Aetheria/docs/faction-territory-target.md

Faction Territory Target

Date: 2026-09-19

Status: target, operator direction only. No map, no schedule. This document owns the ends; a cut map will own the means.

Why

A faction's territory today is a set of zones carrying a Markov-generated name. Galaxy.cs:340 feeds one chain per faction from its GeonameFile (a massaged GeoNames extract), :348 stamps the result on each owned zone, and :352 gives everything unowned an EAC-#### serial. Nothing else distinguishes one faction's space from another's. A Zhestokost sector and an Alakrita sector differ only in the phonotactics of a string.

Operator, 2026-09-19: "Namefiles were how we fed Markov chains to generate faction-flavored names, the limitations of the geonames database I massaged to create them were reflected in the naming choices. We can do much better with generative models, even giving sectors and their stations roles in a faction's colonization timeline and supply chain, with names and backstories that match. Giving each faction such a mapping will also gives each faction a recognizable shape to their territory."

Where it sits

After fire control (operator, 2026-09-19: "slot it in right after fire control, first step is to get the new shape of the combat working"). Combat's new shape — rolls from weapon, targeting and sensor stats, resolution on arrival, the pre-impact commit window — comes first; territory is the campaign after it. Territory is what finally makes the economy and provenance work visible in play, so it does not drift further than that.

Ends

• A place has a job. Every owned sector, and every station in it, carries a role in its owner's supply chain — extraction, refining, fabrication, logistics, administration, defence, research, disposal — and a position in that faction's colonization timeline: founding wave, expansion, boom, retrenchment, whatever that faction's history was.
• Territory has a shape you can read. The role map is spatial, so a faction's space looks like what it does. Lightsail is corridors between other people's markets; Zhestokost is a fortified frontier with depth behind it; Adrasteia is scattered deniable nodes with no obvious centre; Aeronautics Unlimited is an extraction belt feeding a few refineries. A player who has flown two sectors of a faction's space should be able to guess the third.
• Names and backstories match the job and the era. A founding-wave refinery and a late boom-town dormitory do not sound alike, and neither sounds like the other faction's equivalent. The name says which faction, which era, which role.
• The supply chain is real, not decorative. Roles connect: an extraction sector feeds a refinery, which feeds fabrication, which feeds a market. Those links are data, so the economy's backward generation (docs/item-provenance-target.md) can walk them, a lot's Produced origin can name the station that made it, and piracy has routes worth interdicting rather than an abstract risk number.
• Generation stays deterministic. A galaxy seed produces the same territory every time. Nothing calls a model at runtime.

Constraints

• Authoring happens ahead of play, into the catalog. Generative models write typed catalog data that the operator reviews, exactly like roles and product text; the game then reads authored data. No runtime inference, no network dependency, no per-run variation that the seed does not explain.
• Volume has to be honest. A galaxy has many sectors. Whatever is authored must either cover the count or compose deterministically from authored parts; a bank of a hundred hand-written names behind a thousand sectors will repeat visibly, and that has to be a decision rather than an accident.
• The faction record owns its territory rules. Today Faction.GeonameFile points at a NameFile; whatever replaces it belongs on the faction, and NameFile and MarkovNameGenerator go when the last consumer does.
• Unowned space needs an answer too. EAC-#### is a placeholder, and unclaimed sectors are most of the map in some galaxies.
• Zone generation already has settings and a seed (ZoneGenerationSettings, StableHash); territory roles hang off the same generation, not a second pass.

Open questions for the map

• Authored bank versus composable grammar versus a hybrid, and what repetition rate is acceptable at real galaxy sizes.
• Whether a station's backstory is authored text, a few typed facts the UI renders, or both — and where it is shown, since a name nobody reads is cheaper than prose nobody reads.
• How a faction's colonization timeline interacts with galaxy generation's existing spatial logic (megaplex, boss zones, entrances).
• Whether roles are assigned to sectors, to stations within them, or both.
• What happens to a sector when its owner changes hands, and whether the history it carries survives the change.

Not in scope

• Runtime model calls, for anything.
• Rewriting galaxy topology. This assigns meaning to what generation already produces; it does not redesign the map.