Espionage & Intelligence

Sending a Spymission is a genuine contest between your probes and the defender's defenses. Your side's strength is effectively your probe count; the defender's is their probe count plus a small slice of their raw defense power — meaning a strong garrison makes a colony harder to successfully spy on, even with zero dedicated probes at home. The stronger side is more likely to win, but nothing is ever guaranteed in either direction: even an undefended colony catches some attempts, and even a fortress leaks some of the time.

If your spy succeeds, you get a full report: the target's resources, buildings, and garrison as they stood the moment your probes looked. If it fails, your probes are destroyed and the defender gets a detailed report naming exactly who spied and from where — so failed espionage is a real cost, not a free peek. Once Long-Range Sensors reaches level 2, a successful report also reveals the target's combat stance and doctrine research levels.

A strong home garrison does double duty: it wins fights outright, and it raises the bar for anyone trying to successfully scout you. Keeping real defensive power (and your own probes) at home is a legitimate, quiet deterrent even for a player who mostly plays offense.

The moment any hostile attack or spy mission launches at you, it appears on your Fleet page's Incoming list and triggers a red banner with a live countdown, showing the origin, the attacker's name, and the exact arrival time — but never the composition of the incoming fleet. Spy missions telegraph identically to real attacks, so a defender genuinely can't tell a cheap probe from a real hammer just from the banner — which keeps “do I dodge, shield, or ignore this?” an actual decision.

If an attacker recalls their fleet, it silently disappears from your incoming list — the scare cost them nothing, an intentional mind-game the game allows in both directions. If a hostile fleet ever lands without having shown up in your incoming list first, that's a bug, not a balance issue.

Building a Sensor Array(unlocked at Research Spire level 2) extends your — and your whole alliance's — live sensor coverage outward by one star system per level. Any hostile, mission-capable fleet (attack, spy, reinforce, or colonize — never peaceful trade traffic) heading into a covered system shows up as an anonymous contact: an amber marker reading something like “military inbound, 1–6h” — never who, never what it's carrying, never where it launched from. Holding a stabilized jump gate extends this same coverage around the gate's neighborhood.

Every successful spy mission also files a coarse, scoped-down summary — building counts, a rough unit-power band, a rough resource band, never the full report — into a shared pool intended for your whole alliance. It's designed as a continuously-updating group picture: a summary starts as RECENT, ages into STALE, and eventually expires, so scouting becomes an ongoing team job rather than a one-off personal peek.