Starport: Galactic Empires
Encyclopedia
Starport: Galactic Empires is a free, space-oriented, massively multiplayer online role-playing game
which uses a third-person overhead view similar to that used in Asteroids. The game uses semi-realistic 2-dimensional physics for both space and atmospheric travel, affecting both the movement of ships and player-fired weaponry. Characters can conquer and colonize planets with a variety of different terrains depending on the type of planet. The player can harvest resources, generate money, and produce weapons with their colony. Starport shares many core concepts with Tradewars 2002, notably the commodity trading and planet controlling aspects.
"You are in the future at the dawn of space exploration. After a misrable life in a colony on planet earth, you decide to leave and look for a more exciting life. A wealthy space merchant that you meet while on earth decides to give you your chance to get a better life. He takes you into Starbase Sol, the largest trading base and capitol of the galaxy. Because of his increasing sympathy for you, he donates his Merchant Cruiser spaceship and $10,000 credits to you to start your new life.
Your life in the Starport universe begins near Earth where you will be the captain of a new merchant vessel. By gaining funds and experience you can upgrade your ship and your standing as the game progresses. Haul valuable cargo and transport passengers through space to begin working your way up in the game world.
In Starport, greater reward means greater risk. You'll need to equip your ship to handle it. During your progress, you'll engage in combat with other players, planetary defense platforms, space-anchored gun turrets and other hostiles. From traditional projectile weapons and smart-missiles to exotic energy weapons, you'll have a good selection of firepower from which to choose.
You might choose to claim a world by starting a colony on it. Keep these colonies defended, keep the colonists who reside there happy, and they can become valuable strongholds. You will be known as a 'builder'.
Later, you might choose to roam the galaxy as a pirate and invade and take over the colonies of others. You might also choose to spend your warp fuel on exploration, where you might find powerful artifacts of alien technology or valuable information. You will be known as a 'pirate'.
Either way, in time, you could own a large empire of colonies and earn many experience points which will put you in the top of the rankings."
Essentially, you are aiming to become the most feared Emperor or Dark Overlord in the galaxy.
Experience is gained by killing npcs, other players, successfully invading colonies, performing various trading transactions, doing taxi service, and escorting weak npcs. However the most common and best way to gain experience is to build an empire of colonies. Each colony can house up to 25,000 colonists, and for each set of 50 colonists you have per hour, you get 1 experience point per hour. So if you own multiple colonies with a grand total of 50,000 colonists, you will get 1,000 experience points that hour. Experience is lost by getting killed (shot down), getting caught robbing a starport, and completely neglecting a colonies' needs for more than 3 days.
When one player shoots down another, the one that gets shot down will lose 1/4 of his experience, in which case that experience will be given to the player that shot him down. The amount of experience gained or lost can be more, however, if the player getting shot down has a bounty on his head imposed by the U.N. police.
Reputation points are gained by killing people and npcs with negative reputation (pirates) and building colonies with happy colonists. Rep. points are lost by killing people and npcs with positive rep (builders), building colonies with unhappy colonists, robbing starports, and attacking innocent players (newbies).
The ultimate quest for all to play is to be considered by all as one of the legendary starport players.
Player stats are an important aspect of the game due to the fact they dictate how you can function while playing that servers. Players receive 15 stat points to distribute to their character, with a single stat not able to exceed 10.
Currently, their 3 different character stats: Charisma, Dexterity, and Wisdom.
For example, some acceptable combination of stats could be 5 charisma, 10 dexterity, 0 wisdom; 2 charisma, 9 dexterity, 4 wisdom; you would not be able to use stat combos similar to this: 12 charisma, 2 dexterity, 1 wisdom because one of the stats is over 10.
Profiles can be changed with 5,000 admiral tokens. This is often an invaluable advantage when a player decides he wants to change from a builder to a pirate.
The two "types" of servers are: Normal (Player vs. Player) and Pax(player vs. environment [no combat between players]).
The five "forms" of servers are as follows: Permaverse (never-ending), Rebangs (servers reset after 10–21 days), Extended Rebangs (games reset after 1 month to 1 year), Ultra-short rebangs (server resets after 20 minutes), and tournament servers .
--------Version 1.1 of this server was a game that was only 4 hours long. Thereby making building colonies tactically inefficient. The design of this server was to fight other players and invade colonies that were already programmed into the start of each 4 hour game. However, many people lost interest in this server because there were two major defects, one got fixed but the other did not. The first one was a bug that allowed those who owned at least one colony to be able to press certain buttons and instantly receive cash out of thin air. This bug did get fixed after awhile. The second bug wasn't necessarily a bug, but a practical game issue that did not get solved. The game would give you 25 experience points for founding a colony, so people would just buy hundreds of them and place them on planets and they leave them to do nothing. Even though they didn't fully build their colonies, they would still win that game because placing 100's of colonies would give you thousands of exp points. This inefficiency never got fixed.
--------Version 1.2 of this server was developed after everybody wanted a very combat oriented server, but did not want to play the original blitzkrieg due to its bugs. So the developers came out with version 1.2 of Blitzkrieg, which is still in use today. In order for a new game to start, the server will wait until there are at least 4 people online before the game begins. At the beginning of each game, everybody is split into 2 equal teams and each person starts out with $1,000,000 credits. The object of this game is to battle for control of 1-6 planets in an extremely small server (it ranges from 5-9 systems every new reset). For every 5 seconds that a team is in control of one of the planets, that team gets anywhere from 500-1500 experience per person on that team (amount of exp earned per person depends on various factors like amount of people of opposing teams and your characters wisdom score, etc.). At the end of 20 minutes the team with the most total exp points wins. There are no npcs in this server and no building is allowed. The only way to gain exp is to be in control of a colony for at least 5 seconds or to kill other players on the opposite team. Blitzkrieg features the only "active" reset of any server. When most servers reset, the server goes offline for about 5 minutes to be reset before coming back online. Blitzkrieg takes only 1 second to reset and it does not go offline when it does so, in which case no one will be disconnected. This version of the game is one of the most popular servers of starport. It also has rush hours, when more people will be on than on other points of time. The rush hours tend to be at 11am to 1 pm (lunch) and also primetime (5-7pm).
There are two types of servers that fall into the tourney category. The first is The Ring Nebula which is a standard tourney game. The other is The Starport: Galactic Empires Championship. The championship only happens once a year, played the same way as a standard tourney, except that the players aren't there for the sole purpose of trying to win tourney points, but to earn the title of "Starport Champion" of that particular year. This title is usually displayed on their profile in-game and in the forums.
Corporations are used to have people join together to help each other build up colonies, invade enemies' colonies with each other, and share experience gained from each members' colonies. One major advantage is that friendly-fire is disabled for people in the same corporation, so they can't accidentally kill each other. Another privlege they all get is access to a navigator on all of their fellow corporation members' coordinates, so they all know where each other is at all times. The main use of them is to band together to become the largest and most powerful corporation in the galaxy. Because they are only powerful when they have lots of colonies and high exp players, corporations are normally used in permaverses, but can be used in other servers if that person really wants. In permaverses, often the goal for many people is not to be the most powerful player in the universe, but to be a member of the most powerful corporation of the galaxy, which requires a lot of teamwork.
A corporation may also contract individuals to help with colony building and to make short-term allies. These contractors can donate money to the corporation and be under protection from friendly fire from this corporation, but he does not have access to any of the corporation members' coordinates and cannot access any of their colonies except to help donate recources to help build.
Warp fuel cannot be bought by in-game credits. You must wait for it to automatically regenerate. This allows for all people to have a fair chance at the game. However, it still isn't perfect, as full-time gamers tend to usually do better anyway.
There is one exception to this feature. Using real money, you can buy warp fuel from the Admirals Club, however it is expensive. If you have 0 gallons and you want to buy enough to max out your capacity (5000 gallons max), it will cost you 10,000 tokens which is equal to $10 American dollars.
Note: Tokens can buy credits but credits CANNOT buy tokens. There is one exception to this: Tokens and credits can be traded from player to player. So often a player will buy tokens and sell them for ridiculously high amounts of credits to players who do not want to spend real money in the game.
The Admirals Club is one of the more unique item malls in the gaming industry. While most item malls allow you to buy much more upgraded items and thus have a powerful advantage over those who don't buy, the Admirals Club is known to not be completely overpowered. While it does give its buyers an edge, it is not what most say as an "I win" button, where you can buy your victory.
In order to help with the confusion of in-game credit and real money, the developers came up with the idea of using real money to buy special money within the game known as Admirals Tokens. The buying rate is 1,000 admiral tokens for $1 U.S. dollar, with a minimum purchase of 5,000 admiral tokens per transaction ($5). Users pay using an online transaction via a major credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Users paying through a card will have their transaction processed immediately, while those using PayPal have an average wait time of 1–2 days before they get there transaction processed.
All items purchased in The Admirals Club are purchased via admiral tokens. Some of the items that can be purchased are as follows:
These are the main items bought but there are several others that can be bought.
There are two types of space in every galaxy: U.N. controlled and open.
You may also log off in one of your own colonies, however, if that colony is successfully invaded and taken over by someone else, you will be kicked out into open space.
Next, Starport was developed and produced by a small team of developers. However, all but 2 of them have left the studio, therefore making the game undermanned. However it continues to move along in progress. Due to the fact of its small staff, players have become the true testers of the game, but will often complain to the developers when a patch is not done the way they want. This makes a moderate animosity towards the developers, who usually ignore the complaints.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
which uses a third-person overhead view similar to that used in Asteroids. The game uses semi-realistic 2-dimensional physics for both space and atmospheric travel, affecting both the movement of ships and player-fired weaponry. Characters can conquer and colonize planets with a variety of different terrains depending on the type of planet. The player can harvest resources, generate money, and produce weapons with their colony. Starport shares many core concepts with Tradewars 2002, notably the commodity trading and planet controlling aspects.
Pricing
Starport is notable in the MMORPG genre as being one of the very early adopters of the free to play business model, which instead of charging players a monthly subscription fee it is instead free to play and allows players to purchase extra resources in the game through a feature called "The Admiral's Club."Plot
Although Starport Galactic Empires is an MMORPG, and there is no set story, there is an introduction storyline before any player begins their game:"You are in the future at the dawn of space exploration. After a misrable life in a colony on planet earth, you decide to leave and look for a more exciting life. A wealthy space merchant that you meet while on earth decides to give you your chance to get a better life. He takes you into Starbase Sol, the largest trading base and capitol of the galaxy. Because of his increasing sympathy for you, he donates his Merchant Cruiser spaceship and $10,000 credits to you to start your new life.
Your life in the Starport universe begins near Earth where you will be the captain of a new merchant vessel. By gaining funds and experience you can upgrade your ship and your standing as the game progresses. Haul valuable cargo and transport passengers through space to begin working your way up in the game world.
In Starport, greater reward means greater risk. You'll need to equip your ship to handle it. During your progress, you'll engage in combat with other players, planetary defense platforms, space-anchored gun turrets and other hostiles. From traditional projectile weapons and smart-missiles to exotic energy weapons, you'll have a good selection of firepower from which to choose.
You might choose to claim a world by starting a colony on it. Keep these colonies defended, keep the colonists who reside there happy, and they can become valuable strongholds. You will be known as a 'builder'.
Later, you might choose to roam the galaxy as a pirate and invade and take over the colonies of others. You might also choose to spend your warp fuel on exploration, where you might find powerful artifacts of alien technology or valuable information. You will be known as a 'pirate'.
Either way, in time, you could own a large empire of colonies and earn many experience points which will put you in the top of the rankings."
Essentially, you are aiming to become the most feared Emperor or Dark Overlord in the galaxy.
Overall Objective
Players compete to get the most experience points and establish themselves as the most feared pirate of the galaxy or the most respected Emperor of their Empire. Experience points in this game is not like other games where it can help you unlock special weapons or items, but they are more like your "score" in the game. Reputation points can establish 2 things: your way of game play (pirate or builder) and your fame among the galaxy.Experience is gained by killing npcs, other players, successfully invading colonies, performing various trading transactions, doing taxi service, and escorting weak npcs. However the most common and best way to gain experience is to build an empire of colonies. Each colony can house up to 25,000 colonists, and for each set of 50 colonists you have per hour, you get 1 experience point per hour. So if you own multiple colonies with a grand total of 50,000 colonists, you will get 1,000 experience points that hour. Experience is lost by getting killed (shot down), getting caught robbing a starport, and completely neglecting a colonies' needs for more than 3 days.
When one player shoots down another, the one that gets shot down will lose 1/4 of his experience, in which case that experience will be given to the player that shot him down. The amount of experience gained or lost can be more, however, if the player getting shot down has a bounty on his head imposed by the U.N. police.
Reputation points are gained by killing people and npcs with negative reputation (pirates) and building colonies with happy colonists. Rep. points are lost by killing people and npcs with positive rep (builders), building colonies with unhappy colonists, robbing starports, and attacking innocent players (newbies).
The ultimate quest for all to play is to be considered by all as one of the legendary starport players.
Player Profiles
Before a player registers to join a server, he must first set up his profile for that server. He can choose his profile picture, set his username for that server, and lastly set up his player stats.Player stats are an important aspect of the game due to the fact they dictate how you can function while playing that servers. Players receive 15 stat points to distribute to their character, with a single stat not able to exceed 10.
Currently, their 3 different character stats: Charisma, Dexterity, and Wisdom.
- Charisma- in order for all of your colonies to function correctly, the colonists must have good morale. Your charisma is your character's likeability from your colonists. The higher your charisma, the greater your colonists will respect you, thereby increasing their morale. This stat is especially attractive to builders.
- Dexterity- This stat is used to decide how well your ship will handle. By having a higher dexterity, your ship has a better turn speed, ship speed, acceleration, energy regeneration, etc. This stat is especially attractive to pirates and those who engage in combat more frequently.
- Wisdom- This stat has only 2 functions. On all servers but Blitzkrieg, the amount of wisdom your character has determines the fuel efficiency of any ship you own. While some ships are naturally more fuel efficient than others, combining a fuel efficient ship with a high wisdom score will allow you use a very low amount of warp fuel when you play. On the Blitzkrieg server, wisdom determines the amount of experience your player receives per 5 seconds of being in control of a colony. This is explained in further detail in the Blitzkrieg server section.
For example, some acceptable combination of stats could be 5 charisma, 10 dexterity, 0 wisdom; 2 charisma, 9 dexterity, 4 wisdom; you would not be able to use stat combos similar to this: 12 charisma, 2 dexterity, 1 wisdom because one of the stats is over 10.
Profiles can be changed with 5,000 admiral tokens. This is often an invaluable advantage when a player decides he wants to change from a builder to a pirate.
Servers/Games
Starport has grown from one large galaxy (server) into many large, complex and unique types and forms of galaxies (servers). Currently there are just fewer than 30 different servers. However they all fall under one of two "types" of servers and one of five "forms" of servers.The two "types" of servers are: Normal (Player vs. Player) and Pax(player vs. environment [no combat between players]).
- Normal servers allow combat between two players. This allows for pirates and builders to really compete against each other. One builds the colonies and tries to defend them while the pirate goes around killing as many people as he can and by invading and taking over other people's colonies. Normal servers are what the original game concept was built upon.
- Pax servers are player vs. environment with no player vs. player combat. Pax games are essentially just competitions with multiple builders to see who can build the largest empire in the fastest amount of time. Since no one is allowed to invade your colonies, there are certain planetary defenses you do not have to worry about buying or building. The one exception to this rule is the Intergalactic Paradise Worlds. Igp worlds are the rarest form of planet in the universe. They are the best planet type to build and defend and therefore the most fiercely fought after. On pax games, igp worlds are allowed to be invaded by anyone.
The five "forms" of servers are as follows: Permaverse (never-ending), Rebangs (servers reset after 10–21 days), Extended Rebangs (games reset after 1 month to 1 year), Ultra-short rebangs (server resets after 20 minutes), and tournament servers .
- Permaverses are the original server types when the game was conceived. Once created they will never be reset or deleted. These are the most popular types of servers for most active players. Because they never end, they will never be awarded achievement points or trophies for doing well (unlike the other servers where if you win, you receive medals/trophies and achievement points to show how much you have accomplished in your entire starport gaming career). Although most of the galaxies planets will be built upon after about 6 months or so, normally the universe will start to die down in its popularity. When this happens, it becomes an invaders heaven to invade with relatively little opposition. However, eventually colonies will start to die off, in which case more builders will start to come on and start building again. Finally the galaxy will be fully built again and the cycle will start all over. This continuous cycle will happen multiple times before finally people will quit the server permanently. Once the server goes about a month with relatively no activity, then the server will start the reset process, in which case it will give everyone a 3 week closure warning, for the people to get a last chance stand to try and be in the top 10 of that server. Once the closure happens, all of the top 10 will receive trophies and achievement points for their participation. Finally the server is either reset (very rarely this will happen) or be deleted completely. New permaverses come out every 6–12 months, and most old inactive servers will be deleted after being around for about 2–7 years. The only original server that has not been deleted or reset to date is Permaverse 1, making it the only true "perma"verse.
- Rebangs are short time servers that have a slightly different objective than a permaverse. In permaverses you battle for fame, money, and glory of being the most powerful person in that server. On a rebang you battle for the most experience points in order to finish as #1 when the server resets. For this reason, they are usually faster-paced. The action is still the same on this server and permaverses, but players must be much quicker while playing a rebang. On a rebang the top 10 receive medals for their efforts when the server resets. While combat still happens often on this type of server, it tends to be more builder-oriented.
- Extended rebangs are one of the newer concepts of the game that were developed for the competitive players that wanted recognition for being the best players of the game. Permaverses are said to be the homes of the best players of the game, but only rebangs will reward you for winning, because rebangs reset while permaverses don’t reset. So the developers came out with the idea of a really long and drawn out rebang, known as an 'extended rebang'. The only difference between these and regular rebangs are the length in time that they reset. A normal rebang is 2 weeks long, while extended rebangs are usually 2–3 months long with one of them being 1 year long. What makes these more attractive to the very reputable and experienced players is that allows you to receive rewards and recognition for being the best. On a permaverse, they are constantly building and invading colonies in order to be the most feared person of the game. However since they never end, some say that they can get old after awhile and will quit. Regular rebangs are said to be too short to really prove someone's skill in the game. So an extended rebang gives them the best of both worlds: giving them the advantage of a really long drawn out game of 2 months to a year for them to really build a massive empire and invade to be in the top 10 and prove they are the best, and gives the advantage of resetting (rebanging) at the end of the set time limit (2 months to a year) so as to not let them get bored but also receive rewards for winning the game.
- Ultra-short rebangs are essentially that: very short. Currently there is only one server that is this form: Blitzkrieg. This server had two different versions in its history.
--------Version 1.1 of this server was a game that was only 4 hours long. Thereby making building colonies tactically inefficient. The design of this server was to fight other players and invade colonies that were already programmed into the start of each 4 hour game. However, many people lost interest in this server because there were two major defects, one got fixed but the other did not. The first one was a bug that allowed those who owned at least one colony to be able to press certain buttons and instantly receive cash out of thin air. This bug did get fixed after awhile. The second bug wasn't necessarily a bug, but a practical game issue that did not get solved. The game would give you 25 experience points for founding a colony, so people would just buy hundreds of them and place them on planets and they leave them to do nothing. Even though they didn't fully build their colonies, they would still win that game because placing 100's of colonies would give you thousands of exp points. This inefficiency never got fixed.
--------Version 1.2 of this server was developed after everybody wanted a very combat oriented server, but did not want to play the original blitzkrieg due to its bugs. So the developers came out with version 1.2 of Blitzkrieg, which is still in use today. In order for a new game to start, the server will wait until there are at least 4 people online before the game begins. At the beginning of each game, everybody is split into 2 equal teams and each person starts out with $1,000,000 credits. The object of this game is to battle for control of 1-6 planets in an extremely small server (it ranges from 5-9 systems every new reset). For every 5 seconds that a team is in control of one of the planets, that team gets anywhere from 500-1500 experience per person on that team (amount of exp earned per person depends on various factors like amount of people of opposing teams and your characters wisdom score, etc.). At the end of 20 minutes the team with the most total exp points wins. There are no npcs in this server and no building is allowed. The only way to gain exp is to be in control of a colony for at least 5 seconds or to kill other players on the opposite team. Blitzkrieg features the only "active" reset of any server. When most servers reset, the server goes offline for about 5 minutes to be reset before coming back online. Blitzkrieg takes only 1 second to reset and it does not go offline when it does so, in which case no one will be disconnected. This version of the game is one of the most popular servers of starport. It also has rush hours, when more people will be on than on other points of time. The rush hours tend to be at 11am to 1 pm (lunch) and also primetime (5-7pm).
- Tournament games (tourneys) are a special form of rebangs. They are always 21 days long and operate under the same rules and objectives as a normal rebang, with 1 major exception: It requires a payment of 1 tourney point to enter. Tourney points along with other special items are bought with real money via the Admirals Club. Tourney points are the only items in the Admirals Club that can transfer to different servers you are registered on (for example, nukes are bought via admirals club, however you can only use them on the server you bought them on). Once you pay your tourney point before you join the server, it will be placed in a pool in that server. When the server ends and resets, the pool of tourney points is distributed among the top 10 winners. The #1 gets the most, then #2 and so on with each of the top 10 guaranteed at least one tourney point. There are 2 major advantages to playing this type of server. First of all, you have the chance to win tourney points (which are worth $5 of real money in credit in Starport, and they can be used on any server). Secondly, all tourney games have no admirals club in them. This makes the game more balanced and more dependent on skill, rather than in other games where some people will "buy" their victory.
There are two types of servers that fall into the tourney category. The first is The Ring Nebula which is a standard tourney game. The other is The Starport: Galactic Empires Championship. The championship only happens once a year, played the same way as a standard tourney, except that the players aren't there for the sole purpose of trying to win tourney points, but to earn the title of "Starport Champion" of that particular year. This title is usually displayed on their profile in-game and in the forums.
Corporations
A Corporation is the Starport's version of clans/guilds in other games. Players can choose to join a corporation or found their own. Each server has its own rules on how big a corporation can be, but they tend to range from 1-10 people with some servers allowing 15. The founder and/or current leader of the corporation is known as the CEO. He gets a couple of extra benefits with his position. He is the only person allowed to kick people out, change a corporations password (in order to join a corporation you must be told the password by someone inside the corporation and type it into a box in order to join that corporation), and the only person allowed to use the Corporate Flagship, one of the better ships in the game.Corporations are used to have people join together to help each other build up colonies, invade enemies' colonies with each other, and share experience gained from each members' colonies. One major advantage is that friendly-fire is disabled for people in the same corporation, so they can't accidentally kill each other. Another privlege they all get is access to a navigator on all of their fellow corporation members' coordinates, so they all know where each other is at all times. The main use of them is to band together to become the largest and most powerful corporation in the galaxy. Because they are only powerful when they have lots of colonies and high exp players, corporations are normally used in permaverses, but can be used in other servers if that person really wants. In permaverses, often the goal for many people is not to be the most powerful player in the universe, but to be a member of the most powerful corporation of the galaxy, which requires a lot of teamwork.
A corporation may also contract individuals to help with colony building and to make short-term allies. These contractors can donate money to the corporation and be under protection from friendly fire from this corporation, but he does not have access to any of the corporation members' coordinates and cannot access any of their colonies except to help donate recources to help build.
Game Balance
In order to balance the game for full-time gamers and people who work full time and only get to play part-time, the game must be balanced in order to accommodate both of them. This is accomplished via a game feature known as Warp Fuel. In order to travel from system to system, or land on planets or dock at starports, you must use some warp fuel. Whenever you start on a new server, you start with 2000 gallons with a 5000 gallon maximum holding at one time. When you run out, you must wait for it to regenerate. The average is .5 gallons per minute, with the average ship using 9 gallons per warp. So as you can see, if you sleep for 12 hours (720 minutes) and come back to the game, you will see that you have generated about 360 gallons of warp fuel. While it doesn't seem like very much, the warp fuel generation rate also does vary from server to server. The Deep-freeze is a part-time gamers’ haven, because its generation rate is .25 per minute, so if someone were to play it full time, they would run out of fuel real quick. On tourney games they have the best regen rate at 1 gallon per minute, which is better for full time players.Warp fuel cannot be bought by in-game credits. You must wait for it to automatically regenerate. This allows for all people to have a fair chance at the game. However, it still isn't perfect, as full-time gamers tend to usually do better anyway.
There is one exception to this feature. Using real money, you can buy warp fuel from the Admirals Club, however it is expensive. If you have 0 gallons and you want to buy enough to max out your capacity (5000 gallons max), it will cost you 10,000 tokens which is equal to $10 American dollars.
Money
There are two types of money that can be used in the game: Credits and Tokens- Credits- this is the standard in-game currency used when buying items from starports or starbases, building, selling, and trading.
- Tokens- also known as Admiral Tokens. These are only used to buy special items from the Admirals Club.
Note: Tokens can buy credits but credits CANNOT buy tokens. There is one exception to this: Tokens and credits can be traded from player to player. So often a player will buy tokens and sell them for ridiculously high amounts of credits to players who do not want to spend real money in the game.
The Admirals Club
Starport is well known as being one of the first mmorpgs that used the free to play business model. This means that players did not have to pay a start-up fee or monthly fee, but instead is completely free to play with an option to buy extra items and game credit via a store known as the "Admirals Club" via real money.The Admirals Club is one of the more unique item malls in the gaming industry. While most item malls allow you to buy much more upgraded items and thus have a powerful advantage over those who don't buy, the Admirals Club is known to not be completely overpowered. While it does give its buyers an edge, it is not what most say as an "I win" button, where you can buy your victory.
In order to help with the confusion of in-game credit and real money, the developers came up with the idea of using real money to buy special money within the game known as Admirals Tokens. The buying rate is 1,000 admiral tokens for $1 U.S. dollar, with a minimum purchase of 5,000 admiral tokens per transaction ($5). Users pay using an online transaction via a major credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Users paying through a card will have their transaction processed immediately, while those using PayPal have an average wait time of 1–2 days before they get there transaction processed.
All items purchased in The Admirals Club are purchased via admiral tokens. Some of the items that can be purchased are as follows:
- Warp fuel- As mentioned earlier, in order to balance full-time gamers to part-time players, the developers created warp fuel so as to limit the amount of play time one can play. The item mall rewards its buyers with the chance to buy 1 gallon of fuel for 2 admiral tokens, up to 5000 gallons of warp fuel for 10,000 admiral tokens.
- Intergalacic's Ship- The intergalactics were an ancient alien race that used to dominate the galaxy thousands of years before the humans arrived. They have long since been extinct. Some deep-space explorers have uncovered the blueprints behind some of their technology, including their ship, known simply as the Intergalactic's ship, or IGship. These explorers will sell an exact replica of this ship for you to use, for a fee of 10,000 admirals tokens per ship.
- Artifacts- These items are used to dramatically improve a ships' stats. Early explorers have found artifacts of the old intergalactics that were used by their race to improve their ships. Artifacts can be found all around the galaxy. Any player can take the time to search for them, however they are hard to find and they may not necessarily get the exact artifact they want. The Admirals Club allows players to purchase the exact artifact they want without taking the time to search every planet within every system of the galaxy. Some examples of ships stats they improve are speed, handling, warpfuel efficiency, etc.
- Tourney Points- Tourney points are bought for 1 of 2 reasons: either to enter a tourney game, or to transfer admiral tokens you own on one server to another server you are playing. They are the only item that can be transferred from server to server. They are bought with 5,000 tokens per tourney point. They have a sell rate of 4,000 tokens. So this means that if you decide to move 5,000 tokens to another server, you will end up losing 1,000 tokens in the process.
- Nukes- these are the most powerful ship weapons in the game. They can be bought using in-game credits at certain pirates only starbases (only people that are pirates [-1,000 rep or lower] can enter] that sell nukes, but this leaves people with positive reputation nowhere to buy nukes, so the developers allowed anyone with admiral tokens to buy nukes at a price of 250 per nuke.
These are the main items bought but there are several others that can be bought.
U.N. Space and Offline Activity
Because Starport is an mmo, it has an active community while a player will be offline.There are two types of space in every galaxy: U.N. controlled and open.
- U.N.- This is a small set of usually 10-30 systems closest to sol (the starting system), and any system that a starbase is located in. These areas are SAFE, where no player or npc can attack you. If you log off in this area, you will be charged your experience minus your reputation in in-game credits every hour from in person then from your bank account. If you run out, you will be kicked out into open space.
- Open- This is the type of space that most of the galaxies' systems operate under. You are completely unprotected from attack, so if you log off, your ship will be a sitting duck unmoving and waiting for someone to come attack it.
You may also log off in one of your own colonies, however, if that colony is successfully invaded and taken over by someone else, you will be kicked out into open space.
Reception
Starport: Galactic Empires has received generally decent to great reviews from notable reviewers such as mmorpg.com and Tucows. Most of the points lost on reviews tend to be due to the small staffing, un-updated graphics, and a few in-game critics.Criticism
Starport Galactic Empires has over 250,000 players . This causes some tension for the newcomers of the game. While players are encouraged to help out the newbies, some of the veterans tend to just ignore them and will often take advantage of them by killing them and trick them into giving them money or colonies. For this reason, newcomers have a moderate quit rate after their first day of playing.Next, Starport was developed and produced by a small team of developers. However, all but 2 of them have left the studio, therefore making the game undermanned. However it continues to move along in progress. Due to the fact of its small staff, players have become the true testers of the game, but will often complain to the developers when a patch is not done the way they want. This makes a moderate animosity towards the developers, who usually ignore the complaints.