Nothing personal, You_Fool, but I wholly disagree with your way of thinking.  Your adamant adherence to the ideological-based opinion that activity 'should' be the decisive factor is a disservice to the game's potential and an insult to the players.

Rather, automation is quintessential to the game's development and its survival.  You attract players by making it fun and enjoyable for them, not cumbersome and unnecessarily time consuming.

Forcing players to log in for no other reason than to send aid: insulting.

Forcing players to have to log in again and again every few ticks to do mindless, repetitive retakes: insulting.

And when they do take the time to do so, making them right click, open window, right click, open new tab, right click, open new tab, just to recall their transports:  INSULTING

The new method in fleet view where you have a list of planets where you have stationed fleets and check boxes so as to recall them was a move in the right direction but is still insufficient.  What do you do when you want to leave portions of your fleet?  The same as before: right click, open window, right click, open new tab, right click, open new tab, etc., etc. for every attack you've made.  For only then does it give you the option to recall portions of the unit type of a fleet from a particular planet. 

Why do you adhere to the doctrine of unnecessarily insulting and wasting the time of the players you are suppoed to design the game to attract?

Forcing players to have to open multiple windows / tabs and take 30 minutes of the tick, every tick, just to build infra effectively: insulting.  Not having building queuing / auto-building by present percentages of GC resource allocation for infra-building = insult.

Forcing players to schedule their day around a game so that they log on at the proper time to do the necessary action: click attack, click planet, recall portions of fleets, then click attack, click planet, recall portions of fleets, click attack, etc., etc.: insulting.  Not providing a little check box next to the fleet in fleet view where you can select all fleets or individual fleets to attack on arrival at their destination and recall bombers %, fighters %, droids %, soldiers %, droids % after battle, and queue building OB% of lasers at location if attack is successful; not providing the OPTION to select auto retaking on that and other planets; not providing the option for the player to select to send x amount of such and such units of fleet to that planet or even ALL newly attacked planets; not providing queue actions of builds that should be conducted on that planet in the event the re-take is successful; not providing the option to auto-op every such and such # of ticks so that you and the whole fam can be updated regularly on how many lasers are built on targeted players' planets; not providing these options = insult, insult, insult, insult, insult, and insult.

Who are you or even Stefan for that matter to decide a player doesn't deserve the OPTION not to have to waste their time ding boring cumbersome stuff?

And by the way, skill would still determine the outcome of the game even in the event full automation were provided as an OPTION for players, because they would still have to adjust their presets according to round events.

Again, not providing the option is an INSULT to the potential of this game and the players.

And you wonder why this game isn't successful?

Again, nothing personal, You Fool, but because of your stubborn adherence to your ideological delusion of the necessity of ACTIVITY as having to be the determining factor.

Ultimately, it is how people in charge of this game's development is what is killing this game's potential.

I hope you and they rethink their preconceptions about how this game 'should' be and invest a little imagination in considering what it 'could' become with automation.

Read more here:

http://imperialconflict.com/forum/viewt … 0#p1687900