Player guides

A quick guide to tricks everyone eventually learns (or should).  Keep in mind there is no single right or wrong way to play the game, so your milage with these tips will vary.  Do what works for you.

## Gameplay & Useful Links

* The game updates frequently and any of this may become obsolete fast. Cheslava does a great job letting players know about changes, and updates can be found on the forums or under the Game tab.
* Backup your saved games to text files, and keep several saves back. (This game is under heavy development, and now and then you'll run into corrupted files that you can't import at all.) Sooner or later, you'll be VERY glad you did. Don't fret it if the import fails, there is a 2nd import button under the first.
* https://godlloyd.github.io/HeartOfGalaxy/ A link to a lot of useful tools.
* Under the options tab, enabling "Show cost multipliers" will show you the cost multiplier of every building and research.

## Tutorial-like write-ups

* Contents of the in-game tutorial
* Early game guide: Hitchhikers' guide to the Heart of Galaxy
* Second map guide: Andromeda Heart Guide

## Hub & Autoroutes

* To simplify resources management, it is possible to create autoroutes between 2 planets, a cargo fleet will continuously send resources between planets.
* The fleet speed are based on the slowest ship of the fleet, so don't mix up different cargo in same autoroute/fleet.
* Later in the game you want to make an "hub planet". The idea is to have an autoroute between the chosen hub planet (preferably Ishtar Gate or planets next to it) Usually player set everything to 0 on Ishtar Gate side, on each auto-route, and 105% on the other sides of each auto-route. This way every planet will "pull" resources from your hub planet when their consumption is greater than their production, and "push" resources to your hub planet when they produce more than they consume.
* It is also possible to put some cargo ship in the "hub fleet" of you hub planet, if you do that and tick "auto send required resources for queue" in info panel (i), when you'll queue a building on a planet which has not the resources to make it, the cargo in your hub planet "hub fleet" will take resources from the hub planet and bring them to the planet that need them to make the building.
* In a nutshell, autoroutes are for running resource consumption and Hubs for building queues. The optimized scenario is then, if you have N planets, to have 1 Hub and N-1 autoroutes.
* In order to avoid issues with autoroutes during the "idle bonus" phase, choose the "10 minutes" bonus instead of the "1 minute" one. It gives the same amount of bonus (divided by 10), but avoids some problems.
* When you discover a new resource, be aware that old autoroutes don't take it into account (even if all the other resources are at 105% on this autoroute, the new one will be at 0%). You might then want to update them! (EDIT: this changed in version 40+, you can use the setting "advanced options for autoroutes")

## Combat

* The ARK-55 is the best ship during the early game. Once you capture Zelera you should be able to build Alkantaras, which are a really nice addition to your fleet and probably the best way to spend robots/nanotubes to increase your mid game fleet power.
* Some ships with very poor hit points/armor for their cost are actually awesome because of their low weight and high speed. They can survive a long time if you have lots of tank ships (those with high weight/HP/armor taking the damage for them.
* When one of your ship cluster is annihilated by an enemy attack, the overkill damage is transferred to the next cluster it's called "carryover damage". This has 2 effects, first the fact that "carryover damage" ignore weight and is always transferred to next cluster. The second is that carryover damage ignore shield. Because of that sometime adding more ship types weaken your fleet strength.
* Remember to have engines in your war fleet during battles. Unlike armor and ammo, engines will not be consumed if your fleet wins and if the remaining storage is not smaller than the total used storage before the fight.
* When you finish a fight you earn exp based on the number of turns in the fight. So it is interesting to just send enough ARK-55 during the first fight to win it barely. You'll have more losses but you'll earn more exp, besides during early game completely rebuilding a fleet isn't a problem.
* When a fight is over, you retain 50% of the armor and 100% of the engines. Beware, however, that you nonetheless need your victorious (damaged) fleet to be able to contain all the initial resources you loaded (ammo, engines, armor, etc.). If it does not, you might not keep 50% of armor and 100% of engines, so plan carefully! The percentage of surviving Cargo Capacity to initial Cargo used determines the amount of resources remaining.

## Resources

* Buildings boosted by two or more types of science tend to be more productive than their earlier counterparts. Examples: Nanotubes domes, bioplastic synthesizer, floating greenhouses, etc.
* You'll probably want all autoroutes to start and end at Ishtar Gate eventually, to simplify management; this planet is not merely well positioned, it's nearest to the New Babilo market as well. It's a good place to put your main shipyard. (See Hub planet)
* Your engine-making planet(s) will have autoroute issues due to engines speeding up the autoroute, so make a 1 Orion Cargo route that transports only "as many engines as it can find" to your hub planet.
* Fuel and sand will seem useless for a while, but become useful again in the late game. Be sure to stockpile them as you go.
* Never melt ice if you don't urgently need water. Always freeze water if you have not reached at least 25 coolant factories on Vasilis being fed ice full time (the engines need coolants to make). Even if you can't make engines yet, start stockpiling coolant. You'll never be short of engines for combat or faster micromanagement purposes!
* Silicon is important, but ordinary sand smelters are eventually made obsolete by Rhodium Sand Smelters.

## Trade

* Unless you're heavily into trade and have not yet cornered the market, updating your hubs is a waste of resources. Discounts will become worthless when you are able to buy the entire market of worthy resources by selling your excess resources.
* You'll eventually have more than you ever need of some resources: oil, MK embryos, uranium, hydrogen, Osmium, Sulfur, and methane come to mind. These are great to sell on the market. Silicon is especially good to sell to market early game when you just unlocked the market because it will allow you to buy much more circuits that you would by making them yourself.

## Research and Technology

* Investing your resources into laboratories should be your top priority.
* Cryogenic Laboratories and Vulcan Observatories are some of the best RP generators available until you unlock Karan Laboratories.
* Bioengineering Centers and Halean Laboratories are both great because they can be built on almost every planet, but they take a lot of circuits to construct!
* Basic laboratories and Fluid Dynamic Centers are poor choices due to their lack of technology scaling.
* If you reach Xora Tauri, reset as fast as you can the first time (after of course conquering any easy planets for influence points first with the leftovers of your fleet). You'll be very glad you did. Technology Points (TP) are awesome, and the first time you reset, you want them now!
* While RP cost scaling is mostly consistent across all technologies, TP scaling has many variations. One notable example is Artificial Intelligence (x1.20) versus Halean Technology (x1.50). This ultimately results in robot factories scaling far more strongly than Halean AI centers until the end game.
* Most production scales 12% to 25% with each research level, but Electronics scales 30%. This means if you're running low on circuits in the early to mid game then work on your research!

## Other Tips

* Lone Nassaus has a massive amount of solar energy available and very few buildings available to expend it, which lets you specialize the planet as a battery charger. Later you'll make/charge batteries at all gas giants until hydrogen (including bought from the market) runs into negative income and you're consuming your large stockpiles created in your first few weeks in the game.