BULLION WAR — Rulebook

The goal

You run a precious-metals operation: stake mining claims, dig ore, refine it into bullion, mint it into finished goods, and sell into a live market — while defending what you've built. At the end of each 30-day round, the player with the highest Dominance Score wins.

Dominance is not the same as cash or net worth. It rewards real operations — metal you've refined and hold, bullion you've locked in a vault, and the buildings you own — and it docks you for debt. A lucky cash hoarder doesn't win; a productive operator does. (Full formula under Dominance.)

The core loop

Prospect → Mine → Refine → Sell, then reinvest into crew and buildings to go faster. Mint and the rest unlock as you climb.

1. Prospect — spend turns surveying to stake mining claims (your ore deposits).
2. Mine — work your claims to pull ore (tons) out of the ground.
3. Refine — turn ore into refined metal (bullion) at a chosen purity.
4. Mint — (once unlocked) press bullion into finished goods for a premium.
5. Sell — sell refined metal or goods on the Market at the live spot price.
6. Reinvest — recruit crew, buy supplies, level buildings, and bank metal to raise Dominance.
7. Defend — vault your bullion, stay compliant, and keep enough Security to survive raids.

Every step costs turns. You choose how many turns to spend per action — bigger batches do more but burn more supplies.

The round

A round runs for 30 days from the moment it opens (America/Chicago clock). When the 30 days are up, the game pauses in an intermission: human competitors are ranked by Dominance, the Hall of Fame is written, and your standings are frozen exactly as they ended so you can review the month. During the pause you can still log in, browse everything, and message The House — but no production, trading or attacks. The House reviews the results and player feedback, retunes the game, and then opens the next 30-day round with humans reset to the starter pack and bots reset to their PvP stock.

Tie-breaking is deterministic and disclosed: ranks are decided by Dominance (highest first), then net worth (highest first), then the oldest account — so a podium is never ambiguous. Any real-money prize is recorded as pending review at settlement (frozen at the amount set when the round opened) and is never final until The House verifies eligibility, approves, and records payment.

Every human competitor starts from the same pack. Bots are non-competing PvP targets with separate, receipted standing stock.

Turns — your action budget

Turns are the currency of doing. Every produce/compete action spends turns. You can't buy your way past the cap — turns are granted by playing, up to a per-round ceiling.

Natural regen runs whether you're logged in or not, until your wallet reaches the 10,000-Turn passive bank. Blocked intervals are consumed, not saved as a backlog; spend below the bank and future regen resumes. Nothing already in your wallet is confiscated. Join late and you're handed a catch-up grant on entry — but it's bounded at 2 days of passive regen, never the whole stretch you missed, and never the missed login/streak/raffle bonuses. Those active rewards must be earned by showing up; they are never back-paid and may raise your wallet above the passive bank. Starting early still matters; showing up daily matters more.

The action forms warn you before a single batch would spend more than 20% of your current turns — and a big batch makes the button visibly flip to “Confirm Large …”, so you must click again on purpose. You don't dump your whole budget by accident.

Every grant and spend is recorded: the Turn Log (linked from the Turns panel on Operation) lists each line as “x turns spent on y action”, with per-action totals for the round — so you can always verify where your budget went.

Strategic Identity & Focus

On the Strategy Board you declare what kind of operator you are. Your Identity is a round-long commitment — pick one of 4 and it's set until the next round. Your 2 Focus slots are the part that flexes: pair two of the six disciplines (Mine, Refine, Mint, Trade, Defend, Operate), each carrying its own goals and edge.

• These are real modifiers, not flavor — an identity nudges supply burns, protection prices, operation costs and market allowances a few percent each way. The exact numbers show on the Strategy Board itself.
• Focus changes are rationed: 1 free change per week; after that a switch costs $2,000,000 + 250 turns. Commit like you mean it.
• None of it touches Dominance directly — identity shapes how efficiently you operate, never your score.

The production chain

This is the spine of the game. Each step feeds the next; bottlenecks here are what you manage all round.

1 · Prospect → Claims

Spend turns surveying to stake claims. You stake about 4 claims per 100 turns (more prospectors help, with diminishing returns), up to 5 per survey. Surveying burns 2 fuel/turn.

• Claim cap: you can hold 25 active claims, +3 per Mine-Site level.
• Regions & metals: each claim is in a region (Nevada, Ontario, Alaska, South Africa, Comstock, Klondike) with its own ore mix, grade and political risk. All five metals are reachable from the start.
• Depletion is automatic: when a claim is mined to zero it auto-retires and frees its slot — the 25-slot cap is renewable, not a dead end. "Clear depleted" tidies the retired list in one click.
• Sell or release an active claim: Release (10 turns) frees a slot for nothing; Sell (10 turns) pays 25% of the in-ground value of the metal still in it (floor $500). A mined-out claim sells for about the floor.

2 · Mine → Ore

Work your claims to pull ore. Each miner produces about 0.5 tons/turn (scaled by claim grade and your Mine-Site capacity). Mining burns 0.2 fuel and 0.02 spare parts per miner per turn, on top of crew upkeep. Every ton mined draws down that claim's reserves.

3 · Refine → Bullion

Refine ore into refined metal at a chosen purity. Higher purity is worth more per ounce but yields fewer ounces. Each purity tier needs a minimum number of refiners to unlock:

• Recovery (how much metal you actually pull from ore) starts at 85% and climbs toward 99.9% with Researchers (hired at the Store), Refinery level, and Recovery research. Refiners set your throughput and purity tiers — they don't move recovery.
• Throughput: your refiners set the pace, and the Refinery building is the efficient line — about 40 tons per 100 turns at level 0, +60 per level. Crew above it still contributes on a 20%-scaled concave overflow curve, while every refiner continues to burn 0.3 reagents per turn. Level the building to turn costly overflow into efficient capacity.

4 · Mint → Goods (unlocks at 450,000 Dominance)

A Mint building presses refined metal into finished goods that sell at a premium and earn a small Dominance prestige bump. Each Mint level adds 600 oz of per-batch capacity (base 400 oz) and shaves 8 bps off the per-piece metal loss. A strike never costs more than 5 turns — the Mint's capacity, your cash and your refined metal are what bound a batch, though one oversized submit can chain up to 8 strikes back-to-back (up to 40 turns — the form shows the total before you commit).

Mint labor is value-aligned. The Cash charge is each good's configured share of the consumed input metal's current purity-adjusted spot value, rounded up to whole Cash with a $1 minimum per strike. Cheap copper therefore carries cheap labor and expensive gold carries proportionally larger labor; the same dollars-per-ounce trap cannot recur.

Every finished-good path has a positive sell premium under the current rules, including Industrial at 2%.

Goods are scored by the metal they contain (pieces × oz/piece), not by piece count — minting is a value-add on metal you already produced, not a shortcut to the top.

5 · Sell → Cash

Sell refined metal or goods on the Market at the live spot price. Purity discounts the price (90% purity ≈ 90% of spot; 99.99% ≈ full spot); goods add their premium above; your Reputation nudges the price a few percent either way.

Buyer contracts cover both forms. Refined metal and finished goods made from the contract metal qualify by contained ounces and share one per-player allowance. It starts at 50 metal tons, grows by 20 tons per completed round-stage step and 10 tons per level of your stronger Refinery/Mint, and is bounded at 200 tons before Focus modifiers. Minting cannot reset or double that allowance. A good's ordinary retail markup is added against normal spot; the headline contract multiplier applies to the metal value, not to that markup.

Crew & supplies

Five crew classes do the work. You Recruit them by spending turns — target a single class and your recruiters focus on it at exactly 5× that class's current rate. Recruiting yield diminishes beyond each role's soft point (Refiners: 1,300); larger mine/refine crews beyond a building's efficient line still add concave overflow output, but the whole crew eats supplies every turn.

The supply burn — visible, predictable, recoverable

Every turn-spending action feeds your whole crew from three upkeep pools — fuel, reagents and coffee — and the producing actions draw extra on top (mining also eats spare parts, which otherwise only building upkeep touches). The action pages show the burn and a safe-max before you commit. Mine, Refine, Recruit and Prospect cannot produce beyond the supplies available: the server caps an oversized batch to supported turns, with no client override, and blocks it when the binding supply is empty. Mint alone retains its clearly labelled overrun choice.

Buildings

Buildings are your permanent infrastructure — each levels up to 10, and every level costs about 1.6× the last (it gets steep). Building levels also feed your Dominance footprint. You start able to build the basics (mine site, refinery, vault); the rest reveal on the unlock ladder.

Sell a level back any time for 75% of its cash cost — the spare parts a level consumed are never refunded.

How the Vault protects: automatically, off the top — there's no deposit step. Your clean refined metal and minted goods are covered up to capacity the moment you own them, and never locked (selling/minting draws on them freely). Ore can't be vaulted (it isn't stealable); cash is never vaulted. The full status — capacity, protected vs exposed, per metal — lives on the Buildings page.

Late-game capital

Once the ordinary ladders are maxed, Cash and surplus metal buy specialization, temporary expertise, or recognition — not an endless permanent production multiplier.

• Building Capital Projects: at building level 10, each building installs 2 of its 3 configured projects. Refitting an occupied slot pays the new project's full Cash, parts and metal cost with no refund. If its host falls below level 10, the project stays installed but goes dormant until that building is restored.
• Commissioned Research: maxing Recovery and Yield unlocks up to 2 timed projects at once. Current base fees span $2,500,000–$4,000,000, plus 0.75%–1.5% of Net Worth; base durations span 24–48 hours and Researchers extend them. A purchase near round end is quoted only for the time that remains and ends at the boundary; with less than 1 hour left it is rejected.
• Prestige: 6 predefined titles, badges and monuments currently cost $10,000,000–$500,000,000. They are cosmetic, round-scoped, non-refundable, and grant no production, protection, Net Worth or Dominance.

Capital Projects live on Buildings, commissions on Research, and cosmetic purchases in the Prestige Office.

Protection services & paid preparation

Large operations can turn excess Cash into temporary safety. Clean finished bullion is allocated automatically: permanent local Vault capacity first, active private-depository overflow second, and only the remainder is exposed. Offsite metal is safe from NPC theft and excluded from local Vault Raids, but it earns no Vault Dominance.

Contract Security

Temporary defensive guards. They help repel attacks and reduce NPC theft, but cannot attack or add Dominance.

Private Depository

Automatic offsite overflow capacity. It prevents NPC theft, but earns no Vault Dominance and is not part of a local Vault Raid pool.

Exposure Insurance

Partial loss protection with a finite dollar limit. Claims consume the remaining coverage.

Only one contract per service can be active at a time. Contracts stop at the round boundary. Hired guards defend only, take casualties before permanent Security, and add neither attack force nor Dominance. Depository capacity uses a fixed $4,000/oz reference so its price cannot be gamed by swapping copper for gold after purchase. Insurance covers exposed metal and Hijackable Cash by preventing a bounded portion of a real loss, then consumes its finite remaining limit; it never creates a windfall.

Review your current exposure and protection contracts →

Optional attack preparation

Choose at most 2 distinct preparations for one supported operation. Their Cash is charged before resolution and is gone whether the action succeeds or fails. Target counterintelligence and convoy defenses can blunt the advertised effect; preparation never skips permanent Security, Turns, transport, target exposure, cooldowns, or other entry requirements.

A Hostile Takeover's declared war chest contributes one force point per $10,000 — but Cash never counts for more than 50% of total attacking force; the rest must be committed Security. It is leverage on success; 30% of it burns on failure.

Market & money

Spot prices

Five metals trade on a live spot market that drifts every few minutes around a realistic anchor (it wanders, but mean-reverts — no runaway crashes). Higher-value metals are worth far more per ounce, both in cash and in Dominance:

Gold is the prestige metal — ~80× silver and ~2.3× platinum per ounce. But gold isn't the only metal worth mining — the others have jobs:

Spot can also get a temporary shock (a sudden dip) or spike (a jump) that moves a single metal — or the whole market — for a limited window (about 30 minutes). Any live move shows in Market News on your Operation and Market pages; the overlay is already baked into the spot board you see.

What each metal is for

So a non-gold-heavy claim is never wasted: copper builds your operation, the PGMs cheapen research, silver feeds scrap and minting.

The Market Signal (jackpot)

Each live signal action (Recruit, Mine, Refine) has its own hidden daily number. A line never repeats its own immediately previous rolled value, though a number may return after an intervening day. Match it exactly and that batch's output is multiplied — 5× on your first hit of the day. The bonus decays per repeat: each further exact match on the same action that day pays the next rung of the ladder (5× → 2× → 1.25× → 1×), so grinding the same number stops paying. Prospect is not a signal action. The forms give you "warmer / colder" feedback as you change the turn count — chase it if you like, but it's a bonus, not the plan.

Top-dog damping: once your Dominance reaches 90% of the leading human's, the ordinary multiplier for Prospect, Recruit, Mine and Refine is ×0.6. The House and stocked bots do not set this threshold; an all-zero field is undamped. Signal bonuses and the final combined multiplier appear on your action receipts.

Other money systems

• Store — buy supplies, equipment and transport; sell back at 75%.
• Scrap Office — buy silver at ~15% below spot, up to 200 oz per offer, 1 offer a day at level 1 plus 1 for each level above it. (unlocks at 2,000,000 Dominance)
• Research — Recovery (+120 bps recovery/level) and Yield (+120 bps yield/level) directly boost refining. $120,000 for the first level, ~1.3× each level after. (unlocks at 1,500,000 Dominance)
• Loans — borrow against your credit: up to 3 open loans, with a base line of 50% of your net worth plus additional headroom from bullion bars held inside permanent Vault capacity (not exposed metal or rented offsite storage); you need ≥30% credit. Interest accrues daily and debt drags your Dominance. Repaying builds credit only when the loan was real — at least $100,000 of principal held at least 24 hours; flipping micro-loans builds nothing. Unpaid loans default at round end and seize up to 50% of your net worth — cash first, then refined metal, goods and building levels. Leverage with teeth. (unlocks at 2,700,000 Dominance)

The Bullion Casino — Casino Cash games

The live Casino is a turn-neutral, server-authoritative Casino Cash system. It never accepts or awards Turns, metal, goods, crew, claims, buildings, or Dominance. Casino Cash is a whole-number, non-transferable in-game balance with no real-world value. Every accepted wager is tied to the published casino2-rules-2026-08-12.6 rules, a committed server seed, a client seed, and a receipt that can be replayed locally.

Historic Casino rulesets stay available only to verify old receipts. The retired Cash/resource Draw, Five-Metal Wheel and player-funded Back Room are not mounted and are not current rules.

Current games & base return

*The Blackjack and Video Poker figures assume correct strategy under the displayed rules. Actual player return can be lower. The terminal return credit is calculated on total settled stake and rounded down to whole Casino Cash. Blackjack receives 0%, Video Poker 0.40%, and every other live game 1.00%; each published optimal base return plus its credit remains below 100%.

Wager & settlement controls

• No gameplay table maximum, cooldown, daily wager count, daily wager volume, or daily-loss cap. A wager is bounded by the available Casino Cash balance, exact-payout denominations, and safe-integer settlement.
• Roulette portfolios aggregate duplicate positions and resolve every position from one committed spin. Blackjack and Video Poker preserve their committed deck across requests and refreshes.
• After 300 seconds without an action — or at round end/reset — unfinished Blackjack hands stand and Video Poker draws with no holds. They settle once; they are not rerolled or silently refunded.
• The server seed is committed before the browser supplies its client seed or wager. Accepted games use HMAC-SHA-256, rejection sampling and a verifiable shuffle; unused expired commitments reveal their seed to their owner.

Cashier & round boundary

• Total Casino Cash and its separately tracked redeemable portion persist across rounds. Casino Cash that was already redeemable when this policy began stays redeemable until spent or redeemed. Cash that was already locked stays locked while remaining fully playable inside the Casino.
• A deposit costs 10 Game Cash per Casino Cash and enters the persistent redeemable balance. Redemption pays 1 Game Cash per Casino Cash before the fixed 10% fee and requires the Cashier's disclosed whole-Cash denomination.
• Wagers consume locked Casino Cash first. Payouts and refunds inherit the wager's locked/redeemable provenance proportionally. The redeemable share is floored to whole Casino Cash and any rounding remainder stays locked, so old stake cannot be laundered through a wager and a mixed wager returns only its attributable redeemable share.
• Every deposit, redemption, wager debit, payout and refund is enforced server-side and recorded in the append-only Casino Cash ledger.

Dominance — how you win

Your Dominance Score is a weighted blend of what you've actually built. Each term is a share of the score:

• Durable beats recent. Score rewards the operation you've built — held metal, vault, buildings, and staffed capacity — more than what you refined in the last day. Recent production is a modest activity bonus over a rolling 72-hour window, and it's additionally capped at 50% of your held-metal term — a one-session refining sprint can't top a built-out empire.
• Metal value matters: the held-metal and production terms weight each ounce by its metal — gold scores ~80× a silver ounce.
• An army doesn't score. Security is for PvP attack/defense only — it never adds to Dominance, so building muscle is never a scoring shortcut.
• Selling lowers your live score (you no longer hold that metal), but it never re-locks features — the unlock ladder tracks your all-time peak Dominance.

The unlock ladder

There's no "modes" or tutorial wall — the whole game is one progression. Each rung is hybrid-gated: you need both a Dominance threshold and an operational milestone, so the whole ladder can't fling open in one session. A competent first session opens about one system; the full ladder takes several sessions of real building and selling. Unlocks gate on your peak Dominance, so they never disappear if your live score dips.

The heavy Compete verbs deliberately need a Vault first: the big guns arrive once you have bullion worth defending and the means to defend it. The early intel and skirmish operations open much sooner — after your grace window plus your first sale — so the Compete page itself is not gated on this rung.

Risk — always on, but fair

The world pushes back. Theft, environmental compliance, regional politics and upkeep all run continuously — but new players are protected and every hit is visible and recoverable, never a silent surprise.

Theft

Metal you leave unprotected — outside your Vault and any rented depository space — is exposed to theft. Below 200 oz exposed you're immune entirely; above that the chance grows with your exposure, with diminishing returns (from ~0.5% up to a 25% cap), and any single event — and any single day — can only take a bounded slice of your metal. Vault your bullion, recruit Security, or buy Insurance to cut it.

Compliance & shutdown

Your environmental compliance starts at 50% and aggressive mining decays it. Compliance Officers set a floor — the level mining can never push you below — and it takes effect the moment you hire them (not once a day). Below 40% you pay recurring fines; below 20% you're shut down for 60 minutes — production halts, but the recovery routes stay open: sell metal at the Market, buy supplies and hire Officers at the Store (your Vault keeps protecting automatically). Building, recruiting and the Scrap Office wait for the reopening. Staff enough Officers to hold your floor above 40% and you're fine-safe for good, however hard you mine; the operator who gets fined is the one who mines aggressively without staffing up.

Politics, upkeep & counterfeit

• Region events: high-risk regions can hit you with a temporary tax, a temporary export ban (claims there can't be worked for a window), or — rarely — nationalization (claims seized). Diversify regions.
• Building upkeep: your buildings draw spare parts daily. Running short is a nudge to restock, not a penalty.
• Counterfeit: Scrap Office bullion arrives partly suspect — a share of every parcel is flagged and worth $0 until you test it with assay kits / Sigma testers / XRF guns from the Store. Test before you count it.

Your live risk standing — compliance, exposure, reputation, credit, active events, shutdown countdown — lives on the Risk page.

Competing (PvP)

Round opening protection: human-targeted attacks, paid scouting, and Market Manipulation are blocked for the first 7 complete days after the round starts. This applies to every player, including returning players; revenge cannot bypass it. Bot practice remains available once you meet its normal requirements. The House can change this rule immediately during a round; a value of zero removes this opening restriction.

Compete is a capability ladder that opens in stages, not all at once:

• Entry (intel & skirmish): the Compete page — and the light operations below — open once your grace window is over and you've made your first sale (the skirmish moves also want at least 5 Security on the roster). You can be scouting and skirmishing long before the heavy artillery unlocks.
• The heavy roster: Hijack, Sabotage, Vault Raid, Market Manipulation and Hostile Takeover wait for the Compete unlock — 900,000 peak Dominance and a built Vault.

Every player-targeted move commits your Security (or specialists) against another player's defenses, and you can only engage players in your bracket: between 0.5× and 2× your net worth.

Early operations — intel & skirmish

Light, cheap, frequent — they sting and scout, but none of them touches metal, Dominance or buildings. Each has a hard per-target daily cap and a counter the defender controls:

• Boosts: up to 2 optional add-ons per operation (Inside Source, Extra Muscle, Rush Job, Clean Exit) — each trades something real (a committed specialist, extra Turns, Cash, a smaller haul) for better odds, a bigger effect or anonymity. Their costs are spent win or lose.
• Recovery shield: a defender who just lost an operation is shielded from further early operations for 6 hours — no pile-ons.
• Timing matters: each operation has an opportunity window keyed to what the target just did (a sale, a mining run, a build) — strike inside it and your odds and effect improve. Repeat the same move on the same target and its effect decays.
• Committed crew comes back. Specialists a job commits (an Auditor for an hour, Security for a run) return when the window ends; only listed consumables are spent for good.

The heavy roster

Each move targets a different part of a rival's operation, and each has a different defense:

Shipment Hijack — light: skim their cash

• Costs 15 turns. Your fleet gates the force: you need ≥5 transport seats and every Security member sent rides a seat. Min force: the larger of 25 or 30% of the target's Security.
• The protected floor is a safe default: a target's first $80,000 of cash can never be touched, and under $25,000 of exposed cash the convoy reads "not worth hitting" — starters can't be farmed.
• Beat their battle score by more than 1 points to skim (a narrower points win takes nothing); a bigger margin skims more — capped at 15% of their cash per hit (5% if they hold Insurance). Up to 10% of their fuel/reagents ride home too, capped by your seats. You can hijack the same target 2× per day; at most 4 hijacks per target per day from everyone combined.

Sabotage Run — medium: wreck their capacity

• Costs 35 turns and burns 2 Repo Orders per run, win or lose. Min force: the larger of 40 or 40% of the target's Security.
• A decisive win — margin over 1 points, plus +1 per Security Contract the defender holds (capped at +20) — knocks one level off the building you picked and destroys up to 20% of their spare parts (never more than 1,000 parts per run).
• The level floor is a safe default: buildings at level 1 can't be knocked lower — sabotage wrecks upgrades, never the base operation. You can sabotage the same target 1× per day; a target can suffer at most 2 runs per day from everyone combined. Yes, Vaults are targetable — softening a vault before a raid is the classic one-two.

Vault Raid — heavy: haul their bullion

Win a Security battle against a target and haul off some of the bullion their Vault protects. A raid costs 25 turns. The flow:

1. Audit first. The confirm page does not show a target's bullion — that would make raiding a free scanner. Spend 15 turns on an Audit for a banded estimate (pool size None→Very High, defense, vault strength, "worth raiding?"). One audit per target every 6h; it lasts long enough to plan a raid. Owned Auditors discount both numbers — 1 turn less per Auditor (floor 5) and a shorter cooldown — so the button may quote you less than the list price. A target's counterintelligence can come back with an Obscured read — the turns are spent either way.
2. Trucks haul. You need at least 1 Armored Truck to carry loot — no truck, no raid (each truck adds ≈250 oz of haul per seat). Loot beyond your haul capacity is left behind.
3. Force is target-relative. Minimum Security to commit = the larger of 50 or 50% of the target's Security. Growing your own army never raises your bar (no treadmill).
4. Win big to loot. Winning the battle isn't enough: loot flows only on a decisive win — your battle score must beat theirs by more than 1.5 points. A decisive win takes up to 25% of the protected pool (shrunk by the target's Vault level and Security), capped by your truck seats.
5. Vault-protected bullion is the prize. A raid cracks what the Vault is guarding — metal parked offsite in a rented depository is out of reach, and loose exposed metal is the NPC thieves' department, not yours. Below a 25 oz protected pool a target isn't raidable — empty and starter accounts aren't worth hitting. Loot is taken in whole pieces, so a tiny budget against big bars can round to nothing; the receipts show exactly what came home. A target can be raided at most 3× per day.

Defense: vault your metal, keep a Security force, and don't leave a big exposed pool. PvP pressures sloppy hoarders — it isn't a daily wealth engine.

Bots are non-competing standing-stock targets. Their easy, peer and hard slots are spread over the current human Net Worth field, and a bounded timer restores exposed Cash, metal, supplies and target assets toward those slots. Every refill is receipted and all bot-created wealth shares one round ceiling; bots never receive Turns or appear in rankings. Turning automation off pauses refills without hiding the targets.

Market Manipulation — market-wide: move the spot

Shove one metal's spot price up or down by up to 15% for a 60-minute window — it hits everyone holding that metal, then decays back. Needs your own Bullion Exchange at level 2+ (you move markets through your desk), 50 turns, at least 25 Dealers committed, and serious cash per basis point. One move per 6h. Every live move shows in Market News, named as a rival's move — a price swing is never unexplained.

Hostile Takeover — the endgame campaign

The campaign opens in the final 5 days; seizure bids land only in the final 3. Qualify with 3 pressure points — attack wins against that rival inside 72h, from at least 2 different operations (Hijack / Sabotage / Vault Raid). Commit a force of at least max(250, 75% of the TARGET's effective Security) — your own growth never raises this bar — plus a war-chest of 10% of the chosen asset's value (floor $1,000,000, cap $25,000,000; 200 turns). Cash counts for at most 50% of total force. A qualifying bid seizes the asset 25–45% of the time — the force ratio moves you inside that band, never past it. Building levels never merge above the normal maximum; Capital Projects stay with their original operator as dormant know-how. Failure burns 30% of the chest, consumes one pressure point, and locks that target for 24h. Defenders can buy legal cover (shifts the band down), reinforcements (raise effective Security), asset hardening (protects one asset), or a counter-bid escrow that outbids a matching war-chest — see Protection → Takeover Defense.

Engagement limits

The final day of a round lifts the daily attack caps for an endgame scramble — a fast anti-pile-on throttle per target replaces them, and offline protection is waived only in the very last hour. The House (#1001) can't be attacked and can't attack. The full roster above — early operations and heavy verbs both — is live this round.

Organizations & Forum

Social Organizations are active now. Players can create an Organization of up to 10 members, recruit, assign Founder/Executive/Strategist/Recruiter/Member roles, use a private Organization HQ board, and participate in the public chronological Forum. Its House Announcements board is an official read-only channel for players: only The House can publish or add follow-ups. Membership, public discussion, announcements, unread history, and historical rows persist across rounds; private HQ access always follows current membership.

Signal reports are shared only when a player explicitly opens and submits the editable Organization composer. They are player-submitted intelligence, not verified truth: a player may omit, change, leak, or falsify them.

Competitive Organization effects remain off. Membership does not change Dominance, Net Worth, prizes, attacks, or resources. There is no shared treasury, cut or tax, member-to-member resource transfer, shared Security/logistics, same-Organization PvP immunity, Organization leaderboard, territory, alliance, or war in Community I.

Starter pack & cheat sheet

Every human player begins each round with exactly this:

• Win on Dominance at month end. Build it by holding/refining metal, vaulting, and putting up buildings; kill it with debt.
• Prospect → Mine → Refine → Sell; reinvest into crew & buildings; mint and the rest unlock as you climb.
• Watch your supply runway — the forms show a safe-max so you never starve the crew by accident.
• Vault your bullion and keep Security — it protects your score and survives raids.
• First 48 hours are a protected grace window. Use them.

This is a beta ruleset — some numbers will be tuned between rounds based on how each round plays. The page always reflects the current live values. Good hunting.