Combat Doctrine
Field Manual

The moment any two hostile units are within weapon max range of each other, a live battle spins up and every armed unit at that location is pulled in. The simulation runs at 20 ticks per second — every shot, dodge, and interception you see is computed in real time.

Reinforcements — friendly ships arriving mid-battle join automatically when they come into range. Ships can even be engaged in transit: if your convoy flies through a hostile gun line, it gets shot at while moving.

Retreat — there is no retreat button; retreat is a maneuver. Order your ships out of the enemy’s weapon range and they leave the fight. Slow ships under long-range fire may not make it out.

Battle end — an engagement concludes when one side has no survivors left, when all hostiles disengage, or when roughly a minute passes with no damage dealt (a stalemate — the side with the most surviving units takes the field).

Damage hits shields first, multiplied by the weapon’s vs-shields modifier. Whatever breaks through hits the hull, where three reductions stack:

Armor Classes

Armor Penetration

Every weapon has a Pen rating (0–4) — the highest armor class it defeats at full effect. Shooting above your Pen rating collapses your damage fast:

Shield Regeneration

Shields regenerate a percentage of max shield per second — but only after the ship has gone 5 full seconds without taking a hit. Sustained focus fire keeps the regen clock at zero; scattered pot-shots let every target you graze heal back up.

Small Lasers (SL) — dogfight guns

Fast-cycling fighter armament. High accuracy and a 0.5s cycle make them ideal against small, dodgy targets — misses hurt less when you shoot twice a second.

Turbo-Lasers (TL) — the fleet backbone

The only weapon line that runs all the way to tier 6 with balanced stats: +10% vs shields, −10% vs armor, top-tier accuracy, and immunity to point defense. When in doubt, bring turbo-lasers. TL-5 reaches Pen 4 — one of only three weapons that hit Super-armored capitals at full effect.

Ion Cannons (ION) — the off switch

The worst DPS in the game (50–150) at half effect vs everything — and completely worth it. Every ion hit shuts the target’s weapons down for 0.5–1.5 seconds, stacking up to 10 seconds. A dedicated ion wing can hold a battleship’s guns offline while the rest of your fleet works it over. At 95–97% accuracy, ion hits land on nearly every shot.

Plasma Cannons (PL) — shield-strippers

+50% vs shields, and every hit burns an additional 1.5% of the target’s max shield (Shield Burn). The longest-range energy weapon (1,000 at PL-3). Open with plasma to crack the shield layer, then let your hull-crackers through. Weak vs armor (×0.6) — switch fire once the shields drop.

Heavy Missiles (HM) — the armor answer

+30% vs armor and the longest non-nuke range at every tier — HM-5 reaches 1,210, out-ranging every gun in the game except nukes. Heavy missiles are how ships kill armored ships. Their weakness is the flight: slow projectiles (speed 25–35) that point defense eats and fast targets outrun.

Small Missiles (SM) — early hull damage

Cheap +10% vs armor from tier 1. Fine early, outclassed once flak walls appear.

Concussion Rockets (CR) — the crowd-sweeper

Shortest attack range in the game (100–280) with a unique payoff: Area Damage. 30% of every volley splashes all enemies within 225 units of the impact — and the splash ignores armor class entirely. Against packed formations, concussion volleys hit the whole cluster at once.

Proton Rockets (PR) — the burst kings

The DPS cheese of the low tiers. PR-2 lists 1,200 DPS at tier 3 — already 2.4× the tier-3 turbo-laser — and Fast Lock halves its cooldown again in battle, effectively doubling that. The price: 320 max range and interceptable. Get close, delete something, get out.

The trade profile is extreme in every direction: the biggest alpha strike in the game (12,000 per NM-5 volley), +50% vs armor, +50% siege bonus vs structures, and the longest reach of any weapon (1,310) — against the game’s worst accuracy (65–74%), a 4-second cycle, and the slowest projectile in existence (speed 15 at every mark, it never improves).

How interception works

Each combat cycle, every ready AM mount on your side contributes its Intercept rating × mount count to a shared defensive pool that protects all friendly ships in the battle. Incoming interceptable volleys are then rolled against that pool:

Capacity 30 against 30 incoming missiles = every single one dies. Capacity 30 against 60 = each missile has a coin-flip — about half get through. This is saturation: point defense doesn’t degrade gracefully, it gets overwhelmed by volume.

AM doctrine

Attacking a PD wall: synchronize your volleys — 60 missiles arriving together beat 60 missiles trickling in one at a time (each lone missile faces the full pool). Better: lead with uninterceptable energy weapons and make their AM mounts dead weight.

Defending: your AM pool is fleet-wide, so a handful of CIWS escorts (Intercept 5 each) protect the bombers that can’t protect themselves. Capital ships stack dozens of mounts — a top-end super dreadnaught fields 30 CIWS batteries, up to 150 intercepts per cycle. You do not trickle missiles into that.

Inside optimal range — always 65% of max — every volley deals full damage. From optimal to max, damage falls off linearly down to 10%. At max range you are poking, not shooting. Distance also erodes accuracy: up to −10% at the edge of your envelope.

Kiting works. If your max range beats theirs, you can hold the gap and fire while taking nothing in return. Missile ships out-range laser ships of the same tier by 40–55% — a missile line that keeps its distance never gets touched by turbo-lasers. Their counter is to close the gap (or shoot your missiles down).

Projectiles lead their targets. Missiles and rockets aim at where you will be, and the flight-time prediction lengthens the effective shot against a runner — more falloff, worse to-hit. Fast ships genuinely outrun slow ordnance: a speed-15 nuke chasing a sprinting fighter wastes most of its punch. Energy weapons are instant and skip all of this.

The asymmetry is the point: a light fighter dodges over a third of everything shot at it, while a dreadnaught (and every station) dodges nothing. Big ships get hit by every volley the enemy fires — their defense is armor class, not agility. Losing your Maneuvering Thrusters cuts evasion to 40% of normal, and a destroyed Bridge costs the attacker 40% accuracy.

Subsystem kills are random — you can’t call your shots — but big alpha weapons roll near the 8% cap on every volley, so heavy hitters cripple ships while killing them. Subsystem damage lasts the whole battle and carries into the ship’s post-battle state.

What causes it

Exactly two conditions put a ship Dead In The Water:

1. Life Support destroyed — the crew is lost, instantly. The ship drops out of the fight and its crew count hits zero.

2. Main Drive destroyed AND no working weapons left — it can neither run nor shoot. A ship with a dead drive but live guns keeps fighting; a ship with no guns but a live drive can still flee. Lose both and it’s over.

What it does

In battle, a DITW ship stops firing and enemies stop targeting it — it’s out of the fight, not out of the game. After the battle it holds the Dead In The Water status: it cannot move, cannot take orders, and reads as a derelict to everyone in the system.

Recovery — and capture

Repair it — field repair costs roughly 10% of the ship’s build cost and takes about 1/12 of its build time. Capital hulls (size 10+) are too big for standard field repair — they need an auxiliary ship or a rescue dock operation.

Or lose it. A derelict with a dead crew doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. Any commander who reaches it with enough settlers aboard can board it, restaff it, and take the ship — repair cost, ownership transfer, done.

Rule 1 — bring Pen or bring nothing

Check the armor table before the fight. Heavy armor (battleships) wants Pen 3 weapons: TL-3+, HM-3+, PL-1+. Super armor (dreadnaughts) wants Pen 4: TL-5, HM-5, or PL-3 — nothing else hits capitals at full effect. A hundred low-Pen ships firing at ×0.10 lose to physics, not to skill.

Rule 2 — turn their guns off

Big ships have 0–1% evasion and ion cannons have 95–97% accuracy — every ion volley lands. Stack Disable from multiple ion platforms and the monster fights the entire battle with its weapons offline while your damage-dealers work. The ion ships themselves deal nothing; that’s not their job.

Rule 3 — strip, then crack

Capitals hide millions of shield points in front of their hull. Plasma first: +50% vs shields plus a 1.5% max-shield burn per hit, and keep fire constant so the 5-second regen never starts. Once the shield drops, switch everything to heavy missiles — +30% vs armor finishes what plasma opened.

Rule 4 — make them miss, make them split

Size 1–3 hulls dodge 20–35% of incoming fire, and a spread-out swarm dilutes big single-target guns. Concussion splash and fast-cycle weapons counter swarms — check what the target actually mounts before you commit fighters.

Rule 5 — own the gap

If they out-Pen you, out-range them. HM-5 (1,210) fires from outside almost anything. Their PD will contest it — saturate in synchronized volleys, or accept the tax. Against defense platforms, nukes from beyond retaliation range are the whole playbook.

Auto-targeting re-evaluates every second. Ships prefer armed ships → unarmed ships → armed stations → unarmed stations, choosing among the ~3 nearest candidates with a strong bias toward wounded targets — your fleet naturally finishes kills rather than spreading damage.

Manual focus fire — select your ships and order an attack on a specific target. The order locks until the target dies or leaves range, and won’t be overridden by auto-targeting. Killing a ship removes its DPS from the fight; half-killing two ships removes nothing — and their shields start regenerating 5 seconds after you look away.

Overkill spills. Damage already in flight when a target dies redirects to the nearest enemy instead of vanishing — alpha-heavy fleets waste less than you’d think.

Destruction is permanent — no insurance, no respawn. Roughly 40% of destroyed units leave a wreckage site holding about half the resources that built them. Anyone with a salvage-capable ship within 150 units can strip it, and sites expire after 14 days.

Repair — survivors repair at ~10% of build cost. Ships crippled to Dead In The Water follow the recovery rules in Section 12 — including the part where someone else recovers them first.