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