Hack Hacks Hacking
A Combat Action against another player.
- Cost: 5 energy
- Cool Down on Success: 15 minutes
- Cool Down on Failure (or Success while they have no research points to steal): 5 minutes
- Not available against NPCs
- Ability to hack is based on Cloak
- Success is based on Cloak and Scan
- Defense is based on Cloak and Scan
- Does not require enemy ship to be disabled
- Allows the theft of research and on rare occasions planet locations
The following potential outcomes are confirmed by the game developer:
| Outcome | What Happens | Blue Badge Awarded (12 hours since previous blue badge) | Successful Hack Stat | Cooldown Timer (minutes) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hack Critically Successful! | Planet location for ???? copied from enemy database! | 1 | +1 | 15 |
| Hack Successful | You steal ???? Research Points from the enemy database | 1 | +1 | 15 |
| Hack Successful, but ... | ... could not find anything of value in computer database | 1 | +0 | 5 |
| Hack Unsuccessful | Enemy Ship's systems detected and blocked the hack. | 0 | +0 | 5 |
| Hack Unsuccessful 2 | No research points awarded | 1 | +0 | 5 |
| Failure | Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal research from your ship | 0 | +0 | 5 |
| Critical Failure | Enemy ship will counter-hack and steal the location of one of your planets | 0 | +0 | 5 |
It should be noted that Critical Successes and Failures are both rare events.
Later in that Hacking topic, Spyder outlined his theory:
There are 2 "rolls" for hacking - success and effect.
The success roll is Your Cloak VS their Scan. This determines who "wins" the hack.
The effect roll is Your scan VS their cloak (IE them hiding their data). A higher scan:cloak ratio will yield more RP, and will increase the crit % by a certain amount, up to X% (I'd guess somewhere between 1 and 5 %)
However, if you "lose" the success roll, they auto hack you back. This is now their cloak VS your scan to see if they succeed, and if they do, their scan VS your cloak for the effect roll.
but this is countered by an earlier post by the dev:
Success and Failure rolls are indeed "re-rolled" for critical chance.
See Also: Raiding