Ticks

From VoidWiki

Voidwars is a semi-realtime browser game. The server updates the game every 3 minutes, which is considered to be one tick.

Instead of a second or so, the smallest time unit is a tick. A Probe might be reaching an adjacent sector in 6 minutes and 30 seconds, this is 3 ticks (two full ticks and a third one which is currently running at 30 seconds left). A Probe needs 3 ticks to reach an adjacent square, so if you have another Probe in the same sector and order it to fly into the same direction, it will reach the next sector together with the first Probe. However, if you are really slow with issuing your orders to the second Probe and need more than 30 seconds for it, a tick will have passed, and it might look like this: Probe 1 will reach the next sector in 5 minutes and 50 seconds (2 ticks), whereas Probe 2 will need 8 minutes and 50 seconds (3 ticks).

If you don't get it, forget about it. You can play this game well without ever having heard about ticks, it's just technical stuff. Come back when you want to be a real progamer.