Attack Types

An attack type sets how your own strike force fights a baron on another planet. Group attacks have no such choice: they always fight as a Normal Attack.

Going alone also pays better: your own strike takes twice the share of the defender's regions that a group attack takes. 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 disorganized: both sides retreat at 8% losses, and you carry off only half the regions 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 regions.

These losses are for the default Attack Damage setting. Your sysop may halve or double them.

Choose by what you can spare. Regions are slow to win back, so an Extended Battle gains you the most. Send it when you have troops to spare and can afford to be weak for a day. A Quick Strike costs you the least and fights harder than its size suggests, so use it when you are not sure whether you can win. You learn the answer cheaply, and your army survives.

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.

Join Group Attack lists every party still forming, with the troopers, jets, tanks and bombers already pooled in it and the hours it has left. Read those columns before you commit: they are how you tell a party worth reinforcing from one that will not survive the trip.

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.

Regions you capture abroad have no type until you give them one, so they wait 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.