I'm feeling a little moody and overwhelmed currently, non-listening kids don't help the situation and then it carries over into my feelings for the game, or perhaps it is exacerbated by the game.

I have 823 HWs on my HW list (not counting a few special ones that I don't like to see on a list). These total up to 64.5 BILLION defense, I used to do comparisons in my comp class of a Meg vs a Gig- that is a lot of defense.

With 49 20x planets and a little effort lets say you could produce 45M Troops and the Iron to turn them into assaults and with the 300% assaults then you can do 45M damage per round. With 50 active players doing that much damage each month it would take 2 years to wipe them all out... that might be acceptable, if only we had 50 active players which would also mean they'd need 2500 20x planets to do it, good luck with that.

Between everyone that is playing right now I think we might be able to squeeze out the equivalency of 10 of these imaginary players. So if we were all attacking those HWs then it would only take us over 10 years to kill them all. Fortunately some of those HWs are ours and we could subtract out their defense and use it to kill the others, we might be able to cut it down to 6 years of friendly relations and indiscriminate slaughtering of the dead and stinking fish that were left in a barrel.

That sucks.

It is like wiping out a bunch of SP HWs... no hazard, no thrill, no enemies. As an educator I might start thinking of SL as the NCLB of MMOG where everyone wins and no one seems to know the real objective.

Sooo, all that being said....

Iiri, I'm BEGGING you to get something in place to help draw down defenses. Whether that is a daily or monthly depletion of resources for people classified as inactive (haven't logged in for a year... sorry Smithie), or something like your energy drawing ship, I don't care. I just need something to help, and if I can use it on actives, like the energy ship, then that adds an additional strategic aspect and I don't mind that.

Come on and Jerry Maguire me.... Help Me, Help You...

Wait, you might not want that, because that would really be Help Me, Kill You... because unless there is some benefit to wiping out an inactive (lowered resources, higher profit %, someone I really didn't like when they were active), I'd rather hit someone active.

Sorry for the long rant, maybe it's that time of the month... or year... oh yeah, it is, today was the first day of school. At least I don't have to deal with students any more though.

My thoughts exactly.
That is why I started keeping the defense destroyed topic. We destroyed 100mil defense this month but when you updated the list there was about 2-3 bil more over the past few months.

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I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!

My thrill left when Simba left and active ltc was destroyed, sad but true. Having enemies makes the game exciting. We either need more players or some sort of gameplay change..

Not to provide complaints without solutions.... a few things that have been mentioned in the past:
1- resource depletion for inactives, greater % of defensive than non-defensive to help make them fatter

2- energy sucking ship- draws energy off of a planet, unsure of rate, can't be too small or would be ineffectual- has the advantage of being able to be used against actives also

3- increased production- provide a % increase of production based on morale- has the advantage of requiring activity to benefit... possibly easy to code, drop SP value to 1 point per capture and increase value for player attacks (though based on captures and not defense killed, so maybe not REAL easy to code), it maxes out at 32k or so, so set the production to multiply by the (morale *.0001)+1, for a x3 multiplier... or even .00005 for a x1.5 multiplier

4- Just delete planets of people that haven't logged in since the big crash of whenever- not sure how many that would take care of, but I suppose better than nothing

5- SOMETHING... it just seems better than nothing

I am not in favor of deleting or resource depletion.
I think an increase in production would be more enjoyable but I understand SOME sort of solution is required and am willing to go with whatever is most popular or when it gets to Iiri what is most balanced and plausible.
I am going to continue to attack as much as possible and delete as many HW as I can of inactives.

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I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!

Perhaps we should keep a running Tally of where the universe defense is at and what we take out?
I noticed quite a few HW on your list that do not have defense registered in the proper column so the number is actually a little higher

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I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!

I calculated those by hand to figure up my number, now they're in my list

Just as a comparison... the top 20 players by total score have 310M points... assume that 1M points=100M defense, that is only 31Billion defense we've taken out in our entire time of playing... and there is double that amount out there..... on the bright side, that means there are plenty of points to be had in attempting to pass my score

Solution:
Instead of making any mechanical changes why not did a way to inject a ton of vital into the game consistently? A way that everyone could be producing troops without producing vital. When the universe is cleared out you can easily turn it off. You would be effectively doubling troop production with something as simple as spc spawn amounts.
It would have to be drastic like 50k vital per spc planet.
This would be a good first step to see how t goes increasing production.

__________________________
I am here to help in anyway I can! Let's have fun!

I don't really think those planets would be "self sustaining" if they were up-dated on a regular basis. Meaning sooner or later maintaining the shields should cut into the energy on the planet. Sooner or later those shields should run out of energy.
So putting a planet in limbo (not up-dating production) on inactive players has produced the problem.
Of course this would result in no U or H.
I don't know how difficult it would be to just up-date the energy consumption (and also that of U and H) so that eventually the planet no longer can support the shields.

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"Is not easily provoked"
Translated:
It is not good to wake a sleeping bear

"Instead of making any mechanical changes why not did a way to inject a ton of vital into the game consistently? A way that everyone could be producing troops without producing vital. When the universe is cleared out you can easily turn it off. You would be effectively doubling troop production with something as simple as spc spawn amounts.
It would have to be drastic like 50k vital per spc planet.
This would be a good first step to see how t goes increasing production."


^
The above would suit having an upgrade to 100 planets or so for a period of time to wipe out the inactive hws, it would also mean increased credit purchases from the game possibly, that with more upgrade technologies.