Ground you take, ground you build on
Buying a cell with metal is gone: fleets take ground now, empty ground included. Structures gained levels, a cell holds three of them, and everything they pay goes into your worlds.
Territorial capture went out with a price in resources, and that was wrong. A price in metal only asks whether you have a stockpile — it never asks you to wait. With a full vault the map fell in a minute.
The brake is the clock, not the wallet
Ground is now taken by a fleet, and that includes ground nobody owns. It is the same order either way; only the word changes — you claim open space, you conquer somebody’s. What it still cannot do is skip: the cell has to touch territory you already hold.
Building went the other way. Every structure, the outpost included, now needs the cell to be yours already. Raising something is no longer a way to take ground — it is what you do with ground you took. And a structure takes time to come up: a site under construction holds its cell and does nothing else.
What a cell can carry
Three structures at most, and never two of the same kind — two defence arrays on one cell would have tripled a garrison for the price of a build. The three that pay a percentage now take levels; the outpost and the jump gate do not, because what they contribute is structural rather than a number to multiply.
A mining station has also stopped being a thing you can put anywhere. It stands on ore or it does not stand: an ore basin is no longer the cell where a station pays better, it is the only cell where one exists at all. Same for the research station and its anomaly.
Nothing produces in the void
The rule that changed the most is the quietest one. Every structure now pays into the worlds you already own in that system — production, research speed, the strength of your planetary defences — rather than generating something on its own out on a rock.
Territory is therefore worth exactly as much as what you have there to improve, which is a very different game from counting hexagons. It also keeps the older promise intact: nothing out here is ever an empire-wide total.
Holding it
Two ways, and they are not the same tool. A defence array is a wall you pay for once and that then stands by itself. A fleet parked on your own cell is the only defence in the game that moves — it fights with whatever hulls you gave it rather than one fixed doctrine, it counts against your active fleets, and you can always call it home.
When a cell is attacked, the array and every fleet on it meet the attacker as a single force, with one commander leading each side. Lose and nothing moves. Win and the array is destroyed and the garrisons scatter. A draw counts as repelled — if it did not, defending would be pointless.
And what the neighbours see
Claims are public now. Who holds a cell, what stands on it, and the clock ticking on a conquest are all visible to anyone in the galaxy — a rival starting their timer on the cell you were flying at is exactly the thing you needed to know.
Two things stay hidden and need a probe: the level of a structure, and any fleet parked on it. Those are not sent and then greyed out; they are not sent at all.