Straight answers

Yes. Two alpha galaxies are live and free to play, in your browser or with the Android app. Astral Dawn ticks every hour, on the hour, and runs research, fuel, races and free-form ship design. Sovereign Reach 1 ticks every 30 minutes and runs without those four; it is winding down, no longer receives most new features, and a replacement galaxy will take its place. It is an alpha, so systems are still being added and changed while people play, and you share each galaxy with NPC empires that give the same orders you do.

It runs on ticks. You give orders, they sit as intent until the next tick, and at the scheduled tick every empire's orders resolve together, in the same moment. Ticks run on a fixed schedule, and every galaxy has its own tick rate: Astral Dawn ticks every hour on the hour, Sovereign Reach 1 every 30 minutes. Nothing here is decided by reflexes. It rewards planning, logistics and knowing the map.

One hop at a time, and each step is its own tick. Surveying a warp node tells you which node it pairs with on the far side and what class of lane it is. It does not show you what is in the system beyond, or even its name. To see that you warp through and scan the system from inside. The fleet that flew the link keeps the right to re-cross it — on galaxies that use fuel it still needs the fuel to make the crossing, so plan the way back as carefully as the way out — but the node you arrive at is not a route for the rest of your empire until you survey it from that side as well. So opening a new system properly is survey, warp, scan, survey again: four ticks of deliberate work, and a real decision about how far from home you are willing to be.

No. That gap between deciding and resolving is the game. It is what makes a bad decision a real one, and it is what means a player in a different timezone is not at a disadvantage. A tick-based game should not punish you for sleeping, so the automation is built in. Hand a colony a build priority and its colony manager keeps developing it without you. Orders you have already submitted resolve on schedule whether you are there or not, and you can review or cancel them while the tick is still open. Convoys, patrols and standing routes re-issue themselves each tick, including routing across multiple warp jumps. If you switch alerts on, a battle, a contact or a siege can reach your phone or browser while the game is closed, and you choose which kinds.

Caretaker takes over. Your empire is looked after and kept developing rather than left to rot, and it is handed straight back the moment you return. Coming back to a ruin because life happened is not the game anyone wants to play.

With an emailed code or your Google account. Enter your email and we send you a short code — nothing to choose, nothing to forget, nothing to reset. Prefer one tap? Continue with Google works too. Either way there is no password, and nothing for the game to store on your behalf.

Your empire is created on the next tick, not the moment you ask. Even joining happens on the tick. On a galaxy with races, you choose your people when you join, and your race decides the kind of world you start on. You start with a single homeworld and a fog-of-war map, and everything after that you earn: scan systems, survey warp nodes, push back the fog and find what is out there.

Yes, and two are open right now: Astral Dawn and Sovereign Reach 1. Your account is global; your empire is not. One account plays many galaxies, and each galaxy gets its own empire, its own colonies and its own fleets. They never mix. Nothing carries between galaxies: no shared wealth, no shared fleet, no account-wide power. A new galaxy is a genuinely fresh start. Galaxies do not run forever: when one is retired, the empire you built in it goes with it, while your account, your sign-in and your other galaxies are untouched. Sovereign Reach 1 is winding down, and a replacement galaxy will take its place.

Yes, and yes. Fleets fight when hostile forces meet. You set each fleet's stance and your empire's standing toward others, order a fleet to hold fire or attempt to disengage, and read the battle report afterwards. Before a fight, your sensors decide how much of a rival fleet you can read; in the fight, the same reading decides how well your guns hold it. Every battle is resolved by the game itself, under identical rules for everyone, so there is nothing to out-click. Colonies are a separate problem. Winning the space above a colony does not take it.

On the ground. You train garrisons of infantry, armour and artillery, carry them on troop transports, and land them once the orbit is clear of armed defenders. An invasion resolves over two ticks: you establish a beachhead, and the fight resolves after. The defender gets a tick to react. That makes invading a commitment rather than a click, and a well-garrisoned colony genuinely expensive to take. NPC colonies keep a garrison too.

The damage stays. Shields come back by themselves, but armour and hull stay damaged until you repair them: at a colony shipyard, for materials, at a price you are quoted first, or slowly and for free with a Repair Bay or Damage Control Bay aboard. The battle also leaves a debris field of scrap and the cargo that went down with the ships. Any fleet standing on it can take the cargo, and a fleet with a salvage rig recovers the scrap as well, including the side that lost. A field does not last forever.

Empires. Not scenery, not obstacles. They hold colonies, expand, build, research, run supply routes, keep garrisons, repair and refit their ships, defend themselves and fight each other, giving the same orders a player gives. An NPC colony obeys the same climate and pays the same costs as yours. The one exception today is fuel: on galaxies that use it, NPC fleets do not pay for their warps. They have different characters, some settle, some explore, some raid, some just drift, and they can form factions and go to war with each other. A new player arrives into a galaxy with history, not an empty board.

Who you are. Every planet and moon is described across six environmental axes: temperature, pressure, atmosphere, gravity, radiation, toxicity. Every species has its own comfort range on each, set by the homeworld it evolved on. So habitability is relative. There is no universal good planet, and two players can look at the same world and reasonably disagree about whether it is worth having. Settle somewhere hostile and your colonists start dying, unless you build the specific structure that answers that specific problem. One structure answers one axis and protects only so many colonists, so a world that is wrong in three ways needs three answers, and a growing colony keeps building all three. A harsh world is a real option, just a permanently expensive one.

Yes. Beyond the stock designs, you design your own ships from modules, validate the design, and build it in your shipyards. On Sovereign Reach 1 you fit modules into one of a set of hulls; on galaxies with free-form design, like Astral Dawn, a design is whatever you put together, with no size cap, held back only by power, crew and heat. Where research is on, most parts come in ten tiers and every tier does something: better warp engines and drives burn less fuel, bigger tugs tow heavier structures, better salvage rigs recover more. A ship you already own can be refitted to a revised design at a colony shipyard — full price for the parts going on, half back for the parts coming off — and it keeps its name and its record.

Only on galaxies that use it: Astral Dawn does, Sovereign Reach 1 does not. There, every warp burns fuel from the fleet's tank, by the fleet's mass and the class of the lane, while moving inside a system is free. Refineries at your colonies turn gas into fuel, and fleets parked at your colonies top up from it. A scout with a gas skimmer, a fuel converter, a tank and room in its hold can refine its own fuel at a gas giant, and one set to skim when low goes and refuels itself, or stops short with fuel still in the tank when nothing is in reach. Attached fleets can share a tank, and a better warp engine or drive makes every crossing cheaper, never faster.

Only on galaxies that use it: Astral Dawn does, Sovereign Reach 1 does not. Research buildings at your colonies earn research points, and research points are the whole price of a project. Queue projects and the next one starts on the tick the last one finishes. Everything above tier 1 is unlocked through research, and a higher tier costs more and does more. There are ten tiers, with big steps at 3, 5, 7 and 9, and tier 10 is the long goal of a whole galaxy. A building you already have is upgraded in place, for the difference in materials.

The game runs in your browser at play.astralsovereignty.com — nothing to download — and there is also an Android app on Google Play: the same game, the same galaxies and the same empire. Pick the layout that suits your screen — the classic one, Mint, or Concept 02, a denser layout still being tried out — with six colour schemes and five colour-vision modes in every one. Alerts you choose can reach your phone or browser with the game closed. Discord is a second way to play: link your account, then check galaxies, join one, submit and cancel orders, review what is pending, design ships, and run convoys, patrols and travel plans, all from Discord.