Defensive strategy guide

This guide assumes that you intend to play for the foreseeable future, but do not want to put significant time into the game at the moment. It will take you from the very beginning of gameplay to more advanced techniques.

The very beginning

In the very beginning of the game, a purple haired lady will guide you through some exercises intended to teach you how to spend resources. "Resources Spent" is one of the main rankings for this game, so pay some attention. Also, doing what she says will let you score a second Artemis, Ares, and Hermes, long before you'll ever unlock them.

When you are done with the quest tutorial, you will have two Atlas, two Ares, and two Hermes probes. This small arsenal isn't much use for battles except in rare circumstances, but it will allow you to run missions. Running missions is especially important to beginning players in universes where you can complete tasks for free if it would take less than five minutes. You can use missions to get more resources, and keep upgrading until it will take everything more than five minutes to complete.

If you can keep completing things in less than five minutes, then build up the crystal and ore mines until they take just over five minutes. Then start working on the hydrogen mine, preferably just before bedtime. Upgrade the solar field to keep up with demand as best as you can. With any luck, you can upgrade the capitol a bit, and upgrade all the mines a few times more in less than five minutes. By the time things always cost more than five minutes, you'll want to focus your energy. Crystal will be important for a lot of the game, especially in the very beginning, because we want to unlock the Gaia class colony ship as soon as possible.

Keep it on the Down-Low

It bears mentioning as early as possible that when you begin play, you are in a safe zone of "newbie protection." You can only attack inactives and NPCs, and no active player can attack you. Inactives and NPCs never attack, so you won't ever get hit while in newbie protection. However, newbie protection will not last forever. When you reach 1,000 RSP points, newbie protection ends, and you become the new kid to pick on. What is an RSP Point? it represents 1,000 resources spent. What resources? Ore, Crystal, and Hydro. Any 1,000 of either that you spend on a building, ship, defense, droid, or research will become an RSP point. of course... if you destroy, tear down, or abandon something, some RSP will be lost.

Therefore, while most of every Starfleet Commander game is focused on spending resources, and destroying enemy resources to create RSP, and DSP, at the outset of the game, your goal is not so much to spend resources as it is to most wisely allocate your first 1,000 RSP points so that when you leave Newbie Protection mode, your well-equipped to attack, or deal with attackers. If this were an offensive strategy guide, I might mention the benefits of having a sizeable fleet prior to going out. However, as a defensive strategy, I must warn you: Unless you're online, and ready to use a sizeable fleet when you go out, opponents will most likely smash and grab your fleet before you ever get a chance to use it. Instead, I will advocate that you focus on creating infrastructure.

Planets, for example... colonizing a planet gives you no RSP. You actually lose the 40 RSP that goes into building a Gaia when you colonize. if you get your keeper planets before going out of newbie protection mode, your opponents will have to strike all 9 of your planets to decimate you. Should you expect to get hit when you first come out of newbie protection? Yes, it's likely to happen. We;ll discuss how this danger can be minimized later.

Unlock tech

Resources can be spent on more bouldings, on ships or defenses in the shipyard, on droids in the factory and on research in the Research Lab. We will want to unlock these buildings so that we can do all these things. However, we will want to do them in a certain order. Research never dies. Ships can get shot down, and droids must be moved from planet to planet before you abandon the world. For this reason, we will focus on the research lab first, then the shipyard, and finally the factory. ideally, you will also keep upgrading the mines, and running missions, so that you have a continuous stream of income to keep building, researching, making ships, and making droids simultaneously... sort of.

Branch Out

With only one planet, you can only upgrade one building at a time. You can only make one ship at a time. You can only make one droid at a time. You only have one ore mine, one crystal mine, and one hydrogen mine to upgrade. Also, each upgrade of a mine costs more, and takes longer to finish. Teasing you on the top of your screen are eight empty colony slots. With each of these, you can upgrade buildings, make ships, build droids... simultaneously... nine at a time. to do this, you will need a Gaia Class colony ship. Why can't you build it yet?? Check on the Tech tab. I prefer viewing the Full Index, but whatever works for you.

to build a Gaia class colony ship, your shipyard must be upgraded to level 4, and your Pulse Drive must be researched to level 3. To research Pulse Drive, your Research lab must be upgraded to Level 3, and you must research Energy Tech level 1. I suggest upgrading the research lab to level 3 before researching, as it will speed the research along. Also, you'll then end up with plenty of leftover ore for upgrading the shipyard.

Once you can build Gaia class colony ships, you can colonize some planets. At this early point, you will probably just want to colonize the other planets in your solar system, so that you can transport stuff between planets faster. Getting a keeper planet is a rare treat, and every ship is super slow early on. Once you've researched your jet drive, pulse drive, and warp drive a bit, this will hardly matter, but for now, you might as well keep things close together.

Disposable Planets

A lot of your early worlds will be pitifully small. Essentially, anything less than 250 fields is not a keeper. You'll need more fields than you have, and if you hold on to them until you find this out the hard way, you will have wasted a lot of resources. On these early disposable worlds, you never upgrade your capitol beyond level 2. You never upgrade your Shipyard beyond level 4, and you never build anything aside from these, mines, and a factory. You never upgrade the factory beyond level 2, if you even build it here.

Planet-picking strategy

Since you've got a Gaia class colony ship, now is a good time to discuss planet picking strategy. So, let's click on the "Galaxy" tab, and view your Galaxy. You will notice that in reality, there is no way to view a whole galaxy in starfleet command. You are looking instead at your system. Every system has 15 planet slots. An empty system will basically look like a spreadsheet that hasn't been filled out. A busy system, on the other hand, will have debris next to a lot of the planet slots, other players, and between planet slots, there may be Moons, and NPCs. None of that really matters much just yet.

The important point is this: in most universes, there are 15 planet slots in a system, 499 systems in a galaxy, and 1o galaxies in a universe. The coordinates are listed in the familiar format [1:009:13] Where 1 is the first galaxy in the universe, 009 is the ninth system in the galaxy 1, and 13 is the thirteenth planet slot in galaxy 9. Clicking on that link may take you to those coordinates in your universe. Each player has only 9 planet slots though... and they get to chose where they want to colonize, out of 74,850 possible planet slotss in a typical universe.

Early on, many players simply colonize the available slots right next to themselves, for ease of transporting resources. Later on, they usually develop different strategies. Some prefer to spread so far out that no two of their planets are even in the same galaxy. others feel it is best to have a bit more companionship, and keep 2-8 planets in the same galaxy, often spread out about 40-180 systems apart. Most feel it is best not to keep all your planets in one galaxy over the long run though.

Systems

Each system stats at 1, and ends at 15. 1 is closest to the systems invisible sun. It is the hottest, and solar satellites produce the most energy there. However, we are defensive players, and will hardly use those at all. 15 is farthest from the moon. 15 allows the hydrogen synthesizer and nuclear power plant to work at optimum efficiency. Everybody wants hydrogen and energy, so this side of the "galaxy" page is more desirable for anyone who isn't hoping to get a quick pile of ore or crystal from a straight mining world.

The bottom of the system list is also more desirable for another reason: Hunters. Player characters who scan the galaxy pages looking for an easy target like yourself. You'll probably notice that if you could read the words in the planet slot, you also had to scroll down to see the bottom of the list. Some hunters won't be motivated enough to bother doing that if the top few planet slots in the system are empty. Some will also just find a good target up there, and not bother you.

Lastly, we must discuss the effects of that roving terror known as the Hephaestus Class Attack Platform If they can land in your system, they can attack your planet. Many players join alliances, and build "blockades," in which slot in a system is filled by a planet. With no empty planet slots, the hephaestus cannot park nearby, and any attack will take quite a while longer. Other players just hope and pray.

Galaxies

Galaxies are numbered, just like planet slots. In the coordinate systems, they are the three digit middle number. Since you can never see a whole galaxy, and each galaxy is created complete from the get-go, there isn't much difference between either end of the galaxy. In most universes, each galaxy contains 499 systems, numbered from 001-499. Oracle scans and IPBM strikes can only occur from one planet in a galaxy to another planet in the galaxy. Because of this, and because galaxies are linear, most of the action in a galaxy occurs near the middle, and not near the edges.

Typical advice is to steer clear of systems 0-99, and 400-499, because eventually, the range on your oracle, IPBM, or fleet will bump against the far end of the system, and will be wasted. However, some defensive players might really prefer these areas. I would also point out that while the center of a galaxy is around system 249, some players are unsure of the exact size of the galaxy, assuming it to end at 299, or 399, so that active fighters are often accumulated in numbers slightly smaller than 249.

Universes

Each universe has a somewhat variable number of galaxies. They begin with only one galaxy, and additional galaxies are added based on demand. SFCO ended up with an incredible number of galaxies, running into double, and perhaps even triple digits. However, it was discovered that removing galaxies after the fact is much more difficult and upsetting than adding them, so techniques have been developed to cap the number of galaxies, at about 10, depending on popularity... or do they?

Regardless of exactly how it goes, what tends to happen is that the early adopters of the game, often enthusiastic veterans of other SFC universes, tend to have their original territories in galaxy 1, and other nearby single digit galaxies. This is the hot "top of the list" area for action. To encourage painless contraction of universes, at some point, new commanders are prevented from having their homeworld spawn too far away from galaxy 1 either, creating a "middle of the list" where new players form, and often soon go inactive for one reason or another. Finally, at an indeterminate distance from galaxy 1, there is the distant galaxy at the end of the universe, where, no more new players are allowed to form. Experienced players sometimes seek out these very distant lands, in order to create an undisturbed stronghold. So... on either end, there are likely to be some of the meaner players, transporting stuff to each other via warp gate no doubt.