Families
Empires
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Wow, what a round! Will have some thoughts to post here after I get some sleep. If you played this round, feel free to add your own thoughts here too!
Pie with the size steal! All I learned from this round is Caed never sleeps… 
That was a great two days lots of intensity and misclicks from trying to go fast! Thanks for putting it together Pie and for almost everyone showing up! Oh and sorry Pickle 
Here’s a list of things I noticed from playing the round.
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1 minute ticks are probably more of a quarterly or semi-annual option as it really wears you down. The allure will wear off eventually so I treat this like URF in LoL (not that I really play LoL).
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It is apparent that a sleep function is necessary. A toggle on/off with an amount of total time available is too easy to abuse but perhaps closer to the NBA style where you have maybe: two 8hr sleep timeouts, two 2hr extra timeouts - 18hrs of time off available to live your life but also fall behind
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The quick pace would be great to keep players interested. You cannot co-ordinate science exploration rounds easily, if at all, so every player in a larger family would be involved from the start.
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2 man fams leave players open to being at a large disadvantage (the Pie effect I’ll call it). Either solo or 3+ would likely be ideal sizes. Solo is obvious why, 3+ waters down the effect of an inactive or less active player (I think this is true for all of IC but accentuated here).
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A less hardcore but more ‘available’ alt galaxy tick time could range anywhere from 10-20 minutes.
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Starvation may be bugged on chaos server.
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Chaos server needs manual family placement don’t forget, especially if it will be used for this again.
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Wardancer defense bug is very likely real and needs a temporary fix at the minimum.
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1-3 planets per system was a bad idea don’t let us plebs vote on that anymore.
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Currently planets can be selectable by bonus, or by portal status (I’ll be honest if this didn’t exist I wouldn’t have stayed when I returned). A type of ‘hot list’ where you can create custom sub-groups of planets would be wonderful, perhaps call it a cluster. Sortable planets by cluster and maybe a button for ‘Add to Cluster’ so we can create a list of say, for example, Tax Office planets, or Outer Rim planets, or a Key Portal list.
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It was already apparent but this round made it moreso, a more efficient fleet sending mechanism.
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A retake system. I dare to say this as it may make it too easy, and the above idea may reduce the need/want for it. Military page allows you to SET a retake fleet size, the news page allows you to SEND a retake fleet, at the size your empire has pre-determined, with one click.
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I did actually manage to get 8hrs of sleep last night but set my alarm at the right moment to add more defences :-). I genuinely loved this round and would rather play this type of rounds, 1-5 minute ticks, than the regular rounds because of the minimum time but maximum effort. However fun it was to play, it rmade some flaws/improvement points of the game very clear:
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Attacking one planet takes a lot of effort, perhaps make a standard fleet size feature so you don’t need to manually enter all unit numbers for every attack.
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As Cado already mentioned, a retake system would be a nice feature to have. Perhaps being able to send predetermined fleet sizes to a list of coordinates
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With ticks going this fast it’s possible people want to save a battle report but just don’t have the time in the heat of the moment. Perhaps someday it could be possible to save these reports in a battle log per round?
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I found that attacking with a lot of fleet and only wanting to station a small part of that fleet took up a lot of time. I think this could be part of the battle report page: a button to station a predetermined fleet size the the planet and recall the rest to the main fleet
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Even though I won size because I killed Cado during his sleep (and he didn’t manage to kill me during mine), I had most fun last night. Cado, Pie and me set a time to start attacks and then went for it for 2-3 hours, best time of the round for me. Even kept me from having a smoke during that time! I hope in the future people can agree to the same type of wars instead of just waiting for someone to go to sleep, keep it fun for everyone.
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Even though we had 2 man families I think everyone chose to go SS as aiding takes time and during sleep or offline time you just can’t afford to wait on aid from the other fammember(s).
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A sleep mode is a must, although I think income shouldn’t be disabled during that time to prevent people winning a round just by staying awake for 48 hours.
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Besides some planets I took from Pickle after he already mentioned he wasn’t playing anymore, I never had any morale issues. There are only so many attacks/ops u can do per minute and morale fills up fast enough never to run out. Perhaps in the future with more players there will be greater difference in size and morale will be more imporant.
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I liked the 1-3 planets per system because it just needs some more attention and a change of strategy. Yes exploration was a bit weird and even in my first explo wave i had to pick 10-tickers to get the right recourse planets, but ticks go fast enough so i didn’t have a problem with it. Attacking also needs extra attention because most of the fleet is always out on attacking so people can get u with 90% fleet out.
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I had the best map positon but the other 3 families were really close together. This needs to be prevented in the future to give all fams an equal chance to safe exploration.
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Bookmarks: does anyone even use this feature? I sure don’t, however I would like to have a feature to bookmark an empire and see its nw logged every tick for a certain amount.
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Cado’s idea of having a ‘hot lists’ for planets looks like a nice feature to have, especially in the chaos rounds. Will just make it easier for people with less time to organise their empires.
All in all this was the most fun I’ve had in IC so far, thanks to everyone that was playing!
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^ This is the main reason I still use the old map unless I am playing from my phone, if you are attacking multiple planets in the same system you do not have to keep entering the fleet sizes, it auto pre-fills your last fleet sent.
Great insights guys! Great points all around, I’ll be chopping this thread up into bug-reports and feature-requests at some point.
As for me, this was a pretty inspiring round as a dev. I play a regular round once in awhile and feel like the game still holds up well, but this was an entirely different level.
My #1 takeaway here was how important it is for us to clean up the site interface. As @Cadomark pointed out in particular, more efficient fleet sending + retake features will reduce the click-fests.
This was a great learning experience. It’s one thing to experiment on the dev server, but having a real competitive round going at this pace lets us iterate and reflect much faster on what the game needs. We’re going to fix things to make chaos rounds more manageable that is going to benefit the regular server as well.
Thanks for giving it a go, and here’s to more in the future!