Imperion Newbie Guide

[Tezkat]

Although the wiki is fairly comprehensive, there's a dearth of general newbie guides for Imperion. I'm still a newbie in the grand scheme of things, only having started a few weeks ago. Nonetheless I've already expanded to my second planet, so I'll pretend I'm qualified to advise the newbies. I can only speak with authority about Titans, but a lot of this should be applicable to all races.


STARTING OUT

Do your tutorial quests. They provide a lot of extra resources and research points. The missions largely pay for themselves from quest rewards. I personally did the Engineering line, which was quick to complete and gave me a good economic base (complete set of mines, enough RPs for an extra building slot). The Civilian Space Flight line might be better, but I don't have the details on that yet. (Apparently, one of the requirements involves building a Recycler, which can take a long time to complete with limited newbie income.) Xen might be able to get away with the military line.

The tutorial should force you to build most of the structures you need to survive newbidom. If you picked the Engineering line, you might be missing a Fleet Base and Civilian Shipyard. If so, build those ASAP. (Note that Titans will also need a Transmitter first.)


MINES

Low levels of mines have a fairly rapid return on investment. Definitely get them up to about level 3 as soon as possible to generate a steady income stream. Even level 5 will pay for itself in a few days. Beyond that, you can probably hold off on mine upgrades until you have a good raiding fleet built up. Gradually build them up when you have spare cash.


STOCKYARDS

Among of the most important buildings to upgrade throughout your career. One thing you definitely don't want is to lose income simply because you didn't have enough space to store the resources. High activity can reduce the need to upgrade these, but you'll quickly get to the point where you can't purchase higher level buildings without upgrading the stockyards first.


RAIDING

Income from raiding unoccupied planets should vastly outperform mining early on. A lot of your overall strategy depends on your activity level and position in the galaxy (proximity to the core and number/strength of neighbours).

It's not really worth it to raid other players at this stage. They generally have less available resources than unoccs, even if inactive, and baseline planet defense means you might lose ships even against undefended worlds. Unless you suffer from extremely unlucky homeworld placement, there should be plenty of unoccupied worlds to raid.


It's important to measure baseline planetary production in your vicinity. Regen rates increase with proximity to the core. Near the galactic center, it's supposedly as high as 30k resources/day.  Planets near me regain ~100 resources/hour (total, not each). Thus, unless someone else has hit them in the interim, I can send one Small Transporter (800 cargo for Titans) for every 8 hours since I last hit the planet and safely expect a full load in return. Hit a nearby planet in your system a few times over the course of a day to get an idea of how juicy your local real estate is.


Different planets give different resources in proportion to the number of mines slots available. Adapt your raiding patterns to your resource consumption. For instance, as a Titan, I almost always have too much Tritium and a horrible Crystal deficiency. Thus, I give preference to Desert (3/4/3) planets and low priority to Aquatic (2/2/8) worlds.


Although you can pile on the ships and hit each planet less often, it's generally more useful to spread out and hit multiple planets. Therefore, divide your income across new transports and Fleet Base upgrades.


Tip: If you're raiding multiple planets within a system, it can help to open the raiding page in a new tab or window after planet selection. That saves you a lot of clicks finding the system/planets again to send the next fleet.


HARVESTING

Comets are little bundles of resources that migrate from system to system every few hours. Recyclers (and only recyclers--transports can't help) harvest them for you. When harvesting, you'll receive resources in the same proportions present on the comet. Comet appearance is otherwise random. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you don't. You can occasionally follow comets from system to system if they happen to have resources you need, but remember that increasing distance also raises fuel costs (recyclers are gas guzzlers).


Unlike planet raiding, recyclers require time to harvest. It takes 1 hour to harvest 1000 resources, plus 10 minutes to get ready. Each level of Recycling research cuts the former in half. If someone else comes to harvest the comet and bumps you, your fleet will leave with whatever they've had the time to collect so far.


It's important to understand how competition for comets works.

Pure recycler fleets will always be routed ("bumped") in favour of the newest arrival, even if the new guy also sends nothing but recyclers. Size matters not. (One recycler can bump a fleet of a hundred.) If military meets military, they fight, and whoever wins gets the comet. Thus, it's probably a Bad Idea to send military in the same fleet as your recyclers unless your escort can withstand the full military power of anyone in your neighbourhood. Otherwise, you risk losing your recycler fleet along with its escort. Instead, more advanced players will send a "bump" fleet of pure military in advance of their recyclers to clear out a comet before harvesting. (That may not be a good idea at this level if the other party is big enough to get upset about it.)


RESEARCH

Research is important. Research Points are one of the few things that you can't get from anything but time. Thus, you should build lab upgrades as soon as you can afford them. They do get expensive quickly, but you want to at least make the first several levels a priority.

Now... the big question... where to spend RP?


Engineering:

More mines = More resources, so get Geological Exploration to level 4. If you went the Engineering route in the tutorial, you should already have enough points for that. Otherwise, switch focus to Engineering and research this after rounding out your raiding fleet.

Building Lots are very important, but not urgent, as you'll need to upgrade some stuff to open up enough structures to use up your starting lots.

Some people like to park a few points in Storage Capacity. (I haven't yet.) Stockyard upgrades become expensive and time consuming fairly quickly, so you might find it worthwhile.

The rest mostly aren't worth it yet.


Civilian Space Flight:

What to focus on here depends somewhat on your activity levels and playing style.

Your newbie points need to go into blueprints for your species-specific recycler and/or small transport. (Xen don't have transports--they use military ships for raiding; Terrans can also raid unoccupied worlds with military, but their Small Transporter is the best in the game.) As for the rest...

Recycling provides an enormous productivity boost to anyone who spends a lot of time on comets. Every level doubles the efficiency of your harvesting fleet. It's all but required to make a large harvesting fleet usable.

Propulsion Technology matters more if you're online a lot (i.e. enough to benefit from being able to send your ships out again 10 minutes sooner). If that's the case, then it's a huge income boost from raiding more often.

Cargo Capacity is a bit situational. It improves your income per ship if your schedule and targets allow. In my neck of the galaxy, planets generate just enough resources to fill three Small Transporters per day, so I'd need to wait an extra hour or so to hit them the next day with upgraded ships.

The rest aren't important yet. Fuel Consumption probably isn't necessary until you have very large fleets. Given the large number of aquatic worlds out there, Deuterium/Tritium is fairly plentiful. The function of Trade at early stages of the game is better handled by simply upgrading your trade buildings, which is both fairly cheap and fairly quick. Tank Capacity probably won't matter yet unless you have a lot of local competion for resources and need to range farther out for revenue generating planets. It matters a lot more once you have multiplanet empires to manage.

As for spying... as I said, raiding inhabited worlds honestly isn't worth it until you're much bigger, so you can focus on your revenue generating research first.


Energy Technology:

Put all your points into AEC Energy. Right now.

The rest doesn't even matter until you get to your second planet. Titans, being perpetually crystal-challenged, might want to look into unlocking solar power for colonizing desert worlds. All races start with a secondary energy tech, however, so you can save the RP by colonizing an appropriate world.


I can't claim to have any experience with combat yet, so I don't know which military techs are best. For the record, I'm currently building an arsenal of Masterblasters (Planetary Defense) and Delphi (Military Ships). If you raid with military ships, most of the advice in the civilian section should still apply.


TRADING

The markets are a good way to deal with unbalanced resource stocks. You search the offers and exchange one resource for another. It's rare to get 1:1 trades. It's unusual to get better than 1:1 deals. Usually people people will offer, say, 4000 crystal for 5000 metal. Try not to pay too large a surcharge (20% is fair--shop around).

Each trade slot (i.e. level of your trade center/teleporter) can send 3000 total resources. With the exception of Titan-Titan transactions, it takes several hours for the resources to arrive, and usually several more to recharge the trade slot.

You can also send resources directly between players (or, if you have multiple planets, between your own colonies). Note that, while Titans can send resources to another player/colony instantly, there's a 20% surcharge (deducted on top of what you send).


COLONIZATION

Each building generates a certain number of Expansion Points (EP) per day. When you have enough of these, you can send a dropship to colonize another world. It takes several weeks to build up enough EP and resources to expand beyond your homeworld, but start getting things ready several days before you're ready for the expendition. Pick out a nice spot, research the necessary techs, save up the resources, and so on.

Each colony has its own energy supply, resources, fleet slots, and so on. With a handful of exceptions (e.g. Titan's supplying all fleets from a central Transmitter), they function almost like independent players.

How and where to expand offworld depends on what the purpose of the other colony will be. If you want to expand your raiding range, it's probably a good idea to move pretty far from your other worlds so they don't compete for the same planets. A mining/factory world, on the other hand, can benefit from proximity to your other worlds. You'll probably want systems to at least be within the max range of any ships you plan on moving between colonies, however.

Unlike your first planet, you can afford to largely ignore mines and shipyards when starting up a second world. Simply supply colonies from your homeworld until they have a self-sustaining fleet.


TITAN SPECIFIC TIPS

Most likely, you'll be running a Tritium surplus. Titan buildings generally don't require very much, and a majority of planets (Earthlike and Aquatic, which form the bulk of other worlds) produce more Tritium than any other resource. Early on, there are only two major Tritium sinks: Building Yard upgrades and fuel for recycling missions. Which is good, because you want to do those as often as possible.

The Building Yard unlocks two of the Titans' signature buildings: the Shield Generator (level 5) and the Energy Accumulator (level 10). Titans do fun things with energy, and are the only race that really benefits from having a huge surplus.

Secondary power generation is much weaker than your AEC, so power your entire fleet off your homeworld.

As a Titan, you can afford to turtle and ignore military fleets entirely for a while. Which is good, because Titan ships are so expensive that you probably can't afford them as a newbie anyway. (The planetary building slot you'd need for the military Shipyard should also be allocated to Something Else until you have a few points in building lots.) Furthermore, since no military ships can carry loot (Corsairs being a notable--and expensive--exception), they don't help your income until you're strong enough to raid large players.

Anyone who's both willing and able to get through your shield will pwn you anyway, so don't worry about defenses yet. Resource caches also have somewhat questionable value for Titans. A fully maxed out cache only stores 6000 of each resource (unless you research upgrades). By the time you're big enough for players to bother raiding you, your stockyards should hold an order of magnitude more.

[techmaster-glitch]

Question: when highly built up, who has the better defences, the Terrans or Titans? That's how my playstyle mostly works; build up the toughest defence around my holdings as I can in order to shrug off all but the most dedicated attacks, and slowly, carefully expanding with a pacifistic bent (though, when needing to attack, I like to go with the heavies whenever possible) as opposed to rushing and being agressive.

A few more questions; even though you say you don't know much about military action yet, I wonder if you know the answer to them. Is it possible to completely wipe another player off a planet they occupy and take it for yourself? If so, is it also possible to do this against a homeworld? What happens if you take a player's homeworld or all the planets they own?

[Tezkat]

Titans = ultimate turtles.

Basically, it's the shield, which is overpowered from a defensive perspective. After only a few weeks of play, my shield has over a million hit points. That means that before anyone can even hit me, they need to do over a million points of damage. (Examples of stuff that will do a million damage: 3000 Terran Battleships.) The Titan planetary defences are kinda nasty, too.

The problem overall with the Titans is that they have a relatively low military power to resource cost ratio. So when it comes to a battle of attrition (which most big wars eventually do), Terrans beat Titans by outproducing them.

On the other hand, most players won't even bother raiding a Titan simply because of the shield. Basically, in order to get to the juicy middle, you need to break the shield.

Just to put things in perspective, let's say there's a Terran five fields away who wants to raid me. To send enough Battleships to even break my shield, he needs to spend more than 100k in deuterium fuel. Then he needs a second raid fleet kill off my defences, which aren't going to go down without a fight. Then, he needs to send over his transports. This operation will take many hours and hundreds of thousands or resources. Thus, he's not going even going to bother unless he's pretty sure of he can get at least half a million resources out of me. I can't even hold half a million resources yet.


Now, things gets a little more complicated when you move beyond your homeworld. Charging the shield quickly takes an absurd amount of energy. Most likely, you won't have a very large shield on your secondary worlds because you won't have enough energy to power them up into the crazy range (unless people leave you alone long enough for it to build up slowly).

On the other hand, high level Titans have a nifty toy called the Transportal which instantly sends ships from one colony to another. They also have some of the fastest ships in the game (Delphi = speed demon). Also, because of the Transmitter, they can pretty much station ships anywhere they feel like without worrying about fuel. So it's easier for Titans to manage very large, very mobile fleets than the other races.


It's not possible to completely wipe out another player. You can occupy secondary colonies by destroying the embassy there and invading them. As I understand it, that temporarily grants you the resources mined by the colony. You can never wipe out or invade a player's homeworld. The worst you can do is bomb people back into the stone age.

[techmaster-glitch]

Hmm. Yeah, Titans do sound like I would adapt pretty well to their play strategies. I think that, when i restart, I'll do it in galaxy one with the Titans and just stick with it.

Although...

It's not possible to completely wipe out another player. You can occupy secondary colonies by destroying the embassy there and invading them. As I understand it, that temporarily grants you the resources mined by the colony. You can never wipe out or invade a player's homeworld. The worst you can do is bomb people back into the stone age.

Does this mean that, once a player claims an empty planet, it is absolutely impossible to bump them off of it?

[Valynth]

Does this mean that, once a player claims an empty planet, it is absolutely impossible to bump them off of it?

From what I've read only the home world can't be taken by force.

[Tezkat]

As far as I know, you can't destroy a colony. You can merely borrow it for a while.

[techmaster-glitch]

   Although I should probably be thankful the Titan shield generator doesn't have a maximum charge cap, seeing as I'm going to be playing as them, my good game sense just tells me it's rather screwy. The shield generator should have a maximum cap based on its level, like how almost every other building for any faction does for whatever their function is.
   I'm sure there are already players (probably ones who hate going up against titans) who have brought this to the attention of the game's company, right?

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Well, the level increases the charge -> hitpoints ratio.

And the display thereof is currently buggy, anyway.

[Tezkat]

Heh. Everyone hates the Titans. It's mostly because of the shield.

The Terrans used to have a shield breaker, but it's currently disabled (along with some of the even more unbalanced Titan techs).


The shield doesn't cap, but it does have diminishing returns because the charge follows an exponential curve. And once it goes down, it can take months to get back up to the previous level. Also, as I mentioned before, the energy cost of the shield is so large that it doesn't help expansion colonies as much. Basically, they're screwed once someone decides to take the shield down.

Titans also have poor offensive capabilities. And they'll always come out behind the other races in terms of resources costs of military buildup and losses, so they're likely to have weaker fleets overall. Other races' ships have dual military and economic use. Titans separate the two, so they make less use of their military as well. They suck at raiding other players.

[techmaster-glitch]

The shield doesn't cap, but it does have diminishing returns because the charge follows an exponential curve. And once it goes down, it can take months to get back up to the previous level. Also, as I mentioned before, the energy cost of the shield is so large that it doesn't help expansion colonies as much. Basically, they're screwed once someone decides to take the shield down.

Wait, so let me see if I've got this straight... The charge rate of a titan shield is based on how long you've had the shield generator; the longer you've had it, the slower it charges? And, because of this, if you had some time to build up a large sheild that was then knocked down (but the generator is intact) it will continue to charge at the slow rate you were at before the knockdown, and continue to get progressively slower?
   Please tell me I've got this wrong...

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

You have.

It charges at a rate dependant on the power supplied. The result of the charge varies depending on how charged the shield is already.

For example, pulling some numbers out of the air, 200 power units charge at 0hp shield will charge the shield to 200hp. 200 more power units at that point will charge the shield for, say, 100hp, so 400 PU in total gets you 300hp. Another 200 PU then gives you 50 more HP, and so on, and so forth.

These numbers are, obviously, purely representative, and this isn't what the line looks like, but you can see that charging up the bottom end takes a little time, but charging the top end takes a long time (and consequently a lot of power). Does that make more sense?

[techmaster-glitch]

I guess, but then why did Tezkat say it would "take months to get back up to the previous level", like it didn't take that long the first time?

[Tezkat]

Titan shields have something called a "shield charge". That number is used to calculate the hit point total, and it accumulates gradually over time. Over an hour, it will increment by:

Shield Charge += Energy Cost of Shield Generator

The energy cost is based on the level of the Shield Generator, but you can set it from 0% to 3200% of the "base" energy cost to help you manage your energy consumption.

They used to show the exact charge and hit point numbers on the generator, but they replaced it a few patches ago with a horribly pointless and buggy new UI.

Shield Hit Points = Shield Generator Level * 3 * Shield Charge ^ 0.8 * (1 + 0.2 * Shield Technology Level)

It just keeps going up and up without capping, but growth is exponentially slow as the shield charge becomes large.

A shield that's been growing uninterrupted for several months can reach into the 10 million hit points range. But if somebody knocks it down, it will again take several months to get back to that total. In effect, the shield only protects you from the first strike in a war, because restoring it to any kind of useful level takes a long, long time.

For smaller players, however, the shield offers near immunity to raiding, because nobody will bother to knock it down unless they really, really mean it.

[techmaster-glitch]

Alright, I think I get it. Now, moving beyond the "first strike" in war, let's talk about the next line of defence, the planatary guns.

What's the rundown of the three race's defence guns when compared against each other? And, uh...what's the deal with them? I ran some combat simulations with my fleetbase, and it took a bunch of guns and several high-level ones just to knock down one captial ship, and even then, the guns are almost completely wiped out. What's up with that?

[Tezkat]

Heh. Compare the resource costs of those little guns to that of a capital ship.

Basically, each type of artillery is good against a certain type of enemy and bad against others. Something with a lot of low attack weapons works great against little ships and sucks against heavily shielded ones, whereas ones with super high damage will punch right through heavy shields but won't have the total damage to be cost effective against weaker vessels.

Terrans also have missiles, which other races don't. They can zap Xen spies out of orbit, for instance.


The thing about artillery is... they regenerate. Depending on your repair tech level, 30-80% of them get rebuilt after an attack. You can also somewhat recoup your losses because damaged ships and defences turn into debris above your planet. Which you can probably harvest faster than anyone else.

[techmaster-glitch]

So, as Titans, what kind of artillery would you need to fend off an attack capable of breaking a highly built-up shield?

The thing about artillery is... they regenerate. Depending on your repair tech level, 30-80% of them get rebuilt after an attack.

For free, or is there still a resource cost involved?

[Tezkat]

So, as Titans, what kind of artillery would you need to fend off an attack capable of breaking a highly built-up shield?

None. The thing about the shield is... you can't turn it off, and no combat with the planet occurs until the shield has been broken. And once it's down, you need... well... whatever you need against the types of stuff he's sending.

For free, or is there still a resource cost involved?

Should be automatic. Not sure about that, though...

[techmaster-glitch]

Alright, this is really starting to bug me... when looking at my reports for comet-harvesting, in a situation where I inadvertently bumped some other harvesters, how the hell do I know who they belonged to?

[Tezkat]

You don't. Only the defender gets the information on who attacked.

If they're unhappy about it, I'm sure they'll let you know.


Of course, you can guess who it might belong to based on race and range to the comet. Recyclers are gas guzzlers, so people usually do their harvesting relatively close to home.

[techmaster-glitch]

...well, if the Titan player with twelve recylcers gets mad about being bumped by my two, I'll get some valuable experience in what happens when my ass gets kicked, and it won't make any lasting difference. The countdown to my account's deletion has already begun.

EDIT: Upgrading a Research Center is supposed to give you more research points per day, right? Mine is at level 2, and it doesn't seem to be giving any more points per day than level 1.

[Darkdragon]

How in the world do you tell if there's a comet in your system? I've either never seen one (likely) or I'm missing something.

Also: Should I invest in recyclers or in transporters? Or invest militarily?

[techmaster-glitch]

How in the world do you tell if there's a comet in your system? I've either never seen one (likely) or I'm missing something.

You'll have to be -very- lucky for a comet to swing right by your very home system. You'll more likely find them in systems nearby, and mine them that way. Go to the star map, and start checking all the systems nearby you. Look for a small thing that looks like an asteroid, and is not on any planatary orbit, and click on it. Follow recycling procedures from there.

Can't tell you much about how you should invest, though...

[Darkdragon]

It's a pity then that I have a vast expanse of empty space on one side of my system (which I share with three other inactives). I've got seven players which have more points than I do in my starting area, including one guy with (exactly) 7000 points which expanded into it.

[techmaster-glitch]

Ouch. You got screwed over with your start location, man. If I were you, I'd try restarting. After my current account is scrapped and I get restarted over in galaxy 1 as Titans, I was actually thinking I'd be willing to start over again if I got a bad start location, and I wasn't even imagining anything as bad as what you've got

[Tezkat]

Terrans military ships can carry cargo and thus be used for raiding, but they're not very cost effective either in terms of the ships or the fuel. Or research points, for that matter. By contrast, the Terran small transport is arguably the best transport in the game.

I'd stick to transporters to start, personally. If you can get on often, they offer a much better return on your early investment. Recyclers are much slower and more luck-based.


Since the graphics update a few weeks ago, comets look like little balls of poop floating around the edges of a system. Just search the systems in your neighbourhood one by one until you find one. Unless you're having some particularly bad luck, there should be at least on in your 5x7.


Also remember that you've got 10 days of newbie protection during which you can't be attacked. You can get away without building any defences at all during your first week or so.

If you have some unusually powerful neighbours, it would be a good idea to build up passive anti-raid defences like hangars and caches. You'd get pwned in a straight up fight and would just be wasting your resources. Most players seem to be polite enough not to raid actives, however. At least not very often.

[techmaster-glitch]

That's another thing, how can you tell if someone is "active" or not, and what is the criteria for such?

Also; upgrading a Research Center is supposed to give you more research points per day, right? Mine is at level 2, and it doesn't seem to be giving any more points per day than level 1. My bad, it is indeed giving me more points.

[Darkdragon]

Thanks for the advice. It seems I am indeed unlucky, as I had to go out of my 5x7 to find a comet. But at least I know what it looks like now.

Ouch. You got screwed over with your start location, man. If I were you, I'd try restarting. After my current account is scrapped and I get restarted over in galaxy 1 as Titans, I was actually thinking I'd be willing to start over again if I got a bad start location, and I wasn't even imagining anything as bad as what you've got

Wow. I'll go claim the "worst starting position so far" prize, because I'm also ages away from the rest of Thugz (Closest guy is over 30 systems away "as the crow flies"), not to mention there's only three of them in the whole quadrant. While it might be good for resources et cetera, it doesn't help when in need of reinforcements.

In other news, I will get enough resources to build my transporter by 6 AM tomorrow (in fifteen hours and then some). Hooray for having spent all my resources somehow...

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

Darkdragon, I think I'm further away than that.

I'm pretty sure that galaxy 2 is further away than that from G1... ;-]

[Darkdragon]

Yes, discounting you and Valynth. Although you might be closer to Tezket than I am, even taking into account of the Wormhole. Tezkat and I are on opposite sides of the map, literally. (I'm (-84|37) and he's (84|-31)).

[Tezkat]

That's another thing, how can you tell if someone is "active" or not, and what is the criteria for such?

Heh. If they whine when you raid them, they're active.