During battle, your Hydranought sits on the left side of the battlefield, while your opponent will be at the right end of the battlefield. Your opponent will be launching ships towards your base continuously. While your base is capable to defending itself thanks to two turrets, the increasing number of enemy ships will eventually be able to take down your Hydranought, so you need to launch ships to defend yourself.
Ships you launch will seek out the nearest enemy ship and fight it, if your ships survive these battles, they'll attack the opposing base. Take down the opposing base to win a battle. Most ships have abilities that aid them or their allies in battle. Each race has one ship that generates this race's energy.

Energy is important for multiple reasons : it allows you to build more ships or activate abilities and it makes the passive ability stronger. Each race has a passive ability that provides a certain boost. The more energy of this race you have in stock, the stronger this ability gets. The amount of energy your Hydranought can store per race is limited, however, but this limit can be improved by using another ability during combat. Each race has an ability that requires about 80% of the maximum stock as its energy cost, but increases the max amount your base can store by 20%. Having a higher energy stock means you can store more energy to have a stronger passive ability, or you can use this energy to launch larger ships (which cost more energy) or to activate this race's unique ability.

Everytime you defeat an enemy ship you gain some experience (even if you don't end up winning this battle). Each race has its own experience type, which can be used to invest into skills this race offers. Skills can increase the energy stock size or energy generation rate of your base, but they can also boost the active ability for this race. Next to unlocking up to 4 ships, each race also has skills to make their ships stronger.

Early on in a battle, always turn on auto-build for all the energy generating ships you can build. Do the same for all the energy stock ability. While you should keep on building the energy ships throughout the battles, at a certain point you'll want to turn off the energy stock ability to keep from temporarily losing the passive bonus everytime the ability triggers.

Auto-build in general is a powerful tool, as you'll quickly amass so many ships that manual control is near impossible. However, manual control for both the energy stock ability and the combat ability is important.

You might want to consider focussing on Technomancer and Rift Demon opponents first, to get their passive abilities that provide an experience and energy bonus early on. These will definately help in future battles. In general, for all races, the first skills you might want to invest in are the energy generation and energy ship unlocks.

Earlier battles will be relatively easy once you have unlocked a few extra ships. For more difficult battles you ought to specialize certain races into certain roles. Some races are better for their ships, others you might want for their passive or their active abilities. If you focus on abilities, invest in energy generation and stock abilities and only unlock the energy generating ship. For races focussed on ships, invest in ship unlocks, ship stats and some energy skills. Here is an example of a specialization setup :
Human : focus on the defensive ability, so only get the energy ship and invest in ability primarily and energy secondary. Don't put the ability on repeat until enemy ships arrive at your base. Do turn off the energy stock auto-repeat button before this happens so you have plenty of energy in stock to use the ability!
Ca'anian : focus on the offensive ability and perhaps the first two ships. Ability can be put on repeat as it will take a bit before your stock is large enough to trigger the ability.
Xyloxi : similar to Ca'anian, focus on the offensive ability.
Caes'cix : first example of a race where you could focus on ships and ship stats. Especially the unblockable ship can be useful for both defense and offense.
Rivi'i : with base regen passive and base repair active abilities, this race offers very important defensive abilities. Focus on energy generation, stock and ability cost and cooldown.
Mith'ri'aeil : fully focus on ship unlocks and ship stats. Some energy boosts can help to get ships out faster.
Technomancer : another powerful defensive ability, combined with a useful passive, so focus on abilities and energy first.
Rift Demon : if you need more offensive power at this point, use this race for its ships, else, it's passive ability can be quite helpful during battle as well.

For the most difficult opponents it will come down to finding out which ships work together the best. A combination of Guardians that increase the resistance of allies with Tarogis that repair allies coupled with heavy hitters might works better than blindly rushing the opponent with all ships you have. While setting all ships to auto-build might give your more ships, only building those ships that you really need for a certain tactic will ensure you spend energy only on useful ships.

Pages on the NULLL forum :
Hydranought forum

Wiki pages:
Overview
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