Introduction

For smaller players that go through the motions each day of doing some research and building without having a clear plan, this guide gives some suggestions as to how to best grow (until roughly Operations 20).

Scope

Although there are many ways to make your account stronger, our main focus in this guide is the upgrade of the Operations building, because higher Operations level are a prerequisite to unlock many other improvements, either directly or indirectly, for example being able to make better Space Ships and new research project levels. Still, we will discuss the other the other improvements as well, because improving your account in different areas is key to making the growth of your account easier.

Construction

I am in favor of trying to upgrade all buildings as much as possible, not just focusing on the Operations building. There are various reasons for this. Mostly all buildings bring benefits to your account, but besides that, there are also a lot of prerequisite requirements (mainly for building upgrades and research) that require certain buildings to be upgrades, and I find it quite annoying if I have certain buildings lacking and having to upgrade many levels.

Although resources (and other material requirements) are in my eyes the biggest issue for doing building upgrades, it is still worthwhile to focus on improving your construction speed as well. There are also quite some buildings, especially early on, that require little resources, and being able to complete them faster can help your account growth.

The main way to increase your Construction Speed is via the Station Research Category. This research category starts with a Construction Speed project that gives some nice benefit. There is also a Prime Build Speed project a little further in the tree, but this requires 3 Star Uncommon Gas (and quite a large amount of Dilithium), so it can't be researched (without spending) and the early level of the game.

Making sure you are in an active alliance also helps a bit with the helps, but for large timers the relative benefit is very limited.

Early on you require only the basic resource Parsteel, Tritanium and Dilithium, but from Operations 14 the refining Materials are introduced as well as a requirement, and later on these are required for other buildings as well.

The basic resources requirements are quite easy to fill. I like to upgrade my resource production buildings and warehouses as much as possible. Vaults as well for protection. So that once I use up resources, I rightaway have quite some resources back from production. I also researched the Prime Resources so that I have a very high Production Speed. This is not going to fully fill all requirements later on, as some requirements will be higher than your warehouse capacity, but it will give you a lot of resources and the rest you can easily fill with rewards from the Daily Goals, Events and Missions. If you still fall short you can decide to either mine resources in the Galaxy, or attack Space Ships for resources. Also note that there is a research project (only unlocked at lvl 18) Building Efficiency, that reduces the basic resource requirements.

The refining materials are more of an issue. Make sure you upgrade your Refinery and Refine whenever you can. If you have large amounts of the raw refining materials, you can consider doing multiple batches at a time, but realize that these are expensive. Also pay attention to Events that give the refining materials as rewards.

Quite some of the buildings are initially unlocked and require research projects to unlock them. This is one of the reasons to keep the focus on research as well, as you do not want to get stuck with your building upgrades because you have to catch up with a lot of research.

Research

Research can give you a lot of benefit in all kind of areas of the game. There are all kind of economic (or Station) benefits, such as, besides the construction speed we already discussed above, also the production speed (or Fusion), storage and protection capacity of resources, unlocking extra Drydocks, mining ships, and buildings, increasing the repair speed of the various Space Ships. In the Combat research category you will find all kind of projects that improve your performance during combat and unlock new combat Space Ships.

I try to keep research going as much as possible, focusing both on Station and Combat.

Resource requirements are mostly quite easy to fill. Dilithium can become a problem, compared to construction you need a lot of Dilithium for research. I keep my focus on the Daily Goals to get quite some Dilithium. Completing two research projects a day provides an extra 1750 Dilithium. Reaching the 3rd Daily Goals Milestone gives another 1750 Dilithium. The 4th Milestone is sometimes too hard for me to reach, but if I do, I get another 2250 Dilithium.

Note that upgrading the Astronautics Studio reduces the amount of resources you require for research, and upgrading the R&D Department provide a research speed boost. The Research Optimization research project further reduces the resource requirements for research.

Many research project levels have building levels as prerequisites, besides other research project levels, so make sure to upgrade all buildings as well to not get stuck with research.

It seems every day there are some research events active. Keep an eye on those, they can be a great source of rewards helping you grow further. On this website I store the power rewards that I know, which can help you determine whether it is worthwhile to speed up a research project (or maybe even wait a bit with claiming it until a next event is started).

Space Ships and Officers

The quality of your Space Ships is key for a lot of aspects of the game, such as combat against other players and computer opposition. Without well developed space ships it becomes hard to complete Missions, even part of the Daily Goals (defeating hostile ships and to a lesser extend mining resources) becomes difficult or extremely time consuming, hampering your account growth.

With good Space Ships you can also easily defeat many small ships without having to spend a lot of time and resources on repair, so that you can require a lot of resources, ship materials and other goodies.

In general it is good to build a ship as soon as you can. For the first instance of most ships you tend to have enough fragments once you have it unlocked (by research). In theory you can build multiple instances of the Space Ships, but for this it can be hard to get enough fragments, and except for mining I don't find it particularly useful.

I have writen a special guide on Space Ships, have a look at it if you haven't yet. Follow the tips to unlock extra Drydocks (allowing you to use multiple ships simultaneously) and improve your ships, including officers. Also here keep an eye on the events and see if you can get extra rewards when spending Ship of Officer EXP.

I have currently 3 Drydocks, so 3 ships simultaneously. I have 1 Envoy and 2 ECS Fortunates so I can mine with all three ships. Ideally I would have liked 3 Envoys, but fragments seem hard to come by. I have 1 Phindra, 1 Talla and 1 Turas. I plan to keep having the highest available of each of the 3 types of Combat Space Ships. This is useful in general, so that for each type of space ship opposition, I have a reasonable space ship to battle it. I also have 3 decent sets of Officers, so that I can do combat with 3 space ships at the same time. This is not strictly necessary, but does save a lot of time, compared to having only one very good set of officers which you need to reassign.

For a while there was an event that significantly reduced the repair time, but that is over now for a while. Repair times are in my experience a huge annoyance in playing this game. I have put focus on upgrading the Drydocks to increase the Repair Speed bonus (and reduce repair resource cost) and the research projects that increase the repair time. It is still time consuming, but it helps. Being in an alliance with many active members at the time you normally play can help significantly with the time you have to wait before your space ships are repaired.

Typical Focus

Besides just keeping the construction and research going the main focus of my game play is the Daily Goals and Events. Defeating hostile ships can be time consuming, depending on whether the level of ships I need to defeat has just increased. For the rest I am normally able to complete all, which gets me to the 3rd milestone.

If I have more time I focus on Missions, defeating small space ships (I tend to only go for computer opposition) for rewards, mining refining materials, exploring new systems.

Conclusion

This guide should give some guidance for still relatively new players to grow their account to level 20 or so. If you have any comments or questions, please share.