Work in progress Everything below is in active development and does not represent the final product. Screens, numbers, balance and systems shown here are subject to change before and after the patch ships.
Nexus Wars is an MMO
It is played online, and all of it is going online — PvE and PvP alike. Campaign runs, bounty hunts, fleet and ground battles and the entire strategic layer are built to run against live, shared, persistent state on our servers rather than an offline save. When you take a sector or lose a bounty, it happened in a world other people are standing in.
We raised the price of Nexus Wars this week, before the next patch is out. That is the wrong order to do it in unless we explain ourselves, so here is the explanation.
Until now, Nexus Wars has effectively been the memory games. That was the build: the Memory Field, memory selection, knowledge traces, the RAM economy around them. It was a small, strange, good thing, and it was priced like one.
The next patch is not an update to the memory games. It is the rest of the game arriving at once — a first-person command bridge, four separate real-time combat modes, a roguelike campaign act, a strategic galaxy layer, a live economy with nine great powers in it, and a bounty system where the target can be another player who is online right now and fights back in real time.
The new price is the price of that build. The increase is live now so that nobody buys at the old price on the assumption that the old build is what they are getting.
If you already own Nexus Wars, you pay nothing more. All of this is a patch, not a DLC, not an expansion, not a season pass. It lands in your existing copy.
What is actually in the patch in brief
A command bridge, not a menu
The game now opens onto the bridge of your flagship. Crew at their stations, a live holo table in the middle of the room, and the fleet moving outside the viewport. Every strategic surface hangs off it: the galaxy, your sector, the system you are standing in, the arena, comms, mail, standing policies, the bounty board, and NexusNet.
The galactic radio runs behind all of it.
Disembark — fly the warship yourself
A real-time survivor mode built on a deterministic 60-step-per-second simulation. You pick one of three hero frames and the mission actually changes mechanics under you:
Talon Vanguard — teleport-strike warship. The Driveblade crosses the battlespace in one cut and carves through capital hulls.
Casaba Stalker — precision archer battlecruiser. No turret hardpoints at all: one fixed spinal Casaba Howitzer, 7,000+ alpha, three selectable 250-round charge magazines, 200 km fire control.
Warpcaster Arcanum — flux and spell control. Charge cells instead of mana, shaped into homing lances, nova fields, wards, and time control.
Around that: eight canonical turret sockets and a real armory, allied support wings flying the same stats as the fleet roster, a 20-level command doctrine with three classes that stack, a 45-second warp charge you spend on your own course marker, an afterburner that carves your vector instead of just adding speed, RWR-style threat cards on an 80 km sensor ring, homing missile swarms that eject from the hull flanks and then chase, a rival warship that hunts you between waves and locks blades with you, and a kill-cam slowdown that holds while the debris drifts past.
Fleet Battle and Battle Mech
Fleet-scale combat over the canonical 41-hull space roster. Eight officers, each with a doctrine, a starting fleet, a permanent perk and a once-per-battle ability — line warfare, swarm attrition, alpha strike, tech, harassment, saturation. Match layouts from 1v1 up to free-for-all, two enemy doctrines, limited reserves or arcade rebuilds, and an optional Siege Protocol that breaks enemy fronts into your flanks on a timer.
Ground warfare runs the same way across five theaters — from an 18 km capital ship deck to a 370 × 360 km continental front — with a seeded topology generator, so terrain, towers, rivers and cover are reproducible from a map seed and actually affect combat.
Both have practice, arena and multiplayer entries, and both ship a WebGPU edition alongside the standard renderer.
The strategic layer
The year is 7000 AD. Nine great powers, nine sectors, 243 catalogued systems, hyperlanes with chokepoints and wormholes, fronts, relics and wonders.
The Galactic Explorer sits under it: fog of war, per-sector survey and scan progress, contested control, faction claims, trade lanes, anomalies, and a warfare / industry / research / mystery read on every sector. Command and Strategic views of the same data, so you can plan and then go fly the plan.
SECTOR — the Galactic Explorer. A 200 light-year survey radius holding 243 systems, most of them still undiscovered, with fog of war that lifts only where you have actually scanned. Every sector carries a live warfare / industry / research / mystery reading and a contested-or-secured status you can change: engage the hostiles holding it and the badge flips. Faction claims, trade lanes, anomalies, quests and colonies render on the same chart, and an ops clock keeps running whether you are watching or not.
SYSTEM — drop into a single star and the map goes orbital. Habitable zone, frost line and radiation belt drawn to scale in AU. Sector gates, contested belts, and the line where sector authority ends and the Frontier begins. Every fleet and object in the system is listed by real distance and approach vector, out to the 10,000 AU FTL limit.
Bounty hunts — and live PvP
This is the system we are most nervous about and most proud of.
Anyone can file a bounty on a named character. Filings escrow real RAM, they pool against the same target, and every attempt writes an auditable receipt — provider cost, RAM equivalent, escrow before and after, treasury balance, transaction ID.
Then the important part. When you accept a hunt, the server checks whether your target is actually online:
Target is live in open space — you fight them. A real CyberSnap duel against another player, right now.
Target is offline — the server freezes both character snapshots and resolves it deterministically over at most twenty rounds.
Both paths are server-owned and replayable. Attempts that fail pay only metered compute, so nobody can drain a large open bounty by throwing bodies at it, and no character on the target's account can ever hunt or collect their own case.
Politics, money, and nine powers that cannot survive alone
Nine great powers hold this galaxy: the Terran Federation, the Guild, the Cho'Zen Empire, Trinity Synthetics, the Executive Order, Saradook, the Reapers, the Vodah and the Ultra Consortium. Eight hostile factions operate against all of them. None of it is set dressing — there is a screen for it, and it is one of the biggest things in this patch.
POLITICS — the Civic Command Lattice. Every power has its own charter, its own authority, and its own answer to where your leverage as a player comes from. Each one carries a live resolution with a countdown on it: the Federation is currently deciding whether independent synthetic minds enter as equal citizens, licensed auxiliaries, or restricted foreign intelligences. Three options, real vote shares moving between them, internal blocs pulling in different directions, and a policy ledger of standing law underneath — enacted, contested, emergency. You pledge to an option and the pledge is server-owned; it follows your commander into what you do next.
We will be straight about how far this goes today: the forecasts each option shows you — research exchange, counter-intel load, how a rival power's opinion of you shifts — are modeled outcomes. The authoritative effect right now is the pledge modifier on your commander's actions. The rest goes live as the systems that consume it ship, and the screen tells you which is which rather than pretending.
ECONOMY — every faction runs an actual balance sheet, not a reputation bar. Revenue comes in from territorial levies, trade and transit, licenses and charters, and strategic holdings. It goes out against civil administration, infrastructure, security obligations and science endowments. There is a strategic treasury with a runway measured in days of covered commitments, and an active policy lever that moves income and outflow in opposite directions. Change the doctrine and the whole sheet moves.
Three currencies sit under all of it, and they are a value hierarchy rather than an exchange rate — you cannot simply convert your way up. Inter Stellar Credits are the everyday currency of trade, materials and salvage. Solari are scarce, Guild-issued, and what warships, mechs and strategic construction actually cost. Resonant Access Memory sits at the top as the account-level resource, and it is the only rail the bounty system will touch.
INTERDEPENDENCE — this is the part that makes the other two matter. Every power holds one thing nobody else can make, needs two or three inputs it cannot produce, and taxes one service everyone has to use. The Guild issues Solari and runs the power cores, so every fleet in the galaxy is built through them. Cho'Zen moves vassal-tribute metals. Trinity sells shields, compute, and tolls on the gates in its space. The Vodah hold phase technology and the long-haul Stargate franchise. Ultra does the megastructure engineering and the cloning. Saradook sells protection, and the clans that lose their contracts turn corsair. The Reapers run salvage and the black market — and both the Executive Order and Saradook have hard dependencies on the Reapers existing. The Executive Order holds the law and the RAM treasury.
Nobody is self-sufficient. That is the design: an economy where a vote in one senate raises the price of a hull three factions away, and where cutting off a supplier is a legitimate act of war.
[h1]What comes after[/h1]
We are going to improve cohesion of the game system between 9 playable factions, 9 NPC faction related to the 9 factions, and 4 more NPC factions as part of the galactic cannon
Actually there is just too much to list, but each faction has to have around 40 Warships, 40 mechs, stations, and other system related binding
[[url="https://url=https://discord.gg/NCpA7g7qpT"]url=https://discord.gg/NCpA7g7qpT[/url]]Join the Discord[/url]
Target for Release End of the Year 2026 or Early 2027 of Q1