ࡱ> `b]^_Q@ ~Ubjbj͘ +cM<<<8=l>d2>B8F"ZFZFZF5G#[`$R p,m5G5Gmm,ZFZFAmfZFZFm&V@ZF> P Q<1~Œ W0Ό0{j{{c@fREi!kccc,,#)a") How to play Birds by Morgath I assume you to know basic game mechanics like how to build bases and move ships and etc. If you think you have problems in basic things then go to Paul Honigmanns site where you can find several good guides to game basics. Everything in this guide is how I do it. I might be wrong. You might have even better solution. I might have missed something critical. So do not take this as the ultimate truth but one point of view things. Use this guide as a list of ideas to work on. The idea is to make YOU to make your own tactics and strategies! Everything in this guide should be accurate in host 193. When new hosts changes come check changes from Tims pages  HYPERLINK "http://www.vgaplanets.com/v4beta.htm" http://www.vgaplanets.com/v4beta.htm. While reading this guide and especially if you have not played Birds ever you might have an impression that they are unstoppable superpower. They can be really strong if they are played by skilled player but so can every other race. There are really many things that can and will go wrong. This guide is all about how things should be done. Usually you can not do things like you would like to because of other players actions, game setting, starting position etc. Also if you are about start to play Birds first time, accept the fact that you will make mistakes. It is always same thing with a new race, you just do not have the feel what to do and when. But I think that one of the things make this game so great is that player has to learn new things all the time. Just look at this guide, it is not complete and has 23 pages I hope you get some ideas from this and see you in game! Jani Kaljunen  TOC \o "1-2" \h \z \u  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076242" 1 Overview  PAGEREF _Toc103076242 \h 3  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076243" 1.1 Strengths  PAGEREF _Toc103076243 \h 3  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076244" 1.2 Weaknesses  PAGEREF _Toc103076244 \h 3  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076245" 1.3 Race Specifics  PAGEREF _Toc103076245 \h 3  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076246" 1.4 Starting Conditions  PAGEREF _Toc103076246 \h 3  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076247" 1.5 How To Play Birds  PAGEREF _Toc103076247 \h 4  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076248" 2 Ships & Fighters  PAGEREF _Toc103076248 \h 4  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076249" 2.1 Ships  PAGEREF _Toc103076249 \h 4  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076250" 2.2 Fighters  PAGEREF _Toc103076250 \h 7  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076251" 3 Ground Bases  PAGEREF _Toc103076251 \h 8  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076252" 3.1 HW & Ship yards  PAGEREF _Toc103076252 \h 8  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076253" 3.2 Training Bases  PAGEREF _Toc103076253 \h 8  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076254" 3.3 Industrial Bases  PAGEREF _Toc103076254 \h 8  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076255" 3.4 Farming Colony  PAGEREF _Toc103076255 \h 8  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076256" 3.5 Fried n Bake Worlds  PAGEREF _Toc103076256 \h 9  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076257" 4 Building Economy  PAGEREF _Toc103076257 \h 9  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076258" 4.1 Colonization  PAGEREF _Toc103076258 \h 9  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076259" 4.2 Logistics  PAGEREF _Toc103076259 \h 9  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076260" 4.3 Fried n Bake  PAGEREF _Toc103076260 \h 9  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076261" 4.4 Optimizing Your Economy  PAGEREF _Toc103076261 \h 10  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076262" 5 Strategy  PAGEREF _Toc103076262 \h 10  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076263" 5.1 Early Game  PAGEREF _Toc103076263 \h 10  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076264" 5.2 Mid Game  PAGEREF _Toc103076264 \h 12  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076265" 5.3 Late Game  PAGEREF _Toc103076265 \h 12  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076266" 5.4 Home Fleet  PAGEREF _Toc103076266 \h 13  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076267" 5.5 Attack Fleet  PAGEREF _Toc103076267 \h 13  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076268" 5.6 Attacking  PAGEREF _Toc103076268 \h 14  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076269" 5.7 Defending  PAGEREF _Toc103076269 \h 14  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076270" 5.8 Saving Time  PAGEREF _Toc103076270 \h 15  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076271" 5.9 Exotic Techs  PAGEREF _Toc103076271 \h 16  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076272" 6 Tactics  PAGEREF _Toc103076272 \h 16  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076273" 6.1 Boarding  PAGEREF _Toc103076273 \h 16  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076274" 6.2 Ground Assault  PAGEREF _Toc103076274 \h 16  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076275" 6.3 Minefields  PAGEREF _Toc103076275 \h 17  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076276" 6.4 Towing  PAGEREF _Toc103076276 \h 17  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076277" 6.5 Darkwings With World Crusher Missile  PAGEREF _Toc103076277 \h 17  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076278" 6.6 Using a Scout  PAGEREF _Toc103076278 \h 18  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076279" 6.7 How to Use Enemy UFC  PAGEREF _Toc103076279 \h 18  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076280" 6.8 Scanning Effectively  PAGEREF _Toc103076280 \h 18  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076281" 6.9 Improving the Speed Of Your Freighters  PAGEREF _Toc103076281 \h 19  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076282" 6.10 Dealing With the Hyper Jumpers  PAGEREF _Toc103076282 \h 19  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076283" 7 Dealing with Other Races  PAGEREF _Toc103076283 \h 19  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076284" 7.1 Diplomacy  PAGEREF _Toc103076284 \h 20  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076285" 7.2 Hull Trading  PAGEREF _Toc103076285 \h 20  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076286" 7.3 Spying  PAGEREF _Toc103076286 \h 20  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076287" 7.4 Allies  PAGEREF _Toc103076287 \h 21  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076288" 7.5 War  PAGEREF _Toc103076288 \h 22  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076289" 7.6 Analyzing your enemy  PAGEREF _Toc103076289 \h 22  HYPERLINK \l "_Toc103076290" 8 End Words  PAGEREF _Toc103076290 \h 23  TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u   Overview Theme of Birdmen is stealth. Most of their ships cloack completely, meaning that their ships are invisible. It fits to their theme that their ground bases are much less visible than other races and their fighter wings are stealthy too. They are ship based race they rely on their ships to do fighting. Their only big ship is their flag ship Darkwing, all other ship designs are from small to medium. So they tend to use their ship in fleets. Most of their ships have some attack and evasive bonuses and have good armour and shields for their size. They have strong economy and thus are good newbie race. They are hard to find inexperienced players have some more time before being attacked and good economy allows you to build some ships even if you are not familiar how to set up economy. Strengths Birdmen have a good wide farming range. Their growth rate is above average and they have high income. They are very good at mining minerals with their Plasmatron ground assault unit. All this combined they have great economy. They have good ship list with several good hulls and almost all their ships can cloack. Birds are good at gathering contra and most natives like them. They have strong troops and high guard and their training rates are really good. So they are a major ground combat power and they have labour camps to take full advantage from it. Birdmen are best in spying and they have stealth ground bases. They have stealth fighter wings. Weaknesses Biggest weakness that Birds have is that they lack defence against hyper jumping races. Their other major weakness is their scanners. They have only one ship with good scanners. Their fighters are nothing special so they have to count on ships in most of situations. While their warships are very tough they have small repair and ord holds. They are not the fastest race in the universe. Race Specifics Their type 2 ground assault unit have special powers. Each Plasmatron acts as a one mine and one smelter with no negative effects. Each Plasmatron decreases enemy fighters and assault vehicles attack power against Birdmen assault units by 0,5%. The limit for this effect is 50%. Birdmen mine sweeping device does not make any sensor noise, their engines make half of normal sensor noise. Their scanners do double sensor noise. Their bases have sensor image of 20 (normal being 800) and are highly resistant to probe launchers finding them. They have stealth fighter wings. Birdmen assault pods have sensor image of 100 (normal being 250). Birdmen spy attacks are not stopped by high guard. Their three spy masters can sometimes get universal friendly codes of other empires. Starting Conditions You want to have your time and space so HWs should not be too close to each others. Contra and native settings are quite irrelevant. You are good at gathering contra but not the fastest. What you really want is low mineral settings, high starting money. You do not need big amounts of minerals before you start rebuilding planets. After certain point you make all your minerals so lesser there is for others the better. The high starting money allows Birds to colonize and buy tech levels. They can take bigger advantage from these than most, when they ran out of high starting money they already have created income to just keep pushing techs to max. And after that they can go straight to growth exotics. Birds do well when they start with 2 or 5 million colonists. The tech and colonization rush I told can be done easily with 5 million colonists and is doable with 2 million. Never join to game without standard starting ships. You need those three fast Skyfires to scan and colonize, you can not set up your economy without them and Skyfire is tech 5 hull. And another thing is that they are packed with supplies which you need to get a fast start. Being non hyp race Birds like maps with planets as dense as possible. But Birds do not like HWs close to each other. The exception is that HWs are really close to each other, then Birds try to GA enemy HW early. How To Play Birds The Birds are end game race. Their special abilities like spy attacks and getting UFCs come more powerful later the game goes. Usually race reaches limit in food production and having need to expand to get new resources. Birds do not have to. They can get around these limits and keep their empire tight, effective and easy to defend. You can do well with them in early wars but if you fight early, you probably give up the chance to win the game. The Planets are not a war game it is an economy game. At least 9 out of 10 games are won by race with strongest economy. Early wars can be won by cunning tactics but game is won by brute force. Never forget this. The mindset you need to get yourself is that you are just building up economy, maximizing your growth. If you succeed to do this better than anyone else you can even make tactical mistakes and still win. But if your strategy is wrong you have no hope. I said that Birds are good beginner race. That is true, aim for newbie should be to get some feeling how game works and survive long enough to fight few battles. This is quite easy for Birds. You get to build some ships and so on. But when you want to play Birds to win the game they are not easy race to play. You need to build up a strong economy. You need to understand the planet stress levels. Your empire will need lots of micromanaging. And you need to know game mechanics so well that you can go through big number of bases and ships fast and still keep the big picture in mind. And Birds are not race that builds up biggest fleet they can and then send it towards enemy destroying everything coming to its sight. The heart of playing Birds is to master the guerrilla tactics and know how to achieve your goal with minimum losses. So this is where I aim with this guide. Ships & Fighters Ships Any ship that has a cloacking device should always have it on. Every ship that does not have a cloacking device should always have long range scanners on. The phrase Do not put any shields, armour or weapons to this ship means that you do not put any weapons you have to pay for. If you have Amphibians building you loads of otherwise useless weapons put them to any ship able to carry them. But do not except these ships to win any battles even they have something called weapons fitted in them. Always put min. 2 HGs in all of your ships. This pretty much nullifies enemy spy attacks. The Birdmen ships are named really logically, you instantly know ships use from its name. Anything that has Cruiser on its name means it is to move stuff. Things which have Battle or Frigate are to destroy things. Frigate differs from Battle by moving and blowing up faster. The Destroyer is to deal with mines and fighters. Carrier and Scout are pretty obvious and G stands for God damn expensive, everything else means obsolete. More specific information about ships below. Small Deep Space Freighter Useless. Never build one. You can not even use this ship to speed up the early colonization because its guest quarters are too small to set up any colony. Neutronic Fuel Tanker Useless. Never build one. You have several better ship designs to move fuel. Swift Class Scout After having first two scanner exotics Swift comes best scanning ship on your deposal. There is a reason this ship is called a scout. This ship has three other uses, all of them quite marginal. First one is to store an alien hull plan. Second one is to move money around. But this ship can not take any cargo and you hardly ever have a colony that produces only money. Third use is to use this ship as a scout. Never put any other parts than engine to Swifts. White Falcon Class Cruiser A very good freighter. Has two pod bays and fair cargo capacity. Do not put any armour, shields or weapons to it. Whenever you need a cloacked freighter this is your ship of choice. But you do not need cloacked freighter too often. In safe areas Skyfire is much better because its higher speed and scanner. This ship outperforms Fearless Wing by having enough capacity, being cheaper and consuming less fuel. Bright Heart Class Destroyer A very important ship. Bright Heart is your only minelayer and it is only it and Darkwing G have minesweeper. Remember that Birdmen minesweepers do not make any sensor noise, so keep it on at all times. It also shines with 8 point defence weapons and 40 attack and 50 defend bonuses. This ship tough in battle compared to its size. Only problem this ship has is its small ord capacity. This ship has two roles it fills. Minelayer/sweeper and defence against fighters. Even it is a good warship it should never operate alone. Its role is to support your other ships. Only exception is if you need to fight really early in the game and can not build Deth Speculas yet. If it operates in your home fleet it can take to roles. First is to be a minelayer/sweeper and then it does not need any weapons. You might think that you want to put weapons in it, but if you get attacked in your home ground these ships are too busy to lay and sweep mines to do any fighting. If it is in anti-fighter role in your home fleet it should have PTTs, PLs and i.e. 4 mSCs and 4TLs or MMLs(if you really have more money than you can spend). When in attacking fleet it always should have same ranged weapons as ship(s) it escorts. If you couple it with DSs put PTTs, PLs, 4mSCs and 4TLs to it. If it escorts Darkwing with PPCs or LTLA/TLAs it should have PPCs, PLs. 4mSCs and 4TLs. Fearless Wing Class Cruiser A good cloacking freighter. White Falcon is usually better choice. This ship has a couple uses so you should build few of them. You should build one as soon as you reach hull tech to get the bio scanner. You do not need more than one for to find natives, it shows all the natives you ever can possibly get. The other reason you want one early is that its spy scanner reveals who you neighbours are. The spy scanner looks better than is. It has a chance to give you information on enemy high population worlds. But if you have to trust spy scanners to find enemy worlds you are in big problems. Do not put any armour, shields or weapons to it. Skyfire Class Cruiser Skyfire is best freighter because it is fastest, has a good cargo capacity and one pod bay and it is your only ship with good scanners. If you need more capacity tow a White Falcon with it. Besides being your number one freighter it is your scanning ship. You can also use this to tow and reord your Brights that are laying mines in safe area. Do not put any armour, shields or weapons to it. Large Deep Space Freighter Useless. You have several faster freighters with more cargo space. Never build one. Deth Specula Frigate Deth Specula is your warship. And it has a boarding laser, like minesweepers keep it on at all times. Deth Specula is one of most cost effective ships in the universe. It has an amazing 300 attack bonus so choosing large weapons is easy, PTTs and naturally stand off range of 900. Small weapons are easy PLs as always. Point defence is a bit more difficult. The attack bonus does not help PD to hit incoming fire and DS has no evasive bonus, so you can count that almost every shot fired at it will hit. And DS is not an ironclad and has only 4 PD slots. So end result is if anything big gets to shoot at it, DS is gone. Big ships usually have 10-20 LW and at least PTTs or PPCs. Both of these destroy DS with one volley, no matter what PD DS has. Thus being said, we can drop the idea of having anti-ship PD in DS and we will put anti-fighter PD to it. Against fighters attack bonus do count, so DS will hit always, regardless the target or PD it has. Only thing that matters is range. There are two PD that rises up. Flake cannon (range 70) and Turbo laser (range 90). The reason you build DS is its PTTs and boarding laser, everything else should be as cheap as possible. So Flakes are your best choice. If you have problems with fighters bring some Brights to battle, they have a good evasive bonus and much more shields and armour to protect those more expensive PDs. Fill DS with HGs if you can and always have a resupply pod docked. DS has enough ord for one battle only. Resolute Class Battlecruiser The Resolute is a very important ship. Your DSs have no problems with long campaigns but your Bright Hearts do need more ord in regular basis. And you need some ship to carry assault pods too. You could use White Falcons or Fearless Wings but Resolute has an edge over them by having more capacity. And it can carry Ionic Gun Arrays. All your other ships use PTTs which are very good against shields and hulls but are not perfect against heavy armoured targets. Resolutes with IGAs can penetrate 3000 armour and can really make a difference. Unlike your ships, the Resolute should be set to strike through. So arm your Resolutes with 1-2 SCs and 6-7 IGAs, PLs and mSC/Intercepts. Put Intercepts to first few PD slots and fill rest with mSCs. You want to use good PD to protect you expensive IGAs and supplies Resolute is carrying. Every Resolute should tow engineless Bright with them. Resolute is immune to Tachyon Scanners (excluding Loki) Red Wind Class Carrier Red Wind is your fighter carrier. If you use any fighters have a Red Wind to bring them to battle front. Darkwing is too expensive to be used as a carrier for a 400 fighters. Red Wind does not need any weapons, shields or armour. Just set it not to attack and keep it cloacked. If you use it in battle you better have other Red Wind nearby to collect the surviving fighters. Avalor Station Avalor is your cloacking star base. It only haves two problems. First being that you can not move it and second being that you do not need it for anything. Your Plasmatrons are much better in mining and if you need DTMS-N fuel converter you can build much cheaper and movable Alaska instead. As a battle station it is not a worth of cost. Darkwing Class Battleship DW is one of the most feared ships in the universe. But it never should see any real battle. You have better ships for that. The only reason you should ever build a Darkwing is that you need a super weapon. You should equip it with 1SC, 9PTTs, 25PLs, 7mSCs and 3TLs. It can attack to small to medium ships if opportunity appears but these things are too expensive (and fuel hungry) to chase small targets. DW is a lone wolf hunting for big bases. So idea is to carry World Crusher Missile and take out big and well defended enemy bases. It is almost impossible to stop DWs to lurk in range and fire. Operating outside a fleet Darkwing should always tow an engineless Bright to provide mine laying/sweeping ability. It should always have resupply pods docked to carry extra ord and fuel. These DWs should carry two wings of 10 Voltars. If enemy has a base shield you can use these DWs with other fleet to destroy the shield. Sometimes enemy really likes big, bad and extremely expensive monster ships, Gorbi being best example coming to my mind. If this is a case then it might be a worth of trouble to build 2 DWs with cheap weapons and Super Laser. One DW may get hit from enemy super weapon but other one fries the target. And two DWs with Super Laser on costs about 50000mcs where Gorbi can cost 170000mcs. You could go so far as leaving weapons off completely, just simulate that DWs survive long enough to fire the SL. To destroy and rebuild a planet you need a DW with SL and a DW with Proto Matter Cannon. These industrial DWs do not need weapons, shields or armour. DW is immune to Tachyon Scanners (excluding Loki) Alaska Class Refinery Ship You probably never need ore processor because you have Plasmatrons. You hardly ever need DTMS-N converter either, but if you do build one Alaska. And do not put anything else than engines to it, and them only if you plan to move it. Darkwing G Darkwing with 1000 more armour, minesweeper and couple of special properties. For extra armour and minesweeper, tow Bright with normal DW and you get extra weapons too. If you are fighting against Borg building few of these to get Nanovirus Bomb but keep weapons cheap. Same outfit as normal DW but without the WC Missile. (If you are about to destroy base, the normal DW is just as good) Ship also fires through Borg shields but DWG is actually even better against other Birdmen. It can fire through shields and has +1000 armour arc against Birdmen owned ships. Do not build these against Bird. You are probably facing swarms of DSs. If normal DW ever gets chance to shoot, it destroys DS with one volley so Bonuses in DWG are useless against Bird. DWG is immune to Tachyon Scanners (excluding Loki) Fighters There are fighter based races and races that rely ship for fighting. Even races relying to ships need to use fighters in end game because they can not produce enough minerals and end up with more cash than they can use. Birds do not have this problem, in late game they can make all the minerals they ever need. Earlier fighters totally dominated when players could build huge wings. But after recent host changes the sand shields exotic tech is not 100% effective any more. Since Birds do not have this mineral problem they can freely choose between fighters and ship. Talon: Low beam power makes this purely anti-fighter. Not bad but type 3 is slightly better. Eagle: Very accurate beams and missiles. Problem is that beam range is about same as Talon, so there is no need to build these to counter fighters. This fighter has a problem that it has longer beam than missile range resulting that it almost never launches a missile. Voltar G: Very long ranged and powerful missiles, the problem is that it runs out of them soon. After running out of missiles Voltar is useless. If it would have more ord it would be one of the best (if not best) anti-ship fighters for its price. Always set them to quick strike. The amount of Voltars in wing is irrelevant. The 10 Voltars do about same damage than 10000. Sim it if you do not believe. Here are the results from quick simulations against Rush (5mSC,5TL,1SC) with different wing sizes. 10 Voltars all killed, Rush had shields down and 96% armour left. 1000 Voltars all killed, Rush had shields down and 83% armour left. 10000 Voltars, destroyed Rush (with beams) and 230 Voltars survived. 9 wings of 10 Voltars, Rush destroyed. Voltars do same damage with missiles no matter how big the wing is, it always launches about same amount of missiles. After that they do some minor damage with beams if wing is big enough, but take huge losses. Voltar G is an excellent fighter when used in free flying wings of 10 Voltars. It has a travel range of 150 and Bird fighters are stealthier than others. The mixing of Bird fighters does not make them better. In theory mixing Eagles with Voltars should cause the Voltars to use Eagles ord. In practise they do not. Mixing Voltars with Talons or Eagles should make the cheaper fighters to fire their beams faster. In practise they do not. In money basis Voltars are better against fighters than Talons or Eagles. The Eagle is worst against fighters and then Voltars and Talons are quite equal, Voltar having slight edge. Only fighter you should ever build is you type 3 Voltar G. They should be kept in as small wings as possible and have set to quick strike. DWs should have 2 wings of 10 Voltars. One on one Voltars takes down shields from every non EE ship in game. Ground Bases HW & Ship yards These are bases where you build ships. You keep high population and most natives on these bases. HW is simply your first ship yard. After you have more than one it should not be any more important than any other. You should set more ship yards than just HW in some point. You do not need to move stuff so big distances. It can be set closer to border so your ships do not need to fly so long to be where needed. And most important, you are not totally crippled if someone manages to take your HW. Building other defences than having some troops is not needed. Ion cannons and Base shields are too expensive. Training Bases You need few training bases near each of your ship yards. In these bases you train crew, troops and HG. You always try to maximize the amount of HG you have. If you have enough food in your other bases for max growth you send excess food to your training bases. Training bases needs from 30 to 50 training centres. When food limits your HG production, you move some of people to establish a new training base. Food training more HG goes up really rapidly so only answer is to set a lot of smaller training bases. Troops are just a side product you use if you do not have enough HG. Industrial Bases These are big bases and have only one reason for their existence. You need more of something than your ship yard can produce (usually supplies) and you put your excess population to these as they are near the ship yards where the money is needed. Farming Colony A base you set up to farmable planet to grow food. You establish these mainly in early and mid game. Minimal structures, only farms, cities, few mines, pod pad and gov center. Later in game you start fried n bake these worlds. The farming colony has produced enough food for max growth about the same moment it uses all the food it produces. So these bases can not feed your population centres, they are just to breed colonists for Fried n Bake world it becomes later. Fried n Bake Worlds These bases do not have anything else than enough colonists to run farms. Putting them in cities needs more supplies but also makes the Fried n Bake world more or less to pay expenses they cause. Do not build anything else than pod pad, farms and cities (in that order). Use Plasmatrons to mine minerals. Of course if you get a way to stabilize these then you fry n bake all your planets. When you rebuild the planet you end up having soil rating more than 500 and high positive delta. These worlds will explode after 10-20 turns so there is enough time to cities and farms to pay themselves back. With food production around 500+ per turn you are able to keep up your growth rate and get full benefit from growth exotics. But even with this level of food production you can not keep big training worlds having enough food for max HG production. They would soon need more than 100k of food. You only need one DW with Super Laser to destroy your farming colonies and then you need one DW with Proto Matter Cannon for every 10-15 fried n bake colonies. Building Economy Colonization In early colonization you try to claim as big area as you can. Spreading your population to farming colonies creates targets you can not defend. But it usually is worth of it because you need to have food produced and it takes some time before you can start fry n bake. A farming colony also creates a steady income of 400+ mcs to your central account. The amount of supplies and mcs you drop to planet depends from starting money. Try to have colony sending money after 2-4 turns, the faster the better. Do not drop too many colonists there, remember that your colonists reproduce and you just want to take advantage of farms food and mc production. Otherwise your colonists are just as effective and much safer in your HW. In early game do not worry about mineral production too much, you just want to have enough around to build ships you need and enough fuel to run them. Build i.e. 10 mines to your farming colonies. The Plasmatrons come to play when you start making your fried n baked worlds, before that they are just too expensive. You aim to max growth and money so colonize towards that goal. Logistics When your empire grows so big that moving stuff to ship yards is starting to become difficult, build another ship yard. Pods are really efficient way of moving stuff. They are not so fast especially before you have few pod-exotics but they do not consume fuel and do not need so much time to control. Have your empire divided to areas that support certain ship yard. This way you always know where to send the stuff. In early to mid game the Skyfire is your main way to move cargo, later when your economy booms pods are only viable way to get things moving. You need your time to manage your war fleet and once established pod route brings stuff steadily to ship yards. Try to have as efficient logistic network. The minerals are needed in shipyards but fuel and ord are needed by battle fleet. Why not send the fuel to edges of your empire straight away. And you can use forward bases to produce ord and repairs. Fried n Bake If you rebuild an asteroid field to planet you end up with a planet high minerals and insane soil rating. Destroying and rebuilding planets you can have all the food and minerals you ever need. This makes Bird economy very strong. Others are running out of minerals but you are coming richer as game goes on. Also when food is not limiting factor to your growth you can often outbreed even Crystals and Scavs in long run. The only thing that is problematic with fried n bake is that planets you make have high delta stress and will explode again. You need DW with Super Laser only to start the process. As you fried n bake more planets you need more DWs with Proto Matter Cannons as you need regularly rebuild planets. Two really important things you need to understand are Stress and Delta Stress. If planets stress level goes over 1000, it explodes. High stress level is generally not bad at all. Higher the stress is more new minerals are generated each turn. Delta stress is amount of stress that is added every turn. You need to keep on eye on planets stress level so you know when it is time to pod everything to orbit and have a DW to rebuild planet. Then you just land pods and so on. The ideal situation would of course be that that you could get Scalar Wave Damper to your hands. Now, playing God is a little bit risky. Obviously it is a very bad thing to miss turns or being careless when doing your turns. By missing turns you can actually commit a quite stylish suicide. These are of course the obvious risks. But before you start playing God read next few sentences. Accidents will happen. And when they do, do not come blaming me, I warned you. Now you may think that nothing can go wrong if you are careful and do not miss turns. Believe me, they can! I had a really nice planet made, it had soil rating about 700 and it had about 2 million colonists in cities and few hundred Plasmatrons mining metals. I decided to save time by just keeping eye on stress level and podding everything away when needed. So all money and food produced, were still in planet. So the turn arrived that I saw that stress level will go over 1000. No problems, lets just pod all minerals and food to ship yard and rest to orbit. Oooops! Somebody forgot to build the freaking pod pad Things like that happen. And when they do, breaking things helps. So keep something inexpensive near your computer. Optimizing Your Economy When you start fry n baking you can actually make your empire denser. You now have planets that produce about 5 times more food than normal colony so you do not need so many planets to maintain population as earlier. And you do not need to go for mineral rich worlds since you simply create planet which reproduces minerals faster than you can mine them. When you build your first pair of DWs for destroying and rebuilding the planets sit down for a while. Think how you can do as efficient economy as you can. How much population you have on your high pop worlds and ship yards? How many planets you need to keep them fed. Then simply pick the closest planets, you do not have to worry about minerals, soil ratings and temperatures etc. Pick the locations that are most favourable to you. Look for dense clusters where you build these mini empires. Then move your population there. If this means emptying your HW, do so. It might be a good idea to leave few poor planets with only minimal colony to each mini economy. If you have to retreat you can safely super laser your shipyard, training worlds and population centres. Your fry n bake worlds will explode by themselves. Then if you can recapture area you use these poor planets to establish a shipyard, training centres and population worlds. So leave few extra planets around in edges of your empire. Strategy Early Game If you have never played birds before first few turns can be quite appalling. The first fact you probably find out is that their scanners are bad. I have told you all the time how their economy is strong. And in first couple of turns it can look like they are hopeless. They do not do anything fancy in first 5 turns. But thing is that if you play first few turns well you should start feel how their economy starts to kick in. Remember that you main goal in early game is just to set up your economy and up your tech levels, do not worry about anything else. Do not worry about defence early on. Your T3 fighters are fast and your early ships, namely Skyfires, Fearless and White Falcon are adequate for early game. Later on you build up your scanning ability to get an early warning. First Turn Set taxes to enslavement. There are two tech levels you have to raise first turn. Buy planet tech and engine tech. With money left buy other techs starting from cheapest ones (not hyper drives, you do not have any use for that tech). Form eight wings of 10 fighters from your T3 fighters. Beam down everything from your Skyfires, turn long range scanners on. Set them not to attack anything. Send your skyfires in three different direction at full speed. Set waypoints at least 190 light years away from your HW. Idea is to get temperatures and soil ratings from as many planets as possible. It is safe to cruise around first two turns. In HW first turn off med center. Turn on your terra formers and set target temperature to 61. Build max farms. Build government center. Check how much fuel and minerals you have on your HW, if levels are really low build 10-30 mines. Build factories, the amount depends on your starting population and supplies you have base. More population you have, more factories you need. You want to have city for every 100000 colonists as fast as possible. Your Skyfires will be setting farming bases first few turns. You need about 300-500 supplies, 1000-1500 MCs and 100-175K cols per farming colony. So prepare to build quite many factories. 500-700 is absolute minimum (unless starting population is really low). If you start with 5 million cols 1000 factories is minimum. With all excess money and supplies you build cities. Do not forget to turn max factory output to 10000. Second Turn Set your Skyfires to head back home. In HW build a pod pad. Go to Central Command and buy engine tech and hull tech 2. Set your two wings to auto-intercept and escort your HW, target deadly, hit and run, set them to max speed. Check that you have enough factories, few too many is better than few to less. After that, continue to max your cities. If starting population is low take in account that you are shipping quite colonists away so you might want not to build as many cities as you could. Turn on your Gov center and send at min enough money to buy engine and hull tech. You need to have enough money for 3 farming colonies on next turn. After calculating that send all excess money to Galactic Bank. Go back to Central Command. Your goals are now to be able to raise your engine tech every turn and raise hull tech to 4 (Fearless to find natives) ASAP. If you think your income and starting money allows (it usually will) buy other techs starting from cheapest. The money you send through Gov Center will be in Central Bank in time to raise your tech levels next turn. So available for purchasing tech levels is money there now plus your transfer. Third Turn Your Skyfires should be back over your HW now and you should have three planets in mind to colonize. If you were really lucky you have found planet with contraband, Amorphs or Bovinoids nearby. Otherwise head to nearest planets with high soil ratings. Load up the Skyfires and set their first waypoint to planet your about to colonize and second waypoint back to HW. Then if you can not make it to planet in one turn set Skyfire to max speed. Boost a life pod to planet you plan to colonize, set it to dock Skyfire and to drop at planet you colonize. If you have farmable planet really near your HW (pod can make to there in 2-3 turns), boost life and resupply pod to there and let your ships colonize planets further away. Continue raising tech levels but keep colonization as your main priority as long as you have enough colonists in your HW. About million is minimum amount to keep in HW if you start with 2-5 million cols. If you have to decide between raising an engine or hull tech, raise hull tech until you have hull tech 4. Turns 4-10 Continue on setting up farming colonies as fast as you can. If you find Amorphs, Bovinoids, Ghipsodals or Amphibians gather them ASAP. If you find planet with contraband make it a priority. But if there is only 500 or so contra that costs 2,2mc, do not bother. It only worth of 1000mcs, your farming worlds will do more money. Do not worry about your fuel usage, unless you really are in danger to run out of it. If you have resources to set up farming colonies faster than your Skyfires can haul pods and stuff to them build White Falcon with engines you have in HW. However do not forget to leave 2 warp drives for your Fearless. Continue raising your tech levels and build Skyfire as soon as you can. After hull tech 4, you should concentrate on raising engine tech. For other techs you need to set goals. Your first goal could be a Bright with Disrupters and best shields you can afford. After that you can set goal to DS with PTTs. Once you have DSs with PTTs you can stop raising tech levels for a while. Naturally you push engine tech to max ASAP. If you have not set up the training base earlier turn 10 is last turn to send ship to do it. Establish it near to your HW. Pick the planet with highest soil rating. You just load up all excess crew to there and enough colonists that it can produce at least 500mcs and 50 supplies per turn. With this production it can build 10 training centres per turn. Be careful with building training centres there, at this point you want that even your training world has at least some growth. Or more precisely do not want to train so that number of your colonists there lowers. Use notes to write down the colonist count every turn. 20-30 training centres should be enough for some time. You just want to have enough HG to have 2 in your every ship and 1 in your every world. Try to claim as much space for yourself as possible, but do not start any wars. You can start gathering spy mana from turn 11. Start putting at least 100mc per turn on spying, but do not do any spy attacks. Mid Game You should continue building up your economy, the limiting factor probably is that you run out of colonists or farmable planets. That is OK, it shows that you have done things right. Concentrate to maximize your income every turn. When you can not set new money earning bases bring food and metals back to your HW. You build up and put more cols to your training base and build another one when time feels right. Once you have tech levels for DS with Transwarps and PTTs and you have tech for 900 shields and mSC PD tech, stop buying techs. Check can you keep sending 8000MCs to central bank? When you can it is time to buy Tank-O-Tronic A. If you have reached tech levels above but can not send 8000 a turn just activate growth exotic as often as you can. Try stay away from war. You want to concentrate on maximizing your economy and growth. When you buy Tank O Tronic most money probably comes from your HW. If you stop buying it you can build war fleet capable handling most threats in 1-2 turns. Use DSs and Brights, support them with your T3 wings. Keep sending all the money you can to Central Account. You want to have +100 scanners bought soon and have techs for DWs to start Fried n Bake. Every freighter you build should be Skyfire for their scanners. And you should build extra Skyfires so you can see beyond your borders. It is quite easy to tell. You should see your neighbours ships that are close to you. Having decent scanning power gives you few extra turns to prepare if your neighbours actions start look aggressive. When things start looking bad you need to build a fleet and it is better that you have fleet ready before first base is attacked. Late Game As time passes you have to fight some wars. Just try not to get involved all out war. Do not start a war unless you need more space or have an easy target to get prisoners. Concentrate on your economy and by now your empire should be organized to max production. Your empire should have been divided to areas. In the centre of each area there is a ship yard, surrounded by training worlds and fried n bake worlds. The friend n bake worlds should replace farming worlds as they are more effective. Sooner or later your population and economy explodes. Suddenly you find out that resources and money just starts to pile up. This is the moment you have been waiting all the time. Now you can suddenly build enormous fleets and this is the point when you change your strategy from being a nice guy and everybodys friend to over aggressive. You pick one enemy at time do not fight to wars at time even you would feel you could win them both. The plan now is to walk through galaxy pumping up ships faster than they get destroyed in war. The moment to choose to get aggressive is when you feel that your economy is growing faster than anybody elses. You do not need to have strongest fleet yet. Your economy is booming and you start from easiest target. Home Fleet Because your ships are not hyper jumping capable you simply are not and never will be the fastest race around. This why you need to divide your ships to home fleet defending your empire and to attack fleet attacking or kept in borders ready to launch counter attack. So home fleet is not your freighters, they are part of your logistics network. Note that Skyfire is an exception. It has a double role of being scanning ship and being freighter. This double role is the reason why you should use Skyfire instead of cloacking ships. Your home fleet consist on fighting power and minelayers and sweepers. The fighting power is based on DSs and Brights to counter fighters. If you want to save ord you can leave resupply pods away from DSs since they can re-ord from bases. But it is more flexible to have pods docked in these too. You have to consider how likely your enemy is using fighters. If you have i.e. EE as your neighbour you need to be well prepared for fighter attack and thus need more Brights than normally. You can use engineless DSs and Brights to defend your most important worlds. Otherwise you the normal ship setups given in ships section. The minelayers/sweepers are simply Brights with no weapons, shields or armour. One might want to arm these too, but if you get attacked these ships are busy enough dealing with mines to do any fighting. You are keeping heavy minefields even when you are in peace. But in war will mine as heavily as you can. And you have enemy mines to worry about. Use Skyfires to reord your home fleets minelayers. It is just easier when you use one ship in home ground. Skyfires can always be used as a freighters (actually they have exactly same setup, it is just for what you use them for) and if anywhere in your own space you have to have scan advantage. Your industrial DWs will get free weapons from Amphibians over a time and add firepower to your home fleet. If you do not get any Amphibians then you can consider arming them with PTTs on some point. If you feel that your position is safe, or something goes wrong you can send most of your home fleet to aid it. This is why it is good idea to have some extra stuff with ships mainly staying in home too. If you get defence against hyper jumpers you can cut your defence much lighter. Attack Fleet This is your pride and joy. Even you have built an attack fleet you do not have to use it only because you have it. It is an option which you use when it is wise. Basically attack fleet has two main differences over home fleet. First in Skyfires are now simply scanner ships. Because they are visible they should move behind your other fleet doing zig zag in your minefields. Second thing is that this fleet needs to be able to fight long time without re-supplying. When you start your attack you have to take everything you need with you from the start. Carrying all this stuff you have the Resolutes. It doubles being a fighting ship with its IGAs. Always have a plenty of ground assault force brought with your Resolutes. And Darkwings with WC missile always belong to attack fleet. They are not for home defence. In attack fleet every Resolute and DW should tow armed but engineless Bright. DW operates alone so it needs something to clear mines. And Resolute can tow a Bright so you can save on engines. But most of your Brights should have engines and if you are fighting against heavily mining opponent you can add Brights with only engines to deal with mines. One thing you should consider with attack fleet is to put Transwarps to all ships or at least to DWs and Resolutes. The cost is a bit more but you save in fuel which you otherwise have to carry with you. Always big majority of your ships should be DSs. And DSs operating in hostile area can not count on bases so every DS must have a re-supply pod docked. Attacking You always hope that you are the one who decides when war starts. You get time to prepare. When you plan to start attack it should be quiet for first few moves. You have already advanced your attack fleet as much as you can without risk of running to mines or otherwise giving out your plans. Very important is that you have your minesweepers turned off. You have positioned your home fleet to defend against counter attack and laying cloacked mines to border area. You have slightly increased your scanning power etc. Now you are ready to start attack, on first few turns you want to maximize the shock effect caused by surprise attack. You call the shots for first few turns of your attack and you do not want to give up your dominant position. First strikes should be made against targets you can take out without any losses. Targets can be freighters, minefields and farming colonies. Even if damage you do to enemy is not so severe, it is really tough situation to defender psychologically. You seem to do anything you want and he can not even get that one attacking ship destroyed. Remember that he has no idea where you are and how strong you are. Best that can happen is that he simply raises his hands and drops. More likely he panics and tries to either attack desperately or defence his key bases. If he launches attack against your population minefields you have been laying and your home fleet should stop him. While your attack fleet now has less defences to worry about. Next thing you want to do is to really mess up his economy and logistics. If campaign gets long you will win eventually if your economy is growing and your enemys economy is crippled. Aim your attacks where you can do most damage with smallest losses. His defence fleets definitely are not what you want to target. He has built them for that. Go for lightly defended population centres and so on. Always attack in different places, make your opponent decide will he stretch his defences thin or centralize them around most important targets. And then take an advantage from his weaknesses. Always do your best to get your opponent defensive. If he only reacts to your actions you have easy time winning. To attack successfully you need to have more minesweeping and laying capacity than your opponent. The freedom of movement is the key thing. Static fleets do not do any good were they in offence or in defence. You have an advantage that your opponent does not see you. Make sure that your opponent does not have same the advantage. It means that you want to see him, so make sure that you have an excellent scan over battlefield. Defending If you get attacked first thing to do is to think previous chapter. You are formidable when attacking but you are not so good at defending. So you want to launch a counter attack. Attacker probably has weak defences when most of his fighting power is concentrated to attack you. You are not best when facing an attack fleet. So what you want to do is to use minefields to take out the freedom of movement. Use scorched earth. Bend but do not break. Make sure that your enemy do not get any resources from planets he takes and make his supply line to fall. If you have reached a phase when big portion of your farming colonies are evolved to fried n bake worlds, all the better. If your enemy has not a way of controlling planet stress he has his hands full of planets that will eventually blow up. And you can make even worse by using your DWs to destroy worlds that do not blow up by them selves. Sooner or later you enemy should realize that he is not going to gain nothing. Use boarding and other tactics to weaken his attack force. Even in defence you are the one who decides when battles are fought. You necessarily do not need to have mined your space heavily but you need to have an ability to do it fast. This way you can save your ord until you need it. Having active minefields eats your ord all the time. Since usually your opponents are visible you do not have to have so many minefields just in case. Saving Time Here are some ideas how to make your turns faster and letting you to concentrate to fun stuff. Using flags I use three different sets of flags. For farmable planets I get scan for soil rating, I write down soil rating to notes. This way I do not have to go through all planets when looking planets for farming colonies. The other reason is that sometimes the client looses data. If you do not have current scan from planet you should get old data from it. Sometimes that old data does not appear. When I get full scan from planet I mark it with yellow flag. So white and yellow flag would mean that planet is farmable and I have full scan from it so there is no natives or contra there. If there are natives on planet I put green flag. And for contraband I use a red flag. For my bases I use following system. For ship yards I have all four flags turned on. White flag appears when you write a note, I use it as marker that I need to check that base next turn. And I also write down what I need to do there. Yellow means training base and green means production world. I have something important there i.e. factories, contra or Plasmatrons on base with green flag. A red flag marks unstable worlds, the planets that will explode. For enemy bases any information should be wrote down. I mark high population worlds with green. Shipyards and major bases have all four flags. Yellow means that he has something special there, for example natives, contraband or something else. A red flag means that there is something nasty on base. Like mechs or ground zero cannon and so on. Using fleets and naming ships Work out some code of naming your ships so you know from name what is role of the ship. For Brights you could use something like this. Bright HM (home fleet miner no weapons), Bright HD (home fleet, anti fighter), Bright AM (Bright attack fleet miner), Bright AA (Bright attack fleet anti fighter). You can add E for Brights providing minesweeper for DW or Resolute. And if you have organized your ships to several fleets use i.e. numbers to indicate to which fleet the ship belongs. Your system does not have to be so detailed than given above, but you should know exact outfit of that ship and its role by just seeing the name. And build ships with few standard setups, keeping the variations of one hull in minimum helps you and makes your fleet more flexible. It may sound cooler to give ships personal names but believe me, it is a pain in the ass when you have over one hundred ships to control. Use fleets. If you have attack fleet have for example Resolute to be a fleet leader. Next thing you do is that you organize all your DSs to one fleet and have the fleet leader DS to escort Resolute. Do same to your mine layers and anti fighter Brights. This way you do not continuously need to mangle with fleets. If you want DSs to go somewhere faster, it is easy. You have only one DS (the leader of DS fleet) to control, all other DSs escort it. Rest of your fleet continues doing what they were doing. And it is easy to maintain different attack setups within fleet. Mark fleet leaders with i.e. a + -sign so you do not need to look for them. Use sharing options. Your Resolutes should share their ord with Brights and have a re-supply pod to filling up Resolutes ord bay. Thinking how to set up a fleet and setting it up can take some time. But when you do it smartly, you can have infinite amount of ships and it does not require any more work from you than controlling just a one ship. With sharing on, you can just check ord and fuel levels from one ship. When you combine friendly codes (ORD, BUR, BUN) to this you just need to finish movement over base where you have stuff you need. And possibly to swap re-supply pods with full ones. Level of Micromanagement you need Think how deep you need to go with you micromanagement. In early game you want to control every detail by yourself. Later you want to use ministers and checking unimportant bases in intervals of few turns and other ways to save time. Even if you try to use all automatic options provided by client, you might encounter the moment when you just see that you have used all your options. Accept your limits. Stop building cheap swarming ships and start building DWs with LTLAs. They are not so effective, but there is no idea to build ships if you can not manage them. Keep things in level that you can and are willing to control. This is especially important with Birds because you tend to build up economy that needs to be looked after careful. The good thing is that that economy automatically reduces its self to level that player can manage ;-). Remember that this is just a game and it should be fun to play, not exhausting. Exotic Techs There are two exotic techs you should start buying as soon as possible. The Tank O Tronic A and +100 scanners. After that you need to use your own judgement, however a few guidelines to help you. All growth, scan and pod exotics are excellent for Bird. Plasma manifolds and Borlox armour become very good when you have a certain level of ships. From fighting exotics the best are shield exotics as your ships tend to have shield range from 350-900 except the DW. The attack bonus is not so useful. DS has all the attack bonus it ever needs and Brights and DWs PTTs still are shot down even if you have attack exotics and they already have enough attack bonus to hit with PTT. But the evasive exotics are really good, DS has no evasive bonus at all, Bright, Resolute and DW all get full advantage from them. Same applies to weapon exotics, PTTs bring down shield really fast so you really do not need any extra shield drain. If you can afford buy the armour draining exotics instead. Do not buy any small weapon exotics they do not help you pulsed lasers at all. And small weapons do not do enough damage even with exotics. Tactics Boarding Boarding should always be your first option.You want to use mostly HG for boarding. This is because your DSs only have room for 300 guests. A boarding laser in DS makes some hull damage and kills some enemy crew. A ship with hull damage can be boarded. You can set up the needed damage also by blowing up a cloacked mine field. The DSs are best for boarding by far. Not only having boarding laser but they are also fast. You need to board in first 50 movement phases when you are safe from combat and be away from there by movement phase 50. Best thing is that you start your turn within transport range. Ground Assault Instead of blowing up ground base you should try to capture it. If you manage to capture it, you get all the resources in base. You have some prisoners to fill your labour camps. You use PTTs which are really bad at destroying bases. They can do it but they really need masses of ord to take out any big base. The traditional way is to clear the orbit from defenders and then land the GA force in pods. This is your choice too if you can take out defences without too big losses. If you can not do this you still can ground assault the base. First way is to sneak one ship with pod bay to orbit. Then undock the pod and have it to dock the planet. If enemy has not set any ships to attack soft his fleet simply ignores your pod. All bases are immune to orbital attack in the turn they are created. So all you need to do is to get pod to land the planet and you have a chance to do your GA. The other way to do this is to use a cheap throwaway ship with large guest quarters like White Falcon or Fearless. Sneak it to orbit and next turn you beam down the GA force. The ship gets toasted but base is there, untouchable. If you use these tricks to fool your enemy defences do not expect to keep what you possibly conquer. Minefields The trick of minefields is to use a cloacked mines. They are much harder to sweep. And if enemy knows that there are minefields that you can uncloack, the effect is that he has to assume that he is flying on minefield all the time. Minefields can be used to boost many tactics, be creative. The idea of minefields is not so much to attack and destroy enemy ships but to take away his ability to move ships and pods. So if you end up in mining war it is simple mathematics. The side that has more mine laying and sweeping capacity wins. Especially in your empire you do not need actually to have minefields, but the ability to lay them FAST and A LOT. For this you need lots of minelayers and ord. And logistic system to keep your minelayers fed with ord. Having this system does not consume ord, ord consumption only starts when you need to lay the fields. When in hostile area only lay cloacked mines. A path of new minefields appearing gives away the position and heading of your fleet even for a stupid opponent. The other thing is that if you suspect that your enemy is using cloacked minefields and you really want to keep your presence secret turn off your mine sweepers. If you have several Brights they will sweep even cloacked fields. And enemy soon realizes that something is wrong when there suddenly is clear path in his minefields. If you ever have to drive through minefields the optimum speed is 93 lys a turn. In that speed chance per ly are lowest. But remember that your Brights are gone after one hit from Barbs. Only ships to consider doing this are DWs. Towing You should always tow a Bright Heart with you DWs and Resolutes. You not only save the cost of engines but importantly these Brights also add a minesweeper, a mine layer and more fire power to your big ships. If you need more cargo or pod capacity than you have in Skyfire you can tow other freighter with it. You can speed up your slower freighters by having Skyfire tow them high speed when they both are heading to same area. In offence the Resolute can be used to tow enemy ships, just remember that Resolute can only tow ships with hull masses less than 200kts. Be creative with your tow tricks. You can board enemy ships and then tow it to safety. Or you can tow enemy ship to be boarded on safe location or being destroyed either by Resolute of cloacked fleet. The trick of towing is that there is no battle in first quarter of turn. So if you are in same location than enemy ship you wish to tow you can tow it 30lys away before there is chance for battle. It is good idea to have previously cloacked mines and/or backup fleet in Resolutes path in case enemy has set some other ships to escort or intercept the ship you tow. Aim to small ships that are important to your enemy. Darkwings With World Crusher Missile The best outfit for Darkwing to carry a World Crusher Missile is given in ships section. Always put Transwarps to these DWs and have them towing engineless Bright. They also need a re-supply pod to carry enough ord and as much fuel as possible. These ships have to be able to operate by themselves long periods. The WC has range of 100lys. It has 33% of chance to hit any base on planet. If a planet has one base the chance you hit it is 33%. If the planet has two bases you have 33% chance first base in a planet and 33% chance of hitting the second base. Note that when DW launches its WC it is visible. So first get just within 100lys from target base and have a Bright to lay a cloacked minefield. Next tur uncloack the minefield and have your DWs speed of 0. Thus having minimal sensor image and having minefield to protect your DW. Never launch more than one WC from same position. Cloack and move, then try again if you have to. You want to take only well defended enemy bases out with WC DW, you do not need masses of these ships. If you can clear the orbit without too many losses you choose to take the prisoners. Note that WC destroys base completely and kills all population in base. But it does not kill the natives or any minerals, repairs etc. They are left in planet, so you can gather them when you clear the orbit. But so can your enemy. WC is strictly anti population weapon. Well, taking out a ship yard or HW messes your enemys economy quite nicely ;-). Using a Scout OK, I admit that this strategy is more of trying to find some more uses for Swift than really being good. But it might prove itself useful in some desperate situations. It needs few things to make one consider using this. Firstly, you do not have good scan from your enemy. Secondly, he uses minefields but does not cloack and uncloack them often. And thirdly, you need to do some damage. So idea is to have several Swifts. You set one going one turn advance of your WC DW or fleet and have extra Swifts with DW or fleet. The Swift in advance is simply a minefield indicator, when it blows you now that there is a minefield. You stop the DW/fleet for one turn and have other Swift to advance one turn Not too bright. So just make sure that you do not have to consider this, have enough scanning power present at all times. How to Use Enemy UFC After having more than 10 million colonists you get three Praetorian Master Spies. They will from time to time give you a universal friendly code of some player. 20% of codes they give are wrong. And they are not too intelligent. They can give you your own UFC. Uh, you surely did not know that The more colonists and happier your colonists are the more often they give you the UFCs. Having the UFC as your friendly code will stop you from hitting mines and stops enemy from auto intercepting you. UFC will change from time to time. The further the game is longer time it takes for UFC to change. The later the game proceeds more valuable UFCs come as it takes longer to them change and there are more minefields. Keep track when your UFC changes so you can now how many turns it takes UFC to change in that phase of game. If you plan to use UFC to rush through mines, test it first. Have one Swift to run through minefields. If it does not hit the mines you can calculate the chance of UFC changing in that very turn. If you are willing to take a risk you can get a big reward. The UFC is very double edged sword. But I suggest that you use it, just do not put all your eggs to one basket. Especially Darkwings can take advantage of this quite safely. They can take several mine hits and still survive. Scanning Effectively Your only scanning ship without exotic techs is Skyfire. Most natural way to overcome the scanning problems is to build more of them. There are few things that can improve your scan over the universe. Always keep your scanning ships in deep space, if they have nothing else to do set waypoint 1 20lys to deep space and waypoint 2 back to orbit and speed to 40. Second way is mainly usable when attacking. You have your scanning fleet behind your cloacked ships but you want better scan. DS has 150ly scan range. Set DS to have full scanners on for one turn. Naturally it has no waypoint set and speed is 0 and it is in previously cloacked minefield. You can have DS to do same near base that enemy has defences, have DS start near the planet. Set it full speed through your minefields and see if it gets any ships set to auto intercept cruising through your mines. The DS comes useful when you have +100 scanners. After you have +100 and +200 scanner exotics all your cloackers become good scanning ships so from that point on use Swifts for scanning. Improving the Speed Of Your Freighters You can improve speed of your freighters easily. Lets say that you have skyfire 45 lys away from your HW. And you know that next place you want to colonize is 50lys from planet. You can colonize that planet in a one turn. This is how you do it. You set Skyfire to beam up stuff you need from HW, you set boost, dock, drop pod to planet you want colonize. Then you set Skyfire to have waypoint 1 in your HW and waypoint 2 in planet you want to colonize. Set command code to BDA (beam down all). The pod will form a base and Skyfire will beam down all cargo to base it is over in the end of turn. Other way to radically improve speed of your freighters is to use higher than needed speed. You have planet 210 lys away. You use Skyfire normally you would set speed to 105 to save fuel. It takes you 4 turns to get there and back this way. Its better to set your first waypoint to planet and second back to HW. Now you can make it in 3 turns if you set speed to 140 lys a turn. But you can do even better. You set your speed to 190. Now it still takes you 3 turns to do a route, but you are back in home earlier. And you in third turn you can make 150lys towards next target. So idea is simply planning ahead and using several waypoints. The extra fuel used is well spent as you colonize faster and claim larger area. Dealing With the Hyper Jumpers Your first options are naturally to get either hull plans for grav minelayer or ship with grav well generator. Sometimes you do not succeed and you have to deal with hyper jumping race without them. I will cover this with an example. I picked Evil Empire because it is most likely invader that you have to deal without a way to stop hyper jumps. The reason why EE is most common hyp problem is that they seek prisoners in early game when you simply have not had time to do anything for you vulnerability against hyper jumps. They seek for any race that has not grav mines to be their early game prey. From those races you are in best position. Your bases are hard to find even for empire. But if he targets you, you have to do something. First thing is to protect you HW. EE tries to GA the world with most potential prisoners. And he usually does it without warning. What he does is either to send a Star Destroyers or RU25 (in early game) with lots of SCs to kill your fighters. So make sure you have enough firepower to take those out. Later the problem is your farming colonies. You can not protect all of them. So idea is to think what he sends to GA. And have just enough power to take it out. Options you have are either ships (DS/Bright) or your T3 fighters (which fire through his shields). The idea is that you want to take the first ships out, after that you have some time to send your anti fighter ships there. There is no way you can prevent it in early/mid game, just make it as costly as you can. The way to stop EE is to attack him. And that is your first option. Let him take some prisoners since you can not stop it. But take his population out. If you have first scanner exotic bought you can even have your ships running scanners on. The EE can not hyp over you to get a battle if you change direction. Only thing he has to fast enough to intercept you is his T3 fighters. And your DSs make it costly and your Brights with AA PD will eat those fighters alive. EE is not difficult to attack, the problem is that you can not defence against EE and he is faster than you. Best options are to secure the peace somehow or get gravs. Your normal response to hostile race the attack is not as useful as he can launch the attack in one turn. Dealing with Other Races First thing I want you to do is to read Paul Honigmanns awesome strategy guide:  HYPERLINK "http://www.furfur.demon.co.uk/geop/v4startup.htm" http://www.furfur.demon.co.uk/geop/v4startup.htm. And especially parts 6 and 7, Birdmen should know and use the stuff in those chapters. Diplomacy You want to just left alone for early and middle game and decide when is the right moment to walk through the galaxy so you need to use diplomacy to achieve this. Diplomacy is art of making others believe that you have biggest bat around but you want to use it for their advantage. And naturally you aim to be doing nothing. Nobody can now how strong you are as all your warships are cloacked all the time. So pretend to be strong even if you are not. But do not boast too much, you want to give an expression that you are strong but harmless. Being a public enemy number one is sure way down. Only way to other player to get to know how strong you really are is to have war with you, and believe me most players do not want to know that. If there is some minor battle in border area during the colonization process, do not star war because one of your freighters got destroyed. And if enemys freighter got destroyed just prevent the war you do not want. Pay the freaking freighter and everything it had, just make sure that your neighbour understands that you do not do it because you are weak, but because war just does not fit to your plans right now. So what you want to do is to have friendly neighbours. You know that you can be more effective than anyone with planets you have, you just need time. Make non aggression pacts and be a good neighbour. Most players like to have safe borders and Bird is one of the last races people want to have a war with. Mostly because you have a wide range of nasty tricks to do, make sure that your neighbours know that. There is one example I want to give you. So this is kind of things you want to make sure that all your neighbours know (but you want also assure them that you are not aggressive unless attacked). You can destroy all my fleet, you can destroy all my bases. But you never can dig up all of my DWs with WC. And they can wait 10 turns, they can wait 20 turns and then slowly start closing up your most important bases and fire WCs. Somebody will always give me the scan data to do this. Believe me, after knowing this fact your neighbours behave much better. Hull Trading Hull trading is not so profitable because alien hulls work much worse than your own hulls. So any alien hull is next to useless in battle. Alien hulls can not replace your Skyfires and Swifts in scanning either. Alien hulls produce more than double scanner noise (2x +100) and have half of their stated range. This makes them very visible since all your ships already have double scanner noise compared to other races. The end result is that only hull devices can be useful. You want to get ability to do something your own ships are not able to do. Top three devices you want are Grav Mine Layers, Grav Well Generators and Scalar Wave Damper. A hyper jumping freighter is also nice, but not critical unless you have a really large empire. And Hacker Droid allows you to make plans from any ship you board. Which ones of your hull plans are the ones you want consider to trade? There are few plans you do not want to give away. First is Bright Heart. There are only few cloacking mine layers in game. You do not want others to have them. Do not give Fearless either until you have gathered all the natives you want. And you never want to give DW away. The cloacking WC and fried n Bake are two of Birds biggest advantages. Do not share them. DS is not so powerful in enemy hands because it can only be used to board your ships. And what can not be seen can not be boarded. I would say that Bright and DW are only hulls you never should give to anyone. Never assume that the player you give plans would not give them to someone else. So expect any plan you give away to be available to all players. Spying Spy mana starts to gather after turn 10 and you can not use spy attacks before this. The more mana you have more likely you succeed and more damage you do. The 1000 mana is not any upper limit, the mana continues to gather after that. Only the slide bar stops at 1000. There is no negative effect of having 10000 mana, well not for you. To use spy attack mana of 500 is minimum, 1000 is good and more is better. Birdmen spies always get through HGs trying to stop spy attacks. The best spy mission is sabotage ships. It targets to all enemy ships and cause same amount damage than hitting to barb mine. More mana you have more ships you hit. The ideal race is a race which uses lot of ships with hull mass less than 100kts. This attack is devastating in fleets consisting mainly from small ships. And these small ships tend to be scanning ships or mine layers. Note that the ship you hate most the Loki has hull mass of 101kts so you really can mess up enemy trusting to Lokis. The more ships enemy has more targets you have. So this spy attack comes more and more useful further the game proceeds. Steal ship plans use to be much better. But know most hulls you capture this way are useless. The logic goes this way. Your spies pick one ship from enemy fleets and try to steal plans for that ship. It either succeeds or not. The ship they pick is random, so more the certain ship enemy has higher the chance you end up with plans for that hull. I do not consider this mission worth of mana spent. There is a one low cost, low gain mission sabotage enemy bases. It is tempting to use this as it only uses 10 points of mana. All it does is irritating the enemy. You can not do any real damage with this attack. So you are probably better saving mana to sabotage ships mission. Incite disorder could be worth of mana, but I really have not experimented with it so I can not say anything about that, if you know something about it or try it out, please let me know. Allies Usually you are better without close allies. Non aggression pact is usually best. It does not consume your time and gives you a quiet border. If you decide to ally closely with someone do not only look how good your races fit together. Look the player behind them too, is he reliable, how experienced he is, does he tend to miss turns often? If you ally with novice all you get from that alliance is that your ally draws you to troubles and you have to be there to save his ass all the time. And when you try to do something he screws the things up. If there is more than one Bird in game share the UFC:s you get. I mean that you make a simple thing that you email the all UFC besides your own as soon as you get them. You also inform other player when you verify some code to be true or false. There are no negative side effects on this. If other Bird gives you wrong codes or does not share all his codes you will find it out soon enough. You know that you should reach the ten million colonists about same time. You know how often other Bird should get some UFC as you get them yourself. It should be about equal although it is a random event. And you know that UFC has 20% chance of being wrong in first place. And it can always change. So if other Bird is not honest with you will find it soon enough. It really does not pay to share wrong codes. You get short term value of him maybe loosing few ships to mines and having more codes than he. But he realizes it soon enough and starts doing same to you, so in the end you both suffer if either of you breaks the deal. There is a one race which makes a perfect alliance with Birds, the Crystals. Crystals have Light ship which is cheaper to use blow the planets. You rebuild them with DW. You use Light Ships to stabilize your planets. Crystal player uses Hyper Lathes for this. You build him ord plants and farms. He mines both of your empires. You do most fighting while he concentrates to mining. Crystals have dirt cheap fighters. You have cloacked carrier. There are much more advantages from Bird-Crystal alliance, but I brought up these few to point out how strong it can be. War Everything is allowed in love and war. I started with this phrase because it says everything needed to know when playing Birds and entering a war. Be creative, be unpredictable, be ruthless. I used expression of entering the war this is because Birds should always be the race that does the first attack. You have stealthiest fleet and you are best in spying. If you are surprised by enemy attacking it means that you have done a big mistake already. The options Bird usually face when played by skilled player are that they decide to attack or that they have to attack. Decide to attack is the best situation. You have gathered intelligence, made sure that your other boarders are safe, you have moved your fleets to positions and you have an attack plan to bring your enemy on his knees. Have to attack is a situation when you know that your enemy will attack you soon or you are sure that the war is just a matter of time for some reason. You are not in such an excellent position now. You often do not have so good scan data about your enemy you would like, your ships may be in other side of your empire or your enemy may be much stronger than you. Still best option is to be one that attacks. It messes your opponents plans. You may know that your mighty attack fleet has only 2 DSs, but the other guy does not. He just might get defensive and give you time to get your fleets there. And if not, at least you get to call some shots. And remember the fact that you actually can win when you are weaker than your opponent because you can pick your fights. Never declare the war. And never bother to declare war in advance. It gets clear enough sooner or later even if your enemy is not the brightest guy around. Analyzing your enemy The war is not just to shoot everything that you see. This approach may work sometimes but Birds just are not a race best in this. You should be clever than this, you should plan the war according to your enemys strong and weak points. Because any strategy or advice depends on situation you are I take the Crytals as an example. I pointed out that they make a perfect ally to Birds, but to give you some options I tell you how to defeat them. The Crystals are often kept the worst enemy Birds have. This reputation mainly comes from the fact hat Crystals are best miners around. So lets start. Crystals can not beat Birds in any toe to toe fight. Their ships have good shields and no armour at all. But their shields take 3x shield drain from ord based weapons so your PTTs are perfect against Crytals. Only setback PTTs have is its armour drain, but that is not problem against typical Crystal armour of ten units. This implies to most races, the problem is not the Crystal ships but the mines. Every ship Crystals build have all possible minelayers and mine sweeper and their ships either have pod bays or huge ord capacity, usually both. So even that mines usually are major part of your offence and defence you are not winning by having mining war with Crystals, they just will have more minelayers and sweepers around than you ever can get. So now we agree that Crystals is a piece of meat if you ever manage to get through mines, right? Having their UFC is of course the simplest solution, but relying that is bit more gamble than I like. You just may not have it and can not count to have it anytime soon. So next lets look the economies. We found out that Crystals have even higher growth rate than us, not a good thing. But when we go to more detail we found out that we can do all the things we ever need to make our population and production to grow forever. The Crystals have better economy basis but their economy bases purely on planet stress. They do their food and ord from minerals. These are the two key things that Crystal runs out eventually if he can not claim more space, and faster he grows faster he needs that space. And more space he has more ord he needs to keep it mined. So now we found something we can use. Birds do not need more planets. We just make our planets better when we need to. So if we can deny Crystals to have more planets he will run out of food and ord. We can make his ord usage to raise radically lets not attack as we do against other races. We just sweep his mines and build as many Brights we ever can, dump the weapons we probably all ready beat him any way we want to if we get to fight. The thing is that Crystal can and will lay more mines than Birds, the trick is that they can not produce enough ord to keep that up. So all Bird has to do is to patiently sweep his field. You have to retreat some time. He has ord to lay mines. Lay as many small cloacked barbitic minefields as you can. You can destroy masses of his webs when blowing them away. When giving up ground, make sure he never gets a base with ord plant. He can build it but he can use it and in Crystal hands you can count that it is producing 100K of ord every turn. Better if you super laser all the planets you need to give up. Next thing is that you have to be careful for a mine traps, the Crystals are very good using them and the Crystal player probably knows more of them than you can imagine. You do not have to fear him trying any fast attack if he ever comes out from his webs he is dead. Crystals can not build repairs, they only can steal them. So spy attacks are quite nasty against Crystals, he is short of repairs so all damage is bad for him. Other way to consume his repairs is to blow Barbs. And beware his Light Ships, they can hyperjump and they have super laser. Simply you has to make him use more ord than he can produce and his production is going down as he uses up his planets stress and you ord consuming capability is going up. It is boring but simple. You should analyze your every opponent same way, find their weaknesses and strike to them. End Words Lastly I want to thank Tim Wisseman for creating this excellent game that has given me so many good moments. And other person I want to thank is Paul Honigmann. Without his comments and ideas this guide would be full of mistakes and have never reached publishable form. If and When you find a mistake from this guide, blame me, not Paul. He never has played Birds and I did not agreed with him always. So point all critics, comments and ideas to me  HYPERLINK "mailto:gray_z@yahoo.com" gray_z@yahoo.com. 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