Gaia Peace Project

The Gaia Peace Project is the quiet opening. No raiding, no fighting, no fleet. You put everything into getting a second planet as fast as you can and let the mines do the rest. It takes a fresh homeworld to one Gaia Class Colony Ship, and the whole list costs about 93,000 resources.

A new SFC2 account starts with Capitol 2, Shipyard 3, Research Lab 1, Energy Tech 3, Jet Drive 3, two Artemis, two Hermes and one Atlas, on a 163 field homeworld with 25,000 ore, 12,500 crystal and 5,000 hydrogen in the bank. The list below is only what you still have to buy on top of that.

Build/Research List

Name	Ore	Crystal	Hydrogen	Points	Time	Unlocks
Research Lab 2	400	800	400	1.6	4m 48s	Armor, Pulse
Shipyard 4	3,200	1,600	800	5.6	19m 12s	Gaia, Dionysus, Hercules
Pulse Drive 1	2,000	4,000	600	6.6	1h 00m
Pulse Drive 2	4,000	8,000	1,200	13.2	2h 00m	Apollo
Pulse Drive 3	8,000	16,000	2,400	26.4	4h 00m	Gaia
Gaia Class Colony Ship	10,000	20,000	10,000	40.0	1h 12m
Total	27,600	50,400	15,400	93.4

Points are Resources Spent points, the number the Leaders board ranks you on. One point is 1,000 resources put into buildings, mines, research, ships or defenses.

The times are what a fresh account sees: Capitol 2 driving the building queue, Research Lab 2 driving research, Shipyard 4 driving the ship. Buildings, research and ships run in three separate queues, so the two building jobs finish while the research is still going. The long pole is the seven hours of Pulse Drive, and then another 1h 12m for the ship. If you already have the resources, the whole thing is a bit over eight hours of clock time.

Notes on the order:

Research Lab 2 goes first. Pulse Drive is gated on it, and you cannot research anything at all while a Research Lab anywhere in your empire is upgrading.
You can only run one research at a time on the whole account. The Pulse Drive line is seven straight hours and there is no way to run it in parallel with something else.
Research Lab 3 is worth a look. It costs 800 ore, 1,600 crystal and 800 hydrogen (3.2 points, under ten minutes to build) and it cuts the Pulse Drive line from 7 hours to 5h 15m.
Get Shipyard 4 out of the way early. You cannot build ships while the Shipyard is upgrading, so do it long before you can afford the Gaia.
A.I. Tech 1 is 400 crystal and 600 hydrogen, 1.0 point, four minutes of research. You start with one fleet slot and missions use a slot too, so a second slot lets you keep earning while the colony ship is in the air. Best value on the page.
Crystal is the bottleneck, not ore. The list wants 50,400 crystal and you start with 12,500.

When Shipyard 4 and Pulse Drive 3 are both finished, the Gaia turns up on the Shipyard page.

Paying For It

A planet with no mines makes 40 ore and 20 crystal an hour and no hydrogen at all. That is not going to get you 93,000 resources this year, so mines come before everything.

Mines are the cheapest thing in the game early on. Crystal Mine 1 through 8 is about 5,000 resources all in and takes crystal from 20 an hour to 684. Ore Mine 1 through 8 is under 4,000 and takes ore from 40 an hour to 1,028. Both pay for themselves in a few hours.

Every mine level eats energy, and if the planet runs short every mine on it slows down, so put Solar Array levels in as you go. Watch the Energy box in the sidebar on the Buildings page.

Hydrogen is the one that catches people out. A planet with no Hydrogen Synthesizer produces none at all, and this list needs 15,400 of it. Synthesizer 1 through 6 costs about 6,200 and gets a homeworld to roughly 320 an hour. The Nuclear Power Plant is locked behind Synthesizer 5, so you end up going that far anyway.

The Missions page is the fastest money while you are protected, and it is all PvE so it fits the plan. Haul Cargo is a daily and pays about 4,000 ore, 4,000 crystal and 1,200 hydrogen for one Atlas in fifty minutes. The small raids at the top of the list have no cooldown at all, so you can run them back to back for as long as you have ships and fleet slots.

Secret Missions are open from day one as long as the planet has a Capitol. They drop you a hidden NPC base sized to your own strength, and they are the single biggest source of resources for a small account.

Two things to watch. Missions take the ships away for the whole run, so an Atlas out on Haul Cargo is not available for anything else. And missions count against your fleet slots the same way a fleet does, which is the real reason A.I. Tech 1 is on the list above.

Staying Out Of Trouble

Below 750 points nobody can attack you and you cannot attack anyone who is playing. This whole list is 93.4 points, and a full set of early mines on top of it only adds another twenty or so, so the Gaia Peace Project never takes you out of newbie protection. What eventually pushes you past 750 is mine levels, not this plan.

Once you and the other player are both over 750, you can attack anyone within a factor of five of your points, either way, until the smaller of the two is over 25,000. After that the gap stops mattering.

Two holes in that. Inactive players lose all protection, so an account marked i or I in the Status column of the Galaxy list can be hit by anyone, including you. And NPC encounters are always attackable no matter how small you are, which is what makes a peaceful start possible in the first place.

Picking The Slot

Open the Galaxy page and look for a row with nothing in it. The flag icon in the Actions column is Colonize. Hover it before you click, because SFC2 tells you up front roughly how big the planet is going to be.

Fields are rolled from the slot position, and the spread is wide:

Slots 4, 5 and 6 are the big ones, typically 133 to 250 fields. Slot 9 is close behind at 154 to 214.
Slots 1, 2 and 3 are the small ones, 68 to 112.
Every roll, on every slot, has a 16 percent chance of ignoring the typical range and landing somewhere between 245 and 320 instead. A bad slot is never hopeless, just unlikely.
Slot position also sets temperature. Slots 1 to 3 are hot, 13 to 15 are cold, and the Hydrogen Synthesizer produces more the colder the planet is.

The full slot by slot table is on the Gaia Class Colony Ship page.

Colonize close to home. The Gaia is slow, 4,000 speed at Pulse Drive 3, and it is the slowest thing you own. One way at 100 percent speed:

Destination	Flight time
Another slot in your own system	about 47m
Next system over	1h 17m
Ten systems away	1h 28m
Fifty systems away	2h 05m
Next galaxy	3h 26m

Fuel climbs with distance too, and the Gaia burns hydrogen at 1,000, the top rate in the game. If your alliance has a cluster of systems, settling next to them is worth more than a few extra fields, because every transport run between your own planets is short.

Sending It

Clicking the flag opens the Colonization panel. Things to know before you press Dispatch Fleet:

The Gaia has to be parked on the planet you are launching from. Deploy it across first if it is on the wrong world.
Colonization carries cargo, and this is the cheapest start a colony will ever get. A new planet lands with 500 ore and 500 crystal and nothing else, so fill the hold.
Fuel comes out of the hold rather than off the planet on top. In the shot above a Gaia and an Atlas show 12,380 of capacity instead of 12,500, and the missing 120 is the hydrogen for the trip.
Anything else you send along is stationed at the new colony when it lands. It does not fly home. Sending the Atlas with it is a good way to give the colony a hauler, but do not send anything you still need at home.
The trip holds one fleet slot until it lands. There is no return leg when it works.
If somebody colonizes the slot while you are flying, or you are already at ten planets, you get a failed report and the whole fleet turns around with the Gaia and the cargo intact.

The New Colony

A colony starts completely empty. No buildings, no mines, no defenses, 40 ore and 20 crystal an hour and nothing else. An order that works:

Ore Mine and Crystal Mine, alternating, with a Solar Array whenever energy goes red.
Hydrogen Synthesizer once the two mines are paying for themselves.
Capitol. Level 1 halves the build time of everything else on that planet, and it is also what unlocks Secret Missions from there.
Shipyard and Research Lab only when you actually need them on that planet.

Two things that surprise new colony owners. Research still runs off the Research Lab on the planet you are currently standing on, so a level 1 lab on the colony does not help you research anything until you have the Advanced Research Communication Network. Keep researching from the homeworld. And the colony has its own build queue, so mines there go up at the same time as work on the homeworld.

Use Transport to shift ore from the homeworld while the colony is getting started, and rename the planet from the Overview page if you do not want to be Planet 2 forever.

You can hold ten planets. If you land on something small, the Terraform button on the Buildings page buys 5 more fields at a time for credits, up to 320.

Where To Go From Here

When the colony is producing, the choice is another Gaia for a third planet or your first real fleet. Colonies compound, so most people keep going until they have run out of good slots nearby.

If you want to start fighting, the Apollo Platoon and the Artemis Zerglings are the two standard openings, and the attack fleet construction guide covers what comes after those. Whichever way you go, read up on fleet saving before you leave a fleet parked on a planet overnight.