Maybe someday mining will be worth while... maybe... probably not. It truly makes me sad. =/

Uh huh... well I already know how this will end, enjoy your stay shadow folks.

Of course nobody really uses armor, the cost to maintain it alone makes it far more expensive than shields, not to mention you have to haul around a boat load of the minerals you need for repairs which is a huge hassle and if you ever run out then you are pretty much boned.

Cut the profits from coms in half while increasing their difficulty... I really hope the next thing on your list is cutting down the timers. It's nice and all that you are trying to make hanger bays actually useful but honestly most people will never be able to afford not only building them big enough to fit decent ships in there but also getting a bunch of specialized ships together with good enough modules and optimizations and things to actually win a fight. I mean if you actually have to use multiple ships now for COMs then that vastly increases the amount of money you have to invest in order to make money off of them... and you've cut the money we make from them in half. That is pretty dam harsh if you ask me.

I haven't had one of these "new" missions yet so I'll stick around and see but if it is as bad as I've read on here then honestly I think this particular update may have caused more problems than it solved and could require several updates in the future to balance it.

At least the updates are happening quickly however, that much is certainly an improvement.

*Edit- Also one of the points you brought up SirEmi with the AP mechanic allowing for more casual play, well this combat update kind of undermines that. It's not very casual if you have to start up a COM, scan the ships to see what they can do and then realize you aren't equiped to deal with the mission and you have to let it sit there for a week, two weeks, a month, however long it takes to not only create new modules or ships you might need but to also somehow get the money together to make what you need without doing COM's because you aren't equiped to deal with them. I feel like this update has made COM missions only for the super involved that can spend 8 hours or so every day playing this game, which certainly isn't me anymore I know that. I honestly don't even know how I'm supposed to play/enjoy this game right now.

Hands off those numerals :p

I'm approaching tech levels that spell out my initials

Git ya darn dirty Roman! Your kind aren't wanted in here! =p

In all seriousness though I dread the day when I get up closer to where Mata is and I have to deal with something like a mk MMDMCCCLXXXI module or something like that. I mean that is just... ugh... I mean that looks like some kind of serial code or something, it's ridiculous.

Well I wasn't really thinking about altering the odds after the timer has started but yea that is also another way to get odds like that I suppose lol. My missions on my personal COM ships aren't large enough to really warrant powering down my ships, I do that now and then with the corp ship I have but I don't bother half the time since I'm often away for 3+ days anyway it really won't matter if the timer is 38 hours or 72 hours. I don't imagine a lot of people use death rays seeing as how they are a pain to get, I think Rostin and Raph and maybe some other folks in SPQNR are the only people I can think of that seriously put in effort to get them.

if you make the acquasition of qp much more expensive then it's going to slow the newbs down more so than before. 1m per qp is enough. it gives people something to work towards. whilst i'm not making a buckit load of money per day, i do think that 1m solars per qp is enough.

as for ap, well i don't mind that either. again it's something that can help the newbs and you can choose how you use that ap. 1 qp per day with just generating ap really isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things. especially if you want to have officers and vip status. on it's own you'd never be able to save up enough ap to acomplish all that.

Well the thing is, AP working the way they do actually is making it faster for noobs than ever before. I mean if they are picking up even the cheap refugee missions in the 1st or second ring they can easily spend a few of their free AP to cut the time to go around collecting them and then come back to Sol down pretty drastically without having to spend a bunch of money upgrading their engines and paying for a ton of fuel. On the other hand if they are in a corp as many new players do join a corp before long they can already get decent engines and maybe some fuel or even a corp ship to use to make a bunch of money. Those people can save up those AP and use it solely to convert into QP. As SirEmi said the full amount of free QP you could get just from AP alone is 36 over the course of one month (30 days). That is enough to not only buy VIP for 25 days but also an Officier for 15 days. Now if you consider the amount of QP you can get from voting every day (and I mean from the individual votes not the grand prize that most of us will never win) it isn't too hard to see people being able to afford VIP whenever they want it as well as one or even two officiers at least half of the time if not most of the time.

I mean hell when I joined TGE I got a corp ship that can get me enough solars from a single COM to buy VIP status at the current prices after just a week. Granted not all corps have the kind of assets that TGE does (not to mention I've know Jam for awhile so he knew I wouldn't do stupid things with it) but corps are getting stronger and bigger every single day so in the future I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case with all the majorly active corps.

If you want to have perma VIP status you can get that with just the AP you get every day if you save them up, you can even have an Officier half of the time. If you want perma VIP and all of the Officiers then yes you are going to have to pay a premium but honestly you don't really need most of them. I mean starting out the Science Officier is kinda pointless since it's a percentage boost that gets better the more base RP/Hour you have. The Manufacturing Officier is similar though not completely pointless since you are really just trying to make money in order to make something better and you aren't dealing with 100 hour + manufacturing timers. Again the Combat Officier gives you a percentage boost much like the Science Officier so at low powers it's really not all that worth it.

So if you are smart and realize that early on all you really want is VIP and the Nav and Engine Officiers this free AP goes a long way to having those at all times. As things stand noobs will still be progressing much faster than any of us did in the old days with AP essentially giving them more free QP's than we ever got.

Going from 1 mil to 1.5 or 2 mil isn't that drastic of a price increase as well. Once people get into the 3rd and 4th rings they can make that just by picking up 5-10 refugee missions and bringing them back to Earth, with two or three ships doing laps out there you can rake in enough money for any number of QP you want depending on how much support you get from a corp and how much time you have to play. Don't get me wrong it is significantly more over the course of buying those things for several months but I think that SirEmi is entitled to do what he wants with the game. This is just a compromise between what the players in general want and what SirEmi wanted to originally do.

Personally speaking I don't want it to be more expensive, I gotta pay for extra Officiers since I'm actually at a point where the Manufacturing Officier is pretty much vital and the Combat Officier is pretty darn helpful. However it's really not that much effort as it is considering I will basically be getting VIP and an Officier for free from those AP I get every day. It seems like it right now since we haven't had time to build up a stock of AP but I imagine that once we've had the AP mechanic in the game for a month or two quite a few people will feel the same way.

Anyways it was just a thought for SirEmi to think about, I'm sure we will see if it is or isn't a good idea in time.

Always go standard with MAUs unless you are desperate to end a stalemate with a ship with shields.

Other weapons are useful in PvP, as they attack before marines and can do bonus damage in the case of lasers vs shields and railguns vs armor.

Of course you can always use regular weapons in COM missions if you want they just aren't as efficient

Basically all of that. I'm far from a vet in terms of this games combat but having learned a fair bit from my experiences as well as from folks like Raphel, Dadds and Jam I have learned enough to do pretty well for myself.

If you are just starting out then like Rostin said, you just want to use Marines and Shields on your ships, for the reasons previously stated they can attack multiple targets multiple times and they do not miss. Normal weapons such as Vipers, Lasers and Railguns aren't that effective for COM missions because #1 they can and often do miss #2 because most of the time your ship is out numbered and you only have so many shots with those weapons and #3 because the Marine/Shield combo is also pretty much a tank build as the Marines are not only offensive but provide defensive HP as well.

Like Jam I prefer to have some weapons on my COM ships just in case I need to use it for something else and it cuts down time when you want to shift gears from COM's to PvP.

As far as the odds are concerned, whether you win or lose is often determined by a few things. The obvious is how many opponents you have to fight and how strong they are compared to your ship. The not so obvious is what kind of ratios you have on your ships as far as how much of your total power is made up of shields and weapons and then how much of your weapon power is made up of Marines and Firing type weapons. A fairly standard ship build that a lot of folks know is making sure that half of your total ship power is made up of your shields. That results in almost any COM mission that ship could pick up having less total power than your ship has shields most of the time as Rostin mentioned earlier.

You will have to play around with some different setups to figure out what works in which situation. As far as Marines and COM's are concerned I have this advice for you. You should split up your Marine power between 8-16 different Marine Modules. The reason for that is two fold #1 You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and just put one super powered module in there as Marines now fatigue after each attack so their power will go down with every attack against any enemy ship/station/planetary force. #2 You don't want to spread out your Marine power too much otherwise you require too many attacks with your Marines to take out the enemy and they may get through your shields and start depleting your Marines which might seem cheap to replace at first but when you start needing to replace tens of thousands of them after every battle it quickly gets expensive.

Do keep in mind that is my general load out which also includes 8-14 Vipers depending on what lvl modules I'm working with to hit my power ratios for my ship layout. If you go with full Marine research and load out for your offense then you may require more or less depending on the levels of your tech.

However with my standard load out I have won a battle with 7:16 odds in the enemies favor (which only happened because somebody dropped a COM mission on top of mine, otherwise getting odds like that is pretty much impossible unless you lay down multiple COM's at the same time in the same place of the same type). Others have won battles with far worse odds using things like the Death Rays and other hard to acquire tech.

Anywho that is just my two cents, take it for what you will. You might not want to use my setup but I hope it can at least give you some ideas as to what you may or may not want to do.

Just to cue in on my two cents here SirEmi. I understand what you were wanting to do with the QP's and everything, I had felt for awhile now that you were never going to make any money with this game considering how easy it was to get QP. I could see how that fact could contribute to you not really feeling like doing anything for this game.

With this AP system in place it will definitely help the noobs, the speeding up effect of the QP's being put on AP now that regenerate every hour helps them speed stuff up a ton plus since they only cost 50k insteand of 250k like QP used to they can buy them more easily to speed up many tasks.

I am some what concerned that the AP regenerating will undo some of your efforts to make QP less common and to give more incentive for people to buy them with real money. My concern is that you get 24 AP a day which is basically one free QP every day. Granted that still isn't that much but it basically gives everyone a free and unlimited source of VIP at the very least. Perhaps you should push up the cost of QP from 20 AP to something like 30 or 40 AP. As much as it will pain my wallet I would prefer to actually have to work to keep my benefits that some people pay for.

Also since the option to buy AP and then convert the AP into QP exists I feel like it would be a better option to just bring back the ability to to buy QP straight with Solars and just increase the price to what it would be with the method we have now which as of right now 50k per AP and 20 AP per QP is 1 million solars. It just seems a bit cumbersome to have to buy one form of currency just to convert it to another, though I do understand you only added it due to massive outcries from the players.

Someone (I can't be bothered to go back in the pages to look up who it was) brought up an interesting idea. Perhaps you could create a donator status for people that do donate and to give incentive for others to do so. Something that was relatively simple and not game breaking (basically as long as it didn't become a pay2win sort of thing). One thing I can think of is the ability to hold even more AP than we can with VIP status, perhaps an increase from the 200 with VIP to 400 with Donator status? Another cool incentive would be some kind of Donator Black Market where you can sell things for their full value rather than the normal sell price, which would definitely help miners make money.

Maybe a cool little golden ship icon next to their name ingame would be nice as well to identify who is a donator.

There are always good ways to give people an incentive to give you money and not upset the people that either can't or don't want to and not completely change the balance of the game if you look hard enough xD I'm sure many of us could give you other good ideas if you wanted.

The inclusion of AP will probably help a bit.

Honestly though, this game is practically a really slow text based idle game, 99% of this game is just waiting for timers to finish so we can actually do something. As Rostin said having more ships does help in the sense that while you are waiting for one timer to finish you can do something with another ship however that is a double edged sword in that eventually you end up having to manage like 20-30 different timers and at higher levels of power those timers take days or even weeks to finish. That is pretty much what kills PvP in this game. (Though for me it's only one of two reasons why PvP is pointless)

Speeding things up would change the balance of the game considerably, I just think it's not the best way to go about changing that balance. Ultimately it's going to take awhile for anything to get done, people should know what they are in for in that regard. I didn't really have a problem as a noob with waiting for stuff to happen, that gave me time to read up on how the game works and figure out how I wanted to do things and what order I wanted to do them in.

I would really like to see more variety in the early game, some things that actually engage you more instead of going back and forth between planets/systems on missons being your only reliable source of income. I mean that gets old after a few hours and yet if you are like me and are determined to do things on your own for awhile then that is what you have to do for weeks or even months in order to get decent modules and/or ships to move on to something else.

If anything needs to be sped up it is mining because as it is, due to the insane amount of time it can take to mine a deposit (even if that deposit is diamonds) your profit is next to nothing compared to what you can get doing SoS and COM missions. If mining was sped up (and me and sargas and others have posted a number of suggestions on how to do that in this section of the forums) I feel like that would vastly improve the balance of the game and maybe even give noobs something else to do that will actually make them pretty decent money. Especially if this game became a player driven economy and we couldn't just buy infinite resources from Earth (Which by the way completely contradicts the story of the game that you read on the front page). Then again they can't go very far and their mining opportunities are pretty limited in very pirate heavy areas.

Perhaps we could get some more wormholes closer to SOL that lead out into the 3rd and 4th rings to help those noobs expand their opportunities and avoid the pirates? We could also put things like cloaking devices in the game so that people who just want to peacefully mine can do so to avoid the lower level pirates who might not be able to afford a cloak jamming device, and then the higher level pirates who did have them might want to have bigger targets and would leave the new folks alone.

*Edit* Not to mention we might get more groups of miners getting together and forming corps to help protect themselves and everything. It truly makes me sad that mining is not a good source of income nor does it really give an incentive to create mining guilds/corps. If mining actually worked the way that me and Sargas would like it to work and this game was a player driven economy, I would instantly put everything I had into mining operations and I would play every single day and love it. I love games that allow me to mine stuff, craft it into stuff and then be a merchant and sell my stuff, this game has that kind of potential but sadly that potential hasn't been realized in all the time that I have been here because practically nothing has been changed in regards to mining or the economy or selling what you get.

I would do what Raphel does but yea... my computer is garbage. I could use one tab and have it move to 3 different pages taking like 30-60 seconds for the page to load or use three tabs and have each tabe take like 1-2 minutes to load and probably deal with pages freezing while I try to put the numbers in.

I generally deal with module upgrades by upgrading them 20 levels at a time. Like Raptor said I want/need my modules to have even numbers with the effect so I want shields with 10,000 shields rather than 9,925, or cargo bays with 6,300 m3 of space rather than 6225 m3. Because of that I end up dealing with all my modules having an I at the end of them. Most of the time it isn't really an issue but you get up into the 70's or 80's and then it starts throwing in all sorts of numerals that confuse me at first glance and I have to take like 2 seconds to actually figure out what the number is.

Antilak gave that example of a mk 324 module being CCCXXIV, I would rather have 3 digits as opposed to 7 roman numerals. This would also save space in a number of instances.

Idk if a max link is really a big deal, I mean I have research for mk 300 em shields but I've only just started using mk 141's in my ships. Typing it in really isn't a big deal, I just double click the box and type in the number over the number already in there. It really doesn't take long to type in the module level even if you do have modules up in the thousands, or if you are mata the tens of thousands. Personally I got my research on everything up past 20 to get rid of those stupid drop down menus on the manufacturing screen they were just annoying and made the page load slower for me.

Though a button to duplicate or replicate an order in progress might be nice. Like if I'm making some mk 141 em shields it would be nice to have a button I can press to just make another of that same order, or even better have a box next to said button so I can put in how many of that order I want.

Uh huh... well I have my answer anyway lol. Enjoy working that all out.

And this guy things some of us are interesting lol. Oh well at least Sargas seems to understand ya lol. Enjoy your time here at AG Bravo and let us know if you have any questions.

Intense pirate hunters?O.o Npcs only I hope.

Just wondering are PIRATES allowed lol

And SCORPs belief is that this "boring" portion of the game is actually where the player begins to grasp the game and start to understand it. Free modules are great, but you should give a player a month or so to feel the game on his own (are there female players actually???)

I'm sure there have been some female players in AG since it has started... whether or not any of those female players decided to stick around is another matter, who knows?

Personally I also kind of believe that giving a player free modules that are far beyond what they could possibly make does somewhat limit that players grasp on how the game works. If I had not had to do those early missions from Sol to the other planets and then to the other star systems I wouldn't have understood how the efficiency of the engines works as far as having higher lvl WHG's vs. more WHG's installed. Also even after I initially joined Jazz at ITO I still didn't get a ton of help (in the module department anyway) and I had to come up with a plan as far as how I would grow and develop, because of that I investigated many different ways of playing the game and have a good bit of experience with them.

If someone had just handed me a COM ship that made me a couple million solars every day then I probably wouldn't have bothered with anything other than COM's (which honestly isn't a super bad thing) and I wouldn't have devolped as much experience as I have now.

I hope your methods are working for you at SPQNR however, regardless of whether I agree with them lol.

Lol, big bosses... Anywho, what exactly did they do to earn that Rostin? I've been away for a little while since my internet was being dumb with the AG server.