Ship Strategy
In Galaxy Legion there are many styles of game play to use. It can be difficult switching from some of them, as Rank Points cannot be reassigned, but they are effective strategies nonetheless.
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All Rounder
The most popular ship layout, as an all rounder you will have a balanced ship with a balanced Research Tree, although special attention should be paid to Structures and Scanners. Players using this strategy will not be as effective in Combat as other ships, but will be far more effective than people using hacker builds. It is key to remember that specialisation can be a huge advantage in this game, but as an all rounder you may be able to compete with specialists if you invest money into the game, or have good luck with NPCs, finding key NPCs such as the Blade Harvesters, T.O. Troop Carriers, and Rogue Labpods.
Many all rounder ships will turn to combat at a high rank, so maintaining combat ability is a key factor, although energy is often useful. This is to enable autoranking off of enemy NPCs.
With concern to Rank Points, investing in a small number of decks early on is often beneficial but should primarily be left up to Ship-Bots. Since Cargo, Helmsmen and Scientists are generally less effective than Tactical Officers and Engineers, however, the vast majority of rank points should go into the latter two because the earlier ones are available through Artifact production.
- Suggested Races: Aerlen, Konqul, Kronyn, Taltherian, or Vygoid
- Suggested Professions: Excavator, though most are usable. Avoid Biologist and Merchant, however.
Slow Ranker
As a slow ranker you will level up slowly to get optimum Research and Artifacts to make your ship stronger. As such, you will have high effectiveness in Combat, but will lack the Energy to do much in one go (although some slow rankers choose to have higher Energy values and not use it). Slow rankers will often neglect the energy and cloaking trees to give them as much as possible to spend on things like the weaponry and structures. The aim here is to stay at least one tier of Weapons ahead of most other players in your range in order to get as many kills with your energy as possible. One drawback is that your Upkeep can get extremely high, so you will need a very high Mining Points income to balance this and/or the Builder Profession. Due to Rank effecting what Minerals you get, you will need far higher than people at higher ranks.
Many slow ranking ships will engage in an even slower form of slow ranking, referred to as "Freeze Ranking". In this, you will gain no XP at all and spend your energy entirely on XP-less activities such as Hacking. This has the same ends as slow ranking, albeit moreso.
In terms of Rank Points distribution, there are a few different methods you can choose. Some slow rankers like to not have to install Reactors, and will therefore go for a high Engineers set-up. This means they will have a lower damage cap in comparison to their other stats due to not having to install as much equipment.
Other slow rankers like to go for Decks. This is often regarded as a bad move, since Ship-Bots are readily available from artifact pulls right from an early stage, which provide decks and will eventually exceed your deck needs - resulting in a pile of them lying in Cargo. This is not to say rank points should never go into decks. At early ranks, Artifact Points can be hard to come by, and so it is worthwhile putting a few points in early on. If you are planning on using a Small Ship Build to slow rank, then putting rank points into decks is almost always a bad idea, as your deck counts should be low enough that ship-bots can cover it.
Possibly one of the most popular choices, however, would be to put rank points into Tactical Officers, since they provide attack - possibly the most important stat for slow ranking players, due to it allowing more kills per energy both in NPC and PvP, as well as aiding planet invasions.
You do not have to choose only one of these elements, however, and it is often advisable to split rank points between these three - particularly when splitting between Engineers and Tactical Officers. Putting rank points into Helmsmen, Cargo and Scientists is not advisable, due to being less important and available from artifact production.
Fast Ranker
The exact opposite of slow rankers, fast rankers will invest heavily in Energy to level up quickly. Many fast rankers level up more than once in a single day, as opposed to the leveling up once every three to seven days like a slow ranker. You will have a much less powerful ship in Combat, as you will invest more in Engineers rather than Decks, and research the energy tree more heavily, in addition to structures. The ideal is to have enough Decks to install everything you want to Rank up, and the rest goes into engineers.
One problem that many fast rankers have, is that they will be installing and uninstalling Relays on a much more regular basis, and often higher-tier relays. This means that they will break far more often, often costing a lot of money in repairs.
Many fast rankers will NPC, as it has the highest XP ratio, often exceeding 4:1, and NPC Rares can drop some exceedingly good Artifacts, such as the Terraforming Device, which can increase a planet's production availability by 1. As such, it may be just as important to invest into weapons to increase the XP ratio gained whilst NPCing. The eventual aim is to autorank, which will allow the player to level up as many times as they want, or have time for, through NPCs.
Hacker
A hacker build focuses on a specific area of PvP other than Combat as a whole - Hacking. Hacking allows you to steal research from your opponent, ultimately getting you further ahead in your own research - often more so than the slow rankers. Occasionally, whilst hacking you may also uncover the location to a planet, which will more than likely be sub-standard, however, may be good.
As a hacker you need to research heavily in cloaking devices, as well as some scan. It is recommended that you also research weaponry, hull, and other combat-related tools such as defense, as well as structures, to help nullify the effects of retaliation.
This also goes hand in hand with freeze ranking, as hacking does not yield any XP. It is also worth mentioning that if you do want to gain XP, you will have to take part in other elements of the game.
Small Ship Build - SSB / Raider
Often described as a slow death, this is a strategy that looks - and is - powerful early on, but one that you might regret later on in the game (that said, there are some very successful high ranked SSBs). The aim here is to only add one Deck per Rank (more common is adding 2 decks every 2 ranks via the use of a Ship-Bot or Lazuli Parts Vault) in order to keep your damage cap as low as possible. The damage cap is how much damage you can take from a single attack. There are two formulas for this, ((Rank+19)/2) or (Decks/2), whichever is greater. Small ships will typically invest in Tactical Officers and Engineers, and mainly research hull and structures.
A lot of players using this build will use Ship-Bots as their sole income of decks from an early rank, using one every other rank. This allows the player to invest all their Rank Points into Tactical Officers, increasing their attack. This build allows the pilot to be very successful at raiding.
Precision Build/Precision Collector
This is a somewhat newer strategy that only comes into play at the moderate ranks (150+). Given that with planetary artifact points production you can slowly but surely infinitely grow your ship's Decks, Attack, Defense, Shields, Hull, Energy and Cargo, to levels far beyond what any researchable equipment can give, some players aim to have a high Precision build. This setup is a slightly modified version of the Slow Ship Build (SSB) where they restrict the number of Decks to minimize damage to themselves and focus purely on loading equipment and artifacts that boost aspects that are not improved through planetary production - namely Scan, Cloak and energy regeneration - as well as any artifacts that give a % boost to something (and perhaps bragging rights on the rarer stuff). This can take quite some time to get reasonably powerful, but in the long run the significantly reduced Upkeep costs and restricted ship size can be highly beneficial, plus the highly enhanced Scan will make it far easier to locate choice targets and will be vital for doing a planet Scan Blitz.
The Precision Collector is a sub-type of the Precision build: intent focus on the Scan, Cloak and energy regeneration researchable equipment, but they also aim to install every single ship artifact they can find (mostly) for bragging rights. Completely avoiding use of the researchable equipment that is not for scan, cloak or energy regeneration will save you a total of 1849 decks and 21.61 billion (21,610,000,000) credits of upkeep per day.
NPC XP Efficiency Build
More experienced players may wish to check out this page: DeckEngineerBalance in order to learn how best to fight NPCs for maximum XP efficiency.
- For more information, see Professions, Races, Ranks, and the Research Tree.