How to colonise with the best of 'em: Cosmic Colony hints, tips, and tricks

Gameloft's new free-to-play offering Cosmic Colony takes place in a not-too-distant future where young space pilots are tasked with colonising planets.

You play as one such pilot. Unfortunately, your trip is far from successful and you crash land on a strange, barren, and faraway planet. In order to survive, you have to build a colony.

If you've ever watched Prometheus, Alien, or any of the other thousands of movies that are set in the far reaches of space, you'll already know surviving isn't a walk in the park.

That's why we thought we'd help. Thank us when you make it home safely.

There are two different forms of currency in Cosmic Colony: Coins, which you'll earn an abundance of; and Cash, which is the game's rarer premium currency.

Coins, as you'd expect, are collected frequently from the numerous businesses that you'll come to build, as well as earned from completing missions, harvesting meteorites, and generally exploring your surroundings.

Once your futuristic purse is chock-full of this shiny currency, you can use it to purchase additional buildings, expansions, decorations, and other similar items.

Cash, on the other hand, is much rarer, so you don't - to be quite frank - want to spend it on rubbish. As always, you grab packs of cash through in-app purchases for varying amounts of real-world moolah or take advantage of in-game offers.

Cosmic Colony's premium currency allows you to purchase advanced items and buildings from the in-game store, and speed up the production of your buildings.

Before you delve into Gameloft's new explore-'em-up, we suggest you fire up the web browser on your iPhone, iPad, or Android-powered device and take a little trip over to Tapjoy's glorious wall of offers. Once there, download all of the free apps in sight and run them once.

You'll receive a boatload of free Cash when you jump back over to Cosmic Colony.

Resources aplenty

Currency isn't the only thing you have to worry about in Cosmic Colony. There are several other resources to get to grips with: Energy, Crafted Items, Mood, and Population.

(There's also Reputation, but it's only really important if you plan on playing with a lot of friends.)

Anyway, Energy is probably the most important of these, as it's required to construct buildings, collect revenue from them, and complete various other tasks. If you run out, you'll have either have to wait for it to slowly refill or purchase some with real-world money. Your maximum Energy increases every time you level-up.

Then, there's Crafted Items, which you earn from factories and use to complete the construction of businesses; Mood, which dictates how many coins you earn from your various retail outlets; and Population, which affects the size of your workforce.

It's not a resource, as such, but you do have to think about experience points (XP). You'll need these if you wish to level-up your colony and gain access to new buildings and territory. You earn XP throughout the game as you go about your day-to-day duties, so we wouldn't worry about this too much.

Naturally, your colony won't get very far without buildings, which means, well, you'll need some. The three major types are residential, business, and factory.

Residential buildings are, of course, where your colony's citizens live. Therefore, the more residential buildings you have, the bigger your population will be, and the more workers you'll have at your disposal. Tap on these buildings frequently to earn XP and Mood.

Business buildings are your shops and retail outlets, which provide income at varying intervals. You can purchase businesses from the in-game store just like everything else. A portion of your population and specific Crafted Items are required before construction can be completed, though, which brings us to factories.

Factory buildings produce the Crafted Items that you'll need throughout your adventure. Unfortunately, the exact item each factory creates is determined at random, so you can never be sure you're going to get the item that you crave the most.

All three building types are just as important as one another, but we suggest you favour residential properties in the early stages of Cosmic Colony just because you can't run businesses or make much money without workers.

As in most free-to-play games, Cosmic Colony's in-game store also offers land expansions and decorations.

You begin Cosmic Colony with a sizeable chunk of land and unlock an additional patch during the game's tutorial, so you don't really have to worry about expansions for a good while.

When you do decide to expand your colony, however, be sure to purchase pieces of land that feature buildings, artefacts, and other points of interest. Expansions become increasingly expensive, you see, so it's important that you unlock the planet's most beneficial areas first.

Unlike in many social games, Gameloft's range of space-age decorations actually have a purpose. Place them next to your buildings and they'll boost their profits. They also make your colony look nice, or something.

The Cosmic Colony galaxy is packed full of opportunities to grab an extra resource or two. Naturally, these methods won't single-handedly keep you afloat, but they are ruddy helpful.

Firstly, you can convince your Facebook and Gameloft Live buddies to come along for the ride. Once they're on board, you can visit their colony daily and help them collect revenue from their buildings to earn Energy and Reputation rewards.

Another great way to earn valuable resources is to construct a Launch Pad, which will allow you to launch exploration missions into space. You'll even get your mitts on rare items and buildings if you manage to find three rare artefacts from the planets you visit.

Finally, watch out for the meteorites that routinely crash on your new home. Simply tap them for resources and riches.