Oh CRIMINY and PLEASE allow a faster way to rebuild/replace assets when they're destroyed!!!!!!!!

Sorry, but posted on the planet topic on another thread this a.m. before seeing this one.  But you're right, Joe.  Any time there is a way for one player to gain an advantage through brilliance or banking that allows him to take over ALL other players, a game is broken and players start quitting the game.

As to turn costs on planet attacks, maybe these tweaks help...
- There's a formula 40 turns (number may change) x Power difference (as in 3 times pwr requires 120 turns).  As Spayed said, it doesn't matter to someone who'll spend $100, but it at least costs something to do then and prevents one person from running every aspect of everyone's game.  Instead he'll at least choose a very limited set of targets.
- At some disparity threshold (10xPwr?), conquering is not allowed.  At another (20, 50, 100?) raids aren't allowed.

Personally, I'm a fan of adding things that make sense in the game world (galaxy in this case).  After all, there were no Fleet Power or Turn police waiting at Poland's border turning back Hitler.  These aren't the best ideas, but maybe something like the following might help, too.
- Introduce some random but real risk for high disparity attacks on assets.  Dunno what exactly, but maybe traps in the stolen resources/creds blow up the attackers ships--based on chance possibly modified by research--or even destroys a percent of the attacker's cache.  These effects could be randomly timed--adding real risk.  Otherwise, someone will find the loophole like reserving or selling ships after an attack--the counters have no effect or even help with a neb.
- Like reputation, track some measure of amount of planets taken, etc.  The more people destroyed / worlds enslaved, the more rebellions grow and drop productivity, sabotage assets, etc.  This is also "randomizable".
- Allow mining facilities to warp, too, but possibly having to dump some % of resources.  This still allows attackers to gain and costs something in losing those resources and mining functionality during warp bubble but mitigates the losses and the tedium of rebuilding AGAIN.
- Tracking devices can be set by defenders on attacking ships--allowing reserved fleets to be found and destroyed.  Since higher levels often sell rather than reserve, this may have more impact on lower PvP and less on the top ranks.

I'd add one caveat on the protection or not for top 30s.  It is not true that a top 30 should be able to defend himself in the case of the bottom 25 or so, usually.

Earlier this round was a perfect example.  One player had carte blanche to destroy not only anything, but EVERYTHING.  Didn't matter how many bases you put on your planet or how many times you upgraded your ocean (or even proto) or how much you researched station cloaking, there simply was nothing preventing him from taking literally every planet and destroying every single mining facility in the game in one day.

Perhaps at some point, planetary conquering goes away (but still leaving raids) or maybe mining facilities could also research warp bubbles--maybe even having to jettison some of the excess resources.

I know a lot of top players are worried about loss of PvP, but if there is THAT much disparity it's only fun for that guy.

Another Station suggestion

Allow remote configuration of stations, mining facilities and planets.  I can see why Sir Emi doesn't want you to be able to collect credits and resources unless you're physically there, but you should be able to command mining stations to replicate instead of mine or stations to provide attack support more than defense, etc.

I like Joe-RO's UI idea, but could understand where such a large undertaking may not be particularly feasible to Emi--at least not until more players are on.  One way to keep players would be through simple UI changes that make the play smoother / less tiresome.

Here are a number of tedious things that just suck time and make the game dull.  Technically, most would be pretty simple to implement.
= Mission Contracts: 
  - Add checkbox filters for Segs, Workers and Creds to the System screen (or a filter that impacts the system screen).  Few things are more tedious when grinding and not ready to collect segs than having two seg missions appearing forcing you to use the mission contracts page when you could one-click attack on the System view.
  - Add same filters to Mission Contracts so you could, for example, show workers and credits but not segs.
  - Show item payoffs for the missions that are in your system on the Mission Contracts page.
  - Add "System-only" to "Galaxy, Quadrant, Nearest" dropdown to show only those that can be accepted
= Ship Design:
  - Add cloning and editing of own fleets -- allows you to replicate your own designs rather than tediously rebuilding each
  - Create component packaging where multiple items could be bundled into one packet to add to your ship-- main use would be in higher Sships where you'll be adding the same shield and computer stacks to every design
= Stations and Planets
  - When (re)building stations/mining/planets place textboxes / updown controls next to each structure to enter the level to which to rebuild.  Some of us got carpal tunnel this round rebuilding 20 levels of replication and dozens of levels of various planet upgrades.
= Market:
  - Add two buttons, "Bid Minimum" and "Buy Now" and apply to all checked items
= View/Edit fleets
  - change radio/option buttons to checkboxes and allow selling multiple fleets at once (much in the way you can resupply multiple)
= Probes: 
  - Get rid of pinpointers and just let the multi's find them.  It's just plain dull to click scan over and over and over and over and over. 
  - OR if this is some mechanism to slow the few who can't get many pinpointers, add a "scan until __ found or __ probes used" option.


Some points in the game just ^@#@$ you off.  I'd rather have fewer Time Loops (not that I see many) and have them more likely pay off AND not have to click 70 times to get through them.  Same idea goes for others, too, but TL is THE WORST.


PvP is hurting the game.  At higher levels, it's very difficult to do much other than attack each other's planets.  Couple that with diminishing encounters--the top players get bored and drop off.  At lower levels, a few people are having fun wiping out many who then get frustrated and quit rather than filling the game.
= Ship resale:  Change so ships are resold through CHOAM or the Black Market.  CHOAM buys back as it is right now, except there's a chance that your ship will be recognized as an attacker and instead confiscated--perhaps even paying partial restitution to the attacked.  Black Market pays less but is no questions asked.  This evens PvP out at the lower levels.  To offset the higher levels' barriers to PvP, researching ship disguise / CHOAM payoffs or chop shops can allow full price resale through CHOAM with reduced likelihood of confiscation or Black Market Intimidation could improve the price that the black market will pay.
= Get rid of counters or make them effective.  Most every time you have a counter, the attacker has planned for that (wiped you out while offline and now has pships or sold his ships or self-nebbed/alliance-nebbed/friend-nebbed) or because you've been wiped out, you can't rebuild in time to use it.  Bounties are in a similar boat.  I've never been able to collect one (rarely even look for that reason) and when I was a noob got bountied so I stopped attacking--basically they drive off noobs from learning PvP and do nothing to the experienced aggressor.
= You're onto something with Planets, Joe-RO.  I don't have many ideas on how to fix it, but we saw this round that they are too indefensible.  You either have to befriend the top player or lose your planets and stations.  There needs to be more middle ground than one person dictating the entire game.
= Similar to planets, perhaps marine losses should be counted towards nebbing.  Right now a player who is many times more powerful can sell ships then just board you until you run out of money.
= Just like council protection, nebs should expire when the player attacks another.

If I upgrade emphatic trade under commander upgrades, I see the min bid price drop in the market, but when I upgrade the corresponding mothership module, nothing changes.

This is probably just planned misinformation, but looks like a bug if it's not.

This attack was allowed:
Fleet Name # of Units Attack Defence Hitpoints
? 100.000 6.399.751+ 130.731+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 6.399.751+ 130.731+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 6.399.751+ 130.731+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 6.399.751+ 130.731+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974
? 100.000 5.563.183+ 113.642+ 2.219.974

The bugs or misinformation are:
- Fleets are ranked out of order
- The total FP (based on http://forum.spaceo.net/index.php/topic,2965.0.html and http://wiki.spaceo.net/index.php/Swarmer) is nearly 10 times that of the fleets it attacked.

Is this purposefully misleading or did I get buggered?