Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[andrea]

the cores are always stripmined, and will always be. too many people around. If you want greener pastures, fly to the fringes. Mind you, all the good spots will be already taken, starbases will be built. But if there isn't too much traffic around the sector, or if an alliance takes proper care of it, tiles should be harvestable. but , if nothing changed, be careful: only mine tiles that have many resources ( green), and leave them at an high level, because the more resources a tile has, the faster it will regenerate. a tile stripmined to 0 might as well be destroyed.

Of course that doesn't really apply if there hasn't been an expansion of the universe in a long time.  If you are lucky enough to witness one, jump fearlessly into the new wormholes and colonize new space!
Back when I played, in 2007, I had such luck and I went from having just a ship, to being sort-of-leader of a small alliance owning 2 starbases ( well, one. Then we merged with another small alliance who had a nearby starbase)
Building that starbase while both me and my alliance mates had fighters was Fun.

[Shadowlord]

I used to play this shortly after it was created, some nine or so years ago.  It ended when my entire group got banned for winning wars against developer-backed characters.

I can't recommend it.

Ahahaha, that's terrible.

[Akura]

You should hear the story of how people blew up the Military Outposts blocking the Pardus sector, which is the P2P area. The devs banned a few and upgunned the outposts.

However, unless something had changing in the three or so years since I played, the devs aren't *that* bad.

I stopped playing because, well, everything is pretty much run by the older players. Want to build a building somewhere? Make sure the local alliance is cool with it. Want to increase your skills? Pay a hefty fee to get access to a spot where someone has usually rare space monsters roped off and bring the weakest guns in the game because if you accidentally damage it, let alone kill, you'll be bountied for life.

[Aklyon]

This still exists? I remember playing this ages ago, seeing everything within range was already claimed, and got bored.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Seems like the perennial problem with MMOs:

If you use instances, everyone can have their own healthy slice of an effectively unlimited pie. But you don't actually control anything in relation to other players because they each have their own instance too.

If you use shared world space, people have to share limited resources. Eventually resources become concentrated in a few hands and there's nothing left for anyone else.

If you have a shared world with decay of control and ownership, people still take over everything but then they complain because if they go on winter break and can't log in everything decays and other players swoop in and gobble it all up.

(Gonna go post something in Games You Wish Existed)

[Devastator]

I used to play this shortly after it was created, some nine or so years ago.  It ended when my entire group got banned for winning wars against developer-backed characters.

I can't recommend it.

Ahahaha, that's terrible.

Aye.  The backstory is they were behind a group of player 'pirates' who blew up structures in the neutral zone, where, at the time, there weren't any strong alliances, and extorted money out of some of them.

Anyway, we then took advantage of recent pro-defence balance changes, (caused by a different war we'd won about three months previous..)  and set up a blockade with the other powerful federation alliances.  Our combat pilots then headed out and fought them.  There was some skirmishing for a while, but eventually we got the upper hand.  One of their main pilots, fresh with his newly-purchased and at the time unique, doomstar, (price reduced to 25% so this guy could buy it..) poked at the blockade a bit and had no chance of breaking through.

A few days later, the developers banned the guy holding the blockade buildings, and put us on 'probation', saying that they wasted far too much time on us as compared to any other group in the game, as well as saying they would punish us for anything done off-site, which at the time meant our private forums, which, unique of all groups, was not hosted on their server.  Two days later, we had replaced the blockade, and our entire alliance was banned.  And by 'entire alliance', it was everyone with a structure in Tau Ceti, which was our economic heart.

That was the third war that we won against a developer-assisted faction, or as in the first, against a developer-ran character.  The second time featured the current top gun, one of us, getting stripped of his skills, as well as free instant repairs to our opponents structures. We then blew them up anyway. That caused all 20-some attackers to get stuck in one location, because of some bug in their the cobbled together hack.  They did fix that, but had their dev character kill all of us who were stuck due to their own cheat.

The first one was when the devs started running a 'pirate', and killing the dozens of out-of-fuel newbies scattered around the core systems, as no player wanted to take the reputation hit for killing them, and there were no outlaw groups due to a combination of game mechanics strongly discouraging them, as well as a group, (us), who were very strongly pro-carebear and had proven themselves quite willing and able to fight for the public good.

Anyway, so their 'pirate' built a cheap building, and since he didn't need money, turns, or resources, stacked it up high with the current best defences available.  He then went around killing people and buildings for little reason.  The devs parried a few attacks by reading the PMs of people arranging the attack, but eventually we were able to maintain operational security with our off-site forum, and took him down.  There was also a conversation between the group leadership and the developers, where it was revealed that we knew, and had proof, that they were running a dev character to shoot at people for no reason.  That lead to an uneasy standoff, and all the future fights would be done by proxy.

There was some background before the game even began, actually.  Pardus was created by two administrators from the Moo3 fansite, moo3.at.  Some of the members of our alliance were also from there, as well as more from other Moo3 fansites around the web.  The head start and solid organization was used to create a unity of purpose and degree of co-operation that no other group could match, and we never really gave up the lead, as most other alliances were either self-serving organizations created to benefit the leader, or loose groups with limited capabilities, even if they were decent on paper.  In the end, we had won every fight we were ever in, and were able to have a serious effect on the gameworld.  Had they not banned us, the game would be a much better place, as it was whenever and wherever we operated.  The dirt, however, might have made it more difficult to monetize when they decided to start selling helpful interfaces, some months later.

As for the game itself, it wasn't bad, but there were some serious issues with it, and eventually I realized that I was only playing it to be with the other Rangers, and that I could do so without actually playing the game.  I ended up quitting about two months before they banned everyone.  My account was not banned, as I did not have a structure in Tau Ceti, although I deleted it about a week later.

I will admit though, I've never won a war against a game developer before.

[Funk]

i play this years ago, it was fun until i pasted the starting tutorial and look at the vastness of the claimed and mined area filled with monsters way beyond my ship.

[andrea]

well, it seems infrastructure is being neglected a bit, in starting sectors. I started a character on the orion server, and without leaving starting sector I made 300k credits just moving stuff around the local buildings, using my starting AP. and I think I haven't even exploited all the opportunities. That is way more than a freshly created character can spend! I guess it is time to gear up for fighting, and gain some exp. I wonder what happened to my old alliance starbases in the last 5 years. probably gone, but worth checking if they are still up in somebody's hands.