Universal Mob's rise to fame revealed

Originally written by Universal Mob

I chose Wardancers, because +20% income, +15% attack and +30% population growth bonuses sounded great, compared to the other races, whose magic or science bonuses were quite obscure to me. In a bug-ridden beta it is good to have a race that has some certain advantages over others. Also the description of the Wardancers was much longer and enthusiastically written, so I figured, that the creators must like them and they certainly wouldn’t like to see their favourite race as losers. ;-)

In started out with many farms, because I figured when a planet can house 10k people, I would need 100 farms to feed them. Living quarters were useless at this time, because it would take a while until the maximum population would be reached and Cash farms are crap. I assumed that I could make more money by selling iron and endurium on the market, so I also ordered a couple of mines and a few refinement stations.

In the beginning I logged in a lot to get to order buildings as soon as I had the money. The raw material prices were much higher than expected, so I made good money from selling them on the market. Especially endurium seemed to be scarce. You need more iron than endurium, but players receive +5 iron per hour anyway and endurium is needed for almost any building. so I gambled, that many players didn’t order enough refinement stations and ordered some more endurium producers. I was right, prices soared and I could sell my endurium sometimes for 250gc and iron also sold quite high. One other guy even sold 1 endurium for 1000gc!

Then I discovered, that food is bought for 1gc each on the market. Just think about that, 1 farm makes 100 bushel or whatever and that’s 100gc/h! A cash farm only makes 6gc/h. I immediately sold all my food for mucho cash and ordered as many farms I could and also a couple of mines and refineries to have enough raw material for farm construction. Unfortunately I lacked the endurium. I just had placed 50 endurium for 50gc each on the market, and they were bought up before I could get them back, BAH! I bought back some ends for 250gc (ouch!) and ordered a couple more farms.

From then on it went smoothly. I sold my surplus food for great profit and I had many mines and refineries to buy more farms. This was quite handy, because the markets for end and iron collapsed at that time and nobody wanted to sell. I am sure other players must have suffered a lot in this time, because of endurium and iron lack. My economy was thriving and I made more money than I could use, so there was no way I wanted to sell raw materials on the market.

After there was no more food demand, I ordered more living quarters to get population to use up the food I couldn’t sell anymore and to replace my lost source of money income.

Then there was this population bug; everybody had a huge number of people on their planets. I could barely feed all those peeps and I had to order even more farms. Many others must have lost half their income due to lack of food. After my food production was sufficient to feed my people I could even sell a bit of food for 1 gc on the market to other players again.

My home planet was built up to its max size so I started out for new worlds. Exploration ships cost many gc and a few raw materials, I had to sell some ends and iron on the market for more gc. Good the prices were so high at that time; it enabled me to make enough cash to outfit 4 exploration ships. This was possible at that time, I assume the 2 ships maximum was introduced later to slow my growth a bit.

I scanned some systems for resource rich planets to give me some extra metal income and they had to be close to my home system for low exploration cost. After I had the planets explored and my iron and endurium production increased I placed the excess goods on the market at a price of 150-200gc. But prices were already in a free fall, because others must have built many refineries and mines by now and they also needed gc more than anything else. I didn’t gain much from selling at that time, so I used up most of my iron for living quarters. That would give me more income and I would have plenty of quarters when the iron prices rebound.

From then on I just kept exploring planets, constructing buildings and training troops for defence. Login in very often was and is very important so that I can send out as many exploration ships as possible and settle on many rich planets.