Stellar Age is an immersive new MMO strategy game from Crazy Panda, that switches cards a bit by offering a far future out-in-space playing environment, differing greatly from most similar games that stick to the Earth and keep their gameplay tied to some specific historic period. This gives the game a unique taste that helps it to differentiate from the competition because there aren’t many space strategy games out there, at least for mobile devices.
While the game is set in far future, the gameplay is similar to other similar space strategy mobile titles. You have a huge map dotted with bases, placed on planets instead inside castles. There is a huge amount of planets and lots of different players you can invade and who can invade you but the game suffers from a small problem that can greatly hurt the experience of panning the map. You see, you can’t return to your planet automatically, there’s no button that can lead you back to your part of the map. Even when you tap on the base icon, you will return to your planet base but once you tap on the galaxy map you will end on the same spot that’s light years away from your part of the space. The only way to return back is to tap on reports page and then click on a battle report that will drive you to the position of pirates you defeated, or base you invaded. Just remember this when you start panning the map looking for the next player to invade and find yourself in an unknown region of the map.
Other than that small glitch Stellar Age doesn’t suffer from any game breaking bugs. Everything works as intended, however the game lacks in some game modes but we hope developers will widen that area in the future. For instance, you can’t play single player missions and there aren’t randomly placed resource stashes that can be found in other space strategy games. They are replaced by pirates, which you can attack and gain resources but most of the time this just isn’t worthy because resources needed to salvage ships you lost during an attack surpass the prize given when you defeat pirates.
The graphics of Stellar Age are solid, with lots of details on buildings but without large and detailed battles. Every battle resolves in just a couple of seconds and you won’t see any huge, rich in graphics scene showing a clash between you and the enemy. Also, the game is pretty generous with early game prizes, enabling you to quickly develop your base and to grow a strong army before the planet shield, disallowing enemies to invade your base, drops off. We played the game for more than a week and discovered lots of usable and helpful things during our journey through space. Stay with us and find out how to build a strong planetary empire in Stellar Age.
1. Don’t Be Afraid To Upgrade Each And Every Building
The first thing you should do once you start playing Stellar Age is to upgrade your buildings. The first couple of levels are very cheap to upgrade and they take just a couple of minutes for upgrading so we advise you to start upgrading production buildings first, followed by other important buildings that include the research center, main base, as well as the salvage center that warps destroyed ships back to your base.
While notifications are usually pretty annoying we recommend allowing Stellar Age to show them during the first couple of days because you will want to upgrade your base as fast as possible. Just leave notifications on and upgrade your buildings as long as you have enough resources. Of course, not all buildings should be constantly upgraded. The most important production building you should spend most resources on is ore mine. Metal is the most important resource during the first couple of days of playing Stellar Age because every single ship and defensive tower asks for lots of metal. Also, salvaging ships also asks for lots of metal so make sure that your ore mine gets upgraded as soon as you collect enough resources.
2. Attack Weak Pirates
As we said before, the game switches random resource stashes with pirates. And the stronger a pirate band is the more resources they hold. The problem is that in most cases if you want to get back ships lost during the attack on pirates you will have to pay more resources than you’d get for defeating a band of pirates. Yes, ships cost only metal but they cost so much metal that other resource prizes just aren’t worth it because metal is the most important resource, much more important than polymers and antimatter. These two resources become more valuable as you progress through the game, but early game asks for lots of metal so avoid attacking pirate camps that would take down more than five percent of your fleet.
In order to discover potential losses you have to spy on enemies and we advise you to spy on each enemy before attacking them. Focus on weaker pirates because they would destroy just a couple of your ships, making your metal storage filled even after salvaging ships. And be sure to upgrade Vacuum Polarization tech and other technologies that decrease costs of salvaging ships. Also, don’t spend resources on unnecessarily upgrading your Warp Complex. As long as it can salvage all the ships you lose in one battle encounter it’s upgraded enough. Once you see that you cannot salvage all of the ships you lost, only then upgrade Ward Complex.
So, it is better to attack weaker bands of pirates. They will get you resources but they won’t hit your fleet hard enough to lose lots of ships and become weaker. And since objectives (that earn you resources once completed) don’t ask from you to attack powerful pirates (they just ask to attack pirates, no matter how weak they are) it is much cost effective to avoid attacking strong band of pirates.
3. Building Defensive Installations Is Important, Especially When The Planet Shield Is Active
While this might seem counterintuitive, it is better to increase your defensive potential as soon as you start building your base in Stellar Age. Yes, you are protected with a planet shield for a couple of days, but if you think you will be safe once the shield is dropped, just roam the area around your planet base a bit. Yup, there are lots of other players in near vicinity that have lots of power points. And yup, you can bet they will invade your base as soon as your planet shield is broken.
So, as soon as you start upgrading other buildings, start doing some research too. Just upgrade the research center to at least level 3 and then start researching technologies that lead to laser defensive towers. Once you reach the tech, start building all the laser towers you can. And since we already said that metal is an important resource, we hope your ore mine is of high level because your metal production should be highly developed to satisfy your production needs. So, wait with shipbuilding, your first order of business should be defensive towers.
4. Skip On Building Light Fighters
Light fighters are your first option to build in Stellar Age. But we advise you to skip building them completely. As we said above, you should focus on improving your defenses early game, before your planet shield disappears. And once that happens and you have strong defenses, only then you may commence improving your attacking potential. And since you already researched most technologies needed to reach heavy fighter blueprint tech, it is better to keep researching until you unlock it than to spend resources on building light ships. They are way weaker and won’t give you as much power as heavy ones, and they offer way lower attack potential than heavy fighters.
5. Research New Technologies
There are countless technologies to research in Stellar Age, and you should find out which ones you will focus during early game. Basically, technologies are divided into two groups. The first group is made out of technologies that cannot be upgraded, like different blueprints. The second group is made out of technologies you can upgrade, usually up to 30 levels in total.
Since you need to research every new technology in order to unlock more powerful warships and better defensive towers, unlocking new tech is practically mandatory in Stellar Age. But once you discover a new technology it is up to you to decide is it worth it to research new levels of a technology. We advise you to research new levels of those technologies that upgrade metal production since this resource is very important for production. It is up to you to decide which technologies you will research pass the basic level. You should focus on those that you think are important for your play style. Increase production rates if you plan on attacking other players frequently, as well as armor and damage. If you plan on going defensive then research armor, defensive damage, and similar defensive-based technologies.
And one last advice. Don’t spend the premium currency on speeding up building and tech research. It is way better to spend it on getting resource packs and for getting unique bonuses such as planet shield.
Okay, folks, that’s all for now. We hope our strategy guide helped you getting your planet-wide base in Stellar Age on feet and becoming powerful enough to drive other players away from your planet. Thanks for reading and happy gaming!
Tom Van Dam
Tuesday 24th of November 2020
Well, that was a rather distorted, superficial review. It is VERY worthwhile to attack other planets and you do get more out of them than what is required to repair or salvage ships. You just have to have enough ships of a high enough level. When you get farther in the game, polymer and antimatter play a more important role, especially when doing the research. It is very important to join a good corporation (corp for short), they can provide help via knowledge, group attacks and other areas. You get the most rewards when participating in a group activity. Also note that some things cannot be done on an individual basis. Elite pirates cannot be attacked except as a rally, where you invite others in your corp to join you. When you get to a little higher group of pirates to attack (say level 10), you will sometimes get the materials from the attack but also there will be salvage material floating around which you can then collect. This can be quite a large quantity as you progress through the game (I have seen some that were over 400 million units). Who wants to watch the attacks when there is so much to do in other areas. It takes flight time to travel to a pirate or planet, it takes time to collect the scrap materials are you attack a pirate and it takes time to build everything. You don't have time to sit there and watch attacks. Overall, this is a very interesting game and involves a lot of strategy in the type of ships you send to attack down to the commanders and second in command assigned to the mission. Some commanders are hunters, some resource gatherers and some defenders. Build them up based on your needs.