As you may know, IDF is a very powerful tool on the battlefield, as it allows you to fire without a direct line of sight, allowing you to take out enemies before they can fire back.  If you are level 1 or above, you can get City IDF Defence on your side.  This provides a single IDF-5 shot on 10s to hit against a random enemy, every turn.  In low level battles, this can be a decisive advantage.  To activate it, click on the red empire level link in the data pane (eg City (2)), and then next to DEFENDER, click spend a class point.  City artillery will be active in any zone you control which has buildings.

This does have downsides though.  For one, it increases your building costs by 25%, which can be expensive.  City artillery can also be destroyed in battle should an enemy spend a turn in sight of your units on the hex 50,50.

Adding the class point is free, but it can cost you to remove it.  You get 1 free point removal per nevyear (36.5 real days).

Another thing which may seem obvious, but you can't plan a defence unless you know what terrain you'll be fighting in. For instance, it's no good having jeeps if there's so much rough terrain that they can't actually move. Go to the map, click the zone in question, click terrain and view the terrain (you may need to create terrain first). Flat plains are suited to LRM vehicles, woods to close range stuff.

As you grow, you will acquire more and more zones spread out across the face of Neveron. To help keep track of the important ones, you can flag them by going to Land/Build > Flags. These zones will always show in dropdowns for transit of units and parts.

Mechs are offensive units, not defensive. It is best if you do not leave your mechs in a city to defend it, as the mech AI is very poor. Mechs are fine if you pilot them, but left unpiloted, they are likely to die.

It's obvious, but you can't shoot what you can't see. Most vehicles don't have sensors, and those that do usually have rubbish ones. It's important to have sensors on your side on the battlefield, as even 1 stealth tower could disguise an entire army if you're relying on your soldiers' eyes to see things. A light mech is usually good enough at low level, but as you get higher level, you'll need heavier mechs with your units, or specialised sensor units. It is especially important to have sensors when you are defending, as your enemy will likely be using mechs with stealth capabilities.

It is always important to have sensors, and an easy and cheap way to get them in defence is to build TWR-15710s, commonly known as NevTowers. These have decent sensors and stealth/ECM making them hard for enemies to spot, and good at hiding your own units. You first need 12 vehicle internal structure, then go to Land/Build > Towers and build however many you want. You then go to the Armoury > Towers page and ship them to whatever zone needs them before commissioning and placing on the map. Once placed you will not be able to move them, so do it wisely. Note that since these units have no weapons, you may as well use a skill 8 soldier for them.

It's a good strategy to have some spare vehicles in the armoury for emergencies - wars and the like where you may need extra defences fast. However, be aware that you are charged storage fees for vehicles and towers in your armoury. You can see how much by going to Empire > Stats > Maintenance.

Quite often you'll find someone attacks your zones while something is training. Those training units will not be available for the battle unless EVERYTHING in that zone was training at the time, in which case all training units will defend the zone with the skills they had before they started training.

So you've just ended a war, and you now have several vehicles which require movement parts, but you can't get hold of those.  Instead, wait until 30 nevdays after the vehicle was last in combat.  Go to the unit's info page. By the movement crit repair button, there is a button called "change critical status".  Click this.  Assuming the vehicle is otherwise repaired, you should now be able to decommission it.  It will show up in your armoury as a fully functioning vehicle, ready to be commissioned.

If you have lots of units to move, use either View Units by Type, or by zone - you will be allowed to check boxes to choose which units to move rather than only single unit formations.

Every soldier you recruit has what are called "skill multipliers" - that is, what chance he has of getting better skilled in some certain category. However, not all soldiers have the same multiplier. To weed out the crap ones, buy some geckos and train them for about 10 skillchecks. Then decommission and fire any soldiers which don't reach 5 gun. The rest, put into training some more, then decommission the geckos and put your ready-skilled soldiers into more useful towers/vehicles.

You may have found that you commission a vehicle and your battlevalue stays the same. This is because BV only updates when you log in to your empire. So log out and in and you'll see the BV change, and any relevant level changes. You will also need to log out and in before things such as class points take effect.

Some vehicle crits can be repaired just by using cash - locked turrets and weapon crits for instance. These do not use parts. Crits to a vehicle's engine are not repairable - the vehicle will be 0/0 move until it dies. All other crits can only be repaired at a repair bay. But beware, if you need parts to repair a vehicle, you need to say what vehicle you need parts for. Movement repair parts are weight specific - you cannot repair a 35t track with a 40t track.

Not all vehicles have turrets. This does not always matter - the HNT-0A for instance is one of the most used tanks on Neveron, yet has no turret. However, on towers, turrets are pretty much a necessity as they cannot turn to face your enemy. Putting weapons on the front of a stationary object means people will just attack from the back.

If you salvage a mech, it will be in whatever zone it died in. There is no easy way to move it, but it can be done. To do so, first make sure you have the zone you want the salvage moved to as your active zone. Now, click the markets tab and RIGHT click on mechs, and click open in new window. In the window that opens, click salvage. Now, in your main window, go to Armoury, Mechs, and click view mech salvage. Click sell mech, setting price as $ 1,000,000, and click Yes. Now, in the other window, hit F5 to refresh and you should see your mech on the market. Buy it and it will be in your active zone.

The purpose of the two windows is to make the time between it going on the market and coming off the market as short as possible so that no one else gets a chance to intercept.

If you want to have good technicians in any of your repair bays, you need to have at least as many technicians of a given skill as repair bay zones - for instance if you have 3 repair bay zones (say a lvl2, 2, 4), but only two level 3 technicians, you will not have level 3 techs in ANY of your bays. This is problematic in war, as you may take an enemy repair zone, but lack the techs to staff it and your own bay.

You start off with four newbie jeeps - each of these has two soldiers with 4 skill across the board, and above-average multipliers. These people, and your emperor, who has skill 3 across the board, are best kept for mechs so you don't need to search for good pilots.

You cannot use mechpilots in towers - any pilot with better than 8/8 mech skills cannot be used. Be aware of this when building towers.

Suppose you are in a war, and your units are cornered - one or more surrounding zones owned by the person you are at war with.  You can retreat into his zones.  What's more, if there is an active ceasefire between you and your enemy (started after he attacked), retreating into enemy zone and then clicking the Enemy Zone link will send your units home immediately.

Neveron is about war, so it's generally a good idea to make sure you don't level up accidentally - for example, during war, by training, etc. Levelling up means people from that level can attack you (until you level down again), so it's important to be ready. That means being able to defend yourself - have some vehicles ready in your armoury to make the push into the next level, don't do it blind.

When in battle you go to range zero, a slightly strange thing happens. If you try and attack the unit in the same hex as you, the fire arc it comes up as being in is random, but repeated clicking on the button will generate a new random arc, so if you have only weapons on the front of your tank, keep clicking and it'll eventually show up as fire arc F. However, all damage goes to the front side of the units.

If you are in battle but at a stalemate where you have overwhelming firepower but either can't get to or can't find the enemy, exit battle. If no one is active in a battle for 30mins, it will resolve automatically by a process known as Automatic Battle Resolution, which doesn't take account of things like terrain. You can see the idle time of a battle on the War Room > Battles page.

When moving in battle, enemies will find it harder to hit you the more you move. However, the distance you move doesn't matter, only how many hexes you take to get there. For instance, moving back forward back forward back forward moves you nowhere, but will give all enemies +2 to hit you.

In battle, it is possible to shoot at buildings if they are within range of your unit, and your unit also has enemies in range. Each shot reduces the building's CF by whatever damage it does, ie an AC-10 hit would reduce a building from 25CF to 15CF. However, when a building reaches 0CF, it is destroyed, but NOT automatically removed from your map. You will need to press F5 to refresh your page before Line of Sight and movement penalties will update for that hex. This can be very important in a duel, as you can destroy a building which your opponent is hiding behind, and he may not notice.

On Neveron, attacking a zone you are not adjacent to is called "hotdropping", and can only be done with jump mechs or vehicles with hotdrop mods. However, be aware that this is very dangerous - even the most skilled pilots can get their mechs damaged or even killed on hotdrops.

Saving money can be a problem for many people, myself included.  I see money and I have an urge to spend it.  The solution can be to hide your money out of sight.  You can transfer money to a claimed soldier on the Finance > Transfer page.  Alternatively, you can set it up, using the same page, to send a certain amount to a claimed character every nevday via an allowance.  You may get the cash back at any time by setting the soldier with money as your active character, and then using Finance > Transfer to send the money back to your emperor.

It may seem obvious, but as with real life, for full productivity from your workers, there needs to be full employment and a large enough workforce.  You can see how many workers and jobs you have by clicking the Empire tab, then clicking Stats and then Economic stats.  It will say something like this:
 

Commercial Workers: 7,301
Research Workers: 183
Factory Workers: 3,469

Total Workers: 10,955
Total Jobs: 10,954
Employment Rate: 99.99%
 

This empire is balanced, as you can see.  If you have too many workers, then you get unemployment, and, like in real life, those who are unemployed can't pay taxes.  If you have too few workers, then workers will leave research to go to factories, and then leave factories to work in commercial buildings.  If you don't care about production or research this is fine, but it hurts empires which are production- or research-oriented.

Remember the golden rule.  A research facility / factory / commerical building uses all the workers from FOUR residential buildings of the same size, and only 1 in every 4 people will work in your labs/factories/deathcamps.

If you want to speed up your research, try spending some time in the FFA tournament (Arenas tab > Tournaments).  When you kill an enemy, there is a chance that you will get a Treasure Point (TP).  These can be traded in on your Research > Facilities page for 0.2rp per level of your empire (0.1rp each at lvl0).  At low levels, these can cut weeks off your research.

Owning land costs money on Neveron - a minimum of $100 per nevday per zone covers things like cutting the grass and keeping the wobbie population under control. How much money you are paying per zone is dependant on your empire level and how much population you have per zone. The higher your level and the less population per zone, the more it costs you. So if you're losing money from land costs, unclaim some zones. Alternatively, research Land Management - this decreases your land costs by a certain % (down to $100 per zone minimum).

It is always a good idea to keep a good amount of cash on hand to deal with emergencies - namely, mopping up after wars, rebuilding infra, buying replacement BV, etc. Always keep 50mil on hand, preferably several hundred mil, increasing as your level rises. Remember that each level you go up doubles the size, and thus the costs of rebuilding totally.

A word of warning - do not use DP to increase zone size on newbie island. When you join a proper faction, all your newbie island infrastructure will be destroyed and replaced by your new faction leader, who cannot give you zones with more than 200 spaces in them.

If you find yourself hemmed in by other empires, it can be possible to buy zones. If you have a big enough city, you will have "sphere of influence" over the region around your zone, with size depending on just how big your city and any others nearby are. You can see this on the map by clicking SOI in the top right. You can buy any zone which says SOI in a yellow box. To do so, click that zone, click Terrain, and click buy zone. This costs $1mil, and will give the empire you bought the zone from $500k.

Using DP, you can instantly get buildings in your zones at the largest possible size. However, if you DP for buildings on n00b island, they should be considered temporary. Any DPed building will be moved to the mainland when you do, and no DP will be refunded. Also be aware that all your buildings will be placed in a single zone, even if you had them in different zones on n00b island.

When you sell something, the cash from it goes into the bank account of whichever character was active at the time you put the goods on the market. This usually means the emperor. To get the cash from the emperor in your empire's coffers, go to the main Empire page. If your emperor has money from sales, his name will be in orange. Click his name to transfer the cash to your empire.

Betting on arenas can win you quite a bit of money. The admins carried out a test a while ago, and found that by betting randomly, you on average get back more than you spend. Knowing which empire to bet on can be quite tricky, but remember that the mechs will be roughly even on BV, and so which mech is better suited to the terrain may well swing it. For instance, a jump mech will do a lot better in a foresty map than a walker will, but will likely do less well on the flat because it has less weapons and its manoeuveurability counts for less.

Neveron's servers are located in Arizona, and so by default, the times you see on CF pages and the like will be in Mountain Standard Time. To change your time, go to War Room -> Wars. Scroll down to the Cease Fire Options section and click where it says Click to adjust. Calculate your time difference, put it in and click change.

Remember, Arizona does not have daylight savings time, so whenever your clocks change, you'll need to change the time difference. Unless you live in Arizona.

Donation Points (DP) can be used in several ways in Neveron. One way that is not immediately obvious is to exchange them in IRC Chat for NevCash for your empire. There are usually a few players in need for additional DP, and are willing to pay very nicely for them. DP has been exchanged as high as 150,000,000 Nev$ for 1 DP.

Occasionally, you can get lucky and find mech salvage in zones you claim - these are usually leftovers from dead empires or pirates. You'll know if you find such a zone because it will show as yours but have two red exclamation marks in it, indicating enemy units.

Beware - if you do an arena sim, it will bug any betting arena you create after to become victim to a three-way bug. It will then clear at the next daychange.

In the Free For All tournament, you MUST refresh your screen (F5) to see enemy units which have joined on the map (they will still show in enemy units pane). Otherwise you may find there's a 100t assault mech bearing down on you, and the first you know about it is when it shoots you. It's best to refresh after you move but before the end of the move phase. Also, click the timer window (top right) to make sure that all units are showing up on the map.

In Neveron, it is hard to get somewhere on your own. Sure, you own your empire, and on n00b island, you can make a good go of it on your own. But as soon as you get past level 2, you'll need to find a faction. The best way to do this is to speak to people - in factionmail, in the forums, in IRC chat. Talk to people and you'll find that a lot of people are willing to help newbies out with cheap vehicles, advice and places in a faction where you can grow, safe in the knowledge that someone's got your back

First off, be sure you know what your login/password is - there is no password recovery system on Neveron, if you lose your login/password you will not be able to log in. Secondly, do not give out your login/password. No administrator will ever ask you for your login/password - they don't need it. The administrators define the empire's owner as whoever has the emperor login - if you give out your login, you are essentially giving away your empire, and you are unlikely to get it back if someone changes the password on you.

Neveron is not perfect - there are problems with the code, bugs and the like. You may well be doing something and find one which does something you don't expect - for instance moving mechs instantly. In these circumstances, it is important to be circumspect in your actions. First of all, do NOT use bugs to gain an advantage. If something happens by accident, fine, but using that bug in a manner which circumvents the normal operating of a system is against the rules. For instance, if you found that your mechs moved instantly when returning from a repair bay, you should not use that to allow you to attack before they would have returned normally.

Most importantly, if you find a bug, send a help ticket about it (Help > submit new ticket). Include exactly what you were doing at the time so that the admins can trace the bug.

Extortion is a valid tactic on Neveron - saying "pay me or I'll attack you" is fine. However, you CANNOT ask for DP (donation points) as a form of payment. You may ask for nevcash, and if your enemy OFFERS to pay in DP, that's fine. But you may never demand DP. If you do, you can be reported to the admins and punished appropriately. Demanding DP is essentially extortion in real life, since you're paying in US$ rather than nev$.

A word of warning when adding logins to an empire. Do NOT add your own emperor login (for that empire). Doing so may well screw up your access, especially if you then kick yourself. It is unlikely you will get your empire back should you do this.

You can now view these tips in chat. Type "~nevtip latest" in any channel where you see mattbot3 to get the latest tip. You can view a specific tip by typing "~nevtip <number>" eg "~nevtip 5". You can also see all these tips at http://mattbuck.irongalaxy.com/neveron/tip.html.