Fleets and Missions

Mission Types

• TRANSPORT — Move metal, carbon, hydrogen, or DROIDs between your own planets. Optionally set return_after_drop to pick up resources on the way back.
• COLONIZE — Send a Colonizer to an empty coordinate to claim a new planet. The ship is consumed on arrival. The DROIDs on your source planet ride along as cargo and start the colony's workforce.
• ATTACK — Offensive combat mission targeting an enemy planet. Carry no DROIDs on attack fleets — combat DROIDs are your defending planet's garrison, not attack cargo.
• ESPIONAGE — Send Spy Probes only to an enemy planet or base. Performs a full intelligence scan. The probes are always consumed one-way. See Radar, Espionage and ECCM.
• MINE — Dock at an asteroid. Must include at least one Mining Ship. The fleet extracts resources until the asteroid is depleted, the cargo hold is full, or you recall the fleet.
• STATION — Park your fleet on an allied planet or base. Ships fight on the defender's side if the location is attacked, and the stationed fleet becomes a self-sufficient garrison that can carry its own cargo and later launch onward missions from that forward position. See Stationed Fleets and Garrisons below.
• INTERCEPT — Chase down an enemy fleet in transit before it lands. Requires an active war declaration against the target's owner. You launch an intercept the same way you launch any other mission: pick the flying enemy fleet as your destination in the destination picker, then dispatch as usual.
• PATROL — Pure movement mission to an empty coordinate. Fly to a location and return, producing no scan or cargo movement. Useful for Lynceus recon ships whose sensor bubble extends along the flight path.

Travel Time

Travel time depends on distance and ship speed. All ships in a fleet fly at the speed of the slowest ship. A fleet with fast combat ships and a slow Colonizer travels at the Colonizer's pace — mix with care.

You can also dial the speed percentage when dispatching. Flying slower reduces fuel cost proportionally but adds travel time.

Practical impact: mixing fast combat ships with slow utility ships slows the whole fleet. If you want a fast strike, don't load it with Haulers.

Fuel

Ships burn hydrogen. Each ship type has a characteristic fuel rate. Actual fuel cost per ship type scales with distance and how fast the ship travels relative to its maximum capability. Round-trip missions (ATTACK, MINE, PATROL, INTERCEPT) are charged upfront at dispatch. The return leg is then free. One-way missions (COLONIZE, one-way TRANSPORT, and the outbound STATION leg) pay only a single leg from the origin planet.

If you RECALL a fleet before it arrives, you receive a full refund of the fuel that was debited. If the fleet is destroyed on arrival, you forfeit the return fuel with no refund.

Once a fleet is parked as a garrison (STATION), any further move it makes — relocating, striking, or flying home — is funded from the garrison's own carried hydrogen rather than the origin planet. See Stationed Fleets and Garrisons below.

Cargo

The fleet's total cargo capacity is the sum of each ship's cargo capacity. Cargo is shared across all resources and DROIDs:

• Resources (metal, carbon, hydrogen) fill the same shared pool
• DROIDs as cargo each consume a fixed amount of cargo space
• Attack fleets carry zero DROIDs — ATTACK missions force all droid fields to 0
• STATION fleets can carry cargo too — whatever metal, carbon, or hydrogen you load rides along and becomes the garrison's own reserve once it arrives (see below)

On a COLONIZE mission, whatever the Colonizer carries is delivered to the new colony — but the new colony's base storage cap applies at arrival.

Return-After-Drop (TRANSPORT)

When you set return_after_drop on a TRANSPORT mission, the fleet:

1. Delivers your cargo to the destination planet
2. Automatically loads resources and idle DROIDs from the destination (up to per-slot caps you configure)
3. Returns home

This turns a one-way delivery into a round-trip gather operation, saving manual dispatch time when farming satellite planets.

Stationed Fleets and Garrisons

A fleet you STATION on an allied planet or alliance base doesn't just sit there as a passive defender — it becomes a self-sufficient garrison: a mobile unit with its own hold of metal, carbon, and hydrogen, parked in allied territory.

• The garrison funds itself. Every move it makes after arriving — relocating to another allied location, striking outward on an attack or espionage run, transporting resources, or flying home — is paid for out of the garrison's own carried hydrogen, not from any planet's stockpile. There is no more free "teleport home" once a fleet is stationed; bringing it back is just another dispatch, funded like any other.
• Fuel shares the hold with cargo. A garrison has one cargo hold, and hydrogen kept as fuel takes up the same space that resources or loot would. Load a garrison heavy with ore and light on fuel, and it may not have enough hydrogen left to move — watch for a "Needs Fuel" state if that happens. The fix is a resupply TRANSPORT carrying hydrogen to the garrison's location, which tops up its reserve.
• Forward operating bases. Because a garrison can launch its own onward missions, staging a fleet at an ally's base or planet lets you strike from much closer to the front line, then bring survivors home to the garrison or relocate them onward — as long as the alliance bond holds and the garrison has the fuel to fund the trip.

Round-Trip History

A round trip — an outbound leg and its return — is tracked as two separate, linked legs rather than a single row that gets overwritten when the fleet comes home. In your fleet history you can see both the outbound leg (what you sent and where) and the return leg (what came back) side by side, instead of the return simply replacing the record of what was originally dispatched.

Fleet Overview

Your Overview screen's fleet totals count every ship you own, including ships currently stationed away from home as a garrison on an allied planet or alliance base. Those garrisoned ships show up as their own rows alongside your planet hangars, so your empire-wide ship count reflects your real total strength — not just what's docked at your own worlds.