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1988-01-04
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W A R P A T T A C K
Special for the Bennetts and Ron Wheeler
Warp Attack is a strategy simulation for microcomputers
running the MS-DOS operating system. The program is based on a
game released by AH Microcomputer Games (1) in 1981 called
GALAXY. The game GALAXY was written for the Apple II (2), Atari,
Commodore PET, and TRS-80 Models I/III. Since they never
released a version for the MS-DOS world, I do not think that they
are interested in pursuing the copyright issue. The game WARP
ATTACK is an original work, so I think that they could only sue
me for "look and feel" infringements, anyway, something that only
one huge software company has had the nerve to do!
The object of WARP ATTACK is to control the known galaxy.
In this case, the galaxy is a 24 by 40 grid of locations, each
one of which may or may not contain a star system. One person
can play against the computer or two to six can compete against
each other and the computer. Each star system has a production
potential that indicates how many new battle cruisers that system
will be able to build for its owner each year, or game turn.
In a single player game, the challenge is to conquer the
entire galaxy in 200 years, or turns. This is not too difficult
at all! In fact, it is possible to end the game in less that 100
turns even with all 54 systems in the game and rebuilding ships
for defensive use. The goal here is to take the entire map as
efficiently as possible in the fewest number of years. This
"lowest number" will vary depending on the number of systems you
decide to use, whether they build defensive battle cruisers or
not, and the skill level of the player.
In a multi-player scenario, the goal is to control more star
systems than any other player at the games end. This factor
alone determines who wins! In other words, it is not how good
the systems you occupy are, but how many of them you can hold!
------------------------
Usage: WARP [/C][/L][/S][/P][/D]
To load the game, enter WARP at the DOS prompt for the
standard game.
If the characters /C are added to the DOS command line
(i.e., WARP /C), color will be enabled. This is a nice
enhancement to the game if your hardware will support it. This
program uses only character graphics, a graphics card is not
required. The color option can also be toggled from an internal
menu after the game is started.
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The /L switch will turn on logging for the game. This will
cause two data files to be opened on the currently logged drive
and path called WARP.ACT and WARP.EVN. WARP.ACT will become a
text file containing all ACTIONS taken by the players in the
game, such as number of ships sent, where to, and when. WARP.EVN
will become a text file containing all EVENTS, or combat
resolutions, during the game. This file will contain information
about the aggressor, defender, size of forces, system in
contention, year, and the outcome. If you don't have much room
on the drive or have a slow floppy system, you might not want to
use this option.
The /S option tell the computer that you want to play a SOLO
game. This will assume 1 player, 55 worlds including the Black
Hole, rebuilding systems, and a 200 year game. Note that this is
the ONLY way to get more than 54 systems in a game!
The /P switch allows players to print parts of their disk
logs while in the game. This takes some of the mental work out
of the game and may be considered "cheating" by tournament
players. Note that this option REQUIRES the action of the /L
switch, and thus will activate it for you if you use the /P
without the /L.
/D allows players to shell to DOS during the game. I can
not point out any particularly good reason to have this available
other than that I have desperately needed it for various minor
reasons in the past! Note that if logging is active (/L) this
will allow your enemies to TYPE the WARP.ACT file and learn your
fleet actions!
At this time, you will see the startup banner, and after a
short delay, the startup choices. I will describe those one by
one now:
(1) This is for the number of players in the game, one to
six are allowed. This is pretty self-explanatory.
(2) Number of star systems you want to use in the game.
Allowable limits are five to fifty-four. Each player gets one
system to use as home base at the beginning of the game, so you
cannot use five systems in a six player game!
(3) Do you want to use the "Black Hole" or not? The "Black
Hole" is a star represented by the character "." (Period, ASCII
46, etc.) that will not show up on the map! There is no way to
determine its location until you conquer it, and even then only
the occupying player will be able to see it on his map. It is
probably a good idea to answer "N" to this prompt until you are
comfortable with the game and strategy used in playing it.
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(4) Number of turns in the game. If you are playing a
single-player scenario, you will not even see this, the computer
will assume 200 (the maximum). You can specify from 1 to 200
years, or just hit "ENTER". The latter will generate a random
number of years for the game using a strange algorithm that I am
not going to reveal. There is a file included in this package
called YEARS.TXT that shows the year number, number of "hits",
and a bar graph showing relative number of hits during a 25,000
game sample run. If you don't have the file, the algorithm tends
to have games end in two time periods clumped around 65 and 105
years. Having a random number of years in a multi-player game
adds some interesting elements to the overall strategy of play!
(5) Rebuilding systems: The unoccupied star system will NOT
build ships for defensive purposes unless you answer "Y" here.
"N" gives you a faster game, "Y" gives you a tougher, more
realistic setup.
(6) Names of the players. This must be one to four ASCII
characters. If you just hit "ENTER", default names will be
assigned.
At this point, the computer will generate and display a map
for player approval. If any players object to the prospective
setup, answer "N" to the prompt and another map will be built.
And another, and another, etc. We want EVERYONE to be happy with
the setup that WARP ATTACK starts with! Note that having two
player base systems close by will throw them into conflict (or a
treaty) much earlier!
After the map is approved, the computer determines
production factors and base number of defensive ships for all
systems. For non-occupied systems this is random. For player
base systems, the production factor will be 10 battle
cruisers/turn (pretty good!) with the number of initial battle
cruisers based on the distance from that system to every other
system on the map. In effect, if you in the corner you will get
more ships...you will need them!
------------------------
Now the main menu. If you have a line printer attached to
LPT1:, you can use the Print Maps option to make hard copy maps
for all players. You can change the number of years in the game,
let one player drop out, or end the game for everyone. If you
started in the wrong color mode here is where you can change it!
When you are ready, take the first option to go to command entry.
------------------------
3
At command entry, you are shown the current status of all
occupied systems in the game. A player is selected at random to
enter commands first. The entry will require a system to send
battle cruisers from, a destination system, and the number of
ships to be sent. This information WILL NOT appear on the screen
during entry. You do not want the person sitting next to you to
know that you've just launched everything you have at his home
system, after all! You are free to enter as many command as you
wish. The computer will not allow you to send battle cruisers
from a system you do not occupy or to send more ships than you
have there. As ships are sent, the display will NOT reflect the
change. This is to prevent your opponents from finding out how
many battle cruisers per fleet you are launching. Remember to
keep track of the ships "really" there in your head during your
turn!
------------------------
The bottom of the screen show the definition of the five
function keys:
[F1] returns you to the main menu,
[F2] passes the command entry screen to the next player for
this turn,
[F3] displays a map showing possession of systems,
[F4] shows a time and distance calculator (with invisible
entry for aforementioned reasons),
[F5] shows the current system and production statistics for
the game, and
[F6] displays a sample Lotus 1-2-3 (3) screen in case the
boss walks in and wants to know what you are doing playing WARP
ATTACK when you are supposed to be projecting the annual rainfall
in Johannesburg, South Africa, or something like that! To return
to the game from this screen press the "Q" key.
[F7] This key sends ALL SHIPS NOT COMMITTED EARLIER IN THE
TURN to the system of your choice. It also passes entry to the
next player, since you don't have any ships left!
[F8] Hi-Tech! The foremost scientist of your empire, Dr.
Edward van Chucklehead, has discovered a drive that makes your
ships go faster then they do now -- twice as fast! However,
there is a drawback...The ships fitted with this type of engine
do not have a great survival rate while traveling through
hyperspace. If you press this key, the next fleet you send will
be fitted with the "Crazy Eddie" drive and will get there in half
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the time. You will lose between 25% and 75% of the fleet in
transit. The exact loss is unpredictable, do use this ONLY if
you have to have ships there fast and ONLY if you do no care
about massive losses!
[F9] If the /P switch was used on the command line to load
the program, this will print a short on an attacked line printer.
It will contain information about future events scheduled for the
player in question and all past combat events for the player.
[F10] This will allow the player to shell to DOS if the /D
switch was on the command line. Return to the directory that
WARP was called from and type EXIT to return to the game.
After all players have entered their commands and pressed
[F2] to pass the turn, production changes are checked. Each
system stands about a two percent chance of being hit by this
each year. The production factor may go up or down my one or two
points at a time. Base systems cannot drop below 10 battle
cruisers/year and NO system may have its production drop below 0
battle cruisers/year.
------------------------
Now combat is resolved! An internal calender is checked to
see what fleets are due to arrive. The first fleet movement for
the year is considered and one of three things can happen:
(1) If the system being attacked has NO defensive ships, the
attackers waltz right in and set up shop!
(2) If the system is already controlled by the attacker, the
ships are treated as reinforcements and added to the armada of
ships already guarding the system.
(3) If the defender is NOT the same as the attacker and HAS
defensive battle cruisers (this is usually the case, by the way)
combat occurs. Random gunnery factors are determined for both
fleets and attrition begins. Each battle cruiser in each fleet
get to fire once, their kill accuracy depending on the fleet
gunnery factor. The defending fleet ALWAYS gets to fire first,
so send large enough attack forces to allow for this. The
opportunity to fire passes back and forth until one player has no
ships left. This player is then the owner of the system.
At this time the internal event calender is checked for any
more actions in the current turn. If there are none, control
passes back to the command entry screen which will reflect all
changes made by fleet actions during the current year. The game
continues this way until the number of years in the game is
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complete. The winner is the player with the greatest number of
systems when this happens.
N O T E S, H I N T S, A N D T R I C K S
If you just want to know how many battle cruisers are in a
computer-held system, just send one ship! Sure, the "scout" will
get eaten for lunch (most of the time, see situation 1 under
combat resolution above!), but the combat screen will show you
how many defending ships killed him. Likewise, if you are
playing with rebuilding systems, send two single battle cruisers
on consecutive years. Note the number of defending ships each
year, do the subtraction, and you have the production factor of
the mystery star system!
As fleet actions are entered into the computer, they fall
into event slots in the internal calender. Suppose that you have
systems "A" and "B", each six years distant from system "C". If
you launch 4 battle cruisers from "A" and then 400 from "B", the
4 from "A" WILL GET THERE FIRST! The importance of NOT doing
this will become apparent with game play.
Each fleet action is treated as a separate event slot entry.
If you send 200 battle cruisers from system "G" to system "R" and
then later during the same turn send 50 more, the computer will
resolve the combat as two separate attacks. To see the effect of
this, imagine the following: One fleet of twenty ships could take
a system with ten ships defending, but ten fleets of two ships
each could not. This is because the defending armada always gets
to fire first! The ten fleets of two battle cruisers each would
most likely never get a shot off, being destroyed as they popped
out of "hyperspace" in pairs.
The player who get to enter commands FIRST for a turn will
get his actions stored in the first available slots in the event
calendar. This is an advantage. This is why the order that
players enter their commands in is assigned randomly each year!
Ships travel about three light-years, or units, per turn.
You will develop a pretty good feel for how long a fleet will
take to arrive after playing the game a few times, but the on-
line Time/Distance Calculator is always available for reference.
If a player drops out of the game, all of his fleets in
movement are vaporized by the Giant Space Monsters from the
planet Anthrax. (It's not a very good name, is it?) Also,
ownership of all of said players systems revert to the computer
and are up for grabs again!
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Bear in mind that just because a player does not show any
systems on the yearly status display that he is out of the game.
It is possible that all of his battle cruisers (Say, 6845 of
them?) are loaded into the event calendar and are due to arrive
at you home system in the next few years! Then he will have a
system on the status display again!)
If you start a five or six player game with five or six
systems, respectively, and you opt to use the Black Hole, you
will have the last player starting from a system that only he can
see. Neat trick, huh?
Note that if you press the [F8] key for fast ships, then the
[F7] key to send all ships to a given system, ALL SHIPS SENT will
have the fast, unpredictable drive installed! You will get a lot
of ships there fast, but about the same number will perish in the
interstellar void! (Hee hee hee!)
------------------------
Revision History:
December 2 beta release: First official public release.
December 8 beta release: Added a feature that will
automatically end the game if it is a one player game and all
systems are held by the player. Thanks to John Francis
[71600,300] of Brooklyn, NY, for this suggestion! At the same
time, for similar reasons, I added code to skip the command entry
phase for players who do not currently hold any systems in a
multi-player scenario. (So don't worry folks! When your monster
fleet arrives and takes a system, you will get your command entry
turn back!) I modified the endgame routine to show the status of
all systems in the regular display format before showing the
final statistics. I also modified the endgame routine to line
print the total game situation in a more reasonable manner. I
changed the function that generates random game lengths and
included a file, YEARS.TXT, that shows year number, number of
"hits" out of 25,000, and a relative bar graph of this data.
Menu choices were added to restart the game with the SAME options
and to restart the game with NEW and DIFFERENT options. Thanks
to Ron Wheeler [76137,2463] of Garland, TX, for those last two.
(Ron is the guy that designed the Tholian ships for Star Fleet
Battles, if we've got any SFB players out there!) Numerous tiny
cosmetic changes were implemented with this release along with a
couple of decent nips and tucks to the source code. (Getting
LONG it is, yeess!)
December 15 beta release: As suggested by both Ron Wheeler
and John Francis, I added the [F7] key to send all ships not
committed to a given system. I expanded the F-Key menu at the
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bottom of the command entry screen to show [F6], [F7], and [F8].
I fixed a bug in the end-of-game situation printout. I added
code to allow /S on the command line to start a solo game without
all the questions. There was a chance that two systems could
occupy the same location before, i.e., a "binary" system. This
was deemed more trouble that it was worth and eliminated. As
suggested by Ron Wheeler, the year was added to the combat
screen. (This is useful for noting when scout ships arrive!) I
added code to allow a /L on the command line to turn on logging
to two text files on the currently logged disk drive. It was
made possible to use 55 systems in a solo game, and the screen
driver routine was re-written to enable this. There was the
possibility of losing the screen update when a player dropped out
of the game, this was fixed. The number of event slots was
increased from 300 to 500. I changed the name of YEARS.TXT, an
add-on file, to WARP.YRS, so in case other users like to
alphabetize their directories, like I do, it will not get lost.
I added code for the "Crazy Eddie", or Hi-Tech, drive.
Hopefully, this will be the last beta test release. There
have been lots of great ideas from players all over the United
States, and I've added several of them (ideas, not players) to
the program as space has permitted. If anyone has any other bugs
to report or suggestions to make, now is the time!
January 5 "special" release: Not publicly distributed, to
beta testers only. Code was added to support the two new command
line switches, /P and /D. The [F9] and [F10] keys were enabled
upon activation of these switches to allow printing parts of the
log or shelling to DOS. Ron Wheeler found that if a solo player
quit the game instead of ending it, the playerless game could go
on for years! This was fixed. Myron Bennett [76070,257] of
Cincinnati, OH, and his son found some major bugs in the routine
that prints the results. It seems that in games with 6, 7, 8, 9,
14, 14, 16, or 18 star systems the cursor positioning routine
could push it right off the right edge of the screen resulting in
a crashed program! Thanks, Myron! This one was an easy fix,
just something I had not thought of before.
------------------------
If you have questions, ideas, suggestions, a lot of spare
cash, or would like to report program bugs, please send mail to:
CLS
P.O. Box 200515
Arlington, TX 76006
8
Other means of contacting me are via CompuServe [76537,514],
StarText (204317), or my BBS, the MOCHINE, at (817) 461-6013.
This program is currently developed entirely in Microsoft
QuickBasic 4.0. Parts of it may go over to QuickC 1.0 in the
near future for speed and size purposes. When I am satisfied
that the program is pretty tight, I will release it as Shareware
and make the source code available to registered users, and all
that whatnot.
Enjoy!
Marc Nowell
January 4, 1988
_________________________________________________________________
1 Registered Trademark of The Avalon Hill Game Company,
Baltimore, Maryland.
2 Apple, Atari, Commodore, and TRS-80 are all Registered
Trademarks of their respective current or past manufacturers.
3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a Registered Trademark of Lotus Development
Corp.
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