Hey Michael?

I am your boss...

I pay you.

I dropped approximately $2,000 dollars into your pocket over the last 5 months.

You are fired.

The issue of boosting is common with many online games. The flaws with the idea seem to be especially prominent with Facebook based games in fact, where if you don't whip out that credit card, you don't have a prayer of winning.

In some games the advantages are obvious, sometimes they can even be seen by just a cursory read thru of the rules, if one is available. Unfortunately, sometimes they do not become obvious until you've played the game for weeks or months and the subtleties of the game economics become clear.

Here in Battledawn, it didn't take long to figure out that kicking up metal production is key, at least early on. With metal, you can build a bigger army as well as building more outposts, etc., not to mention finishing your initial constructions faster.

Watching the higher ranking members of my alliance also made things obvious. We pulled off a major invasion of an enemy held area recently. One of the top players immediately took a metal mine and a colony of one guy who had some crystals. Of course, this member already had a bigger army to pull off such attacks. Its already clear that unless I put out some cash to buy metal and catch up the size of my own army, there will be NO catching up with that guy. He BOUGHT his advantage early on.

This game isn't as bad as some. At least you have "cooldown" periods to put some limits on boosting, as well as troop capacity limits and such, so you can't exactly build a godzillion tanks in one colony and roll across the board killing everything in sight. A dumb kid with a credit card won't win here. But a reasonably intelligent kid with an unlimited credit card can and will beat out a guy who can't or won't spend the money, regardless of how smart the guy is.

You want to stop the unfair advantages of people that "buy in" to winning? How about making it possible to start additional colonies with full production capabilities. Keep 50% of the production of an occupied colony. Give outposts a small production ability. Let people collect a bit of metal from razing other players' outposts. And review carefully what kinds of truly unfair advantages can be bought by people with those red credits.

We have looked over those ideas before, btu they would help the strongest as those who are already strong would be the ones with the largest amount of extra colonies and outposts that produce resources. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "keep 50% of the production of an occupied colony", do you mean that we should increase the tax from 10% to 50%?
And you already get metal for razing other player's outposts.

I would rather see advertising and know I had a fair chance to win this game than know that anyone with the money to spend could make a highly skilled player look like a fool.

I have seen someone end rank 1 without boosting red tokens, its not impossible at all. I've personally lead a allaince of newbs against a rank 2 alliance when we were rank 6, and won the battle without any boosting, just pure tactics.

I'll finish out my current round, and probably play out one more round in a quick ticks world. If I don't find ways of countering the boosting advantages by then, I'll be leaving Battledawn.

You do not need large amount of money to win. If you pick the right location, the right people and a good leader you will do good against heavy boosters who plays purely to win as a one man army.

I am no booster but ends up around ranked 30 at mid-round with little crystals but with good people. What my alliance constantly do is help non-boosters by trading resources so the whole team grows together and we eventually ends up as a Ranked #2 alliance but we had the most power over the boosting alliances of that time.

But however we dropped down to ranked 20th when few members decides to leave us at the last 400 ticks. It is sad really but it was a great example of overcoming boosters using connection and teamplay.

And it was the LEX alliance in Fantasy 6 last era since August of 2011. We no boosters but end up the most powerful with 300 power difference to the 1st alliance. We had no relics but we were unstoppable and would had won without even having relics (if that is allowed).

So yes don't complain, just play the game.

EDIT: Sorry for bad grammar, I am tired.

7. Alliance Orders - new feature. ability for the alliance leader to place markers on the map to plan the strategy of the alliance. only visible to the alliance members.

There is no way for a booster to win a round just by buying resources.
even if you do spend all your money into BD, you cannot win 1000 other players.

The key to wining the rounds on BD remains diplomacy diplomacy diplomacy

if you can harness a number of alliance to attack a bigger one, the bigger one will stand no chance as long as the smaller alliances are well coordinated.

That's also the reason we lowered alliance size to 10.

Of course boosting gives you an advantage at the start. That's the point of boosting...

And pays the hard working staff!