Light of Nova Early Game Guide

Light of Nova Early Game Guide by yonder

Early game guide

1. Build resources
2. Build Leopard Flagship to Lvl 5 to do ancient battleground missions
3. Build Fleet
4. Do adventure missions to get additional personnel
5. Build another mothership / Seize another planet

1. Build Resources

On newer servers, PvP attacks are not a concern until weeks or months later. If you try to do the PvE missions too early, your fleet will be too small and you will lose many ships. So don’t worry about building ships at the outset. If you do missions early, it is mainly for the purpose of getting more personnel, not ships resources or other goodies.  Similarly, research is not really a priority at the outset – just enough to do tasks 1-5 listed above. What you do need to get down to doing from the start is building resources.

Light of Nova has generally short building times, especially in the early game. Hence, the main bottleneck that players face are resource shortages. So you should focus on gathering resources from the starting point. How to do this?

-Build your Metal and Crystal Refineries up to lvl 25 or so (and later on, after you finish steps 2-5, to lvl 30+).
-Don’t build anything else except Control Centre and Power Plant (which you need to upgrade the refineries), as well as Warehouse (Lvl 10 or so, depending on how often you login) to store resources gathered.
-Every time you login, go to the metal and crystal asteroids to pick up your freebies
– explore wormholes every hour or so that when they appear. Beat the mini-game and you can get goodies, which sometimes include metal and crystal packs
-Explore nearby stars
-Do your daily missions everyday to get resource packs and coin cards.
-If you are lucky enough to get commanders with metal or crystal specialisation skills, MAX these out. There will be plenty of combat specialists you can find later on when you do adventure missions.
-For your governor, MAX politics stat to boost resource production.
-Premium items : Don’t use mining ships or beam drills in the early game. Save these for when you have multiple motherships. If you wish, you can use construction specialisation to speed up contruction of refineries, control center, warehouse and power plant etc
-Research Techs: Should you focus on research techs early game? Not worth it in my view, better to spend the resources that would have to go on research labs on refineries instead. Even resource techs give very little bang for the buck so I would avoid these. Save up your nova coins for basic and advance engineering to build up your second mothership.

2. Build leopard flagship

Once your resource are around 5K per hour each for metal and crystal, start building the techs (manufacturing) and buildings (shipyards) needed to build a leopard flagship. Once you can get the flagship up to lvl 5, you can use the flagship on its own to fight and win Lvl 7-8 Ancient Battleground battles and many of the early missions. Equip the leopard with Barrage for anti-fighter, and the 2nd best weapon and armor you can afford, but don’t bother with building your leopard to lvl 10 – save the resources for better flagships. Another reason for fighting Ancient Battleground lvl 7 and above is to start collecting lion blueprints.

3. Build Fleet

Once you are ready to start the various missions, start building your fleet. For maximum efficiency, build a fleet that overwhelms the enemy, no matter what battle you are fighting.  This will result in minimal losses as the enemy is wiped out in the first few rounds, before they can do major damage.

4. Get additional personnel

Do the adventure storyline missions with your fleet to get more personnel (and other goodies like nova coins). You will lose ships this way, but the resources that are awarded at the end of each adventure help some way toward repair costs. With more personnel, you can explore more of the galaxy at a much faster rate and you will also be more likely to find personnel with skills that you really need (like resource specialisation, or skills for ships you have, e.g. winds, tempests, hammers and knights)

5. Build another mothership / seize another planet

Start getting the necessary tech (lvl 5 basic engineering and lvl 1 advanced engineering – I hope you saved up your nova coins – if not, hit the assembly line!) to build your mothership (or buy diamonds if you wanna save time lol). You also need a massive fleet to kill the NPC planet defence fleets. Scout the planet you have in mind with a single fighter before attacking with your mainfleet. Figure on a few hundred tempest and hammers and knights to overwhelm the defenders. Also advice is: don’t conquer the nearest planet which is minutes away. Save that for exploration missions to build up special flagship equipment. Conquer the second nearest planet instead. Once you have a second mothership, rinse and repeat with the resource refineries. If you want, you can make your second mothership a production facility for basic ships like winds, tempests, hammers and knights. Alternatively, just keep it as a resource generator. If so, then you may wish to build up your transport port at the second mothership to transfer resources to your primary mothership.

Happy Gaming!!