Rank Points
Rank Points are gained 5 at a time every time you advance in Rank, and 3 at a time from Rescued Prisoners. You can also gain Rank Points from the Daily Reward and by using certain Artifacts.
Your Rank Points can be distributed between the six areas listed below, providing increased abilities or making the game easier in some way.
- Decks - provides 1 Deck per rank point spent. More decks allow you to equip more, or larger, and therefore more powerful ship modules.
- Cargo Space - provides 5 Cargo Space per rank point spent. More Cargo Space allows your ship to carry more minerals, artifacts, and unequipped ship modules at a time.
- Engineers - provides 2 Engineers per rank point spent. Engineers increase your max Energy, allowing you to store more energy for completing missions or performing combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Tactical Officers - provides 2 Tactical Officers per rank point spent. Tactical Officers increase your Attack, so you do more damage in combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Helmsmen - provides 2 Helmsmen per rank point spent. Helmsmen increase your Defense, so you take less damage from combat. They can also help you raid enemy ships or defend against enemy raids.
- Scientists - provides 3 Scientists per rank point spent. Scientists increase your Research output per hour, so you can research new technologies - and therefore improve your ship and planet Modules faster.
Note For New Players: decks are generally considered to be the best way to spend your rank points, because they can be used to build Ship Modules that can increase any of your ship stats. Ship Modules make your ship more flexible, because they can be swapped for different modules at any time, allowing you to specialise your ship as your needs change. For instance, you could have a ship equipped for combat, but you can then unequip some weapon or defence modules so that you can equip better scanners for planet scanning. Rank points spent in the other areas do not give you this flexibility. Ultimately, the decision on how to spend them is yours. There is no right or wrong answer and there are many different ship development strategies that work.
General strategy as of 5/10/13: Decks and Cargo are hard to come by when you first start. With patience, however, you will get more than you will ever need of these from the artifacts Tesseract Container, Mass Storage Pod, and Ship-Bot. As a result of these coming from Artifact Points, it is recommended that you put some focus on that early on. Research is also important, but you will, again, get all of it you need from Android Scientists if you are patient enough. Rank Points will come from Rescued Prisoners if you wait it out, but this is a slow process. Not ranking up while you wait for Rescued Prisoners and other artifacts to come in is referred to as freeze ranking. Summary: Put a little bit into research and mining, but focus primarily on artifact.