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Combat Simulation
The Combat Simulation station fights a battle on paper before you fly it: feed it both sides — ships, emplacements, technologies — and read the likely outcome before risking the hulls. The calculator below is the real thing, not an illustration: it runs the same combat resolver the universe itself uses when a raid arrives, on your numbers, in your browser.
How a fight works
When an attacking mission reaches a defended colony, every ship it brought lines up against everything standing there: the ships in the hangar and every emplacement on the wall. The fight then runs in rounds, and both sides fire simultaneously — there is no initiative, no first strike.
Each unit on each side picks a random enemy and shoots. Three things can happen to a shot:
- It bounces. A weak gun against a strong shield does nothing at all — not even a scratch. This is why a swarm of Wasps cannot wear down a Leviathan by volume alone: every single hit bounces, forever.
- It lands. The shield absorbs what it can and the rest comes off the hull. Hull damage is permanent for the whole battle.
- It kills. A unit whose hull runs out is destroyed — and a unit that is merely wounded below the explosion threshold risks blowing up outright on every further hit, with worse odds the deeper the wound.
Some hulls also carry rapid fire: after striking certain targets they immediately shoot again, and again, for as long as the chain holds. A Mantis chews through fighter squads this way; a Leviathan chews through nearly everything. Rapid fire is what makes a mixed wall matter — fodder soaks the volleys that would otherwise chain into your capitals.
At the end of every round the dead are removed — and here is the rule that decides long fights: shields come back to full at the top of each round, hull damage stays. A defence you cannot out-damage in one round, you may never out-damage at all; its shield simply resets while your fleet bleeds. If neither side is wiped by the last round, the fight is a draw and the attacker flies home.
The engine's own figures:
| Rule | Figure |
|---|---|
| A battle runs at most | 6 rounds |
| A hit bounces off entirely when it is under | 1% of the target's current shield |
| A wounded unit can explode outright once its hull is under | 70% of full |
| Ballistics per level | +10% weapon |
| Shielding per level | +10% shield |
| Armour Alloys per level | +10% hull |
| Ships destroyed leave debris worth | 30% of their Iron and Carbon |
Espionage before the raid tells you what stands at the target; the loot a victory takes is bounded by what your surviving holds can carry. See Fleet for the mission itself.
The aftermath
Destroyed ships leave a debris field at the site, holding a share of the Iron and Carbon they cost; any Scavenger mission can sweep it, yours or anyone's — debris is public. Destroyed emplacements leave nothing: a colony's wall can stand back up after the battle, which is what makes defence cheap to hold compared to hulls in flight.
Try it
Field both sides and press resolve. The same seed always replays the identical battle — that is the engine's own determinism, not a simplification — and new seed rerolls the dice to show you how wide the luck runs. Losses in a real raid are never refunded; rehearse here first.
Attacker
BallisticsShieldingArmour Alloys
Defender
BallisticsShieldingArmour Alloys
The picks above are a representative handful. The in-game station fields the full roster — every hull on Shipyard and every emplacement on Defence — plus flight time, fuel and loot preview against a real target.