Fleets and Missions

A fleet is one or more ships dispatched from a planet on a mission. Missions are the primary way you interact with the rest of the galaxy — moving resources, attacking enemies, colonizing new worlds, mining asteroids, or patrolling space.

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 for defense. Ships fight on the defender's side if the location is attacked.
  • INTERCEPT — Chase down an enemy fleet in transit before it lands. Requires an active war declaration against the target's owner.
  • 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, STATION, PATROL, INTERCEPT) are charged upfront at dispatch. The return leg is then free. One-way missions (COLONIZE, one-way TRANSPORT) pay only a single leg.

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.

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

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.