Set up conquest for your game

This page is for people who make or maintain a game. It covers the names, factions and maps a game can supply so that Galactic conquest reads as that game's own setting. Players do not need any of it.

Ways to customise conquest

If you author or maintain a game, there are five ways to make conquest feel like yours rather than generic space — from lightest to most involved:

• Names and factions — supply star/faction name pools and lore factions so a generated galaxy reads as your setting. Set them on your branding-catalog entry's conquest field to reach every user with no app release, or in a distribution profile's conquest for a copy you package. See Names and factions for the schema and merge order.
• AI rankings — rank your AIs hardest to easiest, name the standard one, and say which are mini-games or belong on neutral worlds. A node's difficulty then picks the opponent: a frontier world is a gentler fight than an enemy capital. Set them on your branding-catalog entry's ai field, or in a distribution profile.
• Map style — a terrestrial game where stars make no sense can use the Theatre, Cities or Territories style in place of the starfield. See Map styles.
• Ship a hand-made galaxy — export a specific galaxy and bundle it so players get a curated campaign out of the box, alongside anything they generate. See Bundling a galaxy.
• Ship a hand-made map of land — paint provinces in an image editor and describe them in a text file. A distribution can bundle the folder, a player can import it as a zip, and a game archive can carry it. See the hand-made maps guide.
• Faction AI sides / colours — each lore faction's side and color control which in-game side its AI plays and how it's drawn on the map (see the schema in Names and factions).

The strategic model itself is theme-agnostic (it speaks of systems and lanes), so all of the above except the land map styles is presentation layered on identical rules.

Names and factions

The strategic model is theme-agnostic — it speaks of systems and lanes, and "galaxy / star / faction" is presentation. Star names, faction names, and whole lore factions can be supplied so a generated galaxy reads as your game rather than generic space. Two sources, one schema:

1. the game's branding catalog entry provides per-game defaults (a conquest field on the entry — reaches every user, no app release), and
2. a distribution profile's conquest field overrides those on top (for a copy you packaged).

With neither, built-in pools apply (real star names, then pronounceable invented ones; procedurally-named factions).

The schema (every field optional):

{
  "starNames":    ["Uros", "Ophvor", "..."],   // full system names, used first
  "starPrefixes": ["Al", "Bel", "Cyg"],         // syllables for synthesized names
  "starSuffixes": ["ara", "ion", "eth"],        // (used once starNames run out)
  "placeNames":    ["Harrowgate", "..."],       // the same three, for Cities and Territories
  "placePrefixes": ["Iron", "North"],           // (see "Land maps" below)
  "placeSuffixes": ["coast", "march"],
  "factionNames": ["Sovereign Syndicate"],      // full names, if no `factions`
  "factions": [
    {
      "name": "Sovereign Syndicate",
      "color": "#00c853",   // #rrggbb; omitted uses the built-in palette slot
      "side": "Core",       // in-game side its AI plays
      "aggression": 0.4     // 0..1 chance per turn of opening an incursion
    }
  ]
}

How they're used when a galaxy is generated:

• System names are drawn uniquely from starNames first (real star names by default), then synthesized from starPrefixes + starSuffixes.
• Land maps (the Cities and Territories styles) name their locations from placeNames, then from placePrefixes + placeSuffixes. Each place field falls back to the matching star field, so a game that supplies only star names gets them on every style, as before. A game that supplies neither gets built-in place names composed from two lists, and each planet has its own pair. They are drawn from a separate random stream so the names never change where anything is placed. Galaxy and Theatre maps keep using the star fields.
• Factions come from factions presets, assigned in order with the player first. A preset wins for every field it sets; anything it omits falls back (colour to the palette, name to factionNames or a synthesized name). With no presets, factionNames (then synthesized names) supply the names and the built-in palette the colours.

Merge order per field is profile > catalog > built-in; an empty array is treated as absent, so an override never blanks a pool.

The bundled catalog ships this for the Total Annihilation lineage — Balanced Annihilation, XTA, and Basically OTA — giving each a flat pool of world names drawn from the TA campaigns and expansions (the original planets Empyrrean, Core Prime, Thalassean, Barathrum, Rougpelt, …; Core Contingency worlds Hydross, Lusch, Temblor, Gelidus; Battle Tactics locales Destral II, Yrdac, Neovestral II, …; moons such as Dump, Novaspin IV and Nayrb; a few community easter-egg names; and the TA: Kingdoms kingdoms Aramon, Veruna, Taros, Zhon and Creon) plus the two Arm / Core lore factions. Names are drawn from one shared pool regardless of who holds the system (ownership shifts in play), so it reads as a TA galaxy rather than mapping planets to a side. Each faction's side uses that game's own casing (ARM/CORE for BA and BOTA, Arm/Core for XTA) so its AI launches on the right faction; colours are left to the palette (player blue, enemy red).

Bundle a galaxy

A conquest galaxy is a single JSON document. Export one from the Conquest list to share it, or drop the exported file into a distribution's .coilbox/galaxies/ folder to ship it — it appears in Conquest as a Bundled galaxy, ready to play, alongside anything the player generates. Run state is stored separately, so bundled (read-only) galaxies still track progress. See Distribution profiles and Portable mode for how the .coilbox folder works.