Ohh, Yeah, Just Like That….
Right.
If you’ve done the tutorial, you know how to spawn ships with the factory, and you know how to tell a child ship what to spawn. I’m going to continue that with a few more points.
Control
You can also tell a station what to spawn. Same deal. Hit Tab to switch to Command Mode, hover the mouse over the station, then hit 3.
If you do not tell ships and stations what to spawn, they will use an algorithm to determine what comes out. Their preference will be for designs in your inventory. So the stuff you build comes first, even the garbage.
Cheaper designs will spawn more often. So you may see tons of crappy ships that are only 49P. You can control which designs are preferred by eliminating all the cheaper designs in your inventory. Although, if you only have expensive ships, the game will start using default designs again.
You can set stations to spawn other stations.
If a ship in your fleet spawns a ship, it will be a Friendly ally, but it is not actually a Follower in your fleet. If you want to control resources with-in your fleet, only use ships without factories, that way they’ll give the R to you rather than building ships with it.
Ships in your fleet can evolve into a higher P design. I have no idea what determines it, but it does happen.
Environment
Ships and stations need enough resources to spawn a design. Therefore, in regions with very little resources, there tend to be a lot of small ships. But if a station swallows-up a large ball of resources, it is more likely to produce a larger ship.
The game is only active in regions around the player. The rest of the galaxy is frozen in time. So, your little ecosystem is not reproducing anything when you’re not around.
When you wander into an unexplored region, the game populates the space. This is usually when you see higher P ships spawn. Large 6000P and up designs almost never spawn. If they do it’s because a new region was populated.
Agents spawn from uploaded fleet files. But for each Agent, only a certain maximum P worth of ships will spawn in your game. That’s why you see some Agents that have only 6-8 large ships, but others have 20-30 small ships.
As long as an Agent’s marker appears on the map, they will spawn when you encounter them. If you fight an Agent and have to run away, be aware that the fleet may spawn again when you come back to them. Therefore, it’s not a good strategy to snipe an Agent fleet to death as repeatedly encountering them can simply multiply them. A better strategy is to build up your own fleet and crush them all at once.
Build-Up
You can maximize reproduction of your faction by having low P designs with factories. Just make sure they have enough cargo space to hold the resources needed to spawn again and continue the cycle.
Faction 4 fleets are the most reproductive in the game. Their solar panels can make them almost completely independent from collecting R, and they can spread rapidly. Faction 2 also has solar panels, but they are far less productive, and although they can collect more R from their seed launchers, the AI does not make good use of them.
The starting faction’s stations have a Command Module that also acts as a factory. As long as the Command Module is not completely enclosed, you can make self replicating ships with it.
For faction 12 (the bees), their buildings have a Command Module that produces R. You can build small ships around them with a factory. Although not as productive as other factions, they will still reproduce quickly.
Although faction 3 is the most fragile, it’s blocks are also the cheapest. About the only strategy for playing them is quantity over quality.
– Cool. That’s it for now. If anyone has anything else to add, let me know.