The Ultimate Guide to Raiding Inactives
Gathering resources can be a tricky business. Mining is the most consistent source of income, but it is also slow and will never give you that much needed spurt to move you onto the next level. On the other hand, fleetcrashing can give huge returns, but needs equally huge battlefleets to pull it off.
You’re just passed the newbie stage. You’ve got your cargo fleets worked out. But you haven’t quite got the resources and technology to start attacking other players directly, because most of them have better ships and are in more powerful alliances than you. So what to do in the meantime? The answer is simple: only attack players who can’t fight back – inactives.
When an OGame account isn’t used for more than one week, it gets listed as an inactive account (and gets a little “i” next to the player’s name in the galaxy view). If it isn’t used for 28 days, the white “i” changes to a grey “I” – after 45 days the account is automatically deleted.
If a player hasn’t logged in for 28 days, you can assume they’ve left for good.
Another thing to note is that the mines on an inactive planet are never switched off.
What this means is that there’s usually a tonne of resources left lying around! And it’s all there for the taking!
- Raiding inactives is easy
- Raiding inactives doesn’t provoke wars (you raid and get away with it!)
- If you pick the right inactives you can easily rake in 250,000 to 500,000 resources per day.
The easiest way to find inactive players is to use a Galaxytool. This handy tool records the universe as you scroll through it. Over time this data will become your map to the universe.
After your ‘map’ is built you will be able to search it automatically for inactives. You can even search it specifically for inactives within a range of ranks. (I’ll explain why this is important later)
Essentially the Galaxytool will pinpoint and remember where the best inactives are so that you don’t have to scroll through the universe every time you want to find them.
The Galaxytool is a free php script which requires your own php enabled hosting with MYSQL databases in order to run. You will also be required to download an addon for firefox which will send data about your universe to the Galaxytool as you scroll through Galaxy View.
Everything you need to setup your own Galaxytool can be found here.
If setting up your own Galaxytool seems too complicated, don’t worry. There is a much simpler way; use someone elses!
Because the Galaxytool is such an important tool, you will find that many alliances will already have one up and running. In such a case you should be able to get direct access to the map and begin searching for inactives immediately.
Using the Galaxytool
Once inside the Galaxytool click the “Search in Database” button, and then click the first two orange gears in the corner of the box
- In the second box, enter the galaxy you want to search in, then in the “Rank” boxes type 0 and 800.
- In the third box, reverse “Player Status” – uncheck “all” and check “possible targets”.
- Click Search.
This will give you a list of all the inactive players ranked between 0 and 800 within your chosen galaxy.
Scroll through your list and write down the coordinates of the first few. You must now check that each of these players are still inactive (you don’t want to attack an active player!) and after verifying that they are inactive you need to espionage each of them.
If you find you are unable to obtain a full espionage report for a player, it is because your espionage technology is too low. You can either send more espionage probes or choose a lower ranked.
After espionaging a good number of inactives you can choose which ones are right for you.
It is important to note that defences and fleets still operate on inactive planets, so you’ll still have to deal with these. In most cases you’ll find no defence at all because they were wiped out long ago, hence the player’s inactivity. Sometimes there will be a lot of defences on a planet, however, if it’s a particularly good inactive, then high-ranking players will also target them, usually smashing apart their defences in the process. If the defences on a planet are a little too strong for your battlefleet to crack, just wait a while and see if a stronger player takes them out – let someone else do your dirty work!
When you have found the perfect set of inactives, raid and pillages them for every penny! If they have defences, make sure you use a battle simulator so that you don’t lose your precious fleet!
And that’s it, voila! After your first successful raid, you can continue to send out your raid fleets everyday to take whatever resources are lying around. When the inactive finally disappears just repeat the process with another inactive. You can get upwards of a 500,000 resources every day this way. Raiding inactives remains a profitable strategy throughout the various phases of your OGame journey, stick to it and you’ll not go far wrong! Good Luck.
