Thanks to Paul Honigmann for hosting and comments and tips. Thanks to Sebastian for helping with the fighters.

Kicstart v 1.0 by Skies
Last worked on 17/05/2005

Before you start you should have read Tim's CoM guide at www.vgaplanets.com

GET SET!

The Lost Colonies of Man (CoM) are probably one of the easiest races to play out there. Therefore this guide tries not to be the "complete guide", as I fear it would be a rather useless document since even a newbie should learn to play them in a few turn test game. Granted, winning might be difficult, but the basic functions of the race are easy to grasp. Just because of this, I think they're ideal race to start your VGA4 experience with! Tim's guide is good enough for them, here I have tried to explain few things that one should keep in mind when playing the race and to list some of the relevant, not so obvious information.

GO!

ECONOMY

CoM colonists grow just fine on board Sagittarius ships. Growth can take place in most of the ships, but one should plan to use only Sagittarius for this purpose as the growth rate is hull dependand and on Sagittarius it is the best. I guess some ships just have that certain something in the air recycling system. CoM growth on a planet (with no drawbacks/perks) is 7% per turn. On sagittarius ships, it's 6%. Since cloning tank exotic techs don't work on ships at some point you probably want to send your population down to a planet. However there are few perks involing food consumption and taxation which might make you stick with Sagittariouses.

While colonists are onboard Sagittarius (other ships) they grow with very little food, that is 10kts of food to every one million colonists. You don't need the food stockpile either to gain optimum ship growth. In fact the growth on ships is always the set value. For this alone Sagittarius is a very lucrative dwelling through out the game.

The other thing is the taxation. On board ships, the CoM pay rather good taxes. You get double the money that they would produce in cities + the normal tax income. Happyness doesnt seem to be a factor when onboard ships.
Note: Currently there's a bug and host calculates your people on ships to the galactic bank tax pool. This is not true, so if you have lot of population on ships be careful: what the host reports is more than the galactic banks receives.

Important notes about command codes and Sagittariuses: While you keep your colonists on ships remember to use these 2 command codes on them. NOT stops the troop training on board ships. BDC, beams the credits down to a base the same turn. BDC (beam down credits) is very important command code, because ship's (money-) transfers appear in the client right away, but in the host order of events ship building is before transfers. In english: you will be building ships that never appear if you do not use BDC. If you don't have a clue as to what I just said, just use BDC on your ships and all will be fine. BDM (beam down money and metals) does the job as well, but it doesn't show the amount of cash beamed down.

SHIPS

CoM ships have everything onboard to make it possible to the CoM to live in space. Although living in space is inefficient business in my opinion one can use the trick mentioned in Tim's manual to insure some level of income even if your core empire gets destroyed. That is, send your Sagittarius and Celestia (maybe Aquila, too) out side the star system, then you can use the Celestias and the galactic bank to tranfers the money back into use and your enemy will have hard time finding where the money comes from.

In any case using the various ship devices and special abilities correctly is the key to winning as CoM. ..ahem, well to every race some would say? Most of them are simple enough to read from the docs, but few CoM ships deserve a closer look. There's also a ship review at the end of this document to help you grasp what the ships are made for.

But first let's tackle the darnest: The Celestia with billion money related devices.

Celestia

She'll make you rich. Theoretical maximum is over 30 000mc/turn with one base. To create income like this the ship uses crew on board, colonists on planet underneath and colonists and High Guard on board as well as some food. Optimal use is to park it over a planet with 50 million colonists and load 10000 High guards and 1000 colonists on board with 10 food. The devices on board don't interfere with one another so you can have the benefits from all of them. However if you do have many such devices (ships) at the same location or near by chances are your income will be cut down. I'll post the device despcriptions here, too, it's collected from Tim's site.

Just looking for a simple advice? Then, build one over every base with + 1 million colonists and load all the extra high guards on board them with 1000 colonists and 10kt of food/turn and you're doing just fine. Use the BDC with this ship.

Celestia is multi-use ship. Devices are simple enough to fathom if you take time to think them through. This is about as difficult as it will get with CoM, so try to hang in there for two more devices. Galactic Bank and Galactic Draw. With these devices it's possible for the CoM race to "wire-transfer" money between two or more Celestias. You can send in what ever amount you want and withdraw money 10 000mc at a time.

Aries

Aries is another multi-use ship but the devices are more simple. One thing that might be easily over looked is the rather large construction bay. On board this ship you can (quick-) build other ships. Even the Virgo. Because of this quality it's good for trading too.

Virgo

Ah. The best ship in the universe. I don't care what other people say. Insane in battles, but a fuel hog and every other ship in your fleet is cheap as rice compared to this monster, so you might not want to spend all your cash on these. Fully equiped, the prices start from around 80 000mc's. Has lot of large weapon slots and looks like a ship that can mount photon torpedoe launchers but in reality the ord capacity is quite small and it has no pod bays. So don't fall into that one unintentionally.

Virgo is minefield immune if it has 1 or more High guards on board and 1 or more wings docked. Let's talk about that for a minute because "immune" is too strong of a word to use here. Correct way to think of it would be: With 1HG and a wing the Virgo is immune to most of the negative effects of the minefields. "Most" means you can travel safely through minefields using warp-engines or lightspeed. By the way, that ability comes with the hull, so if your Virgo is captured, it's "immune" in the hands of your enemy against your minefields as well.

So what falls outside of the immunity circle? Every minetype can be detonated. Virgo is not immune to detonating minefields in any way. So if you sit on top of 12 nova barbitic minefields at the end of the turn, your ship goes bye-bye the next turn. If there's less than 12 minefields your ship will still take hull and system damage from detonations like everyother ship. Webmines. Detonated webmine causes the engines to halt. This goes for your normal engines and Light Speed Device. And so on, detonations are not covered.

But there's more: As a bonus, all the ships starting their turn at the same location with a minefield immune Virgo, will also be immune to minefields for the following turn. "Immunity" here means the same things as above = no hitting mines. You migh have a hyperjumping ship with you, so can you now use the immunity to jump through Gravitonic Mines? No you can't. The HYP ship will shot down back to normal space like a duck from the autumn sky at the edge of the Grav minefield. The virgo at the location needs to be immune at the beginning of the turn. So if it doesn't have a HG onboard or wing docked, it's too late to beam/dock one and pass the immunity on.

All in all, this immunity business is extremely valuable trait. You just have to expect the correct things from it.

These command codes work with Virgos only:

LSD: Light speed on, even at very short distances
LSP: Light speed on every turn

FIGHTERS

CoM fighers are among the best in the universe. They're not by any means cheap though, because of this you see a lot of Type 1 fighter wings. I tend to separate the T1s from T2s and T3s because of the travel range. Because T1s only travel 300Lys it makes liitle strategical sense to keep them in mixed wings.

Wing combinations are always a bit tricky subject and you see a lot of combinatios. Sebastian from the newsgroups explained to me that the best combinations in battles are mixed wings of T1s and T3s (8/0/2 or 8/0/3). This way your expensive T3-fighters would be protected by less expensive T1s. If you want to use missiles (anti-ship weapon) in your battles, you should use mixed wings of T1s and T2s (5/5/0).

Of course your Virgo can hold 10 000 fighters so you have to use a lot bigger wings in that. Do as you might, but try to have thousands of fighters on board rather than hundreds. And if you have 350 000mc to build 10 000T1 wing, you'll notice that in real game situations it's volume that commands.

STRATEGY

Every race has their short comings. CoM have suprisingly few of them.

You're in real trouble if the fight is brought to your territory. So don't let them. Use your powerful and long ranged fighters to strike at the enemy from early on and then keep them in your grip. Refuel your wings at bases (outposts) and small ships, which you will be sending out from turn 1. Fighters can also reload from a resuply pod if it has fuel in it. So spread around meaningless ships, outposts, pods, just so you can send your fighters in after them. T2,T3 types can fly 200LYs and return to the starting point at the same turn - that's actually quite good distance.

How bad is your defence? Or in other words how desperately should you be about attacking the enemy first. Here are few examples.

Privateers and Hyp races (Rebel, Evil Empire) are hell to battle for every race with out gravitonic mines. My only advise is to get to them first.

If you're under attack, try to make a run for it and keep your population on ships because on planet they're defenceless. This leads an interesting outcome too: When you keep your colonists on board Sagittariuses, youre wery difficult to assimilate or to take prisoners from. When a ship is captured your colonists will disappear, also there's a good change the ships will be destroyed by the battle. In some cases you can avoid combat just by appearing a non attractive target. You should be very unappealing target atleast for the Borg, Evil Empire, Lizards and Azzcanny.

Every neigbouring race that lays loads of mines is your biggest enemy. So try to ally yourself with them.

Due to the lack of minefields cloakers are also a bad thing for you.

Summarum: Even though you have the strong ships and fighters, it's hard to protect your colonists from "suicide" missions. There's always a change that the weaker force will blow up your Sagittarius in combat or that they get to your base, which does not have a base shield.

In fact CoM are beautiful combination of the best attack and worst defence in VGA.

SHIP REVIEW

This seems to be quite popular and I guess it's good tool to choose a race with. Atleast for the new players, so I'll end it this guide with that.

	Taurus Scout For a scoutship very strong armour. Average speed. Nothing special but fills the shoes.
	Cygnus Destroyer Again, very strong armour. Attack bonus and price aren't quite right to make this a mass production ship.
	Little Joe Escort Very similliar to Cygnys, but with 1/3 of armor. Lot's of PD and cheap, so maybe could do as an anti-fighter ship.
	Aquila Mobile McDonalds. Nutricious meals up to 50Kt's every turn.
	Cobol The fuel-maker. Has all the fuel devices on board. Virgo's burn fuel, Cobol's make it - even out of thin air.
	Aries Metal Ship With one million tax payers on board, totally self-sufficient ship yard. Extremely efficient devices for mining and metal processing.
	Sagittarius With exeptionally high growth rate and 10 million colonists on board it has to be all about the space hippie movement.
	Celestia Swindlers and bankers combined. You win.
	Warrior Shuttle Ability to attack against the special racial buildings, like GUNZERO!s.
	Pisces Cruiser Excellent ship with Photon Torpedoes. Maximum amount of large weapon slots, cheap hull and good speed.
	Scorpius Carrier Well, it's a carrier like the name says and mostly useless in that. Can protect a wing of 600 from lasermines.
	Gemini Transport Insanely big transporter with good defences. Not too necessary due to Sagittarius (growth) and Aries (cargo size) but good second to both ships.
	Prometheus Frigate A CoMs very own race car. 190LYs/ turn make this a good support ship for Virgo, but is a bit vulnerable in battles with 3 point defence slots.
	Virgo The best. Improved fighter combat. On board High Guard training. Max armour. Max fighters. Max warp speed. Max large weapons. Minefield immune. Big Trouble.