Quote:
Originally Posted by Randallw
I actually quit AstroEmpires shortly afterwards. It was just setting queues, and I didn't want to start paying for it.
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It does take a long time to accumulate some resources so you can do something. Several weeks even if you know what you are doing. But it is possible to play without paying for an upgrade. Especially if you use a Mozilla browser with the adblock extension.
The main problem is that it's a real-time persistent "world" with no 'save' or 'logout' options. Your bases are in the game 24/7 and someone can show up and trash your fleet at any time of the day or night. When you have to spend weeks "setting queues" to build up enough fleet to compete with the big players it can be extremely frustrating to have it all trashed at 4 am your time.
Belonging to a guild helps. You park your main fleet on a jumpgate with other members of your guild and form a "blob" where everyone watches each others' fleets. But of course, groups lead to
politics and all the usual problems. You have to follow the rules to stay in the guild, so it becomes less and less a 'game' as guilds get bigger and more ambitious because they make more and more demands on the members. And you can get attacked just for
being a member of your guild when another guild declares war.
So it ends up as a sort of online gang culture. There is occasional fun to be had trashing someone
else's fleet.
But it's mostly about the politics. The spreadsheet fleets are just the playing board for the politics.
This new game is especially nice in one way... there are so few players in this huge universe that you can do pretty much what you want. Although, what most people "want" is to form those gangs. The player base on that new server is already mostly composed of two rival guilds. I have formed my own guild and am staying away from the two big ones for now. We'll see how things develop.
Re: What other games do you people play?
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