OGame - Misplaced Pages

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OGame is a management-type online browser game with over two million gaming accounts worldwide.

According to the OGame story, in the year 2250, man began to colonize other planets in the Universe after the invention of "impulse engines," engines that achieve light speed. The increases in scientific technology helped man achieve a new era of pax. The peace ended, though, when a rare element, "Xentronium", was discovered, described as having "the power of 10,000 terran suns per microgram". The desire for this element caused strife between the human organizations, and war ensued. The war ultimately ended when an "omega bomb," the future equivalent of a nuclear weapon, was used, wiping out much of what had been built. The game is supposed to take place after these events, trying to rebuild man's lost interstellar civilization.

Gameplay

File:Ogame screenshot.png

A screenshot from OGame.

OGame's system is based on real-time; that is, the timing is based on actual time, not an internal time system. This system sets OGame apart from other RTS games. Since it is a free browser based game, the graphics are minimal and glitches are reported from time to time.

OGame in various languages/domains

Because OGame's native language is German, the German version has been around longer and has more players than any other version. The other translations of the game are newer and thus have less users - a fact that is represented by the number of universes running. As of January 2006, OGame.org (the English version of the game) reported breaking the 100,000 user threshold. Then in February 2006 OGame went on to pass the 2 million users landmark internationally

The table below shows all of the OGame translations and is accurate as of June 15, 2006.

Language	Website Extension	Opened	Universes
German	.de	October 3, 2002	54
English	.org .co.uk	September 13, 2004	20
French	.fr	September 23, 2004	40
Spanish	.com.es	October 26, 2004	34
Polish	.pl	January 20, 2005	42
Russian	.ru	January 20, 2005	7
Chinese (Taiwan)	.com.tw	January 27, 2005	7
Turkish	.com.tr	March 2, 2005	28
Bosnian	.ba	March 27, 2005	9
Croatian	.com.hr	May 27, 2005	9
Dutch	.nl	May 27, 2005	8
Italian	.it	May 30, 2005	19
Portuguese	.com.pt	August 11, 2005	10
Danish	.dk	November 28, 2005	4
Portuguese (Brazil)	.com.br	April 6, 2006	2
Chinese	.com.cn	April 4, 2006	1
Czech	.cz	Not in operation yet	0
Finnish	.fi	Not in operation yet	0
Greek	.gr	Not in operation yet	0
Slovakian	.sk	Not in operation yet	0
Swedish	.se	Not in operation yet	0

Alliances

An alliance is a group of people who have banded together, like a guild or clan. Alliances are mostly used for solidarity purposes. Currently, as most of the universe are under OGame version .73d, alliances can do little tactically; however, an ACS combat system, a system allowing an alliance's members to station their fleets at another member's planet, has been added to the English OGame in universes five, eighteen, nineteen and twenty. The ACS system has been also aded on all universes of Polish and Portuguese OGame.

Alliances often protect each other from attacks and promote free trade amongst members. An alliance page in OGame is divided into several parts:

Rank: Your rank or status within the alliance.
Members: the number of people in the alliance.
External text appears to everybody who visits the alliance page, member or not. It is typically used for general announcements.
Internal text only appears to members of the alliance. Announcements of a more discretionary nature usually go here.
Alliance homepage, if any, is the link to that particular alliance's homepage.

Depending on a player's rank, he/she may send circular mails to their alliance, view and reject/accept applications, adjust the status of other members, adjust the example application text, create new ranks, set a new alliance logo/homepage, rename the clan, hand over leadership status, or even disband the alliance all together.

Points

Points are used, for the most part, to rank players, which factors into the ranking of alliances. One point is awarded for every thousand resource units you spend; likewise one point is taken away for every thousand resource units you lose. Additionally, you gain one point for every ship you build and every research level you gain. Primarily, points are gained from mining, raiding, research and shipbuilding, but they are lost from being raided and surrendering colonies.

Resources

There are three resources available in OGame: metal, crystal, and deuterium. Raw metal is the most abundant resource, and is used in large amounts in everything from planetary structures to building ships to research. Crystal is also used for structures, but is used in excess in research. Deuterium is mainly used as fuel for the player's fleet. These resources are procured through two main methods; using a fleet to raid other players' planets, or peacefully mining one's own planet(s). Due to the relatively slow nature of mining, the more common form of resource acquisition is through raiding.

Later on in the game, one option for large players is to "Fleet crash" smaller opponents, destroying their entire fleet, and recycling the resulting debris (only metal and crystal can be obtained this way).

Buildings

Buildings are used for gathering resources (Mines), for energy (Solar Plant and Fusion Reactor), for storage (Metal Storage, Crystal Storage and Deuterium Tank), for building your fleet and defense (Ship yards), for research (Research Lab), for shortening the time buildings, ships and defenses take to construct (Robotic Factory and Nanite Factory), or for creating and storing missiles (Rocket Silo). Buildings in OGame are different from buildings in many games in several ways. First, you do not place them, you "build" that structure type and then you upgrade it. Second, is that there are, for all intents and purposes, an infinite number of upgrades (level 1, level 2, etc.). The cost of resources double each level of upgrade, except for metal mines, crystal mines, deuterium synthesizers, solar plants, and fusion plants.

Each building takes up a "field" on a planet, and each new level takes up a new field. When the fields of the planet are full, no new buildings can be built, unless a terraformer is constructed, providing more fields for each level of the terraformer.

Ships

OGame is mainly known for being a combat game, so a fleet is of the utmost importance. Players with larger fleets often fleet crash players with smaller fleets, with no repercussions. Building obscenely large fleets is often stated as the key to dominating tes, Recyclers for picking up the debris from a fleet crash, colony ships that build colonies on unoccupied planet slots and solar satellites that generate the ever so necessary energy for planetary needs. The amount of energy produced from solar satellites varies, depending on the position of the planet in the solar system (planet #1 producing the most energy and planet #15 the least).

Defense

As opposed to building massive amounts of ships, there are few advantages to being purely defensive. If destroyed, there's no chance of recovering the lost resources with recyclers or an equivalent of fleet saving. One advantage is that there is a 70% chance that defensive structures will be rebuilt if they are destroyed in battle. This 70% is chance computed on every single structure that will decide if that specific structure will be repaired or not.

However, if the defense is destroyed by interplanetary missiles, it will not be repaired. To protect your defenses, you must build Anti-Ballistic missile (ABMs), which require a missile silo of level 2. Each Interplanetary missile fired at your planet can be taken down by your Anti-Ballistic missiles (ABMs, at a 1 to 1 Ratio.

A good Defense is generally a good and worthwhile thing to have, and if it is strong enough it will scare away even the strongest of enemys.

Rules

The Game is policed by Game Operators, Super Game Operators and Game Administrators. One of the main rules is that each player can only own one account per ogame universe. Owning more than one Account in any single Universe and there Accounts will be Banned permanently by a Games Operator (GO). Also each Account can only be played by one person only. If a single account is played by more than one person then this is Account Sharing and this will also lead to a Permanent Ban of the Account by a GO. The rules for ogame.org can be found here - http://board.ogame.org/thread.php?threadid=57

Terminology

Spaceflight

Unlike many other games in Ogame's genre, Ogame does not give you direct control of your spacecraft. Instead, you tell your ship(s) where to fly (using the game's coordinate system) and what to do when they get there, and a timer will appear on your overview page showing you your fleet's ETA (estimated time of arrival at destination and arrival back to the dispatching planet). Your fleet cannot be attacked while on a mission, but only when it is at a certain planet. Fleet movements cannot be monitored by other players unless one has built a sensor phalanx (these can only be constructed on moons). There are seven types of missions that can be performed by ships in OGame (not all ships can perform all actions):

Transport

A transport mission is a mission in which a ship (usually a large or small cargo ship) is dispatched to another planet with the express purpose of delivering resources to that planet. There are no restrictions on what type of ship may perform this action. Also, you may transport goods to any planet whose coordinates you know (unless the planet is on your own IP, and not your account).

Attack

Atttacking involves sending your fleet to attack another planet. There are two normal reasons for doing this: The first is raiding; if you win the resulting battle, you will capture up to half of the defender's resources, as long as your ships have sufficient cargo space. The second reason is to destroy another person's fleet. It is important to note that, unless war has been declared, attacking someone more than three times in 24 hours is considered "bashing" and is a bannable offense. Nevertheless, a planet can be attacked up to nine times in a 24 hour period if "waves" are launched. A complete attack consists of three fleets, "waves", that arrive at the target within 30 minutes of each other. Three wave attacks within 24 hours is that maximum that may be launched against one planet. You can attack someone up to 9 times a day (3 waves) as there is no time limit between the wave attacks. If one alliance has declared war on another as outlined in the Ogame rules, then the bashing rule is suspended between members of those two alliances - members of one may attack members of the other as many times as they wish without penalty. If war is declared by one alliance then it does not have to be acknowladged by the other alliance for this rule to take effect.

Espionage

For espionage missions, the dispatched probes, once they reach the destination, scan the target planet and determine resources, defences, fleets, buildings, and researches on that planet (only resources are available at start, you must have either higher espionage tech or more than 1 probe to receive any more than that). The formula of espionage is simple, The difference of the espionage technology of you and your target squared (multiplied by -1 if your espionage technology is inferior to the target.) and added to the number of probes you send. If the number is lower than 2, you get only information of resources, if the number is 2, you get the information about their fleets, if the number is 3~4, you get the information about their defences, 5~6 gives you information about buildings and 7 or above finally tells you about the research levels. For example, if I have an espionage level of 4 and I spy on a player with an espionage level of 5, I need to send 6 probes in order to obtain the information about the defences. Only the Espionage Probe is capable of performing this action. The more probes you send, the more information you receive but the higher the chance that you can be caught. When a probe is caught it is destroyed, and its remnants are left as a debris field.

Knowing the defences is important, but knowing the buildings status is far more important because you can then plan for the next probing time!

Colonization

Colonization is usually a one way trip. A colony ship is sent out to colonize an uninhabited planet. The colony ship is destroyed after the colonization, so if one decides that the planet is unfit after colonization and forfeits the colony, the colony ship does not come back.

If you send any resources with the colony ship they will be lost in the process, so you have to wait until after the colony is created and then send another fleet with resources to help it build up. If you have fleets acompanying your colony ship, they will return to the original start place.

The number of fields on a new planet is random but somewhat dependent on the position of the planet in the solarsystem, planets 4-6 being the largest, on average. The position of the planet in the solar system (1-15) also determines another factor. The colder a planet is (the further away from the sun it is), the more deuterium is produced by its deuterium synthesiser. The warmer a planet is (the nearer it is to the sun), the more energy solar satellites will produce.

How to colonize a planet: First, go onto galaxy and find a slot that has a number but no picture of a planet. Memorize the co-ordinates, then send a colony ship to that planet. Soon, you will have a new planet under your command.

It is a good idea to only colonize when you feel you're strong enough to protect both planets. Also, pick a planet near to you so that it takes a shorter period of time to move ships or resources there.

On the other hand, placing your planets near each other makes it easier for an attacker to attack all your planets, without having to find the locations of each one, so it is best to get a planet near to you, but still, quite far.

Harvesting

The harvesting action is performed by the Recycler. The recycler is dispatched to a debris field (the material legacy of a particularly large battle, exactly a third of the resources used to construct the destroyed ships) where it gathers up the recyclable debris and transports it to its dispatching planet. The amount of debris is aproximately two thirds of the amounts of metal and crystal it took to build the ships that were destroyed, however any deuterium used to make those ships is lost. However, only recyclers can hold the debris, so sending other ships (such as Large Cargo ships) in hopes of getting more of the debris field (if applicable) will be pointless, as they will be unable to pick up the debris. Debris fields consist of metal and crystal only, not deuterium.

To recycle debris simply choose some recyclers, enter the coordinates, remembering to change destination to DF (debris field) and then send. With OGame Commander, you can simply go to the galaxy view, and if there is a debris field, move the mouse over it and click the harvest button.

Deployment

Deployment is the redeploying of ship(s) to another planet. All ships may perform this action, but it can only be performed on planets owned by the deploying player. The overview page used to show that the ship(s) will be making a return trip, even though they wouldn't, but this bug has now been fixed.

Destroying Moons

This can only be performed by Death Stars. The outcome of the mission will vary:

nothing happens
the moon is destroyed
the Death Star(s) is/are destroyed
the moon and Death Star(s) is/are destroyed
if there is a fleet stationed at the moon, the opposing forces will have a normal fight and, presuming there is at least one remaining death star attacking, the result will be any outcome from 1-4

The outcome will vary on the number of Death Stars performing this mission, and the size of the moon. The formula for the destruction of a moon is: (100 - squareroot(moonsize)) * (squareroot(number of deathstars)).

However, at the same time, the chance that the deathstar(s) and all accompanying ships are destroyed is: (squareroot(Moonsize))/2

Moons can be destroyed, but Planets cannot be destroyed by other players, only surrendered by the account owner unless they are home planets which means they can only be destroyed if the player deletes their account.

Fleet saving

Fleet saving is a common strategy where a player will send their fleet away from their planet just before it is attacked. While this may seem foolish at first, it makes a lot of sense if the fleet that's attacking you is much too strong for your defenses. By sending your fleet away (Preferably sending all your resources with it), you can minimize your losses. After the attack is over, the player simply calls the fleet that was saved back to the base.

Another use for fleetsaving is overnight fleetsaving. This is where a player sends their fleet out to a debris field using recyclers and cargo ships with all their resources so that if someone attacks, only the resources generated from that day can be stolen. By sending recyclers to far away debris fields, accurate return times can be made.

The point of fleetsaving is to prevent other players from destroying your fleet and stealing your saved resource while you are asleep or away from your computer. Because fleets can be seen traveling between two planets on a sensor phalanx, the safest way to fleet save is to do so from a moon to a an invisible debris field (any time an inactive is attacked an invisible df is automatically created). Another safe way to fleet save when you don’t have a moon is to deploy to a in system planet and then be online before your fleet lands. This way if someone has you under phalanx you can easily recall (recalled deploy missions can not be seen on a phalanx)

Different versions

A few different versions of ogame have released over its time. These are as follows:

Version Description

v0.73e - The current version of the english ogame (ogame.org and ogame.co.uk)

- alliance pages called without sessions

- fixed alliance text repetitions bug

- colony deletion possible with opera browser

- the following file extensions are allowed for alliance logos only: BMP ( .bmp), PNG (.png), Tiff (.tif und .tiff), JPEG (.jpg und .jpeg) and GIF (.gif

- same restrictions are valid for graphics embedded into alliance descriptions

Improvements: - Alliances can be clicked on in the statistics. - Clicking on the sensor phalanx doesn't lead to the Galaxy View. - In the Empire View, it is now possible to build on planets all the way to the right by double-clicking. - New menu item, Commander Info, is in the left menu. < v0.60a - The original version of the online browser game.