A battle is fought round by round inside a single turn — rounds are iterations within the turn, never across turns. Both sides fire at once and die at once, with no first strike and no initiative bonus. There is no command window between rounds and no way to direct the fight. The one thing you decide, you decide before launch, written into the order itself — how bad it has to get before you leave.
Battles happen on worlds, and only on worlds: an arriving fleet against whatever garrisons the planet. There is no interception and no deep-space engagement — two fleets whose courses cross in the void fly on past each other, no shots fired.
Attack and defense are not identities; they are the order you gave. Only two orders ever take the field: attack, and station — and whichever you gave is the side you stand on. Arrive under an attack order and you are the attacker; everything standing on the world — the home garrison, guest reinforcements, even a fleet that landed under a station order this same turn — defends. A transport fleet delivering cargo is in neither column: it unloads and leaves, fights no battle, stands on no side. The server reads neither your ships nor your relationships. It reads the order.
Fleets of the same side arriving on the same turn merge into one force, firepower pooled — the turns page covers it. What matters here is that a battle in progress cannot be fed: reinforcement means landing the same turn and merging, or arriving another turn as a separate wave. Once the shooting starts, nobody adds ships to it.
Same-turn arrivals and merging — the turns page →Each round, your output is the sum of every ship's attack: all three classes shoot, no hull is dead weight, but the attack orca is the spearhead. Damage taken pours into your ships in casualty order — fill one hull, move to the next, the overflow pouring onward. A heavy enough blow floods all the way through to the transports at the bottom.
Casualty order differs by side, and that asymmetry is where the feel of attack and defense comes from. Attackers lose the spear first: attack ships die early, output decays round by round, and the attacker is born impatient — win fast or bleed out. Defenders lose the wall first: pufferfish die in front while the punch hides behind, built to drag the fight out and make the attacker cut through layer by layer. Transports sit at the bottom on both sides — protected, never immune.
The same pufferfish is an expendable front-rank shield when it defends, and a back-rank backbone outliving the orcas it flies with when it attacks — build the fleet for the posture you are flying. One more thing: a transport that dies takes its cargo with it. Matter aboard a lost hull is gone, not dropped, not salvaged. Spending Matter into buildings is safer than sailing it away.
What each of the three ships is — the fleet page →Every order sent to attack or to station carries a retreat line: retreat when cumulative losses reach a set share. Like the destination, it is policy fixed in advance, and it can never be changed — not in flight, not on the ground. At the end of every combat round the server checks your cumulative losses against it; cross the line, and what remains of the fleet leaves the field as one, committed to the flight home to the world it launched from.
Losses are counted in hulls: ships lost, divided by ships you arrived with, all three classes weighing the same — one orca, one pufferfish, one whale each count as one. The three cost the same to build, so the fraction is also the fraction of your Matter gone. Deliberately not weighted by combat power: weighted that way, a convoy of loaded transports wiped to the last hull would register as no loss at all.
You cannot see the other side's line, and they cannot see yours. It is a game of chicken played blind: set both lines hard enough and nobody turns, and the field runs red.
Launch is commitment — how a turn runs →A line at zero runs on the same rule as every other line: what is checked is the loss percentage, never a round count. At the end of each round the server asks whether cumulative losses have reached the line — exactly touching it counts — and a line of zero is reached at the very first check, at zero losses. The effect is one round of contact, then out: fight one round and leave, carrying home the first round's report — who the defender is, and the full composition standing on the field that round, so many orcas, so many pufferfish, so many whales, read straight off the page. That is intelligence no one gets without fighting: brightness only says how fat a world is; what actually garrisons it shows only under fire.
The price is standing in the open for one full round of the defender's output. The stronger the target, the more that one look costs: reconnaissance is priced by the thing being scouted. An undefended world fights zero rounds, so the check never triggers — you win, you loot, you fly home on schedule.
Retreat needs survivors to carry it out. A fleet destroyed in the first round has no remnant to withdraw and receives no battle report — you never even learn who was waiting. The server hands you exactly one thing: a tombstone. The fleet was annihilated; it will not return. That one line — no opponent, no rounds, no account of the fight. What you know is still just this: the world was held, and you lost fast. A rout is blinder than a retreat: when you cannot win the fight, you cannot even buy the intelligence.
In a battle of many parties the round itself does not change; the bookkeeping does. Each round's damage is shared out by proportion — attackers by the firepower each brings, defenders by the punishment each can absorb. The shares go to players, not fleets: one player's fleets on one side take their share as a single pool, so splitting a force into several fleets saves no hulls. Allies are separate players, each a pool of their own. But every retreat line is checked fleet by fleet: each against its own cumulative losses, each deciding independently whether to stay, so one player's fleets can leave at different times.
Hence the cascade. One party crosses its line and leaves; next round the same firepower lands on fewer fleets, losses climb faster for everyone still standing, and the next line is crossed sooner. Collapse is contagious.
The defending side has exactly one anchor: a fleet garrisoning its own world holds a retreat line fixed at one hundred, and it cannot be lowered — the world it launched from is the one underfoot, and there is nowhere to retreat to. So the common ending in this forest: the allies leave one by one, the home garrison dies to the last hull, and every ally who leaves makes what lands on you heavier.
Reports are issued by the round. Stay through round N and you keep the record of rounds one through N, the round you retreated in included, each round listing every fleet present on both sides at that moment. What happened after you left, and who finally held the field, is never sent. One exception: when the world under attack is your own, the owner always receives the complete report.
Being sunk is different. Your record stops at the last round you were alive for; the round that destroyed you happened without you, so it is not in the report, and neither is anything that came after. A destroyed fleet's kill count is therefore always short, and no field in the report tells you how many rounds the battle actually ran.
So the retreat line is also an intelligence policy. Whoever stays to the end takes the field and the full report; whoever cuts losses early keeps the fleet and carries home a record that stops mid-story. Survival and information price each other on the same line.
The winner is whoever holds the field without having retreated. Winners carry off the world's liquid Matter, capped at the lesser of the surviving fleets' total capacity and what the world holds to plunder; deposits already committed to works cannot be carried away. Looting is not conquest: no occupation, no staying on to bleed the world — the raid ends in an automatic committed flight home, spoils aboard. Several winners on the same field split by capacity, in proportion.
The loser loses exactly what was on the field: the fleets that fought, and the Matter carried off. Buildings do not downgrade, the world does not change hands, no civilization is eliminated — economy and territory are permanent, and a shipyard that never burned rebuilds the fleet. In this forest, the price of exposure is usually not death. It is becoming a mark that gets raided again and again.
A fleet garrisoning its own world stands to the last: the line is locked at one hundred and the rules will not let you move it. The only way to save the fleet is to launch early, while the incoming warning still burns — and that is a launch order, which means abandoning the world. Waiting until the turn the attack lands is too late: the world freezes with your fleet on it, the battle is fought, and the departure order takes effect for the survivors only afterwards.
A line below one hundred means something only for fleets sent away: a stop-loss on an attack, or the point at which a fleet garrisoning someone else's world runs for home. How fleets come to stand on other people's worlds — and how guests leave — is its own set of rules.
How garrisons work →Once battle is joined, no cleverness helps: the fight resolves inside a single turn and no order can reach it between rounds. Whether the fight is worth it, how much to pay before walking away, whether to look once and leave — every judgement is pressed into one order before launch. What is measured here is not reaction. It is foresight.