OGame.Origin

I've been invited to re-post some of my ideas here, which originally appeared in the .org suggestions board. I'm also going to repost an idea I had about making the galaxies circular... I wasn't invited to repost that one in particular but I do think its a good idea and it's been getting good responses from other players, and it was also in that thread that I made a proposal for a new procedure for testing new features that involves having players in a uni vote on whether they want to test a new feature for a given length of time, be rewarded with dark matter for filling out somewhat regular surveys (the kind which produce aggregate quantitative rather than qualitative data) and then allowed to vote again at the end of the test period on whether or not they would like to keep the feature. A 75% approval threshhold might be necessary in some cases to prevent massive boycotts of a test uni. Without further ado;

---

Everyone seems to be aware that OGame is struggling to stay alive, its getting harder to retain players. I do my part and advise the noobs I raid on how to be less of a target, what to build if they have an obvious weakness, how to find good targets for themselves, go on expeditions, etc. But the game itself needs to be altered at a fundamental level, and perhaps this alteration should be introduced into existing unis so that they don't die out. Now, I'm starting out by being vague because I want to leave the discussion as open as possible, but generally I think that the primary goal of such a change should be to ensure that players of all ranks and skill levels keep coming back for small victories, and small defeats, perhaps. Another goal should be that players are more motivated to interact with one another - its networks that keep this game alive.

For the sake of suggesting something specific, here's an idea to get the discussion started, it's not entirely new, but it's a good place to start - although I hope that the discussion won't revolve around this one idea.

Pirates and aliens should have planets. We could make OGame a lot more complex, there could be multiple alien nations and pirate factions going in and out of war with one another that would be able to make basic agreements with human alliances, but it doesn't really need to be that complicated. I'm thinking of a very basic sort of AI that has a few planets, builds up its mines over time, has a 90% predictable online/offline/fleetsave schedule, and launches probes and attacks on any targets that seem profitable - and a pirate's profit margins could be extremely narrow! Pirate empires could pop up in particular neighbourhoods and become a menace - or a good source of farming. They could pop up anywhere - the GOs could run them in a macro sort of way, deciding to put 15 pirate planets off in the middle of Galaxy 7 and see if anyone moves in to stop them from getting too powerful. Players in a particular area might have to cooperate in order to put the pirates down, you might have a weaker player telling a stronger one "hey, pirates are attacking me from their moon here, so their fleet should be returning at this time, you can blind phalanx them and maybe pay me for the info", etc, etc. Inactive planets that are due to be deleted could be taken over by pirates instead. Aliens might operate on a completely different ethic, two tribes could be warring with one another with such a rage that they don't even pick up their own massive debris fields...

Other types of random events that could increase activity would be like... a large comet that passes through a region of space, scattering debris fields of varying sizes around random planets - even uninhabited ones. A large enough fleet could destroy it to grab a large amount of debris before it went off to an unreachable location. Stars could occasionally go supernova (but miraculously reforming somehow ;p), giving a 7 day warning, which would destroy all fleet around all planets in a given system in a single instant - requiring players to move their fleets away or to be in the middle of a fleetsave for that moment. Perhaps players would somehow be able to CAUSE these supernovas in another system... deliver 1kk deut to a sun? That would simplify a graviton crash! The real cost of solar satellite energy would be driven up generally if everyone knew that regardless of whether or not they were attacked, they would have to rebuild their satellites eventually. Minor (unpredictable?) solar flares could either cause solar energy production to shut down or skyrocket for a short period of time, triggering a flurry of graviton attempts!

Expeditions could be enhanced - the sixteenth slot could actually have its own debris field that everyone could see, destroying a pirate/alien fleet could actually provide some benefit. Fleets lost 'to a black hole' could actually re-emerge somewhere else (slot 16) - unpiloted, ready for another player to see (scan) and capture (send 2 LC to capture 1 unpiloted one, for example) and the player who lost their fleet to a black hole would be the first to know where it went. Droid colonies could be discovered, providing a short term production boost to one of the mines on the planet from which the expedition was sent. Wormholes with short lifespans could open up in pairs in different slot 16s across the universe, suddenly shrinking the distance between two places (distance calculating here would be quite complicated, also how to specify to a fleet that it goes through this wormhole and comes back before it closes etc, but it could be worked out)

Each system could have an asteroid field between planet slots 4 and 5 (that's what we have here in Sol anyways) each with 7 different asteroids that could be captured (requires the continual stationing of a colony ship) and mined. Example; you target an asteroid (4:237:4,5c) and scan it: 1.439.776 metal, 814.113 crystal and 11.929 deuterium, no mines or solar plants, 64 fields. So you capture it with a colony ship and a few truckloads of res and then decide what to build on it. (The colony ship is sacrificed when you capture the asteroid) To the right of your 'planets' column you have an 'asteroid' column. Let's say that each 3 levels of astrophysics lets you mine 1 additional asteroid, and you can automatically occupy one asteroid without any expedition tech. For this asteroid specifically, it probably would not be worth the effort to build a deuterium mine. And it wouldn't necessarily be beneficial to build the metal or crystal mines too high, since youll lose them eventually - they should be just high enough that you can farm it in a reasonable amount of time, without worrying that someone else will just capture it, but not so high that your profits from the asteroid are actually lowered by the input cost. While you mine it, the metal/crystal/deut remaining on the asteroid diminishes. Because an empty asteroid might actually be valuable to a player as a place to launch a fleet from, they are only destroyed when the player decides to destroy them. If an asteroid is left undefended, it can be captured by another player's fleet - and they would get all of the mines that have already been built on them, and 100% of the resources that have already been mined and are ready to ship! Shipyards and robotics factories would be the only FACILITIES that could be constructed on an asteroid, but defenses could not be built. When an asteroid is destroyed, a new one takes its place 48 hours later. Another possibility is that the asteroids aren't actually mined with buildings, but with Colony ships themselves, which land on the asteroid with their little mini colonies for a set number of hours (taking up an expedition slot!?) and pull out a set number of metal/crystal/deut per hour per colony ship (a rate adjustable by further research into... say... ion and plasma technologies?!)

And, one thing that could be made UNRANDOM: When you colonize a planet, you know exactly - in terms of size and temperature - what you are going to get because of which slot it is. You know what's not fun at all? Spending a month looking for the right planet.

I'm just brainstorming to get the discussion flowing, we need to generate ideas, flesh them out a bit maybe but generally just try to produce something that the programmers could get a hold of and actually IMPLEMENT - leave the real fleshing out of details to the people that code the game to be balanced and fun.

Let's keep this game ALIVE!

....

Alright, let's work on the comet idea.

Let's say the comet appears and disappears in different unoccupied planet slots in different solar systems each day, as if it were moving. On any given day, the comet can be seen in these three places, it's 'trail' (a comet trail which can be scanned, the espionage report will reveal the current location of the comet) where the comet was yesterday, the comet itself (which can be scanned, revealing the 'size' of it and the server time at which it will transition to the next location), and the comet's trajectory (which, like the trail, can be scanned to reveal the comet's actual current position) where the comet will appear tomorrow. Here's what an espionage report of a comet might look like.

Comet "Anonymous Hamster", 4:215:6
Mass: 378.000 tonnes
Here until: 0:00:00 server time (T-13:24:56)

Now, the player knows that in order to destroy this comet they need to have a fleet arrive in the next 13 and a half hours that deals 378.000 damage in a single round to blast the comet into a debris field. This debris field will be made up of a RANDOM mix of metal and crystal, that would add up to a total of 378.000. So, you get your fleet together, and destroy it - turns out it was 40% metal and 60% crystal, a damn good find! a debris field of this size will appear:

151.200 metal
226.800 crystal

So, this would be a medium sized comet, one that 30 destroyers and 70 battlecruisers with level 12 weapons technology could destroy. If the amount given is too high considering the investment in fleet that was necessary, the percentage of mass that goes into DF could be adjusted, but probably not down to 30%.

Comets would encourage miners to actually have a fleet of battleships they could use to snipe out passing comets.

The amount of comets that would appear/disappear could be random, as could their sizes, but actually - THIS WOULD BE AN EXTREMELY USEFUL MACRO-MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR GOs! Once it was established - through some testing and some guessing - how many comets would be needed to spike interest and retain players in the game, they could adjust the number and size of comets accordingly. Maybe it would be beneficial to create large numbers of comets that move through unoccupied areas, motivating people to create temporary planets way out in G7 to chase a large number of these things. And fleeters could chase the comet chasers.

Fun times!

How could this be improved?

EDIT: Dark matter could be used to 'buy' a subscription to a prop astronomer's newsletter which tracks the largest clusters of comets and the locations of their expected appearances.

Thank you

And, sorry to all that this thread may have more than one idea, depending on how you look at it. Basically, I thought it would be good to have a place to brainstorm specific ideas about random events to introduce, but the one BIG idea is random events themselves.

Right now, everything except for expeditions is up to the players - nothing is left to chance. Even combat, which includes a random element (which ships will shoot which ships and which ones will blow up) is fairly predictable with combat simulators.

One of the things it means to play in a universe made up of only players, where the only events that can take place are those directly caused by players, is that there can be no central intentionality involved in the development of the universe - once a universe starts to die, there is nothing to be done for it but let it die. It was pointed out in the original thread that in order to stop noobs from quitting, we (more experienced/higher ranked) players need to be nice to them - give them advice, resources even, stop farming them so often they can't stand up, etc. But in dog-eat-dog gameplay, there is little incentive for long-term thinking. Much like economies need regulation, so does OGame I believe, on a macro-scale... but what tools exist for GO's to ensure that new players are retained and participation remains high? Central banks can raise and lower interest rates, governments can invest in companies, or raise/lower taxes selectively, workers can be induced to pay into social security, etc, etc, to keep the economy going.

OGame is essentially an economy of virtual resources that MUST keep flowing - and should flow through everyone's hands, not always from poor to rich - in order to keep a universe alive. So, given that the incentives for individual players lead them to bash noobs into oblivion for short-term gain and ultimately kill the universe, I think that the goal of OGame macromanagement should be, if not to alter these incentives (noob protection, bashing rule, the potential introduction of a vassalage system that rewards top-down generosity with dark matter), then to introduce new structural elements that provide new sources of revenue to members of all income brackets.

I would hope that my suggestions around pirates/aliens and comets in particular can be seen in this light. A team of GOs for a given universe should have access to aggregate data about gamer participation, should be able to reclassify this data to see which rank grouping is suffering the most, where their planets are, etc, and initiate a comet storm in that region, create pirate planets in another, etc. Ideally this would take minimal effort on the behalf of GOs, which are in short supply I understand, or it could even be a function of a macromanagement algorithm that operates automatically without any need for direct human oversight.

The possibilities are endless, but before we can worry about the details of particular features I suppose we need to deal with the philosophical issue - do we want to move away from purely player-based universes? Random element - whether they are actually even more random than the chaotic behaviour of the disorganized player base, or whether they are the policy tools of a semi-automated OGame 'government' which seeks to retain players of all ranks in all universes - are a step away from player control, to be sure, and such a move might have profound implications, both philosophical and functional.

I don't speak German, what does this mean?

not a wall, paragraphs! and thank you for translation, and thank you for welcome

Thank you for the long and thoughtful post!

Pirates and aliens: I would imagine that they would be quite dumb, easy to pick on, easy to avoid. As for their techs, it would depend on the player they engage with! I play in Fornax on .org, which is a non ACS uni, so this is much simpler for me to think about, pirates are always 2 W/S/A behind. In an ACS attack, maybe it would have to be -2 of the average tech. Or maybe strong/weak/medium strength pirates could exist as you suggested, with set techs.

Supernova: OK, I agree, it is a bad idea But solar flares could be interesting, especially if its visible in the Galaxy screen where it happens - if they necessarily increased energy output of solar collectors for, say, 1 week... there could very well be a flurry of activity, as some dude suddenly finds his graviton cost cut by 25% (which still makes it extremely expensive) and decides to go for it right then and there, while some other gentleman says "well well, looky what we have here, time for my fleet to pick some cherries!"... and if they could be caused, players could choose to invest whatever the deut cause would be right before they clicked "research" for graviton, hoping that nobody would notice what's going on... to add risk for that player, maybe a 24 hr countdown timer would display in the galaxy view that a solar flare was coming... so they might have to plan a bit, and leave a window that would get them noticed! miner's with high enough mines, and several planets in one system (a strategy i think is generally silly but for which there would be added incentive with solar flares) might make it their policy to ensure that their own sun is in a perpertual state of solar flare, if he production bonus was worth the initial investment - essentially trading deuterium (+cargo cost) for energy! Numbers would have to be adjusted, of course. Now, this might create one thing that GOs would have to watch for... a strong player with a bunch of planets in one system always receiving solar flares from weaker players... Maybe the banning program could be set to pick up on this sort of thing, maybe it's a great deal more complicated. Sorry if any of this wasn't expressed clearly. But yes, supernova, bad idea all around. Solar flare, maybe not!

Black holes as a means of transferring ships between players: OK, its a problem, has the potential to be abused, and it wouldnt really be that interesting for anyone. The risk of your expedition being swallowed up by a black hole would be really really annoying and probably discourage people from doing them. Any thoughts on the wormhole idea, or the other things that could come from expeditions, like mine-enhancing droids?

Asteroids: They could be 'possessed' like planets or 'occupied' like slot 16 on an expedition - either way, I don't see it being so complicated.

Comets: As the battle takes place in an instant, and the coordinates of the comet are certain at any given time, I think it shouldn't be too difficult to code. Let's say you can get a fleet that can destroy the comet to its current position at 100% in 1h5 minutes, or at 90% in 1h15 minutes, but the comet is due to move one system further away than you in 1h10 minutes. You select 100%, a little green message says something like "Comet will be intercepted by your fleet (provided nobody else hits it first, in which case yous till have a chance to get debris! )"... you decide to save a little fuel and throw off anyone phalanxing the comet, and you set the speed to 90%, the green turns to red and says "Invalid mission. Comet will have relocated to (x:xxx:xx)" and the "send fleet" option will have gone grey. you could go back, change the coordinates to the next spot and send at whatever speed you want (as long as you get the next 24hrs before it moves again) or you could just send your fleet out at 100%. Once a comet is destroyed, the debris field stays stationary. I can't pretend that would be easy to program, as I don't even know how to program, but I will posit that it would be well worth it! I think this feature in particular would bring a lot of excitement to the game, and would be fair for everyone.

The numbers in regards to the comet need to be thought out a great deal, what size fleet with what upgrades should be capable of yielding what size debris field?

?

Who's insulting who? I don't mind. Here:

Summary: Players left to their own devices may not behave in such a way the creates a universe that is fun, fair, and longlasting. Interventions could take the form of introducing 'random' events (which might actually be macromanaged manually in order to keep a uni alive), or an 'environment' for the players to interact with profitably.

Suggestion 1: AI controlled pirate or alien players, primarily there to provide easy targets for lower ranked players, predictable attacks that can ninja'd, and soforth

Suggestion 2: Asteroids that you can mine like planets but which have a limited amount of resources. Can be destroyed when empty. Easy to just grab an asteroid as a mobile colony. Possible that they could be captured and transferred back and forth between different players hands when not sufficiently defended.

Suggestion 3: Comets that can be attacked, blown up and harvested for debris

Suggestion 4: New expedition results, like finding a bunch of robots that you bring home and they enhance that planet's mine production.

Suggestion 5: Solar flares that temporarily increase the solar plant/solsat energy output of all planets in a system. Could be random, could be triggered by depositing large amounts of deuterium into the sun. Problematic as it could serve as a means to pushing. Encourages miners to build several planets in one system, which also makes them better targets for raiders; complicates cost/benefit analysis.

Suggestion 6 (Made elsewhere): Implement a vassalage system that rewards higher ranked players for helping some lower ranked players to develop - reward could come in the form of dark matter proportional to the growth of their vassals.

Suggestion 7 (Made elsewhere): Make galaxies circular, so that 1:499 is right next to 1:1 - brings coordinates closer together without eliminating any space. May be necessary to provide some planet relocations to players who had been trying to 'hide'

Main point: OGame needs new features that really mix up the game to encourage lower ranked players to stay active, or else the food chain dies out and the universe stagnates. Also, providing GOs with 'tools' to macromanage a universe (ie create comet here, initiate solar flare here, establish mini-pirate empire here) in order to keep it alive. If this cannot be agreed upon as a goal, it should be everyone's goal to establish a goal: a method of either managing unis or continually implementing new features to keep all players happy. Old unis are dying, new unis arent as exciting as they used to be, and mergers are merely stopgap solutions.