Officer Ability Activation

Concept · Game mechanic

An ability triggered by a weapon exchange takes effect on the next sub-round; one triggered on the round’s last sub-round takes effect at the start of the next round.

A round is fought in sub-rounds, one per weapon slot: in each sub-round every ship fires the weapon in that slot if it is loaded. A fight has as many sub-rounds per round as the ship with the most weapons has weapons — so with a five-weapon ship in the fight, sub-round 4 is not the last one, whatever the other ship carries.

An ability triggered by something that happens in a weapon exchange — a hit, hull or shield damage taken, a critical hit — takes effect on the next sub-round. The exchange that triggered it is resolved without it: an ability that responds to hull damage cannot protect against the attack that caused that damage.

When the trigger happens in the round’s last sub-round there is no next sub-round, so the ability takes effect at the start of the next round instead. In a combat log that ability appears among the next round’s round-start activations — that is how a carried-over activation reads.

The trigger itself still has to happen. An ability that fires when your hull takes damage does nothing on a hit fully absorbed by shields, so a ship already routing all damage to its shields stops re-triggering it — including on the last sub-round, where it would otherwise carry into the next round.

Players are often taught that such abilities trigger “after the attack, in the same sub-round”. That describes the same timing — the attack resolves first — but the game’s own log records the effect on the following sub-round, which is the simpler way to read it.