As @nextcolony is progressing further and the battle module being active now for a week, we see more and more attacks being flown against other players. A discussion has broken out whether attacking other players is nice and whether destroying other ships just for the sake of it is appropriate behavior. In this post I am looking closer at the different strategies.
Playing NextColony Peacefully
As we are all Steemians, we are a big happy family together in the same boat. We want to be friends with each, get some good upvotes with our content and enjoy the games on this blockchain. NextColony has brought one of the most aggressive browser-games I have ever heard of to the Steem blockchain. However, becoming a peaceful settler with a defending strategy is possible.
You can build a shield generator, that can be charged and activated. Depending on your shields level, it will hold for hours, allowing for a good night sleep, without worrying about your resources. However, it will charge longer than it holds and while doing so reduce your production rate by 10%. It is a slow and costly approach in the long run but certainly possible and the most peaceful way to play NextColony.
With this approach, you can concentrate on exploring and trading with other players. If you are lucky, you will find many planets that way and grow your peaceful empire. You might even open up a market for ships and sell them to others for Steem or resources. However, if you start collecting ships, you have to adjust your strategy, as they are not saved by your planets shields. You have to actively keep them in space travel and each minute they are waiting in orbit is a potential danger for them.
Playing NextColony Semi-Agressively
Another approach is to fly attacks against the planets in your surroundings, that seem to be inactive and have no ships. You can check their activity on SpyColony and @rafalski's interactive NextColony Map. This way, you are not annoying any other player and risk their frustration. As long as nobody is contacting you about that, you can assume that your strategy is reasonable.
With this approach, you are able to collect resources and grow much faster than with the peaceful approach. The daily stream coming from other planets to yours, will allow you to build out your planets and battleships. The more ships you have, the more attacks you can fly and the more resources you can acquire.
With this strategy, you will focus mostly on small planets without any ships. As soon as just one single explorer is on that planet and you attack it, it will be destroyed and your semi-aggressive strategy quickly becomes something else.
Playing NextColony Agressively
The concept of the game is to fly attacks against others, sometimes with gigantic fleets. As an experienced player from Galaxy Wars (an Ogame-clone which was the inspiration for NextColony), I know that the heart of the game is all about raids, intercepting opposing players fleets on their return and preemptively destroying the growing fleets around yourself. This is fun and challenging and - in my opinion - the point of the game.
There is so much strategy involved in this approach. If you play well, you will be dominating your surroundings. I predict that this will become the only really successful way to play the game in the long run. Blockchain allows everyone to have multiple accounts, run bots like @buildteam's AutoPilot, which is managing your alts and see 100% of what is going on at each moment. This is both a blessing and a curse and the @nextcolony team has to work hard to keep the endgame still interesting for people without alt-armies.
Just to give you an example: A user called 'Gold Company' on Discord has bragged with his over 40 alt-accounts. He used a custom JSON command to save his fleet from an interceptor, who timed the attack down to seconds. However, 'Gold Company' was able to avoid the loss of ships, with the custom command, that send his returning fleet away again, in less than seven seconds. If that is too technically for you, than you have not understood NextColony yet.
Monetizing NextColony
NextColony will reward us financially, as they have announced to share 30% of the games revenue with the players. There are three main ways to receive rewards:
- Wonder of the universe
- Successful players
- Active players
We don't know exactly yet what any of that will mean in the game. The Wonder of the Universe will probably cost tons of resources. The peaceful players might be able to achieve that when they team up and pay for it together. They have to be incredibly careful though, as this attempt might make them a target for the aggressive players, as holding tons of resources on one single planet will be prone for attacks. It will be easier for the other strategies to achieve that, as they have greater streams of resources and plenty of ships to defend themselves.
The reward for successful players is most likely paired to the destruction of other ships, although that is speculation. We can already see the new ranking list with points for destruction. The only way to collect destruction points currently is by attacking and destroying other ships. This is only possible with the aggressive play-style. That means, there will be a financial incentive to play that way. You can see the current ranking on Jarunik's alternative open source NC-Client under ranking, in the right column.
The final way to earn the revenue share is by being active. We also don't know what that means, but I assume this will be something that is achievable to all playing strategies likewise. But again, that is mere speculation on my end.
Conclusion
All-in-all there are huge incentives to play this game and there are even more incentives to play it aggressively. I understand everyone who just wants to play a peaceful building game. NextColony can that be but it will be hard and requires being active every day, which is true for any strategy. If you are inactive, you will become a farm for others for sure.
As you can see from the screenshot above, I have been the second most aggressive player so far, receiving points for destruction. However, I also release my Space Policy, allowing players to contact me and ask for a truce. Please check it out before I also destroy your ships. Otherwise I will!
This is a great post :)
Excellent breakdown.
Clearly, I'm in the peaceful camp. Like you, I couldn't wait for the monetization. :) I wanted to spend more, so I needed to generate, so I opened a business. Pickle's Corvette Emporium is growing every day. I don't plan on becoming anyone's target, but if I do, they won't get much out of me... especially if I'm spending all my resources on battleships and sending the battleships away.
Pickle's - Peace Through Firepower
Its actually a good strategy and with the amount of planets you have actually doable. I have only four planets for weeks now and I have to make the best out of what I got. Not quite sure what that is but selling ships certainly is fun.
Tell me about it :D
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that these game pieces are worth actual money. I finally started a planet for Carrie yesterday. She's way over in the outer ring, but I've already got Corvettes on the way to her. She's got a fully inactive mine with 360 Uranium about 2.5 squares away.
I also found a good wholesale seller of ship and made a purchase of 50 Transporters. Now I don't have to pay the hefty resource cost for those bad boys :D
In future I will only loot neighboors with rep < 40 (obviously sock puppets) and anybody who attacks me or my allies.
I've been playing a lot, but I still do not understand how to attack, it's very difficult, can you help me?