Why is the Espionage Probe attacking me?

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Why is the Espionage Probe attacking me?

If someone kamikaze’s a probe into your planet (a probe on attack mission) it is because he is creating a debris field so he can clean house (collect resources) later.

Before a recycler can be sent to your planet, a debris field must exist. Normally, you only have a debris field AFTER the attack. However, if you kamikaze a probe into the planet, a very tiny debris field is created. It has {0, 0} for resources but it allows you to target your recyclers to that planet and time them to arrive 3 or 4 minutes after the main fleet hits.

A good safety precaution if you are trying to protect your fleet might be to station it on a planet where there’s no debris field. The kamikazee probe will be your early warning system that the recyclers are probably on the move.

The best method of protecting your fleet, is to save your fleet often.

The Battle Report

The following fleets where facing each other on 12-31 19:05:19 , as it came to a battle::

The defender has won the battle!

The attacker has lost a total of 1000 Units.
The defender has lost a toteal of 0 Units.
At these space coordinates now float 0 Metal and 300 Crystal.

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1. you don’t have to anymore, you can now target empty debris fields.
   — misosoup    Jun 15, 02:57 PM    #
2. Another reason someone would attack with a espionage probe is to see if a planet is undefended. Many times if I find a good target and my esp. probe can’t get defensive information, this is how I check to see what is really there – the battle report says it all and I don’t have to waste some more expensive ships in the process!
   — tappakeggadae    Jul 16, 11:41 PM    #
3. Amen to that tappakeggadae, I’m still a newb to this game but near me there are tons of players who started, and then got bored. Unalligned Inactive Planets are gold mines for newbs to hit. I can just send in cargo ships to carry off the loot. If i’m not sure i send in a esp probe on attack to make sure. So far it has never back-fired. we’ll see later on…
   — Mike Nelson    Aug 13, 03:11 AM    #
4. you can get useful information from this kind of attack without spying the attacker. If we look at the heading, we will see something like:
   Weapons:+60% Shields:+60% Hull Plating:+60%
   
   So we can know something else about the guy who is going to attack us.
   — nacho    Oct 16, 02:59 PM    #

5. I know this has been answered before, but does probing someone count as an attack?

   
   — Alpal    Dec 31, 03:19 PM    #

6. Probing counts as fleet activity, if that’s what you mean, but there is a seperate command for attacking versus spying.

   
   — Dannyboy    Jan 2, 10:47 AM    #

7. Yeah, I tried to spy on someone, and it said, “Noob protection prevents attacks” even though I was just spying

   
   — relam13    Feb 1, 09:17 PM    #

8. Note that esp. probes are superfast too eh… Cheap too!

   
   — Ko    Mar 21, 06:50 PM    #

9. Not really on topic but I couldn’t quickly find anywhere to post a new topic if we even can. Just wondering if anyone knows the formula of counter espionage? From what I can tell it doesn’t appear to have much to do with defense or espionage tech level but with the ships that you have on the planet getting spied on. How I came to this was I recently saw a top 300 player go idle so I probed his planet got 100% counter espionage and therefore lost all my probes. He had a fair bit of defense plus some ships hanging around. Once someone recycled his ships I’ve then probed again with the same number of probes and got 0%. His espionage tech was 1 higher than mine and he still had a couple of hundred launchers, lasers, turrets there etc. So just wondering if anyone knows a formula, does different ships give different percents to detect a probe, etc. Like would having 100 probes at each planet give you a damn good chance of detecting someone elses?

   
   — Kzp    May 27, 08:15 PM    #

10. ...I can’t target empty DF… also my probes don’t create any DF…so it is impossible to send my recyclers ahead of time

    
    — midikir    Jun 12, 01:18 PM    #

11. You have to send one probe in attack mode.
    It will not generate a report and will die if there is something on the planet.

    The point is the fight, though insignifiant, does create the field.

    
    — Etheric    Jun 14, 07:29 AM    #

12. An attack only counts for bashing, if it’s a successfull attack(if you win), otherwise it does not count for Bashing.. it’s in the rules, if you read it well.

    
    — Ransso    Jun 24, 05:18 PM    #

13. lol i raid the same guy 5 times a day (well i did till he got newibe protect) and ty to his mines his res just kept coming back faster than i could take it dose this count as bashing?

    
    — bommaboy    Jul 22, 02:13 AM    #

14. i have a question . how to destroy espionage probe wich comes for spy ? please answer me

    
    — Hoki    Aug 12, 03:27 PM    #

15. If you espionage someone more than 6 times in a day, does that count as bashing?

    
    — Daniel    Oct 22, 04:22 PM    #

16. no didnt you read the bit above? it counts as fleet activity

    
    — 12345sniper    Dec 30, 12:33 AM    #

17. The main thing to remember with bashing, is that you can attack a player up to 6 times a day. Now, Im not sure how waves and backup fleets work with that, but honestly, I’ve never been accused of it.

    
    — ascii    Aug 3, 07:41 PM    #

18. Um that using probe attack to get info method is bad. Its okay with an inactive player
    But most of the times your probe will get destroyed and you will get no information from it due to it being destroyed in the first round.

    Think of it this way
    If the probe does not get destroyed you could’ve just as well used spying instead of attacking
    if you wanted the armour/shield/weapon levels you could’ve just used 5 to 7 probes(in the second run after checking counter esp is low)

    
    — missingpoint    Apr 16, 07:49 AM    #