How should the developers improve the game?

Ladies and Gentlemen, and those who are offended by such terms:

At this point in the SE BfS development, the game has become an evony or kindoms of camelot in space. What could the developers do to make this game exciting?

Random events, alien incursions (a-la Masters of Orion 2) are two things that come to mind immediately. Maybe they can go to the game they're using the name of for inspiration too.

Almost the same as absolutlush. As we do not wanna offend so much peeps at the start of the raids,
I prefer Random AI players for a start for us to attack but i don know how is gonna work out for the AI to defend and attack back.
As for the rewards...could be Shipbuilders...Transwarp ...something...but my is just a very very roughly sketch...

this is escobars reply after joshua friendly asked to reply

escobar likes the game like it is (cos we are the big boys)
for new players it could be hard at the beginning ..
no ideas at the moment to improve escobars fav game ...

Maybe they could use the background story for some ideas? There are plenty of events to develop from there. Personally, I want to see Xel Nathu in the game.

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Some AI fighting. It could be as simple as another button for "missions" (like one for probes).

Upon pressing the missions button you choose basic missions i.e. Pirate Hunting (combat), Asteroid Exploration (mining?), Relic Hunting (higher level one, maybe the search for ancient ruins). Possibilities are endless.

When you select a mission, you then select a fleet you wish to send to do said mission. Travel time same as it would be for attacking players, and perhaps a limit on how many fleets can do missions, and how many missions can be done at the same time (like probes). Each type of ships are more suited for different missions. For example, smaller ships would be better for pirate hunting (or not, up to the devs).

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Another neat thing is to add a possibility of discovering ancient ruins when you colonize a planet. Similar to SE:V. Maybe you get a random power up, or something cooler (up to the devs on how deep they want to go).

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Bottom line is to give a reason for players to log in other than build more buildings which gets monotonous and boring after a while. And attacking inactive players get rather boring too you know.

Razorwing wrote:

Ladies and Gentlemen, and those who are offended by such terms:

At this point in the SE BfS development, the game has become an evony or kindoms of camelot in space. What could the developers do to make this game exciting?

I already told them how to ++ their game, but they like the colonization system as it is.

There is almost no sense of competition, and no defined purpose. We have resources and ships, but all they can do is get us resources and ships. I think Space Empires Battle for Supremacy (SEBS) could learn a lot from Tribal Wars (TW).

Tw is host to fierce competition resulting from a strong balance of economy with very little limitations on growth. The single flaw in Tw aside from its over the top addictive nature is stagnation; after about a year of a world being out things tend to slow down and people are fighting just to fight, not really moving in any direction.

SE needs to quickly rethink their economic model. There should be more benefits for increasing structures (build time decreased when you increase the town hall (w/e its called), ship building time decreases when you upgrade the shipyard, etc.

I also feel that there should be more units types, as well as a defined about of resource each one can haul (carry)

Perhaps they can have heavily armored ships, cool but it only carries a pinto bean. So lets add some lightly armored ships, increase its speed and give it greater carrying capability. K but now we are just plain greedy, lets make ships dedicated completely to holding plunder. Cargo ships.

But lets say we send a cargo ship to a planet alone to get resources. Well the population should kick their buttz. Cargo ships should not be able to attack a planet alone. So send a light ship with, same speed but now they can beat up the population a little bit, shake them upside down and fill their cargo ships with lewt. Now lets say the planet gets smart and builds a bunch of guns, send a light ship and you might not see it return. So we add some heavily armored ships, now the travel time is increased because the slowest ship dictates the fleets speed.

So this is all good and stuff, but if we have a maxed out espionage center, why cant we tell who is comming after us?

+ I would love to see research improved greatly. I would like to see espionage develop to the point where we can build "intel buildings" and develop intel points, where we can set projects like finding nearby resource filled planets, or maybe even getting advanced notification of who is attacking us. (so lets say they decide to make intell stack up) I have this intel building, and it has produced 20,000 intel for me, so I set it to spend 200 points per hour to man the observation array and discover incomming fleets. So it finds one, and I spend another 4k on this wave of incomming ships and my guys come back with a report of who is attacking and what time it is expected to arrive. It could even go one step further and try to predict what type of fleets are comming, where they are comming from and when they expect to return.

I also feel that fleets and ships should be attackable whether or not they are in the planets defense structure. The defense structure could provide "support" to ships around the planet during an attack, such as the wall in TW. This could be a % of overall strength, + a small boost to weapons/shields on a planet. (10%, maybe... 20% once the structure reaches half its max level)
So lets say it goes up to level 20. At 1 it might be a 10-20% increase to fleet strength, but be an easy build that takes time more then anything, and at around level 20 it could increase fleet strength by as much as 120%, so like having 2.4X the number of ships.

We may also want to limit the number of ships on a planet, or to avoid just copying tw, use maintenance as a empire wide limitation. This will create a level of uncertainty, plus present the opportunity to attack planets with no defenses (if all the ships are in one location, the other planets are undefended)


I would highly recommend creating way more planets and systems, and reducing the base planet output to some minor structures that are automatically created when built. There could be a nebula around the systems that "create new stars" As new players join the game, the galaxy literally expands outward.
Systems that new players abandon can become food for larger empires.

To make this all fun, SEBS has to scrap its idea of colonization. Colonization should be based on economy to give resources some purpose. Economy will then become the heart of the game and plundering when once again make sense.

One more point... the planet looks cool and stuff, but building each item on its plot can be a bit of a pain and makes the game look to grid plug and chug. If buildings are listed and offered in the town center it will make the game a lot more player friendly, or at least just freaking listen to the community when they say ZOOM OUT!

It may also do SEBS a lot of good to streamline the UI. It is slow to load and there are way to many confirmation boxes with only one option "close". It would be more user friendly to have the confirmation show up on the bottom of the panel we were working with, or in a separate streaming info box (like chat kinda thing)

One more laster point for economy. Try to make sense of the resources. Crystals should be used heavily for construction, metals should be used heavily for creating ships, and gasses should be stockpiled to use on large transports that teriform and create new planets. So creating a ship may be 10,000 crystals, 400,000 metals and 200,000 gasses. Upgrading town center may be 500,000 crystals, 200,000 metals and no gasses, or like 80,000 gasses or something.

As you begin colonizing planets, compatible atmospheres become harder and harder to find. More and more colony gas transports carrying vital gases are required to create a stable ecosystem on new planets. As a general rule of thumb, each new planet you colonize requires 200,000 more gasses to teriform then the last one, or one gass transport. (gass transports could require a lot of metal and crystal as well. Figure around 25% crystal 25% metal and 50% gass) So to colonize your first planet all you need is one structure transport and one gas transport: 350,000 crystal, 200,000 metals, 50,000 gas for the structure ship and 50,000 crystal, 200,000 metals, 750,000 gas for the gas transport.

When deciding the ship costs consider two factors, what would the ship likely require of each resource in a practical sense, and what do I need to make sure resources are balanced or unbalanced in the way I want them to be.

Crystals may be more important early when building up your first planet, as all you are building are structures... but as ships become your focus, metals and gases go up, and then gases are pushed heavily as you start to colonize. This creates a dynamic economy and gives a bit of an edge to the game that helps break the monotony of economy It also gives some dynamic to plundering, as with different mines or storage levels, the enemy planet may have the precious gases you are after or just more of those pesky crystals. (as your planets mature and you build less structures, either gases or metals would become most valuable with crystals being the least.

I would do this: (numbers used only to show differences between resources for each ship type and not a suggestion for the actual number to use)

Lightly armored ships 40,000 crystals, 70,000 metals, 25,000 gass (holds 20,000 units of resource)
Plunder Transport 30,000 crystals, 180,000 metals, 90,000 gass (holds 90,000 units of resource)
Heavy gunship 90,000 crystals 420,000 metals 140,000 gasses (holds 5,000 units of resource)

Notice how light ships are heavier on crystals and light on gasses, and the plunder ship is the opposite.
The heavy gunship really pushes metals, is better on crystals vs metals, but tends to use a bit more gasses.

This is all intentional. As the gunship should be harder to make, it is the brunt of fleet strength and are sent as a first wave to destroy enemy forces before sending in light ships and transports to collect the goods. These ships should not be cheap, and should be made with the most valuable resources, and should increase the value of metal by heavy reliance on it.

The light ships are the compliment of the heavy ships and the transports, they are made of more common materials and are designed for speed while still providing fire power for a quick offense, or for protecting/escorting transports. They use the resources that gunships do not as a way of balancing the fleet cost.

Transports are a bit more expensive because they are seen more as an economic peice. They are an investment and they should not be to cheap or easy to build. It may even be better to increase the cost by 3 fold and its storage by 2 fold.

Again, these numbers are more of a way of explaining the idea of balancing, or strategically unbalancing the game to create an atmosphere of intelligent economy.

In tw there was a way to break down buildings and take out walls. It may not be a bad idea to add special ships you can research to do similar things. Perhaps even use intelligence to "skim" a small portion of resources off the top and "hide" it in a separate storage center. When your ships come by during the night undetected, they can collect resources from a player without them even knowing it.
This may or not be a good idea, but it pushes the idea of intelligence and gives room fore more interesting research fields.

A dynamic game is an interesting game.

-- Ages

Could also add a Premium option, were you pay a small monthly fee, or a fee up front for credits. This may allow you to assign a city planner, and add buildings to a queue. (city planner could be at town hall, otherwise we build like it currently is.)

It would something like this> you would click hire city planner, lets say for 10 fb bucks (one months worth). After you confirm, it will return you to the town hall where it now shows your queue slots as being empty. (Queue slots could be a fixed number, a fixed number but after like 4 the prices for each new building increases and you don't get them back if you cancel the build OR it could start out at 2, but you can "upgrade" your city planner by purchasing the upgrade for like 50 fb bucks)

You could not build normally, after say 2 buildings, things that you upgrade are added to the queue, until you either start inuring a fee for additional builds, or you simply hit the maximum number.

There also could be special customizable bars or other helpful things to make life easier for premium players. It could cost like 10 fb bucks to start the premium service, and then another 10 to get the planner. or it could be considered part of the service and you would get it for cheap or free (2 fb, or just automatically activated)

This may be a separate window that shows detailed information about fleets, planets statistics etc.... maybe incoming attacks etc can be tracked easier (if you discovered them because of intel maning your observatory array or w/e)

This should help to generate income, and make the game easier for players at the same time, win/win!

Fix the defense buildings to give the advantage to the defender, taking down a planet with defenses should not be as easy as it currently is and i don't mean just because i have large fleets of class 3 ships.
the attacker should not always get the first shot off, as is shown in the combat simulator and combat reports.

Attack buildings should get one attack per level of the building. ie. 5 level 5 missile arrays will shoot 25 attacks instead of the current 5. Siege ships should not be all powerful against planetary defenses.

Damage should be be more directed not just spread out across the entire fleet, ie. focused fire should be considered when damage is being dealt, no more attacks of 7530 damage but no ships destroyed. if that was done to an attacking Ramuh fleet that should mean 10 ships destroyed not 0, with a priority on lightest ships destroyed first.

Allow for the conquering of planets, but only on an individual attack not the large scale alliance attacks(see below). Conquering a planet will require that you have the colonization tech level to command another colony, A portion of the attacking/winning fleets (a pre-set mineral value) could then be decommissioned to create a "command enforcement module", and allow you to rename the planet for free. If you don't have enough surviving ships the next person to attack with a fleet of enough value may assume command.

Allow 3 safe worlds set by the player that can not be conquered, (may still be attacked and plundered)
this gives a "safe haven" to all players.

Extend the newbie protection to 14 days at least.



Along those lines of pay to play premium services,

Alliance tactical control panel

A system that allows members to assign fleets for attack/defense purposes under the control of the
alliance officers assigned to command the positions.

Detected attacks could then have fleets sent to defend a members planet even if the member is not online.

Alliance attacks could be coordinated to arrive in a specific time/order without the individual member being online.

If you limit this to 1 fleet per member there would be a maximum of 100 fleets for attack and defense available at all times to the alliance tactical coordinator.


more to follow if i can ever find the time.

Ages wrote:

Could also add a Premium option, were you pay a small monthly fee, or a fee up front for credits. This may allow you to assign a city planner, and add buildings to a queue. (city planner could be at town hall, otherwise we build like it currently is.)

The moment they roll out a monthly fee, even a voluntary one that will give players a significant advantage I will leave the game for I cannot compete with people who have money. I am sure that will be shared amongst many people.

Sure you can already pay for speed ups and such, that is the limit that should be in my opinion.

Oleg.Perchine wrote:

The moment they roll out a monthly fee, even a voluntary one that will give players a significant advantage I will leave the game for I cannot compete with people who have money. I am sure that will be shared amongst many people.

Sure you can already pay for speed ups and such, that is the limit that should be in my opinion.

If they don't make money, the game won't exist. The pay options are what is funding your "freeloading".

If the advantages were like what I proposed, it would be an alliance wide advantage and you would benefit from it as well, and could still be a freeloader

Surely you could save some spare change and muster a 5$ purchase of credits sometime. Supporting the game financially even a small amount, goes a long way to helping the game continue and improve.

I agree with you Slay, hence my comment :

Quote :

Sure you can already pay for speed ups and such, that is the limit that should be in my opinion.

. Of course that would have to be first appropriated into my budget, which is not an easy task at times :-)

AI planets to attack would help. With resources as slow as they are new players are very likely to quit if they get beat up on repeatedly (and they are barely worth the trouble anyways). If you prefer, maybe have derelict ships traveling that could be detected and there may be a limited time in which one can attack them. But there have to be targets that do not scream and throw down their keyboards.

I agree that newbie protection should be extended to at least 14 days. Maybe even to a minimum experience level with a larger time limit.

Planet management especially for a new planet gets borying after a while. I would pay some monthly to have a resource manager or to be able to have a build backlog. This would make the game more interesting without disadvantaging those who cannot pay (they will just put in more time to make builds themselves).

I second the alliance controls idea. And of course, there should be an easy way to tell whose alliance a player belongs to. It should be easy to add that to profile. Ideally level, number of planets, race, alliance should appear as mouse-over info.

Now defense has to be beefed up. Try setting up a simulation at the Espionage Center where the attacker has 3,000 sheivas, level 100 tactical, level 50 fleet commander and the defender has 3,000 sheivas, level 100 tactical, level 50 fleet commander and 20 level 5 zeus cannons. The attacker destroys the defender losing under 200 ships every time. The attacker's advantage is lower at lower tactical and fleet commander levels and at fewer numbers of ships, but the experiment shows that there is a strong imbalance favoring the attacker.

I think we need a reset!
I don't like the way the game has evolved, it seems unfair to the new player that we can dominate as we played during early development and since Attack has just been placed, I do think this shows the problem.
Also attacks on planets don't seem to do much apart from knock out a couple of defense guns and take away a few resources. Its too easy to repair them and too easy to get those resources back.
If you attack a planet you must in some way either be able to dominate it and destroy most if not all buildings, alongside this, those buildings should be able to be targeted individually for each attack, but only if you have had the fortune of being able to probe that planet.
I know it hurts to lose stuff in these sort of games but you are building war planets and not a friendly ones.
On the subject of friendly, if this planet destruction idea was implemented I do think you need to allow other type of players to be safe from attack by them having only certain "SAFE" buildings, so that other types of players can feel safe in the game, that way the other type of player can grow or plant stuff and not have it taken away, they can only be attacked if they build say a shipyard or other military constructions, if they have these, then it is good night to them.

I like Ages ideas. Also in regards to Slay's suggestions for tipping the battles in the planet's favor on other thing would be have planetary forces attack all anti-planet ships. They are concerned about defending themselves so they would be shooting them first. I would also think actually that all defending ships and buildings would be shooting the anti-planet forces first since they the anti-air forces are useless for bombarding a planet and it's populace.

Revamp the Planetary Attack System (I know I know it just came out) so that the attacking fleet is not ALWAYS getting the first shot. Possibly based on level of Espionage Center as well as the Planetary Defenses vs. the Class and Levels of ships attacking. I second Slaythars comment about revamping the abilities of the Planetary Defenses. At the moment they are too easy to defeat, however this may be mitigated by new players who won't be able to create truly massive fleets due to the resource changes.

Slaythar wrote:

Oleg.Perchine wrote:

The moment they roll out a monthly fee, even a voluntary one that will give players a significant advantage I will leave the game for I cannot compete with people who have money. I am sure that will be shared amongst many people.

Sure you can already pay for speed ups and such, that is the limit that should be in my opinion.

If they don't make money, the game won't exist. The pay options are what is funding your "freeloading".

If the advantages were like what I proposed, it would be an alliance wide advantage and you would benefit from it as well, and could still be a freeloader

Surely you could save some spare change and muster a 5$ purchase of credits sometime. Supporting the game financially even a small amount, goes a long way to helping the game continue and improve.

But, this is a Facebook game. If this were a stand alone game (full screen with no advertisements) like Runescape I could see paying a small monthly fee. Even a game like Runescape is a free game that is a full experience with a ton of content without having to pay. But, there is a lot more game you don't have access to unless you pay a small monthly fee, and when you do you get a TON of extra game, not just a few trinkets and do-dads.

The way I see it, Facebook should be giving them a percentage of ad revenue when people visit links from the SE game. These types of games help bring people in to Facebook, or at least keep them logged on many more hours than they would otherwise. I know just because I see it that way isn't the way it is, but I can't see spending a monthly fee on a Facebook game.

People just go from one FB game to the next too quickly. I can't see them spending real money when they might find a more interesting free game on Facebook next week. I do like the idea of buying credits or gold or what have you. Other Facebook games seem to do fine with this model. My first Facebook game was Mafia Wars...it's nothing but a boring clickfest, but I'm sure there are some people still paying real money for "extras" or it probably wouldn't still be around.

Right now this game isn't very fleshed out. I'm kind of surprised they released it as early as they did. And, it sure doesn't feel like a 4X game. The tech tree is very boring. That was the first thing that stood out to me. You should be able to research different types of weapons and equip them on your ships. Say learn lasers to level 5, then that opens up particale beams, ext. Right now when I go from Weapons Tech 8 to Weapons Tech 9, I see no change to my weapons or the power of my ships. Same for shields and so forth.

A planetary invasion with troops would also be a nice touch. And, as long as you have troops, you have people on your planets with it's own community. They could then add another staple of 4X games, choosing which type of government you have. Say you choose Democracy, you could get a boost to resource production. Choose Dictatorship and and your workers would work really fast building structures and ships. These choices would be part of the tech tree.

Unless you are at war, there still isn't much to do besides click on buildings. That little scuffle we had the other day was the most I've had to do in game for some time. And all I did was send one wave, and that took 3 hours to get there...lol Need some wormholes. I like the idea of attacking NPC's. It would give you something to do between clicking on buildings.

Get rid of the quest system. Past the beginner quests it's just pointless. Maybe they had planned to turn it into a KoC type of quest system where once you build a new structure or upgrade it to X level for the first time you'd get some bonus resources and items and just haven't got around to finishing it. But, if that was their idea of the finished quest system, they should just remove it. Sigils are pretty much pointless anyway.

I've been playing Caesary the past few days. You can turn another players city into a colony, and it will then send you resources/money. That could work well in this game too. You can go plunder what ever they have, then conquer it and have it stream resources to you. That way you wouldn't have to keep a spreadsheet of all the known abandoned planets to keep going back to plunder again and again.

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I didn't scroll down farther to read the rest of the suggestions when I wrote this, so someone may have beat me to all of my suggestions.

DDK wrote:

Planet management especially for a new planet gets borying after a while. I would pay some monthly to have a resource manager or to be able to have a build backlog. This would make the game more interesting without disadvantaging those who cannot pay (they will just put in more time to make builds themselves).

It does get boring. I discovered Kingdoms of Camelot the other day, and it's the same thing. Just started playing Caesary a couple days ago and...it's the same thing. There's got to be a better way. If they could get away from this cookie cutter system they could really stand out. But, by the time they do, they'll have a lot of people playing that would probably get a little miffed when they trashed the current system and went with something new.

At the very least drop the level cap of buildings from 20 to 10. Maybe have separate build trees per building for different additions. Like level a building to level 5, then that forks into 3 more trees that go to level 5, each one having a different affect on the output of that building. It's still not very different from the current Facebook game models, but at least having a tree as opposed to going from 1 to 20 would "feel" more interesting. That's why the tech leveling feels boring to me. Give me a tree and different paths to take. Or even gain research points and then let me click and learn the tech right then and there.

Give each level of tech it's own name. In Masters of Orion 2, you first learned Nuclear Drive, then Cold Fusion, then Advanced Fusion, then Ion Fission, ext. It's the same thing, but it just felt different. Like completing one opened the door to the next, as opposed to just clicking "next". What kind of weapons do you want to research? Beams? Particle? Kinetic?

On the idea of NPC's, which I heavily favor as well, there should be one or two "Master Races" like the Antarans and the Orions in the Masters of Orion series. There would still be PVP wars, but it does give you time to focus on NPC planets as well.

Tony Gustino wrote:

this is a Facebook game.

I think that because it is played on Facebook, I think the pay options are not going to be maximize to their potentials because this is just a website game, not an actual game. There are bunch of website games out there, more than desktop games. So it easily visible that it will be harder for one person to be attached to a website game compare to desktop games. (in a general perspective)

Nevertheless, what I like are the speedup items. They should expand that more and they need to stop giving away free credits (don't burn me like a witch for saying so, lol) I love free stuff, who doesn't? But you have to look at a side that giving gifts reduce certain people that were going to donate $$ but didn't because of free gifts. Freeloaders should only receive free gifts for contributing well to the game by playing a lot. (I am a freeloader, btw)

Tony Gustino wrote:

Right now this game isn't very fleshed out. I'm kind of surprised they released it as early as they did. And, it sure doesn't feel like a 4X game. The tech tree is very boring. That was the first thing that stood out to me. You should be able to research different types of weapons and equip them on your ships. Say learn lasers to level 5, then that opens up particale beams, ext. Right now when I go from Weapons Tech 8 to Weapons Tech 9, I see no change to my weapons or the power of my ships. Same for shields and so forth.

I agree that this game is plainly dull as it should've been much more "shiny" (makes you stare and play the game longer) because I am very certain that FB SE have this potential! But as Razorwing pointed out, they brought too much of similarity of Evony and bunch of alikes to this game and ruined much of this potential the game had. (yes, had, but maybe they can turn this around)

As Tony Gustino pointed out about research different types and equipping such on ships - If you ask me, I cannot recall such strategy space games that does not have customization and/or more variety of research techs. It is quite disappointing that the ships are so simple that you just build them and that's it. I wish the ships are able to be customized by hull size, defense types to put on, and weapon types as well...engines too. This alone would bring a load of fun to the game because it would create tens if not hundreds of different strategies because of many different customizations anyone can do with ships. Research techs, of course, should bring those types (defense, hull size, weapon, engine, etc) into the players' hands to be utilized for their space domination plans. (It's what Stewie from Family Guy will do!)


I read posts here so far, I did not see anything relating to planets. (excluding colonization).

I...feel...that the planets right now has too many construction slots (mostly brought by terraforming). I want the planets to have so much less slots that we the players would be forced to carefully plan what to build and what not. Rather than currently...build whatever you want because in the end, you will have all kinds of buildings maxed out on everything on every each planet.

I played a game that planets does not have many slots and the planets vary in size which affects how many # of construction slots it has. There should be different sizes of planets in the game - smaller has less slots and bigger has more slots. This would bring more strategies especially bigger scale wars that are likely to target bigger planets to gain more advantages. But of course, keep the terraforming, but limit them severely down to..add 1 to 5 slots max depending on the size of planets.

About benefits of combat, as some may pointed out, I am feeling a bit stupefied about the fact that if your planet under an invasion attack without any resources or defensive structures, you won't lose anything. This, I find ridiculously lame. Hurts the PvP potential of the game....big time. The building upgrades time-length should be reduced and allow them to be destructed or leveldown after a failing defense against invasions. Destruction or leveldown should be random depending the level of buildings - higher, less chance of total destruction. (If this to implement, there'd be a lot to work around on other sides of the game to make this idea to blend in well)

Conclusion, I am sure I have more to say as these are on top of my mind, but think about this.....keep playing this game for 1 year...what will change? (assuming they don't change or add or take away anything in this game!!) No change...just boring...have all 20 planets....all buildings maxed out...all you do is...build defensive structures, ships, plan out the attacks - rinse and repeat for infinite times? There's not much to anything here for "end-game" scenarios. Consistent-playing value seems to be low here, in my opinion. Thus, Space Empires (FB) currently are seem to be short-lived?

I am very well aware that this game is still in Beta, I look forward to many changes (should be) before the game goes into retail.

Thanks for reading and Enjoy your day!

i agree with most above but not mentioned was the help function part or the chat area which could be better such as making the chat box movable so you could have it tucked away out of site or expanded huge for easier reading when lots of people are chatting fast, also a pause button so you could keep the chat messages from scrolling similar to lords of ultima chat box

I would like to make a suggestion to change how fleets stationed on a planet work with the rise of 'no def is the best def' strat that is now out there.

The Current Problem: People don't defend their planets because they only lose a bit of resources that come back shortly anyway. Huge fleets are ignored if not stationed on defense.

My Suggested Solution: In order to get around people who simply let their fleets float around uselessly and uninvolved in defense I suggest that those ships become partially vulnerable to attack.

Example: My 1000 ships are heading to a planet that has 1000 ships in fleets but NOT stationed in defence mode. I propose that up to 30% of unassigned ships that are in fleets be destroyed without any attackers loss as a 'surprise attack'. This will encourage players to plan a more balanced fleet assignment of offence and defence.

Of course the way around this is to simply have no ships in active fleets at all, which is why further to this I propose the following.

Example 2: My 1000 ships are heading to a planet that has 1000 ships in NOT in fleets but sitting in the planet's reserve. I propose that up to 10% of unassigned ships that are NOT in fleets be destroyed without any attackers loss as a 'surprise attack'. This again encourages players to think more dynamically about balancing offence and defence.

As it stands right now there is very little risk in letting attacks succeed on you. This will dramatically increase the strategic portion of combat in this game in creating a real risk to leaving planets undefended.