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: Catch a fleet in flight and fight it in deep space. Targets are fleets of players you are at active war with, and pirate fleets. See Interception below.
• 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.

Joint Attacks

Alliance members can combine their fleets against one target in a joint attack. Any ATTACK mission a member of your alliance has in flight toward a planet can be joined. When you choose ATTACK on the Fleet screen and such attacks exist, a Join Allied Attack panel lists them. Selecting one fills in the destination. Choose Independent Attack to fly on your own instead.

• Arrival is synchronized. Every joining fleet arrives at the same moment as the fleet that started the attack. A fleet that cannot get there in time is refused, so a joining fleet must be fast enough to reach the target before the lead would. A faster fleet simply slows down to match.
• You can join from anywhere you own a planet. You can join an alliance-mate's attack, or your own from another planet, and send several fleets into the same attack. Joining is only possible from a planet, not from an alliance base or a garrison.
• Each fleet pays its own way. Every participant pays its own round-trip fuel from its own origin planet, and returns there afterwards. Joining fleets carry no cargo and no General on the way out.
• Recalls do not strand anyone. If the fleet that started the attack is recalled, the joined fleets continue and still arrive at the agreed time. Any participant can recall its own fleet under the usual rules.

All participating fleets fight as a single attacking force. If the attack wins, the loot is shared among the fleets in proportion to the firepower each one brought, and each fleet can only carry home what fits in its own surviving holds. Every participant and the defender receive the same combat report. See Combat.

Interception

An interception catches a fleet while it is travelling and forces a battle in deep space, before it reaches its destination. Two kinds of fleet can be intercepted:

• fleets belonging to a player or alliance you are in an active war with, on any mission and on either leg of the trip. See Wars.
• pirate fleets moving between planets, with no war needed. See Pirates and Generals.

The target must be inside your radar coverage, which includes your alliance's shared radar. Select it on the galaxy map and use Intercept Fleet, or pick it as the destination on the Fleet screen. You can launch from one of your planets or from an asteroid dock, and a General can command the interceptor like any other fleet.

The Rendezvous

When you launch, the game works out a point on the target's path that your fleet can reach in time and locks it in. The interceptor flies to that point and does not chase afterwards. An interception is only offered when your fleet is fast enough to reach the target's path from where it starts. If the target is not at the rendezvous when your fleet gets there, because it was recalled, changed course, or had already landed, the interception misses: no battle happens and your fleet flies home empty.

The Battle and Its Aftermath

The fight happens in empty space, so neither side has planetary defenses, DROIDs, or any defender advantage. Only the two fleets fight.

• If the interceptor wins, it captures cargo from the target's surviving ships, as much as its own surviving holds can carry. The rest is lost. Cargo aboard destroyed ships is lost with them.
• Whatever survives of the target continues to its destination. A fleet that is wiped out ends its mission there.
• Interceptor survivors return home with anything they captured.

Radar shows no more during war than in peace, so you usually commit an interceptor without knowing exactly what you will face.

Coordinated Interceptions

Alliance members at war with the same enemy can intercept the same fleet together. Interceptors that target the same fleet, meet at practically the same point, and arrive at nearly the same time fight as one combined side, and any captured cargo is shared among the surviving interceptors. An interceptor that arrives elsewhere or later fights its own separate battle against whatever is left of the target. Pirate interceptions are never combined.

When a war ends, every interception tied to that war turns around and flies home without fighting.

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.