Get Good: 5 Tips for Galactic Reign Beginners

You know every map, every ship, and every tech upgrade in Galactic Reign. You’ve beaten all the Battle Academy challenges, too.

But you’re still losing matches.

Why?!?!?

Most likely, you’re making the same mistakes every new player does. Here are five strategic and tactical tips every player needs to note if they want a new hope at striking back at their enemy’s interstellar empires.

It’s the economy, stupid

The up-front cost of founding a colony may seem  expensive, but the sooner you purchase planets, the greater returns you’ll see. After all, the price for buying a system is a one-time transaction… but the income generated by your colonies will accumulate for the rest of the game, assuming you protect it.

Colonize a handful of planets early on, and you’ll find yourself rolling in credits by the midway point of the match, when you need them most. Wait too long to settle down, and the cost of inhabiting new worlds most likely won’t be recouped before your opponent destroys them or the game ends.

Diversify your portfolio

A fleet of long-range dreadnaughts or a vast swarm of thousands of fighters certainly looks impressive, but it leaves you open to easy counters by your enemy. Since certain upgrades counter certain ships so thoroughly, your foe could easily retake the lead even with fleets half the size of yours. So even if you’ve switched to a certain tech tree to counter his/her moves, sticking with that ship composition for the rest of the game could still cost you.

You don’t need a completely even split of vessels, though. Adding a few long-range battleships to a cloud of fighters can help thin out enemy cruisers. Likewise, chucking a few hundred anti-assault cruises in with your dreadnaught fleet will ensure they can’t be picked off by an unforeseen bomber run.

Try renting over buying

Artifact Planets are key to earning the Victory Points necessary for, um, victory. So it’s not uncommon to see players scrambling to scoop them up as early as possible, not unlike Monopoly players who are dead set on owning every railroad.

But since you don’t actually need to colonize Artifact Planets to reap Victory Points (you only need a fleet in orbit), settling them can be a waste of credits. Doubly so when you consider that artifact planets have 1/3 to 1/2 the resource nodes of regular systems, meaning they produce less money each turn you control them (even though they cost the same amount to colonize). Why buy the planet when you get the Victory Points for free, right?

Keeping eyes in the skies

While your smaller fleets are most easily used for settling new worlds or bombarding the planets of your opponent (they’re definitely good at both), sometimes the map setup simply won’t let your tiny ships float around so safely. Instead, consider setting up one or two fleets of your low population ships at high visibility nodes one jump outside of your most important settlements (Artifact Planets or high-resource colonies).

Since vision through the fog of war is limited to a max of one connection, pushing disposable vessels to right outside of your borders can warn you of a massive incoming strike force. And if you keep your own capital ships a jump behind your scouting fleet, you can surprise your adversary with a switcheroo – your foe is unlikely to bulk up his forces when he’s expecting to wipe the floor with the 15-credit scout fleet that used to be there!

A rolling stone gathers no resources

Chasing your enemy’s fleets around the galaxy sure is fun, but it doesn’t accomplish anything other than signaling your single-minded strategy to your adversary. Sooner or later, you’ll be led into a trap, or you’ll find your foe has colonized half the map while you were busy playing cat and mouse.

Going on the offensive has its time and place, but if you’re confident enough to play space tag with your enemy, consider locking down the map instead. Choose important planets, invest in upgrades/fleet diversification, and wait. Your enemy will have to strike back eventually, and when he does, he’ll have to broadcast his moves to you instead.