By Skies, with credits to Daniel "Alucard" Basting, Admiral Quixote, Chris Steele,
            Ed, Tim Wisseman, Sheltem, Lazol, Paul Honigmann, Wiki community and many many others.

THE AMAZING ROBOT GUIDE  SHOW  STARTS   HERE!

Your every day Robot Features, Characteristics and Persona

What makes a Bot stick out from the crowd of plain Feds? Well there's the stuff inside this table below, really shiny tritanium teeth, and .. you also get to be evil! Be evil. Robots are a stand alone race, which means you can hold your own and play dirty. I'm a coward so i don't, but do as I teach with this one.

<<< Be faster, skip to the "BEEF!" >>>

The "BEEF!" is what a really experienced VGA4 player should know about the Robots. It is guaranteed to be tasty and should be devoured with only a pinch of salt. As a side dish, you will be served a variety of other chapters, all prepared with the same quality as your main course.

Ships and Ship Devices and Where to Use Them
(Rather tedious bable about the fleet. However, if you're a beginner your only choice might be to read it.)

Robot ships tend to be strong armoured and have big Large Weapon Slots. Basically the ships are designed for bashing. The weaknesses are low number of Point Defence Slots, Speed and relatively small Fighter Bay capacities. By relative, I mean in this case relation to the fighter efficiency. Not much good to carry around 400 Rutzies (Type1 Fighters) in your Instrumentality.

Robots also have 14 Ship mounted devices at their disposal. Most are integrated into just one hull design. They're used to increase the metal production, destroy food (production), detect enemy and to compensate the penalties suffered from slow fleet.

Before continuing to more powerful ships, allow me convince you of the importance of Small Deep Space Freighters. They are extremely handy for the Robot. Build these. SDSF has a fair gargo capacity since you primaly use it to transport tritanium (other metals can take time to be podded home). Capacity is also enough for establishing a GUNZERO (1000 supplies, 30k cash, 10 colonists, some troops). The SDSF is by Robot standard a very fast ship!

But on with the business.

Hull Design	Devices integrated
Cat's Paw Minelayer. The all around handyman. That's because it is the fleets only mine laying ship and bots need minefields everywhere. In defence, attack, and on Mother's Day. Do not use it and you'll bite the dust, no doubt. Also a massive battle ship for tech 2 but to be honest these guys never see much battle, not even when attacking. They are just ment to slow down the enemy and destroy enemy minefields. Don't even bother to build them fully equipped, it's a waste of minerals. The ord capacity, 40 000, is insane.	Barbitic Mine Dropper: Converts ordnance units into (Nova) Barbitic mines and drops them. There's more on the use of Novamines after the the delicious "BEEF!".
Q Tanker Chances are you won't need this "speeder" to transport neutronium at all. But what Q Tanker can do is refuel your wings up to 100LY away and reduce the sensor image of your ships to 5 with in the same range. The ship it self has sensor image of 5, too. Some reports of the features not being bug free (just yet) have been seen at this time (host 195).
Pawn Class If you ever lay your hands on Laser Mining Drill or Particle Fountain this ship will come really handy in keeping the Hyper Dimensional Delta Levels in check (in other words prevents planets from exploding while you mine them hollow with your Vltavas). About Hyper Dimensions and Metal mining check the 'Metal' bit, later in this guide. The more food you have, the more useful this hull comes for you.	Bioscanner: It's primary use is detecting native life on planets (700 LY). When on the bioscanner's findings will be reported in the ship's log. Using the scanner does not make the ship any more visible to the enemy than normal. Food To Supply Converter: When on all the food on the ship is turned into supplies. One food unit is turned into one supply unit. Scalar Wave Damper: Reduces the stress and frequency levels of the planet under the ship, which can stop the metal creation of a planet (not metal mining, metal creation) in careless hands. Never use it on own planets volunterily (only exception is to prevent planet explosion.) Soil Sterilizer: Poisons the soil of the planet under the ship so that farming can not take place. Recommended to be used in enemy space only.
Cybernaut Cybernaut is fastest battle ship in the fleet (120 LY's/ turn). Vast guest quarters make it a hard to capture and you can use it to set up several mining colonies in one run. There's 2 pod bays but no tractor beam nor devices and only 2 fighter bays. The other choice for a midsized battle ship is the Instrumentality. In comparison Cybernaut is half the price and significantly faster, has better shields but only 50KT large weapon banks (enough for Pulsed Phasor Cannons). Lower mass than Instrus and only two fighter bays. In Diplomat simulation Cybernauts are more cost efficient than Instrus.
Instrumentality On Instrumentality you can mount any large weapon, and they come with lots of armor, 4 fighter bays and 15 small weapon banks (Cybernaut has 4), tractor beam (2000Kt) but shields only at 1K. Instru also has 4 fighter bays and devices which tip the scales for her in most cases. ...And it was the ship in the TV-series. Either Cybernaut or Instru is going to be the backbone of your fleet. Choose their poison.	Eye Of Madagon: The eye will destroy food stockpiles and kill amorphous natives out to a range of 250 ly. Food on planets, enemy bases and pods are all in danger of being spoiled. While spoiling the food the madagon device will create food and fuel onboard the ship. The device will also cause all Chupanoids in the base under the ship to have 300% happiness and all Chupanoids join the base. The range for this is 10ly and it only works if the ship has under 10% system damage. Soil Sterilizer: Poisons the soil of the planet under the ship so that farming can not take place. Recommended to be used in enemy space only!
Automa Automa's usefulness comes through it's Boarding Laser. I see it as a ship made for special tasks. Not a real challenger to win the big battles (with four Point Defence slots). Now that alien hulls are a rare treat, it's good to pay attention to capturing enemy ships. Atleast one is good to have in the attack fleet as you tend to find interesting utility ships in the other empire cores. Just one excellent enemy support ship can have significant impact on the Bots.	Boarding Laser: Helps your troops take over the enemy ship. It cuts holes in the enemy ship doing between 5% and 300% hull damage to the target depending on the size of the target ship. It kills up to 10% of the enemy crew, 40% of the enemy colonists, and 10% of the enemy troops. You need to beam over 1 of your guys for every 5 enemies you want to take out. Native Dust Off: Loads all the natives on the planet under the ship onto a native life pod and places the pod in one of the ship's empty pod bays. The device only works on natives that are on the surface of the planet outside of a base. The device will only work if you have an empty pod bay on the ship. In the case of a Bot, good for capturing Amorphous, not much else.
Golem A very powerful ship design, nearly as good as Vltava but costs a lot less duranium. It is only good for wreaking havoc but that is usually enough. Has a good sized cargo space as a perk. Be careful of the low crew/guest capacity, it is just too easy to capture these. Make your boarding-enemies go the minimum distance by keeping one or two Cats as escort. Capturing is lot harder inside minefields. At one point in time Golem had a feature called a Golem Hyper Space Network, which allowed fuel free transportation of fighter wings between two Golem's. Hopefully we haven't heard the last of that. TIM!
Vltava One of the best dreadnaughts out there. It has the Jump Gate builder on board so you need to have one of these in the attack fleet. Jump Gate movement should be an essential part of your attack strategy. It also has the Laser Mining Drill, which can be used to increase planets Hyper Dimensional Stress and to mine metal. High HD Stress can generate a lot of metals. While this is really a capable battle ship beware of it's crew/ guest quarters - for a ship it's size it's easily captured with out a Cat's Paw escort.	Jump Gate Builder: Ship will build a jump gate when this device is on. The gate is built after movement. All gates have a 3 letter code, which is the code needed to travel too the gate. Jump Gates can only be destroyed by anti-matter maul super weapons that have set the gate as a kill target and have parked on it. To travel to another Jump Gate park your ship on any gate and set one of the ship's command codes to the code of the gate you wish to travel to. In the Host queue Jump gate travel happens after normal movement and Jump Gate building. Requires 10 000mc and 1000kt Molybdenium per use. Laser Mining Drill: Extracts mineral ore from the core of the planet under the ship and converts it into metals and stores the metals in the ship's cargo hold. The limit per turn is 1000Kt's. The drill increases the climate of the planet by 0.3 degree's a turn and the HD stress of the planet by 10 to 60 points. The device has no effect on ore or metal that is sitting on the planet's surface. The device will not mine fuel or fuel ore. Mobile Fighter Factory: Builds fighters in space using cash. The device will add fighters to any wing docked with the ship that does not have the full number that can fit in the fighter bay. If the ship has any empty fighter bays new wings will be formed and the bays will be filled with new fighters. Soil Sterilizer: Poisons the soil of the planet under the ship so that farming can not take place. Recommended to be used in enemy space only.
Alchemy Ships Merlin and Alaska You probably won't need the fuel but you will need tritanium. Duh.	Alchemy Device: Convert supplies to minerals (2700 supplies = 675KT of metals / turn) DTMS-N fuel Converter: The device will convert 10 supply units into 1 kt of fuel. It can also convert 1 duranium, 1 tritanium, or 1 molybdenum into 1 fuel unit. The converter only uses metals and supplies that are in the ship's cargo hold. It will stop processing when the ship's fuel tank is full. If the ship uses the command code "BDF" all but 60 kt of fuel will be beamed down to the planet below. Ore Processing: The ore is converted into metals and stored in the ship's cargo hold. You can have the metals automatically transported down to a base. Two ore units yield one metal unit. The only limit as to how much can be processed in a turn is the size of the ship's cargo hold. Ore processing costs nothing.

Special Robot Structures
(This stuff will help to digest the "BEEF!", but is not the actual "BEEF!")

Insectoid nests (and insectoids)

This building is the foundation of your empire. In many regards Insectoids are like colonists to you. You can do nothing without these guys/ this building. Keep in mind that insectoid nests have an trick to them: There has to be atleast one colonist present to get the nest going - a Robot colonists is enough and only requisite (an insectoid is NOT required!) Here's info on the building and it's residents:

Happy bug is a busy Bug, Insecoids -like all natives- will breed in a base according to the native happiness level of the base. Meaning: increase that number with Goverment centers, Public space ports and at times low taxation). The maximum increase per turn is 3%

Insectoid nest turns warm blooded natives into insectoids. This includes humanoids, Bovinoids, Reptilians, Avians, Amphipians and Ghipsoldals. Conversion rate is 4 bugs for every native. It might be useful not to bring everyone to slaughter, more details in this guide "Natives and how to benefit of them".

A Nest does nothing to some natives including (and you can benefit normally from these): Amorphous, (Insectoids), Siliconoids, Chupanoids.

The warm blooded natives (and insectoids) immediately join your base after nest activation and are transformed to bugs. For conversion it makes no difference if they are on a planet or inside your base. This is why the Native Dust Off Device is not so important. Natives inside an enemy base on the same planet will not convert. You have to ground assault and capture the enemy base first. Oh joy!

Insectoid nests attract the other players' colonists and turns them to insectoids. Nests also generate money from the other people's colonists. Insectoid nests attract 3% of enemy colonists and generate 100 mc per 1000 colonists taken. So you'll get a 100 dough in your pocket from a colony of around 35 000 people in your area.

And there is Death! If any base loses colonists to your insectoid nest another 4,5% of those colonists just plain die (per turn). There's no message for the owner of the base for this either.

Basically you get more bugs by building nests close to your enemy! In the original series of the Battlestar Galactica, insectoids had a on surface casino/hotel/ resort, which lured the unwary to the peril. In VGA4 only few races can resist the gambling lounges of your bug nests. The races that can resist the temptations are the other Robots, The Solarians and The Crystals. You can also lure Borgs in with the nests but the conversion ratio is only half a bug per colonists compared to others 4 bugs per colonists. On the other hand, thinking of the borgs, Insectoids can not really be converted to borg drones either - it takes 6 bugs to make just 1 drone.

The maximum range you can attract the colonists from is between 30-400LYs. This depends on how many colonists and insectoids you have on the base. Note: The Host program caps the nest max range and gradually let's the maximum range to increase until turn 60. Only then can nests be used to their full potential (400LY range). It is never worth while to have more than four million colonists and insectoids (counted together) in a base regarding this purpose. Interestingly, if this number consists mainly of colonists it gets very close to a colony which can support enough factories for a maxed out Merlin!

The base log show's you the actual range of the nest, so you don't have to sweat with the math like your neighbours. Note that the colonists are also grapped from your allies. You're the only one to get a log message from these event. Meaning the VGA4 colonists will not email home once they decide to go cast a little dice. Home World get's a small boost to the Nest range but the nests on outposts will catch up in 20 or so turns.

Finally one of the most important (early) game features of a bug nest. An active bug nest mines fuel. Not only that: for as long as the nest has fuel to mine it will also generate money and ordnance! With a million insectoids and just one nest (yes,1) you can get in one turn:
10 000mc, 500Kt of fuel and 20 000 units of ordnance. Whenever you don't desperately need fuel, have the insectoids mine it for you. This goes (especially) to your Home world! Do not use the mineral mines there until all fuel is gone in the beginning of the game. Do not send Fuel Dradless into high Neutronium planets, either. In fact if you have time and patience the Insectoid nest will quickly produce back the money it takes to build one (300mc) with the fuel it mines even with a few (like 10 000) bugs.

The insectoids pay very good taxes too. A lot more than your colonists would create outside the cities! Actually the number is close to the amount your colonists create inside cities!

Do not be afraid to build several nests and waste your Tritanium early on. Also do not be afraid to turn the nest off, to leave yourself some hundreds of kilotons of tritanium every now and then for ship production.

GUNZERO!

Basic function: Annihilates dreadnaught ships and most small ships in a very effective manner.

GUNZERO! kills up to 250 LYs! It is a useful cannon in many scenarios and if you happen to be in one of those scenarios you should have this built on as many planets as you can afford. (You can even use it in enemy territory, if you are evil enough). It's damage and accuracy is based on the target ship's hull mass as is shown on the somewhat accurate and not at all ridiculous picture below. If you count together some of the numbers in the table below you might quickly come to an conclusion that in many cases one GUNZERO! is not enough. Damage per turn just is not high enough - it is expensive to build several of them so be careful when doing the investment decisions.

Picture I. What you can expect from the GUNZERO!                                                       

You might want to check what the enemy is coming at you with, altough in general this is what you do: When the enemy ships enter your space, take a look at the damage. If it's little (10-15%) or the gun misses all the time the GUNZERO is not working. Bring in support. If the damage is around 50%, they get what they deserve. Gun Zero fires 1 shot at every enemy ship per turn as long as there's 100 ord per shot and 10 colonists on base to work the thing. Shots are fired after movement. GUNZERO leaves a log entry on the base log.

Downsides:

Will not target, under any circumstances, really small ships. (hull mass of or under 100kt). Active cloaking device blocks targeting unless you (or enemy himself) manages to bring the sensor image of such a ship above 400. Ships with cloaking device turned off and all other visible ships with no cloak ability (no matter what the sensor image) are dead meat.

There is a gap in the accuracy and damage infliction that allows for ships with a hull mass of 800kt's to 900kt's in practise to ignore your GUNZEROs if they have the repair units available.

At least for the moment, the GUNZERO fires after the host has repaired ships. This can lead to ships having over 100% damage. Those ships will be destroyed at the beginning of the next turn. Most significant outcome is that these damaged ships have time to lay a minefield before their destruction.

What to do in general. Bases and Planets and What to Do with Them. What to Do with Natives,   Where to  Spend   Galactic  Credits.   And   eventually,  Why  You  Will  Win!
(Basically, look for the "BEEF!" here)

The "BEEF" is Followed by Some General Things in Alphabetical Order
(This is marvelous stuff, but the actual "BEEF" is now gone.)

Alliances (politics). You don't have much to ally for both in a sense of gaining nor giving. You can't share any hull plans with the enemy. You need to keep the Insectoid nests on, which means death to most races. There are some races you can techinally ally yourself with, if you find something in these do so by all means. But in all reality, Robots are loners in the universe. The thing on your side is: Food surplus, you can trade with this. The other thing working for you is that your space is not very interesting to others. Politics in general allow you to be your evil self! Perhaps non-aggression pacts are the most suitable deals for you.

Bases. You might want to optimise a few to get the most out of your resources.

Home World. Very basic, full of cities. I usually have 5 training centres on HW to keep up the troop production. Don't use the mineral mines in the beginning, let the Nest do it's job first.

Native world. Base for free weapon and engine production. Keep an assortment of all natives here, keep them happy and build a Public Space Port to lure more of them in.

Outposts. Have some with Insectoid nests to lure in enemy colonists or to lure the enemy to attack there first. Some outposts you can call mining colonies. At some outposts you might want to keep an ordnance plant running to supply your Cat Paws. To further update an outpost build a GUNZERO if the location is suitable - remember almost any enemy will attack here first. Some out of goofier reasons, some out of bare necessity. GUNZERO worlds draw the attention of advancing enemy fleet away from your Home World, which in it self alone is worth the 30 000mc's.

Prison world. Note: I haven't tested this in a real game. In case you have several nests in the range and want to "feed" your prisoners to the nests a bit faster than 10% per turn pod them to a unhabited planet. They should create a base there. Just make sure it has no money nor supplies. On the other hand if you pod there food, too and use only one active nest you might end up with a stable (or even growing) "prisoner" population.

Training world. Ingredients: lots of training centres for trooph/ High Guard training. If you happen to find a planet close by in the early game with lost of Kerria chrystals, that's your Training Word.

Secondary Home Worlds. By the early mid game you will find efficiency in establishing other breeding colonies. Unlike all other races, you don't have to spread around your colonists for farming. The benefit of spreading around your population is more factories (look at the table below). Luckily it doesn't matter what planet you use for this purpose, so pick planets with unusually high tritanium levels or some other benefits. The other reason to spread around is to get more resource points. In all your bases build cities when ever the population allows. Absolotely no reason not to.

Excotic Tech. I have no idea why this isn't recommended by all player guides, but the most important tech to activate the early game is the Plasma Manifold A. I always buy this in the first 10-15 turns. In mid game I usually buy the Manifold B at which point the fuel consumption drops to near nothing. Having enough fuel is really important in VGA! and full throttle is important speed setting for robots. Save the rest of the money for the tech increases in the early game. Pod boosts (first two are enough) are handy once you actually start podding stuff from mining outposts. I also find the Borlox armor good investment in mid game - it can prolong the military campaings. In mid - end game use the Excotic Tech to protect your fighters (Sand Shields etc.)

The ultimate and only important goal is to get the S-pulse.

Fighter wings. Anyone interested in tweaking the fighters, I suggest you go straight to the planetswiki and stay there for quite some time. The bottom line, per me, is this:
Robot fighters are good because they are hard to hit (the CoM is an exception), resistant to sand casters and most importantly: cheap. As soon as you can afford it buy 1000 Rutzie Fighters (type 1) every turn. This should happen in about turn 25-30 in your HW, but do this at all possible bases. T1's are not that good but a fleet of 20 000+ is quite something. You can add the T2's and T3's later. In ship Fighter Bays use as good fighters as possible (or mixed wings).

It is good to mix wings. I think it is an intented feature but especially since at the moment there seems to be a lot of bugs (host 195). Ratios of fighter types in mixed wings? Sim, the changes seem to be frequent now. (clues: lot's of cheaper ones, atleast 1 of everytype and go with fewer expensive ones)

It takes around 2500+ T1 fighters in single wing to take down an enemy HW baseshield.

First turns. The robot fleet is slow enough already so do not give others anymore lead by waiting with the expansion. In every turn, raise your engine tech levels until you reach FTL1 (or the Tylium thrusters, in case you are short on cash). You need decend engines as soon as possible to do the little you can. You also need to rush out there like eveyone else to get the resources and territory. The competition is at the same level one only for the first 10-20 turns. If you wait until that time to "prepare" you are late already.

Be aggressive. In the very first turn build 2-6 Small Deep Space Freighters with the FTL-5 engines you have in storage. I'm absolutely sure this is the only right way for a robot to start. (I stress this, because you could run into people who disagree.) You can recycle the SDSF's later. Consider if you want to stay with only 2 SDSFs and have 2 fast, low fuel consumption Cat Paws or 1 Cybernaut in the early game. Have the SDSF's scout the area and what ever your strategy, do not stop until you have found yourself a lot of natives you can turn into bugs. As soon as you find suitable natives build a bug nest on the planet and pod most of them home to safety (so take enough supplies and cash with you). The other goal is to find a planet loaded with Tritanium. As you search tritanium and natives keep in mind that you can severely harm your play by sacrificing the wrong type of natives (Ghips) and mining the fuel with mineral mines or fuel dradles instead of the insectoid nests. In your expansion also make sure to leave a planet or two near your HW with out an insectoid nest.

Once you get going, Hull Tech 10 is a very expensive, but a necessary target. As soon as the metals in your area run out your growth caps. The faster you get the Alchemy ships, Merlins, running the better. The game is all about colonists and the only way for you to get colonists is through Tritanium metal. Practically all your tritanium goes into this. You'll figure out the rest of the techs on your own, they're not that crucial. Planet tech 8 gets you the GUNZERO! so if you have money don't stay at planet tech 4 until turn 50, like everyone else.

Build a few Cat Paws in the early game once you have the impulse-engines and then a few more as you get turbo thrusters.

Food. The food issue is easily handled. You don't need it. You can use it in trading (everyone else needs it badly) and also by converting it to supplies and later to metal. Build farms.They also produce money. Recently someone commented that Robots get a happiness boost in setting up a new colony if you beam 100kt's of food with the colonists. This is uncorfirmed bug (host 195).

Ground Assault. Well. It's not that hard to do and there's plenty to loot. Good source for metals. Keep a lot of troops at hand in the attack fleets (in attack pods). You can use fuel dradles and T1 fighters in assaults, too (cheap firepower and if the draddles survive they really make a difference in the surrendering phase). Most of the time you have thousands of fighters with in you fleet, so when there is an opportunity to use the ground assault against a weak base pull them into a fight (dock to a base). Make sure you have Planet Tech 10 for Air Attack Base to relaunch the wing. Chances are that you also have some fuel draddles in you fleet as they are very good in keeping an advancing fleet fuelled. All ground units count a lot towards the enemy base surrender.

High Guards. You need two high guards on more important ships to prevent Spy Sabotage Missions, which you are really vulnerable to. Your training of HG doesnt require food but Kerria Crystals. You get a handy note in your base log when you are short on these.

Jumpgates. Use these. Do not build one on or near your Home world (if this happens change your HW!). In fact try to build these in out of a way places. These are not for transporting every day gargo.

Because anyone who knows the Jump Code can use the gate you need to defend them. This is simple. Use minefields, fighter wings, ships and a designated Cat's Paw for these tasks. Take advantage of the fact that a Jumpgate can be used the same turn it's build, just enter the Jump Gate Code of the desired target into Command Code field of the ship you want to move and leave it at the same coordinates the gate will be built. A Jump Gate near your enemy is a marvellous thing, it will bring you joy.

Metal. You get metals from supplies (and food).

Food is something you can live with out. But having farms on your planets might be worth while. They generate a small income and later in the game you can turn the food surplus into supplies and metal (or trade them for something really useful). You have the necessary devices in your fleet to process food to metals.

Try to have the maximum amount of factories in all your bigger colonies (+ 500 000) after the first few dozen turns. If you can't figure out a way to use all your supplies, you're over looking something or they will be spent later in the game. Think more Alchemy Ships and Ordance (minefields).

Metal creation and manipulation of planets. Planet core generates new metals when it has positive Hyper Dimensional Stress and Hyper Delta stress. HD Stress (Dimensional Stress) varies mostly between -1000 and 1000. Delta Stress is a small number, in most cases between -10 and 10. Both these values are shown on the 'Base Screen's 'Overview' tab (HD Stress, HD Freq). Now, if you have a planet like this with both numbers on high positive and you park on it a Pawn Class ship with the device called Scalar Wave Damper on, you have just shot your self in the leg. Robot's have lot's of ways to inflict harm on them selves. This one is the most easiest to do.

The SWD device lowers both the Dimensional Stress and Delta Stress of the planet. The metal creation will perform itself on all the planets which have a positive Dimensional and Delta Stress, the higher the numbers, bigger the amounts. A good planet can create more metals in a turn than you can extract with 50 mines.

The most basic situation to use Scalar Wave Damper (SWD) is to reduce the HD Stress (the big number) so the planet will not explode. Often this happens when using Laser Mining Drill (on Vltava) it will get you metals but has a secondary effect which can lead to planetary explosions. A planet will do just that if the HD Stress reaches 1001. From there on begins the numbers game. Take the last three figures of that number: that's how likely you planet is to explode every turn. 1001 = 1%, 1050 =50% and so on.

You can manipulate HD Stress with Laser Mining Drill (to increase. On Vltava). You want to work a planet with a high or atleast positive HD Frequency value + 1 is enough. Your target HD stress should be around 700-900. Laser Mining Drill will not affect the HD Frequency. Sadly. This trick is a simple thing to do and very important so, don't over look this.

Manipulating the planets goes further but I'm not sure if this is important for a Robot to mess with. Just in case someone wants to sim it, I will explain it. A SWD can lower both of the planet stress numbers as stated before. The smaller number, HD Frequency, will flip back to positive +100 once it reaches -300. During the process, the HD Stress value can sink to a rather high negative number, too but if you manage to have the Frequency number at +100 it will get back to positive in some turns. The HD Frequency value is added to the Dimensional Stress value every turn. Keep an eye on the planet so it won't explode. An ideal starting planet to perform this task on is a planet with a high positive Dimensional Stress and negative Delta value and the Tritanium extraction rate should be from medium to high. Try to do this trick in one (or no longer than in few) turns. Sim it, do not try it in real game first.

SWD device will lower the Delta Stress with 8 points per device, so a simple math equation has to be solved to reach -300 in single turn. If the value doesn't reach -300 nothing will happen. If you over shoot and the number ends to be lower than -300 the occurring positive Delta Stress value will not be that high. At -400 the Delta Stress flips into 0. Waste of time? Dunno.

Natives and how to benefit of them.

The obvious benefits from the natives are the Siliconoids and their boost to the ordnance generation, Amorphous worms and their spice (contraband) generation, chupanoids and using them as a weapon. Efficient robot player will however look beyond this.

There are natives which you can bring to slaughter but which are in fact more beneficial to you left alive. Amphibians and especially Ghipsoldals. Even 50 000 Ghips are enough to completely change the game for you: The slow speed of your ships means you can take full potential of several different engine types. You spare the tritanium costs of big ships (free Tylium thrustes). The weapon production of Amphs is not as predictable, but large gun mounts allow you to take advantage of all weapon types.

The same planet which you will leave without an insectoid nest to keep Amphs and Ghips alive can also act as an attraction to other types of natives. Leave a small "seed" population of every native type (few hundreds) and build a public space port there. You should get a free flow of different native types which you can then pod to the insectoid nests. Keep the natives in this base really happy, be careful not to lose any through the port (maybe build 2 separate colonies, one for the Amphs/ Ghips and one for the Public Space Port). You will get the idea.

Native benefits (All native features will take 10 000 - 80 000 to be enabled)

Bovinoid - double factory production at ridiculously low population (10 000)
Amphibians - weapons
Ghipsoldals - engines (saves money and metals!)
Siliconoids - double ord production. (You will need a lot of ord for your minefields).
Amorphous worms - contraband
Chupanoids - weapon. Detonated Chup pod will affect planets up to around 300-400 LYs.

Nova minefields. Only minetype you can lay is Nova Barbitic. It inflicts massive hit and detonation damage but has some weaknesses. The fact that it will not affect fighter wings in any way is the biggest short coming. On the other hand the Nova Minefield doubles as a gravity well, so it blocks all hyperjumps and UEA's Pax jump.

Cloaked Novaminefields can now be swept, but the chances of failing in that are quite high (75%). So keep on laying all the minefields cloaked in the enemy territory. Mines are layed after movement and cloaked mines are turned active before all movement, so the only difference it that the minefield is harder to sweep. This is a "bonus feature" to all barbitic mines (Nova and normal).

Minefields are layed and sweeped at the same time with the more experienced ship performing it's task last. High Guard on board your ship is beneficial, too.

Detonated novafield clears all other minefields that have the centers with in the detonated field. Exeption: The minefield you are trying to blow away is a novamine, too. This will result in chain reaction and while it's dangerous if done by mistake it is a very useful feature when planned ahead.

Anything that hit's a minefield will reduce it's power by 1. With Nova mines this includes fighter wings (!) and pods. Big Deal! Nothing can hit a minefield if it's cloaked, on the other hand a minefield can take unlimited hits during one turn - it will be destroyed only at the end of the turn if the power has ran out. So spend some time to flip those switches and look your enemies wither in frustration. At the moment (host 195) minefield recharging takes place before minefield runs out of power. It's not a bug per se but expect it to change.

You can use alien ships with barbitic minelayer to lay Nova barbitics. In fact you don't have a choice either. A cloaked Nova Barbitic minelayership is everyone's nightmare but yours.

Minelaying techniques can be taken to extreme to do it you have to learn the host order of events, from the minelaying point of view. You have a chance to do quite a nasty moves in single turn.

Shokazul Pulse. This is why Robots win. It stops the colonists from breeding but sadly makes the insectoids hibhernate. To win a Bot player needs to generate enough income (government transfers + taxes) to support this by the turn 60 or so. If you don't use this early enough other races will pass you by in population because their growth is exponential. Basically you need to do this before the other can afford the Cloning Tanks (exotic tech).

It's impossible to say at what point this will happen, but in a game of normal settings, average amount of players it's around turn 60. (It's certainly not by 35 and way before 75). The point is, that when the others get all the cloning tanks on it's all over for the enterprising Robot. When you get the Pulse on just increase the amount of Insectoid nests and pile up tritanium, then drop the pulse for one turn and see your population explode. Repeat.

At the moment (host 195) an experienced UEA player can work a way around S-Pulse but expect this to change, I hope.

Taxes (and Happiness). During what must be around 300-400 real game turns playing as the robots I have had tax level set to other than Enslavement for maybe a total of 10 or so turns. You can raise happiness in most cases with Public Space Ports.