One of the top questions we get from our new members is - how do we defend ourselves? Can you defend us?
And there are situations where we can use ACS defend to send ships and defend an attack. You must have at least Spy Tech 8, so you can know how many ships of what types are coming, you must be online to see the attack coming, and we must be online and have fleets available to arrive in enough time to defend.
That's a lot of 'ifs', and so we also want to teach you how to minimize attacks and damage from attacks. That is what this article is about.
The first lessons to learn is how not to leave any ships or resources 'sitting around'. Spending resources is a great way to put them to use, but as the game goes on you will increasingly be 'saving up' for ever more expensive purchases.
So today, I will teach you the 'Trade-Save' strategy that is recommended to do every time you are away and not monitoring the progress of your precious resources. There are more advanced strategies, but this one is very effective and easy to understand.
First, go into the 'Fleet Tab' and find your fleet. You should have lots of cargoes for this strategy, they hold the resources we are saving! All other fleet can go with a trade mission. Select ships first, then hit continue.
On the following screen, select the TRADE mission under 'Special locations'. The specific coordinates for this are always the 17th planet slot in your solar system, but by pressing TRADE the coordinates will automatically fill themselves in. Now hit continue again.
The last screen will let you load up your resources. There are a number of things to select here, so pay attention. In the top right, you can load resources, up to the 'MAX' that will fit. More cargoes are needed for greater numbers of resources to be safe. In a pinch, recyclers can also be used to save resources on the trade mission. Each ship can hold some amount of resources equal to their storage capacity.
The second section 'EXCHANGE' is where we must select a trade value. This is because the trade mission is offering to trade your resources, but by setting an arbitrarily outrageous price we can be sure that no body will want to trade, thus they are kept safe! I usually select crystal (this would be the resource someone would have to pay in) and at least 999 million as the payment amount.
The last, MOST important section is AT FLYING. This is the flight time, and we ALWAYS want to select 168 hours, which is the most allowed. When this counter ends, the ships will come back on their own, as failures. The reason we want the max, is that we can recall them at any time, but we never want them to come back before we are ready.
Different ships have different speeds, but my current time to send/recall a trade mission with large cargoes is 23 minutes. That means that all my ships (and resources) are just waiting for me, safe, 23 minutes away!
A variation of this thinking is the question:
Shouldn't our ships stay and 'defend' our planet and resources?
Like Einstein published, all matter IS energy, all ships ARE resources. Because of the state of our universe, there will always be a bigger fleet, and your ships, while they do help defend, are just debris waiting to be harvested by a bigger fleet. Better to keep them safe a few minutes away.
In SteemNova, moving ships cannot be attacked, so we never stop moving!