The Interface

To the top left hand side of the screen you have the Avatar which is you and also accesses settings. If you want to open a support ticket, then you need to hit settings button legal & FAQ pick any question and select that it did not answer your question. You can then open a ticket. You need to repeat the process to see any response from support.

Navigation bar gives quick access to the items listed, ships, officers etc. The number indicates usually the number of things open to you to build, refine etc, but isn’t always accurate, especially on refinery. Below this is the What you have building, depending on number of build/research slots you have and expands when building/recycling a ship.

Events screen is to open up the events that are running so you can read the details. Also if an Eventstore is available then a tab for this is available there so you can buy items from successful event completions. Gifts is basically the same, but you will use this as you complete daily missions, and any extra free things if they are running like special event tickets etc.

Bottom of the screen is Mission quick access, and collection, often annoying with repeated update your operations centre messages. Alliance lets you access Alliance menu and store, also something you will use often to spend Armada credits or collect alliance freebies when available. Inbox is basically battle logs access for kills/defeats.

Middle section is the selection of ships and sub menus for that change depending if on base or not. and lastly to the far right

is the Interior/exteriror of your base for either locating the map back to base, or building/research within base. Also is the navigation for travelling between systems map and the last few icons give access to shielding your base, exocomp activation and bookmarks/search for a system.

Collecting Blue Prints (BP)

Through all levels collect blueprints, from faction stores, away team missions, events and Gifts (weekly/monthly) ships that you want for these apart from the usual ones are the special ones: Botany Bay, Dvor (latinum mining), Vidar (borg probes), Stella, Discovery (not overly useful till much later), Sarcophagus (also not really useful until your alliance has territory). Of these, Botany Bay, Dvor, Vidar and Stella are the most useful.

Life in this game starts at level 32 really.

Until level 28 your kind of limited and should really concentrate on core ships and using opportunities when they arise. E.g. North star, nice ship, but expensive to tier, and wouldn’t buy it (I did and shouldn’t of bothered), if available during events then get the blueprints if other event items aren’t more useful. It will take 2-4 events to collect all BP usually so plan carefully, and don’t do it if blueprints for dvor, vidar are available these are more important, discovery potentially but not overly important at lower end of the game.

Ship priority: Aim to get a saladin,brel,centurion level ship and don’t over invest in the ones below that level. Tier to do your dailies/missions and dont worry about PVP there is always someone stronger. Once you have this, then its saving for epic ships enterprise,aug,D4 to give you a fighting chance from level 32 plus. Again these are more for dailies and bigger Armadas rather than PVP, again always someone bigger. These need to be Tier 5 plus really which is expensive a max tier saladin for example with the right crew can take out a Tier 4 D4/Augur/Enterprise.

Research: Pick what is useful, lower levels mining research and some defense/ship reasearch is useful. Efficiency research is very useful in making ship/building upgrades cheaper. When speedups are available do research that costs no or little resources (gas/ore/crystal) and make some extra if the daily reasearch/build events are happening.

Levels 1-16

I would suggest you use these to familiarise yourself with the game, and menus etc. Once done then really just do missions, extract resources for your dailies and make your way through the game. There are a couple key events one of which is choosing a faction. Once you decide which faction then you should consider archiving all missions for the factions that you didn’t choose. This will come in handy later when you go for dual, they are easy to spot as they will have a faction symbol on them. Also the next big event is moving to level 17, basically it means your base can be attacked by level 20 and below, and is stopped by remembering to shield when you are offline. To be honest raiding bases before your in the 20’s is kind of pointless, as it takes 2+ hours with an envoy to clear someone out. Do try to protect your resources as they will come in handy so basic rule is shield or share, do this whenever offline for extended periods and over night.

Level 17-24

This area is basically the same, progress through the ships you have to and skip things like the North star (if you do buy it I wouldn’t take it past tier 6/7 8-9 is very expensive in resources better spent on something else) unless it’s in an event. It might take a little longer but your aim is to get to the Kumari and have a decent couple of envoys for mining, ending up with a Horizon later on. So start collecting the blueprints, from killing or events, and now away teams.Level 24 is where you can start building better faction ships but will take a while to collect the blueprints and buy them from the faction store. General rule (you can google locations for blueprints) is if you kill lots of survey vessels you will end up with some horizon blueprints, equally if you kill faction ships of a particular type (battleship etc) you will end up with some plans for those.

Everything in this game takes time, and even once you get to your goal, there will be another that will take just as long if not longer, so progressing quickly is really only possible through spending money.

Level 24-34

This is where things get more fun, however also more to do. Through the lower levels you should of been getting the special ships. These will add to your farming dailies Stella (eclipse ships and armadas for progression through the Rogue Store), Vidar for borg probes and refinery, Dvor for Latrush Mondays, and Botany Bay for data collection. All of these need tiering, so you can access better areas, and or mine/farm for more resources.

Level Skips. I skip levels where there is a need, e.g. for building some ships require a certain level, so levelling faster will get you the ship sooner. However this potentially leaves the research lagging behind, so you will need to spend time catching these up if you do. I find the reward is usually better and research can be caught up on through events, and when your held up do to resource shortages, especially the ones that any 2/3* resources. There are some hurdles in levelling that are harder than others, 27-29 for example where everything on the base has to be built in order to level up. Some however like 32-33 are just a case of updating the operations building, and catching the others up after.

This can be useful, 33-34 for example opens up more research for improving cost efficiencies that reduce the resources used for buildings, ships etc. Also while you are collecting for your next major faction ship (Augur, Enterprise etc) you want to be near 35/36 as they can’t be built until then.

Raiding bases will become an activity that you will need to do, during the main milestone levels you need alot of these resources, and you need them for repairing etc. so at some point you will need to raid someone’s base. You do have tokens you can exchange, these can be accessed when you go to build something you dont have parsteel etc. for or from the Inventory Resources tab, where you have all the tokens you have collected for the three resources, parsteel, dilithium and trilithium.