Homeworld

## Overview

The Homeworld is the base of operations for the game. It can never be destroyed, allowing you to build up again if you lose everything. It contains all facilities, dealing with everything from production to research. Facility and technological upgrades are all done here. It also produces a significant amount of resources, making it crucial for any empire to exploit these raw materials.

## Sectors of the Homeworld

Before getting into more detail, the basic 'sectors' of the Homeworld are:

* Facilities
* Research
* Development
* Production

This page will go into greater detail for all of these.

## Facilities

Facilities are the most important part of your Homeworld. They deal with upgrades, bonuses, storages, the commander academy, and resource production.

### Research Lab

This is the base of command for all your research. Here you will control what research to perform, including general and tech-specific research. Many units require research, and all of the research you perform will help increase efficiency for all aspects of your empire.

### Development Station

This is where you control the development of new ship types. It is crucial that you develop more advanced ships to significantly improve your empire's strength and ability to expand.

### Production Facility

This is where you can order up units to build for your fleet. Upgrading this allows you to unlock more advanced ship types, but you must develop them first. You will need to upgrade the main facility *and* the tech adons in order to build tech cruisers, carriers, and battleships.

### Diplomatic Office

This facility controls intelligence and efficiency of the homeworld. Upgrading it, along with its adons, allows you to speed up and reduce costs for production, research, and developments. Another important adon is the Intelligence adon, with which you must upgrade to access more advanced intel. At first you will only be able to use scouts, but upgrading this gives you infiltrators and spies. Here are what they do:

* Scouts: The basic and cheapest intelligence comes from these buildable units. They don't cost anything to send, and give you information only on the present strength, stored resources, and ship types located on the homeworld. Due to their quick speed it is easy to find a target's wealth and ships so you can decide whether or not you should send more advanced intelligence missions.
* Spies: This is the next unlockable type of getting intelligence. This sends an agent onto the target world to gather information about outposts as well as any information the scout would get. This one costs resources, and without bonuses will need 50k of each resource to send, and takes more time than scouts.
* Infiltrators: The most advanced intelligence comes from infiltrators, allowing for information about past battles and alliance bank wealth, plus any other intelligence a spy would provide. It requires 150k of each resource to send, but arguably provides the best information about the enemy planet. Its initial update takes longer than the spy, but the infiltrator doesn't stop there; it will give 2 updates at 7 hour intervals, allowing you to gain a substantial amount of accurate information. It is definitely worth the investment, as you are paying for 3 missions instead of just 1; however, one should only reserve these intelligence missions for targets they really wish to attack.

### Officer Academy

    This is the building where you will get all of your officers for you empire. It will produce a maximum of 1 per day, and upgrading this facility increases the rank at which your officers will enter your forces at.

### Resource Vault

    This building hides resources from the enemy, making sure that they will not take a set amount of resources as the will be stored here. Upgrading this increases the amount of resources protected. Keep in mind this simply protects resources, and will not add to the amount of resources you can hold. For example, if you hold 3,000,000 of each resource, and this building protects 500,000 of each resource, that means that an enemy can steal 2,500,000 but not the 500k stored in the vault.

### Refinery

The refinery is the first and arguably your most reliable source of resource production on your homeworld. Producing around 60000 of each resource at level three, including max level add ons, one can increase this even more with the **Ore Processing Plant** and Tech-point allocation, both of which double the original production. This means that by having a level 3 ore processing plant and 100% increase of HW output from the tech tree, one can get 246000 of each resource, or a whopping 984000 resources per hour. Not only that, some crafty players will use extra tech-point bonuses to quadruple this value, as in total the tech point tree can increase a player's HW resource production by 300% if that player so chooses.