ARLECHIN, This is in shadow space, its not the most populated area, but there are alot of bases around of large players.

How the current system works is that each pirate spawns 1/4 of its fleet every 6 hours these spawns are offset by and hour and they are proportional to the number of points of the players in that area and maybe the total production in the area that they spawn. Each spawned pirate fleet will stay spawned for 24 hours before flying away and a new spawn replaceing it. There is no diffrence in spawns on the weekend as opposed to the weekdays. This means that every hour on the hour 3 or 4 pirates spawn 1/4 of their fleets.

My suggestion is to inscrease the spawn amounts on the weekends as well as create a mechanism that will force greater spawns in areas where pirates live for a very short period of time. (perhaps over weeks or months) This will allow any area to become a hot spot so to speak if pirates are agressively hunted. it also makes sense with the change to the radius of recoverable fleet being reduced to 10,000c kilometers, they want people fighting close to their bases so lets make it so they can.

This is not some attempt to scream to make things more profitable, i honestly belive that the more time people spend in the game playing the more likely they are to spend money on it. People want the ability to advance and progress and this would go a long way to enableing smaller players to catch up as well as allowing people to play during the times when they have the free time to do so, like the weekends.

Я искал пиратов в системах 1372 примерно в 13 ширинах системы от 1 до 87: 415 - 430, у меня был установлен фильтр, чтобы показывать только флоты с рейтингом выше 3000 очков.

Я нашел один флот с 16000 очками и еще 5 между 3000-4000 очками, скриншоты прикреплены ниже.

Понятно, что администрация снизила скорость появления почти до нуля, чтобы компенсировать изменения в боевой системе, которые не были приняты должным образом. К сожалению, сейчас не лучше, чем тогда, когда потери при нападении на пиратов были непреодолимыми.

Это было не в период высокой активности серверов, это был будний день и вне основных часов активности в России. Эти выходные были настолько плохими, что большинство людей, которых я знаю, даже не удосужились полететь за крохами, которые были в наличии.

Игра просто умерла?

Есть ли какие-то планы по новому источнику дохода или это просто игра окончена для игроков, у которых еще нет десятка ОПС и кучи астероидов, чтобы прокормить себя?

Буду очень признателен за комментарий администрации по этому поводу.


Я считаю, что нам нужна адаптивная система, которая увеличивает скорость и количество появления пиратов в районах, где их часто уничтожают. Особенно по выходным, чтобы резко увеличить количество спавнов, когда у игроков есть свободное время, чтобы воспользоваться этими преимуществами.

Реальность такова, что чем больше людей играют и летают, тем больше вероятность того, что администрация наберет подписчиков и купит Гидры за ресурсы или корабли, а это будет иметь большое значение для этого.



I want to post this in english as well as russian, so the message gets out to the entire community.

I searched for pirates in 1372 systems in about 13 system widths from 1 to 87: 415 - 430, I had a filter set to only show fleets rated above 3000 points.


I found one fleet with 16000 points and 5 more between 3000-4000 points, screenshots are attached below.


It is understood that the administration has reduced the spawn rate to almost zero to compensate for changes to the combat system that were not adopted properly. Unfortunately, it is no better now than when the losses in the attack on the pirates were insurmountable.
This was not during a period of high server activity, it was a weekday and outside the main activity hours in Russia. This weekend was so bad that most people I know didn't even bother to fly for the crumbs that were available.


Did the game just die?


Are there any plans for a new source of income or is it just game over for players who don't already have a dozen OPS and a bunch of asteroids to feed themselves?


I would be very grateful for the administration's comments on this matter.

BloodDragon, If they removed a post instead of blocking you from the forum you probably got rather lucky, i assume you said some things that were not polite which is against the rules. If they removed it was likely because of this.

UncleanOne,

You do realize that this is going to buff many xerg pirate units as the reduction of the damage will occur as the last step in the calculation and will therefore apply multiplicatively as a form of damage reduction. It will also reduce pirate aggression against xerj units multiplicatively in all combat calculations. Since a unit that recieves damage save for capital ships dies quite quickly this is actually quite a buff to xerg units in way. Since the change of lost ships was reduced to only 10% or less hp this is actually quite a boon for most xerj units in most circumstances as regeneration only allowed you to save units by regeneration once an overwhelming advantage was reached in the combat. If xerj players learn what this means and play to its strength this is alot better then the regeneration they used to get. It will take signifigantly more damage, as much as 30% more damage to kill a xerg capital ship in a round or two than it did before. This will be a boon in pvp as well if used correctly. (remember its going to stack multiplactively after all other specilizations and technology are already applied)

I am just saying if i was xerj i wouldnt be so quick to complain about this change, their are times when this change will be to their advantage and times when it won't be; a smart player will choose combats that allow it to be to their advantage. If i was one who enjoyed betting, i would wager on this reducing the number of combat losses for xerj rather than increasing them under most circumstances.

Listen guys there were problems in this game before this change, and it is concievable that these changes were meant to address that problem. The fact that somone 1/4 your size could show up at you base with 30k defences and stomp it to oblivion without losing a single ship while barely fielding enough ships to exceed the defence in points. Thats a real issue, i have no defences on virtually all of my bases for this very reason. No resources are ever stored on a planet, they are stored in civil ships and they arent even sent to expedition off my bases because this would make them a target when i recall. (i know this to be true because i was the one making such hits and not just one or two, but hundreds of them)

We have in some sense reached a contradiction about whats best for PVE and PVP and the only way i can see to pernamently solve this problem is to de-couple them.

Changeing pirate aggression to increase as if they were 100k point players would be a brilliant solution to this problem and would fix many other aspects of the game!

Increaseing the percentage of dropped debris to compensate for the additional losses, lots of other solutions.

You take into consideration that players who are actually larger with better tech, and anytime you get caught with something worth stealing or blowing up and its instantly gone, with no penalty in anyway to the attacker. Some kind of change was needed. This change for PVP purposes makes alot of sense, the problem is 95%+ of the minerals and metal in this game comes from pirates and the aggression of these pirates inscreases as if they were 10k point players. This means aggression levels of 4000-6000 are a real possibility and when your doing 40-60 times the amount of damage per ship, well your making pirates no longer a viable options for the majority of players with this change. There are many solutions to this problem, introducing a structure stat to ships that is beneath the armour stat for these values. There is also a lack of understanding of the combat mechanics in this game by almost everyone, which really doesn't help.


Lets not give up completely just yet, this is a transitionary stage in the games development and while the changes effectivly make it impossible to fly for virtually all players right now, i think that the administration has at least heard this and can see it on the stats side of the server with virtually all players on expedition or mining comets only! They have tried to add a realistic factor of warfare in an unbalanced way, most people dont want to sit and watch their ships enter combat because they got better stuff to do. In the end this a game and it needs to be fun and enjoyable and that means progression and this clashes directly with what war is... No one wins in war everyone loses, just some more than others...

There are dozens of solutions to the problems from this change, lets do our best to be patient with the devolopers and hope that they can come to understand that the changes as they were implemented are a problem for the future of this game, there are 50 pages of such discussions on the russian forum; as well as votes in the senate. I am not saying an acceptable solution will be found that will allow you or me to continue to play this game, but i think we should give them some time to try and do so, without resorting to name calling or trashing them. Such behaviour helps no one and is not productive in anyway.

There is a small chance that hope is coming.

EDIT: "Basically what this means is there saying any ship with less than 50% damage may be lost equal to the percentage of the damage its sustained. It will eventually be fixed and then returned to you at a later time or fixed and sent into the star with some unstated probability. They are not saying that every ship with less than 100% armour will be lost at a percentage equal to the damage sustained. They are saying it might need repairs to return home at this percentage, what percent of the damaged units that choose to return home when they are fixed has not been stated."

This statement has been proved to be 10% base, +10% for premium and +x% for the technology that is to say the probability of losing a ship pernament is essentially the percentage of the amount of armour the unit has at the end of the battle. Although this is technically 10% the range of recovery has been reduced to 10,000 ckm meaning 90+% of the battles you have no chance of recovery even if you got lucky and rolled for it to be recovered. Also the percentage is a threshold not a random number. That is to say if you lose 9 ships in this way you will recive 0!!! returned to you no matter what a minimum of 10 lost ships would be required to recieve even one ship returned to you. This means you cannot let the paint of a capital ship get scratched in combat or there is a very really possibility that it will be lost to you with absolutly nothing given in return. (unless you lose at least 10 capital ships by this new means.)



I assume that this means amitorization costs will be removed form the game as we obviously are no longer going to be maintaining ships, but instead just leaving them where they are whenever they are damaged.

The other concering thing is this just gave zerg units an immesurable power up compared to the other races as they are the only race that can bybass shields and have units that can regenerate. I expect a cost reduction of no less than 50% on all non zerg units would be needed to blance out this change so that it is fair for all players of all races.

Otherwise, yeah there is no point in playing this game anymore if you arent a zerg player.

What you could do instead, is create an equation that unbalances this equation so units that are heavily damaged are much more susecptible to this change, in a exponetial/logirithmic way. That is to say a death star with 99% could theoretically be unrecoverable after a battle but it needs to be 10 times less like than a ship at 98% which is 10 times less likely than a ship at 97% with a reasonable chance of the ship being lost at around 50% damage and a greater chance the higher the damage is. Your are trying to say that percentage of damaged armour is a not really armour its the structure of the ship and all critical componets. The problem with this they would stop shotting in the middle of battle if they were knocked out from operatibility or at the very least your implying that continuing operatibility will cause the units destruction by the end of the battle. We are the ones control our ships and commanders and if we already have an overwheleming victory forcing a unit to keep shotting when it could power down and be saved in a combat is much more logical. Your essentially enforing stupidity. Not to mention the percentages you suggest are, illogical, incomprehensible and have no direct parrell to reality in anyway shape or form. A tank thats 1% damaged is not 50 times more likely to be fixable after a battle than a tank at 50% damage. Its like infinitly more likely to be operational.

Anybody designing a tank that can be knocked out with only 1% damage needs to be taken out back and shot. These are war machines they are extencivly and excruititatiny designed to be functional for as long as possible under the worst possible conditions and your implying the best the designer of that object could come up with was a linear expression for its surviablity? not even the germans could make something that precise. Your proposed changes only make sense for zerg units as they are living organic entitiies.

Your basically saying a car accident that involves denting a vehicle could somehow make it inoperable. This is sound logic unless you realize that we design vehicles so that the important parts are protected even when damage occurs to the outside parts. Infact that is the very purpose of many of these parts and these are commercial vehicles not machines of war where we are paying much, much, more attention in the design to ensure functiuonality when damage is sustained.

A means of matinence in the form of amitorization configurable by the user and a technology that goes with it to make it so your better at avoiding such losses the higher ur matinence amitorization and the level of this tech. You also would need to reduce the chance of such failures happening from units that bypass shields. ( or at least give us a technology to reduce these losses)

Sometimes a tank or unit with only 1% armour or structure left can still be operational and recoverable; have you ever heard of the KV-1? IF ANYONE HAS PROVED THAT THIS IS THE CASE ITS THE FUCKING RUSSIANS!

I am not saying such a change would be good, but this is the only way it could be implemented to not break the game in its current form and cause mass exodus. Theres no way to hunt pirates for most players with this change.

At the very least you need to make these values based on comparing the current armour to the base armour the unit has. That is to say that the armour tech has at least succeeed in some way to be useful at protecting critical components for the ship to operate when taking damage or some form of nanite regeneration that would allow mechanical ships to repair themselves in some way like zerg units do, maybe to some preset maximum like 10% based on avalible materials.

Alternatively you could add or split the armour values for a unit into a structure and a armour value, allowing some zerg units to bypass shields and hit armour, but not structure directly, and make losing armour the priotiry in battle, but shifiting as the armour decrease to cause more damage to the structure percentage wise. This would allow it to make some sense with the real world. A damage value of 50% structure would be reasonble to not bother fixing a damaged ship and would align with the stated purpose of this change. It would also allow you to put the values more in line with reality and realistic outcome from battle damage to a ship.

In order to make this change fair, you would still need to make sure that terran is the most robust at resisting changes to the units structure, they need some kind of bonus is some way to make them more recoverable from damaged structure than protoss or zerg units. This is also in line with logic and reality, the zerg units may be able to regenrate minor wounds or even be able to continue fighting with massive injuries, but they are less likely to survive such a situation. Terran engneering is terribly deisgned compared to protoss construction making them much more likely to get by with a critically damaged structure. Where protoss units are very precise and perfectly tuned making it more difficult to recover the unit with the same level of structural damage to compenstae for this, protoss units have very advanced shields making it less likely they will incur structural damage. (with the exception of zerg damage dealt directly to armour)

Its much easier to put something back to functioning or maintain functioning if it is not very precise, in some ways these things are more difficult (though not nesscariliy less likely) to break and easier to fix than more precise counterparts. Think AK47 vs whatever the hell anyone else was using at the time.

I would also like to point out that this is very poorly worder in english.

Here is a summation of what it apperas to mean.

What this is basically saying is that a unit with more than 50% armour but less than 100% can eithier be functional at the end of the battle or not functional and recovered or not functional and unrecovered. if it is determined to be functional it will be status quo and usuable at the end of the battle. If it is determined to be not functional and it has more than 50% armour it will it will be eithier Recovered or lost by some percentage not stated to the stars cordinates in that system. If the unit has less than 50% armour, it will be destroyed at the end of battle and drop debris. Essentially as long as a ship has more than 50% armour at the end of the battle it will immediatly be repaired and returned to you or eventually be repaired and returned to you or repaired and not returned to you.



At least it most likely hasn't been stated, if they are stateing it they are implying that there is a percent equal to its damage that it will needs repairs and that the odds of it retuning home are also the same percentage. Say if a ship has 75% armour it would have a 25% of being lost in the battle and once it was repaired it would have a 25% chance of not returning to you and going to the star instead. This would mean a ship with 75% armour at the end of the battle would have a 75% chance of being returned to you immediatly; in the 25% chance that it is not, it will then have a 75% chance of returning to you eventually. For a total probability of 93.75% of a ship being returned to you immediatly or eventually and a 6.25% chance that the ship will be pernamently lost to you and be sent to the star in that system instead if its armour is at 75% at the end of the battle.

EDIT:So it looks like everything is hashed out and the changed are finalized. They administration rolled back the changes in combat to an extent, making it so pirates are once again profitable to hunt, but in the same stroke they have essentially removed pirates from the game to prevent people from being able to profit from their existence. This guide is largely correct, although they have changed the energy generation from terran solar panels to be more effective when they are in later positions around the stars.

Unfortunatly the removal of pirates from the game means its no longer possible to really advance in this game or at least i havent figured out how to as of yet, so at this time i still cannot reccomend this game for new players just starting out. If this changes i will edit this post with my suggestions on how to advance, but for the time being there is no path i can see for newer players.

Why am I writing this; the first thing that comes to mind is insanity followed by stupidity, but the truth is am tired of repeating myself hundreds of times and linking to this post should save me some headaches.

The initial post of this is just going to be the very basics of the game that every veteran player wish they knew before they started playing. How to get resources, how many fields you need, where and what you should colonize, etc.

Upvotes and comments via reputation in game or by direct message may encourage me to take the time to add all the details, pictures, etc to this post or even to write other posts.

I understand that not all the details are present to explain why these are the best choices for you to make, it’s not that I don’t know the details its simply that it’s a lot of work to explain them and as I stated earlier this post in no way benefits me and actually costed me hydras to post; so, whining about this fact will get you nowhere with me. As time permits i may answer questions or edit this post to cover them. Direct message in game is free as opposed to costing hydras to ask here.

EDIT: I recieved a decent amount of in game messages about this post so i have edited it to add more details, pictures and instructions of how to carry out these basic operations in the game. Unfortunatly, no one found this information helpful enough to donate hydras toward additional topics and while i don't mind spending a bit of my time to write them i would rather spend my hydras on something useful to me. As such this will be my last post of this type. You are still welcome to ask questions here or message me in game, i am happy to try and help as time permits.


Vision

The first thing we need to talk about is vision, if you’re just starting out you can only see your solar system. As a Terran (human) player you need to research a technology called detection technology. This will allow you to see 1000ckm per level (one solar system linearly the diagonals are (1000^2 +1000^2)^(1/2) or 1414ckm. As a Zerg player you need to build the Sensor spore colony which is a defensive structure. For Protoss it’s a building called the fleet beacon.



The most important thing when your just getting started is to raid the inactive players, you see the newbie protection status prevents the vast majority of active players from attacking people below 25k points. This means there are literally thousands of 7 day inactive players within 100k ckm of you that only a small handful of players can attack. They also usually have no defenses and at least a few hundred thousand resources.

As Terran its best to use small cargo ships (SC) to raid these players, they are quite fast and as long as the enemy has no defenses you don’t need a ship with weapons to steal their resources.
Unfortunately, the Devs hate new players, so in order to get some vision your detection tech or spore colonies are a must. Your best bet at the start is to go onto the chat and beg some bigger players around you to share some vision with you. This will help a lot as you are waiting to level up your tech, or spore colonies.
If you do this you should easily be able to loot about 30 million resources in a week and be around 25k points at the end of the week.

Planets
Why is bold and underlined? Well, because it is the biggest mistake virtually every player makes in this game when they start out. This mistake costs millions or even billions of resources to correct later, (the longer you wait the worse it is)

Note: in order see the details about a planet, like what type it is you need espionage level 5 or higher!


One of the things you likely will have noticed on your home world is that it has 220 or less fields the truth is your home planet must always be eventually abandoned for this reason. You see Terran need an inordinate number of fields, 300+ base fields per planet. As for Zerg, 270+* and Protoss we will say 250+.
I constantly get push back on this by new players or people who don’t know what they are doing, the truth is when Terran gets more advanced they need about 350 fields per planet, even at a modest score of say 500k-1 million points; while getting a base roll of 350 fields is technically possible, its much more feasible to get 300+ and with some pumping technology and infrastructure levels and terraforming you can easily squeeze out the extra needed fields for an affordable amount.

There is an astrisk beside Zerg, because they dont actually have the ability to terraform the planet, they can build 100 creep colonies to get an extra field, this is a pain in the ass. Many Zerg players will only keep a base with 320-330 or more fields for this reason.

So why don’t you just keep that 200 base fields and terraform it to 350 base fields? Well, because it will cost you about half a billion resources to do this. If you do what I suggested it will cost you less than a million resources…

Now I am a mathematician, but it really doesn’t take one to know that less than a million resources is preferable to half a billion for the same thing. Especially when if you follow this guide, you can get that 300+ base fields for less than 100k resources.

Here is the trick, every time a planet is colonized the number of fields is generated arbitrarily so if you get a low roll, you can build a a robotics factory and then a shipyard, then take all the resources off the planet, abandon it and the re-colonize it for a new number of fields. To do this quickly I recommend 9 or 10+ colony ships as it reduces the colonization time to 6-10 hours instead of 24. The formula is 24/sqrt(number of colony ships) rounded to an integer this is how many hours it will take at minimum to colonize the planet.

You only lose one colony ship and half of its resources are converted into useable resources on the planet that you can take with you so you’re only losing about 15k resources per attempt, even less if you pick up the spawned materials before you take off to make a re-roll.

You cannot abandon your capital and you can only transfer your capital to anthor planet for free one time only!



The next question is what type of planet should I colonize?

This one is easy it doesn’t matter what race you are there is only one answer, GAS PLANETS and not just any gas planet, you want a gas planet with a negative temperature the colder the better! The best roll is a -120 degrees minimum temperature with a maximum temperature of -100 degrees. This is a “perfect planet” the max temperature for gas planets is 20-40 degrees higher than the minimum tempature you see from the galaxy view. There is no correlation between position and temperature for gas planets, they can be +100 or -120 degrees in all 9 positions around a star, this is what makes them so valuable.

*Important* The temperature of the planet or it being gas has no effect on the output of the minerals or metal produced. Yes there is a planet type that can, by a very small percent increase of metal or mineral production (1-4%), but these planets are much warmer and will produce 20-60% as much gas as a negative temperature gas planet. 40-80% is many times bigger than 1-4% and gas is way scarcer once you break 25k points.


I am not going to bother showing you the math for each race, but i will do a quick example with terran. Lets say you find a nice sand planet that is 80 degrees and its gives a nice bonus +4% to metal production; lets say i find a nice gas planet that is -80 degrees. For the Geyser we first note that it generates 20% more gas on a gas planet than any other type, the next is pretty simple math.

For the sand planet we have 2 * x^(1.8) * (0.8 - 0.001 * max tempature of the planet.) The only diffrences in these two calculations is the last part, your planet will multiply the gas produced for a given level by 0.8 - 0.08 or 0.72 and mine will multiply it by (0.8 - (-0.08)) = 0.88. So for the same level of building my planet will produce (0.88/0.72) * 120% = 146.7% times 108% for it being gas so 158.4% more gas for the same investment level.

For the refinery it will generate 1.28 - 0.16 for the sand planet and for the gas planet it will generate 1.28 +0.16. So we have that it will produce 1.44=1.12 = 128.6% time 108% is 139% as much gas on my planet compared to on yours.

Now you may be going, you promised up to 60%, so here how you get it for one a gas planet will add 8% to all of these values. However, these are the base gas values, things like infastructure, geologist, other tech buffs all stack multiplicativly with these numbers NOT ADDITIVELY!. So if you have say a level 5 geoligist (a 15% buff) you are getting 148% gas form the refinery and 169% from the buff instead of 115%. There are many other things like planetoids, alliance stations and etc that will also stack multiplicativly with this bonus so 60% is actually a very low value compared to the potential increase in gas. (note the gas addition from being a gas planet stacks additivly not multiplicatively thats why i left it out of the secound set of calculations.)

The only race that gets a bonus multiplicativly for the gas type bonus is protoss. For gas planets in the calculation of the vespene generated by the green droids only it is multiplactive as long as you have an assimlator.) This is an important point as it means that the metal inscrease from your sand planet is 4% of the base value and my inscrease stacks before this calculation occurs so its multiplicative instead.

Take into mind that 1 vespene is generally considered to be worth as much as 2 mineral or 4 metal per unit and you start to understand that it is pure stupidity to colonize any other kind of planet. Now you may say, most of this bonus is coming from the cold tempature, not from being a gas planet! This is true, but only gas planets can roll as cold as -120 (not even ice planets can do this) They can also spawn in any position away from the star and this means you can have a very cold planet that is 1st position.
This is important because terran and to a lesser extent zerg actually rely on solar energy! We also note that all metal and mineral production buildings have no effect on the output of these buildings from tempature!

So tempature only affects the amount of gas produced on a planet; tempature has no effect on the output of metal or minerals on any planet, regardless of which of the three races you are playing!



Does the diameter of the planet matter; what does it effect?

The diameter affects the base structure of a planet, this can make it harder to blow up and hard to be eaten by a lexx. It also has an affect on the amount of resources produced if you are Zerg or Protoss. These two races will produce more resources (metal and minerals only) on a smaller diameter planet. The amount isn't huge, but ever bit helps. You don't really need to worry about a Lexx attack unless you are offline for like a month or more. For one no allaince allows its memebers to eat an active players planet, and secoundly Lexx is unimaginably slow they have a base speed of 1 unit of distance per minute. No one is going to send them to an active players planet as they are so slow you can make the needed changes to prevent anything from being eaten anyway.

My friend said to change the time back to 24hrs when using multiple ships to colonize a planet; why?
Well so there is something i didnt mention in colonization the roll occurs by generating a random number between 40 and 350 as far as i know at least. 348 is the largest i have ever seen, but i have been told by a mod that 350 is the maximum roll, but honestly who knows. Anyway the part i left out is that the roll occurs and then there is a small number of bonus fields added to this roll, its equal to square root of the number of hours rounded down. So if the colonization time is 4 hours then u get +2 base fields, 16hrs you get +4 base fields, 999 hrs you get +31 base fields. The thing is it doesnt appear to increase the maximum roll that can occur, and if you understand anything about statistics its much more likely you will get a high number of fields in the same amount of time by performing more rolls with a smaller bonus than less with a larger bonus. This is why i didnt bother mentioning it. It also possible to colonize as many planets as you have fleet slots at the same time, even if you have no avalibility to colonize a planet in your tech you can still colonize as many as you want. The key is you must have an avalible slot when the colonization finishes this will allow you to colonize several planets at the same time and only keep the one or two with good rolls.

DO NOT COLONIZE ANY PLANET THAT IS NOT A NEGATIVE TEMPATURE GAS PLANET!
The position matters a little bit, if you are Terran ideally you want a planet that is in position 1-5, for example a planets coordinates are 100:100:1 this is a first position planet. The reason why is that Terran needs to generate a certain amount of energy from the star and the closer you are the more energy you get from this. Terran the size of the planet is irrelevant; some people will tell you 15,000+ km diameter this is an old thing and nothing you will ever need to worry about.

As Zerg, the position matter less, its more about the temperature, they can theoretically colonize any position, they do use overlords for energy sometimes though. It is also preferable to colonize a small diameter planet, this is because Zerg is able to harvest resources more efficiently later on smaller planets.
Protoss, they are the only race that planet position has no effect on anything for them, no structure or unit etc is affected in away by the planets position. Like Zerg they are able to more efficiently mine resources later in the game the smaller the diameter of the planet.

Do not colonize multiple planets in the same solar system, this is bad for so many reasons. Try and keep your bases at least 5k+ distance apart!

As you colonize more planets and continue to raid inactives, you will start to grow very quickly, you want to begin to set yourself up for the real way of getting resources in this game. They are often called “feasts” by the Russian players, but I will just call them pirates.



Pirates
EDIT: Unfortunatly recent changes to the game has made this section no longer relevant, it is no longer feasible for terran or zerg races to hunt pirates for profit. The current configuration of the combat system makes it impossible to profit off of killing pirates for these two races if any amount of aggression has accumulated. It is still sort of possible to hunt very select pirate spawns with protoss, unfortunatly this is a bit of acomplicated of a discussion for a tutorial and the race is locked behind having completed a quest for one of the aformentioned races.

Very important! Fleet and resources protection!


Ideally you want your fleet to be secured under FAS all of it. There is a commander that adds +1000 to every base per level or a building for terran and protoss or research for zerg to accomplish this.


Fleet auto save (FAS)
To see or configure FAS you select the planet you want to see and then click on the overview button, you can then toggle it between enabled, civil fleet or disabled.

Clicking on the FAS button itself will bring up a management screen to show eacatly what units are covered and how many of them etc.

It will likely become clear very quickly that this will only cover some civil fleet and the production of some ships. In order to protect your main combat fleet it will need to saved in a diffrent way.

If you have more than 5000 combat fleet on a planet not covered by FAS; you will lose every single ship! Do not ever do this!
So how do you keep your fleet safe? Well the answer is expedition, you send your fleet on a preferably 999 hour expedition. Each hour that passes on expedition the fleet will burn 1% of its fuel consumption value as indicated in the specifications screen. This fleet can be recalled and all unused fuel will be returned minus the warm up cost of the warp engines and 1% of the fuel cost per hour. This is matched down to the slowest unit in the expedition, so if you have a very slow unit it will save you gas on the other units.

Most people don't seem to understand how fuel consumption works so i will give a short explanation.

The fuel consumption of the above unit is 2.95 vespene. This means it will require this much vespene to move 1000ckm at the top speed of this unit. What is not explained in the warm up phase of the engines. You see any flight no matter how short requires the engines to warm up and this costs the same as flying 1000ckm. So to send this unit on expedition for say 7 days (168 hours) it will cost two warm up fees one to get to the middle of nowhere and then one to get back + the fuel used in expedition.

Expedition uses 1% of this value every hour so we will use 2.95 x 2 + 0.01 x (2.95) x 168. So we will use 6.9 units of fuel to send this ship on expedition and then 5 units of vespene for exploring on expedition for 7 days. So expedition really uses very little fuel after you get past the warm up fees of the unit. It is very important that you do not let the expedition timer run out as you may lose your entire fleet in a black hole or have other terrible things happen. This is why it is best to send your fleet on a 999 hr expedition!

Any combat fleet in excess of 5000 units not covered by FAS or large amounts of resources on a planet must be sent away in this way to prevent them from being deystroyed or stolen!

All unused fuel for the expedition is returned! so if you recall at 40 hours the remaining fuel for the 959 hours left will be returned to you when the fleet arrives home. Recalling the fleet only takes about 3-10 minutes and it can be done anytime during the expedition.

Note: there is no risk of losing and ships or falling into a black hole or worm hole as long as the expedition is recalled and not completed! However, there is also no reward for a recalled expedition.
Large cargo ships are very fuel efficient so if you ever need to hide resources this is done in the same way by sending them with your combat ships, you can also use colony ships or lurkers, but they are really slow and i find the warm up times anyoing.

How to send fleet on expedition.

This can be done from anywhere, its best to send it off from a jump gate, but a base or sattilite will work as well. You simply click the fleet option with the correct object selected and then manualy type in the last cordinate the number 10. You then select the ships and resource you want to take on expedition and then send them.