Raising the Fleet

The full unit table, lift capacity, floating mines, mothball economics, and the one discipline that keeps a standing army from sinking you: upkeep is forever.

Units

Trainees don't defend until graduation

Every unit above — marines included — queues on a real-time training timer the instant you buy it, and stays completely invisible to every combat, strength, and defense calculation until that timer finishes. This exists specifically to close the "buy troops the instant after an attack to inflate your repel odds" exploit. A well-run flotilla plans its army composition tides ahead of when it actually needs it — not the moment before.

Manpower cap

At most 20% of your population may be in active service at once, scaled by your conscription policy (Govern): aggressive conscription raises the effective ceiling by ×1.35, a volunteer-only policy shrinks it to ×0.75. Specialists are crewed directly out of that same Marine pool at purchase — an assault craft consumes 3 marines, a helicopter 2, a War Corvette 8, a submarine 12, and a patrol boat 4. Buying the hull spends the crew immediately; you don't separately train the crew afterward.

Lift gates the ground assault

Landing craft carry 30 seats each. Your committed ground force for an assault is capped at whichever is smaller: the posture's usual committed share of your Marines, or your total lift capacity. Without landing craft, a ground assault simply cannot commit troops — no lift, no landing. At $100/seat against a $320 marine, that's a flat ~31% surcharge on any army you actually intend to land, at every scale (a 1,000-marine overrun needs 34 craft, $102,000 — almost exactly 32% of the $320,000 the marines themselves cost).

Mines

Floating mines are $2,500 each, stock-capped at 5,000, and lay on a real 24-hour timer once bought — no panic-sowing a minefield the day a war starts. Strike chance scales with how saturated your field is, up to 50% per unit at full saturation (1,500 mines is "fully saturated"). One mine hit sinks a whole 30-marine boatload at once — chunky losses, not smooth attrition. Decommissioning an unwanted field refunds 35% of what you paid.

Mothball & decommission economics

Parking a fleet you don't need right now isn't instant or free in either direction — both moves spread over roughly 10 real days:

• Mothballing (active → reserve) pays a 20% decommission fee, charged in slices as each day's batch crosses. Reserve equipment still pays 5% of its normal active upkeep — parking a bloated fleet cuts the bill and the overdraft happiness hit by 95%, never to zero.
• Recommissioning (reserve → active), standard speed, pays 20% of build cost up front, in full, then re-crews over roughly 10 days.
• Expedited recommissioning pays 4× the fee (80% of build cost, still all up front) for a much faster return — about 4 days instead of 10.

The $5M upkeep happiness knee

An oversized standing army doesn't bankrupt you directly — it costs you morale instead. Once your base military upkeep crosses $5,000,000/tide, a power-curved happiness penalty starts biting, capped at −20 happiness for an enormous army. There's no runaway cash-diseconomy model anymore; demobilizing or mothballing relieves the penalty directly.

Salted Crews veterancy

Units that survive battles get better at fighting. Each battle grants +0.1 combat weight, with a further +0.05 on a win, decaying 1% per tide when idle, hard-capped at +12%. This bonus folds into your ground combat strength only — it never touches morale, which stays a separate, already-existing channel.

The discipline lesson

Salvage Expeditions (Derelict Charts)

One wreck a day, shared by the whole ocean. It surfaces on the Radar the instant that day's tide boundary turns over, already tagged with a tier — rookie (roughly 55% of days), mid (roughly 35%), or the rare apex (roughly 10%) — and a hazard baseline you can read before committing anything. Salvaging it means detaching a real chunk of your own military for real time, so it's optional risk-for-reward, never required progression.

Send window & transit, by tier

Send it any time before the window closes — miss the close and it's already gone. Everyone who sent, whenever within the window they did, resolves at the exact same instant: window close plus the tier's transit delay. Sending in the first hour buys you nothing over sending in the last one.

Strength bands are absolute, not relative

A wreck is one shared object, so its eligibility band has to read the same for every commander looking at it — unlike a war band, it can't be recomputed per viewer. Eligibility is checked against your own strength as a multiple of a standing reference point (60,000): rookie wrecks accept anyone at or below 1.2× that reference, mid runs 0.6×–3.0×, and apex opens at 2.0× and up. The bands deliberately overlap so the tier lines aren't razor-exclusionary. Seeing OUT OF STRENGTH BAND on today's wreck is completely normal, not a sign anything's broken — a fresh wreck, possibly a different tier, is waiting at the next tide boundary. There's no way to "wait for a better one" beyond simply logging in the next day.

Outfitting presets & up-front fees

Three presets — Light Cutter, Escort Flotilla, Battle Fleet — commit a percentage of your CURRENT available Marines/assault craft/War Corvettes, never a fixed headcount, so the same offer scales honestly for a five-figure flotilla and a fresh one:

A floor only applies to a unit type you own at least one of — a flotilla with zero War Corvettes is offered zero in every preset, never a blocking demand for a fleet it doesn't have. Two fees land up front, before departure: an outfitting fee priced off the sized package's own committed strength (the same Marine/assault-craft/War-Corvette weights — 0.6 / 4.0 / 6.0 — used everywhere else in the game), and the standard Detached Duty dispatch fee, 10% of the committed units' build cost. Apex packages price 20% more per point of committed strength than rookie or mid — the one real per-tier premium left once the presets themselves went percentage-based.

No recall, and the detachment is gone while it's away

Only one expedition can be outstanding at a time, and there's no recalling it once it ships — the fee is non-refundable and the commitment is final the moment you click Send. The sent cohort is physically pulled out of your standing military for the round trip: it can't defend home while it's away, same as any other Detached Duty posting.

Contested resolution

At the resolve instant, you (if you sent) and every eligible AI rival that independently rolled a send for that specific wreck all contest it together in a single pass — no multi-round melee. The wreck's own automated guardian defenses (the table above) are in every contest too, so even a wreck nobody else shows up for still fights back. Each party's share of the contest is its committed strength raised to a softening exponent over the total (strength ~1.2, so a bigger fleet doesn't flatly dominate the split), and that share drives two things at once: how much of the loot pool a surviving party gets, and how hard everyone bleeds. Whoever holds the single biggest share among the real senders takes the lead bonus — a 1.4× weight on the loot split — while every other surviving sender still gets a cut, with a guaranteed minimum per stat so nobody who made it home walks away with literally nothing.

Casualties & captures

The whole sent force is at risk, not just a committed slice — an expedition is already fully detached. Each party's loss fraction is the tier's base hazard (15% / 22% / 32%) times one minus its own contest share, jittered ±25%; the bigger your share of the fight, the lighter you bleed. Of a non-leading party's own Marine losses, 30% are taken prisoner rather than killed outright, and those prisoners funnel entirely to the single top-share party (never split pairwise among everyone). The leading party's own Marine losses are always fully killed — there's no third party positioned to capture from the winner.

Loot & artifacts

Each wreck draws one shared loot pool (cash, platform, tech, rescued crew) from a flat, tier-keyed range, unrelated to any party's own economy — a wreck's payout reflects the risk taken, not who's richest. Only parties with at least one surviving unit share in it, split by contest share with the leader's bonus weighting and the scrap-floor minimum described above. The single top-share party also rolls once, independent of the loot pool, for an archaeological artifact — win or lose survivors, a leading party that got wiped out still salvaged something on the way down. The tier mostly changes what you're rolling for rather than whether you get anything: rookie wrecks roll common or uncommon pieces only, mid adds a real chance at rare, and apex never turns up common at all — it splits its roll across uncommon, rare, and (half the time) legendary. Every artifact you've ever recovered lives in your Lore Archive; the Museum of the Drift wonder puts the whole collection on display and scales its income bonus with how many unique pieces you've found.