Anti-Ballistic Missiles

Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABMs) are the only thing that stops an incoming Interplanetary Ballistic Missile (IBM). They sit in your Missile Silo and fire on their own. You never launch them and you cannot aim them.

How they work

When someone fires missiles at your planet, your ABMs go up automatically. One ABM kills one incoming missile. If thirty missiles are inbound and you are holding twenty four ABMs, twenty four get shot down and the other six hit your defenses.

ABMs are spent when they fire. Nothing is repaired and nothing comes back, so if you want the cover again you build it again. Nothing that gets shot down leaves debris either, and neither do the defenses that a missile does destroy, so there is no salvage in the exchange for anyone.

ABMs only ever deal with missiles. They take no part in a normal fleet battle, which is why the battle Calculator does not list them. They cannot be shot at either: an incoming strike only damages defensive weapons and any IBMs sitting in the silo. Defenses that a missile does destroy are gone for good. There is no 70 percent rebuild the way there is after a fleet battle.

The strike report

Every strike that lands on you turns up as a Missile Strike Report in Messages. It lists how many missiles were sent, how many ABMs were used, how many got through and what they killed. The attacker gets a much thinner report that only says the strike completed, so they cannot tell from it how many ABMs you were holding.

Building them

ABMs are built on the Defense page along with the rest of your defenses. The planet needs a Shipyard, and the missile itself needs a Missile Silo at level 2 or higher.

Every missile you own lives in the Missile Silo, and the silo holds 10 slots for each level. An ABM takes one slot and an IBM takes two. A level 4 silo has 40 slots, so it holds 40 ABMs, or 20 IBMs, or any mix that adds up to 40. The Silo line under the missile shows how full you are, and the Max figure is how many more you can fit and pay for right now. Missiles that are queued or still building already count against the silo.

The Missile Silo is a planet building, so a moon never carries ABMs.

How many you need

Because an ABM costs half the silo space of an IBM, a silo packed with ABMs is expensive to shoot through. For an attacker firing from one planet to land a single missile on you, their silo has to be at least twice your level plus one.

Your Missile Silo	ABMs it holds	Attacker silo needed
2	20	5
4	40	9
6	60	13
8	80	17
10	100	21

Take a level 4 silo with 40 ABMs in it. A level 8 silo holds 40 IBMs and every one of them gets shot down. The attacker has to reach level 9 before five missiles get through, and building a silo that far costs a little over 10 million ore and 10 million crystal against the 300,000 of each that your level 4 cost. That gap is the whole point of the ABM.

Two things take the shine off it. Missiles can be launched from several planets at once, so what really matters is the total number of missiles in the air against the number of ABMs you are holding, not one attacker's silo level. And an espionage report that gets far enough to show defenses lists your ABMs by name, so anyone who scouts you properly already knows the number they have to beat.

Taking them back out

To clear silo space, open the Defense page, click More Info on the Anti-Ballistic Missile and use the Deconstruct Missiles box at the bottom. It happens instantly, and you get nothing back for the missile.

Cost

Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen
8,000	0	2,000

Requirements

Missile Silo (level 2)
Shipyard