Mineral Packet Bombardment

More about Combat

Playing Stars!

If your starbase has a mass driver, you can fling mineral packets against planets with no mass driver or a lesser mass driver. This will destroy colonists and installations, and is cheaper than building and sending bombers (as long as you can afford to throw away the minerals). A warp 13 mineral packet is as close as Stars! comes to a doomsday weapon.

You can defend against this type of attack by building a mass driver to catch the packets. If the sending driver is more powerful, you'll at least slow the packets down and reduce the damage. The next best thing is to have good planetary defenses. (These are described in the Planetary section of the Technology Browser.) If you're fast enough you may be able to intercept the packets in flight (assuming it will take the packet more than one year to reach its destination) and transfer their load into your cargo holds.

Packets targeting your world send you a warning message if your scanners can spot them in time.