Ok, so I'm rank 180 now, and up until now I'v been putting every single rank point into deck space. I currently have 952 deck, but it was really just 950 when I lvl'd (I just used a ship bot for the extra space). What I'v been noticing is that its definatly been taking longer to lvl, not by too much, but i'm no longer on my usual 1 lvl every 24hrs, or maybe sooner if I manage my energy well.

What I'm thinking of doing now is that I continue to raise my deck space in incriments of 5 per lvl (so basically having 955 decks at rank 181, 960 at rank 182, ect.), and putting any extra remaining rank points into engineers. Rite now I only have 100, but with modules and stuff, I have a maximum possible energy of 1251 energy rite now with relays off.

So for example, if i get a ship bot in my aritfact delivery and use it, because it adds 2 decks, I am thinking that I will only put 3 rank points into decks for that lvl, and the remaining 2 into engineers (+4 energy). For another example, if i were to get Rescued Stryll Prisoners (gives 6 rank points) or something during my hunts, I would only use 5 of the rank points for deck space and 1 on an extra engineer, and then when I lvl, I would put All rank points into engineers (+10 energy)

What do you think of this stragety?

I would agree you need more energy but the way your thinking is slightly flawed. As others have said there is a max amount of decks you need to be able to fit everything into your ship, so every rank point you spend in decks is a waste.

Since rank 180 I have spent around 10 points in decks and only used ship bots. I spend all my points in energy and tac officers, as these are the only 2 things you dont get artifacts for. I have a smaller than average deck size for my rank but I do have a lot of tac officers, helmsmen and engineers.

The higher your max energy the less you need to recharge between rank ups. Also the faster you recharge, the quicker you can rank up.

Power leveling isn't the way to go, I'm afraid. Why?

1. You level so fast you won't have time to catch up your tech's. A level 300 with +12's will trump a level 500 with +8's. Even though the level 500 may have more planet slots, lets not forget the increasing costs of colonizing new planets the higher level you get. A level 300 has about 76 planet slots, whereas a level 500 has 126. The cost to colonize 100+ planets is more expensive than colonizing slots 60 - 75.

2. Leveling fast means you won't be able to get some NPC boss drops anymore. If you power level past 600, you lose quite a few easy NPC bosses that drop decent planet buildings. Level past 900, and no more queens for you. Level past 1,000 means no more fabrication plants for you.

3. PvP will suffer. If you power level and go past 600+, you'll get farmed hard by the higher levels in the top 5 legions. As your tech is weak for your rank, you won't be able to ward them off as easily, and hard to get revenge on them. Also, the 40% disparity is even greater. When you're level 600, level 1000's can farm you for badges (400 levels difference), whereas if you're level 400, then people level 600 and under can farm you (200 levels difference).

4. New content. If you power level, you burn through missions and new content Dan creates much faster than people who level slow and steady. Then you'll get bored and whine about no new content for levels 900+. No new NPC's except the new XRP warp station, very limited PvP options cuz of top 5 legions alerting and farming you, exponential rise in planet colonizing costs, no level 900+ mission chains, and NPC's being the only hardcore action left... boring environment. Imagine how bored Frail and the players above level 1000 are. Also, Dan is more likely to create new missions for levels 300 - 500 than for levels 1000+ cuz there are far more players under 500 than over 500. Probably a couple hundred players are above 500, whereas the other 99% (thousands) are under that.

5. Tedium. Imagine clicking "kill NPC" thousands upon thousands of times to auto-rank or as the only viable activity in the highest levels. Carpal tunnel, anyone?

Some points are spot on but getting bored because you have more energy to work with doesn't make much sense to me. For myself running out of energy and waiting to come back to the game is the boring part.

Well thanx for your views on what I should do, and I understand both arguments being made. However, heres where I have comments about your advice:

First with bobdebouwer's argument is that I cannot focus entirely on engineers like power rankers do, and ignore decks becuse of ship bot deliveries and such. The reason being is, quite frankly my artifact production is abysmal it is just under 400/hr and at that rate I wouldn't get decks nearly fast enough to compensate for my rank and modules.

Second with Veristek's argument is that I realize that power ranking would infact hurt me very much in the long run. However, seemingly standing still at lower ranks does not appeal to me either. Now to go along with your argument, most people who power lvl do infact loose out in having poorly researched modules and such. However, unlike my artifact production, I have focused heavily on research my entire time playing GL (about 5months or so) and I want to rank faster so that I can infact keep up with my researched modules.

Thank you for your input and I would appreciate any more suggestion to my thoughts =)

First who mentioned power levelling? Because I didn’t, obviously even the mere mention of engineers is enough to annoy you. Doesn’t power levelling need a CC? I guess you meant auto ranking but even auto ranking has limitations.

The cost to colonize is the same no matter what. It doesn’t matter whether you take 6 months or 6 years to get to 100 planets the cost is the same.

Auto ranking via npcs will give you all the npc modules you can get and you can only get a finite amount queens/fab plants etc anyway. Unless all you do is wait for someone else to alert one.

My pvp doesnt suffer. Tech is not the be all and end all that you think it is. Think about this, the max att from a researched weapon is only 427. By the time you have researched these and can afford to equip them and pay the upkeep, you could have got a couple of artifact planets instead of mining and you will probably have received more than enough prisoners to cover the difference from a less powerful but less costly weapon.

Correct about power levelling but not so much with auto ranking/levelling.

What else is this game but clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking and even more clicking?

Just 1 last point. Why is it that when anyone mentions putting a lot of rank points into engineers people think you are trying to tell them to auto rank/power level. The simple fact is if you don’t enough spent rank points in engineers then it starts taking longer and longer to rank up. Even the highest researched reactors will only give you 1620 energy which is not enough for anyone higher than rank 250 to rank up more than once every couple of days, even with the best relays installed.

Am I the only non-slow ranker content with leveling every 2-3 days?

yes

Yep :/

Yes, auto-ranking. That's why people go heavy on engineers in hopes of auto-ranking. That's what I hear from most energy-heavy builds these days.



The issue here is money.

If you auto-rank and get like 100 extra planet slots in 1 month, compared to leveling more conventionally and netting 100 extra planets over, say, 6 months. The player would be hard pressed to collect credits fast enough within a month to spend on colonizing 100 more planets. At higher levels, planet colonization costs a billion or more each, and 200th planet costs like 20 billion or so to colonize. 300th planet probably costs 100 billion to colonize. And so on.

Try collecting a couple hundred of billion in a month to pay the colonization costs. Plus let's not forget daily upkeep for the modules, AND the costs to build production, defense, attack, or cloak buildings on the 100 new planets.

Now, if you colonized the same 100 new planets over several months, you'll be able to afford it much easier and effectively. Instead of rushing to buy stuff and use up hundreds of planet time vortexes to instant-grow colonies, and have to colonize a lot of mining worlds (which hurts AP planets colonized ratio since you need AP worlds) just to afford all the stuff you need to do... Also, for the higher auto-levelers, you'd need to gather at least 10k+ mining per hour to be able to do everything.



Modules isn't the issue here. If you auto-rank and raise up past the upper ceiling of, say, Lazuli refinery plants, you can't get gas igniters or eruption channelers to add to passive attack of gas / volcanic planets (which helps with invasion defense). Ditto for Lazuli fabrication plants. You can't get passive cloak and defense upgraders for your planets anymore past rank 1000. Queens drop the energy sacs AND a nice 2 research for 1 space building that can be built on ANY planet.

CTP from scrapped NPC modules and buildings and traps suck at higher levels compared to the lower level NPC's. Lower level NPC's scrapped stuff gives 20 - 40 CTP each, while the higher level NPC boss drops only give 10 - 20 CTP or less when scrapped. Plus they're a lot tougher to take out for their lower CTP rates compared to easy-kill lower level NPC bosses for fast n' easy CTP.

So if I slow level, I can get, say, 300 Lazuli fabrication plants between rank 300 and 1000 as I won't get to that level 1000 cut-off point for a year. Compare that to the auto-rankers who go from level 300 to 1000 in a couple months, and may only see 50 or fewer Lazuli fabrication plants. Lets not forget you may not be able to lock on these bosses cuz they die so quickly, so even fewer chances to get actual loot for yourself.

That's a huge difference. 50 cloak / defense passive buffs for auto-ranker and 300 for slow leveler. Now apply that to the other useful buffing or building drops from other NPC bosses.



I don't plan on installing the NERF guns cuz they're 1 billion upkeep each, and I'm happy with my heavy null rays. Yes, there's the rescued prisoners / rank points for tactical officers. However, you have to decide whether to put your points into tac officers and engineers, and auto-level. That is, unless you have insane 20k AP per hour incomes and get several prisoners a day. But to get to that point, you'll need to be high leveled already, plus tons of scan blitz's to find the good AP planets, plus researched +12 buildings, scan, and attack to invade + build up enemy occupied AP planets.

You get 5 rank points from leveling up, and 3 from prisoners. Auto-rankers need to spend 25 more energy per level on average to maintain their auto-ranking, which means all 5 rank points plus 3 rescued prisoners per auto-rank. That brings us to the issue stated above. Its hard to expect to consistently gain 3 rescued prisoners every minute or so if you auto-rank off missions, or every 10 minutes or so if you NPC auto-rank. Now where will you get the tactical officers then, if you have to pour everything into energy / engineers?

Now, if I don't power / auto level, I can put those 5 rank points and 3 rescued prisoners into tactical officers, which will help me be stronger than players who just pour everything into energy. 25 tactical officers per level compared to 25 energy per level. In about 40 levels of this, I can easily make up the difference between 8x Heavy Null Rays and 8x NERF guns (1000 net attack). Whereas the energy build won't have that extra 1000 attack free-of-upkeep cuz they spent it all on engineers.

Finally, its much easier to gather badges in the lower levels than the higher levels. The higher levels (500+) have the big veteran players like Dysonians, Ni, PA, etc. who know what they're doing, and in the case of Dysonians or Ni, alert whoever attacks + badges them just so the other high levels in their legion can badge off the victim. This is due to the scarcity of variety in PvP targets in the 500+ arena. With the lower levels, there's thousands of players to badge off in the BT, and less likely to be farmed by the same player(s) repeatedly.



As for the clicking, imagine trying to click to kill 1000's of NPC's daily to auto-rank? Slow levelers can burn through 1k energy easily by doing missions that are still there for them, or PvP, or base combat, or such. Thats a lot less clicking than for 5k or 10k energy builds.

Click. Click. Click. Killed NPC. Click "close NPC ship screen". Click next NPC. Click. Click. Click. NPC dead. Rinse n' repeat for the next 1000 NPC's for the day. I've been told by BinaryMan that he has to sit for hours clicking nonstop on NPC's to auto-level as high as he did (1700'ish) before he resetted. How fun is that? Can't be doing anything else, like movies, going out, spending time with the wife / girlfriend, or other RL stuff if you're sitting for hours clicking to kill 1000's of NPC's.

And the reason why I like GL and why it's the best game on FB is because there's a degree of strategy in it that other games lack. Zynga spamfest games- you wait out timers and collect crap. Castle Age, you just farm monsters and stuff and the game automatically assigsn the weapons and defenses to your army. With GL, you can choose your modules, outfit the ship any way you want, fight certain players / legions, invade planets you want or ignore others, fight NPC's you want, etc. Also unlike the other games, GL has 3 tiered system. PvP, PvE, and missions. Other games only have PvP and missions.

So instead of 100% mindless clicking like other FB games, GL makes you PLAN and strategize and think what you wanna do next, and optimize the way you want, and no automatic assigning stuff.

nope we should make a club or something

I'm a slow ranker at 445 and I'm satisfied. Also I have no work so I don't spend on this game or any other. I did spend $20 last year (2010).

Rules I wish I had lived by.

Under no circumstances ever spend rank points on the following:
Decks
Cargo
Helmsmen
Scientists
All of the above can be got from artifacts and you'll be able to catch up as your production goes up. There will come a time were you use those artifacts that could improve your ship to create nice artifacts from the base labs.

That leaves Engineers & Tactical Officers.

Early on you need the attack but latter on energy.

I do really wish I had lived by these rules.

Also Dan has put a lot of time and effort into this game. Everyone give him a little income by purchasing the FATHER relays. You'll need them to reach the max recharge of 120/hr.

Your 361st planet costs 45billion to colonize.

My problem before rank 1000+ was never about having enough credits to pay for colonizing a planet, it was always about having a good enough planet on scan to colonize. The reason for that was I always kept my upkeep low by installing modules which weren't the top tier of my research, except the energy modules (Most people waste a lot of credit by always installing their new top tier research modules. Even at around rank 1100 I had 8 heavy null rays installed even though I had acess to everything(with an upkeep of less than 4billion). And to be honest, I never had any trouble disabling the biggest, toughest ships that cost 5times in upkeep. And that's because debuffs neutralizes any ship str advantage.

The thing about going heavy engineers is that it requires more thought and strategy than any other build to do it correctly. It's one of the reasons I don't recommend it to everyone. You have to try and squeeze the most efficient combination of modules into the least amount of deck space that you feel you can get away with. And, I'm very happy that I went that route since it challenged me more than going any other route.

Frail, what do you do these days now? Have you finished every mission in the game, gotten everything you could get, etc?

Also aren't you frustrated with the lack of new content for the level 1000+ section?

...
You're assuming the planet spots will be taken up as soon as they become available. Nobody does that unless they have a planet in mind for it.

I think this all depends on what your game strategy is. If you rank once a day playing missions then I think you'll need more engineers. At level 200 there's a mission which uses CTP to get more energy.

If you PvP or NPC then you'll need to keep focusing on decks for a little longer. You're at the stage where you can hunt NPCs. The bonus is faster ranking, CTP and the drops.

It's all about the drops for me. I have a few 15x toxic planets which are getting boosted to irradiated planets. I completed the Hyperterraformer mission by rank 260. I admit NPC killing can be a bit boring because of all the clicking but it's about the strategy. I have pretty good production for my rank. PQI is still over 200 I reckon with 100 planets colonised. The drops from NPCs help a lot. More productionmeans more research, more ship bots and rescured prisoners and more cash to maintain a decent ship. A lot of players are builders but I stayed as an Excavatour so my ship costs are pretty high. 2.2 billion. Those 15x toxic planets help a lot.

I assume you've already got Drannik Power Cores. You'll find XRPs at level 200 or level 220. They add more energy. Crimson elites drop new attack artifacts. Think they're around rank 200 and 220.

I hunt NPCs but rank relatively slowly. Usually once a day. sometimes 2. I'm at the same rank as bobdebouwer but have been playing GL for a year or two. I'm currently rank 407 with 13438 NPC kills. (He's probably out ranked me in the last week or two).

All the extra energy I have on level up gets thrown in our legion base. I've put in 100k energy to our base as of today.

So, if you kill NPCs then make sure you have a full set of heavy null rays and a decent sized hull then don't worry too much about ship size. Attack and energy become more important. More energy means more NPCs to kill on an NPC blitz. If you play missions then energy is king. If you play a mixed strategy then great. You'll find a lot of good stuff from missions and NPCs after rank 200.

Oh...and the best tip and what anyone else would say: get your arti production up.

No- rank 340 odd and only rank every couple of days- full energy set up but not in a hurry- been playing since june last year (around)

The argument for pro auto-rankers or power leveling is leveling fast so they have more rank points AND more planet slots for MORE production compared to slow rankers.

I dispute the "more rank points" and "more production" because... if you're forced to pour all your rank points into energy to maintain auto-ranking or power leveling rate, you won't be able to spend those points into tactical officers which will have drawbacks in PvP and NPC (weaker attack power).

The "more production" is disputed because the auto-ranker will have to generate A LOT more credits to have the "more production" in a shorter time span than the slow levelers do. Unless the power leveler is happy having 50 empty planet slots (at level 500) whereas slow levelers usually only have a couple empty planet slots (at level 300) . In this example, both the fast and slow leveler will have the same amount of planets, thus, averaging the same production.

Who says you are forced to put all rank points into egineers? Each level is not 20-30 more xp then the last