Radar, Espionage and ECCM

Radar is your detection infrastructure — it tells you when enemy fleets enter your neighbourhood before they arrive. Espionage lets you peer inside an enemy's defences and economy. ECCM (Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures) is your shield against being read — it blurs the numbers your enemies see when they scan you.

The Radar Building

Every planet can have a Radar. Its range determines how large a circle of space that planet monitors for incoming fleet movements.

Radar range grows with each upgrade level. Early levels cover only a small vicinity — not enough to reliably catch nearest neighbours. As you invest more levels, coverage expands to encompass nearby planets and eventually a significant corridor of space. Each level costs more than the previous one (both in resources and in the incremental range gained), so the return on investment gradually tapers at very high levels.

What Radar reveals: when an enemy fleet enters your radar circle, you see it on the galaxy map as a fleet track. You see who owns it, what ships it carries, and its entry/exit points. You do not see its mission type, origin, destination, or ETA.

The Lynceus — Mobile Radar

The Lynceus recon ship carries a built-in sensor array. Any fleet dispatched with a Lynceus projects this moving sensor bubble along its entire flight path. As the fleet travels, it reveals:

  • Enemy fleets whose path intersects the moving bubble
  • Alliance bases within range of the bubble's path

This makes PATROL missions with a Lynceus a useful scouting tool — fly through a suspect corridor and see what is hiding there.

Espionage — Spy Probes

Spy Probes are the fastest and cheapest way to get inside information on an enemy. Dispatch an ESPIONAGE mission (Spy Probes only) at an enemy planet or base and receive a full scan report:

  • Exact resource stockpiles (metal, carbon, hydrogen)
  • DROID count
  • Every building level
  • All ships stationed on the planet

Probes are always consumed one-way. Even if the planet is undefended, you never get your probes back. Build them as a recurring expense.

The defender is always notified. When your probes scan an enemy, that enemy receives an ESPIONAGE_DETECTED report with your name, how many probes you sent, and the coordinates the probes were dispatched from. Scouting is not a silent action — it signals intent.

ECCM — Defending Against Espionage

ECCM is an empire-wide research that blurs every espionage scan run against any of your holdings. At level 0 you are fully visible — a single probe gives an exact read. As you level ECCM, scans return ranges instead of exact values.

Prerequisite: Radar must be researched before you can queue ECCM research.

How the Blur Works

For each quantity (resources, DROID count, building levels, ship counts), the reported value becomes a band — the true value is always inside the band, but the attacker cannot see exactly where. Higher ECCM levels produce wider bands. More probes in a single mission narrow the band — the only way to improve accuracy against a defended target is to send more probes at once. Sending the same small probe repeatedly does not help; the band placement is keyed to the current time epoch, so a repeated mission in the same window produces the same result.

ECCM raises the cost of intelligence gathering for your enemies. It is a price-raiser, not an impenetrable shield — a determined attacker with enough probes can still get useful reads.

ECCM Cost

ECCM uses the same levelled research structure as Construction Speed. Cost grows steeply per level. Early levels are inexpensive and meaningfully degrade casual intel gathering. Later levels grow expensive quickly.