Good evening Sonatians. The contest to take the Emperor’s Throne has gone through a few iterations over the past few years, from a game of “escort the payload” to the battleground oriented fights we have seen more recently. We have carefully monitored the experience of the Emperor mechanic since its inception and plan to continue iterating on the design as we learn more about player patterns and preferences.. In this blog, we will describe every aspect of the current system! It will be detail oriented and should answer any questions you may have about how engaging with it works.
The Anatolian Expanse
First, let’s talk about the Anatolian Expanse. The Anatolian Expanse is a layer of space found by traveling to Anatolia (which can be found off of Earthforce Perilous Outpost), then heading past King Midas into his domain. Here you can find Midas’ soldiers waiting to engage whoever comes to challenge them. The soldiers come in a few forms: Midas’ mining crew, his foot soldiers and his champions. All of these soldiers drop Anatolian Crests, a currency that can be used to get rewards for participating in the Anatolian Expanse and provide your team influence. I will elaborate on that later.
This layer has a few other rules that make it a PvP battleground. You cannot transwarp in or out of this layer. You must go in through one of the entrances, and there are no other ways out. Logging out of this layer will also cause you to be kicked out of the layer, which means no hiding large fleets logged out in deep space. Every galaxy within the expanse also has a set arena size. There is a 24,000 radius asteroid belt in every galaxy, and each galaxy emits a deadly aura past that point! This allows for plenty of room for large fights, while also preventing some extreme cases of kiting Midas’ Champions. (The early fights in the expanse took place tens of thousands of distance away from the center of the galaxy)
Midas’ Soldiers
Midas’ miners and foot soldiers aren’t too interesting. They will fight anyone that engages them, but they don’t give much influence. However, they are a good source of Anatolia Crests. You can find them at all times in the expanse, but compared to the champions they are significantly weaker.
Midas’ champions are where his might is truly on display. They are capable of fending off entire squads of players. They also provide large numbers of Anatolian Crests and a large amount of influence. These champions come in three different ranks that drastically increase in strength and rewards. There can only be one of each champion in the Expanse at a time, and they spawn on timers that can be seen in notifications next to the chat. If you do not see a notification there when you log in regarding these bosses, they are either already alive or not respawning soon. The ranks and champions are as follows:
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The lowest rank champion, Taxiarhos, is worth 30,000 Influence.
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In the middle is Strategos at 180,000 influence.
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And, finally, the strongest and most legendary champion is Polemarchos worth 900,000 influence.
Anatolian Crests
Anatolian Crests are one of the two things that are obtained by defeating Midas’ soldiers. Their concept is relatively simple: you kill soldiers, they drop crests. Gather lots of crests and take them to any of the AI bases in the Anatolian Expanse to turn them in for lots of wonderful rewards! Be careful, if you are killed while transporting these crests you will drop them to whoever killed you! These PvP items have a few other attributes that go along with them.
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Crests drop on death.
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Crests drop when you leave the layer. This can happen due to logout kick or just warping out.
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Crests prevent undocking while they are in your inventory. You will have to sell them back to the base for credits if you are unable to get other rewards for them.
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Crests stick around longer than other debris.
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They provide visibility to a ship that holds them.
With 100 crests you can purchase an Anatolian Trove. These are loot boxes that contain a bunch of very useful items, including a low chance at a Tarnished Imperial Seal! Crests and troves can be obtained before, during, and after the Throne is claimed, so come on in and fight for some crests!
Claiming the Throne
As mentioned before, killing Midas’ soldiers provides influence to the killers team for killing them. Influence is what is used to determine which team will be crowned Emperor. However, you cannot just go and get influence in the Anatolian Expanse at any point in the universe. The Emperor’s contest is a timed event. At exactly 720 hours (30 days) after a new universe is formed, killing soldiers inside the Anatolian Expanse provides any teams that took part in killing any given soldier with influence. This influence is provided proportionally based on how much damage each team did to the soldier. 20% of a soldier’s influence is also provided to the team that landed the killing blow on a soldier. At any given moment you can see the total amount of influence a team has by looking at the bulletin board in any AI station.
The contest itself lasts 3 weeks (21 days). When this time period ends, the leading team will be crowned Emperor, with a few conditions. After 3 weeks, if no teams are eligible to claim the throne, the contest continues until the moment a team becomes eligible. For a team to be eligible they must have at least 1,000,000 influence and they must also have a 900,000 point lead ahead of the team in second place. If a team is not crowned by the universe reset, all influence is wiped and an Emperor will not be crowned for that universe. Since the contest is a one time event, once an Emperor is crowned that Emperor will hold their throne for the rest of the universe.
The Contest’s Spoils
The current rewards for the Emperor contest take 4 major forms. Three of which are only provided for the Emperor and their team:
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A 5% tithe is applied to scooped credits and colony sales to players not on the Emperor’s team.
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The Emperor can dock at the palace in Anatolia and receive three augmenter reset modules and three ship dry dock modules
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A galaxy in wild space will forever be named after the Emperor.
Additionally, there is another reward that is distributed amongst the top 10 participating teams who have accrued at least 100,000 influence. A pool of 250 Imperial Chests are proportionally provided to these eligible teams based on their teams percentage of the total influence earned by all teams. The greatest amount of these will always be provided to the winning team, but there’s still chests to be earned by whoever can snag a spot in the top ten!
Round up
The Anatolian Expanse and associated Emperor Contest is a labor of love by us to support an active PvP event that breaks up the day to day activities in Star Sonata. We appreciate the many rounds of feedback the community has given about this experience. We are committed to continuing to support this activity and monitoring its success and failures. This blog post includes all information on the current system used to ascend to the throne to become Emperor, but like with many things in Star Sonata, it changes often. This system will likely be iterated into the future to bring an experience that promotes competition. You can stay up to date on what is involved in the contest to become Emperor by visiting our wiki page on the topic. https://www.starsonata.com/wiki/index.php/Emperor