Bots

A bot is an opponent the game itself plays — in the sense Civilization or Warcraft mean it. A bot holds colonies, mines, builds and attacks under exactly the same rules you do: the same buildings, the same ships, the same flight times. What it does not share is your immortality. A bot is killable and a player never is — bot colonies can be worn down and destroyed, and destroying one pays.

Tiers

Every bot has a tier — its strength class, pinning how tough it spawns and how it is provisioned:

Tier	What to expect
easy	The universe's small game. Thin walls, thin stocks — early raid targets.
medium	A working economy behind real defence. Worth scouting before the raid.
hard	Dug in and provisioned. Bring a fleet, not a probe escort.
BOSS	The apex. BOSS bots seat at a planet's poles — the top and bottom of the world are where the universe keeps its monsters.

On the Galaxy station, bot colonies are marked by tier, so the map reads as a menu: easy prey near your weight, BOSS nests to grow toward.

Temperament

Bots differ in how they play, never in what rules they play under. Each carries a persona — how greedy, how vengeful, how cautious — and holds a stance toward you personally: cordial, neutral, or a grudge. Stance moves with what you do to a bot and decays with time, and it is what decides whom a bot attacks. Raid one and expect it to remember for a while.

Colony hull

What makes a bot colony destructible is its colony hull. Your attacks wear it down; between attacks it regenerates slowly, colony by colony; at zero the colony vanishes from the map for good. How much hull a colony has, how fast it heals and what its destruction pays all scale with the bot's tier, and are the universe's configuration rather than fixed figures — a BOSS is a campaign, not an afternoon.

Remaining hull is not public. It is shown only to a player who has already attacked that colony — the wound is your intelligence, earned by drawing blood. Regeneration is why you press an advantage: walk away from a half-broken colony and the bot heals behind you.

A player colony carries no hull at all. Players are never destructible; losing every ship and emplacement is a bad week, not an ending.

The reward

A bot colony destroyed by players pays its killers Dark Matter — the account currency the Merchant trades against — split by the damage each dealt. Team up on a hard target and the pay follows the hurt, not the killing blow; the account that ground the hull down through a dozen raids is paid for them, not the one that swooped on the last sliver.

Moon garrisons

Coming — this is the settled design, not yet in play. Ordinary bots never seat on moons. The only bots a moon will carry are its garrison: dormant BOSS bots seeded with the universe, inert — no raids, no moves — until a player settles that moon, then hostile to the settler until crushed. The intended play is to crush the garrison first; settling early is allowed and punished, never refused. A garrisoned moon is the game's hardest real estate, priced by the standing speed advantage every fleet sailing from a moon enjoys — see The universe.