Combat and Weapons

Only with aliens

The game has combat only with hostile aliens, and only where they stand: in an orbit, in a belt, by a moon. Aliens do not travel, so the ones who end up in a fight are those who flew to them or built next to them. There is no combat in flight.

Another player's ship is never a target. If someone else's copy is fighting beside you, you are on the same side.

A turn lasts half a minute

A fight is played in turns of half a minute of real time: enough to read the screen and change your mind. The server works it out, so the tab can even be closed.

You set a course with a click on the map and pick a target. A ship keeps the speed it has gained, braking has to start early, and every manoeuvre burns fuel. The guns fire on their own, while torpedoes leave in a salvo you have ordered. With no orders the copy fires back, but it won't choose a course for you. Leaving it next to aliens for the night is a bold decision.

There is always a way out: get far enough away from every enemy, and a "Leave the battle" button appears. An alien will give chase, but it never strays far from its place.

A weapon is a module like any other

Weapons are researched, printed at a factory and fitted into the hull, just like a drive or a scanner. Their shelf does not open at once: first a copy has to realise there is something in space to defend against. The starting hull has no room for weapons, the interstellar ones have little. Every copy has service drones, but they hit lightly and only point-blank.

Each kind has its own character. A laser reaches far but weakens with distance. A railgun is strong up close. A torpedo reaches farthest and hits hardest, but it can be shot down on the way in, and in time point-defence guns appear too. With every era weapons grow stronger.

Rounds are counted before departure

A new gun leaves the factory empty. It is loaded at a colony's station, and the colony's warehouse pays for the rounds. In a fight or in flight a magazine can't be topped up, so rounds are counted before departure: this is one case where arithmetic protects you better than armour.

Hits take tonnes off the hull. The ship's printers patch the wounds little by little, and out of a fight a factory on the same orbit does too.

How it ends

A fight ends when one side is gone. A lost copy takes its ship and everything it has learned with it, and wreckage stays on the spot. The wrecks of defeated aliens sometimes hold something useful for your own hull.

Stations don't fire, and an alien turns on them once no copies of yours are left in the fight: a copy shields the colony with itself. What else can be lost and how to avoid it is told in "Threats and Losses".