Tips spaceempires

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

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

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.) 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 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.

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. 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.