Raiding is OGame's second economy — a veteran who ignores it is essentially playing with one hand tied behind their back. While mines generate a steady baseline, a well-organized raid route can multiply your hourly resource income by a factor of five or more, compressing tech and fleet timelines that would otherwise drag on for days. This guide is for players who want to raid profitably and consistently, not just occasionally score a lucky hit.
Raiding: The Second Economy
Every OGame account has two resource engines running in parallel: the passive economy of mines and the active economy of raids. Mines scale slowly — each level costs exponentially more and delivers incrementally more output. Raids, by contrast, scale with your fleet size, your routing discipline, and the density of inactive or unshielded targets in your local galaxies.
The underlying logic is simple. When another player fails to fleet-save their resources overnight, those resources sit in storage. Whoever shows up with enough cargo capacity and firepower takes them. There is no moral ambiguity in the game design — OGame was built around predator-prey resource loops from day one. Successful raiders treat it as logistics: find the resource pool, calculate whether the trip is worth it, send the right ships, repeat.
On speed servers the pace is dramatically compressed. With economy multipliers of 50x in Andromeda, 99x in Nebula, and 200x in Proxima, mines fill storage fast and inactive players accumulate loot quickly. A Proxima account that misses a fleet-save window can pile up tens of millions of resources in hours. That creates rich raiding opportunities — but it also means the competition for those targets is fierce. Speed and routing discipline matter more, not less.
Before you commit to building a raid fleet, understand the investment. Early raiders typically run their first fleet build on a mix of mine income and bonus Dark Matter. Once you have a functional raiding fleet, it should be paying for its own upgrades and then some. If your raids are consistently breaking even or losing, something in your process — target selection, cargo sizing, or fuel management — needs to be fixed.
Finding Profitable Targets
Target selection is where most amateur raiders fail. They attack the nearest thing on the galaxy map without checking whether a raid actually makes money. Profitable raiding starts with the galaxy scanner and the espionage system.
Inactive players are the safest category. The galaxy view marks accounts inactive after a week of inactivity (yellow dot) and long-inactive (red dot). These accounts have typically stopped fleet-saving, which means their mines have been running unattended. The caveat: other raiders are watching the same list. Popular inactive farms get cleaned out fast, especially on speed servers. You need either proximity (attack before anyone else can) or a schedule (hit them on a timing that others miss).
When you spy a target, read the report carefully:
- Resources on planet: The actual loot ceiling. You can only take 50% of what is there (75% with the Raider class bonus), so multiply visible resources by 0.5 or 0.75 to get your max haul.
- Fleet: Any fleet sitting on planet is a combat variable. If they have war ships, calculate whether you win and whether the debris pays. If they have only cargo ships, those are soft — your combat ships will likely destroy them cheaply.
- Defenses: Rocket launchers and light lasers are cheap fodder. Heavy defenses — plasma cannons, small/large shields — can chew up your attackers. Factor defense debris into your profit calculation on servers with high defense debris rates. OGames' Andromeda pays back 17% of destroyed defense in debris, Nebula 22%, Proxima 32%.
- Activity dots: A planet showing recent activity (flashing dot) means the player may have just logged in. Abort or delay — you do not want to fly 40 minutes into a fleet recall.
The spy report alone is not enough context. Cross-reference with the phalanx on any moon you control, and check whether the target has a moon (which could house a phalanx watching your fleet). Farming inactive players is the low-risk entry point; active-player raiding adds the complexity of counter-espionage and ninja setups.
Score-ratio targeting is a veteran shorthand: if a target's score is less than one-fifth of yours, they cannot defend against your fleet class economically. It does not mean they have no defenses — it means your fleet can absorb those defenses as a cost of business. Higher-score targets can be worth it for enormous resource payouts, but the math must clear first.
Profit Math: Loot vs Fuel vs Risk
Every raid has a break-even point. If you do not calculate it, you are gambling, not raiding. The core formula is straightforward:
Net Profit = Loot + Debris Value − Fuel Cost − Ship Losses
Let us walk through each component.
Loot: You take 50% of resources on a planet/moon (75% with Raider class). If the spy report shows 4,000,000 metal and 2,000,000 crystal, your max haul without Raider is 2,000,000 metal + 1,000,000 crystal. Deuterium on the target counts too — and it is often worth more than metal because fuel costs are paid in deuterium.
Debris field: Destroyed ships and defenses leave a debris field. On OGames servers the debris percentages vary meaningfully: Proxima returns 80% of destroyed ship value and 32% of defense value, making it very rewarding to crack defended targets. Andromeda's 43%/17% split is lower — debris is supplemental income there, not a primary driver. Always check whether your recyclers can reach the debris before someone else does.
Fuel cost: Deuterium consumption scales with fleet size, ship type, engine level, and distance (number of systems or galaxies). The in-game simulator shows you exact deuterium burn for any mission. Key benchmarks to internalize: large cargos are fuel-efficient per unit of capacity; battleships burn hard; light fighters are cheap to fly but have terrible cargo ratios. Run every large raid through the simulator before committing.
Ship losses: If you are raiding inactives with light/heavy defense, expect to lose some ships. The question is whether the debris and loot offset the reconstruction cost. A rough rule: if your ship losses cost more deuterium-equivalent to rebuild than you loot, abort. On Proxima's 80% ship debris return, destroyed attackers partially pay for themselves through the debris field — a dynamic that changes the aggression calculus considerably.
Risk premium: Active-player raids carry a ninja risk. If the defender recalls a fleet onto your incoming attack, the whole math changes. Ninja setups are specifically designed to lure raiders into landing on a recalled war fleet. Factor in the worst case: if there is a moon at that planet or nearby, the defender can phalanx your fleet timing and counter. For inactive farms, this risk is zero. For active players, you need a risk budget.
A clean profit threshold for most speed-server raiders: aim for at least 3:1 loot-to-fuel ratio on routine farm runs, and 2:1 minimum when cracking defended targets with high debris potential. Anything below 1.5:1 is a marginal trade — fine occasionally, but a bad habit at scale.
Building Raid Routes
Ad hoc raiding — spotting a target, attacking, moving on — works in the early game. Scaling up requires route thinking: a repeatable list of targets you hit on a consistent schedule, optimized for proximity and resource cycle timing.
Cluster your targets by galaxy proximity. Traveling between galaxies costs 5x the deuterium of traveling within the same galaxy. Build your primary farm list within your home galaxy cluster first. A raider who owns a moon in the center of their target cluster can slash travel times dramatically — moon-to-moon jumps via jump gate eliminate the distance penalty entirely for repositioning your fleet.
Time your hits against storage cycles. Mines refill storage continuously. An inactive player with level 20 mines on a 200x server fills their storage in hours. If you hit them every 2-3 hours in Proxima, you are catching them at a fraction of potential loot. Hit them every 8-12 hours and you are scooping near-full storage every time. Match your route frequency to the storage fill time of your targets, not to your convenience.
Maintain a hit list, not a hit-when-you-remember list. Veteran raiders keep a documented farm list: coordinates, approximate loot per cycle, best hit window, and notes on defense level. This sounds obsessive — it is also what separates players who consistently outpace their mines from those who plateau. OGames' three universes each have distinct player densities, and your farm list will look different in Andromeda versus Proxima.
Rotate targets to manage relations. Most servers including OGames enforce bashing rules — you cannot attack the same player more than a set number of times in 24 hours. Know the rule, stay within it. Repeated hits on the same target also provoke active retaliation even from previously inactive-seeming players. Rotating through a list of 15-20 farms is safer and often more profitable than hammering 3 targets repeatedly.
Use multiple planets for distributed launches. If you have colonized planets across several systems, you can launch raid fleets from multiple positions simultaneously. This covers more geographic territory and lets you respond faster when a target logs off unexpectedly. The fleet-save discipline of your targets creates windows — multiple launch points help you exploit those windows before competitors do.
Cargo Sizing for Full Loots
Under-cargoed raids are one of the most common and costly mistakes in OGame. You fly 40 minutes to a target, win the fight, and leave half the loot on the ground because you sent 30 large cargos when you needed 50. The fuel cost is already sunk — the missed loot is pure waste.
Calculate cargo need from the spy report, not from feel. The formula: take your expected loot (50% of visible resources, or 75% with Raider class), sum metal + crystal + deuterium, and divide by the cargo capacity of your chosen transport ship. Large cargos hold 25,000 units; small cargos hold 5,000. Round up generously — spy reports can undercount resources if the target has active mines running between spy and attack landing.
A practical buffer: add 20% extra cargo capacity over your calculated minimum. If the math says you need 40 large cargos, send 48. The marginal deuterium cost of 8 extra large cargos is trivial compared to the cost of a second run or lost resources.
Factor in debris recycling. If you are cracking a defended target, you need recyclers for the debris field, not just cargos for the planet loot. Recyclers should arrive at the debris field just after your combat fleet clears it — if you send them with the attack wave, they hang around on the planet and are at risk; send them a few seconds after, timed to arrive just after combat resolves. On Proxima with 80% ship debris return, a big fight can generate a debris field worth more than the planet loot itself.
Match ship type to mission profile. Pure inactive farm runs against soft targets (light defense only) can use large cargos escorted by a minimal combat screen — just enough firepower to clear the defense. Cracking active players or heavily defended planets warrants bringing your combat fleet, with cargos following. Never bring more combat power than needed for a farm run — it wastes fuel on ships that are not doing work.
Character class matters here. The Raider class increases loot taken per raid by 50% (to 75% of visible resources) and also speeds up cargo ships. If raiding is your primary income strategy, Raider class pays for itself very quickly. The combat mechanics still apply regardless of class — your ships need to win before loot is ever collected.
Raiding Routines on Speed Servers
The tempo of speed-server raiding is categorically different from 1x. On OGames' Proxima (200x economy), a player can accumulate raid-worthy resources in two to three hours rather than two to three days. This compresses everything: your reaction window, the competition for targets, and the rate at which the meta evolves.
Session discipline beats raw hours. Three focused 20-minute sessions per day — one in the morning, one at midday, one before bed — consistently outperforms a single unfocused two-hour grind. In each session: check your farm list with espionage, calculate the top 3-5 worthwhile targets, dispatch attacks, then immediately fleet-save your own resources. Leaving your loot sitting on planet after a raid session is how you go from raider to raid target.
Coordinate with alliance members. In a well-organized alliance, members share farm lists, call out large inactive stockpiles, and divvy up targets to avoid duplicated effort. ACS attacks let alliance fleets combine firepower against targets that no single member could crack alone, unlocking larger loot pools. OGames has full alliance and ACS support — use it. The alliance system exists precisely for this kind of coordination.
Use the Battle Hall to research local raiders. The Battle Hall logs recent combat across the universe. If a specific galaxy is showing heavy raid activity from one player, that is both a warning (they are aggressive and watching) and a signal (there are targets in that zone worth raiding). Studying the Battle Hall gives you situational awareness that galaxy scanning alone misses.
DM-funded advantages matter on speed servers. OGames gives players meaningful free Dark Matter — 5,000 at signup in Andromeda, up to 20,000 in Proxima, plus weekly grants. Commanders like the Admiral (additional fleet slots) and Engineer (defense boost) directly improve raiding capacity. Extra fleet slots mean more simultaneous raid dispatches. Prioritize commanders that multiply your raid output before spending on cosmetics.
Adapt to the local player cycle. Speed servers attract players from different time zones, and player activity patterns vary. If your server has a large European player base, the overnight window (01:00-06:00 local time) will see many fleet-saves expire and resources pile up. Targeting that window — even partially — can dramatically improve your loot per session. Track when your best farms tend to be undefended and build your schedule around it.
FAQ
What is the single most important factor in profitable raiding?
Target selection. Sending the right fleet to the wrong target wastes fuel and time; finding a resource-rich inactive with minimal defense turns every attack into clean income. Espionage discipline — spying before every attack, reading reports fully, rejecting marginal targets — matters more than raw fleet size.
How many cargos should I send per raid?
Calculate your expected loot from the spy report (50% of visible resources, or 75% with Raider class), divide by your cargo ship capacity, then add a 20% buffer. For a target showing 6,000,000 metal and 4,000,000 crystal, your non-Raider loot ceiling is 5,000,000 total; you need at least 200 large cargos (5,000,000 ÷ 25,000), so send 240. Better to fly empty capacity than to leave resources behind.
Is raiding active players worth the risk on speed servers?
It can be, but the risk profile is fundamentally different from farming inactives. Active players can ninja your fleet, recall their own fleet onto yours, or have a phalanx-equipped moon watching your timing. The profit ceiling is higher — active players often hold more resources — but you need strong espionage, phalanx access of your own, and a clear exit plan if the situation changes. Start with inactives, graduate to actives once your fleet and intel network are solid.
How does debris field income change the raid math in Proxima?
Dramatically. Proxima returns 80% of destroyed ship value and 32% of destroyed defense value as debris. On a target with heavy defenses, the debris field can be worth more than the direct loot. This changes the aggression threshold: attacks that would be marginally profitable on Andromeda (43%/17% debris) become clearly profitable on Proxima. Always include debris value in your profit calculation and always send recyclers timed to land just after combat.
What should I do with raid loot immediately after it lands?
Spend it or fleet-save it — never leave it sitting on planet. The moment a large haul lands, you become a high-value raid target yourself. Queue upgrades (mines, research, ships) to burn the resources immediately, or if the timing is wrong for building, load the resources into a fleet-save mission: a long-duration expedition, transport to an ally, or a timed return-to-planet that lands when you are back online. Fleet-saving resources and ships is the other half of the raiding discipline loop — master both or lose what you earned.
Ready to put these strategies into practice? OGames runs three speed universes — Andromeda, Nebula, and Proxima — each with generous free Dark Matter, active raiding communities, and full ACS support. Create your free account on OGames and pick the universe that matches your pace. The farm lists are waiting.