Quick Start Guide
From DarkGalaxy
New player guide
If you are completely new to DG, all of this might seem a bit complicated. This manual is here to help you get acquainted to the game concepts, and help you find your way in the DG community.
If you haven’t already created a game account, you should do so now.
Contents |
Building your first structure
First of all, let’s put your population to work.
Log in, ( http://jupiter.darkgalaxy.com/ )
and go to the planets page by clicking on the “Planets” button in the top bar.
This is your planetlist. You have only one planet for now, but this will (hopefully) become a very long list later on.
Click on the name of your planet, and you will be taken to the building page.
Here you can control what the people will build on this planet. Directly under the top bar you will see a block with some basic info about your planet, it’s picture and a few buttons to go to the different screens for this planet (building, production, training and communications).
On the lower left is a block called “Completed Structures”. This displays everything that is already built on this planet.Your first planet is given to you with 1 farm, 1 solar generator, 3 metal mines and 3 mineral extractors. They provide you with enough income to get started.
On the right you see an empty block called “Structure Queue”. This displays all the buildings that are being built at this moment such as queued buildings.
Let’s fill it up shall we?
Look at the block below, called “Structures available to build”. This is a list of buildings you can choose from. For now, select a metal mine, and click the “build structure” button.
Congratulation, you've just started building your first structure. Many will follow. To get an overview about all structures in the game, read the building list.
What to build first?
To start successfully into the game, there are some basic structures you'll need for a fast start. The order on which you build those will determine your strategy for the first period of the game and vice-versa. Important buildings for the start are:
- Metal Mines and Mineral Extractors to get resources for building other structures and your first space ships. Your stock at the start will run out quite soon.
- Leisure Center to increase you population faster. Some important buildings for the start require a lot of worker to build them.
- Launch Site to be able to build a Ship Yard
- Ship Yard to be able to build Outposts and colonize new worlds
- Light Weapons Factory to be able to build Army Barracks and to create basic combat ship designs in your Ship Yard
- Research Lab for researching better technologies
- You should also take care that you have always enough energy incoming to power your new buildings.
Now it's your choice on which strategy to go with. If you are new to the game and without assistance from an established alliance with experience, you might better go for a Colonizing Strategy. In this case you should try to get a Ship Yard as fast as possible, building Metal Mines and Mineral Extractors only before (don't forget enough Energy to power buildings and Farms to feed your people). Nearly all experienced players colonize at least 6 planets and sometimes over 20 before they start invading planets.
You can also try an Invasion Strategy where you will wait much longer for you first colonized planet but you'll invade an already build up planet from your enemy. For this strategy you will need to build a Ship Yard, Light Weapons Factory and Army Barracks, produce an Invasion Ship and train Soldiers. This strategy is not recommended if it is your first round as it is much, much more risky.
For the Research Lab you have to do a choice: Having many planets right from the beginning is a huge advantage. Whatever you'll need to have to pull back building of the Research Lab and missing research time can be a huge disadvantage later too.
Starting inside an established alliance often provides you the advantage of getting a planet building order for the first 200 turns or so, which provides you to best follow up goals and achieve them as fast as possible.
Where to go?
You now have your first outpost or your first invasion fleet ready to go for a second world. It's time to make a decision where to go now. If this is your first round and you start only freelancing without any alliance on the beginning, you should stay in your home galaxy. This provides you a near distance to your new worlds which mean short travel distances. It also prevents you to be killed by elite players since they'll always go for the better planets in Free Galaxies (Read: Navigation).
Even starting with an alliance where none has already experience in this game, it is almost suicide to go for a FreeGal right away. You might be able to successfully get a foothold there, but when half of the game will be over, the good alliances will not tolerate your presence any more.
If you start as newbie in an experienced alliance, you don't have to worry about where to go. Your alliance leadership will tell you where to send your fleets. They will know where you'll encounter which enemies and according to this you will avoiding or facing them. You're almost sure to end up in a FreeGal if you alliance isn't gone for a smooth testing round.
What to research first?
When you got your Research Lab and trained your first Scientists (Read: Training), you surely want to know what you should research first. (Read: Research) If you cannot be near a computer every 9 hours, you might invest some time for Planet Management Research and Queue Length 4 Research. Depending on your strategy, you have to take all further descissions. People on Fast Colonizing Strategy will need to research additional Planet Limits early ingame while others can first concentrate on better resource technologies. Do not research Mass Production right away since you won't have enough resources for their expensiv buildings early ingame. Researching at least one type of advanced trading or combat ships will provide you faster fleets by putting one of those advanced ships into your fleet.
- Read Chapter Research for more information.
Which alliance to join?
Without doubt, the best place to learn the game is an experienced alliance. Whatever, most of them do not recruit once a round has been started. On the one hand it's a security risk to maybe face a spy, on the other hand their strategy is already set up by then. If you want to become part of such an alliance, look around for recruitment threads on DarkGalaxy Forums (Jupiter or Pluto subforum).
Alliances that recruit ingame during the round are often mass inviter alliances without good organisation or tactic. They are a save place to survive in HomeGals but no real place to go to FreeGals to with. Whatever they are a fine place to make friends if you couldn't join an experienced alliance in your first round or you don't have that much time.
Forums
One of the most important things about DG is the Forums http://www.turnengine.com/forums/.
Here all the players get together to discuss everything about the game and more.
Important forum sections:
• Announcements. http://www.turnengine.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=78
Game admins inform the community about important developments concerning DG
• Help & Support http://www.turnengine.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=94
If you have any questions about DG, you can ask here. But before you ask, try to find the answer in the manual and the announcement section, or see if it is already asked.
• General Discussion. http://www.turnengine.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=92
Here everyone can talk about DG in general, from all kinds of polls to complaining about ads.
• Alliances: Jupiter (round 2) http://www.turnengine.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=116
This is where all discussion about alliances takes place. Several alliances are always on the lookout for new members, and this is the place where they advertise. We strongly advise you take a look here!
• Alliances: Pluto (round 1)http://www.turnengine.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=100
This is where all discussion about alliances takes place. Several alliances are always on the lookout for new members, and this is the place where they advertise. We strongly advise you take a look here!
IRC
Now there is just one important part of DG left to explore, and it is probably the most important one: IRC. If you have checked out the Alliance recruitment threads, you have probably seen that they ask you to come to their IRC channel. IRC is a chatsystem where all of the major alliances talk and make strategies, but also make a lot of fun and friends. You will find that DG has a community that is very open to new players if you get on IRC and talk to a few people. Check out the IRC Tutorial if you are new to IRC. DG resides on the chatspike IRC network: irc.darkgalaxy.com The official Darkgalaxy channel is #darkgalaxy . A few alliances use their full name (without spaces) as their irc channel eg #darkempire , however most use their tags eg #brc for Black Rider Commandos.
That was all you needed to get started! Of course there is a lot more to DG, but you will find this out on the way. Good luck on your way to glory!
