Gal6 Guide

[Tezkat]

(Gal6 discussion thread lives here...)

The Gal6 interface is pretty confusing to newcomers, so here's a quick guide on how to get started...

Please note that this information is based on the current (pre-reset) version of the game and might change when the new turn rolls around.

Thanks to Sauronthe1, Myzaree, and Sibre for the info.




REGISTRATION

Your Login Name and Password are private and not visible to anyone. In game, you're known only by your Planet Name and its location in the universe.

You should pick USA as a Nationality regardless of your actual country of origin, for reasons that will become clear below.



WHICH RACE SHOULD YOU PICK?

Your race determines what ships you can build. All six races are actually pretty balanced, with no one race or strategy dominating the others. Pick whichever you think will fit your playstyle the best.


DIGITROX

Advantages:
Best Planetary Defense Systems
Disadvantages:
Slowest, weakest, most expensive ships
Alliance Roles:
Turtle
Plasmator Stealer:
Trojan (Destroyer class; Speed 9/12/15) (Lower numbers indicate faster speed.)

Digitrox's superior PDS make them a real pain in the ass to attack--ideally suited to players who like to sit back and turtle. However, not only are their ships the slowest and weakest in the game, higher PDS counts will inflate score ranges beyond actual fleet strengths, making it difficult for them to attack without assistance. Most alliances consider them to be dead weight due to their relative inability to help in group combat.


HUMANS

Advantages:
Strong, versatile ships
Disadvantages:
Slow, expensive raiding fleets
Alliance Roles:
Attacker, Defender
Plasmator Stealer:
Net (Cruiser class; Speed 9/12/15)

As in many games, Humans are versatile and balanced. They have some of the most powerful and efficient ships in the game. However, their heavy plasmator stealers slow them down on raids.


KHADUUII

Advantages:
Quickly disable opponents without killing
Disadvantages:
Bad at actually killing things
Alliance Roles:
Defender, Raider
Plasmator Stealer:
Vortex (Gunboat class; Speed 6/9/12)

Khaduuii have special ships with the ability to "block" enemies, temporarily disabling them.
Their blockers act faster than anyone but the Shin, giving fleets high survivability, but they also leave a lot of enemy ships to fight another round. Their damage-dealing ships are relatively weak.


SHIN

Advantages:
Hidden fleet size
First strike in combat
Disadvantages:
Relatively weak ships
Alliance Roles:
Attacker, Defender, Raider
Plasmator Stealer:
Vampire (Destroyer class; Speed 8/11/14)

Shin hide their fleet size, making it extremely difficult to determine the composition of an incoming Shin fleet. Fake attacks can trick enemies into dividing their defences. Although usually not as strong, their ships almost always act before others of the same class.


PIRAATI

Advantages:
Can steal enemy ships
Fastest ships in the game
Disadvantages:
Can only targets same ship class
Require significant micromanagement
Alliance Roles:
Attacker, Defender, Raider
Plasmator Stealer:
Robber (Gunboat class; Speed 4/8/11)

Piraati ships "steal" half of the enemy vessels they defeat, adding them to their own fleets. However, Piraati ships are useless against enemies outside their class, so they must beware holes in their defences. Piraati can potentially gain the powers of every race, but such varied fleets require considerable effort and management to maintain.


ZYK

Advantages:
Cheap, efficient ships
Massive swarms cover more valuable ships
Disadvantages:
Individually weak ships sustain higher losses
Alliance Roles:
Attacker, Defender, Raider
Plasmator Stealer:
Pupa Robber (Frigate class; Speed 6/9/12)

What other races do with one ship, Zyk do with ten. Their massive, efficient, and easily replaced fleets swamp enemy targeting and provide excellent cover for both allies and their own ships.


EXTRA

Advantages:
Strong ships
Disadvantages:
Must pay real $$$

It's also worth noting that there's a seventh "Extra" group of ships available to any race as a perk of paying real world money for the Planet Extra Package. These ships are excellent in terms of combat abilities, but they lack any racial special abilities. To help get you hooked, they should be accessible free of charge during the first week or so of play. (If you're Digitrox, they're a particularly good deal.)


Here's how races stack up against each other in various areas. And keep in mind that it's a gross generalization of overall capabilities. Many races have ships that are especially strong in specific roles.

COMBAT INITIATIVE (First to Last)
Shin, Khaduuii (Blockers), Extra, Piraati, Human, Zyk, Khaduuii (Standard), Digitrox

COMBAT EFFICIENCY (Strongest to Weakest)
Khaduuii (Blockers), Human, Zyk, Piraati, Extra, Shin, Khaduuii (Standard), Digitrox

RAIDING SPEED (Fastest to Slowest)
Piraati, Khaduuii, Zyk, Shin, Human, Digitrox

[Tezkat]

So... now that you have a planet, how do you build it up?


GAL6 TIME

Gal6 resets every 4-6 months. The turns are divided into rounds, each of which lasts one hour. Most activities in Gal6 take a certain number of rounds to complete.

Note that, during the first 10 minutes or so of every hour, when the round counter in the top right flashes "Calculating" in red, the game won't let you queue any new purchases. You have to wait until it finishes processing.



RESEARCH

(Menu: Economy > Technology)

Technology unlocks pretty much everything you'll be able to build in Gal6. In order to unlock and use a technology, first you have to research it, then you have to construct it. You can only have one research and one construction project active at any given time. Thus, most of the time, you'll be developing two tech trees at once, alternating research and construction between them.


The very first thing you'll want to do is research/construct the first four Probe techs (up to Plasmator probes, a vital building block of your economy). The rest of the tree deals with espionage, which you can hold off until you've unlocked enough upgrades for a decent military.

Fleet tech unlocks new ships... bigger and stronger as you go down the research tree. Unless you plan to turtle, it'll be your first priority after getting plasmator probes. You'll need to research at least far enough to construct combat ships of the same class as your plasmator stealers.

Drive tech makes ships faster. The first two upgrades (through 2nd Generation Hyperdrive) do absolutely nothing. The last three each reduce your travel time by one round. Speed is important if you plan on doing any attacking or defending, so build this up alongside Fleet tech and max it as soon as possible.

Planet tech gives you a small boost in income, but it's tiny compared to your plasmators. The final tech in this tree allows you to build ships for raiding resources from other planets, which are expensive and only practical alongside powerful fleets.

PDS (Planetary Defense System) tech is primarily useful for Digitrox, since most defence in the game is active and involves moving fleets to support allies.

Raw material tech is something you won't have to worry about for a while. It merely increases your resource storage capacity.

Advanced tech can't even be researched until you have a lot of battles (and thus XP) under your belt, but it can provide huge boosts to your planet.



PLASMATORS

Plasmators are the income generating units of Gal6. There are no maintenance costs of any kind, only income from Plasmators and spending on hardware and technology.

(Menu: Production > Probe)

Queue up Booster rockets and Plasmator probes in a 1:1 ratio. The tutorial recommends 99 of each. Upwards of 300 (or even 500) is better.

(Menu: Economy > Raw Materials)

Now that you have probes, you need to launch them. Launch everything at once. The very first set of probes launched should return with up to 90% Plasmators. The next batch will net you significantly less (under 20%), with diminishing returns as a function of how many Plasmators you already have.

The probes will return with Inactive Plasmators, which do nothing until you Activate them by assigning them to produce one of the three resources.

Activating your nth plasmator costs 750 + 250n Metal. So, the first costs 1000, the next 1250, and so on. Order doesn't matter. The first 80 activations still cost 870k Metal whether you activate them one at a time or all at once. You probably won't have enough Metal to activate everything immediately, so work on activating your plasmators as you go.

Since your primary starting expense will be Metal, activate your Metal plasmators first. The "helpful" game tutorial advises you go with 45% Metal, 45% Crystal, and 10% Narion, but you'll need a much higher ratio of Metal (more like 80%+) at the beginning. You start with more than enough Crystal and Narion to last the first few days.

As you grow, you'll want to balance out resource production (40% Metal, 40% Crystal, 20% Narion is a good starting point). Keep in mind that different races and playing styles have different resource requirements. Shin consume much more metal than other races, for instance, whereas Piraati consume more Crystal. Players who battle regularly will go through a ton of Narion--millions a day at higher levels--whereas pure turtles use very little. (Narion is used for ship fuel.)


Rinse and repeat. Use your period of newbie protection (4 days--96 rounds) to focus on aquiring and activating new plasmators. This procedure gets pricey fast, and you'll soon reach the point where taking them from enemies becomes cheaper than finding and activating them yourself. Towards the end of protection, start building ships (and possibly PDS).

[Tezkat]

ALLIANCE COMBAT

First off, you need to understand how Gal6 is organized and how combat works in a general sense.


Unlike most browser MMOs, Gal6 is all about massive multiplayer battles. Multiple enemies can send fleets to attack a planet, and multiple allies can send their fleets to defend it. And then everyone who happens to be at the planet in a given round will duke it out. All attackers will sum up their forces into a single massive fleet, and all defenders will do likewise. Any surviving ships will remain and fight the next round (up to 3 rounds total for an attacker; 6 for allied defenders).

Thus, a large part of the game revolves around seeing that your allied fleets are all in the right place at the right time.



PLANET SCORE

Gal6 has a simple metric for keeping score:

Score = ((# Plasmators) * 2500) + ((Total Cost of Fleet + PDS) / 10) + ((Total Cost of Probes) / 1000) + ((Total Cost of Tech) / 20) + ((Total Resources on Hand) / 1000)

Thus, you can tell at a glance roughly how much military hardware a given planet is carrying.

Players cannot attack opponents with less than half their score. Even after deploying, if the defender's score should fall below 50% of the attacker's by the time they meet, the attacker will turn back automatically without engaging. Killing too many ships can also force a recall partway through multi-round combat by pushing the opponent below the threshold (which can sometimes be disastrous if supporting allies). Likewise, players can deliberately disassemble their own forces in order to slip under attacks from large enemies.

There is no upper limit on the size of attack targets. A player of any size can join in attacks against arbitrarily large opponents. There's also no limit on assisting in defence. Strong players can send vast fleets to protect newbies in the alliance.

Building PDS will weaken your fleet strength to score ratio, so avoid them unless you're a purely defensive player (i.e. Digitrox planning to hole up behind a wall of PDS).

It should be evident that this game was not designed for lone wolves.



GAME GEOGRAPHY

A Gal6 planet (i.e. player) address is a four-number sequence divided as follows:

Universe : System : Galaxy : Planet

Travel times depend on how far out you need to fly. Sending a fleet to another planet in your galaxy is faster than sending a fleet to another galaxy, which is faster than travelling to another system, which is faster than visiting another universe.

The Universe is determined by player Nationality. Therefore, you want to pick the same country (in our case: USA, #214) as the rest of your alliance so that they can reach you faster and vice versa. Furthermore, you want to cluster friends in the same Galaxy, and keep most friendly galaxies in the same System.

Elected Galaxy Commanders can invite you to a galaxy with available spots.



JOIN AN ALLIANCE

(Menu: Alliance > Profile)

For the new turn, we're members of the #NSR alliance. Type #root in the box and click the Jump To button. Then wait for the page to finish loading and click the Join button to apply. Don't hit the "Enter" key. The game tends to be a little finicky about how its forms are loaded, and you might join the front page alliance by mistake, resulting in a 72 hour waiting period until you can rejoin the correct alliance. (Yes, this happened to me... )

As with many such games, most of the fun goes on in IRC. Efficient communication is especially important in a game that demands as much coordination as Gal6.

Join #NSR on Coldfront.

[Tezkat]

And now for the meat of the game... combat!


SHIP CLASSES AND TARGETING

There are six ship classes. In order from smallest to largest:

Fighter (Fi)
Gunboat (Gb)
Frigate (Fr)
Destroyer (De)
Cruiser (Cr)
Battleship (Bs)

In general, smaller means cheaper and faster. Larger means stronger but slower and more expensive.

Each of your ships can target up to three different classes of enemy. For instance, a ship that targets De/Gb/Fr will attack Destroyers until there are none left, then move onto Gunboats until there are none left, and finally attack Frigates. Ships cannot damage enemies not on their target lists. If they run out of targets, they're little more than fodder. Thus, it's necessary to deploy a range of ships distributed to counter whatever opposition you're expecting.

Some ships can target All, which means that they will attack enemies in order of increasing size, starting with Fighters and working their way up to Battleships.



THE ANATOMY OF BATTLE

Ships attack in order of Initiative, from lowest to highest. Any surviving ships get to act on their turn. They attack the first available target on their list. If there are multiple targets of the same class, damage is divided evenly between them in proportion to their numbers.

This process continues until all remaining ships have acted. Special actions, such as transfering stolen plasmators, resources, or ships, happens at the end of the round. Any ships left over can fight in the next round.



SPECIAL SHIPS

Plasmators are the backbone of the Gal6 economy. You want to have more than your enemies. One of the best ways to do that is to take them by force. Each race has their own unique Plasmator Stealer (as listed above). These vary widely in class, cost, and speed. Any attacking stealers that manage to survive the round of battle (they always attack last) will instantly transfer plasmators to the attacker's planet.

The other three special ships have identical statistics regardless of the race building them.

PDS are not really ships, but they act like ships in all respects except inability to move. They can be targeted normally like regular ships of their class, but their extremely high power to cost ratio makes that approach less than ideal. The Devastator is an ultra high damage Fighter designed specifically to take down enemy PDS. Any attacks on planets known to employ PDS should include Devastators to take them down.

The Raider is a huge and expensive Battleship class vessel that functions like a Plasmator Stealer, except that instead of stealing Plasmators, it steals resources (Metal, Crystal, and Narion) from enemy stores.

The Spy is basically a planet probe that takes up a fleet spot and requires travel time.  Most players rely on probes instead.



ATTACKING

(Menu: Fleet > Control)

In order to attack a target without taking heavy losses, you generally need at least a 2:1 advantage in fleet strength. 3:1 or higher is better. Since you can't actually attack planets less than half your size, attacks are usually a cooperative venture. Several players must time their attacks to land together and combine forces.

In general, smaller ships move faster. Thus, you have some control over travel time by manipulating the ship mix. If you buy the Planet Extra Package with Credits (i.e. real world money), you can send out delayed attacks at any time. Otherwise, you must arrange to be online during the hour you're supposed to ship out.

You can even get away with sending your entire fleet out on attacks, relying on allies to defend you should enemies try to hit you while you're out.

You almost always want your fleets to engage for the maximum of 3 rounds.

Builds specialized in attack support usually emphasize the heavier, more efficient ships. They tend to have very strong fleets for their scores. Speed remains important, however, so  concentrate on Frigates through Cruisers (capping attack time at 12 rounds with maxed Drive tech).



RAIDING

They key to successful raiding is ensuring that your stealers survive. You accomplish this task in two ways. One is to send many ships of the same class as your stealers as cover, forcing enemies to divide their fire. The other, of course, is to eliminate them before they eliminate you.

Builds specialized in raiding maintain a large number of combat ships in the class(es) necessary to cover their stealers. By staying small and fast, they can usually afford to sacrifice ships for loot and fund larger allies to help defend them.



DEFENDING

If the alliance has purchased the necessary upgrade, you can see all fleets entering or leaving alliance space.

(Menu: Alliance > Status)

Concentrating forces minimizes losses for defenders just as it does for attackers. As with attacking, you want to aim for a 3:1 advantage in military forces.

Fleets can remain to defend a planet for up to 6 rounds even though each attacker can only remain for 3. Enemies sometimes (either intentionally or as a result of poor coordination) stagger their attacks. It also gives you a bit of wiggle room in case you can't be on at the precise round needed to meet the attackers.

Being closer to your allies in Gal6 space means you can usually mobilize more quickly than their attackers. Alliances can purchase an upgrade that further reduces intra-alliance travel time by one round.

Builds specialized in defending require a diverse fleet of ships capable of neutralizing all four classes of potential plasmator stealer (Gunboat through Cruiser). Pure defenders can even get away without raiding, relying on grateful allies for financial support.



TURTLING

Turtling is pretty easy to do.

Step 1: Play Digitrox.
Step 2: Build PDS.
Step 3: Profit!!!

Presenting an unappetizing target for enemy raiders frees turtles to help the alliance financially rather than militarily. Combat-oriented allies can support them in fleet engagements.



TACTICAL RETREAT

You can recall a fleet to base at any time, for any reason. It's sensible to probe a target before landing to make sure that they haven't organized an overwhelmingly strong defence to meet you. You don't get any narion back, however.



XP

Gal6 rewards participation in combat by awarding XP (for successful kills, steals, blocks, and so on). Crossing certain thresholds of XP increases your Rank (also known as Experience Level or EL), which grants bonuses in combat and unlocks powerful bonus technologies.