Getting started

How the game works

Each player commands a mothership, a mobile base set down on a large hexagonal map. Around it lie iron, silicium and energy deposits, barren, defensive or arable tiles. You work the neighbouring tiles, develop the buildings of your ship, carry out research and raise an army.

Skydos is cooperative: no player can attack another player. An attack sent towards another commander's ship turns back on its own. Every battle pits humanity against the AI, which holds the centre of the map and keeps growing throughout the game. Personal ranking matters little: the game is won or lost together.

The AI is not mere scenery. It plays by the same rules as you: it extracts resources, builds bases called VMs, researches its own technologies, produces 16 unit types and pays their upkeep. The further the game goes, the bolder it becomes: it colonises, spies, sabotages and attacks.

The four phases of a game

The pace of the game follows the AI tier calendar, from T0 to T7. Each tier changes its posture, that is what it allows itself to do. The calendar is specific to each server; the game's Threat screen shows the countdown to the next tier.

1. Colonisation (T0-T1). The AI is passive: it settles in and only defends itself. This is the time to build your economy, choose a research specialisation and join an alliance. You can already attack the AI: the tiers only rule its own behaviour.
2. Development (T2). The AI turns defensive and strikes back at those who attack it. Its first raids against motherships start from T2.
3. War (T3-T5). The AI is aggressive: regular raids, colonies outside its territory, destruction operations, retaliation against the accounts that harass it.
4. Final assault (T6-T7). Total war. Humanity must break into the Grey Zone, at the centre of the map, and destroy the AI Core.

How the game ends

Humanity wins when the AI Core, sheltered in its central VM at the heart of the Grey Zone, is destroyed. That zone is first sealed, invisible and impossible to attack; it is guarded by 6 Sentinel towers that must be brought down to open it.

The AI wins if, from tier T3, its strength reaches 30 times humanity's and stays there for 14 days. Strength is measured by adding up the attack and defence of every living unit on each side. If no human mothership is left alive, the AI wins at once.

These two conditions make every player part of the victory: producing units, keeping them alive and destroying the AI's lowers its strength ratio, even without ever going near the Core. The threshold used on your server is shown on the Threat screen.

Your first days, step by step

When you sign up, you choose a quarter of the map, or the name of a friend to settle near. The game offers you an area, always on the outskirts and with at least one iron and one silicium deposit nearby, and you choose the exact tile. You are allowed a few new draws if you do not like the area. Take the time to look at the neighbouring tiles: they will make your production.

The game missions then guide your first steps chapter by chapter and pay out resources at each stage. They roughly follow this order, which we recommend:

1. Command Center. It is built first: every other building requires it. Your ship has 15 interior slots for 12 building types.
2. Generator and Farm. Energy powers everything, and food has a single source: the Farm. Take both to level 2 quickly.
3. First extractors. Set an iron extractor and an energy extractor on deposits adjacent to your ship. A rich deposit with an average extractor often yields more than a poor deposit pushed to the maximum.
4. Warehouse. Without it, each resource soon hits its cap; a full resource simply stops piling up.
5. Research Center and the first technology of the common trunk, which widens your vision and opens the 4 specialisation branches.
6. Trading Post, then a silicium extractor. Silicium becomes essential for advanced units and research.
7. Armory and first defense tower. Without ammunition your units do not fire; a tower defends your ship even with no garrison.
8. Embassy and alliance. Embassy level 1 is enough to join an alliance. Do it early: shared vision, reinforcements, resource shipments and coordinated attacks change everything.

The Command Center also sets the size of your construction queue: 1 build at a time up to level 3, 2 from level 4. Taking it to level 4 early clearly speeds up the rest of your development.

Time and server speed

Skydos is played in real time: constructions, production and journeys go on while you are logged out. Each server has a speed set when it opens and shown in the server list.

On a fast server, the economy speeds up by the same factor: production, upkeep and consumption are multiplied, while constructions, unit and ammunition production, transporter deliveries and the AI tier calendar are shortened.

Two things never change with speed: movement (motherships at 20 tiles per hour, armies, colonisation, AI troops) and combat (turns, resolution, recall window). An attack therefore takes the same time to cross the map on every server: coordinating with allies remains a matter of timing.

Going further

The other pages of the guide detail every system of the game: the economy and buildings, each of the 20 human units, each AI unit with its abilities and how to counter it, the 45 human technologies and the AI research tree, and the combat system, shot by shot.