Notifications and Alerts

A theatre can run for hours or days, so you will not be watching the whole time. Nova keeps you informed without you having to stare at the screen: in-app banners while you are playing, and push notifications on your phone when you are away.

The news wire

The Comms tab is the game's running record — the news wire. Every event you are allowed to see lands there as a one-line report, newest first: battles (a coloured mark shows your victory or defeat), fleets and probes arriving, per-cycle production summaries, and — if the autopilot ever stood in for you — its orders, prefixed "Autopilot dispatched …". It is fog-of-war filtered: you read only what your commander could know. Star names in a report are links — select one to fly the map to it.

The wire is where you catch up after time away; the notifications below exist so the most important of these events can also reach you while you are not looking at the game.

Banners while you play

When something happens in a theatre you have open — a fleet arrives, a battle is fought, one of your stars is scouted or nova-bombed — a short banner slides in with the news. Tap or click it to jump the map to the star involved, or dismiss it (it also clears itself after a few seconds). On mobile, the events that really matter — losing a battle or having a star destroyed — also give a brief haptic buzz, so you feel them even when you are not looking.

Push notifications when you are away

Push notifications reach your phone even when Nova is in the background or fully closed, so you can leave a theatre running and still hear about the things that matter. (Push is a mobile feature — the first time you join, allow notifications when your device asks.) Three kinds of event can reach you, and the difference between them is worth understanding.

When you are attacked — always

Anything a rival does to you always notifies you; you never opt in to defensive alerts:

• a rival's fleet attacks one of your stars — and whether you held it or lost it;
• your probe shield stops an enemy spy probe;
• a nova bomb strikes one of your stars — blocked by your nova shield, or the star destroyed.

(A spy probe that slips through a star with no probe shield is silent — you are only told when your shield actually blocks one.)

When your own dispatch arrives — only if you ask

This is the one to remember. Your own fleets, spy probes, and nova bombs arrive silently by default — Nova does not push you about your own moves, only about attacks on you. So if you want to know the moment a dispatch lands and what happened — the battle result, the intel a spy probe brought back, or a nova bomb's strike — turn on Notify on arrival.

• It is a per-launch switch in the command composer, off by default. Flip it on before you confirm the fleet, probe, or bomb.
• You can also turn it on after the fact: open the unit's Fleet in transit panel (tap its marker on the map or its row under the Fleets tab) and toggle it there, any time before it arrives.

Turn it on for the launches you actually want to wait on — a decisive assault, a scouting run before a big attack — and leave it off for routine reinforcement, so you are not buzzed for every ship you move.

When the theatre pauses or resumes — always

Pausing is a shared decision (see Core Concepts). Every step — a pause or resume being proposed, seconded, withdrawn, expiring, or auto-resuming — notifies all commanders, so everyone always knows whether the clock is running.

When the autopilot is about to step in — always

If you stop giving orders (see the Autopilot chapter), Nova warns you before acting: after two production cycles without an order you get "No orders for a while — autopilot takes over your empire soon unless you act", and after three it tells you "Autopilot has taken over your empire. Any order takes back control." Open the game and give any order and it stands down. You get each of these once per quiet spell, never repeatedly. (If you engaged the autopilot yourself, there is nothing to warn about, so neither is sent.)

Where an alert shows up

Nova never double-notifies. A push for the theatre you already have open appears only as the in-app banner, not as a separate notification. Pushes for your other theatres still arrive even while you play, so a different game can still get your attention — tap one and Nova offers to switch you to that theatre (it asks first, so a stray tap never loses your place). On mobile, the app-icon badge counts unread chat messages across all your theatres at once.

Nova also re-syncs on its own when you return to the app or the connection recovers, so you never come back to a stale screen.