Black Nova Traders

I sent you an invite, Chewie.

And I think developing planets get you good points. Blowing shit up gets you evil points.

I think maybe it takes a while to get scored. I've got 2 moderate planets in the Londinium system, but no points.

Niska's Skyplex is now open for all Browncoat military needs!

Quas - automating trade routes enables you to automate the dock/trade/warp/dock/trade/warp process.

Sort of like a macro which you can do a designated number of times.

might join you lot but no idea how to play it

Money in the IGN bank seems to be the factor...I had 270million in to test and was around 16,500 in score, though I pulled it for reasons of my own and I think my score will drop the next update.

I really don't think scores under 30,000 mean a damn thing, at 30K points that means you're sitting on a cool billion or so in the bank. Of course, that is barely enough to get a ship to 20 hull...which means as the game goes on a billion creds is going to be a drop in the bucket.

There seem to be some obvious strategies in the game once you figure out how it works, I thought I had a couple down, but was wrong and wasted about 200million creds on a system I shouldn't have bothered to exploit, and another 100 turns or so trying to figure out what warp editors were useful to do.

Plus I screwed up with my main system, exactly how I'll reveal later on, though as a hint, with a map that is this big with the small number of players that we have I don't think it will matter.

Personally I think we should play for another week or two and get an idea of how many players that will be dedicated and then start on a map with about 100 systems/player...right now, if we have 20 dedicated players, that means we have 250 systems/player which seems way too much to me.

I like a big universe, myself. Lots of room to develop and fight over

Well, the more universe that there is, the more that I'll ultimately own.

Score Update:

Pulled all my creds out of the bank and my score did drop to 0...this tells me a few things, no matter how big your colonies and ship get your score can stay zero...in other words score is *NOT* an indication of "temporal" power. However if you have an escape pod, score is a damn good indication of how much ass-whuppery you can put into a spaceship to enact your retribution.

Justed used all my moves doing random jumps.

near the bottom of the map now.

Another useful tidbit, from what I can tell based on my calcs, population will increase using this formula:

<current population>=<last turn population>*1.001487 up to a max pop/planet of 100,000,000

This is the most straightforward calc I've found thus far (and I'm not looking at code, but in game effects) though there's several other interesting things that I'm seeing...

From the FAQ.

Colonists reproduce at the rate of 1.0005 * your current population each turn. So, it takes 2000 colonists to have one baby each turn. Man, these guys need some more mood music I guess.

Okay, I'll add that if you're found to be playing two accounts at once, at LEAST one will be destroyed, maybe both. It's cheating and its not cool. If you want to restart because you wasted all your turns and stuff, that's fine, just inform me and I'll delete your old account.

Not if I had months to do it in . . .

Me too.

Well, not so much that last part

There are some very simple strategies to do what I did, and quite honestly I am nowhere near as efficient as I could have been.

Here's the key: update hull before you update anything else.

yup, dropped half a billion into my account and watched as i shot up the rankings...

course, then i spent the money on bring my hull up to level 19

yeah, I'm dreading the next few hull updates and wondering if they're worth it

Nick the FAQ might say 1.0005, but the calcs on my own systems show that pop is actually increasing for me at a rate of 1.001487. Not sure why they'd be different, maybe it is 1.0005/tick and over three ticks the average is 1.001487 (when we update...seems like updates happen ever 6 minutes but "ticks" happen every 2 minutes).

Anyway, I ramble and have a few hundred turns to blow...

Ok, if anyone wants to get into the game but is leery about starting late I have a few business opportunities for you. PM for details, but I'm willing to pay you handsomely for your time, certainly more than you'd make trading for your first 1000 turns or so, plus I can hook you up with some strategies so you're not mystified.

from what I can tell score is based mainly on cash in the bank, though I do have slightly more cash in the bank than you

I found this glitch as I was perusing across the universe.

If someone has two accounts, and I destroy their dual account, it doesn't destroy the actual account, just their ship. So any fighters or torpedoes are left on that planet in the ownership of the dual account, and they will attack.

Ok, I beefed up my ship a bit and went hunting...found a nice tiny little world that didn't look so tough and proceeded to attack it, it was a very minor planet so if the owner is really pissed about it I'll pay you some creds to make up for it (100,000 pop*5) + Genesis (1,000,000) + a few million for your time = call it an even 5 million. Cheap to see a combat test first hand.

Basically what I learned is that planets are NASTY, even if you totally outclass them, if the owner had been on the planet he would have wiped me. Make sure you scan before you attack, because if even a few torps get through you're screwed (I lost 8K armor due to torps, a second round of fighting would have killed me outright) You also need to make sure that you have the energy (read: power) for both your beams and sheilds, I'd assume a power tech level 2 higher than your beam/sheild levels and make sure that you have the energy onboard.

So, fighter screens work well against everything, but cost alot - a dedicated warmonger is probably going to want a world or two just making fighters for them (because at 50 creds a pop they add up quick) The way the system works is that you can lose up to half your fighters blocking each volley - though fighters get widdled down by beams BEFORE they get widdled down by torps - and since the only other thing that stops torps is armor you want to make damn sure that you've got enough fighters left over from the other guys beams to block that torp damage. Quite frankly, if I hadn't spend the extra turn buying armor after I bought up the tech level I'd be dead now.

Oh, and attacking planets then blowing them up really chews up your "good" rating. But I just hadda test the Wave Motion Gun.

Should I even bother logging in to check?






Actually I've not explored much at all, and as of 14+ hours ago there are still plenty of planets to be snapped up



EDIT: Nope, not mine. yet

Hehehe, I was on your trail when I ran into this world.

Who's Doomsday anyway?

^^


Oh, P.S.: I've found that logging out forces an update of your score.

^^^ Foil--didn't know you were going to go the Romulan route. You want me to rename two of my planets from Romulus and Remus to something else? They're in the same sector--just seemed logical to call'em that. Let me know.