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Galaxy G official homepage and player waiting list http://www.lochnet.com/49845/rec/games/pbm/galaxyg.htm Rules for Galaxy G Rules : February 1997 Adjustments made by: rko@industry.net Original Galaxy Copyright 1991-1992 by Russell Wallace Copyright 1993-1995 the Galaxy PBeM Development Group Copyright 1994-1995 Graeme Griffiths (HTML version) Copyright 1996, 1997 by Rko@industry.net Special thanks to Kev Davis. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction Galaxy G is a space wargame for several players (turn based, limited information). No special software needed to play. A game usually has somewhere between 10 and 80 players that can last 2-3 months or more, and one person to host the game. You design your own ships with numerical stats. These ships can transport cargo and colonize planets, or fight battles with your neighbours to take over their planets. Ships can be improved by technology research. You can wage limited wars and coalitions, and you can give ships to other players. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Galaxy The galaxy is circular shaped (for the sake of simplicity the third dimension is ignored) which contains a number of habitable planets or other astronomical objects. The size of the galaxy is given by the corners of the map. Your view of the locations of planets is limited to within 1 turn of a mass 1 probe. You can also trace back the location of planets from ships heading towards one of your planets. If you have an accurate name for a planet, you can send ships to it. Your view of other information is limited to the location of your ships. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Units Game units include: distance, population, goods, raw materials, ships, industrial ability, technology etc. Obvious later on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Industry Each inhabited planet has an industry level. This may not be greater than its population but may be less. The productive capacity of a planet is determined mostly by its industry and partly by its population. Each industry unit on a planet gives one production point, and every 4 population units over and above industry also give one production point. If a planet had industry 500 and population 1,000 it would generate 625 production points per turn. Production points can be spent on producing raw materials, building spaceships, building industry units, or researching an area of technology. Planets also produce extra population, but this does not cost production points. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Technology You have technology in the following areas: Drive, Weapons, Shields and Cargo. These levels can be increased by allocating production to research. The higher your sum of tech values, the harder it becomes to increase. Drive technology increases at half the rate as other technologies. If your current technology is less than other visible players, technology research costs less. Information of the technology values of other players are not given to you, except for cargo tech of ships in your view. Fractional increases of technology are immediately useful. If your tech goes up by 0.00001, it will be immediately noticed and recorded. Your tech sum = your drive tech + your weapons tech + your shields tech + your cargo tech Drive Tech = 2500 * (your tech sum) * (your drive tech / visible highest drive tech) Other Tech = 1250 * (your tech sum) * (your other tech / visible highest other tech) Technology research can be 'shared' or made easier by having a ship (mass 30 or greater) located in view of higher technology ships (mass 10 or greater) of other players. You will not be given the technology, but research of technology will cost you less. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Raw Materials Producing anything other than research requires raw materials as well as production points. Raw materials represent things like sheet steel, copper wire and wood and oil for conversion into plastics. Each planet may have a stockpile of raw materials and if present this will be used. If no stockpile exists, some production points will be allocated to producing raw materials. For example, suppose you allocate production at the start of the game to building spaceships. Since you start off with no raw material stockpiles, raw materials will have to be produced in order to build the spaceships. (To build spaceships requires an amount of raw materials equal to the total size of the ships built). This is completely invisible from your point of view, the only effect it will have is that spaceship production will be somewhat lower than you would otherwise expect. The only reason you need to know about materials at all is that some planets are better than others at producing them. Each planet has a Natural Resources attribute which indicates how rich it is in metal deposits, coal and oil etc. Planets high in Natural Resources can produce materials more cheaply. So if you colonize some planets with low Natural Resources you should dedicate your planets with high Natural Resources to producing materials and ship them to the other planets. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Population Each planet has a Size attribute. This is related not only to the planet's physical size but also to how much of it is mountains, desert or oceans, how suitable the climate is for agriculture etc. The planet's population can never be higher than its Size but may be lower. A planet's population increases by some amount every turn. Population increases beyond the planet's size are converted into colonists. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Colonists Population increases beyond a planet's size are converted into colonists. These are people stored in containers in deep freeze. Every 8 extra population units are converted into 1 unit of colonists. When colonists from a planet's stockpile are shipped to other planets which still have room for population growth, they are automatically thawed out into groups of 8 again and added to the planet's population. This is how uninhabited planets are colonized. (Note that colonist production is completely automatic, and consumes no production points.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Capital A planet's industry level is increased by the production of capital goods. These represent things like machine tools, computers and transport vehicles. To produce one unit of capital requires 5 production points and 1 unit of raw materials. If the planet's industry level is below its population it will then be increased by one unit. Otherwise the capital units will be stockpiled. If shipped to a planet whose industry level is below its population, that planet's industry level will be increased. This is useful for quickly building up the economy of a colony planet. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Designing Ships Galaxy allows you to design your own types of spaceships! To design a ship, you decide on a name and give numbers for the following: Drive - how powerful is its hyperdrive engine Attacks - how many rounds per fire (integer) Weapons - how powerful is each of its guns Shield - how powerful is its shield generator Cargo - how much cargo can it carry Some example types are: Drone 1 0 0 0 0 Fighter 1 1 1 1 0 Gunship 4 2 2 4 0 Destroyer 6 1 8 4 0 Cruiser 15 1 15 15 0 Battle Cruiser 30 3 10 30 0 Battleship 25 1 30 35 0 Battle Station 60 3 30 100 0 Orbital Fort 0 3 30 100 0 Space Gun 0 1 10 0 0 Freighter 8 0 0 2 10 Megafreighter 80 2 2 30 100 Support_scout 2.92 1 1.50 1.62 2.9500711 Forward_Fighter00 1.163333 3 1.245 1 0 Advance_Fighter00 3.49 3 1.245 1 0 Advance_Defense025 1 0 0 1 0 Advance_Defense050 2.346809 0 0 2.773501 0 Orbital_Defense031 0 0 0 1 0 Secret_C 25 24 4.09 23.9 0 Secret_B 25 50 2.00 23.9 0 Secret_A 25 100 1.01 23.9 0 The Attacks number has to be a whole number, but the others can be fractional. However they must be either zero or at least 1. For example, you can have a Drive of 1.5 but not 0.5. See below for the effects of the numbers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Names As well as the various races, other things in the game which have names are ship types and planets. Names for all three things may be no more than 20 characters (a character is a letter, digit, space, punctuation mark etc). Ship types are given names by their designer. All planets only have numbers for names at the start of the game. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Building Ships You can allocate a planet to producing a type of spaceship. The cost of a ship is equal to its mass times 10 production points. A ship without weapons has a mass of Drive + Shields + Cargo (e.g. a Freighter from the above list has a mass of 20). A ship with one attack has a mass of Drive + Weapons + Shields + Cargo. For a ship with multiple attacks, each attack beyond the first adds half the Weapons number to the ship's mass (e.g. a Gunship has a mass of 11). Example: If your homeworld was producing Drones, and there was a stockpile of raw materials, it would produce 100 per turn. (If there was no stockpile of raw materials, it would produce slightly over 99 per turn.) However, if it was producing Battleships , it would only produce one and one-ninth per turn. After the first turn, there would be one battleship in orbit, and one one-ninth built. After the second turn there would be two battleships in orbit, and one two-ninths built. If you then switched production on that planet to another type of ship or something else entirely, the two-ninths completed ship would be scrapped so it's a bad idea to switch production too frequently when building large ships. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Groups In later stages of the game you can have hundreds or even thousands of spaceships, which would be inconvenient to handle individually. Hence spaceships are handled in groups. A group is a collection of spaceships which are all of the same type, in the same place, carrying the same quantity and type of cargo and built with the same tech levels. This last bit is important because a ship's effectiveness depends on the tech level at which it was built. Any ships without a certain type of component are recorded as having a tech level of 0 in that component e.g. unarmed ships are always recorded as having a Weapons tech level of 0 so that two otherwise equal groups of them can be merged into one. You can load an entire group of ships with cargo, send it to another planet etc. with one command. Groups can be split up, and the program will automatically merge together any identical groups after processing your orders. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fleets Fleets are a formed group of different types of ships. They are basically a group of groups. Fleets can be ordered to move around as a single group using the fleet orders. Fleets also do not go off on routes. Also, the speed of the fleet is the speed of the slowest group. When a individual group is given a 'send' or 'intercept' order it is automatically removed from its current fleet if any. Also, breaking off a number of ships from a group which is part of a fleet automatically removes the broken-off group from the fleet. Loading and unloading cargo does not affect the fleet status of a group. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Movement Spaceships are equipped with hyperspace drives whose power is equal to their Drive number multiplied by the Drive tech level at which they were built. (Ships with a Drive of zero remain forever at the planet where they were built). A ship moves a number of light years per turn equal to an amount times its drive power divided by its total mass. "Total mass" means the mass of the ship itself plus the mass of any cargo it's carrying, so transport ships move faster when empty than when full. Note that large ships should have correspondingly large drives or they will be very slow. On the other hand, the fastest ships you can possibly build are probes (Drive equals 1 and the rest being zero in the design). This may change in the next major game version, but is true now. Hyperspace travel is only possible from one concentration of mass to another, i.e. from one star system to another. A ship can only travel at maximum speed in hyperspace. When a ship enters hyperspace, no time passes for the ship or those on board; a ship in hyperspace cannot change course, or be attacked. Ships may reverse course or turn around though. Detection of ships in hyperspace is a difficult business. Of course, your administrative staff will keep a record of your ships, so you will always know where they are. However, the equipment to accurately detect the position of alien ships in hyperspace requires a large staff to operate and maintain, only works from a centre of mass, and can only track ships heading to or from that centre of mass. In practical terms, this means you will only receive a report of groups of alien ships heading towards one of your planets (all of which are assumed to have hyperspace detectors), though a rough indication of the location of other ships on the map will also be given. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cargo The amount of cargo a ship can carry is determined by the following formula: cargo-technology * (cargo-number + cargo-number^2/10) where "cargo-technology" means the cargo technology at which the ship was built, and "cargo-number" is determined in the ship design. So, at cargo technology level 1, some examples would be: Cargo Number Amount Carried 1 1.1 5 7.5 10 20 50 300 100 1100 At cargo technology level 2, these quantities would be doubled, and so on. Note that large freighters can carry very large quantities of cargo, but if fully loaded are likely to be slow (e.g. a fully loaded Megafreighter at drive and cargo technology 1 would have a speed of only 1.22 light years per turn). The slow speed of heavily loaded ships can be alleviated by higher levels of cargo technology, however. At tech level 2, the mass of any cargo loaded onto a ship is only considered to be half as much as normal, for purposes of calculating ship speed and shield dilution (see " Combat" below). At tech level 3, the mass is divided by 3 and so on. So, a Freighter from the example ship types can carry 20 units of cargo at tech level 1. At tech level 2, it could carry 40 units, but these would only slow it down as much as 20 units at tech level 1; thus, a tech level 2 freighter loaded with 40 units of raw materials can travel as fast (assuming the same drive technology) as a tech level 1 freighter loaded with 20 units. A ship may only carry one type of cargo at one time. The possible types are raw materials, capital and colonists. Cargo may be loaded onto a ship at a planet where it is available. Capital and materials may be unloaded onto any planet; colonists may only be unloaded onto a planet you own, or an uninhabited planet. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Routes To move cargo between planets you can use a route instead of doing it manually. A route from planet A to B for a particular cargo type means that the computer will try to get that type of cargo from planet A to planet B using all available transport ships. So once the route is set up, any empty ships at planet A each turn will be loaded with cargo (if any of that type is present on planet A) and sent to planet B. Any ships at planet A which already are loaded with the appropriate type of cargo will also be sent to planet B. Any ships which arrive at planet B carrying that type of cargo (even if they didn't come from planet A) will be automatically unloaded. You can set up a total of four routes from each planet that you own, one for each of the three kinds of cargo and one for empty transports which is useful for returning transports from resource consuming planets to resource producing planets. You can only set up routes from planets that you own but you can set up routes to any planet at all, so you can use them for shipping colonists to uninhabited planets. Routes are assigned transport ships in the following order of priority: colonists, capital, materials and empty transports. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Combat *NOTE: Being at peace puts your warships at NO disadvantage in combat. Ships in hyperspace cannot be attacked but whenever hostile warships are present at the same planet a battle will take place. This proceeds as follows: A ship is picked at random. It selects a hostile target at random and fires. The target may or may not be destroyed, depending on weapon and shield strengths and on luck. If the attacking ship has more attacks, it will fire again at randomly selected targets until it has used them all. Then another ship is picked at random to fire its shots. This continues until all ships have fired. If neither side has been wiped out another round of combat takes place, and so on until only one side is left (or until any remaining ships are unable to destroy each other). The success of an attack is calculated as follows: The power of the attack is equal to the Weapons number multiplied by the Weapons tech level. The power of the defense is equal to the Shields number multiplied by the Shields tech level and divided by the diameter of the target ship. (A ship's diameter depends on the cube root of its total mass). This is because a large ship's shield will have a larger area to protect and so be diluted and, other things equal, weaker. A ship with numbers 8 1 8 8 0 will have only 4 times the effective shield strength of one with numbers 1 1 1 1 0, even though it has 8 times the Shields number. (It might arguably be more realistic to dilute shields as the 2/3 power of the ship mass, but this would make large ships too vulnerable.) Note that any cargo carried does not affect shield strength. The numbers are calculated so that if a ship with numbers 10 1 10 10 0 fires at an identical ship, it will have a 50% chance of destroying the target. If the effective attack is four times as strong, the attack will always succeed. If the effective defense is four times as strong, the attack will always fail. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Conquering Planets If an armed ship is left at one of an enemy race's planets after all fighting has been done, it will bomb the planet and do _some_ damage. The larger the weapon/gun attacking, the more bomb damage you do. Small guns are much less effective than heavier guns. Diminishing returns result for additional attacks/ships, multiplied by the weapon tech of each gun divided by shield tech of the planet's owner. You may also land colonists to attack an enemy planet. Casualties are reported at 1:1 ratio, but don't depend on it. This is how you conquer planets occupied by another race. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wars, Coalitions, and Peace At the start of the game you are assumed to be at peace with all the other players. You may declare war on another player or planet at any time. -- Being at peace puts your warships at NO disadvantage in combat. -- If you wish to remove a declared war status, you must declare peace with the A command. A coalition will not override a war status, EXCEPT when you have declared a WAR/GUARD status at one of your owned planets. (Safe passage is only granted to players you have specified in your coalition list for any planets you have at GUARD/WAR status. If you declare war on yourself, you will attack any other player. If you declare a coalition on yourself, you will defend any other player who does NOT initiate attack. You will ONLY defend players/planets as specified in your coalition list. You will not defend other players as a result of a chain of coalitions between other players. In your turn report, only planets or races will be listed that you can see, even War and Coalition status. You also don't know whether other players are at war with you unless you encounter some of their warships. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Victory and Defeat There are no goals or objectives, although some want to conquer the galaxy. Your goal may be simply to play indefinately for co-existing survival. Maybe YOU want to kill everyone in sight. It's up to you. Basically the game ends with a concensus from the Judge or players, winner(s) are debated upon. When a race has no planets or ships left, it is declared extinct and deleted from the database. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Order Format To enter orders for Galaxy, you should send a mail message containing the following: #GALAXY gameName playerName ...orders... #END or if the race's password is set: #GALAXY gameName playerName passwd ...orders... #END The #GALAXY line should be in the body of the message, not in the subject line. It is very important to type this line correctly, as otherwise all of your orders will be discarded. Everything before the #GALAXY line or after the #END line in the message is ignored by the program. Each type of order is designated by giving a letter or keyword as the first non-blank character on the line. The program only checks the first letter, so you can either give a whole word or just the letter. Parameters are given after this, separated by spaces or tabs. Blank lines are permitted, as are comments; anything after a semicolon on a line is treated as a comment and ignored. (Messages (see below) are an exception; semicolons in message text are treated as part of the text rather than comments.) The parser is not case sensitive, so all commands, names etc. may be given in upper case, lower case or a mixture of the two. However, when supplying names containing spaces, the name must be surrounded by double quotes, or else underscore characters must be used in place of spaces in the name. (These things apply to the #GALAXY and #END lines as well as to order lines.) Replacement sets of orders may be sent anytime before the deadline. The last set of orders received at the time of running the turn is used. Any player not sending in orders for three turns in a row is removed from the game, e.g. if your last set of orders was for turn 20, you will receive reports for turns 20, 21, 22 and 23; your turn 23 report will contain a request to send orders; and you will not receive a turn 24 report. Note that an empty order set (i.e. no orders between #galaxy and #end) still counts as sending in orders. Examples of correct order lines: Send 100 "Zzyax Prime" send 100 zzyax_prime s 100 "zzyax prime" ; Attack the Zzyaxian homeworld Examples of incorrect order lines: Send 100 Zzyax Prime s 100 "zzyax prime" Attack the Zzyaxian homeworld --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Orders The following orders are available: A race-name Declare peace on another race. A planet-name Disable your GUARD or ATTACK status on a planet. B group-no number-of-ships Break off a number of ships from a group. C new-name Change the name of your race. D type-name drive attacks weapons shields cargo Design a new ship type with the given numbers. You may not name your ship any of the following things: 'Cargo', 'Drive', 'Attacks', 'Weapons', 'Shields', or anything else that might be similar. :) E type-name Erase a ship type (only works if you have no ships of that type in existence or being built). F race-name This finds the email address of the indicated player. If there is no address, this means that that position is either not being played, or being played by the GM, or being played by someone who cannot be contacted by email. Use this command to contact players. G group-no [number-of-ships] Upgrade a group of ships. The group must be at one of your planets, and must remain there during the turn long enough for the upgrade to be performed; this means that it cannot be given a Send or Intercept command that turn, though it may be automatically sent on a route, as this happens later in the turn. Ships in the group will be upgraded to the latest technology levels as of the start of the current turn (if they are already at the latest tech levels, nothing will happen). The cost of upgrading a ship is equal to a fraction of the cost of building a new one; for example, if the ship is currently at 2/3 of the latest tech levels, the cost of upgrading will be 1/3 of the cost of building a new ship. (Effectively it will be even cheaper than this, because upgrading uses no raw materials.) The exact formula for the cost is: 10 * ((1 - ship-drive-tech/current-drive-tech) * ship-drive-mass + (1 - ship-weapons-tech/current-weapons-tech) * ship-weapons-mass + (1 - ship-shields-tech/current-shields-tech) * ship-shields-mass + (1 - ship-cargo-tech/current-cargo-tech) * ship-cargo-mass) If the number-of-ships parameter is given (even as 0 to explicitly specify the entire group), exactly that many ships will be upgraded, even if only enough production points are available to do a partial upgrade. If the parameter is omitted, only as many ships will be upgraded as can be fully upgraded. So if you have an expensive ship which will cost more than a full turn's production to upgrade, you must partially upgrade it the first turn, and issue another order next turn to upgrade it again. (This is different from building expensive ships, where a single production order will cause a planet to keep working until told to stop.) Production points spent on upgrading ships during a turn are deducted from that planet's production that turn. H group-no [number-of-ships] (Hyperspace recall) (Help) (S.O.S.) This will reverse direction for ships. Ships stop, come out of hyperspace, and instantly reverse course into hyperspace again. I group-no planet-name [number-of-ships] Order your group to intercept alien ships at another planet. With this command, you specify one of your groups, and a target planet. Typically there will be an alien ship or fleet at the planet, which you want your group to attack and destroy. However if you use an ordinary "Send" order, the alien fleet may leave the target planet on the same turn, so your group would arrive to find it gone. With the Intercept order, if alien ships leave the target planet that turn, your group will be sent towards whatever planet has the largest total mass of alien ships sent to it from the target planet, except that only planets which your group can reach in no more than two turns will be considered. Otherwise your group will be sent to the target planet itself. L group-no cargo-type [number-of-ships] See GRAMMAR.TXT for other syntax options. Load cargo onto a group of ships. The following cargo types are available: CAP Capital MAT Materials COL Colonists M x y size Change the area covered by the map on your turn report. X and Y are the coordinates of the top left corner of the map and size is the size you want covered in light years, e.g. M 10 20 50 will give you a map starting at (10,20) and 50 light years on a side. Useful for zooming in on a particular area for greater detail or zooming out again to get a wide picture. The position and size of the area covered by the map is included in your turn report. N planet-name new-name Change the name of a planet. O option Sets game options. The following options are currently available: O GALAXYTV Now the default setting. Your report can be viewed in GalaxyTV. O UNDERSCORES On your turn report, names with spaces in them will be output using underscores instead of spaces. This may make the turn report look less attractive, but also makes it easier to use a spreadsheet or other tool to analyze the report. Note that this has no effect on the requirement to use underscores or quotes when entering orders. O TWOCOL Report data will be printed in multiple columns where possible. This is not as good for viewing the report on a computer, but makes it look better and saves paper if the report is to be printed out. O NAMECASE Names that you input in your orders have the first letter of each word converted to upper case. This means that you can type names in all lower case and save the bother of having to capitalize the first letter. If you set this option on one turn, it will affect all names you input that turn, but not ones you have input on previous turns. O AUTOUNLOAD Automatically unloads all cargo arriving at one of your planets. This does not work at a planet occupied by another race or an unoccupied planet. O SORTGROUPS Sorts the groups with respect to planet order. All your groups at your planets will be displayed first in planet order, then all your groups at planets belonging to other races will be displayed in orders and finally groups at unoccupied planets will be displayed. The group number will be changed so that all groups are still numbered logically. O PRODTABLE Makes the 'Ships In Production' table be displayed. You can turn off options using O NO UNDERSCORES O NO NAMECASE etc. You cannot set more than one option using one O command, separate commands must be used. The default options which you will start with are: NO UNDERSCORES NO TWOCOL NAMECASE NO AUTOUNLOAD NO SORTGROUPS NO PRODTABLE P planet-name produce-what Set production for a planet. The following things can be produced: CAP Capital MAT Materials DRIVE Drive research WEAPONS Weapons research SHIELDS Shield research CARGO Cargo bay research type-name Ships of the named type Q your-race-name Quit the game. You must provide your race name as the parameter as a safeguard to prevent Quit orders being issued accidentally. R from-planet cargo-type [to-planet] Set a route. The following cargo types are available: CAP Capital MAT Materials COL Colonists EMP Empty transports WAR Non-fleet member Warships (no cargo ability) Specifying no to-planet indicates that an existing route should be cancelled. S group-no planet [number-of-ships] Send ships to a planet. U group-no [number-of-ships] Unload a group's cargo onto the planet it's currently at. Colonists can be unloaded onto an friendly alien planet (this applies to unloading at the end of routes, as well). Capital and materials unloaded onto an uninhabited planet will sit there until someone colonizes the planet. V groupNum playerName [shipName] Volunteer (give) ships to another player. Optional shipName. Cargo IS included. The player who you are giving ships to must be present at the same planet with at least 1 ship. W race-name Declare war on another race. W planet-name - Declaring war on a planet you don't own (non size 0 planet): (ATTACK) You will attack the current owner of the planet. War status will be turned off automatically when the _current_ owner is destroyed _WHILE YOUR SHIPS ARE AT THAT PLANET_. - Declaring war on a planet you own or size 0 planet: (GUARD) You will shoot at anyone at that planet. X group-no [number-of-ships] Scraps old spacecraft. The ships are converted into raw materials which are deposited on the planet where the group is located (must be at a planet, not in hyperspace). Any cargo the ships were carrying is unloaded first. The command will not work if the ships are carrying colonists and over an alien planet. Y passwd Sets the race's password to passwd. If passwd is not specified the password for the race is cancelled. Z new-address Change the address to which your reports are sent. Things to note: All orders involving groups can take an optional last parameter giving the number of ships to be used. If this parameter is given, the indicated number of ships will be broken off into a separate group first, and the order applied only to that separate group. Whenever a group number is required as a parameter, the keyword MAX may be used instead. This will apply the order to the group with the highest group number. This will be the most recently created group. Keywords used as parameters to orders must be given precisely; unlike order keywords they cannot be abbreviated (nor expanded). The following keywords are used: CAP, MAT, COL, EMP, DRIVE, WEAPONS, SHIELDS, CARGO, UNDERSCORES, NAMECASE, TWOCOL, MAX. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fleet Orders The following fleet orders are available: B groupno FLEET Remove Group groupno from it's current fleet D FLEET fleetname Create a fleet called fleetname E fleetname Disband Fleet fleetname. H fleetname (Hyperspace recall) (Help) (S.O.S.) This will reverse direction for your fleet. All ships stop, come out of hyperspace, and reverse course into hyperspace again. I fleetname planetname Intercept ships at planetname with Fleet fleetname J groupno fleetname [number-of-ships] Add Group groupno to Fleet fleetname. If it is currently with another fleet it will be moved to the new fleet. J fleetname1 fleetname2 Merge fleetname1 into fleetname2 leaving fleetname1 empty. O [NO] FLEETTABLES Select which format you want the fleets to be displayed in: The default is FLEETTABLES S fleetname planetname Send Fleet fleetname to planetname T fleetname new-fleetname Change the name of the fleet to new-fleetname The following keywords are used: FLEET, FLEETTABLES --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sequence of Events The following sequence of events takes place when a turn is being run: 1. All orders except for renaming and upgrading orders (C, G, N and T) are executed. 2. C, G, N and T orders are executed. 3. Hostile ships fight each other. 4. Ships bomb enemy planets. 5. Cargo is loaded onto ships at the beginning of routes, and the ships are sent into hyperspace. 6. Ships are sent on intercept orders. 7. Ships move through hyperspace. 8. Hostile ships fight each other again (new battles might be possible after ships emerge from hyperspace). 9. Ships bomb enemy planets again. 10. Production takes place. 11. Cargo is unloaded at the end of routes. 12. Identical groups are merged. A few things to note: When orders conflict, such as two players trying to unload colonists onto an uninhabited planet simultaneously at the start of the turn, whoever is first in the list of players will have his order executed first and colonize the planet. In practice this does not happen often enough to be relevant. A ship which takes several turns to build will be built with the tech levels available at the start of the final turn. Because names are changed after other orders, entities which are renamed in a turn must still be referred to by their old names for the rest of that turn. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hints and Tips Comments/Suggestions/Questions are welcome at rko@industry.net... Thanks for your support!