Race and Profession: Most of the Leaders in my Galaxy are Vygoid because of the 20% bonus to research. Many are Builder because maintenance costs of modules can be very high towards the end of the game, and the 50% savings probably dwarfs the benefits of other professions. (The wiki has tables of research, maintenace costs etc. You get to wiki through help, same way you got here.)

Planets are key, but don't colonize the first planet you get. The wiki shows the planet sizes and various resource grades available. My advice: Plow the first 200 research points you get into scan and scan as many planets as you can. Continue maxing out scan with research points for your first 20 levels or so. (And use research points as soon as you get them so they aren't stolen by Raiders) The more scan points you have the more planets you can find. Simulataneously maximize your decks with rank points so you can equip 5 of the best scanners as soon as you research them. Use missions to get money to buy scanners and planet improvements.

Fighting: Attack, defense, shield are all nice but unnecessary at first as there is no penalty for being disabled and you can get experience from missions rather than attacking. When disabled you can then be raided, but if you don't carry any minerals or artifacts, nothing can be stolen and repairing a ship is minimal cost. So DON'T invest in attack or defense at the beginning and skip the few missions that require attributes in these categories.

Missions: Use these for money, but try to increase in level as slowly as possible. You have two weeks to do as much research as possible. Use it to research scan and find planets. Every 4 levels you are eligible to colonize a new planet, so leveling up is good for this, but once you hit level 16 try to slow down to maximize the protection period as it disappears at level 20. As weird as it may seem, you might even want to stop doing missions right before you are about to break to level 20 and just check in periodically to spend research points and cash in minerals if you are mining. Resume doing missions after your proection has expired.

Colonizing a planet gives a 30 experience bonus. This can lift you to the next level and refresh you energy if played at the right time.

If you are following this model, it might be best to colonize research planets first. Mining isn't as profitable as missions at this point, and artifacts aren't really as necessary as they will be later

Account Reset: If you are below level 20, account reset is not such a bad idea. I did it once and might do it again. I hit level 7 in about a day after reset.

Rank Points: If possible plow as many of them as you can into Decks (and maybe research if you can't get enough research from planets). Do not put them in attack or defense or energy. If energy were a good investment, many more people would be the race Inergon, but I see very few of this race at higher levels. You get 10 additional energy capacity after completing 3 mission sets (this is also on the wiki under special modules). Many of the people posting here complain they don't have enough deck space. You will be adding cargo space later so you can swap in and out high cost modules. At the low levels they are so cheap and improving so fast, I just sell them to save the upkeep costs.

Zolazin Battle Mission: By forfeiting attack and defense stats, you will be unable to do this mission. The reward from this mission is an artifact that allows you to change race and profession. To get it you have to defeat 10 Zolazin ships as well as others that might fill the NPC enemy slots and have to be cleared away to allow the Zaolazin enemy ship to appear, which they do at random, rotating randomly with other enemies. Unless you choose to be a professional fighter, the energy you use on this mission can be used to generate infinitely more benefits in other missions, and the change of profession/race reward can more easily be obtained by simply resetting your account (Unless you have a strategy to change at a much higher level.)

Caveat: I am still below level 15, so read comments below from more experienced players.

I got to admit, for a newb this is pretty good, but there are a few debatable things.

1: Race and Profession, Simply due to the fact that every Race/Profession is very useful im going to have to argue going Vygoid/Builder. While the buffs from those races are effective, many would argue they could be better spent. For instance, Sillix/Explorer, it gives a 10% bonus to the 2 hardest to gain stats in the game. Inergon, very nice at higher ranks and I know for a fact that by combining it with putting rank points into engineers you can ride the energy return from ranking up quite a bit (I think I got to rank 16 my first day ding that). Which brings me to the next thing.

2: Rank Points, "Rule#1 of GL: You can never have enough decks" you just cant, you have to work around that fact youll never have enough decks, its part of the game. (srsly its designed this way) But you can not have enough crew, crew are useful after ranking to 20. It gives you raid protection, not to mention modules arn't worth the trouble until you get to atleast your second tier, and with energy modules(which you should be spending almost every research point in at this time) you need to get cores+relays at the same time. Because of this (and what I said earlier about riding ranking energy) I highly recommend putting every rank point into up to rank 20 atleast into engineers (maybe a few other things too). The 200 energy will also be useful for when you have to unequip your cores, which the game wont let you do if you wont have enough energy afterwards. (I recommend putting a bit of your RP into cargo after getting some decks)

3: Zolazins, First off, it will be available later, calm down about supposedly not being able to do it (not so much with what you said, but others have been flippin sh*t). Secondly, PVP gives some great XP, iv heard/experienced everything from 2.3-4.65(with PVP missons) PVP Energy/XP Ratio. So this is actually a great way of ranking up (just stick to the NPCs), and your only going to take less damage by putting your RP into crew.

I am an Inergon/Builder, which I picked in part since I looked at the 10% energy gain and said given what I know from past games that more energy (in any form) means you can do missions faster. The builder half I did not fully know what is meant (truth be told). But it looks like I hit gold.

The one that gives 10% deck looks like it would be worth to change to even for a bit (glade I know the current mission will come back).

Thats a superb newb guide if you are in fact a newb. I found hacking to be handy below rank 20 if you are trying to research a lot without ranking up.

There are plenty of viable race professions really. Inergon might be nice for levelling quickly if you have a real life. Aerlen are kind of pointless still. You don't really get anything from defending besides staying alive and that, aside from being pointless, won't actually happen. The humans are pretty pointless too. if you take 10% of your total experience and add it to your current xp, thats 2 or 3 levels. That is nothing frankly. It doesn't nearly add up to any other race's bonus even if expertly applied. Artifacts can well outdo that at almost any rate. It could be a building block though if you plan to use a CC and then change races anyways. Otherwise it is utterly pointless. I can easily see why someone would want to be konqul after research costs become ridiculous or at any point really. 20% extra attack is awesome. I think sillix basically got pooped on by the recent update. As professions go, some are less disappointing than others and there aren't too many good ones for the sillix. Konqul have nice professions. Spy is now awesomer with the new planetary cloaking update. Minimal cloaking has SOME effect now. I don't think anyone knows the numerical differences between spy and hacker besides Dan. Everyone seems to prefer spy. Fixer is great for PVP. The raider profession will eventually be more popular now with the deck/damage update. Excavator is pretty straight forward though hard to notice. I consider it more of an almost negligible building block as opposed to an end to the means. Vygoids are obviously awesome. I like to pretend I'm a cylon rather than a borg.

I switched from vygoid spy to sillix merchant then back to vygoid excavator already because of the damage/decks ratio update thing. I'm scared to use the third glaviz device and vygoid excavator fits well with my resource-based strategy. It's good for the long haul since I only seem to get artifact planets. I'm probably the only person to actually neglect research and it certainly isn't on purpose; but on the plus side having crap research makes your upkeep super low and it will certainly be easy to catch up on, seeing as how early tiers are so cheap and nearly every planet I have is already full of chassis. My current plan is to get 4 new tiers of energy research and nothing else. Research planets will come with time.

At levels 40-90ish (probably beyond) The best idea is to settle your best planets regardless of what type they are and base your strategy around your overall production and never stop ranking up. Too rich from mining? research planet structures, money=gone. Then you get better production overall. Those planets only get awesomer and more necesary as you level... Too many artifacts? Fight stuff/people to clear out cargo space. artifacts=gone. You'll get better production from chassis. Cargo space is also handy because you will probably have more than normal anyways and with low upkeep from lack of research you can have multiple 'configurations' to accomplish whatever task is actually at hand and you will also have extra deckspace for further specialization. That's my situation. I Would try to avoid it really... Too much research? No such thing. Do energy research. More levels=more planets=more production. Ranking, production and then ranking some more should be the priorities. I'm guessing research becomes too difficult for the returns at some point, but nobody has gotten there yet.

At early levels, what spaceduster said is spot on. Research your ass off and find decent planets to settle... hands down. Don't settle on/for crap planets. He is an insightful MFer.

/concur, hope to see more from ya spaceduster

Thanks for the feedback. No surprise that SpoonyJank likes my post. Most of what I said was inspired or out-right copied from his posts. If you like what I said, I highly recommend searching out his posts.

Regarding energy, I am planning to go all out research and scanner to get the biggest selection of planets possible while scanners are still relatively cheap. Then once protection runs out, go all out energy, because yes, I do believe that is probably the next best thing to research. In my opinion, levelling up is inevitable, but as I level up, I'd like to be strong for my level and have a strong foundation, so that when the energy kicks in I can protect myself.

Also, it totally makes sense to go with the planets that you have. After the reset I got some amazing planets and, luckily for my strategy, most of them are research.


For the record, I'm currently a level 10 Sillix Merchant, maximizing both decks and cargo, but am thinking of changing... we'll see. It's nice to know I'll be able to change later through missions, without doing the reset again. I started out as a Aelon Fixer until, around level 14, I realized this combination was not going to fit my style of play.