The Academy
The Academy is your account-wide talent system: three trees of 28 talents, bought with Academy Points (AP). Every talent is a small permanent bonus (production, build/research speed, combat stats, fleet slots, expedition finds …) that stacks with your research, officers and lifeform technologies. Open it from the left menu: Academy.
Classes and the three trees
The three trees mirror the three character classes — Miner ↔ Collector, Commander ↔ General, Discoverer ↔ Discoverer — and the Academy page is also where you pick your class. Talents from all trees stay active once bought, but only your active class's tree runs at 100% effect — the other two run at 50%. Maximum planets, fleet slots and expedition slots are the exception: those three pay in full from any tree, because a slot is a counted thing rather than a percentage. Your class also decides your affine lifeform race (Rock'tal / Mechas / Kaelesh — see the Lifeforms article), whose planets get a +10% building-bonus kicker and whose tier-3 tech amplifies your class bonuses themselves.
Switching class costs Dark Matter (the first pick is free) and has a cooldown between switches — plan the identity, don't flip it per raid.
Earning Academy Points
Three channels, each aimed at a different kind of player. None of them pays you for being big.
- Online activity bonus — every claim (the green pop-up in the left menu) grants AP alongside the Dark Matter. This one is weighted toward smaller accounts: a new commander earns the full amount and it tapers as you climb the ladder. It is the newcomer's channel.
- Expeditions — every completed expedition grants a flat amount, the same for the server's largest fleet and its smallest. Fly often, fund the Academy.
- Score growth — awarded automatically on each highscore regeneration, for the fraction of your own score you have grown: doubling your score over a day is worth the same whether you are rank 1 or rank 300. It only pays for reaching a new high, so losing score to a raid and rebuilding it does not pay twice — and a very sudden jump is paid out over the following runs rather than all at once.
A message every morning reports what you banked the previous day and from which channel, so you never have to open the page to find out whether there is anything to spend.
Level caps — and the talents that have none
Talents whose effect is a plain multiplier have no level cap and are marked ∞ on the tree: Deep Extraction, Reactor Output, Rapid Assembly, Applied Science, Vault Engineering, Weapons Doctrine, Hull Plating, Shield Harmonics, Yard Throughput, Cargo Rigging and Survey Yield. Their cost is the only limit: past each one's soft cap the price per level accelerates on top of its normal growth, so every doubling of your points buys only a handful more levels. There is always something left to buy, and nobody can buy their way to infinity.
Everything else keeps a hard cap, because for those a level is an unlock rather than a number: colony slots, fleet slots, expedition slots and espionage levels are counted things, and the reduction talents (fuel, jump-gate cooldown, crawler energy, plunder protection, defence recovery) are percentages of a bounded quantity that would be meaningless past 100%. Dome Lattice is capped for the same reason — it raises how many dome bodies a planet may hold, and an uncapped body count is an uncapped turtle.
Costs, prerequisites, reset
Each talent's cost grows exponentially per level, and deeper talents require levels in earlier ones (the prerequisite chips on each tile). A full reset costs 200,000 Dark Matter and refunds every point spent — except Colonial Charter (+max planets), which is permanent so a respec can never orphan your colonies.