Doctor Ransom's Strategy Guide

'''THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM CONTENT EDITS. SPELLING, GRAMMAR CORRECTIONS, AND COMMENTS ARE WELCOME.'''

Pre-requisites
In this guide I will assume that you have already completed the Getting Started Guide created by the developer. You can, however do some things a little differently. Personally, I started producing concrete before I had 100 lumber yards and started making Tech earlier than recommended. This worked for me and was therefore acceptable. It may not work for you. Before you start this guide, you should have at least 10 concrete producing systems and 2 tech producers with infastructure to support them completely. It's recomended that you are producing about 1K wood per minute. It will probably take about a real time week from creating your account to get to this point.

Step 1: Getting Ready for Data
So you have started making Tech. Now what? What do you do with this rather expensive resource? Well, there are a lot of options, but right now your best bet is probably to start making data. Data is made by computers by using power, and allows you to discover new planets. Depending on the number of metal, glass, concrete making facilities you have you may be starting to feel a bit cramped. A new planet is the perfect way to expand your empire.

The first things you're going to need is a way to power the computer. I prefer solar panels because of their footprint, but generators or even ten waterwheels would work. Go ahead and set these up and put a pipe in the spot you would put the computer. Now create a pipe system to take the data to your base. It's good to creat the power systems first. Set them up so that the unused power goes to you base. You may need it later, but that will be explained more later.

Add the computers as you can afford them. Planet discovery costs have been greatly reduced as of one of the Jan 2014 updates, but having a lot of extra data can be convieniet. Even if you can't use it at the moment you might be able to sell it to another player for enough of a profit to buy yourself into an alliance. More on that later.

Here's an image of my data center as of an old Alpha build. You probably won't need this many computers. At the time I built this planet discovery costs increased exponentially and I found it often took more than a week to save up enough data to buy another planet.

Step 2: Preparing for War
Now that you are starting to collect data for acquiring planets, you are going to need a way to keep them. You can't loose your home planet, but there are plenty of player who think they like your planet more than you do. It only takes 20 missiles to take a bare planet, and 20 missiles isn't hard to come by, so you need to build some defenses. The best way to do this is to increase your planets health. This can be done by placing machines and producers. They each provide 1 health point to the planets total, so well developed planets are automatically better protected than their less developed counterparts. However, fully building over a normal sized planet only give you a few thousand extra health points, and that's not enough to deter the more determined players. You should build defense machines.

Defense machines are autonomous machines that provide 1K health to your planet for every defense machine placed. They also increase the rate that your planets health regenerates by 1 point per machine placed. You should probably place about 5 of these on all of your planets, with the more important ones havingt 20+. This seems excessive, but it is a great deterrent to all but the most determined players. It takes about 20 missiles to take down 1000HP, so the more health you have the more the other player has to spend to take you planets.

The second thing you are going to want is a great big stockpile of missiles. Missiles are what you use to take a planet, and it's a good idea to keep a lot of them on hand. I would recommend that you alway keep 20 per attackable planet so you can quickly retake any that you lose. Missiles cost 1K Metal, 1K oil, and 1K Tech. Obviously they are very expensive and you shouldn't use them unless you are sure you can use them effectively. I don't have a recommendation of how many builders to purpose to this task, it really depends on how many resources you can spend on them, but I suggest that you creat at least one per hour. I produce quite a few per hour since I am fighting for well defended planets.

It's very easy to use all of your stored resources making missiles. I recommend creating oil, tech, and metal makers that have no other purpose than to supply the missile makers. They don't have to be physically connected, but you need to think of them as reserved for the missile makers only. Here is a photo of one of my smaller missile producer setups.

Step 3: Taking your first Planet
So you found a planet that someone else already discovered. It's a metal planet and you really need that resource! Don't worry, you can take it. You are going to need to user those missiles you made earlier, and a lot of them. Missiles do a random amount of damage between 0 and 100 hit points (As of a Jan. 2014 update the average is weighted toward 50.) so will will use the avareage damage, 50 hp, for calculating how many missiles we will need. You can figure out how many missiles you will need by deviding the planets health by 50. Once, you have that many missiles, I recommend that you do not send them all at once. IF you send them in vollies of ten or twenty at a time you may find that you don't need as many as you thought if the randomizer works in your favor. So, build the missiles and fire them. Take the planet and... now what? You are going to need to defend it. You should have been producing a lot of tech at this point. I recommend having 50K before you take a planet. Start dropping defense machines (Or defense sattilites if you have them.) as fast as you can and then heal your planet using that energy you stockpiled earlier. You may not be able to heal it all that way, but try to get it over 30K health. This will deter all but the most determined of players. Eventually try to get it over 50K hp, or even 100K for those important planets. It takes about 2K missiles to take a planet at 100K health and only the wealthiest players will have those numbers.

Step 4: Expanding Your Empire: Research
So now you have taken a planet or two. You are doing well with your resources, and you probably have a lot of dirt or ice that you don't know what to do with. Well, it's time to do research! What does research give you? Awesome. That's what. It's so awesome it doesn't even need an exclamation mark and that is pretty awesome if you ask me. Ok, really, it gives you upgrades. You can upgrade your pipes to hold more stuff as a time. You can upgrade your producers to make twice as much stuff, and your machines to handle TEN TIMES the amount they once could. Additionally, upgrading your home base collects free resources automatically! Sounds nice? it is. Here's how you get it.

Fist you need to make some research labs. They cost 10K tech a piece, but they are worth it. You need just one to start. Send 100 units off your junk resources to it a minute. This will give you 1 research a minute. That's not a lot, but the amount or rea\search you get per minute increases based on how many different sets of 100 resources you feed it per minutes. This page breaks that down for you better than I could here. Once you have enough research you should go for the pipes upgrade. This increases allows you to increase the inventory of pipes, give your base and warehouses the ability to teleport resources to other teleporter- enabled warehouses, and to upgrade your base to collect free resources automatically.

Keep in mind that upgrading a building is not free. Even though you researched the upgrade, that's all you did. Upgrading a building costs resources like oil, metal, and rubber. Keep this in mind and don't upgrade machines that don't need it.

First you need to save up and upgrade your pipes. This upgrade is powerful and relatively cheap. You will find that you need this upgrade to take full advantage of the other upgrades. This upgrade, when applied, will increase the inventory of you pipes by a factor of ten. That, however, is the least of its abilities. You will find that this upgrade can be applied to Warehouses and Bases as well. When applied to the former the bases gain the ability to teleport their inventory to other upgraded warehouses using transactions. This can be useful to cut down on the number of pipes needed to more resources from one place to another. This can also allow the player to create complicated manufacturing systems that would otherwise be impossible to make. Upgrading a base gives it the abilies of a warehouse, but also one very specail ability. The upgraded base will now collect free resources as they appear. This is a huge benefit and for some players it can effectively double the collection of several resources. You should apply this upgrade on any planet that has any sort of valuable free resource.

(Note: as of writing this, upgraded warehouses loose the ability to send transactions to neighboring tiles. The developer is aware of this and has indicated that this is likely a bug that should be fixed in a future version of the game.) 

Once you have the pipes upgrade I wopuld recommend getting orbital stations. This allows you to place oribtal version of defense stations, power stations, labs, etc around planets that are either full or unable to support the standard machines. After this, I would research the items that are related to getting lumber, then stone and concrete, then metal. Then move on to tech and work from there. Notice a pattern? You should.

Step 4 cont.: Expanding You Empire: Localized vs. Distributed Manufacturing.
So now that you have a few extra planets and the means to keep them you have started to use there resources to make more stuff. You have probably noticed that you are running out of room for all your machines. You are probably using localized manufacturing. Localized manufacturing describes the method of refining your resources where they are collected. Early on this has it's advantages since you don't have to worry about getting the right number of machines and resources to balance everthing. Power and resources are just there and you don't have to worry that you don't have the inventory space in your pipes to move everything and you don't have to use a lot of pesky warehouses to make everything work like it should. It looks simple and pretty. It just works. Like a Mac.

Later on, however, you are finding that all those pipes are getting annoying. You don't have enough room for the machines and resource collectors. It's time to work with distributed manufacturing. This is actually a lot easier to set up than you might think, it just takes time. First, just start collecting the raw resources. Delete the machines controlling them and just make a planet of producers and pipes. Send these resources back to you home planet. On your home planet start setting up areas of producers and warehouses to supply them materials and energy. Notice the resource collection and processing no longer take place in the same spot. This will save you lots of time and space in the long run.

Step 4: Expanding Your Empire: Finding Allies
Once you are fairly well established you should start looking at joining an alliance. This will permit you to access all the benefits of an alliance such as help from other players, free resources, protection, etc. You should probably become relatively stable on your own. An alliance will want you to be able to offer them something in return for allowing you to join them. Do you own a metal, marsh, or carbon planet? An alliance might allow you to join if you promise to share some of the resources of that planet with them. In turn, they may offer you their protection and weapons when you need to defend that planet.

If no alliance will take you, or you don't like the exsisting alliances, you can start your own if you have 100M Stellars. You need to money to buy a ship. A ship is the base of operations for an alliance. Its where free resources are stored, and upgrading it can give you damage and protection boosts. As long as a ship is in service, none of the players in the alliance may be attacked. This means you should work to upgrade the ships health and sheilds as soon as possible.

''At the time of writing this, Alliances are not enabled in the game. ''

Helpful Hints
1. If you planet has ice caps, take advantage of them. Ice is not a very useful resource so use the space to place you base and and build those systems that don't need to be next to the resources.

2. Never use all your missiles to take a planet. Wait until you have enough to counter your opponents attempt to instantly recapture his or her planet. This will assure your victory.

3. Learn to use warehouses. They take a minute to set up, but they save a lot of time and space in the long run.

4. Collect large quantities of a "trash" resource. You can sell it for 1 stellar on the market and still make millions.

5. Try to make systems on your home planet independant of outside systems. This will help prevent problems when your planets are taken.

6. Never use all of a resource when building producers or machines. You just might be interupting your coal-making or tech-making systems elsewhere.

7. Never sell a resource on the market if you think you might need it. Only sell your excess. The market is not yet reliable enough to insure that you can get your resource back.

8. Always assume that your planets are visible to your opponents and defend them accordingly.

9. It's possible to find out how many defense machines a person has on a planet. Fire one missile and then wait for the health to increase. The number of defense machines on the planet is eqaul to one less than the amount the health increases after a minute. This can be used to find the number of real machines on a planet and then guess at its value to the owner.

10. Start your own alliance if none will take you. This gives you the benefit of the protection that a ship offers which can be nice if you have a lot of planets. (Please do not use this option if there are a lot of alliances in the game. This Tip is for now, when less than a dozen people can support such a tactic.)

11. Never attack Adam, Doctor_Ransom, Ginnypond, or Matrix expecting an easy fight. They are very powerful or have powerful allies. They are attached to their planets and will make you pay for them in blood. Doctor_Ransom once suffered a complete reset caused by Adam because he took Ginnypond's planet. (That deffinitly was the reason. The new alpha build requiring a server reset had absolutely nothing to do with it.)