Combat

Combat takes place when an attacking fleet reaches its destination. When combat takes place, all participating parties receive a Battle Report.

In combat, there are two sides: the attacker and the defender. If the defender has ships or defense on his planet, each side will take turns firing upon the each other. In an ACS attack, there can be multiple attackers. If another player sends a fleet to “hold position” over the defender’s planet during an attack, there will be multiple defenders.

How it works

Every battle has four basic parameters that affect the outcome: Weapons, Shielding and Armor Technology levels; and “Rapid-Fire”.

A battle is organized into a maximum of 6 rounds; in each round the attacker and defender take a single turn in which all their units fire at the other. A battle has 3 possible outcomes: The attacker wins, if he destroys all defending units within 6 rounds or less; A draw occurs if both attacker and defender have units remaining after 6 rounds; the defender wins if all attacking units are destroyed by the end of 6 rounds or less.

If the attacker wins, he is awarded half the resources on the defending planet or moon (or the maximum amount the attacking fleet can carry, whichever amount is smaller).

At the beginning of each round, every unit starts with its Weaponry and Shielding set at it’s initial value plus technology upgrade levels. The Armor for each unit has the value from the end of the previous round (or the initial value plus technology upgrade levels if it is the first round).

In each round, all participating units (defenses+ships) randomly target an enemy unit.

For each shooting unit:

• If the Weaponry of the shooting unit is less than 1% of the Shielding of the target unit, the shot is bounced, and the target unit does not lose any Armor (i.e. shot is wasted).
• If the Weaponry of the shooting unit is lower than the Shielding of the target unit (but greater than 1%) , then the shield absorbs the shot (which weakens the shield), and the target unit does not lose any Armor.
• If the Weaponry of the shooting unit is stronger than the Shielding of the defending unit, then the defender’s shields only absorb part of the shot and the rest hits the defender’s Armor, decreasing its strength. Once the Armor of the target unit drops below 70% of its initial value, it has an increasing probability of exploding. If it explodes, the armor value for that unit is set to zero (but it can still be shot by the other units during the same round, because they already targeted it).
• Finally, if the shooting unit has Rapid-Fire against the target unit, it has a chance of choosing another target at random, and repeating the above steps for that new target.

Every unit that ends a round with all its armor depleted (set to zero) is destroyed and thus does not appear in the next round. If every unit on one side (attacker or defender) is destroyed at the end of the round, the battle ends with the opposite side winning.

After the combat, 70% of defensive structures are automatically rebuilt immediately without additional costs.

Debris Field

When the combat is over, the wreckage from all destroyed ships are thrown into a debris field which orbits the planet where the combat took place. This field contains valuable resources that can be recovered using Recyclers. The amount of resources in the debris field depends on how many ships were destroyed in that battle; planetary defensive units produce no debris (unless the game universe settings allow “defense to debris field”). The size of the debris field and its makeup can be seen in Galaxy View, and can be harvested by any player who’s Recyclers arrive there first, even if they did not participate in the battle.

Moons

A moon may be created from debris left behind after Combat. The likelihood of a moon being created depends on the size of the debris field. The maximum chance of a moon being created is 20%.