Quick Start Guide

Starfleet Commander is the game of intergalactic conquest. Though the possibilities in building your empire are endless, there are three main things that all emperors will do. They are:

1. Build up planets to get resources.

2. Use those resources to produce ships and defenses.

3. Use your ships to steal resources from enemies and smash their fleets.

This article will help you get started on these basic first steps.

Building Up Mines On Your Homeworld To Get Resources

Step 1: Solar Plant

The first thing you are going to do is build up your home world to give you some resources on an ongoing basis. This means you need to build your mines, but to get them operating they will need electricity which comes from your Solar Plant, so this should be the first thing you build.

Click the link in the nav bar that says "Buildings". You can see all of the available mines here. Scroll down to where you see the Solar Plant and click the link that says "Build".

After you've clicked build, you should see something similar to the following, indicating the Solar Plant is being built:

So now you have a couple minutes to wait for your Solar Plant to get finished. While you're waiting, let's head over to the missions page and start stealing resources from enemies.

Step 2: Missions

You can see that the Solar Plant is going to take a couple minutes to build. In the meantime, click where it says "Missions" in the Nav Bar. This will take you to the missions page, where you can see a couple laid out for you.

The very first one you'll do is called "Raid an Unguarded Ore Mine". This is a mission in which you send an Atlas Class Cargo to raid an enemy ore mine that has no defense. Click the button that says "Start".

Now you have to choose what ships you want to send on the mission. You start out with only one Atlas, so choose that (either by typing "1" in the box, or by clicking the "Max" button or the "Select All" button. You've now chosen your fleet, so click the "Dispatch Fleet" button and send your cargo ship to pick up some ore.

You'll immediately see a timer start counting down from 45 seconds. That's how far away the enemy mine is, so your round trip time will be 90 seconds. For maximum production, you'll want to head back to the missions page each time one ends and start another.

Now we've got a little time to wait for our Atlas to come back, so let's head back to the mining page.

Step 3: Ore Mine

By now your Solar Plant is probably finished. Because we're mainly concerned with building now, and buildings take more ore than anything else, the Ore Mine is the most important early on, so let's start by building one of those.

Now we want to start building more advanced ships to run better missions and even raid other players, but to get there first we're going to need some good resource production.

Buildings also take a certain amount of time to build, depending on the level of your Capitol which we'll get to in a bit) and the number of workers assigned to your buildings page.

One easy way to speed up building is to assign a worker or droid to your buildings page. You get workers for free when you invite a friend from the Crew page and they accept.

Once they've accepted, they'll be a member of your Crew and you can assign them to mines or building. For now, let's assign them to a building. Click the assign link on the left hand side of the page:

Then choose your crew member and click "Assign".

You'll now see that you receive a 4% build speed bonus for all of your buildings.

Step 4: Building/Upgrading Mines

Here's a decent build order for your mines. Remember that while you're building up, you can keep running missions to help you get the resources you need to get to the next level. The only resource you can't get that way is hydrogen, so we'll get some of that early.

We're also going to keep ore, crystal, and hydrogen mines fairly balanced. You'll need more ore, but it's also easiest to get via missions since it's closer to you. If you're not going to run missions, then you should probably build your ore mines to a few levels higher than crystal. Assuming you're going to run missions, here's a solid build order that will get you to your next step (the Capitol and then the Shipyard) quickly. There are two ways to go from here, one is to continue down this quick start guide and build up that way. Two is to continue building up these resources until they are very high and then go on to building an researching. While the quick start will get you into the game faster, you will be fighting a lack of resources more later. Especially if once you get over 100 spend points you employ Diplomatic mode and 25% of your resources start going to taxes (expensive, but not as expensive as being cleaned out in repeated attacks). By building out your resource tree early it can pay off for the rest of the game, but it will not be a truly "quick start."

1. Solar Plant Lvl 1 (already done)
2. Ore Mine Lvl 1 (already done)
3. Crystal Mine Lvl 1
4. Solar Plant Lvl 2
5. Hydrogen Synth Lvl 1
6. Solar Plant Lvl 3
7. Ore Mine Lvl 2
8. Crystal Mine Lvl 2
9. Solar Plant Lvl 4
10. Hydrogen Synth Lvl 2
11. Ore Mine Lvl 3
12. Solar Plant Lvl 5
13. Hydrogen Synth Lvl 3
14. Crystal Mine Lvl 3

Now you've got a pretty solid mining base, giving you a decent amount of resource production, especially the Hydrogen you can't get from missions yet.

Step 5: Assign Miner

By this point, you'll probably want to assign the one worker you have to your mines rather than your buildings page so you can get more resources. That's done pretty much the same way. Just click the assign link under a mine's cost.

Building Ships

Step 6: Capitol And Shipyard

It may take you overnight to save up the Hydrogen you need for this step, so feel free to keep building your mines (especially the Hydrogen Synth) past level 3 with your ore and crystal until you get some hydrogen saved up, then proceed with this step.

Now we're ready to build a Shipyard, but before we do that we have to build our Capitol to Level 2 so let's start by doing that.

As you can see, this drastically reduces the times to build mines. Each level of Capitol makes all other buildings go faster, but for now we'll stop at 2.

Once that's done, we're ready to build the Shipyard. You'll notice that it has appeared on your page above the Capitol. That's because you've built the necessary prerequisites for it. Throughout the game you will unlock new buildings, ships, defenses, and researches by building prerequisites, all of which you can find in this Wiki.

When the Shipyard is done building, you can visit it but you'll notice there's nothing there. That's because you haven't yet unlocked any ships by researching the proper technologies.

Step 7: Research Lab and Technologies

So to get started on that, build your Research Lab.

Then to get to our first ship, an Artemis Class Fighter, we're going to have to build two technologies. As you can see from this wiki, the Artemis Class Fighter requires Level 1 Jet Drive. You'll notice you don't see that in your Research Lab though, because to get Jet Drive you first need Level 1 Energy Tech, so research that first.

Once that's done, you should see Jet Drive appear in your Research Lab. Go ahead and research that too.

Step 8: Build an Artemis

Once you've gotten Jet Drive Level 1 Research completed, you'll see the Artemis Class Fighter appear in your Shipyard. Once you've got the resources, go ahead and build one.

When that's done, you'll have an Artemis Class Fighter to go with your Atlas Class Cargo. Congratulations, you've unlocked your first new mission. Head back to the missions page and you'll see a new one called Raid a Crystal Mine.

AI Tech & Multitasking

When you start off in Starfleet Commander, you have a maximum fleet number of 1. This means you can only have one fleet on any type of mission at once. This is fine when you only have a couple ships, but as your empire grows bigger and bigger you're going to want to be able to multitask. So a good first step would be to research AI Tech. Each level of AI Tech gives you one extra fleet slot you can use. With AI Tech Level 1 you can run two missions at once.

Once you have two fleets available, you'll probably want to build a second Atlas Class Cargo so you can run two at once. Please note that putting more than one Atlas Class Cargo in a fleet will not result in getting more resources from a mission or attack, unless that mission or opponent is paying out more resources than one can carry.

With more than one fleet, it's also wise to look into fleet saving to prevent other players from wiping out your fleet while you're not playing the game.

The End & The Beginning

This concludes our Quick Start Guide, but your journey is just starting. Where to go from here? This wiki is the ultimate resource, so use it to determine what you want to do next. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Missions: If you're going to be an active player, you might spend some resources building ships you need for missions. Raid a Passing Atlas Class, for instance, requires you have an Apollo Class Fighter and pays out a little hydrogen in addition to decent ore and crystal.
2. Raiding: Raiding other players can be a much more efficient, but also more risky, way to gather resources in the early game than missions. They take longer to run, but if you find a juicy target you can potentially get very large amounts of resources. You can raid blindly (not a bad strategy against people who have very few points - you can tell this from the Leaders tab) or you can build Hermes Class Probes and espionage people.
3. Turtle: Turtles are players who make most of their money from mining. They usually build straight to colonies and then use those for extra mining capacity. Instead of building fighters they build large amounts of defense to keep opposing raiders away from their resources. They often also build large fleets of cargo ships so they can resource save whenever they are attacked by a bigger player who can penetrate their defenses.

Where you go from here is up to you.