1-2-3 TERRAN RACE STRATEGY GUIDE

Introduction

This guide is specially made for the Terran race. The author acknowledges that there are many strategies and that this may or may not be the best strategy used in all situations and circumstances. The purpose of this guide is to provide a brief strategic outline for new players.

Before you start

Before we start off, here is the basic stuff you should know.

1. Colony
1 colony can be equal to 1 planet.
1 colony can contain more than 1 planet (if using clustered colonies).

2. Protection
You will be under protection if your power rating is below 5,000.

3. Power rating
A measurement of how powerful your economy and military is.

4. Border colony
These planets will have some risk of being taken over if you failed to defend yourself against a hostile empire invading you. 

Starting

Each player will start off with one colony. 

This planet will have an individual land size, mainly depending on the type of planet. This land size or available land will determine how many buildings (infrastructure) you can build on that planet. 

Besides generating ore, each planet will also generate a certain type of mineral. Ore is used for building infrastructure and is limited; minerals are used for building ships and are unlimited. You’ll get a certain amount of minerals and ore at the end of each turn.
 
First thing is to get more credits. The more credit you have, the more powerful ships you can buy and maintain. So try to build up your infrastructure. 

Go to your colony as follows:
Command > Manage Colonies > Select Colony to Manage

Each infrastructure unit you build will cost 1 labor, 1 land, and 1 ore.

Mining: I would suggest having 5 mining initially. This will supply you with the ore you need to build your infrastructure. Where there is no ore left, you will be able to demolish your mining infrastructure, which will free up land and labor. (You can also demolish any other infrastructure to free up land, but be careful when demolishing housing. If you accidentally demolish all your housing, then your colony will not be able to support any life at all, therefore it will be a useless and lifeless colony.)

Housing: Always try to balance your agriculture and housing. Each unit of housing will hold 10 population. You will need to expand your Housing to increase your population, and thus your labor. Labor is needed to man existing infrastructure and also to build new infrastructure.

Agriculture: Build agriculture in order to ensure your food income is positive. If you run out of food, your population starves and dies off. Population takes time to grow, and they themselves generate taxes, and man infrastructure. If your population dies off then you can’t build any more infrastructure and have to wait for the population to grow, thus wasting time and turns. 

Each Agriculture generates 1 food/turn. Each unit of food feeds 10 population. Thus if your initial population is 200 you will need 20 Agriculture to regularly feed them, but it's always best to stay a little bit ahead of the curve. At the end of every turn you'll see a listing of your resource gains or losses: 

+50 Credit    +10 Food    +5 Good

In case of emergencies, you can buy food from the market. Or you can buy them to stock up your reserves.

Commercial: Build as much commercial infrastructure as possible because they are the easiest to use when it comes to increasing your income of credits. Although there are other ways of getting credits, commercial is the simplest method used. (Other ways of generating credits are industry mainly used by the Marauder race and the intergalactic market mainly used by the Aspha Miner race.)

Exploration

Since ore is limited on your planet, you will soon have to explore for new planets to get more ore. It’s either that of you can purchase them from the market. Of course once you have finished building up your first colony you will be forced to explore for other colonies to continue to expand your empire. 

First, build up some scouts and send them to explore. Check and ensure you do not go in to debt by having a negative income due to building too many ships.

It would be advisable to explore 3-4 new planets at a single time and then disband all your scouts. This will ensure you save credits, as there is no point having scouts lying around and not doing anything. Also remember that you may want to keep your power rating below 5,000. Players with power rating below 5,000 are under protection and therefore no other empires can attack you. This will give you a save haven for you to build up on your research and other areas until you are confident enough to venture out of protection. Disbanding your scouts also contributes to lowering your power rating.

After you have explored all the planets, it is time to build up those colonies. Remember to build as many commercial infrastructures as possible on all colonies. Some planets have bonuses to agriculture, so try to build agriculture on those planets and demolish agriculture on other planets.

Research

Now, since you have a couple of colonies up and running you can conduct research. The reason to build up some colonies first is, so that you can generate more credits while waiting for the research stuff to finish. 

Initially I would advise research in commercial infrastructure. The beginning level of the infrastructure research is relatively cheap. It is also advisable to concentrate solely on commercial. A level 10 commercial technology will double your credit income. So having 3-4 colonies would be equal to having 6-8 colonies! Because of this, try to research until the number of turns required for additional research reaches 20-25. 

After you are done with this, it is time to begin research on other areas. The best path to research would be:
 
Mineral – Terran Metal
Small Terran Hull
Medium Terran Hull
Large Terran Hull
Terran Destroyer
Terran Cruiser

When you can build destroyers and cruisers it is time to go on the offensive. By the time you can start building them, you would have a large reserve of credits to use for your offensive campaign. Remember not to go in to debt as you will be charged interest per turn for any debt incurred. You may go bankrupt if you can’t recover from your debt. The only way a Terran empire could die is from going bankrupt.

The Offensive

There are basically two ways of moving forward from here. You can either build up an army and send them to invade and take over other empire’s colonies or build scouts to explore and find planets for yourself. If you have less than 10 colonies then it would be better for you to find colonies yourself because it is very easy to explore for new planets in the early stages when your planet count is still low. 

Build up scout as before, and explore for at least 2-3 planets at a single time. Build up your infrastructure in your new colonies as previously advised. The difference now is you must remember to build up a defensive fleet to protect your colonies at the end of each turn before you go offline or log off. Go to ranking and click “ranking near me”. Try to get your power rating to planet ratio up compared with those around your rank. That means, try to have a higher power to planet ratio. Other empires generally tend to attack empires with a lower power to planet ratio.

Player 1 – Power=10,000 Planets=4
Player 2 – Power=9,800 Planets=8
Player 3 – Power=9,500 Planets=7

In the example above, Player 1 does not seem to be such an attractive target due to a higher power to planet ratio (2,500). Player 2 would seem to be the ideal target for attacks (ratio of ~1,200). Planets also provide an estimated 1000 to 1200 power rating per planet. Therefore you can estimate Player 1 has a fleet with the power rating of 5000, compared to Player 2 with a fleet power rating of 1800. Obviously player 2 has fewer defenses compared to player 1. (You can use this strategy to choose your targets as well if you choose to attack another empire.)

Fleet Management

Once you have explored 10-15 planets, exploring for new planets will become more and more difficult. The only other alternative is to attack other empires and to capture their colonies and planets.

Now you must learn how to better manage your fleet. To save credits you can disband your entire fleet at the beginning of your turn, and then perform research, build stuff on your colonies, and take other actions. Remember that while you disband your fleet, other empires may take the opportunity to attack you at this particular time. So you have to perform your task fast or leave a small number of ships just in case someone attacks you.

Don’t use up all your turns; leave 10-20. Once you have finished performing all your tasks, build up your fleet, and try to go in to negative income. If you are earning 5,000 per turn, I would suggest you to go in to negative 10,000 per turn. Be careful here, and watch your deficit. Since you are on negative income, you depend solely on your credit reserves; therefore it is very useful to have a large credit reserve. You can calculate required reserves based on the turns you wish to spend to build ships and attack while in deficit. For example, if you are running at a deficit of 10k per turn, and wish to spend 20 turns to build ships and to attack then you can calculate that out to 10,000 x 20 = 200,000. Therefore you must have more than 200,000 credits in reserves (not including the cost of building ships).

Now at the end of your turn, try to attack some other empires with a low power rating per planet ratio. I would recommend that you invade at least a minimum of 4 colonies each day. Do note, each attack will cost 3-5 turns depending on the location of the target empire.

Also remember that you can only lose 3 to 4 colonies per day (while you are offline). So if you invade at least 4 colonies a day, then you will always gain colonies instead of losing them. 

Try not to build on those border colonies until the next day. This is in case another empire does successfully invade them from you, then you wouldn’t have wasted turns building up infrastructure for some other empire. 

Always try to keep 5 turns as extras, just in case. Sometimes you may lose your entire fleet attacking another empires. So you may require those turns to build up a defensive fleet before logging off.

Of course, on the next day, at the start of your turn, you can still attack other empires depending on the size of your fleet. If your fleet size is still big and you did not take that much damage from your previous attacks then you can opt to continue to attack others instead of disbanding your fleet.

Attacking strategy

Always remember the following:-

•	Attacker does 5% less damage 
•	If attacker and defender have the same range, the defender fires first
•	Range determines who fires first in a battle

Now, let’s say you want to attack another empire. First you must calculate if you can win the battle or not. Assuming you have a Terran battleship, which can cause 2000 damage and would take 8000 damage to destroy. Therefore if you want to attack another empire which you assume has battleship technology, then you must build at least 5 battleships to win. 

8000 / ( 2000 * 0.95% ) = 5
Hull / (Weapon * Efficiency)

You can use the same method to calculate other ship types.

Stacking strategy

Ships will go into lines, or stacks, based on the total power rating of the ships in that stack. For example:
•	Ship 1 – 1000 total power rating
•	Ship 2 – 500 total power rating

Many battles can be won with a clear understanding of stacking strategy. Generally to get the ships to the 1st stack you must build more ships of that type until its’ power rating is the highest. This can be done by a simple calculation prior to building up and organizing your fleet. For example:
•	Ship 1 = 10 power rating per unit
•	Ship 2 = 5 power rating per unit

If you wish to have a stacking strategy of:
Ship 2
Ship 1

Then you are required to build more than 2x the amount of units for Ship 2 compared to Ship 1 to obtain this stacking. For example:
•	Ship 2 – 101 units – 505 total power rating
•	Ship 1 – 50 units – 500 total power rating

There are basically three types of ships.
•	Balanced
This is a balanced ship, has medium attack and defensive capability
•	Heavy Attack
This has good attack capability but low amour, therefore dies very easily
•	Heavy Defense
This has strong amour but low attack, making it ideal as a cannon fodder

Stacking strategy basically depends on what stacking your opponent is using. For example:

If opponent is using	Would suggest using	
Heavy Attack	Heavy Defense
Heavy Attack 	
Heavy Defense
	Balanced
Heavy Attack	
Balanced	Heavy Attack	

The idea is to ensure your opponent is busy attacking a “Cannon fodder” stack while your main attacking force will attack your opponent’s fleet. For Terrans, Starbases and Cyril ship type has heavy armor, while Photon ships have heavy damage but very light armor. The Terran battleship is balanced.
 
Usually it is recommended to use a Heavy Defense as the first stack and a Heavy Attack as the 2nd stack for attacking, while the opposite for defending. This is because of the range difference in attacking and defending. Defenders always fire first if the range of both the stacks is the same, therefore the defender will have an advantage if both parties uses the same stacking strategy, especially by putting the heavy attack ships in the first stack. Because of this bonus, defenders have an advantage to use Heavy attack as their 1st stage compared to the attackers.

A lot of tweaking (adjustment) is required for you to perfect your stacking strategy; always remember that a good stacking strategy will increase the chances of you winning a battle. I have seen empires having good stacking strategy being able to defeat another empire with double its’ power rating. However there is nothing absolutely 100%, so you may even lose from time to time even with a very good stacking strategy. 

For new players I would suggest using a more balanced ship first before venturing in to other stacking strategies. All Terran native ships are balanced type of ships. Among them are:

Ryu-jin	Fighter	
Maru	Corvette	
Sentouki	Frigate	
Garuda 	Destroyer	
Ra-Kalieum	Cruiser	
Empereur	Battleship	

Other Races

The stacking strategy for Terran is not that noticeable because there are so many balanced ships available to the Terrans. The number of balanced ships drops when it comes to other races, and the attributes of the ships also become more extreme. For example, ships with defensive capability will be more extreme towards defensive and vice versa for offensive capability. Therefore stacking strategy is more apparent and is a major requirement here. 

Guide written by Stephen Yong, 5th May 2003
Last updated on 27th May 2003