Combat is a major part of Planetarion. It's possibly where tactics and skill are found most. The important thing is not the AMOUNT of ships that you attack with, but the types of ship. In effect you're trying to "drive" your fleet through enemy defence, so you want it as streamlined as possible. Sending every different ship you have might look impressive, but a lot of people will only even bother stopping the important ones - the ones that capture asteroids and kill structures. The current game statistics are located here.

Damage types

There's 5 different types of ship damage. These are those that:
Kill ("normal" damage),
EMP ("ElectroMagnetic Pulse" - basically stun),
Steal,
Asteroid stealing, and
Structure killing.
The normal/kill, asteroid stealing and structure killing damages are fairly self explanatory.
Stealing ships steal a certain class of enemy ships for no cost (enemy ships are taken and now work for the attacker) and EMP ships stun ships for the duration of the round of combat.

Classes of ship

There are 6 classes of ship. These are (smallest to largest):
Fighter Class,
Corvette Class,
Frigate Class,
Destroyer Class,
Cruiser Class,and
Battleship Class.
Each ship is a certain class, and (unless it captures asteroids or fires at constructions) fires at another class, which may or may not be the same class. Each time the ship takes part in combat it fires once.

Inititative (or init)

This is one of the least understood parts of the game for new players. It's basically the order that ships fire in. Generally, Cathaar EMP ships fire first, then Xandarthii ships, then Terran and Zikonian kill ships and Cathaar kill ships, and then the astropods, and then steal ships, and then structure killers.
So, with an init of 1, the Spider, Black Widow, Scarab and Beetle ships fire first.
Guardians and Roaches have an init of 2, so they fire next.
This means that, for example, Scarabs fire their EMP damage at Roaches before Beetles can allowed to fire.

What are these Arm/Cost and Dam/Cost columns on the stats page?

These are, in some ways, more important than the armour, damage and cost columns themselves. They summarize these columns by saying, per cost, how much armour or damage the ship does. This means you can quickly compare ships no matter their different costs. looking at Terran, you can see their "Arm/Cost" column is much bigger than the other races. Cathaar and Xandathrii have bigger "Dam/Cost" columns, but keep in mind that 6 of the Cathaar ships only stun their opponents.

How combat works

Combat occurs when one planet sends some of their ships to attack another planet. Attacking (and defending) ships can take anywhere between 7 and 14 hours to reach their target, depending on the size of the ship and the amount of research that's been done by the attacking planet. The target planet does not have to have ships home (or even ships sent from other people) for combat to occur.
When the attacking ships land, combat takes place. The attacking and defending ships fire at the same time in order of initiative. They fire at the class they target, and are obviously fired on by ships that target them. The damage the ships do is from their "damage" column, and the armour they have against damage is their "armour" column. These damages and armours are the same no matter what damage is being done or what armour is taking the damage.

What race should I choose?

There are four different races. These are:
Terran,
Cathaar,
Xandarthii, and
Zikonian.

Terran have bigger, more heavily armoured ships than the other races (their Destroyer class ships are as big as Cathaar and Zikonian Battleships). They're slower and generally fire later, but their armour means they can take losses and fire on their enemy afterwards. This means they can power through and take acceptable losses on bigger planets than others, but due to their poorer than average damage they're sometimes seen to be targets.
Cathaar are seen to be more peaceful - 6 of their 9 ships that target other ships only EMP them (although they do so more efficiently than other ships). To compensate, their armour is slightly lower on their EMP ships, and their kill ships are slightly more heavily armoured, but much weaker damage wise. They're again quite effective attacking, but weaker defending - a lot of people don't mind being EMPed as they don't loose ships.
Xandathrii are the heavy artillery. They rely on firing first with large guns, and so have the weakest armour. Because of this, people are often not so willing to attack them, but if you can stop their ships firing and/or survive their heavy guns, they die quite easily. This means sometimes people choose targets of a similar value or smaller, to reduce the risk of loosing ships.
Zikonian are the hardest race to play - while their race is able to steal all classes of ship from all other races, their ships are slightly worse, generally slightly slower, and very much harder to play early on. For this reason they're recommended for experienced players only, who've planned how to play them.


For more information on combat, see here.