Advanced strategy guide

This guide assumes that you have played for a couple weeks, play for over an hour a day, and are intelligent enough to play aggressive without continually making big mistakes. Most players play defensive but playing aggressive is by far the best way to gain ranks and a great way to gain resources. You should always know from www.battlecalc.com how much debris and resources you will gain versus how many resources in ships you will lose. I'm above rank 50 and rank 20 on destroyed ships so I actually have used and tested this stuff out.

Fleets

Fleet ratios are a dumb concept because it overly generalizes what you’re supposed to build and it gives the implication that having a lot of everything is good. Having said that I use an approximate fleet ratio of about 100 Artemis, 50 Athena, 50 Hades, 30 Dionysus. The reason I use so many large ships is to receive 0-5% losses when attacking. Hades is often the best ship to build because it's the least likely to get destroyed and Ares/Prometheus are too slow and hydro expensive. When you have higher warp drives and some other people have lots of Hades/Proms/Plasma Proms may no longer be quite as bad. If you keep your ships alive well Athena/Ares/Proms will actually spend more than 20k hydro in fuel consumption whereas the Hades is much less. However when you build tons of Hades you will create a mass of ore that’s wasted if you don’t spend it so you will have to build Athena, Artemis, batteries, and trade. Also if you don’t have the tech for Hades yet, building and using the largest ship either Poseidon or Athena to raid with is the best because they will allow you to fleet smash and plunder small players with almost no casualties. You will need some Artemis fodder once your enemies are producing significant amounts of Athena/Ares/Hades/Proms/Gauss/Plasma, however many people talk as though fodder is a requirement punishable by death, fodder often increases your losses against the weaker opponents you should be targeting until even the weak players are building a lot of big ships.

Fodder

You use fodder under 3 circumstances, the most often is when the enemy has at least a moderate % of high damage ships/defenses which can take out your big ships in 1 or 2 hits so you might as well have some Artemis die rather than a big ship, also when you’re going to suffer decent losses(greater than 10%) so you just want to throw everything you have at them, or because you want to limit the rapid fire on your big ships usually because they have some Hades and your attacking with Athena. You can play around with battlecalc to see if you should send Artemis or how much. I have always found Artemis to be the best fodder to support Hades/Athena although I'm sure there are situations where Apollo or Poseidon are better but those limited situations mean it's usually a bad idea to build them. Battlecalc also sometimes incorrectly shows more large ship losses when you greatly overwhelm an enemy than you will actually take in the battle.

Attacking

Half of my attacks I do not send fodder and I only target people near my rank for fun not because it's smart. When I attack someone that’s much weaker say a 10-100 Dionysus fleet hopefully composed of no Proms/Plasma and 3 tech levels below me I send as many Hades as I can or need to and then possibly fill in the rest with Athena to the point at which I carry everything back or have enough to smash them while maybe losing a ship. The other half are usually 50-500 Dionysus fleet and if it's a somewhat big ship fleet I'll play around with battlecalc to determine whether to send around 1-3 times as many Artemis as I do Hades+Athena. Sometimes I will find someone that has a lot of resources in which case I usually split my fleet into 2 waves, the first being a quick hit on their fleet because debris usually outweighs resources and atlas get annihilated. The second I send at the same time with more big ships accompanied with Hercs. Occasionally this can become complicated and depends on how battlecalc tests show and how I feel about the target.

Defense and Defense Ratios

Defenses are pretty bad, I only use 15 batteries on each planet and a mass of them on my homeworld to help guard against a drive by of transports and to help spend my excess of ore. Oddly enough I’ve still been hit with 20 nukes. Fleet/resource saving is much better however if you’re too lazy, don’t think you need to, or are not always available batteries make the best fodder in the game and are the best for an opponent who is taking heavy >20% losses. If you’re in the stage where Poseidon’s are common laser cannons are better and you may want to make a few cannons just to decrease the % of batteries you have to limit Poseidon rapid fire. If the person attacking you has overpowered you completely with big ships and is going to take <5% losses the best defense is gauss or plasma because those guns concentrated firepower will ensure players using large fleets of big ships think twice about attacking you when they see they will take losses on battlecalc. On average you should spend about as much resources on batteries/cannons as you do on gauss/plasma but it really depends what you think you will be attacked by. Big weapon damage defenses inflict the most damage against large ships overpowering you, small guns inflict the most damage against small ships overpowering you.

Techs

If you often attack and get away with <5% losses you should do hull then weapon then shield but if you often lose more ships being attacked or don’t usually get away with <5% losses you should do weapon then hull then shield and either way you should keep them the same level with shield probably 1 level lower. Most people do not have high enough techs. The point at which you should upgrade is when (TotalResourceCostOfUpgrade/TotalResourceCostOfShipsAndDefences ) is smaller than (1-(1+.1*CurrentTechLevel)/(1+.1*(CurrentTechLevel+1)))*.4. The formula shows the percentage of cost vs benefit and both will be less than 9% you just have to compare them. Keep upgrading your jet drive to speed up your Dionysis, Hercs, and Artemis so your fleet is not slowed down as severely when you add fodder. You will need Advanced Communications Network eventually but don't rush to get it and put all your crew members in the research lab.

Resources and Mines

I use an ore/crystal/hydro ratio of 1/2/3 instead of 1/1.75/2.5 because late game ore is way too plentiful. In order for a lvl 20 ore mine with workers to pay for itself plus its solar energy cost is 26 days, a level 18 crystal mine and level 17 hydro mine are slightly worse than that. If you start using Helios that time reduces by about 1/3. A few levels higher than that and it begins taking months and months, a Dionysus on the other hand can potentially pay for itself in just a few hours. After a couple months it's easy to collect a million resources a day from production, if your active for more than a few hours a day it's also easy to collect half a million from raiding and over a million from fleet smashing and collecting their debris. In the beginning production is the best way to get resources and then fleet smashing becomes better if you have a large fleet and your doing it right but you have to have to play at least a couple hours each day to keep it up. Missions are not worth the time neither is building the crew members so you can run them, it is extremely easy to find an inactive that has 30k resources which is lot of missions. Hydro becomes a big problem when you have 400+ big ships and cannot collect it with Dionysus. Crystal is also very important to be able to build Hades rather than Athena and upgrade techs.

Espionage

I try to keep my espionage level 1 level above those around me and I send 3 probes so that if they are the same level I get their defenses. Then I calculate their espionage level based on what information I received and I sent the appropriate amount of probes at their colony with the least amount of ships to get their techs. You can also reverse calculate how many ships someone has based on the % chance that your probe is detected if you can determine their espionage level based on what information you received but normally their esp is not high enough to make that worth the time. It is generally unwise to scan players ranked above you unless you have been scanned or attacked, if you are scanned or attacked it's often unwise not to scan them it may just let them know your there so they don't attack.

Catching Opponents and Not Getting Caught

You should almost never attack or even scan someone when they are awake. Exceptions would be if they have a lot of hydro with not enough transports, your want to scare them away because you don't want to attack, or you want to find out their fleet size. During the night the chances to land attacks are much higher, it's especially high if you have recognized when someone sleeps. If someone attacks you try to use a base which they have just probed or do not know about and then reinforce from there and monitor the fleets page from a remote colony. If you know someone is back and your not sure what type of ships they or their close alliance friends have just recall or slow the attack down with a probe. http://forum.playstarfleet.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3802 The possible gains from an attack are usually 15 times less than the losses if your fleet is wiped out. The importance of fleet saving cannot be overestimated a larger player will make a colony by you eventually and it may take a while before you notice.

Buildings It is not a waste of resources to get a capitol of 5 on permanent colonies to speed up building. Before you make a foundry get level 9 shipyards with 4 workers on your permanent colonies because it is cheaper. Once your making over 4 million resources a day you'll need to start upgrading only your homeworld foundry and occasionally it's shipyard. Put all your crew members from people you invited into your research lab and get it to lvl 10 then get Adv Comm Network when you making at least over a million a day and upgrade your 2nd research lab to lvl 8 and don't bother putting research droids in it.

Colonization

Putting a lot of colonies right by your homeworld is good for protection and transportation but it puts a huge target on yourself. People know they will find a homeworld if they scan, they will also be able to discover your sleeping habits and if you are really afk easier so they are more likely to scan you. Having planets in the same system or very close by also limits how many people you can farm. After a month protecting small amounts of resources and ships will not matter, it will become increasingly more difficult to find people to farm, and protecting your fleet becomes priority number 1. In order to maximize farm while minimizing hydro usage it is extremely good to place colonies about 50-150 systems apart and only colonize an adjacent galaxy rather than ones far away. You can then move a raiding fleet around in a circle overnight farming the people in that area for a few days and then move on to the next area overnight while you fleet save. You can also make 7 permanent planets and keep 2 as raiding colonies that way you can go to a new galaxy and start at say 40 then transfer your fleet to 120 abandon 40 and make a new colony at 200 and keep going until you hit the end of the galaxy. This massively saves on hydro when you have a huge fleet. Building hydro efficient ships like Hades and Artemis allow you to move a very large fleet around and attack with it multiple times per day.

By EvilPenguin