The Evil Empire

EE's Emperor portrait from Planets Nu

The Evil Empire race icon from VGA Planets Nu

The Evil Empire is derived from the "Empire" in the Star Wars series of movies.

Race Characteristics

The Empire is a fighter race, and has some of the biggest and baddest of them around. Their lineup includes the ability to ground assault planets with Imperial Stormtroopers, as well as the Gorbie Class Battlecarrier, the largest ship (or is it a moon?) in the game. They can sense enemy planets with Dark Sense.

Racial Abilities

• Dark Sense, which can sense enemy planets from far away. The Empire has excellent strategic data collection abilities because of this.
• Builds 5 "free" fighters per turn per starbase, using 3 tritanium and 2 molybdenum each.
• Fakes bioscan reports by reporting Amorphous life on the planets the Empire owns
• (NuHost only) Starbase Fighter Transfer: Starbases and Gorbies can send and receive fighters over a distance of 200 LY.
• (NuHost only) Galactic Power causes Gorbies to always fight from the left-hand side in combat.

Campaign Mode Abilities

• Dark Detection allows your ships to see if there are cloaked ships at the same location.
• Destroy Planet can use a Gorbie to destroy a planet, turning it into a debris.
• Upgrade "free" fighters production: up to 20 per starbase, per turn.

Ship List

See The master ship list for a list of The Evil Empire ships.

Important Ships

• The Gorbie Class Battlecarrier is your main hammer weapon. It is the biggest carrier in the game, but is a gas hog. In Standard, the Gorbie is able to send and receive fighters using the Starbase Fighter Transfer mission. This is incredibly useful in getting fighters to where you want quickly. When you don't need the fighters, you can send them elsewhere. Sending fighters after a Gorbie has arrived at its destination can also save fuel, which can be crucially short for EE.
• The Super Star Destroyer is a feared weapon and usually a desired trading ship by other races. The SSD is deadly in combination with a cloaker. A cloaking ship can arrive at a planet with an SSD which is out of fuel. Since the SSD is out of fuel, ships will not attack it, and since it has planet immunity, a NUK friendly code on the planet will not be able to attack it. The next turn, the cloaker transfers fuel on board the SSD and the SSD drops its 10 clans, capturing the planet. This attack is very difficult to defend against.

If your fleet has an SSD, you can avoid setting Primary Enemy to attack the enemy planets. If an opponent wants to defend their planet, they are forced to use the ATT/NUK friendly codes before you do the Imperial Assault mission, and/or defend with ships with Primary Enemy set. When the enemy has PE set, you get Left-Side Advantage.

• The PL21 Probe is a Hyperdrive ship with 180 fuel, allowing 3 jumps. In combination with Dark Sense, this is your main intelligence-gathering ship, able to gain intel on races far away. Excellent as a money transfer ship. Its HYP ability can also allow it to establish remote colonies for refueling or intel gathering.
• The Super Star Carrier is a useful early carrier, with 4 bays and the largest cargo hold of the EE medium carriers. It has 1 more bay than the SSD and the same number as the Super Star Cruiser. For combat and for colonization/transport missions, the Super Star Carrier is the general workhorse of the fleet.

Campaign Mode Only:

• The Aries Class Transport is an alchemy ship that produces fuel from other minerals. It solves your constant fuel shortages for less cost than a Neutronic Refinery Ship. It also has a larger cargo than any EE war ship, making it a very flexible cargo and fuel hauler.
• Ru25 Gunboats and Ru30 Gunboats are squadron ships, useful for scouting, raiding weakly defended targets and depleting the enemy of torpedoes, thus messing with their battle order (using the elusive ability).

Alliances

Overall

Most races will be interested in your Gorbies and SSDs (especially cloaking races, which can bring a fuel-less SSD to a planet to keep it from being destroyed). Most races will also enjoy Pl21 probes for money transfer, although HYP ships are usually easily capturable anyway. Everyone can benefit from an intelligence agreement with you since you can collect great information using Dark Sense.

The Lizard Alliance

This makes a good alliance. Lizards can provide you with cloakers (which help with Imperial Assault missions) and Lokis. They will be interested in Gorbies since their ships are weak, and SSDs which they can use well in combination with cloakers. They might find your Pl21 probes useful for ground combat. Even if you are far away from each other, you can use Pl21 probes to quickly establish a starbase in each other's region of space and build ships for each other (Gorbies at a humanoid base, LCCs at ghipsoldal). If you give the lizard player an LDSF full of your colonists, he can use them to drop clans on your nearby opponents.