To begin with... I am a longstanding Planetarion player, having begun playing over 4 years ago, about mid-way through round 3. I've played most of the rounds between now and then and have observed many of the changes that have occurred. I have participated in several of the beta tests and have been fortunate enough to know many of the people involved in the development of the game and, in particular, the ship stats.
It is my opinion that the current round's setup is one of the best the game has ever had. Given the recent criticisms of the round, I feel I have to fight the other corner and explain why I think this is such a good round.
The Galaxy System
This really is the best it has ever been, without a shadow of a doubt. The main reason is the size of the galaxies. This has long been looked at from a game mechanics perspective, with the assumption being that large galaxies are bad because they favour big alliances. The performance of many of the smaller alliances this round - Veneratio spring to mind, but there are others - has proved this to be false.
However, there is another far more important point to be made about galaxy size. It is that small galaxies often contain too few active players to function as any kind of social unit. In a 10 or even 15 planet galaxy, it is entire feasible that, for most of the day, only one galaxy member is active on IRC, More fortunate galaxies might have two or three, with only the most lucky reaching the heady heights of five or six members online at any one time. With galaxies or 20-25 planets, it becomes much more likely that two or more galaxy members will be active on IRC at the same time. This coincidence of activity is what allows social bonds to form; it is what gives rise to the community that causes players to come back to the game. Without it, people simply won't come back. The single biggest step forward that this round has made is creating galaxies large enough that a critical mass of IRC-active players can exist in a single galaxy. For the first time in a very very long time, I expect to remain in contact with my galaxy members after the round ends, and this increases the likelihood of all of us playing again.
The exile system works to assist this - by removing dead weight inactive planets, it makes it easier for the active players to find each other. Some see the exile and self-exile process as purely a means for players to get into higher-scoring galaxies, but it has a secondary effect of putting active players into contact with each other. This is crucially important to the success of the game.
Stealing
This was always going to be controversial, and for good reasons. In my opinion, stealing is a good idea. It's fun and it adds a new dimension to the game.
To be honest, I can't find much justification for it beyond "it's fun", but is any other justification needed in a game? Doubtless the counter-point from the anal stats crew will be that it's "unbalanced", and it almost certainly is. However, the solution to the balance problem
must not be to remove stealing, or to return it to its previous useless state of profitless stealing or subversion. Stealing is a fundamentally fun feature and everything should be done to keep it in future rounds.
It also adds an alternative method of growth, beyond simply capping more and more roids. This helps to make the game a bit more interesting for those of us who might, after more rounds than we care to remember, be finding roid-stealing to be a little repetetive
Attack/defence balance
Again, I think this is pretty good this round. Ship armour is, relative to recent rounds, quite high, which favours attacking because it reduces the losses sustained on attack. This makes attacking viable for a longer period of time and reduces the likelihood of a situation occuring where a player is unable to find a viable target.
Combined with the fact that there are six pod classes, making it difficult for any player to have substantial defence against all types of pods, most planets are vulnerable to at least one type of attack. This, in my opinion, is exactly how it should be. Nobody should be invincible and every player should be forced to think carefully about the balance between their attack fleet and their defence fleet.
In general, the easier it is to attack, the longer the game remains fun. There might be some issues with the fact that some races are too vulnerable to some types of attack, but the general principle that attacking should be easy is a good one.
I can't think of any more to write atm - there are many other things about the current game which I think are worthy of praise, but most of these are not new features and I would be wasting everyone's time by listing them here. What I would like to know is what other people think, particularly what people's positive opinions are. Often the threads on the forums focus entirely on the negative views of the game and that bias can lead the PA team to get the impression that players are demanding large changes to the game when, in fact, the majority of players are quite happy with the game.
So, what do you like about the current round?
) and cat's are maybe a little too weak.
Linear Mode
