Galaxy Life Defending Your Planet Guide

Galaxy Life Defending Your Planet Guide by Stormcaller3801

Let’s begin with the basics: there’s no real way to keep your planet secure. Eventually an opponent or series of opponents will assault your planet and through sheer weight of numbers tear down your defenses. Your best bet is to try and minimize the gains they can make through careful base design.

Why?
The first thing to do is ask, “Why are they attacking me?” Well, there’s a number of reasons. The most common is resources- raiding another planet can yield coins and minerals faster than you can earn them, if you manage to pillage more than it costs you in terms of training/building units.

The second reason is parts- destroying Warp Gates and Star Bases in particular will give an opponent parts you can’t get otherwise. Star Bases yield several different items that are essential to efficiency and upgrades, such as Hammers and Mana Lights.

Priorities
This then gives us information on what our attackers’ priorities are likely to be- and what we can do in response. Resources come from houses, mines, Silos and Banks, while items come from Star Bases and Warp Gates. So these are the locations opponents will want to hit.

Priority 1: Banks and Silos
Your Banks and Silos are your highest defense priority because they hold massive amounts of resources- something that’s difficult to recover from quickly. The buildings may be repaired, but the riches inside take time to accumulate.

Priority 2: Compact Houses and Mines
After your Banks and Silos, these are the places that hold your resources- particularly when you’re not around to collect from them. The more frequently you collect resources, the less risk involved in having them destroyed. Even when they are destroyed, you typically recover a lot of the resources they hold once they’re repaired.

Priority 3: Warp Gates and Star Base
In as much as the Star Base is your ‘HQ’ unit, it doesn’t really cost you much to have it destroyed, at least as best as I can tell. It only holds a small amount of resources and repairs can be done instantly, while a damaged Star Base doesn’t cause problems for the rest of your buildings. Similarly, the only risk in having a Warp Gate destroyed is if you have units there waiting to be sent out- at this point you risk losing the value of the units.

Priority 4: Other Buildings
Destroying any other building you own won’t do more than cost you the minerals required to repair it instantly, and possibly the time that was spent with the building destroyed. This is a fairly minor loss, and thus makes these buildings a very low priority.

Defenses
Now that we know what we want to defend, the question is, how do we defend it? There’s multiple answers to this one.

Turrets
Your main defensive option will be turrets. Each variety of turret has its own strengths and weaknesses, and there are specific things to keep in mind to make the most of them.

1. Team Up Turrets
Grouping turrets together will help you in a couple ways. The first is eliminating weaknesses. A Cannon Blast turret has trouble dealing with a small number of really tough targets, while a Sniper turret has issues with large groups of weak targets. By putting these two towers together you ensure an attacker can’t exploit a weakness in one of them.

2. Concentrate Fire
Much the same way that 10 Marines firing at one thing will destroy their target faster than 10 Marines firing at ten things, setting up your turrets so that they can fire at the same target will eliminate the target faster. This makes it much harder for your opponent to eliminate your turrets. Just keep in mind too that your turrets have limited range, and so you need to balance concentration of fire with protecting all angles of attack.

3. Range and Target Type
One of the first things you notice when you start placing turrets is that some of them (Snipers) have a much longer range than others (Cannon Blast). You may also notice that only certain turrets can attack air units, while others can’t attack ground units. Your best bet here is to arrange your turrets to make sure you take this into account- keep the short-ranged turrets further out so they can engage enemies earlier (preferably while protected by long-range turrets), and make sure you can engage any type of enemy that comes at you.

Walls
Walls don’t do much on their own- a wall with no turret to back it up can be blown up safely, or ignored completely. That’s not to say they aren’t useful, however.

1. Area Denial
Here’s one of the most viable way to use walls: deny your attacker areas to land units. By using walls to fill in gaps between buildings, you force them to assault the outer layers of your defenses first, and work their way in. That way they can’t bypass things.

2. Traffic Control
This works to a point. Attempting to funnel attacking units into a given area will tend to either get them to charge straight in where you want them or get them to sit there and attack the walls instead. This seems largely dependent upon target priority; Flamethrowers will scoot around a wall to reach a turret, while Bazookas will just hang out and shoot. This can be useful for dividing up opposing forces.

3. Time Wasting
Attackers only have six minutes to assault your base- the longer they spend shooting walls, the less time they have to blast the things they want to blast. This works best with enemies that will happily target anything they see, and is of limited use; if you can’t repair the walls between assaults, they aren’t there to help you later.

Bunkers
Bunkers are an excellent defense because they represent an unknown for your opponent. They can’t know what you have inside, and thus cannot modify their assault force to compensate. They also represent a larger concentration of firepower than your turrets. Place them wisely and enjoy the damage that they can cause on your behalf.

Traps
Traditionally traps are used for area denial- opponents don’t want to walk into an area because it has traps in it. However, in Galaxy Life attacking Starlings don’t really care- they just wander straight into them. This means they work better for softening up the enemy before they reach your lines.

How do we do this? You have two options.

The Honey Pot
Set up a tempting area- maybe some low level resource generators, or a weak point in your defenses- and then trap the spot that the enemy is likely to land in or travel over to reach it. This is hard to pull off, and will only work once- an opponent who’s savvy to this trick will drop some Marines in to set off the Traps, then bring in heavy guns. Or use units that are immune, such as Wasps.

The Outer Line
Scatter Traps around your base, wherever it seems likely attacking units will pass through. This is usually a learning process- pay attention to the replays of attacks to see where people like to land units, and how those units move during the attack.Scatter Traps around there.

The Plan
Now that you know what you want to protect and what you have to defend it, lets look at some plans for how to tie it all together.

The Sacrifice
This is largely a plan built around the question of, “What am I willing to give up?” Rather than try to defend everything, you choose things you’re willing to let your attacker have and set them up as easy targets, while concentrating your defenses around the things you really want to keep safe. This encourages attackers to take what you offer and then avoid the losses they’d incur by attacking the rest of your base.

The Scattershot
Splitting things up, you scatter buildings and defenses across the map into small groupings. The idea is that attackers can’t hit it all, so at most you lose a few groupings but save the rest. It works largely against opponents who’ll only make one attack- and presumes they don’t have enough troops to just swarm everything quickly.

The Layered Brick
Clustering everything together into a symmetrical fortress in the middle of the map, you layer buildings and defenses with your highest priority stuff in the center. No matter where the opponent comes from, you have defenses pointed that way. The downsides here are divided defenses- your turrets have to cover all directions- and that you will have to put some things on the outer layers. This will usually mean using resource generators and low priority buildings as walls to help protect your turrets, while trying to keep them within those same turrets’ range. If an opponent can tear through one side, they can probably keep going all the way through to the other.

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2 Responses

  1. mateo says:

    can also make a wall maze for units that have priority targets, they run throug the maze while gettin shooted by turrtets, also, the litlle space between the maze walls maximise the power of traps and mines

  2. Anonymous says:

    Thanks!! Now I can use all these informations to better protect my planet! Cheers! Thanks again!

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