Well, is it "e" Monkey?

Just wondering ^_^

You should have named yourself bigboni ^_^

What happens in the market is that, when you are bidding (not sure if it's just on outbids), it will say that you bid what you would have if you had no commander bonus.  What it actually takes from you is affected by the bonus, though.  That's why there's the difference.

Looks like you have 14% off of market bids...am I right? (54114351696/62923664763 = about .86)

Yeah, I had found out that it works (for me, anyway).  It's really easy to see if you have an alt with no points in the skill.

What this means for non-gold members (in case anyone was wondering):

Having between 100 and 250 billion credits in your base is pointless!

What do I mean?

The math: at 100 billion credits, you earn 5% interest.  This means you get 5 billion credits/day.
At 150 billion credits, you earn 5-(500*.005)=2.5% interest.  This means you get 3.75 billion credits/day.
It is not until 250 billion credits, when you have been at 2% interest for a while, that you again earn 5 billion credits/day.

This gap of earning is not helped by putting points in increased interest, as shown below:
100 billion * 5%*(1+[interest bonus/100]) = 5 billion + 50 million*interest bonus
increases faster than
150 billion * 2.5% * (1+[interest bonus/100]) = 3.75 billion + 37.5 million*interest bonus

In short, unless you're gold, don't bother having 101-249 billion credits in your base.

Edit: I believe the same holds true for gold, as they simply earn 2x the interest of non-gold.

Same reasoning applies to the other abilities.  Getting 1% extra interest doesn't increase the interests # by 1, but multiplies it by 1.01.  Otherwise, you'd see a lot of people pile as many points as possible into the interest skill.

Well, I use some defense.  My reasoning: for equal power, defense will be more useful.  However, for equal cost, hp is far more useful.  I suppose I'm just paranoid about missions 

bios and commanders could perhaps grow a little past the cap or max out later.  After a certain point, the max cp isn't enough to really do anything with on its own (although still very useful), and the max experience gives you far far less.

But black holes...450 turns is already a lot, at any point in the game.  Let's say you find a maxed black hole, and you take 35 turns to get there.  You complete it on the first try.  You gained 400 turns and tons of exp.  That is more than 6.5 hours gained right there; over 1/4 of a day.  The part I don't enjoy about the black holes, is that sometimes a 17 million hole gives 103 turns (not the default 100-turn minimum), but then I do a 150 million hole and it gives 45 turns.  Yes, I still enjoy that I got turns.  But it seems random.  Oh well.

Yea...sorry I may have said it confusingly.

The only things that can happen with the ship when it's reserved are upgrading, buying more of the ship (which will increase the re-activation cost accordingly), resupplying marines (marines have no effect on the activation cost, by the way), and selling the ship.

Things that can't happen in reserve: ship attacks someone, ship is involved in defending attacks, ship gaining experience (happens in attacks anyway), marines are lost from ship, activation cost lowering (though it can increase due to resupplying the ships to a higher amount).

My guess as to its main use is to create ships for use in the galaxy, to defend places...maybe including planets.

Yes, many bugs exist with counters.  I have held off posting here, hoping the problem would go away (read: e fixes it).  But I feel now I must add in that counters are in need of improvements.

Improvements needed:
No hit-and-run (or limited ability).  This means an attack, then loss/reserving of ships to below a hittable range still gives the person a counter they can use (not just hypothetically...ACTUALLY use).
Whether this means a full-force counter-attack, tagging the ships used in an attack for use in a counter (and for a way to keep it within the 10-fleet rule...if there are 10 fleets stronger than these, replace the last fleet with the fleets used to make the counter...the problem with doing this is...what if there's more than one counter, with different ships used?  This method may not be very feasible, as I am beginning to have troubles with all of the possible cases), being unable to reserve a ship used in an attack for the duration of all counters it was involved in creating, basing the power you can use in a counter off of the enemy's fleet power, or whatever, hit-and-run is an unfair tactic that deserves to be eliminated, because it gives an attack without repurcussion.

No infinite scouting to use a counter.  Either make a scouting on someone use a counter every time, or use a counter only when a fleet is engaged in battle.  Either way, scouting someone to death seems in itself an odd concept.

Scout attacks provide a counter.  When someone destroys your ships with a scout attack, that means two things.  One, you had really weak ships.  Two, someone just got a free shot on you, with no fear of a counter.  I have seen this tactic used many times, to scout someone, without having to worry about consequences (except for the enemy's anger towards you).  See above comment regarding scouting to death.

And while it doesn't necessarily belong strictly in counters, I agree with Lamma about the more than 10 fleets.  Either don't count the unused ships in calculating the power rating, or allow attacks based solely on what the power rating is listed to be.

Soppe is right.

First, often, you don't want to outbid certain people, namely alliance mates or those you get along well with.
Second, it would help to teach the outbidder a lesson (or attempt to) by outbidding only that person's items.  You don't necessarily want to draw a third party into the problem.  A bloodless war, so to speak, with no far-reaching side-effects.
Third, as Frank and Soppe mentioned, a lot of times people will outbid just to anger you.  So, to anger them back, you attack them.  Problem solved!

You can't steal items when you attack someone, by the way.  At least, not as far as I've ever noticed.

Think I saw him make an attack (or was it a counter) a couple of hours ago (after ars' message was posted).  Could be wrong, but that's what my memory claims.

Reserve fleets are ships that you have built that you stash in a hard-to-find location, where nobody can do anything to it.  The crew, however, enjoys being with the family, and so heads home.  That's why all of the fees when you bring it back.  Or at least, that's my hypothesis.

No, it can't take damage.  It also doesn't do any damage.

The drawbacks to this style:
If anyone else is in the same area doing missions, and wiped them out, it may take you 100 turns to be able to do more missions.
If anyone did missions in the area recently (a given with it being new), there will not be 2/star.
Lower income (for now).

Benefits:
Maybe end up as higher income, at least for a time.
Something else to do when you run around the galaxy (it only uses 1 turn).  However, drawback is that more people will be in the galaxy.

Also, I used a full day's worth of turns.  Towards the end of my session, I was averaging almost 1 mission/star.  However, despite this, I only got 70% of the way to lvl 2.  Just thought I'd throw in that you don't increase as quickly as you might be hoping.