Attack Types

When you send your own strike force at a baron on another planet, you choose how to press the attack. Group attacks have no such choice — they always fight as a Normal Attack.

Going alone also pays better: your own strike takes twice the land a group attack of the same weight would. What you give up is the whole-planet target and everyone else's forces.

• Normal Attack — your forces fight at full strength. Both sides break off once they have taken 15% losses, and you take the standard share of the defender's regions.
• Quick Strike — surprise lets you fight at 120% of your normal strength, but the battle is short and disorganised: both sides retreat at 8% losses, and you carry off only half the land a Normal Attack would.
• Extended Battle — a grinding assault. Fatigue drops your forces to 85% strength, but they press until both sides have taken 20% losses and bring home 125% of a Normal Attack's land.

The choice is really about what you are short of. Land is the thing you cannot buy back quickly, so an Extended Battle is the one that changes the map — pay for it when you already have the men to spare and can afford to be weak for a day. A Quick Strike costs you least and hits above its weight, which makes it the honest answer when you are not sure you can win: you find out cheaply, and your army is still standing.

Remember that your strength is measured on arrival, not on departure. Against a distant planet the defender has days to build turrets before your force lands, so the extra weight a Quick Strike carries is worth less than it looks against a target you cannot reach quickly.

While the force is away, and when it comes back

A group attack does not leave the moment you file it. You set the wait in hours, between 12 and 120, and it sits on the launch pad until then — other barons can join it in the meantime, and the delay is how you time it to land before the target takes their next turn.

Once a force leaves, it is out of your hands and out of your army until the other planet's board resolves it and the answer travels back. When it does, you get a private report: what you sent, what came home, what it destroyed, and whether it found the target at all. A force that found no such realm, or found it still under New Realm Protection, is told so rather than counted as a defeat.

Land you capture abroad has no type until you give it one, so it waits for you and the region picker comes up at the start of your next turn — the same question a Regular Attack asks at home. On a group attack the regions are shared between the barons who paid for them, in proportion to what each committed.

If the answer never arrives — a board goes quiet, a packet is lost — your forces come home by themselves after the number of days your sysop has set, and a report that turns up after that is thrown away rather than paid out twice.