Hooray, I've been attacked!

I've been "playing" Ogame for weeks now. I use quotation marks, because nothing much has happened in the game. It took forever to even get to the stage where I could build a spaceship, then forever again till I could colonize a planet. Eventually my "empire" has grown to 4 planets, which are pretty self-sufficient and require very little time or energy on my part. The downside, of course, is that it is boring.

My interaction with other players has been very limited. I've raided some planets, but mostly just those of players who've been inactive for over a month and thus unlikely to retaliate. I'm such a late-comer to the Universe I chose, that most real players have a huge jump on me in terms of tech and fleet development, so it wasn't ever worth the risk of my attacking them. (I chose the game, and that universe within it, because some old buddies used to play there - but I haven't been able to find them on the rosters.)

A couple weeks ago, I got a single spammish "join my alliance or be crushed" message from some random player, but it didn't make me want to join him. At the time I thought "this game's been so boring, I look forward to him attacking." But he didn't, and after a few days it returned to be boring.

A google search for "better than Ogame" pointed me in the direction of a game called X-Wars. It's graphics and interface aren't nearly as pretty as Ogame, but it has a big plus in the form of getting to design your own spaceships. I started playing it a couple weeks ago... but I considered putting quotations around "playing" in that sentence. You get a sense of progress and accomplishment faster in X-Wars, so it seems more gamelike.

The last couple days I've been weighing in my mind whether or not to just bag Ogame and walk away. Then, early this morning, I got probed. Two of my planets were spied on by one player, and then a different player sent a single probe to suicidally attack one of my planets. The two players aren't in the same Alliance, however, so I'm not sure what the intention of the suicide attack was. If it were the same player both times, I'd assume the point of the probe was to create a small debris field around my planet. He could get a salvage fleet headed toward the debris, timed to arrive a few minutes after his attack fleet hits my defense fleet stationed there. But, since that same player doesn't seem to have previously scanned me, it's also possible he was attempting espionage and accidentally told the probe to attack instead (by mis-clicking).

To play it safe, I sent my non-combat vessels of the fleet elsewhere, loaded up with supplies from the endangered world. I then sunk just about all my remaining resources on the planet into beefing up my defenses there. Hopefully, if it is an attack, his fleet will find the results a lot less rewarding than he'd imagined.

Getting attacked like this was kind of exciting, but I won't know it's full impact till I see how this plays out. If it was an accidental attack, I'm back to the game being boring and non-interactive. If it's a precursor to a longer invasion, who knows. It may breathe new life into a game I was about ready to give up on. Or, he may crush me so badly there's no chance of recovery. Don't know which it will be, but I'm excited to find out.