Dave's Galaxy

[De-Legro]

Have to admit I'm thinking whether it's worth it to keep playing the game. The amount of time and effort it's taking me it just feels more like a chore than anything else. I could easily spend a few hours every day just clicking through planets to keep things moving. Heck, it already takes almost an hour to just move my fleets from newly taken planets to new ones and from outlying planets to the production centers. I don't even want to think what it would take to go through my planets to start all the upgrades I've missed on hundreds of them.

The game turns seriously unfriendly towards you once you start a war, take/lose planets or grow past a certain point.

Currently, on the days that I actually do something in the game, I spend in excess of 4 hours checking fleets, assigning new targets etc. This is why most days I just log in and check my messages, who the hell has 4 hours a day to spend on a web game.

[Dav3xor]

Errr, haven't posted here in a while, apologies.

The heart of all the trade issues is the pricing algorithm, I've found what I think the bug is, and it should be fixed very soon.

Scripts -- Yeah, I don't know..  The nature of my game is that it's scriptable, and I can either get super angry at people who write scripts, and make their lives miserable, or I can go with it and see what happens.  Several people like that aspect, and I flipped the coin, and decided "scripts ok!".  Zootcat isn't a programmer, and as far as I know he's not using scripts, and he's towards the top of most of the scoreboards.

I apologize for experimenting with the game all the time, I'm just trying to find the mix of stuff.  If your empire is too ungainly, and you want to start over, I'm more than happy to restart anyone who wants it -- there are still plenty of stars left in the galaxy, even with Heirulf and Ik spamming arcs all over the place.

And I'm working on making it better! 

[De-Legro]

Errr, haven't posted here in a while, apologies.

The heart of all the trade issues is the pricing algorithm, I've found what I think the bug is, and it should be fixed very soon.

Scripts -- Yeah, I don't know..  The nature of my game is that it's scriptable, and I can either get super angry at people who write scripts, and make their lives miserable, or I can go with it and see what happens.  Several people like that aspect, and I flipped the coin, and decided "scripts ok!".  Zootcat isn't a programmer, and as far as I know he's not using scripts, and he's towards the top of most of the scoreboards.

I apologize for experimenting with the game all the time, I'm just trying to find the mix of stuff.  If your empire is too ungainly, and you want to start over, I'm more than happy to restart anyone who wants it -- there are still plenty of stars left in the galaxy, even with Heirulf and Ik spamming arcs all over the place.

And I'm working on making it better! 

Heh, once you get the system up and running for things like Morale, those of us that have gone crazy with planets will pay the price, so long as scripts don't automate that as well. Would it be possible to have a system to abandon or destroy planets? I'm getting to the stage were I simply don't want to fight any more cause I have more planets then I could possible ever want. Yet there are players I want to do significant damage too, and pirate fleets just don't cut it.

[LilWolf]

Scripts -- Yeah, I don't know..  The nature of my game is that it's scriptable, and I can either get super angry at people who write scripts, and make their lives miserable, or I can go with it and see what happens.  Several people like that aspect, and I flipped the coin, and decided "scripts ok!".  Zootcat isn't a programmer, and as far as I know he's not using scripts, and he's towards the top of most of the scoreboards.

And I'm working on making it better! 

Getting to the score boards is relatively easy. I was doing just fine when all I did was peacefully expand, but that gets boring and Hierulf was putting a death grip on me. So I went to war and it all sort of blew up when you had 10 times more things to worry about.

The first time I lost a planet to Hierulf I spent 15 minutes just looking for where that planet was since it was a complete surprise it was taken. There's no obvious easy way to find a planet that isn't yours anymore.

Finding newly taken planets from your planet list is a chore as well when you have 90 pages of planets. A simple search box would be nice or even if you made the planet names in the in-game turn report clickable and then had the map center on that planet. Heck, if you even put in a option to set default society levels when to start building stuff on all you planets it'd be even nicer(like, society level 11 - start Long Range Scanner 1, Society level 20 - Start Long Range Scanner 2, Society level 70 - Start Mind Control etc.).

Honestly, I don't mind the script people, but the user interface really could be more friendly to those who don't have the inclination to run them. Right now it's a nightmare to try and manage things by hand if you try to do anything else but spam out arcs.

[Chenier]

I find scripts to be an unfair advantage: all should be playing with the same tools.

I'm not opposed to what they do, just the advantage they give.

[De-Legro]

Getting to the score boards is relatively easy. I was doing just fine when all I did was peacefully expand, but that gets boring and Hierulf was putting a death grip on me. So I went to war and it all sort of blew up when you had 10 times more things to worry about.

The first time I lost a planet to Hierulf I spent 15 minutes just looking for where that planet was since it was a complete surprise it was taken. There's no obvious easy way to find a planet that isn't yours anymore.

Finding newly taken planets from your planet list is a chore as well when you have 90 pages of planets. A simple search box would be nice or even if you made the planet names in the in-game turn report clickable and then had the map center on that planet. Heck, if you even put in a option to set default society levels when to start building stuff on all you planets it'd be even nicer.

Honestly, I don't mind the script people, but the user interface really could be more friendly to those who don't have the inclination to run them. Right now it's a nightmare to try and manage things by hand if you try to do anything else but spam out arcs.

When I've got some time I will release some of the scripts I use to make the user interface more friendly. The only thing I can't do is take you to a planet you have lost, since I haven't found a way to just provide the planet ID to the game engine and be taken to that planet, currently I have to find planets in your planet list and then use the link provided in that table.

IF I start caching planets in a database on the client side, then I could do this, but I'm loathe to start providing scripts that do that.

[Vellos]

My Haman account is actually staying pretty manageable, and that's despite fighting constant wars.

The trick is to have plenty of active allies you can collaborate with, and to look for lopsided wars. I take out small players pretty routinely--- not inactives mind you, but little outlying empires. I'm about to crush a fifth, and I've already got my sixth conquest picked out. From there, I arc-spam the surrounding pace until I link up with my main empire. Once a week, I log on to put on upgrades for my planets. Takes about 30 minutes to an hour.

Again, you've just got to limit your borders. Get solid allies on most sides, limit wars to one or two areas. I may be about to have my first big war here soon, but we'll see...

[De-Legro]

My Haman account is actually staying pretty manageable, and that's despite fighting constant wars.

The trick is to have plenty of active allies you can collaborate with, and to look for lopsided wars. I take out small players pretty routinely--- not inactives mind you, but little outlying empires. I'm about to crush a fifth, and I've already got my sixth conquest picked out. From there, I arc-spam the surrounding pace until I link up with my main empire. Once a week, I log on to put on upgrades for my planets. Takes about 30 minutes to an hour.

Again, you've just got to limit your borders. Get solid allies on most sides, limit wars to one or two areas. I may be about to have my first big war here soon, but we'll see...

If I targeted smaller players regularly, well enough people already complain about me and my wars. Besides where would the fun be? It is trivial at this stage for me to take down empires of 200-300 planets. All I would be doing is beating down on someone that has next to zero chance of fending me off. Thus I look to bigger players, which generally means they are either super active, or running scripts. Even if they are neither the PD means I need to me amassing MASSIVE fleets which of course takes time to go through your planets, build fleets, send them off, monitor when they all arrive etc. That can all be scripted away, but then people would once again whine about using scripts. Besides which Baz's experiments with allowing scripts to handle everything ended up with a massive war when the scripts had a bug.

 That is forgetting that it isn't always YOU who chooses a war at any rate. I could work on getting more allies, but really people see my empire and just figure why bother. People are willing to ally with me, rarely are they interested in fighting with me.

[Dav3xor]

Getting to the score boards is relatively easy. I was doing just fine when all I did was peacefully expand, but that gets boring and Hierulf was putting a death grip on me. So I went to war and it all sort of blew up when you had 10 times more things to worry about.

The first time I lost a planet to Hierulf I spent 15 minutes just looking for where that planet was since it was a complete surprise it was taken. There's no obvious easy way to find a planet that isn't yours anymore.

Finding newly taken planets from your planet list is a chore as well when you have 90 pages of planets. A simple search box would be nice or even if you made the planet names in the in-game turn report clickable and then had the map center on that planet. Heck, if you even put in a option to set default society levels when to start building stuff on all you planets it'd be even nicer(like, society level 11 - start Long Range Scanner 1, Society level 20 - Start Long Range Scanner 2, Society level 70 - Start Mind Control etc.).

Honestly, I don't mind the script people, but the user interface really could be more friendly to those who don't have the inclination to run them. Right now it's a nightmare to try and manage things by hand if you try to do anything else but spam out arcs.

Yeah, I want to do all this, but I've been putting out fires, haven't had a lot of chances to fix the UI stuff I really want to fix.  Getting there slowly.

[Chenier]

My Haman account is actually staying pretty manageable, and that's despite fighting constant wars.

The trick is to have plenty of active allies you can collaborate with, and to look for lopsided wars. I take out small players pretty routinely--- not inactives mind you, but little outlying empires. I'm about to crush a fifth, and I've already got my sixth conquest picked out. From there, I arc-spam the surrounding pace until I link up with my main empire. Once a week, I log on to put on upgrades for my planets. Takes about 30 minutes to an hour.

Again, you've just got to limit your borders. Get solid allies on most sides, limit wars to one or two areas. I may be about to have my first big war here soon, but we'll see...

Is this the kind of behavior that's meant to be encouraged? Just go gang up on the newbies?

Hell of a lot of fun it is to be a newbie in this game...

[Vellos]

Is this the kind of behavior that's meant to be encouraged? Just go gang up on the newbies?

Hell of a lot of fun it is to be a newbie in this game...

 

[Ramiel]

Welcome to Earth; which is inhabited by Humans, Chénier.

[Qyasogk]

Is this the kind of behavior that's meant to be encouraged? Just go gang up on the newbies?

Hell of a lot of fun it is to be a newbie in this game...

As long as there are stronger empires and weaker empires there will be those that try to dominate and conquer others. If you treat the newbies around you better than that, you are to be commended for your noble alien rights record.

The seemingly weaker empires are not always as weak as the stronger empire would imagine, and vice versa. Smaller empires can always employ diplomacy, though it seems that many players overlook this very valuable part of the game. If I've got a problem with a particular empire, I try  to reach out to that empire's neighbors for intel, learn who his allies and enemies are and exploit that if I can.

Finally, by virtue of being located on the outer areas, the newbies have the advantage of totally empty space on their border. They can send out arc escape pods, so that even if they lose their homeworld, they can still survive (and maybe one day seek revenge on their conqueror?)

[Kai]

yeah, revenge, half a year later. i don't think my attention span would last that long.

[Chenier]

Finally, by virtue of being located on the outer areas, the newbies have the advantage of totally empty space on their border. They can send out arc escape pods, so that even if they lose their homeworld, they can still survive (and maybe one day seek revenge on their conqueror?)

Growth is exponential. All the time they spend running away, their conqueror keeps growing.