[Kal]

To continue my series of threads I'd like to discuss what its like for the semi active once attacking is going properly.

To do this I need to add some more background and risk give away details about my planet, but what the hell.

I'm in a top 20 alliance, as is most of my galaxy, only one member is in a top 10 alliance.

Until my galaxy was attacked we were top 10, and normally top 5. We were all active attackers, I myself was a top 10 planet at times. Things were good considering we wern't active.

Then we got attacked - 3-4 waves. None of us got any defence form our alliances and very little from each other. This is where the semi-actives loose - they don't get defence. If it wasn't for my experience in the game (running fleet etc.) then I now would have no ships and would have given up playing the game.

This I think is a huge problem, multi wave attacks have a real possibility of making new players quit the game just as they were starting to get interested and do well.

Given the importance of XP, loosing roids isn't that big an issue right now - but loosing ships is. We need a way to protect thoose ships so that new players don't loose them and quit. (not wanting to suggest, but perhaps allowing ships in base fleet to be immune from combat or something).

The other issue here is that its distinctly depressing to see a galaxy status with 3+ waves of incs and no defence. I remember in the olden days an alliance would attack multiple galaxies with a single wave rather than multi-waving a target. In my mind multi-waving is hugely bad for morale. It has just occured to me that the prevalence of multiwaving occured after we moved from 3 tick attacks to single tick attacks - perhaps a return to multi-tick attacks would remove the need for multi-waves?

Now enough about the depression that is defence - what about attacks? On many of my attacks I've been annoyed to find other alliances hitting the same targets, while probably less annoying for the new player, its very annoying for me. To solve this I would very much like to see more advanced war/combat features where unless attacking fleets are on the same "side" they will attack each other.


The interesting thing here, is that as I've got back into the game more the user interface issues have annoyed me less and I've now switched my annoyance to game mechanics, and the way existing players and alliances interact with them (note I'm also annoyed that my own alliance uses the very tactics I think put new players off).

So in simple terms, I think the following needs to be done to grow the game:
-fix the interface
-fix the mechanics - make it harder for people to be wiped out, more friendly, but without reducing the complexity that current players love.

I will reiterate that a lot is right about the game, things like quests, population, government, races, etc. are all interesting and the current practise of tweaking will largly work for theese areas.