Overview
This is a guide on how to play playable faction 7 effectively according to how far in I am and what I understand about it, so expect it to be updated over time. (In technical terms its faction 15, commonly called the Reapers, but I say its playable faction 7, as in its the 7th playable faction you see on the new game screen going down-right)
Starting Out
Spawn Area
You will start out near dangerous enemies such as the crystal faction so you should try to stay away from them until you upgrade your weapons. You also have a large amount of P so you will start with powerful agents. (I started with 4k P agents) You may even need to use a wormhole to move to a new galaxy.
Starter Ship
The starter ship has some extra P to use on more armor and weapons and it turns and accelerates forward very well but is very bad at strafing and stopping. So you probably want to spend your P on point defense, strafing and breaking thrusters, and armor pieces. Put your gauss cannons on ripple fire or even auto ripple fire as charging them is pretty much a waste of time and you will probably forget to constantly fire them then.
Starter Upgrades
With your starter C you should buy the cheap upgrades. (harvester and the extra armor plate shapes) The rest of the C you collect early on you should spend on P as your early-game primary weapon (gauss cannons) cost 400+ P and you need a lot of them. Once you get some extra P you should add more gauss cannons (first priority), then armor (to protect the cannons) and thrusters (to turn better, since the cannons aren’t turreted).
Profiting
Since the gauss cannons are so powerful, you can probably fight some of the small crystal fighters nearby or even an agent fleet to get some R to trade. The faction has the same ways of getting resources as playable faction 1, but you’re probably better off fighting because of your gauss cannons. You might want to recruit a fleet to help you fight.
Conclusion
At the start, you can’t face strong enemies but you will get stronger over time by getting more P and the nuke, annihilator plasma turret, and obliterator beam turret. Then your fleet will be EXTREMELY powerful and will be able to kill nearly every agent and NPC.
Mid-Game (3000-6000 P)
Strategies
So I found two strategies around this point:
- Be a gauss spammer, when you have a small ship with 6-10 gauss cannons that are set to ripple fire on multiple keys/auto. DON’T put all the gauss cannons on one key on ripple fire because you will be wasting rate of fire when you have like 8 gauss cannons. I put my left cannons on left click ripple fire and right cannons right click ripple fire. By doing what I did, you will have a constant stream of death x2 going down range.
- Be a tank. The armor plates in this faction are REALLY good if you position your command module and have a ton of plates. Ramming ships covered on all sides by armor spikes (the armor spikes that do 5x more melee damage) can take a VERY large amount of fire. I have a ram-ish 5k P ship that can withstand a 2k P agent FLEET (more than 5 ships) for about 20+ seconds until the hull starts getting shot.
For the Laughs and Giggles
You can make a HUGE ramming ship with giant armor spikes and TONS of engines and armor plates/spikes on all sides that can just encase ships and asteroids and make them get rammed by the armor spikes, destroying them very quickly. (I found that small ramming ships don’t work since they can’t consistently apply melee damage to ships because they have no scoop to hold the ships.)
Upgrades
You should mostly upgrade your P because the nuke and super laser weapons cost about 2k P to put on your ship and are absurdly expensive to unlock.
End Game (6001-8000+ P)
Yes, 8000+ P is possible, just modify the cvars.txt file. I have the max P limit set to like 10k.
When you get 8k P just get 2 nukes on your ship, they’re incredibly OP and unbalanced in the default game without modding them. The obliterator lasers aren’t that good compared to the nukes. But they do have hilarious knockback on enemy ships. Also just put a lot of armor plates and spikes and add a lot of the large and small turrets. Gauss cannons are useless now because large ships dont turn well and tiny ships with tons of gausses aren’t worth it compared to the nuke, unless you don’t want to farm the C for the nuke.
Tips and Tricks
These are things that I noticed that help with conquering the galaxy:
- Place your resource storage/depots not so that they stack on top of each other but connect to the hull by the thin side if you have a 3×3 or wider. This will dramatically increase build speed for depots, as you will only have to build the hull and then all the depots will build at once, instead of every single depot being built once at a time one after the other.
- As I mentioned before, put your gauss cannons on auto-fire and/or ripple fire for maximum effectiveness.
- The flurry missiles are a decent weapon when you have a lot of them, though it costs a lot so I recommend using them when you have about 5k P. (I tested my flurry missile spammer with the tournament mode and the testing thing in the editor and its very decent)
- The armor plates are absurdly good, can take on fleets for about a minute if there is enough plates and they are positioned well.
- Damage by the melee armor spikes is calculated with the momentum of your ship, so a long, skinny ship would be a nightmare to stationary ships.