This is the last post in my series about strategy and tactics in Neptune’s Pride. Here I’m going to explain a few things about the trading system which might not be clear, and a few ways you can use it to manipulate the game. Finally I’ll talk about star garrisons. If you’re already pretty familiar with the game I suspect you will get more value out of this post than the others

Trading Explained

For the most part the trading system is fairly self explanatory. You can send a gift of money, technology, fleets or planets. Money and technology is fine, the confusion begins when we get onto fleets and planets.

If you gift a fleet to your opponents while it is orbiting one of your stars, it will immediately attack the defenders the same as if it was a hostile fleet which had just arrived (as far as the game is concerned, it is). This will result in the usual lost ships, planets and economy. The solution is send a fleet toward a star owned by the player you want to gift it to, and then send the gift as it is in transit. Make sure you tell them what you are going to do, otherwise they may mistake it for an attack!

If you do gift a fleet and you are incredibly paranoid, you may want to rename it. Fleets are named after the stars where they are created so if you gift a fleet to player A who then uses it to attack player B, B may twig that he got it from you. However given that there can be multiple stars with the same name and they change hands frequently anyway I wouldn’t worry too much about this.

Gifting planets is different. When you gift a planet you also gift any fleets orbiting it, and any other ships which may be in the garrison

Trading for fun and profit

An interesting feature of the trading system is that in some situations, it can be used offensively. If you’ve played a free game you will have undoubtedly come across the concept of an AI player. This is someone who signed up but for one reason or another hasn’t logged in recently to play and their assets have been put under AI control. From what I’ve observed the AI operates on a tit-for-tat basis – if you attack them they will attack you and you can use this in a very sneaky way to your advantage. If a player is attacking you and you are finding it hard to hold up, wait until they are approaching one of your stars and then gift it to an AI close to them at the last second (preferably after evacuating your ships safely away from it). As far as the AI is concerned they have just been attacked by that player and will start to retaliate. I’ve used this to great effect in some of my games.

You can also of course gift tech to small players in order to slow down a bigger threat which is making its way to you. The most effective tech to gift in this case is weapon skill – you can turn what was a fairly soft target into a nasty defensive porcupine with just a few levels of weapons tech. Combine this with the AI trick above for even better results, but be warned you will likely make someone really annoyed once they work out what you did! To muddy the water don’t bring them all the way up to your tech level, try and make it look like it was another player who sent the gifts.

You could also experiment with sending your ships to attack player A, and then gifting them to player B once they are in transit. However you’d need to be very crafty with this and probably gift the originating star to player A to mask that they originated at one of yours, otherwise it will be blindingly obvious what you did. Don’t expect this to be a reliable tactic, it will only work against the most stupid an un-communicative of opponents.

One last use for the trading system is to end the game early under conditions favorable to you. We’ll take a scenario to illustrate this. Lets assume you are in the end game with 2 other players. You are second, player A is in 1st and player B is in 3rd. A and B have allied against you, you are outnumbered, outgunned and diplomacy has failed – the best you can hope for is 2nd place. For the sake of argument lets say it is 90 stars to win, you have 60, A has 70 and B has 30. Each day A and B are taking more stars from you and its just a matter of time. The best course of action here might be surprising – you should gift 20 stars to A and secure 2nd place. Why not fight it out? Assuming you have judged that A will inevitably win, you want to make sure he does that before B takes enough of your stars to drop you down to 3rd place. We know A will take 20 of your stars, which means B only need to take 5 to tie with you. Its much better to gift them before this happens and end the game on your terms.

Garrisons

An often overlooked feature is the fact that you can set a garrison size at your stars. This sets the minimum number of ships which will be left defending a star. You can then program your fleets to visit the stars on their way to the front lines, and they will pick up any excess ships into their ranks. You can use this to chain a fleet through multiple stars without having to manually transfer ships at each one. You should always garrison at least 1 ship on each star for reasons discussed in part 1.

That concludes my strategy series on Neptune’s Pride. Bear in mind that the game is in beta and new features are still being added which may not be covered here