Speakeasy Corporation: NEST

NEST : Native Star Economics, Strategies & Tactics

NEST :  Native Empire Strategies & Tactics 
Home System "Best Practices"

Table of Contents

The Credit Economy

Second to Hydrogen and effectively a product of it, the amount of credits you generate each turn only scratches the surface of the many moving parts and underlying opportunities to optimize your top-line credit income.

Briefly, the major methods are:

1. Native/Yellow Star: Hourly Trade Station & Planet Shipments
2. Research/Salvage Artifacts
3. Blue Stars: Wins
4. Red Stars: Croids

Next, let's look at how to maximize the Credits generated by Method #1, "Hourly"

1. Shipping Methodologies
2. Best Practice: Trade Stations & Planet Upgrades

Shipment Methods & Credits

Below, find a video which presents "Best Practice" if your goal is to balance IRL time spent with still maximizing income as much as possible.

Remember, every hour the shipments to a given planet refresh. If full, shipments will be sent one-way to the Nether, in order to put new ones there. Don't leave premium (post-bonus) shipments waiting too long, or will begin to lose the bonuses you've applied.

In terms of Hydrogen usage and concern about "waste", remember that "waste" is a relative term —it all depends on what the potential credits are worth to you at the time. Hydrogen production is the fundamental economic driver and will almost always be in short supply, budget accordingly!

Shipping Modules

The following discusses the best use of Shipment Computer, Trade Boost & Burst and Shipment Relay.

• Set a TT (w/ SC modules!) destined for a Planet located in a system that is connected via one of your Warp Lanes (WL); immediately then set a subsequent waypoint to the warp gate next to it. After that, quickly set additional waypoints corresponding to shipments on the planet you are headed towards, which are for another planet also reachable via a warp-lane. If you still have room left, add waypoints for planets not connected by WL. The moment your TT arrives at that initial destination planet, quickly cancel all waypoints (before your TT can get to the next one). This should leave your TT full, sitting at that first waypoint (the warp gate).
  • Do this until all of the planets connected via warp gates have had their shipments picked up; dropping shipments on one or more planets that have had their shipments cleared using the above process;
  • You will likely run out of capacity to hold all of the shipments on your TT, so pick an initial planet and use #1 above to clear it of all shipments. Then you can start emptying your TT there, so they can continue to do the pickups (#1). As this planets becomes full, eventually sort them, and then load up all the shipments there for a given planet(s), and send it to yet a different one for "holding". Prioritize of course sorting and consolidating shipments headed for planets on your WLs, since if you are going to use Shipment Relay, the bonus applies to all shipments >1 per load on the Shipment Relay starcraft.
  • Let the Shipment Drone run, picking up and delivering all shipments destined for planets connected via your WLs.
  • Beyond doing only the above, you can extend the same tactics to also pick-up shipments that are not reachable via WL; You will want to consolidate these to a single planet also, ideally choosing one located where it will be easiest/efficient for your TT to get to and then on to the given destination(s).
  • If you decide to go further and do step #5, make your life easy using nearly identical "pick-up tactics" described in Step #1, however for the purposes of this step, you will allow your TT continue on to its destination(s). **Ideally, you will want both Trade Boost & Trade Burst active, and you want at least one or the other in order to make this "manual delivery" worth more than just using Shipment Relay to handle them.
  • Now, after you are done with what you're going to do in Step #6, it's time to let Shipment Relay to do the rest.

Upgrade Costs & Economics

The Hydrogen Economy

Hydrogen: Ship Movement Costs

Movement Costs: Impact from Modules (& Upgrades)

Most modules and overall ship class upgrades have an effect on the amount of Hydrogen a corresponding ship will require. Pay attention to this and consider the implications of your Hydrogen Economy carefully, prior to committing to an upgrade (recommended) and especially prior to equipping or becoming dependent on its use.

Manage Ship Transit Efficiency

You should pay close attention to how much it costs to run your Battleship and Transports over a given distance, such as a sector. You can see the amount of Hydrogen your ship would use by clicking on it once then sliding your finger to a destination or alternatively, the amount of Hydrogen/AU is a statistic listed on your ship detail page and provided you know the distance, just do the math. I suggest settling on a kind of standard and using that information to plan medium-long term. i.e., Cost/100AUs.

➞ Update this as you grow because it increases with new tech levels.

Hydrogen Mining

Hydrogen is the most basic economic unit in the game, and every bit of progress you will make stems from it. Gathering Hydrogen and maintaining enough of it is a balance between:

Mining Strategies

• Operating your Miners as constantly as possible;

• Revealing enough System Sectors so that more Hydrogen potential exists in the first place.

• Remember, empty Sectors are not "worthless" by a long shot. Those Sectors without Planets will contain more Hydrogen than Sectors that do. (The exception to this is your Home Sector and the Sectors immediately surrounding it, these have the very most both in total and per Rock/Asteroid

• Upgrading enough of your Planets to have a sufficient overall capacity for storing Hydrogen.

There are some tactics you can use to increase your total Hydrogen income, including harvesting it when you visit Red Stars, and via partners thru a Diplomatic Gateway. The latter can be difficult with another live human player, but you may want to consider setting up an "Alt" (Alternate) account by creating another, separate instance of Hades Star and connect that via your Diplomatic Gateway.

Hydrogen Farming

Creating a Hydrogen Farm

A sector can be leveraged as a Hydrogen Farm. Such sectors are dedicated to Hydrogen production, and provide an additional sourceH-juice. To create a farm in a given sector:

• Start by clearing the sector entirely with your Miner.
• Use Genesis repeatedly until the Sector has 14 total rocks.
• Now use Enrich once each day, until each rock is worth 1500 Hydrogen.
• You are done with the creation portion, now to harvest!

Sustainable Farming Scenarios

Once you have a Farm Sector containing 14 rocks worth 1500 Hydrogen each, consider this example on how to best farm it each day.

Scenario 1: Enrich Daily, Each Day: Harvest 3192 H/Sector, Daily.
Scenario 2: Enrich Daily, for 3 Days: Harvest 8000-8400 H/Sector, every 3 days.

• Enrich has a 12-hour cool-down, but each Sector has a 24-hour Enrich cool-down.
  • Therefore, single Miner can technically maintain two Sectors per day, Enrich one and then the other, alternating every ~12hours.
• Genesis is the reverse, 1 day cool-down for the module, just 12-hours for a Sector.

Scenario 1: Assuming you have Enrich Level 6 (18%), you can use a Miner with 2,000 capacity and Hydrogen Upload Level 6 (55%) to mine 3100 Hydrogen from that Sector each day. Your Miner will fill to capacity, use Hydrogen Upload once, then fill back up to capacity (3100 total). Then, applying just a single Enrich will restore all 14 rocks back to 1500 each.

Scenario 2: In a fully mature hydrogen farm sector (14×1500 = 21,000), if MN-Capacity = 2K, Upload=1100 & Enrich = 18%, two 2 MNs can hit a single Sector together, load to full and use Hydrogen Upload =twice=, so that each rock will end at 900 each.

The total take away is 8400 Hydrogen, and of course with four (4) MNs and 2 Sectors = 16,800 Hydrogen, all captured within about 10 minutes real-time including Hydrogen Upload refresh and with Mining Boost active. This can be even faster if you use your Alt ships to provide TW and/or the system TimeModulator.

If you then return these MNs to your home system and return directly, Mining Boost will still have enough time to hit another 2 sectors (2 MNs each) and pull another 16,800.

This method offers a good balance between efficiency & quantity harvested, if you Enrich at 19% =three times=, returning the rocks to 1500 each.

To be clear, each of these 4 Sectors will then require at least 48h before returning to 1500/rock, or 72h if you want to wait for that given Sector to be immediately "Enrichable" after Mining it again in the future..

This means 33,600 Hydrogen in < 25 minutes, and 4 sectors put "out of commission" for 72 hours total. If you have at least 16 total Farm Sectors and are careful to Enrich as soon as possible each 24h, then you can pull a steady 33,600 Hydrogen every single day continuously. Having 20+ Sectors gives you some wiggle room so you don't need to be so timely with Enrich.

✵ Note however: If your 2K Cap. MNs can upload only 50% (1K), then you can follow the same methodology and get a little less (8,000/Sector) and Enrich at just 18% (the optimal Enrich technology level IMHO) and still get it done in 72h (3x Enrich). This translates to 32,000/day as compared to the 33,600 above. So, the formal recommendation from SPKZ Research is MN @ 2K Capacity, 18% Enrich and 50% Hydrogen Upload, with at least 16 Farming Sectors in and Alt System.

Best Place for Hydrogen Farms

**It is best if you create your Hydrogen Farm in either an Alt account, or in a Diplomatic Partner system, because you can then use Sector Assignments and rest easy knowing your Miners will never mistakenly mine our your entire Farm one day!

Generally, if you aren't planning to make every Alt Sector a Farm, then you will want to create your Hydrogen Farm Sectors in a Sector that naturally generates the least amount of Hydrogen each day. This of course means you would not want to use the Sectors that are either adjacent to your starting planets, and especially NOT the final several sectors that can be revealed, as these will generate upwards of 4K in Hydrogen each day on their own, fully mined out. That's half what you can get from a farm each day, but with the benefit of not having to worry about Enriching it.

To repeat, you never have to worry about your Miner suddenly destroying your farm. A "foreign Miner" stops once filled, and does not move. It will never travel to another sector in that system unless you manually direct it. Plus, once at capacity (assuming 2,000), you can simply hit Hydrogen Upload anytime you want, (like the above example #1) completing the extraction for that Sector, then either use Enrich on your own Miner, and/or use a Miner from your Alt Account to Enrich the Sector back to 1500/asteroid.

Shipment Drones

The following video attempts to describe the use of Shipment Drones, comparing the benefits with alternative modules such as Trade Burst and Trade Boost. Off the top this one thing can be said which is perhaps most important of all:

All else being equal, meaning even if the bonus level of these modules happened to be exactly equal based on your current tech level, Shipment Drones offer multiple significant, unique benefit over Trade Burst/Boost:

• Shipment Drone operation involves no variable Hydrogen cost to make Shipment deliveries, only a fixed, initial cost to launch the drone.
• Shipment Drone operates for a full 60 minutes, where Trade Burst and Trade Boost operate for 20 and 10 minutes, respectively.
• Shipment Drones are totally automatic once you point it at an initial planet destination.
• Shipment Drones move very quickly, about 20x as fast as a Battleship, the fastest ship in any fleet, so they deliver much more in a given period of time.
• Shipment Drones can only pick-up or deliver to those Planets connected via active Warp Lane.
• Therefore, (#5), Trade Burst and Trade Boost should be used to deliver shipments to all those Planets and Trade Stations which are not currently connected via Warp Lane.
• When (#6) is performed in an optimal way, a similar strategy of "stacking" shipments to enable the most efficient, highest concentration cargo and delivery. Also, pick-up and delivery should be performed via Shipment Computer whenever possible, in order to take advantage of that "base bonus" at all times.

With that as a summary, here is a closer look at how to employ Shipment Drones:

【VIDEO Creation in Process】 

Military & Combat

See REST, WEST or BEST for Red Star, White Star and Blue Star military information. Learn about strategies, tactics plus weapons and defense information, including many easy to reference charts and graphs, respectively.