Fighting: fleets, boards and taking ground
Two hostile fleets in the same sector are locked into an engagement, fought on its own board, one stack at a time.
The board
When two hostile forces share a sector they are pulled onto a battle board before anybody can leave. You deploy, then act one stack at a time. Nothing in that sector goes anywhere until the engagement ends.
Shields recover 35% at the start of each volley and fully between fights. Damage that gets through has a 30% chance of splashing onto an adjacent module at 50% strength, so a tightly packed hull loses more than a sparse one.
A vessel is finished when 60% of its fittings have been stripped — or immediately, if the Core Module goes.
Breaking off
You can leave, and it costs you. A disengagement attempt succeeds 35% of the time at base, and it takes a round of neither manoeuvring nor shooting to try. Deciding to run is a decision to spend a round being shot at.
Taking ground
Winning in orbit is not taking a world. Bombardment levels structures at 90 damage each — nothing is half-wrecked, a building is standing or it is rubble — and the worker in it has a 40% chance of dying with it. A staffed garrison shelters civilians and halves that.
And what you take, you have to hold. A conquered population starts at 55 unrest and stays angry for a long time, which is a long way past the Disorder line — so a freshly taken world produces at 65% or worse and builds at 50% while you garrison it.
Then there is the ground itself: a 35% chance per levelled building that the tile under it is ruined, permanently until somebody cleans it. A world taken by force is worth measurably less than the same world settled.
Who should be fighting at all
Soldier strength varies by a factor of three across the six peoples. The Varkesh Host fight at 135% and hold ground at 125%; the Nemora Bloom fight at 45% and should be defending with orbital guns, point defence and a planetary shield rather than with troops.
For most peoples most of the time, the cheapest war is the one where your world is expensive enough to take that nobody tries.
Keep reading
What happens when you end a turn
The exact order a turn resolves in, and why it explains most of the surprises.
Power, and what shuts down first
The grid, the shutdown ladder in full, and why a brownout is a warning rather than a disaster.
Food, farms and going hungry
How a sector feeds itself, what a birth actually costs, and how long you have when it goes wrong.