Hades Star Elite Economy and Resources
Hades Star Elite - Introduction to Economy and Resources P1
Today's post is a long one; but it is an important follow up article to the New Player Walkthrough series. This is also a topic that deserves it's own discussion. This article will serve as an introduction to the subject in question, with additional articles to follow.
What is that topic? Economy, and the economic resources of Hades Star
Why does this deserve it's own discussion, you may ask?
Because Hades Star, at it's heart, is a resource management campaign focused on economic development. The better your daily Credits income, the more you progress. The better your fuel efficiency, the more Credits you can earn.
The paramount resource most of us will struggle with is patience. The second crucial resource is time. Patience and time go hand in hand. Always keep in mind that Hades Star is not designed like any other mobile game (that I've found anyway.) Hades Star will take only days for you to become proficient, but it will take weeks and months to master.
With regular play and time management, you can go from level 1 to 40 in 30 days or less. That's a significant amount of progress. While level is not an accurate representation of progress advancement, it is a relevant indication of time invested into Hades.
A month spent playing Hades Star, without spending crystals, is about the it will take for an aggressive, active player to reach a maximum credit storage capacity of 120,000C. At 120k, you can afford some critical steps in moving upwards in your Hades career; the most notable of which is the level 5 upgrade for your Red Star Scanner. Level 5 is a heavy transition in your RS career. Chances are you will spend a month or several at this level of progress.
This is where patience becomes more than critical, it becomes necessity. RS5 is not a "burn and churn" farm, whereas RS4 can be treated that way.
As you progress further and further through Hades Star, build times for structures, planet upgrades, and module research escalates rather rapidly. Colonizing a planet is always instant, but upgrading a planet from level 14 to 15 will take 3 days.
The "in game" resources are as follows: hydrogen, credits, storage space, artifacts, blueprints, ships, modules, research capacity, and Crystals (capital C.)
Side note: There is the Blue crystal artifact, which you research or salvage. And there are Crystals, which are the in-game premium currency purchased with irl $$ and sometimes found via planet to planet shipments. Thus 'blue crystal' or 'Crystal.'
With regards to Hydrogen and Credits, effectively they are one and the same. Without hydrogen, your fleets are at a stand still. At zero H, not even your miners can move.
Maximizing your hydrogen capacity, gathering speed, and gathering potential are critical. Equally important is maintaining a fleet with minimal fuel consumption. Taking an approach that keeps these two ideas in mind will allow you to regularly finish two shipment cycles per day, while still earning a substantial sum of credits through salvage operations.
By my experience, there are several factors in play regarding hydrogen generation. The most significant factor is the amount of sectors you have revealed by short range scanners. Revealed sectors influence many things in Hades, including planet locations and future credit costs. The number of asteroids that spawn in a given sector starts low, with higher value hydrogen. The number of asteroid spawns in a given sector increases as the number of sectors revealed increases. Once a hex is uncovered by a short range scanner, it will have that same number of asteroids in perpetuity.
In contrast, the more purple gas rocks in a hex, the lower the starting value of said asteroids. This is important because of modules like Remote Mining and Enrich.
As for maintaining a low fuel consumption fleet. The concept here is to have enough firepower and defenses to obtain sufficient current-tier red star artifacts to continually feed your research lab. This is a rather delicate balancing act. No two players will have the same fuel requirements. Playstyle, activity levels and tech advancements all affect how much fuel your fleet will consume in a given 24 hour period. Ultimately, you will want to only upgrade your technologies when you absolutely need to. For example, keep your transports at four ton capacity until you are ready for red star tier 5. Another example is to not level your battleships to 2 until rs4.
I touched on hydrogen, and credits would make sense to be the next resource on the priority list. However, they are further down the line.
Since there is a maximum amount of fuel and credits which can be warehoused at any given time, resource storage capacity is just as important as resource generation. All major credit purchases are gated behind storage capacity requirements. It is important to continue leveling your planets, not just to earn better value shipments, but also to increase your maximum storage. Exceeding your credit or hydrogen maximums results in wasted resources, especially wasted time. This is something to avoid where and when ever possible.
Research capacity is one of the few fixed resources in Hades Star. You can only ever build on research station, which will always have a fixed amount of four artifact slots for researching. Artifacts from rs1 thru rs5 take between 2 to 3 hours to research. So on average you will need to check your research station at least twice a day. This circles back to time management.
There are two things to note with research stations: one is salvaging artifacts. To salvage efficiently, you will want to leave one slot open on your artifact research station. This will require more time management so you don't have a time frame where nothing is being researched, but it means a higher credit and resource daily income. Secondly, completing research will reward you with nice chunks of credits and hydrogen. Always be aware of your maximum storage, as research rewards can easily put you over cap.
Everything discussed above will result in credits. Credits are the vehicle of our Hades Star Journey; whereas storage is the fuel tank and time is the mileage.
Everything required to progress through the game requires large expenditures of credits. "Large" being relevant to your particular point of advancement. At the start, 2kC to upgrade a planet seemed expensive. But when you spend 80K to build an SRS, then another 80K to scan; then that original 2k seems like nothing. Just a offering a bit of perspective there.
There are two doors by which our player advancement is gated. One is credit income, and the second is time (as noted above.)
The more credits you can earn per day, the faster you can advance, and also the faster you can recover from mistakes (like losing your entire fleet in a red star supernova.) It's reasonable and feasible to earn 60,000 credits per day just from salvaging artifacts from red star tier 4. I know of players who have made triple that, just salvaging t4 arts. But to earn that much requires a significant time investment on a daily basis. That also requires patience, as farming RS gets repetitive quite quickly.
New players will likely get the impression that there are two main resources to be concerned with: credits and artifacts.
While I explained the importance of credits above, I listed them a bit down on my priority list of resources. That is because you will always be earning income, up to your maximum storage. Even when you are offline for a week, you are still earning an hourly salary of credit. Credits are, in my opinion, the one research in Hades that is the most accessible, given enough time, fuel, and storage.
But Wicked! Artifacts mean technology! Shouldn't arts be higher on the list?
Actually, no. Not at all. In fact, artifacts are throw aways. You will never research all the artifacts you could feasibly collect over the course of your Hades Star career. The game mechanics just don't allow it. I've covered artifact hoarding before, and I stand by that statement. It's just a bad thing to do in most circumstances, with some few exceptions.
I ramble on and on about salvage, because salvage is the #1 credit earner. It is limited only by your available play time and your available fuel. At rs4, with level 3 miners, using remote mining and mining boost, you could feasibly farm rs4 instances for 5kC per run for most of the day. These are 'dirty runs' where you clear just one planet for the 3 to 6 arts available there and then abandon the instance to start another one, influence loss be damned.
Blueprints come from completing artifact research, along with credits and fuel and experience. By and large, blueprints can be ignored. There will be occasions where you are actively monitoring the available number of blueprints for a particular module (say, for example, you want to level up your Battery.) But in general day to day affairs, it's quite easy to forget blueprints are even a thing.
Artifacts and blueprints lead to modules. Modules are the personalization and individual playstyle factor in Hade Star. Some modules are used by everyone, and sort of required: the cargo bay extension is one. Battery and Passive shields are also prime examples. There are some modules that should be skipped, and some modules that are worth unlocking but never upgrading. For example, as of this writing, Delta shield should be skipped and never unlocked. Trade Burst is worth unlocking and pairing with Auto Ship, but not worth the time or credits to upgrade.
The least important resource in the game of Hades Star would be Crystals (capital C.) Crystals are present only for the sake of player convenience. There is no VIP bonus, no pay-to-win benefit, of buying more and more crystals. That being said, crystals are a wonderful resource for those of us impatient people.
Bonus paragraph!
The most important resource in Hades Star is the community. The HS Community is wonderful, with a few exceptions. We do not suffer the toxicity of other mobile games, and we actively police ourselves to keep trolls to a minimum. I have a learned a great deal from players old and new. Our community is welcoming, knowledgeable, and most of all, friendly. So hop into galaxy chat and say HI!
Remember always, efficiency is success! Success in efficiency.
For further reading, see Noob Traps and the Early Game Domination tutorials.
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This is WickedWon wishing you a wicked day!