[JonnyBGood]

Thinking about it I'm probably more responsible for the development of fortress gals than anyone. When Ascendancy originally started doing them, in r19 first of all and then from r25 onwards on a wider scale most people used to tell me that they were a poor idea because it just made it easier to target your alliance and meant you couldn't call on ingal def. These two issues still actually exist. So why do people go for fortress gals and why do they seem to work?

Well, first of all they don't actually work anywhere near as well as people think they do. The winning alliance of the round rarely has one of its core gals as the #1 gal. I think r29 is realistically the only time you could actually claim that that happened. You do get lots of t10/20 gals out of it though. This is due to the fact that it's difficult to keep down a gal of active players. There's no "trick" to it or anything. By centralising yourselves you also focus your alliance. You're declaring who, what and where you are and telling everyone else to either bring it or **** off. Largely they work because they make it easier to see what's happening, raising your overall efficiency and because it's simpler to keep someone in your gal and alliance active, reducing the inevitable decline in activity that afflicts all planetarion alliances. They appear to work a lot better than they actually do due to the nature of galaxies. Anyone who thinks apprime wouldn't have won last round, or somehow been significantly worse, with the new proposed system is, well, a bit of an idiot. The primary factor is that they're ****ing better at planetarion than the other alliances.

Responding to a few points in particular

1. It makes it much harder for new players to get rolling. I've had many newbie gal members join the game, then almost a week later leave it realizing they were at GREAT disadvantage on top of being new to the game.

To be honest I think you're completely full of shit here. I have severe doubts this has happened "many" times, or even once to be honest. Someone entirely new signs up and decides to quit a week later because they see that the big alliances control a lot of the top galaxies? ****ing hell I'd be surprised if they'd found the universe rankings page by that point. On top of that what on earth difference is it going to make to them if the big alliances control the big galaxies as long as they aren't in them. Furthermore, and I've been in a lot of fortress gals, I always tried to integrate new players if possible. Usually what happens is that most of them don't really care too much about pa and it'll make more sense for me to exile them and hope for better exiles. This is going to be true regardless of whether or not I'm in a fortress gal or not.

2. The meta game has turned into attack recall, attack recall... this is so ****ing boring it nearly makes my nose bleed thinking about it. I know other factors contribute to this dilemma, but this is certainly one of them.

This is being addressed this round with the introduction of single targeting. Either way this isn't really a "problem". It's a design choice, some people prefer games in which defending your planet/roids is easier, some don't.

3. More fleets. The past few rounds i've seen fort gals have 3 to 5 more planets than most galaxies. Considering that most fort gals are extremely active... 9 to 15 more fleets is an incredible advantage over say the 10 planet quasi-fort gal. Late joins shouldn't be allowed IMO, it only makes overpowered gals, even more overpowered.

This isn't even vaguely true. Fortress gals occasionally have 1 more planet than the average gal. You can even check this up on www.sandmans.co.uk (although it's slightly into havoc now so it might be a bit off). The issue here is that a) people exile out of shit gals and b) shit gals rarely have late starters. It's nothing intrinsically related to fortress gals at all.


The main problems with the game are that it's been the same for quite a while now, no significant changes have occurred since r24 and the introduction of multi-targeting. Because it's been the same for so long winning strategies become well known. As well as this the playerbase has been roughly the same for a long time and the active players know the alliances they need to join if they want to play with other active players. Some choose not to for various reasons but they're in the minority. Because of this you have the same group of players winning the same game over and over utilising the same strategies. If this sounds boring to you it's because it is. It's nothing to do with fortress gals. Getting rid of fortress gals will just make a few mediocre alliances forget they suck as much as they do for a couple of rounds. Unfortunately they'll still suck and the game will still be basically the same.