The Academy
The Academy is your account-wide talent system: three trees of thirty 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%. Your class also decides your affine lifeform race (Rock'tal / Mecha / 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
- Online activity bonus — every activity-bonus claim (the green pop-up in the left menu) grants AP alongside the Dark Matter.
- Expeditions — every completed expedition grants AP. Fly deep space, fund the Academy.
- Score growth — a trickle proportional to how much your account score grows, awarded automatically every few minutes.
All three channels scale with how your account compares to the server's top player, so AP stays meaningful at any server age. Bigger accounts earn more per claim/expedition.
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). Every talent is live: Shields of the planet raises your shield-dome stack caps by 10% per level, and Effective crawlers cuts crawler energy consumption by 2% per level. A full reset costs 200,000 Dark Matter and refunds every point spent — except Expanding the empire (+max planets), which is permanent so a respec can never orphan your colonies.