Radar, Espionage and ECCM

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.

Detecting enemy bases. Radar coverage isn't only about catching fleets mid-flight — a hidden enemy alliance base that simply sits inside your (or a mobile scout's) detection circle is discovered too, and stays revealed on your galaxy map for as long as it remains covered. A planetary Radar or an alliance base's own Radar works the same way here as it does for fleets: no dispatch required, just standing coverage.

Coverage on the galaxy map. Your radar range is drawn as a coverage outline around each of your planets (and bases) on the galaxy map, so you can see at a glance where your detection reaches. If you belong to an alliance, your own coverage and every ally's coverage are merged into a single combined outline — the map shows the union of everyone's radar as one continuous "informed" area, not a tangle of overlapping circles.

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

You can launch a scan straight from the galaxy map: selecting an enemy planet's info card offers an Espionage action alongside Attack, so you don't need to detour through the Fleet screen just to send probes.

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

Spy Probes cannot ride along in an attack fleet. They are a reconnaissance-only ship — mixing probes into an offensive fleet isn't allowed, so keep scouting and combat dispatches separate.

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.

For resources, DROID count and ship counts the band width also carries a deliberate wobble, and the bounds you are shown are rounded outward to round numbers rather than reported to the last digit. A spy report therefore reads more like "somewhere between twenty and sixty thousand metal" than like a precise measurement — and for those quantities the width of a band is not by itself a reliable readout of how well defended the target is. Building-level bands are the exception: they take neither the wobble nor the rounding, so how wide a level range comes back is driven by the target's ECCM level and how many probes you sent. One other thing narrows them — a reported level range can never extend below zero, so where a band would run past that floor it is clipped there, and bands on very low-level buildings read narrower than they otherwise would.

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.