Quote:
Originally Posted by Cochese
On a personal note, I quit playing because frankly getting up in the middle of the night to check an online spreadsheet is retarded. You click some buttons, then wait an hour. Rinse, repeat. If I can't play the game--and enjoy it--on my time, then it becomes an inconvenience. I was 20 when I started playing, but now I'm 30 and running my own business. Sure, I can play for free and run a "do nothing" planet, but it simply isn't rewarding.
Why do that when I can pay $15 a month for EvE and play the game entirely on my terms..."carebear" and run missions (making risk-free money), do PvP runs with friends (risky but exciting with explosions and pew pew), manufacturing, research, exploration etc.
All without worrying about what's going to happen to my stuff while I'm asleep. That's the key.
I'd play again, and get roided at night, if I felt I was entertained for the few hours a day I was in front of the computer, actually "playing". As it stands, there isn't anything to do aside from click buttons once an hour and chat on IRC.
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The point of planetarion should be that you are able to cooperate to a level where enough of the time you wouldn't need to do this and that your friends will cover you. For example, say if I got attacked, all my alliance mates, galaxy mates and 'friends' were alerted to incoming. Players could then be able to post commentary to the incoming, saying what they had sent to cover it, share scans, etc.
However, Cochese - one facet of planetarion you will need to accept is that you will get roided at night, although I find your particular issue odd, given that you are a US player. In my opinion prelaunch attacking should be discouraged (perhaps a percentage chance of detection or limited to a smaller number of ticks) or maybe even removed as it currently means that attackers go to bed and get rest, and defenders are up at 3 or 4 am to pool defence. My only downer on clipping attacking prelaunch is that it removes the sit planets prelaunched to hostile planets to make them prelaunch defence on the wrong place, and switch at the last minute tactic.
Another suggestion would be to return to the old system of 3 tick attacking and 6 tick defending. This basically limited you to receiving two waves a night when you are up against a raid or in a war, and gave the attackers and defenders much more to think about
:
- I don't have enough defence now, can I cover tick 3 and encourage a recall?
- If that defence is covering/partially covering my fleets for the third tick, will I be online to recall or will the losses pay off given what I gained before that last tick?
- How can I distribute my fleets across the galaxy in light of the respective losses and gains that can be made from missing the odd tick?
- Do I want to commit fleets for defending one or two ticks? Or attacking for one or two ticks?
This had the side benefit of slowing the game down, which meant combined with a longer round meant long term tactics really paid dividends. Planetarion was once a bit of an endurance battle, which meant managing yourself from day to day and focussing your strategy to get to the end. In my opinion it's this kind of experience that got a lot of Ascendancy through r30, which is why many of us rate the performance so highly. It was straight from the old school play book.
Fundamentally though, you need a lot more players to make the game work well. I believe that more players is never bad in Planetarion, in fact unless it takes out the servers it's pretty much all good. Another thing people have mentioned is the interface - it's a bit too complicated now and some of the skins are just crap.