Getting Started

[GenocideHeart]

Okay, to introduce you to OGame:

http://www.ogame.org/

This is where you sign up. We TFFers are in Universe 14, in the alliance called U.B.W. or Unlimited Blade Works.

To start out well, build in this order:

Solar 1
Metal 1
Metal 2
Solar 2
Metal 3
Crystal 1
Solar 3
Metal 4
Crystal 2
Solar 4
Deuterium 1
Solar 5
Metal 5
Crystal 3
Solar 6
Deuterium 2

...and continue until you have:

Solar 10
Metal 9
Crystal 7
Deuterium 5

At this point, you have one of two choices. The recommended one is to start building a research lab, a shipyard and a robot factory. Then keep building up the various mines evenly as outlined above. Due to the players in Universe 14 being really fucking strong, chances are you will not be attacked for a very long time, so take advantage of it and build an imposing array of defenses. Since by the time you'll be attacked most people will have cruisers, you'll probably want to aim for light lasers and Gauss cannons for defense.

However, if you have inactive players (names greyed out) near you, check their defenses with spy drones. If, and only if, their defenses are weak, consider building up a small fleet of light fighters and light cargo, and raiding them while they can't strike back.

Finally, if you see LARGE debris fields, build Recylers ASAP, and raid those. It's fully safe and in such a strong universe, it'll likely net you 20,000 or so units of mixed resources per trip.

That's all for starting well. Good luck, men. :snigger:

 

[GenocideHeart]

Here's a quick recap of the player names' colors:

White: About as strong as you and recently active (no more than 6 days ago, could be active at the moment too).

Grey: Inactive. Light grey means he hasn't logged in at least one week, dark grey means he's been gone 4 weeks. After 36 days of inactivity, accounts are terminated, IIRC.

Red/pink: Strong player. They can't attack you until they turn white. That happens when their total points count reaches no more than 5x yours, so you'll be safe a long time, I think.

Green: Weak players. They have less than 1/5th your points, and you can't attack them. (You'll appear red to them, BTW tongue.gif )

Blue: Vacation mode. They can neither attack nor be attacked. Also, Vacation Mode freezes all your activities (building mines, resource growth, fleets), and must last at least 24 hours.

Also, an asterisk near a planet's name means recent activity on it (not necessarily a player's, it can be that he was spied), and a number near it indicates how much time elapsed since last activity.

 

[GenocideHeart]

By the way, once you have enough resources, consider building a cargo ship or two. This way, not only can you raid weak inactive players to steal some extra resources, but you can also trade with other members of the Alliance.

The accepted trade meter is

3 Metal : 2 Crystal : 1 Deuterium

Less than that is considered pushing, and can get you banned, so careful.

Essentially, if you want to trade away 1000 deuterium, you can ask for 3000 metal in return, or 2000 crystal, or 1500 metal and 1000 crystal. And so on...

 

[GenocideHeart]

Strategy for avoiding getting creamed:

If you see someone trying to attack you, have your entire fleet (preferably a few light cargos included) get all your resources, and send them all away on a mission of some sort. I prefer to include a spy drone in the fleet and make it spying.

Tweak the fleet's speed (there's an option to do that) until it will be safely away when the attack happens, and will return when things are calmer. This way you'll save your fleet and resources from attacks.

Also, when you get stronger, you'll want to fleetsave your fleet and resources before turning in for the night. Just use a Recycling or Spy mission as above, and time the fleet's return for when you wake up.

 

[GenocideHeart]

Regarding colonies, keep two things in mind. First, planet size is randomly determined as indicated in this table:

As you can see, the biggest planets are between 4 and 6, and also tend to be large enough around 9.

Planets closest to the sun get more energy from solar plants and solar satellites, so they are good for mining. Planets farthest produce more deuterium than average, due to being cold, so they are good as deuterium mines.

My advice is to colonize a gas giant in a system, then build one or two colonies to support it and act as mines, possibly in the same system. That also reduces fleetsaving costs.

 

[GenocideHeart]

Finally, eventually you'll have to attack planets with actual defenses. Heavy scouting is your friend, and to know how much you'll lose in battle, you can download SpeedSim, a great little battle simulator that lets you cut losses to a minimum.

Get it here: Sourceforge's SpeedSim page

 

[GenocideHeart]

EDIT: Nevermind, I stickied the topic.