Explore the galaxy, uncover ancient civilizations, and learn the truth of your awakening in this exciting new turn-based strategy game. 

Initial Turns

Lucky you! Your empire starts out on a single homeworld ideally suited to your race.

Now go explore your current star system, scout for resource deposits, potential colonies, and anomalies.

You need to find suitable worlds to establish MORE colonies as well as find ways to expand into neighboring star systems.

Don’t get too comfortable! As you explore, you will encounter anomalies – some helpful, some…not so much. Anomalies can be quite visible (ion storms, large and aggressive monsters) or hidden (ancient guardians or minefields).

Anomalies sometimes are just plain weird or odd surprises – like sentient planets interested in eating you but could be persuaded to help you long-term.

Not just for show, anomalies matter! Ancient ruins reveal clues as to why the races were brought into existence, who the Watchers are, and what they want.

Investigate and explore to discover enough about the anomaly to be useful. Some investigations can take multiple turns and act much like a quest.

Expand to claim new worlds, meet other newly awakened empires, and stake your claim in the galaxy. 

Early Game

As with any 4x game, expansion is a key part of overall strategy. In CoE, worlds and star systems are based on hex grids, and exploring the area around the starting area is crucial to finding habitable worlds to colonize. Once suitable (habitable) worlds are found, empires can establish colonies which can then build facilities to provide resources, income, vehicle production, and more. Of course, colonies can face many obstacles as well, from disease, to unhappiness (or even revolt!), to invasion.

Exploit neighbors with might or befriend them to form trade alliances and share your knowledge in peace.

Mid Game

As empires grow, run into their neighbors and start to establish borders (peacefully or not), the game moves from the land-rush mentality into the mid-game where empires consolidate power by adding colonies and resource outposts, build up their military, and set their overall strategy for winning the game. The primary elements of this phase are combat and diplomacy. Combat is primarily performed by fleets of vehicles, while diplomacy can happen with any empire that yours has contact with.

Once you have ships, you can create fleets, decide their overall strategy and split them into task forces based on their specific function within the fleet. Fleets in CoE can be quite large (potentially thousands of vehicles) and this is why battles are intended to be AI-controlled.

In the end, will your empire thrive or be Exterminated? 

End Game

Whether the player is a ruthless conqueror or a beloved leader, no matter how much they are liked or hated by other empires, the main thing that matters at the end is the Watchers. In this stage of the game, the player should be able to get enough clues to understand the desires of the Watchers and plan accordingly. Since these Watcher desires (and thus “win” conditions) are randomly determined for each game, strategies that work in one game may fail completely in another.

At a certain point in time (somewhat random, but never “quickly”), the Watchers will evaluate all empires for how well they’re satisfied the Watcher win condition and either declare a winner (requires an empire remaining that meets certain power-level requirements) or declare no one the winner. Once that happens, the Watchers will begin the reset the galaxy for the next batch of empires. This, of course, requires removing the current empires by whatever means are necessary.

This reset takes some time and empires can choose to

• fight the Watchers, individually (the Watchers will typically be too powerful for a single empire to handle, thus making the choice to fight them individually extremely difficult)

  • The “winning” empire has the choice to join the side of the Watchers against all the other empires! Assuming they survive this fight, that empire can be replayed in another game and get some bonuses.

• Fight the watchers as a coordinated group

• Contribute to a research project to escape pocket galaxy and get away from Watchers (typically takes more research in the amount of time available than a single empire can generate, thus this option is usually done as a cooperative endeavor.

• Many options here beyond the usual “destroy all enemies”
  • Win via Watcher criteria
  • Win via custom victory conditions (including political dominance, alliances, economic dominance, etc)
  • Win via co-op fight vs. Watcher Reset