The Umbral Choir/Gameplay

Observers and infiltrators, the Umbral Choir seeks to understand--and heal--the galaxy.

About
**Gameplay**
Traits
Ships
Strategy

As the game's "espionage" faction, the Umbral Choir was built to leverage the Hacking mechanic, with access to several faction exclusive outcomes. For example, they must hack systems to colonize them, eschewing the traditional colony ships other factions use. Everything they own from their colonized systems to their mighty fleets also comes with built in cloaking that upgrades itself to higher tiers under certain conditions. They are silent, but deadly.

## Colonization

Unlike most factions; the UC has a single primary system (the only one on which you will create improvements). This system is located in a special node (i.e. a black hole, nebular cloud, asteroid field, etc), and is filled with 5 artificial planets of a new type called "Crescents". These are essentially ringworlds and terraforming one adds additional rings to it, boosting the pop capacity and per-pop yields.

Using a special hacking mechanic, they're also able to seed other planets with a special colony-like entity called a "Sanctuary". Sanctuaries are hidden to other players, do not obstruct other players from colonizing on top of them and can co-exist after that happens, are unable to build improvements, and feed resources back to the home system.

Furthermore, they can implant "Transmigration Beacons" into special nodes, both acquiring the special  provided by that node, and also - in an utmost emergency their home system to actually teleport itself to that node to escape destruction.

## Sanctuaries

It's not entirely clear what Sanctuaries are - the lore suggests a conglomeration of nano-machines and other cloaked infrastructure - they're able to house UC populations. But at the same time these are immaterial creatures made of pure energy/information, so there's a lot of room for imagination and interpretation here.

### Creating Sanctuaries

There are multiple ways to construct a Sanctuary - the primary method is to hack either an uncolonized system, or a system with an outpost that wont turn into a fully fledged colony before you're done. You may implant it on any planet in the system as long as you have its respective colonization tech. Only one sanctuary is created per hack. You must hack the system again to make the second one, and so on.

You are only allowed to start creating sanctuaries on systems that somebody else owns if you've embedded 2 sleepers first. Thankfully, this only applies to the first Sanctuary you implant on the system; don't worry if the "neighbor" purges a sleeper between implanting subsequent sanctuaries.

If you conquer an enemy system, you're not allowed to actually seize their planet in the way other factions can. You may instead "Purge" the system, which implants sanctuaries on every previously colonized planet in the system and removes any trace of life and infrastructure.

### Sanctuary Defense

Sanctuaries are cloaked - yes, "cloaked" like a combat ship. They can be detected either by an enemy flying a ship by them which has cloaking detection that meets-or-exceeds their cloaking level, or by an enemy Choir that finishes hacking that particular node. The cloaking level of a Sanctuary system is tied to the number of your Sanctuaries present in the system - rather than being associated with your global cloaking level in the military tree. This is capped at a level of 3.

CAUTION: The sanctuary system will not notify you when it's been detected. You must manually check the indicator on each system every turn to know if somebody has found you.

If a sanctuary is detected, expect company soon. In order to clear you out, the enemy may either invade it in the sense of a ground troop invasion or hack the host system to destroy one Sanctuary at a time. Regardless, your sanctuaries are fragile. You only get 200  per Sanctuary, up to 1000  on your valued 5 planet systems (5 planets x 200 = 1000 ). This  cap cannot be increased by any other means besides the Draft defensive action. A preemptive strike is likely your best defensive measure.

### Sanctuary Population

Because sanctuaries funnel all of their  FIDSI back to the primary system, Nexus, they cannot grow any on their own. Because only Nexus gets the , only Nexus gets to grow s. But unlike other factions, the Nexus system may grow as many s as the total  production allows. (e.x. if Nexus has 900 /turn, you get 3 s/turn . If any other faction had 900 /turn on a single system, they'd only get 1 .)

By default, Nexus will keep any pops it makes, filling the empty slots like a normal system. You can order Nexus to divert the news instead to a specific Sanctuary system at any time, but you cannot relocate existing s to a different system. If the chosen destination is already full, or Nexus has grown more s than available destination slots, then the "overflow" is redirected elsewhere.

> ℹ️The priority rules for this overflow are poorly understood, although we believe it first prioritizes the UC home system, over sanctuaries; once the home system is full, it seems to 'evenly distribute' pops among sanctuaries, but the priority rules for which sanctuary is picked are a total mystery. Clearing that up would be a nice TODO.
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The population hosted on a Sanctuary is shown below the planet in the system view, and although the housing capacity is directly tied to the planet type just as it is for physical populations, the Sanctuary pop does not interfere with the physical population in any way.

Sanctuary populations can be moved between planets **within** a system, but there is no mechanism whatsoever (like the "Starports" other factions have access to) to transfer them between systems. Once they're created on a given system, they're stuck there, forever.

### Sanctuary Resources

All resources from a Sanctuary are sent back to Nexus for processing, adding the collected . strategic, and luxury resource totals to Nexus' output. Because the Nexus Crescents are all cold/sterile worlds with poor / growth, the simple diversity of available planets is itself an enormous boon.

There's a huge amount of fine print on which "per-thing" yield bonuses actually affect sanctuaries (buildings, hero skills, etc); we've attempted to document this over on the The Umbral Choir/Traits page. A few of these, like the basic / declaring openly that they give e.g. +10 /planet are made explicit in the game, but most other bonuses are unclear within the game.

Sanctuary systems are locked at a neutral 50%  rate, regardless of planetary traits (anomaly or otherwise) or any bonus/penalty from an event, law, or quest. The sole exception is the temporary +25% boost (to 75% ) from finishing the Endless Research Park wonder. This is primarily relevant for the associated / bonuses. Sanctuary  ratings are not counted towards your "Empire Approval"; only the UC home system is.

### Sanctuary Sleepers

**Sanctuaries on other empire's systems are the quickest way for the UC to create sleepers.** Through hacking alone, the UC is marginally better than other empires at creating sleepers, but it's slow, and error-prone. However, if you have a sanctuary on another faction's system (it does not matter whether they colonized the same planet your Sanctuary is on), you can immediately consume a Sanctuary pop, transforming it into a sleeper on that system. There's no "rate limit" on this, so if you have e.g. 8 pops on a Sanctuary, you can instantly fill the corresponding non-UC systemwith 8 sleepers in a single turn — you are only limited by the number of pops the other player has on the system.

## Cloaking

The UC has the ability to cloak ANY ship it owns from the very beginning of the game. This does not require a cloaking module (unlike all other factions), and it also allows them to cloak any ships it owns, not merely the faction-specific ships but any ships acquired from minor factions, mercenaries, or curiosities. Researching the appropriate cloaking technology from the military tree will immediately upgrade all ships to the new tier.

Like your sanctuaries, the home system Nexus is also permanently cloaked, but its cloak level is instead tied to the system improvement level. As there is no "tier 4" cloaking; this is relevant for your first two improvements, but the third and final system improvement (tier 4) offers no further cloaking benefit.

> ℹ️As with other factions, you can of course delay issuing this system improvement until you find some ideal, possibly higher-tier resources. The main caution with the UC is that a failure to increase your cloaking level leaves you uniquely vulnerable, since they are balanced around using the *outright invincibility* of being undetected to compensate for the strategic weakness of having only a single system, and having poor manpower growth.
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## Invasion

Umbral Choir has special actions that replace the Occupy and Pillage actions in Ground Invasion Outcomes.

* Purge (Occupy): Destroys all enemy colonies and replaces them with initially-empty Sanctuaries (if you didn't already have Sanctuaries on those planets). Unavailable if you lack the respective colonizing tech. Used on a minor faction this gives you their trait.
* Abduct (PIllage): Like Pillage except it also 'rescues' ALL Sleepers present (see the below Hacking section for mechanics). No  penalty.

## Minor Faction Interactions

Like the Vodyani, the UC are completely shut out of acquiring other population types — you're allowed only the two primary types (Umbral Choir, and Umbral Shadow), and that's it. The developers have nipped every possible way you could acquire one; it's simply forbidden by the gameplay mechanics.

That said, they still have a wealth of interactions they can do with Minor Factions:

* "Survival Training" has replaced "Selective Migration" where applicable. You will get 100  instead of a minor pop.
	+ Very useful. The Choir has *extreme* struggles with manpower replenishment. It's bad enough in practice that you'll struggle to stock all of your ships and defenses with troops throughout the game, despite taking all the available steps to solve the problem. The UC is the worst in the game at manpower replenishment in both a relative and absolute sense.

* Assimilating a Minor Faction via the Assist quest or  buyout (relabeled to "Purge", but unrelated to the invasion outcome of the same name) will give you their trait and orbiting fleet, but their pops will disappear.
	+ You will also receive Sanctuaries over every planet they colonized (regardless of your tech).
	+ Invading the system will only give you the trait if you pick the Purge invasion outcome, which is unavailable if they colonized planets you don't have the tech for.

Contrary to expectations, these new Sanctuaries will be empty. By the lore, it's assumed that the UC is somehow uplifting the population to live amongst the Choir, as they do with the Umbral Shadow pop units converted from former "sleepers", but ... you neither receive Umbral Shadows nor additional Umbral Choir pops on either your home system, or on the brand new sanctuaries — they're just gone. Regardless, the conversion of minor faction systems is fairly advantageous to you, since their assimilation bonuses (usually) work on your Sanctuaries, and the new system is a perfect launchpad to seed a new network of Sanctuaries and backdoors for hacking.

A critical strategic point here is that there's nothing stopping you from assimilating a faction on the other side of the galaxy. This is extremely unlike the Unfallen, which share a similar gameplay style of building a growing 'network' of nodes (in fact, the vining uses the same distance limits and path mechanics as hacking). Once you've done so, you get sanctuaries on their planets, and you can start setting up a new cluster of sanctuaries far away from your core area — and thus, greatly spreading out your assets and lowering your risks. Keep in mind that there are two key risks for the UC. The first is the obvious risk of detection and destruction, but the second is it's also very devastating simply to be obstructed by enemy systems that are much more time-consuming to hack.

## Hacking

Hacking was a new mechanic introduced in the DLC which introduced the Umbral Choir ("Penumbra") and is central to their mechanics. Most hacking mechanics are available to all factions. The UC has a few significant bonuses to hacking (especially when considering their unique faction quest rewards), and also has access to a few unique hacking actions which replace mechanics available to other factions.

In addition to the standard hacking actions, the UC can also;

* Create the aforementioned Sanctuaries
* Abduct Sleepers to create Super s
	+ If there is a UC  available on the home system, it will turn into an "Umbral Shadow", which has double the FIDSI output and food consumption of a regular pop.
	+ If there aren't enough Nexus s to accommodate the abductees, excess sleepers are liquidated into a sizable  and  bounty, even if there is an empty slot.
* Create Transmigration Beacons on special nodes

### Transmigration Beacons

Hacking a special node will allow you to implant a transmigration beacon. This will immediately provide the node's ownership bonus to Nexus, and allows you to teleport your capitol system to that node.

#### Costs

Your first beacon will cost 10 bandwidth to maintain, and each successive beacon will cost 10 more than the last (e.g. the second one is 20, the third is 30... etc.). You can right click the beacon's bandwidth in the hacking screen to dismantle a beacon you no longer want.

> ℹ️Unfortunately, that statement of "10 more than the last" holds true even if you remove an earlier one; if you still have a beacon up that costs 30, the next will cost 40. It's a little awkward.
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#### Ownership Bonuses

The ownership bonus (much like for the Unfallen) can be an extremely potent source of resources in the very early game, especially since it's far cheaper for the UC to hack such a node than it is for the Unfallen to vine them.

> ℹ️Note that you do not assert "influence/territory" over this node, like the Unfallen do, since of course the UC is trying to 'hide' rather than stake outwardly visible claims to territory.
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#### Teleporting

Teleporting your system can be done simply to pick a better location, but the most pressing reason you may want to do it is if your home system is detected by foes. **Once a sanctuary or home system of yours is detected by an opponent, it's visible to them from that point onward,** despite still being cloaked to other players. For sanctuaries, this is permanent. If you wish to conceal your presence, you must completely vacate the system and start implanting sanctuaries from scratch. For your home system, however, the act of "Transmigrating" to a new node restores it to this "hidden/unknown" state. Anyone who has previously detected you must bring a ship with an appropriately leveled anti cloak module to your new location to reveal you again.

The teleportation process is immediate - your system will instantly arrive at the new place with no delay. Upon activating a beacon and teleporting, all your other beacons will be dismantled, and you will suffer a temporary -50% bandwidth penalty. This will also remove any embedded sleepers (at no expense to your pops) or sanctuaries present on the system. You cannot activate a beacon if your Nexus is currently being invaded.

Once a beacon is implanted, it will "charge up" over the next few turns. If you allow it to fully charge, then it can be used with no consequences other than losing the other transmigration beacons active at that time. However, if you're desperate, you **can** activate a beacon that is not fully charged, *but only at a **terrible** price.*

> ⚠️CAUTION: Activating a beacon that hasn't finished charging WILL DESTROY up to 99% of ALL population and improvements on your home system. This value is proportional to the number of turns the beacon needed to finish charging.
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> The game will amply warn you about it, but it's serious enough to warrant a note here as well.
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