Cosmic Supremacy Guide: New Player Guide:

This guide is originally from Cosmic Supremacy Official Site, which was written by uncountednose. This guide may not be exact. The game is under constant development and these guides, therefore, grow more and more obsolete with time. At this point, this guide can still provide you with very valuable information on the more general subjects, but examples and values given are likely to be outdated.

UN’s New Player Guide
By uncountednose

Prologue

It seems that quit a few people are having some difficulty getting started and i thought i would try to write a plain english guide covering the beginning of the game and a few principles to get people going in the right direction. I am assuming that you at least browsed the manual and played the tutorial galaxy. If you haven’t go do that now. I am going to try to keep this guide from being to specific for three reasons:

1. having been in the military I am a big believer in the K.I.S.S. Principle (keep it simple stupid)
2. I don’t want everyone to play the same way because its boring. I think this game is designed well enough to allow multiple paths to victory so I encourage new players to use this as a starting point, not a bible.
3. I don’t want to give away to much about how I play.

Click here for full image

Getting Started


You are going to start with 1 planet and 2 colony ships. The first thing is you need to get those colony ships moving and get your planet doing something.

Pick the two most attractive planets in your system and send your colony ships towards them. You want to pick planets with good food, production, and science output with food and production being the most important. Size is important but in the very beginning this is not a big consideration because you are not going to have max pop planets. Eventually you are going to colonize all of your home systems so pick the planets that are going to give you the most benefit immediately. On turn 1 a planet with 4 food and 4 production with a max population of 17 is more attractive than a planet with 3 food and 3 production planet with a max population of 35. In the long run the second planet is much more valuable but we are talking about turn 1 not turn 100. You also want one of those planets to have 4 science production because you need to get your research going soon. Many players start researching on their home planet from turn 1 so you need to get moving. Couple of tips:

• 3 food/3 production is greater than 2 food/4 production or 4 food/2 production at this point.
• make sure you set your ships to colonize planets, not to move to planets.(i have done this)

You also need to get that home planet going. Set up a queue of 3 farms. Make half your pop farmers the other half workers and make a governor to maintain that. Once you colonize those other two planets set them up the same way.

Moving Along

Once you get those three farms built on your home planet its time to build ships. Some players will build ships immediately, others will wait longer. Find what works for you but for the purpose of this guide this is the time to start building ships. You have a big choice at this point, build a scout or a colony ship. Lets look at the advantages of each:

• scout ships allow you to explore surrounding systems sooner allowing you to make informed decisions about where to send you colony ships. Even if you don’t build one immediately you need to make one soon.
• colony ships allow you to increase your planet count sooner. More planets=more economy=faster start=more likely to win. There is some risk involved you may find a really poor system or you may find another players home system. Colonizing someones home system is risky and slightly aggressive. Its risky because they have at least one developed planet and you have a 2 population colony. One troop ship can end your stay in that particular system. Your other option is to send your colony ship to another system which can be very time consuming.