Significant change to post combat

Combat Outcomes

• Combat no longer ends in one generic way. Enemy arcships now resolve into four distinct outcomes: Withdrawal, Forced Retreat, Boarding Capture, and Total Destruction.

• Withdrawal is now the default outcome in most fights, with retreat cooldowns, reputation impact, and possible revenge behaviour instead of constant repeat harassment.

• Forced retreat is now a major strategic win: crippled ships fall back multiple map nodes, lose strength/resources, and stay out of the fight for much longer.

• Boarding capture now has real outcomes:

  • Capture Ship

  • Loot and Abandon

  • Install Puppet Leadership

• Captured ships no longer always disappear. They can persist as allied clients or loyal puppets depending on your choice.

• Total destruction is now much rarer and gated behind catastrophic failure conditions, including reactor collapse, crew survival failure, and special disaster triggers.

• Pirate arcships now use special defeat outcomes, including long retreat cooldowns and one-shot salvage-field aftermath nodes when destroyed.

• Destroyed arcships now create meaningful aftermath:

  • survivor rescue opportunities

  • refugee/pirate offshoot outcomes

  • salvage sites

  • permanent arcship graveyards

• Arcship graveyards are now persistent map features with follow-up content like salvage, anomalies, pirate activity, memorial events, and continuum instability.

• Arcship destruction now causes broader sector shock:

  • doctrine-based reaction events

  • wider reputation fallout

  • trade disruption that can propagate across the sector

• The sim now protects sector population better:

  • minimum living arcship count is enforced

  • new arrivals appear with narrative justifications instead of silent replacements

• Defeated AI arcships now remember losses and can react by militarising, seeking alliances, collapsing internally, fragmenting, or pursuing revenge.

• Destruction pacing is now capped so campaigns do not spiral into wiping out the whole sector.

• Arcships now use a fuller combat model including HullIntegrity, ShieldIntegrity, ReactorIntegrity, CrewMorale, and CombatStrength.

Other Follow-on Fixes

• Old saves are now backward-compatible with the newer save version chain.

• The research panel now opens on Engineering instead of the removed All tab.

• Fuel tanks now work as real storage sources: pawns can haul fuel out of tanks to reactors and other fuel-using devices.

• The inspector no longer double-reports buffered tank fuel as loose cell stacks.

• Recently Evacuated, Former Boarder, and Shipborn Generation (from pregnancy) crew now use normal trait generation instead of fixed trait pairs.

• Special backgrounds still keep their identity:

  • Recently Evacuated: +1 Social, -1 Engineering

  • Former Boarder: +1 Engineering, -1 Social

• Older saves with legacy forced traits on those special-background crew are repaired automatically on load by rerolling them into standard traits.