August 22, 2009

Planet Limit Discussion

Filed under: Professions, Resource Management — Pedro Santos @ 7:47 am

From time to time there are always some players that ask for additional planets, or wonder why the current 8 planet limit. It may be a small limit but it was carefully chosen. On the old days of Orion’s Belt, players could have up to 35 planets. On the first version planet management was harder. You had many buildings and you had to manage them properly for good income and production.

It was a hard task and players complaint that they took a lot of time just to manage planets, and they lost motivation because of that. And they really need to have the max planets or else they wouldn’t be a challenge to other players.

On this version planet management is much simplified and we have the 8 planet limit. Should we increase it? We find that the quantity of players that talk about it isn’t significative, but we’re always open for discussion. We could also increase the max planets on some Colonizer quests. What do you think?

3 Comments »

1. At first when I started to play Orions Belt, only having 8 planets was a bit of a downer because I was used to playing Spaceward Ho! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceward_Ho!). But now that I have 3 players with 24 planets, its not that easy. My brother that used to play trivan, had about 60 villages and I used to see him with spreadsheets to administrate it all. Spaceward was easy because the resources are managed like it was one planet. But it had some concepts that were nice, like new types of tecnology that would make the deference in warfare and radical investigation’s which was like a random lucky shoot that could make you more powerfull (the random rare resources in public planets does that in same way). But the games objective was to create a Empire of planets and defend them. We would have to be ally with other alliances to create a line of defense on the borders of your empire. Orions belt is more about combat and not about planet empire. The only thing more like defending a empire, is the relics (the relics to me looks like the dragon balls in the Dragon Ball anime, if you get them all you will get a surprise, ;)). Orions Belt needs more different missions, like defending a fleet with a special cargo through a enemy territory. But there is no territory in Orions Belt, the most there can be is the area between the relics. Even the private zones that are like territories, we can’t attack them. I understand for new players, it would be hard to manage our private zones if they were always being attacked. I guess after all of this, maybe Orions Belt needs a managemente system like in SpaceWard, manage all planets like one (the planet overview does that but not with my 3 players). What I’m trying to say is a territory system would be nice. Maybe special planets that are habitable (have the relic proprieties) that we had to defend, the more habitants the more resources. In spaceward, just some planets were possible to be habitable because of its gravity and temperature. To habit a planet, we needed to send a colonising ship and this ship in orionsbelt could be a good mission to defend so it could travel through enemy lines

   Comment by Danceman — August 22, 2009 @ 6:02 pm

2. I really dont see having more planets has a good thing, I would rather see more things to do with the planets we have or around them or some other stuff =) 8 seems fine, by me.

   Comment by reborned — August 24, 2009 @ 4:29 pm

3. I think the limit is ok, me as newcomer gets some free space and resources associated with it. Without limit you could have few players owning all and that kind of pyramid is not that good in a game.
   I agree with reborn that after some time it gets a bit stale with the planets even for me that plays so few time. (more type of constructs on the planets?)

   Comment by vranasm2 — August 24, 2009 @ 8:14 pm

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