Combat

Accurate as of v2.0.18 (August 2026).

Combat is instant and automatic. You engage, the server resolves the whole fight in one shot, and you read the report. There is no round-by-round input.

Before the dice: the gates

Every engagement runs the same checks, in this order:

1. Not yourself.
2. Safe territory. Federation territory and flagged safe zones are an absolute block — they override even a PvP-enabled galaxy.
3. The galaxy has PvP enabled.
4. Same sector, same galaxy.
5. The target isn’t cloaked — a cloaked ship reads as simply not there unless your effective StarNav is 4 or better.
6. Not in your corporation.
7. The target isn’t landed on their own or their corp’s planet.
8. Neither of you is under PvP immunity.

Engaging costs 1 turn.

The resolution

Power

Each side computes a power number:

raw   = (hullTier × 100) × 0.5
      + 2.0 × fighters      (attack)   or  1.0 × fighters  (defense)
      + 0   × shields       (attack)   or  3.0 × shields   (defense)
      + 5.0 × torpedoes     (attack)   or  0   × torpedoes (defense)

power = raw
      × (role offense/defense + module bonus)
      × region multiplier
      × XP tier multiplier
      × (1 + faction combat bonus)
      × (1 + role combat bonus)
      × ability multiplier

Read the weights carefully. Shields do not attack. Torpedoes do not defend. Fighters do both, unevenly. A pure-torpedo ship hits like a truck and folds like paper.

Modifiers in play:

Win probability

winProb = attackerPower / (attackerPower + defenderPower)      each side ×0.98–1.02
        + (attackerFighterShare − 0.5) × 0.30                  fighter skirmish
        + 0.12 stealth first strike (−0.06 vs Advanced Sensors or a sensor-edge hull)
clamped to [5%, 95%]

Torpedoes also strip shields out of the defender’s power before the ratio is taken: 1% shield penetration per torpedo, capped at 50%, reduced by 10% in an asteroid field.

The 5–95% clamp is real. You can always lose, and a hopeless target can always get lucky one time in twenty.

Hull and shields

Damage always lands on shields first. Whatever overflows spills into hull at ×1.5.

shieldLoss = min(shields, damage)
overflow   = damage − shieldLoss
hullLoss   = floor(overflow × 1.5)

That multiplier is the design. Fighting on stripped shields is not “a bit riskier” — every point that gets through costs you one and a half points of hull, and hull does not come back for free.

Damage is computed against your whole defense pool (shields + hull), so a big hull is not a bystander in the math; it makes the same attrition percentage into a bigger absolute number.

Losses

The winner loses:

• fighters: attrition × 40%
• shield-directed damage: (shields + hull) × attrition × 25%
• torpedoes: 20% + 50% × attrition

The loser loses at least 50%, scaled up by how badly they were outmatched, applied to fighters, torpedoes and the defense pool. A real fight always deals at least 1 damage, so a ground-down ship can’t asymptote at hull 1 forever.

Both sides’ shield loss is reduced by how healthy the shields were going in: up to a 50% reduction as shields approach 100 points and beyond.

Escape

Only the defender gets an escape roll, and only if the engagement allows retreat.

chance = 0.25
       + 0.35 × your hull's escape rating
       − 0.15 × the attacker's share of total fighters
       + 0.05  in Federation space
       + 0.05–0.08  Corsair-line retreat bonus
       + 0.15  Stealth Plating
       + 0.10  asteroid field
clamped to [5%, 85%]

A successful escape means no losses on either side. Nothing is looted, nothing is damaged, no alignment moves.

Pirate hulls carry +0.10 escape over their Federation mirrors, which is worth +3.5pp on the roll. The Corsair line at 0.60 escape plus its retreat signature is the slipperiest thing in the game.

Loot

Only the winner takes anything, and only from a player loser (NPCs drop their own loot table).

The credit take is also capped by the winner’s hull tier: 5,000 / 15,000 / 40,000 / 100,000 / 200,000.

Only the wallet is ever looted. The bank is never touched.

Cargo loot is taken proportionally across the loser’s stacks, and it is capped by what the winner’s holds can actually fit.

Alignment consequences

And, separately: a defender who survives or beats a pirate aggressor earns +2 alignment — whether the aggressor was an NPC ambush or another player. This is one of the few reliable ways a law-abiding trader earns lawful standing without going hunting. It fires on NPC ambushes, which is the common case.

Sides are decided by your alignment, at ±300 — never by what hull you fly.

PvP immunity

One clock, several sources, and it always extends, never replaces.

A winning or retreating attacker earns nothing — the qualifying event is being attacked, not swinging.

Defense contracts cover NPC ambushes too. This changed in v2.0.2 — a contract now suppresses pirate and patrol ambushes as well as player attacks, not just PvP. It is genuine immunity, not just a PvP flag.

Contracts cost 4,000 cr for 2 hours, sold where the defense service runs: Federation Ports, the Stardock and the Merchant Exchange. The Pirate Haven does not sell them.

Three things about immunity that bite people:

1. You cannot commit aggression while immune — any aggression. Starting a fight, deploying or attacking ordnance, planting limpets, sieging or capturing ports, raiding planets, robbing traders and trading posts: all of it returns IMMUNE. (v2.0.15 closed the loophole where an immune captain could still mine a lane or strip a planet untouchable.) Peaceful acts — trading, moving, even a roadside deal with a trader NPC — stay legal.
2. Immunity is never shortened. A lost fleet strike used to overwrite nearly two hours of purchased contract with a two-minute window. It doesn’t anymore — every write extends the later of now and your current window.
3. Immunity skips warp interruption rolls entirely.

Immunity also protects you from deployables: limpets cannot latch onto an immune ship.

Destruction

Hull 0 is the only death. See Ships → Destruction and escape pods for the full sequence. In short: you lose the ship, everything installed on it, all its cargo, and every remaining turn. You keep your wallet, bank, XP, alignment and inventory.

NPC combat

Attacking an NPC checks only your immunity — NPCs have none.

NPCs carry no hull pool of their own in the resolver’s sense: they die on any loss. But damage now sticks to a named NPC between fights and they regenerate 25% of their spawn strength per world tick, so a boss you can’t beat outright can be ground down over about four attempts — and will be back to full roughly sixteen hours later if you leave it alone.

Losing a fight pays no XP. That changed in v2.0.8: an unbeatable boss at 1 turn a pull was a steady XP faucet.

Pirates drop 500–2,000 cr scaled by tier. Traders drop 100–500. Patrols drop nothing — killing them only buys you a warrant.

A hired retinue helps here and only here. A tavern mercenary contract adds up to +12% combat power against NPC opponents — pirates, patrols, traders, named captains. It contributes exactly nothing in PvP, port sieges or planet raids; that firewall is structural, not a tuning choice.

Fleets

A fleet is up to three ships from the same corporation operating as one.

• Forming a fleet requires corp membership and a mid-ladder level gate.
• Joining requires the same corp and an earlier gate.
• The leader leaving disbands the fleet.

A fleet strike costs 1 turn, is leader-only, and requires every counted member to be in the leader’s sector with an active ship. Members elsewhere contribute nothing.

The strike runs exactly the same gates as solo combat, plus the leader’s own immunity check.

• Loot goes to the corp bank, not to the leader’s wallet.
• Attrition is redistributed across members — everyone bleeds.
• Any member’s hull can reach 0, and that member goes through the full destruction and pod flow.
• Fleet kills now apply the same alignment, statistics and immunity consequences as solo kills. The leader personally earns any bounty claims.

Pending encounters

Not every NPC contact is a fight. A non-aggressive NPC becomes a pending encounter you can act on: bribe, surrender, jettison, submit to a scan, trade, rob, or engage.

Confirming a fight re-rolls it under the stored seed, so the outcome is deterministic — and confirming does not allow retreat. Walking away means letting the contact expire.

See NPCs & Encounters.