Rank Points
Acquiring Rank Points
You gain 5 Rank Points, every time you advance in Rank.
You can also gain 2 Rank Points at random from the Daily Reward.
https://galaxylegion-erismedia.netdna-ssl.com/galaxylegion/images/artifacts/prisoners.png Rescued Prisoners provide 3 rank points when used.
https://galaxylegion-erismedia.netdna-ssl.com/galaxylegion/images/artifacts/prisoners2.png Rescued Stryll Prisoners provide 6 rank points when used.
https://galaxylegion-erismedia.netdna-ssl.com/galaxylegion/images/artifacts/rescapt.png Rescued Stryll Captives provide 7 rank points when used.
Spending Rank Points
Your Rank Points can be distributed between the six areas listed below, providing increased abilities or making the game easier in some way.
- Decks - provides 1 Deck per rank point spent. More decks allow you to equip more, or larger, and therefore more powerful ship modules.
- Cargo Space - provides 5 Cargo Space per rank point spent. More Cargo Space allows your ship to carry more minerals, artifacts, and unequipped ship modules at a time.
- Engineers - provides 2 Engineers per rank point spent. Engineers increase your max Energy, allowing you to store more energy for completing missions or performing combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Tactical Officers - provides 2 Tactical Officers per rank point spent. Tactical Officers increase your Attack, so you do more damage in combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Helmsmen - provides 2 Helmsmen per rank point spent. Helmsmen increase your Defense, so you take less damage from combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Scientists - provides 3 Scientists per rank point spent. Scientists increase your Research Points output per hour, so you can research new technologies - and therefore improve your ship and planet Modules faster.
Note For New Players (OUTDATED, see NOTE below): decks are generally considered to be the best way to spend your rank points, because they can be used to build Ship Modules that can increase any of your ship stats. Ship Modules make your ship more flexible, because they can be swapped for different modules at any time, allowing you to specialise your ship as your needs change. For instance, you could have a ship equipped for combat, but you can then unequip some weapon or defence modules so that you can equip better scanners for planet scanning. Rank points spent in the other areas do not give you this flexibility. Ultimately, the decision on how to spend them is yours. There is no right or wrong answer and there are many different ship development strategies that work.
NOTE as of August 2nd, 2014: While Decks are of some importance, as you get into higher ranks, it becomes less and less important what you have installed on your Ship and more and more important how many Engineers, Tactical Officers, and Helmsmen you have, which are gained directly from Artifacts. There is a limit to the number of Modules available, but there is no limit to how many of these you can get via Rescued Prisoners for the first two and Android Helmsmen for the third. Also, Tesseract Containers and Mass Storage Pods will give you Cargo. Android Scientists will take care of your Research needs after a while, but, in the meantime, you may want to pick up a handful of good research planets. Ship-Bots add Decks, so you need not worry about putting points into Decks except for perhaps a very few in the early going. You can use Rank Points on Helmsmen, Decks, Scientists, or Cargo if you wish, however, it is not recommended. Also, if one wishes to PvP, then an argument could be made that you should have your decks as close to your Damage Cap as possible. Keep in mind that there are perfectly viable reasons not to do this, especially Scanners for scanning, as if you don't have enough Decks to install the scanners, then you cannot scan as many good Planets to colonize or conquer.
General strategy as of 5/10/13: Decks and Cargo are hard to come by when you first start. With patience, however, you will get more than you will ever need of these from the artifacts Tesseract Container, Mass Storage Pod, and Ship-Bot. As a result of these coming from Artifact Points, it is recommended that you put some focus on that early on. Research is also important, but you will, again, get all of it you need from Android Scientists if you are patient enough. Rank Points will come from Rescued Prisoners if you wait it out, but this is a slow process. Not ranking up while you wait for Rescued Prisoners and other artifacts to come in is referred to as freeze ranking. Summary: Put a little bit into research and mining, but focus primarily on artifact.
See Also:
Stats
Crew
Decks
Cargo
Ship Strategy