Galaxy Legion: PvP Badge Values

While I was off at WBC the Galaxy Legion game updated with a bunch of new features. One of the things they added was legion base combat where essentially you can spawn a random enemy base to attack. The enemy base will have some abilities they can use to try to defend themselves from your invasion and they can build defensive structures. You have 8 hours to kill it. If you do then the top X damage dealers (where X is defined as 5 times the level of the base you're attacking) get some silver badges as a reward. Also the enemy legion suffers a penalty to their base resource production for having their base destroyed. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot you can do to stop them other than building the right defenses and having someone to hit your 4 hour repair cooldown at the right time so it isn't really interactive but there is something there.

Your legion can find a base to attack every 8 hours. In order to spawn a base you need to spend red badges which are earned for disabling enemy ships. There are a bunch of rewards you can buy with red and silver badges so the question is what do they do and is it better to get the red badge ones first or to try to convert them into silver badges?

Red badges really only turn into one thing other than silver badges: guns. You can have up to 4 of these guns total and there are three tiers of guns. I have 4 of the first tier already, purchased before they added the next two in. If I buy the higher ones I will have to replace the lower ones. So I can spend 128 red badges and 9 ship space for 100 attack. I can do that 4 times. After that the only thing left to do with red badges is turn them into silver badges (or stop earning them at all).

Silver badges turn into 4 different and unique items. You can get a permanent base health buff, you can get a planet defensive building, you can get a ship module for attacking NPCs, and you can get a ship module for attacking bases. In detail:

2 silver badges adds 10 shields and 15 hull to your base. There's no space usage here, it's just a permanent buff. It's awfully minor though, and I imagine it exists mostly as a badge sink for people who have maxed out on everything else.

10 silver badges gets you a planet structure which is size 1 and gives artifact 1. This is a decent but not spectacular production building. On top of that it also gives 300 defense which is worse than the best defensive buildings but not by a lot. Oh, and it gives +20% defense on the planet. You can build 2 per planet. Adding 40% on to your actual defensive buildings is a really big deal if you're trying to defend a planet with defense. As such you're probably going to want 2 of these on any planet worth defending. (Which I don't think is very many planets, to be fair.)

24 silver badges gets you a ship module which is size 20 for 40 scan. This is again not spectacular but is still decent, especially since scan is a stat you want to max out whenever you're really using it. On top of that it adds 5% to your attack when attacking a base. You can have 3 of these equipped and you really want 3 of them.

32 silver badges gets you a ship module which is size 20 for 50 energy. Like above this is not a great ratio but more energy is always good even if it isn't terrible efficient. On top of that it adds 5% to your attack when attacking NPCs. You can have 3 of these equipped and you still really want all 3 of them for the energy alone.


How good is the extra attack? I'll look into it in more detail at a later date but I built a pivot on my spreadsheet to work out what would have happened to the fights I'd tracked if my attack was different. I have data for 1079 shots. Over those shots I would have saved 77 shots if I had an extra x1.15 multiplier on my NPC attack value. By contrast, adding 300 attack from the bigger red badge guns would have shaved off 75 shots. Either way I'm only looking at saving 7% of my energy spent on attacking NPCs. (I built this part of my sheet to look into what switching to a Drannik race would do. It's +40% NPC attack and I decided it wasn't good enough.)

Note that those 77 shots would only cost 385 energy. So the 3 modules which add 50 energy each every time I level will have a much greater impact than the NPC attack will when it comes to killing NPCs. And will do something when I'm attacking other things too.

The base attack is in some ways worse (I don't shoot bases very often) and in some ways better. One of the reasons the NPC attack isn't very good is it often doesn't do anything. Because most NPCs don't have much health I already kill them in 3 or 4 shots. In order for NPC attack to actually have an impact it has to knock off a full shot; mostly it just means I overkill them more which does nothing. Bases have a much larger health pool and therefore the odds of just adding overkill instead of real damage goes down.


The questions now are how much does it actually cost to get a red badge, and how much does it cost to convert into silver badges?

You get a red badge each time you kill another player with a couple restrictions. They have to be within a certain level range (60%-140% of your level) and you can't have killed them in the last 12 hours. (To prevent you from just farming some easy target.) You get a 'battle tab' which has 10 random players within your level range on it at any given time. Shoot them even once and they disappear and a new random player comes in. I've been keeping mental note of how many shots it takes me to kill other players and it seems to be around 10 on average, but I'm picking off the people who seem weakest first. If I was really going at it I'd probably end up at more like 12 shots per kill. Also sometimes they have defended themselves with traps so I need to use null fuses to keep going. And there's the repair cost involved from the damage they do back to me. (Though I have a lot of shields so that doesn't tend to be very high.)

At any rate, I think saying it costs about 60 energy is valid. These shots tend to have a very high experience per energy ratio.

How about a silver badge? Well, in order to spawn a base it costs 5 red badges. You can keep the random base you spawn or you can spend 5 more to get a new random base. (I imagine if you do this a lot you'd start identifying which bases are well defended and which ones aren't.)

Bases are defended to varying degrees and I haven't fought enough to have a good idea how many shots they take to kill. I just spawned one and it will take 24 shots to kill and will return a total of 15 silver badges assuming 10 different people shoot the base. I will get at most 2 of those 15. So for this base (which seems particularly weak) the total spend is 420 energy to get a spread of 15 silver badges. 28 energy per badge.

Lets say we'd randomly spawned my legion's base. It would take me about 6700 shots to kill my base. It's a higher level base so the returns are higher: 50 silver badges spread 20 ways. Nevermind the fact we don't have 20 people who could help. So the total spend is 33800 energy for 50 silver badges. Of which I'd get at most 4. 676 energy per badge.

It's also important to note that while the experience for shooting players is actually good the experience for shooting bases is very bad. I practically soloed a level 3 base a couple weeks ago and the substantially lower experience return cost me about 2 levels. So there is a very real extra cost to killing defended bases.