published on February 09, 2026 in devlog
The maintenance release is out, and Michi started working on a new feature: Faction Influence
Michi (molp)
This week saw the release of the recent maintenance update. It went well for the most part, but there was an issue that was promptly pointed out to me that required a hotfix. For a brief time it was possible to send STL-only ships to other systems, even though they don't have the engines for it. I tried to fix it as quickly as possible, as I feared that this bug could potentially strand ships in neighboring systems and create a pile of support work for me. Luckily, I just received one report so far of a ship that was sent out-of-system by accident.
So, what's next? I will now focus on a new feature called Faction Influence. Fabian has written (and rewritten as you'll see in a bit) a game design document for this. In a nutshell: It is about faction-wide politics and allowing factions to spread their influence to more systems than just the existing faction systems.
The work on this started sometime last year, and we presented the idea first to our supporters. Here is a forum topic from September 2025 that explains the concept in detail. It is available for everybody now. We received lots of feedback on the draft and are very happy about that. It showed that the majority of the community dislikes the strong competitive character of it. Fabian took all the feedback and came up with another draft, which you can find here. The main change is that the competitive character has toned down quite a bit. It is still possible to change a systems faction affinity, but there will be no direct, hostile take-overs.
Balancing a feature of this size can be hard to get right on the first try, which is why we are trying a different approach this time. We'll try to release parts of the feature gradually, so we can collect feedback and data to help us guide design and balancing decisions. For example: Faction motions will require money and influence. Influence will be measured in influence points and these will be generated by players of the respective factions. Right now, workforce satisfaction, faction contracts and participation in planetary governments will create these faction influence points (FIPs). I think it would be a good start to implement the generation and collection of FIPs and release it to get an idea how many FIPs will actually be generated. From there we can work on the balancing and at the same time implement other parts of the feature.
As always, we'd love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!