Expanding your empire
Keep the war-economy growing

The goal of this game is to build an empire for yourself, seek out the remaining races of the Echo Cluster and destroy them in the pursuit of galactic conquest. To accomplish this mission you must develop an economic base upon which your empire can be built.

The All Important Act of colonisation
Although colonisation may not sound like the most exciting of jobs, it is by far the most important. If you fail to colonize properly it will be next to impossible for your empire to become any kind of power or threat in the universe. When you begin the game you start off with one freighter and one small capital ship, except the Feds who start with two capital ships. All you have to draw resources from is your homeworld, which has no natives and only a limited amount of minerals. The most advisable course of action at the beginning is to load both of your first two ships with clans (a clan is a group of 100 colonists that are loaded into starships like cargo), some money and supplies.

You then want to plan out a course for your ships that will allow them to reach the most number of planets possible in the shortest amount of time. If you do this properly the number of planets in your empire will grow quickly and the more planets you have the greater access you have to resources. Those first two starships are a search and locate team.  It is advisable that you set your starships mission set to sensor sweep, because this will scan for enemy colonists and structures on nearby planets. You hope that those starships will find either good deposits of minerals, native races or both. Once these starships have located one or more good planets, you can send a much larger freighter with many more clans, supplies and megacredits to the planets that will be the most beneficial to you. This will allow you to develop them first and more quickly than blindly sending out large freighters.

The majority of players tend to build several freighters early, unless of course they have a nearby hostile neighbour. These first few freighters are usually sent out containing colonists, supplies and some money. It is important to remember that a starship that is sent out to colonize needs to have some supplies or you will be handicapping the growth of your worlds, by being unable to build factories,mines or defense outposts on new planets.

It is important to note that your freighters have a dual nature. Not only are they responsible for expanding your empire through colonisation, they are also a necessity for gathering up minerals, supplies and megacredits and returning them to your starbase(s) for use in production of a fleet. Because of their key role in developing and maintaining an empire and their lack of weapons, fighters are often important targets for enemy races. It is important to keep them safe and protect them.