User Guide

NOTES AND TIPS
GENERAL TIPS
• Pick your faction wisely. The bonuses and penalties intrinsic to each faction
may seem minor, but they exert a constant influence on the faction’s devel-
opment throughout the entire game. Therefore, you want to select a fac-
tion where the abilities are an asset to your personal style and long-term
strategy, rather than a detriment.
• Don’t be afraid to use the governors and automate units. This can make
gameplay flow much more smoothly, without reducing your actual control
over your units and bases in any significant fashion.
• Watch how you place your bases. Try to use all the resources from as many
squares as possible. Don’t place bases directly within one another’s produc-
tion radius, but it’s okay to let the radii overlap a bit. Try not to let any
potentially productive squares go to waste.
• Build several colony pods early in the game, to give your faction some ter-
ritory as quickly as possible. From a strategic perspective, it’s never a good
idea to have all your eggs in one basket. Plus, more bases gives you bigger
energy reserves, faster tech research, and increased capacity to produce
Secret Projects and offensive units.
• When you start a base, build a defensive unit right away (more than one, at
higher levels of play). Also build at least one former per base.
• Make sure to build several bases on the coast. This allows your faction to
produce sea-based units.
• Never forget that units can hide in fungus.
• Explore as much as you can early on, while rival factions are small and rel-
atively friendly and mind worms are young and wimpy.
NOTES AND TIPS
APPENDIX 1
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