Battlestation first contact is a space strategy game, similar to a tower defense. You control a battlestation along with various reinforcements and fighters, defending against waves of enemies. It is fairly simple but addictive! The first episode is free and contains just about all of the gameplay. 4 more episodes are available, but they are not hugely different than the first, except for the last episode. Buy them if you enjoy the first episode, but they are kind of pricey. This mini-guide attempts to break down some of the various options available. Allocating Soldiers: -------------------- After picking an episode you have to choose an allocation between Marines, Pilots, Engineers, Scientists. Extra space increases score. Here are the effects of each choice: Marines: These are used to defend your space station from enemy boarders (episode 2 only), and for taking over enemy ships. You can command only ONE enemy ship at a time and it requires you to build a Shuttlebay. Hence, this is a 1-shot type of thing... you capture 1 ship then sell the shuttlebay and the marines have served their purpose. 10 marines is useless and not recommended. 15 marines is enough to capture the first enemy big ship you will encounter. This is the number of marines that I recommend. 20 marines will adequately defend in episode 2 and guarantee capture of enemy ships against races that are better at marine combat. More than 20 should not be needed. Note that marines seem to magically regenerate somehow over time. No clue where they seem to come from. If you choose more than 15 marines, you will need to MANUALLY tell your shuttle to pack 24 instead of the default 16. Pilots: These are used to fly the fighters that your hangers generate. When fighters die, pilots eject sometimes and start slowly floating back to the battlestation. But at some point you need to buy more pilots. This gets kind of wierd... you buy a Full Refill for a fixed price of 1500. Whether you get 5 or 50 pilots the cost is the same. Hence, having more pilots really only affects how often you need Refills and how efficient the refills are. I recommend 25 to 30 pilots. This ensures you have enough to fill 6 hangers worth of ships (18 ships) and enough spares to keep them going for a while, so you can buy other stuff. You usually need two refills per game. Having more pilots does not save you that much cash and isnt worthwhile. You'd need 50 pilots to save 1/2 price vs having 25. Having less pilots though can be detrimental. Only 10 pilots would mean you might need 5 or 6 refills per game which can slow down other purchases. Engineers: They affect build speed of new components in the battlestation. They are also allocated to 3 sub-areas. 1. Repair - Boosts repair speed when the station gets damaged. This is most useful during the first 10 waves and not so much afterward. 2. Weapons - Every engineer adds 1% more damage to all battlestation guns. This is kind of weaksauce and it does not affect fire rate. You generally want your battlestation to have mostly fighter bays. 3. Hangers - Every engineer reduces build speed of hangers by 0.2 seconds. Not all that helpful as if you are losing ships THAT fast then things are going very poorly and slightly faster replacements is not likely to help. As such, I set to 10 engineers. HOWEVER, this makes life hard for the first 10 waves. For some stupid reason the battlestation SHIELD starts off NOT BEING BUILT! And it takes a variable amount of time to build wierdly. Hence, some games you can literally get killed before your shield even gets built... let alone before your Guns can come online if you skimp on engineers. 15 engineers is more of a guaranteed situation...they build fast enough to survive the initial onslaught. Scientists: Affect research of new techs. There are 3 areas to research. Energy: shields, laser, PLASMA, orb, bolters, fixer, etc. Projectile: Gatling, MISSILE, etc. Other: Fighter speed, armor, pilot backpacks, science/engineer boost. You can either discover a new thing to build or get a boost to an existing tech. Usually around 15% boost to damage,fire rate, etc to a gun or thrusters, or 33% boost to a shield or armor. In a typical game with 25 scientists you will research about 4-5 items in each category. Research slows down over time so having double scientists will get you to the same place twice as fast, but you won't get twice the number of breakthroughs. I like to allocate up to 50 scientists when possible. Getting key tech such as Plasma is important, and a single boost can really help your overall effectiveness. Adding say 15% damage to bolters for example is a big boost to your overall firepower as all fighters are affected. 30% more fighter armor is huge, as is shield capacity boosts. The benefit from research outweighs what engineers can provide with their relatively small boosts. Beginning the Game: ------------------- You see your battlestation which immediately starts building its Shield. This takes varying amounts of time seemingly, but the more engineers the faster it goes. You have 2 options and only 1 good one. Fighter hangers or bolters. The hangers take about 17 seconds per fighter to be created which means they are simply too slow to be useful at the very beginning of the game. Also, they would be picked off 1 at a time. Therefore you should queue up 2 bolters and add a 3rd bolter when you can afford it. This will let you survive the first 10 waves or so. After that, start building Hangers every time you get 500 credits. When the hanger is built, you will want to adjust its settings but do NOT launch it. Once you get about 2-4 hangers, you will then launch them all at once and set each hanger to AutoLaunch to immediately reinforce the team. You will then be ready to play the rest of the waves. BATTLESTATION OPTIONS: ---------------------- You can adjust your number of engineers to boost weapon damage, rate of fighter building, or repair rate. In general you want to start out with weapon boosts for your bolter guns, then transition to Hanger boosts once you start relying on fighters for defence more than guns. You can adjust your SHIELD to charge faster or slower but with more overall capacity. I typically go with fast recharge rate in the first few rounds once my shields are depleted, then go to Capacity focus once fighters are doing most of the work. You can actually SELL your shield too to free up a 9th slot! I would not recommend it, unless you have a strong reinforcement ship above the station. You can adjust your weapons to target different enemies too. Fighter Options: ---------------- There are FOUR places to order your fighters. First is the hanger itself which adjusts various settings. TARGETING: I always stay at CLOSEST. while it is tempting to go after the strongest by default, it tends to get your fighers killed as they ignore threats right in front of them, on their way to their target. It is better to order your fighters manually to do this. TARGET: Defaults to RANDOM, meaning a fighter squad will typically disable components of a large target before killing it. This can be useful. However, it tends to waste time and firepower. Killing the HULL will take out the entire ship after all. Hence I target HULL. You can always manually tell it to disable a ship which is much faster than Random. WEAPON: Bolter seems to be the best overall weapon. You might change this depending on your research boosts. Laser is very accurate but weaker damage. Orb is just terrible. Super slow fire rate. Missile is strong but leads to lots of "overkill" as firing 10 missiles at one dinky fighter is hugely wasteful. Missiles tend to miss frontal attacks too, and fighter AI isn't setup to fire and peel off. Having a few squads carry missiles isnt a bad idea though. Gatling is NOT an option for human fighters. AUTOLAUNCH: Without this ON, fighters will just sit in the battlestation until you order them launched. Always leave this ON once you mass enough fighters. SHIELD: Gives fighters a small regenerating shield. Takes a bit longer to build them. This is a no-brainer. You want more health/shield. If fighters are dying so fast that skipping shield would be a good idea, then something is horribly wrong. AGGRESIVE/EVASIVE: Adjust fighter attitude when engaging. Aggressive wastes no time and maximizes firepower. This is the best option in my opinion. Evasive is fine for MISSILES and LAZERS since they can shoot at an angle or fire-and-forget. In the main battle display, you can press a button to toggle the list of your fighters and ships. Click a fighter squad button to give further orders. LOADOUT - sends you to the fighter hanger options. LAUNCH/RETURN - Lets you manually recall fighters if you want to heal them, or swap out weapons. OFFENSIVE/DEFENSIVE - This lets you set your fighters to stick by the base, or to go forth and look for bad guys. Offensive keeps most of the fighting away from your station and you automatically engage all of the enemies. This is best if you are using a fighter-heavy strategy. 6 hangers or more. Defensive means your station absorbs more damage, in theory protecting your fighters somewhat, plus allowing station weapons to fire. This is best for smaller numbers of fighters...4 hangers or less. You can click on a friendly large ship and select PROTECT, then pick any number of fighters to go on guard duty. Annoyingly you cannot protect a shuttle...which is about the only thing that actualy needs protecting... Finally you can click on an enemy large ship and select ATTACK, then pick any number of fighters to immediately engage that ship. Enemy Big Ship Options: ----------------------- As mentioned ou can click an enemy and tell certain fighter squads or ships to attack. This is mandatory for Defensive fighters so they will go forth to kill. It also helps you prioritize carriers and the like. You can click FOCUS which will make all battlestation weapons and any reinforcement/captured ship weapons attack a certain foe. it will NOT override DEFENSIVE fighters who will stay in their defensive position. Clicking DISABLE will have everyone shoot the turrets and hanger bays of a given target. This will quickly keep it from being a threat, at the expense of wasting firepower to deal non-lethal damage. This is extremely useful for fighting the big mothership at wave 50... and also gets set by default when you attempt to CAPTURE any ship. Battlestation Weapon Choices: ----------------------------- FIGHTER HANGERS: are by FAR the most cost-effective choice in this game. For only 500 credits, you get 3 small ships...each one with a 300 credit Bolter gun, and its own set of health/shields, that defends the station. You will want at least a few bays of fighters, or the enemy will simply target the station. Which is a big target that they can't miss. Station shield/armor do not scale or get much better, so enemy firepower will simply overwhelm you without fighters to run interference. Massed fighters do a ton of damage. However, as pilots get killed you will need to pay 1500 credits for a new batch. Assuming 30 pilots, thats 50 credits per pilot more or less. And pilots often can eject and not die. Replacing the fighters themselves is FREE for whatever reason. SHUTTLEBAY: Lets you capture ONE enemy ship using marines. This is an extremely cost-effective option that you should always take advantage of! For 350 credits, you can use the 15 marines that are otherwise unused to capture a Carrier that would cost you 7000 credits as a reinforcement! To capture, you build a shuttlebay around round 10 or so. Then when an enemy big ship appears (around wave 12 or so), you click the Capture button and the shuttle will launch. THEN you need to click the enemy big ship and tell fighters to attack. This will have them disable all its guns/hangers AND fly interference so that your shuttle doesnt get killed. As soon as you board/capture, immediately click the ship and HYPERSPACE so it doesn't get killed by the next wave. Then, deploy it right on top of your battlestation so its shields protect the injured ship. Have it LAUNCH its fighters and as soon as repaired you have a great cheap asset with a fighter bay and a few secondary guns as point defense. Sell your shuttle bay as soon as you do the capture... you won't need it anymore. Don't bother to get more marines either. NOTE that any fighters a captured carrier has are in OFFENSIVE profile and will roam the board. If the rest of your fighters are defensive, then they will get blown up a lot... GATLING GUN: Useless. An expensive bolter with short range that needs to be researched. LASER: Medium range accurate weapon. Good in theory but it doesnt have enough punch to make a huge impact. Range is too short to reliably take out enemy big ships. It only really works with DEFENSIVE fighters that bring enemies close to the battlestation. MISSILE: Long range weapon that is good against enemy large ships. Sadly its range is not QUITE good enough to reliably do so. Enemy ships can hide at the top and quietly repair and/or launch ships forever against you. It also does not mass well since it wastes a lot of firepower upon a kill. When something does finally die, the 4 missiles right behind it are wasted. FIXER: Heals your ships. Good in theory but doesn't work in practice. It is very expensive for what it does and requires your ships to be in Defensive mode to be close enough to heal. It doesn't help that fighters targeted tend to get killed 1 at a time, instead of spreading out damage. Fighters also regenerate their shields, AND most importantly... are replaced for free when blown up. For that much credits, you could buy two entire refills of pilots and save a battlestation slot! PLASMA: This is the ONLY really good battlestation weapon. Costs 5800 credits which is hugely expensive. However it has INFINITE RANGE making it ideal for killing enemy large ships. Always set this to target the STRONGEST, and hit HULL. Two of these will take out enemy large ships pretty quickly and also give you a guarantee that they are always prioritized. Only 1 plasma tends to take way longer to kill because it mostly just keeps the enemy shield suppressed and is not doing much hull damage very fast. You can also use even more Plasma guns and less fighters and adopt a more defensive strategy, while the big guns vaporize enemy larger ships very fast. REINFORCEMENTS: --------------- Once you have all your battlestation slots filled, you will want to consider getting extra ships via reinforcements to gain extra firepower. Basically you are paying a premium for extra item slots, along with armor and shields and ability to deploy them in different places. The first two reinforcements are for marines and pilots. You should never need marines, and will pick up pilots as needed. So you have 4 choices for extra ships. You can only have 5 extra ships from reinforcements but you rarely run into that limitation due to lack of cash. You usually want your ships to be a bit above the battlestation to help kill enemies that spawn in the lower area of the battlefield. MISSILE SHIP: 5500 credits. NO shields. Two missile bays which would cost you 7000 credits and 2 slots on the station. As such, it seems pretty cost-effective! However, you cannot tell the ship how to target their missiles which makes them MUCH less useful. It will instead target dinky fighters and nearby stuff instead of the dangerous enemy large ships. Due to lack of shields, it is very susceptable to having its missile bays destroyed temporarily. It needs to be placed on top of your battlestation where it functions as a cost-effective slotless dual-missile launcher that you cannot control. BATTLE SHIP: 6500 credits for a shielded, decently armored ship with 1 laser which is worth 2700 credits, and two bolters worth 600 credits. While less cost-effective, it is a lot more useful. The lasers do suppliment your overall firepower quite nicely and the bolters provide point defense against enemies that get close to your station. You can also scooch these ships up from your battlestation to cover more area due to their shields. FIGHTER CARRIER: 7000 credits for a ship with two 500 credit fighter bays. It also has a single gatling gun (900 credits). Clearly this does not seem all that good, but as I've stated...fighters are worth a lot more than the 500 credit cost would indicate. The main advantage to this ship is that the squadrant stays back and defends the carrier which would be close to the battlestation. These 6 ships provide decent firepower and distraction for enemies that find their way to the battlestation terrain. CAPITAL SHIP: 15000 credits for a heavily shielded and armored ship with two HEAVY lasers (longer range than what you can install) worth about 4000 each I would estimate. Plus a fighter bay (worth 500 technically). And 4 bolter cannons (1200 total). This ship is by far the best value of the bunch, being like two battleships merged together, with even better lasers and a bonus squad of fighters. I usually deploy this ship a bit in front of my battlestation so that its big lasers can reach the entire board pretty much and its 4 bolters make short work of enemies that spawn in the middle area. Note that you will usually want to deploy your ships on top of each other. In this way, when 1 shield goes down, the next ship's shield tends to absorb damage. It also prevents any ship from being focused since the one next to it will block damage one one side since the ships will always be slightly offset. GENERAL NOTES AND STRATEGIES: ----------------------------- * When you kill enemies you will sometimes see stuff to pick up by tapping. You can get Credits which is by far the best, followed by Repair and Shield boosters. * When it says that it lost track of the wave beacon this means you will have a empty wave followed by a DOUBLE wave. This is quite difficult and you have the best chance of losing at this point. Even good defenses may not be able to kill the entire double-wave before the next wave hits, which can lead to a snowball effect. This is particularly bad if you are saving up for a Capital Ship as you will be underpowered temporarily. * To kill the enemy Mothership you need to click DISABLE as soon as it appears. Your ships will quickly kill all its turrets and make it helpless. Then unclick DISABLE to finish it off. Otherwise, it will deal too much damage with all of its guns if you focus on the hull. This is a contrast to normal operations where you want to focus hull on big ships instead of the guns/hangers. * If playing INFINITY mode, you can actually CAPTURE the wave 50 mothership! Set to 25 marines, send in first team (setting shuttles to 24 dudes), then refresh dudes and send in more. Once repaired, this ship is a BEAST and provides a ton of firepower! Another mothership shows up at wave 70. EPISODE SPECIFIC HINTS: ----------------------- * Wanderers -- They use bolter fighters, dual-plasma-shooting corvettes, dual-missile launcher corvettes which are hard on your fighters, and 3 big ships: A carrier with missile, Carrier with Orbs, and a very strong dual-laser battlecruiser with point defense guns. Aggressive Offensive 8-bay fighters do the best against these guys, with capital ships reinforcing the middle area. Plasma guns onboard the station also do very well here with defensive (but still on aggressive) fighters. * Trolgars - Their fighters use gatling guns. They use ASSAULT SHUTTLES instead of corvettes which try to take over your station...causing you to immediately lose the game. Note that their ships have NO SHIELDS but are tougher to kill. You definitely want to keep bolters on your battlestation longer than vs most other races. Marines of 15 might not be enough. 20 is a safe bet to defend against a few incursions that get through, as well as capture their ships since they have a marine effectiveness advantage. Aggressive fighter strategies do not work quite as well because your fighters can wind up way up top when enemy shuttles warp into the bottom area, causing a quick loss. You don't really want to split your forces though either... Try to capture their first tier carrier, making sure to change your shuttle bay to 24 marines instead of the 16 default. That way you will send 20 dudes to guarantee capture. Make sure they dont get an assault shuttle to your battlestation while you are capturing their ship! Once captured you are in good shape. The carrier has TWO gatling gun defense which is amazingly good at killing enemy shuttles. This allows you to sell off bolters and replace with more fighters or whatever. No shields remember so keep the carrier on top of the battlestation. * Schellai. Standard fare fighters and corvettes. These guys emphasize Shields so focus-fire and massing is quite important. Their battleship is interesting as it has tractor beams to suck a fighter in and blow them away. Amazing against a defensive fighter strategy but an offensive one will have fighters in their face anyways which negates their advantage. They also have a 10% marine advantage, so a capture with 15 marines may not work. Their first tier carrier is quite nice to grab though with 3 fighters, a shield, and a missile battery on board. * Celestials - They have small fighters with lasers. Their corvettes are quite strong with an Orb shooter that does high damage and is tough. They have several larger ships armed with big lasers. Note that they have a 15% marine PENALTY making it quite easy to take over their ships. Overall they are pretty easy to deal with. Make sure that your fighters are set to Aggressive as they cannot outmanuever enemy lasers. Hence their best bet is to mass firepower and outblast the enemy with bolters. * Nemesis - The final episode is quite different. The mothership appears immediately and starts spamming lightning balls that zap whatever is closest to the top with lasers. Thus you need to get something to absorb all that damage as it will drop your shields so their fighters can do hull damage and disable components which is very bad. They tell you to attack the tentacles which is a HORRIBLE IDEA. Fighters ordered to attack will blast away and get killed by other stuff and there is no way to make them stop attacking the tentacles...which take forever to kill anyways due to insanely high health. Fighters will chip away at them in their spare time if set to Offensive mode, so let them do it on their own. The enemy mothership has no other turrets or guns, so there is no real reason to stay away from it... you can't avoid the zappie-balls anyways. Hence, Offensive fighter mode should be used. Plasma guns do a great job here as you can "FOCUS" to have them attack a single tentacle to take it out. Missiles suck as usual as do lasers. The major problem is that Plasma is very expensive and you have no idea when/if you will research it. Thus it is not the best solution. Fighter Swarm seem to be the best strategy. They absorb zappie ball damage well, and due to low cost are the fastest way to mass a lot of damage. In this episode, you need MORE engineers and assign them to hangers so that they can crank out fighters faster...since they die more due to zappie balls. If you lose too much fighter mass without replacements you might not have enough firepower to withstand the attacks. In fact, Scientists are the LOWEST priority in this episode since you tend to win or lose rather quickly before advantages of research start paying off. You dont need any tech boosts for the swarm strategy. I go with 15 marines, 10 scientists, 30 pilots, and the rest engineers. Remember that you have to manually assign engineers to hangers. The objective is to kill the enemy mothership, instead of surviving waves. Nothing really happens at wave 50. To focus a single tentacle, you want to DISABLE one of them and DISABLE the primary mothership itself. This will force your fighters/weapons to attack the only thing left... the other tentacle so you can focus it down and disable half of the zappie balls. Then be sure to un-disable the other tentacle, then the mothership. Best use of money is to drop a Capital ship in the middle of the screen, or use a Battleship earlier to cover enemies that make it closer to the bottom, since your fighters will tend to stay at the very top sniping at the tentacles in their spare time. Carriers are particularly nasty in this episode and spawn powerful laser frigates instead of plain fighters. Focus them for sure! Yes you can capture them, but they will then only generate plain ole fighters and periodically fire a weak laser. FYI: You CAN capture tentacles or mothership but it will simply blow up that component or cause them to retreat. You cant make them beat on itself with its own tentacle...too bad. :-)