Sunday, August 14, 2011

Galaxy Online II (Part One)




In the spotlight today is a fairly popular facebook game called Galaxy Online II. Made by IGG Inc., this game has about 504,000 monthly active users and 180,000 facebook "likes". It is a sci-fi strategy game that allows the player to pit his wits & military power against other players worldwide.
Tip: In fullscreen mode, there's a bug that makes you unable to type anything. Exit the mode to recover your typing function.
First up, this is the fullscreen view of the game. At this moment, the only benefit of being in this mode is to reposition your buildings as you expand yourself. The normal view is kind of small and cluttered, thus making it hard to move your buildings around. Currently though, there is a bug which doesn't allow the player to type anything, be it in the chat window or numbers when your building ships, therefore, most of the players avoid using fullscreen mode.
The dashboard
The dashboard is the first thing you will see when you finish loading into the game. To newbies, it is useful to read and follow the advice given under "Daily Routines". To the more experienced players, you will mostly be interested in the status update for "Science Upgrade" & "Module Upgrade". Apart from that, the dashboard just offers a shortcut to the other menus without clicking on the respective buttons.
Remember to collect your resources first thing after closing your dashboard
Click on the resource warehouse and then the harvest button to collect whatever resources that your residential area (produces gold), metal collector (produces metal) & he3 extractor (produces he3) buildings have produced. Storage space in the resource warehouse is limited (Hover your mouse over the "Harvest" button to find out your current limit). The storage limit can be increased by upgrading the resource warehouse or upgrading the relevant science tech.

Once your resource warehouse is full, your buildings will no longer produce any resources until you empty the resource warehouse.

A flying craft will hover over the resource warehouse to signify that one or more of your resources have filled the warehouse.

Navigation buttons
These buttons on the left changes your hud view between "ground base", "space base" & "galaxy". The "ground base" view shows you the surface of your planet. In this view, you will build your "ground" facilities which are classified into "Research", "City Services", "Landscaping" & "Military" buildings.

In "space base" view, you will build the last category of facilities which are classified as "Defense" buildings.
"Space base" view
The two most important buildings in this game is your "Civic Center" & "Space Station". The upgrading of these two buildings is necessary in order for you to upgrade your other buildings to higher levels.

There are various preferences with regards to the placement of defense buildings. Some prefer to spread them all out as shown, some prefer to pack them around the space station tightly while others prefer to pack the defenses at one side, totally ignoring the space station (the game is coded in such a way that the ships will only attack the space station AFTER destroying all the defense buildings).
Central
Side












At the time of this post, it is important to note that the defense buildings are still poorly scripted. They can be one shotted by a single strong fleet despite upgrading it to higher levels. Their hp doesn't allow them to take much damage from the fleet. However, upgrading them is still recommended as their damage dealt to the fleet is still fairly significant plus they force the enemy fleet to waste he3 & attack round. Most of the defending of your territory will have to rely on your fleets at the moment.
"Galaxy" view
The galaxy view shows you which server & sector your in (eg. S12. Taurus (102)), your neighbours and what's happening around you. This view is also where you will launch attacks on hostile planets to take their resources & subsidary territories (if they coincide with your own).
The next thing would be to familiarize yourselves with these set of buttons. These buttons are split into five major sets, build, military, social, my tools & mall/lucky draw.

Build
Blueprint research
Science research
Build warship
Construct building

























When your still new to the game, focus on building & strengthening your finances and technology. Slowly, build out all the ground buildings if possible (pack the buildings close and there will be enough space to fit all the ground buildings that you can build). Join a corps as soon as you can (after building your "alliance center"). Remember to build up your fleets to conquer the instances too. You can either choose to design your own ships or donate your resources to the corps and buy ships from the mall (some of the mall ships are good while some are bad...ask around for opinion).

Military
Commander
Fleet supplies
Create fleet
Ship design
























You can recruit commanders to command your fleet in the commander window. This is the normal way of recruiting commanders and there is a cooldown for recruiting (upgrade your command center to reduce it). When recruiting, there is a small chance for you to claim skill, super & legendary commanders (they will appear as cards in your inventory...use the cards to get the commanders or merge them to increase the "star" of the commander). Note that as you level up, the number of commanders you can have increases (up to a maximum of 50).

Alternatively, you can spend 3 mall points to override the cooldown and recruit again or spend 100 mall points to randomly buy a skill, super or legendary commander card. 

When you have ships built, you can assign them to commanders via the create fleet window. Name the fleet, place the ships in the boxes and assign the commander to it. Remember to select whether the fleet attacks at min or max range of the weapons and what type of target to attack. There are 9 boxes where you can place the ships at and each box can hold a maximum of 3000 ships of the same kind. A good idea would be to spread your ships evenly across all 9 boxes and if possible max the number of ships in each box to 3000.

After you created your fleet, it will appear beside your space station in "space base" view. You can then position your fleet, refuel or dimiss it there. When you have more than 1 fleet, use the fleet supplies window to refuel your fleets all at once.

Remember to dismiss your fleets and donate your resources away (when you log off) if your prone to being attacked by stronger opponents. Slowly amass your fighting strength and move to a better corps if your old one is dead. Better corps will give you better resource bonus and better tech mall ships.

Ship designing is a bit complicated if your new to the game. To create a new ship design, you have to choose a hull type first. Then proceed to choosing the modules to install on the ship and finally name the ship design. Depending on the hull type you choose, the amount of space you have to install modules will be different. The hull type you choose will also affect the kinds of damage it is venerable or resistant to. The modules you install will affect the kind of punishment the ship can take and dish out as well. It will be a tough job to balance the attack power, defense power and mobility of the ship.

After you have created your ship design, it will appear in the build warship window. Click on it and specify the quantity to build. You can create and hold a maximum of 20 ship designs only (19 when you count the original wikes design which cannot be deleted). To delete the outdated designs, click on the "X" at the top right hand corner of the design.


Next: Galaxy Online II (Part Two)