Missiles

Missiles are guided projectiles that can pursue a target across sectors and through hyperspace. A missile is not an independently positioned ship or object: the target carries an incoming record with the missile's remaining distance, charge, and firing ship slot. Missile command covers syntax, target selection, launch checks, and flux cost.

Charge and tactics

Unlike a torpedo, a missile item has no useful payload of its own: the firing ship supplies its destructive energy from neutron flux at launch. The allowed charge and its cost differ by version; Missile command gives the accepted values and launch checks. In ge-next, more charge increases potential damage and endurance but, since 0.3, slows the missile's initial flight. A lightly charged missile reaches its target faster but runs out of energy sooner; a heavily charged one hits harder and lasts longer but starts more slowly.

Neither the target's launch warning nor REPORT ORDNANCE reveals the missile's charge. An opponent therefore cannot know its potential damage just from the incoming-missile report. There is no universally best choice by distance: a fast, light missile may be valuable against a distant moving ship, while a slow, heavy one may be especially threatening nearby, where its slower travel matters less. A heavy missile's greater endurance can also help it continue pursuing a distant target. Choosing a charge is a trade-off among travel time, damage, endurance, and flux expenditure, with some uncertainty for the defender.

Launcher capacity and the target's incoming slots limit how many missiles can be launched; see launch checks for the classic and ge-next rules. ge-next 0.2 also equipped eligible Cybertrons with missiles and added AI behavior to fire them; classic Cybertrons did not use missiles.

Flux balance

Early classic GE withdrew one unit of shipboard flux for each unit charged into a missile. The 3.0a release notes describe a switch to a fraction of the charge for playability; a later release made that fraction configurable. The distributed 3.2e setting makes a heavily charged missile relatively cheap to fire. This likely helped make large charges practical, particularly when an available flux pod was not reliably loaded on demand.

ge-next 0.2 returned to a one-for-one withdrawal, making flux pods a more important combat resource. Automatic pod loading removes the classic missed-reload problem, while the allowed charge range and damage scale were rebalanced together. Missile command gives the current charge limits, exact flux costs, and refusal behavior; Flux covers pod loading in each version.

Flight in classic

At launch, classic records the target's distance plus a small 20-unit offset. Each target ship-state update, normally about six seconds apart, reduces the remaining distance by the fixed MISLSPED; the stock value is 1,212 distance units. The missile's charge does not decrease in flight, and the target's ordinary travel does not add to the countdown. Thus a missile can keep following a ship through hyperspace even when its nominal speed is far below the target's displayed warp speed.

Classic has a special escape mechanism instead: when the target accelerates past whole warp levels, a crossing at warp 4 or higher tests a random threshold from warp 4 through warp 7. This gives a 25% chance of shaking off all incoming missiles at warp 4, 50% at warp 5, 75% at warp 6, and certainty at warp 7. A ship does not shake off missiles merely by maintaining a constant high speed; the test is on acceleration across a whole warp level. If a ship is already cruising at high warp when missiles arrive, it must slow below a whole-warp boundary and accelerate through it again to get another check, unless it can accelerate across a still higher boundary.

Classic tests for impact only when remaining distance is strictly less than one movement step. If it equals MISLSPED, the tracking path decrements it to zero and the missile disappears without a hit. ge-next changed the comparison so an exact final step hits.

Flight in ge-next

ge-next 0.2 made the target's travel count against missile progress and gave missiles a finite charge that burns during flight. ge-next 0.3 added charge-dependent speed: each target ship-state update recalculates the missile's travel step from its remaining charge.

speed scale = sqrt(5000 / (remaining charge + 300))
speed scale is clamped to 0.5–2.0
movement step = MISLSPED * speed scale

The stock ge-next MISLSPED was raised from classic's fixed 1,212 to 2,441, matching the stock torpedo speed before the charge adjustment. With this base value, a 20,000-charge missile begins at about 1,220 distance units per update, while an almost exhausted missile can approach 4,882. A missile that remains in flight burns 500 charge per update, so it speeds up as it lightens. If its remaining charge is too low to continue, it loses the target and disappears. A light missile therefore has less time to reach its target despite its higher speed.

The target's travel during the update is added back to the remaining distance after the missile advances. A fast target can outrun it until it runs out of charge or exceeds the 50,000-unit tracking limit; extremely high target speed can also break tracking directly. This replaces classic's random high-warp shake-off. In ge-next, REPORT ORDNANCE shows active incoming and outgoing missiles and their remaining distance, but not their charge.

Interception and lost tracks

An active decoy can intercept a missile within 3,000 distance units. Each eligible decoy gets a separate one-in-DECODDS chance per target update; the stock value is 11. A successful interception destroys both missile and decoy. Raised shields do not intercept a missile but substantially reduce its hull damage and absorb a separate shield hit.

Both versions protect the neutral zone from approaching missiles. ge-next also clears a missile when its target passes through a wormhole or when nebula visibility is lost while it is still at least 5,000 units away. Classic's 3.2d wormhole change attempted to clear incoming projectiles but called the routine that clears the firing player's ownership instead; ge-next corrected the incoming-ordnance cleanup in 0.2.4 (Classic bug: Wormhole projectile cleanup). ge-next notifies the firer when a missile loses its target.

Impact and damage

Both versions scale the missile's remaining charge against the target ship's DAMF before calculating hull damage. Classic then scales the effective charge against 50,000 and the stock MDAMMAX of 25. An unshielded impact multiplies this by a random factor from 0.5 to less than 1.0; with raised shields, the hull-damage factor is from zero to less than 0.1, and the shields take a separate hit. Classic's hit description describes the effective charge (from "very small" through "devastating"), not necessarily the hull damage actually inflicted.

ge-next scales its smaller charge against 20,000 and raises the stock MDAMMAX to 35; DAMF and optional armor plating still protect the target. It describes the actual hull damage, so shielded and unshielded reports are more meaningful. Random system or cargo damage can follow an impact. When several missiles hit on one update, ge-next batches their target messages and makes one combined random-damage assessment while retaining credit for each distinct attacker; classic reports and assesses each hit separately.

Ownership and combat

The incoming missile stores its firing ship slot for impact and kill credit. In ge-next, destroying the firing ship leaves its projectiles in flight but marks them ownerless; leaving the game does likewise, so a later player assigned that channel cannot inherit the kill. In ge-arena, the firing player remains in a stable match slot through destruction and respawn, so ownership survives those events and becomes ownerless only when that player leaves the match.

An incoming missile keeps the target in combat while it remains active. The Missile command page explains how successful launches, failed attempts, and shield state differ between classic and ge-next.