Gameplay · in development
The four pillars, walked.
These are design notes for Heavenly Baddies, not a manual for a shipped game. Each pillar is tied to fleet commanders, territory, economy, exploration, or combat.
Expand
A system is a berth you can walk.
Expand does not flood a hex map. A system joins your territory when an orbital berth connects it to a station you already supply. The fleet parks in the sky and keeps the approaches honest. The legal act is personal: a commander leaves the flagship, crosses the deck, and plants a standard in the station log.
Neighbors do not flip because they touch your color. They open when the chain of berths reaches them and someone is willing to walk the new deck. Overreach is a supply problem, not a paint problem. A glamorous arrival still needs fuel behind it.
Exploit
Yards, tribute, parade.
The economy has three ledgers. Yard throughput builds and repairs hulls. Tribute is collected from stations that have actually been walked. Parade upkeep is the alloy, escort time, and dress fuel spent to arrive looking untouchable.
Parade is not a cosmetic skin. It raises oath stability in held systems and spends material that could have been armor. Let the yards starve and the gold on the collars comes off the hulls. Commanders recruit by reputation, and reputation is a line item.
Explore
Rumors stay dotted until a seal is shown.
Scouts can mark a dark relay, a derelict chart-room, or a silent approach. Those marks stay unconfirmed. Probes come back with static. The relays in this setting answer to a command seal, and the seal travels with a person.
Exploration is finished when a commander boards, reads the room, and brings the route back to the fleet. Until then the map is a rumor and a berth should not be bet on it. Confidence is allowed. Certainty is earned on site.
Exterminate
Break the line. Take the bridge.
Combat opens as a line engagement: range, formation, fighter screens. The war goal is the enemy flag bridge, not a button that deletes a faction from a list. A boarding decree spends elite crews to finish that crossing.
What you do with the prize is the rest of the pillar. Surviving crews can be sworn into your fleet, the yards can be stripped for the ledgers, or the standard can be burned so the system goes quiet. Exterminate is decisive and expensive. Numbers are not final.
