Day 3

The first week or so is always going to be a slow; techs are minimal, ships take forever to get anywhere and your industry isn't producing a whole lot of ships.

Despite this, things are starting to get tense.

As you can see from the screenshot above, my borders are now touching enemy borders on all sides, most of the nearby stars have all been taken and my scanning isn't good enough to know what my neighbors are doing.

This is the game play screen and I'll detail what each item is. The orange line is my scanning range; other than the locations of stars and who controls them, I cannot see anything beyond this line. The colored circle around the star indicates who owns it. The yellow circle slightly further out is how productive the star is. What this means is that if you want to build on it, it's cheaper if the yellow circle is larger. Also, the more you have built on it, the more expensive consecutive builds are. The three numbers below indicate the number of economy, industry and research buildings on the star. The final number below that indicates the number of ships on a given star.

If you look at the list of players on the right of the screenshot, I'm currently in second place but that doesn't really mean anything at this stage of the game. I've run out of stars to grab while I know that some of my opponents still have a few stars available to take. Besides this, the players at the top of the list are always going to be targeted and teamed up against so as to not allow one to race out ahead of the others.

What I have got going for me are my techs. My feeler messages all came back positive. In fact, I couldn't have planned it better. I had each of the three say they'd be willing to swap a different tech with me. This means if all come through and we continue to trade, I should have every single tech increasing at the same rate - 4X faster than people without trades. Now that being said, so far I've sent out speed to all three of them and only received one back, I have heard from one of the others who has promised it me soon but I've not even heard from one of them. The other thing I have to be concerned about, as I said in my previous post, is that it is possible to see what everyone else has. If any of these 3 work out I'm getting 4 techs at once, they might see me as a threat and cut me off. And to just to let you know, sending a tech costs $25 which is quite a lot of money at this early stage of the game. To top it off, there is no in-built trade window so there's no guarantee that the swap will go both ways. I may have sent speed to these people for free. Let's hope not.

I've also had my first (albeit unplanned) battle. At the right of the screenshot is a planet called Rigil Kentaurus (I didn't come up with it's name!) where my fleet with 5 ships beat the dark reds fleet of 5 ships also. We just both happened to be going there at the same time, both seeing that it was unoccupied at the time. Once the ship sets off from a star, there is no altering course. I happened to reach it first and with my defensive bonus and extra weapon strength (from the trade), I was left with 3 ships and a star to call my very own. The star from which his fleet came from (Tarazet) is within both of our jump ranges, but not our scan ranges. The lesson is, be careful when jumping to a star outside of your scanning range!

The game explained

Since the first 2 posts, I've had a couple of emails from people with questions regarding the game play so I thought I'd use this post to briefly outline the game.

So the basic game is to expand your territory and capture half of the stars in the galaxy. For this game, that's a total of 111 stars needed. At the beginning of the game, we started with 6. To capture stars, you create a fleet carrier for $25, load up with ships and travel to another star. If it is unoccupied, you automatically claim it, but if there are enemy ships present, there is a battle (with very simple battle calculations) and the person with ships remaining at the end of the battle claims the star.

You get income at the same time every day depending on your economy and you get a certain number of ships every day depending on your industry. Your money goes towards increasing your economy, buying industry or buying research facilities all of which are specific to a particular star. Some stars are easier to build on than others and therefore more valuable.

There are 4 different types of techs available;

• Speed - increases how fast your ships take to get from one star to another
  
• Weapons - increases your fleets weapon strength
  
• Range- increases how far your fleets can jump between stars
  
• Scanning - how far you can see away from your stars (to spy on enemies)
  

The game is one of the most simple games I've ever played. Everything is done is extremely simple calculations eg. 1 economy = $10 per 24 hours, 1 industry = 2 ships per 24 hours etc.

As the official website's help section details, there are only 4 things you need to do:

• Move your Fleets
  
• Upgrade your Stars
  
• Choose your Technology
  
• Talk to the other Players
  

What makes this game so interesting is the diplomacy between your rivals. Brute force isn't going to win the game for you. As you can see from the first map, there are 10 people competing over 222 stars and everyone needs half of them. Along the way, you're going to be making and breaking numerous alliances so you're forced to communicate with your neighbours.

What also makes this game very interesting is that you know precisely how strong each of the other players is. It details everyones fleets, income and techs - just not where their fleets might be located. This means if you suddenly see someone you're fighting with jump from 3 weapon strength to 6 as you're on your way to attack, you know they've struck some sort of deal with someone to trade techs as there's no way you can get techs that quick. You'd better watch your back because it was in someone else's interest to have you weakened or eliminated!

If you want more information on the game, please check out the official website.

If you have any other questions for me, please feel free to use the comments section and I'll address them in future posts.