From Jonathan's Reference Pages
Early on, you won't be able to afford an Orbital Space Dock, and will only be able to build small ships. Your first ships should be empty Scout Ships to quickly map the other asteroids and prospect to choose colony sites. Next, your choice is between Assault Fighters and Combat Eagles.
You'll probably want a fleet specialising in ship combat and a fleet specialising in ground attack. Since it's hard to tell ships apart by their armaments, you could make all Assault Fighters into bombers (Vortex Mine or Napalm Orb) and fit all Combat Eagles with ship weapons.
Once you have the money, start building ships on every occupied asteroid. You'll want large ground attack fleets and large ship combat fleets to escort them. The ship attack fleets can go first and engage the enemy fleet while the bombers attack the colony. When your money outstrips your ship building rate, start building the ships with more expensive hardpoints.
Small ships will repair in a hangar if you have a Repair Facility. This requires you to have the ships leave the fleet, which can be cumbersome.
In combat, always attack with ridiculous overwhelming numbers where possible.
Missiles are expensive. A full rack of ten of each non-blueprint missile will cost 607,000 credits, including the price of 90 units of red ore and 40 units of yellow ore. Including the blueprint missiles, a rack of 10 costs about 6,000,000 credits, including 180 red, 60 yellow and 20 green ore, not including an additional 1,500,000 in blueprints.
The advantage of missiles is that a large strike can deal a lot of damage before the enemy can rebuild, and a lucky hit can take out. A strike too small to obliterate an asteroid can still weaken its buildings and defences enough for a fleet to finish the job. Missiles also move at 4FN, faster than any ships, and cannot be intercepted by ships. However, they have a miss chance based on range, and can be shot down. They also only hit once, unlike ships with air to ground weapons which can fire multiple times before the ship is destroyed.
Probably the best overall missile is Nuclear, which strikes every building on an asteroid at once, as well as ships in orbit. A few hits can wipe out a colony. It's expensive, at 300,000 credits for the blueprint and 50,000 per missile, but worth it. Given the cost, it's best to fire Nuclears in groups of two to five, along with ten or twenty cheap Explosive missiles to decrease the chance that a Nuclear missile will be shot down.
Since miss chance increases by range and missiles can't be transferred between asteroids, it's vital to only build missiles with a nearby target in mind. The average effect of a 50% miss chance due to range is to double the price per successful missile. Ore Teleporters make it much more feasible to send the right ores to distant missile-producing worlds. It's worth using Asteroid Engines to close range with the enemy asteroid while building missiles.
In general, missiles are a great way to deal a lot of damage in a short space of time, if you have a lot of money.
A vital tactic is to ram an enemy asteroid with a colony equipped with Asteroid Engines. Unlike missiles and ships, asteroid ramming cannot be countered except by destroying the approaching colony or moving out of the way. In particular, the Ax'Zilanths have asteroid teleporters for this purpose, and the Tylarans have Asteroid Engines capable of moving at speed 8.
Your colony moves at 0.02FN per point of speed, or one pixel every fifty days. At speed 5, an asteroid will move one pixel every ten days, and cross one sector (the screen is 8 by 5 sectors) in 400 days. It's a good idea to keep colonies away from the sides of the screen, since they will collide with new asteroids.
Establishing a colony for the sole purpose of ramming is expensive. A new colony and Asteroid Engines costs 75,000 credits and take at 104 days. Your CPU will only produce food and water for 250 days, long enough to build the engines and move the asteroid 18.6 pixels, or just under half of one sector. Basic life support beyond this will bring the cost to 102,500.
A useful side-effect of ramming is that two asteroids are removed from play, causing two new ones to enter from the edge of the screen. Asteroid ramming can be used to get rid of an asteroid that's been emptied of ore and generate a new one.
Be selective when choosing blueprints.
Early on, you'll want the Gravity Nullifier, if it wasn't provided for you at the start. This is vital to avoid asteroid crashes once you start building colonies. It's also useful for rescuing valuable asteroids from collision. Bear in mind that asteroids appearing at the edge of the screen are vulnerable to collision with asteroids, so you'll want Asteroid Engines as one of your first purchases. Engines are extremely useful for crashing enemy asteroids, closing missile range, moving out of missile range, or establishing a wider sensor network.
Second-generation mines are useful when you're in a race against time to generate income and expand faster than the enemy. Buy Seismic Penetrator as soon as you find Traxium or Nexos and can spare the funds. The blueprint and one Seismic Penetrator cost 146,500 credits together, which one unit of Nexos or two of Traxium will pay for.
Once you have several colonies, your priorities change from saving money to spending it on offence and defence, and saving effort. The most vital blueprint is Ore Teleporter, which lets you import ore easily to your main asteroid for sale and manufacture, send ore out for distribute ore out for large-scale ship or missile production, evacuate ore from an endangered colony, and transfer ore quickly if the Imperial Transporter shows up at the wrong asteroid.
Other convenience technologies are the Asteroid Tracker (useful in combination with the Asteroid Engines) and Construction Droids (when you want multiple colonies all producing small ships as fast as they can).
Start buying offensive and defensive tech as money allows. Nuclear missiles are extremely effective and even a few can wipe out a colony. If your ship production ability exceeds your income and you're using a fleet-heavy strategy, start building better-equipped ships - buy Fleet Battleship, Shield x50, Deflector and perhaps Terminator. Defensively, the Repair Facility, Building Armour, Anti-Virus Missile and Anti-Missile Pod become important, especially later on if the enemy sends powerful missiles.
Later, when you have so much money you can't spend it quickly enough, start investing heavily in blueprints. Absolutely buy up all the offensive and defensive tech you can make use of, plus Missile Bay Extension (if you plan to make heavy use of missiles). Also buy any cheap tech you missed, like 2nd Generation Mines or Power Amplifier. If defence is stil a problem but you have Solar Matrix and cash, build a lot of Protected Solar Matrix buildings and dot your asteroids with Shield Generators.
The high end Virus and Mega missiles are tempting, but are even more expensive than they appear. As the ores required are rare and valuable, you'll want to sell them early on, and later when you can afford the blueprint you might have enough for only ten of each missile. Including the blueprint and the opportunity cost of keeping the ore, ten Mega missiles cost around 4,950,000 credits, and ten Virus missiles 1,215,000 credits. Either missile will destroy a colony in one successful hit, but so will five Nuclear missiles, whose ore is in plentiful supply, and a single Mega missile is more likely to be shot down than a barrage of Nuclears.
Stasis can be used to freeze an asteroid so many incoming missiles strike at once when the stasis wears off, overwhelming anti-missile defence, but again, a few Nuclears will do the same job, and the Stasis missile itself could be shot down. A similar en-masse missile effect can be achieved simply by building ten or twenty silos on the one asteroid, costing 4300 per silo with no power use. Avoiding the use of Stasis altogether also lets you sell all Korellium ore, which has no other use.
The Powerplant is rubbish - it consumes Asteros ore, and most asteroids have only enough to sustain two reactors for 200 to 1000 days. For the same price as the Powerplant blueprint and one Powerplant, you could buy the Solar Matrix blueprint and build four to produce the same amount of power. The next Solar Matrix will cost twice as much to build as a Powerplant per megawatt, but money regenerates, while Asteros is in short supply (and needed later on for Nuclear missiles). Once you have the Power Amplifier, four Solar Generators will generate the same power as a Powerplant in the same area, build twice as fast for 60% of the price, and won't consume ore.
Improved Sensors is another crappy tech. For the price of this blueprint, you can build Sensor Arrays on eight colonies, plus enough Solar Generators to power them. The advantage of the blueprint is that you save one square and 2MW per asteroid, can't lose sensors in an attack, and sensors kick in immediately upon colonization instead of 36 days later.
Page created: 10th November 2009
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