Combat
Combat in Orbitarion is not about who clicks fastest. It's about preparation, intelligence, and timing. Battles resolve automatically at the tick — you set everything up in advance, and the engine does the rest.
Understanding how combat works lets you build better fleets, pick better targets, and survive attacks that would wipe out less prepared players.
How a battle starts
Send a fleet to an enemy planet with mission type Attack. When your fleet arrives — when its ETA reaches zero at a tick — the battle resolves immediately as part of that tick's calculations.
The defender doesn't have to do anything. Any ships on their planet automatically defend. Any allied defend fleets that have also arrived at the planet that tick join the defense.
You cannot stop a battle once fleets are in position. You can recall an outbound fleet before it arrives, but once it has landed, the fight happens.
Home fleet defense
When your planet is attacked, every ship you have at home defends automatically — not just the loose ships in your shipyard, but every ship in every fleet with "home" status as well.
This matters because organizing your ships into named fleets is part of normal play. You might have a fleet prepared for an upcoming attack, or a defend fleet staged for a neighbor, or ships grouped by role. As long as those fleets haven't departed, they're still physically at your planet. The moment an enemy arrives, those ships consolidate with your general defense and fight alongside everything else.
You do not need to "deploy" them manually. You do not lose the fleet organization afterwards — the consolidation happens under the hood, only for the purpose of the battle. Surviving ships end up pooled in your main planet inventory after the fight, and you can reorganize them into fleets again as needed.
The rule to remember: a fleet is only "away" when it has actually departed on a mission. Attack, defend-elsewhere, return trip, or a scheduled launch still queuing — any of these leave your planet's defense until the ships come back. Everything else at home fights when needed.
A planet that has sent all its ships out on a distant attack is extremely vulnerable. Good attackers watch for exactly this moment.
The 3-round system
Every battle plays out in exactly three combat rounds.
Round 1 — All ships fire at their primary target (T1)
Round 2 — Surviving ships fire at their secondary target (T2)
Round 3 — Surviving ships fire at their tertiary target (T3)
If a ship's target class has been completely destroyed, it falls back to the next available target. Losses are applied between rounds — ships killed in Round 1 don't fire in Round 2.
Within each round, ships fire in initiative order. Lower initiative number fires first. The Aetherians have the lowest initiative values in the game — they always act before everyone else.
Initiative and firing order
Initiative determines who shoots first within a round. This matters enormously.
A ship that fires before its target can kill some of those ships before they get to shoot back. At the extreme end, The Aetherians' Celestial battleship has initiative 3 — it fires before every other battleship in the game. UEC's Titan has initiative 4 and fires afterward, but it has more armor and higher DPS.
The tradeoff between firing first and surviving longer is one of the core strategic tensions of the game.
EMP — freeze, don't destroy
The Aetherians use EMP weapons instead of conventional kill weapons on their Fighter, Corvette, and Frigate class ships. EMP ships freeze enemy ships rather than destroying them.
A frozen ship cannot fire for the remainder of that combat round. It can still be killed by other weapons.
EMP effectiveness is reduced by the target's EMP resistance. ATH's own heavy ships — Destroyer, Cruiser, Battleship — have 30–40% EMP resistance, making them nearly immune to being frozen. Most other ships have 0–10%.
EMP alone doesn't win battles. You need kill ships — your own or your alliance's — to destroy what the EMP ships have disabled.
Hit chance
Not every shot hits. Accuracy is determined by the attacker's weapon speed versus the target's agility:
hit chance = (25 + weapon speed − target agility) / 100
Minimum 5%, maximum 95%. Fast, agile ships like the ODO Stinger are notoriously hard to hit. Heavy UEC ships are easy targets — but they can absorb enormous punishment.
Determining the winner
After all three rounds, the engine calculates a dominance ratio based on the fleet value of surviving ships on each side. The outcome:
| Result | Condition |
|---|---|
| Attacker wins | Attacker dominance above 55% |
| Defender wins | Attacker dominance below 45% |
| Draw | Dominance between 45–55% |
Fleet value is based on the total resource cost of surviving ships — not ship count.
Draws are real outcomes
A draw is not a partial win for either side. On a draw:
- The defender keeps all their orbitals — no theft happens
- STC attackers do not raid resources
- Both sides still lose the ships they lost in combat — casualties are permanent regardless of outcome
- Surviving attackers return home with nothing to show for the losses
Draws are common between well-matched fleets. Tactically, the 45–55% dominance band is the worst possible outcome for an attacker — you pay full casualties without gaining anything. Before pressing the attack, make sure your expected dominance is comfortably above 55%. Marginal attacks are a tax on your own fleet.
Orbital theft
After a battle, surviving capture ships (Orbital Pods and Transport frigates) steal orbitals from the losing planet. How much they steal depends on how decisive the victory was:
| Victory margin | Steal chance per orbital |
|---|---|
| Dominant win (>70% dominance) | ~90% |
| Close win (>50%) | ~60% |
| Close loss (>35%) | ~25% |
| Crushing loss (<35%) | ~5% |
Maximum steal per battle is capped at 15% of the defender's total orbitals. Stolen orbitals arrive as uninitiated orbitals at your planet.
A draw results in no orbital theft — the defender keeps everything. Only a clear attacker victory triggers the theft roll.
The Sytherian Cartel has no capture ships. They raid resource stockpiles instead — see below.
STC resource raiding
STC has no capture ships. Instead, when STC wins a battle, they automatically raid a percentage of the enemy's Titanium, Silicon, and Uranium stockpile. Resources transfer directly from defender to attacker — no pods needed, no orbital mechanics, no transit time.
The raid percentage scales with the size of the surviving STC fleet:
raid_pct = surviving_fleet_value ÷ 10,000 × 5%
Clamped between a minimum of 5% and a maximum of 25%. A large, mostly-intact fleet raids harder than a battered one. A Pyrrhic victory with 2,000 fleet value surviving raids the 5% floor. A crushing 50,000-value victory raids the 25% ceiling.
Only wins trigger a raid
The raid mechanic only activates on a clear victory — dominance above 55%. If the battle is a draw or a loss, STC takes nothing. No resources, no orbitals, no consolation prize.
This is STC's fundamental trade-off: their per-battle ceiling is significantly higher than orbital theft could ever be, but they need to actually win decisively to collect. A draw against a tough defender costs STC the same ships as anyone else — with nothing to show for it.
STC never steals orbitals
STC can never gain orbitals from combat. They do not have Orbital Pods or Transport frigates. Their combat fleet is pure offense. This is compensated by economic bonuses: 25% cheaper orbital scanning and 20% cheaper orbital initiation. An STC player grows their production base through efficient scanning; they grow their spending power through raids.
Reading the raid in battle logs
When STC wins against you, your Private News shows the exact amounts raided per resource type. When an STC attack is a draw or a loss, the battle log shows no raid section at all — not because the raid "failed", but because the mechanic never triggered. There is no partial or failed raid state.
Planetary Defense Systems (PDS)
Researching the PDS branch unlocks static defense structures that fire before combat rounds begin. PDS deals bonus damage to all incoming attackers before a single ship has fired.
PDS is not a replacement for a fleet. A planet with strong PDS but no ships will still fall to a serious attack — it just becomes more expensive for the attacker. Think of it as a tax on aggression.
Tactics
Combat mechanics create a rich tactical layer that experienced players exploit constantly.
Tick timing — Send a fleet in the final seconds before a tick fires. Your opponent's fleet appears on their scan results and arrives in the same tick, giving them almost no time to react.
Two-wave strategy — Send a kill fleet on tick N. Send a follow-up fleet with Orbital Pods on tick N+1. The kill fleet clears the defenders; the pod fleet steals orbitals from an unprotected planet.
Fleet evacuation — When a superior force is inbound, send your fleet away before they arrive. You lose orbitals but keep your ships. An empty planet with no fleet loses orbitals but survives to fight another day.
The boomerang — Evacuate your fleet, time their return so they arrive back after the attacker's kill fleet has left but before the orbital-stealing follow-up fleet arrives.
Fake-out — Send an attack, watch your opponent scramble their fleet in response, recall before arrival. Their ships are now out of position.
Red defense — An allied player attacks you to intentionally raise your combat score and reduce how many orbitals an enemy can steal in a follow-up attack.
Battle logs
Every battle is recorded in full detail in your Private News feed. You can see exactly which fleets participated, which ships fired on what targets, losses per ship type on each side, how many orbitals were stolen, and the final result.
Reading your battle logs carefully is one of the fastest ways to improve. If you lost a fight you expected to win, the log tells you exactly why.
Score protection
The game includes score-based protection rules to prevent the strongest players from endlessly farming the weakest:
- You cannot attack any planet with less than 20% of your score
- No planet with more than 5× your score can attack you
This doesn't make small players invincible — a player at your score level is still fair game — but it prevents total domination by the very top of the rankings.