The Zeus and Academy Guide

The Zeus and Space Academy unlocks is very important step, since it gives massive boost to your gains. In this guide we will cover best practices to get most gains from them.

To unlock The Zeus you will have to push quite a bit to get to it. It requires e1000 Cells and should be available around Player Level 128.

The Zeus first unlock

When you are starting a run for The Zeus unlock, you should get Ship upgrades forcused on Mod Points, Shards and Research Points, since this will be one long run.

When you finally get e1000 Cells and The Zeus is unlocked, you should head to Upgrade Console and take a look at Space Academy

Get everything you can, keep hiring Personnel as you get more Cells and send them on the Missions.

Balance between Tech Samples and Gear early on, since both of those options will give you massive boosts to your gains. Prioritize getting a complete set of gear over any gear, otherwise as always Mod Points, Shards and Research Points Gear should be a good option.

Try to push as far as you can before performing the Loop Reset. Getting mk8 its a good call if you have a lot of diamonds to spend in the new cards unlock. I prefer to say do 10 projects, get the MP Construction Milestone and aim to get the next eps level. Thats not resetting until e1120-e1140

Mission Control

After recruiting your first Personnel you will be able to do Missions in Mission Control. There are 2 types of missions: Farm missions (on the top, they are repeatable) and Campaign missions.

As you finish missions you will get exp, that increases your Mastery, which gives additional bonuses to your gains.

Campaign missions give you very good rewards, but also harder to complete most of the time. If they take too long, its a good idea to schedule them for your afk/offline time, for example overnight.

General rule of thumb:

If you want to focus on the campaign put most of your personnel over there (or time it so it will take time you wont be able to play), and have some extra personnel do the farm missions (Usually just a couple of units will be enough)

When you feel that campaign takes too long focus on farming instead to get passive bonuses, increase Cells and get more personnel. Campaign may take up to 36 hours, its normal.

Have always a few personnel or 15 available doing F1-1, its the shortest mission and will increase your The Zeus rank continuously.

Small tip:

When you loop reset, you can still continue your campaign and missions, so before a loop reset, leave 3-15 ships in the first mission and send everything else in campaign. Zeus should have the time to get the 2 Ship install (ap and material) by the time the campaign finish. Make sure you have enough time remaining in your campaign before your loop reset!

Academy Outpost

Inventory folder

Here you will find all your Materials. Those can be exchanged for Tech Samples or Projects.

I would recommend balancing between those two, focusing on Tech Samples if you can get Tech Samples milestone or on Gear if you can get a Gear set.

Gear

Gear gives you massive boost to one of your Resources when full set is acquired and can be upgraded for secondary boost to specific Ship upgrade options.

Its a good idea to upgrade the gear that gives you bonuses to upgrades that boost your Mod Points, Shards and Research Points.

Construction Milestones

Construction Milestones are like your skilltree. You can remove assigned Blueprints before you finish the Milestone, but once its finished you cant change it.

You can get Blueprints by finishing Projects.

What Construction Milestone should I get next
Recommended order of unlock its 2 1 4 6 5 3 9 10 11 12 8 7
2 for extra Mod Points
1 for the Shards, 4 project still very pricey
4 now because its better than 5 and the Academy Points is good
6 its one of the strongest CM at the price
5 for the extra Shards
3 because its the cheapest and you want to see 9 to unlock it
9 is very good compared to everything else
10 11 12 are 40 projects cost and they are extremely powerful

Academy Badges

You can pet Innovation Cores from Campaign and Projects construction and first badge you will have to get is Workers Badge.

As a second badge Engineering is the best on long term if you have the patience, Innovation/Tinkering is the popular choice since is an instant boost. Engineering its wait 1 extra week

Projects Folder

Projects is another option of spending your materials. They take time to complete and give you additional multipliers, as well as Blueprints that you can use in the Construction Milestones.

Usually you would like to balance them with Tech Samples, unless you get something that you like a lot.

Sources used:

wsxandres#3813 from Official CIFI Discord