Transition matrix

Section titled “Transition matrix”

A ship or population can leave its owner in three different ways. The game can remove the object, change its owner, or move selected assets into another object. A destroyed ship is removed at once while its damage is resolved, and its damage report can come later. Captured ships and transferred populations keep their records and IDs. Absorption keeps the receiving population and removes the source after copying a fixed list of assets. Each of these operations clears a different set of links.

Weapon formulas are in space combat resolution, boarding hit chances in boarding and ship capture, and occupation progression in colony and population lifecycle. Each row below separates the action that starts a change from the shared step it uses. No single “victory cleanup” covers all the rows.

Transition What starts it and when Identity and ownership Distinct outcomes
Combat ship death Incoming damage reaches catastrophic destruction. Removal happens before the damage step finishes. The ship’s ShipID leaves the live ships of the game. A new WreckID normally records the old ShipID. Reports and kill credit belong to the combat step. Evacuation for a standard race and the wreck for any race belong to ship removal.
Removal on abandonment A ship is removed as abandoned. The ship is removed, normally leaving a wreck. Evacuation for a standard race keeps the whole current crew before it is stored as a whole number, instead of rolling destruction survival.
Deleted or scrapped ship A ship is removed for any reason other than destroyed or abandoned. The ship is removed. This case creates no wreck. Disembarking and the relocation or removal of local ground formations replace evacuation. Other rewards belong to the scrapping or salvage action.
Boarding capture An open-hull pass, once the boarding clock qualifies, finds no defending formations and exactly 0 current crew. Same ship and ShipID. Race, species and class change. The receiving fleet can be new. Boarding capture restores one crew member and low readiness. No surrendered-crew survivor group is created.
Ship surrender Ship surrender is ordered by NPR tactical logic or by a population transfer. The same shared ownership change. The original crew becomes a survivor group. Ship command officers are marked as prisoners before the transfer.
Ground population surrender No hostile formations remain in the ground combat context, friendly formations are present, then occupation strength is sufficient. Same PopulationID. The owner changes last. Technology, wealth and local ship surrender depend on the transfer options and on their own conditions.
Population control transfer on its own The population control transfer runs directly. Same population. New system survey, name and political status. The recorded original race becomes the immediately previous owner. It does not recheck combat victory, hostility or occupation.
Population absorption One population absorbs another population and its assets. The receiving population survives. The source is removed. Copies a named list of stocks, yards and surface population, then removes the source. It is not a complete merge of the two populations.
Population deletion Population removal runs after the deciding policy of a window, the NPR AI or an automatic rule. The source PopulationID is removed. Attached forces, yards and selected links are cleaned up. A population on a fixed body (FCT_SystemBody.FixedBody) removes that body too. The protection flag FCT_Population.DoNotDelete is not checked by the removal itself.

Ship death: immediate removal and later aftermath

Section titled “Ship death: immediate removal and later aftermath”

Successful combat order

Section titled “Successful combat order”
  1. The shared attack record pass looks up a ship target among the live ships, then applies the hits one by one. A record whose target has already been removed is skipped.
  2. Catastrophic component damage sets the ship’s destroyed flag (FCT_Ship.Destroyed), adds the ship to the list of destroyed ships kept for damage reports, and logs the destruction with a cargo loss report. It then removes the ship as destroyed and recalculates the old fleet’s speed. The ship therefore stays available to the damage reports after it has left the live ships.
  3. Ship removal does its dependency cleanup, evacuation, wreck and formation handling and the final removal from the live lists at once. It is not postponed until the casualty reports at the end of the round.
  4. The incoming damage step reports destruction. The attack record is marked as having destroyed its target, kill credit is recorded, and the record stops applying hits. Later records must look up a live target again and can skip this one.
  5. When the target race and the attacking race stored on the record are both still set, the record applies attack accounting and the diplomatic penalty. Later the damage reports are built from the live damaged ships plus the destroyed ships list.
  6. After the reports the destroyed ships list is cleared, the ground combat aftermath runs, empty salvos are deleted and damaged surviving ships can detach from their fleets.

Kill credit is therefore not part of ship removal. A ship removed directly, or a parasite removed along with its carrier, does not automatically receive the history and tonnage credit that kill credit gives the attacking ship or STO unit. When a ship made the kill, kill credit adds a history line to the attacking ship and its captain naming the target and its tonnage. It marks the attacker’s record of the target hull destroyed and records one hostile ship destroyed plus the target’s tonnage as commercial or military shipping destroyed. When an STO ground unit made the kill, its formation commander receives the history line and the shipping tonnage measurement, and its race’s record of the hull is marked destroyed.

Ship removal order

Section titled “Ship removal order”
Order inside ship removal Effect and relevant limit
1. Tasks and attached yard Remove the shipyard tasks linked to the ship and the first shipyard whose parent ship is this ship.
2. Tracks and continuing damage Note the IDs of the contacts tracking the ship, then remove those contacts and the continuing acid attacks on the ship.
3. Orders aimed at it Find fleet orders whose destination is the ship’s whole fleet, or one of the removed contacts. An NPR fleet with such an order clears all its orders. Any other fleet loses the matching order and every order at the same or a later position in its list (MoveOrderID equal or greater).
4. Weapons and carried craft A missile salvo aimed at the ship is removed when its missile has no onboard sensor (EM, thermal and active strengths all 0). Any other such salvo loses its fire control and target. Every fire control assignment aimed at the ship has its target cleared. Parasite craft carried by the ship are removed in turn as destroyed. Other ships assigned to this ship as their mothership lose that link.
5. People and ground forces If the ship is destroyed or abandoned, the ship’s race gets evacuation (standard race), a wreck , the death of the commanders of embarked formations and the removal of those formations. For any other reason, disembark, then move the embarked formations to a population of the ship’s race at the ship’s coordinates, or remove them when there is none.
6. Remaining relationships Ships towing this ship lose their tow target. Naval administration commands hosted on the ship move to the population of their parent command, or to the population of the root command when the parent has none.
7. Live lists Remove the ship from its fleet. Remove an empty fleet directly from the game’s fleets, or recalculate the fleet’s speed. Remove the ShipID from the game’s ships.

The empty fleet removal here deletes the fleet entry directly. It does not run the full fleet removal. Full fleet removal refuses a fleet that has shipyard tasks or that is the destination for space station or fighter factory construction. It also deletes sub-fleets, clears anchors and prunes orders aimed at the fleet. Those guarantees do not apply to the last step of ship removal.

Survivors, wrecks and lost cargo

Section titled “Survivors, wrecks and lost cargo”

Evacuation on destruction keeps survivors = current crew x (d50 + 25) / 100, then stores the survivors rounded down in a new lifepod. The current crew already reflects earlier component casualties. When the decimal survivor count is 0 or less, evacuation ends before it reaches the officers, and no lifepod is created. The eligible officers (the commanders transported by the ship, the commanders of admin commands it hosts and the six ship command roles) are collected once each and lose their assignments. Each one survives destruction on an independent 50% roll. On abandonment they all escape. A surviving officer gets a link to the lifepod. One that fails to escape retires as Killed in Naval Combat.

This evacuation does not turn colonists, mineral cargo or trade goods into rescued survivors. Embarked ground formations are removed separately. Their commanders retire as Killed in Naval Combat unless evacuation already handled them. Evacuation handles such a commander for a standard race when the commander’s transport ship is the destroyed ship, and that commander then takes the officer escape roll instead. Races other than standard races skip evacuation.

The wreck gets a new WreckID and keeps the old ShipID, race, class, system and location. Its mineral stock comes from the class construction minerals, not from cargo. Each mineral gets its own d5 roll and keeps d5 x 10% of the class amount, so 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% or 50%. Components are the class component counts minus the damaged ones, capped at five per design, with components marked NoScrap left out. Technical data is generated separately.

A wreck neither carries the original cargo nor guarantees that any cargo can be recovered. Wreck salvage handles knowledge before it allocates components and minerals, then deletes the wreck even when physical stock is left. Intact salvage instead removes the target as deleted after its own rewards and creates no wreck for the target.

Ship capture and surrender

Section titled “Ship capture and surrender”

Boarding timing before capture

Section titled “Boarding timing before capture”

The boarding update first returns two kinds of formation to not boarded, those without a ship and those aboard a ship of their own race. It groups the remaining formations by ship. For each boarding race that the boarded ship’s race does not already treat as hostile, it applies the general diplomatic change with 0 points and forced hostility (see relationships). It then adds the elapsed time to the ship’s boarding clock (FCT_Ship.BoardingCombatClock).

The hull counts as open when its deepest armour damage reaches the class armour thickness, or when it has no armour damage and the class has no armour. A closed hull waits until the clock reaches 30 seconds. At 30 seconds the clock resets to 0 and a breaching charge adds one point of damage to the most damaged armour column, or to a random column when there is no armour damage. The update for that ship ends there, even when that charge opens the hull. Combat and capture on an open hull need 60 seconds. The reset to 0 discards any time above the threshold.

Capture is tested before any fire. Defenders are the old owner’s formations aboard the target or aboard a ship whose mothership is the target. Only when there are no defenders and the current crew is exactly 0 does the race of the first boarding formation win. A round that kills the last defenders does not capture at once. A later qualifying pass must find that state. When the crew is 0 but defenders survive, no temporary crew formation is created and the pass moves on without a fight.

When a round is fought, both sides fire before the shared aftermath applies the pending unit losses. Collateral damage passes through ordinary ship damage and can destroy the boarded ship. The boarding aftermath skips the troop bay capacity casualties. It does not skip the immediate crew casualties from destroyed components (for a class that has crew, component crew x (0.25 + 0.05 x d10), rounded down, never leaving fewer than 1 crew), and it does not skip ship removal on destruction.

After a capture decision the boarding update reveals the actual class to the captor and shows the portrait. It logs an event for each side and transfers the ship. It then sets OverhaulFactor to 0.01, sets LastShoreLeave to the current time minus twice the class planned deployment, sets CurrentCrew to 1 and crew casualties to 0. A class that is not commercial gets CrewMorale 0.25. Active commanders of every formation boarding the ship each record one Successful Boarding Combat measurement. These resets and measurements belong to boarding capture, not to the shared ship transfer.

Shared ship transfer order

Section titled “Shared ship transfer order”
Phase Changes made by the shared ship transfer
Recipient and class Find the recipient’s survey of the system and its primary species. When a player race receives an NPR ship, it first renames the source class to the name it knows from alien class intelligence. Reuse a class whose FCT_ShipClass.OtherRaceClassID matches the source class ID, or copy the class. Lock the class. The reuse search does not check which race owns the class.
Owner changes before disembark Set the class, race and species (the recipient’s primary species), then disembark the officers. Commander placement and the crew grade academy credit therefore use the recipient race. The credit applies when the ship’s crew grade points exceed 100 and adds floor(current crew x grade points / (100 x recipient training level)) to the recipient’s academy crewmen.
Civilian and tow links Clear the shipping line and the ship’s tow target. When the transfer asks for known names, rename the hull to the name the recipient knows, if it has one. Clear the tow target of other ships towing this one.
Source troops Select the embarked formations that belong to the ship’s previous owner. Move them to a source race population at the ship’s coordinates when there is one. Otherwise clear their commanders’ assignments and remove the formations. Boarders of other races fall outside that owner filter.
Selected cargo, tasks and intelligence Clear trade goods cargo, the ship’s shipyard tasks and its tracking contacts. Remove every race’s remembered alien hull record for this ship. This is not a clear of all cargo.
Receiving fleet An NPR recipient creates ship AI for the ship and works out the class’s automated design role. Colony ship, liner and freighter roles take the recipient’s shipping line and force a new fleet. When no destination fleet is given, the recipient creates a fleet at the ship’s coordinates, named after the ship, with the history line “Created to receive foreign ship”. Another NPR uses Reinforcement Group (ID 11), or Civilian (ID 18) for a ship with a shipping line.
Move and carried craft Move the same ship to the destination fleet, cancel its tasks and clear its squadron. Remove the empty source fleet when possible and update both fleet speeds. Transfer every ship whose mothership is this ship in turn. A player recipient clears ship AI and the destination fleet’s standing orders.

The ShipID and the construction date (FCT_Ship.Constructed) stay on the same ship. A copied class or a new receiving fleet is a separate new identity. The transfer does not rebuild the ship from a pristine class, refill fuel or ammunition, or erase armour or component damage.

Moving a ship between fleets has its own flaw. For each carried parasite it adds the carrier, not the parasite, to the target fleet’s ship list, while it sets the parasite’s fleet and sub-fleet. The later transfer of carried craft to the new race is a separate step. A correct ship list for every parasite does not follow from the carrier’s transfer. Moving ships and sub-fleets records the same gap.

Capture does not use up the winning boarders. A later boarding update returns formations aboard a ship of their own race to not boarded. Boarders of other races can stay aboard as foreign occupants after the first race wins.

Surrender adds prisoners before the same transfer

Section titled “Surrender adds prisoners before the same transfer”

Ship surrender first reveals the actual class to the captor, shows the portrait and logs the surrender. It records the old race, species and current crew as a survivor group. Each officer in a ship command role gets the history line “Surrendered to” the captor, loses the assignment, takes this ship as transport ship and is marked as a prisoner. Then the shared transfer runs. Only after it does ship surrender add the survivor group and apply the same one-crew and readiness resets as boarding capture (overhaul factor 0.01, the old shore leave time, 1 crew, 0 casualties and morale 0.25 for a class that is not commercial).

The disembark step inside the transfer clears those officers’ transport ship and places them at a local captor population when one exists, without releasing them from prisoner status. “The officers became prisoners” and “the officers remain aboard the prize” are therefore different claims. Boarding capture creates no survivor group from the old crew. Both paths need existing alien class and hull records before their revelation and logging steps. When such a record is missing, ship surrender shows a Function #2714 error and ends there, and boarding capture shows a Function #1816 error and the boarding update ends there.

Ship surrender itself has no tactical eligibility check. The decision belongs to the action that orders it. The NPR tactical decision weighs damage, the local situation and the crew species. In that decision, fleets marked not to surrender try to ram instead. Population conquest forces local ships to surrender when the forced option is on and the surface population is at least 10 million. Separately, when the old owner loses its last population, each remaining ship of a standard NPR old owner asks its automated design policy (DIM_AutomatedClassDesign.SurrenderStatus), where 0 is never, 1 is always, 2 is only when the ship can no longer perform its role, and 3 is when it can no longer perform its role or has no missile ordnance left. A special race’s tactical refusal is not a ban inside ship surrender.

Colony conquest and control transfer

Section titled “Colony conquest and control transfer”

Combat victory does not itself transfer a population

Section titled “Combat victory does not itself transfer a population”

The ground combat context enters its surrender step only when no hostile formations remain and at least one friendly formation is present. It picks as occupying population the acting race’s population on the same body with the largest total formation size stationed at exactly that population. It then tries each hostile population on the body that passes the population-or-assets test. The surrender test requires the following.

occupying population total occupation strength >= surrendering population amount x (Determination + Militancy + Xenophobia) / 300, with Determination, Militancy and Xenophobia taken from the surrendering population’s species.

Equality succeeds. Strength at another friendly population does not add to the chosen population’s strength. The initial surrender test does not multiply by the status occupation modifier (DIM_PopPoliticalStatus.OccupationForceMod). Ongoing occupation does. Surrender and occupation strength has the strength formula.

Success logs a surrender, liberation or empty colony occupation event and runs the population control transfer with status Conquered, technology capture when the New Tech from Conquest option of the Game Information window (FCT_Game.TechFromConquest) is on, wealth looting on and forced local ship surrender on. These are the choices of ground surrender. They are not features that every ownership transfer turns on.

Control-transfer sequence, with old owner retained until the end

Section titled “Control-transfer sequence, with old owner retained until the end”
Order Effect and conditions
1. Species and knowledge When the recorded original race (FCT_Population.OriginalRaceID) is not the recipient, the recipient records knowledge of the old owner’s species, and a population above 0 shows the old owner’s portrait. An empty population takes the recipient’s primary species. A population above 0 keeps its species.
2. Technology and civilian mines Also needs the technology option and an old owner that is a standard race. An Imperial Population transfer grants every nonracial technology the old owner knows, the recipient lacks, and that is not marked FCT_TechSystem.NoTechScan. A Conquered transfer rolls d100 <= the research lab count for each such technology, when the population has labs. Civilian mining complexes become Ex-Civilian Mining Complexes only inside this technology-enabled Conquered case.
3. Wealth When the recorded original race is not the recipient, positive old owner wealth, a standard old owner and the looting option give loot = old wealth x captured surface population / summed surface population of all old owner populations. The recipient records it as income Looted from Conquered Population and the old owner as the expense Lost due to Conquered Population. No check guards against a zero total. If it fails, the transfer shows a Function #2179 error and ends there, after the earlier steps have run.
4. Projects and command infrastructure Clear research projects, industrial projects, ground unit training and installation demands. Remove the old owner’s queued research here, its sector commands here and the naval administration commands here.
5. Observers and movement An observer keeps and updates its record of the population only when it has a contact on it updated this increment and knows the recipient. Every other observer loses its record. All actual contacts on the population are removed. Old owner fleet orders aimed at the population or its contacts are cleared, and civilian freighter and colony ship fleets also lose their cargo. Every fleet assigned to this population loses the assignment.
6. Population and yards Set total population to the surface population amount, turn off civilian mineral purchase (FCT_Population.PurchaseCivilianMinerals) and delete local shipyard tasks. Shipyards stay, change race, and have their build class, retool class, default fleet, upgrade task and capacity target cleared.
7. People and formations Rescue the recipient’s commanders held here. Credit the recipient’s prisoners held here to its academy crewmen (FCT_Race.AcademyCrewmen) without removing those prisoner groups. Clear old owner commanders located at this population or in command of its colony or academy. Remove all formations stationed at exactly this population, clearing commanders first, with no check of the formation’s race.
8. Local ship surrender When forced surrender is on and the surface population is at least 10 million, old owner ships in the same system at the exact same X and Y coordinates surrender one by one. This happens before the colony’s race changes.
9. Capital, politics, AI and salvos When this population is a capital, pick a replacement capital from the old owner’s populations by descending total population, then clear this population’s capital flag. Assign the requested status only when the original race is not the recipient and the population is not 0, otherwise Imperial Population. Reset status points and unrest to 0, clear the mass driver destination and adapt the population AI (removed for a player recipient, created when a player population passes to an NPR). Remove missile salvos aimed at the population as a population, ground unit, shipyard or STO ground unit target.
10. NPR ships after the last population When the old owner is a standard NPR whose summed total population equals this population amount, each of its remaining ships at the same location asks its ship AI whether to surrender, and those that agree surrender. This is separate from the size and option condition of step 8.
11. Final owner identity Replace the system survey and the display name (the body’s name as the recipient knows it). Set the original race to the old race, then the race to the recipient. The PopulationID does not change.

The recorded original race is therefore the previous owner after each completed transfer, not a fixed founding owner. It also decides technology, looting and the resulting status before it is overwritten. A return to that recorded race can therefore take a different path from a first conquest. Colony capture covers the technology results, the political status catalogue the statuses, and conquest, independence and initial funding the loot accounting.

Capital selection does not exclude the transferring population while it still belongs to the old race. It can pick the population itself and then clear its capital flag. The order of the steps allows this, so a conquest does not guarantee a usable replacement capital.

Player conquest stops here, without the NPR consolidation below. When an NPR succeeds and the captured population is above 0, its friendly formations on the body move there. Other empty populations on the same body (total population 0 and no installation entries) lose their invasion staging flag and go to the NPR empty population removal, which also retargets fleet orders. That list does not check the race. When the captured population is 0, it is absorbed into the occupying population instead.

Population absorption and deletion

Section titled “Population absorption and deletion”

Absorption adds the source’s installations, missile stock and stored components, moves its shipyards, adds its minerals and surface population, then removes the source through population removal. Yards are attached to the receiving population before the source is removed, so the same yards survive. The receiving PopulationID survives. The source ID does not.

Absorption does not add the source’s orbital population, fuel, maintenance supplies (MSP), emigrants, production progress, prisoner groups, political progress or unrest. It does not move ground formations itself. The removal that follows deletes those still at the source. It is an explicit stock transfer followed by deletion, not a general deep merge. Absorption, abandonment and removal places it in the colony lifecycle.

Population removal removes queued research, sector and naval administration commands, contacts and selected orders aimed at the population, with cargo cleared for civilian freighter and colony ship fleets. It clears fleet assignments, removes the remaining attached yards and their tasks, clears commanders’ assignments and removes local formations before it removes the population entry. A population on a fixed body then removes that system body too. Unlike the control transfer, removal does not update other races’ records of the population and has no local ship surrender.

Automatic eligibility, window confirmation and the FCT_Population.DoNotDelete protection belong to the actions that request removal. Three tests use different asset lists.

  • The population-or-assets test used by ground combat passes on total population above 0.01 million, any installation, any formation, any minerals, any prisoner group, or missile ordnance .
  • The Delete Empty button of the Economics window removes, after one confirmation, every colony of the race not marked do-not-delete that has no population, installations, minerals, missile ordnance or stored components, no abandoned factories, a ground survey no better than minimal, no fleet of the race in orbit, no formation of the race and no fleet order of the race aimed at it.
  • The single colony check, used when a civilian mining colony is disbanded, applies the same list, including the do-not-delete flag, but does not look at mineral stock.

Running population removal directly repeats none of these policies. The Delete Pop button of the Economics window asks for confirmation, and asks a second time when the population is above 0.

Relationships, cargo, orders and knowledge

Section titled “Relationships, cargo, orders and knowledge”
Concern Destruction Ship capture or surrender Population transfer or absorption
Object identity Removed ship, with a separately numbered wreck and lifepod Same hull ID and construction date. Class and fleet can change Transfer keeps the PopulationID. Absorption removes the source and keeps the recipient
Commander consequence Evacuation survival or retirement. Embarked formation commanders killed Disembark after the owner changes. Surrender specifically marks officers as prisoners Rescue the recipient’s personnel and clear old staff and formation assignments. Absorption’s removal clears the source’s assignments
Ground formations Embarked formations removed Source owner troops relocated or removed. Foreign boarders kept Transfer and removal delete all formations at exactly that population. The NPR conquest step may later move its other formations
Cargo Lost ship cargo is not wreck cargo Trade goods cargo cleared. Not a universal cargo wipe Cancelling selected old owner civilian fleet orders can clear ship cargo. Absorption copies only the listed colony stocks
Orders and targets Fleet and contact orders aimed at it pruned, salvos reset or removed, all ship fire control targets cleared Transfer removes tracks and hull intelligence, but does not repeat the salvo, fire control and order cleanup of ship removal Transfer clears old owner orders aimed at the population and salvos aimed at it. Absorption uses the removal behaviour

The shared ship transfer does not run ship removal. Missile salvos and fire controls aimed at a captured ship are not cleared just because the prize’s tracking contacts were.

Knowledge of a destruction depends on observation. Races other than the attacker that hold a contact on the destroyed ship updated this increment mark their record of the hull destroyed. Kill credit separately marks the attacker’s own record. The observer report “has been destroyed” is logged for the destroyed ship’s race. For a beam weapon kill it adds “by energy weapon fire from” the attacking ship when any race other than the attacker detects that ship by active sensor, not only when that observer does, and the observer has a record of the attacking ship. A kill by STO weapons is attributed to their population in the same way. These logs are not a uniform proof that each observer knows. Observation and knowledge lifecycle follows the records.

Capture and surrender reveal the actual class before the transfer removes the hull records. The revelation copies the actual class’s armour, speed, jump distance, jammer and shield strengths, thermal signature, name and active sensors into the captor’s class record. Removing the hull records does not delete the class knowledge. Colony transfer likewise separates the observers’ records of the population, which survive and update, from the actual contacts, which it always removes.

Diplomatic changes belong to specific actions. A ship attack record debits diplomatic points (FCT_AlienRace.DiplomaticPoints) by shield hits x damage per hit x 0.1 + armour hits x damage per hit x 0.25 + penetrating hits x damage per hit x 1, all tripled when the target is an NPR ship whose class main function is diplomacy. The same amount is added to FCT_AlienRace.DamageCausedByAlienRace. When the points are still above -101 afterwards, the fixed relationship flag (FixedRelationship) is cleared, the points are set to -101 (or -303 when tripled) and an NPR victim sets the attacker hostile. This floor applies even when no damage was positive. Ship removal and the shared ship transfer apply no combat penalty. Boarding applies the general diplomatic change with 0 points and forced hostility. That change needs an existing contact record, bypasses a fixed relationship, lowers points above -100 to -101, and leaves the status change to the NPR AI.

Ground surrender already selects hostile populations. The population control transfer adds no diplomatic conquest penalty of its own. The bombardment penalty for non-ship targets is a separate attack record path (total hits x damage per hit x 0.25, with the same -101 floor). Wealth looting, species knowledge and class revelation are separate consequences and do not stand in for diplomatic status.

Surrender survivor groups can later be unloaded at a population as prisoner groups, merged by race and species. Prisoner commanders transported by the ship move to the population and the ship’s groups clear. Interrogation, release and rescue follow their own rules. Neither boarding victory nor surrender interrogates anyone. Prisoners and interrogation covers the later steps, and step 7 of the control transfer covers rescue on conquest.

Synthetic before-and-after timelines

Section titled “Synthetic before-and-after timelines”

Space death: Ship 101 in Fleet 40

Section titled “Space death: Ship 101 in Fleet 40”
Stage Synthetic state and consequence
Before the fatal hit Standard race Ship 101 is live in Fleet 40 with current crew 100 and embarked Formation 7. Another hull keeps Fleet 40 nonempty.
Inside incoming damage The catastrophic damage case sets the destroyed flag, keeps the ship for its report and removes it. Tracks, orders, targets and parasites are handled before evacuation.
Removal outcomes Suppose the survival die gives 25. Crew fraction = (25 + 25) / 100, so a new lifepod stores 50. Formation 7 is removed and its commander killed. A new wreck stores the original ShipID 101 and class-derived stock.
Damage step returns Ship 101 is absent from the live ships. Fleet 40 survives with its speed recalculated. Kill credit is recorded. A later record for 101 finds no live target and is skipped.
Reporting boundary The destroyed ships list supplies the removed ship’s damage report, then clears. Keeping it for the report never puts Ship 101 back.

This timeline assumes the ordinary outcomes, not a guaranteed result of the random escape rolls.

Ship capture: a round finishes before ownership changes

Section titled “Ship capture: a round finishes before ownership changes”
Stage Synthetic state and consequence
Before the round Old owner Ship 102 has an open hull, positive crew and no other defending formations. Race B boarders are aboard.
First qualifying pass The capture test fails because crew is above 0. Both sides attack. Pending losses apply in the shared aftermath. Assume crew becomes 0 and the boarders survive. The ship still belongs to the old owner.
Next open-hull pass at 60 seconds No defenders and 0 crew now pass the capture test. Race B wins, the class is revealed and the shared transfer runs.
Shared transfer The same Ship 102 changes class, race and species, officers disembark, selected links, cargo and intelligence clear, and a Race B receiving fleet can be created. Damage stays.
After capture Crew becomes 1, military morale 0.25 and readiness resets. A later boarding update returns the Race B boarders to not boarded. No surrendered-crew group was created.

Had ship surrender run with an original crew of 80 instead, it would record those 80 as a survivor group of the old race and species before the transfer and add the group afterwards. This difference holds although both paths end with 1 crew.

Ground conquest: victory, surrender, transfer, optional consolidation

Section titled “Ground conquest: victory, surrender, transfer, optional consolidation”
Stage Synthetic state and consequence
Before the surrender chance Race B has formations at its own Population 20. Hostile Population 30 has a surface population of 20 million, no hostile formations remain, and the resistance species values sum to 300.
Strength check Population 20’s occupation strength of 20 equals the requirement of 20 and succeeds. A strength of 19 would leave Population 30 with the old owner despite the battlefield victory.
Transfer while the old owner is still assigned The technology and wealth options are evaluated, and projects, orders, intelligence, yards, personnel and forces are processed. With forced surrender on and 20 million at or above 10 million, old owner ships at the location surrender one by one.
Final assignment Population 30 keeps ID 30 and gets Race B’s survey and name. The original race becomes the old owner and the race becomes Race B. The political status and progress follow the transfer conditions.
Back in ground combat Player Race B keeps Populations 20 and 30 separate. NPR Race B moves its friendly formations to Population 30, which has population above 0, and runs its empty colony consolidation. An empty captured colony would instead be absorbed into Population 20, removing Population 30.

For old wealth 1,000 and old owner surface populations of 20 million plus 80 million, this transfer loots 200 when its original race and wealth conditions pass. Technology capture has its own conditions. Five labs mean one d100 <= 5 roll per eligible technology.

Persistence and reload boundaries

Section titled “Persistence and reload boundaries”
Surviving result What the game saves and rebuilds
Captured hull FCT_Ship stores the same ShipID with the new RaceID, SpeciesID, ShipClassID and FleetID, the construction date (Constructed), crew and readiness values and BoardingCombatClock. Loading builds a new ship in memory and needs the race, species, class and fleet it refers to.
Removed hull A save writes the ships still in the game. A removed destroyed hull is absent although FCT_Ship has a Destroyed column. The destroyed ships list exists only for reports, and the aftermath clears it.
Carrier, tow and assignment links Ship rows carry IDs (MothershipID, AssignedMSID, TractorTargetShipID). Lookups made after loading rebuild the mothership, assigned mothership and tow links. They do not restore deleted linked objects.
Transferred or absorbed colony The population row stores the surviving population, including its owner and original owner (OriginalRaceID). Loading restores the original race from the stored ID. A removed source is not recreated as a record of the absorption.
Boarding and ground forces Formation owner, location and boarding status, and element units and morale, are saved. Pending per-round losses and report counters are not a saved conquest transaction.
Wreck FCT_Wrecks keeps the WreckID plus the original ShipID, race, class, system and minerals. Component and technical data rows (FCT_WreckComponents, FCT_WreckTech) attach separately. Loading does not need the original ship to exist.
Lifepod and commanders Lifepods (FCT_Lifepods) and commanders are saved and loaded separately with their surviving entries and links, when the linked records still exist. Retired commanders keep their retirement and history state. Removed commands are not brought back.
Surrendered crew and detained prisoners FCT_Survivors stores the old RaceID and SpeciesID plus the carrying ShipID and Crew. FCT_Prisoners stores the population, race, species and counts. A survivor group loads only when its ship survives. A prisoner group loads only when its population survives.

Saving a game opens one database transaction around all its writes and commits it. The ownership changes above are not wrapped in a transaction. Each shows a function error when it fails and keeps the changes it already made (Function #2439 for the shared ship transfer, #2179 for the population control transfer, #2107 for absorption). After such an error, the action that ran the step, such as ship surrender, can carry on with its own resets. The save transaction does not make ship capture, conquest or absorption all-or-nothing in memory.

Reloading builds a new set of objects, not the same objects in memory. IDs are lookup keys, not permanent historical identities. The ship ID counter starts from the highest FCT_Ship ShipID when a game loads, so the ID of a removed hull that held the highest ID can be issued again after a save and reload. A wreck’s ShipID and the ship’s history do not reserve that hull ID. A wreck’s old hull number is a historical association, not proof of where a current ship came from. Deletion, reload and restored-branch reuse covers ID reuse in general.

Concept map

Section titled “Concept map”

Resources

Section titled “Resources”

Related community documentation and developer posts. These may describe a different game version.