Land the lander. Grow the colony. Hold the world.
Protocol 105 was about pulling ore out of a rock. COLONY OPS is about keeping people alive on it. This mode was developed even before the game was released by EA, and we are finally presenting it.
New: COLONY OPS
Colonies with real ground under them - every planet is generated: terrain, rivers, lakes, tides, named seas. Where you land decides what you get.
Colony tiers - grow an outpost into a colony, a province, and finally a single capital that lifts the whole planet's tax.
Day, seasons and weather - a 25-minute year, hemispheres in opposite seasons, a snow line that crawls toward the equator and back. Dust fronts, ion storms, solar flares, bio blooms and rich seams drift across your sectors.
Live precipitation - rain and snow form in random cells, drift with the wind, and die. On a temperate world it can rain at the equator while it snows at the pole.
Power grid - reactors, wind, solar, tidal and rad-catcher stations. Every colony now carries an emergency reserve, so a dust storm sags the grid instead of killing it outright.
Armies - infantry, vehicles, aircraft and navy, each from its own building. Ferry troops across straits, besiege settlements, take ground.
Factions and diplomacy — freeholds, raiders and corporate rivals live their own lives, raid each other, and remember what you did.
Supply lines - depots, convoys, roads, and interplanetary lanes between orbital ports.
The nuclear branch - arsenals, warheads, carriers and a climate that remembers the strike. Thirty warheads and there is no world left to colonise.
New: Four mining worlds in the Maori system
AKI V50, LX-571, NIZIRU, VS-13951 - four new bodies, each with its own cave, its own hazards and its own ore.
Thirteen new tradable minerals feeding the SAC Exchange.
Ice and airless worlds behave differently - on a frozen world the seas never open, so there is no dock and no fleet. Ever.
New: Arena prestige
The prestige ladder — kill the Silt Tripod boss and reset into a harder run. Enemies hit harder, you hit harder, and every kill pays more.
Scaling that keeps going — health, damage, XP cost, SPX and credits all climb with each prestige.
New: 8 achievements
First colony, colonies on two worlds, ten colonies, your first look at the galaxy map, your first warhead, and the first, second and tenth prestige.
Improved
Weather now bites — blizzards slow ground columns, and on frozen worlds a whiteout halves their speed and closes the airfields entirely: aircraft fly home and wait it out.
Iron finally matters — vehicle plants, docks, airfields and the orbital port are built from it.
New colony buildings — Foundry (iron into alloy), Grid Buffer (power reserve), Granary (separate food storage), Storm Mast (shields a sector from weather).
Balance
Colony income rebalanced — a developed colony no longer prints money on late-game planets. Distant worlds are still better than near ones, just not by orders of magnitude.
Orbital port — was mandatory on the starter planet and pointless on the last one; now it scales properly, costs iron and titanium, and pays SAC a 10% cut of its berth revenue.
Titanium is no longer everywhere — some worlds have none, so it has to be shipped in.
Power gates raised — high-tier buildings now need a real grid, not a second reactor.
Fixes
Translation improvements and bug fixes.
Minor UI, save and performance improvements.