UNREGISTERED TACTICS

The best advice I can give to the average unregistered player is to get registered! There is no advantages to playing unregistered and you can only do yourself favours by fronting up with the pathetic amount of cash that getting registered requires (ie. You will immediately start winning more games against decent players). And when I say pathetic amount I mean it. Even I, who has never had a job in his entire life and basically lives off the generosity of the Australian government :(, could afford to register myself. That is how extremely small a sum it is. Only $24 US dollars for the regular registration (the cost is more if you have to send an International Money Order from Australia to Canada like I did!). If you have any kind of job, get pocket money or anything like that and intend to continue to play this game, then you should be ashamed if you fail to register yourself.

Now that I've finished ranting :), on to the actual tactics. In fact, the best thing that can be said of unregistered tactics is that they are merely a subset of registered tactics. Unfortunately for the unregistered player, this subset contains the worst tactics available to the registered player and not the best. The main difference between registered and unregistered tactics is that an unregistered player should never buy any universities until it is absolutely necessary they do so. These necessities are:

To buy Sharks in one turn so that you can get out there and capture wrecks. Don't buy the destroyer uni one turn and the shark uni the next. You are better served using the money to get more cities and mines and to send out trucks to pick up your accumulated resources. At some point, you will then be sufficiently rich to be able to buy the Destroyer and Shark universities at once. Another reason for this is you want to be able to get as many wrecks in a turn as you can when you start getting them. The reason for this is that, in the first turn, two of your wrecks will almost certainly turn out to be blueprints. However, in following turns you lose all your advances and so four of the wrecks you pick up will be blueprints and essentially worth nothing to you (unless you are ready to attack someone's base with Captains! A good player will not put his base where they can be attacked by Captains though). As each wreck is worth an average of $50, you are effectively squandering $200 each extra turn that it takes you to picks up all the wrecks you can. Obviously, this is to be avoided at all costs.
To buy Panthers with which to expand rapidly, but only in city dense areas. In other areas, soldiers will do the same job for less money if used correctly. For examples see the page on Movement.
To buy Hercules with which to expand. In general, you should wait to buy the Hercules until you have the Metropolis. In fact, for unregistered players it is a wise investment to leave approximately 1/4 of their cities on a tax rate of 0% so as to have as many Metropolises as you can. You can then pay $264 for the Predator/Hercules double university. You should buy any Hercules that you want to use the moment the turn starts in which this double university develops. For one thing, you can only buy the Predator from such cities and so must buy the Hercules from your base or a factory (which you can do on that turn only). For another thing, the use of advances in base and factory for unregistered players have been known to go up in a puff of smoke even before the turn in which you are supposed to be able to use them ends (which is not supposed to happen, but does anyway). If this happens to you, it could certainly spell disaster. Especially if you counted on having 7 or 8 Hercules flying from a particular factory and wind up with absolutely none...
So this little trick can be a bit hazardous for unregistered players, but it is better in the expansion fazes of the game than the alternative. Namely, buying all the advances up to Patriot and then buying the advances for Predator and Hercules which costs $904 if you build the 1st, 2nd and 4th of your ground universities in Metropolises (which is not easy to do...) If you use no Metropolises at all, it will cost you $1244. This may be even more expensive in the long run than taking the time to develop 3 Metropolises for every time you want to buy a bunch of advanced units later in the game.
In other words, don't buy the Hercules just because it would be cool. Buy it only if will actually improve your expansion rates to do so or if you are on such a rich map that you can easily afford to and indeed must to keep up with the registered players (who will have the Hercules on Turn 2 at the latest if the map is that rich).
To attack an enemy. Of course, you have to buy the technologies the turn before you use them and be absolutely certain that you buy the minimum level of technology required to get the job done. A lot of registered players will just keep buying technologies until they reach Scorpions and Hercules. An unregistered player should not buy these advances unless it will fulfil one of the points outlined above or they will be ready to make an attack in the next turn and absolutely require these units.
In general, the Grizzly unit is very much sufficient for the unregistered player to take out any target, so the Scorpion should almost never be purchased. In some very rare cases, however, an unregistered player may be in such a position in which he can only just reach a mildly defended base with a Commando riding in a Hercules. In such a case, it may be advisable to buy Scorpions to destroy any Porcupines defending the base. Scorpions have the same movement as a Commando and so can actually reach the base (unlike the Grizzly which would not be able to get close enough to even attack the base) and provide a surround bonus for themselves (unlike Artillery which is almost as strong as the Scorpion, but is a long range unit). This is an extreme situation which I just outlined, and even a registered player that got a kill out of it in that turn would have to consider themselves very lucky indeed...

If you follow these guidelines in purchasing your universities, you probably will not waste much more cash than utterly necessary and may just pull of a win against a half-decent registered player. On a moderate to small map anyhow... On a very large map, you will find yourself being forced to freight your units in from long distances to fight in an ongoing battle and will probably be pushed back by the superior mobility of a registered players forces (because they can have their new units appear instantly at the front and you will lose the ability to produce units as the cities containing the relevant universities are lost unless you purchase more. Which will put you behind again of course...).

Also due to that need for technology, an unregistered player must be constantly on the search for the oppositions own universities. They will probably be higher technology than the unregistered players own and they will also be within the opponents own empire, making them almost as good as a factory (sure you can only build one tech, but if you find say the Panther and the Grizzli Universities close to one another, you can really go burn a hole instead your enemies empire). Which brings me to the topic of maps for unregistered players. The correct choice of maps is very useful in helping you find enemy Universities. The kind of maps we are talking about here are the "pod" maps. The best examples of these maps are Airwar, Airwar 2, Antartica and RiverRace. Other maps follow the pod style to a certain extent, but on these maps, the placement of universities is at its most predictable. Then there are the maps on which you probably should not play at all. These are the big maps. The ones were you don't have a hope in hell of finding enemy universities amongst the hundreds of cities they own (and if they know what they are doing, they are on the other side of their empire from you anyhow....). You also wind up wasting thousands of dollars from buying your technologies over and over again (when you get in attack range of an opponents base usually).

The final difference between unregistered play and registered is that you must protect your empire even more vigilantly than that of the registered player. If a registered player loses a university, he has only allowed the opposition to gain a place from which to buy some units. But the importance of that same university to an unregistered player is vastly more. The unregistered player loses his ability to produce the unit from that university (at least in that area if he has more than one such university) until such time as he is capable of recapturing that university or is able to build a new one of the same type. If the university that is lost is of a high level, then this may very well be impossible and cost the unregistered player the game! To protect against this, the unregistered player must make every effort to ensure that he does not lose these very valuable cities. If this means that he must fortify and put at least one Porcupine in every one of these cities, then that is what he must do!

And that is basically it. An unregistered player must plan very carefully to avoid wasting too much more money than the registered player and must always be ahead of his enemies in every way if he expects to succeed.

NOTE: Strangely enough, some people actually find this added difficulty attractive and so you may well find quite experienced players playing under unregistered aliases. I won't pretend to sympathise with that desire. In any case, be warned that there is a subculture of experienced unregistered players who will take you down a peg or two if you get lazy. Actually, I just happen to have a little bit of strategy (?) written by one (ex-)Colonel Dion... It tends to advocate game styles that I wouldn't normally consider playing, so I figure I'll share it with you.

Dion's Unregistered Strategy Guide

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