Newbie guide

Things you should do to play this game smart:

1. Always be shielded
2. Don't give away resources to the enemy
3. Don't feed the enemy by giving them an easy kill

Let's see how you can achieve these:


******************** STAY SHIELDED ********************


Ideally you would like to stay shielded all the time, but shield cost gold and you never have enough. So first you have to make sure you have a steady gold income. If you click on your ark's cargo, you can see a menu item called "Investment". Here you can deposit your gold in different categories and after a while, they will produce some interest on your gold. Here are the categories:

Black Market Trading -  Takes 1500 gold, give 105 gold in one day
Spice Trade - Takes 1500 gold, give 105 gold in 3 days, which equals to 35 gold per day
Shadow Matter Investment - Takes 3000 gold, give 600 gold in 7 days, which equals to 85.7 gold per day
Carnival Operations - Takes 5000 gold, give 5000 gold in 30 days, which equals to 166.6 gold per day
Faction cooperation - This requires a Level 20 cargo, so getting this to work is a long term plan, but it takes 10000 gold and give 4500 gold in 15 days, which equals to 300 gold per day
Galactic Management - This requires VIP level 7, so work towards to get that as soon as possible, even if you have to spend a little gold for that. This takes 20000 gold and give 6-14000 gold in 15 days (random), which is 400-933.3 gold per day.

If you add these up, they give you 1092-1625 gold passive income every day at level 20, 792-1325 gold every day if you ar lower level, but at VIP level 7.
From the daily login rewards you can get 350 gold every week, which is another 50 gold per day.
From the monthly login rewards you get 1110 gold for the first 4 week, which is 39.6 gold per day.
So to add these up, if you are VIP 7, you have 5 of the 6 investments running, you basically get at least 881 gold per day. A 3 day shield costs 2499 gold, so you are almost there to stay shielded all the time. The missing gold you will get if you get a better reward from the last investment and from event monsters.
So your first goal is to get VIP 7 and make all your investments running, then you can sit back and enjoy being shielded all the time and not have to worry about the enemy stealing your resources.


******************** DON'T FEED THE ENEMY WITH FREE RESOURCES ********************


This brings us to the second part, not feeding the enemy with free resources.
When an enemy attack you and your ark get defeated, the enemy will steal some of your resources. To prevent that you have to know your protected resource limit, which you can check on your ark's cargo information. You can increase this amount by upgrading your cargo and researching higher level "Res Protection" in the lab. If your resources are below these levels (please note that cash protection level is half the amount of the other resources), then the enemy won't get anything from you. If an enemy is heading towards you and you know you will be defeated, it's still better to use your resources than giving them away. To the guild fortress you can send up to 2 mil of resources once in every 24 hours and can store up to 10 mil of resources there. When you need them, you can get them from the fort immediately.

Another way to use your resources is by building something quickly (troops, building, research) or spending them on guild upgrades.

Another trick to save your resources requires you to get to an enriched zone (the areas with flashy tiles). While you are sitting in such area your res production silos will produce resources with a double rate, but if your ark gets defeated while being there, you will get teleported to a random location. When you get teleported, all your stuff (troops, transfers, etc.) will be instantly returned to your ark. So if you are sitting in an enriched area, the enemy is heading towards you, you can send all your res to the building of the fort (normally this is not allowed), but if you get teleported before your res reaches the fort, you will get everything back. Sadly if the enemy decide to not attack you, and turn back, your res will reach the fort, unless you use an ark jump manually.

If you are in an enriched zone, you are being attacked and you don't want to get teleported, all you need to do is to start you ark to move out to a normal tile. As long you are moving, it does not matter if the attack happens while your ark is above the enriched area, you won't be teleported.

Please note that there is a special area at the center of the map, called Centican, which is a tax-free zone, you can buy from the shop without the 10% gold tax while being there (so I suggest to buy your 3 day shield there) and you can send res to anybody from the guild, without any tax.


And this bring us to the next section of HOW NOT TO FEED THE ENEMY WITH FREE RESOURCES:
When you are anywhere on the map (except Centican), when you send any resource to a guild member, it is subject of being taxed. And the tax goes to the guild who owns the capital in that area. So DO NOT SEND large amount of resources to others unless you are in Centican, as you will be FEEDING APO with that!!!

If you want to just complete the daily mission of resource sending, send only the smallest possible amount!


******************** DON'T FEED THE ENEMY WITH EASY KILLS DURING THE WEEKEND EVENT ********************


On every weekends there is a player hunting event going on, where players compete about who can kill the most enemy units and get the highest score. There is an individual event starting on Saturday after the server reset and there is a guild event starting 12 hours later. Both events last for 48 hours (so the whole event last for 60 hours after the Saturday server reset), but if you want to contribute to both, the best to wait until the guild even start too.
In this event only the troops count that are killed in an active battle (with two commanders involved), so if you don't have any commander garrisoned in your ark and the enemy commander massacre your troops without any battle, he will not get any point for that!

The higher the tier of the unit, the higher scores you will get and what is VERY IMPORTANT: rangers don't give any points!
So during these events, your goal is to only attack weaker players to get them defeated and avoid being defeated by stronger ones. If you don't want to risk your troops, it is possible to participate in the event without wasting your shield.

Stay alert, watch your enemy's movement and when you see that a weaker player is heading towards a tile, launch your troops too while he is on route and you will keep your shield intact even after commencing a battle at that tile. If you are not sure he is weaker, wait until he gets close to the tile and after sending your troops there, send a scout too. If you do it with good timing, both your troops will be flying towards the tile before he capture it, but your scout should arrive to the tile after him, so you will get a quick report of what is waiting there for you and if you don't like it, you can turn your troops back before arriving.

Another safe way of fighting is sending reinforcements. If you see that a weaker enemy is heading towards a guild mate, send your troops as reinforcement and they will defeat that enemy while your shield remain intact.

Please always pay attention to your targets (being a tile or a guild mate) as the enemy might notice that you are heading there and could prepare a nasty surprise. If you have marching speedups (you can get the +25% version by killing monsters on the map) use them to shorten your travel time and avoid being detected.

If you don't have shield during the event, you have two options to keep some of your troops safe:
Find a guild member who remains shielded for that 60 hours, take your highest leadership commander and send all the troops you can as a reinforcement. This way they will be safe under your guild mate's shield, but they won't be available for you.

Another alternative is that you take the same commander with all the troops and send it to Explore. Troops that are stationed in Explore, are not affected by ark battles and you can take them out any time when you need them (just don't forget to put them back).

If you are not shielded during the weekend event, make sure you don't set any troops to garrison your ark, as you will provide easy score to stronger enemies (and you can be sure they will find you). Also make sure that Auto-Garrison is not enabled unless you know what you are doing.

When taking tiles during the weekend event, ONLY USE RANGERS. They are damn weak and you can only capture lower level tiles with them, but at least you don't feed the enemy with easy score.

And why it is important to not feed the enemy with easy score? The players and the guilds who get the most score, will get big prizes. If we get score on them, but they can't score on us, we will have a chance to win those prizes or at least get in the first 3 guild in the guild event.

Play smart, only attack targets you know you can defeat and be safe!

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!