The planet defenses.

[ravenzachary]

Strongbad - the way to win is to expand like mad land grab style until you bump into your neighbors, build up economic wealth and talent points until you can pursue your victory condition. If that's Warlord, use Dreadnaughts and Planet Killers to take out other players. If that's Trader, hoard wealth. If that's Researcher, collapse stars.

Warfare is only the requirement of one skill tree - Warlord. Wars happen, but if you can avoid them, you're better off. Warfare in the endgame is where it gets interesting. Warfare prior to the endgame is frankly, just a waste of resources.

[Strongbad]

If you don't fight for the best planets early on, you loose, you won't see endgame!!

[ravenzachary]

If you don't fight for the best planets early on, you loose, you won't see endgame!!

It depends on how you define "fight". If you define fight as racing to the unclaimed planets and taking control of them before other players get there, YES. If you mean warfare, then you're going to spend way too much time and resources early on fighting small wars that keep you small while other players who took the peaceful route, grow faster than you.

[Strongbad]

When I started, there was 3 players nearby, and 3 systems to take, I smashed them all and took their stuff and won...I don't see how trade would have really done anything here except make me loose those systems and the game. If you don't have any income I don't see how you can research your way out of that. Later on, I met another aggressive player, it turned into a slugfest and he won, the rest of the people in the sector are now toast in oh so many ways..

Trade your way out of that.

[ravenzachary]

Strongbad - read my post here:

http://www.zarksoft.com/cms/showthre...of-the-Eclipse

[Strongbad]

That's a nice guide, I don't disagree with some of your points, but I think you underestimate the wargame, you will get seriously burned.

[Leedot]

A couple other options for dealing with high population colonies - Equip your dreadnaughts with Biological Weapons, or use smuggling to sap their population then attack, or just use blockade running so you can trade with them while at war status and then crank up your counterfeiting skill and economically strangle them. Just a few thoughts anyhow.

[Velucritus]

Raven has a good point about waiting. Granted most of my skills to this point have been in advancing my riches through more ships(Advanced orbitals), defense, mineral collection, and getting cargo ships for long distance trading (Of course, i'm a trader so all valuable skills.) I've seen what he currently has, and lets just say I'm glad I haven't pissed him off yet. I've also seen another neighbor be aggressive, and while he's done some impressive things he's pretty much locked in a battle at someones home world and I'm not sure it's going to end pretty for him.

On a side note, Leedot, can you choose to use counterfeiting on certain people or once you've researched it, it's always active?

[JetJaguar2000]

Of course quietly amassing a huge empire of resources is the best the long term strategy, but is it the most fun?

The problem with that style of play, in my opinion, is that it's kind of boring. I am curious to see how the game pans out, but with 150+ players, I'm guessing the winner is going to be someone on the other side of the galaxy from me that I never even encounter over the course of 2 months. He'll blow up 15 planets or stars I've never seen, or use his vast network of harvesters to get the trade win without me having much to do with it. I know I'm not going to be the last man standing, so to spend two months shuffling harvesters around and trying not to piss anyone off feels like a pretty banal exercise. I'm not out to be an aggressive jerk, but if it means some interesting multiplayer interaction, I'd rather do that than play it like a singleplayer game.

But again, we'll see how it pans out. While I do like the idea of a single winner, the largely "individual" win conditions make me think the game can be won by ignoring everyone else in the game. That kind of defeats the point of an "MMO" game like this, doesn't it?

[zarkwizard]

Everyone has a different play style I suppose. I am curious if you could think of different win conditions. Maybe even not really have "win" conditions per say, but maybe a score based system. Where each action effects your score.

Then at the end of 2 months scores are tallied and a ranking is displayed. I suppose if that was the case we could probably display in game details live rather than have a global score. Since if we had something like fighting gives you <x> points, trading gives you <x> points, discovering sectors gives you <x> points, holding artifacts every day gives you <x> points.

As always we are open to discussion on things and peoples thoughts. So then even people that do little skirmish type battles on a regular bases might end up with the same points as say someone with Ravens play style.

As a side note, while his guide is a good foundation if there were too many Ravens doing land grabs it might not be as easy for him in the long run. Since in reality you have major contention if everyone grabs their allotted 13 planets.