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Playing NextColony Peacefully
As we are all Steemians, we are a big happy family together in the same boat. We want to be friends with each, get some good upvotes with our content and enjoy the games on this blockchain. NextColony has brought one of the most aggressive browser-games I have ever heard of to the Steem blockchain. However, becoming a peaceful settler with a defending strategy is possible.
You can build a shield generator, that can be charged and activated. Depending on your shields level, it will hold for hours, allowing for a good night sleep, without worrying about your resources. However, it will charge longer than it holds and while doing so reduce your production rate by 10%. It is a slow and costly approach in the long run but certainly possible and the most peaceful way to play NextColony.
With this approach, you can concentrate on exploring and trading with other players. If you are lucky, you will find many planets that way and grow your peaceful empire. You might even open up a market for ships and sell them to others for Steem or resources. However, if you start collecting ships, you have to adjust your strategy, as they are not saved by your planets shields. You have to actively keep them in space travel and each minute they are waiting in orbit is a potential danger for them.
Playing NextColony Semi-Agressively
Another approach is to fly attacks against the planets in your surroundings, that seem to be inactive and have no ships. You can check their activity on SpyColony and 
With this approach, you are able to collect resources and grow much faster than with the peaceful approach. The daily stream coming from other planets to yours, will allow you to build out your planets and battleships. The more ships you have, the more attacks you can fly and the more resources you can acquire.
With this strategy, you will focus mostly on small planets without any ships. As soon as just one single explorer is on that planet and you attack it, it will be destroyed and your semi-aggressive strategy quickly becomes something else.
Playing NextColony Agressively
The concept of the game is to fly attacks against others, sometimes with gigantic fleets. As an experienced player from Galaxy Wars (an Ogame-clone which was the inspiration for NextColony), I know that the heart of the game is all about raids, intercepting opposing players fleets on their return and preemptively destroying the growing fleets around yourself. This is fun and challenging and - in my opinion - the point of the game.
There is so much strategy involved in this approach. If you play well, you will be dominating your surroundings. I predict that this will become the only really successful way to play the game in the long run. Blockchain allows everyone to have multiple accounts, run bots like 
Just to give you an example: A user called 'Gold Company' on Discord has bragged with his over 40 alt-accounts. He used a custom JSON command to save his fleet from an interceptor, who timed the attack down to seconds. However, 'Gold Company' was able to avoid the loss of ships, with the custom command, that send his returning fleet away again, in less than seven seconds. If that is too technically for you, than you have not understood NextColony yet.
Monetizing NextColony
NextColony will reward us financially, as they have announced to share 30% of the games revenue with the players. There are three main ways to receive rewards:
- Wonder of the universe
- Successful players
- Active players
We don't know exactly yet what any of that will mean in the game. The Wonder of the Universe will probably cost tons of resources. The peaceful players might be able to achieve that when they team up and pay for it together. They have to be incredibly careful though, as this attempt might make them a target for the aggressive players, as holding tons of resources on one single planet will be prone for attacks. It will be easier for the other strategies to achieve that, as they have greater streams of resources and plenty of ships to defend themselves.
The reward for successful players is most likely paired to the destruction of other ships, although that is speculation. We can already see the new ranking list with points for destruction. The only way to collect destruction points currently is by attacking and destroying other ships. This is only possible with the aggressive play-style. That means, there will be a financial incentive to play that way. You can see the current ranking on Jarunik's alternative open source NC-Client under ranking, in the right column.
The final way to earn the revenue share is by being active. We also don't know what that means, but I assume this will be something that is achievable to all playing strategies likewise. But again, that is mere speculation on my end.
Conclusion
All-in-all there are huge incentives to play this game and there are even more incentives to play it aggressively. I understand everyone who just wants to play a peaceful building game. NextColony can that be but it will be hard and requires being active every day, which is true for any strategy. If you are inactive, you will become a farm for others for sure.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have been the second most aggressive player so far, receiving points for destruction. However, I also release my Space Policy, allowing players to contact me and ask for a truce. Please check it out before I also destroy your ships. Otherwise I will!