Devlog #2: Fair by design

Space strategy games rarely die because their rules are too simple. They die when they quietly demand that you put real life second. We have watched friends quit games not because they stopped enjoying them, but because the games no longer fit around a job, a family or a normal night’s sleep.

Fair by design treats that as a design requirement, not a player weakness.

Quiet Hours: sleep is allowed

You choose one contiguous 7-hour window per day in your own time zone. During that window your planets cannot be attacked or spied on, and any attack that would arrive inside it is blocked at launch.

The price is symmetrical: during your own Quiet Hours you cannot launch attacks or espionage missions either. Transport and deployment are still allowed. You can change the window once a week, with a 24-hour delay, so it cannot be used as a tactical shield.

The minimum flight time against another player is 20 minutes. That is long enough for a push notification to give you a real chance to react. To keep a fleet safe before bed, there is the Patrol mission: your fleet circles your home system for 1 to 12 hours, cannot be attacked and uses about half the plasma of a normal flight.

Sometimes one night is not enough. Vacation mode lasts at least 48 hours and at most 14 days, with a cap of 21 days per season. While it is active, there is no production, nobody can attack you and you cannot act either.

Protecting the start

A late start should not be a punishment. For your first 5 days, or until you reach 20 percent of the season’s average score, newcomer protection keeps you safe from player attacks. The trade is fair: you cannot attack other players during that time, though NPC factions are fair game. If you attack a player, your protection ends immediately.

After that, permanent weak-player protection stops you from attacking anyone below 20 percent of your own score. The exceptions are deliberate: a bandit who has attacked someone in the last 48 hours, or a target that has been inactive for 7 days.

The bash limit is the other half of the promise. The same planet can be attacked at most 4 times in 24 hours, counting all attackers from one alliance together; between alliances at war, the limit is 6. Not being online at the right moment should not turn one bad evening into a lost season.

Catch-up for late arrivals

Seasons last 8 weeks, and people join when they join. A player who starts on day N receives a Dawn bonus of +min(200%, 8% × N) production for their first 7 days, and the starter package also scales with the season day.

The target is concrete: a player who joins in week 3 should reach the middle of the field within 10 days. That is a number we test in the simulator, not a gut feeling.

Money does not buy power

The public Fair Play Charter is short, and we mean every word of it. Money buys cosmetics and convenience. It does not buy combat strength, production, build or flight time, fleet size or information.

No premium currency, no loot boxes, no countdown offers, no pre-ticked purchases. Cancelling takes two clicks, in the same place where you started the subscription. The Command Bridge costs €4.99 per month or €39.99 per year and gives you skins, UI themes, a profile frame, extended statistics, a 90-day report archive instead of 14 days, and custom notification rules. What is not for sale: extra build queues, fleet slots, expeditions, speed-ups, resource packages, shields, longer Quiet Hours or earlier warnings. Not a single one.

We are not making the game gentler. Raids, espionage, debris fields, real-time fleets, alliances and leaderboards all stay. We want the competition to be decided by decisions, not by who can set an alarm for 3 a.m.

Where we are

The interface exists as a clickable mockup in English, German and Hungarian. The rules engine and the balance simulator come next. The simulator will check numbers like the 10-day catch-up target before anyone plays a real season.

We will not take pre-orders. Sunsfall launches when it is finished. If you want to hear when that is, follow our Facebook page. We only post when there is something real to tell.