Project Entropy drops you into the Entropy Zone, the roughly 500-kilometer crater a 2099 meteorite strike carved into Kepler-452B, and hands you a single colony to grow into a galaxy-spanning power. Between base construction, hero-piloted mechs, and a fleet you'll eventually push out toward other planets, it's easy to spread your first few sessions too thin. Here's where to put your early effort so it actually compounds instead of stalling out.
Keep the Command Center Moving First
Your Command Center is the gate everything else sits behind — new buildings, higher unit tiers, and extra hero squad slots all unlock at specific Command Center levels, not by upgrading those things directly. That means a maxed-out barracks or research lab does nothing for you until the Command Center itself catches up, so resist the urge to pour early resources into a secondary building while your core upgrade sits unqueued. In your first sessions, queue a Command Center upgrade the moment it's available, then use the downtime to chain upgrades on whatever supporting buildings it just unlocked rather than letting builders sit idle. Early upgrade timers are short enough that checking back every 20-30 minutes for the first few levels is worth more than one long session where you queue something and walk away for hours.
Pair Heroes With Mechs Before You Fight
Combat runs on hero-and-mech pairs assigned through the formation screen and dropped into a grid-based arena, and while the fighting itself plays out automatically once it starts, the pairing you choose beforehand and the abilities you trigger mid-fight are what decide the outcome. Don't spread upgrade materials across every hero you pull — pick two or three you actually plan to field, level them and their paired mechs together, and save the rest as backups rather than half-upgrading a roster you won't use. When a fight starts, watch for the ability prompt: each hero's active skill has its own trigger condition, and firing it at the right moment against the right target on the grid swings fights you'd otherwise lose on paper.
Match Hero and Mech Types to the Fight
Heroes and their skills lean on specific damage types, and the enemies you're facing — whether Grod outpost defenders or a rival commander's squad — have their own leanings too. Before you commit to an outpost or a PvP target, check what you're walking into and swap in a hero-mech pair whose type has the edge, rather than sending the same top-leveled pair into every fight regardless of matchup. This matters more as you unlock additional heroes, since their kits and activation conditions get more specific than your starting roster's, and a mismatched pairing will underperform its raw power rating. Keeping two or three geared squads with different leanings, instead of a single "best" squad, pays off the moment you hit an outpost or opponent your main pair struggles against.
Farm Grod Outposts for Steady Resources
The Grod are the hostile alien faction holding outposts scattered around your starting territory, and clearing them is a more reliable resource source than picking over wild nodes on the map or waiting on daily quests alone. Before you attack an outpost, check its listed difficulty against your own power rating — outposts noticeably above what you can comfortably clear will cost you troops for a payout that isn't worth it, while ones well below your power waste time you could spend pushing further out. Work through the outposts closest to your base first, since taking them also pushes back the radius other players can raid you from, and revisit outposts you've cleared as your power rating climbs and tougher ones become worth the trip. Treat outpost clearing as a daily habit rather than something you do once and forget — it's one of the steadiest ways to keep your upgrade queues fed.
Scout Before You Commit Troops or Ships
Deploy drones early to reveal the land immediately around your base — they show you resource nodes, Grod outposts, and other points of interest before you commit troops to them, which saves you from marching into a fight you didn't plan for. Make scouting a habit every time you expand your visible territory rather than a one-time setup step. Your fleet of hero ships is a separate, longer-term investment: it's what eventually lets you push past your home planet and contest territory elsewhere in the galaxy, so don't rush ship construction ahead of your Command Center and hero roster. Get your base and combat squad solid first; a fleet you can't back up with strong heroes and mechs just gets picked apart once it leaves friendly territory, and reinforcing lost ships is a far worse resource sink than waiting a bit longer to build them properly.
Join an Alliance on Day One
Joining an alliance as soon as the option unlocks is one of the highest-value moves you can make early, and there's no reason to wait until you feel "ready" or built up. Alliance members can send Help clicks that shave time off your construction and research queues, which adds up fast during your first heavy building phase when almost everything you queue is worth speeding along. Beyond that, alliances track shared achievements, run their own rankings, and coordinate missions and defense that you'll want in place before you're a visible target in Alliance Wars. Look for one that's actually active — regular Help clicks and members near your own power level — over one that just has the highest member count or ranking, since a big but quiet alliance won't do much for your queues or your defense when you actually need either.