Combat

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The **Combat** in Helium Rain.

While trading and producing goods will provide your cash flow, it is important that you also expand your military to protect those means. Having a solid military will allow you to maintain peace but also give you the means to eliminate competitors.

**Building Your Military**

In the beginning of the game you will not need to worry a military but once you hit a company value of 300K, the pirates will randomly start wars with you. This means that you should start thinking about building a military when your company has a company value of 200K+ credits. Note that I am taking about company value and not credits in the bank, you can find this number in the upper left corner of the Company menu.

Ideally you should have a military force that is slightly larger than the largest other military. This will help dissuade pirates and other companies from attacking you and allow you to earn some credits by getting involved in wars between other companies.

Note that you do NOT want to have a military much larger than any others, its ok to be the biggest, but only by a handful of points. All the other companies will start hating you if your military grows too large and one day you will find yourself in a war with all the other companies. At some point you will want to put your Caesar pant's on and start conquering the world, when you do make sure you build up your military quickly and are ready for every company to attack you at the same time.

**Fleet Composition**

I recommend building one or two large fleets of mostly Orcas and Phalanxes with one or a few Heavy Ships. It is important to make sure that your fleet is able to deal damage to fighters as well as large ships and stations. Having fighters and heavy ships in your fleet ensures that you can perform both of those tasks.

Upgrades are also important to manage on each ship. They can be an easy way to add some military points to each ship but you will not necessarily want the most expensive upgrade for every slot on every ship. Especially on heavy ships, weapons upgrade will have different capabilities, most will either be good against fighter or good against heavy ships/stations but not both.

**Using Your Military**

Battles are slightly different than most games, instead of ships being completely destroyed they are generally just disabled. Navies will fight again after being defeated, they just need to be repaired. It is possible to manually destroy a ship after it has been disabled but this is a pain and will result in a drop in reputation.

This dynamic means that wars are usually a battle of credit attrition instead of a single clash of units. If you win a battle, you need to plan for the defeated forces to come back in a couple days and if you lose, you will be able to use those forces again. If you are planning to start a war, you should make sure you have a war chest to fight it with.

Once all enemy ships are disabled in a sector, if the fleet remains in the sector it will start taking over all of the enemy stations. After a period of days (look at progress bars in Sector menu) the stations will be taken over by the victor and be under their control after the war ends unless taken back.

**Tactics Tips**

AI companies tend to have a single largeish fleet and many small sized fleets spread around other sectors. You can take advantage of the AI splitting its forces by concentrating all of your forces when invading or defending a sector. Using this tactic can allow you to either defeat or cause trouble for a company with a military force that exceeds your own.

When a war starts, it is easy to panic as many of your sectors and logisitics ships will come under attack, but remember that your ships will almost always be just disabled and your stations take a fair amount of time to take over, especially by small fleets. Gather your forces, determine what forces your enemy has in each sector, and then methodologically destroy them one by one.

It is critical that you try and prevent your stations from being taken and so timing is important. Larger fleets will take over stations faster and take many days to defeat while smaller fleets take a long time to capture a station but can only take a day to disable. Identify a sequence of invasions that will allow you to knock out as many of the enemy fleets as possible before they capture your statoins. Researching Fast Travel as soon as possible will make this task alot easier.