Reports Of Wormholes Appearing In The Echo Cluster

Excerpt from councilor's notes, Hon. Garton Sweft, 3rd Representative of The Solar Federation, Nu Year 0077:

Transmissions received by the high council from several systems indicate the recent appearance of high energy rifts in space-time. Many on the council are laying blame for these disturbances on the Cyborg, and their continued development of space-time warping technologies like the Stargate and Temporal Lance. But regardless the cause, these massive wormholes are a reality now.

Our engineers have developed new sensor arrays so our ships can detect and analyze these anomalies. And most interestingly, several of our fearless captains have confirmed that the wormholes are navigable by starships, allowing for nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances. Which opens the possibility of incredible expansion... or conducting military operations from afar.

Though of course these sorts of things are not without risk...

Game Details

Every turn it is possible for new wormholes to appear, until the maximum number in the settings is reached. As wormholes collapse, new ones may take their place.

Some wormholes can be traveled in both directions, others are one-way only.

Wormholes have a stability rating ranging from 1-100. More stable wormholes are generally safe to travel, but as the wormhole becomes more unstable and heads towards collapse, it can become quite dangerous. As the stability decreases, the risk of a ship taking damage and the amount of damage it receives increases, and highly unstable wormholes are capable of destroying small and medium ships.

The stability of a wormhole can change each turn. The lower the stability, the more drastic the shifts can be. Note that this happens before movement, so you will never know with certainty what the stability will be when you enter.

Wormholes are not automatically visible, but can be detected by ships using the sensor sweep mission. Sensor sweeping ships can detect wormholes within 100ly. You will also need to sweep wormholes to get updated information  (or travel through it).

When you scan a wormhole, you still will not know where it goes to until you travel through it, or happen to scan the other side as well.

To enter a wormhole, a ship must use the "Enter Wormhole" mission and have at least a unit of fuel when it arrives at the wormhole entrance. Assuming these criteria are met, the ship will travel through the wormhole and appear on the other side the same turn. Much like chunnelling, ships emerge from the wormhole with their shields down.

Due to an unexplained resonance between wormhole energy and advanced cloaking technology, undamaged ships with advanced cloaking devices emerge from wormholes cloaked.

Regarding the host order, wormhole stability changes and addition of new wormholes happens before sensor sweep, and worm hole travel takes place after all normal movement, but before the first glory activation and chunnelling.

For initial testing, wormholes will start to appear in new melee games, some wandering tribes games, and will be available in custom games as well.

Custom game hosts have settings to control the maximum number of wormholes in a game, the mix between 1-way and 2-way wormholes, and the scan range for ships to detect them.