Advanced strategy guide
This guide assumes that you have played for a few 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, a great way to gain resources, and will help you learn faster. 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 currently rank 32 overall and rank 17 on destroyed ships so I actually have used and tested this stuff out.
Fleets
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 because they minimize losses when attacking. With the above ships you should be looking for targets that have up to 35 dinos of ships will give more profit than the ship loss and hydro. Hades and Athena are the best ships to build because they are hard to kill, are fast, and cheap on hydro. Ares/Prometheus on the other hand are also hard to kill but are slow and very hydro expensive. When you have higher warp drives and some other people have lots of Hades/Proms/Plasma Proms are not quite as bad particularly as a mobile defense. If you keep your ships alive well Athena/Ares/Proms will 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 no or little 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 especially large amount of it often increases your losses against the weaker fleets you should be targeting.
Fodder
It is beneficial to use fodder under 3 circumstances, the most often is when the enemy has a large percentage of high damage ships/defenses which can take out your big ships in 1 or 2 hits so you add Artemis to die rather than a big ship, also when you’re going to suffer decent losses(greater than 5%) so you just want to throw more of what 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. Artemis is the best fodder to support Hades/Athena. I find it helpful to use fodder in almost half of my attacks although sometimes the effect is so minimal that I leave them out to shave 5-10 minutes off the time.
Attacking
I hope for targets that are within 60 systems which have less defenses, few Proms/Plasma, and a low weapons tech and I send an appropriate amount of Hades/Athena based on whether I'm looking for cargo, saving on hydro, survivability, or rapid fire. If more than a couple ships will die I'll play around with battlecalc to determine how many Artemis results in the least resources lost often times this number is about as many as how many Athena I sent. 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 almost always outweighs resources and atlas get annihilated. The second wave I send at the same time with enough big ships to take on the defenses accompanied with Hercs. If splitting my big ships into 2 waves results in large losses I usually resend my fleet once it has returned but I may add Hercs or Atlas. If your ending a fight in round 5 or 6 you might want to ask for help from someone else or group attack with your own ships from another location. If they do join in make sure to tell them the time so that they slow it down as little as possible and remember there is a limit of 30% that they can slow it down so they may need to start the attack if they are further than that.
Defense and Defense Ratios
Defenses are used because you cannot play this game 24/7 while fleet saving perfectly when you sleep. The amount of defenses you build should be based on how often your not fleet/resource saved and your are afk. Batteries make the best fodder in the game and they work especially well with the Athena/Hades fleet you should be using. If Artemis and Batteries are over 70% of your fleet you should switch to making Cannons to limit Poseidon rapid fire. High damage Plasma and Gauss can help scare off bigger players from overpowering you completely with a fleet of only big ships and taking small losses but you should have Athena/Hades that provide concentrated firepower anyway. Big weapon damage defenses inflict the most losses against large ships overpowering you, small guns inflict the most damage against small ships overpowering you.
Hull, Shield, Weapon Techs
If you usually attack and get away with <5% losses it is a little better to do hull then weapon then shield but if you sometimes lose ships from 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 possibly 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 you get to debris first and your fleet is not slowed down as severely when you add fodder.
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 few months with this fleet heavy aggressive strategy 50% of your resources will come from debris, another 25% from raiding and 25% from production. Stop running missions they are not worth the time neither is building the crew members so you can run them or upgrading expedition tech, it is extremely easy to find an inactive that has 50k resources which is lot of missions. Hydro becomes a huge problem when you have 500+ big ships and cannot collect it with Dionysus. Crystal is also important to be able to build Hades rather than Athena and upgrade techs. In order to do multiple big attacks each day of targets with a lot of hydro. You rarely want to send Dionysus first and wait to attack unless you know they will stay offline or your waiting for your fleet to return.
Espionage
I try to keep my espionage level the same or 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 send the appropriate amount of probes at their colony with the least amount of ships to get their techs if I'm going to attack. 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. It is generally unwise to scan players ranked above you unless you have been scanned or attacked or you know they are not from that galaxy as it will help draw attention to yourself. If you are scanned or attacked it's often unwise not to scan them as it will let you know what type of force they have so you can play accordingly and possibly relay that information to other larger players and it may just let them know your there so they don't attack and blow up some of your defenses.
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, you 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 know when they sleep. If someone attacks you try to use a base which they have just probed or do not know about and then reinforce from there if possible or from a homeworld briefly or when they scan your homeworld. Then monitor the fleets page from a remote colony. If someone's activity spikes they are not necessary there, they could either have been scanned or had an attack return, you can check when it spikes to see if any resources or ships disappeared. If you know someone is back and your not sure what type of ships they or their close alliance friends have just recall especially if they came back with over an hour left. You can also slow the attack down with a probe and I recommend people try this before they need to use it. http://forum.playstarfleet.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=3802 The possible gains from an attack are usually 20 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 if there is not one there already and it may take a while before you notice. You may even be attacked by thousands of ships from another galaxy as I have.
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 over a million resources a day and upgrade your 2nd research lab to lvl 8 and don't put research droids in it they don't work.
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
