Advanced strategy guide
Created by EvilPenguin
This guide assumes that you 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. 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'm above rank 30 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 very approximate fleet ratio of about 100 Artemis, 80 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 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 will 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 smaller players with the lowest 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 usually increases your losses against the weaker opponents you should be targeting.
Fodder and Attacking
You use fodder under 3 circumstances, when you’re going to suffer decent losses(greater than 10%) so you just want to throw everything you have at them, when the enemy has lots of high damage ships/defenses which can take out your big ships in 1 or 2 hits so you might as well have an Artemis die in 1 hit from a Prom/Plasma rather than an Athena, or because you want to limit the rapid fire on your big ships because your sending a large % of Athena and they have Hades or your sending a large % of Hades and they have Proms. You can play around with battlecalc to see if you should send fodder or how much. Battlecalc also often incorrectly shows more large ship losses when you greatly overwhelm an enemy than you will actually take in the battle. ¾ of my attacks I do not send fodder, I attack someone that’s much weaker say a 10-100 dino fleet hopefully composed of no Proms/Plasma and 3 tech levels below me and then 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 taking very small or no losses.
Defense and Defense Ratios
Defenses are pretty bad, I only use 10 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 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 if your being attacked by a massive fleet of small ships or a big fleet of large ships. 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. 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.
Collecting Resources
In order for a high lvl 20 mine to pay for itself plus its energy cost it takes over a month. A dionysis or transport on the other hand can pay for themselves in just a few hours. It's pretty easy to collect 1 million resources a day from production, if your active for more than a few hours a day it's also pretty easy to collect almost a million from raiding and over a million from fleet smashing and collecting their debris each day after a few months. In the beginning production is the best way to get resources and then becomes the worst, fleet smashing is the worst and then becomes the best but you have to have a few 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.
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 you have recognized when someone sleeps. If someone attacks you try to use a base which they have just probed to defend it and then only 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.
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. It lets them find out easily when your sleeping, larger players will know they can find a homeworld with a few scans, and it 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 is extremely good to place colonies about 100 systems apart and only colonize an adjacent galaxy rather than one very 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 moving on to the next area overnight while you fleet save. Roaming around will also help spread resources to your high level shipyards on your colonies which are much cheaper than making 1 very high level shipyard, upgrading a foundry, and continually transporting resources to it. Building hydro efficient ships like Hades and Artemis allow you to constantly move around farming with a very large fleet while protecting yourself and not consuming ridiculous amounts of hydro.
