Welcome to part 3 of my guide to Neptune’s Pride! This time I’m going to be talking about your economy, industry and technology

Upgrades

There are three things you can upgrade on your stars; economy gives you more money; industry gives you more ships; and technology determines how fast you get upgrades. Now of course you can’t upgrade all of these as much as you would like, so you need to plan a little about what you intend to upgrade where.

As a general rule upgrading your economy will help you out in the long run, upgrading your industry will provide more short term relief, and technology sits somewhere in the middle. Because of this the attitude of your neighbors greatly dictates what you should be doing. If they are peaceful you should take the opportunity to invest in your future, but if they are hostile you might need ships more than other things.

You will also have noticed that some stars allow you to upgrade for cheaper than others – these are the places you should spend the majority of your cash since you’ll get more bang for your buck. You can tell which are the best stars by looking at the brown ring which surrounds them, the larger the ring the cheaper the star will be to develop. You should make these stars prime targets when attacking. However don’t try and spend all your resources making one of these into a ’super star’, you’ll do much better if you spread things around.

Economy

On the surface economy is pretty simple – each point of it that you have provides you with $10 a day and so therefore the more of it that you have the better. Unfortunately its not quite as simple as that, and you do need to put some thought into where you upgrade it.

Payback time

Remember that for each level you upgrade a star, the next level will cost more. If level 1 economy costs you $10, level 2 is likely to cost you $20. Because of this you need to factor in payback time when deciding where to upgrade your economy – this is the amount of time it will take you to break even (remember that each point in economy gives you $10 per day). In the case given above, you will break even for level 1 after 1 day, but for level 2 it will take 2 days before the upgrade pays for itself. Until you hit the break even point, that economy upgrade has actually cost you money!

Positioning

When I plan my economy upgrades I normally ask myself two questions. Will someone else capture my star before this upgrade pays for itself, and will the game end before the upgrade pays for itself. If the answer to either of these is yes, you are probably better off not upgrading. This doesn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t invest in your border stars, but if you do make sure you have the military power to defend them. When you capture a planet, you get $10 for each level of economy it has (and then the economy is reduced to zero). If an enemy has developed economy on a star and then left it undefended waste no time in capturing it as this is free money – you don’t even have to defend the star you can just ransack it and leave.

Industry

In Neptune’s Pride you can’t directly create ships. Instead you get 2 ships per day for each point of industry at a star. If you neglect this area in the beginning there is no fast way to build large fleets later on, so even if your neighbors are peaceful and you are going down an economy route make sure you pump a little into industry. Its also worth bearing in mind that an early industry build will destroy anyone who focusing purely on economy or technology – you will just steal their resources away from them as they are built.

Positioning

Assuming you are developing on high resource stars, there isn’t really a bad place for you to put industry. If you upgrade your border stars you will be bolstering your front line, and if you upgrade your further off stars you are providing a valuable source of reinforcements. Obviously don’t upgrade a front line star unless you feel you can defend it, but losing industry isn’t such a big deal, as long as you have a plan to get it back shortly

Technology

Each point of technology you have provides research points which are used to improve your technology. This is the most expensive upgrade, but it is vital if you want to stay competitive later in the game. Don’t worry too much if other players are going for a tech build early game, you should be able to catch up with them once your cash gets flowing and you start trading with other players. You will get up to 10 econ or industry upgrades for their one tech upgrade, and in my opinion that will be more useful to you early on. Like industry, technology isn’t destroyed when a star is captured

Some technology in this game is more useful than others. The four you can research are Weapon Skill, Speed, Scanning Range and Jump Range – in roughly that order of importance

Weapon Skill: Since this is a game about combat, WS is the one skill you can never have enough of. Once you start getting this stat higher than your neighbours you gain two advantages – it costs you fewer ships to take one of their stars, and it costs them more ships to take one of yours. If you can get this stat significantly higher than everyone else you will still stand a chance even if they team up against you, as you will be able to defend against vast numbers of their ships while losing few of your own.

Speed: If Weapon skill is your power, speed is your maneuverability. This will let you organise your defenses while your opponent is in transit and strike them before their fleets can react. I don’t class it as being as useful as WS, since an opponent with a better speed can be mitigated against somewhat by good planning and positioning, and superior scanning range.

Scanning Range: This lets you see what other players are up to and gives you more warning of enemy fleet movements. On the plus side its very cheap too, so you definitely shouldn’t neglect it. You should be aiming to get this up to at least 1 lightyear by the endgame because by that point the surviving players will have very fast, very strong fleets. The more you can get the better, but chances are you will find that WS is a higher priority.

Range: Not very useful after the first few levels, for a few reasons. The further you jump the longer you give your opponents to have something waiting when you arrive, so lots of shorter jumps tend to be better even if they take longer. You also don’t want to be jumping blind to systems you can’t see and so in order to use this effectively at long range you may find that you need to upgrade your scanning quite a bit. In my experience, once you get your jump range up to 1-1.5 lightyears you are better spending your tech on other things.

Tech Cartels

If you have to resarch each of these yourself, it will take a long time. A much better strategy is to pick another player early on and form a tech agreement with them where you each research a certain area and share the advances. I would suggest that one of you focuses on WS and one on Speed. This way you will both outstrip your neighbors quite quickly. You should pick one of your distant allies to form this partnership with. The hope here is that they will subdue their neighbours, you can defeat yours and you will meet in the middle – once this happens games are usually ended in a gentlemanly manner with the weaker player allowing the stronger to win. What you shouldn’t do is have more than one trading partner – this is likely to cause upset, especially if you are giving one players tech right back to their neighbor.

Positioning

As far away from other players as possible. If you have resource rich planets on your borders which you can defend then its ok to upgrade these a little, but the majority of your tech upgrades should be out of range of opponents since they don’t need to be at the front lines to be useful.

Picking your targets

You’ll find that due to the different resource levels of stars players will tend to spend their upgrades at a few stars – these are the targets you should go for. Unfortunately they will be the most heavily defended, but if you can take them you will be well rewarded. There is no point wasting ships taking a star with no developments unless it will give you a positional advantage or you are cleaning up during the endgame. Focus your attacks on their strongholds and turn their upgrades against them. Make sure that when you attack you leave enough defenders behind, otherwise you might take one of their best stars only to lose one of your own. For this reason you should keep your own high production stars out of range where possible, and for the best effect build a buffer zone of low value stars between you and your enemies.

Next time I’ll be talking about all the other odd bits and pieces that didn’t fit anywhere else, and hopefully it will be a bit shorter than this post!