Many years ago, when websites were still very much static and updating a number on screen without a click seemed like the pinnacle of technology, so-called browsergames were everywhere. Pretty much the original idle clickers, they consisted of pages over pages full of tables with ever-growing numbers, and timers for which some people even set alarms to not miss their next chance to click and advance.

I never played OGame, which became one of the biggest of them all, and even is around to this day. A bit more than a week ago, a team around @hivetrending / @pizza.witness launched a clone of a clone of this game, and as I have some free time at my hands at the moment I decided to join. 


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Players start with one Planet and have to build mines, research technologies, and build spaceships to steal resources from other players to build more mines, spread their empire to new colonies to build mines again, somehow create moons for those planets on which we'll probably be able to build even more mines, and try to prevent other players from stealing their resources.

There have been 286 signups from Hivers and interested OGame veterans so far, of which about 150-200 seem to remain active today. That's a pretty good start, but for the game to be fun over a longer time it requires a bigger playerbase.

The team decided on a limited round with a win condition, so the player who gets the strongest spaceship (called Deathstar) first will be able to call himself the winner of the first public Hive Moon game. While most games of OGame run over years and this ship can be build after several months already, I think it was a good decision. 
For one, reaching the point of being able to build that ship requires a lot of research and also a good defense, as other players can interfere with the final steps to get there, so it allows for some potentially epic battles before someone can claim the title.
It also gives some time for word about the game to spread, so another round can start with a bigger playerbase.
And of course it allows the team to take suggestions about features and find potential bugs. They are very responsive on the PIZZA Discord, and have made plenty of changes already.

So far I had quite some fun finding my farms and developing my planets. If you're not familiar with this type of games it might be a bit overwhelming to understand all the different building and unit types, but due to the age of OGame there are plenty of wikis and forums on the internet to help new players learn the basics and even advanced strategies.

There is one complaint I have, and it's a pretty big one.

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The original OGame is using real money transactions to offer small benefits to the player. You can for example use it to quickly trade from one resource to others without having to find a willing trading partner, or get officers providing small bonuses for your fighters, amount of fleets you're able to send, or resources produced (with the latter being highly contended by the community - buying resources with money isn't something everyone agrees to).
Hive Moon took this idea and ran with it, using PIZZA tokens to acquire the ingame currency. While the bonuses from officers in the original game are rather small, and the effect is only temporary, here they're permanent and _vastly_ overpowered. 
As I want to support the team and saw others already maxing out their Geologists, I went with that one first. At max level, these double the resource production of all mines. This seemed really expensive at that time, but the boost in production easily catapults one right above all free players. 
But it didn't end there. I quickly realized that energy production, which is required for all mines to operate at full capacity, is the main bottleneck in the game. There's another officer boosting that. It also raises the attack and defense values of the fighting units, and there's another one specialized on that. Maxing these out gives the fighters a total bonus of 250%, which makes the fleets and defenses pretty much invincible in the beginning.
I played like this for a while, until I started wondering why the top player is still collecting points so much quicker than me. I checked the remaining available officers and realized that, if you max out _all_ of them, you don't only get bonuses on production times and a myriad of additional fleet slots, the last one even grants you 2 more colonies. This is such a big advantage especially in the beginning, that to stay competitive I had to get this one too.

In the end, maxing out all officers cost nearly 2000 HIVE - or $500!
Some of these will be distributed to players over the course of the round, and of course the developers need something in return for their efforts too. But I do think to grow the playerbase and keep people engaged, this isn't the right way. Free to play users have such a large disadvantage now, that the whole game will be absolutely dominated by whales. No amount of online time and no good strategy will be able to make up for these bought advantages. And I honestly think that this alone will keep a lot of potential players away from the game.

I hope that the rewards which are spread to players are attainable by FTP users somehow, I am not playing to get my investment back. I'm curious to see if the team finds a way to make this possible.
But more than that, I hope that they change the ingame currency system in a way that provides small temporary bonuses only, so players aren't forced to spend such a huge amount right at the start of the round to be able to compete in the top ranks.

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If you're interested in checking out the game, visit https://moon.hive.pizza
And when you got the hang of it and want to join an alliance , consider an application with The Curators (THC).