Combat

Every unit has two attributes:

• Health — 0 to 100. New units start at 100. Damage in combat reduces Health. A unit dies when Health hits 0.
• Skill — 1 to 9. New units start at 1. Every survivor on the winning side of a combat gains +1 Skill, capped at 9. Skill doesn't decay.

Damaged units still fight — they just hit softer. A unit at 1 HP isn't useless, though it is a liability.

Your units show:

• A horizontal health bar below the unit icon, split into 10 segments. Color shifts from red (1 segment filled) to green (10 segments filled).
• A small skill number (1–9) in the top-right corner of your own units' icons. Enemy Skill is hidden — you don't get to see how veteran the defenders are.

Effective power

A unit's damage output is its attack power multiplied by:

skill_mult  = 1 + (skill - 1) / 4           // 1.0× at skill 1, 3.0× at skill 9
health_mult = 0.25 + 0.75 × (health / 100)   // 0.25× at 0 HP, 1.0× at 100 HP

A skill-9, full-health unit deals 3× damage compared to skill-1, full-health. A skill-1 unit at 1 HP still deals ~25%. The health multiplier floors at 25% — a wounded unit still shoots.

Each unit type has an armor rating. Higher armor reduces incoming damage:

• Infantry: armor 1
• Tank: armor 3
• Transport: armor 4
• Construction Truck: armor 3
• Warship: armor 3
• Jet: armor 3

Armor doesn't prevent damage, it scales it down. A tank takes substantially less damage per hit than infantry.

For a simple one-on-one fight, the resolver:

1. Computes each side's effective power (above).
2. Applies armor-based damage reduction on incoming damage.
3. Applies terrain modifier and defender's advantage to the defender.
4. Applies a randomness multiplier (uniform 0.7–1.1 in default worlds, Gaussian in worlds with that option).
5. Compares damages and resolves.

Multi-unit sectors (rare under the 1-combat-unit-per-sector cap, but possible briefly during movement or overflow) distribute damage proportionally across defenders.

Even matchups should be genuinely uncertain (~55/45 range). Slight advantages are meaningful but not guaranteed (~70/30). Overwhelming force is near-certain (~95/5).

Terrain meaningfully shapes combat.

• Flatland — no modifier. Favors mobility and open combat.
• Hills — defender deals roughly 15% more damage. Movement is slower than flatland.
• Mountains — defender deals roughly 25% more damage. Movement is much slower — mountain strongholds are very tough to dislodge.
• Forest — defender deals roughly 10% more damage, and movement is a bit slower than flatland.
• Water — land units can't be there without a transport or bridge. Combat on water uses sea-unit rules.

A defended sector earns a fortification bonus that grows the longer its current owner has held it (+2% defender damage per cycle, capped at +30% after 15 cycles of uninterrupted ownership). This applies to whatever units are present at the time of attack — what matters is how long the sector has been in friendly hands, not how long these particular units have been here.

This makes breakthroughs feel hard-earned. You usually can't just march one unit into established territory and win — you need force concentration, air/naval softening, or flanking through weaker sectors.

Capturing a sector resets its held_since for the new owner — so a captured border sector is initially no more defensible for you than it was for the enemy before.

Defense % readout on your units

Each of your own units defending your own sector shows a small defense % label next to its skill number on the map (e.g. 12%, 24%, 30%). This is the current held-since bonus the unit will receive if it's attacked this cycle. Newly captured sectors show nothing (the bonus is 0 until the timer accrues); long-held interior sectors cap out at 30%.

Use it as a quick read of where your front line has gone soft. Sectors where your defenders show 0% or low single digits have just changed hands or are still building up — they're vulnerable. Sectors at 24–30% are entrenched and substantially harder to dislodge.

Enemy units don't show the label, by design — knowing the defender's exact fortification bonus before attacking would remove a meaningful part of the gamble.

Bunker armor bonus

A friendly Bunker on the sector grants every defending unit a +3 effective armor during combat. An Infantry (armor 1) defends like a Tank (armor 4); a Tank (armor 3) like a Transport (armor 6). The bonus only fires when the units are actually defending the bunker's sector — attacking out of a bunker sector gets no benefit at the destination. See Structures.

At most one combat unit can occupy a sector at a time. This prevents invincible deathballs stacked on a chokepoint.

• Spy units are exempt — they're not combat units, and including them in the cap would leak spy presence to enemies watching for unit counts.
• Bases and structures do not count against the cap.
• When you queue a Build Unit order, you pick the destination from sectors within reach of the producing base. Currently occupied sectors are valid targets — attacks resolve before production, so the occupant may move out by the time the build runs. If the destination is still at the cap, the new unit spills over to the nearest owned land sector with an open slot — only as far as the terrain allows (easy ground reaches farther, rough or mountainous terrain barely spills at all). If no slot is found, the unit isn't built and you aren't charged for it.

When an air unit flies to its target, defenders along (or near) its flight path can shoot at it:

• Defense Turrets within their fire range of the path fire at full strength, with distance falloff. Turrets are the backbone of air defense.
• Warships within their fire range of the path fire at full strength as well (no anti-air penalty), with the same falloff.
• Land units sitting directly on the flight path return fire at reduced effectiveness (about 30% of their attack power).
• Treaty allies' forces do not fire — your planes can cross an ally's airspace safely.

Interception deals damage to the flying unit rather than outright killing it per-defender (in the current one-unit-per-order model). A single jet might take 15–50% damage from one turret along its path; two turrets may kill it outright; a well-defended corridor makes air strikes very costly.

Spy Planes, Paratroopers, and other air units all face the same interception rules.

Before Phase 4 runs, any structures you've marked for scorched earth are destroyed. This denies the attacker the captured infrastructure but gives you no refund. See Comeback.

Damaged units heal at friendly bases:

• Land and air units sitting on a matching-type friendly base sector heal +35 Health per cycle (capped at 100), provided they didn't take a move/attack/board action that cycle.
• Sea units heal the same +35/cycle when adjacent (1 hop) to a friendly Sea Base, since they can't sit on the base sector itself.
• Units in transit or fighting don't heal.
• Medics in the field heal every friendly Infantry within 1 hop by +7 Health per cycle, capped at 70. Multiple Medics around the same Infantry don't stack — one heal per unit per cycle.
• Mechanics do the same for every friendly non-Infantry land unit (Trucks, Jeeps, Tanks, Mine Layers, Rebels, Medics, Spies, other Mechanics) within 1 hop — +7 HP/cycle, capped at 70.
• The Medic/Mechanic cap at 70 means base healing still owns the last 30 HP. Field healing keeps an army in the fight; base healing brings veterans back to full.

Bases and structures have their own strength (1000 for bases, 100 for most structures, 300 for Bunkers, 500 for Surveillance Centers). Queue a repair order to restore their strength for a proportional cost; the repair resolves in Phase 5.

Every round of combat rolls a random multiplier on each side: 0.7–1.1 for the attacker and 0.8–1.1 for the defender (uniform distribution). The defender's slightly tighter floor is part of the baseline defender's edge.

Air strikes against a sector hit whatever's there:

• Units in the sector take full damage.
• Bases and structures take damage too, but scaled down (bases lose strength proportionally, structures typically lose more of theirs per hit). Bases are durable — it usually takes sustained strikes to reduce them.

Warships bombarding coastlines similarly hit units, bases, and structures in the target coastal sector.

After each cycle, the Cycle Report and Replay show exactly what happened — who fought whom, how much damage each side dealt, and which units gained Skill. Use these to understand why fights went the way they did and to tune your future plans. See Report & Replay.