What is the game about?
Galactic Reign is a turn-based head-to-head game of tactical expansion and conquest. You and your opponent colonize planets, design ships, and build fleets as you fight for domination of the galaxy. When opposing fleets meet, the battle is rendered on the cloud, showing the result in a stunning cinematic movie.
In addition to player vs. player strategy, Galactic Reign features an extensive collection of single player missions that challenge you to use clever ship design to defeat enemy fleets.
Galactic Reign is available on Windows 8 and Windows Phone, will I have to buy it multiple times to play on both devices?
Buy once play anywhere. If you've already purchased Galactic Reign on another device, there is no need to purchase it again! You can download the trial and still have access to the additional content. Purchasing on other platforms will only unlock the ability to gain achievements on that platform.
Do the effects of components stack?
Yes. All special components stack, generally in simple mathematical ways. Two 25% damage amplifiers increase damage by 50%. Two 80%-evasive cloaking devices give a ship a 160% chance of evading incoming attacks (although there’s always a slight chance to hit). Some component stacking is not particularly useful, however.
Examples: Double Defensive Warp will give a ship slightly more evasion and will jump back farther, but that is often not worth it. Double Target Hacking will make enemy ships prioritize the equipped ship even more than ships with one Target Hacking.
What happens when enemy fleets try to move past each other?
The fleet that is larger (after ships are built) ‘pins’ the smaller fleet in place, blocking its movement. Even if the smaller fleet wins the fight, its movement is still denied.
How do ramming strikers work?
Ramming works the same as any other attack, except that a successful attack also destroys the ramming ship. Ramming attacks are affected by damage boosts, evasion, and other factors the same as any other weapon.
How was I attacked? I didn’t see a fleet there.
A player can place a destroyed fleet and immediately build into it. This allows a player to ‘ambush’ an opponent by placing a fleet on a colony that they think will be attacked and building lots of ships.
Do a Zorn factory ship’s special components affect the Drones it spawns?
No. Zorn drones are not affected by Damage Boost or any other special component equipped on the factory ship.
What determines how my ships act in battle?
Ships choose a priority target based on their weapons and how much damage they expect to inflict. Ships with higher rates of fire will prefer smaller targets, for example. Also, because artillery and assault ships host more and have less health than other ships, they will usually be prioritized first. Ships move to their weapons range and fire, shooting anything else until their best target is in range. They will not, however, do fancy things like waiting for screening ships to be cleared or prioritize ships that present particular threats to them or other ships. They inflict as much damage as they can on the opposing fleet.
This fleet is unstoppable! What do I do?
Every fleet has a weakness. If there’s a composition that you can’t figure out, take a look through the Battle Academy. Most strategies are represented there. Failing that, ask on the forums.
What does a rate-of-fire of 1.5 mean?
Rate of fire ‘stacks’ between ships of the same design. If you have one ship with a rate of fire of 1.5 then you’re wasting that .5, but if you have 2 or more ships then the rate of fire multiplies as you might expect. 2 ships have an effective rate of fire of 3, etc. This is because a single ship cannot fire half a bullet, but a stack of identical ships will add all those halves up into full shots.
Can a weapon’s damage be reduced below 1?
Only by armor. Weapon Accelerators, for instance, never reduce a weapon’s damage below 1.
Can armor completely negate damage?
No. Armor has a minimal level of damage that it can reduce attacks to, which is .5 for ‘built in’ armor and .25 for Sundog armor components.
How fast do Zorn Battleships and Dreadnaughts launch Drones?
If you think of an individual weapon’s having a rate-of-fire of 1 as taking a unit of time to fire, Zorn factory battleships and dreadnaughts take 15 of those units to fully deploy their compliment of drones. That’s a long while, so it behooves the opponent to take these ships out long
before they can launch all their drones.
What happens to Zorn Drones at the end of a battle?
They fizzle and shut down, no matter what. Drones launched during a battle never have any effect on subsequent battles. If a battle ends with only drones remaining, both fleets are lost. During the next battle with those factory ships, a new set of drones is launched.
Are light strikers useful beyond the early stages of the game?
Yes. Also, ‘Very.’ The smallest ship class remains important as a screening force against assault ships and due to their numbers and evasiveness, they are always an excellent response to late-game weapons with low rate of fire. There are many weapons in the game that completely dominate these ships, but if your opponent doesn’t build enough of those, a surprise attack with a massive striker swarm can be devastating.
When are shields better than armor and vice-versa?
Armor is ideal against high rate-of-fire, low damage weapons. Note that because armor has a minimum damage, there is a wide range of weapons for which it is equally effective. For instance, a fully armored Sundog Dreadnaught essentially negates the damage from any type of Zorn Drone, so Hunter Drones will prove as effective as Assault Drones against it.
Shields, on the other hand, are equally good against everything, but exceptional against nothing. They provide a straight 15% health boost, so as long as the weapon hitting them isn’t enough to destroy them in one shot even with the shields, the shields will be doing something.
If you’re trying to decide between shields and either armor or hardened shields, just figure out what percent of a weapons damage the armor will negate. For example, Hardened Shields will reduce an Alkari Thermal Beam from 2 damage to 1, a 50% decrease and much more efficient than the 15% shield effect.
When are weapon accelerators useful?
Anytime you want to destroy lots of smaller targets with a weapon that would otherwise waste damage against them. For instance, Alkari Cruiser Gauss Cannons are great against destroyers with their rate of fire of 1.5. But the same ship armed with a Corona Beam and two Weapon Accelerators has the same rate of fire and does more damage. Of course, this takes both component slots and as a result you can’t use fancy things like Defensive Warp. So there are pros and cons to both.
How does evasiveness and to-hit chance work?
Whenever a ship fires a weapon, it has somewhere between a 100-5% chance of hitting its target. If there are no interfering factors, the chance to hit is 100%. Evasion, Cloaking, Ghost Signalers, Defensive Warping, specific weapon modifiers, and Scanners all have effect on this. All of these things stack and effect each other in a purely additive way. For instance, two Cloaking Devices gives a ship 160% evasion, making any attack against it use the minimum chance to hit of 5%. If the attacking ship has three Scanners, it has a 150% bonus, making the chance to hit 90% (160 evasion – 150 accuracy bonus = 10% miss chance).
How do multiple Dispersion Matrices work?
Unlike Evasion, Dispersion Matrices are not additive. Damage passes through each one separately. So let’s walk through what happens when a Singularity Warhead (2000 damage) hits a cruiser with two Dispersion Matrices (each negating 90% of the damage over 100).
The first Matrix lets through 100 damage (because they always do) and then negates 90% of the rest of the damage. In this case, we’re talking about 1900 damage, so the Dispersion Matrix cuts that down to 190. So the attack is now dealing 290 damage (100 that always gets through + 10% of the remaining damage).
The attack hits the second Matrix and the same thing happens. 100 damage goes through. The remainder (190) is cut down by 90%, leaving it at 19. So the total amount of damage dealt by that Singularity Warhead is 119.
What is a capital ship?
Capital Ship is a general term that encompasses Battleships and Dreadnaughts.
How is a weapon strong against ‘assault ships’? Shouldn’t it be equally good against other ships in that hull size?
Assault ship weapons are always high damage, with a range of 10. They are also mounted on ships with relatively low health and high cost. Weapons that are good against assault ships are weapons with a range of 40 that deal enough damage to destroy these ships before they can get close enough to return fire.
For instance, Alkari Thresher Flak Cannons have a higher rate of fire than Javelin Missiles and as a result will kill strikers at a much higher rate. But because the flak cannons have a range of 10, the ships that are using them will almost certainly get wiped out in return if those strikers are assault or ramming strikers. Javelin Missiles in comparison will kill fewer ships, but will kill them before they can close range. This Range-40 ‘keep them away’ approach is the defining characteristic of Javelin Missiles, Goliath Railguns, and Execution Beams.
How does the ‘DO NOT RENDER VIDEOS’ option work?
When a player selects this, the cloud will not render battles for him. This means that Battle Academy results will return immediately, though without any video data to analyze. If both players in a multiplayer game check this option, then their turns will resolve immediately without any battle videos being rendered.