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

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!

Diplomacy

This game is all about diplomacy, so don’t be afraid to talk to other players. The chances are that at least some of them will be talking amongst themselves, and if you are not in on those discussions you are setting yourself up to be the target of a combined attack. I tend to put other players into three broad categories – immediate allies, immediate enemies, and distant allies.

Immediate allies and enemies

Everyone with whom you share a border falls into one of these two groups. At the start of the game send a message to all of these people and suggest an alliance, or at the very least a non-aggression pact. Your ideal goal is to obtain friendly relations with all of your neighbors except one – the friendly neighbors become your immediate allies and the unfriendly/non responsive ones your immediate enemies. Expand into your enemies space while trying not to annoy your allies (do this by trading them tech and info, and even fleets if necessary). If all your neighbors turn out to be friendly you have two options – either turn one of them into an enemy yourself (by attacking them) or wait until one of them decides to attack you. In the early stages expansion is key so don’t be afraid to ruffle a few feathers – its all in the spirit of the game!

Distant Allies

As well as contacting your immediate neighbors you should also be contacting the more distant players as eventually you are likely to come into contact with them. Your goal with these players is to feed them useful information and the odd tech to keep them sweet – later in the game it is likely that one of them will be quite powerful and you want them on your side if that happens. All of the players you aren’t neighbors with should be in this category. If you end up with distant enemies you are hopefully doing very well in your game (with lots of tech and stars) and should endeavour to turn them into distant allies before they form an alliance against you.

Keep an eye open

As well as forming your own allies, try and identify other alliances which have formed. Sometimes this is easy, and sometimes you just have to go on gut instinct. The two most obvious signs are tech trading and weak shared borders. Look for players who have similar tech levels, and in particular look for players who seem to be quite a way ahead of the curve. In most cases this indicates a tech cartel (explained later). The other easy way, although it requires scanning, is to look at borders between players. If the border is heavily fortified you can assume the players are either at war or at least don’t trust each other. If the border has not much there it is likely you are looking at an alliance. Bear these in mind when choosing who to attack – if you manipulate things correctly you can end up with extra allies to aid your assault, but if not you might find more resitance than you were bargaining for.

Don’t be a twat

While everything might start out all nice and friendly at some point there will be backstabbing, and you will probably be both the recipient and the deliverer. Remember that when you get down to it this is just a game, don’t take it personally or make life miserable for other people. A large part of the fun is the plotting and scheming that goes on in the background, so if you wake up to find that the rest of the galaxy has allied against you don’t sulk about it, just laugh it off and work out where you went wrong with your diplomacy. Likewise don’t antagonise people who you are beating. No one likes a sore loser or a boastful victor.

Next time I’m going to tell you all about resource management and technology

Combat System

You need to drop any preconceptions of how this should work, as it is different to what you would intuitively expect. The way you probably expect the combat to work (as a rough formula) is

‘Number of ships’ x ‘Weapon skill’ = ‘Damage caused’

However in practice, this is completely wrong and you will frequently see cases where you opponents’ 2 defenders manage to kill 15 of your 500 strong fleet before you take them out. So what is really going on here? Firstly you need to start thinking of your fleets as a single ship with a ‘health’ value, rather than a lot of individual ships. Secondly you need to realise that each of these ships take turns to damage each other, and that the damage done is equal to your weapon skill (+1 for the defender). The defender strikes first. Lets run through an example, Player A has 9 weapon skill with a 25 strong fleet, and is defending against player B with 10 weapon skill and a 45 strong fleet. Since A is defending they get to strike first, and also get +1 WS bringing them up to 10.

Start: A = 21; B = 45
Round 1: A attacks B for 9+1 damage. A = 21; B = 35
Round 2: B attacks A for 10 damage. A = 11; B = 35
Round 3: A attacks B for 9+1 damage. A = 11; B = 25
Round 4: B attacks A for 10 damage. A = 1; B = 25
Round 5: A attacks B for 9+1 damage. A = 1; B = 15
Round 6: B attacks A for 10 damage. A = 0; B = 15

Hopefully this illustrates better how the combat system works. Note that it cost B 30 ships to kill A’s 21 – the defender has the advantage in this game.

Now the good thing about this system is that you can work out exactly how each combat will go and plan accordingly, but bear in mind extra ships and tech gains that your opponent might make while you are in transit to their stars. There are also the following tactical points that we can apply as a result of the combat system.

Have a minimum defense of 1 ship

In many cases your planets will be under attack by an overwhelming force and you will want to pull your ships back to regroup. In these cases you should always leave at least one ship stationed at your star. That way you will kill your WS+1 of their ships, for the cost of only one of yours. If you apply this across a few planets a large fleet can be reduced to nothing by the time it reaches your core systems. There isn’t really any excuse not to have 1 ship stationed at all of your planets all the time – it provides a deterrent and stops small fleets from quicly capturing your stars. This leads us onto the next point.

Know your minimum attacking force

If your opponent has WS 10 and you send 5 ships at one of his (defended) stars you are wasting your time – he will wipe out  your forces before they can retaliate. In this example, assuming there is only 1 ship defending you would need to send at least 12 ships to take the star. 11 of your ships would be killed and you would be left with 1 ship on the star.

Try and be the defender

You will always come out better in a fight if you are the defender – if possible try and draw your opponents into attacking you rather than the other way around. Weaken the defenses on a planet but have reinforcements close by, out of your opponent’s sensor range. Once they take the bait move your ships back to defend the star, then if you feel strong enough retaliate against their now weakened defense. You can see you opponents sensor range on the map or the minimap – select one of their stars and look for how far their colored border extends – this is their sensor range.

Pick your fights

You can see tons of info about other players in the player browser, including their tech levels and number of ships. Don’t pick a fight with someone who has better weapons and more ships than you unless you have a very good reason (eg, an alliance of other players helping you out). You are very likely to lose and get wiped out in their counter attack.

In the next part I’ll be talking about diplomacy and a rough guide of how to deal with other players.