Ogame – or does a persistent MMORTS make sense?
So here is the first in an overdue series of articles that I had put up over a month ago so that I would get off my lazy so-and-so and actually write something.
A few months back, I had been looking around for a free browser-based game that I could play during my lunch break. It had to be browser-based because I have only HTTP access at work and free,cuz well 
.
Since I am a HUGE strategy game fan, I was eagerly looking for a RTS game and I was very happy to find OGame.
OGame originally started in Germany and is a space RTS. You start with a planet on which you collect 3 resources (Metal, Crystal and Deuterium) for which you need power (either using Solar Plants, Satellites or Fusion plants). Once you have collected sufficient resources, you can build research labs and shipyards.
Now this is classic RTS stuff and I dived right in – I should mention that OGame has a fairly attractive interface for a web-based game and I found that a pleasant surprise. Ogame also has “noob protection” built in, so you are safe from high-level griefers while you are still levelling up.
For those of you interested in playing Ogame, I recommend this site – it’s a very useful collection of tips.
As is my wont, I spent a fair bit of time turtling in my home planet building up my defences. A few weeks later, I launched my first attack – and even though it was against a idle player, it was the most nerve-racking 3 hours of my life (OGame plays in realtime, so if the game says 3 hours to reach a planet, it will take 3 hours). At this point, I was completely sold on the persistent RTS experience.
About 2 months into my Ogame experience, I went past the 5000-point mark and that meant the gloves were off and I was fair game for all the high level players. And that;s when it sinks in – since Ogame is a persistent RTS, you can be attacked at any time.. even when you are not playing.
Now I had heard about ‘fleet-saving” from ogame-tips, so I would faithfully log in every day, load all my resources on my fleet and send it off really slow to some debris field, so that no-one could attack it.
Unfortuantely, that isn’t a guaranteed method for escaping attack and sure enough, I missed doing this one day and almost immediately, a high-level player executed a classic “fleet-crash” (attacking a smaller fleet with an obscenely large fleet to collect the resources that become “debris” when the smaller fleet is destroyed).
So 2 1/2 months into the game, I had my home planet, 2 small planets and about 50% of my defences. Over the next 2 weeks, I poured all my resources into re-building my fleet and thinking dark thoughts about the player who had crashed me and vowed, one day, I’d get “even”.
So I had finally re-built my fleet to back where it was, but that just meant I was fair game again. Back on the “Fleet-save” treadmill again. And this time I guess it was worse, since I knew what happens to mid-level players that don’t remember to “fleet-save”.
And so it was, one saturday afternoon, out shopping, I found myself in a panicky search for a Internet cafe. Why? Cuz I had just remembered my fleet was due back any minute and I didn’t want another crash. I log in, fleet save again and then my brain starts working again.
The next day, I log in at 8PM in the night, just so I can “fleet save”.
Monday afternoon, I find myself logging in and thinking “Why the fuck am I doing this? Where’s the fun in this?”. Over the previous 3 days, I had caught myself thinking many times “Is it my time for my fleet to return?”. For a married guy, working 11 hours a day, that’s too much time spent thinking about gaming in the little time he gets to spend with family.
I deleted my Ogame account that Monday afternoon and have never looked back.
Looking back, I think I finally get why all the big titles (starting from Age of Empires upto Civ IV) only support PvP play and have never branched out into supporting any kind of persistent gaming. The thought of knowing you could be attacked and not be able to do nothing kinda kills the point of the game.
Postscript:
Still looking for a free browser-based game that I could play for 5-10 minutes at a time, I came across Star Wars Combine.
It’s an MMORPG set in the Star Wars Universe, somewhere in the time before Episode IV. Plays in realtime as well and many features like combat and items (MMO staples) are still missing.
But it’s quick, it’s free and I can log-off without ever having to worry that my character will be dead by the time I log in again.
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Geek, Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on April 17, 2006 at 11:37 pm JD wrote:
Nice review of Ogame! It sounded cool at first, but that hassle of having to manually login and fleet save sounds pretty crappy
on April 18, 2006 at 12:28 pm Balaji wrote:
Hi JD,
Thanks for the kind words – looking at it again, I don’t really think the article matches up to what I had in mind when I wrote it,but then I’d never get anything written that way >:p
Yes, that whole manual fleet save is extremely irritating after a while. But if you have time on your hands, it’s a great game.
on September 5, 2006 at 12:08 am Andrew wrote:
Hi,
Nice blog on Ogame. I started it a week ago, and I started playing it because my girlfriend plays it and I had bright ideas about being her knight in shining armour next time she gets destroyed. What bugs me about it is the time it takes to get anywhere. I have played alot of RTS games, Age of Empires, Dune 2000(My favourite), C&C etc. But if I had to spend a week getting to a level 3 shipyard, which allows me to build one fighter(and only one because I have spent all my resources), the disc would have become a coaster very quickly. I like it because I can log in, in work, and its not obviously a game as such, but it takes so long to do anything. I left it over the weekend, hoping I would have loads of resources. In about 10 minutes this morning I had spent all my resources on my upgrades, and have to wait for about another 8 hours to save up some more. I have not gotten as far as fleet saving, as I dont have a fleet. I have a satilite though. lucky me! Its a really addictive game, but I think its down to you being promised Galactic Domination, and I think most people would give up after a couple of months. If Hitler had had to use this system to take over europe, he would still be trying. Or he would have given up and tried pottery.
on September 15, 2006 at 10:37 am Balaji wrote:
Hi Andrew!
Thanks for stopping by. Yes, like you, I found the change of pace that Ogame enforces from RTS games (even a TBS game) to be a huge shock. But when you go into attack mode, that realtime play can really ratchet the tension up quite nicely.
Your resources really only start to pile up once you get to a level 10 and above metal,deut,crystal plant and you need to settle on other planets – till then yes, you are really scraping by.
Nice going with the satellite – I didn’t get one even though I settled on 3 planets and got fleet crashed once.
Since I posted this, I’ve dropped off from Star Wars Combine as well, so it looks like MMO’s are not really my thing.
LOL on the hitler bit
on September 16, 2006 at 2:48 am Jay wrote:
hello, I play Ogame, I am currently in 3 Universes -_- I kind of enjoy it but it does get rather boring sometimes, you just gotta find a way to kick up the pace a little bit I think, getting fleetcrashed can really kill it for some people, and it is VERY time consuming and addictive -_- I like your input on it and it is all very true. nice posting.
on September 18, 2006 at 3:06 pm Balaji wrote:
Hi Jay!
Thanks for stopping by – I’m astonished at your patience to actually play in 3 separate universes. How do you keep everything straight?
Yes, I think the realtime play really slows ogame down a lot, though it does make casual play a bit easier, since you pretty much can only do 1 thing every day.
I feel that fleetcrashing is not as bad as the realization that once you recover, you can be fleetcrashed again whenever someone decides to and you might not be able to do anything about it, simply because you are not online – that’s what killed it for me.
Glad you liked the post – best of luck with your quest for galactic domination!
on December 18, 2006 at 3:53 am Jigz wrote:
Hi ,
( huh ! tat was a real sad day … but still wen i retire in life , wen i hav nothing much to do in life i will open an account again in ogame \:d/
Well , to begin with i have played ogame for last 10 months and quit recently coz am geting married and dont want to run to court facing divorce suit for a reason like ogaming :d But yez it gets into nervez .. its addictive but still its FUN ! ITS NICE TO FLEET CRASH !! and ya in one of the uni i played i have got my 2000 BS and 15 LFs wit loads of other ships crashed , wen i forgot to wake up during my fleet return time
heehee i think i kno who this Jay is .. I have played in his unis and if am ryt , he is my alliance mate too in one of te uni
- Jigz
on December 19, 2006 at 12:26 pm Balaji wrote:
Hi Jigz,
I’ve pretty much given up on all PC gaming recently, though not cuz of marriage, mostly because I’ve found other hobbies
That was a nice fleet – kills ya when you forgot to log in and shit happens doesn’t it? Well I’m not sure if Ogame will be around for decades to come, but you never know
on January 31, 2007 at 1:52 pm Don Lapre Zach wrote:
Your selection of this color combination ,links and idea about this blog seems very good .:d/It shows talents.I wish your dreams be come true.:-?\
Don Lapre Zach
webmaster@don-lapre-richards.com
http://www.don-lapre-richards.com
on September 5, 2007 at 6:44 pm Ida wrote:
I wanted to thank you for the time you spent building this page.n
on September 6, 2007 at 9:55 am Balaji wrote:
Ida: Thanks for the kind words and for stopping by.
on May 8, 2010 at 4:59 am Alucard0 wrote:
Well, I used to play ogame for some months ….
actually some years, getting on and off again, I finally decided to play seriously 3 years ago. I took over a small account that I basically transformed into a wayyyy bigger one. Huge mines, huge fleet ( 8k battle vessels for those who knows) , 6 moons, really hard to get in the game, over 3 million points … and so on and so on ….
well, I eventually came to the same conclusion ?
why am I wasting my time for that ? what is it at the end, it’s just a game nothing more. Worse, when you want to fleet crash and raid other players ( because your mines are never enough when you have a big fleet) you have to spend hours raiding, wasting your time.
When I found myself nightering/doing white night/ brief, not to sleep all night long because it was the only time I could play, I started to wonder why I was doing this …
then my school grades, marks and so on started to go off so well, I quit playing eventually
Now that I look back, I regret … If I had spent the whole time I spent playing learning whatever language, I would be fluent at that time :s
on September 9, 2010 at 5:53 am GOHOF wrote:
Hi Balaji
Just wanted to congratulate/thank you for this brilliant description of what kind of game Ogame really is. It’s without a doubt the best review so far that I’ve read.
I played it during 1 – 1,5 years, stopped when I was #53 in the universe (developing my empire at the pace of the top10’s), with I don’t know how many million points. I have a lot of good memories from it, but also a lot of bad ones.
As a confirmation for you, and anyone else that reads this, your final analysis was spot on from my point of view. The game itself is without a doubt a really good game, but the truth is that the longer you play, the less fun it’s going to get. But most won’t quit, because the longer you play the more addicted one gets to it and the pleasures that come with playing it.
These pleasures range from attacking to developing your empires infrastructure. And especially the major pleasure of this game is the friendships that you can make there, and I really want to point that out.
It requires that you have a lot of time on your hands and preferably a flexible schedule (even if you can adapt your way of playing to your schedule, which only adds to the addictiveness), also you need to able to follow the schedule exactly and prioritize the game above almost anything else. As Balaji explained, even one little schedule slip-up can cause the destruction of your entire fleet ( = possibly months of your spent time). It is NOT a casual game, if you have ANY ambitions at all, and no matter how you play you won’t be able to escape your enemies if you don’t login.
I do however feel, Balaji, that because you quit so early on (thank god for you, because trust me, it was not a coincidence that you ended up seeing the game get more and more out-of-hands) you missed much of the more advanced sides of this game.
There’s so many different ways you can catch somebody’s fleet, some so advanced compared to the normal method of just attacking, that you can’t believe how somebody actually has figured this out and been able to successfully implement it. I also feel compelled to point out that the way of “fleet saving” that you described in your post is very easy to catch (unless the game mechanics weren’t the same as when I played), and you wouldn’t be able to save it even if you were online, in that case.
The game has a lot of good sides, but many more bad sides. I hope that people thinking about playing Ogame read Balaji’s blog post. At least that way they know what is awaiting them. I would say, for the community and many of your fellow players, absolutely. For the game, no no no and no.
@Alucard0 : I recognize your thoughts of regret, but I think the reason why most people start and continue to play this game is because there’s something missing in their lives. A thrill, a challenge or maybe just the joy of doing something you actually choose to do, unlike your job or school maybe.
People are very illogical creatures and we don’t always do what is most logical or productive. Even if we hadn’t played Ogame we probably would’ve wasted that time or more, in the long run, doing other pointless stuff, because we wouldn’t have learned our lesson.
At then end of it, I believe people keep keep playing it until they realize that they’re losing more than what they’re gaining, just as it was for us two, and even for Balaji who played considerately less. Some realize it sooner and others later…