Curious about hacking?

Hacking allows your ship to steal research points from an enemy ship. In order to qualify, your ship must be sufficiently cloaked in order to avoid detection. The higher the rank of the enemy ship, the more research you can steal. Hacking is an option on enemy players. After gaining your first few ranks, you should see some enemies in the 'Battle' tab.

You will find the hacking option in the 'Actions' tab when targeting an enemy.

The greater your combined cloaking + scanning power, the greater the chance you will succeed with your hack. However, there is a chance of failure. See below:

Critical Success: You will steal the location of a planet in the enemy ship's database
Success: You will steal some research points from the enemy ship
Unsuccessful: No research points awarded
Failure: Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal research from your ship
Critical Failure: Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal the location of one of your planets

Hacking Tips:

- Like in the real world, hacking is often more successful during off-hours, when most players are not online. This is simply because those players will not be there to spend the research points they are gaining during those hours.

- Use artifacts to your advantage during hacking! Look for ones that lower the scan/cloak of your enemy, or boost the same for your ship.

- Switch enemies! Dont waste energy focusing on a single ship only to find out they have no research points left to steal.

I've hacked a Guy that disabled me 3 times in 2 days ... I got successful but I was wondering if he knows I hacked him ... Cause he seems to disable me after I do such thing :p

haha If I had known I would have chosen hacker


Also ... Raising my cloak abilities doesn't prevent me from being found if I enter in the Hall of fame - legion ... I based all my defense on being invisible ^^ and I got too much legion ... I'm exposed ...

An enemy will be notified only when you are successful. Yes, sometimes this will provoke them to go after you

I'm thinking of changing some of the Galaxy Leaderboard settings so that you can only target battle-related rankings. That way, if you live a quiet life you should be out of harms way (in general)

Just a question.. Does hacking actually steal research points from an enemy instead of artifically general research points that enemy would never lose?

Reason: one player made a "permanent" enemy of our legion (he made lot of foolish mistakes and idiotic actions against my legion). I hacked him over 150 times thinking that I actually slowed his research progress down.. Is my theory correct? If he loses NO research points at all via my hacking then the purpose of hacking would be diminished.. We do war of attribution against him in the long run til he finally decides to make peace with us.

yes, they lose that research. they could probably overcome such a deficit and put the remainder in stealth and scanning research if they were smart, but if you hacked him 150 times you probably got 4 or 5 planet locations from him and you're probably on the leaderboard. That and you don't have to be on 150 people's newsfeeds. If they never log on though, their research will still be maxed when they get back on. You can't hack someone to death.

GOOD! I'm glad that I can slow his sorry arse's research progression down.. He is almost always online so that's even better.. Yeah I revealed his planets 3 times but all were garbage.. I only care more is to slow his tech down. Yeah, I'm on the leaderboard (No, I won't give my real Galaxy Legion name cuz it would bring that idiotic enemy with broken English here to make all weird, dumb, pointless comments) now thanks to his initial rare planetary thief action and idiotic actions with so many horribly broken English with taunting comments against my legion comrade. I don't know why he kept commenting in my wallpost wasting lot of EPs and I usually delete them and not replying back to him cuz he sure is not worth to talk to..

BTW, I hack him about 20 to 65 RP so far so that averages out to be 42.5 so ~150 successful hacks x 42.5 research points = 6,375 Research points lost by him and added to my own! Relative change in research point is 12,750 RP!! My tech advances little faster as his tech slows down a little. It really adds up alot over time especially at lower rank. I'm rank 48.. I will keep hacking him til he gives the rare (WELL FORTIFIED) planet back to my legion comrade that he stole from and make a peace for good.

I have a question about how many research points you steal when hacking. I noticed when I hack some people I get ~40 or so, while others I get ~100. I have done it several times so far to see if its just random, but I'm wondering if it isn't related to the person that I'm hacking. Would higher level players give more points? Or those who have lower hacking defense perhaps?

read the second line of the first post here

The higher the rank of the enemy ship, the more research you can steal.

Doh. somehow read it twice and still missed it. Thanks for the eyes.

I only have these on my options

* News
* Ship
* Planets
* Legion
* Missions
* Battle
* Trade
* Research

where do i get the hacking menu or what do i have to do to have hacking..???

New to the game.. could use some help.. "_"

Hacking is an option on enemy players. After gaining your first few ranks, you should see some enemies in the 'Battle' tab.

You will find the hacking option in the 'Actions' tab when targeting an enemy.

When you say "one of your planet" does this mean planet that you have colonized or location of the planet you have scanned

location.

If its location then its a nice way of getting planets locations that might be juicy for colonization..

It gives both settled and non-settled planets. It's pretty much the only consequential kind of attack in my mind. You have to defend or flux the stolen planet though. Plus it takes a certain kind of vigilance. Once every 25 minutes for a 2-4% chance at a planet. Less energy for ranking. I highly reccomend hacking for levels 1-20, other than that... not really... unless your desperate for planets and way high up in scanning tech... the planets you get from low levels are easy to steal, but you get very little research, the opposite for higher levels. and the research is never really that great.

You know what? I just realized when someone is constantly banking their research causing me to fail, that I get 5 times as many opportunities for a critical success because the timer is shorter... failure FTW

Does high cloaking, relative to your victim at least, give you a chance to be undetected when you hack?
Do you get notified if you are discovered?

At the moment, the victim is notified whenever there is a successful or unsuccessful hack against them I think.

I would advise hacking of people higher level than yourself, and making it supremely wasteful to kill you. Repair costs mean essentially nothing, and you only have to be alive to hack again. between defense, shields and hull, they will realize they get squat out of the deal. Dying some means nothing if you don't show up on the battle grid anyways and your "battele rep" is essentially inconsequential if you intend to be invisible. Just make it a pain in the arse to kill you and hacking can be a very good investment. And almost nobody will raid you. which, if it mattered, means the loss of your artifacts and/or minerals... Nobody does it! It's GD amazing. Leave yourself disabled if you have to and reap the benefits... Nobody defends against it... coincidentally, it is the best way to take someone apart, utterly... Yeah it takes vigilance and and a casual death-wish, but thats really not much.

If that sounds unconvincing, bug the developer with a level-headed argument why hacking actually sucks. (it does, level up)

Higher level =
1. More Research points hackable per time (assuming they have some remaining)
2. Much more powerful retaliation (if any). Prepare to be disabled


Doing so will cause anger. Prepare to be hated by your hack victim