On-Line Diaspora Guide: Advanced Play

From:  http://www.home-brew.freeserve.co.uk/diaspora/chapters/part3.htm :

Advanced Play Here's some suggestions for once you feel that you're well grounded in the basics of Diaspora. Even if you're not out of the realm of being a "newbie" read on, you can see what to look forward to when you are more established in the game. Guild Ownership

Contents Guild Ownership Owning your Own Planet Role Playing Galactic Council War Techniques Using the forum

Creating a guild must be well thought of BEFORE you decide to go ahead and found one. Not only for your sake, since you'll be spending 1500k (1.5M) to found a guild, but also for Diaspora in general, too many guilds get really annoying and you must be dedicated to a guild and play every day. Never found a guild before you go away on vacation or any other time in which you know you won't be able to spend time on the guild, because it WILL NOT survive (trust me, I know first hand, and know some other examples). BEFORE you found your guild you want to establish a few things. a) What is the main idea of your guild? What are you goals? This must be carefully considered. If you decide to form your guild under a specific type of game play to early off, you may be putting a big target on your head for other guilds. b) Who do you know? You must make sure that you're going to have some help in creating your guild. Not necessarily direct help, but you must make sure you have some friends who will help get your guild known in the world of Diaspora. c) How many other guilds are there like yours? Guilds come and go very fast. You must make your guild original enough to stand out and make people WANT to join, so you won't have to resort to enlisting too many beginner players. d) Image? This part is not a necessity, but the image of your website is quite important. This may be confusing, but basically you want to ask yourself, does my guild look stable? Is it "cool"? The main thing that can help you create a good image is a webpage. It is advised that you (as the founder of the guild) know how to create a webpage. It is NOT advised to have a friend do a webpage for you because that person no matter how much it seems in the beginning, will not have the same interest in your guild a few weeks down the road. That about covers this section. Realise that guild ownership is not for everyone, and even if it IS for you, it is very difficult to successfully found a guild. Owning Your own Planet If you decide to create a guild you may eventually decide to buy a satellite. These are located at each of the planets in the Neutral zone and also at the 3 velic planets. Now, you must be careful when choosing a satellite as some other guild may own it. If you feel you deserve it more than them, you may wish to destroy it and take it. Be advised, this almost always results in war! To buy a satellite, destroy it,  click on it to land. Then click "install defences". The purchase price for a satellite is 500k. This gives the satellite 10 thousand hull. Each additional upgrade of your satellite is another 500k until level 8. Which will leave the satellite at 80'000 hull 95 Shield and 13 guns. Planet defences can now be found on all planets that do not have a GEN field (this includes the Velic planets). Also to prevent the situation where a single (determined) ship could destroy a satellite, by continuously landing for repairs then attacking again a ship is now not permitted to land for 1 minute after attacking a satellite. Role Playing Diaspora falls under the definition of a RPG (Role Playing Game). What this means is, that the users of Diaspora have the option of creating a personality that may be completely unlike that of the one in real life. Imagination is of course the key here. Role playing can be quite stress relieving and adds a different perspective to the game. Of course you don't HAVE to role play, and there are no rules to how role playing must be done, it is just something that can be considered. It can range from simply being slightly more aggressive than you might be in real life, to being the brother of Mjr Darius of the militia guild, or whatever! =) Galactic Council This is an area of the game that as of yet, has not quite been totally established. In the beta version of Diaspora, it was a (sort of) effective way for the leaders of guilds to vote on topics in the game, and gather information to present to the creators of Diaspora. If the old system of the galactic council is used in the new version of Diaspora, there are two ways to get involved. One, is to own your own guild and grow it so that it is eligible to be represented in the Galactic council meetings. The second is to be voted by the guild leaders to be a moderator of the meetings themselves. Of course this is very difficult and is usually reserved for the longer serving members of Diaspora. This portion of the game can be interesting because it involves politics and voting etc. If you're into that sort of thing. War techniques War is an inevtiable part of Diaspora. There a MANY factors that will dictate whether your guild will win or lose a war. The BIGGEST mistake people make about a guild is the fact that a guild has many big ship, therefore they assume that the guild is untouchable. The factors that best determine how powerful a guild is, in order is as follows: ~member dedication: Having very dedicated members means they will stick with their leader no matter what happens. If you war a guild that has very dedicated members, there is little anyone can do to win against them. The only tactic is to kill them over and over and over and completely shatter their moral. If you're a smart guild leader, gaining dedicated members to win wars should be by far the most important goal. ~Resources: If a guild has money, they have a big advantage, no doubt. A guild who has the ability to keep buying powerful ships, even after they've lost many, has a huge advantage over one that lacks money. It's important as a guild leader or anyone in the guild to trade whenever there is free time. Make sure every member has enough cash to buy their ship again in case it explodes for whatever reason. A guild that keep shrinking every time it's attacked will eventually lose. ~Firepower: One of the less important factors that dictate how successful a guild will be in a war is it's amount of firepower. None the less, it always helps : ). Having a lot of guns to play with allows your guild to do something that smaller guilds won't be able to do, and that's to complete the one node kill. If you mass your fleet in one area and wait for an enemy to jump in, with enough guns to shoot at a target hopefully it would be possible to destroy the ship before it's jump bar can fill. This is very usefull and prevents guilds from running for the nearest planet and leaves slower ships vulnerable. ~practice: Practice makes perfect. Before you go to war, have your guild practice tactics that your sick mind comes out with. Create short codes and rules. One hint is to get your guild to only use the guild chat for emergencies when you're in "war mode". This prevents confusion. There are TONS of tricks to win wars which I'm not going to give away here, but do some thinking and you might be able to pull it off : ). Good luck. Using the forum: The forum is place where players of Diaspora can comment on what's going on, or what they want done in the game. The forum can be found at: Xiaspora click "forum" on the side. I'm not going to go into detail into how to actually USE the forum, you can find all the information about that on the forum itself. I'll talk about etiquette. Your behaviour on the forum will dictate very strongly how people percieve you in game. One of the most annoying things is when people talk about subjects on the forum when they know nothing or little about them. If you don't know about a situation, DON'T GUESS ABOUT IT! People will laugh at you! It's better to build a name for yourself in-game before you go talking too much on the forum. Always make sure you understand a thread clearly before you comment, and make sure your comments are wanted and valid. Annoying thing on the forum is when people double post. Sometimes this happens by accident. It's polite to go into your double posts with the edit command and remove the text to limit the "annoyance" that double posts create. Only ask questions if you've tried every other method of finding it out, newbie questions are annoying. DO NOT: say anything racial or relgious (and above please refrain from flaming other players, this seems to have disappeared since the new forum was introduced). Otherwise you risk your forum account being banned. You may notice that some people have an "ACE" under their name, while others have "ROUGE". You become and "ACE" on the forum after you've completed 30 posts on the forum. ROUGE means 30 and below posts. Don't make posts with the only intention to become and ACE. Be polite and keep everything in perspective when you say it on the forum. It's a useful tool and can be very helpful, but don't abuse it.