timesink get?

I accepted a friend's invite to Starfleet Commander on Facebook and I've been playing it.  It's a massive waste of time.  It's kind of neat because it's playing even when you aren't at your computer, and you can start stuff that takes a long time and then leave, log out, close your browser, or even turn off your computer and it'll still finish.

The game has a tutorial to get you through the early stages, which basically walks you up to being able to build ships.  Towards the end of it I was gleefully ignoring it for a reason I'll explain below.

I have some issues with the game.  First off the prices.  They start out reasonable, but then you hit a brick wall approximately 54% of the way to your first ship when the prices suddenly skyrocket.

The next issue: To get certain things in-game you have to invite friends to play it (and they have to accept your invite).  Any time someone accepts your invite you get three Crew Points and one Crew Member.  Crew Points are required for certain things, and Crew Members can be used to speed up production of nearly everything.

Further, to get resources you have to micro-manage.  You can't just say "okay, go get me some crystal" and have your crystal value go up periodically.  You can build mines to get resources automatically, and upgrade them so they give you resources more often, but the amount you get is very small compared to the prices you have to pay for everything.  So to get resources, every two or so minutes you have to click a button.  This makes it very hard to do anything else, such as typing a blog post.

There is an exception to the "you have to invite people" rule to get crew points and members.  You can build droids that do the same things.  You'd think a droid would be more effective at any given task than a human would, but this isn't the case.  In fact, humans are twice as effective as droids for increasing production and three times as effective at increasing your crew points (and a hell of a lot cheaper).  I was just going to eschew social interaction on a social network entirely and simply build droids to do my shit for me, but they're basically not worth the money and time it takes to make them.

I found an ultimate solution to the crew issue, though perhaps unwieldy.  Simply log out of Facebook and make a dummy account, set it up with the bare minimum stuff, and then invite it and accept the invite.

There's a partial solution to the micromanagement issue.  Once you get multiple cargo ships and the ability to fly them all separately, you can tell it "hey, send this number of ships to get crystal".  You still have to click once every couple of minutes, but you get more resources per click.

The last issue with the whole friend invite thing is that to be able to send a cargo ship to get the resource you need the most of, hydrogen, you need one crew point.  Either build a crew droid, which serves no other purpose except to get you crew points but takes forever to unlock and build, or make a fake account to invite.

It sucks that this game is designed to be a time waster, because if the costs and build times were more reasonable it would actually be kind of fun.  In fact, this game reminds me of a much better shareware-turned-freeware game for Windows (it runs nearly perfectly in Wine in case you're on Linux) called Warpath 97.  The galaxy was a bit smaller (divided into eight octants with 16 planets each), and it isn't massively multiplayer, but its gameplay is much faster and more better.  Also 90% of the people in Starfleet Commander are inactive.