Spaceward Ho! is the famous game of galactic conquest, written by Delta Tao Software, and distributed by New World Computing. (####) Outland is proud to feature Spaceward Ho! online.
The following text is taken, for the most part, from the Spaceward Ho! 3.0 manual, written by Joe Williams, head cheese of Delta Tao. Some modifications have been made so it all makes sense for version 4.0 on Outland.
Before playing your first game, we recommend that you read the first few sections of this chapeter (up to "MORE DETAILED INFORMATION"). Then, if you're feeling adventurous, try playing a game yourself, taking advantage of the help messages in the Report Window. When you Create your game in the Ho! lobby, make sure to give yourself No Time Limit, and then Lock the Galaxy from the lobby menu, so you can go at your own pace.
INSPIRATIONAL INTRO
Spaceward Ho! is a strategy game of awesome scope, casting you as the leader of a spacefaring race. Your goal is to explore and colonize the galaxy. Of course, you are not alone. As you discover new worlds to colonize and terraform or mine, you'll find aliens bent on their own galactic conquest. Ally with them, or fight them using ships built with your latest technological advances. And if you use your resources (both limited and renewable) cleverly, you'll conquer the galaxy.
A QUICK SUMMARY
The goal of Spaceward Ho! is to conquer the galaxy. You start out on a single, wonderful, heavily populated planet. You have just become capable of building your first interstellar space ships. So you build a couple of exploratory ships and send them to nearby stars. Some of the planets at these stars will be more habitable than others.
Once you find a planet that窶冱 like your home planet, you build a Colony Ship and go colonize it. Once there, you make its temperature better by terraforming it, mining the metal from it, and using it as a base for further exploration and colonization. After a number of years the new planet窶冱 population will grow so large that it make a profit, just like your home planet.
You窶冤l hop from planet to planet expanding your galactic empire. Somewhere along the line, you窶冤l run into opposition 窶 bad guys who are out to conquer the galaxy, too. In addition to exploring and colonizing, you窶冤l need to defend yourself against the more aggressive of these alien races. You can do this by building defensive satellites at your colonies. You can also defend yourself by building fleets of fighters and preemptively attacking the aliens. If fighting isn窶冲 to your taste, you can befriend some of these aliens, creating allies instead of enemies.
In addition to building ships and terraforming and mining planets, you spend money on technology research. The first ships you build are capable of travelling to other stars, but they can窶冲 go far, they窶决e slow, they can窶冲 attack or defend themselves well, and they require a lot of metal to build. When you spend money on research, your ship technology levels will improve. To no one窶冱 surprise, better ships will destroy obsolete ones in battle.
When you have conquered all enemy colonies, you win.
ULTRA-QUICK INSTRUCTIONS
The Ho! Lobby is where you set up games. OutlandHo is where you conquer the galaxy. You can switch back and forth during the game.
LearningSpaceward Ho! is fun. Play with the bar charts and pie charts to adjust spending. Click on the messages in the map to make them go away. Double-click on a colony to design and build ships. Drag from one star to another to move those ships. Ask others for advice. Experiment. Conquer the galaxy.
(Complete instructions follow the Glossary.)
GLOSSARY
Ally: An alien with which you share refueling privileges and a non-aggression pact.
Enemy: Anybody that isn窶冲 allied with you.
Gravity: Everything that can窶冲 be changed about a star system. Any planet between 0.4 G and 2.5 G can be made profitable, if enough people are on it and it is fully terraformed. An ideal planet is 1.0 G. Each player has a different idea of what 1.0 G is.
Income: The money you took in last turn.
Marooned: What a ship is when it doesn窶冲 have enough fuel to leave the planet it窶冱 on.
Metal: The sum of all nonrenewable resources.
Mini: The amount of shrinking a ship has. High Mini ships use less Metal, but cost more Money.
Money: The sum of all replenishable resources. You get money every turn from profitable planets.
Planet: The same thing as a star. Represents the whole star system.
Radical Tech: High-risk, high gain research. Sometimes you get something really great, sometimes you get garbage.
Range: How far a ship can reach without refueling. A Range 8 ship can go out 4 and back 4, or can go out 5 and be stuck.
Satellite: A ship that can窶冲 move. Its Range is zero. Satellites are much smaller than other ships.
Shield: Something that protects a ship. A Shield Tech 8 ship will prove almost invincible to a Weapon Tech 4 ship.
Ship Savings: Money you窶况e accumulated to build ships with. You get interest on this money. If you窶况e spent more than you窶况e saved, you pay interest.
Speed: How fast a ship goes. A Speed 3 ship will take 2 turns to go to a star that is 5 units away.
Star: The same as a planet.
Temperature: Everything that can be changed about a star system. The ideal temperature is 72ﾂｰ. Each player has a different idea of what 72ﾂｰ is.
Terraforming: Improving the temperature of a star system. When a planet is fully terraformed, its temperature is 72ﾂｰ.
The Ho!: What experienced players call Spaceward Ho!. If you want to be really cool, say, you窶决e 窶徘laying the Ho!窶
Weapon: Something a ship shoots. A Weapon Tech 8 ship will rip apart Shield Tech 4 ships.
MORE DETAILED INFORMATION
The best way to learn Spaceward Ho! is to play the game your first time while reading the manual. We're not going to give you a bunch of "read the whole manual thoroughly before beginning to play" garbage. Sit down and take a pop at the game. Just remember you'll have questions, and this manual answers them.
The Windows
Spaceward Ho! has three windows. You can drag the windows around and resize them how you like, so you can configure the game for your monitors and style of play.
The Main Window
The Main Window is the only really important window in Spaceward Ho!. It contains the Star Map and the budget, planet, and fleet information. The window's title bar will say something like, "Peter in Milky Way in 2000," which means you're currently registered as Peter in the game "Milky Way" in the year 2000. Duh.
The Star Map
The right part of the-main window of Spaceward Ho! is the Star Map. It lets you see where you are, where you've been, where you can go. You use the Star Map to move ships (click and drag from one star to another) and to choose the planet to look at and deal with.
When you are done with your turn, click the clock on the top left corner of the Star Map.
There are several types of stars you'll see in the Star Map. For now, we'll just explain the kinds you can see at the very beginning of a game.
Your Home Planet
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This is where you live. It's a heavily populated, highly profitable, technologically advanced planet ready to go out and explore the universe. You'll build your first ships here.
An Unexplored Planet
ﾂ
At the start of the game, everything but your home planet is unexplored. Once you go to a planet, you'll find out more about it, and its picture will change to reflect your new discoveries. The rest of the types of planets will be covered later, in the "Planets" chapter.
A Selected Planet
When you select a planet, it highlights by getting a corona around it. All the information to the left of the star map will now refer to that planet 窶 its temperature, gravity, income, and so on.
Messages & The Report Window
The Report Window is a scrolling history of the important things that have happened over the last several turns. Each message will appear in the lower left hand corner of the Star Map at the beginning of each turn. When you click on the message, it will go on to the next one.
There are many different kinds of messages. When you explore a star, you'll get a message about the star's temperature and gravity. When you colonize a planet, you'll get a friendly notice. When you're in a battle, you'll get a message summarizing the result.
You can click on an old message in the Report Window to get further information. For example, when you click on a battle summary, Spaceward Ho! will replay the battle. When you click on a message mentioning a planet, you'll scroll the map to that planet and select it.
End Turn Button (The Clock)
Because Spaceward Ho! is a turn-based game, you will need to indicate when you are done with each turn. To do so, just click the Clock Button at the top left of the Star Map.
In timed games of Spaceward Ho!, you will need to consider the Turn Length and Bonus Time. For instance, if the time limit for your game is 30/120, you'd have 30 seconds to complete each turn, after which you start eating up bonus time. Once you use up your 120 seconds of bonus time, each turn will automatically end for you after 30 seconds.
Budget Information
This is what the most complicated part of Spaceward Ho! looks like. The top half of this area gives information about the planet which you have selected from the Star Map. The bottom half does not depend on which planet you are looking at.
ﾂ
What it all means:
Top, Left: Stats for the current planet.
Top, Middle: Bar to allocate spending between Mining (Blue) and Terraforming (Green) for the current planet 窶 just drag that handle thingy up to mine more and down to terraform more.
Top, Right: That's what the planet looks like. Silly question.
Not-Quite-Top, Middle: Info on the fleets at the current planet. Select a fleet by clicking on it in the list.
Middle, Middle: The total resources of your planets. All your money and metal goes to and comes from these numbers. The information in parentheses represent changes since the last turn.
Bottom, Left: List of players in the game. A check mark by their name means they've finished their turn already.
Bottom, Right: Bar chart for dividing up your spending among shipbuilding, technical research, and planetary development (mining/terraforming).
(more detailed info below)
The Bar Charts
The most important controls you have in Spaceward Ho! are your bar charts. They are what you use to spend your money and carry out your strategy. Unlike boring bar charts you see on overheads during business presentations, you can change the bar charts in Spaceward Ho!
For example, the Budget bar chart is what you use to divy up your money between each of your colonies. You also can use some of it for technology research, and save some for shipbuilding. The bigger you make the bar to the right of a planet name, the bigger the portion of your total budget that will go to that planet. Click and drag the mouse in the bar chart to lengthen or shorten the bar to where you clicked, adding to or subtracting from other bars proportionally.
The Budget bars can be broken down into smaller bar charts. For example, click on the word "Tech" in the Budget Window. The Tech Window will pop up. This is a detailed, specific view of your Tech spending. That is, it divides the money that you spend on Tech in the Budget Window. We'll tell you more about the Tech Window later.
Ship Savings is money that will be saved up for later use and shipbuilding. In general, it's a good idea to have money saved for a rainy day. You get interest on your savings, just like at your local bank.
Planet Information
Information on the currently selected planet (the one with the "corona" around it) is in the upper left hand corner of the Main Window. If you select a growing colony, you'll see a bar that shows how money you spend on that planet is divided between mining and terraforming. Again, don't get too concerned about exactly what percent you're spending on each item; just try to get the proportions right.
Spend money on Terraforming to modify a planet's temperature to 72 degrees. (That's your favorite temperature.) If a planet is already 72 degrees, you can't spend money on terrafoming.
Spend money on Mining to free the planet's resources, making the metal available for shipbuilding. Again, when the planet runs out of metal, you can't spend any more money mining it.
The "Income" of a planet is how much extra money a planet puts into your total budget. If it's a planet you've just colonized, this will be negative, meaning that you have to pump money into it just to keep it alive. The more a planet is like your home planet (which is 72 degrees and 1.00 G), the more money-making potential it has. Planets too unlike your home planet will never make a profit.
The Tech Spending Window
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Use the Tech Spending Window to show what technologies you want to develop the most. You may choose to research different technologies, depending on your strategy, philosophy, and the current game situation. For the most part, you don't need to fool with this window much.
Remember that the Tech Spending Window just divides up the Tech money and doesn't decide how much Tech money there is窶土ou set that with the Budget Window bar charts.
Note that the hash marks on the left of the Tech Spending bar chart are not evenly spaced. Each hash mark denotes 10%, but they're displayed logarithmically to allow you to get more precision when dividing up your tech spending.
THE ECONOMY
Spaceward Ho! represents the entire economy of the galaxy with only two numbers: Money and Metal.
Money represents energy, food, manufactured items, educated people 窶 anything that can be replenished every year. If you can't run out of it, it counts as Money.
Metal represents things you find 窶 metals, oil, uranium, that sort of thing. Anything you can run out of is Metal. There is a limited amount of Metal in the Galaxy. Controlling the Metal can be very important.
You can spend money on lots of things: research, terraformng, mining, building ships, and so on. The only thing you use metal for is building ships. The more advanced ships take more money and metal to build.
That's it for the economy. Most of your decisions will involve how you spend your money. If you ever spend more money than you need for something, the extra will be conveniently saved. For example, if you spend $10,000 mining a planet that only has 100 metal left, the extra $9,000 will be put into savings, where you can use it later.
You never have to worry about moving Metal or Money. It will automatically just show up wherever you need it. You can mine it on the far right side of a huge galaxy and use it the very next turn on the far left side. This means you can build ships wherever you need them. Money behaves the same way 窶 you never have to move it to where you'll spend it. Forcing you to maintain supply lines would be more realistic, but it wouldn't be much fun.
You can choose different ways to spend your money depending on your particular philosophy and goals. The more money you spend on Tech research, the less you'll have left to develop planets. The more money you spend terraforming planets, the less you'll have for research, at least in the short term. Having more profitable planets gives you more money in the long run. Of course, it also means more places to defend. Decisions, decisions.
Remember that every time a starship is destroyed, most of the Metal used to build it is gone forever. This means that as ships are built (and destroyed), the material you build them out of disappears. Permanently. Near the end of the game, Metal can get scarce, and therefore extremely valuable.
Diminishing Returns
When you spend money on most things in Spaceward Ho!, the more money you spend, the less value you get for your dollar. This means that it's better to spend $10 for two days than $20 for one day, unless you're in a hurry.
This makes it a good idea to keep your Tech spending steady, for example. If you spend only on Weapon Tech, then only on Shield Tech, then Range, and so on, your overall Tech levels will go up slower than if you spend a little bit on all of them at once.
This also applies to mining and terraforming. It's less efficient to try to do these things all at once than to do them gradually over a period of many years.
Diminishing returns does not apply to shipbuilding. Each ship costs the same whether you build ten of them in one turn or only one.
Debt
You can go into debt. This means that you can spend more money on shipbuilding than you've saved. You can borrow up to five times the total income from all your planets.
Unfortunately, you have to pay interest on your borrowed money. 15% of your debt will be automatically deducted from your income each turn. A high debt leaves you with less money to spend on terraforming, mining, and technological research. To pay off your debt, just put money into Ship Savings.
Experiment with debt. You'll notice that in the short term, it can dramatically improve your productivity, but over the long
term it's likely to be disastrous.
If you ever get into a situation where your total income won't even pay the interest on your debt, bad things happen. So far, we've never managed to recover from this situation. We highly recommend not getting into it.
SHIPS
Ships are what you use to explore new stars, defend your colonies, and colonize new planets. There are several different kinds of ships, and you can create your own.
Spaceward Ho! ships are incredibly huge and expensive. As an example, your first Colony Ship will take almost a third of your planet's total resources, plus the entire industrial output of the planet for thirty years. It's a big boat.
Building Ships
You can build ships at any of your colonies. To do this, click on the planet where you want to build ships and select "Build/Design Shps..." from the "Ships" menu or just double-chck on the planet. A big dialog will pop up. This dialog lets you both build ships and design new ship types.
On the left side of the dialog is a list of the available ship types. If those don't suit your taste, you can design a new class by playing with the scroll bars in the lower right.
Moving Ships
To move a fleet, just click and drag from the planet where it is to where you want it to go. If you can reach, you'll see an arrow pointing along the route your fleet will take. When you let up the mouse, you'll hear a "Hyahh!" sound, letting you know that the course is set. When you end the turn, the ship will go along its way.
If the fleet can't reach the star you've dragged to, the path will be shown by a dotted gray line. If the fleet has enough fuel to go to the star you've selected and come back, the path will be a double-pointed arrow.
To make a fleet hold still, or cancel its move, click on the fleet's planet and hold it for a second. When you've done it right, you'll bear a "Whoa!" sound when you let up the mouse.
If you have more than one fleet at a planet, you can choose the fleet to move by clicking on the fleet's name in the Budget Information. When a fleet has a destination, and is planning to move when you end the turn, the fleet name will be bold to let you know. Hitting the TAB key will automatically select the next fleet at that planet.
A fleet will automatically refuel any time it goes to a planet you or your allies own. If a fleet doesn't have enough fuel to leave, you can send a Colony Ship to that planet, colonize it for a turn, and then have everybody leave. OR, thanks to version 4.0, you can just send a Tanker.
A fleet's course can't be changed while it's between planets窶妬n hyperspace there's no turning back.
Organizing Fleets
Sometimes you may want to divide a fleet into pieces or put several fleets together. To do this, select "Organize Fleets...", from the "Ships" menu. Then click and drag the ships around until they're distributed the way you want them. Sorry, a fleet can only contain ships of the same type (to reduce file size).
Scrapping Fleets and Ships
As the game progresses, you'll find that metal is scarce and your obsolete ships are next to useless. You may want to get rid of some of your older vessels. You can regain 75% of the metal from a fleet at your colonies by scrapping the fleet (select "Scrap Current Fleet" from the "Ships" menu). Or you can scrap an entire ship type (click on "Scrap This Type" for a specific type in the "Ships ..." Dialog).
When you mark a ship type or fleet for scrapping, it doesn't scrap it until you end the turn. If you get cold feet before then, you can just push the "Don't Scrap Type" button in the "Ships..." dialog, or select "Don't Scrap Fleet"from the "Ships" menu.
If you only want to scrap part of a fleet, use the "Organize Fleets..." dialog to divide the fleet into those you want to keep and those you want to scrap.
When you scrap ships, if they're over a colony, the metal will just instantly go into your global supply, and you can use it immediately. If you don't own the planet the ships are over, the metal will fall down onto the planet. The next person to colonize it can then mine the metal from your scrapped ships.
Designing Ships
This is possibly the coolest part of the game. As your technology increases, you'll want to start building more advanced ships using these new technologies. It's easy. Just set tech levels the way you want your new type to be in the "Build/design Ships..." dialog. You just move the scroll bars around to set the qualities of the new ship. (The rightmost side of the scroll bar is always whatever your current Tech level is.) When you've got your ship the way you want it, just build one (by pressing the " + " button) and the prototype will automatically be designed and built.
There are four major classes of ships: Colony Ships, Satellites, Scouts, Fighters and Tankers.
Colony Ships
Colony ships carry people and colonize new stars for you. Colony Ships are incredibly expensive both in Money and Metal. Colony Ships cost so much that you'll want to build only a few of them. That, and because miniaturization doesn't do them much good, will mean that you probably won't want to use any Mini at all on your Colony Ships. Colony Ships are also the first thing the enemy will shoot at in a battle, so you'll want to be careful with them, too.
Satellites
Satellites are ships that don't have engines. That means that their Range is zero. Satellites are a cheap, effective means of defending your planets against enemy attack. Unfortunately, they can't move; they can only defend the planet where they're built. Satellites are much smaller than normal ships, so it doesn't take as many shots to destroy them. Of course, it does take nearly as much metal to build Satellites as Fighters, either.
When a planet has Satellites, it'll have a ring around it in the Star Map.
Scouts and Figbters
Scouts and Fighters are your basic ships. The difference between scouts and fighters is a trade-off between Engines and Weapons. Scouts can have a Range two units higher than your Range Tech. Unfortunately, their maximum Weapon and Shield Tech is one lower than your current levels. This makes Scouts ideal for exploration, but not too good at combat.
Spaceward Ho! will automatically put each Scout into its very own fleet, so it can independently go flying off to explore. Fighters automatically clump into one group.
Tankers
Tankers can be used to refuel other ships. They are expensive and use lots of metal, but not compared to building a Colony Ship.
Dreadnaughts
Dreadnaughts are incredibly powerful ships of destruction. You'll need to save up for one of these guys.
Development Cost
It costs more to build the prototype of a new ship type than ones that come after窶妬t takes effort to work the kinks out and do testing. This is especially true of ships with high miniaturization. Just keep in mind that the development cost is a one time thing associated with every new ship type.
Outland's version of Spaceward Ho! includes all the features of the stand-alone game, with the addition of a lobby to set up matches. Oh yeah, there's also player rankings, a Hall of Fame, and, best yet, real people to play against and talk at. See ...
