Posts by spanishiwa

Kelenken yes I've already said Kaelesh has no good buildings unlike rock'tal. However, as I said, it's irrelevant because most of the early game life forms benefits come from the technologies and not the buildings. Anyway, I am speaking purely from a mix-max try hard perspective from new speed unis (not 1x), obviously if rock'tal is fun then choose rock'tal.

Quote from Kelenken

Rock'Tal buildings on the other hand are incredibly good and cheap enough to be used right from the start (1-2M points), so even if you are starting a new uni it is the best choice.

No, investing in resource production boosting life forms techs/buildings (or even mines) that early, especially before astrophysics 9, is not an optimal strategy. Everything should be going into LCs or astro 9 at this stage (even more so if your uni has a top rank guy abusing DM). As I said, the majority of early game income comes from expeditions and not mining. To focus on mining at this stage when it represents such a small portion of your income is very inefficient. To put it in perspective, at that 1-2M stage, my resource findings were 90%+ of my total daily income. In fact, even though my economy is top 10 on my server, my expedition results completely dwarf my mining. On my small active discoverer account a single 1hr expedition could return more than my daily income (indeed, this happened today)

Quote from Kelenken

So basically you would be choosing Kaelesh only to get expo tech without random picking, but getting it at random is not that hard since it is in the first tier. All you need is a little effort and patience and you'll get a good tier after several retries.

Yes this is entirely the point and yes it is very difficult to random techs and increasingly more so the more techs you want. Both expo res techs and even the expo ship techs are vastly superior to all other life forms techs and buildings for an early game discoverer account. So much so that all other techs combined have a negligible effect on income - nothing more than glorified really good plasma techs. Given that there is almost no downside to switching, it makes perfect sense to treat kaelesh the same way people treat discoverers - use it to grow fast up to the early late game then switch later

Quote from sebastianjosan

Whoever still thinks that any slots except slots 8 and 15 matter are delusional. All the bonuses in ogame are additive except the planet location bonuses which affect your original production from which all your other bonuses apply. The cost for improving a metal mine and the resources that metal mines provide will always be more in terms of MSU on a slot8 planet, compared to any other slot.

What most people fail to understand is that the merchant is actually busted, and resource management is key in ogame. You don't want to buy DM is a valid choice. But saying that there are better uses for the free dm is silly, DM is overpowered, resources packs are absolutely ridiculous, yet in my opinions 2nd most broken thing in ogame is still the merchant. Get big enough storages and you don't need to change resources 20 times. It is a heavy initial investment in those storages, but it's the same with everything else in ogame. Once you have the infrastructure built it's no competition.

Yes agreed, hopefully it is obvious to everyone that the other slots are so outclassed that they're unusable except for like mobile colonies. When an option is so great it must always be chosen it basically removes the ability to choose at all. This is a serious design flaw that you can see in most parts of ogame (like the alliance depot life forms technology and other similar ones).

Players should need to carefully pick and choose the planet slot with enough benefits and drawbacks that all slots are viable. I don't have a solution, but the solution should be interesting and dynamic without nerfing slot 8/15, like if smaller planets had a production bonus as more of the planet slots were filled. This way production is weaker for new accounts, but gets stronger over time to allow the possibility of recolonization (don't nerf slot 8, just make other slots better). It also avoids boring black and white scenarios where like how having more planet fields is only a good thing with no drawbacks.

A general rule is if you're not a collector or close to ultra late game (100M+ points) don't pick rock'tal. Very similarly to how most people should pick discoverer, most people should pick kaelesh.

The reality is the vast majority of lifeforms benefits come from the technologies and not the buildings which means you're incentivized to pick the race that has the most techs you want. By choosing the race with the most techs you want it allows you to roll for a fewer amount of random techs. This is important because you cannot random roll for all or even most techs - rolling a t2 tech takes more than 3 days and each slot has a 25% chance (and you must be successful on every planet). Randomizing for more than 3 techs (personally I don't even like to roll for 3 random techs) per tier is just an unrealistic strategy for non DM whales or people with extreme time horizons (like rolling techs for a year or more). Keep in mind this is t2 rolls only, t3 takes even longer.

The vast majority of all income for non collector/ultra late game accounts comes from expeditions and the bonuses for expeditions are stronger than the bonuses to resource production. Most lifeforms production benefits only affect base mining income in a "additive multiplicative" sort of way and not a pure multiplier e.g. if your total income is 100M which includes a bunch of other multipliers like boosters and then throw in a 10% lifeforms production bonus it will not become 110M. However for expeditions your max resource find will be multiplied as you would expect so your max metal find of 100M with a 10% expo res bonus will become 110M.

There are few downsides with switching from Kaelesh to another race when you do reach collector stages of the game. You can switch races for the first time instantly (there is no 2 day delay) and rebuilding your food and population is fast (just takes a lot of clicks). The levels you upgraded in your techs will still be there when you choose your next batch of techs, so all you really lose are the buildings (which are as few as possible since there are no production boosting buildings), population/food, and you have to choose the techs again.

I think everyone saying rock'tal is just one of those mega sized accounts or idk. The power gap between kaelesh and rock'tal for a small active discoverers is almost as big as the gap between discoverer and collector. Honestly just switch your races if you have already chosen rock'tal and you are a small active discoverer.

Quote from Kelenken

Quote from RRJStudio

so how effective are these lifeform techs for resource value? its really hard to gauge

Early game not much, but late game it will be insane. Don't forget the Rock'tal buildings which are overpowered. With production techs, buildings and lastly bonuses for collector class (which improve their 25% bonus by a factor), collectors will easily double their production.

I made a forum account just to post this as there isn't much information on life forms. Lifeforms is said to be "late game", but the tech goes in tiers so it's viable at all stages of the game. In particular for early game active discoverers Kaelesh is extremely powerful. I easily reached more than +30% expedition resource findings very early around 10kk points and was able to re-roll for mining techs too accounting for roughly +15% to metal/crystal/deut. Some techs are not as useless as I initially thought - additional cargo space is not strictly terrible and I am testing if the black hole reduction tech makes combat expeditions extremely profitable in the early game. Some techs are not as good as I thought like the rock'tal techs which provide 0.08 to a single resource compared to Human and Kaelesh which often provide 0.06/0.06/0.06 to all 3 resources.

I haven't done the actual numbers, but if you are talking about mining bonuses I'm pretty confident that tier 1 technologies are worth it as early as lvl 26 deuterium mine or potentially earlier. If you are talking about expedition resource findings they are immediately worth it as early as astrophysics 9 or potentially earlier