'So you're in a war' guide

There are two main parts to fighting a war: Money and defences. Money comes from occupations, your own astros, pillages and debris. Defences are turrets, command centres and fleet. Your aim to keep as much of your defences around as possible, while removing as much of your opponents defences as possible, while taking as much money off them as you can. The purpose of this guide is to try and help people fight, while hindering your enemy as much as possible. I’ll start off by writing about money.

Firstly, and I cannot stress this enough, when there is a chance of the *beep* hitting the fan and having one of your bases getting occupied, spend all of your credits. If you spend all/most of your money then the enemy cannot receive it in pillage and if the enemy don’t have it, then they can’t use it to buy more fleet. During a war you should spend all of your money when:

1 – you go to bed at night, in case any of your astros are pillaged while you sleep

2 – You see a giant enemy fleet heading for one of your astros (and can’t find a weak spot to hit for massive damage)

The opposite of this also applies: try and pillage your enemy when they have lots of credits on them.

So say the worst comes to the worst and one of your bases is occupied. The first thing most enemies will try and do is bring in recyclers to collect the debris. There are two ways to stop this:

1 – move away as much of your fleet as possible. That way they won’t make much of a profit as most of the debris will have come from their ships.

2 – Queue up a bunch of fighters to be finished just before the next half-hour. With any luck the recyclers should appear just in time to get mauled by a bunch of fighters.

Option 2 is preferable, as it will hinder the enemy from recycling debris in the future.

If and/or when you take an enemy base, a good idea may be to invite someone from another guild to recycle the debris and pray that the person you’ve occupied doesn’t attack them. Another thing to note is that if you are allowed to pillage trade routes, then do so. Another trick is to ‘ninja’ the debris. You do this by sending your recyclers so that they arrive just before half past the hour. You let them stay just long enough to pick up debris, then you send them elsewhere. If you’re lucky you should get the debris and not get your recyclers blown up.

A lot of the higher economy players have large numbers of occupations, which provide a lot of their money. Therefore, you should end them as soon as possible. That policy should also apply to yourself; free your astros ASAP. If the occupation is a UC, then it is recommended that you send the location to another guild to prevent it being retaken by the enemy. If the occupation is of another player, then either take the astro for yourself or try and give the guy time to defend himself, in case the enemy comes back for the astro.

Summary:
- Spend your money so the enemy can’t take it
- Kill recyclers where possible
- Dispose of enemy occupations

And now we move onto defences.

Firstly, defensive fleets. These fleets should include a lot of fighters and based off what we’ve learnt from Borg and ragex recently, lots and lots of cruisers and heavy cruisers and by lots of cruisers, what I mean is thousands of them. You could use some of the larger ships (I.E. titans et al), however that does mean that you run the risk of having your big expensive ships getting ker-sploded.

Offensive fleets are more or less the same thing as defensive fleets: fighters, cruisers and heavy cruisers. Just remember to only attack bases that you know you take (check the battle calculator to make sure) and to have a load of recyclers waiting nearby to collect debris.

Base defences are probably even more important than fleet. One of the buildings central to defending yourself is the command centre. For every command centre built on your base, your fleet in orbit gets an extra 5% attack and defence power. 10 command centres is 50%, 20 is 100% extra, now that adds up to a lot. One of the best ways to put someone off attacking you is to have a lot of command centres.

Turrets are also important. Firstly, you want to dispose of any non-shielded turrets as soon as you can as they will be taken out far too easily. Secondly, don’t forget to get multiple levels of the turrets. If the listed power is something like 158/158(, then each turret level gives you 5x that (1 level of disruptor turrets is about the same as 5 battleships). Eventually you should be able to get deflection and planetary shields. They have minimal offensive power, however, they have a lot of armour and shield. The point of the shields is to preserve the life of your other turrets; they are no good at actually blowing up enemy fleets. The ultimate goal is to build planetary rings as one or two levels of those will discourage all but the toughest opponents.

Also, unlike ships, turrets repair themselves over time while you are not occupied, so they could end up being cheaper than fleet.

The thing to remember is that the aim of defences is as much to discourage people from attacking, as it is to defeat them. Just remember that when all of that fails, pay attention to what I wrote about denying your enemies money.

Summary:
- Fighters, cruisers and heavy cruisers are your friends, build lots of them
- Build lots of command centres
- Build shielded turrets