Round 3
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Round Details
Spinner describing changes since R2
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Well to be totally honest not a huge amount, but it has been made somewhat more polished than it was before. Gone are the useless GDF (Galactic Defence Force), and the not so useless MOD (Minister of Development). You can no longer see if people in other galaxies are logged in or not. Travel times have been tweaked again and are now a mixture of first round and second round travel times. We now have swanky new graphics, Planetarion is hosted on a new server and we also have a couple of other small tweaks to the game that are generally speaking nice touches.
GC and MOC have the same abilities as before, and now that the out of cluster travel time increase has been put back in the MOC's are going to be invaluable in helping the Cluster stand together as one.
With the loss of the MOD everyone in the galaxy now has the ability to donate resources to each other. This is a excellent idea no longer do we have to wait for the MOD to come online to action our trades, and we know for a fact that the resources we send are going where we want then to, not being embezzled by a crafty MOD.
You can no longer see if people in other galaxies are logged in or not. This is also a great idea and really makes you think about your attacks now instead of waiting till somebody logs off and gang banging them. Of course I'm sure you could still work out their playing patterns with a series of news scans to see when they launch their fleets, and then try and guess when they are offline. Another option is to try and bribe a member of the galaxy you want to attack and get them to give you information of people who are logged in, and when they log in but beware, they could always betray you. All in all the removal of the logged in indicator makes it much harder to plan a successful sneak attack, and in my opinion adds greatly to the tactical aspect of the game.
Planetarion has also had a bit of a face-lift in the graphics department. It now has all new swanky pictures, and curved ergonomic buttons for you to click away at if you wish to look at your news or mail. Another nice touch is the ability for your MOC or GC to set a galactic message that will show up on your overview screen so that you can send a message to those people that don't think to check the politics board.
The resources screen has also been tweaked and is now a mixture between the round 1 and round 2 screens. You can still choose what sort of asteroid to initiate, and now you can initiate more than 1 at a time, but the costs for aseroids have increased and are currently at the same sort of level as they were at in round 1.
Finally you can now see your galaxies score on your galaxy screen just after the name of your galaxy. This is a nice touch it gives you and idea of how well your galaxy is doing compared to the rest in the top 100.
Combat
The ships have been tweaked and I have heard quite a lot of people complaining that they cannot defend against Astropods now, and there have been shouts that the game has become imbalanced. From my experience there are no problems with game balance in this round, and if you have built the correct sort of ships to defend against Astropods you will have no problems at all.
Thieves and Pirates have been removed for this round and I have to say I think it was the correct thing to do, the game has much better balance and you now have to work for your score by pulling off successful attacks instead of building tons of thieves and going fleet hunting. The only problem with the removal of these ships is that there is now no real incentive to help people defend their planet. Before you had the promise of some nice fleet to capture, as a reward for your good deed, now there is nothing. Something I think that the creators should implement is a Salvage Ship. This ship could act like a Cargo Ship by collecting resources from the destroyed ships at the end of each battle tick with a limit of say 500 units of resources as opposed to the cargo ships 1000. You could then have every ship that is destroyed leave say 1% of its construction value in available salvage for your salvage ships to collect. This could well give something back to all those defenders out there without hugely unbalancing the game like the Thieves and Pirates did. 1% does not sound like a lot of resources for the ships to drop but put in perspective every interceptor destroyed would leave 10 metal, and you will normally lose quite a few of those in a fair sized battle.
===Travel times=== have been tweaked again and this round it takes you longer to travel outside of your cluster, as well as taking longer to travel outside of your galaxy. This again is a good decision in my opinion, you have now solved a lot of the problems with huge cluster spanning alliance because people simply cannot get there in time to defend each other as well as they can defend people within their own cluster, making the large alliance less desireable and the cluster alliance a much better looking alternative. With the new travel times Cluster alliances are going to be the big powers once again and I think the most organised cluster will be have almost all the people in the top10 by the end of this round, but we shall have to wait and see if I am right.
All in all Planetarion is at the stage I thought it would be after the first round. We basically have a slightly tweaked 1st round Planetarion with a more stable server and the ability to communicate with people that you have always wanted. Unfortunatly the server does still have problems, it seems to not let people log in all the time, a problem which the creators are working hard to fix, on the plus side though the ticker seems to be going strong this round. Overall I am very impressed with this round its simple effective, and is going to be great fun.
Source: UKGamer Interview
Information
End of round announced by Spinner on the R3 portal then called PlanetZone. Zeus also posted a very detailed announcement on the servers, state of Planetarion, popups and the whole kitchen sink.
Ship Stats and Tech Tree
The Forums
PA forums from shortly before the start of R3
Round Summary
The build-up for Round 3 began with the two victorious alliances of Round 2, Fury and Legion, allying themselves with ReBorn, with whom they had friendly relations towards the end of the round, to form a block which became known as The Triad. This block was supposedly opposed by STEL, which consisted of a number of alliances formed out of the remnants of WaC the previous round, Sedition, Elysium and LOST, alongside The Empire. Unfortunately the STEL block barely got off the ground after it formed in the initial days of the round and within the first couple of weeks of "war" with The Triad found themselves rapidly losing ground against a far more cohesive and efficient unit. The lack of genuine top class opposition to the Triad meant that militarily they were able to steamroll the rest of the universe. Other alliances such as Æternals were initially able to compete with the various Triad planets as regards the top rankings but they were far too small and disorganised to fight them effectively in the long run. Despite the efforts of some, memorably LLG (Last Laughing Guy) who was the #1 planet for the first month of the round, the Triad devastated any opposition they faced.
Although the alliances involved in the STEL block survived they were unable to cope with the strength of The Triad and Fury, Legion and ReBorn soon dominated the top ranks. An early period of stagnation set in. This was punctuated first by ViruS and a rebuilding BlueTuba attacking RB. Success for the two looked unlikely but soon after a cheating scandal broke concerning a wing of RB, Section. With the closing of the entire Section wing by PACrew ReBorn lost a lot of its firepower. Legion had already been keen on removing RB from the Triad in order to take their roids and now Fury and Legion, sensing weakness and using the cheating scandal as an excuse, dropped their alliances with RB and kicked them out of the block.
As Furgion turned on their former ally the rest of the universe joined in and RB were roided dry in a short space of time. Further stagnation set in as the lengthy round, almost six months, went on and on. A number of top players quit due to the lack of action, with Nodrog famously quitting and putting up this gal banner. A lack of both opposition and roids led to problems developing both between Fury and Legion, both of whom were concerned to gain a clear advantage before outright war began. This was made possible by the departure of the Wolfpack battlegroup from Legion towards the end of the round. Disgruntled with events within Legion, and possessing most of the closest ties with Fury, WP and Fury allied, with Fury dropping all ties with Legion, after an initial period in which they waited to see what would happen.
Fury and WP went on to launch a full scale assault on Legion for the final days of the round, including this attack on censor. While damage was caused to a number of top Legion planets this war, due to both the strength of the remaining Legion players and the short amount of time left in the round, was largely inconclusive. A massive, and rather unsuccessful, assault was launched by many alliances, orchestrated primarily by Elysium, on the Fury CEO, Synthetic Sid in the last weeks of the round as well. The winning galaxy in the end was a Fury galaxy, all of whom donated huge amounts of resources via the galaxy fund to one particular planet, belonging to Singularity, leading to him claiming the #1 planet ranking.
