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The Game of Celestial Caesars Amiga Version 1.11 by Tony L Belding INSTALLATION Put the game program wherever you like, be it floppy, hard drive, or whatever. You can run the game from CLI or Workbench. BACKGROUND For zillions of years the galaxy has been at peace, ruled by the all-powerful Empire. Suddenly, the Empire has collapsed for No Apparent Reason. Unfortunately, the Emperor had an official monopoly on all star-maps and navigational charts. The charts have all been destroyed by Vandals, in protest against the Great Proclamation of Fried Eggs (which, some suggest, may have triggered the empire's collapse; others say the Empire fell because the Emperor was nutty as a fruitcake...). You, as leader of your planet, must send ships to explore the galaxy, conquer other worlds, rebuild the Empire, and secure your own monopoly on star-maps and navigational charts. Of course, the other players will be trying to do the same! GAME TURN SUMMARY Each player in turn moves his ships on the map screen. Commands are given in secret, so make sure your opponent isn't peeking over your shoulder. When all the players have given their orders, they gather to observe the movement and battle phase of the game, where combat takes place. After combat, the next round begins at the command phase again. STARTING A GAME When you select `New Game' from the main menu, a requestor appears with options for you to choose. The options selected here will remain in effect for the course of the game. They are: Play by file-mail? When this option is selected, the game is automatically saved after each player makes his move. Then you send the file on to the next player, by whatever means is convenient. The file will have an AmigaDOS filenote attached to remind you who is up next. Show enemy ships? When this is selected, hostile ships will appear on your map display in red. Otherwise they will not be visible. This option will give the earlier players a subtle advantage over later ones, since they can see ships before they are moved into warp. For a completely fair game, leave this option off. It is mainly useful for beginners. Use hidden movement? When selected, the movement and battle report will show only ships arriving where there is combat. If it is not selected, the report will show all ship arrivals. Use planetary defense shields? This gives you the option of turning on shields to protect your planets. Unfortunately, your planets will not produce any ships when the shields are running. You must only use them where you strongly feel you will be attacked. Limit neutral planet ship production? When set, neutral planets will halt production after building 30 ships. Otherwise, they will keep building ships until the end of the game. Wrap around edges of map? Normally, there is no way for ships to cross the boundaries of the galaxy map. With this option they can do so, passing from one edge to the opposite. But this option also reduces ships' range to only two sectors per turn, down from the normal three. Allow planets to be destroyed? With this option, planets can take damage from battles fought over them. If the planet's industry or technology is reduced to zero, the planet will be utterly destroyed; only an asteroid field is left to mark its passing. How many players this game? The game can can support up to nine players. They can be any combination of human or computer controlled. How many turns will the game last? The minimum is five, the maximum 99. Fifteen or twenty turns generally make for a good game. After setting these options to your whim, you will be presented with several smaller requestors, one at a time. Each of these wants information for a single player. You must enter each player's name and select the `HUMAN' or `COMPUTER' gadget. SECURITY CHECKS When playing by file-mail, your map will be protected by a password. On the first turn the game will ask you for a four-character password. At the beginning of every turn from there on out, you will have to re- enter the password. This will prevent other players from loading in your battle map and examining it. Do not lose or forget your password! You can't continue the game without it. ENTERING YOUR MOVE Each player in turn will be called to his command post. At this time the other players must turn away while you enter your orders. First you must select an origin sector. Simply click your mouse pointer on any sector controlled by you: any sector with a green icon. That sector will be highlighted in white. Now you must select a destination sector, which may or may not be one that you control. The destination will be highlighted in violet. If you have selected the very same sector as both origin and destination, the game will present you with a dialog box full of useful information about that sector. It will show the tech level, industry rating, and so forth (more on these things later). You can also use the gadgets to turn the sector's defensive shields on or off, if it has any. When you select two different sectors, the same dialog box will appear, but it will allow extra functions. The information it shows pertains to the origin sector only. You can still turn shields on or off, and now you can also send ships. Whatever value is in the number gadget when the box is closed is the number of ships that will be sent. You can type a value into the gadget directly, or use the two arrow gadgets to adjust it. The requestor will not send more ships than are available in the sector. Ships sent do not arrive immediately! They must go through warp. Whenever you send ships, the box will show an ETA number. This is how many turns the ships will take to reach their destination. After sending ships, the destination sector will remain highlighted, just as a reminder of what you did there. Attacks will be marked in red, fleet movements in yellow. Whenever you have moved as many ships as you wish (or all you've got), you should end your turn by selecting `End Turn' from the other menu. LOADING AND SAVING GAMES The menu items are available to load or save games. If you are running the game under Workbench 2, an ASL file selector will appear for these functions. Otherwise the game will automatically use the name "CELEST.GAME" for all file operations. When you are playing in file-mail mode, the game will always save automatically at the end of your command turn. MOVEMENT & BATTLE After all the players have entered their moves, they are called together for the movement and battle report. When playing by file- mail, the report will appear for each player before he enters his move, showing the results of the previous turn. During this phase of the game, the fleets arrive at their destinations. As each one arrives, the location is shown and the results posted in the message area at the top of the screen. Sectors will be highlighted in different colors depending on the nature of the encounter: VIOLET - A single ship arrived, meeting no resistance. This will not appear if the `hidden movement' option is selected. ORANGE - A single ship arrived, meeting some resistance. YELLOW - A fleet arrived, meeting no resistance. This will not appear if `hidden movement' is selected. RED - A fleet arrived, meeting some resistance. GREEN - A fleet arrived to reinforce a friendly sector. This will not appear if `hidden movement' is selected. COMBAT RATING Ships are produced by planets, and the quality of the ships will naturally depend on the Technology Level (TL) of the planet. The effectiveness of a ship in combat is expressed as a Combat Rating (CR). Each point of TL on a planet is worth 10 percentage points of CR for ships produced there. Thus, a planet with a TL of 4 will produce ships that have a CR of 40%. Whenever two fleets of ships are combined into one, the CR of the resulting fleet is a weighted average of the two values. THE NATURE OF COMBAT Whenever fleets engage in combat, certain rules determine the outcome. A battle is fought in rounds. During a round, each ship fires one shot. Each shot has a chance to hit equalling the CR of the ship firing it. Thus, a fleet of 20 ships with a CR of 50% should be expected to achieve 10 hits, on the average. At the end of the round, the hits are totalled and that number of ships are removed from the opposing side. Then, if ships still remain in both fleets, another round begins. This continues until one side is eradicated. A shielded position gives the defender a special advantage, depending on the TL of the sector. Each point of TL will deflect 10% of the attackers shots. Thus, a planet with a TL of 6 will deflect 60% of the attacker's shots, provided the shield is turned on. Asteroids do not have shields, but they are naturally easy to defend. For game purposes, they are considered to have a shield strength of 20%. Note that this will apply even when `defensive shields' was not selected as an option. In such a game, asteroid fields are the only sectors with any defensive strength. Because of the way combat is handled, large fleets do much more damage than small ones. Massing your ships for an attack is important. If you send several small fleets against an enemy position, they will likely be cut up piecemeal. WHY SHIPS SOMETIMES RETREAT A morale rating is stored for each player. At the beginning of the game, morale is set to 40%. During the course of the game, it can climb as high as 80% or fall to zero. Morale affects the chance that ships will retreat. Successfully attacking a planet increases your morale by 10 points. Failing to take a planet results in a 10-pt loss of morale. When attacking a neutral planet, your morale will not change by more than 5 points. Whenever a fleet retreats, there is a 15 point morale penalty. A fleet of only a single ship is considered a scout, and suffers no penalty for retreating. An attacking fleet will never retreat unless outnumbered. Even then, the base chance is only 25%. That will double if the fleet is outnumbered two-to-one or more. It will double again if the sector is protected by a shield. The game program will `roll' against the base value, but even if the roll fails, the ships might not retreat. They must still roll against the attacker's current morale value. If both rolls fail, the fleet will retreat. The exeception is scout ships. These will always retreat if outnumbered, but incur no morale penalty for doing so. A fleet that retreats will return to the sector it originally came from. It will usually take an extra turn to arrive, beyond the normal ETA for that distance. You have no way to directly determine your morale value. You must estimate it from your own performance in the game. Keep in mind that ships never retreat if they are not outnumbered. So, when you are doing badly, it is more important than ever to mass your forces. SCORE & WINNING Each player's score is calculated as follows: 500 pts for each planet owned 150 pts for each asteroid field owned 50 pts for each sector explored 5 pts for each ship owned The winner is the player with the highest score at the end of the game. STRATEGY HINTS Try to scarf up neutral planets as quickly as possible in the first few turns of the game, while they are sitting ducks. The options selected at the beginning of the game have a great impact on game play. When production is limited on neutral worlds, they will make easy targets. Capture all the neutral worlds you can find before attacking your enemies. But when production is not limited, neutral worlds eventually become hard targets to crack. Under these conditions attacking your enemies is more profitable. When shields are available, use them sparingly. Typically, you will not use them often, but they can be a life saver on special occaisions. You can easily rack up big points for area explored. Sometimes this factor decides the game. The computer is a fairly good player, but has two weaknesses. Unlike many aggressive humans, it will never strip its defenses to assemble an attack fleet. Furthermore, it usually does not counterattack aggressively when invaded, especially when its empire is small. Rather it tends to reinforce its new front line and dig in. When the computer DOES go on the offensive, it uses overwhelming force. Try to strike first and keep it on the defense. Big fleets win. Mass your ships. HISTORY The game of Celestial Caesars was originally written by Jack Hardy, and originated in the early days of the Atari ST computer. Along with Megaroids, it was one of the first freeware games for the ST. The Amiga version has some significant improvements over the ST version. The biggest addition is the file-mail mode. The computer now plays a stronger game than before, and can run multiple opponents. Also new are: asteroids, morale checks, tech levels, combat ratings, the wrap-around map option, destroy planets option, and shields that can be switched on and off. Only Amiga makes it possible! This is where I usually give my address and ask other Amiga users to write to me. Nobody ever does, so what's the point? Oh, well, here it is anyway: Tony L Belding PO Box 512 Hamilton, TX 76531 PS: My apologies to those who tried running earlier versions under AmigaDOS 1.2. When I wrote the program, I was under the mistaken impression that 1.2 was obsolete, so I told the game to abort when run on a 1.2 system! Version 1.11 works on AmigaDOS 1.2 through 2.04 (and presumably beyond).