Nopilas is a real-time, turn-based browser strategy game. An update happens on the hour, every hour — 1:00 pm, 2:00 pm, 3:00 pm… — and that is when everything moves one step: production, construction, research, troop movements and battles. Between two updates you give your orders; the game keeps running while you sleep.
The goal is simple: build a thriving planet, raise an army and go attack your enemies — or deter them. To get there, you build structures that produce resources, research technologies that unlock units, and manufacture robots, ships and orbital stations.
The resource bar
At the top of every screen, the resource bar sums up the state of your planet:
- Score and rank — how powerful your planet is, and where you stand in the rankings.
- Vitarium — what you have over what you can store, and hourly production.
- Energy — available over maximum, and hourly production. Every building consumes some.
- Food — available over maximum. It feeds the population.
- Population — the inhabitants of your planet, your workforce.
- Next update — the countdown to the top of the hour.
Your first construction
To start well, build a vitarium refinery. Go to the Construction page: the list of buildings shows what each one costs and yields. A refinery costs 400 vitarium, uses 1 energy per hour once built, and takes 12 hours at base speed.
Click Build. The site shows up under “under construction”. One more thing: say who is working. Go to the Population page and assign a percentage of your humans and robots to construction. With no workforce, the site shows “--” and does not progress.
Those are twelve real hours. A refinery started at 1 pm is ready at 1 am — a little sooner if you put a lot of robots on it.
What next?
The rest of the guide goes through the game screen by screen, in the order of the left-hand menu. If you only read one more page, read Your first 48 hours.