Let's summarize the story so far in our MOON Universe 2 Story line -
- We live in a dying universe
- Galaxy 1 already blew up! - its dangerous out there!
- There will be 3 solar systems that survive.
Players with planets in these three solar systems will win the grand prize and achieve the end of season goal. There are 39 slots, 1 player cannot claim them all, no matter how many points they have. Let's get to the game theory after, but here I have asked Claude to give us some flavor text:
THE CARTOGRAPHERS OF THE VOID
— Science Fiction -
The data arrived the way most truth does: quietly, without ceremony, in the small hours when the rest of the station slept.
Commander Veyla pressed her palm to the cold surface of the holo-table and watched the galaxy map bloom into light. Nine spiraling arms of possibility stretched before her, each one home to thousands of star systems, billions of worlds — and somewhere among them, a handful of coordinates that would decide which civilizations survived what was coming.
She had spent three years running the numbers. The last 6 months feeding the collapse models into the AI cores, watching them chew through petabytes of gravitational survey data, quantum resonance signatures, stellar drift projections. The End of the Universe was not a metaphor now, it was a timetable.
And now the cores had finished their work.
"Show me the results," she said.
The map flickered. Most of the galaxy dimmed — systems going dark one by one as the simulation's extinction wave rolled outward from the deep void. But three points held their light. Three bright coordinates remained when everything else had been consumed.
A triangle of survival, the head of which sat in Galaxy 7, solar system 55.
Veyla leaned in. Galaxy 7 was much closer to known territory — relatively speaking. Close enough to the battle frontier that Galaxy 6 has become.
But the other two were even further out.
She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the station's temperature controls.
The second and third coordinates floated deeper — much deeper. Out past the comfortable middle galaxies where most commanders had planted their flags, out past Galaxy 7 - to Galaxy 9 where the bold ones had pushed when the others called them reckless.
Two winning systems in those deeper regions. The simulation didn't lie.
Veyla thought about what that meant. About the commanders who had trusted their instincts, burned their resources on deep expansion, extended supply lines that made their logistics officers weep. The ones who had been told they were overextending, that the frontier was a fool's errand, that no prize worth having could exist so far from the galactic core.
They were going to be very, very vindicated.
She saved the data to encrypted storage and sealed the file. The full coordinates would come later — there were protocols to follow, clues to release, a community of explorers who deserved the chance to reason their way toward the truth before it was handed to them. That was the point, wasn't it? Not just survival, but the act of finding the path to survival. Anyone could be handed an answer. Only the worthy could deduce one.
She darkened the holo-table and stood in the brief, beautiful dark.
One system in the familiar galaxy, she thought. Where the established empires had built their cathedrals of metal and fire.
Two in the deep.
Where the adventurers had gone alone.
She had always suspected the universe rewarded courage in ways that compound ledgers couldn't capture. Now she had the proof. It was just a matter of watching the rest of the commanders figure it out — some of them in time, some of them not.
The evacuation fleets were already being quietly assembled.
39 planet slots will win the grand prize this season
You will have to form your own strategies. There are edge conditions on colonization, but no player can occupy all the slots, no matter how many points they have.
There are more than two months until the universe ends (~May 19th), remember that you can destroy a planet to get the planet slot back - but that slot will remain a "destroyed planet" for at least two weeks.
TL;DR:
To: Active Commanders, Universe 2
From: Office of Strategic Intelligence
Subject: What the Galaxy Distribution Tells You — And How to Act On It
The latest intelligence confirms what careful players have long suspected: the three winning coordinates are not clustered. They span multiple galaxies, and the distribution pattern itself is a strategic message worth decoding.
Let's be precise about what we know. One winning system exists in Galaxy 7, which is system 55. Two winning systems exist in Galaxy 9, further out in the spiral arms of the universe. That's the entirety of the confirmed information.
Good Luck out there.