Advanced strategy guide

Created by EvilPenguin

My advice is going to assume that you play for over an hour a day and are intelligent enough to play aggressive without continually making big mistakes because while most players play defensive playing aggressive is the best way to gain ranks and resources. Playing aggressive does not mean attacking players you will take big losses against, you should always know from battlecalc.com how much debris and resources you will gain versus what you will lose. I've only been playing for 7 weeks and I'm rank 40 on destroyed ships so I actually have used and tested this stuff out.

Fleets and Fleet Ratios

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 a fleet ratio of about 100 artemis, 100 athena, 80 hades. The goal is always to obtain the most resources while losing the least and to do that you will want the largest ships possible in order to receive 0-5% losses when attacking. This makes Hades usually the best ship to build because Prometheus are too slow and hydro expensive. A good player will actually manage his ships well enough that Athena and Prometheus will spend more over their lifetime in hydro than the hydro cost to build a Hades. However when you build tons of Hades you will create a mass of ore that’s wasted if you don’t spend it so build Athena, batteries, trade. Also many people don’t have the tech for Hades yet, in which case you want to build some 50 Poseidon or up to a 100 Athena to raid with as they will allow you to fleet smash and plunder with the smallest casualties. You will need some fodder typically artemis once your producing Athena/Hades, however many people talk as though fodder is a requirement punishable by death, fodder usually increases your losses against the weaker opponents you should be targeting.

Fodder

You use fodder under 3 main circumstances, when you’re going to suffer decent losses(greater than 10%) so you just want to throw everything at them, when the enemy has lots of high damage ships/defenses which can take out your big ships in 1 or 2 hits, or because you want to limit the rapid fire on your big ships usually because your sending Athena and they have Hades. You can play around with battlecalc to see if you should send fodder or how much. ¾ of my attacks I do not send fodder, I attack someone that’s much weaker say a 30 dino fleet hopefully composed of little Gauss/Athena or bigger ships and 3 tech levels below me and then I send as many Hades as I can or need to and then fill in the rest with Athena to the point at which I carry everything back or have enough to smash them without taking a single loss.

Defense and Defense Ratios

Defenses are pretty bad, I only use 15 batteries on each planet. 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 want to protect small resources of a colony or homeworld overnight batteries make great fodder and are the best for an opponent who is taking heavy >20% losses unless you’re in the stage where Poseidon’s are common in which case you want laser cannons. If the person attacking you has overpowered you completely and is going to take <5% losses the best defense would be gauss or plasma because those guns concentrated firepower are scary to someone powerful who is smart enough to send only a big ship fleet and use battlecalc to find out they will lose several Poseidon/Athena/Hades. You should spend about as much resources on batteries/cannons as you do on gauss/plasma.

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 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. I know right that formula is some scary stuff but it is the percentage of cost vs benefit and both will be less than 9% you just have to compare them.

Mines and Hydro End Game

In order for a high lvl 20 mine to pay for itself plus its energy cost it takes over a month. A dionysis on the other hand can pay for itself in just a few hours. I can make resources a lot faster by using a massive fleet of ships and dinos but hydro becomes a huge problem. Once you have 500 big ships it’s easy to make lots of points and millions of ore and crystal fleet smashing and difficult to afford the hydro because dino’s don’t collect it and moving huge fleets costs a lot.

Catching Opponents

You should never attack or even scan someone when they are awake unless you know what your doing. During the night the chances to land attacks are way higher, it's especially high if I take a look at a prime target every few hours for a couple days until I can tell when he goes to bed.

Moving Fleet Colonization

Putting a bunch of colonies right by your homeworld might be nice for protection and transportation but it puts a big ass target on yourself for other players, lets them find out easily when your sleeping, and limits how many people you can farm. After a month protecting small amounts of resources and ships that get built doesn't matter much, 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 would be extremely good to place 3 colonies in your homeworld galaxy 100 apart and then 5 in an adjacent galaxy at 50, 150, 250, 350, 450. You can then move your fleet and resources around in a circle overnight farming the people in that area for a few days and then moving on to the next area, if your farms become too small for the size of your fleet you can break it up into 2 forces or 3 forces while circling around. Using shipyards on your colonies are much cheaper than making 1 high level shipyard, upgrading a foundry, and continually transporting resources to it anyway. Build hydro efficient ships, moving around a lot makes it way easier to farm and protect yourself but costs a lot of hydro.