Capitol

The Capitol is the main settlement on a planet. It produces nothing and defends nothing. What it does is cut the time every building and mine on that planet takes to go up, and it is the first thing the Shipyard and the Foundry ask for.

You build it from the Buildings page of whichever planet or moon you currently have selected. Your homeworld starts with a Capitol already at level 2. Every colony you settle starts at zero and needs its own.

What it does

Build time comes from the ore and crystal cost of the job, divided by one plus your Capitol level. Hydrogen counts toward the price but not toward the time.

Time (hours)	(Ore cost + Crystal cost) / (5,000 × (1 + Capitol level) × 2 Foundry level)

So a job costing 5,000 ore and crystal between them takes an hour with no Capitol, half an hour at level 1, twenty minutes at level 2 and twelve minutes at level 4. Nothing ever finishes in under five seconds, however small the numbers get.

The saving is enormous at the bottom and tiny at the top. The first level alone halves every build time on the planet. Going from level 9 to level 10 takes another nine percent off and costs 512 times as much as level 1 did. Most players push the Capitol hard early, then leave it alone and spend on mines instead.

Cost and effect

Every level costs exactly twice the one before it. The last column is how long a job takes at that level compared with having no Capitol at all.

Level	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	New build time %
1	400	120	200	50.00
2	800	240	400	33.33
3	1,600	480	800	25.00
4	3,200	960	1,600	20.00
5	6,400	1,920	3,200	16.67
6	12,800	3,840	6,400	14.29
7	25,600	7,680	12,800	12.50
8	51,200	15,360	25,600	11.11
9	102,400	30,720	51,200	10.00
10	204,800	61,440	102,400	9.09
11	409,600	122,880	204,800	8.33
12	819,200	245,760	409,600	7.69
13	1,638,400	491,520	819,200	7.14
14	3,276,800	983,040	1,638,400	6.67
15	6,553,600	1,966,080	3,276,800	6.25
16	13,107,200	3,932,160	6,553,600	5.88
17	26,214,400	7,864,320	13,107,200	5.56
18	52,428,800	15,728,640	26,214,400	5.26

There is no cap. The pattern carries on for as long as you can pay for it, and the last column is always 1 / (level + 1) as a percentage.

What it unlocks

• Level 1: Secret Missions. The Secret Mission entry only appears on the Missions page when the planet or moon you have selected has a Capitol on it.
• Level 2: the Shipyard, which is where every ship and every defense on that planet comes from.
• Level 10: the Foundry, which also needs A.I. Tech at level 10.

The Capitol itself needs nothing on a planet. It is one of the first things you can build. On a moon it needs a Lunar Base at level 1, because nothing at all goes up on a moon before the Lunar Base.

Capitol and Foundry together

The Foundry is the other half of build speed and the two stack. The Capitol divides the time by one plus its level, then the Foundry halves it again for every level it has. A planet with Capitol 10 and Foundry 3 builds at one eleventh of the base time and then an eighth of that, so about 1.1 percent of what a bare planet would take.

The Foundry costs millions and cannot be started until Capitol 10 is up, so for most of the game the Capitol is the only build speed you have.

Tearing it down

More Info on the Capitol row lists what the next several levels cost and holds the Teardown button. Teardown drops the Capitol one level, hands the field back and costs a third of what that level cost to build. It takes time and uses your one build slot on that planet while it runs, exactly like an upgrade. Everything else on the planet gets slower the moment it lands, so it is a last resort when you are out of fields.

On a moon

A moon can have a Capitol and it works the same way. A moon cannot have a Foundry, so the Capitol is the only thing that will ever speed up moon construction, and moon jobs are the slowest in the game.

The Warp Gate makes the point. On a bare moon it is fifty days of building.

Capitol level	Warp Gate build time
0	50 days
1	25 days
3	12 days 12 hours
5	8 days 8 hours
7	6 days 6 hours
10	4 days 13 hours

Seven levels of Capitol cost about 51,000 ore, 15,000 crystal and 25,000 hydrogen all told. The Warp Gate costs 2,000,000 ore, 4,000,000 crystal and 2,000,000 hydrogen. Put the Capitol up first every time. The one thing to watch is fields: a moon only gets three fields per Lunar Base level plus one, so every Capitol level there is competing with the Lunar Base, the Oracle and the gate itself for room.

Worth knowing

• Every level takes one field, the same as any other structure.
• Finishing a Capitol upgrade does not speed up a job that is already running. The clock is set when you press Build and it does not move after that.
• The Capitol does nothing for research or for ships. The Research Lab sets research time and the Shipyard sets ship and defense time.
• A planet builds one structure at a time, so the Capitol is queueing against your mines. Early on it usually wins, because it pays for itself in every job after it.
• Any job with under five minutes left finishes free, and longer ones cost 1.12 credits a second to rush. A high Capitol makes ordinary upgrades cheap to hurry along and often free outright.