Lost Components

The Lost Components Event (or "LoCom" for short) are any "Ship Building" Events that give you LoCom units based on the types of ships that get destroyed in a battle during a LoCom event. BOTH the Attacker and the Defender a given LoCom units - Win, Lose, or Draw.

There have been 3 LoCom Events since the LoComs where introduced in late February 2014 and as of the writing of this article (July 2014), each one of the events has been "tweaked" to fix/adjust major and minor bugs (IMHO, the event will probably be tweaked more). On the 2nd LoCom event, a new item named "Power Fusion" was added - which gives you 20% more ships and a greater chance to get Destroyers, Iron Behemoths, Interceptors, Devourer Interceptors, and Titanenergetic Frigates. IMHO, there is no point in buying the Powerful Fusion items for the event.

Currently, it takes 100 LoCom units to execute a ship build and those 100 LoComs can give you any Warship above a Heavy Fighter. The amount of warships per 100 LoCom units has fluctuated in each of the 3 prior events, but this event is by far the most important GE event for Ship Building.

What makes the LoCom event the most important GE event thus far is:

1. This is the event is completely FREE and it allows you to convert all your lower warships (i.e., Light Fighters) into Interceptors and Above ships. This event does not give much additional benefit to "spenders", so its a free for all really.
2. If you arm yourself with the Nanite Projector and VIP (at a level that has some Fleet Return), you will find that the amount of the ships you get back after converting the LoCom units amount to MORE than the ships that you crashed (if you convert the ships to the resources it took to build them). The last LoCom Event that ended (iOS) in March 15, 2014 was returning 100-115% for the common warships (civil ships, cannon, and Interceptors and Above warships) crashed. This means you actually benefited from crashing the ships you just made again and again and again until the bulk of your ships were all Interceptors and Above. No other strategy and no amount of money can build more super ships (or warships of any kind for that matter) in such a short amount of time than what you can make in 1 LocCom event (if you employ Super Neb Fleets).
3. Metal and Crystal become unlimited to you. If you work the event with your "Alt" or in the same system, you can attack and recycle all at 10% speed and still manage to get in dozens of attacks during the 3 days of a LoCom event. I recycled over 400B in Metal/Crystal during the March 12-15 2014 event and there is no possible way to use that much in the 40-50 days between LoCom events. One player doing well on a LoCom can supply their entire alliance with enough Metal/Crystal so that every member can make their first 1 million Probes in 3-4 weeks.

This impact of point #2 and point #3 on GE gameplay is that all prior Ship Building, Resource gathering/mining, and Attack/Defense strategies became OBSOLETE. Most players, even the ones that consider themselves Pros are not playing this event at maximum levels (most still consider the Galaxium Event important). This is the impact of LoCom event as I see it:

1. Shipyards became less important, because all they need to build are Probes. I've only built Probes and LCs since March 2014. Why? Because Probes make the best Nebula running ships and LCs are the next gas efficient Neb ship I can build on my VIP 6 Shipyards. Once the LoCom came, the player that pulled the most Light Fighters out of the Neb (and who as able to protect them until the next LoCom) is the play that will have the most powerful fleet on a server. So, it follows that no smart player should be building anything but neb running ships in their Shipyards in order to get the biggest Neb Fleets (hopefully mostly containing Probes and LCs) running faster than then next player. It does not take long to get your first 1 million + Probe fleet running (about 3-4 weeks at 20-22 Lvl Shipyards at Astro 14) if you devote ALL your planetary AND moon shipyards to building JUST PROBES. If you are VIP 6 and above, you can get a few 250-500K LC fleets up and running before the Probes finish building ---- this will get you more Probes from the neb (and a good amount of LFs too) that will decrease you time to "Super Neb Fleet" status. Even when you reach 20+ million Probes, you must continue making MORE (you can stop building LCs if you are VIP6+ and begin making warships again after you get a few million LCs and don't need more). I made around 1.25 million Bombers, 68K Interceptors, 35K IBs, 30K DevInts, and 25K Titan Frigates in the last LoCom in June 2014 and NO AMOUNT of standard shipyard building in 1 YEAR'S worth of VIP6 building could equal what I made in 3 days of the LoCom event. THAT is why I have not built warships in my shipyards in nearly 6 months
2. Metal and Crystal unlimited to you - while GAS becomes EVERYTHING to you. The recycling you get from just 1 LoCom event will give you MONTHS worth of resources even if you put every Shipyard you have on 30 day Probe builds (assuming you already reached super neb fleet status and crashed at least 15-25M LF in the event). I used my excess Metal/Crystal to trade for Gas - at 5 to 10 units of Metal/Crystal for every 1 unit of Gas. That sounds crazy, but pulled in over 400B in Metal/Crystal in the last LoCom. Super Neb Fleets will give you 10s of millions of LF and your fleet will grow at 100-200 million Power Points per day (this is true once your neb fleets hit half a dozen or so 5-10 million Probes). Fleets this size require 100+ million in gas just Fleet Save at 10% speed - so you can see why gas becomes the limiting factor in how you play. Trading is the fastest way to get big amounts of gas. You'll find that you will covet the 4/5 Star Yellow and the 4/5 Star Green Gem to boost your Gas Production to the 1M+ units per hour so that you will pull in 200M Gas units per day from all your planets. Your Alts will also have massive Gas Plants running Yellow/Green gems (which were paid for by my unlimited Metal/Crystal from LoCom event recycling). If I've talked to you to death about GAS, its because 10B gas is only 3 slower than normal speed attacks for me now and I can't get enough of it.
3. Attacking becomes centered around destroying other player's Super Neb Fleets and mainly during the LoCom Event itself. Since losing any Destroyer and under warship outside of a LoCom event is basically throwing away your ability to grow (and wasting the point of gathering 10s of millions of LF from your own Super Neb Fleets). The best time for an Uber Fleet player to attack is during a LoCom event - that way all the lost DS and under warships get converted to LoCom units and not wasted. Since many of your Uber Fleet opponents will NOT get that they need billions in gas on hand and 200M gas production per day, many Uber Fleets will become "beached whales" and you will be able to kill their neb fleets on their basically undefended planets or attack them head on knowing fully well that a Draw will work out in your favor (and you only lose warships that can be converted to LoCom units anyhow). Attacking becomes very different once you become an Uber Fleeter. You have to learn to play psychological games and make strikes that force NAPs between your fellow Ubers - which will give you the freedom to go to war selectively (which saves gas).
4. The definition of "Meat Shield" changes and defense strategy becomes complicated against other Uber Fleeters, but simple against Non-Uber Fleeters. Once you become an Uber Fleeter, you become nearly impossible to attack by any player that is NOT an Uber Fleeter also. Your Super Neb Fleets will pull in several million civil ships per day (pulling in 100-500K of Colony Ships per day is normal). For those that don't have an Uber Fleet, just 250K of Colony ships is a DRAW ---- and most Ubers Fleeters will have over 10M Colony Ships and over 100M SCs/LCs/Recs. Your strategy against non-Uber Fleeters will be simple --- you just ignore them. You can place 2M Colony Ships and 20M SCs/LCs/Recs on every Neb Running planet you have and the non-Ubers will simply do nothing - even the Ubers will not waste their warships or gas to destroy those useless ships. These "useless" and excess Civil Ship you pull from the neb become an impassible Meat Shield once their numbers are in the 10s or 100s of millions. You won't have the gas to move them, but it won't matter since you don't really care if they are destroyed at all (which could only be done with HUGE waste of gas by a group of enemy Ubers) as long as it costs them warships. With a meat shield 100+ million Civil ships thick, no attack will reach your important warships before a Draw occurs - this will deter almost all attackers (even Ubers). Your best defense against other Ubers is make sure not enemy can attack you WITHIN your main fleet's solar system - that means employing a "Stuffed System" defense where you use your Alts to occupy all 15 planets in the system. This makes the nearest full fleet attack over 1 hour away (as any fleet deemed big enough to attack you will have to travel at 10% speed just to keep the gas cost under 1 billion units) and that's plenty of time to activate a Peace Treaty or to move just your Probes and lower warships out if you want to take the attack on your meat shield to a Draw.
5. Players without Super Neb Fleets won't matter. The players that build warships instead of Probes for neb fishing won't be able to play the LoCom events to any great extent and therefore won't grow really at all compared to an Uber's growth rate. These players will simply not matter any more and they are just good for Gas trading. These players will never reach Uber status and will not matter much at unless they are your gas making Alts.

I've traded over 100B in resources for Gas and that trading serves 2 purposes - it gets me Gas AND it gets billions in resources to non-Ubers so that they can build Super Neb Fleets of Probes that will eventually get them to Uber status. The bottom line is POWER BEGINS with you bulking up your Neb Fleets in order to make the best of a LoCom Event ------ AND ------ to give you the most opportunity when the update to enable Ship Trading in the Alliance Depot comes.