Oh, game...

Apparently all these years I've been stifling my inner German - he's an unassuming, efficient little man whose hunger for reams of statistics is equaled only by his thirst for galactic conquest. But he's been set loose.

I've discovered Ogame.

Ogame is a browser based game. No, not one of those inane little flash-based time wasters. This is a Thinking-Man's game. Or, to be precise, a Worry-About-His-Fleet-All-Day-Man's game.

On the surface, it's a traditional 4x space exploration game. From the moment you log in, you are peppered with little pictures of space ships, planets, planetary defenses, etc. But don't let that fool you - this game is really just about numbers: making your numbers as big as you can, and using them to bludgeon poor saps with smaller numbers, at which point you take their numbers and add them to your own. They might as well take down all the space-themed pictures, and replace them with photos of puppies.

The crux of this game is that it operates in real time. You want to research a piece of technology? It'll take 2 or 3 hours, in real time. You want to colonize a new planet? You send your ship off, and when it arrives 14 hours later the planet is yours. The higher you research your "computer" technology, the more stuff you can do in parallel (attack other planets, etc) - there's technology that allows you to research or build things faster, have your ships travel faster (so they arrive at their destination in a shorter time, etc). But in the end, it all comes down to the numbers - when you attack a planet, how many of the different kinds of ships do you have, vs how many "defensive" units the planet has. Whoever has more is likely to win (after taking into account things like ship statistics, various relative technology levels, weaknesses of certain units against others, and good old-fashioned random luck).

It's complex enough that in a close battle it can be quite difficult to figure out how it will turn out...so the crafty German player base has come up with a set of tools to simulate battles and give you reports on how they will turn out (since there is an element of luck, the simulators tend to run hundreds or even thousands of times and provide best/worst-case results). Here's an example:




Since it all pretty much comes down to numbers, there's a definite food chain where the top 50 players prey on the top 250 players, and the top 250 players prey on the ones below them, and so on, and the smallest fish can almost never beat the larger ones in a direct fight (you can still do guerrilla-style hit-and-run raids on their bases while their fleets are away, but mostly as a small fish, you try really hard to stay below the radar of the big fish).

And that's where the true evil of this game comes in... Ogame has a persistent universe (actually, it's dozens of different universes, each of which has thousands of players). That means that while you are sleeping at night, someone who is stronger than you (and there is always someone stronger than you) can find your base and/or fleet and attack it. Bases that are attacked just lose resources (and 30% of your defenses are permanently destroyed), but if someone destroys your fleet...poof, it's gone. Weeks of work down the drain.

To counter this, Ogame uses this simple mechanism - fleets that are in transit are safe; only fleets in orbit around a planet can be attacked. That means that if you want to go to sleep, no problem, just send your fleets on an 8 hour trip. Want to go out to lunch? Send your fleets on a 90 minute trip. Just don't oversleep, or pick a restaurant with slow service, because as soon as your fleet returns, it's fair game. And if you wake up early and want to play, your options are limited because your fleet is still off on a mission.

The end result is that the serious Ogame player is forced to divide his day into two sections - times where he cannot play, because his fleets are off on safety missions, and times when he must play, because his fleets are at his planets and are vulnerable. And god forbid that the hapless player should have a windstorm which knocks out internet service for several days (*cough* me *cough*) because he'll inevitably freak out and have to drive to Kinko's to rent a PC to save his fleet.

The combination of having an increasing investment in the game (my fleet has been accruing for nearly 2 months now) with this "you must play, or lose everything" mechanism is crushing me, actually. It's even worse than grinding PvP in WoW was, because you can't even take a day off.

It's actually kind of a brilliant hook, when you think about it...