Outer Space, The Game (screenshot, text heavy)

TMC

Late last year I played an online turnbased galaxy conquest game ("4X"), which took me 4 and a half months to play. It's called Outer Space (www.ospace.net) it was pretty damn addictive and had a massive impact on my life like I suppose a MMORPG addiction. That single game left me alot of memories, so I've always wanted to recount it. It ended 6 months ago now.

Now, the game is rather popular and has a limited number of galaxies. Normally there are no free positions in any games (there are 15ish galaxies and a new galaxy starts with 40ish players, but that number quickly halves, and many people actually have several accounts).

However, just now I checked and was shocked to discover a galaxy was reset, with 29 places still free! I'm highly tempted to spend another couple months playing that game.. somebody needs to talk me out of it QUICK! I have a feeling that by the time I make up my mind, there'll be no more free positions though. On the other hand, if they want to give it a try, they better hurry up, and can talk me into it I suppose. Most players don't stick around too long.

But that reminded me to finally post this record, mostly for myself. I realise it makes Komera's posts look short in comparison. Believe me, it could be 4 times longer.

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Click on "thumbs" to enlarge.
It was not so good of me too post most of my screenshots. Also, those thumbs are way too big.

The game plays at 1 turn per hour, 24 turns per day, 6 days a week (the speed halves during weekends) This screenshot is maybe a week after beginning a game in the Galaxy INERA:

You can see the days:hours clock in the bottom right corner (measured since server startup). The game runs very slow the first few weeks, but become feverious in pace when you're running 100 planets.

I'm green, my home system is Siadesh, the yellow planets are other players (who turned out not to be playing, so I took over their responsibilities)

3 days later, I've acquired the Cendourou system, which turns out to be my best. Icons on Phoeret (after which I named my game) and Shourtes are strategic resources.

Another 3 days, I've encountered blackrax to the south, who was a gentleman, and Maledikt tothe north, who sent me about 3 messages all game, which eventually came to annoy me.

2 days: I agreed to enter blackrax's union, the UFSP. I share line of sight. Purple planets belong to Sybesis also in the union, a weak player, and south planets to Zerian (capital Angelhill (www.angelhill.net). Behind him somewhere is UrRenderer. As I join it, the UFSP is engaged in a war with John Silver who attacked UrRenderer. I am the strongest in the union, my allies were stunted because of the war. The UFSP was apparently the first to form and strongest and won the first vote for galatic leader.

Now, where it gets awesome is that Zeraien set up a UFSP wiki. I could read all about the "Romulan Crisis" and by the end of the game this wiki, which really added a large amount to my experience, was huge, the stats show 231 pages.

At the top right in white: jp205, neutral. By this point, Maledikt is the most powerful player due to early concerntration on military.

The Romulan crisis was over, John Silver resigned, his ally J.I. threatened to continue, then Badza, very powerful ally of J.I., threatened us to stop.

I began a massive westward expansion into the center of the galaxy (where no players start) to claim as much as fast as possible.

This is a month later. Sybesis and UrRenderer left the game and we took over their planets. Vitually all planets have been claimed, and the situation is delicate. The UFSP declared war on Maledikt and allied with jp205 who he was attacking. This is a move I now regret. It turns out he was fighting several factions to the north, the details are unclear. With our attack, he was doomed, but all those other players managed to take large pieces of him before we could. Allying with jp205 was in retrospect was stupid, he was uselessly weak. The UFSP covers 1/3 of the galaxy, and about half is visible.

Dehyeph "Dira" at bottom is the black hole at center of galaxy.

To the left, blue is Lazyhead I believe, position neutral. Top, dark green, is Balduran. Brown to south west is RoyalGeorge, obviously English. South is Badza, purple, his empire is huge but not visible. Dark red to his left is Aspa, with a military roughly equal to eveyone else's put together.

We felt Badza was pushing us around, he made demands of certain resource planets of us because we could not use the resources. Also, we were shocked when Lazyhead, Rubicious and Balduran voted for him, and then he placed a large army on his border. We decided to do a "surprise" attack.

Lazyhead, Rubicious and Balduran tell us not to attack. They're alot bigger than us, but we think Badza has horrible defense and we can destroy him with our massive fleets.

At war, 10 days later. We tried to talk Aspa into an alliance but he said he was allied with Badza. We made some deal with Rubicious where he won't attack us but instead spends a few months absorbing RoyalGeorge (with Aspa) to become all powerful and THEN attacks us. The whole time he kept telling us what fun enemies we were. At this point, things look bad.

Aspa is about to attack Coryal, one of my best systems. The conquest of Badza is going to plan! Also, I am launching an attack on Lazyhead.

Whole galaxy at this point.

Month+ later.

War against Badza backfired bigtime. Badza covered every single planet with defense installations, knocking him out of the game but making him unconquerable. His awesome systems were needed to have a hope to win the war. We are outnumbered 2:1 now and deadmeat.

Also, Balduran showed an AMAZING ability to sneak massive fleets past our northern defenses and destroy valuable systems. I was often crippled. We hatched a plan to conquer him but he was too far away.

The war is on 3 fronts: galatic center against Aspa, later Rubicious, north against Lazy, Balduran, Rubicious, south against Aspa. Generally, I lost battles on the north but DID manage to destroy Lazyhead. He resigned but soon after Rubicious poured in massive fleets with stargates so we lost rather than gained ground.

Oh yeah, we invaded Aspa, but did not make terribly much progress. Mostly we managed to keep him away from our borders. Zeraien and Blackrax fought mostly on this front. We never gained any planets able to produce much, by destroyed a bit. It was obvious we were overwhelmed though.

At this point there was little we could do. Their alliance was always only 1% short of the needed 2/3rd majority to become Imperator, because they voted for each other. Our fleets were crushed, my capital destroyed over and over, and I stopped paying the game much attention for about a full month before it ended.

1 month later, down to last 4 systems. They toyed with us, wanted to conquer a helpless state for fun.

The UFSP is no more.

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Causes of death:

* Having 2 3rds of the galaxy ally out of NOWHERE. Crazy.
* Diplomatic mistakes
* Tactical mistakes (inability to keep Balduran out, massive blunders against Aspa)
* Flawed ship design (mostly too little attention to ship speed meant getting repeatly outmaneuvered)

Game problems (actually not the game itself, which I've paid no attention, but the experience)

* Too many czechs. Many speak english, but poorly, and you can get people to translate
* Long time for game to end after the winner is clear
* Players know each other and may ally on sight, leading to ridiculous alliances.

Fin.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

Onlyoneinall · **Bug finder** Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Posts: 746

Cool, I heard about this game from someone. Games that don't have enough free slots to play make me sad. :/ Especially when they tell you, be a subscriber and you get to log in anytime! lol
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http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=750 Bloodlust Demo 1.00

Valigarmander · Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2006 3:13 pm Post subject:

I agree with OOIA. Looks awesome. But I only play games that allow free access. I'm very cheap.

TMC · Posted: Sun Jun 25, 2006 10:35 pm Post subject:

Yeah, that's why it's nice thats it's free - open source in fact (the server code was opensourced recently, so you can run your own server, increase the rate of play and scale down the galaxy size)
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"It is so great it is insanely great."