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Conquest -------- COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Conquest is Copyright © 1990 by W. Michael Bryant All rights reserved. This software is provided AS IS. No warranties or guarantees are expressed or implied. Michael Bryant cannot be held responsible for ANY problems arising from the use of this software; use at your own risk. ======================================================================= Please see the end of this file for the latest update notes ======================================================================= BACKGROUND: This program has been in the works for quite some time now. It was originally inspired by a program on the Radio Shack CoCo. My first version of this program was called Conquest and was written in BASIC. Next came a version that ran on a PDP 11/45, then finally this version on the Amiga. The program has grown quite a bit since its first conception. Unforunately, it has taken so long to get this program done for the Amiga that other games called CONQUEST have sprung up. For a while, this game was renamed to "Dominion", but that still didn't feel quite right. For now the game is called "Lore of Conquest", if there are any suggestions for names, let me know. Special thanks to John Nowak who created the original version of the combat system for Conquest. INTRODUCTION: Conquest is a war game similiar in concept to the board game Risk. You are the lord of an entire world, destined to rule the galaxy. Some worlds are virgin fruits, ready for you to colonize. Some worlds have natives who do not wish to accept your rule, these you must conquer for they will yield more valuable resources. As you claim the galaxy you will find that you are not the only one extending your dominion. This is a two-player game. Be prepared to defend yourself and take what is yours! ---------------- The following instructions give only a brief description of game play. Experiment with the program and find out how the program runs and what strategies will lead you to victory! PLAYING THE GAME: Lore of Conquest is a two player game where each player secretly enters their moves for each turn. When it is started, you are asked for each player's name and the number of turns you wish to play. Next, the galaxy map will be displayed and each player will be asked to select their homeworld. Available worlds will be outlined. Select your homeworld by clicking on the letter of the world. The game has now started. At the beginning of each turn you will be displayed your income for the turn. You earn income for each world that you control. Each world has a class value assigned to it. The higher the class, the more income the world generates. A homeworld is a minimum of class 7. After closing the income window you will see the galaxy map and command window. On the galaxy map you will see the first letter of each planet's name, and a number or a question mark next to it. The number indicates the class of the world. A question mark indicates that the world has yet to be explored. You need ships in order to explore and conquer other worlds. Select "Buy Ships" from the command window. The following are the types of ships available: Scout - Fastest ship. Non-combative. Flies past one or more worlds, to gather information on each. Cruiser - Fast ship. Average fighter, but cheap. MissileShip - Average speed. Excellent fighter but must wait to reload every other turn. Dreadnought - Big, slow, awesome battleship. Best fighter, best defender. Railship - Slowest. A High-Tech piece of hardware. A huge flying cannon that will automatically destroy one other ship in reverse order. ** More on this later. Send ships to other planets using the "Launch Fleet" command. Fleets of ships will only move as fast as the slowest ship. If you wish to launch a scout use the menu command "Launch Scout". Scouts can scan multiple planets before finally landing on one. They can be invaluable for keeping track of enemy fleets. When more than one enemy fleet is present on a planet, combat occurs. The offensive capabilities for the entire enemy fleet are compared to the defensive capabilities of your fleet. This determines how many casualities you will sustain. Casualties will be first removed from ships in the following order: Cruisers, MissileShips, Dreadnoughts, Railships This means that all casualties will be taken from cruisers until none are left, then from missileships, and so forth. Railships are a special case. These ships can attack from long range and destroy a ship with a single shot from their massive cannon. These ships can only fire once a turn but destroy ships in the reverse order of normal casualties: Railships, Dreadnoughts, MissileShips, Cruisers This means that after one turn of combat only one side will still have any railships in combat. These ships can be an extreme strategic advantage. Planets of class 4, 5, or 6 will have natives. These natives when left alone will slowly build ships of their own. A player discovering a class 6 planet late in the game might find a mighty native fleet to contend with! All planets generate income each turn. If you own the planet, you get all the income stored for the planet. It is therefore a stategic advantage to conquer the natives before your opponent does. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- There are many stategies and finer points to this game. If you can't seem to figure out the game, or have questions about it, send me a letter at the address below or contact me on BIX as mikebryant. If you like this program and would to show your appreciation, send me a letter. If you REALLY like the program, send me money! I can be reached at: Mike Bryant 37 Adna Road Bristol, CT 06010 This program has been evolving for a number of years now. Please feel free to send any comments or wishes for enhancements for future versions. ======================================================================== 5-21-90 Release of version 1.0 of Lore of Conquest Lots of changes with this release. Special thanks to Doug Walker (DJWalker on BIX) for the suggestions. New with this version of Conquest are: Ability to scrap planets. If you are going to lose a planet, you have the ability to lower the planet a class level. You get 15 credits per class of the planet for scrapping the planet. It can also be used when you REALLY need some extra cash. Since it costs 25 credits to raise the planet up one level, this is not a recommended option with the exception of dire emergencies. Distance command. You can now get the time it will take a fleet to travel from one planet to another. This was (and is) built into the launch ship requester but you had to have bought the ship in order to see how long it took to get somewhere. The distance command doesn't have this problem. Intelligence History. Intelligence on past battle reports now goes back to the last three events. This will allow you to get a better grasp on what is happening to a specific planet than the old 1 level intelligence report. Stargates have been improved! The old version of stargates were not even documented in this file. (Sorry.) Stargates allow you to travel from gate to another in just 3 turns! It doesn't matter what type of ship you send through the gate, three turns later it comes out the other end. To use a gate you must own both ends of it. To build a gate you must have a class 9 planet as your homeworld. Each gate costs 100 credits. Battle report has been revised. I've changed the format of the report to better display important information. Battles will have Start Fleet, Casualties, and Survivors listed so you don't have to do any math in your head. The Next and Prev gadgets also enable or disable depending on the available information. The command screen has a new look. Hopefully it is more attractive that the previous version. Mail has been fixed so that messages don't get lost from turn to turn. Note that Mail is NOT saved with a save game command. There is now a tally command to compare two players at the end of the game. When you quit the game you will be asked if you want to see the final tally. Traditionally when I end a game of Conquest, we agree to watch each others screen for the last move to see what lands. The tally command is a quick display to see who has more territory and ships. Well, that's about all for now. If you have any suggestions for the game, send me a letter or leave me E-Mail on BIX to MikeBryant. ---------------- In the future... I plan on adding a two player feature to Conquest that allows you hook two Amigas up via DNET and play Conquest head-to-head. This mean that while you are entering your moves, your opponent can do the same thing. No more waiting!!! Considering that I only have 1 Amiga at the present, this feature may be a while. Anyone interested in computer opponents? I'm considering splitting the current Conquest screen into 4 quadrants. You could play 1 to 4 people with computer opponents filling in the empty slots. ======================================================================== 9-30-90 Release of Lore of Conquest 1.1 Thanks to Mark Burton on BIX for his many suggestions to enhance this version! With this version I upgraded to SAS/C 5.10. This was a rather painful process because it reveals several shortcomming of the software design. (Bad habits from Microsoft Windows programming... ;( ) Anyways, the new system promises to be much more robust and consistent. Scraping planets has been revised. You now get 15 credits per level that you scrap. You can only scrap your own planets. You can only scrap your home down to class 7. Scraping now takes time. You get the money right away, but the planet will be unavailable to be scrapped again for (class / 2) + 1 turns. This is to prevent the wholesale scraping of the entire universe just to buy a stargate or other such nonsense. You can now save the status of Conquest at any time. This means that you are able to make a move, save the game, and post the file on a BBS. Your friend can download the file, make his move, save the game, and post it back. This might make for some long games, but should allow almost anyone with a modem to play. (I considered direct modem support for Conquest but considering that most of my games take 4-6 hours to play...) Save files are 46448 bytes long. LHARC, however will compress them 97% to 1619 bytes!!! The size of the save file will not change as you play the game. The data within it, though will change. You mileage may vary. Other quick notes: Stargates will only be used if they shorten distance. Scouts now show up to 10 destinations in the hyperspace list. Scounts also show destination list as you select planets to scan. Current home planet, and bank balance are on the main screen. I've included some short cut keys for main menu commands: T Tally S Launch Scouts D Distance I Intelligence The "Confirm" requester can also be answered with "Y" or "N". The default names for the game are pseudonyms for a friend and myself. (I'm Alexis.) If you really find this annoying, I can change the default names to something else... ** REMEMBER : SEND ME YOUR COMMENTS ON THIS GAME ** ======================================================================== 11-5-90 Release of Lore of Conquest 1.1a Minor bug fixes and a few enhancements. Although you were able to save a game of Conquest at the end of either player's turn, there was no way to select home planets without both players being present. Ooops! Now you can select SAVE GAME from the menu after the first player selects his home planet. (The first player will still have to enter the names for both the players.) Now the Tally command will display a SCORE! For those games that are close, you can now declare a true winner. (For those whose game ends before utterly exterminating their opponent.) Scoring works as follows: Each planet you own adds to your score: Class * Class * 10 All the ships you own: Cost * Number of Each Ship Type / 10 As you can see, it really pays to hold high class planets. Ships don't count very much in your score but do add a little bit. Scrapping planets will hurt a bit more now... Please feel free to post this file to any local BBS's you wish. I'd be happy to see it spread around! Thanks. --Mike B. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11-7-90 Release of Lore of Conquest 1.1b Ooops. A minor fix to this version to allow players to start the game correctly. Now the second player selects a home world first. When the first player is asked to pick his world, you can save the game to disk. When the other player starts the game he can choose his homeworld and then begin his first turn. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12-22-90 Release of Lore of Conquest 1.2 Discovered a bug in the SAS/C compiler that was generating wild memory writes. If you found that Lore of Conquest crashes your system or caused bizarre behavior, this bug was probably the cause. Fortunately the nice people at SAS fixed the compiler as soon as I reported the problem. I enhanced the hyperspace listing so that the list is sorted by turn number automatically. Ships that arrive next turn are highlighted even if you use Turn or Destination listing options. You also should not ever see a blank page. (I now count the number of entries before displaying the page so if the page is full but there are no entries for the next page, the window closes when you click on More.) Stargates are not revealed on hyperspace listings, or planet listings unless you own the planet. (Previously, you could simply send a ship to a planet to find out if it had a stargate or not.) Battle reports will now correctly report if a stargate is on a planet or not. Careful use of Intelligence can help you determine when a stargate appeared on a planet. (Scouts can detect a stargate on a scan.) Just for flavor, I've added a signature to all mail messages. Mail messages are saved to disk so you can send messages via saved games. In addition to drawing a border around planets that have battle reports for the current turn, I've color coded those borders so you can easily recognize what is going on around the entire screen. White = Victory / Re-enforcements / Colonization Blue = Rebellion Green = Scouting Report Cyan = Battle Loss Yellow = Battle in progress For anyone who desires a "secure" game, you can specify the use of passwords for each player. On the startup screen where you specify the player names and game length, there is a button called "Password:". Next to it is the text "Don't Use" or "Do Use". Clicking on the button will toggle this text. If passwords are in use, the user has to enter in a password at the start of each turn. I imagine that this will never be used in a "live" game, however if you want to play via E-Mail it makes sure that your opponent isn't tempted to peek at your screen. Menus have been cleaned up a bit. There are other misc cosemetic bug fixes... I hope I've wrung the bugs out of this version. Sorry if the SAS bug caused any grief. I've also included a version number in the save game files so that the program can recognize what files it can or can't load due to revision changes. This version is incompatible with previously saved games. (Hopefully I'll run out of things to add to the data structure and the save format won't change again.) --Mike B. 2-10-91 Release of version 1.3 of Conquest This release adds a few features and fixes a few minor bugs in the system. You are now able to save or quit the game at each player's "Ready" screen. This means that in case you really meant to save the game but hit End Turn out of habit, all is not lost. It also allows you a graceful way to exit if you are playing a game and forget the password. A minor bug where scouts did not use stargates if they were the first destination has been fixed. Menus are now approriately enabled and disabled when starting the game. (It's amazing that the Amiga Rom kernal manual doesn't tell you how to use the OnMenu()/OffMenu() functions! Lucky I found a sample program.) Thanks to Mark Burton for his help in testing the play-by-mail feature of Conquest. Hopefully we'll even finish a game on BIX someday. Keep those shareware donations rolling in! To date I have received a whopping total of THREE! ;^)