I didn’t think it’d be possible, but this “Ogame”:http://ogame.org thing is really quite addictive. I’ve been playing for a bit over a week now (10 days, actually), and I’ve worked my way up to a solidly established Homeworld (which I dubbed ‘Darkfall’) and two colony planets (Firestorm and Hammerstrike). I’ve actually got a colony ship _en route_ to arrive at a potential fourth planet in about six hours. This is actually my second attempt to gain a fourth planet, the first of which failed in the last 15 minutes as someone arrived there just before I did (it was a 10-hour trip one-way, so the colony ship had to turn around and come 10 hours back home again).

My strategy thus far has been simple – keep as low of a profile as possible, spend resources as fast as possible, and spread myself out around the galaxy as much as possible. Fortunately, I’m under what’s called ‘newbie protection,’ which means that more advanced players who have been at the game longer than I can’t attack me until I level up quite a bit more. Likewise, I can’t attack players newer than me (beyond a certain level). I’ve primarily spent most of my time sending cargo ships out to ‘attack’ inactive players who haven’t logged in for at least seven days, some of which have been away for 28 days or more. Some of these folks are about to have their accounts deleted anyway, so I can safely raid their stuff while they’re gone without fear of retaliation. Soon enough, though, I’ll have to start building fleets and become a bit more active in the local battles and wars in order to continue surviving. Newbie protection doesn’t last forever, you know.

It helps to enter this game with an alliance already in place. A bunch of guys from my “Halo clan”:http://tiedtheleader.com have been playing Ogame for several months now, so most of them are already firmly entrenched and well-established. My first few days in the game saw care packages coming in from several different players and planets. The extra resources were instrumental in allowing me to gain a lot of ground in a very short amount of time. This has also allowed me to establish a pretty solid foothold so that I can share some of my resources around to newer players, as well. As an alliance, TTL works very well together and the goal is for us to become one of the highest ranked alliances in the game (at least on our server). We’ve even managed to pull players from other Halo clans into our Ogame alliance, thus making us even stronger.

Ogame is pretty cool for what amounts to little more than a glorified Excel spreadsheet. There’s no animations (aside from the countdown clocks), no super-fancy graphics, no wicked cool sounds. It’s simply a slow and plodding game of resource management and colony development. It’s amazingly complex and requires a certain amount of strategy to be able to manage your development. I like the fact that there is no luck, no chance involved. Everything is very mathematical and formulaic, and therefore outcomes are relatively easy to predict.

Feel free to give the game a try, and if you decide you want to register and need an alliance to ally with, declare yourself over at “TTL’s Ogame Alliance Hall”:http://forum.tiedtheleader.com/index.php?topic=8529.0 for a pass to our private strategy forum. Tell them Demag0gue sent you.