• Combat Preconditions
• Combat Overview
• Ship Vs. Ship Combat
• Planetary Defense
• Ground Combat and Conquering a Planet
• The Battle Report
• Score, Reputation And Rank

The following provides an overview of score, reputation and ship-crew rank (not Player Rank), and how they interact with each other.

You can gain quite a considerable amount of score by winning a battle. “Winning a battle” actually means you have destroyed at least one ship during a battle. You do not have to completely destroy all of the ships of your opponent, nor do your ships have to survive combat in order for you to receive ‘score’ for the battle. You merely have to satisfy the requirement of destroying one ship or one planetary-defense facility. The amount of ship-units or planetary-defense units that you destroyed are added to your overall score. So if you for instance destroyed a ship with 1,000 units, 500 points will be added to your score. So for every 2 destroyed ship- or PD-units you gain 1 score point.

However, things are not quite as simple as that. In order to avoid that a strong and advanced players simply kill all the ships of newbies and less advanced players in the galaxy, the score that you receive is influenced by the score-ratio between the two players.

If we take the example from above: someone destroys a ship worth 1,000 score points, but it turns out that his overall score is twice as high as that of the player whose ship was destroyed, then that person will only receive some of the score that he actually “deserves”, as determined by score ratio.

Score ratio is determined by the following formula:

Score-Ratio = Player-B’s-Score / (Player-A’s-Score - 20%)

Example: Player A destroys one of player B’s ships worth 1,000 score points. Player A’s overall score is 10,000 while player B’s score is 5,000. The math would go as follows:

1,000 x (5,000 / (10,000-20%)) = 625

So instead of the full 1,000 points, player A would receive 625 points.

On the other hand, if that same person destroyed a ship of a player with twice the score of himself, then the score he earns will be greatly increased! In the above example Player A would have received 2,500 points instead of 1,000, if he attacked someone twice the size of himself. In short, it pays off to attack someone with a higher score than yourself.

It used to be, that when the score ratio was calculated, your own score and that of the enemy was compared, and the resulting value was considered the score ratio. That meant that if you attacked a player with a score of only 1 point lower than yours, the score ratio would be negative - only very slightly negative, but nevertheless.

To avoid that effect we have pushed down the “break-even” point slightly, by defining that an empire with a score that is 20% lower than yours, will give you an even score ratio. This means that if you attack an empire with the same score as yours the score-ratio leans quite considerably in your favor; the score ratio when attacking an equally sized player is 1.2. In effect, this means that the score you gain from battling an opponent with more or less equal score, is multiplied by 1.2!

This effect of course further increases, the bigger the empire you are attacking is compared to yours!

To further amplify this effect, namely that one is punished for attacking weaker players, and one is rewarded for attacking stronger players, reputation has been introduced.

You gain and lose reputation through so-called diplomatic incidents. A diplomatic incident would for instance be the first time you successfully attack a player that you have declared war on. Successfully would mean that you need to destroy at least one ship, or one planetary defense facility.

Please note that only the first battle in which you gain score (that is, hostile units are successfully destroyed) is used to compute reputation. We call this battle the “first significant battle”. All subsequent battles will not lose or gain you reputation anymore.

Please also note that a player only gains positive reputation if he destroyed at least half a percent of the enemies total physical power during a battle. The physical power is the combined number of ship- and PD-facility-units of that enemy.

The following conditions must be met in order to lose or gain reputation:

• You gain/lose reputation if you declared war and had the attack order given.
• You gain/lose reputation if you declare war then follow an ally who has an attack order, you will engage ONLY who you are declared against. Note: help ally attack
• You gain reputation if you defend against an aggressor and manage to destroy hostile ships.
• You will NOT lose reputation if the other side declared war on you, even if you or your ally is the aggressor.
• You will NOT lose reputation if you help defend your ally, for instance by simply parking your ships at an ally’s planet which is under attack.

This means, that if a weaker player than yourself declares war on you, attacks you, and during the course of the battle loses all his ships, you will not lose any reputation, because you did not declare war in the first place! Or in other words, if someone else declared war on you, you are free to attack that player without the danger of losing reputation during the battles.

Note: If you move to a planet that you are at war with, you are always considered the aggressor.

Basically we make a distinction between an ally helping to defend, or an ally automatically joining in a battle if your ally is the aggressor.

The details are explained in the chapter Combat Preconditions.

So how is reputation calculated? Reputation is based on the score-ratio of the two players at the time of the battle. If your score is 100,000 and your opponents score is only 50,000 then the resulting score ratio is 0.5. However, we add a bias to that formula so that empires 20% smaller than yours are still considered the “same size”, and will result in a score-ratio of 1.2 (see above ‘Score Ratio “break-even”‘).

Reputation gained/lost during a battle is calculated with the following formula:

Score-Ratio = Enemy-Score / (My-Score - 20%)
Reputation = log(base 2)(Score-Ratio) x 5

So far so good, but what effect does reputation have in the game? We learned already that the score-ratio between the two players has a big role when calculating the score. The opponents reputation further amplifies how much score you gain in a battle! In case your opponent has got a negative reputation, that will raise the amount of score you gain!

For example, you are attacking an enemy with twice the score of yourself, and destroy a ship with 2,000 units, you will gain 2,500 score points. Now, if on top of that the player has got a negative reputation of -20, then the score you gain is further raised by 20%! In total you will gain 3,000 score points for destroying a ship worth 2,000 units.

However, a positive reputation of your opponent has no effect on the score calculation.

That means you can boost your overall score by attacking players with a higher score than yourself, that on top of that do have a negative reputation. Those are considered juicy targets. At the same time avoid having a negative reputation, because this will turn you into a good target yourself.

There is another very important effect that reputation has on your empire: it influences the amount of corruption in your empire!

Please read Corruption for more detailed information on that topic.

Similar to the player gaining score by destroying enemy ships, the ship-crew involved in a battle will gain experience too. The amount of experience every crew-member gains, depends on the overall firepower-ratio of the ships involved.

The entire firepower of the two sides is added up and weighted against each other. If the firepower on both sides is equally large, then the resulting ratio is 1. This is further multiplied by 2, which results in a gain of 2 experience points for every crew-member.

If you managed to defeat a large fleet with only one ship, which is only really possible if the hostile fleet is heavily damaged, your ship-crew will gain the biggest amount of experience. However, if you attack a small harmless ship with a strong fleet, your ship-crew will barely gain any experience.

Experience translates to the following rank:

The rank of a ship is calculated by adding up the entire experience of all crew-men, and dividing that by the minimum number of crew that is required to fly this ship. The resulting rank is the rank of the ship, which determines how much its firepower is increased during combat.

For every extra ship-rank your ship gains a +10% firepower bonus during combat. So for example a rank 3 ship would have +30% firepower in a battle.