Winning at OGame
For those that don't know about it, OGame is an browser based mmo where you enter numbers into boxes. It's more fun than it sounds, especially in the middle stages.
Simple enough game - gain resources by harvesting on your planet, steal them from other players or buy them with your credit card. Spend resources on defences, space ships or bonuses.
It starts of easy enough but everything keeps costing more the higher you develop. Such as, improving engines from level 1 to level 2 might cost 200 but going from level 2 to level 3 might cost 400. By the time you're getting to level 15 it's costing millions.
Not that collecting that much is the issue, but if you leave too much lying around on your planet, you'll get attacked by other players who'll break your defences and nick your resources.
What the enemy can't do is destroy your planet or your capacity to produce more resources. So even if all your planets get attacked, all your ships destroyed and all your defences smashed - you can't really lose. Which also means you can't really win either...
The only ways to win are to a) stop playing b)continue playing indefinitely, or c)reach some artificial target.
Today I reached my target of getting a moon on all my planets. There's an economic limit to how many planets you can have (I reached 9) and the only way to get a moon is to have a bunch of ships blown up in orbit so the debris can form a moon. And it's random, so you could have a truly epic battle that results in a bunch of debris and no moon.
So on that happy note, I can now declare victory and stop playing. :D Accounts are deleted after about a month of inactivity, so I might log in on occasion just to keep the planets producing so other players can harvest the resources.
