Fleets & Combat

Fleets are sent from the Fleet page, or with one click straight from a Galaxy row. A fleet in flight can be recalled— it turns around and mirrors however long it's already been flying (a fleet 10 minutes into a 20-minute trip takes 10 minutes home). A returning fleet can't be recalled again, and a reinforcing fleet returns at full travel time when called back. If your target disappears mid-flight, your fleet is never just destroyed — it turns around and comes home with a report explaining why.

There are eleven ship classes. Each belongs to one of five wings— a broad tactical category that determines how it interacts with the enemy's own composition (the counter system, below).

When an attacking fleet arrives, the whole fight resolves in one pass:

• 1. Breachers first. If the attacker brought Breachers, they degrade the defender's Planetary Shield before anything else is calculated.
• 2. Power compared. Total attack power vs total defense power (garrison + stationed reinforcements + shield + Bastion).
• 3. The loser loses every ship. The winner loses a share too — and the closer the fight, the worse that share. Win 10:1 and you lose almost nothing; win by a hair and you bleed heavily.
• 4. Bombardiers strike. If the attacker won and brought surviving Bombardiers, they now destroy a handful of the defender's building levels — permanent structural damage.
• 5. Plunder. If the attacker won, they may take up to half the defender's stockpile, capped by surviving cargo capacity — a raid can never zero out a warehouse.
• 6. Reports. Both sides receive a full report showing the arithmetic. A defender with no surviving units and no probes at home sees only the attacker's totals — dying blind is the cost of skipping a scout.

Once you've researched a little at your Research Spire, combat gains a real decision layer on top of raw power. Crucially, if you never touch this research, your battles resolve exactly as if none of it existed— this is additive depth for players who invest, never a hidden nerf to players who don't.

• Fleet Doctrine unlocks stances, chosen per attack. Aggressive trades a power boost for heavier casualties on a win. Guarded trades a small power penalty for a safety net: if you lose anyway, a real fraction of your force escapes the usual 100% wipe and limps home wounded. Balanced is the classic un-modified math — the default.
• Target Analysisturns composition into a weapon. Every hull's wing beats one and loses to another in a strict cycle: Line beats Swarm, Capital beats Line, Swarm beats Capital — and an unescorted Siege fleet gets eaten alive by Swarm. The cheap Swarm hull is deliberately the answer to the most expensive Dreadnought.
• Long-Range Sensorssharpens your probes and, at level 2, starts reading the enemy's stance and doctrine on spy reports — and symmetrically unmasks a hidden attacker's stance and rough composition on your battle reports.

None of this is hidden math — every battle report includes a full breakdown (base power → after counters → after stance) so you can always reconstruct exactly why a fight went the way it did.

Read quickly, the fight system can sound like “scout, then send whatever's bigger.” It isn't, and the reason is that every layer above stacks real risk onto that decision instead of just more math:

• A stance is a real bet, not a free upgrade. Aggressive wins faster and harder — but even a won fight costs you more of your own fleet than a balanced win would have. Guarded is the opposite bet: weaker in the fight, but the one stance that turns a loss into a bruised retreat instead of a total wipe. Neither is strictly better; both are a real tradeoff you commit to before you know the outcome.
• The counter cycle punishes assuming, not just under-building.A bigger fleet built from the wrong wing still loses to a smaller, correctly-countered one — so “send the bigger number” only works if you already know what you're sending it into.
• Long-Range Sensors is the real information war.Below level 2, an attacker's stance and wing composition are invisible on your incoming report — you see the strike coming, but not what's actually in it. That's a genuine misread risk: commit your defense to the wrong stance or the wrong counter, and a smaller attacking fleet can still beat a larger defense. There's no bluffing mechanic — nobody can fake a fleet that isn't there — but there is real, exploitable information asymmetry between whoever researched deeper and whoever didn't.

Put together: outnumbering an opponent who has the right counter, the right stance, and better sensors than you loses anyway. The bigger number is a real advantage, but it's never the only one that decides a fight.

Your Planetary Shield multiplies your defending power and adds a flat bonus on top. Bastion is a separate additive percentage on top of your raw garrison, stacking underneath the shield rather than competing with it. Breachersare the counter to both: they knock the shield's effective level down before its multiplier is even calculated, on a diminishing-returns curve — a handful barely dents a big shield, but a genuinely large breacher fleet can suppress it hard. This is deliberately expensive: shield-cracking is a big-war tool.

Separate from win/lose math, some survivors of any battle come home wounded rather than fully combat-ready, scaled by how rough the fight was. A Repair Bayheals wounded ships over time; a base field-repair rate works even without the building, so investing only ever speeds recovery, never gates it. This sits alongside guarded-stance retreat as one of several channels for softening a bad fight's aftermath.

Every colony has loyalty, a 0–100 stat that starts full and slowly regenerates (faster with a Diplomatic Relay). Bringing surviving Command Envoysin a won attack against another player's colony knocks its loyalty down — the first envoy does most of the damage, each additional one adds steadily less, so the efficient play is repeated waves, not one giant stack.

A single attack can never drop loyalty to zero— a hard per-attack cap means capturing always takes at least two separate, fully-telegraphed won attacks, giving the defender real chances to shield, reinforce, or counter-raid in between. When loyalty hits zero (and the attacker has a free slot, and the target isn't a home colony — those are never capturable), the colony defects: ownership flips, buildings stay intact, queues are wiped, one envoy is consumed. Post-capture loyalty starts low, so a freshly-taken colony is a hot potato — including from its original owner taking it right back.

Every real battle leaves something behind. 30% of the alloys and crystal cost of every ship that died— winner's and loser's both — spills out as a public debris field where the battle happened. Isotopes never appear (they burn with the ship) and neither does Aurium (never lootable, anywhere).

Anyone can see a debris field and anyone with spare empty cargo can send the Harvest mission to collect it. Harvesting is scavenging, not aggression: no telegraph, no shield check, no protection restriction— you can harvest a wreck in someone's home orbit and they'll never see it coming. At arrival you collect whichever is smaller — your cargo capacity or what's left in the field — split between alloys and crystal.

Nobody owns a wreck until it's physically in a cargo hold. Beaten there, or the field decays first, and you come home empty — no penalty. This cuts both ways: if you lost a battle, your own salvage run can recover real value from your dead ships. A field decays 48 game-hours after its most recent deposit, and every fresh battle at that spot tops it up and resets the clock — so a contested front stays littered with salvage as long as the fighting continues.