Game Guide
Learn to Play Age of Space - Complete beginner's guide to Age of Space. Learn how to build, attack, spy, colonize, and dominate the galaxy!
Advanced Fleetsave
Basic fleetsaving keeps you alive. Advanced fleetsaving makes you untouchable. The difference between a good player and a great player is how they protect their fleet. This chapter covers moon-based fleetsaving (invisible to Phalanx), Sensor Phalanx mechanics and how to exploit or avoid them, ninja defense traps, moonshot farming to create moons on demand, multi-planet fleetsave coordination, and sleep-safe windows. Master these techniques and even the most determined attacker will find you impossible to catch.
Moon-Based Fleetsaving
The single most important advancement in your fleetsaving game is obtaining a moon and launching all fleet operations from it. Moons are completely immune to Sensor Phalanx scans. When you send a fleet from a moon, no enemy can see where it is going, when it will arrive, or when it will return.
This immunity makes moon-based fleetsaving the gold standard of fleet protection. An attacker with a Phalanx can see every fleet launch from your planets — departure time, destination, mission type, and return time. But from a moon? Complete invisibility.
The procedure is simple: move your fleet to your moon (via deploy mission from the planet), then launch your fleetsave mission from the moon. When you return online, your fleet lands on the moon. Re-save from the moon again when logging off. Never return your fleet to the planet if an enemy has Phalanx in range.
Priority planets for moons: your main production planet (highest value target), your fleet planet (most ships), and any planet within Phalanx range of known aggressive players.
Sensor Phalanx Mechanics
The Sensor Phalanx is a moon-only building that scans enemy planets to reveal all fleet movements to and from that planet. It costs Deuterium per scan and has a range based on its level.
Understanding the Phalanx is crucial because it is the primary tool attackers use to time their strikes. If an attacker can Phalanx your planet, they can see exactly when your fleetsave returns and land an attack at that precise moment.
| Level | Range (systems) | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | 3 | Immediate neighbors only |
| 3 | 8 | Nearby systems |
| 5 | 24 | Half a galaxy (50 systems) |
| 7 | 48 | Nearly full galaxy |
| 10 | 99 | Almost 2 full galaxies |
The Phalanx shows: departure time, arrival time, mission type, origin, destination, fleet composition, and resources carried. Essentially, it reveals everything about the fleet movement.
Timed Return Strategies
The art of the timed return is calculating exactly when your fleet will arrive and ensuring you are online at that moment. This is critical because the window between your fleet landing and you re-saving it is when you are most vulnerable.
Use the speed percentage slider to precisely control flight duration. Setting 10% speed makes the flight approximately 10x longer than 100% speed. Use intermediate percentages (30%, 50%) to fine-tune the arrival time to match your schedule.
The alarm clock technique: set a phone alarm for 5-10 minutes before your fleet returns. This gives you time to log in, check for threats (spy your own planet to see incoming attacks), and either land your fleet or recall it if danger is detected.
Ninja Defense Traps
A ninja defense is an advanced trap technique where you intentionally leave your planet looking vulnerable to lure an attacker, then time your fleet to arrive during the battle and obliterate them. This is the ultimate "gotcha" in Age of Space.
How to execute a ninja: First, identify an attacker who has been scanning your planets (you may notice spy probes in your reports). Move your fleet away from the planet, leaving it with minimal defense and some resources as bait.
When the attacker launches (which you can detect if you have Phalanx on their planet, or if you spot their fleet via activity on the galaxy map), time your own fleet to arrive at your planet at the same moment or just before the attacker lands.
The attacker sees "no fleet, weak defense, good resources" and commits their fleet. But when their fleet arrives, yours is already there — waiting with overwhelming firepower. Their fleet is destroyed, and you collect the debris.
Moonshot Farming
Moonshots are coordinated fleet crashes between allies designed to create debris fields large enough to have a chance of forming a moon. Since moons are essential for advanced fleetsaving, players actively "farm" moonshots on their key planets.
The mechanics: when a debris field contains at least 100,000 total resources (Titanium + Graphene), there is a 1% chance of moon creation. Each additional 100,000 resources adds 1%, up to a maximum of 20% at 2,000,000 total debris.
A typical moonshot involves an ally attacking your planet with a fleet calculated to produce exactly the right amount of debris. The most common approach uses Light Fighters because they are cheap and produce clean debris numbers. Approximately 1,667 Light Fighters destroyed = ~2,000,000 debris = 20% moon chance.
After each failed attempt, recycle the debris and try again. Coordinate with your ally to establish a rhythm. Most players achieve a moon within 3-8 attempts at 20% chance each.
Multi-Planet Fleetsave Coordination
Advanced players do not save their fleet to the same destination every time. Instead, they rotate between multiple planets and moons, keeping their movements unpredictable even if an attacker manages to piece together their schedule.
The rotation strategy: save your fleet to Planet A's moon tonight, Planet B's moon tomorrow, and Planet C's moon the night after. Even if an attacker identifies one of your patterns, they will guess wrong on two out of three nights.
Deploy cycling is another technique: deploy your fleet from Moon A to Moon B, then from Moon B to Moon C, then Moon C back to Moon A. Your fleet is always in transit between moons and never parked on any single location for long. This works especially well across galaxies where flight times are very long.
Sleep-Safe Windows
A sleep-safe window is the maximum time you can be offline before your fleet returns and becomes vulnerable. Calculating this correctly is the difference between losing nothing and losing everything.
Calculate your sleep-safe window: determine the maximum flight time you can achieve with your fleet at 10% speed to the farthest available target. For deploy missions, this is one-way. For transport/expedition, it is round-trip.
For example, if your fleet's slowest ship can travel 200 systems in 4 hours at 100% speed, then at 10% speed this trip takes approximately 40 hours. This means you can safely sleep for up to 39 hours (with 1 hour buffer) — more than enough for any normal absence.
If your sleep-safe window is too short (less than 8 hours), you have two options: choose a farther target (different galaxy), or reduce speed further. If even 10% speed is not enough, consider deploying to a planet in a different galaxy for maximum flight time.
Phalanx Avoidance Techniques
Beyond moon-based fleetsaving, there are additional techniques to avoid Phalanx detection. The most important: never recall a fleet to a planet when an enemy has Phalanx in range. The recall will be visible, revealing your return time.
If you must send a fleet from a planet (no moon available), send it to a position outside Phalanx range of known enemy moons. Check the galaxy map to identify which systems are within the scanning range of enemy Phalanx installations.
Fake fleet launches can also be effective. Send a small fleet from your planet to a nearby target, while your main fleet saves from your moon. The attacker sees the decoy fleet on their Phalanx and may waste time tracking it.
