Bashing

Bashing is hitting the same planet or moon over and over in a short space of time. SFC2 puts a hard cap on it. You can land six attacks on one target in any 24 hours, and the seventh is refused.

The limit

Try to launch a seventh attack on the same target inside 24 hours and the game turns it down before anything leaves the ground.

A refused attack costs you nothing. The check runs before any resources are taken, so your ships stay home and no hydrogen is burned.

How the count works

• Per attacker, per target. Your six are yours. Every planet and moon you own draws from the same pool against a given target, and every other player has their own separate pool.
• A planet and its moon are two targets. Six on the planet and six on the moon in the same day is fine.
• Every planet the defender owns is its own target. A player with five planets can take six hits on each of them.
• The clock starts at launch, not at landing. A slot frees up 24 hours after the fleet left, so a slow attack ties up a slot for the whole flight.
• Fleets still in the air already count. Six attacks on the way and you are at the cap.

Joining somebody else's attack spends one of your slots. A group attack lands as a single battle, but every player in the formation burns a slot of their own. Fill a formation with seven fleets from your own colonies and the seventh is refused, because all seven are you.

Getting a slot back

Two things hand a slot back:

• Withdraw. A fleet you turn around never lands, so it does not count.
• Lose the whole fleet. If every ship you sent is destroyed, the attack does not count either. In a group attack it is all or nothing: one surviving ship anywhere in the formation and every attacker keeps their slot spent.

What is not an attack

• Espionage. Probes are never blocked by the limit and never use a slot, even when they all get shot down and the report reads like an attack.
• Interplanetary Ballistic Missiles. Missile strikes sit outside the limit completely.
• Group Defend. Sending ships to help defend somebody is not an attack.
• Harvesting. Sending recyclers to a debris field is not an attack.

The two exceptions

• NPCs. The green rows in the Galaxy view have no limit at all. Farm them as often as you like.
• War. While your alliance and the target's alliance are in a declared war, the limit is lifted between those two alliances for as long as the war runs. It comes back the moment the war ends, and it never applied to anyone outside the war.

The rule is wider than the code

The game blocks the seventh landing, but the written game rules cover more than that.

The gap is the free slots. Because a wiped fleet and a withdrawn fleet both give the slot back, you could in theory keep throwing fleets at one player all day and never trip the counter. Doing that on purpose, with nothing to show for it, is still bashing and gets handled as bashing.

Slow token attacks sent only to make somebody's screen light up fall under the harassment rule instead. Either way the penalties escalate: a warning, then 3 days, then 7 days, then indefinite.

Attacking inactive players

An inactive player loses newbie protection and the rank range check, so almost anybody can attack them. They do not lose the attack limit. Six per target per 24 hours applies to an inactive planet exactly like it applies to an active one.

Players in vacation mode cannot be attacked at all.