Combat

Combat in Galactic Empire happens in real time. Ships continue moving and turning, systems recharge, and projectiles continue flying while players choose commands. A target that was in range during a scan may have moved by the time a shot is fired. This page explains how an encounter fits together; the linked weapon and system pages cover the detailed calculations.

From contact to attack

A sector scan or range scan reveals ships that the current scanners can detect. A ship scan gives more detail about a selected contact. Scanner jamming, cloaking, nebulas, and distance can limit what is visible. Scan letters identify contacts on the player's current display; a lock remembers a particular ship rather than relying on its letter remaining the same.

A lock can be used as @ with TORPEDO, MISSILE, and SCAN SHIP. It does not guarantee a firing solution or make an out-of-range ship hittable. Standard PHASER instead takes a relative bearing and fires through an arc; it does not aim at a ship letter or @. A moving target may leave that arc before the shot is processed. See Scan command, Lock command, and Bearing.

Weapons also depend on the firing ship's state. A class may lack a launcher or phaser capability, a system may be damaged or recharging, and a shot may require ammunition or neutron flux. Ordinary phasers and torpedoes operate at impulse, while hyper-phasers and missiles can engage ships in hyperspace. Sector 0 0 imposes additional restrictions.

Weapons

Weapon	Where it operates	What happens
Phasers	Impulse	A directional beam strikes eligible ships in its arc immediately. A wider spread covers more angles but concentrates less damage.
Hyper-phasers	Hyperspace	A narrow beam fires at hyperspace contacts and consumes flux. Its range and hit-report behavior differ between classic GE and ge-next.
Torpedoes	Impulse	A guided projectile travels toward one ship. A target entering hyperspace breaks its ordinary impulse-space track.
Missiles	Impulse and hyperspace	A guided projectile is charged from the launcher's flux supply; charge affects damage and flight. Classic and ge-next have different charge limits and flight rules.
Mines	Local area	A laid mine counts down at a fixed position and can damage multiple ships, including its layer. Zippers can trigger nearby mines early.
Ion cannons	Planetary defense	An armed planet fires automatically at qualifying attackers; players do not launch these as ship weapons.

The ship-weapon command pages explain how to fire or lay each weapon; the linked topic pages explain what happens after launch or impact. Planetary ion cannons fire automatically. For planetary assault, players instead send fighters or troops against a planet's defenses. This is a separate combat path from ship-to-ship fire.

Defense and countermeasures

Shields protect against applicable hits while raised and supplied with flux. A standard phaser hit is deflected completely rather than spilling its calculated damage onto the hull; other weapons can still inflict hull damage through shields. Successful phaser, torpedo, and missile firing lowers the player's raised shields, which do not rise again automatically.
Decoys can intercept incoming torpedoes or missiles. They are temporary and do not guarantee protection.
Cloaking hides a capable ship from ordinary detection and guidance, but uses flux and does not prevent every kind of attack.
Jamming interferes with nearby scanners and guidance, including those of the ship using the jammer.
Zippers detonate nearby mines, potentially clearing a route but also creating an immediate blast hazard.
Armor plating (ge-next only) reduces certain damage when installed on capable ships, see Ship upgrades.

Speed, position, and timing matter too: a ship may outrun or evade a threat that it cannot absorb.

Damage and the combat timer

Hits can increase structural damage, drain or damage shields, and disable individual systems. The displayed damage description does not reveal the ship's exact structural value. Ordinary damage control works during ship updates; planetary maintenance is a separate service with its own orbit and hostility requirements. See Hull damage, System damage, and Maintenance.

Combat actions set a timer that temporarily prevents an ordinary X exit. A player who disconnects during that period may lose the ship, with kill credit assigned under the game's normal rules. In ge-arena, the timer is shorter and maintenance has different costs and availability. Ship destruction is normally processed on an update after structural damage reaches the fatal threshold; this brief interval does not mean a ship is safe. ge-next blocks most functions of an already-doomed ship during it.

Kill credit, scoring, and salvage

A ship records its most recent qualifying attacker in lastfired. The attack that first pushes damage over the fatal threshold is not necessarily the one that receives credit: another effective hit before destruction is processed can change that field. Incoming projectiles and laid mines may strike after their owner has moved or even after that owner's ship was destroyed. Environmental damage and ownerless weapons have their own attribution rules. See Kill credit for the classic and ge-next differences.

A credited kill can add points and let the attacker recover cargo from the wreck, subject to available hold space; the defeated player's score can also change. In ge-next, recovery prioritizes as much gold as will fit, then attempts a randomized portion of other recoverable items. Men, troops, and spies are presumed lost after ship destruction and not salvageable. Classic GE uses the same randomized recovery but does not prioritize gold, meaning a near-capacity ship might pick up less valuable cargo. See Scoring and rosters, Gold, and Ship inventory.

In classic GE, a player who destroys another player's ship also has a chance to recover a secret document listing the defeated player's planets. This is enabled by the compile-time SHOWDOC definition, with default odds of one in six set by RNDDOC. Standard ge-next instead makes SHOWDOC a configurable 0–10 option (0 disables it; 10 always awards it), and picks displayed planets at random instead of always displaying the user's first planets established.. This information reward is separate from cargo salvage and does not apply to ge-arena. See the 2.1a release notes.

ge-arena uses match-specific scoring and respawns rather than deleting a participant's persistent ship. It retains item and gold recovery after kills, but the winner depends on the active mode, not necessarily the number of ships destroyed.

Other threats and rules

Cybertrons and other automated ships use many of the same weapons but have their own targeting and movement logic. Planetary combat, self-destruct shock waves, wormholes, collisions, and the galactic boundary can also damage a ship. They do not all follow ordinary weapon damage or kill-credit rules.

Classic GE and ge-next differ in several important combat details. ge-next applies DAMF consistently to phaser damage, rebalances missile charge and flux use, improves projectile ownership and kill attribution, and avoids lowering a player's shields for failed torpedo or missile launches. The linked weapon, shield, and kill-credit pages explain each change without treating ge-next behavior as if it were universal.