How to play Epochs

The shape of a game

Epochs is a turn-based strategy game. Players take turns moving ships, building, researching and fighting across a grid of star systems. Each round your colonies pay out credits and your score climbs with the colonies, tech and territory you hold.

You pick how a match is won before it starts. In Standard — the default — you win by claiming the map: the last house still holding a colony takes it. There is no points bar. In Ascendancy, the first house to reach 75 points claims dominion instead. Either way, if the Reach falls silent before anyone has won, the highest score at round 150 takes it.

What you'll be doing

Every game comes down to four instincts: explore the map, expand your holdings, exploit what you own, and outfight your rivals.

The fleet

11 ship roles, each with a distinct job. Attack and defense decide combat; move is tiles per turn; range is how far a ship can strike; sight is its vision radius. Cost is in credits, and heavier hulls take more than one turn to build. A ship that survives enough kills becomes a veteran, and a veteran can be promoted to your flagship — lending a command aura that sharpens every friendly attacker beside it.

This is not a turn-1 shopping list. Only the 4 hulls with no gate below are buildable from the opening; the rest are unlocked by research, and the tag under a name is the tech that opens it. Which specialists you can field is a consequence of how you spent your research.

Moving. A ship makes one move a turn, and that move spends its whole allowance however far it goes; it may still strike or act where it lands. Striking ends a ship's movement. Rangers and interceptors have Dash: they can split their allowance across several moves, and move after striking. Rough ground is slow, never a wall: a ship with its full moves left can always step onto one adjacent sector, however dear (Deep Space aside), and that is its move for the turn — so a 2-move warship crosses an asteroid belt one sector a turn. Enemies block: no ship passes through a sector holding an enemy ship or colony (a neutral colony included); your own and your pact partner's pieces are passed, though no move ends on them. Fog is a wall: no ship enters or passes through ground you have never seen, so a move takes you up to the edge of what you know and the next ring opens from there. What you cannot see can still stop you short — a hidden enemy in your path, a hidden builder's toll — but it never cancels the order.

Ship	Atk	Def	HP	Move	Range	Sight	Cost	Build
Warship core capital — balanced attacker	6	2	10	2	1	1	5	2 turns
Founder settler — founds new colonies	1	2	10	2	1	1	3	1 turn
Ranger fast skirmisher / scout Needs Propulsion	5	1	8	3 Dash	1	2	3	1 turn
Breaker ranged striker (range 2) — no reply Needs Weapons	6	1	6	2	2	2	5	2 turns
Interceptor cheap fast screen Needs Propulsion	4	1	6	4 Dash	1	2	2	1 turn
Carrier tanky support capital, wide sight	3	4	14	2	1	2	6	2 turns
Dreadnought apex heavy hitter Needs Railguns	9	3	16	2	1	1	10	3 turns
Harvester durable economy / extraction Needs Nebula Harvesting	1	3	12	2	1	1	4	2 turns
Tender fleet support — heals adjacent ships Needs Logistics	1	3	14	3	1	1	4	2 turns
Builder field engineer — builds all structures	1	2	10	3	1	1	3	1 turn
Bombard siege artillery — attacks colonies only Needs Siege Doctrine	7	1	7	2	2	2	10	2 turns

Terrain of the Reach

Seven sector types. The number is the move cost to enter — higher is slower, and Deep Space is impassable to everyone: empty dark that fleets route around. A sector that costs more than a ship's whole allowance still lets it in from full moves, as its whole move. Some houses cross their favoured terrain more cheaply, heal upon it, or draw extra yield from it.

Technology

25 technologies across four lanes. Entry techs open a lane; tier-2 deepens it; cross-lane capstones reward a balanced empire. Costs are in research credits.

What builders build

Two different ships expand your empire, and it matters which one you produce. The founder only settles: it consumes itself to plant a new colony. It must settle before it moves, so it walks to a site one turn and founds the colony there the next. The builder raises every structure on owned tiles — improvements and extractors boost a tile's yield; turrets guard it; relays extend vision; supply depots push your logistics forward; and a Forward Shipyard lets you produce combat ships far from the capital, so war moves to wherever you can plant one. Hyperlanes are permanent fast routes, also laid by a builder, spent from its movement rather than from credits; a lane laid on unclaimed ground claims that tile for you, so a link can cross the gap between your territories. A colony wired into your capital's lane network grows faster — and once it depends on that link, losing it hurts: if a lane is captured or an enemy ship sits on it, the cut-off colony stops growing until the link is restored.

Both start unlocked, so your first production is a real three-way choice: fight, expand, or develop.

The frontier

Beyond the basics, a handful of systems reward players who read the whole board — command, the old gate-network, diplomacy, and how a colony chooses to grow.

Colonies & victory

Colonies are your engine and your anchor. They pay credits, project vision, grow in level over time, and must be defended — capturing an enemy colony swings a game, though a captured colony sits in unrest for 4 rounds, paying half and not growing, until you park a ship on it. Colony levels are the single biggest term in your score, ahead of technology, with raw territory a distant third.

The houses in depth

Each house is a distinct power with its own doctrine. Identity is more than a colour — it changes where you heal, how you move, and what you build toward.