Player Combat

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Player combat resolves an attacking fleet against the defending ships and available stationary defenses. This guide describes the current local combat rules. Void Boss Combat uses a separate encounter system.

Firing order and rounds

Ships fight in blueprint stacks: ships in one fleet entry share a ship count, weapon output, shields and hull pool. They do not take individual turns.

1. Both sides' stacks enter one firing order, sorted by reaction speed. The fastest stack acts first; the entire attacking fleet does not fire before the defender.
2. The firing stack's surviving ship count determines its weapon output. Its damage is distributed across surviving enemy stacks.
3. Shields and hull damage are applied immediately, and destroyed ships are deducted before the next stack acts.
4. The next stack fires with its remaining ships. A destroyed stack cannot take its turn.

Each surviving stack can act once per round, subject to its weapons and battery endurance. Equal reaction speeds receive a random tie-break each round, with no fixed attacker advantage, except for a surprise strike. Combat lasts at most five rounds and ends earlier if either side is wiped out. If both sides remain after the fifth round, the result is a draw.

Reaction speed

Reaction speed decides the firing order above, so it is one of the most important values of a combat design. For almost every ship it is simply the ship's speed: a fast design shoots before a slow one. Only the Charger makes a ship react more slowly than it flies.

How it is calculated

1. Engine and frame. Every design starts from 10,000 engine points. Each engine tier above T0 adds 10%. Each skeleton tier costs 5%, each transport-module tier 8% and each extractor-module tier 10%. Drones have no skeleton or module penalty.
2. Mass. Every 3 points of mass lower the result by 1% (3.45 mass: −1.15%).
3. Tactical module. A Bomber multiplies the speed by 0.7 (−30%), a Surger by 1.3 (+30%).
4. Reaction. Reaction speed equals this speed. A Charger multiplies it by 0.7: the ship reacts 30% later but still travels at full speed.
5. Research. Engine Engineering raises speed and reaction speed by 5% per level.

The civilian government bonus and Mark upgrades only raise travel speed; they never change reaction speed.

Design	Speed	Reaction speed
T0 skeleton, T0 engine, 3.45 mass	9,885	9,885
Same design with Engine Engineering 2 (+10%)	10,873	10,873
Same, with a Charger	10,873	7,611
Same, with a Surger	14,135	14,135
Same, with a Bomber	7,610	7,610

Surprise strike

If the defender did not counter-scan an incoming attack fleet, the attacker catches them off guard: all attacking stacks get +20% reaction speed in round 1 and +10% in round 2. From round 3 on, normal reaction speeds apply. A fleet the defender counter-scanned gets no surprise bonus. The battle report marks the affected rounds with a Surprise strike line.

For defenders, a counter-scan on an incoming attack is therefore worth more than the information alone. For attackers, the bonus decides the first volleys when both sides are about equally fast; it cannot make a much slower fleet fire first.

Using it

• Destroyed ships are removed before the next stack acts, so a stack that fires first can wipe out or thin an enemy stack before it shoots back. Reaction speed matters most when your first volleys can decide the round.
• Heavier skeletons, cargo and extractor modules and extra mass all make a design fire later. Light, purpose-built warships react first.
• Each stack keeps its own reaction speed. A fleet's travel time follows its slowest ship, but in combat every stack fires on its own turn.
• Equal reaction speeds are ordered randomly in every round.
• The Ship Assembly preview lists reaction speed among the platform values, and every saved blueprint card shows it. With current research switched on, the Engine Engineering bonus is included.

Tactical modules in combat

Module	AP	Effect in combat	Drawback
Bomber	10	Fires at surviving stationary defenses and defensive drones first and deals them double damage.	Engine speed −30%, so it also fires later.
Charger	22	Energy weapon damage builds up over the battle (table below).	Reacts 30% later; weak in the first rounds.
Surger	8	Speed +30%, so it also fires earlier.	Uses 60% more fuel.

A Charger's energy damage per round, compared with the same ship without one:

Round	1	2	3	4	5
Energy damage that round	30%	60%	120%	240%	480%
Total so far (without Charger)	30% (100%)	90% (200%)	210% (300%)	450% (400%)	930% (500%)

A Charger only overtakes a normal ship from round 4 on. Ships fire in all five rounds (battery limits apply to drones only), but a battle ends as soon as one side is wiped out. Chargers are therefore an investment in long, even fights; in a short battle, for example against a much weaker or much stronger enemy, they deal less than a normal ship.

These values come from the server's combat rules and can change with balancing. The assembly tooltip always shows the current values.

Damage distribution

A volley is divided using 80% of the enemy's total mass and 20% of its ship count. Heavier or more numerous stacks therefore receive a larger share. Dividing identical ships between more blueprints does not increase their combined targeting share, though turn order and rounding can still affect a battle.

Energy damage reaches shields first. A precision portion of both weapon types bypasses shields; research can affect this portion. Tactical modules, chassis matchups and civilian targets can modify damage. Bombers prioritize surviving stationary defenses or drones when those are available.

Destroyed ships immediately reduce a stack's maximum shield capacity. Between rounds, surviving stacks can recharge 12–25% of their current maximum shields; a defending planet's Shield Emitter adds to that recharge range: each Shield Emitter level raises both ends of the range by 1 percentage point, up to +25 points at level 25. A fully built emitter therefore gives a 37–50% recharge instead of 12–25%. The emitter does nothing while it is offline, for example after you harness a solar flare in a planet event. Hull damage does not regenerate between rounds.

Critical survival

Hull damage first determines the number of would-be casualties. Those ships are divided into at most twenty-five nearly equal groups, and each group receives a 5% chance to survive critically damaged. Smaller casualty counts use fewer groups; uneven counts are distributed so no ships disappear through rounding.

For example, 500 would-be casualties form twenty-five groups of 20. A successful roll can preserve that group, rather than rolling separately for each of the 500 ships. This makes survival happen in batches: 5% is a chance per group, not a guaranteed surviving share.

Damage is still deducted from the total hull pool. Critical survivors do not receive fresh hull, and every retained ship needs at least one remaining hull point. Excess damage can reduce the number of survivors even after a successful roll. If the stack's remaining hull pool is exhausted, it is destroyed regardless of survival chances.

Critically damaged ships still fire at full weapon strength. On a later hull-damaging hit, eligible would-be casualties can receive another survival roll. Merely advancing to the next round, or taking no hull damage, does not trigger another roll or restore hull. Hull is tracked as a shared pool, rather than a separate health bar for each ship.

Loot

Only a won attack takes loot. For each resource, the attacker can take at most:

• half of the planet's current stock (less on repeated raids), and
• only what lies above the planet's Resource Bunker reserve: 4% of that resource's storage plus 2% per Bunker level, up to 50%. The Bunker protects nothing while the planet has an energy deficit.

The fleet's cargo capacity limits the total. Loot is spread evenly across the resources that still have something to take, starting with SEM.

Repeated raids

Raiding the same player again and again pays less and less. Your first successful raid on a player opens a 24-hour window:

Raid in the window	1–3	4	5	6	…	12	13 and later
Most of each resource you can take	50%	45%	40%	35%	…	5%	0%

The window counts from that first raid, not from the latest one. Once it has run out, your next successful raid on that player opens a new window at 50%. Every defending player has their own window, and only won attacks count. From the second raid in a window on, the battle report shows which raid it was and the share that applied.

Reports and losses

Reports records the result, participating stacks, round-by-round ship counts, shield and hull pools, damage exchanges and actual losses. Only ships actually destroyed count toward losses, combat debris and destruction-based rewards; a critically surviving ship is still alive.

An incoming volley's raw damage is not necessarily its hull damage. Shields, distribution between targets, precision and damage modifiers all affect the result. Battle reports retain the original combat inputs and random seed so the same battle can be reproduced without using later fleet changes.

See Fleet Operations for launching an attack, Ship Assembly for ship designs and Debris Fields for collecting combat debris.