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

The following provides an overview of score, reputation and ship-crew rank (not Player Rank), and how they interact with each other.

You can gain quite a considerable amount of score by winning a battle. “Winning a battle” actually means you have destroyed at least one ship during a battle. You do not have to completely destroy all of the ships of your opponent, nor do your ships have to survive combat in order for you to receive ‘score’ for the battle. You merely have to satisfy the requirement of destroying one ship or some planetary-defenses. The amount of ship-units or planetary-defense units that you destroyed are added to your overall score. So if you for instance destroyed a ship with 1000 units, 1000 points will be added to your score.

However, things are not quite as simple as that. In order to avoid that a strong and advanced players simply kill all the ships of newbies and less advanced players in the galaxy, the score that you receive is influenced by the score-ratio between the two players.

If we take the example from above: someone destroys a ship worth 1000 score points, but it turns out that his overall score is twice as high as the players’ whose ship was destroyed, then that person will only receive some of the score that he actually “deserves” as determined score ratio.

Score ratio is determined by the following formula:

Player-B’s-Score / (Player-A’s-Score - 20%)

Example: If player A destroys one of player B’s ships worth 1000 points. Player A’s overall score is 10,000 while player B’s score is 5,000. The math would go as follows:

1000 x (5,000 / (10,000-20%)) = 630

So instead of the full 1000 points player A would receive 630 points.

On the other hand, if that same person destroyed a ship of a player with twice the score of himself, then the score he earns will be greatly increased! In the above example Player A would have received 2500 points instead of 1000 if he attacked someone twice the size of themselves. In short, it pays off to attack someone with a higher score than yourself.

Usually when the score ratio is calculated the score of yourself and that of the enemy are compared, and the resulting value is considered the score ratio. That meant that if you attacked a player with a score of only 1 point lower than yours, the score ratio would be negative - only very slightly negative, but nevertheless.

To avoid that effect we have pushed down the “break-even” point slightly, by defining that an empire with a score that is 20% lower than yours, will give you an even score ratio. That means that if you attack an empire with the same score as yours the score-ratio leans quite considerably in your favor: the resulting score ratio when attacking an equally sized player than yours is 1.2. That means the effective score that you gain from a battle is multiplied by 1.2!

This effect of course further increases the bigger the empire you are attacking is compared to yours!

To further amplify this effect, namely one is punished for attacking weaker players, and one is rewarded for attacking stronger players, reputation has been introduced.

You gain and lose reputation through so-called diplomatic incidents. A diplomatic instance would for instance be the first time you successfully attack a player that you have declared war. Successfully would mean that you need to destroy at least one ship, or one planetary defense facility.

Please note that only the first battle in which you gain score (that is, hostile units are successfully destroyed) is used to compute reputation. We call this battle the “first significant battle”. All subsequent battles will not lose or gain you reputation anymore.

The following conditions must be met in order to lose or gain reputation:

• You gain/lose reputation if you declared war and had the attack order given.
• You gain/lose reputation if your ally declared war and had the attack order given (so following your ally to a hostile planet will gain/lose you reputation too).
• You will not lose reputation if the other side declared war on you, even if you or your ally is the aggressor.
• You will not lose reputation if you simply park your ships at an allies planet which is under attack.

This means, that if a weaker player than yourself declares war on you, attacks you, and during the course of the battle loses all his ships, you will not lose any reputation, because you did not declare war in the first place! That means if someone else declared war on you, you are free to attack that player without the danger of losing reputation during the battles.

Note: If you move to a planet that you are at war with, you are always considered the aggressor.

Conditions under which your ships will participate in an allies battle:

• Your ally is at war with the other player.
• You do not have an active peace treaty, military alliance, or a cease fire with the other player.
• You have combat ships present at the battle.

Please note that if you “blindly” follow an ally who is about to attack a hostile planet (which he first had declared war to), then you will lose reputation too, IF you gained score during that battle (that is you successfully destroyed a ship or PD facility).

So how is reputation calculated? Reputation is based on the score-ratio of the two players at the time of the battle. If your score is 100,000 and your opponents score is only 50,000 then the resulting score ratio is 0.5. However, we add a bias to that formula so that empires 20% smaller than yours are still considered the “same size”, and will result in a score-ratio of 1.

Reputation gained/lost during a battle is calculated with the following formula:

Reputation = log(base 2)(Enemy-Score/My-Score[-20%]) x 5

So far so good, but what effect does reputation have in the game? We learned already that the score-ratio between the two players has a big role when calculating the score. The opponents reputation further amplifies how much score you gain in a battle! In case your opponent has got a negative reputation, that will raise the amount of score you gain!

For example, you are attacking an enemy with twice the score of yourself, and destroy a ship with 1000 units, you will gain 2500 score points. Now, if on top of that the player has got a negative reputation of -20, then the score you gain is further raised by 20%! In total you will gain 3000 score points for destroying a ship worth 1000 units.

However, a positive reputation of your opponent has no effect on the score calculation.

That means you can boost your overall score by attacking players with a higher score than yourself, that on top of that do have a negative reputation. Those are considered juicy targets. At the same time avoid having a negative reputation, because this will turn you into a good target yourself.

Another way of losing reputation is by breaking an active treaty. A warning box will pop-up before declaring war to someone you still have an active treaty with. It will inform you about the amount of reputation you would potentially lose. You can decide if that is worth it to you.

There is another very important effect that reputation has on your empire: it influences the amount of corruption in your empire!

Please read Corruption for more detailed information on that topic.

Similar to the player gaining score by destroying enemy ships, the ship-crew involved in a battle will gain experience too. The amount of experience every crew-member gains, depends on the overall firepower-ratio of the ships involved.

The entire firepower of the two sides is added up and weighted against each other. If the firepower on both sides is equally large, then the resulting ratio is 1. This is further multiplied by 2, which results in a gain of 2 experience points for every crew-member.

If you managed to defeat a large fleet with only one ship, which is only really possible if the hostile fleet is heavily damaged, your ship-crew will gain the biggest amount of experience. However, if you attack a small harmless ship with a strong fleet, your ship-crew will barely gain any experience.

Experience translates to the following rank:

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.