Nebula War
Hidden in the void between planets, every galaxy has a nebula — a contested strategic zone where alliances battle pirate remnants for control of ten defensive slots. Capture them. Hold them. Climb the Alliance Power tiers. Earn bonuses for every member of your alliance.
This is the long-game layer that runs outside the tick system. Combat here is asynchronous — you engage when you're ready, and the battle resolves in seconds.
The nebula
Each galaxy contains exactly one nebula with 10 defense slots, arranged from easiest (slot 1) to hardest (slot 10). At season start, all ten slots are held by Void Raiders — an NPC pirate faction that has drifted in the void for centuries.
Void Raiders are the remnants of collapsed civilizations, drone fleets gone rogue, and deserters from a dozen dead empires. Their ships are improvised — lower armor, weaker weapons, no EMP, no cloaking. They use the full three-target chain in combat but have no race bonuses and no tactical surprises. Predictable opponents by design. The challenge is volume, not cleverness.
Void Raider garrison strength scales with slot tier:
| Slot | Typical defense |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | Scrap Fighters and Junk Corvettes — clearable during protection with early-game ships |
| 4–6 | Rust Frigates and Hulk Destroyers — mid-game territory, frigates minimum |
| 7–9 | Wreck Cruisers and heavy mixed fleets — late-game, bring cruisers |
| 10 | Dread Hulks plus a mixed fleet — only engage with battleships ready |
Each slot holds multiple defense fleets at once — easier slots have 2, the boss slot has 8. When you attack, you fight the weakest active fleet first. Win and the next fleet is yours to face. The slot doesn't change hands until every fleet is cleared.
Sequential access — the adjacency rule
You cannot dive straight into slot 10. Nebula slots unlock in sequence based on what your alliance already controls.
Slot 1 is always attackable. It's the entry point for every alliance, at any time, regardless of what you own elsewhere.
Slots 2–10 require an adjacent foothold. To attack slot N, your alliance must control either slot N−1 (pushing forward) or slot N+1 (pushing back if a rival has captured something behind you).
This is supply-line logic. You can't leapfrog past enemy territory to attack what's behind them. And if a rival punches through and takes slot 6 from you, they still have to fight their way up from slot 1 if you hold the positions below.
It also means losing one slot deep in the chain doesn't lose you the rest. You can reconquer from either direction.
Attacking a slot
Tap an attackable slot, review the defender composition, select ships from your planet, press ENGAGE. The battle runs immediately — no tick required, no ETA.
The ships you commit leave your planet instantly. They are not travelling — they are gone from your defense for the duration of the fight. Plan accordingly.
Attack cap — 1.5× slot capacity
You cannot drown a slot in an infinite fleet. The fleet value you commit is capped at 1.5 times the slot's garrison cap. A slot with a 5,000 cap tops your attack force at 7,500 fleet value. A well-prepared garrison has a genuine chance to survive, or at least to cost you enough ships to matter.
This is what makes garrisons meaningful. Without the cap, any wealthy player could one-shot any slot. With it, composition and coordination matter.
Approximate intelligence only
You see the defender's total fleet value and rough composition — fleet sizes, ship classes, whether it's fighter-heavy or cruiser-heavy. Exact ship counts are hidden unless you have Premium Commander.
What you keep after the battle
Your surviving ships return to your planet automatically once the battle concludes. No ETA, no transit, no "in-limbo" state. If you win, your survivors come home. If you lose, your survivors still come home — there are just fewer of them.
This matters for a practical reason: after a victorious attack, you do not garrison the slot with the ships that just fought. They're back on your planet. From there, you choose which ships to send — those same survivors, different ships from your fleet, or a mix. It's a cleaner flow with no confusion about where a ship actually is.
Draws
If dominance lands in the 45–55% band, the battle is a draw. The slot stays with the defender. Both sides take the losses they sustained. Nobody's happy, but it's clean.
The 5-win cooldown
To prevent one player from steamrolling all 10 slots in a single evening, every attack counts toward a personal cooldown:
After 5 wins in the same nebula, you enter a 2-hour lockdown. During lockdown you cannot attack any slot in that nebula. Your alliance members can continue — this is a personal limit, not an alliance limit. A coordinated push with five active members can clear half the nebula in an afternoon, but no single player solos the entire thing.
Losses and draws don't count toward the cooldown. Only wins. So if you want to soften up a slot with a sacrificial probe attack to burn down NPC fleets, feel free — it costs you ships, not cooldown.
Garrisoning
Winning a slot is the easy part. Holding it is where the season is decided.
Any alliance member can garrison a captured slot by sending ships from their planet. Ships sent from the same galaxy arrive instantly. Cross-galaxy ships have ETA 2–4 ticks depending on cluster distance, using the same rules as any other fleet mission.
The garrison cap per slot determines how much fleet value can be committed:
| Slot | Garrison cap |
|---|---|
| 1 | 5,000 |
| 2 | 8,000 |
| 3 | 12,000 |
| 4 | 18,000 |
| 5 | 25,000 |
| 6 | 35,000 |
| 7 | 50,000 |
| 8 | 70,000 |
| 9 | 100,000 |
| 10 | 150,000 |
Multiple alliance members can stack into the same slot up to the cap. If a slot is full, no more ships can be added. If ships are in transit and the slot fills before they arrive, the in-transit ships are returned automatically to the sender's planet.
Withdrawing
A player can withdraw their own ships from a garrison at any time. They return with the same ETA rules — instant within galaxy, 2–4 ticks cross-galaxy. Withdrawn ships are vulnerable during transit, so don't pull an irreplaceable fleet back while a rival is clearly inbound.
You can only withdraw your ships — not another alliance member's.
Lockdown
When a slot changes ownership — NPC to alliance, or alliance A to alliance B — it enters a 2-hour lockdown.
During lockdown:
- Rivals cannot attack the slot. It's safe from counter-attack for two hours.
- The owning alliance can still garrison. Reinforce from your own planet or from other members' planets normally.
- Other slots remain attackable based on normal adjacency rules.
Lockdown is the breathing room. It's the pause between rounds — the defender catches their breath, fills the slot, and prepares for what comes next. Without it, a well-timed alliance could take and lose and retake a slot within minutes, which is just noise.
Two hours is deliberately short. Long enough to rally a response; short enough that rival alliances don't have to wait overnight to counter-attack.
Victory Points
Capturing and holding slots earns Victory Points — the currency of the Nebula War.
Capture VP
Awarded immediately when your alliance takes a slot:
| Slot tier | Capture VP |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | 10 VP |
| 4–6 | 15 VP |
| 7–9 | 25 VP |
| 10 | 50 VP |
Holding VP
Awarded daily at reset for every slot your alliance controls:
| Slot tier | Holding VP per day |
|---|---|
| 1–3 | 10 VP |
| 4–6 | 15 VP |
| 7–9 | 20 VP |
| 10 | 30 VP |
Control bonuses
Scaling bonuses for holding multiple slots in the same nebula:
| Slots held | Bonus VP per day |
|---|---|
| 4 or more | +20 VP |
| 7 or more | +50 VP |
| All 10 | +100 VP |
Full control of a nebula — all 10 slots in a single galaxy — is massively more valuable than partial control. An alliance holding all 10 slots earns roughly three times what they'd earn holding 6. Pushing for the clean sweep is almost always worth the fight.
VP accumulates across the entire season. You can lose slots and your accumulated VP stays — you simply stop earning more from lost territory.
Alliance tiers
Your alliance's total accumulated Victory Points — across all nebulae your members control anywhere in the universe — determines your tier. Each tier unlocks passive bonuses that apply automatically to every alliance member's planet.
Thresholds have been tuned for 4-week seasons:
| Tier | VP required | Build time | Ship cost | Research time | PDS time | Free scans/day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unranked | 0–199 | — | — | — | — | — |
| Bronze | 200–799 | −5% | — | −5% | −5% | — |
| Silver | 800–1,999 | −10% | −5% | −10% | −10% | — |
| Gold | 2,000–4,999 | −15% | −10% | −15% | −15% | 1 |
| Platinum | 5,000–9,999 | −20% | −15% | −20% | −20% | 2 |
| Diamond | 10,000+ | −25% | −20% | −25% | −25% | 3 |
Diamond bonus: −1 tick fleet ETA when the target galaxy is in a cluster where your alliance controls at least one nebula slot. This is on top of the table above — a conditional territorial advantage that rewards holding nebulae near your enemies.
All discounts apply to time (ticks to complete) and cost (resources to spend). A Platinum alliance builds ships 20% faster and 15% cheaper than an unranked one — a compounding advantage over a full season.
Tiers are sticky. Once you've earned Bronze, you're Bronze for the rest of the season even if you later lose the slots that got you there — but you stop earning more VP from those lost slots. Climb, don't coast.
Two paths to victory
At season's end, two separate titles are awarded:
Strongest Alliance — highest combined total score across all member planets (fleet value + orbitals + buildings). This rewards raw military and economic strength.
Nebula Overlords — highest accumulated Victory Points from nebula captures and holding. This rewards coordination, persistence, and territorial dominance.
A small, scrappy alliance that runs every nebula campaign can win Nebula Overlords without being the biggest military force. A two-player alliance with monster fleets can win Strongest without touching the nebula system. Two paths, both valid, both permanently recorded on stats.orbitarion.com.
NPC respawn
If a slot sits empty — no garrison, no owner — for 24 hours, the Void Raiders reoccupy it at 75% of their original strength. A slot your alliance takes but doesn't defend will eventually revert to NPC control.
This is intentional. It prevents abandoned nebulae from becoming permanently empty dead space when one alliance wins early and loses interest. The pirates are always out there, waiting to reclaim the silence.
Keep what you take, or let the void have it back.
Premium features
Premium Commander subscribers get sharper intelligence in the nebula system:
- Exact NPC fleet composition — see precisely which ships fill each Void Raider defense fleet per slot, not just the approximate summary
- Battle replay — replay any nebula battle from your Intel feed with the full animated ticker
- Push notifications — get an alert on your phone when a rival attacks a slot in a nebula your alliance controls
Free players engage the entire Nebula War system normally. Premium just makes the intel crisper and the defense faster to coordinate.
Strategy notes
Start at slot 1 on day one. It's available during protection, clearable with fighters and corvettes. Every hour your alliance doesn't hold slot 1 is VP left on the table — and you need that foothold to attack slot 2 anyway.
Divide labor across time zones. The 5-win cooldown is per player. A global alliance with active members in different time zones can run sequential pushes around the clock without any one person hitting their limit.
Holding is worth more than capturing. A slot captured once and lost gives you capture VP once. A slot held for 30 days gives you capture VP plus 30 days of holding VP plus any control bonuses. Defense wins seasons.
Don't hollow out your planet. Ships committed to nebula garrisons aren't defending your home. A smart rival will hit your planet while your best ships are stuck in a distant nebula slot. Balance commitment with self-defense, and never put all your battleships in one slot.
Full control is the jackpot. +100 VP per day for holding all 10 slots is an enormous multiplier. If your alliance reaches 7 slots in a nebula, pushing for the final three is almost always worth the cost.
Probe attacks are free intel. Sending a small scout force into a slot won't win, but it will tell you exactly what's defending. Losses don't count toward the 5-win cooldown, so probes cost only ships — not time.