Conquest

Early Game

Once you've made some headway with production and research on Promision, you'll research Interstellar Travel. This will reveal another planet, and allow you to construct your first ships from the Shipyard tab at the bottom of the screen.

At this point in the game, you will need to send a Vitha Colonial Ship to colonize other planets. In order to do this you must build one from the shipyard tab, go to orbiting fleets within your fleets tab (tab at the top of the screen), and move the fleet to the next planet. You should see the fleet in your travelling fleets tab, and once the journey is complete, the fleet will return to orbiting, but over the next planet. Now, you can select the fleet, and choose colonize from the right of the screen, which will consume your Vitha.

You will then be able to build on the new planet, but in order to do this, you'll need to transport some resources over. If you want to save some time, you can send them at the same time as your Vitha, you just won't be able to unload and build until you colonise the planet.

Hostile Planets:

After the first few undefended planets, you will encounter enemy planets. You can send ships to scout the planets by moving a fleet to the planet you're interested in. Don't worry about losing your fleet, the enemy fleet will not auto-engage your fleet. You will then be able to compare the strength of the enemy fleets, and decide how to engage them most effectively.

After destroying the enemy fleets, you can freely colonize as if the planet was unoccupied.

How to battle enemy fleets:

ALWAYS EXPORT A SAVE BEFORE ATTACKING IF YOU ARE NOT SURE WHAT YOU'RE DOING.

The game's battle calculations are fairly complex, and not many people understand them fully. But in summary:

Defence:

• Fleets are comprised of "clusters" of ship types, for example a fleet made up of 100 Ark 22 and 100 Ark 55 has 2 clusters.
• Damage is dealt proportional to the relative weight of a "cluster" - a heavy cluster will receive the most damage. This is useful if you want to protect lightly armoured ships such as Luxis.
• Next, armour provides a base damage reduction, and in early game the enemy will far outclass you on this - as they often have a single strong ship, whereas your fleet will have many ships with low armour. Unlike power, armour reduction is calculated per ship and doesn't add up - exactly how you'd expect it to in real life.
  • If you load armor onto your ships (Mid-game), this will multiply the armor of each ship, which will increase that ship-type's damage reduction. You will lose half of the armor loaded after the end of the battle.
• The damage left after the reduction from armor is then affected by the relative speed difference of ships. Think of it as "Evasion" - A faster ship will evade damage from slower ships, and a faster ship will be more accurate against slower ships.
  • Loading engines onto your fleet (Late-game) will increase the speed of each stack, affecting damage accordingly. You will not lose engines because of any losses in battle, unless your entire fleet is destroyed.
• The leftovers after those calculations will damage each of your clusters, and you'll lose ships according to this.

Shields

From v41J (Aug 26, 2018) release notes:

Fixed shields. They work as follows: if a defending ship has X shields (considering all bonuses), and the attacking fleet has Y power (considering all bonuses), then the damage suffered will be (Y-X)*number of attacking ships. If Y < X the damage will be 0 (i.e. shields are greater than the base power of the attacking ships).

Shield Capsules will add

$1000\times\sqrt{\text{capsules}}$ shields to each ship and a multiplicative bonus of

$10\%\times\log_2\left(1 + \text{capsules}\right )$ .

Offence:

• Your fleet's strength is called Power - This value is how much damage output your fleet is capable of. If a battle lasts more than one round, this will get lower each round as ships die - so it is good to try and make battles as short as possible by having an overpowered fleet compared to the enemy - as many enemy fleets are largely made up of one strong ship that won't weaken over the course of the battle like yours will.
• Your power is initially the power of each ship in your fleet added together.
• Then, it is multiplied by the effect of Ammunition (Which is calculated on a logarithmic scale with diminishing returns)
• Then, that number is multiplied by the effect of U-Ammunition (Which is twice as effective as Ammo, but also on the same logarithmic scale)
• Then, that number is multiplied by the effect of T-Ammunition
• Once you unlock Alkantara, they will multiply your power again, and again with diminishing returns.
• All ammo and U ammo and T ammo that you load onto your ships will be used after the end of the battle, but it will continue to increase your damage during the battle even if it lasts many rounds.
• If a cluster is destroyed, the leftover damage before armor and speed reductions gets passed on to the stack below it in full, where it is then affected by that stack's armor and speed reduction.

Piercing

Some ships have piercing power, that will give it the ability to ignore part of the armor damage reduction of the enemy. The calculation for this is: (net damage reduction) = (armor damage reduction) - (piercing power). Therefore, if you have more piercing power than the enemy has armor (i.e. 15% of luxis versus an enemy with 2% armor), then armor is completely ignored. Luxis has 15% piercing power, while Siber has 8% piercing power. They are meant to be useful against enemies with high armor. For example, with an enemy with 92% armor, Siber will do roughly 2x the damage, Luxis will do 3x the damage; against an enemy with 96% damage reduction, Siber will do 3x damage and Luxis will do roughly 5x damage.

Tactics

• There isn't really such thing as an ideal ship combination, but the cost/benefit of each ship type is different. In general, the best value for money seems to be Babayaga and Alkantara, in particular because they require different resources. But if you cannot afford those or have not unlocked them, feel free to pad out your fleet with ARK-22 and ARK-55, particularly early game. Muralla can be very useful for reducing your losses too.
• Always try to overpower the enemy fleet substantially, it will really reduce your losses if you keep battles to 1 or 2 rounds, meaning you can attack your next planet more quickly.
• There are some issues with carry-over damage if a cluster dies, so try not to let that happen if you can help it.
• You can "simulate" a battle by exporting your save, attacking the enemy, and importing your save again. You can do this to make sure that you're happy with the losses that you're going to suffer.

Carryover

From v41a (Aug 20, 2018) release notes

• Battle calculations changed. Carry over damage will be distributed proportionally upon all survived clusters.

Experience

• Each turn the fleet survives in a battle will award that fleet 1 experience point, plus half of the enemy experience points upon victory. This applies to enemy fleets too, so if you lose a battle, half of your experience points will be lost and given to the enemy.
• Each experience point will give a basic +0.05% stats (hp, power armor and shields)
• Draws won't award experience
• Experience is capped to 5000 points, so you will gain a maximum of +250% stats with 5000 exp
• The Medal of Glory artifact will double the experience cap, to 10,000
• Dividing the fleet will redistribuite experience points to the two fleets proportionally to their resulting military value. This is why cargo fleets have military value 0, so they do not affect this formula.
• Merging fleets will sum up experience points.
• Some enemy fleets will now have experience points as default (they will be affected upon the next time travel).

Advanced:

The calculations for Ammo, U-Ammo, T-Ammo, Armour, Engines, and Alkantara (I forgot to write this down can someone add it in for me pls) are below:

$\begin{align} &\mathbf{Ammo:} \\ &&\mathrm{Ammo \_ Multiplier} & = 1 ~ + ~ 10 ~ \times ~ \log \_ {2}\left (1 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{Ammo}}{10000000} \right ) \\\\ &\mathbf{U-Ammo:}\\ &&\mathrm{U-Ammo \_ Multiplier} & = 1 ~ + ~ 20 ~ \times ~ \log \_ {2}\left (1 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{U-Ammo}}{10000000} \right ) \\\\ &\mathbf{T-Ammo:}\\ &&\mathrm{T-Ammo \_ Multiplier} & = 1 ~ + ~ 60 ~ \times ~ \log \_ {2}\left (1 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{U-Ammo}}{20000000} \right ) \\\\ &\mathbf{Alkantara:}\\ &&\mathrm{Admiral \_ Multiplier } & = 1 ~ + ~ 0.1 ~ \times ~ \log \_ {2}\left (1 ~ + ~ \mathrm{Alkantara \_ number} \right ) \\\\ &\mathbf{Armour \_ Multiplier:}\\ &&\mathrm{Armour \_ Multiplier} & = 1 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{Armour}}{2000000}\\\\ &\mathbf{Engine \_ Multiplier:}\\ &&\mathrm{Engine \_ Multiplier } & = 1 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{Engine}}{5000000}\\\\ &\mathbf{Experience \_ Multiplier:}\\ &&\mathrm{Experience \_ Multiplier} & = 2 ~ + ~ \frac{\mathrm{Experience}}{2000}\\\\ \end{align}$

Notes:

Ammo and U ammo power multipliers are logarithmic scales - overloading ammo or u ammo is not really worth it.

Armor and Engine multipliers are not in themselves logarithmic, but affect calculations that are. As such, doubling the armour of ARK-22 will increase its damage reduction substantially (but this is actually still a small amount because its armour is so low), while doubling the armour of Muralla will add much more armour to the ship, but actually increase its damage reduction by much less. The same idea applies to Engines.

Damage reduction equation:

$\quad\text{Damage Reduction} ~ = ~ 1 ~ + ~ \log_2 \left(1+\frac{\text{Armour}}{10000}\right)$

In order to take armour into account:

$\quad\text{Damage Reduction} ~ = ~ 1 ~ + ~ \log_2 \left(1+\frac{\text{Armour}\times\mathrm{Armour \_ Multiplier}}{10000}\right)$

From v41A release notes

• Armor stat will not show up anymore in ships description, as Damage reduction provides a better explaination of its effect

Battle simulations

Some people use simulators to see if they can win a battle before sending their fleet.

Yasim have made this in google spreed sheet

Godlloyd provides a convenient simulator.

Source