The Aspha Miner Guide to Fame and Glory

Prologue

Thank you for choosing the Aspha Miner as your race of choice. This is first and foremost a strategy guide written by and for Aspha Miners, or A.Miners, as they are known. 

Now an important note for all potential A.Miners: There is no fame and glory.

Aspha Miners are a peaceful race that has an incredible potential in areas of industry and defense. This can be seen in the race description in the manual. (See the bar above your screen, click on the one named Manual then Alien Races at the sidebar. The manual is an oft forgotten tool that players everywhere ignore.)

The Beginning

Players now more or less are proficient in the management of colonies and fleets from your previous experience as a Terran so I’ll just discuss the basics and differences from the Terran race.

Now while the Terran race specializes in Agriculture and Commerce the Aspha specialize in a whole new spectrum, mainly Industry.

The Aspha Miners have a few weaknesses. One is their –50% negative modifier to Agriculture yield. This means you get only 50% of the food you’re supposed to get. Your population will starve and your loyalty will go down if you let this problem persist.

Other than that, Aspha Miners have a –95% to taxes from Commercial. This means you have a penalty to the amount of credits you get selling your goods to your population. It seems that Aspha Miner population like huge discounts on their goods! You are not recommended to waste time on Commercial infrastructure.

Aspha Miners also have a –95% to credits earned when you plunder a colony. The Terrans also have a slight negative penalty but an A.Miner’s penalty will reduce the amount even further, sometimes earning you only a couple of hundred credits. Sometimes it’s a good idea to cluster all your colonies with low total land then plunder them to make sure you use less turns.

Yet there are the good sides.

The Aspha Miners are very efficient industrialist with a very high bonus (+200%) to their industry. It is thus highly recommended that you focus your beginning infrastructure in Industry. Industry, of course, requires Raw Materials to produce the finished Consumer Goods so building some Agriculture to produce Raw Materials is recommended. The Aspha need a whole lot less Consumer Goods anyway compared with the Terrans.

Aspha Miner populations also pay an insane amount of tax to you.  With a bonus of 150% to tax given at every turn it more than makes up for the abysmal profit from the sale of goods. It must be either gratitude from the cheap Consumer Goods.

Aspha Miners have a +1000% to Mineral Extraction. This means, taking your home world as an example, that 1 turn will produce 11 Terran Metals. This amount varies according to planet count of your colony. A Cluster Level 1 that produces Red Crystals will extract on an average 51 Red Crystals per turn. This is in fact 10 times faster than Terrans. Please note that constructing Mining infrastructure does not affect this. 

It is up to you to determine what you build on your planet but I would recommend Housing, Industry and/or Agriculture.

Research

For infrastructure research you can begin with balancing your Agriculture penalty to ensure your population has food. Now you have two paths.

Choice one is to focus on the tax given by your population. This means you need a huge population on your colonies. Thus it is advised to research Housing and Agriculture because more people need more food. This tactic ensures that your turn income is almost that of a Terran.

Choice two is to play the Market. This interesting tactic involves researching mainly in your Industry. This will ensure that you will get tons of Consumer Goods per turn. I will elaborate more on this later.

Don’t bother with Commercial because no matter what you do you’re just wasting turns. You might want to research Mining but bear in mind that only the research, not the buildings on the colonies, increases the amount of minerals as well as ore extracted.

As for ships you should do the basics mineral research. Now note that you do not have scouts. This is bad since all you have is an M.Hal that provides 1 scanner rating! Now that will put a damper on exploration for a while. I would suggest this research path, in order: 

Buy or mine Red and White Crystals first.
Red Crystal
White Crystal
Starship Engineering
Sensor Engineering
Seeker Scout

With this you can start exploring for planets with your first scout. Another mineral worthwhile researching is Rutile, which is needed by many of your advanced ships.

Now, we move on to the most interesting part of being an A.Miner.

Playing the Market!

The market is where the Aspha Miners rule! Whatever tactic you choose you still have a part in the market. (To get to the Market look at the bar at the left side of your screen. Click on the Market option. A list of sellable items should be displayed along with their prices, quantity for sale as well as the amount of that item in your warehouse.)

While Terrans get their credits through Commerce you get credits through selling in the Market.

Now if you chose to focus on Industry you’ll be pleased to see that there are many opportunities in the Market. If you did what I recommended you should have a considerable amount of Consumer Goods. 

One race needs the Consumer Goods. This happens to be the Terrans. With Consumer Goods their credit income per turn will skyrocket. Thus many Terrans still commute to the Market to buy some supplies.

Now to sell Consumer Goods click on the item. You will then be shown the Consumer Goods section, a section you will spend quite some time in . As I said before your population only pays you around 1 credit per goods sold. Thus no matter how much you sell your Consumer Goods (Recommended 3 – 4 credits) you will still get a profit. 

You should by now know how to sell your goods.

If you don’t like Consumer Goods, never fear because you still have your minerals to trade. As I said before, you will extract a lot of minerals per turn so you can have a significant stockpile of them by some time. If you have some to spare, which is most likely, you can sell them in the Market. The price is up to you to decide.

Here’s a small tip. Focus on extracting only a narrow range of minerals e.g. 2 or 3. This is to ensure that you can get more of that type of mineral from your planets. Here is an example.

Player A has 3 Cluster Level 1s that produce, respectively, Rutile, Red Crystals and White Crystals.

Player B has 3 Cluster Level 1s that produce solely Terran Metal.

Player A would extract, per turn, 55 Rutile, 55 Red Crystals and 55 White Crystals while Player B will produce 165 Terran Metal. (This is excluding the home world.)

Player A now has a variety of minerals to while Player B has only ONE mineral to sell. One advantage to Player A’s tactic is that he can gauge the Market and find the minerals he can sell at a very profitable price but Player B is forced to sell his mineral at whatever price the Market currently has to stay on top. One disadvantage to Player A’s tactic is that he has a very small quantity of minerals for his own use while Player B has a ton of minerals to use and sell.

It’s your choice what you want to follow.

Combat and Defense for Miners

It is unadvisable for A.Miners to strike out at others at the early stages of the game. Being a peaceful race, as well as a ‘slow’ one, the Aspha have a tendency to develop their ships at a much slower rate. Requiring much research, these ships are a pain to research and require much patience. Yet all that patience pays off in the end.

The Aspha Miners have exceptional defense ships. For the early stages you can get to research a specialty of the Aspha Miners: The M.Lakko Starbase. Fairly easy to research and the most readily available starbase of any race the M.Lakko is very easy to build, requiring a little of each mineral (except Strafez Organism), and has a decent hull.

One plus of using the M.Lakko is its range: 15. This holds the record for longest range in the game and is the best quality of the M.Lakko. With that range it can even beat the Terran P.Thor. As you know the defender or attacker with the highest range attacks first so the M.Lakko always goes first. Its Defense Modifiers are equally good since it is weak to kinetic attacks and resistant to the rest. 

The downside of the M.Lakko is its very high Power Rating and cost. It will take a bunch of credits to construct a group of these starbases and their high PR would usually mean you’d be an easier target.

As for offensive ships, the Aspha Miners lack a suitable ship in the beginning to make a decent attack. The weakness of the Aspha ships, namely their weak damage and very weak armor can make it hard in the initial stages to get a good attack out. The Aspha Miner ships have one common weakness: Energy, Chemical and Missle attacks. Most attacks of these types are effective against various Aspha ships.

There are some exceptions though. The M.Chlorite and the M.Epidote are two very good ships to have. With a range of 9 they can outrange most of the other ships out there. They are also the highest range attack ships in the Aspha Miner arsenal. The M.Chlorite is especially good since it loses most of the weaknesses leaving it only susceptible to energy type attacks and good against missle type attacks. Still they cannot attack back once they are hit so it is best to pair them up with the M.Epidote, which can take significantly more punishment. Basically these two ships are mirror images of each other, one high in offense and the other high in defense.

Much later more advanced ship will be available to your arsenal and it will be easier to attack after that. Ships like the A.Aragonite are good intermediate level ships since it is resistant to all the previous weaknesses but is weak against kinetic type attacks, a deviance from the classic Aspha Miner ship resistance. But since very little ships do kinetic damage anyway, especially between the Terran and Marauders, this doesn’t pose quite a problem.

Please note the low range among all the Aspha Miner ships (excluding the M.Lakko of course) it is most probable that their ships will attack second so proper stacking is recommended among Aspha Miners. Many Aspha Miners have fallen due to aggressive and reckless attacks.

This is just the basics of playing the Aspha Miner race. In due time you’ll begin to get a hang of things as well as have access to the Aspha Miners’ greatest ships. Remember though to finish the missions as you go along.

Written by ScarRift.
11th November 11, 2003.