However, I am comparing the differences in bonus including the crawlers.
That is why I only compare Discoverer’s expos with the Collector’s 25% extra mine income and crawler bonus.
Are there any other factors that I am missing?
Your calculations on page 1 only had the 25% mine bonus in it.
As for the example you present, 48-39-42 is super late game! Of course there is not a clear definition of “late game.”
Again, I do agree that the Discoverer is too strong in early game. The issue is your suggestions in your opening post just makes the Collector stronger in every stage of the game, and that only by improving its passive bonuses.
Unless you can change the Collector's bonuses to active bonuses, in my opinion the Discoverer should always stay the better choice for an active playstyle but nerfed a bit in early game. For example by making expedition results scale with account size.
By the time that a Collector reaches 48-39-42,a Discoverer should be miles ahead.
Again, with the current class design, this is perfectly fine and reasonable.
But there are barely any slow fleet speeduniverses now… OGame officials have been speeding everything up over the years.
If you balance classes around high fleet speed, you make them worthless in low speed universes that do still exist. So you can't just neglect low speed settings just because there aren't a lot of them around.
Also, 8 out of the 23 universes in EN/ORG have 1-2x Fleet speed / Peaceful fleet speed, so I wouldn't exactly agree that there are "barely any" slow fleet speeds.
Also, as you explained the speed and flighttime relation, speed does not affect flight time that much.
You are mixing up things here. The flight time is divided by the speed factor in universe settings. So 1h flight time in 1x fleet speed becomes 30min in 2x fleet speed.
Exactly, “any account” that is played 16hrs a day should have an advantage compared to a account being played 30min aday.”
A Collector account that is played 12hr aday should have an advantage over a lazy Discoverer who only plays 1-2hr a day.
Again, I do agree. But not with the current class design. If you want to make each class as viable as the other, you need to come up with ideas to turn the Collector's bonuses into activity based bonuses. You can't just increase its passive bonuses like you were suggesting in your opening post and have the Collector perform as well as the Discoverer by just staring at the screen.
Again, new players do not expect class selection to involve "time available" as a consideration.
Unless the official show that in some sort of hint in the class selection page, I believe this is against the role picking mentality of most gamers.
Then you need to come up with a better balancing and not just demand increasing the Collector's current bonuses.
