Nova Empire: Space Commander brings a fresh perspective into the conquest genre by adding an awesome element of exploration, giving you much more freedom to move around the world while also developing your space station and building your fleet of ships. In this sense, this game is like your regular conquest title like Rise of Kingdoms, but with a “town” that can freely move around across different systems in the galaxy.

This small change makes a world of difference since you have a new element to consider when planning how to proceed. You no longer need to worry only about building an army and gathering resources, but also about the availability of said resources in your current system. After all, it might be better to move your base entirely if you’ll have an easier time farming elsewhere, instead of having your ships travel to different systems to gather materials, increasing the time it’ll take for them to collect resources due to the long trip.

Nevertheless, while Nova Empire is somewhat similar to other titles in the conquest genre, it has enough differences for it to feel like a completely foreign experience. And considering how lackluster the in-game tutorial is, you’re going to need all the help you can get in getting started on the right foot. To this end, we have created this brief guide with 5 awesome tips and tricks for Nova Empire. If you’re just starting out, keep in mind the following:

1. The In-Game Missions List is Your Best Friend

We weren’t kidding when we said the tutorial in Nova Empire is lackluster. It features a more hand-on approach, having you learn by doing things rather than explaining the reasoning behind. In this sense, while you can learn some of the basics with this feature, you won’t really know why you’re doing it, nor what the endgame is.

Simply put, Nova Empire is a conquest game; only instead of fighting on a planet like in other games, you’re doing it in space. Whether for resources, territory, or conflicts between alliances, there’s no shortage of reasons for why you’ll be butting heads with other players in this game. And if you want to stay competitive and survive, you’re going to have to develop your base and build your fleets ASAP.

Luckily, the in-game missions list helps a lot in guiding you to what you should be focusing on at any given moment. At times, you will also run into a few cutscenes where Ceres, your AI assistant, will give brief explanations on how certain features work. While these are few and far in between, make sure to pay attention to everything Ceres says as she’ll show you around your base and explain how to get around the galaxy.

2. Always Send Out Your Fleets to Explore

Speaking of which, while developing your base and completing missions is important, securing a steady supply of materials is also crucial for your success in Nova Empire. After all, you wouldn’t be able to build structures, research technology, or upgrade existing facilities without precious minerals, crystals, energy, and alloy.

As we mentioned in our beginner’s guide for this game, there are many ways through which you can collect resources. Some of these include scanning planets in your system, fighting space pirates on the system map, salvaging the remains of destroyed ships that are left behind after battles, and by gathering directly from resource deposits. You must keep your fleets busy at all times if you want to have enough materials to continuously develop your base, especially at the beginning.

If finding mineral deposits to gather is proving too difficult in your current system, since they are quite limited and other players might already be gathering in them, you could explore other systems. If you find some good deposits in a neighboring system you could send out your drones to gather. If they’re too far away, however, you could consider moving your space station entirely.

3. Increase Your Fleet Slots ASAP

The more fleets you can dispatch at any given time, the more things you’ll be able to do—it’s as simple as that. For this reason, one of your top priorities should be developing your base enough to unlock the second fleet slot.

You can unlock more fleet slots by upgrading your space station, in general. However, you can also unlock an additional slot by researching the Expanded Command technology in your Research Lab, once you upgrade the building to level 6. Make sure to unlock these upgrades as soon as you can as they allow you to essentially double your productivity, especially if you’re constantly fighting pirates and collecting debris.

4. Customize Your Ships

And speaking of your fleet, you can freely customize your ships in Nova Empire, greatly altering their behavior and performance in combat, as well as altering their upkeep in energy and minerals. These customizations are performed in the Ship Design Center, after which you can save them as blueprints, and set them as your default models in the Shipyard. By doing this, any subsequent ships that you build will feature the updated blueprint, as well as any modifications that you made.

Depending on the type of ship, you can alter many different parts including their weapons and hull components. Furthermore, larger ships feature more parts in every category. For instance, the regular gunships only have 1 gun and 1 hull component, while the larger frigates have 3 guns and 3 hull components. You can freely mix and match different parts and customize your ships for any situation.

5. Complete Those Daily Quests

Nova Empire is quite an expansive game; you will have lots of things to do, which can be quite overwhelming if you’re just starting out. In some cases, you might have a lot of downtime while waiting for constructions to conclude, a research project to finish, or a ship to get built. Whenever you’re stuck not knowing what to do, feel free to check out your daily quests as these often have missions that don’t require much in the way of constructions or waiting for projects to finish.

In fact, you should ALWAYS aim to complete your daily missions as they can grant many awesome rewards, especially as you complete specific activity milestones. Every daily mission you complete grants 5 activity points, and every 30 points will give you an extra box packed with great loot. These daily rewards cap out at 150 points. Meanwhile, these activity points will also contribute towards 2 weekly milestones; the first at 250 points and the second at 500 points. As you can imagine, these weekly rewards are also quite important and contain some of the best items you can get as a f2p player.

While the tutorial in Nova Empire isn’t very good or informative, you have plenty of guidance in-game to always keep you on track. And with the tips we’ve shared in this guide, you’re set to start your journey on the right foot!