion ratio than the planet
Cannot Host the deep production chain. No vertical levels, no core power.

The constraint that keeps the planet dominant is hull space: every production module is armour, storage, bay, tank or logic module not fitted.

Two payoffs. It makes where you do the last step a real decision: ship bulky finished ammunition, or ship dense intermediates and finish at the front, which finally puts unit_size to work. And it makes "I mined a nearby star and I will sell you the ore" a genuine career, which is the supply-chain-provider endgame appearing in the middle of a war.

It is also the first exit from stranding: a stranded mothership beside an asteroid field can slowly refine its own fuel.

Persistence

Scope Notes
Mothership design Account Unlimited saved designs
Mothership instance Account Any number parked in your world; one deployed per gate
Mothership stock, fuel, ammunition Never persists Arrives at a war empty
Escort designs Account Unlimited
Engineering Research Account Armour density, reactor efficiency, umbrella radius, command range, drone throughput, tank capacity. Home of the infinite nodes.

Two rules govern this:

Advantage carried between worlds is capacity, never stock.

A veteran arrives with a bigger, better-armoured, better-automated depot containing nothing. Their advantage has to be filled by that world's factory.

Account research improves capacity and efficiency. It never unlocks capability.

Thicker armour per tonne and a wider umbrella, never a weapon a new player cannot build.

One mothership deployed per gate. Within a world you can commit to several fronts, but only one gets your depot. Two supplied fronts requires two players with two motherships, which makes the alliance need mechanical rather than encouraged.

Changing the physical mothership needs a shipyard and materials, so designs cannot be swapped mid-war to counter what you just saw.

Fleet Power

Fleet Power replaces APR's old role as a matchmaking number. It is visible before engagement and war terms may cap it (see [31_War & Combat System Design](<./31_War & Combat System Design.md>) → Admission control).

A supplier's Fleet Power is low and their value is high, so the rating prices combat contribution honestly without excluding builders from a high-level war.

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

Open Questions

  • The mothership kit: what parts exist, their hull footprints, and the assembly rules
  • Umbrella radius and command range per class, and how research scales them
  • Transit fuel per unit distance, and operating fuel draw at rest and under manoeuvre
  • Drone loss rate under fire
  • Docking bay throughput, and whether resupply requires docking or umbrella proximity alone
  • Field refining conversion penalty relative to planet-side
  • Logic module costs per automation tier
  • Whether escort ships may also carry small production or only modules

Revision History

Version Date Changes
0.2 2026-09-05 Control tether renamed command range, which says what the range is. Two radii now pair as supply reaches this far, orders reach that far.
0.1 2026-09-03 Initial. The mothership as mobile depot and Genesis counterpart, the two-tier build, hull space as the central constraint, the two radii with the umbrella grounded in drone range, the anchored fleet, seven classes by role in the attrition economy, two fuel budgets with a protected return reserve, drone distribution, the supply and fleet automation ladders, retreat doctrine, radar, bounded manufacture aboard, and persistence rules. Partly supersedes the Unwritten/05_Spaceship Design & Building System stub.