Wars

A war is a formal, named hostile relationship between two parties. It is not ambient hostility — every war has a specific aggressor and a specific target, and the consequences are scoped entirely to those two named parties. Everything else in the game continues as normal.

Parties — Who Can Be at War

A war party is either an alliance or a solo (unaffiliated) player. All four pairings are valid:

  • Alliance versus Alliance
  • Alliance versus Solo Player
  • Solo Player versus Alliance
  • Solo Player versus Solo Player

If you are in an alliance and your alliance is at war, every member of your alliance is effectively at war with every member of the opposing party. If a solo player is at war with an alliance, that solo player is at war with all its members.

Why solo players can be war parties. If only alliances could be targeted, a player could become completely immune to war simply by leaving their alliance. Allowing solo players to be declared upon directly closes that loophole — quitting an alliance ends any alliance-scoped war for that individual, but it does not grant immunity from being declared upon personally.

Declaring War

War is declared one-sidedly by the aggressor — no consent from the target is required. Declaring war costs nothing.

The aggressor must be authorised to act: an alliance owner declares on behalf of their alliance; a solo player declares for themselves. A disbanding alliance cannot declare war.

Two protection rules prevent the most lopsided declarations:

  • Score-ratio cap: You cannot declare war on a party whose score is significantly below yours. War is reserved for near-peers.
  • New-account grace period (solo targets only): You cannot declare war on a player account that is too new. This gives new players a short window to establish themselves. This axis is never evaluated when the target is an alliance.

If you are already at war with a party (in notice or active), you cannot declare again until that war ends.

The Notice Period

When war is declared it enters the NOTICE state, not immediate combat. A notice period elapses before the war goes active. During this window:

  • Neither fleet interception nor alliance base attacks are unlocked. The target retains full peacetime safety for their fleets and bases.
  • Both parties receive a system inbox notification so the target can prepare — recall exposed fleets, reinforce bases, build interceptors.
  • The aggressor can retract the declaration during NOTICE, cancelling the war and returning to peace with no penalty (since declaration is free, there is nothing to refund).

Once the notice period ends, a scheduler automatically transitions the war to ACTIVE state.

What Changes While at War

When a war is ACTIVE, three escalation mechanics become available that are impossible in peacetime:

Fleet Interception

Any in-transit fleet belonging to an enemy party can be intercepted in deep space. If you have an enemy fleet on your radar (or on an allied member's radar, via the alliance radar union), and you are in an active war with that fleet's owner, you can dispatch an interceptor fleet to a rendezvous point along the enemy's flight path.

The interceptor must physically reach that rendezvous point before the enemy fleet passes it — this requires both sufficient radar range to detect the fleet early and sufficient interceptor speed to reach the intercept point in time. Speed and radar coverage are the two earned capabilities that make interception possible.

Combat at the rendezvous point is pure fleet-versus-fleet: no planet defences, no droid garrison, no structural bonus for either side. If the interceptor wins, it captures the surviving cargo from the defeated fleet and returns home. If the interceptor loses, the target fleet continues to its destination.

Interception uses the same radar visibility contract as peacetime — war does not reveal any additional information about a fleet's composition or size. You still only see what your radar normally shows. Launching an interceptor is a partial-information commitment.

Fleetsaving against a declared enemy stops working. Fleetsaving (sending your fleet on a long round-trip to dodge an incoming attack) is safe against everyone except a declared war enemy. During an active war, any fleet movement through the enemy's radar coverage is a potential intercept target. Fleetsaving remains fully intact against all parties you are not at war with.

Alliance Base Attacks

Only a party at active war with the owning alliance can dispatch an ATTACK mission against that alliance's base. Bases are an explicit war objective, not a free-for-all target.

Asteroid Attack — War as an Engagement Filter

Asteroid ATTACK missions may be dispatched at any time regardless of war state. However, at the moment combat resolves, only occupants (dock owners, mining-fleet owners) who are in an active war with the attacker are treated as defenders and can take losses or be looted. Peacetime occupants are bystanders — they are untouched by the battle. If no occupant is at war with the attacker, the mission resolves without combat and the fleet returns home.

What Is Not Affected

  • Planet raiding is completely unchanged. You can always dispatch an ATTACK mission against any player's planet for loot, and they can do the same to you, regardless of war state. Planet raids behave identically in war or peace.
  • Alliance non-aggression on planets also remains unchanged.

Automatic Protection — Score-Ratio Auto-End

A war that is running can end automatically if the score ratio between the two parties drifts too far in either direction while the war is active. The threshold for this automatic end is wider than the declaration threshold — this deliberate gap (called hysteresis) prevents a war from self-terminating the moment the aggressor starts winning.

Both parties' scores are compared symmetrically: the game looks at how many times larger the stronger score is than the weaker one. If the gap exceeds the auto-end cap, the war ends immediately regardless of whether anyone wanted it to. The check runs in the background on a regular schedule.

This is the de-facto victim-protection valve: a worn-down party can be released from a war automatically once the power imbalance becomes extreme enough — without needing the aggressor's consent. On auto-end, all in-flight intercept missions and base-attack missions are immediately recalled (see below).

Note that there is no time-based or inactivity-based expiry. A war between comparable parties does not expire after a fixed number of days, and vacation mode or inactivity confers no immunity.

Ending a War — Peace

A war ends in exactly two ways: mutual agreement or the score-ratio auto-end described above.

For mutual agreement, either party (aggressor or target) can propose peace. A peace proposal is pending until the other side accepts, declines, or the proposer withdraws it. Only when both sides have agreed — one proposing and the other accepting — does the war end. A single party cannot unilaterally end an active war by peaceful means.

Retracting during NOTICE is the only unilateral exit available to the aggressor: if the war has not yet gone active, the aggressor may cancel it outright.

What Happens to In-Flight Fleets When Peace Is Signed

When a war ends — by either mutual agreement or the score-ratio auto-end — all in-flight intercept missions and in-flight alliance base-attack missions belonging to either party are immediately auto-recalled. They turn around and return home with no combat. War-end is instant safety for every committed offensive fleet.

Peacetime planet raids in flight are unaffected — they are never war-gated and continue normally.

The Wars Tab in Your Overview

Your Overview screen has a Wars tab that lists all wars involving your party. Wars are shown as NOTICE or ACTIVE (and historically as ENDED). The tab badge lights up when war alerts require attention:

  • A war in the NOTICE state shows a countdown until it goes active.
  • If the other party has submitted a peace proposal awaiting your response, the Wars tab flags it as an alert so you can act.

Enemy fleets detected by your radar while at war show up as fleet alerts on the Overview as well — these are the contacts that can be acted on as intercept targets from the galaxy map.