Trade War Vets: Strange New Worlds

Always have a low turn exploration vehicle. This could be a Merf, Orion, a captured Assault Trader.

Use this vessel almost exclusively. When you need to Twarp or fight a powerful enemy, get to your Good Ship and do it, but to check on Sectors, ’Avoids’, and areas you haven’t visited before or not for a long time, use the
expendable ship.

Sometimes you get 50 points at port because no one has gone there. When this happens towards the End Game, you know this is a definate place you should reside.

Having one home sector is not brilliant. The longer the game goes on the more likely you will be Invaded. In fact as soon as a Sector is ‘discovered’  your strategy becomes moving your Home Planet.

Having a few dummy sectors is standard.  Upgrading them over time is oft forgotten.  Check dummy sectors periodically to find any 50 point Space Station, meaning no one has been there.  Maybe they passed during Early or Mid Game, seen nothing of value and moved on.  Maybe you’ve luckily found one of those worm holes so that during your first explorations you’ve entered Sector 876 via 77 but can’t get back through 77 but have to go like 20 hops or more.  

In early game, before you’ve gotten a T-warp vessel, it’s a real pain, but you’ve found probably one of the safest Home Sectors available.

Always build a Space Station if you didn’t start with a BBB port in your Sector. Upgrade it as often as you can.

When your Home Sector is powerful and there’s an Attempted Invasion, it is time to make ‘escape’ plans. Many players are very stubborn. Yeah, they’ve tried to invade, been podded, maybe you’ve come on to kill them, whatever; in the words of the Terminator; ‘I’ll be Back.’

Your strategy is not to make your Sector stronger, it is to move your planets and goods to one of those Dummy Sectors.  You do this by removing colos to Twarp worlds and taking them away.  You might want to fire a couple of Gen Torps to fill the empty space when you have two Volcs with Q canons.  Removing all Colos from the Volcs and setting them to deplete fuel is what is called a Phyric victory.

Some players fire so many Gen Torps as to turn what was home into an asteroid belt, but this is childish. What you want your enemy to do is to come back and attack as if he’s going to ‘get’ something, wind up being podded, and eventually being able to land on as prosperous a place as the Lunar surface.

Although you build a fabulously strong Sector, which may have some sentimental connection, you have to appreciate that at some point in time, there will be an Invasion or attempted invasion.

You prepare for it by making your worlds as strong as you can, but prepare your response when that guy has pounded on the Gate, and you know that as soon as he gets enough turns, he’ll return.