Straight answers

No. Astral Sovereignty is in development and not yet open to players. There is no public launch date, and none is going to be invented here. The systems described on this site are built and running. What has not happened is opening the doors. Testing today is done by the game's own NPC empires, which play by exactly the same rules a person would. Follow for launch.

It runs on ticks. You give orders, they sit as intent until the next tick, and at the scheduled tick every empire's orders resolve together, under the same rules, in the same moment. Ticks run on a fixed schedule, and every galaxy has its own tick rate, so there is no single number to quote. Nothing here is decided by reflexes. It rewards planning, logistics and knowing the map.

One hop at a time, and each step is its own tick. Surveying a warp node tells you which node it pairs with on the far side and the name of the system that node is in. It does not show you what is in that system. To see that you warp through and scan the system from inside. The node you arrive at is not a route home until you survey it from that side as well. So reaching a new system and keeping a way back is survey, warp, scan, survey again: four ticks of deliberate work, and a real decision about how far from home you are willing to be.

No. That gap between deciding and resolving is the game. It is what makes a bad decision a real one, and it is what means a player in a different timezone is not at a disadvantage. A tick-based game should not punish you for sleeping, so the automation is built in. Hand a colony a build priority and its colony manager keeps developing it without you. Plan orders ahead in a queue, then reorder or edit them while the tick is still open. Convoys, patrols and standing routes re-issue themselves each tick, including routing across multiple warp jumps.

Caretaker takes over. Your empire is looked after and kept developing rather than left to rot, and it is handed straight back the moment you return. Coming back to a ruin because life happened is not the game anyone wants to play.

With your email. You enter it, we send you a short code, and that is the whole flow. Nothing to choose, nothing to forget, nothing to reset, and nothing for the game to store on your behalf.

Your empire is created on the next tick, not the moment you ask. Even joining happens on the tick. You start with a single homeworld and a fog-of-war map, and everything after that you earn: scan systems, survey warp nodes, push back the fog and find what is out there.

Yes. Your account is global; your empire is not. One account plays many galaxies, and each galaxy gets its own empire, its own colonies and its own fleets. They never mix. Nothing carries between galaxies: no shared wealth, no shared fleet, no account-wide power. A new galaxy is a genuinely fresh start.

Yes, and yes. Fleets fight when hostile forces meet. You set each fleet's stance and your empire's standing toward others, order a fleet to hold fire or attempt to disengage, and read the battle report afterwards. Every battle is resolved by the game itself, under identical rules for everyone, so there is nothing to out-click. Colonies are a separate problem. Winning the space above a colony does not take it.

On the ground. You train garrisons of infantry, armour and artillery, carry them on troop transports, and land them. An invasion resolves over two ticks: you establish a beachhead, and the fight resolves after. The defender gets a tick to react. That makes invading a commitment rather than a click, and a well-garrisoned colony genuinely expensive to take.

Empires. Not scenery, not obstacles. They hold colonies, expand, build, run supply routes, defend themselves and fight each other, using exactly the same orders and rules a player uses. They get no special privileges: an NPC colony obeys the same climate and the same costs as yours. They have different characters, some settle, some explore, some raid, some just drift, and they can form factions and go to war with each other. A new player arrives into a galaxy with history, not an empty board.

Who you are. Every planet and moon is described across six environmental axes: temperature, pressure, atmosphere, gravity, radiation, toxicity. Every species has its own comfort range on each, set by the homeworld it evolved on. So habitability is relative. There is no universal good planet, and two players can look at the same world and reasonably disagree about whether it is worth having. Settle somewhere hostile and your colonists start dying, unless you build the specific structure that answers that specific problem. One structure fixes one axis and nothing else, so a world that is wrong in three ways needs three answers. A harsh world is a real option, just an expensive one.

Yes. Beyond the stock hulls, you design your own ships from hulls and modules, validate the design, and build it in your shipyards.

The reference client is a mobile-oriented app. Discord is a working way to play: link your account, then check galaxies, join one, submit and cancel orders, review what is pending, and get your turn sheet, all from Discord. Reports can also be delivered as email, in a large-print format with a complete plain-text version, which is a supported way to play rather than an afterthought. Browser play is planned and proven feasible, but not built. There is nothing to download yet.