Tips spaceempires

Mouse Controls

• Double click = colonize planet, tow mineral, tow wreck, deposit mineral, deposit wreck
• Mouse wheel = up/down scroll
• SHIFT + Mouse wheel = left/right scroll
• CTRL + Mouse wheel = zoom in/out

How to Build Ships

To build a ship, you need (a) cash, and (b) a colony with shipyards. At the start of the game, you only have shipyards at your homeworld, so if you want to build ships anywhere else, you must first build some shipyards (SY). You can only build one shipyard per planet per turn, and you can only build shipyards at planets that are generating at least 1 income. You cannot use a shipyard the same turn it was built. Once you have a planet with a shipyard, the planet will show the capacity for building, in the form #/#. At Shipyard technology level 1 (the initial level) each SY can build one ship with a hull size of x1. Click that planet, and then choose one of the ship-building options on the blue buttons at the top of the screen. The game automatically keeps track of this building limit and of the maximum amount of counters - the check is carried out when you click on Done, so if you exceed a value you need to go back and fix it. To remove a ship which you don't want to build any longer, you can click on the counter which has appeared next to the planet.

Strategy Guide

Settling Planets

The basic opening strategy is to settle as many planets as quickly as possible. To do this, you mostly want to build enough scouts to explore all of the stars near your homeworld, especially the colorful stars (rather than the grey stars), because the colorful stars are more likely to have habitable planets and less likely to have lethal damage. You then need to build colony ships and send one of them to each habitable planet. Your colonies will then automatically grow. If you invent terraforming, then you can also settle barren planets. (In an advanced game, you must research terraforming before you build the colony ship, or specifically upgrade your colony ship at one of your shipyards.) Mind that terraforming has a large up front cost and with a single planet pays itself in 8 economy phases (24 turns), it might be better to concentrate on fighting instead. You should also build a second miner and then send both of your miners to grab mineral deposits and tow those deposits back to your colonies and deposit them on your colonies. It may be worthwhile to buy one or two levels of move technology in the early game so that you can send ships into deep space a little faster. If you have a lot of surviving scouts, you can send them into deep space (the grey stars) and just let them die if they run into danger. If most of your scouts die early, then it might be worth buying the exploration tech (and two levels of ship size tech) so that you can buy a cruiser with advanced exploration technology (basically the USS Enterprise from Star Trek) and safely explore the remaining grey stars.

Think carefully about where to build new shipyards -- you need shipyards in order to build new ships, and shipyards make reasonably good defensive units, but you can only have shipyards on 4 planets at a time. You should save at least one 'stack' of shipyards to use as a forward base near where you think your enemies will appear.

Building a War Fleet

After you have five or six planets colonized, it's time to think about building your first war fleet. Consider investing in ship size (to build larger, stronger ships), attack technology, and/or defense technology. It's better to buy the technology before you buy the ships; otherwise your ships might not benefit from the technology. On a small map, you will need to pick one or two technologies to focus on, because you won't have time for all of them to pay off before you are at war. On a larger map, you can invest in more technology. You can only improve each technology by one level per economic turn, so if you want to build huge battleships, or cruisers with +2 offense, start buying the relevant techs a few turns before you plan to start construction.

Note that attack and defense technologies are capped by the hull size of each ship. This means Scouts and Destroyers can only benefit from +1 attack and +1 defense, Cruisers and Battlecruisers can only benefit from up to +2 attack and up to +2 defense, and so on. In general it is advised to build bigger ships only when you have at least one technology (attack or defense) capped for that hull size. I.e. Cruisers and Battlecruisers should have Attack/Defense 2/1 or 1/2 at least or they may be outperformed by smaller ships. Ditto for Battleships and Dreadnoughts. If you are playing with advanced upgrade rules, then you must also invent the tech before you build the ship; otherwise you have to specifically go and upgrade the ship before the new tech will take effect.

The amount of technology you can afford to invest in before building your first fleet will depend on the size of the map and on how aggressively your opponents are behaving. On a larger map, or if your opponent is mostly sticking to their half of the board, you may be able to research battlecruisers or other more advanced technologies before doing any significant construction. On the other hand, if you are playing on a small 2-player map and your opponent is sending scouts into your half of the board, you may need to build some destroyers, shipyards, and/or forward bases to protect your colonies before you continue researching more advanced technologies. Although larger ships will eventually be more cost-effective (because they can retreat and automatically heal the damage they take for free and because they cost slightly less in maintenance fees), in the opening it is actually smaller ships that are more cost-effective. A swarm of smaller ships will usually get a +1 fleet size bonus to their attack rolls, and if you only have time to build 2 or 3 of your high-tech ships, then it is too difficult to justify the large up-front investment in technology when that investment is only being divided among 2 or 3 large ships. To get good use out of a technology, you usually need to be able to deploy it on 5 or more ships before the decisive battle.

Winning Battles

If your fleet is larger than your opponent's fleet, you will have the option to "screen" some of your ships before each round of combat. Screened ships can neither make any attacks nor be the target of any attacks, but they still provide you with their special abilities. For example, a destroyer with scanner technology will continue to scan cloaked enemy raiders even if it is screened. It can be useful to screen a relatively weak ship with an important special ability, or to split off and screen damaged ships, or to screen ships that you plan to retreat very soon and that otherwise might not survive. Civilian ships like miners and merchant pipelines are automatically screened and cannot retreat. Otherwise, you generally should not screen your ships; screening your ships badly weakens your offensive power. If you're not willing to risk a ship, then either don't send it into combat, or retreat it from combat at the first opportunity.

When deciding which enemy ships to target, keep an eye on your opponents' offense, defense, and hull strength. There is little point in targeting a x3 hull strength ship if you only have 1 attacker, because if the x3 ship is ever in serious danger, it can simply retreat. Similarly, if your opponent has +3 defense and you are attacking with an E3 laser, you are going to do very little damage. If at all possible, it is better to target ships where you have a realistic chance of killing your enemy. If all of your enemies are vulnerable, then look at which enemies are capable of doing the most damage to your fleet. It may also make sense to target enemies that have not yet fired in the current round. For example, if you are attacking an enemy colony defended by a Base (tactics A) and a Destroyer (tactics D) with a fleet of cruisers (tactics C) and scouts (tactics E), then you might want to use your Cruisers to fire at the Destroyer -- if you hit it with your Cruisers, it will be dead before it can return fire, whereas if you hit the Base, the enemy Destroyer will live long enough to fire on your Scouts. Note that between firing this turn and next turn all enemy ships in this example will have a chance to fire, so it may make sense to shoot at the higher class ships regardless.

When deciding when to retreat, keep an eye on your fleet size bonus (for fleets of small ships) and your accumulated damage (for fleets of large ships). If enough of your small ships have died that you are no longer collecting a fleet size bonus (you no longer have 2:1 superiority), then the battle will likely only get worse for you from now on, so you might want to leave. Conversely, if one of your x3 Battleships has already taken 2 hits, you might want to retreat that ship and continue fighting with your undamaged ships. This temporarily weakens your fleet, but it keeps you from losing a valuable resource.

Keep in mind that ships can retreat in unexpected directions as long as they do not move further away from any of their owners' colonies. If your opponent only has colonies in one region of the map, then their ships may be able to retreat "sideways" along the imaginary border of their empire in a direction that actually takes their ships closer to your homeworld.

Ship Types

• BB: Battleships
• BC: Battle Cruisers
• CA: Cruisers
• CV: Carriers*
• DD: Destroyers
• DN: Dreadnaughts
• F: Fighters*
• R: Raiders*
• SC: Scouts
• SW: Minesweepers*
• SY: Ship Yards

*Spaceship types introduced in the Advanced Rules