Maximum Defence with Minimum Donation Points on Unification Wars

The empire building continues on your Unification Wars empire. So you have done your restarts, be it Collective or Marauder, and now armed with a fist full of artifacts, you have made the trades needed to get a handful of donation points. These are hard-earned points and you want to spend them wisely.

Generally, most would either opt to get the pair of extractors so that they help generate more artifacts for you to trade for more donation points, or get paid status and swap to a paid account race such as Marauder (if you were doing Collective restarts), Guardian or Viral. Suppose you do not want to do that and what you really want is to get a strong system structure with a good main system and 9 darks protecting it.

First step you do is to restart as Collective. As Collective, you start off with a titan and you are able to make 7 dark systems for a total of 8 systems. That done, obtain paid status if you have not already done so, purchase the DNA Restructure I project and change to Marauder. At this point, it would be extremely useful to have well off friends or a wealthy lord as you will need some help to finish the missions to obtain the second dark systems. After the first dark system is obtained, you will receive a titan system. This needs to be destroyed immediately before proceeding further or you will risk not getting the second dark system. Once done, you are all set to move on. You may choose to remain a Marauder which is a fine race to play offering strong offensive capabilities as well as the fastest build rate in the game. Alternatively, you may purchase a second DNA Restructure I project and switch to whatever race you choose to be.

If you have the luxury of time, as Collective, it would be advisable to complete all the missions for the rewards and to level all the dark systems but not the titan system. Collectives have, in my opinion, the best artifact rewards of all the races and I think it would be a shame not to get them all. Why not level the titan, you may ask. The main reason is that both Collective and subsequently Marauder missions will give plenty of planets on the innermost system, namely your titan. If you have leveled the titan, you would not be able to get rid of the planets, you would have wasted all those turns and time getting the titan leveled in the first place, and it would also affect your efficiency in leveling your remaining systems if you choose to explore.

Total cost of this if you stay as Marauder:
DNA Restructure I (9.95 donation points) + 7 days paid account (2.98 donation points) = 12.93 donation points

If you choose to change to another race:
2 x DNA Restructure I (9.95 donation points x 2) + 7 days paid account (2.98 donation points) = 22.88 donation points

Note: This is a revised post from my original post in Tinker's Sojourn.
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Artifact Farming - Marauder Restarts Walkthrough for Unification Wars

On Unification Wars, other than Collective restarts for artifact farming, the other popular form of artifact farming is Marauder restarts. Marauder restarts are quick and easy and yield only big time capsules. Big time capsules are in popular demand as currency to trade for donation points as top empires need them to trigger off the Overmind project which is the ultimate project in the game.

This is a guide for how to get Marauder restarts done in the most efficient way possible. Before you begin, you need to ensure that you are on real time normal turns and have a lord or friends that will be willing to support you with tributes each time you restart. The major only hurdle to cross is that Marauder require you to have paid status as the big time capsules only show up in Act 3 which is only open to players who currently have paid status.

1. Restart as Marauder and assign all infrastructure levels on commerce.
2. Get your lord or friend to send you about 400b credits.
3. Skip act 1.
4. Research Class 3 Marauder Hull.
5. Purchase 155m food, 5m red crystal, 50m rutile and 75m strafez organism from the market. Do not be afraid to purchase from the black market if none is available.
6. Build 81600 units of e.rays.
7. Explore till you have 20k planets.
8. Assign all planets to commerce and check if you have 1 million income from commerce. Continue exploring until you attain 1 million in commerce income per turn. Note how fast this is achieved is purely dependent on how high your total infrastructure level is since all of it is assigned to commerce.
9. Stop at Act 3 Mission 6 when you receive 3 big time capsules.
10. Restart and repeat. Do note that artifacts cap at 255. You may go over 255 up to a maximum of 9999 but each time you restart, the total per artifact gets reduced down to 255.

Your total artifact haul for each restart is:

• 3 big time capsules
• 2 minor suerte

Note that if you proceed an additional 3 more missions, you can gain an additional 2 historia which could come in handy. The 3 mission requirements are low.

1. Purchase an additional 100m strafez organism and 50b raw material at the start.
2. Build up additional e.rays to the required 60m pr level at Act 3 Mission 7.
3. Stop at Act 3 Mission 9 when you receive the 2 historia.

Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn.
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Artifact Farming - Collective Restarts Walkthrough for Unification Wars

On Unification Wars, artifacts are very useful for several reasons. They provide you with protection from the effects of negative artifacts, they also can be used to attack other empires to the extent of putting them into vacation mode without turns for a period of time, and they can be used to give you more planets or more game turns. Artifacts are also valuable in that some artifacts, particularly big time capsules and regalos, can also be commonly traded with other players for donation points which can then be used to grant paid account status or purchase other paid projects to enhance your empire. Other than excavating for artifacts, which is very long and tedious, many players take a short cut known as artifact farming by doing multiple restarts within a period of time. As artifacts carry over empire restarts, they can be accumulated much more quickly than by excavation.

One of the most popular form of artifact farming is via collective restarts. This is a guide for how to get it done in the most efficient way possible. Before you begin, you need to ensure that you are on real time normal turns, have your infrastructure at above 25 levels and have a lord or friends that will be willing to support you with tributes each time you restart.

1. Restart as collective and assign 25 levels to agriculture and all remaining infrastructure levels on housing.
2. Get your lord or friend to send you about 4b credits.
   
3. Skip act 1.
4. Research mega projects, spying capability and spy recon.
5. Purchase 1.5m terran metal, 500k red crystal, 50k rutile and 50k composite from the market. Do not be afraid to purchase from the black market if none is available.
6. Build 1320 r.schooners and click build 5 times till you hit about 13m pr.
7. Explore till you have 65k planets. Act 2 Mission 9 requires you to hit 70k planets but you get 5k planets as a reward from Act 2 Mission 2.
   
8. Quickly finish all the missions till you hit Act 2 Mission 10 which requires you to have empire level 7.
9. Increase your population to 430k for non-paid players and 70k for paid players.
10. Click on Diplomacy > Vassal to reset your empire level which should be at empire level 7 unless you are hit while you are doing the missions.
11. Complete the mission.
12. Restart and repeat. Do note that artifacts cap at 255. You may go over 255 up to a maximum of 9999 but each time you restart, the total per artifact gets reduced down to 255.
    

Your total artifact haul for each restart is:

• 15 minor barreras
• 10 regalos
• 20 minor afortunado
• 50 organic base
• 50 assimilated base
  

To complete all this requires about 30 minutes and most of it is spent waiting for turns to generate. And you can do this several times a day. If you do not want to sit there to spend time waiting for turns, I would suggest you change to medium turns and after each restart, log off and come back in 2 hours and you should have enough turns to complete a restart. Do note that on medium turns, your pace of doing restarts will slow down considerably since you will require about 4 hours per restart, ie two full loads of turns at the medium turn rate.

Keep going on enough rounds, you will be on your way to being a rich empire in Unification Wars.

Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn
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Unification Wars Guide - Defence

If you have been following this series on Unification Wars online game so far and trying it out in the game, congratulations! The boring bits are over and done with. Let's get to the more fun parts about fighting. There is no point winning planets if you do not keep them long enough to enjoy them. That is unless you want to be a suicider, in which case you don't keep any of it anyway.

To manage a strong and effective defence in Unification Wars, you need to understand what is involved. A successful defence in battle is determined by the following conditions:

• You, the defending empire, must lose less ship pr than the attacker. So there are two variables here - how much your defending fleet damages his fleet and how much the attacking fleet damages yours.
• The attacker must do more than 2% damage to the defending fleet or else, even if the defender loses more ship pr, the defender wins.
• To successfully defend, you must lose enough ships. Damage protection is achieved after you lose 8 DP tokens. You lose 1 token if your defending fleet loses >=2% and <5%>=5% of ship pr. So clearly it is not just about winning the battle.
  

What are the factors that affect your defence?

1. System defence
2. Minister
3. Outpost reinforcements
   
4. Fleet

System Defence
This is the main reason why most people go for the single main system and as many dark systems as they can squeeze in, ideally nine for the maximum defence using non-paid systems. while it is not clear precisely how the system defence bonus affects the outcome of the battle, it is clear that it is in effect and having a high system defence at your main makes you tougher to beat on your main system. You should have all your systems done before start gaining planets.

Minister
Two of the biggest variables affecting the outcome of any battle is the two ministers. I have done tests with different ministers attacking the same defending minister, same attacking minister vs different defending ministers and the outcome can vary by a huge margin. This will be the subject of an article at a later date. So to begin with, if you are defending, put an appropriate minister. When selecting a defending minister, it certainly does not mean that you must have a minister with all hull increasing and damage limitation traits to defend successfully. A look at the victory conditions and damage protection conditions clearly indicates that losing some ships (about 5-6%) won't hurt as long as you do not lose more than the invading fleet. Whatever minister traits you choose, it should complement the ships that you pick in your fleet. I have a balanced fleet that is flexible on the attack and defence, so I tend to use a balanced to slightly aggressive war minister with warmonger, aggressive, anticipation and foresight traits that strengthens the fleet overall and presents little weaknesses to exploit.

Outpost Reinforcements
The single biggest reason for joining a fed is for the outpost reinforcements that is given to you by your fed mates. You will also get outpost reinforcements from your lord and vassals. How does outpost reinforcements work?

• Outpost reinforcements only come to you when it is 25% of your pr or less. So if you are at 100m pr when you are attacked, you will only receive outpost stacks that are 25m or less. This is a rough indicator as I have noticed that outpost stacks above 25% by a little are also called. However, I am not sure where the absolute limit is. So I suggest a little lower than 25% is safer.
• When you get hit, the three stacks with the highest pr that meets the 25% requirement arrives from your fed mates to join the battle.
• After outpost reinforcements from your fed mates are resolved, the system checks if you qualify to receive reinforcements from your lord or vassal. From observation, the criteria for reinforcements from lord or vassal is the most recently built stack, regardless of pr.
  

So how do you use outpost to your maximum advantage?

1. Always be aware of how much outpost is available in your fed before you head out of dp and stay up to date by checking on the outpost status frequently, especially if another fed mate is out of damage protection at the same time or when you get hit.
2. Do not be overly conservative and stay at precisely 4 times above outpost stacks. A good rule of thumb is to be about 10%-25% above your lowest safety pr. So if you take the previous example, if fed outpost stacks are at 25m pr, your lowest safety pr is at 100m pr. You should stay at 110 to 125m pr to give allowance for taking damage when you attack and when you get hit a few times in rapid succession on your main system in an attempt to drive you below outpost level, ie. you get tagged by two or more players.
3. Learn to conserve your use of fed outpost and leave some for your fedmates after you are done. Just as you do not want to be waiting to go out of dp and find out that the previous guy had used up all the available outpost in the fed leaving you with none, do not do the same unto your fed mates.
4. Have your fed mates who are online post higher than the offline fed mates and refresh actively whenever you get hit. This way you preserve the outpost in your fed. Likewise, when you are online and there is a fed mate out of dp, do the same.
5. Use the toughest ships you can deploy on outpost but do not fall into the trap of posting only one ship type.
   

Fleet
There are several schools of thought on fleet make up in Unification Wars. I personally do not think there is a right or wrong answer here and I suggest that the best way to do this is to try for yourself and experiment. Every race is equiped with a range of ships with different characteristics. The first thing one must do is to download the ship list from the manual. Spend some time understanding and experimenting with various ships and do not be afraid to try out everything regardless of what anyone else tells you. There is no better guide than experience and you will learn even from the losses if you take the time to review the battle records and see what went wrong. A reasonably balanced fleet composition to have would be to have the top 3 ships with either high hull to pr ratio (greater than 2.5) or have a decent hull to pr ratio (1.75 to 2.4) and have long range (6 or better). The bottom three stacks should be reasonably strong attack ships with weapon to pr ratio greater than 20 and having the long range attribute so that they will flank without taking damage. Discussions about fleets and stacking will be discussed in later articles.

Armed with this basic knowledge, you will be able to do reasonably well in the game and have some success in defending. Have fun playing!

Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn.
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Unification Wars Guide - Ministers

If you have been following this series on Unification Wars online game so far and trying it out in the game, you would probably have sorted out your system structure and economy. This article is about ministers that you will be hiring and using in the quest for domination of the universe.

Free account players on Unification Wars are limited to only two ministers at any one time. Typically players have one minister that is trained to maximum level for the economic trait for their empire generally referred to as the economy minster and a second minister that is solely used for fighting and is usually referred to as the war minister. Paid account players may hire up to a maximum of eight ministers at any one time. If you purchase an additional paid project the minister's large office, you may hire up to ten ministers at any one time.

Free account players
As free account holders only have two vacancies for ministers, the combination an economy minister and a war minister can be built along two schools of thought.

First, a more economy driven approach would be an economy minister with 1 main economy trait and 1-2 secondary economic traits and a war minister that suits your style. The war minister will be discussed later in the article. Assuming like most players in the game, tax is your main form of income, your economy minister should have tax as main economic trait. Secondary economic trait or traits would depend on individual habits. Some would choose to have miner or excavator, or both. Others with the luxury of a Parthenon as the main system may opt to have a tax and farmer combination. The balance of the slots in my opinion should be filled with defensive military traits. There is no point in wasting slot on other traits such as publicly loyal since you only need it once to get up the loyalty of all your systems up to 5000 and after that, maintaining loyalty is not too troublesome. If you do want to do that, my suggestion is to make a publicly loyal minister up to about level 100 on publicly loyal, get loyalty on all systems up to maximum, and then sack that minister and get on with your real one. Suggested defensive traits for this minister are Defensive and Fearful.

The second school of thought fits a more combative style of play that does not really want to bother with secondary sources of income. The economy minister is one with a primary economic trait and three defensive traits. This would serve as your economic-cum-defensive minister. At the same time, on days when you do miss damage protection expiry times, this minister will make a big difference. Suggested defensive traits for this minister are Defensive, Fear and Fearful or Anticipation.

Paid account players
With the luxury of 8 slots for ministers, I would suggest the following configuration.

1. A main economy minister commonly tax with three defensive traits
2. An excavator minister with three defensive traits
3. A balanced war minister
4. An offensive war minister
5. The remaining four ministers made up of defensive ministers.
   

This is the logic behind this. Eventually, most players will focus on economic specialization and as your empire grows, artifacts begin to play a bigger role in game play. This is where an excavator minister would begin to help matters. Furthermore, in my opinion, one of the biggest factors in determining victory in a battle is the two ministers on both sides. It is this interplay that will determine the big win or a horrible loss for the attacker and likewise, a successful or failed defence for the defender. Why have so many defensive ministers, you may ask. One of the more common ways of winning is to deplete a fed's outpost reinforcements by making suicide attacks on outer systems to destroy defending outpost fleet so that the hapless empire is left with no protective cover from fed mates. The use of defensive ministers deployed in these outers help reduce outpost fleet loss and makes it easier for online fed mates to rebuild reinforcements much more quickly.

War ministers
This will be covered in a separate article to be published later but for now, we can make simple generalizations which would be helpful as a start for most beginning players. The following are samples of ministers for consideration.

Defensive minister - Defensive, Fear, Fearful, Anticipation giving hull +50%, damage -35%, enemy damage -30%, enemy hull +10%

Balanced minister - Warmonger, Aggressive, Anticipation, Foresight giving damage +30%, hull -10%, enemy damage -10%, enemy hull -10%

Suiciding minister - Warmonger, Aggressive, Suicidal, Insult giving damage +60%, hull -35%, enemy damage +10%, enemy hull -20%

Naturally, there are many combinations and it is worthwhile to experiment with various combinations to see the effect. What you must be aware is that the war minister that you use affects the basefleet that you use to battle with. As such, you must consider the characteristics of the ships that you are using and use an appropriate war minister to either amplify your fleet's strengths or balance out your fleet's weaknesses. Once done, the other variable at play then becomes the opposing fleet and the enemy commanding war minister.

Note: This is a revised post from my original article published in Tinker's Sojourn
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Unification Wars Guide - Economy

In a previous article on the internet game Unification Wars, I suggested that tax income was the best way to go for two reasons. Firstly, it was passive income that does not come at the expense of turns devoted to it. And secondly, a high population gives you empire levels and empire levels are necessary to gain access to various projects.

The way to maximize the economy is focus and specialization. This means finding the best system for your choice of economy leveled to the maximum X, putting all your research infrastructure levels into one type rather than spreading it around and putting a minister on that system with level 999 on that economic trait. In terms of choice of main system, if you're doing tax, it should be an Eden, Orion, Titan or Parthenon. For agriculture, Farm, Urania or Parthenon. For commercial, Capital, Urania or Archeron. Industry-wise, it is the Heavy, Titan or Archeron. And Miners would want a Rich or a Titan.

Suppose you want to go against the grain of conventional thought and go your own way, and you further decide that to hell with the empire levels and the access to nice projects, what could you do as alternatives? The Unification Wars manual has a comparison of various races' economic ability put into a series of tables. The last table in the page is the one to read.

Agriculture
At first glance farming seems to be the way to get richest. especially since this table is still probably based on the days when food was capped at 15 credits instead of 20. So here's the top tip. If you want to get rich, farming is the way to go, right? Well, not always. As long as you stay at lower pr levels, farming is certainly very viable. First you sell your food, wait anything between ten minutes to half an hour for your food to sell and the credits to arrive, then you go out with your guns blazing. Five trillion credits will go a long way for most races depending on how you use it. Then, keep selling food as you run out down your credits, bearing in mind the lag times. Unless you're Marauder, that works perfectly fine up to probably two billion pr or maybe even a little more. Similarly, you first sell your food and then you build up outpost reinforcements or keep going at it. The trick to this is anticipation. However, this is a perfectly happy scenario as long as you stay at the lower pr levels and not rise higher. If you do rise higher, you will find that selling food will not keep you maintained for long and it eventually becomes a drag and you mess up somewhere along the line and become a sitting duck with no credits to rebuild your fleet when you get hit. In short, this is pretty good as long as you stay at the lower pr levels. And as seen from the table, Terrans, Marauders, Collectives and Virals are great at farming.

Commercial
From the numbers, commercial income clearly seems to be the poorest economic choice to make. And it is. But on the plus side, compared to tax income, you do not need to spend turns to increase population and then spend even more turns to reward the population to increase their loyalty. But over time, the initial up-front investment in turns in population pay off. And unlike industry, mining and agriculture, you do not need to depend on the market's vagaries to sell product for credits. Or devote planets elsewhere to create an economic link. In addition, mining require you to actually spend turns on mining to get income. So, effectively, it is actually a decent choice if you want to go off the beaten track. All races may try this except perhaps Guardians.

Industry
Strictly on the number in the table, industry looks like a sensible contender to tax income. Unfortunately, industry-based economies need a steady supply of raw materials to keep moving and a shopping-mad populace to consume the goods if you do not want to wait for the goods to sell in the market. All this diverts planets away from your primary income source and these planets aren't working at their best either, since you cannot put in much infrastructure research levels to either. So its for the brave and those that love juggling. All races can try this although Terrans, Miners and Marauders would do this slightly better.

Mining
One of my least favourite ways to start although it is a great way (according to others who tried) to get rich so that you can level your ministers and get a quick leg up on your empire if you do not have a rich lord to fund you. My only grouse is to make money from mining, you have to use turns. Best done as Terrans and Miners.

Tax
Enough has been said and this is the most popular choice of economy. And whatever the numbers say, all races tend to choose tax income as their main economic driver.

In Unification Wars, empire income source is best summarized into a simple chart with active/passive on one axis and direct/indirect on the other axis. Active income sources require you to actually spend turns to generate the income, whereas passive income does not. Passive income gets generated even when you spend the turns on other actions. Direct income sources put credits directly into your current credit total, whereas indirect income sources require you to actually sell the economic products before you gain the credits. Indirect income sources make you dependent on the speed of the market to deliver the credits to your account.



Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn
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Unification Wars Guide - System Structure

After you have selected the race that you wish to play in the browser game Unification Wars, the first step you need to take is to establish a sound system structure.

Why the need for sound system structure?
Every empire in Unification Wars may have up to a maximum of ten systems. If you look at all the races, you will find that they can only build between six to eight systems. The remaining systems to make ten may come from completing missions or purchasing them by donating for paid projects. A look at empires from the top to middle rankings would show that there is a common trend towards structuring systems in the empire and everyone appears to have a commonly accepted principle for this.

Systems are organized for two main purposes.

1. To maximize system defence - that is why all outer systems are dark systems or paid systems like Mintaka, Archeron, or Parthenon in some extreme cases. These provide the most defence in the game, +6% defence in the case of dark systems and +7% defence in the case of paid systems. As system defence is cumulative, the more you have, the more the system defence add up at the innermost system where you put most of the planets you need to protect.
   
2. To maximize economic income - the higher the level of your system, the more it produces in income, regardless of whether it is in farming, commerce, industry, mining or tax.
   

The Unification Wars manual system list gives you a list of all the systems with their economic attributes as well as their defense factors.

Common System Structures
Traditionally the innermost system (also refered to as the main system) is one where tax income is maximized. As such, these tend to be those that have strong population and tax attributes such as Eden, Titan or Parthenon. Tax income is most preferred in the game because having a high population in your empire also gives you empire levels with grant you space programs that give you free planets every 18 hours and increased system defence. In addition, this also allows you to concentrate your infrastructure levels on housing only, rather than spread them around.

Of course, it is not to say that one can't play the game dependent on other forms of income such as agriculture, mining, commerce or industry. It is just that mining income depends on you putting turns into mining, turns that you could have used elsewhere like attacking more empires for planets or on other activities. Agriculture income depends on you waiting for the food to sell on the market to get credits and this may take anywhere from 5 minutes to days. There is nothing wrong with commerce or industry as your empire's main source of income per se, the only issue I can see being that of empire levels. The Unification Wars manual on vassals gives you the requirements for each empire level.

The remaining systems should ideally be all dark for maximum defence. Some out of neccessity would put up a secondary system as a second source of income. Typically this would be agriculture since you could ideally use the food produced to feed your population making your empire totally self-sufficient. In practice, this isn't really necessary as given the huge population numbers required to gain empire levels, you would make more than enough income to buy food from the market anyway.

Occasionally, one will also see empires that have spread the planets evenly across all their systems. The logic behind this is to avoid giving your attackers a single big target to hit and to avoid big losses. In practice, this works up to the point where you have about 300,000 planets per system and then it doesn't work. You would be losing too much each time to make this even worth your while to maintain. It does work brilliantly, however, if you keep under 2 million planets in total spread across 10 systems.

Conclusion
So, in summary, the ideal empire structure is to have a single source of income which allows you to specialize and focus your entire empire's resources to maximizing that type of income. In addition, the remainder of the systems should be devoted to maximizing the level of defence protection given to your main system.

Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn
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A Guide To Getting Started In Unification Wars

Unification Wars is a free browser-based online game where you play the leader of an empire. To gain greater advantage, you may choose to pay to play. However, as a free account player, you can still play Unification Wars and go on to become a top empire. It is just a bit harder as a free account player. Your objective is to expand your economy, military and power by both diplomatic or military means to dominate the galaxy by triggering off the ultimate weapon.

To get to be the best in Unification Wars, you first need to know your basics and establish strong foundations for your empire. This strategy guide is a series of articles that focuses on the basics that are needed. What are the basics?

1. System structure
2. Economy
3. Ministers
4. Defence
5. Federations
6. Attacking
7. Artifacts

Before we go into all that, we need to figure out what race we want to play first. Unification Wars has 3 races that are available to all and 3 that are only available to paid account players. The free races are Terran (which everyone starts as), Aspha miner and the Collective and the paid account races are Viral106, Marauder and Guardians.

Terrans - Most people quickly move away this race once they got the hang of the game and a look at the top empires in power rating terms reveal a very low number of Terran players too. However, Terran can be fun to play as they have a range of both offensive and defensive ships that make for versatile fleet options. Coupled with good economic traits, they are an easy race to use and much more powerful than most people make out to be. Perfectly suitable for people who like an all-rounder race that is relatively easy to play.

Aspha miner - According to the game's description, Aspha miners are supposed to be defensive with strong defensive starbases. Ironically, nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, the starbases are weak and almost not worth the effort of building them. Secondly, having the least amount of systems possible means that defense is weakest among all the races. And finally, they boast of having arguably a pair of the finest offensive ships - G.Livid and A.Aragonite. Mining is also arguably one of the better ways of making money. The only snag is that you need to consume turns in order to make the money and you are dependent on the market to get credits. Best suited for players who just want to attack others for the sake of winning. Many non-paid account suiciders choose to be Aspha miners. Suiciders will be covered in another topic.

Collective - Collective has been panned by virtually everyone in the game as having totally useless ships for defense or attack. The situation has improved somewhat after the last ship update in late 2008 but it is generally regarded that collective ships are still mostly rubbish, especially when deprived of the best ship, r.monitor which is available to paid account players only. Even then, r.monitor is merely a super-sized hull ship with little bite in weaponry. However, there are some pluses to collectives. For example, strong food production as well as +200% population capacity to all systems make collectives very rich income-wise, regardless of whether they go into tax income or farming. They also have the most number of systems makeable and start off with a titan. This gives collectives a great system defence to make up for their weak ships. Mostly used as a stepping stone to another paid race or for artifact farming. More on both later.

All the paid races have clear advantages over the non-paid races.

Viral106 - This used to be one of the most favoured races in UC. A quick scan through the top ranked players would show a clear majority of Virals. Why? Because while Virals have no decent ships of their own to speak of, they may re-engineer three ships each from Terrans, Aspha Miners and Marauders. This created a monster of a fleet with the best ships of three different races and few chinks in the armour. However, after the last ship update in late 2008, the advantage has been evened out and Virals are no longer allowed to re-engineer dreadnaught and juggernaught class ships. A balanced race that is relatively easy to play. Once you picked the right ships to re-engineer.

Marauder - This is a strong balanced race play but starting out as Marauder is quite tough. The ships are expensive to build, though they are cheap to upkeep (you need to build them first!!). Starting Marauders often find themselves very strapped for cash in battle and the situation is only improved when they gain significant income (usually several million planets coupled with strong infrastructure above 200). A rich lord that supplies the starting Marauder with plenty of tributes would make things much easier. Marauders get strong system defence after including the two dark systems from missions and the fastest building ships in terms of turns in the game. These saved turns can be used on more attacks or on infrastructure or posting outpost reinforcements. A great race to play all the way to the top but the start is a struggle.

Guardian - According to the description in the manual, Guardians are strong defensively and have well balanced ships. This is also another race that has a tough start to it. Researching the two best ships in the fleet require 18000 turns. That will generally take you a week or two to get sorted although if you choose to go on normal turns and sacrifice a night's worth of sleep and a pair of eye bags the size of the moon, you could get it done within 2 days. However, the sacrifice is well worth it since that pair are arguably the most well balanced ships in the game to have in your fleet, especially k.Hun-Xe. The best part in my opinion about playing Guardian is that even after your paid account status expires, you get to continue using the two k.class ships. Unlike Marauder's d.Dominions and d.Fallen.

Note: This is a revised post from my original article in Tinker's Sojourn Read more...

A new start

Some of these articles originally appeared in Tinker's Sojourn and I have decided for ease of management to split out Tinker's Sojourn into a few separate blogs, each specializing in a particular subject. This new blog Tinker's Web Games is all about online games. For now, I only have time for Unification Wars and so this blog will be mostly about Unification Wars for the time being. Enjoy reading and playing!
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