1. Combat
   • Combat Preconditions
   • Combat Overview
   • Ship Vs. Ship Combat
   • Planetary Defense
   • Conquering A Planet
   • The Battle Report
   • Score, Reputation And Rank

Following is an introduction how combat is performed in Space Civilizations.

We basically distinguish between two types of values: the “offensive” firepower, and the “defensive” units. You can interpret the units of a ship as the mass/weight or the gross-registered-tons (GRT). The more units a ship has the more firepower it takes to destroy this ship.

Example: Lets say for instance you do have a ship with 1000 firepower and you attack a ship with 2000 units, it will take you 2 turns to completely destroy this ship. After the first tick the ship being shot at will have a condition of 50%, after the second turn the condition will be 0% - which means it is destroyed

During combat units are further increased by shields, hence it will be more difficult to destroy the ship. If you have got shields installed with a shield strength of 50%, your units are increased by another 50%. We call the resulting value the hitpoints (units plus shields). You will often see units and hitpoints displayed right next to each other.

Example: If you have got a ship with 2000 units and shields of 50%, your ships effective hitpoints in the battle will be 3000. So this means that your enemy needs to have at least 3000 firepower in order to destroy your ship in a single turn (round) of combat.

We distinguish between 3 different types of firepower. These are:

• Light-firepower (the light-blue value): most effective against light-ships.
• Heavy-firepower (the dark-blue value): most effective against heavy-ships.
• Bombing-firepower (the orange value): only effective against planets, or rather its planetary-defense.

On the other hand there are two types of ships in the game:

• The light ship-classes: these are “Shuttle”, “Corvette”, “Frigate”.
• The heavy ship-classes: these are “Destroyer”, “Cruiser”, “Battleship”.

Light-weapons are especially effective against light-ships. Heavy-weapons are especially effective against heavy-ships. Bombing-weapons, on the other hand, only have an effect on planets, or rather on their planetary defense. That doesn’t mean that light ship-weapons are useless against heavy-ships! They will still shoot at heavy-ships, but not with their full firepower. Actually they will lose 50% of their firepower against heavy-ships. Similarly heavy-weapons are only 50% as effective against light-ships.

Example: Say your ship is equipped with weapons worth 1000 light-firepower, and you meet a heavy-ship with 2000 hitpoints, what will happen? Your light-weapons are only half as effective against the heavy-ship. As a result (presuming that the other ship is not firing back) you will need 4 turns to completely destroy this ship.

In order to destroy a planets’ defenses, you need to bomb that planet. This is done by attacking a planet with a ship that is equipped with bombs. The bombing-firepower of the ship defines the strength against the planetary-defense hitpoints.

Please read the chapter Planetary Defense for more details.

Example: Say you have a ship that is equipped with bombs worth of 5000 bombing-firepower. The planet that you want to attack has got a planetary defense of 10000 hitpoints. It will take 2 turns until the entire-planetary defense is destroyed. Please note that the planets’ defense will be shooting back at your ships in orbit of that planet. A planet too has got weapons against light and heavy ship-classes, and will shoot at them.

The ships’ rank is determined by the rank of the ship-crew that is piloting this ship. The more experienced/trained your ship-crew is, the higher the resulting average rank of the ship. The rank of a ship is calculated by adding up the entire experience of all crew-men, and dividing that by the minimum number of crew that is required to fly this ship. The resulting rank is the rank of the ship, which determines how much its firepower is increased during combat.

Experience translates to the following rank:

So what effect does a higher rank have to the ship? The ship-rank increases the ships’ firepower. The idea behind it is that a more experienced crew can fly and operate the ships’ weapons a lot better.

Example: Let’s say you ships average rank is 1, this will increase the firepower of the ship by 10% during the battle. So, a ship with 1000 firepower will effectively have 1100 firepower during a battle. A “rank 5” ship will give you an increase of 50% to the ships’ firepower. In short, you gain 10% of increased firepower per rank-level.

The ships’ condition indicates what percentage of the ships-units is damaged. If the condition is for instance at 80% then that means that 20% of your ship is already destroyed. Once it hits 0% the ship is completely destroyed.

Damaged ships can be repaired at any of your own planets with a shipyard, or at any of your allies planet that do have a shipyard. In the galaxy-map a little anchor symbol is displayed next to their name, to indicate that this planet does have a shipyard.

Per turn 8% of a heavy ships’ and 15% of a light ships’ damage is repaired.