I asked myself, and a few other players, the title question, and unfortunately the answer has always been YES. In this thread I will try to understand why the game is boring and whether something can be changed to make it more popular and exciting. The post will contain a lot of criticism, but I hope it will be constructive (and it will be huge feedback text). I play SI2 so I will write from that point of view but many things probably also apply to other worlds.

So first thing are facts. At main page after login you can see how many players servers have. Not more then 700 people is registered at any existing server. If you would calculate active players then probably you would have something about 100/200 per server. These numbers in today's world are not impressive. I don't have data from the past years but I tried space invasion a few times before and it felt like there were more active players so I think the number of players is decreasing over time. I think saying the game is dead we are not far away from truth. In best interes of everybody players and game devs is reincarnation of that corpses.

In order to keep players in the game, it must constantly attract their attention. There must always be something to be done in the game. But can we say that about SI? Not really. Worse, the further we get in the game, the less we have to do. I will try to discuss this by dividing the game into individual sections:

Defence - Let's start from easiest section, defence. Defense doesn't actually exist in the SI2 world and there is no sense in building it. To prove that imagine I would be able to make even 1 000 000 Solar cannons instantly on single planet. What would happen then? The top player can just attack me with some of his fleet, destroy it with no loss and pick up rubbles

Simulation. Cost of fuel is less then rubbel field resources from pretty small distance, but what's problem to colonize planet next to bunker? After all, he will not escape the planet with defensive units right?

So defence can be built probably only at top 2 players cause everybody else can be destroyed by them. And don't think I'm crying here cause there are bigger players, think about what defense is actually for in the game, if building it does not make sense. Only situations where defence would have any impact are probably when you build only a little defence on planet so big players would't be interested in destroying it and it would defend you from somebody farming you with only transmitters when you are afk.

I also spied a lot of players, and it seems they think about it in same way. Nobody is building real defence at their planets. I built my first defence right now at halloween event only cause there are quests to make it for event points. And probably some other players do it same way. So I think we can all say that defence doesn't really exist in game.

Is that something that can be repaired? Maybe, probably by boosting somehow the defence. I think defence will not exist until cost of simple destroying it will be smaller then rubble fields from destroying it. If you would pay more for destroying defence then you got from rubble fields maybe players would attack planet when there is something else there too (resources and fleet at planet) and not just to destroy defences and earn from it. It can be achived by decreasing amount of defence destroyed after attack to some point, but it's probably not so easy cause there is probably one fight system in game so it would also affect aliens (they would be harder to destroy etc.). Also the ratio of cannons power to their cost can be increased, then for same amount of defence agressor would have to send more ships, would have bigger cost etc. There is not single solution, it's also not simple but something probably have to be made.

Buildings - Yea now we have buildings. There is 18 buildings in SI2. At start 3 of them are pretty useless: Particle shield, Particle cannon (if defence doesn't really exist why anybody would build it), Thermosolar plant (also why would anybody waste most valuable resource for some energy when he can just make fusion plant or some solar cells). So we are left with 15 buildings.

Nine of thoes buildings are directly related to raw resources. 4 mines, fusion plant, 4 warehouses:

1) mines - what level of mines you should do? So as example I will use pig iron mine Calculations. In column B, C you got mine cost in pig iron and kryptonite, in colum D I calculated sum of that cost expressed in pig iron (using kryptonite to iron ratio equal to 2).

Then there are 3 areas where I calculated return rate of that mine with columns:
1) F, G, H, I ; - speed-up x1 (no speed-up) mining tech 0
2) K, L, M, N ; - speed-up x1 (no speed-up) mining tech 20
3) P, Q, R, S. - speed-up x100 (no speed-up) mining tech 20

Probably the second set is most important here cause it's accurate for big players, they don't have speed-up, and their technology is around lvl 20. In column K you can see hourly production of mine at certain lvl. And in column L you can see something that really matters, that is change of production from lvl to lvl. That is what you really gain when you upgrade your mine. And in columns M, N you can see return rate in hours or in days (These are exactly the same values only in a different unit). So as you can see at level 40 of pig iron mine it earn for itself after almost 2.5 year. So I'm not sure if there is reason to buildit futher.
Of course at SI two we have speed-up system. So for now you have x100 speed-up up to ~630 milion points. Thats only reason why players might build higher levels of mines. But around lvl 45 of mines at all your planets you would hit that 600m points, then your speed up is only x50 and return rate increases times two. No matter if there is speed up or not sooner or later you will hit glass ceiling. As I saw big players they made around lvl 45 mines max (for some reason dark angel made some pig iron mines even lvl 51 and she will wait next 30 years until the mine's costs pay off :DDD)

This is return rate of that pig iron mine in days:

What I think is the biggest problem here is that cost is increasing much more then production of mines. Cost increses every lvl about x1.51 times while production is getting smaller and smaller with every level (columns U, V). What I also showed at chart (for all 50 levels):

As a resoult this is how many times bigger the cost and production is at certain level then it was at lvl 1 ( columns W, X) (graph on a logarithmic scale). As you can see the difference is bigger and bigger with every level. And multiplying cost by 1.51 each time makes jumps in price really big. Cause of that we really fast stuck around 40/50 lvl mines and there is no reason to make it higher. Cause production isn't growing at comparable speed thre is just no reason to make higher mines, it's just waste of resources.



2) fusion plant - of course mainly reason why people build fusion plant is to have power for their mines. When you stop building mines you probably also stop building fusion plant too (so around 45-48 lvl).

3) warehouses - Why you need them? When you have full warehouse your production stops. Let's talk here about big players ( with no speed-up, and mines around lvl 45, mining tech lvl 20) their production per hour is (for example pig iron mine) is about 800 k per hour. So with warehouse at lvl 12 ( capacity is 400 000 000) he would have to produce resources for 500 hours (it's around 21 days). without gathering it. So level 12 seems to be more then enough, and as I scanned some big players they stop their warehouses around that level. So you can build it more but there is no practical sense to do this.

So there is 6 more buildings:

1) Development center - building it stops at level 12. The further people buld only microsystem accelerator due to it's greater impact on building/production time.

2) Weapons factory - building it stops at level 13. You got all ships unlocked at that level and making it further doesn't give you much. I've seen single players with level over 13.

3) Research lab - highest level I saw was at another player was around 25. Higher probably cost becomes really big (while it increases x2 every lvl) while it doens't give you that much time and as I know the max time of research is 365 days so when you get to that lvl or research upgrading research lab gives you nothing.

4) Teleporter - There are no major contraindications against upgrading the building, except if you will use it enough to use up all the energy. So again highest teleporter I saw was around level 12. Mostly players got around 6-8. They probably won't need more since they jump through all planets probably once/twice a day to gather resources.

And we have two more buildings that are probably only buildings that somebody would build with no limit:

5) Fleet base - every level is a benefit. Only thing to consider is if cost (that increases fast) is worth less then resources you will get from that additional fleet. And if you will send so many fleets at all.

6) Microsystem accelerator - shortening the construction time (mainly of the fleet) is always a good idea.

So thing I try to show there is that almost all buildings are not really worth building at some point. You can mainly build all of them at this 'max' levels until 600m points ( so you have x100 speed-up), so time isn't really problem here (at SI2). But what when you build them? Nothing, buildings doesn't really matter for you anymore. You can just stop thinking about them, there is no use in upgrading them. Another branch of the game (after defense) ceases to exist for you.

What can we do with this? I can't think about another idea then changing some basic rules and variables for the game itself. Like return rate of mines etc. Or changing that huge steps (in cost and time) between successive buildings levels, Here some big thoughtful change would be needed that would make the building system profitable for a long time (perhaps forever). Imagine if buildings would be like a fleet and you would upgrade them infinitly :DDD

Reserch - here the biggest problem is time. Cost of reserch is low. Only time for doing it is incredibly huge. There is not much to say. The single reserch is made for days, weeks and soon I will hit even months of reserch time. I'm not sure who thought about that but there is no much fun in clicking one button and then waiting for months for upgrade... The only thing which is saves research are events where you can shorten research time a little. I mean maybe it was fun 15 years ago when game was created to make something for 1000 hours but for now it's just boring.

If you are scared that too high research levels would disrupt the gameplay maybe for example decrese the bonuses research gives, drastically reduce the time needed for research, increse cost for reserch. It would be so much better if reserch would cost a lot and would be made faster then reversed.

Cause for now this is the third group (after defence and buildings) that is useless for big players. Also cause of that timings at certain point everybody got almost same reserch levels (cause big player must wait year for research while small player can make couple levels at this time until he also hits 1 year reseach time). The only difference between players becomes from how long they already play the game.

Fleet - probably the best thing game has to offer. The infinite system where you can get bigger and bigger, you can eat smaller players and grow faster cause of that. That is amazing idea that I think should be expanded at other aspects of the game. Can't really say much about it.

Maybe 1 thing that is really painfull is losing fleet that you built for years in single moment. Probably a lot of players decided to quit game after such expirience. That's why a lot of games introduced something like 'hospitals' (in medieval games) where you can at lower time/cost restore all/part of your dead units. That 'hospital' got it's capacity depending on it's level etc. So you still lose all your fleet but you are able to faster get it back, at least to some point.

But there is something about fleet flights. This flights are also slow and boring. And I understand that attack flights against other players must be little slow so player have a chance to react. But what about other flights: farming spacia, gathering rubbles and maybe some others? There is no benefit in this at all. Everybody would profit from faster flights the same way or maybe even active players would benefit more.

Activity - and here we go to the last point. If we want players to play game, the game must force the players to be active. And they must have something to do while beeing active.

If not then imagine login to game, start reserch that will be finished in months, the buildings are expanded to such a level that there is no reason to upgrade them more, so maybe send some flights. Yea I send flights, but they will be back in 3 hours. I will not watch game I have nothing to do in for 3 hours, so I go do something else, I forget about game. Next day I log in fleet is destroyed, I quit game cause it's boring anyway.

That's what is happening when there is nothing to do in game. Go play some popular games, they do everything to keep players all the time in game, and player love it. It's not fun to wait hours and hours for something in games. Now are times of immediate gratification.

So if your goal is to have active players you must give them reasons and options to be active. The days waiting for single thing without your contribution won't make players active. And also thing to think about is what really player get when they are active? Cause in normal game there is not really much advantage you get when you are active over unactive players. There is no option to really speed everything up by beeing active. And this is especially true when there are so few active players. With higher number of players maybe by beeing active you would be able to farm a lot of players and get advantage over rest of players.

Also for example chest events, there is also no real advantage for active players, that want to play the game cause there is limit of 100/150/200 chests for day. So probably every player that is playing can get all chests to this limit and that way everybody gets the same. Doesn't matter if you play 15 minutes a day or couple hours.

Ok I think I can finish here All in all, the game is boring. It's not only my point of view but also some other players I talked too. The further you go in game the less you got to do in game. But at the same time it has great potential with some minor and major changes and upgrades. If game will stay like it new players that have more interesting alternatives will not stay at game and old players sooner or later will leave the game too. Don't be scared of changes, game needs it, it's a lot of time since game started, it has to adapt to today's conditions

Also have to say that game have great admin/host/moderator Dschibait which for me personally turned out to be a great help in every matter and with him game just can't go down no matter what. So big shout out for him. Also I hope for best for this game. I hope you will approach my opinions with some distance and you will give your opinions too.

Do you think is game boring or not? Can't wait for your opinions

Thank you It would be great if you could add your thoughts as well.

Yes, I can completly agree with you.

If you ask players that still are playing if they like the game, they will probably say 'yes'. If they say 'no' then why they are still playing? But it's not a lot of players.

I can see that somehow people find out about the game (there are new small players, more then I expected). But they end at small points and leave the game. I think you should also think about this players, why they left, and what can game do to keep them playing?

I also can say from my expirience at SI2 - I checked changes in ranking in couple days and it seems that about 80/100 players had some changes in their points. And the sad thing is, I usually don't get a single attack a day, no one even spies me out. So there are players that are playing but they all seems to be unactive and they are like you said 'casual players'. They are actually playing the PVE game. And there are two things here:

- Why they are all unactive? I think that's because of game, it's normal evolution of players. Every 'hardcore'/active players went somewhere else play games where they have some activities to do. Or hardcore players become casual players cause game didn't give them opportunity to get some advantage over others.

- Sad but I think true thing to say that casual players are less important then hardcore players in that kind of games. Cause the hardcore players that tryhard usually spend a lot of money, they compete at all costs with each other. They create the competition. Other players look at them and want to be like them, it drives them to play more. Then game is running.

Probably you see also other online games. I think the mobile market is the biggest now. I strongly encourage you to play different games for up to an hour / two to see how mechanics work. And to see how fast that two hours will disappear, how many things you can do in thoes games etc. It can be a huge inspiration and a lot of ideas from this games.

There is also a lot of games that are pretty similar to space invasion. (For some reason all in German :D) I don't want to advertise but I recently found similar game and from all I saw it's probably the newest and looks the best (due to UI). The game is called 'escape to sidious' and I also encourage to check it out and see if maybe there are some things that are made better or worst.

Also I didn't mention this that introducing big changes you risk in some way that some players will be pissed. So probably the best way of introducing some changes is to make it on some new server. I saw in a lot of games something like test servers - you can test there everything ( you say players there is possibility that in one day all their fleet/planets will be reset, that there may be bugs, etc.). And if some changes are working fine, no bugs, and players like it you can make some you can do a questionnaire where they decide if they want changes or not.

Quote from Eternal1

I believe the real problem to excitement in this game stems from the top 10. If they did not play "cutthroat" and destroy every planet a person has as well as plunder all res, then people would not just quit the game. That is why active players have dwindled. It is not because the game is boring. Then there are those

And I have completly opposite opinion. I think that AZ isn't problem at all. I think that AZ can even doesn't exist at all, and I will tell you why.

1. If you think that AZ if you think AZ equalizes the players you are completly wrong. You can take any AZ, ANY, and every time if you look for +2 AZ there is enough points so the player can destroy you without losing anything.

For example you take AZ 10, you can have up to 40 k points. Who strongest can attack you? Players from AZ 12, with max of 200k points. And tell me how can you defend against player with 5 times more points? You don't have a chance, he will have probably better buildings and maybe 2 times your fleet.

The only reason why you think AZ is working is cause there is no players in the game. All active players are very quickly up in AZ 15-17. And nobody stays in lower A-Z. So when you are new player you go through AZ and nobody attacks you not really cause of AZ but cause nobody is playing game. If there would be a lot of players and in every AZ constantly there would be a couple of active players there would be no difference if you are in AZ 5, 10, 15. All the time somebody much stronger would attack you.

And for real what's difference if you are attacked by player 5 times stronger or 1 000 000 times stronger? You cant defend yourself anyway. And if you think "AZ is good cause difference between players is smaller, and small player can catch up to bigger" then I think it's also wrong. Cause if smaller player catch up to bigger one, that means he jumps in AZ, so again there are new players at +2 AZ that can destroy him with no problem. He caught up with his opponent but at that moment he got new opponents and same problem.

So for me AZ works is just an illusion made by small number of players in the game. I think game mechanics should assume that more players is in the game, you can't just change game every time when number of players drops down or goes up.

2. AZ with the current number of players only delays what you talk about. No matter how many AZ you create, there allways will be that three last that you will get sooner or later where active players will attack you and destroy you if you are not active. Now this point barrier is at 1 mil points, what's difference if you make it 5, 10, 50 mil? Small player will play little bit longer in relative peace and the moment he jumps in the top 3 AZ he will be destroy, and the higher you put that points barrier, the player's loss will be greater and greater and more probably he will leave game.


In that canse I can see at least two problems with what you are talking:

1. The first one is bad buildings mechanics design. At game it's just impossible to be a miner. You cant be miner infinite time. You can build up to about 45 lvl mines. Then your speed-up is down, and return rate of buildings is about months or years. That means that nobody can play peaceful miner game for a long time. When he hits about 650 mil (thats barrier for now cause of 'dark angel' points and speed-up bonus) there is no other way to progress then to make a fleet. And the fleet is something you can lose. So peaceful unactive players will sooner or later get some fleet, they are getting destroyed and they are mad. But they are mad at enemy players that just did what they should do instead beeing mad at game design that did't let them do what they would like

2. Second thing is a little question. Why if there would be no AZ I would never attack 1 000 points player when I have more then 1 mil? Cause it's not worth it! And that should be the case for small players! Huge players shouldn't attack smaller players cause it shouldn't be worth it! If you give big players no activities in game and the only thing they can do is farming small players all the time then why are you mad on them? It's not their fault, they do only thing they can to progress in game. If you now rise the AZ the first thing is you just move that barrier little bit higher but problem will be still the same (just little bit later), the second thing is you will cut the opportunity from bigger player. Keep doing that and they will have completly nothing to do and just leave the game.

I think the solution here should be:
1. Making changes in mines mechanics, mainly return rate of mines should be lower and probably never never exceed 1 month. So players are not pushed to make fleet they can lose if they doesn't want to.
2. Making changes in defence so it wouldn't be useless like it is now. I don't think it's enough but you can try to decrease number of defence that survives attacks up to 90% (keep in mind that player can be attacked 3 times so even with 90% you can daily destroy 1 - 0.9*0.9*0.9 = 0,27 = 27% of defences), but at same time it shouldn't be changed for aliens. And maybe defence shouldn't generate derbis fields at all.
3. Add activities for players so that it would not be profitable for them to farm much smaller players. Maybe even constant events would be good idea. I saw it in couple of games. There is couple small events in game and they rotate every day/couple of days. So let's assume there is no other events in game:
January 1-3 - derbis field mini event (derbis are spawning at planets).
January 4-6 - pirate treasure event etc.

It's in kind of like it's now but it's all the time. There is no gap when you don't have some extra activity in game that you can't do. It's also cool cause you can program it once (for example in 3 days period) and it will work automatically without your participation. Later you can just add new activities to the rotation.

And I'm pretty sure that if you give players enough activities in game then you can even completly get rid of AZ. Big players won't attack smaller players if they would have better things to do

Yes, you are right. It's part of what I said. Big players attack small players cause it's worth it (they don't have better alternatives). This is also partly the fault of the speed-up x100. This is so strong mechanic that of course farming small players is best thing to do. And if you look at it you first give small players x100 speed-up so they can have a lot of resources to fast grow but it creates problem that big players attack them too often, so you will just don't let smaller players to be attacked. And I can tell that this will create another problem, big players will have completly nothing to do in game (mainly when there are no events).

I also think that this x100 speed-up bonus is amazing thing. It's probably only reason why I still play, cause without it game was just too boring for me (I tried to play it couple of times but I allways left). And I think this is the way game should go: game should be faster, and have more activities (it all comes down to not being boring).

And of course you can make more AZ but I'm sure you won't get rid of the problem, you just push the points treshold where the problem occurs, and you probably make couple new problems. But every change is something exciting so I can't wait for what you prepered

No I think not. It would happen if there would be a lot of active players. In current state of game they will be safe until they hit that 10 milion points

Quote from dark angel

after 10 million they are destroyed if they do not learn how to play

cancel 100x speedup? do less?

And maybe instead of taking speed up away from small players just give it to big players too? At least in some form

Yes it's true. But I think without the 100x bonus players may not be interested in playing at all cause game is too slow The x100 bonus is (maybe not the best but still something) solution to game beeing too slow.

Imagine if big players can get for example x10 speed-up bonus but not for free (like small players). But for example for farming 100 different spacias in single day. (It don't even have to be spacias, you can create some new type of planets for that purpose). In this solution there is so many cool things:
- You reward active players
- You give bonus for big players so I think they will be less interested in farming very small players (cause now small player can have your daily production at his planet, if you would have some bigger production maybe you would think if it's worth if to make so many attacks, waste so much time on that if it doesn't give you that much in compare what you got from your own planet)
- And I think the most important thing. Player would have to send 100 flights to get that bonus. Cause spacias must be different he cant send all flights on closest planet and get it fast. So a large chunk of his fleet bases will be occupied => he can't send as many flights at smaller players. You can also push it further and add the requirements of the specific type of ship that needs to be sent or their quantity.

And that's kind of think I'm talking. You don't just ban player to do things, you give them opportunity to do something else, something that he would probably value more.

Of course such solution must also have some better easier way of sending flights cause for now sending 100 attacks like this would be really boring and painful in couple of days

That's just an idea, you can modify it