The Raider Guide

By Ascended Dolphin

Current Version: 0.1.1

Last updated: 2-6-2010

History:

[v0.1] Started writing

[v0.1.1] Edited Path of the Warrior due to a change in the way housing works in game

Disclaimer:

Everything I write in this guide is accurate as of the time of writing but is subjected to change since the game is still in Beta. So you should always check with veteran players and on the forum to make sure things work the way they should. As I have stopped playing Asgard Heroes before it reaches its final form, there are bound to be changes after this guide is written. As such, you are welcomed to edit this guide or use it as a basis for your own guide, though please give credit where it is due. All questions, comments, and constructive criticism are welcomed. ==Introductionwould like to begin by saying this, "Asgard Heroes is a war game." Remember first and foremost that even if you don’t like conflict, conflict will find you in this game. This guide, as the name implies, tells you how to play the game as a raider. To be honest, playing as a raider is really simple; you just raid...a lot. But if I stopped here, this wouldn’t be a very interesting guide. So instead, I’m going to go into great details about why you should start the game as a raider and how you can play the game well as a raider.==

Let’s start with an example. Player A is a raider who has played for 39 days. Player B does not raid but has also played for 39 days. In those 39 days, player A has accumulated 9 outposts, over 4500 population, and a 5000-unit army, while player B has 2 outposts, just over 1000 population, and about a hundred units. Why the big difference? Because player A has almost a hundred times the resource income from raiding than player B. Player A’s growth is only limited by construction speed and troop training speed. Player B’s growth is limited by the availability of resources. On top of this, player B’s limited military made him a target of players C thru F, which probably caused him to wipe a few times. Remember, “Asgard Heroes is a war game.”

A lot of people look at this game in terms of population and outpost numbers, even the player ranking is based on those two factors. But as anyone familiar with strategy games will tell you, the blood and soul of any well-run army is resource income. If you have the ability to bring in more resources than your opponent, then it doesn’t matter if they have better tactical skills, you will always have the option (at least in this game) to simply overrun them with superior numbers. The best strategies in the world do not matter if you do not have the troops to carry them out. If I haven’t convinced you to start raiding by this point, then you should stop reading this guide because this play style is not for you. Otherwise, let’s look at the mechanics of raiding.

Important Game Mechanics for a Raider
This section is written for people who are already familiar with the basics of how to play the game. This section goes into a lot of details about game mechanics that beginners may find hard to understand. If you’re just starting Asgard Heroes, I recommend you skip ahead to section 3 and get some gaming experience first.

Mechanics of Raiding
In Asgard Heroes, the act of raiding is to send a military force to attack a target outpost or mine with the intention of looting the target’s resources. It is as simple as picking out a target, click “Go to Stargate”, type in the number of troops to send, and click “Send Troops”. A timer will show up telling you how long until your troops arrive. When they do, you’ll get a report hopefully telling you that they looted some goods without encountering resistance. On your colony screen, you will now see your troops returning. The amount of time it takes them to return will be the same as the amount of time it took them to get to the target.

It is important to note that the travel time, which I define as the one-way trip time, is proportional to the distance between the origin and the destination. The distance, in parsec, can be calculated by,

Distance_in_parsec = sqrt((difference_in_X_coordinate)^2 + (difference_in_Y_coordinate)^2)

The X coordinate is the first number in the coordinate pair for any outpost/mine, while the Y coordinate is the second number. The formula is just simple geometry. The travel time formula is more complicated.

Travel_Time_in_minutes = Distance_in_parsec * 60 / (Unit_speed + 2*Stargate_level)

Note that the game rounds the travel time off to the nearest minute with a minimum travel time of 1 minute. This means for a group of marines traveling in a level 7 stargate, their travel time in minutes is roughly equal to the distance for that trip in parsec. We will see later the implications of these simple game mechanics.

Mechanics of Target Choosing
The game rule dictates that for outposts with a population less than 120, troop protection is granted for 3 days plus the population difference in raiding party’s outpost and the target outpost divided by 100 in days. The protection is calculated based on when the target goes inactive. So for example, if the target outpost has 50 pop and the outpost from which you wish to raid this target has 100 pop, you can raid the target 3 days after it goes inactive (The protection time is rounded to the nearest hour or something like that). On the other hand, if you’re sending troops from a 700 pop colony, you’ll have to wait 9 days. In theory this means younger players have more targets to choose from than older players and younger players should pick out targets that are fresh out of protection in order to improve their chances of hitting a target that hasn’t been picked clean. Older player can take advantage of this by building low pop secondary raid bases. For targets with population over 120, there is no troop protection.

Since this guide isn’t about warfare, we will, for the most part, only consider defenseless targets. When raiding, there are four types of targets. Newbie inactive outposts (nubposts), developed inactive outposts, mines, and active outposts. I define nubposts as anything with a population less than 50 because there is almost no chance that such an outpost will have any defenses. You need a certain amount of infrastructure to begin training troops. The population needed to support these buildings plus auxiliary support buildings means that players typically won’t have troops until their population hits 60, and usually much higher. The only way for a nubpost to have troops is if someone else wanted to trap them with defenses as a prank for unsuspecting raiders. But who would do that?

Other notable nubpost population sizes include 2 and 6. People who made their colonies, looked at their colony screen, and quit will have a population of 6. People who made their colonies, but for whatever bizarre reason never made it to their colony screen will have a population of 2. In either case, they don’t need their resources, so as a good raider you should put that resources toward a greater cause, yours. I personally got 75-80% of my raid resources from these targets because they are not raided nearly as frequently as other targets. Not to mention they don’t fight back.

Developed inactive outposts are just like nubposts except a) they may have defenses, b) they probably set their tax to a non-zero number before going inactive so the resource production pattern is different from nubposts, and c) they probably generate more resources. This makes them more attractive targets for other players who don’t have much time to play the game and want more resources per raid. Remember that travel time is proportional to distance, so raiding anything beyond your immediate neighborhood takes quite a bit of in-game time. Ironically, the fact that these targets generate more resources also causes them to give fewer resources to each raiding player because so many people try to raid them. The greed of man will lead to his own downfall. If you just started raiding, I would advise you to start with nubposts instead as you may end up wiping your troops against the defenses of a developed inactive.

Mines typically provide the highest amount of a particular type of raw material (erythium, argon, or energy) compared to other raid targets, except on weekends. Even more so than developed inactive outposts, mines are constantly raided by everyone, when everyone is online. Mines generate a small amount of food, capped at one to two thousand and a large amount of one of the three raw materials. The maximum raw material a mine can hold varies from ~30k to ~80k depending on its population. When either the food or the raw material is stocked up to the capped value, any new food/raw material is converted to gold at a ratio of 4 to 1. This means that although mines don’t produce BC, they can still accumulate lots of BC by overflow conversion if left un-raided for a long period time. Alas, I can tell you with confidence that over 90% of the mines on the map are constantly raided and the top players probably raid the last 10% frequently. I know Unicron and I both went through a lot mines just to get at all that accumulated BC. Although you may get lucky, I would not count on mines to yield large amount of BC for you. With that said, outposts generate a lot more food (and BC if you tax correctly) than raw materials by design, so you will want to raid mines occasionally to boost the relative lack of raw material intake from inactive outposts.

The last category of targets is active outposts. These outposts tend to yield fewer resources than developed inactive outposts. I mean what do you expect, they probably do use their resources. Since this is a war game, you are free to attack players you believe to be weaker than you. But keep a few things in mind when doing this, a) you will probably only get resources the first time because people will learn quickly to build shifters; b) you do this enough and someone will get pissed and hold a grudge. If that someone gets strong somewhere down the road, you could be in for a nasty surprise. A certain player X lost 50k worth of BC to a certain player Y even though the alliances they belonged to had a peace treaty because player Y held a grudge, and not unreasonably so; c) worst still, if that someone is your neighbor then they will watch you carefully for any sign of weakness and strike when you least expect it. So if you are going to raid active outposts, I recommend that you only raid them once each. If they ask you to stop attacking, don’t be greedy, give them a chance to build. Better yet, teach them how to defend themselves so they’ll be less hostile toward you.

Mechanics of Resource Generation
Why do you need to know the mechanics of resource generation? Well let’s look at raiding in a different way. Let’s pretend all those inactive outposts are mines that generate all five resources. And let’s pretend your troops are freighters. In that case, raiding is the same as sending freighters out to get goods for your colonies. In order to bring in a balanced amount of goods, you must know how the goods are generated.

You may have noticed already, but I refer to erythium, argon, and energy as raw materials. This is just to make it easier for me to categorize the resources.

Food is by far the most common resource in the entire game; it was made this way by design. For resource generation buildings of the same level, an E.D.E.N. farm generates 3-4 times as much resources as an erythium mine, an argon extractor, or a solar plant. On top of this, there are 8 E.D.E.N. farms per outpost in the game but only 6 generators for each of the raw materials. This means the average outposts generate ~4.7 times as much food as any one of the raw materials assuming equal level resource buildings. This food generation is partially offset by the fact that each population cost one food per hour to feed regardless of rather the population comes from buildings or from troops. BC is generated by taxing and by overflow conversion. For taxing, raw materials get converted to BC at a ratio of 4:1. I suspect, though the numbers don’t always reflect this, that food converts to BC at a ratio of 3:1. I got this result from actually writing down my resource values at regular interval. I have found that the BC generation rate is faster than what is displayed on the resource bar. But putting that aside, let’s assume all resources convert in a 4:1 ratio. When resources overflow, that is the accumulated resource reach the storage cap, the excess is automatically converted to BC in the same 4:1 ratio.

So what does all this mean to your targets? Let’s start with nubposts. Although many nubposts have no resource buildings, they still generate food and raw material over time. I believe this may have been designed into the game to make them meaningful as raid targets. Nubposts have very little population so their food generation rate is very high compared to their raw material and BC rates. However, since they have no storage buildings, they are capped at 1750 food, 2250 raw, and 2250 BC. Game rule dictate that outposts have a minimum shifter of 600 so a fully stocked nubpost yield 1150 food, 1650 raw, and 1650 BC even though it generates food much more quickly than the other resources. In the course of 24 hours after a nubpost has been raided, it will regenerate roughly 1150 food, 700-1000 raw, 300-600 BC all depending on your exact timing. In reality, the nubpost regenerate 1150 food in a mere 10 hours but overflow converts the excess to BC.

Developed inactive outposts tend to vary greatly in terms of resource generation and storage building levels. Sometimes you will find one with a lot of food, sometimes they’ll have a lot raw materials. Because the tax is usually set on a developed inactive, you’ll usually get a more balanced amount of food and BC.

Building up your base requires a balance amount of all five resources while training basic troops require more food and BC than raw materials. If you’re an active builder, or you train advanced troops, you will inevitably end up with less raw materials than food and BC from raiding so you will (at least initially) need to compensate by raiding mines.

Depending on your luck, you may end up with not enough food or not enough BC. If you don’t have enough BC, there is not a great deal you can do besides maxing out your tax and hope you get lucky with a mine/outpost/trade. But if you, for whatever reason, don’t have enough food, there is a simple way to increase your food intake by taking advantage of the fact that nubposts don’t have tax set. In the previous description about resources generated by a nubpost, the ratio of food to BC is about 2 if you wait 24 hours between raiding. But if you raid the same nubpost twice a day (waiting only 12 hours between raiding), the food on the nubpost will have just reached the storage cap each time and you will take in 2300 food, the same amount of raw material, and almost no BC in one day. Now it is unlikely that you’ll ever run low on food with the way the game is set up right now. But it’s a neat trick if you need a sudden infusion of food.

Day Zero
From this section onward, I will outline some rough guidelines for how to play Asgard Heroes as a raider. Keep in mind that this is just a rough walkthrough and you should adjust according to the amount of time you have to play, the situation, your own preferences, etc.

The game starts at day zero. Day zero is the all inclusive term I use to describe the preparations you should make before starting the game as a raider. You can optionally play as a different character for a day or two just to get a feel for how the game plays so that the mechanics I describe in section 2 actually makes sense. If you do, please delete your test account when you starting playing your real account so you’re not holding an unfair advantage by having two accounts.

When you’re ready to start playing as a raider, the first and most important thing you must do and decide where you want to laid down your first outpost. The game let’s you randomly pick a location on the galactic map but chances are slim that such a random location will be ideal for starting out as a raider. There are three things you should look for when choosing a location.

1) There should be at least one erythium mine, one argon mine, and one energy mine near your starting location so you’ll have a source of raw material. Having these within about 10 parsec of your outpost would be ideal.

2) There should be a relatively dense population of inactive outposts near your starting location. This also means that edges and corners of the galactic map are not ideal as a lot of space near you will remain unpopulated by outposts. Since travel time is proportional to distance, having targets close to you will greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to raid each target and increase the amount of targets you can raid for a given amount of time you can play.

3) Watch out for high-rank players and players who have high loot/aggression stats. If they’re raiding the outposts around them all of the time, there will nothing left for you to raid. I’d like to also give a warning to people who like to cluster together and form defensive alliances. Although you can reinforce each other quickly due to being in close proximity, you are also limiting each other’s growth as raiders because you will be raiding the same targets. Worst yet, if there are enough of you in one area, the game will not place many outposts randomly into that one area, thus reducing the number of potential targets. I understand not everyone wants to play as raiders but if you are going to play as raiders, don’t cluster together.

Be sure to visit the forum, especially the alliance section to get a general idea for the current relationships between alliance and perhaps even figure out which one you’re most likely to join (assuming you’ll join one someday). This could potentially influence where you decide to plop down your first colony.

Day One
On day one, you should get at least three things done: 1) build a barrack, 2) build a stargate, and 3) research the technology “combat simulation” to allow you to train marines. To do these things, you’ll have to expand your asgard by a couple of levels and build an armor barrack.

Now if you’re an active player like I was you will also want to do the following things on day one.

1) Upgrade your resource buildings to level 2. In case you’re unlucky and the nearby mines are empty, you can at least generate some of your own resources.

2) Build a marine and start raiding mines. If you upgraded the resource buildings then chances are you’ll be short on argon. Find the nearest argon mine to you and start raiding it. You may bring back only food on the first raid, just keep at it until you get to the argon. This will obviously go faster if you have more marines or if the mine is very close to you, but even one marine can get the job done in enough trips.

3) Build more marines, 5 or so is enough for now. You’ll probably run out of BC by now and perhaps food as well. Look for the nearest nubpost without troop protection and start raiding. It may take a few trip to get at the BC.

4) In the meantime, you should construct a level 2 biosphere and a level 3 storage so that you can build your shifter. Your goal is to get the shifter level high enough by the time you reach pop 120 so that all your resources except BC is covered (by covered I mean the amount of resources under protection is greater than your resource storage cap). BC is not designed to be completely coverable.

5) You’ll probably reach about pop 60 by the end of the day with a few marines. I personally had 4 by the end of my day one.

Day Two and on
From this point onward, it’s just a matter of building more marines with the resources you bring in and upgrading your buildings. You should, by the end of day two, have assembled some 30 to 50 marines with your outpost in constant construction. Which building to upgrade will differ depending on preferences but here’s what I would prioritize.

1) Asgard to lv 7 so you can open up a new queue slot, which will allow your outpost to keep building while you’re away or sleeping.

2) Upgrade your stargate to increase both the raid speed and the number of simultaneous raids. You initially get 2 raid slots, which increases by 1 at every stargate level that is a multiple of 4. (So level 8 stargate has 4 raid slots). You’ll obviously need to have enough marines to actually split into multiple raids in order to take advantage of this. I recommend at least 80 marines per raid because it takes 78 marines (carrying capacity 100 each) to loot a fully stocked nubpost in one trip.

3) Upgrade your farms both to keep up with the increase in population maintenance (1 food/hour per pop) and to tax your food income for much needed BC. If you find the raw material income from mines insufficient, you may also want to build some raw material generators though they tend to be horribly inefficient for the price.

4) All the while you should upgrade your biosphere and storage as the cost of construction rises. And upgrade shifters to cover your resources.

In case it isn’t clear, the reason you want to start by building only marines is because a) they’re easily accessible, b) they’re fast, c) they have high carrying capacity for the cost, and d) they’re fairly good at offense if you have to overcome guards on an inactive outpost.

Once your population reaches above 120 and you’re out of troop protection, you must begin considering defense. You will need to add the following items to your construction queue.

1) Build a space academy so you can start researching troop upgrades at the armor barrack. Upgrades make a very big difference for basic troops like marines and templars. At the moment, upgrades only go up to lv 10. When all three upgrades for a marine or templar reach lv 10, it is typically three times as strong as the lv 1 version. Note that upgrades only apply to the troops based in that outpost, including troops sent out on raids. So if someone reinforces your outpost with marines, the marines will be at your outpost’s upgrade level regardless of what upgrades it originally had.

2) Upgrade your barrack and armor barrack so you can build spies and templars. Spies are useful to ward off enemy spies and to gather info on an inactive outpost to find out what defense it has if any. I can’t stress enough the importance of information warfare. If a potential opponent cannot find out what kind of defenses you have, they may choose not to become your opponent. Templars are nice because they cost about the same as marines but are much better at defense. The downside is they have half the carry capacity and are slightly slower, so are not as good for raiding.

3) Build and upgrade the wraith pylon and the ground battery. Wraith pylon increases your outpost’s defending troops’ HP while ground battery increase the defending troops’ counter-attack. Both are invaluable in defense.

4) Joining an alliance can help ward off potential troublemakers. Though you definitely don’t want to join one that’s currently at war if you’re still building up. Sometimes, being in the right alliance is sufficient defense to keep you safe while you build up.

Once your population reach 120 you should also consider sending your troops out on long-distance raid before going away for a long period of time (like to sleep). There are three reasons for doing this.

1) If someone attacks you while you’re away, they won’t wipe you of your troops (the freighters with which you transport back resources from nubpost). If your resources are under shifter as well then the attacker gains nothing.

2) Troops that aren’t raiding are troops that aren’t working. And when troops don’t work, they eat. By sending troops away, you won’t have to pay for their maintenance.

3) You may get some good loot from a place that’s far away when the local area becomes over-raided.

Now, everyone’s play time will vary, so the amount of time you spend in this phase could be a few days to a few weeks. If you find yourself unable to keep to the above guidelines then just try your best to follow these three golden rules.

1) Your outpost should always be building something.

2) Your troops should always be out raiding (once the local area is depleted just radiate outward, once again, having a good location helps a lot). Or at the very least, your troops should spend as little time as possible idling in your base (where they will only eat up food and take up housing).

3) Any resources not being spend on construction should be used to train troops. There is no such thing as having too much troops. (The game doesn’t even have a cap on the amount of troops you can have)

Once you have a decent outpost, population 350-400, army size 300-500, its time to start thinking about how you want to play the game from here on out. I’ve outlined two possible paths, though you can take a mixture of the two or come up with your own path. Figuring out how you want to play is half the fun!

Path of the Warrior
A warrior exists to make war. As a raider, it is very easy to transition into a warrior. All you have to do is spend all your resources building units and upgrading them. You might wonder what would be the point of having a big army and a small base (since you won’t build anything except what’s needed to build better, more advanced units). Well, there are a couple of advantages.

1) As your army gets bigger and bigger, especially if you want to house permanent defense units, it becomes more difficult to keep below your housing cap in order to train more units. There’s a practical level for how high of a pop cap you can achieve with a reasonable amount of time and resources. By using a smaller base (only the essential for military operations) you have more flexibility in running a large raiding army and housing a large defense army while still be able to produce large amount of units.

2) People have a tendency to judge your power based on your population. This is the most fallacious assumption that beginners make. By keeping a small base, people will under-estimate your true strength until you attack them.

3) Recall troop protection depends on your base size. Smaller bases can raid the same inactive outposts sooner than larger ones.

So how do you play as a warrior? Here are a few guidelines.

1) Join an alliance, preferably an active and aggressive one. If you’re playing the path of the warrior then you probably want to fight wars. A relatively new, low pop player coming in with a massive army will surprise people every time. You can do a great deal of damage if you catch people unaware.

2) Build another outpost or two. The cost of upgrading your building will increase significantly as you get past level 12-18ish depending on the building. By building a new outpost and a new stargate you can add two new raid slots immediately as oppose to upgrading your old stargate 8 levels. You can also tap into previously un-raided area by placing your outpost there. Even if you place your new outpost right next to your original one you can greatly increase your raid speed and the number of outposts you can raid in a given amount of time. Your new outpost will also have a lower population and therefore access to inactive outposts sooner. You can further shift your troops back and forth between the two bases to avoid attacks. I recommend leaving roughly the same amount of raid troops on each outpost. Should someone wipe one of them while you’re away, you won’t lose your raid capability. Remember, raid troops are also freighters for shipping resources from nubposts to you.

3) Upgrade toward the more advanced units. Valkyrie is a good one because it has decent offense and defense. It’s perfect for people who are too lazy to keep a separate offense and defense force. They are, however, not as effective as templars at defense because their defense capability per cost is lower. Note that valkyries are quite a bit slower than marines and not as suitable for raiding. This can be overcome by having a high level stargate.

Drones and wasps are also good units to use. Though being space units, they play by a different set of raid rules. There are currently no limits on the number of space raids you can carry out at once. I’ve once carried out 35 simultaneous space raids just to test the limit. However, the range of space raids is limited by the level of your destiny. The destiny becomes pretty expensive past level 12-15ish depending on if you use the architect bay, and it only adds 3 parsec per level. I believe you start with a range of 6 parsec at level one. So the number of targets will be very limited until you get a high level destiny. Furthermore, most nubposts have fleet protection even after their troop protection wears off. So you’ll only be able to raid mines for the most part. On the other hand, drones and wasps have comparable fighting/raiding power per cost as marines and templars (drone being more powerful than marines) yet have a higher fighting/raiding power per upkeep. I like to keep a small number of them for raiding mines since you can raid all of them at once and figure out which mine is not empty.

4) Fight a few wars and make a name for yourself. In all the time I played this game I have never been attacked. Not even once. I like to think it’s because of my peaceful ways but more likely it’s because everyone knows I have a big army running around crashing people’s parties. Your reputation can actually become a better defense than a gazillion templars. People are less likely to attack you if they think they’ll lose their troops.

5) Contrary to popular belief, you do not need a large base to be a good warrior. And having a large base does not make you a good warrior. Keep your bases on the light side and build only what is necessary.

Path of the Builder
This path may seem contradictory to you at first, a raider/builder sounds like an oxymoron. But a raider actually makes a great builder because the amount of resources needed to build higher level buildings can grow rapidly. Only a raider can bring in the kind of resources necessary to build high level buildings quickly. There are certain advantages to playing a raider/builder as oppose to a raider/warrior.

1) You will build a lot more outposts than the warrior and many of them will be farm colonies focused on resource generation. This gives you a large fixed income that can be tweaked to compliment your raid income and easily make up for any resources you lack.

2) You will have access to more advanced units because the most advanced units require a lot of resource investment just to access, which is typically not worth the cost and time for a warrior. But as a builder you’ll probably upgrade your asgard and architect bay, cutting both construction cost and time.

3) You will become stronger than the warrior in the long run.

There are also disadvantages.

1) The initial investment toward building new outposts and building up asgard/architect bay/resource structures are enormous. Thus you will be initially weaker than the warrior. Building up an empire requires patience if you don’t plan on playing the game for more than a month or two, the warrior is the better path to take.

2) You will initially need to spend more on defense since your military strength is comparatively lower. This means in the beginning you won’t be able to do war like the warrior can.

Here are some guidelines to playing the builder.

1) Build up your asgard and architect bay on your capitol once your second outpost is out and can help with raiding. Even though you’re a builder, your second outpost should still be geared toward raiding so your capitol can now focus on the initial investment needed for the builder path. Practically speaking, you’ll should only try to get asgard/architect bay up to level 16-20ish because the cost will rise very rapidly at that point.

2) Once you have a high level asgard, a high level architect bay, and accompanying resource storage, it’s time to spam outposts. The most important resource for building new outposts is food and BC, which is perfect for a nubpost raider. Plan out ahead of time which outpost you want to turn into farms, place these right next to your capitol for easier defense. Any additional military (read as raid) outposts you want to build are probably more effective if placed elsewhere. Note however that outposts placed farther away will take longer to transport resources to, so their start up time will be longer and they need to be more self-sufficient.

A typical build for a farm outpost should include at least a lv 1 stargate and a lv 1 desinty, in case you need to transport troops/ships back and forth. It should also have “combat simulation” researched in case you need to train marines here in an emergency. It should have a ton of E.D.E.N. farms and a few level of temple of Ra to generate food and BC. The levels of the raw material generators will depend on what you feel comfortable with. I found that keeping them a few levels behind farm generate sufficient raw materials for me without overtaxing my food income (every level of resource generator require additional upkeep). Next, the farm base should have enough resource storage to store all resources generated in 24 hours and transporters needed to transport the resources to the military bases. (You can tweak this based on your laziness) Lastly, have a high enough level shifter to cover your resources.

As a side note, once you have a few farm colonies down, it is now possible to overcome BC shortages. Just let the resources on your colonies build up to max. Your BC income will skyrocket from overflow conversion. I think you can get 50-100% more BC this way depending on what tax level you were originally set at. You don’t have to max every resource, even maxing one of them will give you a boost, though maxing food is usually the most effective.

Now you might ask, why not do this on your military base? Because this trick only works if you are not constructing buildings or training troops. A good raider is always constructing and/or training. If you can’t keep that up, then the solution is to raid more, not to max out your other resources and wait like a pacifist.

3) Once your farm outposts reach a decent size, stop constructing on them. In fact, you won’t need to look at them more than once a day to transport resources. These outposts are meant to provide you with a stable source of income, which they cannot do if they keep constructing. You must decide on when you want to stop investing in them. I found that pop size 400-500 (mostly resource buildings) is a pretty good size though your preferences may vary. While you’re building up the farm outposts, you should build toward more advanced units on your military outposts. See the path of the warrior for good choice of units. At the time of writing, starships are not effective on a fighting-power-per-cost basis. However, Disturbia and Valhalla are the only units capable of de-leveling buildings so if you have the resources might as well get started toward those.

4) If you’re rapidly growing empire hasn’t given people pause already, you should go make a name for yourself by fight in a war or two. At this point, you should be powerful enough to play with the top players or at least contribute significantly to your alliance. Go out there and crash some parties.

Tip: When you build your Battlestation, a good unit that is quite easy to resaerch and train is the eragon. Strong, good carrying capacity, and as far as destroyers go is fairly cheap.