Domination.

The best range. The most power. The best solar panels. Everyone thinks this faction is overpowered, it’s not so much a question as a statement. Instead of finding ways to survive, this is more a matter of optimizing for ultimate killing power. Let’s take a closer look at beating the game.

Basics.

The basic blocks are lower health-wise than most factions, so Tinkrell ships are fairly weak once their shields are down. Shields are a necessity. The shields also add cost, thus making smaller ships in-efficient. However, the faction has an excellent balance defensively. Shields add armor, drones distract enemies, and defensive lasers exceed at eliminating missiles and opposing drones. If you build light and add thrusters, they’re pretty hard to nail-down. The only catch is energy. Everything needs power, so you need lots of generators … and unfortunately, generators explode. So yeah – shielding is key. However, once a ship gets to about 3,000P or higher, they can liquidate enemies with the quickness.

The Power of Power.

The solution comes down to making sure enemies can’t get near you. This is where the guns come in. With the modular guns, you can build a weapon as powerful, or as long-ranged as you can afford. A well-designed ship should have no problem liquefying entire sectors. With a fast/maneuverable ship, you can solo Agent fleets easily. Just spray everything with your gooey gunfire until it dies. To try it out, you can download my ship here – 3,000P worth of deadliness.

For an in-game build, it makes more sense to focus on shields and maneuverability. You want a strong gun, but you also need to turn quickly to bring it to bear, and you need plenty of shielding to make sure you don’t get clobbered if enemies get close. Power is important, and you only need enough range to hit things on-screen, so a lot more P can be placed into drones. You can have ships that hammer enemies with a powerful main gun, and swarm them with masses of drones. The combo is deadly.

If you’re planning on entering a tournament, then power at range is the key. The tweak here is how big do you want to make your gun, and can you hit a target? The typical faction 4 ship has a big modular gun, some drones to harass the enemy and score cheap points, at least a forward facing shield or two to take a hit, and defensive lasers to prevent opposing missiles and drones from scoring damage. You might give-or-take these things to reach a different balance, but this is the basic formula for a tournament winning ship.

The hitting the target part comes in when you look at aiming. Because the formula for a tournament ship is so simple, the difference between a winner and loser comes down to aiming and AI. When you have a longer ship, you’ll need thrusters on the front and rear of the ship, not just for motion, but also to aim the thing. Depending on your desired range, you might actually want smaller thrusters instead of the large ones. The smaller thrusters respond faster to small adjustments and engage quicker, whereas the larger thrusters are a bit slower and give larger movements. You might also need to add extra blocks to the corners of your ship to aid in steering and aiming. Having thrusters just on the base structure will move it forward-backward and side to side, but corner steering and thrusters on attached blocks will help with a good pivoting motion to align your gun to a moving target at range.

Building Your Guns

Decide what you want out of your ship. This will determine how you construct your gun/guns. If you’re playing in a regular game, you probably don’t need any more that five or six Range amplifiers. That will give you enough to hit most everything on-screen. If you’re building a tournament ship, you can easily double that and more.

Add as many damage amplifiers as you can afford. Don’t bother with the smaller Damage Amplifiers. Just use the big ones. The small amplifiers give you 30 damage for 5P, but the large ones give you 60 damage for 8P, (so 30 damage for 4P times two).

The final adjustment are the Velocity amplifiers. This is usually where you do the most tweeking, and has a big impact on how the weapon behaves. If I’m making an in-game ship, I like to have steady stream of weapon fire that never runs-out. This way I can coat everything with a never-ending stream, knocking out masses of missiles, drones, small ships, and obliterating everything else that gets in the way. This usually means around three or four velocity amplifiers. If you start to add more, you’ll fire too often, and use-up your generator power. If you add more generators, you can add more velocity amplifiers, so this is where the fine-tuning comes in.

On the other hand, if you add a bunch of velocity amplifiers, you’ll get one giant shot or stream that fires all at once. Then the weapon has to wait a second to recharge before it fires again. This is preferable if you’re making a tournament sniper, or something that’s designed to blast enemies on the first instant of a match.

If you have enough power and velocity amplifiers, your ship will kick-back when the gun fires. This is a huge benefit when getting away from enemies, but you also have to take kick-back into account when sustaining fire on a target. If you’re designing a sniper, use the kick-back to maintain range from your enemy. If you want a shorter-range dog-fighting ship, add additional thrusters to the rear so you can counter the kick-back effect and stay on target. If there aren’t enough rear thrusters, the AI can struggle to actually hit a target even though it has tons of firepower.

Cap everything off with your Rate amplifier and you’re done. When you build the gun, have the Velocity amplifiers at the base, then the damage amplifiers, and the range amplifiers near the tip. The reason for this is that usually the first thing to get damaged is the front-end. You want to design it so – if the front pieces get knocked-off, you still have a deadly weapon that can annihilate whatever is in front of it.

Designing for Tournaments

In the past, Tinkrell ships have dominated. I expect this to continue, but things are changing. New updates to the game have added a border edge to the playing field. This means a sniper ship can’t retreat forever, and will eventually get stuck in a corner. Plan on redesigning your ships for better maneuverability instead of relying on kickback. You are probably going to need dog-fighters instead of snipers. Plan on adding a lot more thrusters. That being said, I expect massive firepower will still win.

Generators

You need a lot of them. As many as will allow the gun to fire consistently. Basically, generators equal firepower. You also need energy for your shields, drones and defensive lasers. When it comes down to it, it’s actually preferable to have your ship almost all generators. You’ll be more susceptible to damage, but the ability to slather your enemies with damage means they’ll never get close. Equip enough shields to protect your fragile ship. If one generator does blow-up, your whole ship will likely be dead.

Drones

These fall somewhere between the starting faction drones and the Bee drones. Tinkrell drones do more damage than the starting faction drones, but they’re a lot more expensive – especially with energy usage. The Bee drones are way more powerful, and they don’t use any energy. You can make Tinkrell ships focused on drones, but because of the modular guns, these are always going to be a secondary weapon. They are good to have as a distraction, or to take-out small ships. In a tournament, they are good for scoring easy points, especially when equipped on a sniper ship. Feel free to use the drones, but my advise would be to not use so many that you reduce the effectiveness of your main gun. Your modular guns are a better investment for the P.

Don’t bother with the Rocket Drones. They are a cool idea, and they do have good range compared to other drones, but they are WAY too expensive for their effectiveness. You can buy four regular drone launchers for the same cost. Even the large Bee drones are less than half the cost, and that doesn’t even take the energy Rocket drones need into account. Take that 400P and cram it into your modular gun/guns. It can’t hurt to have 50 more damage amplifiers on your ship!

Lasers

Excellent point-defense. Equip them in bulk to take-out opposing drones and missiles. They don’t use much energy, so load-up on them as needed. It doesn’t really make sense to use the large lasers for offense. Between the drones and powerful modular guns, you’re better-off staying at range. Your armor isn’t that good and your ships are usually loaded with generators. If your shields fail, you’ll be toast. Range is your friend.

The big lasers do have more range, but four of the smaller ones do more damage and can cover more in-coming targets. I use the smaller ones more often because they’re easy to fit into all your ships, but feel free to use the large ones as you see fit. They can take-out weaker enemies, and the added range is nice.

Armor?

If you do want some armor, use the R Banks. They have 800hp. If you put two triangles together, you get a square – use these squares as your big armor blocks. I don’t care to use them so much on my ships, but on the bases – I will surround the solar panels with R Banks rather than adding tons of expensive shields. Your bases will also have extra-massive storage capacity to hold all the R from the solar panels.

Be a Dick-Bag

Not that you’re trying to be, but if you go through a wormhole with a well-optimized Tinkrell fleet – some poor soul somewhere will be cursing you out. One of the biggest complaints new players have is when they run into an Agent they can’t beat. The most likely suspect is a faction 4 Agent. Basically if you optimize this faction to use all it’s strengths, it will out-compete all the other factions.

Guns with seemingly unlimited range and firepower. Drone swarms. Dreadnoughts with heavy shielding and point-defense lasers. – The keystone for all of these things are the Solar Panels. They are far better than the Farmer solar panels and produce more resources than the AI could possibly do otherwise. They allow Agents to reproduce powerful fleets of self-replicating ships that can take-over a player’s world. It’s hard to kill faction 4 Agents, and if you fight against them and can’t eliminate every last one of their ships, you could come back to find a fresh fleet waiting for you.

The large solar panels will reproduce more R, but the smaller ones are easy to integrate into your ships. Any ship that has a factory should have some solar panels. Instead of collecting resources, just let the seconds tick, and the AI will pop-out another ship. To the point where your game can slow to a crawl because the region is maxed-out with ships. If you are starting a new game, you should have all the blocks and and the full 8,000P cap unlocked in about a half hour. Just sit there, collect R with solar panels, and add more to your ship as you unlock P.

If you are playing as the Tinkrell, whatever you do – Do Not Keep Cheap Solar Panel Ships in Your Inventory! The AI will reproduce those ships like a plague. Make sure your smaller fighters are the cheapest ships available, and build more expensive solar panel factory ships.

The formula for making Dick-Bag Agents is pretty easy. You’ll need some powerful ships, and a solar panel factory ship. Include a base that’s all solar panels and you’ll complete the dickiness of it. Upload that to the wormhole and people on the other end will be either be beet-red with frustration, or joyful at the challenge. :)

Beat the Dick-Bags

If you’re playing as a different faction and encounter a faction 4 Agent, here are some tips:

1. Hope the guy that built the fleet wasn’t really optimizing it. That means you’ll have a better chance.

2. Once you’ve identified the Agent – leave. Leave the area altogether. It’s better to be prepared for an encounter than jumping-in willy-nilly. Let him come to you.

3. Build-up a large fleet. As much and as strong as you can reasonably make.

4. When his map arrow gets close to you, roll your fleet over to ‘activate’ the Agent so it spawns. You want the Agent arrow to get as close to you as possible before you do this. You don’t want to have to drag your fleet any distance and risk losing ships.

5. Crush the fleet entirely. Don’t move too far away from the main Agent ship. The Agent fleet can respawn if you get too far from the main guy. Keep him in-sight and kill him. If another ship becomes the main Agent, kill him too. You want the red arrow to disappear from the map – that’ll indicate that the Agent is deactivated.

6. Clean-up any remaining ships so they don’t solar-panel their way back up to strength.

7. If you die, stay away from the area. The game is only active around the player. If you are near the Agent ships, they will be reproducing. Get away, build a new fleet and start from the top again.

Be aware that the more times you encounter the Agent, the more difficult it’ll be to clean them all up. So try to hit them as hard as you can the first time, or avoid them altogether. If things go really badly, you can give-up and regenerate the world. Don’t feel bad. If you’re playing one of the tougher factions, say the Reds – it’s a tall order to take-out a well optimized Tinkrell Agent. Feel joy if you can kill them at all.

I’m Bored!

Personally, I don’t play this faction much. It’s too strong and I don’t find any challenge in it. It’ll be pretty easy to dominate everything in the normal game and get bored. To solve that, you can check-out the Steam Workshop and try to find some tougher factions to fight against. Or, you can increase the number of Agents on the map. I think 100 is about right.

That’s all for now. If you can think of anything you want me to add, let me know.