Combat

Combat is what happens when two or more opposing fleets meet at a planet. Combat lasts for one tick. The fleets will usually fight for possession of the planet's roids. Hostile fleets may attempt to steal asteroids or destroy Structures with Structure Killers, while defending fleets will attempt to stop this from happening. Aditionally, ships may be stolen from either side.

Mechanism

Combat works based upon the ship stats. Initiative determines the order in which the different ships fire in battle. Ships with the lowest initiative fire first, then sequentially higher initiatives fire. Ships with equal initiative fire at the same time.

Targetting is based upon ship class. Each ship has one or more targets and does not fire upon any other ship classes.

Ships may do different types of damage, ranging from EMP to stealing or killing.

When ships fire, the damage output of each ship is multiplied by the number of firing ships and divided by the armour of the targetted ship to determine how many hostile ships are destroyed. Unlike in earlier rounds, guns always hit.

At their initiative, any surviving and unfrozen pods will attempt to steal roids. Pods must do 50 damage to capture a roid, limited to 25% of the planet's total in each tick; for example a planet which has 100 Metal, 200 Crystal and 100 Eonium asteroids can lose a maximum of 25 metal, 50 crystal and 25 eonium asteroids (requiring 5000 damage). Captured roids are shared between the attackers, depending on the value of their fleet as compared to the total value of the attacking fleet. If any attacker does not have enough pods available, some roids will not be captured.

Last, any surviving structure killers will bomb structures. Each structure has 500 armour and only 10% of structures can be destroyed each tick.

Following a battle, defenders will collect salvage if any ships have been killed in battle.

History

Before round 10, combat could last for one, two or three consecutive ticks, while defending fleets could remain in orbit for up to 6 ticks. Ships also had a number of attributes that have since been removed, such s firepower, weapon speed and agility.