Some info on farming.

Im currently recieving emails from a website giving me the top 10 tips for ogame. I will post 1 everyday. Take a look at them they may help you as they have done for me.

Don't waste probes on poor planets, or planets with poor mines that have recently been raided. Once you have used up all of your fleet slots, return to overview. Await the arrival of your probes. Once
they are back, check your messages, delete any reports that have too low resources, or the defense is too good. But if you think you can take the defense at a later date, or some IPM's would take it down in a day or so, make a note in your Notes menu, in a topic called, Targets. Have names of planets that you plan to attack, have notations to say how important, like !!!!!!!! means really good, ! might mean, so-so, and maybe not even worth missiling.

Once you have weaned out the dud planets, remember the co-ords or write them down, and send off your fleets. Usually I send off 4 Large Cargo ship, or if that small extra amount of deuterium matters, then use a quick calculation to figure out how many ships are going. Then, if you still have spare fleet slots, continue probing from where you stopped last time. Some days you'll find empty planets, and will have to settle for less, other days, you'll be deciding which to attack between.

If the planets have a few defenses left, send off cruisers with the fleet, I send off enough to destroy the defense in the first round. If you might lose 1 Large Cargp, then better SpeedSim it if you care about the deuterium, or just overkill the defense. Either works fine.

Although it might seem more efficient to probe the whole range first, its not. You will be overcrowded with messages, and might end up deleting some reports that were good. Then you have to remember the co-ords, and go back, its just very messy. And always remember if your fleet has only just left, you can always recall it and go somewhere else.

Sometimes, if you are strapped for time, judge the level of the mines and the solar plant, and then if it is high-ish, add it into targets without notation. So when you log on for 10 minutes, you can log off with fleets going and getting res.

If you still wanted to transport resources, do it before you send off your fleets. It's a waste of time to recall an attack for fears of being attack for large amounts of res.

Before you leave OGame to itself, always check that your fleets are headed to the right planets. Do this by; once you have sent the fleet, go to overview, see the name of the planet it's headed to, and then check your messages for the report. Don't delete the report before the fleet has gone, if the report has defense, then you better keep the report until the fleet has landed. It's horrible to not now know what happened to your fleet. If it went tothe wrong planet, if you got ninja'd. Its good to have the report
to compare to. You can also see if you got to the target first, of it you were beat to it.

Continue probing for more targets, if you know how long you are going to be online for, try and probe all the planets in your range before you're done. Just incase you miss a multi millionaire. Not
common, but brilliant when it happens. I missed my first 4-5 millionaires. I made timing mistakes, and wrong calculations, but you learn.

Anyway, I hope some of these tips help. Most of them are pretty basic. Also remember that you can add your own twist to it, like using mass probes, or small cargo's.

Thank you for the good info; I'm very left-brained so I keep my stuff pretty well organized. That said it's nice to have a template to begin with and then modify it for my specific needs.

Part 2

First steps:

The basics remain the same. You need cargo ships ASAP, else you
won't be raiding anything. Also spy probes are important. So first,
build some mines and get a couple spy probes and a small transport.
Then, find some inactive players. You'll recognize them by the (i)
or (iI) next to their name in the galaxy screen, which is in a gray
color.

(i) means that the player hasn't logged in for a week, and (iI)
that he hasn't logged in for 4 weeks.

After 40 days an inactive account is deleted by the system. In the
more developed universes, inactive players are also more developed.
Some of them have colonies and high mining levels. Any defenses
they might have had will be bashed by the stronger players around
you after a week or so. Which means that there are defenseless
resources for you to get. If someone has a level 20 metal mine,
then that planet makes 100k metal in 24 hours. That's heaven on
earth for a starting player, and most developed players won't
bother. To find them, use the spy probes. First espionage some
inactive planets around you. You won't get a reading on most, and
especially not on the good ones, since they also will have some spy
tech. That's no problem. First send your small cargo a couple of
times to a planet where you can see the resources, i.e. where
someone did practically nothing, and after 3 weeks of mining with
metal mine 2 there's 10k res. Which is enough to fill your cargo.
Build more cargo's, mines and tech. Especially computer tech, you
need all the fleet slots you can get.

Alliance:

Another thing you can do is join an alliance. Find something that
appeals to you, and ask some of the better players to spy the
inactives in the neighborhood for you. They have enough spy tech
and fleet slots so if someone spends 15 minutes, you have 10
targets for the next couple of weeks. And alliances are fun

Moving on to bigger stuff:

Then try to find a good farm (i.e. inactive with no defense and
high mining levels). If you see a good bunch of resources (for
example 100k metal, 50k crystal and some deut) that might be a good
farm. The problem is that your low spy tech won't give you a
reading. If there's more then 0% counterespionage, don't bother any
further, there's some defense. If it's 0%, you might be on to
something. If you have a lot of probes, you may try to spy with
more, to see if you get a reading then (8 for example), but usually
that's pointless. If it's still 0% counterspy, chances are that
there's no defense left though. Send another probe, but this time
on an attack mission. There are two options: you lose the probe,
and 1000 crystal, or it comes back with 1 metal, crystal and
deuterium. In the last case, you luck out, and you can send your
cargo's without any danger. Find a couple of these targets, at
least as much as you have fleet slots. Make a list. You can use a
program like ORP for that (
http://www.gamingjokers.com/ORP/index.php ) or simply use a paper,
or whatever you prefer. I've been using the notes in universe 1 of
.de, and that works just fine for me. You'll lose some probes, but
the benefits will be much higher.

Farming and expanding:

Ok, now that you have your farm list, you have some catching up to
do. Whenever you log in, send as much fleets to your farms as
possible. 6 fleet slots times 3 raids per day, times 75k profit per
raid is 1,5M resources per day. Your mines will never make that any
time soon. But you have to work on that. Make more colonies. Build
colony ships, and send them to different galaxies. That will
increase your raiding grounds. Always go for 4-6 spots. They give
the best chance for a big colony. And don't settle for anything
less then 200 fields. This is a game of patience, and you'll be
playing for years if things go well, so you better make sure that
you have a good start. If you get a smaller colony, just accept the
loss, and delete it (click the colony name, click surrender colony,
and CLICK the button (no doesn't work (if you're stubborn,
go , ))). You can keep a smaller colony for a while,
but it's temporary, so don't get attached to it.

Building up:

Invest in mines. That's steady income. Don't bother with fleet. In
uni 1 of .de you can count on every other player to have 200
destroyers and twice the tech you have. And they're not too shy to
attack you if you have 20 battleships. So that's just a waste of
resources. Mines on the other hand will bring you lots. Don't focus
on anything else until you have level 20 metal mines on all your
planets, just build enough cargo's to keep raiding the inactives.
With 9 *level 20 = 900k metal per day, your mining income will
start to rival your farming income. Also, to defend stuff, build
some defense. 1000 small lasers and 10 plasma cannons (and shield
domes) will deter most attackers as long as there's not too much on
your planet, so you can keep 500k resources and 20 cargo's or
something without fleet saving. That frees your fleet slots for
more farming. Except for the 200-destroyer guy of course, he'll
occasionally visit, accept the losses for now, and move on. Get
back at him next year, or get your alliance mates to help And
the same goes for the guy who's testing his IPM's. So build some
missile silo's to protect the plasmas once you have them.

Choice:

Well, that about covers it. When you're done with this, you'll be 2
months further, and have approx. 100k points. And a very nice basis
for an account. Now is the time to make choices. Either you go for
a raiding account. Build 100 battleships, and start raiding active
players. And try to get a moon. And put some stuff into your mines
for when your fleet gets crashed, or you go for a turtle account.
Just move as you've done so far, and build bigger defenses and
mines. Either way, have fun.

Thanks, good stuff mate.

nice stuff, this could be very usefull for our weaker members...