I have went over my guide once and corrected mistakes. Grammar is my weakness. Also, I am very specific in the beginning of this guide. My goal is to set a good foundation to your base with helpful tips and pictures. I set general goals to hit for each wave/horde.

Difficulty and Length explained:
- Length of the game has 4 stages, Short to Long. Long games are the easiest as it gives you more time between hordes to prepare and expand.
- Difficulty from what I can tell primarily translates to more enemies, higher saturation of tougher enemies and bigger hordes.
Setting the difficulty to Explorer and the length to Epic will give you the best parameters to learn the game mechanics. I recommend doing this if you have never played TAB or a similar game before, especially if your new to RTS. For my TAB gamers you can set the difficulty to Settler.

Default captain is really good, faster shooting troopers and unlock-able perks for your ship are your main advantage.
Arm mounted rockets come in handy for taking out pockets of a horde and dealing high damage to special enemies, it also has good range. Marine Capacity and crew efficiency are useful for your ship allowing you to do more with less.
Commandos are cool I guess, they have long range and high damage but struggle with groups of enemies like hordes which is the main thing that ends games. Can be used to clear fog of war and explore since they don't trigger buried Goo, you will need a lot of them to overcome the slow fire rate. They are unlocked early in the mid game.

Your basic ship is about as good as the rest, A couple stand out but they all do the same thing for the most part. The main difference is size and how easy it is to build new modules. Big ship = big cost = more room.

Keep in mind that not all starts are equal and you can restart for a better spawn.

I like to open with 5 habs in U shape pattern (Eventually it will be 8 habs with a space in the middle for a robotics facility) followed by a water pump with roads leading to where I want the crystal mine that I will immediately save up for.

Take note of my unit placement. My troopers are defending each side of my base, you really dont need to defend you main structure as you will have plenty of time to pull a unit to protect it since it has mega HP. My troopers defend while I send my captain out to clear the initial landing area and then push out to gain XP.

After you build your crystal Mine you will need to place a solar panel for power and save up immediately for a barracks to train more troopers so you can expand.

Below is an example of a 8 hab layout with a robotics facility in the middle.

The 2 orange boxes are where your troops spawn from the barracks, make sure the orange boxes are in the open. I like to place mine on roads as I generally don't remove roads.
Its time to start producing troopers to guard your expansion. I don't have a set amount I like to build, I just build them in batches and they are needed for the next part of this guide. So I don't know, build like 4.

Note: As you can see I lied and built 2 solar and even more habs, that delayed my barracks but Its not that big of a deal, make sure you expand your base like I am: more habs, more water, more power and more troops.

Make sure you reasonably exhaust all the resources in your starting area, keep your building protected with troops (setting your troops to patrol can help cover larger areas). Make sure your getting all the crystals you can, build more habs, collect more water.

Your captain should be clearing all the mobs on the edge of your starting area, lookout for new spots to expand to, your looking for dirt ore, crystals, grass and choke points. If your running android hero you can send your drone out and use your sky ranger to scout. On settler you can go out and explore a bit, just got to keep watch of the underground goo spawning a bunch of dudes.

once it feels financially reasonable to expand (got most of your resources, your overflowing resources etc etc.) place a thumper at the edge of your base and guard it with your commander or a couple troopers.

As you can see in the Image there is dirt ore, more crystals and a large mtn wall creating a natural choke point that only flying enemies can pass. Early dirt ore can net you an early cannon on your ship and/or mortar squads.

To the north there is a geyser and a large amount of juicy crystals. geysers net you 50 water once you research their specific building, its a later early game tech that you can get once you have a decent amount of habs.

Generally speaking, having space, crystals and water will lead to a powerful economy. Dirt ore allows construction of powerful units and defenses, a lot of which have aoe attacks. They also are needed for upgraded ship modules.

You may have noticed these on your minimap.








These are deadly goo snipers:

A very large group of enemies will come from each exclamation mark. They often times will split and hit the whole side of your base they approach from. Even if it doesn't look like they would go for a spot on your base, if its on the side facing them they often do so don't leave openings in your defense, they also can have flying enemies that go over mountains. If you got a solar panel in a corner of a mtn range facing them you might want to keep a group of troopers nearby just in case.



Settler diff: Double wall, bunkers and couple mortars held super easy. really didn't need the mortars.



It generally feels like the hordes will be about 2 times larger each time. at the end they come from 2 sides. They will also get artillery (lobbers) and spawners. Late stages will come with very tanky units.

In between waves the enemy will send units to attack your base, starts off with the trash, but they start adding thrashers, after the first horde they start sending 1 or 2 thrashers and sometimes ranged units. you will need a couple troopers at each point of your defense and eventually bunkers.

After the third horde its common for long rang enemies that can out range your troopers to appear, you can counter this with a bunker. You can counter lobbers with your own mortars.

Maybe you have taken a look at your ship and noticed that all the basic modules are like 20+ crystals and you wonder how you can afford that? well the factory just straight up doubles your crystals and ores. Highly recommend getting it before your second horde.

To build it just place it anywhere and it does the rest. Mined resources automatically go to it and it gets doubled.

(Image is of a cycle 53 base)

As you can see water takes a lot of space compared to the actual habs.

Your ship is expensive to get going, but its power is immense and can single handily carry hordes with its giant cannons. The issue is that its not ready at all when you start and you need to build it up like you did your base. This costs a ton of crystals, especially if you have the bigger damaged ships.


Ships have three bars you want to balance and keep out of the red. First off, the one in the middle determines how often your ship gets attacked by aliens and how many attack. An alien attack effectively shuts down your ships functions for it duration, this sucks when you need to fire cannons at a horde. I don't know what happens if you lose all your marines from an invasion, its kinda hard to do that. The power bar needs to be at least positive to to charge the bar on the right side of the screen where your cannon button will be. without positive power you cant fire. Crew efficiency does as it says.

As you can notice there are modules with chocolate bars at the top of them, those are hard-points and those are the only spots you can build cannons. The first level of the cannon is weak but you can shoot 2 times in a row. A factory is advised before you start building your ship since it doubles materials.

I start upgrading my ship once I start having a surplus of crystals or cant spend them quick enough.

Hovering over the buttontells you how many shots you have which is also indicated by the bullet symbols next to it. The bullet symbol gets bigger as you upgrade the cannon module. It also tells you how much energy is required per individual use.

The main thing to note is how much energy you need to fire all your bullets, the bar on the right is filled by your ships generators. If you have 4 shots/uses you want to have enough energy to fire them all. They have decent reload speed so having less is a waste in my opinion.

A quick note if your wondering if you should get 2 cannons or 1 upgrade: the upgraded module is like firing 2 smaller cannons per use but you save 50 energy and you only need 1 slot on your ship.

Targeting: it will take about 1.5 seconds for the first part of the salvo to hit so aim towards the front of a horde. You can also wait for the horde to get clumped on your walls since the salvo wont hurt your structures.

What you should have:
-Double walls (you can get away with 1 but I hope the saved minerals were used for troops)
-Minefield (mines can be built in the red without triggering the goo so as long as you have vision and no enemies are too close you can build to your hearts content)
-Mortars (optional) They do good damage in a small area, you need numbers to make them effective.
-Troopers in bunkers
-Ship cannon (You can do without, but its risky if you don't have numbers/good aoe).

You can use your captain to reinforce a weaker side.

After your 2nd horde you should have a pretty good grasp on the economy and expansion. You may notice mistakes made in the early game and that might result in not having enough economy to defend the 3rd horde. This is fine, when you start a new game you can eliminate what set you back before and you will be at a better position.

But anyways, for your 3rd horde I recommend 1 medium ship cannon or 2 small cannons. 2 layers of mines is advised too. more mortars. A laser tower is pretty good for the cost too.

I recommend a gun turret, 5 mortars per point of contact. 2-3 layers of mines. 2 medium ship cannons with the energy required to fire them all at once. At this point you should have access to walkers so any that you have built. Troopers start being irrelevant at this. they are really only good for non horde defense. The rocket turret isn't very cost effective, I wouldn't build them to be honest, Id rather build the mobile rocket truck.

Im not sure if its possible for them to come at 2 sides yet. Mine didn't for the 4th horde on settler.

Assuming you have plenty of effort to go around you can make a recycle that allows you to buy crystals, ores and even uranium with effort. you can also exchange ores and crystals etc. this allows you to recycle your surplus into what you need at the moment.

So I recommend putting your whole economy into defenses like gun turrets, mortars. Once you know the directions, spam mines turrets along those entry points. If you built walkers spread them out as you see fit. Get ready to pull them to sides that buckle and slow the goo.

Unlike the rest of the hordes you don't have to beat it, you just have to last long enough for the main base to take off. As long as they don't steam roll your defenses you should be able to place secondary walls and mines on the inside to slow them down if they do get through your walls.

I did settler on medium length and My finial wave was from 2 directions.