STATS GUIDE

This guide aims not only to teach you the basic workings of combat in Planetia but to develop an understanding of how everything works together. The stats are not the only thing that effects the balance between the races; teches and scans and the composition of the universe all play a role.

First off let's look at the basic values displayed on the stats page:

Class - Identifies the ship as belonging to a certain category. Ships are targeted and shot at according to these categories. The class is also extremely important for the concept of streamlining your fleet, which I'll discuss more later.

T1, T2, T3 - These determine which classes the ship targets and in what order. The order is essential, since often you might want to target a given class of ships but find yourself having to hack through another class before you can do so. This concept of using other ships to take the damage whilst your primary ships or pods go mostly unharmed is called flaking. More about this later.

Init - Initiative refers to the order in which ships fire in combat. This can mean that a stronger ship with a late initiative(higher numeral value) infact becomes weaker than a statistically weaker ship with early initiative. The typical order of initiative is based on class, race and type. There are however deviations from these rules, most noteable is perhaps the Pegasus.

Agil - Agility is part of the "to hit" calculation. The higher the agility, the faster your guns need to be to hit it with accuracy. Quantitiy can also overcome a high Agility, but might suffer in effectiveness. Typically classes follow a given range of Agility.

Wpsp - Weaponspeed notes the speed at which the guns fire making it easier to hit an opposing vessel. A high weaponspeed results in high accuracy and good efficiancy. The Wpsp is typically ranged according to what classes the ship targets and in what order.

Guns - Each gun has it's own "chance to hit" calculation dependant on the ships Wpsp and the targets Agility. More guns means more chances to hit.

Pwr - The Power of the gun refers to the amount of damage done by each hit to the enemy armour. High Power guns sometimes run into the problem commonly known as overshooting, i.e. the Power of the gun is larger than the armour of the target resulting in wasted Power. This is bad for the resource efficiancy. This means that a weaker ship which doesn't overshoot might actually be more resource effective than a stronger ship which overshoots a lot.

Arm - No, this doesn't mean the ship has grown so and so many arms, it's the rather awkward abriviation for Armour. Armour determins the amount of damage the ship can take before being killed.

ERes - Stands for EMP-Resistance. EMPs chance to freeze a ship is calculated quite differently than a normal ships chance to kill. Agility is ignored and EMP ships don't have any Wpsp. The Armour doesn't mean anything either, and there is no chance of overshooting since no Power exists. It's simply Guns and ERes. Each Gun hits, and dependant on the ERes of the ship it either freezes it or not. With more ERes it takes more hits to freeze the ship, naturally. However don't blindly look at the ERes to see what ships are hard to freeze. Resource efficiancy is the all important thing. How many resources has each gun cost you and how much is the value of the target. The cost results in a rather odd situation where a ship with no ERes can be the most expencive to freeze within its class. It's not hard to freeze, every shot fired at it is a hit and is sure to freeze, it's quite simply so cheap that you end up freezeing less resources per gun than you would against other ships.

Titanium/Silicon - These two make up the cost of the ship. Everything in stats has to do with how effective the ships are in comparison to how much resources you spend on them. They also form a resource balance. Most planets tend to produce more Titanium than Silicon, thus it might be easier to get vast amounts of ships which cost more Titanium than Silicon. However, some races or types usually use up more of one of the resources, resulting in a need for something to dump the other type of resources into. These kind of "dumps" are generally refered to as resource-sinks and are often useful to build even if they might not be the best available in resource efficiancy.

Fuel - Simply how much Uranium is used to send the ship somewhere. This isn't a very important chapter when deciding that ships to build, however for larger planets late in the game it might mean that they will end up having trouble launching their fleets as often as they'd like.

ETA - Estimated Time of Arrival. Basicly how many ticks it'll take for the ship to get to its destination. Ships with low Travel Time are usually used for defence whilst high Travel Times restrict ships to be used in attacks, in defending your galaxy or as mobile SDS. However, the lower the Travel Time of your attacking fleet, the less time your target will have to react to it and the less time he'll have to get help.

Type - The types of ships available are Normal, EMP, Cloak, Steal, Capture and SDS.
There's not much to say about Normal, it's a killing ship with no technical fancy-pants stuff. That doesn't make it any weaker than the other types though, sometimes brute force has its charms.

EMP is the peaceful way of playing. High resource efficiancy but unable to kill, only freezeing its target for 1 tick of combat at a time. EMP tend to get weaker towards the end of a combat due to being unable to inflict losses to its target.

Cloak is the stealth-option. Invisible to Unit Scans and showing up as 0 on the Galaxy status, these litle buggers have given birth to such concepts as fake attacks and defence. Since you can't tell what's incoming except for the eta of it you never know what to expect. In theory. Of course most players are predictable so most tactics are well known. More on this later.

Steal means that when the ship kills an opposing ship it converts itself into that other ship at a rate of 133%. This means that, in theory, you could grow from Stealing other ships. However, this is very hard to do in practice. This can also result in some problems given that you are losing ships which target the class you were initially intending to target, but it's not as bad as it sounds, most likely that class is also dwindling along with your steal-ships and you might actually be replacing them with ships that kill the same class if you did your homework right.

Capture is the class of ships which do the actual stealing of Orbitals(or "roids" as they are often refered to). It's a weak type which needs to be defended. Defending the Capture-type is infact the primary purpose of the rest of your fleet whilst attacking. The goal is to ensure minimal losses for maximal roid-gain. When defending against an attack, your primary job is to try and stop the Capture-type. After you manage this, most attackers will think twice about landing.

Strategic Terminology:
These are some of the commonly used terms and concepts within strategical discussion.

Streamlining your fleet - The goal is to make sure as few ships as possible are able to hit your particular fleet. This means using fewere ship-classes and clumping them closer together. Using Fi-class together with De- or Cr-class is not really much better than covering every class in between aswell. However De- and Cr-class together is a well streamlined option. Often also the difference between a fleet spanning 2 or 3 fleetclasses can be litle or none, and if the other factors warrent this, it may be the path to follow. Perfect streamline is of course a single-class attack fleet, though these often end up sacrificing effectiveness. Note: Streamlining is only really used when talking about offencive fleet combinations. There's no reason not to have Fi-class lying around for alliance defence even if your attack fleet is De or Cr based.

Flak - A ship which serves the purpose of dying instead of another, more important, ship. This can also be applied to EMP, in which case an additional ship-class can be added just to stop some EMP-ship from being able to freeze another ship-class or ship. The key is that various ships are either more or less effective against different classes of ship aswell as against different ships. Thus you drop a bunch of high armour ships into your fleet to die instead of, most commonly, your weakly armored pods.

Overshooting - As explained earlier, the effect which occurs when the amount of damage done to a target is greater than the armour of that target. Since excess damage doesn't continue on to the follow target this is a unwanted situation in terms of fleet efficiancy.

Resource-dump - A ship which is built mainly in order to use up excess resources of any given kind. Usually the result of a in terms of resources unbalanced fleet(either costs far more silicon or titanium) which results in large amounts of spare resources of the other type. A resource-dump ship doesn't need to be as resource effective and is most often a Fi-class ship ment for defending allies with. It is built because it's better to build something with the resources than to have them simply lying around.

Mobile SDS - A ship with good efficiancy but which, due to class and high eta, is not useable for attacking nore defending allies with. It's most often used to augment the own defences and help defend the galaxy with. Its merit over that of normal SDS is that it can be sent away if harm comes your way.

Fake Attacking - Disguising a attack fleet to look like something it is not. For instance making a Fr-fleet look like it's De by making sure the numbers match. When there is an ETA different between the fleet classes a ship of higher eta can be used to slow down a faster fleet. It's however mostly impossible to make a higher eta fleet look as if it's a lower eta fleet. Odonata are the favoured race for Fake Attacking due to their ships being cloak. Until Military scans are available it's impossible to know exactly what is in the fleet that is coming at you. However, an experienced player may guess this based on the typical fleet combinations in use. After Military scans Fake Attacks require having 2 fleets with equal amounts of visible ships(pods). Odonata Fake Attacks may of course also be only pods, hoping that the enemy will flee from the unknown threat.

Fake Defending - This only becomes useful once News Scans become available. It is the action of sending a single cloaked ship to defend someone. If the attacker news-scans he will see a 0 fleet heading to defend, but will be none the wiser wether or not that is the whole fleet of said planet heading to defend against his attack or simply 1 ship. Once Military scans become available it is best to make sure that actual ships have been moved to another fleet so that it actually looks as if you might be defending something. Note: Nobody will mistake your attacking fleet with pods in it for your defence-fleet. Both the fake fleet and the actual both have to show up as 0 ships on a gal-status.

Overkill - The practice of including more ships than needed into your attacking fleet in order to ensure a smooth transaction of roids to your planet(and sustaining more damage to the target).

Bashing - The practice of greatly outnumbering(in terms of fleetscore) your target in order to kill his whole fleet in a single tick. This is often followed by a second fleet consisting of nothing but pods in order to obtain the opposing fellows Roids.

Fleet Catching - The act of catching an enemy fleet as it's returning home form a mission. This requires precise timing and is usually done with huge amounts of Fi-class ships being sent to attack for the single tick when the opponents fleet reaches home. The point is to cripple the enemys capabilities to wage war by taking out his whole fleet(or a big part of it) in a single blow.