Attacking & Capture
Drag from your planet to a target, then release to pick how many probes to send. The cursor shows the travel time while you drag. Inside your own galaxy every probe arrives, so there is no loss in transit.
Capture
Your probes fight the defenders on arrival. Finish with more probes than the defender and the planet is yours. A tie goes to the defender, so taking a planet needs the garrison plus one. Probes sent to your own planets, or to an ally's, reinforce them instead.
What you have to beat is the garrison at arrival, not the one on the planet when you launch. A level-10 defender adds 10 probes a minute the whole time your swarm is in the air, and Defense can make a garrison count for up to double.
The send dial does that arithmetic for you. Drag from a single planet and it marks the exact send that takes it, growth, Defense and your own Assault included. Release on the mark to send that many and no more, or hold C through the drag to send the same amount without opening the dial. On a planet of your own, or an ally's, there is nothing to capture, so the same mark and the same key send exactly what it needs for its next level instead.
The mark is only drawn for a single source. Several swarms arrive as separate battles, and Toughness gives the defender part of its losses back after each one, so a group attack has no single number to aim at.
An arrival flashes as a shockwave in the attacker's colour, so a landing you were not watching for is still visible on the map.
Speed depends on where you launch
Swarm speed depends on where the swarm launches from, not on how many probes it carries. Swarms launched near a galaxy's rim move at up to 4× the base speed, swarms from deep in the core at as little as ¼×. A slow swarm gives the defender more time to react.
Attacking another galaxy
A new galaxy is normally unreachable for its first 3 days. Every launch into it from outside is refused, and those are the galaxies new players spawn into. Its black hole counts down the time remaining, and the galaxy is ringed on the map. After that, the same spot shows the current border toll, falling toward 0% as the galaxy ages. A galaxy stops taking new players the moment its border opens.
There is always somewhere to attack. When every galaxy with room left in it is still shielded, a galaxy is created with no border at all: no shield, and no toll at any age, so a swarm from anywhere arrives at full strength. Nobody spawns there. Take its black hole and another galaxy opens up elsewhere, and the one you took keeps its open border for good.
After that, part of a swarm is destroyed crossing the border. The toll starts at 100% and falls 10% a day as the galaxy ages, reaching 0% by day 13.
| Galaxy age | Swarm lost at the border |
|---|---|
| 3d | 100% |
| 4d | 90% |
| 6d | 70% |
| 8d | 50% |
| 11d | 20% |
| 13d | 0% |
The toll applies to probes, super-probes and megaprobes alike, and to automations every time they fire. The attack dial shows the current figure before you send.
Because the border is taken before probes convert on arrival, the smallest attack that lands anything rises with the toll. On the first day a border opens, at 90% lost, one super-probe costs 1,000 probes and one megaprobe 1,000 super-probes. Smaller launches are refused rather than accepted and lost.
Nothing is wasted above that floor: a send is trimmed to what converts, so 543 probes aimed at a sun in your galaxy leave as 500 and the planet keeps 43.