VGAP4: The Klingon Battle Manual

Because there are other guides available covering the really basic "what to do" aspects, I've rewritten this document. It is now a higher level "how to win" strategy guide. People interested in the basic mechanics of the game should check these sites:

Admiral Quixote's quick outline of how to set up the game and start playing (A small PDF file.)

Olly Harlow's "Idiot's Guide for Complete newbies" on VGAP4 International. (Select "Newbies Guide" from the left hand navigation bar on the left.) This document has attracted much praise from newcomers, particularly for the comprehensive explanatory screenshots. Unlike Admiral Quixote and myself, Olly was a complete beginner and wrote his own guide from a fresh perspective, covering the areas a real beginner finds puzzling.

Tim's online help files. Incidentally, there are no longer any on-disk Help files.

Mark Cowper's "How to Win" monograph

Cody Nelson's GRG Zone
If anyone writes an alternative strategy guide mail me at and I'll link to it.

Other useful references: This guide has been compiled by learning from literally thousands of mistakes since 1999 by myself and others on the VGAP4 mailing list and newsgroup. Some of the advice will be plainly wrong for weirder races like, say Borg (Happiness is Irrelevant, etc). If something looks wrong, do not treat it as a plan you must stick to rigidly. Because "what's best" varies from race to race, and sometimes with new Host releases, this is not a tactical guide.

Many more tips have been sorted into various pages accessible from this site's main page - for example tactical guides for particular races, and a page specifically on combat tips. Another page, which is useful for VGAP3 players converting to VGAP4, is here. People interested in running (Hosting) a game will find this page useful.


Rules of Thumb You WILL mess up and destroy yourself many times. This is called 'learning' - Henry Leroy Don't worry, all rules have exceptions, no one knows them all, that's the point! There are always things which are unexpectedly interacting with each other (clever loopholes) and therefore are very hard to consider in the first instance. [Tim patches abuses when they are discovered, but leaves some he considers fair.Every time a new race is introduced, the rules are tweaked to ensure that balance is maintained. - Sparrow ] "To crush your enemies, to see them fall at your feet - to take their horses and goods and hear the lamentation of their women. That is best." - Ghengis Kahn All's Fair in Love and War Do one thing and do it well. Only fight on one front at a time and strike hard, ruthlessly, ignoring lossses! Complicated plans don't work. It's a complex game. Never rely on a complex co-ordinated attack with an ally. Don't bother planning things in detail more than 2-3 turns in advance (and this minimises micromanagement, too). Enemies often change tactics when they see what you're doing. [ Top level chess players only look about 5-10 moves into the future in detail, and chess is a simpler game. ] Don't ally with someone on the far side of the galaxy. Lots of work and fuel expenditure, little return, no effective military help to each other. The game is designed to force you to move colonists to your vulnerable periphery (to grow food), and explore with ships (to find resources). This will lead to friction, conflict, prisoner taking. Without taking risks, you will not grow and win. Population is everything - Mark Cowper A lazy or incompetent ally is much worse than no ally at all. The only way to guarantee winning a fight is to use overwhelming force. There is a lot of chaos in battles so simulations sometimes mislead you. Games with big maps (more than 25-30 stars per player) are long and boring. If you don't go get your neighbor, he'll come to you. I cannot emphasize this enough: everyone assumes the worst. Talking with players after games have ended, I invariably find rivals overestimated the others' resources. Just because someone can build an interesting tech 10 hull doesn't mean he's got many. Usually they are more cash strapped than you realise. A common mistake is to assume that you will find the enemy has concentrated all his forces in the most dangerous possible position. In practice, it takes many turns to move ships from all round his empire to one front, particularly if you have launched a rapid attack.. A related error is to assume that the ships you see have the best possible weaponry - but few people can afford to triple the cost of their ships with mega-weapons. The number of assaults I've seen which were aborted after a promising start is unbelievable. The attackers lost their nerve, not realising the defender was on the brink of collapse. A typical comment after a game is: "Why didn't you do X?" They cannot believe you ran out of fuel / thought they had more ships... most ships are sent to the front line as soon as possible, so if you've penetrated into an enemy's core, he's probably in deep trouble. Don't give him time to regroup. Once you start fighting, don't despair because you've lost some ships / bases. You wouldn't expect to win a game of chess without losing any pieces. I've seen a lot of games lost because people didn't trust each other enough to ally effectively against a common enemy. Sometimes you've just got to take a risk and trust folk. What's to lose? It's just a game! Don't fight unneccessarily Kill enemies as quickly as possible. It minimises losses, and gives other people a smaller window of opportunity to attack you while your forces are elsewhere. Speed is important. Although experienced players may be good at "tactics" - i.e. they know some obscure rule interactions - I strongly suspect that we all settle into patterns and there is no outstanding genius amongst us. Despite the mass of rules, there's no particular reason why another Mark Heinrich shouldn't pop up (his insights revolutionised the Centaurs, previously thought too weak to play; some people have since asked for Centaurs to be reduced in power!) Similarly, Drew Sullivan transformed the Scavengers from a minor race to one which often wins. As a new player, you bring fresh perspectives, so don't assume you're going to lose. If you find yourself up against someone really good, you can always use the newsgroup and mailing lists to ask for specific advice. Google the newsgroup to find their postings and study their psychology. I don't think many experienced players re-read these strategy guides, because they "know it already". Meanwhile, people keep sending me new ideas, and I keep thinking. Don't play a duplicate race in a game: it reduces your unique advantages. And try to play a race with as many marketable abilities as possible, to offer an ally. Don't trust a Privateer player. Some people - usually younger players - have "infinite" time for their turns and can spend hours tuning their moves to produce startlingly well-co-ordinated precision manouvers. Effects include boarding your ships without being counter-attacked, dummy battles to ensure your forces are split, etc. Beware players with hundreds of ships: they are probably very experienced, very dangerous. However, being young, they are emotional and easy to manipulate. It's better to be good at one thing than try to do too many things at once,which dilutes your resources. An average game has about 12 players. On average ou will win 1/12 games. A really good player will win maybe 1 in 3-4 games. The social nature of the game inhibits some players from treating it as a wargame. Drew Sullivan writes: "The players in VGAP are all wimps (tell them that)" [I agree - Doc Devious] "who will try to make deals and negotiate and complain while you are removing their spleen though their nose.. and backstabbing, ...and think there is something wrong with that behaviour (not ever having read the biography of Napoleon or Winston Churchill). You would not hesitate to attack in chess! For "additional reading" I do not recommend Macchiavelli. I recommend The Godfather. You want to strike suddenly, violently and effectively (don't forget effectively) way before they are ready and way before they even suspect you are thinking about them."

Basic idea of the game: choose a race to play with abilities which suit your style of play (aggressive, sneaky etc). Colonise the galaxy and exploit its natural resources. Team up and trample on other players.

Some important basic concepts

The official Help files are comprehensive but disjointed. Here are some key points which might not be immediately apparent:

Your military power is linked to a successful economy. In general, you need to maximise your population to generate as much cash as possible.
A corollory of this is, that protecting your own heavily populated worlds whilst destroying the enemy's is normally the key to winning.
A number of recent rule changes have made food much more important than might be obvious at first. It has become a key bottleneck to growth. You need large stockpiles of food on a base to ensure decent population growth (say, at least 1000 food on a world with 1 million people).
You also need food to train High Guard, who are essential to help guard ships and bases against spy attacks (sabotage) and are immensely useful for capturing ships by boarding, and Ground Assaults.
Natives don't need food except the parasitical Chupanoids, and these can be a real pest. A common strategy is to sneak Chups into an enemy's empire by exploding a pod full of them in deep space. All worlds within 300LY are likely to be infested with a plague of hungry space locusts. Chupanoids' only use is as an offensive weapon.
Another understated part of the game is, you need to keep your colonists happy. Your population (ie economy) grows faster and is more resistant to attacks. See Tim's page here to find out how to keep them happy.
High Crime levels on your worlds are bad. It can knock Happiness right down, and result in population implosions (riots etc). You can reduce crime on your worlds by buying contraband there. You can increase crime on enemy world by selling gold pods of contraband within 50LY of the target base.
The following Native types are extremely important and worth fighting over: Amphibians, Amorphs and Ghipsoids. They generate free stuff which you do not want falling into your enemies' hands.
The game favours aggressive players.
The game structure causes resource shortages, for example food, making wars inevitable.
The most important tech to develop is engine tech.
Some games use an optional Victory Points scoring system to determine the winner. It is described on this page. But most people prefer a straightforward slugfest!
Knowing what's around you (good scanner information) is very important. It can help compensate for slow ships (you see threats early) and helps you find valuable Stuff quicker. Unless you have Bioscanners, you need to get within 5LY of a planet to see natives, and even Bioscanners won't help you find contraband if you're >5LY away.

The 7 Deadly Sins

Here are some tips on etiquette. Don't do the following, unless you want to get a bad reputation.

Dropping out of a game before you are truly beaten - the number one way to get a bad reputation, and sadly the most common sin.
Missing excessive turns.
Being rude to strangers in a personal manner, or using profanity. (Amusing insults which are obviously untrue are an integral part of the game, but insulting someone's family could get you chucked out of a game.)
Being a lazy and incompetent ally - relying on partners to tell you what to do, and then not doing it after they've spent a long time analysing to help you.
Cheating. Thankfully there have only been a couple of instances, which were quickly patched. VGAP4 is pretty cheat-proof. It is occasionally suspected that some player or another is playing two races in one game, with two PC's, though I'm not sure this has ever been proven.

One thing deliberately missing from this list is treachery. It's a valid strategy. See advanced strategy, below. The trick is not to get a reputation for it.

Part 2: Turn by turn checklist

Turn Zero: What race to play?
A couple of words for beginners here. In my experience, races with low growth rates (less than 100) are trickier to play, because you are always short of money compared to other players. You need to pay attention to every detail to keep up with the high growth races. If you play a low growth race, (which tend to be powerful at the start of the game,) try to kill the high growth races - or ally with them - absolutely as soon as possible, because once their population booms with compound interest, they are like a runaway chain reaction.

Read up about your neighbours' powers, particularly those who are likely to be enemies. Choose an enemy who has no defense against your special powers. Choose allies who can synergise well with your powers.

Some races win more often than others. See Scytale's race rankings table (this is very illuminating!). Another table to check is at the beginning of my races page, where there's a chart to help choose races according to player ability and universe settings.

Races with slow ships (like the University, Robots and Draconians: max hull speed less than 190, no hyperdrive) are at a big disadvantage. Not only are they easily outflanked if fighting begins, but they cannot grab territory as fast as others in the initial "I was here first" carpetbag stages.

Don't play in a big galaxy unless it has wraparound (ie a wormhole ring). The game will last too long and lose its fun, because it will be difficult to bring to a conclusion.

Shareware players: with limits to your tech levels, the best races in order for you to play are: Robots, Rebels, Stormers, and Lizards. Most or all of these races' ships have low shield ratings, two of them are fighter races with acceptable fighter counts on hulls below the shareware tech limit (besides Rebels have 400 LY fighters under their own power), and the other two are cloaking races with all their cloakers below the shareware limit. - Jon Nunn

To ally or not to ally? Many players arrange alliances even before a game begins. But I must say, it is less work (more fun?) playing when you do not have to co-ordinate with an ally...

Tips for early game (turns 1-6):

Miscellaneous

Select the Transmit Messages button on the top toolbar and experiment with sending helpful advice to other players. The "Anonymous" button is particularly useful. "Player 4's homeworld is at ..." "Player 2 backstabbed me in the last game..."... "Player 8 approached me re: alliance against you. What is your counteroffer?"
Check the Registration Codes of other players (it's shown in the Races screen). Duplicates indicate that one person is playing two races! Low numbers indicate someone who's been playing since VGAP4 began in 1999. Reg codes start around number 100. (Mine is 146.)
Use your judgement when building structures - no point wasting money building a labour camp unless you've reached the fighting stage and have captured enemy prisoners.
Leave at least 50 supplies on your homeworld at the end of each turn. Some of these will be needed to run your structures, make ordnance etc. Always try to have a few hundred mc left at the end of a turn, or some structures may not work.
Keep your base shield on. It eats 10kT fuel / turn but, ships belonging to other players have blundered into enemy homeworlds as early as turn 3 in some games. If this happens with an unshielded base, combat occurs, and immense damage can occur to the Base if it lacks a defending ship too. I never turn my base shield off.
Switch on your AA guns. They cost nothing to run. Keep some Ord on the base at all times (for the AA guns), several thousand ord if possible.
Rename your ground base as something inspiring like "Meat Rendering Plant".
There's loads of stuff on your starting ships, which is needed far more on your homeworld than colonies. Particularly supplies. Unload most of this stuff to your home base.
Don't build a Small Deep Space Freighter (hull tech level 1), they're good for almost nothing.
If there are Privateers in the game, you should build a minelayer as soon as possble (e.g. the Feds get the Nocturne at hull tech 2, which has a mine laying / sweeping Ship Device): unlike version 3 games, not every ship with torpedo tubes can lay mines. (See minelaying for more information on mines.) You start with 1000 ord, which will rapidly run out as you need it for many ship weapons, and to lay minefields. As it's expensive, see if one of your ships has a free "Supplies to Ord" factory - some races are lucky that way.
Spy screen (HQ menu): Don't bother with Spy attacks (sabotage etc); these are disabled until turn 10. You can't even invest in mana until then. (Ie raise it above the starting 150.)
Use the Notes screen thus: bear in mind that scan data is difficult to get, so it is worth recording. Also, there is no point hanging Notes on things which may disappear - ie, scanned enemy bases and ships - because purple (historical) data is deleted after 10 turns. So hang notes on planets, not bases or ships.

Use Red notes to mark bad things like "Lizard base - turn 4 - population 500 - No significant structures"
Use Green notes to mark good things such as "1 million Avians and 3000 Kierras, turn 12".
Because scan data is poor, it might be worth using yellow flags to mark "definitely nothing of worth here".

Later, when you're scouting for mineral / Native / Contraband deposits to gather, you just have to glance at the map to spot green flags.
Send raiders into far off areas as soon as possible in the game - like, turn 1. Your "best starting ship" will be obsolete by turn 12 so don't worry about losing these things. Pick up fuel from empty planets along the way. Once they enter rivals' space, they become a massive disruption to him. He has to divert ships to deal with the menace, and guard colonies / freighters. It really mucks up his economy. Also, they gather immense amounts of scouting information, and can be used as bargaining chips - for example you may decide to use them to swap hull plans with someone you find.
If sending ships into dangerous areas, you can set their scanners to "Passive" with no "Running Lights". This makes them very difficult to see on the starmap. It makes them much less likely to see things themselves too.
Food: this is very important. Colonies need a minimum of 100kT of food or their happiness drops rapidly. You used to get a free 5kt of food when beaming colonists down to a new world, this is no longer the case. You have to bring food with you now, or build farms rapidly (though sometimes you can find it on the surface of planets). If you beam down colonists and suddenly next turn they are all gone, it might be because you forgot to bring food.

Tips for mid game (turns 6-15):

There's no need to build smelters. Mines convert ore to metals (change in Host 141: it was generally agreed that smelters and ore just complicated the game.)
Public Space Ports: these are even more important than you might think from the official Help files. Expensive, but worth building occasionally. They sometimes generate free natives, and they can generate free colonists too, but their main uses are keeping colonists / natives happy; stealing other players' natives; an alternative way of gathering natives. In order to work properly, you need to stock them with natives of as many types as you can. Let's say you have a PSP on your border stocked with Avians and Amorphs. All it needs is say 10 natives of these types to get the ball rolling. You might have to deliver them (to the base with the PSP) with a Native Pod. This PSP will steadily suck Avians and Amorphs off all worlds within 300LY, if the ones in your base are happy. This is particularly useful if the natives involved normally require Spice, Kierra Crystals or some other condition to join a base. It is common practice to place PSP's on your borders, and poach natives from neighbours!
Keep your own PSP's more than 300 LY apart or they can hop, turn by turn, right across your empire to get sucked out by a neighbour. They are attracted towards happier brethren, and Rebels (Host 110 - a special Rebel advantage). In particular, if you build a PSP on your homeworld don't build others within 300 LY!
Start destructive Spying on turn 11. No! It needs 500+ mana to do any real damage, all you do on turn 10 is annoy people.
You should always keep an eye on in-game messages anyway, but if the Host has switched on "show scores", keep an eye on the progress of rivals. It is excellent grist for the propaganda mill.
Build your factories up on your homeworld - aim for 500 by turn 8 and about 30 on several nearby worlds. Supplies are the bottleneck to every world's economy. By the end of the game you may have as many as 5,000 factories on your homeworld, to supply alchemy ships.
Some people say: when you first start the game you have no decent hulls but some decent engines/weapons. Recycling [using the Base command, Recycle Ship] is a good way of recovering those parts and putting them on a decent hull.
Colony worlds: farms need a certain climate range to work - for example, Fed farms need temperature to be near 45 degrees. However, it will be a while before you can build terraformers on colony worlds: they require planetary tech level 6 to build. The answer is to use ships with global warmer / cooler devices, the Eros (hull tech 4, cools) or Bohemian (tech 3, warms). Bear in mind that once these leave a planet, the climate might slowly drift again. (This caused me lots of problems playing Stormers, because my best farming worlds became slowly unfarmable. Some races don't have ways to control climate, which is why hull trading is important.)
Build more training centres. But don't overdo it. They reduce the breeding rate on their base. With 90 training centers, Feds get no population growth! For the Stormers, who have a lower breeding rate, just 38 or so Training centers will bring your homeworld's breeding to a halt. The trick is to have 1 or 2 on your homeworld, but many on a nearby specialised training world. As the game progresses, you build up the training centres there to several hundred(!). Crew, troops and HG are generated there and shipped back to the homeworld as required. The training world will also need lots of food (a stockpile of at least 1000 kT of food at all times).
Build up a stockpile of supplies. At some point, you're going to want to build lots of ordnance in a hurry, to lay mines or arm certain weapons.
Ord dumps exploding (due to sabotage) kill lots of people so don't keep vast ord dumps on your homeworld!
Consider starting to build defenses for all your bases.
Consider a Blitzkrieg attack on a neighbour's home world who may have neglected their weapon techs. If you want any Base Shields on your colonies you'll need to boost planetary tech to 11 and spend 10,000mc / planet.
You should be disrupting neighbours' shipping by now, as you assert your grip on your territory. - Some players have pointed out that this is unwise; if you do this, you better be prepared to finish them off. A sensible point. Attacking early can drain you. I have evolved in a group of very aggressive games, and I often played races which are strong in the early game (EE, Stormers). You'll have to make your own decision on this, check your race's specfic How To Play guide for advice. But bear the following in mind: almost all the really top notch players are super-aggressive. Drew Sullivan writes: "A huge advantage to being the aggressor is that you control the time/place/tempo of the action. You thereby not only get to pick the odds but you also get to spend your time making plans instead of salvaging plans that went amiss. You want to be the one who controls the major flow of the action." Another point here is that it is only wise to be an early aggressor if you have very fast or hyperdrive or cloaking ships, ie if you can choose the ground where you strike.
Around turn 7, when you've got some spare supplies building up on your homeworld at last, send Ord and extra supplies to borders. You will need to build up advance bases, and I mean serious ones where you can re-arm, on your borders. This should help avoid embarrasments like minelayers out of Ord.
If enemy ships reach your bases, the bases are dead - either by bombardment, or ground assault. Planetary defenses are not ver good. Better to build e.g. ships and wings for defense.

Turns 16+:

If playing the Feds, build Bohemians and Eros's. (Global warmer / cooler devices.) Use these to get planets' climates to a farmable range quickly - 50 farms on a planet will produce 50MC / turn and pay for the ships in about 4 turns, but only if the temperature is right. These ships are pretty cost effective, they cool 5 degrees a turn and heat 6 degrees a turn, much better than Version 3 types. If you're not a Fed, you'll need planetary tech 6 to build Terraformers (1,000mc each - eek!)
Lay more mines.
I like to build Planetary Scanners. Need planetary tech 7, but information is power. It's nice to see visitors before they arrive. Range: 100LY. They do not increase the visibility of your base.

Part 3: Strategy

For many more tactical tips see the combat tips page.

Check the Guides for your race, and your co-players' races

I have split discussion of different races to a separate group of pages. Includes strategy suggestions; and tactics usable against the race. Some special ship devices are dealt with in detail under the appropriate race page - for example the Borg page has detailed descriptions of how to use Chunnelling and Hyperdrive. There is also a page dedicated to hyperspace movement, gravitonic mines and other hyper-stuff.

Key points - How To Win

Protect your colonist population. There is an important factor to consider - Resource Points. Although there are a possible 20,000 objects (ships, pods, minefields etc) in the game, all slots can get used up in, say, an 8-player game by turn 60. Some people were beginning to deliberately hog slots with e.g. superfluous pods or excessive numbers of minefields, in order to block others building things. This is one of the big problems with VGAP3 (the Ship Limit - VGAP3 only allowed 500 ships total) and to prevent it, Host now allocates a certain share of the available slots to each player, based on population. The number of Things you can have is directly proportional to the fraction of the galaxy's colonist population belonging to your side. This has a very important consequence: you can win a war against an otherwise powerful enemy by denying them "resource points". There are 2 main ways of doing this:

Kill off his high-population worlds
Outbreed him. 1 million colonists is a lot at the start of the game but if you have a higher breeding rate, compound interest will mean you get a progressively greater proportion of the available Resource Points. Tank O Tronic technology increases breeding rate slightly, but my experience is that it is not worth the investment for low-growth races like the Evil Empire, but very worthwhile for Scavengers etc. Exception: Jon Nunn has persuaded me (I'll skip the maths) that even Tank-o-Tronic A is good for Borg, but that's because of special features concerning this race. I still wouldn't bother with it until the population exceeds say 5 - 10 million, or you'll be spending more on the Exotic Tech than you get back in a reasonable timeframe.

How Resource Points affect games: In a game as Stormers I was doing well versus Crystals until I lost half my population to an attack. Suddenly I was using 100% of my resources (I knew this because Host sends you a message each turn), and I could not build any new ships. The Crystal player did not realise he had a huge advantage (I could not replace losses, whilst he could afford to send in waves of stuff to wear me down). Instead of counterattacking he dug in. His breeding rate was twice mine and over the next 20 turns his population rose from about 30 to 130 million whilst mine rose from 3 to 5. As you can imagine, although I was desperately trying to ditch non-vital minefields, ships etc, I stayed at my limit and seemed doomed. I could not even replace vital minefields which had been swept. However, eventually I managed to knock out his 2 main worlds and with his population back down to sub-20 million, I had plenty of resource points and went back on the offensive... Note: colonists in pods are only worth about 40% of those on planets, for RP's.
Be prepared to lose peripheral planets. They are utterly expendable red herrings. If you try to defend everything, you will be stretched too thin. Peripheral planets should mostly be settled with, say, 2000 colonists (to support 20 mines), a pod launcher, and farms if they support them. You might want some troops or even mechs to make enemy ground assaults costly, and you should always build farms where possible - the food can always be podded home. Don't build coveted pod launchers or government centres near a Borg border, it is just inviting them to attack. Border worlds' prime purpose is to be looted as fast as possible, minerals and natives totally stripped before the enemy get there. Border worlds' second function is to look like targets. This distracts enemy fleets from reaching your high population core quickly. Of course there are always exceptions. Planets with lots of contraband need 100,000's of colonists to gather it quickly. Amorphs are valuable but need 100,000 colonists or so to breed faster than the amorphs eat them. You may decide to invest in a shipyard in a strategic position.
Territory is not important, resources are. Peripheral planets make a good time-buying buffer when invaded, that's all.
In the end game, 90% of your income comes from 10% of your worlds. The other planets are essentially mining colonies you want to strip. Don't worry if enemies overrun a large amount of your territory. Many people worry about losing stuff in a war. Losing stuff can be good! The Russians used the "scorched earth" policy to great effect versus Napoleon and Hitler, and it is a great way to delay enemies who think they are making enormous progress when all they're really doing is wasting their strength capturing stripped worlds. Meanwhile you build up, then strike their fleet when it is isolated and away from help. (And its tech levels will be several turns older than your new ships'.)
Keep your forces concentrated. - unless you're weak, in which case you can probably cause more problems with many minor raids. Borg and Privateers can probably use "formlessness" as a strategy (no clear centre to attack), but in general, concentration is best.
A lot of Strategy is about fooling your enemies - so be sure to read the Diplomacy sections below.
First mover advantage

Use of Blitzkrieg

(when you have an advantage in e.g. materiel or the target is tied up on another front)

Attacking steadily over a broad front

(when you and your opponent are equally matched)

In my opinion, speed is 90% of an assault. I have seen a lot of games bog down in slow wars of attrition, where the guy with the upper hand feels he has to consolidate the territory he gains before advancing further. This leads to slow games which go on forever, because all this does is give the defender time to build up back at his core and lay more minefields.

If there is no clear advantage on either side, then you shouldn't be fighting. You should instead concentrate on diplomacy, to encourage other players to attack the enemy on another front.

If someone has had time to surround themselves with many layers of overlapped minefields, forget Blitzkreig. You will end up funnelled into killing fields as more and more cloaked minefields are revealed.

The idea of speed is that you go ROUND or punch through the front line defenses, and knock out the industrialised core of your enemy before he can build a good fleet with the latest weapon techs, whilst the attacker's fleet is going slowly obsolete.

If you are launching an all-out attack to gain territory, use ground assault on key worlds en route to the enemy's core, to capture fuel dumps and ord plants. Or take spare stuff along in pods. Otherwise your long supply lines become a big problem. Don't waste time, concentrate on the major threats, mop up his lightly colonised outer worlds last.

Another use of rapid raids is looting. You may simply want to grab control of that amorph world long enough to steal them, or you may want to knock out a particularly troublesome base with a Gun Zero, or capture lots of prisoners with a ground assault from a cloaker.

Some races like the EE are designed to be powerful at the start of a game but gradually fall behind the Fast Breeders. If they do not use their early relative strength to make opportunistic quick strikes, e.g. to capture an enemy homeworld (slaves) by turn 15 or so, they are probably dead.

There is a difference between speed and hurrying. Hurrying wastes time, causes blunders. You need to be prepared to move in extra forces to replace losses as you press towards an enemy's core. Don't over-reach yourself, because you aren't properly prepared to follow through. An example in Planets would be going up against a minelaying race like Crystals with insufficient forces to sweep mines, and trusting to luck that you will blast through the minefields. A job done poorly is normally a waste of time. Speed is best for one-off opportunities which you notice.

Blitzkreigs work partly because they demoralise the victim, unsettled by rapid change.

Mark Heinrich writes:

I have found in other strategy games, there is little to be gained throwing yourself against the wall.

This may sound easier said than done, but slow steady pressure applied along the full front, punctuated with quick bursts behind non-conventional attacks will be more efficient. In a land based strategic conquest game I used to play with conventional weapons (tanks, troops, bombers, fighters etc.) if you squared off toe to toe it would be a blood bath. The best strategy was to slowly crawl along, rarely attacking, just pushing against the weak spots. Periodically if there was a clear path to make a strike (due to some oversight or misfortune of the opponent), bombers would soften up a hard spot to advance into. In "Planets" you could crawl ahead below the mine trigger speeds and dash in following glory device pops and triggered minefields. Typically the entrenched defender has the advantage in most wars, so it is best not to address strength with strength. Economically, the slow moving component can be very cheap. Cheap engines + generators are less expensive than fast ones and are as hard in a fight. A light ship with gatling lasers still blows up in a minefield right?

Mark is correct up to a point. Your attack needs to be well supplied and organised. But if you don't push the attack as hard as possible once it's started, but become hesitant, you are lost. Delays give the enemy time to improve defences. Don't give them time to react.

Mark is a more thoughtful player than me. I tend to run out of Ord / Fuel etc at the end of long supply lines, and impromptu Blitzkrieg requires less attention to detail! (I lose more games than him...)

In later years, I realised that the above arguments (broad front versus Blitzkrieg) are two sides of the same coin. The key element is, in fact, short supply lines. If you try to build ships in your core and fight several turns away, and cart loot all the way home, your opponent (fighting on his home ground) is in effect much more maneuverable than you - he takes less time to respond to changing situations at the front line. If, however, you take a risk and move lots of resources to near the front line, you can build ships etc with captured materials / income from captured prisoners, at the place they're needed. Successful Blitzkiegers use the stuff they capture right there, straight away.

Blitzkreig versus Steady Pressure - another view:
Change gears at critical times. Maybe a couple of times in a game. It makes you difficult to predict.

In general, here's how things go with your neighbours:

Mutual expansion
First contact as you stumble unexpectedly into each others' ships and outlying bases. Since you are almost certainly not yet allied, skirmishes occur and tempers flare.
Mutual race for territory. Both seek to colonise as much as possible along the contested border since it's easier to negotiate favourable borders when you can argue "I was there first" (possession is nine-tenths of the law, etc). Lots of blustering and threats.
Further border clashes as you test each others' resolve and try to find enemy homeworld
Agree border [possibly ally with neighbour depending on level of trust] OR, an escalation to war.

Escalation usually occurs if the sides are greatly imbalanced or one perceives an immediate threat from the other. For example, if I found my neighbours were Privateers I would be tempted to attack immediately because they will begin stealing things from my bases immediately. And the kinds of people who play Privateers tend to be untrustworthy, so alliance is not an option. And I might attack Borg because I know they're very weak at the start of the game and unstoppable later. But, attacking a race of similar power just because you're arguing over a couple of planets on your borders is a sure route to self destruction. Other players will encourage you both to attack each other, so you both waste resources and destroy each other, while they use the next 20 turns to build decent economies and fleets - then attack your rear.

As Rob Herring pointed out, there is no "best" strategy to win: "There is always a strategic decision to be made, such as to expand or move out from HW quickly with little defense; or to build slowly ensuring complete ability to defend what you have before expanding more. Each person has to find a balance between risk and reward... It is a strategy game... you may be rewarded for your boldness and courage or destroyed for your carelessness, which is fair, you can't have it both ways." And each game's setup is different, if only in who your neighbours are.
A quiet border is worth more than most allies. Even a good ally ties up time and resources as you trade and co-ordinate with him. A quiet border frees up a lot of resources.
A poor ally is a frustrating waste of time. I would rather have no ally than one who had a radically different playing style, or didn't care enough about the game to be dependable. I have come across a couple of players who literally were more dangerous as allies than enemies - they leaked secrets, couldn't co-ordinate attacks (so their ally lost his ships), tied up ships trying to swap hull plans, were too timid etc. It took all the fun from the game.
The Bovinoid Player Problem: some players are very passive and think they are playing Sim City or Civilisation. They build large shiny fleets but never seem to do anything. In my experience, people who have not committed to a fight (and particularly ones who are not allied to anyone) by turn 30 are paper tigers - they may look dangerous (because they have not wasted ships etc in a war yet), but they crumble when attacked and act surprised that someone attacked them in a war game. Often they whine and drop out of the game! Feel no mercy for these sheep. They shouldn't be playing with the big boys, and if you don't capture their resources, someone else will.
Oddly, comments about the Bovinoid Player Problem were criticised by several people on the mailing list. "Many people play for subtler reasons than simply fighting... maybe their role playing or other aims were different to your shallow ones" wrote one. Fair enough, but pacifist vegetarian hippies shouldn't expect to join wargames with strangers on the Net looking for a challenge and expect to survive on beautiful philosophy for much longer than a steak in a cage full of starving Klingons. Er, I'm ranting, aren't I.
Big fleet battles cannot be predicted too accurately, because there are too many variables, although there is a combat simulation tool available, which can help you envisage the probable outcome of a battle. But the best way to ensure winning combats is by using overwhelming force rather than trying to be clever and using "just enough" force.

There's a snowball effect as your fleets begin crushing the enemy. Big fleet battles destroy far more of one side's ships than the other. When empires crumble, they sometimes go under remarkably quickly.
Don't forget to put Ord and Repair Units in warships. You can tow extra Ord in pods if needed or even shoot it out to your front line in untowed pods. There's nothing quite so pathetic as a minelayer using all its Ord in minefields and having none left for combat...
Ground Assault (which is covered in detail on this page) is the only way of capturing an enemy's infrastructure. Ships will blow away an enemy base, but you need ground assault to capture the mines, fuel dumps, fighter plants, natives etc. A ship based attack will destroy even the minerals your opponent had mined. So you capture a mined-out planet and cannot refuel to move on... when launching big fleet based assaults to capture an entire area, you usually have to acquire fuel etc en route. It is essential to capture some Bases, not planets, using ground combat. (Interesting point: if a ship is destroyed by a massive overkill of damage when in orbit round a planet, its hull-minerals end up on the planet's surface.)
Many races' ground vehicles seem expensive for what they are worth in combat. However, colonists are all but useless versus ground vehicles. You need 10,000 colonists to take out 1 enemy Mech. So by dropping one tank on an enemy outpost, you can do immense damage at no risk over a few turns. The power of crew and troops to destroy ground units and fighters is quite low.
Base Defense: Ensure every colony has at least got a few troops. See here for more info.
If someone is getting too powerful, but are too far away to attack directly, you can sabotage them anonymously using Spy Attacks. Tip: these are more effective if your mana is higher (ie, you've invested more cash in them). It doesn't matter if you don't share a border; your spies will find them. Even Feds (weak Dark Powers rating) can do remarkable damage this way, but it's expensive. It doesn't work against Borg.ighting - the end is quick.
Attacking an enemy's Happiness is another way of eroding their income. Once you have a few hundred thousand prisoners, the problems begin piling up. Particularly if you have sold them to a race who can put them in prison camps / mines...!
Target enemy bases with Government Centres. The cash in their Central Account rapidly erodes. This means they can no longer afford Exotic Techs. This works! People have done it to me. As your empire shrinks you can fund fewer and fewer Exotics and your fleets begin losing more and mor!
Jumpgates are a double edged sword. I am now vey wary of using them since enemies got "inside my network" (ie, seized one, and had scouted the access codes to others). Their fleet could hop anywhere within my network. I couldn't defend every JG with an equivalent fleet: they could choose their battleground.
Never build a Jumpgate above an important base. Always surround them with a rosette of minefields. (You can overlap up to 5 in one place without their centres overlapping. That way, if anything nasty appears at the JG, you can detonate them and do 5 lots of damage.)
Killing an enemy homeworld: (these links are to the appropriate sections of the combat tips page:) Superweapons are not as good as they sound in normal combat due to huge charge times and cost. But they will blow away the Base Shield of a homeworld. Another way of cracking this nut is to use Wings in your attack force, which can partially shoot through a base shield. These will eventually knock out the Shield Generator and then the ships in your assault force can fire on the base too. A third (difficult) way is to use ground assault and a fourth is to destroy the planet itself with HD stress amplifiers / laser mining drills or glory devices to increase HD Stress above 1,000. Finally, a superlaser can destroy a planet and thus the base on it.
Capturing powerful bases: first you must get rid of their defending fleet. The trick: Bases can only engage in a limited number of combats per turn. One between movement phases 50 and 199, then one last time at the end of the turn. If you hit the base early with a scout say on movement phase 51 it will engage the base. Now any further fights that develop between movement phases 52 and 199 will NOT include the base. So you move your fleet in, engage the defending ships, then move AWAY from the base before the end of the turn. Thus you do not need to engage the base's ion cannon, AA guns or Home Guard wings, and the base is open to capture by Ground Assault next turn.
Wings: Your homeworld starts with an Air Assault Base. Although you'll need to reach Planetary Tech 12 to build another, you can form Fighter Wings from turn 1. If your fighters have a good long range (eg 200LY) you can use them to raid neighbours in an unexpected way: most ships carry weapons designed to kill other ships, not fighters.
I suggest you form your free starting fighters into three Wings (ie do not mix fighter types in the Wings) and set these to "anti ship" and "anti fighter" for homeworld defense.
Undercities are no better than Raid Shelters for protection against Orbital Bombardment, but they also make your bases harder to scan. Another bonus of undercities is that unlike normal cities, they don't have any impact on your population growth rate.
Laser Cannon (a planetary structure) are an expensive way to protect a base. Why not use mechs or troops?
AA Guns (another planetary structure) are extremely worthwhile if you expect raids from a fighter-using player. However, they need quite a bit of Ordnance in the base to work at maximum effectiveness.
Ion Cannon (another structure) seem useless, but they are quite good at smashing ships up if you build 200 and they have plenty of Ord to fire.
A word of wisdom from AstonishingTales.com : 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer'. Sun Tzu said this. Or perhaps it was Norah Jones. Regardless of the source, it's crazy advice. If you try it the other way around, you'll find it makes much (much!) more sense because that way, when your enemies attack, you can use your friends as a fleshy wall of protection. In fact, if you're a sufficiently popular type, nothing short of a full-scale unleashing of a minor nuclear power's arsenal could penetrate the sheer mass of your Shield'o'Chums. This is an important point, and one often not grasped, although I do think Sun Tzu mentions it in a later chapter, as does Norah on her Feels Like Home album.
Lessons from poker
Don't give away "free cards". Or in VGAP terms, don't give away free chances to hurt you, no matter how remote. Make people work to capture stranded ships, etc.
"Tilt": Good poker players don't let emotions affect play. Immediately after a big success, they are back to a waiting game until the time is right to pounce.
There is no optimal strategy; each game is different.
Don't ovevalue flashy hands - in VGAP terms, expensive status units like big ships and superweapons.
Bluffing doesn't usually work if the stakes are low; people say what the hell let's give it a go. Bluffing works best when you are forcing the enemy to risk a lot.
Good poker players know that psychology is much, much, much more important in a no-limit game than in a limit one. Limit games often turn into math battles, while no-limit games carry a strong psychology component.
Good Poker players are willing to take a long-shot risk if the reward is high enough, but only if the expected return is higher than the risk.
Good poker players understand they need to be more risk-averse with their overall bankroll than their stack at the table.
Players who are good at one form of poker are sometimes poor at others.
Trick your opponent into not making the best move. In poker, information is everything. VGAP analogy: disperse his strength with distracting raids; make him think you're angling to kill someone else; hide your ace (whether it's a cloaker or a secret ally).
Get caught bluffing once in a while when the stakes are low. You win pots that you don't deserve when your bluff works. You make people think you are a loose and careless player, and they "call your bluff" when you are playing for higher stakes

Morale and psychological warfare
About 30% of empires which collapse do so simply because their players think they've lost. They then start to miss turns, only do minimal turns, and not surprisingly this accelerates their collapse and their morale drops further. Often they are in a better position than they think - for example their enemy may give the impression of vast resources - but in fact they are not seeing the tip of the iceberg, but the entire enemy fleet, stretched to its limit. This kind of player assumes that if he cannot scan an area a long way away, it is full of the worst possible stuff he can imagine. In fact people put their best forces near their enemies!

If you are lucky enough to find an enemy giving up like this for no obvious reason, the correct strategy is to take risks. He won't be micromanaging his forces and you will be able to count on him not realising, for example, that if he repairs his fleet they will be more effective; he will be fighting half heartedly. If you take risks, you seem even more powerful and he's even more likely to give up.

A variety of fighting styles you may encounter

Women
Girls aren't usually attracted to the game. But when they play they are generally very deadly. One VGAP3 team game was deliberately set up as a girls vs boys game, after the girls got fed up with male bragging and challenged them to prove themselves. The girls thrashed the boys because they co-operated much better.
Women are much better at spotting lies than blokes.

Married blokes with kids
Tend to be good players... who miss occasional moves due to family crises.

The AI
This automated computer player, is intended to

help newbies learn to play the game by giving them something to duel;
replace dropouts;
act as an assistant to do some of your turn for you if you don't have time to do it all.

When a player drops out and is replaced by the AI, there is no warning message. How can you tell? Alliances end?
It can be a tricky opponent as it cheats a little. I don't think this is unfair as it seems largely unintentional, and it has to do so in order to have a chance against a human player.
It was only introduced around the start of 2006 (at which point Tim got tied up in family responsibilities so development slowed for a while) and you should view the current version - Host 195 as I write this - as very much an early version. It has a core of basic strategies plus some special rules for each race. Beta testers have fed lots of suggestions to Tim on how to improve it, and you can expect many refinements to its play.
The AI cannot be reasoned with though - it automatically ends any alliances and attacks its neighbours.
It loves using pods to set up bases. Keep an eye out for "illegal" numbers of people in Life Pods. They make an excellent haul of prisoners, if you can capture them. (If the AI is going to cheat, you may as well take advantage of it right back!)
It is a very poor player in most ways. It does not manage its economy well. Humans are much more dangerous when they attack. The AI is a bit of a plodder - it does not launch long range Blitzkreig attacks. It defends its area and gradually expands. It seems to build up for 2-4 turns, then (if there are nearby forces within 100 LY or so) it will strike, while laying mines. So don't assume it is ignoring you just because one ship got near last turn.
Olly has summarised how to use the AI on his website here.

Glorious death when losing
Sometimes a player will deliberately go out in a blaze of glory (suicide attack) or ask the Host to put the AI in charge of his side, rather than spend weeks playing a hopeless cause.

Fighting to the bitter end when losing
Rather fewer people will fight to the bitter end, to cause as much trouble as possible for their opponent and give their allies a chance of revenge. I suspect a good indicator of this kind of tenacious fighter is given by their Drewhead statistics, assuming they play there. If they turn in 95% of their turns, they are not prone to dropping out when the going gets tough - prepare for a hard fight if you attack them. I think this will become less common now they have the option of asking the Host to let the AI play their side if they leave a game.

Groups of friends
Hmm... we seem to have three people from the same city in this game... might they perhaps be co-operating?
Players who have other social links - all at same university, etc - tend to form unshakeable alliances. Some however (like the group I emerged from) have great internal rivalries. However in general, it's bad news when you notice several players have very similar email addresses! Beware of one acting as a "mole" in your alliance.

Defensive players; Fence Sitters
Sitting at home and building a huge fleet behind minefields doesn't usually conquer a galaxy. But it does allow high growth races like Crystals and Feds to win VP based games, simply by breeding.
Assuming it is not a VP based game, but one where the winner is based on military prowess, there are generally three reasons that people wall themselves off and refuse to join in Wars of Mutual Advantage:

Late game races such as Robots, Feds, Crystals, CoM, Scavengers become proportionately more powerful (compared to other races) as the game progresses. They are the opposite of the EE, which peaks in "relative strength" early and must strike a neighbour by turn 10 or die. Late game races benefit from staying out of other folks' wars for as long as possible. By the way, there are other ways of playing these races so don't assume they will be played thus; but it's a good idea to cull them early on, before compound interest mushrooms their population, and thus economy, beyond control. They may also be waiting for special abilities to kick in once they have attained a certain tech level, etc.
the Ship Polisher (see next section - Noncombatants) is a player who is not actually interested in fighting. Don't confuse these with the much more dangerous...
Fence Sitter. Often the game is won by someone who is simply left alone too long. Everyone else fritters away their strength fighting each other, and then these extraordinarily patient players - who may have waited half a year, carefully avoiding losses in battles - decide it is the right time to strike. And when they do, it is an incredibly well prepared strike. Fence Sitters will usually arrange non combat alliances with all neighbours, and often they will string neighbours along with ambiguous mentions of support which they have no intention of fulfilling (ie encouraging you to waste your strength). They tend to give themselves away by feeding information to both sides in a war. You have to ask "how do they know this? They must be allied to both sides and playing us off against each other." Very annoying types, but you have to admit it works if you have the patience for it.

On the plus side, defensive players are often loners, and not in any effective alliances.

Noncombatants ("Sim City players") - give up when merely attacked
Perhaps 10% of players are only interested in the "sim city" part of the game: building a powerful looking empire. They look dangerous, but these "ship polishers" are lost and demoralised when someone attacks them, and their apparently powerful fleet folds spectacularly. (Often they whine a lot about the unfairness of it.) These players usually huddle on a small number of worlds, afraid to expand. They often play games where you can win by simply sitting still and breeding (ie win by Victory Points).

Morale collapse when losing
About 30% of players put up a hard fight up to a point, then give up when they believe they can't win. This is more common in beginners. Usually they have no idea how stretched their opponent is, and don't consider other options like forming new alliances. They begin missing turns and become progressively easier to crush as they lose interest in the game, eventually dropping out. When conquering such players, it is essential to grab as many prisoners and other loot as quickly as possible, before their empire begins decaying (after 10 unplayed turns) or they ask the Host to get the AI to run their side.

Scorched earth when losing
This is becoming much more common and sophisticated. Denying resources to an enemy has a long tradition. When losing, why let your conqueror benefit from the acquisition of slaves, minerals, etc? There are ways to deny him his spoils...
The best example of this I've seen was by Solarian. He was the victim of a Blitzkreig attack by the EE, who hyperjumped in and blockaded half his major worlds in one go. Rather than put up a stiff fight as everyone expected, he realised he would lose [he had no defenses against e.g. the Moscow boarding lasers, and the EE destroyed his main defense - fighters - with laser mines, and he'd not prepared for this kind of attack] and so he ruthlessly destroyed his own empire in about 3 turns - too quickly for the EE to change tactics: they could not blockade every world simultaneously. He realised this would do more long term damage to the EE than simply blowing up some ships. It was unexpected because most scorched earthers only use it as a last resort, not the first one! He writes:
"There is another level to this which goes beyond the individual game, having a reputation for always having hidden reserves can be a big psychological advantage, and having it known that attacking you will always result in getting much less back than you lose is a good way of having somebody else picked as a target.
"There is also a certain satisfaction in sitting back and imagining the expression on the opposition when you do something so outrageous that you just KNOW they don't have a contingency plan for. Which is something I'll lose in this case if this becomes a regular manoeuvre."

I was very impressed by the stunning speed with which he imploded the EE's potential loot. Here are some of the tricks he used:

Recycled ships at bases into metals etc. (This is a command on the ship Mission screen.)
Put the metals, his population, natives, supplies, food, etc into pods and boosted them off-planet and detonated them before he was blockaded. He was fortunate enough to have enough wings to mean that he couldn't just send one ship per planet once I recycled the ships - which is important, it prevented the EE blockading every planet of his.
Cash wasn't podded off, it went into building fighters to make the bases harder to attack.
Chups were podded towards enemies
I assumed he TNT'd his bases as they seemed to just disappear (this Command Code destroys them. It would not work if the EE removed his ships from orbit, so he had to work fast.). In fact, although he EPA'd the mines and DOC'd the cities, he wanted the enemy to have to lose time actually attacking his bases. He docked all remaining fighters at the bases to protect them from laser mines, and make the bases difficult to attack.
He also launched a (fighter) strike on one EE base specifically to kill off the prisoners that base had just captured.
End result: the EE only captured 10% of his population and maybe 5% of his other wealth.
If he had fought conventionally, he figured the EE would have destroyed his fleet anyway... but captured most of his population and resources. He specifically wanted to deny the EE his Celestias [money making devices] and Aquilas [Agro Domes].

Another trick you can use, for bases where you cannot save the population, is to deliberately make them super-unhappy with crime, lack of food, provoking attacks on the base etc. The population will start killing each other off, and destroying structures. I guess a Public Space Port might allow some to escape to nearby bases, too.

Part 4: Mechanics - obscure things worth knowing

When this document was written, the latest Host release was Beta 166. Keep an eye on Tim's VGAP4 website for changes since that release. Sometimes there are tweaks to the game when Beta testers find another loophole to abuse!

Tip: read the Host Release Notes on Tim's site. These are also collected by subject by Clausimu and shown here, on Saarland Outpost, which you may find more readable. Skimming these you will notice lots of rule wrinkles you can take advantage of.

Classic mistakes

Building a Terra Class Starbase with my entire stock of metals on turn 5. And then finding that it has no engines, and I don't have a ship which can tow it until Hull Tech 8.

Before sending yor turn in, make sure your homeworld Government Center is not set to suck out more cash than you've got on the base.

Before laying mines, make sure your ship has enough ordnance on board. Otherwise the mine laying screen does nothing.

Food

Food comes mainly from farms, and is often the limit to your growth. It s gobbled up by Cities (2kT food per city per turn); you also need 1 food per 100,000 colonists; and most games are configured so that a large stockpile of food is required to keep a base happy (ie enough to feed it for 100 turns!). So a planet of 10 million people in 100 cities, will need:

100 food for the colonists each turn; and
200 food for the cities each turn; and
a stockpile of 10,000 food for max growth

This is why farming colonies and terraforming are important. A planet can have up to 250 farms, depending on soil rating (average approx 100), and each farm will require 1000 colonists to run (or build) it. A recent Host change allows you, or your Ministers, to build them a quickly as you like; but you need 1000 colonists per farm you are building. If you have 100000 colonists on a planet and it has a soil rating of 100, go ahead build 100 farms. . .

There are some other ways to get food: the Glory Device converts worms to food on planets at a rate of 20 worms to 1 food; agro-domes create 50kT food / turn. There are other ways to use food: some Devices; obscure racial powers; Chupanoids eat it if they can get it. Some races like Robots don't need it. The IMT Megacorp "race" can convert prisoners and natives to food.

Planets drift in temperature a degree or so every turn. Hot stars heat them up. If the temp is marginal for farming, add 5 to the heat to get the temperature in the long run. It may not be worth building farms unless you can terraform them to a better temperature.

Even small bases need a little food. If you beam down colonists to forma base, and suddenly next turn they are all gone, it might be because you forgot to bring food. I find even a small base needs >100 food to stop its happiness rapidly plummetting to -150.

Miscellaneous

It's worth pointing out to new players that Base refers to a set of buildings your race has set up on the planet. Whereas in VGAP3 "Base" meant a big orbital thing and "Planet" meant the buildings, in VGAP4 they are combined into a ground based thing; and over the course of the game, your colonists will gather resources from the planet's surface, of which Food, Supplies, Natives and Contraband are particularly interesting. And just to confuse the issue, there is also a kind of starship called a Starbase, which is huge, has no engines and needs to be towed.

There is a build queue order: 1st factories and labour camps, 2nd cities, undercities, farms, smugglers cantinas, 3rd any others. Because you can queue structures, beware that if you e.g. order 500 factories: those vital cities you wanted for revenue won't get built for several turns until the higher-priority stuff is finished.

Med Units are no longer used in the mainstream game; where they used to be used by Cities and Resorts, now you use Food instead. They are still used by a couple of obscure races / devices, but during Beta testing it was found they simply added micromanagement, but didn't enhance the game. So you can ignore these. Recent discovery from Mel Hadden : actually there are strong indications that forming a base with 100+ med units helps keep its happiness up.

Base Attack Mode settings:

Peaceful mode gives a slight population growth rate bonus and should be used for high population bases which are not under threat. In combat terms, it is perhaps better described as "full defense mode". Troops are dug in and better at defending the base but won't go out and attack enemy bases as they would in Roaming Defense mode, for example.
To capture enemy bases use CrushKillDestroy! mode or Capture mode. Capture mode is like an extreme form of CrushKillDestroy - your troops kill far less enemy colonists but they take 3 times normal losses. Capture is very useful when attacking enemy bases that are almost all colonists.
If a hostile enemy base is threatening to Ground Assault yours, then to defend against capture, flip a coin to decide whether your colonies are on CrushKillDestroy! or Attack and Run mode. This means your enemies cannot predict what mode to expect. These modes are the best defense against Ground Assault. The Attack and Run ground attack setting blocks a CrushKillDestroy attack unless the race doing the CrushKillDestroy attack has twice the number (or more) of Troops or has twice the number ( or more ) High Guard. If the race with the CrushKillDestroy mission is fielding twice the troops or twice the High Guard the Attack and Run mission never happens. (I'm not sure what happens if the aggressor uses Capture mode.)

Players who drop out - and every game has some - unbalance the game for the remaining people because the drop out's nearest neighbours can grab his Stuff. Fortunately Tim has coded in a decay rate for unplayed Empires, they gradually fade away if left unplayed for several turns, but their planets remain with their resources (natives, contraband, minerals). So, if you see a power vacuum next to you, get in quick and loot as much as possible before anyone else notices, or it fades away. Or the Host decides it would be good to let the AI control it.

Efficient fuel use: One way to conserve fuel is to open the ship's NAV screen. In the bottom left corner there is a slider bar below a graph. This is superior to the Speed Setting control on the Ship Overview screen because, the graph indicates the efficiency and you can see when to increase speed slightly. However, unless you're a hyperdrive based race, you will save much more fuel by investing in Plasamfold Exotic Techs than by micromanaging the warp speed setting.

Incidentally, the NAV screen speed control shows you estimated fuel consumption for all waypoints, whilst the Speed Setting control on the Ship Overview screen shows est. fuel to get to just the next waypoint. Took me a while to realise they were both right, and were not disagreeing with each other!

Most people play in universes starting with 5 million colonists. (This makes Rebels too powerful.)

The Unlimited Minerals trick: ramping a planet's HD stress to extremes generates enormous amounts of ore. (Both positive and negative stress works, though positive has the disadvantage of blowing up the planet.)

Mineral bonus: if ships fight and get destroyed over a planet as they defend it, they end up as metals on the planet surface if they are destroyed, which the winner can scoop up.

More Mines are not necessarily better: Mining efficiency decreases as a square root for all mines over 100 on a base. (Only the excess mines will be squarerooted.) So 1,000 mines are really about as effective as you'd expect for 130 mines if it was a linear relationship!

Mines need 100 colonists to run each one.

Combat / VCR ticks are not the same as movement ticks. Game movement is split into 200 phases, sometimes called ticks.
When Host.exe runs, it does things in a certain order. When it gets to moving ships, they move 1/200th of their speed every phase. It helps to think of one game turn really being 1 month.
If a ship finds itself within combat range (5LY) of an enemy during one of these movement phases, a battle ensues. These are resolved in "more or less real VCR time" and you can see the results in the Visual Combat Record files that result. These battles generally last from 200 to 2000 VCR ticks. A ship can have multiple battles (VCR's) in one turn. There are some special rules:

Every 20 ticks, Host checks to see if you've hit a mine.
There is no combat during the first 50 movement phases, only the last 150.
Most hyperjump movement occurs on movement phase 100 and a ship which hyperjumps can't move in warp drive for the last 100 ticks, although it can move into position for a hyperjump during the first 100 movement phases. (There are two exceptions - the Rebel Falcon and Privateer MCBR.)

These quirks have been used to cook up various cunning tactics., for example, boarding lasers still work in ticks 1-50 so you can capture ships before they can fire back!

Ship names can yield useful info. Some players are busy (lazy) and encode useful information into them.

Hammers and Anvils: read up about these in the on line Help files. Tim has improved the explanation of how to use the game's controls at www.planets4.com/v4notes.htm. Make sure you understand the concepts. It will avoid a lot of confusion. Sorry about all the bold type but it really is important!

To set the anvil object using the space command list window: make sure the blinking green lights are traveling to the right. . . Click the item on the list.

You may find it easier to think of the hammer / anvil concept thus: when you give a ship an order, it is like a sentence. It has a grammar. There is a subject (the active do-er, the hammer); an object (the anvil); and a verb (the action).

Some useful pages on related topics:

Minelaying tips: see the Mines page.

Hyperdrive, Jumpoint Generators and Jumpgates (separate page)

Combat tips (separate page)

Diplomat combat simulation tool (separate page)

Exotic Techs

These were introduced as a way to burn excess cash which tends to accumulate during endgames. Thus, they are deliberately very expensive. However, some are cheap enough to be cost effective very early in the game. In particular I would recommend looking at the following ones:

Pod Kicker A - and, if you get lucky and have the startup cash at some point, Pod Kicker B - some players complain that they never have enough minerals, or it takes ages to get colonies going with large numbers of people. I never have this problem, and with Pods flying round at speed 50 I don't need to bother building medium freighters and spend time working out where to tow docked pods round either. Low pod speed acts as a brake on your economy.
Tank O Tronic A - now I'm not sure about this. My arithmetic indicated it would pay for itself in increased tax revenue within 8 turns or so as Stormers. Even if you only have it on for a single turn, the marvels of compound interest mean that its effects keep working after being switched off! (Because the extra colonists you generated will continue breeding forever.) But oddly, it didn't seem to make a significant difference in test games. I checked with Tim and realised... it does not increase your breeding rate by 20% from say 5% to 25%. It increases it by 20% of 5%. So for 8,000mc per turn, it hardly seems worth it until late game when 8,000mc is easily affordable. Others swear by it. I have heard some folk say that it is worth it for high growth races like Scavengers but less worthwhile for low growth ones likethe EE.
My strategy is: ignore the negative effect of Cities on population growth (which is miniscule: growth is reduced by 0.2% per city so if you would have bred 1000 colonists, you get still 980 with 10 cities). Build cities for the extra 100mc / turn they give you, and save up money to buy Tank O Tronic A as soon as possible. Growth Rates vary from about 15 (Borg) to 175 (Crystals).

A few notes on Exotic Techs:

It is really easy to burn lots of money on Exotic Techs with nothing to show for it a few turns later. Few ET's have lasting effects or yield cash returns. Don't go mad at the start of a game!

All Exotics are additive. You can turn on a plus 10, and a plus 20, and a plus 30 bonus, and get a plus 60 total bonus.

If you can not pay the maintance cost for an exotic tech you will have to pay the full starting value all over again to get that tech bonus again.

Money is first spent on maintaining exotic techs that you already have.

Any left over money in the central bank will be used to buy new exotics.

Potential cash flow problem: The exotic tech spending is after all taxes are collected and before money is spent on normal ship and planet techs. But, Exotic Tech spending takes place before money is transfered from government centers to the central bank.

I tried Stealth Mines in my latest game. Pointless. Despite being cloaked, which reduces scanner effectiveness, and having awful scanners, the enemy danced round them, using relayed scan data from a Fed scout. We compared notes. He could see about 75% of my minefields.

Alien hull plans

You can steal enemy hull plans with a Spy mission (or trade them with friends). As usual, players began taking this Too Far and started building warfleets consisting almost entirely of other peoples' hulls. Therefore, Tim introduced a few restrictions which don't stop you using alien hulls' devices, but you probably don't want to use them in a battle any more:

Alien ship hulls repair at a maximum rate of 5% hull damage a turn

Exotic Tech does not work on alien hulls in your fleet

40% of weapons fail on alien hulls in your fleet

Boarding lasers do not work on ships of alien hull design. Ie if you capture a Deth Spec its BL won't work for you.

Alien hulls have defective scanners and make extra noise

Exceptions:

The UA (University), Cyborg*, Peeps, Rebels and Scavengers have immunity to hull plan restrictions. They can still trade plans and build copies of hulls which fight at full effectiveness, and they are not affected by the Hconfig switch which disables the trading / spying / capture of alien hull plans.

Robot* hull plans self destruct. Ie, Robot hulls can't be copied. Robots can use alien hull plans just fine.

Crystals can't use alien Plans to build ships, and other races can't use theirs.

Privateers can't use alien Plans to build ships, but they have other uses for them. And if Privateers capture an alien ship, they have none of the usual bad effects (combat, repair etc) when using it.

(* races with the Hacker Droid device need to be able to use alien plans or there's no point to the device.)

Related HConfig options to allow Hosts to tailor games:

Option of turning off weak combat / slow repair of alien hulls (default = On)
Option of forbidding the trading of alien plans (default = On)

Trading for hull plans: this is covered in Tim's Help files, but note you have to erase any plan in a ship before transferring in a new plan.

Capturing ships by Boarding

Generally best with High Guard.

Two important boarding rules:

1. Defending CREW: x10 strength bonus defending.

So Borg Biocide crew strength = 10x40x6900 = 2,760,000!

2. Colonists attacking in boarding actions are worth 10% their combat value.

Skill and experience

Ship Skill is quite obscure, useful only during certain phases of Boarding mechanics. Basically, you get a slight bonus to your Crew's fighting ability when boarded or boarding... but as Boarding is normally done with massive overkill numbers of HG and so on, it isn't worth worrying about.

Ship Experience is much more useful. It helps weapon accuracy and, more importantly, it helps when sweeping mines. Tim has said, cryptically: "most experience comes from combat".

The weapon accuracy bonus only appears when a ship's Experience rises above 100 and maxes out around 700. There's a big bonus (+30% weapon accuracy) when you hit 100 experience, rising linearly to a 70% bonus at 700 expereince.
But ships start out at 0 and it is very rare to see a ship with experience above 30! Although it is meant to be acquired by fighting, it is thought (from observation) that it only actually gets added by the use of Large weapons in destroying a ship. Missed shots, and hits on shields and armour don't seem to count, only hits on the hull itself. This implies that you're more likely to see experience accruing on ships with weapons that arc across armour / shields, and which have survived many fights, ideally against Swarms (ie large ships).

I would suggest trying: Ion Cannon / IC Array (300 Armour Arc - next best is Force Beam, 150), or Plasma Bolt Cannon / Foce Beam / Blaster Cannon, which all have Shield Arc of >100. (This is all theoretical - it only occurred to me as I pulled this stuff on experience together, I would welcome any feedback on the subject!)

When it comes to mine laying and sweeping, even a point of (skill?) + experience is valuable. Since Host 78, the order that ships take actions are based on the ship's skill, experience, and high guard on the ship. Ships with more skill, experience and high guard take their actions last. They will sweep mines last, they will lay mines last. This means a minesweeper with a point of experience is very likely to survive mine-trap-duels with, say, Crystal ships because it will sweep the traps before they can be detonated at the beginning of each turn. And since minefields which are remote-detonated explode before movement, you can drive up to an uncloaked minefield and sweep it safely before it is deonated.

There is a little more info on Experience on this page. [that link might not work, that page is still being rewritten]

Blockade

Three or more ships over an enemy base stops them from launching any pods (blockade). Having one friendly ship over the planet after movement breaks the blockade.
Blockade also stops the base below from buying or selling contraband.

There's a bit more on Blockade on the Evil Empire page, blockade section. Prisoner-taking races like the EE use Blockade to stop enemy colonists escaping, while they bring up some forces to Ground Assault the base.

Tim says: The blockade rule has been added to REWARD any empire with the power and the will to place its fleet over the planet of an enemy. It is a reward for being bold and taking enemy planets. I have seen too many cowards pod launch everything off of a planet just so my fleet would not be able to claim its prize. If you want to scorch the planets before me do so BEFORE my fleet parks itself in your sky. I favor things that make the game more agressive and bloody, blockades serve that goal. If you want to break a blockade all that you have to do is get one ship in orbit over the planet. You can send in a bunch of cheap high evasive ships set to flee. If just one gets away it will act as a screening ship for your pods the next turn and you can launch all the pods you want. Those blockade breaking ships are your heroic ones that rely on some luck to be successful. They are the ones that they will sing the songs about. Fortune favors the bold.

How to use pods (Base Command screen - "POD PAD" button)

Pods are the way you move large quantities of Stuff around for minimum fuel use. To move them quickly, dock them to a ship or use Exotic Techs. Pods are the only way to move ore or natives.

A pod can move 1000kt of stuff or 400,000 life forms for 25mc. They can move in 3 ways -

Pod movement method	Pros	Cons
On their own Simply flung into space from a Pod Launch Pad, they will travel in a straight line until they reach their target.	Does not tie up ships or use fuel. Can be done automatically by Ministers, saving much time	Slow (depends on race but typically 20 light years / turn unless you use Exotic Techs) Targeting info: enemies can see where they are going to (your homeworld?) or coming from Lone pods are quite easy to capture, so do not fling 400,000 colonists into space in a free pod!
Towed	Sometimes useful when capturing a pod in a hit-and-run raid. Ships can move much faster than pods.	Many ships do not have the Tow Power to drag a full (1000kT) Pod. (You can "carbon freeze" Life Pods so they are one quarter the mass.) Burns lots of fuel. Requires ships messing about with Intercepts or other rendezvousing techniques, which delays them (ship is ready to go, but pod needs to be launched and visble first).
Docked to a ship	Docked pods do not count for fuel consumption purposes. Ships can move much faster than pods. At Pod Launch time you can say "Dock with ship 643" and simultaneously set ship 643 to move. The pod should be docked with the ship before ship movement (not completely reliable) and so next move it's already on its way. If you set the Drop Target of the pod to a planet / Base the ship will pass, the ship doesn't even need to stop at that planet. As long as one of its waypoints is this planet, and it's moving at less than about 100 LY / turn, the pod will automatically detach from the ship, and land on the planet as the ship passes by.	Not all ships are able to dock with pods

To send a pod to a remote planet, use the "Boost" [To] and "Drop" [At] commands.
Life pods and assault pods that are over unowned planets that turn off their orbital thrusters land on the planet. They form a new base on the ground and then all other pods can land at the base by turning of their thrusters. No dock or drop target setting will be required.
To dock a pod with a ship in orbit round your base, use the "Boost To" button [selecting the ship as the target], and the "Dock" [With] button.
Although ore pods, etc can store up to 1000kT of material, a Life pod can store up to 400,000 colonists. But don't ship 400,000 colonists away in one pod until at least turn 7, preferably much later. Stick to a maximum of 2,000 colonists per pod for the first few turns. There are 2 reasons for this -

Colonists don't breed in pods. If you lock up 20% of your population in pods and they take, say, 5 turns to reach a new world and start breeding again, you've severely restricted your population (ie, income) growth at the beginning of the game. Compound interest. Besides, why set up cities for cash on colony worlds if you have to ship it back home somehow? There is a point in building farms on colony worlds, for extra income you would not get otherwise, but you only need 20,000 colonists to run 200 farms. The only time you need populated cities (50,000+ people) on colony worlds is where you build shipbuilding facilities, which will need significant cash.
Colonists don't breed fast enough to replace these kinds of losses. In general, don't suck more than 10% of your homeworld population off until you have at least 2 million colonists. (This doesn't necessarily apply to all races - for example the EE might have good reasons to ship almost all its population off world to make a quick buck gathering contraband.)

Outfit Pods can be used to refit ships with better weapons, etc. The docs aren't clear on how to use them but fortunately Sidewinder has figured it out - currently it seems you need to dock the pod to the target ship for outfitting to work. This may seem to rule out outfitting for ships without pod bays. However if you set the pod to Dock with the target ship, it *does* dock momentarily (just long enough for the refit to work) and then undocks before Host finishes its run. So to Refit a ship, use the "Dock With [target ship]" and "Upgrade Ship" buttons on the Outfit pod. There is one thing missing from Tim's instructions: You must also switch on "Transfer To Ship" in Pod Command/Main. Without all these three settings, Transfer, Upgrade and Dock, it doesn't work. Pete Chambers notes: You can also downgrade equipment this way: ie recover good engines from mediocre hulls which have had their day. One minor problem is that Pods take 2 turns to upgrade: 1 to launch pod and 1 to get it to dock
Medium Freighters can carry 3,000 colonists, so there's no point sending vulnerable pods containing less than about 5000 people EXCEPT onturn 3, when you can launch - oh, say 5 Life pods full of 20,000 colonists each [be careful you don't depopulate your homeworld!] at the 5 nearest farmable planets, before your neighbors have ships capable of travelling to your neighborhood and picking off these easy targets. The pods will radiate out from your homeworld, which is a bit of a giveaway, but no one will be near enough to see for many turns. Don't send unguarded pods of people out like this except right at the beginning of the game, because they could easily end up as prisoners. (Unless you use Assault Pods, but they can't carry Colonists.)
Assault Pods are 3 times more difficult to detect than Life Pods, but only Life Pods will hold colonists.
Wreckage pods: Sometimes you can see wreckage in orbit round a planet from destroyed ships. Q: How can you get hold of this, and what's it good for? A: Once the pod is captured (you can do this with the CAPTURE option in the navigation screen) the pod should have a "Salvage" switch: the following turn you will get some new goodies. A captured pod will automatically try to dock with the ship that captured it. NB the CAPTURE option is only for pods, not for capturing enemy ships - for that, you need to kill the crew or disable their weapons. See the Diplomat.hlp file for more info on this.

Tech level costs, in mc

Planet - 0/1500/2500/3500/4500/5500/6500/7500/8500/9500/10500/11500/12500 - Total: 84000 MC
Super Weapon - 14000/5000/7000/5000/10900 - Total: 41900 MC
Large Weapon - 1500/2000/900/100/3700/900/4900/5700/2400/4900/13500/27000/45000/10900 - Total: 122050 MC
Small Weapon - 0/120/200/300/300/300/5500/1020/1765/1900 - Total: 6455 MC - ???
Point Defense - 400/200/100/300/1300/1400/4200/1400/3200/6000 - Total: 18500 MC
Generator - 0/20/30/500/120/150/2300/2400/3000/2300 - Total: 10775 MC
Hull - 0/1500/2500/3500/4500/5500/6500/7500/8500/9500 - Total: 49500 MC
Hyper Drive - 0/400/200/500/400/400/1200/1000/1000/2000 - Total: 7100 MC [ no use to players whose hulls lack hyperdrives! ]
Shield - 0/20/20/1500/700/750/2400/3500/1400/2100 - Total: 12390 MC
Total: 352670 MC
Engines (start at tech 6) - ~~150mc -> tech 2 /300mc/200mc/200mc/700mc~~/500mc/490mc/1800mc/2900mc -> tech 10 /1000mc/190mc/140mc/100mc/5800mc -> tech 15 (first Warp drive) /2200mc/2230mc/2240mc/2500mc/5500mc -> tech 20.

Note: there are 20 types of large Weapons distributed over just 14 tech levels.

Cloaking

This is covered more fully by Sidewinder at http://www.kolumbus.fi/sidewinder/sensors.htm

The lower the scanner profile the more difficult it is for enemy scanners detect the object.

Things which make a ship less visible	Things which make a ship more visible
Lower speed Low "warp signature" of hull Cloaking device turned on "Hiding behind" (being in same location as) a planet: a ship or wing sitting at a planet, not escorting or intercepting and with no waypoint set, have 20% it normal sensor image and 50% normal scanner power.	Higher speed setting (even if you're stationary!) Large "warp signature" of hull Scanners turned on Minesweeper device turned on (+50% warp signature, and halves your scan range) Transferring material / boarders to another race's ship or base (+25%) Tachyon pulses (a ship Device on e.g. Lokis) Gravitonic Accelerators Hyperjumping Travelling through Web minefields

The scanner profile of a ship depends on several factors; cloaking, the hull ' s warp signature, the ship ' s speed and emissions from the ship ' s own scanners.
A cloaking device lowers the warp signature of a hull by 50%:

Ship Scanner Profile = ((WS + EM - Cloak) / 100) * ((S + 80) / 100)
Where EM = Emissions from scanners; WS = Warp signature of hull; S = Ship speed in LY per Turn; Cloak = 50 if ship is cloaked Cloak = 0 if ship is not cloaked

So the Cold Pain which is normally 50% as visible as most ships would be 0% visibile; no room to spare so it needs to stay passive.
The Thorn and Deth Specula are normally 40% as visible as other ships and so would be "-10%" visible (so it might be able to stay undetected with planetary sensors active or even short range ones; it would still be a very bad idea to have the long range sensors on, except as a decoy.)
"Alien" hulls (ones you cannot normally build, but have got the plans for or otherwise acquired) don't cloak. I built 5 Thorns, which are about the best cloakers around, an sent them into enemy territory. He saw them and destroyed them in 2 turns.
Big ships have higher warp signatures -> are worse at cloaking.
If you are cloaked in a ship with stealth 50 or less with your scanners all off there is a 0% chance of being seen, unless a Loki lights you up.
Even if you have a Ship Scanner Profile of >0, you are not AUTOMATICALLY detected. Tim gave an example of 2 ships with scanners off, not moving. [maths deleted for readability...] ..At 100km range, each of the 40 scan pulses has a 12.5% of making contact and a 6.25 % chance of a full scan of the object. It is very likely the ship will be detected and fully scanned. However by 200km range the chances of being detected fall to essentially nil.
A docked pod or Wing is hidden.
Cloaked ships will attack the enemy from cloak if the ATTACK switch is on. If you wish to avoid combat you will have to turn off the ATTACK switch. if the cloaking is perfect (a sensor image of 0), the cloaked ship will not engage. However, if the cloaking is imperfect (so the enemy may see an unknown contact), then fighting occurs.
The cloaking device isn't allowed to bring the emissions below 0. So having Mine Sweepers (non-Bird) on or transports to non-friendly objects, or having the other things that add emissions on will allow a chance for the cloaked ship to be seen no matter how low its profile.

Decloaking (Tachyon Pulse generators)

Any ship within the radius of a Loki Class Destroyer (or other ship with tachyon Scanner) gets a 250 profile boost (per Loki!). It hits your own ships as well. A Loki's default tachyon pulse range is a radius of 100LY. A Loki sends out one pulse before movement. The pulse will basically disable the cloaking devices of all cloaked ships within that 100LY, and they are visible at the end of movement too, so are vulnerable to being attacked, assuming there are scanners active during movement. The Privateers can rob, but it is not going to stop a fight if they stick around. If they are robbing they better also be running away.

The Hirst Maneuvre was discovered when he turned his Loki's Tachyon Scanner device on at his homeworld, to unmask enemy cloakers in the area. There weren't any, but it made his own fleet there visible from the far end of the galaxy. We all knew what ships he had and how much he was building a turn.

Important note about the Tachyon: In addition to your own ships and your enemy's ships, it also lights up YOUR ALLIES' cloaking ships. You'd be amazed at the number of Deth Specs people have seen and killed thanks to their allies having a nearby Loki.

Spying ( HQ screen, click on the button with the picture of a shadowy figure):

Spy attacks on ships can be stopped with just 2 high guard on board the ship (most of the time).

For the steal ship plans spy mission to work you must get a ship within 40 LY of a ship belonging to the enemy race that you wish to steal plans from

I would not expect a "Steal Ship Plans" mission to work if I only had 300 mana, but it probably will work if you have 900. High mana improves the odds.

Spying is quite effective, except against Borg who are immune. But it doesn't work until turn 11.

Scanning

Bioscanners (which can spot valuabel natives up to 700LY away) have become extremely important. The lack of information on scanning planets has a huge impact on the game. However, if you see them as yellow and set them as your waypoint/transfer target, you do at least get to see what is on the surface and from this info you can guess whether they have been visited/settled by another race. - Mark Cowper

Color coded scans indicate a good scan (yellow dot with a yellow circle ) / poor scan ( a little yellow dot in a grey circle) on planets. Purple (OK, magenta) map objects are "historical" data.

Contraband, natives, minerals on a planet can not be seen unless you have a ship over the planet or a base on the planet.

However, Evil Empire probes are able to view what is on a planet's surface.

The GLORY device lights up the planet so that all races that can scan the planet can see what is one the planet ...

Hyperships arrive semi-blind after a Jump, and are extra visible.

The Picard maneuver: scanners are not entirely reliable. Sometimes, you see old images of things which are no longer there (like Captain Picard moving faster than light and fooling the enemy into thinking his ship is still where its image seems to be). This is not so much of a problem as "old" data is shown as magenta on the starmap to show it was not reconfirmed in the latest turn's scanning.

What is more of a problem is that sometimes you don't see things that really are there - your scanners only have a percentage chance of seeing each object. In general, things which are massive, or moving fast, or very near you are easier to see. And in general, cloaking ships have poor scanners (they do not give out big noisy radar pulses) and miss lots of things, so they run into minefields they did not see a lot. This means that by mid-game, it is almost impossible to send lurking cloakers deep into enemy territory to prey on their freighters and planets, because they are likely to have too many minefields to penetrate. The fighting is concentrated on a few borders.

HyperDimensional Stress (HD Stress): If a planet has a stress level of 900 and is increasing you are in big trouble. Don't count on these planets being around for long! If it is going down you are safe... until someone arrives with a Glory Device or Laser Mining Drill. If the planet has a high population, evacuate it or get some HD Stress Amplifiers in orbit quick.

Some tips from David Ouimet to give you a slight edge:

Warning: Hyperdrives stay turned on even after a jump so you will need to turn them off unless you're doing a multiple turn jump.
Transports: You can only transport items once per turn, so it takes some planning, general set your transport orders the turn you plan on arriving within 5ly of the target, that way you can transport to another target on the next turn if you move away.
Structure building is done in two phases, half of all construction is done at the start of a turn and half is done at the end of a turn. So if you have an order for 10 farms, you will see 2 messages, both of them saying you have built 5 farms. Note: In theory you CAN use half the resources you gain in the first half of the turn to build things in the second half of the build phase, so if you have 10 Factories on a planet and 0 supplies, you could still build 5 farms if you have the cash.

Robots, Privateers and Rebels are parasitic neighbours within 200 - 300LY due to side effects of their races. (Affect your happiness, spoil food, stea your natives and stuff.)

Don't trust "race guides" too much. The rules evolve too quickly. Check when the race guide was last updated, then check the Host Release notes for changes since then.

High guard training

HG are vital. You wants lots - i.e. several thousand by turn 20 - 30.

HG production depends largely on food . Oddly, it does not consume food - you just need a stockpile at the base.

The basic math is as follows: (Fortunately, you don't need to work this out - the Base Military screen displays the estimated training of high guard and lists the food needed for maximum training rates.)

Number of HG produced, X = ( Number of Training_Centers ^ (0.8) ) * ( Troops / 100000 ) * ( Race_DeltaTroopsToHighGuard )

Limit = SQR( (Food) * SQR(Race_DeltaTroopsToHighGuard))

If X < Limit Then X High Guard are made

If X > Limit Than Limit High Guard are made

Example. A Fed world has 577,478 troops and 6257 food.

X = (60 ^ 0.8) * (577478/100000) * 1

Thus, X = 26 * 5.77478

ie X = 150 HG per turn

However, there is insufficient food present to create 150 High Guard. The limit = SQR(6527) = 80 High Guard per turn.

Note: Robots use Kerria Crystal Artifacts to train high guard instead of food.

Further HG training tips:

Start EARLY! Compounding interest. Established a training world about turn 5.
Send almost all of your initial crew, troops, and a single HG to the training world. Until you reach higher tech ships you only need 1 HG/ship and are not building many ships in early game. Leave most of them there until you can really use them.
A single HG will boost the conversion rate of troops to HG. (Jedi Master training initiates.) There is no bonus from having >1 HG though.
Periodically bring excess crew from HW and other high population bases to training world.
The Help Files suggest setting up cityless Breeder Worlds. Experiments show these make no measurable difference to overall population so are useless for their ostensible purpose of boosting population, but they do have one good use: you can set up a world near your homeworld as a training centre, and train up crew, troops and High Guard. If you did this on your homeworld, the training centres would significantly reduce breeding rates in the mass of your population there.
Tip: a Government Centre will slightly increase training rates. (Add 1 to Race_DeltaTroopsToHighGuard) - Jon Nunn

Tip: by highlighting (clicking on) an object in the data grid, then the hammer symbol in the datagrid, you open up its command screen.

Ship command codes help speed up micromanagement: Transfer takes place after movement. The transfer is from a ship to a base that you own. The codes only work for ships that end their movement over a base:

Lord Lancelot sent me this updated list, which is more complete and organised than my version:
Ship command codes
BEAM DOWN
BDA - Beam down all cargo, including guests and money. The only thing not beamed down is Ordnance.
BDC - Beam down Mc's.
BDF / BDG - Beam down all the food.
BDM - Beam down all metals and Mc's (except neutronium)
BDN - Beam down all fuel (excep 60 kt).
BDO - Beam down all ord (excep 500)
BDP - Beam down People - all troops, colonist, HG's and cash. Useful for Borg when using their Assimilation Beams.
BDS - Beam down all supplies

BEAM UP (I've heard these commands work not only on your own bases, but on any with a matching friendly code.)
BUC - Beam up Cash.
BUF / BUG - Beam up food.
BUM - Beam up metals
BUN - Beam up fuel.
BUO / ORD - Beam up ord.
BUR - Beam up repair units.
BUS - Beam up supplies.

SPECIAL COMMAND CODES
NCH - Ship doesn't travel in warp chunnel or via jump point generator
REC - recharge a minefield within 200LY with fresh ord instead of dropping a new field. The type of minefield will be the type the ship is set to drop.
RFD RFT RFM RFS can be used by Fuel Refinery ships to control what goods will be used to make fuel
WPF - (Way Point First) Ship uses waypont target instead of escort target. If ship has no waypoint then escort target is used.
WPP - (Waypoint Priority) causes ships to go to their waypoint before going to their intercept target or escort target. The ship will switch to the intercept or escort target as soon as waypoint is reached. A ship can move to a waypoint and then move in an intercept course during the same turn.

RACE SPECIFIC COMMAND CODES
JOE can be used by a ship with a Jump Point Generator to ensure that only escorting ships and wings will jump with the ship.
JOE command code on a chunnel ship stops undocked pods from leaving with the ship.
LSD - Colonies of Man: Virgo's light speed ON, even for insanely short distances. Overrides lightspeed auto cut off so you can burn lots of fuel - allows you to intercept or escort at light speed ships that begin the turn right next to you. If you do not use the LSD code your light speed will cut off if your waypoint is set to a distance less than 50 LY, because your ship thinks it is silly to burn all that fuel just to move 50 LY.
LSP - Colonies of Man: Virgo's light speed still activated after the movement
MET - Aczanny: "Cargo Desk" will make pods with metals.
NID - Q Scavenger ships gets a new Id.
NOT - Colonies: Stops of training troops in ships.
R## - Rebel ## (01-30) is the number of the race your ship seems to be.You're immune to the damage of their mines.

BASE COMMAND CODES
TNT - you can destroy a base by setting the command code of the base to TNT. This requires that a ship be in orbit and no colonists on the base.
GBA - Give Base Away. Your base will be given to any other race with a base on the planet. It will go to any friends you have first, if you have no friends it will be given to your enemy. All your assault units, fighters, special race buildings, colonists, crew, troops and high guard will vanish.
EPA - causes the base to destroy all smelters and mines. (Curiously similar to the American Environmental Protection Agency.)
USA - removes labor camps and labor mines from the base.
CIA / KGB wipes alien hull plans
DOC destroys old cities, causes all cites to be destroyed. (Not undercities though.)
NOG stops base gathering stuff from the planet
ATF removes cantinas

I may have missed some codes. See also: Osgoroth's Complete list of Command Codes. In Englih, Castellano and Català.

Part 5: Economy - optimising yours and wrecking your rivals'

Industry There are four main income sources: Taxes and Cities, Prisoners, Natives, Contraband.

See also: the official Help files have sections called "How Do I Make Lots Of Money? ", "How do I keep my colonists Happy? ", and "How do I get Natives to come to my planet? " which explain the basics of keeping people happy, breeding and extorting maximum taxes.

Taxes and Cities

Success in the game is closely linked to maximising your colonist population, because:

The amount of money generated from taxes is directly proportional to population
The amount of money extorted from Natives on a planet is reduced if your colonist population there is <~~1 million~~ Correction: now 1.4 million
The amount of free contraband collected from a planet is reduced if your colonist population there is < 1 million. Contraband prices depend on population.
Population is important not just for money, but "Resource Points". The game can handle a maximum of 20,000 objects - ships, pods, bases, wings, minefields etc. Eventually all the slots are full (around turn 50+ in a normal game). To prevent people denying a share of the objects to others by building lots of cheap objects, everyone gets a share dependent on their population.
The major source of Victory Points is high population during the end game. (Some games use this point system to determine a winner.)

Build 1 city for every 100,000 colonists on a planet. It will pay for itself in 1 turn. Some people say they reduce breeding rates, but I've tested this and saw no effect with 10-20 cities. Not surprising as you'd have to have five hundred cities to slow the breeding rate to zero.

Tax rates:

The basics are covered in the official online Help files here. There is considerably more (maths) detail for the nerds among you under the release notes for Host Beta 58.

In general, it is better to aim for maximum happiness to maximise breeding and other benefits - even if your tax income is reduced in the short term. In practise you get lots more cash from Cities; so don't worry about losing a few mc with the wrong tax setting. Use Utra Conservative for most races, but use Enslavement for Feds and Borg.

I found the terminology of Liberal, Conservative, and Ultra-conservative very confusing. It turns out that Tim, being American, has completely the wrong idea of what these terms mean. Apparently Yanks think Conservative (Republican) means less government control and Liberal (Democrat) means gun control, high taxes etc. Over here in the Socialist Republic of Britain, of course, we understand that Conservative = Police State.

More importantly than direct income from taxes, is the fact that you can deliberately drive your happiness down by using the Complex tax setting for a few turns. This will drive the price of certain Contraband up - the types your race likes. The profit from buying Contraband low and selling high can far outweigh income from taxes!

Happiness

Closely linked to a successful breeding program is high happiness of your natives and colonists because they breed faster, generate more tax revenue and are more resistant to spy attacks. Experienced players try to keep it at maximum whenever possible.

A Base's Happiness ranges from -300 points to +300. Above 100 points you contribute mainly to resistance to spy attacks. Below 100 points, tax income begins going down. Below 80 points, your colonist growth rate drops. Below 30, cities and undercities stop producing money, which is a disaster.
If above 100, it might seem worth switching to a Complex tax system for a turn to get an income boost, but to skip a detailed and dull discussion, let's just say that experienced players don't do that because high happiness is better in the long term.
Tim's web page on happiness has plenty of tips about how to raise and lower your happiness. Key points: Colonists need food. Enemies capturing your population and using them as prisoners is very bad.
Be careful not to build too many mines (>50) or smelters (>10). Don't build labour camps or labour mines on high population worlds.
Colonists like Public Space Ports, Government Centres, Resorts. These need to be turned on!
Turning off mines and smelters does not help happiness - they are still upsetting blots on the landscape. If your base's happiness gets below 20 the colonists will start closing down mines at a rate of 10 a turn. There is a base Command Code (EPA) which will destroy all mines and another (USA) which gets rid of labour camps / mines.
Lizard hissing increases happiness to 100, and they can do it to allies.
I've seen reports (in early Hosts) that podding people / natives around resets their happiness. So you can reset very unhappy natives by putting them in orbit in a pod for a turn! I've also seen a report that you can store the population from a very unhappy base in pods, then destroy your own base, and reform it with sensible happiness and crime levels by landing the pods. Tim figures he's fixed that loophole in Host 195. Pods of people now remember their unhappiness, though it looks like he's instituted a global happiness level (the implication is, podding unhappy people off base A means people landing at base B pull its happiness down).

Economic warfare - using Prisoners to affect happiness:

Under Host 195 you can crash an enemy's economy if you hold enough prisoners:

Proportion of enemy population held prisoner	Happiness penalty on 30% of enemy bases
3 to 19.9%	10 points
20 to 34.9%	50 points
35% or more	60 points

Mel Hadden writes:
"An observation.
The unused med unit may in fact have a purpose according to recent studies. Newly formed bases without any medical units beamed down along with all the other stuff have a hard time with their happiness ratings. Beaming down 100 food units starts the new base on an upward happiness curve. Beaming down 100 med units along with the food greatly increases starting happiness."

It's also strongly suspected that you need to keep at least 100 food on a base or its happiness drops rapidly.
If you want to set up an advance observation post and don't have food to hand, use crew / troops. They aren't as badly affected by happiness problems as colonists.

Prisoners

Contraband, potential prisoners and natives have to be found before they are exploited. This is where the EE have a particular advantage. To most races, the map is fairly blank unless they have explored within 5LY of a planet (bioscanners help spot natives within a few hundred LY). But the EE's Dark Sense allows them to see contraband and natives from [the scan range of the ship, typically a few hundred LY]. Also their probe launchers help them scan enemy bases in great detail from 500LY away. The EE style is meant to be rapid, risky hyperjumps and attacks in the early game (before turn 15) to shift vast population via pods to contraband / native rich worlds, gather these, and to drop lots of their free Battlebots and Troops on enemy homeworlds to capture vast numbers of prisoners. If the EE hasn't managed to take out at least one enemy homeworld and harvest a million prisoners by turn 15-20, to kick-start his economy, he's probably dead, because his population grows too slowly to compete with other economies in the later game.

(Several players, better than me, tell me that with 5 million starting colonists, the EE can be making 10s of thousands by turn 10 in contra alone. Then he builds T2 assault units and gets free 1s and 3s. After capturing a million prisoners, average income is 133k or better until prisoners are burnt out.)

Stormers and EE are especially well adapted to capturing prisoners, who can be put to work in labour camps / mines. Tip: mines produce money as well as minerals. Tip: Prisoners can work double shifts ie 100 prisoners can simultaneously run 1 camp and 1 mine, producing 20mc / turn. Prisoners die off rapidly in labour camps; if possible, spread the prisoners over several worlds with a max of 100,000 prisoners per world. Keep prisoners off worlds where there are useful structures as they regularly destroy these in riots (ie keep them on worthless mining-only planets). Keep a few hundred troops of yours, and a few dozen HG, on prisoner worlds to reduce frequency of riots from 75% to just 50% of turns.

Borg and Robot prisoners are useless, they won't work in prison camps / mines.

Warning: There are traps in the Host code to stop cheats from selling their own colonists as slaves to allies. It was a quick way to make lots of money (pod your population to a race with Prison Camps, split the profits 50:50). If you try it these days, "Bad Things" happen.

Lizards have a special way of making cash from prisoners. Prisoners owned by Lizard players get turned into cash: a colonist is worth 0.66mc, crewmember 2.4mc, troop 3.6mc, HG 7.5mc.

Robots use prisoners to feed their insects and thus create more Robots.

IMT can grind up prisoners (and natives) for food.

If a base holding prisoners is the victim of an enemy blockade the prisoners will escape and form a new attack base on the planet..

Natives

Chups In native-rich universes, tax revenues from these can dwarf income from colonist populations, but normally it is a minor factor in your economy. However with enough Amorphs, Amphibians and Ghipsoids, you can defeat much larger economies.

Rebels and Privateers can hoover natives up before anyone else with the Native Dustoff device, unless you block this by setting up a base on a planet. This is why people race for territory and drop 1-man bases all over the place.

Type	Tax income	Bonus
Amorphs	0%	Create Free Lerchin Spice (especially when in a base). Unfortunately amorphs like to eat colonists! As long as there are wild amorphs outside the base your colonists will get munched. 30 amorphs eat 1 colonist. Pods of 25,000 - 400,000 are common for colonising amorph worlds. If all your colonists disappear, so does the base! (It just occurred to me: you might be OK with low populations if there were some mechs there.) About 10% of the wild amorphs will join your base per turn - it's faster if you leave some Spice unsold at the base. It attracts them (they do not eat it). Once all amorphs are in the base, they stop eating colonists. Amorphs are important: some people claim they are the most important factor in your economy. Fight for amorph worlds!
Amphibians	100%	Free Large Weapons if >50,000 present and happiness >74. No minerals required. Possibly even more valuable than free Spice. 200,000 Amphibians will produce, on average, 2-3 free large weapons of random techs per turn. It's really random though. Effect maxes out with 4 million Amphibians (theoretically, max 8 weapons of each tech, but I think it is far fewer in practice). Weapon creation is not limited by your own tech levels.
Ghipsoids	Only 10% I think?	Will not migrate into a base unless it contains Kierra Crystals (which they eat). 100 Kierras = 10%of normal Psi-based chance of attracting them per turn; 1000 Kierras = full normal chance (ie 27% for Feds). 20% chance per tech, of free Engines if >50,000 present in base and happiness >74 and you have built an Engine Plant. No minerals required to build these engines. You need 10,000 colonists present per free engine. 200,000 Ghips will produce, on average, 4 free engines (of every tech level) = 80 engines per turn. Effect maxes out with 2 million Ghipsoids. Engine creation is not limited by your own tech levels. Engine Tech bonus for Borg Note: wild Ghips call out for help if they see Borg ships. See: Humanoids, below.
Insects	300%	Eat Enforcers (UEA). (Think "Starship Troopers".) Insects like the RCS. They mine like Reptiles for them and join RCS bases at a 5% rate above normal.
Bovinoids	200%	Double Supply production from factories if >10,000 present and happiness >74
Avians	200%	Attracted extra quickly into Aczanny bases.
Siliconoids	only 8%	Double Ordnance production if there are at least 100,000 and happiness is >74 (Free Ord for Crystal players)
Humanoids	100%	Hull tech boost for Borg Wild Humanoids send out calls for help if they see Borg ships 50% of the time (useful for finding Borg homeworld in early game). The higher your race's Public Relations, the faster they join. Note: wild Ghips and Humanoids call for help if they see Borg ships nearby (50% chance) if they see Borg ships nearby. This helps other players figure out where the Borg are in the early stages of the game. If you are playing Borg, and your probes discover Ghip or Humanoid planets, assume that people know where your probes are.
Reptilians	25%	Double mining output if there are >50,000 present and happiness is >74.
Chupanoids	0 !	Eat your food and natives if happiness is less than about (75?). Breed prolifically. Cannot be Assimilated by Borg. Eat contraband. The less happy they are, the more they eat. Make other natives on the same planet unhappy (allegedly). Almost indestructible. Only way to kill them is detonate a pod full of them >300LY away from any planet. Ideal gift for neighbours, best delivered in pods exploded within 300LY of their worlds. They arrive hungry. Chups refuse to get into Native Pods if happiness is less than 70. Only definitely get in pods once happiness is 250. You can make them happier with Ultra Conservative taxes, starving colonists and possibly Public Space Ports (not sure if Tim was being ironic about that). Native Dustoff Devices, however, will force wild Chups on planets (not in bases) into pods. Along with any other native types present. If a mixture of native types including Chups are put into a Native pod, only Chups will emerge. One way to get rid of Chups is using Public Space Ports across your empire. They are attracted to the happiest base, where they are easy to pod into space.

General points about natives

Atracting Amorphs: they join a Base at a rate of 10% + 300. Example: if you have 1000 Amorphs on a planet 400 join; if you have 400 Amorphs on a planet 340 join; if you have 60 Worms on a planet 60 join. Also they are attracted by leaving some Spice at a base rather than spending it all. Amorphs will never join the Evil Empire's bases, they are too afraid of the Dark Force. EE players wishing to harvest Spice must be prepared for massive losses (amorphs eating base personnel) or capture a base belonging to someone else who has already rounded up some amorphs into cages, or get an ally to herd them up for you.

Amphibians if you are fighting an enemy who owns Amphibians, you can expect some very unusual weapons even on low tech ships. Previously, cheap ships tended to have cheap weapons because who would risk losing an expensive weapon on a ship which was likely to die..?

If you have less than 1 million colonists on a planet then tax income from natives is reduced proportionately.

Keep Public Space Ports at least 300LY apart, or natives will migrate to the happiest base.

Large Rebel bases will steal your natives from 200LY away.

Different player races attract different native types depending on Political Correctness, tax rate etc. The formulae are too complex to go into here, but basically, there is likely to be one or two types who won't migrate into your bases.

In order to gather natives, you don't have to put huge numbers of colonists on a planet. Large numbers of natives will enter a one man base on a random basis

The formulae for how likely theyare to join are described in the Host Beta 58 release notes. And I think ShipCalc has a function to help you calculate it.

AFAIK native happiness don't goes up under Liberal. You need at least Conservative.

Contraband ("CONTRA" button on the Base screen).

Contraband is only a significant way of making money if you get "free contraband" from Amorph natives or Cantinas. You can no longer "play the market" because following host changes around Host 190, its price no longer fluctuates significantly. But it's still useful for sabotaging enemy happiness and poisoning their bases with Crime.

You could say there are two types of contraband - the free stuff lying around on planets like a natural resource to be gathered, and "the Market". The Market is a slightly risky investment and requires you to invest money (tie up your capital) for several turns. If you invest in a type liked by a particular race, its value goes up as that race's population expands or their happiness drops (because the population buys illegal drugs etc to cheer themselves up). But there is always the risk that their population will implode due to an act of war...

Tip: Solo test games have very low contraband prices due to low overall galactic populations, so you can get a distorted view of how contraband works.

Free stuff lying round on planets:

You might not gather any Contraband for several turns. your odds of finding something is related to your race's PSI rating. If you have a PSI of 0 you have a 27.5% chance per turn of finding a contraband item. The amount you gather is reduced if you have less than 1 million colonists on a planet.
Most unexplored planets will have some contraband on them that you can gather and sell. It is free money. It is a motivator to expand fast and grab territory as quickly as possible. However, since you now need up to 1 million colonists to gather it before the game ends, it's not as big a reason to expand as it used to be.
This free contraband is a finite resource; some planets have 10,000 units but most only have about 100.
Don't bother moving population to planets simply to gather contraband. The rate of gathering contraband is so slow, and takes so much population, that you can make much more cash, continuously, by simply putting the same population in cities.
Amorph natives generate free Lerchin Spices.
Privateers' Contraband dust off devices hoover up this stuff much faster than any colonists can gather it, but the device is blocked by any base (except your own) on the planet under the ship - so it is worth making bases on worlds with contraband, even if they're only 1-man bases, to stop Privateers stealing it!

The Contraband Market:

The idea used to be: prices fluctuated. Buy low, sell a few turns later when price rises. Repeat.
You can buy contraband anywhere even if there is none on the planet. You just go to any Base's contraband screen, and use the cash on the base to buy contraband for that base.
The price used to be affected by various factors like races' happiness. Players found ways to exploit this (like cycling their own race's happiness) until their income from contraband trading dwarfed all other sources. Tim introduced various complex fixes but new loopholes were found and exploited. In the end, he simply tied the price of contraband to the ratio of each race's populations in the galaxy. This means contraband prices are more or less fixed over, say, 10 turns. This makes "playing the market" pointless these days. If you want to know more about how it used to be possible to "play the market" look at this page, but it's no longer relevant.

General stuff about all types of Contraband:

You can sell a maximum of 1kT per 1000 colonists on a planet. There is an absolute maximum of 10,000kT of each type per base.
(It is possible to ht that limit! Sometimes peole with Glory Devices "pop" amorphous worms. This can generate up to 50,000 Spice.)
If there is more than 10,000kT of contraband of one type in a base, Privateers can steal it by flying nearby.
Selling contraband with Gold Pods raises crime. Once a base's Crime level exceeds 1000, Very Bad Things start happening. (Rioting, colonists killing each other etc). Too many Cantinas will do this, and so will selling Gold Pods to enemy bases! Marvellous way to sabotage them.
Selling to your own colonists with a Gold Pod (to affect their happiness through crime - thus manipulating the contraand market) is not possible.
To sell contraband in Pods on your own worlds, you should land the stuff at a base and then from the base screen sell the stuff into the black market. You will NOT suffer any harmful effects selling this way from the base screen.
There are Exotic Techs which can crash the price of Contraband. Borg players - who can't use contraband - like to use these.
Each race has favourite types of Contraband, listed in the race description. (Tools - Races - Race Stats.) Values below 50 mean little.
If there is a contraband type priced at 2.2mc, it means no race in the game is interested in it. It will never increase in value. Sell any such contraband immediately, to raise cash.
Some races (Rebels, Privateers, Aczanny) can get free contraband from Cantinas, which also acquire cash when someone sells contraband nearby. Like most "free" things in VGAP4, there is a serious downside. These raise crime levels, and once it gets above 1,000 Bad Things Happen.
Chupanoids eat contraband! (Check your base log if these two things co-exist.)

Crime

This has become a significant actor to consider with recent Host changes. You need to minimise your own worlds' crime and try to maximise enemies', to wreck their economies.
I have found that selling gold pods is more effective at destroying empires than fighting them. The crime shoots up a few turns later, their cities stop generating cash and their population begins crashing...
You can see a base's Crime level on the base Overview screen, the contraband buy / sell screen [which will show you how much a particular sale will increase crime], and the datagrid (sorted to show bases with contraband, sub-selection Crime).

Crime rates of over 100 have the following effects:

diminishes income from cities (Undercities are immune)

contraband will be stolen when you launch a pod of contraband

criminals steal contraband from bases with high crime. (50% chance that 5% will be taken if there is over100 crime)

You can fight crime by:

stationing High Guard (minimun 10) and Troops (minimum 10,000) on a base. 10 HG will reduce crime by 5 points. The more you have the better they get. The more crime you have the better they get.

If you have 10000 crime and 10000 HG they will drop crime by 1000 points.

If you have 100 crime and 100 HG they will drop crime by 8 points.

If you have 10000 crime and 1000000 troops they will drop crime by 500 points.

[Buying contraband decreased crime, but I'm not sure if that is still the case after recent Host changes]

Robots and Borg have some other way of fighting crime (I don't know what).
If you are holding a large amount of contraband and the price goes up crime decreases.
A government centre will reduce crime by 5 points
"Crime wave! We need at least 1000 megacredits to fight crime! Cheap contraband is flooding the streets!" - If you see this message, keep at least 1000 megacredits on all your bases with high crime so you WILL NOT get hit with that 20% death rate thing! (Tim)
When you have more then 100 crime units on a base it becomes very hard to reduce the crime
Having more than 651 food units on the base will help reduce crime. (So said Tim. I am not sure whether to take this seriously.)

Tim summarised it thus (April 2004):

Crime is tied to holding contraband.
If you hold contraband you risk having crime.
To completely avoid crime stay out of the Contraband market.

Crime levels may appear to fluctuate a bit in a random fashion. Tim says there's no randomness about it, "but the maths is really weird. "

How to increase crime

Selling gold pods of contraband to a base. This makes fly-by pod sales an extremely potent economic weapon. Dock a gold pod with contraband to a ship. (The ship can be cloaked.) Fly the ship to within 59LY of the target base; the pod should have instructions to Sell Contents to the base, and Transfer Cash to Ship. Next turn, flee with your cash. The contraband disappears (the enemy does not get it), but the target base gets a Crime wave.

The crime wave is created by using types of contraband favoured by the enemy race (check their race stats). - After looking at Tim's code - crime is ONLY generated by selling types they like. The more they like it, the more crime is generated. And that crime, which could be up to 40 points per turn, keeps increasing at that rate for many turns, until all the contraband you sold leaks away - at a maximum of a few tens of kT a turn.

Quantity does matter: more contraband --> more crime. As long as it's a type they like.

Gambling deck ships generate 2 points of crime on bases they are over.

Show lounge ships generate 2 points of crime on bases they are over.
Pyramid lounges increase crime on bases they are over

When a base is captured by ground combat the crime from the base is spread about to all bases belonging to the victim race within 800 LY.
If you are holding a large amount of contraband and the price goes down crime increases.
Attacking a planet from space can cause crime there. (Then Ground Assaulting the base seems to move the crime on to remaining worlds!) This is used by some players as a deliberate tactic to spread crime in enemy empires.Victims see base log messages like "Incoming criminals from base XXX".
(Host 194) Crime can move from base to base and spread over your whole empire.
Privateer bases can cause crime.
(Host 194) If a very high crime rate base (Crime rate 1000) is destroyed it spreads 100 units crime to ALL your bases within 800 LY. So simply TNT'ing your own bases is not always a solution.

Note: you do not increase crime on your own bases by using the normal contraband sell screen - although you could increase it, if you wanted, with a gold pod.

Some practical points about using contraband in Gold Pods as a weapon:

There is a time delay of 1-3 turns between selling contraband and the base's crime going up. There's a damping factor if a base has zero crime; once it rises above zero the brakes are off.

The normal limits apply, concerning how much contraband you can sell to a given population. A base must have 1,000 personnel per kT of contraband.
You get double the normal price if you sell gold pods to enemy bases!!! Ie 1000kT of Kierras would make, say, 20,000mc not 10,000mc.
You can sell Gold Pods to Borg. It doesn't affect their happiness, but you still get double the price. Some people are using this loophole with Borg allies to generate cash for free.

Tim considered and rejected the following possibilities. You may come across misleading mentions of them:

If you hold a large amount of contraband that your race likes your crime decreases. - Not true
Crime flows from base to base with in your own empire. Large populations suck it up from low population worlds, sucking hundreds of crime units from low pop bases while gaining just a few crime points while doing so. - No. However, Privateers will have this effect if they have a base nearby.

Breeding

It takes 14 turns to double your population at a growth rate of 5% a turn. You can improve this (eg happiness >80 --> growth rate is 7.5% --> double in 10 turns). Arguments rage over whether the Tank-O-Tronic Exotic Tech is worth the cost.
The Help files state that Cities reduce population growth rate. This is true, but the effect is negligable. (It is 0.2% of the basic 5% growth rate per city, i.e. it would take 500 cities to bring population growth to a halt.) I have proved to my own satisfaction in games, that the braking effect of Cities on population growth is lost in the noise of other factors. (Example: two Lizard players who both had 6.1 million colonists at turn 40; one had built no cities and lost lots of income, the other had 20 cities, lots of cash and 1% less population...) Since the bulk of your income is population dependent, the best strategy is to build cities for additional income. Don't build lots of training centres on your breeding worlds, though.
It's probably best to buy the Tank O Tronic A cloning technology as soon as possible, because of the compound interest benefits of population growth - a small boost early is more valuable than the same boost later. But Tank-o-Tronic is expensive, so you need to gauge how important it is to your specific situation. Population is important for income, but some races make most of their money in other ways. But population is also important to avoid Resource Point limits later in the game...
With higher levels of Tank-o-Tronic Exotics, growthbecomes more a function of the Exotics and less related to the race's base growth rate.
Drew Sullivan did some number crunching and test games to find out exactly how Tank-o-Tronic works. Counterintuitively, it turns out Tank-o-Tronic has more effect on low growth races like EE. That's because Tim's code adds the boost rather than multiplies it. So if there are other boosts (like being happy, base attack mode etc) they do not get boosted - just your race's basic growth rate gets boosted.
Michael Richardson has done a useful growth calculator tool , an Excel spreadsheet, to help you optimise breeding
If there is not enough food to feed the population then no growth occurs. It's a simple on/off switch. If there's no food, the base's happiness decreases by 2-8 points.
Temperature affects Crystals, but not other races. Crystals need a high temperature to breed.
If you build Cities you still get the normal tax income from the inhabitants as well as the 100mc / turn per City.
Registered players have marginally higher growth rates on high population planets, than non registered players
Food has become very important recently. Make sure you have lots of food on your high population planets to maximise breeding rates. This has introduced a new aspect to warfare. People are beginning to target enemy food stockpiles as part of long campaigns, and some races have "Soil Steriliser" devices which can wreck a planet's farms, permanently. (If you cannot hold an area, you can at least wreck it for anyone else!) Players also gather chupanoid natives (which eat food) into pods, transport them to enemy territory and detonate the pods there to create famine zones. See: Chups.

Efficient colonies

Don't disperse your population unneccessarily, as any cash they generate just needs to be shipped home to your major shipyards! Just spread them around as much as needed to efficiently exploit resources, as shown in the table below.

Colonisation doesn't generate vast amounts of cash from every planet; a city of 100,000 people generates the same cash on any world. The trick is to gather natives and contraband as quickly as possible, and set up a network of lightly settled mining and farming bases to supply your industrial core. Build farms as quickly as you can get colonists to them to farm them, as they pay for themselves within 10 turns and then keep generating free cash.

Planet resources	Number of colonists needed to exploit it	Other stuff required to colonise efficiently
Farmable	1 colonist can build as many farms as he likes in a turn, but you need 1,000 colonists to run each farm once built! This many farmers (potential prisoners) need guarding with troops and / or mechs or you are just sending prisoners to your enemys' labour camps. If you have say 100,000 colonists on a world, guard them permanently with a warship or Wing too.	Enough supplies to build 10 factories and all the farms you intend building. The farms will generate cash and food thereafter, until the planet climate drifts too far.
Decent minerals	2000 colonists, to run 20 mines	Minimum of 30 supplies + 400mc to build mines and a pod launcher and for podding the stuff home. Many people also used to ship in stuff to build a couple of smelters (90mc + 1 supply each), but mines now smelt 30kT of ore for free if your race has the power to build smelters. (That is not cumulative - just a flat 30kT per planet.)
Lots (thousands) of contraband	200,000 to 1 million colonists, in order to gather it as quickly as possible. If your race has a low (<33) Psi rating, it may not be worth your while risking this many people in a vulnerable location. This many colonists need serious guarding, including a ship or Wing.	100 food. Enough supplies to buld farms and cities (100 supplies + 100mc each) for the colonists, and a Goverment Centre (100 supplies + 100mc). Undercities are less easy to spot. Build Raid Shelters if you can't afford Undercities. If you build AA guns make sure they have Ord in the base to fire.
Natives	A single colonist is sufficient to Gather them, unless they're Amorphs. Ghipsoids will need Kierra Crystals in the base to attract them. A single colonist can't tax them though, so ship them home quickly.	Stuff for a pod launcher (1 supply + 15mc) and money to launch pods of Natives home (25mc /pod, say 150mc)

As usual, there are exceptions! The following races disperse population differently: Ultra high growth races, such as Crystals, Scavengers and Peoples' Army, don't need to worry about stripping their homeworld of money generating colonists; they're usually more worried about them overcrowding and starving. It makes sense for Borg to chunnel their home base around to assimilate more population. It is probably sensible for Privateers to disperse their population to avoid total wipe out when people find their homeworld. Evil Empire can spot contraband from far away and HYP a million colonists over to gather it quickly.

Part 6: Basic diplomacy, alliances and co-operation - How To Win Friends And Influence People.

Diplomacy is important because every race has weaknesses which can be compensated for, by teaming up with other players. Participants need to co-operate to some extent to find workable solutions to their situations. Because Planets is a turn-based game, there is plenty of time for between-moves chat by email, etc. Suffice to say you will learn a lot about teamwork, confusion, treachery and misinformation.

Some players think the wheeler-dealing negotitions and half truths are the most fun part of the game!

There are many areas where a skilled manipulator can gain an edge -

encouraging others to fight
deception
planting doubt between allies

Etc. Observe the real world. The successful countries aren't always the biggest ones, due to the leverage you can exert through a network of allies and fellow travellers. Politicians often adapt their election promises once they are in power. The question is not "are you an honourable negotiator?" but "are you an effective one?"

Stage 1: Decide who you want on which side

You need to read up about the other races in the game and decide which are most dangerous to you, then decide which are most dangerous to them. Ally with your enemies' enemies. If you are being threatened by one player, who is their natural enemy?

Send ships well out in early stages of a game so you have large areas to trade off

Version 4 does not limit people to playing different races. What happens to alliances if there are, say, 2 Robot players? "I'll give you a better deal!"

Most of the other players will be enemies to be crushed. Some may be allies, temporary or permanent, and some may be members of pre-assigned teams.

Don't ally with someone in a remote time zone.

Warning: don't be desperate to ally! -

Moderately experienced players can usually be spotted by the fact that they rapidly form alliances. So what? I've long had my doubts about the usefulness of very close alliances. In my experience, they get grossly complicated really quickly. Conventional Planets wisdom is that alliances always win - but this is not true. Of late, I have become quite convinced that close alliances with other players usually dilutes your strength and reduces your flexibility.
The main reasons alliances win a lot, are:

two or more players pool their resources; and economy is a big part of the game. But due to tying up ships and other resources you're sharing, it's an inefficient way to boost your economy. Lone players can strike it rich - for example by acquiring lots of Amorphs, successfully manipulating the contraband market, or (for some races) capturing lots of prisoners. When this happens, I've seen them steamroller alliances.
alliances can win because it is easier for them to attack from two directions, or they pool their "unique" abilities such as chunnelling. But most of these abilities depend on hull devices - and hull plans can be Spied, traded for, or captured.
People in alliances often seem to win not because of their alliance, but because they're better diplomats - better manipulators. They instinctively understand that socialising with the other players gives them immense leverage.

When I floated my ideas on the Newsgroup, I was reassured to see broad agreement from several experienced players. Minime-hammer wrote: "In my past games an alliance only served to scare other players into ending a game early because they THOUGHT they had no chance against an alliance. Mere hype IMHO. I always had to teach others how to play before an alliance ever reached effectiveness. Even then the sheer amount of e-mails and coordination is a whole additional level of workload almost like playing 2 games istead of one." Soxee wrote: "I saw five allies attack another player, they failed miserably because they were disorganised and didn't know the left hand from the right hand."

This is when alliances are useful:

Teaching new players how to play
Allying with a good player can teach you new tricks
Non Aggression Pacts without obligations are simplest, and thus best. For example, ships told not to fire on each other are useful when you are co-operating with someone else to carve up a third party, or to keep a peaceful border with a neighbour.
Trading. Until you have what you want.
In games where there are restrictions on hull plan trading. (Ie, you cannot clone alien hulls, and they fight with negative modifiers if you acquire them.)
To disrupt a rival's plans to ally with someone, when you calculate that the two of them together are more of a threat than one at a time. I.e, ally with one of them first, to isolate an enemy. (Many games limit the number of allies you can have at once.)
To trick a rival to ally with an incompetent player. (Most people are desperate to ally with someone.)
To divert attention from yourself as a threat.
To encourage your 'ally' into impetuous behaviour.
Timely, generous gifts (intelligence, hull plans etc) disarm peoples' suspicions. Give before you take.
Allying and then feigning incompetence is an excellent way to cripple a rival. I've had genuine allies who I suspected of working against me, they soaked up so many resources helping. They would never pay proper attention to co-ordinating properly, resulting in the losses of huge fleets.
To pick up intelligence. Social isolation is bad.
Learn what makes your allies tick.
Test your allies. Let them know where something "valuable" is (a scout, perhaps, or a juicy base vulnerable to being captured and converted to prisoners). See if it gets mysteriously attacked by your overt enemies. If your "allies" are betraying you - that's great! They can be fed false information.
Supporting someone who is allied to your rival can protect you from that rival. ("Don't attack Doc Devious yet, he's vital to me on another front.")
Hiding in a group is an excellent way of stirring up trouble, whereas slander when you are NOT allied is usually seen through.
The acquisition and utilization of "weak allies" can be good for you if only as a buffer zone - remember, even a weak or ineffective empire can take a long time for an enemy to plough through and conquer.....also, you are neutralising that race by in effect annexing their territory into your own and utlizing the resources that it represents by using their own laziness against them to make it seem like you are makng their life easy...the trick is to recognize the ally's inefectuality at the outset and so plan and act to use that also form the outset.
Something for nothing: giving someone a percentage - even a large one - of something that you otherwise would have to expend resources, and take attrition, to get is not a bad thing at all.

When not to ally

Never help the Doomed.
A bad ally can do more harm than an enemy.
When entanglements outweigh advantages.
Remember at all times: there is a meta-game: beware acquiring a reputation for treachery. So if the other players are very "honourable", inflexible types, it may be best not to ally at all, or stick with a bad alliance choice and take the consequences. In these cases, maneuver your allies into breaking the alliance, by acting incompetently, or dragging them into more trouble.
Don't be hasty in committing: you will be taken for granted.
As the saying goes, "a person, who is nice to you, but rude to a waiter, is not a nice person." Watch other players' behaviour to everyone to learn their true personalities.
If the other party is in a very different time zone.
If there are language barriers - you need to communicate easily.
In particular, if the Host configuration allows hull plan trading, then you're better off without a close alliance.
If you are short of time. Full alliances are weak at offense, due to co-ordination problems, unless you put a HUGE effort into it.
Instructive example: the First World War was arguably caused by rigid alliances forcing people into war, and preventing the resolution of the underlying conflict. (Google the "July Crisis" for further details.)

Some other points about alliances

Ever noticed how the word "ally" sounds like "a lie"? Never forget that people only ally with you for their own advantage, not because they like you. It is a war game! Once circumstances change, so will your Non Aggression pacts. Make sure you stay useful to your allies.
Holding back from alliances can give you great sway, if the other power groups are balanced and not threatening you. I.e, if your forces can decide things. I have always despised this "fence sitting" strategy in a war game, but in retrospect I see that is because I lacked patience.
Let your allies take the credit for things.
Uneccessary alliances sap your time and strength. (The converse is: this is a good way to drag down rivals. Form an alliance with them, promise much and do little. Or drag them into wars with you.)
An "alliance" doesn't need to be military. It could be a group of players who all agree to manipulate the contraband market in sync, perhaps to the detriment of another.
When, whether and how to ally is clearly the most important choice you make in a game; since no choice will be perfect, you are likely to get dragged into new theatres of conflict, etc.
Not every race / player is a good ally for you.
Sometimes in a good alliance you can also trade resources like ships occasionally, but this seldom happens and is almost always REALLY time consuming. (Don't ask why - it is).
Don't expect everything to happen as discussed and agreed on - mistakes will happen.
Communicate often and well. This is the way to keep your alliance strong like a well-oiled machine. In many cases, this will eliminate the need to worry about mistakes since you communicate why you are doing something that may make them feel uneasy.
The main use of an alliance is to give you diplomatic leverage in a game, not to do someone else's fighting for them.
Close alliances eat a lot of time. Which is why I think the argument about "close alliances will always beat a single player" is rubbish if the lone player is very good, particularly if the game runs very quickly (say, one turn a day) Alliances simply cannot respond to rapid changes quickly.
Players sometimes form co-operative agreements without actually allying: selling members of their own race to prisoner-taking races and splitting the profits; forming "experience rings" with rigged fights to gain experience for their ships.
The Rebels can see alliances, and sometimes sell the information on, which can destroy some subterfuges but raises another possibility. This power only starts after turn 10, and they can't tell what KIND of alliance you have with someone - just that you have switched off combat towards player X. You can't fool the Rebels' power by pretending to ally with a powerful player by simply arranging a "share scanner info" agreement, or by turning non-combat alliance on unilaterally. The Rebels will know whether the other party has turned off "attack" too.

Stage 2: Open communication

Use the in-game message system to talk with other players as soon as possible. (Email is better - faster - if you have their email address.) Communication is the first step to finding out their attitudes to you. Some people won't respond; that's fine. That tells you they probably aren't going to be allies with you.
The key thing is to discover, what do others want? A secure border? A hull you can capture for them? A feint on a third party? Get them talking.
Don't open negotiations with folk by giving away your plans - "hey if we got together we could do XYZ to achieve ABC". Instead of pushing information at a potential enemy (even if he does not use it directly, he could pass it on), rephrase your opening to pull information out of him.

Use positive language when offering things, negative when dismissing them. "We can share these natives".... "If I were you, I'd be wary of what the Scavenger says as the Rebs tell me he is allied to your 'friends' the Birds and remember, Scavs only need a few of those natives to do X; he plays the long game and likes to trade things on for more gain later. The phrase both ends against the middle comes to mind."

Speaking as a strong player, I find new players are more interested in co-operation than rival strong ones, because they want to learn. Strong players often turn down offers of co-operation or attempt deception, because they see me as a threat!

Chat up lines
I usually throw lots of jokes in - I will open dialogue with universal messages to everyone about silly things to break the ice: "Hey is it safe to come out yet?" Of course many players don't have English as a first language, so they're not sure how to respond to jokes. But it's good to get a spirit of rivalry and bonhomie going in the game.
Talk about borders.
Offer to share scanner info. Knowing what's going on beyond your borders is hugely valuable, so make sure this is reciprocated.

"Can you see any potential synergies if we worked together?"
"Is there anything I have you would be interested in?"
"What would you offer me for this hull?" (Offer him a poor hull, let THEM point out what they want from you. You don't need to give him the hull, but it's interesting if he says "actually I'd prefer that one, it fills a weakness of mine" - you find out what's on his mind).
"I am worried about the Robots on our common border" - of course you may actually be allied to the Robots, but he won't know that unless he is a Rebel, or allied to them
"I see the Borg are getting you to fight the Crystals for them"
"I seem to have some spare long range fighters. Can you see anything worth bashing in the neighbourhood?" With, of course, no intention of doing so.
"I thought you ought to know, the Privateers are tring to arrange a co-ordinated assault on you"

Useful communication tools:

You can draw dots / lines on the map and share them with selected players (See pen tool on menu and select share map drawings under races - allies screen). Tip: this only works if both of you have turned on "Share map drawings".

You can use these highly visible (flashing!) markers to highlight Message Buoys. Combining Buoys with the line / dot tool allows you to place text on the map ("Border agreed with Borg", etc). Tip: read Tim's Help files closely concerning buoys. Their controls are rather non intuitive and many people turn on the wrong switches, thus making them highly visible to the wrong people!

Stage 3: Making friends - the simplistic view

Everyone has something to barter with - ie. Feds have climate control ships, cloaking races have cloakers, and so on. Play up your strengths. Some players want territory, others need natives.

Usually a gesture of trust right away is good at establishing rapport. You want to be trusted. It sends the right signals if you help a player, give a ship, whatever, and worry about reciprocity later. Experienced players often go straight to full alliance, and swap RST files. This shows they are not hiding anything. Otherwise you can generate more distrust instead of less! (What is he not telling me?)

Be open and honest. If someone is wary, offer to set a simple non aggression / sharing scan info alliance. This is fair for both sides and again demonstrates you are acting with integrity, not just saying the right things.

Some people set out the terms of an alliance ahead of time, i.e. 20 turns of non-aggression, etc. Then stick by them no matter what. At the end you can renegotiate...

Some tips from a Negotiation Skills course I went on:

Look for win-win deals, not ones where the other party feels cheated
When negotiations are going badly and tempers fraying, it is often because people are looking at a situation as a black and white one. Remember there are always a LOAD of compromises and counteroffers that can be made. So your neighbour wants that Ghipsoid world? Well why not offer to split them - or trade some to him in return for Amphibians - or ally and divvy them up as appropriate - and if you can't stop him taking them, maybe you can just blow up the world or get the Borg to assimilate them so he can't have them.

Stage 3: Influencing people (Isolate, divide and conquer!)

Don't lie - you will be found out. But you don't have to tell the whole truth. You can make it sound worse or better for them than it really is.

Plausible deniability - "I didn't know they were going to do that."

Try to get the really bad players to ally with your enemies. This may seem stupid because it "helps" your enemies. Ha ha ha! Quite the reverse! It dilutes their fleets, wastes their time, and if they are stupid enough to depend on the bad player for help, they will regret it!

Talk up the danger your enemies pose to everyone. Don't be too obvious about it though! You might mention that you spotted a tech 5 hull belonging to player 3 on turn 6 to illustrate how dangerous they are. (Of course it's unlikely they have such a hull - but it's possible.) Tell people that player 3 has settled an amorph world / traded hulls with you / you have allied with him. Oh, maybe mix some truth in there too..?

Rebels can masquerade as other races. It should be possible to increase tension between 2 players by having one of "their" ships appear in their rivals' territory.

Once people begin talking, you can use their words against them. For was it not said by player 3, that he already had Amphibians? He must be a threat, then.

Gathering intelligence allows you to spread believable misinformation. Your aims are to spread distrust, disrupt ,confuse and neutralise rivals, and waste their resources sending fleets to inappropriate borders, where they wil hopefully look like a threat to another rival.

Point out synergies with potential allies.

If you are playing a HYP race, it is a good idea to pick on races who have no access to grav mines or grav well generators. Try to stop them allying with players who do have those.

Point out that Privateers are stealing ships... There is no defense vs X... There is no defense vs X except me...

Offer to be a neutral third party to help resolve others' problems (!!!)

CAUTION!

Why people don't like backstabbers

One interesting result from game theory relates to revenge. If you are playing with opponents who are new to you, and whom you are unlikely to play with again, then a backstab (for sufficient gain) is probably worth it. But if you're likely to play with them again, they will probably (instinctively) adopt a "tit for tat" or outright "revenge" strategy next time you meet. And you should do the same if you are betrayed - go all out to sabotage the traitor. It will deter him, and those who witness your reaction, from betraying you again.
Humans are social. We talk. Reputations spread. So even if you don't intend playing with Player X again, don't make him feel betrayed. If you attack him, he must empathise wih you and understand it is part of the game.
Psychologists' research shows that humans are prepared to suffer inconvenience themselves in order to punish "cheats" and "parasites", i.e. people who break the rules and social conventions and prey on others in the community. It is built into our wetware.
Players have a huge investment of time in the game - typically a couple of hours or more times 60 turns - and tend to get emotional about: cheats; allies who betray them; people who drop out of a game half way through; lazy Hosts and allies. You may have to keep an eye on flaring tempers from players who feel hard done by, and remind them that it is important to keep in mind that it is, after all, a game.

Therefore, it is essential that other players understand emotionally that when you attack former allies, it is all part of the game, nothing personal. The next section (on Machiavellian techniques) gives some tips on how to manipulate people into believing this.

I would draw a distinction between Non Aggression pacts and allies. It is OK to attack a NAG partner; this is part of the game. But an ally is a much closer relationship, more like a colleague at work - there is a great deal of trust and intimacy after you have worked closely together for 6 months. Imaigine how you'd feel if your partner betrayed you with no warning. So never stab an ally in the back (unless perhaps it can definitely win you the game). That really stirs up feelings of betrayal and other players in the game could decide to punish you for it.

If you find you must backstab to win the game, at least have the courtesy to inform him/her that you are severing the alliance. Even if it is only one turn before you attack, at least they knew it was coming. If you get a reputation as a back-stabber then you become that 'rogue player' that no one wants to ally with. At that point, you had better be v-e-r-y- good if you ever want to win again. - P. Bond

Part 7: Advanced diplomacy - Machiavelli and Realpolitik

I've been playing the game for a few years and observed people competing, read books about psychology and politics, and grown a bit more cynical... so I've written a new section on how to take the game to the next level.

Warning: if you are of a sensitive or honourable nature you may be offended by what follows. Don't whine at me, I'm not forcing you to read this.

What is "the next level", Sensei?
What you have to realise is that despite all the warnings about Do Not Backstab in the previous section, we humans are instinctively competitive and manipulative.

Machiavelli pointed out that there is no "good" or "evil" in politics, just pragmatism. You do what is needed to achieve your aims. You see this in all walks of life - from children competing with each other, to the way you try to avoid awkward pointless jobs at work, to the somewhat more subtle behaviour of politicians. ("I have not broken my promise because we are now at war, and other priorities must be addressed.")

And though the game is populated by lots of polite, gentlemanly players who like to play according to honourable protocols, actually they all use some of the following nasty techniques. But we don't backstab, oh no. Because we are so good at lying, that we deny it even to ourselves. So people get angry if they realise you are manipulating them. They use emotionally loaded words like "unfair" and don't admire the elegance of your trap. So the trick is... don't let them realise they've been manipulated.

And if using tricks like the ones that follow seem unfair to you, consider them valuable Lessons in Life for your more bovine co-players. In fact, people who complain about how beastly and unfair you are, are actually manipulating you! They realise they are at a disadvantage and hope that by using emotional blackmail, they can get you to stop outmaneuvering them - to keep the war in the predictable tactical domain, their "comfort zone".

All Planets players are rubbish
There are some good Planets tacticians out there. I'm certainly not the best. But as I age, pure tactics isn't what interests me any more. I am now more intrigued by the relationships which develop. I come from a background of board games played between friends who did not take umbrage at betrayal, but rather celebrated each others' marvellous tricks, and strove to outdo each others' lies and subtlety. Relationship manipulation is neglected by VGAP players.

Frankly, I don't think there are any real Planets masters out there! Oh, there are guys who know more rules than me. But the psychological warfare dimension is very underexploited. I think the game is being stultified by good manners and linear playing styles. Yet it has enough depth and a big enough community to support a much more exciting level of play - a vibrant and fluid social one. One which reflects real life more accurately and helps those involved understand how the world really works (for you can see scheming manipulation in everyone - as a social species we compete on many levels for status). I hope that by bringing up the ideas put forward in this section, I can elevate the game to a level beyond other multiplayer war games. Computers and the internet have introduced a lot of new players to things like VGAP, but people these days play specialised games in social isolation. The boardgamers' tradition of sneakiness needs to be rediscovered. And believe me - if you use the concepts in this section, your game will be on a higher plane than the ossified experienced VGAP players'. I hope to see some new names unexpectedly clawing their way to attention soon, as famous ones topple under the New Way. I would be delighted and honoured to be thrashed by someone reading this - best to learn how people manipulate you whilst having fun in a game.

Manipulation techniques
All these strategies have a correct time. Drone... drone...

This is not a simple 2 player game. All-out alliances may be a waste of time, but a completely quiet game just helps pure tacticians take on isolated opponents one at a time. So stir quiet games up socially - use humour, abuse, forwarded fake messages, outrageous military tactics, propose limited alliances or even ones you have no intention of agreeing to - to get people talking. Broker unstable deals between others, (hull swaps / tell a Crystal or Privateer where the swap is happening so he can steal the plans); lie about racial abilities and other players' histories; keep the rules changing! This breaks up the stable political patterns the tacticians depend on.
Ignoring people attacking or taunting you enrages them, which is a good way to make them careless. Alternatively, if taunted by a weaker foe, answer sweetly - don't seem upset - your reputation will be enhanced with other players, whilst the taunter's diminishes.
Limit others' options by using trading, border agreements, alliances, pressure from third parties, non aggression pacts, no-go zones, 20-turn moratoriums on some action, disintegrating planets they desire, stripping natives / minerals before they get to them, laying dense minefields to limit their avenues of expansion... I have seen someone welcome a Crystal invasion because he knew he could beat it off, and it would leave Web fields guarding his border from someone who was more trouble!
You can spin out negotiations with one neighbour to give you time to fight another - this frees up resources. The normal method of communicating with other players is by email, but the built-in messaging system within the game is ideal when you are stalling for time.
Contrariwise, deadlines can put negotiators off balance, force them to agree. (Beware folk using this on you. Retain control.)
Many people don't play the game seriously. They like the "empire building" part but have no clue about warfare. They typically sit on the fence, build a huge fleet (with no idea how to use it) and stay out of trouble; or join an alliance, because they like to follow a strong leader. If in an alliance, they are generally more trouble than they're worth due to their hesitancy. If you find someone is one of these timid types, which can be ascertained by their response to grabbing a few planets of theirs or sending scouts into their area, you will find they are easily bullied. They always assume your fleet is much harder than anything they've got.
Some people crave respect, and can be flattered into joining your schemes. For with their strength, intelligence and experience, it should be no trouble to take over our common neighbour etc...
Others are greedy, and value sheer territory without understanding that in war, it is normally better to be concentrated than diffuse.
Some proud people can be told X is impossible, to goad them.
Take prisoners whenever possible. They are useful for trading to races which use labour camps / mines, and Lizards. Or holding as hostage.
Radiate confidence, but be careful this does not appear to be arrogance.
People look for familiar patterns. If a fleet shows up on their borders they'll assume it's the ships which are dangerous, not realising the ships are unarmed decoys and the real threat is masses of fighters (using exotic tech to minimise their scanner signature), or cloakers being towed (to minimise their warp sig, their own speed set to zero).
Rumours. "Player 2 is dropping out, only doing minimal turns. Easy meat." "I was surprised to find that player 4's ships were only armed with disruptors." "Player 1 is selling colonists to the Lizards, his back is against the wall." "I can scan a Privateer ship near your homeworld"
Doctor screenshots and send them to people. "I already have a base here, it is my planet."
Gifts disarm suspicion. Gifts could include help of all sorts, such as tips on rules and tactics.
Ambiguous borders are a good way to confuse and intimidate. I've seen Player A propose a rational border... Player B implied this seemed reasonable, but did not state agreement specifically, then proceeded to take planets that Player A thought were his. He continued to nibble away at A's territory, but did not answer questions directly. Player A did not know what had been agreed, or whether he was being invaded, for quite some time. (Yes, he was being invaded.)
Food shortages can force isolated people to negotiate. Chupanoid pods...
Since average rules-loving Planets players get unsettled and emotional when the universe's rules change around them, this can be used against them. For example, start raidng with lone ships, switch to swarms once they adapt, then fighters, then switch to defensive (entrapment) for a while. And so on. Meanwhile isolate them diplomatically. Computer programmers are notoriously bad at interpersonal communication. Combining these two threads, if the alliance structure of a game suddenly shifts, they are going to feel very unsettled in their new, unstable universe. At this point they may be very grateful for a friend...
Lure enemies into action on your terms (maybe with easily captured prisoners, a hull type he wants, by capturing one of his mineral-rich bases and building lots of mines there, moving prisoners to a "lightly defended" world near the border, stranding a ship out of fuel near him). If he sees a transient opportunity like a pod with valuable plans in it, and attacks without preparing properly, you could trick him into overextending himself. An ideal time for someone else to attack his rear, or for him to discover the minefields you laid with the "stealth mines" exotic tech, or find you're allied to the Privateers and he has no fuel.
The reciprocation rule: "if someone does you a favor, you owe him a favor in return". This is a "preinstalled" rule, which means you learned it when you were a child. This is a very powerful belief that almost no one questions. And of course, it can be used to manipulate people. Have you tried a free sample in a store? Wait a minute! This person just gave you something for free - it can be qualified as a favor! What can you do in return? Buy these overpriced Corn Flakes? Note that the "rule" does not mention the size of a favor. Other examples: "Here, let me help you with your bag"... "I went out of my way to help you..."
Trying to co-ordinate with a poor ally can do more damage than an overt enemy. So... ally with your rivals against a common threat...

Lying

Brazenness: I recently checkmated someone during a game of chess. Or so I thought. They were most upset. It was a few minutes later that we realised it wasn't actually checkmate (indeed I then lost). But if you say something confidently enough, and act as if it were true, it is amazing how often you can get away with it, particularly if something else happens to distract them (in the chess game, it was me jumping up and doing a victory dance!). In Planets terms, one equivalent would be to move a fleet of dangerous looking but lightly armed (thus, cheap) hulks to threaten a timid player. [However, be careful that the EE are uninvolved, or they may leak the true armament to your target. EE players can see weapon loadouts.]
Social proof is the tendency to believe what most people believe. If an advocate creates the impression that "everyone knows" something, people don't question it.
Repeated assertions create the impression that the assertion is true.
Vivid examples -- especially dramatic case histories -- often influence judgments more than dull but more accurate quantitative examples. "Contraband price manipulation was a common technique in early games, but once Tim realised people were abusing the market, he introduced Chup Plagues, and they eat contraband stockpiles."
Confusion techniques can associate negative perceptions with the subject being discussed. For example, illogical but eloquent rhetoric delivered with an air of certainty can create such perceptions, if a few clear alarming phrases are woven into the message. Dramatically announce that players have found the latest Host has made Rebels incredibly wealthy, as if this were a discovery, or something unusual. Ignoring coincidence and drawing attention to a few Gun Zero hits can be highly misleading. "The Robots are the prime menace!"
People tend to assume that sensational terms represent reality. The "Al Quaeda organisation" and "the Minefield Bug" are prime examples. [Al Quaeda is a philosophy, and I just made the Minefield Bug up - it would sound even better if I associated it with an expert i.e. "Lord Owl's Minefield Bug"]. The existence of a name does not necessarily mean that there is a corresponding real event.
Interruptions, objections, topic changes and ad hominem arguments may also be used to divert attention from facts. Manipulators strive to divorce us from the facts, rather than encouraging us to examine the evidence and reasoning! If someone asks an awkward question, ignore it and answer a different one.
Scapegoats are useful for diverting blame, particularly when you are working to destroy an alliance from within, or trying to switch alliances. Never delete emails from other players, they can be forwarded, slightly doctored, along with their views on other players; or you can blackmail them with their email from 30 turns ago... It's common to hear people blame their defeat on another player's stupidity or his dropping out. You often hear apologies for missing that crucial rendezvous became of some event external to the game, or the substitute player who filled in while you were on holiday and broke a treaty, and quite often people blame the host or Tim for changing the rules of a game! Privateers and dropouts make the best scapegoats as no one likes them. It's also common to blame the threat from a powerful neighbour as the reason you did not show up to the Big Fight where your friend got slaughtered.

The Big Lie (an alternative style contributed by The Archon)
This is a classic tactic from history. Some lies work better the larger and more seemingly incredible you make them. Google the phrase "The Big Lie" for further ideas. This is related to how some news stories mutate as time goes on. The first known Big Lie was by one of the Egyptian Pharoahs whose monuments boast prominently of a successful military campaign of conquest agaist a neighbour. This was believed for many years until mounting evidence showed that the other civilisation beat the pants off the Pharoah's army, and continued for many years as an independent culture. But as they did not record their victory in prominent public monuments or written records, and travel was uncommon in those days, the Pharoah was apparently able to cover up his fiasco until the 20th century.

For further ideas, Google Game Theory and Negotiation Skills

Neuro Linguistic Programming and human suggestibility

Most of human history has been a series of efforts by some humans to control what other humans think. Consider:

Cults , religion
Guantanamo Bay, behavioural conditioning of prisoners (Geneva convention?)
McCarthyism, Witch hunts, the War on Terror
Subliminal advertising / images. What does Coca Cola bring to mind?

Humans are very suggestible, and such practitioners have refined their techniques to a fine art. If you search for NLP, or Persuasion Tactics on the Web, you'll come across some very unsettling pages about how to manipulate people.

Basically, hypnotists, salesmen and con men try to install Pavlovian responses in their targets by getting their listener to associate something like a gesture, or phrase, with a strong memory. Then by repeating the trigger, they re-instil the feelings in their subject. (The triggers lose their effectiveness if they happen too often, which is why hypnotists often use the touching of an ear as a trigger - it's unlikely to happen by accident or trigger other memories.) You can also use this technique to break anxieties, by associating bad events with some gesture and then overwriting it with another stronger good feeling, but I digress. This is why people get convinced that they cannot do X. For example I've always had problems with penetrating massed minefields so I tend to despair when I see them. The usefulness in Planets terms is that whenever something bad happens to your victim, you should work a phrase into your communiques which he will come to associate with Doom. Such as ending messages with "Minefields ahoy!" Or perhaps you can come up with a more subtle, unique trigger pattern...

Communicate the goal as if it has already happened, or is happening now.
Phrase EACH suggestion 3 different ways for maximum impact. "Bloodaxe is planning to kill you. He will kill you unless you kill him first. You had better kill him in self-defense."
Teaming: a old con man trick, this refers to people bulldozing their way into your "trusted" zone by making you associate them with something which inspires trust. Some predatory males use a crude form of this when they see females in trouble, by offering to help; the girl then gets in their car, lets them carry the spilt shopping into her flat etc. A key element of this is the verbal patter, using the word "we" in place of "I", fooling the listener into associating the stranger with themselves. In Planets terms, you can inspire trust by apparently altruistic acts - perhaps unexpectedly helping defend a threatened border, giving free strategic advice, or refueling a stranded ship in your territory - and then discussing how "we" will address the other player's problems. Once he begins using "we" too, you can start positioning your forces in his territory, or asking him for that hull plan.

Further reading: here is a useful link about the psychology of deception.

Miscellaneous pragmatic points about accumulating influence and power

Never explain your tricks. (Like this.)
Make things seem effortless. Don't mention extensive preparations. It enhances your reputation, and demoralises enemies.
Assume your allies have read this guide too. Don't be out-allied by your allies!
In a many-player game, you don't have enough forces to fight everyone. Operate on humans, not forces.Thus you have unlimited leverage, because you are not resource limited.
Don't get a reputation for treachery. Dress it up as something you were forced to do - can you trick your ally into betraying you first? Claim you are being forced to break alliance with him by another player? Accuse him of not living up to his bargain? Point out the 20 turn alliance is now expired?
I find that because I've written this guide and other documents, created the Diplomat simulator and helped create the IMT race, I have an immense reputation in games I join. Everyone assumes I am a master of everything. People scramble to ally with me and hesitate to attack, no matter how experienced they are. It is an example of how reputations can follow you from game to game. I always make a point of being very aggressive and vengeful in games, and try not to drop out until I really don't have any forces left. I think it is a good idea to get a reputaton as someone who fights back to the last ship. It deters people from casual raids.
People always assume more experienced players are invulnerable. Yet the best tactician I know of is very proud and emotional, his own worst enemy, and I believe I have seen people deliberately antagonise him to distract him. Once he dropped out of a game before destroying an enemy, because he was so outraged (though that seemed to be more of an accidental consequence, but it shows another possible way of manipulating people!). He craves respect - it's the button you can use to control him.
It is normally wise to crush someone utterly, rather than leave a kernel which can regrow. In Planets, it's usually impossible to kill every last ship, but destroying the bulk of an enemy's population usually does the trick (warning: Crystals and Scavengers have an unbelievable breeding rate). However, if you can afford to, it is much more useful to convert enemies who attack you, to allies, by showing mercy. In their gratitude, they become much more loyal than normal allies as they feel they have something to prove. You need to do this properly if you decide on this strategy. If you take territory or other valuable Stuff, they will harbour resentment and still scheme against you. Push folk to despair, then give them relief.
Vanity begets blabbing, --> giving away too much. Feed peples' vanity.
Don't rise to bait.
You can annoy people with the much-hated Message Buoys. Angry people make mistakes.
Dominance games: assuming someone really needs you, you want to ensure you keep the upper hand in the relationship. Boldness in negotiations unsettles folk. Keep changing your mind. Bullying nervous players is quite easy, sending forces to their homeworld or simply threatening to use your Rebel powers to reveal their alliances / EE powers to reveal their weapons to their enemies! Don't bully newbies, but if an experienced player is a coward, you are doing him a favour by forcing him to confront his problems with asserting himself within the safe confines of a game.
Words only go so far - actions or symbols are better. Decloaking a force he was unaware of, or "casually" swatting a ship or base of his "without apparent effort" can make a point. Or revealing something near his homeworld.
Devices, such as Contraband Lockdown, are very useful in negotiations, if you have the right information about where to use them.
An air of mystery enhances your reputation and thus your effectiveness. You can see this in any game - the guys who stay silent are enigmas, every little action is taken to be of great significance. If you have to talk, talk enigmatically.
Why are your allies helping you? In many game setups, there can be only one winner. Assume they've read this document too, and are manipulating you. There are no rules against it.
Assume other players will act pragmatically, not on a history of favours done for them. If you want their help, appeal to their self-interest.
Never be obvious about what your true objectives are. If you want to capture someone's homeworld population, how much easier if they let a ship approach to set up a base as a trading partner. Or if you help their main enemy distract their forces away from their homeworld.
The ideal is probably to antagonise one enemy into attacking another. Before they realise you are the real enemy.
Review the games you have played. What mistakes did you make? Did you end up in uneccessary wars, blab too much on the message board? Who won, and how?
You can make it appear that someone is working with you, when they are not. Examples: travel through his space as if you are allowed to. Have warships visit his planets with attack "off". Send him pods of Stuff. Lay mines to help him. Threaten his enemies "on his account".
Be nice to Newbies.

Classic examples to learn from

Spin: In English schools, we are still taught about Otto von Bismark's fantastic bit of spin in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. By leaking a comment from his Kaiser to the French Ambassador to the press, he enraged the French nation, who declared war on Prussia (and then got their asses whipped). By making the French seem to be the aggressors, and over a silly point of etiquette, he isolated them from potential allies and ensured the other Germanic states' firm support for Prussia.

Dodgy assumptions: I once discovered 1 million amorphs in a native-poor game on a world near my homeworld. But my rival Mark wanted it too. I was outraged and a huge war raged over it. Eventually it transpired that our homeworlds were quite close and actually, the amorphs were exactly mid way between us. We had both thought the other was grabbing "our" amorphs. If we'd known that earlier, we might have reached a sensible agreement.

Poor communication: in the Cuban Missile Crisis, poor communication hampered efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully. Kruschev and Kennedy had great difficulty reading the others' political signals due to different cultural backgrounds and technical problems with telephones (thus leading to the introduction of an improved Hot Line afterwards), and it was very difficult to come to a sensible agreement. (America withdrew their missiles threatening Russia from Turkey, shortly after the Russians removed the Cuban missiles - a completely unrelated affair of course - neither side wanted to be seen as backing down. It was these missiles which had motivated Kruschev to use Cuba as a missile base, because Russian missiles could only reach Europe at that time. It is worth praising columnist Walter Lippman for coming up with the idea.) Interestingly, Kruschev emerged looking sane and statesmanlike, where Kennedy acquired a reputation for recklessness which is possibly why he was assassinated (too dangerous to have around).

Important game features about alliances: The Host can set a limit on the number of allies a player can have. And did you know that the Rebels know who's really allied to whom? (They get messages from Host saying "player 1 is allied to players 4,6,8...") This Rebel power relies on formal "attack off" or "share information" switches being set in Planets, though, and can be fooled by out-of-game co-operation agreements.

How I suckered myself - not everyone plays intelligently: I once talked myself into losing, by offering to work with someone who had the same enemies as me. It made sense to me to work together. What I didn't realise was that he was uninterested in the game, he was playing for the first and last time, and he just said "sure" to shut me up, and see where it would go, but he had no intention of doing anything. He missed half his turns and eventually dropped out when he was finally invaded. So I went to a great deal of trouble to trade hull plans... which he never used, and my enemies ended up with them when they captured the plans off him... because he'd allied with EVERONE in the game. Needless to say when I attacked the enemies on one front, he did not attack on the other. You need to recognise players who are only interested in "Sim City" or are not committed and likely to drop out / miss turns. Such players are best simply bullied, they have no long term committment, don't understand the game system and are thus easily intimidated.

Further reading on diplomacy: http://www.xs4all.nl/~donovan/strategy/diplomacy.htm - The Art of Diplomacy by Emperor Bondservant, who did an international relations game-theory in college. This is a discussion on NAGs (Non Aggression pacts) versus full alliances, trust, how many alliances should one have... Emperor Bondservant was actually writing about VGAP3, but the article is as relevant now as it was then.

See also: Drew Sullivan's Scavenger guide. This opens a door for a quite different look on alliances.

Part 8: Philosophy

Why play?

There are generally two answers to this. Playing to win: OK, in that case you want to know all about the best use of allies, little combat tricks, squeezing the last drop of income out of a resource. But there's also: Playing for fun - some folk aren't so interested in combat, but are interested in the "Sim City" aspects of empire building. Others - and this is my own tendency these days - are fed up with complicated alliances, micromanagement of empires etc and just play for maximum fun, meaning flamboyant attacks to frighten neighbours; no alliances, to minimise endless email tedium; irritating enemies by coming up with bizarre schemes; and generally creating galactic havoc. Of course, this may mean I lose in the end. But I no longer play to the same winning conditions as others. If I have fun, I win.

(This led someone to comment: "Alas most of my pals like the idea of co operative play on the spurious grounds that it wins games." Pah!)

If a game is going to last half a year or more you eventually need another element to add zest. Examples:

Playing with friends (rivals) is always fun as you can meet up and curse each other
Playing for real money (hmmm...)
National pride (I once saw a fantastic game where 3 Russians teamed up and attacked 3 Americans - the rest of us just stood back and laughed)
To prove a point against rivals

Because you are likely to play with people from different countries over a game lasting half a year or so, conversations spring up... there are extra dimensions to this game. It's not just "meet interesting foreigners and kill them". You will...

Learn from others and pick up new world views from their chat
Learn about yourself: your attitudes and prejudices
Learn about trust (game theory). Some people (cultures) take treachery very seriously and carry distrust into other games... you will learn how people can misinterpret things you consider unimportant or clear, particularly when communication is poor (ie with people from a different culture / language), and react unexpectedly. It is good to learn this in a game before it happens catastrophically in Real Life!

What is a successful game? It is one where you have fun.

What is a successful strategy? It is one where you achieve an objective, and the objective should always be to hinder a rival or improve your own position. Sometimes a successful attack is simply one where you tie up a rival with an apparently ineffective attack in order to give an ally time to get ready.

Chivalry and other useful analogies with real warfare ("Nice guys don't win")

Military historians categorise "Primitive" warfare as fighting with no long term objective. It is often just raiding, vandalism and murder to gain loot or drive off rivals. It is also characterised by a lack of logistical support (inability to operate at long range). Primitive warriors lack commitment to what Clausewitz called Absolute (Total) War - and it is essential that a VGAP4 player realise that though raiding is fun and certainly disrupts enemies, counterstrategies to light raiding ships exist (notably minefields), and raiding alone will not bring an enemy to his knees.

Even Ghengis Khan was a "Modern" warrior, inasmuch as he had a clear idea of how to bring an opponent down and was utterly committed to his objectives. He destroyed enemy armies and seized their capitals, took wealth (often in the form of slaves) and used the food and other supplies he captured to fuel his army and horses. He had spies and scouts who reported on enemy tactics, where their forces were, etc. In VGAP4 terms, this is equivalent to scouting ahead of the main fleet to locate the major enemy population centres, etc.

One thing Ghengis did not have much of, was a sense of honour towards enemies. And here is another lesson for VGAP4 players. Even Clausewitz's Absolute War, which he famously described as the logical (ie, ruthless) extension of diplomatic policy "by another means", had limits. We know these as "the rules of war" or, in Medieval times, "Chivalry" and they are typified by the humane treatment of prisoners, formal declarations of war, truces etc. However, VGAP4 is just a game and with no real-life price to pay if you lose, most players use unannounced surprise attacks. To put it another way, there are no "rules" for how a VGAP4 player must conduct his wars, and with a big international pool of players, you will keep coming across different styles of play. The only limit is that people who behave treacherously towards allies tend to get bad reputations, but most players do not view surprise attacks as treachery. This can upset some victims. Be warned: keep your eyes peeled for suspicious build-ups on your borders.

Some other things can be learnt from analogies with real-life military history. Take Clausewitz's Total War. This has dominated Western military thinking since Napoleonic times and is typically described as:

Lack of limitation in the use of force. A society goes all-out to war and attempts to deal the enemy a decisive and permanent defeat. Only obliquely relevant in VGAP4, because your entire economy is invariably optimised solely to feed your war effort. Civilians are cynically manipulated to maximise revenue.
Singularity of purpose. Don't chicken out part way through a campaign. You've undoubtedly already lost forces - don't let them be lost in vain.
Unwillingness to settle for anything less than outright victory. Until a VGAP4 race's population is so low that they can never conceivably make a comeback, assume they're still a potential threat.

Another real-life strategist who influenced war was the Chinese general Sun Tzu. His Art of War took a different tack to Clausewitz, and clever strategists will use the elements of both philosophies appropriate to their situation. Cloaking races are well suited to his effective, sneaky style of warfare. He emphasised that you should

Avoid fights you can't win or, to put it another way, avoid uneccesary risks.
Wear down an enemy with time: use low-loss raids to hit soft targets; let him use up his supplies of fuel, etc by hitting unimportant targets, and forcing him to tie up forces in defense.
Use psychology and misinformation to overawe. If an enemy thinks he's in trouble, he's usually less committed and might not think of how best to use his forces. Use secret "neutral" allies to feed lies to him.

Despite Westerners despising this approach, being more used to Big Decisive Battles according to rules they recognised, it works. Mao Tse Tung used this system very effectively to gain control in China. And the North Vietnamese are famous for demonstrating that if you can't pin down guerilla revolutionaries in big battles, and they have a widespread presence which you can't root out, you can't defeat them if they don't decide to give in. (Actually the truth is more complex. They tried something similar to Mao with the Tet offensive against the superpower of America, which curiously [though a military disaster for the fifth columnist Viet Cong guerillas] convinced the American public that the Viet Cong were far more numerous and dangerous than they really were. The Americans lost heart in the war and pulled out, though in reality they'd almost won. Although the Viet Cong were finished [militarily] after the Tet offensive, South Vietnam fell to the regular North Vietnamese army two years later.)

Whilst (unlike Mao) a VGAP4 player cannot count on a peasant uprising to swell his numbers in areas he attacks, he can give the impression of invincibility by ensuring either -

his fleets always win, i.e. you ensure that any sizeable concentration of enemy ships is knocked out before it becomes a threat, or
he successfully attacks on a broad front with distracting expendable ships whilst the main fleet goes for sensible targets. This won't fool experienced players, who are happy to take losses if they can kill your industrial heartland. But I've seen it demoralise many beginning players who lose heart just because their borders are under attack and they don't believe they can counter it - some even drop out, leaving their area ripe for plundering with minimal risk!

Further lessons from military history

The obsolescence of tactics is a recurrent theme throughout history. A culture develops a new way of fighting (Macedonian phalanx, cavalry or whatever) and seems invincible for a while, but if it doesn't continually innovate it is eventually overrun by someone who develops countermeasures like gunpowder. In VGAP4 terms, this usually means the enemy gets hold of a new hull plan which synergises with something else. For example, suddenly he can lay gravitonic mines and you can no longer hyperjump large forces into his territory. So throughout the game you should continually try to think of new ways to use your abilities and how to develop new tricks. Fighters are pretty weak... until the endgame, when you can afford masses of them. Keep reviewing your tactics.

Until the invention of gunpowder, it was an axiom of military strategy that the defenders of fortresses had an advantage over attackers. There was no way to breach fortresses without massive losses, or long seiges, treachery etc. Do not be fooled into thinking a VGAP4 Base is impregnable! There are many ways to launch surprise attacks. For example, using cloakers, hyperspace, long range fighters etc. And even if a race cannot breach a Base's defenses head-on, it may be able to attack by unonventional means (Bird Mens' Nano Bomb vs. Borg, etc.) There are some fairly effective base defense structures (ion cannon, etc) but they're very high tech and expensive. This is not to say you should not bother defending your primary bases - just that it's better to use ships to stop enemies getting near them in the first place, because your options are reduced if the enemy reach a major world.

It is worth mentioning that the British Empire (and possibly the Roman Empire) had a deliberate policy of not bothering to defend what could not be defended. My point is, don't build major bases on your periphery; they are too vulnerable. Mark H would disagree. Your shipyards, which usually end up with high population and other resources out of necessity, should be buried deep within your empire. Some players never bother building extra shipyards until after turn 50, rather than spread / risk their wealth. Minimising the number of juicy targets has other benefits. It is easier to defend just a few targets. Also, it lets you utilise Sun Tzu's principle of letting the enemy waste their strength attacking fringe worlds which you really don't care about. It is amazing how many players think they absolutely have to mop up every base of yours on a broad front as they advance, even though a 500-man mining colony is clearly no threat, instead of spearing ahead like Rommel in a lightning strike for the key points before the enemy can prepare.

Military Intelligence is always important. You need to know what an enemy can field - is he up to tech level X yet, etc. My reading on this subject, though, brings up an interesting point. More important than an enemy's capabilities are his intentions. It is not important if he has a huge navy if he's using it to guard another border. Whereas a small enemy can be a huge problem if he attacks unexpectedly. Keep an eye on enemy movements, pump his allies for information, ask his children what he's boasting about, use false email identities to get his guard down..!

Drew Sullivan: Because you have human opponents, the winning strategy in VGAP4 tends to differ from the winning strategy in other Space Wargames. In many similar appearing games, the key to victory is well thought out, patterned play to maximize searching, to optimally develop technology, and to build infrastructure rapidly. In those games, players work out a "perfect plan" of the most efficient way to expand and develop. They then use that plan over and over in each successive game. Against human VGAP opponents, patterned predictable play will lead you into an ambush and a one-way trip to an enemy Labor Camp. Human players, unlike steady computer opponents, will confront you with a combination of brilliant threats, clever traps, and incredibly bone-headed blunders.VGAP4 rewards players who do the unexpected, whose next move cannot easily be foreseen, and who can react rapidly to opportunities or threats that suddenly arise.

Any wargame favors aggressive, offensive play over a passive defense. In VGAP4, the player's empires are fairly robust, but the game system does allow attacks to develop rapidly. The game system is rich enough to provide many different ways to damage your enemy. Space battles, orbital bombardment, and ground infantry battles are all there. So are subtler ways to reduce your enemy's economy, happiness, income and productivity through covert, non-combat means. VGAP4 gives great advantage to the offensive minded player because you can combine ships, fighters and ground troops into a mutually supporting attack, and do this at a time when you have arranged that your enemy's economy is in ruins his a population in revolt.

Part 9: The Top Ten Techniques to save you time

Doing your move can take well over an hour by turn 20, and several hours by turn 60! But there are ways to speed this up.

1. Focus. Before opening yor RST file, pause a moment and think: "if I only had 30 minutes to do this turn before going on holiday for a week, what would my priorities be?"

Consider the turn from the following perspective. You started playing this game for fun. If the fun is being drowned in micromanagement, it's time to focus on the bits you enjoy. It is, after all, a game.

You shouldn't need to look at every colony, etc every turn, because you can queue structure building.

2. Ministers. AI helpers which can do much of the micromanagement for you - structure building, etc. They are controlled from the HQ screen and can save you enormous amounts of time. Points to note:

Ships and bases have a minister ignore switch, if it is checked the ministers will IGNORE this object. It is a small white box with an "M" inside it. (Make sure it is checked on your homeworld.)
All actions that ministers take are instant and universal. All actions take place player side the instant the player clicks the minister button.
Particularly useful Minister functions (in my opinion) are:

Build Farms - saves so much time!
Build Cities: Cities are built on planets that have at least 100,000 colonists that are currently not in a city
Pods Send Metal to Yards, Pods Send Ore to Yards: A ship yard planet is any planet that has a ship yard (Military Space Port) . The base sending the pod must have over 100mc cash can over 300kt of metals before a pod will be launched. The maximum distance that a pod will be launched to is 300ly. Now that Tim has added the ability to simply say "send pods to the current Anvil", these functions are extra useful. Note: Ministers use the Base Reserve Levels screen to limit what they pod off to other planets.
The ability to change friendly codes on the fly is great, especially when allied to other folk.
The ability to set ship vectors and turn off ground attack are very popular methods of saving time. (It is far better to have all your ships attack in a bunch when fighting big battles, to fire massed volleys. It should be a different vector each turn so the enemy cannot use the information against you, i.e. attack with lots of short range weapons - which tend to be more powerful - knowing how to get in close because you always use the same vector.)
I would be cautious about using Build Mines and Build Smelters. They might build far more than you want - and the planet's Happiness plummets.

3. Fleets. (Button in top toolbar which looks like 2 ships overlapping.) All ships in a Fleet will follow the Fleet Leader, so you only need to give navigation commands to that ship. Tip: be careful to set all ships' speed to be the same, otherwise the fleet leader can end up with a trail of followers spread out over 50LY! Use the "s" hotkey to cycle through ships in a fleet (same location), or use this "undocumented feature" found by Zevious: When looking at the ship overview screen, if you click just to the RIGHT of the picture near the top right, it will cycle thru the ships at the current location.

4. Groups. Different to fleets, and they can overlap. The idea behind Groups is that you can give mass orders to all ships in a group. So all your Deth Specula Cruisers might be in one group, say, and be told to I need to investigate these - how do you set them up? And where is the Help file on the hard disk? See bugs section.

5. Organising your screen. Large screens help a lot in VGAP4 (sorry, I know this is not helpful to many people). There is a lot of mousework involved in Planets, but I recently got a screen which can show 1920 x 1200 pixels. This means you can leave several windows open permanently. I leave the Starmap, Central Commnd, Overview screen and Notes permanently open. You probably already know that the Overview screen will change from Base Overview to Ship Overview, as appropriate. But did you know that the Notes screen can be left open and displays info on the current anvil?

6. Quick Build.

7. Map Hot Keys


Draw concentric circles of various diameters on the starmap using the number pad "0"key. [Useful for: showing hyperjump ranges, what a ship can travel to in 1 turn, what's in range of scanners, tachyon pulses, World Crushers...] To highlight all of race X's units: If you highlight a ship belonging to another race, all ships of that race get little boxes around them. The colour is sort of off-white. (Wings get little ovals.) To share map drawings with allies, use the button at the top with a red pen icon (pop-up tooltip: "Draw on map"). However, unless both you and your ally have "share map drawings" turned on, he won't see anything. Keyboard number "5" centers the hammer object in the map. Immensely useful when using the data grid, it allows you to choose a ship in the grid, make it the hammer, then jump to its location on the map. Homejumps to the next ship of same type. You can look at all your Fireclouds . . then your Cubes. . . I think <End> lets you jump to the previous ship of the same type. <S> takes you to the next ship in the area, <B> for base and <W> for wing. What experts like Tim do: use the PageUp and PageDown keys to jump from base to base.When you see that there are ships or wings in orbit use "S" (Ship) and "W" (Wing) to jump to their overview screens to give orders. (Watch the space command list box for objects next to the base). The hot key "B" takes you back to the base, and PageUp takes you to the next base. This allows you to quickly do a move without referring to the main starmap. (However you will need to refer to the starmap when exploring, or planning strategy.) Summary: use the keyboard - PageUp, s, s, s, s, s, pageup, s, s . . . More obscure map hot keys, for experts: +Plus Zoom - Minus Zoom F7 clears hammer object F8Clears the anvil object Copens the command screen of the currently selected object, if you have the power to command the object. Delete removes map memory objects (the purple data on the map / Space Command showing things which were present, but can no longer be seen this turn)
Ship movement:

8. Ship Hot Keys

SHIFT allows you to drop a waypoint in deep space without it locking onto the nearest object

i Intercept current anvil object

I cancel Intercept

e Escort current anvil object

E Cancel escort

b jumps to the nearest base within 10 ly of the currently selected object

w jumps to the next wing within 10 ly of the currently selected object

s jumps to the next ship within 10 ly of the currently selected object. (Typing s over and over again cycles the selected object through the nearby ships, which is ideal when you have a fleet in the same position.)

t jumps to the transporter screen if the currently selected object is a ship

9 quickly sets it to full speed.

C opens the command screen of the currently selected object.

H turns ship hyper drive on and off

9. Datagrid. The best use of the datagrid is to sort bases or ships by race, and quickly see what enemies are up to. This can highlight the fact that they have another Virgo Class Cruiser you hadn't spotted (and by clicking on it in the datagrid, then the hammer icon in the datagrid, it becomes the hammer; then hotkey "0" will centre your map on it.). It can also help you spot the juiciest enemy bases to attack without having to tediously click on every one you see on the starmap. It's occasionally useful organising your own stuff, but you usually know more or less what you've got and where!

10. Allies. Get rid of useless allies who aren't pulling their weight.They soak up your time and give nothing in return.

11. Question: when cycling round your bases / ships with the "up/down" arrows, is there any way that you can put a switch on a ship or planet that will take it out of the 'next ship' or 'next planet' cycle? Or perhaps a way to filter the ships that are cycled such as by hull type? In several games I have over 100 ships, and sometimes I would like to be able to cycle through only my alchemy ships or only through the ships that are members of a certain fleet.

Answer: Tim introduced the following really important thing: Ship overview and Base overview screen has a view indicator, it will show up as a "V" in a box. You can click on it or use the "V" hot key. When the "V" is on the ship or base will act normal, but when it is turned off the ship or base will not show up when you use the up and down arror button or pageup or pagedown buttons to switch to the next base or ship. This status is saved if you exit the game half way through a turn.

Alternative answer from Claudius Muller: This is where the so beloved Space Command comes into play... I name all my stuff in the alphabetical order I want to see them. Then I go to the "List Objects" button, select what I want and import the list into the SpaceCommand. The imported list will be in alphabetical order! Furthermore, if you select your objects from within Space Command the Main Starmap does not recenter itself around the newly selected one every time. Thus I can arrange my windows (Main Starmap, Space Command, Overview, DataPad, Notepad, or what ever!) once for each kind of object. Just have all ships within a certain fleet start with a certain letter. I know, this is not the perfect answer to your problem. But it works for me right now.

Miscellaneous useful time saving tips

There is a tool which can draw circles around important resources on the map. (See circles on toolbar.)
Leave the NOTES screen permanently open. As you select different things in Space Command, the Notes change to reflect them. In this way you can rapidly identify the key Things Needing Doing from a dense mess of objects.
You can launch "clones" of pods with the CLONE button on the Pod Launch screen. A very quick way of launching a great number of exact copies of a pod to the same destination.
If you click on an object on the map, all objects belonging to that race get little boxes round them. So you can quickly see where all player 5's ships are.
When you use the find object window all the found objects will show up on the main map with purple boxes around them.
New: Clone ship button for regular ship builds. If you have the parts you can build many copies of the same ship, at a base.
Planet Management: Once a planet is set up you can do almost everything from the Overview screen. You can build your structures, look at your happiness, and even adjust specific buildings by right clicking on them(rather than going to switches). The only time I leave the Overview screen is to sell contraband, change military status, or build parts for use in an outfit pod.
In Space Command, a right click on the list loads the selected item as an anvil object
Map Setup: You can use F9 and F10 to view stats of your Hammer and Anvil object, a good way to use this to quickly pick planets is select your Anvil object to a planet, look at the planet with F10 and then set a "Note" if there is anything of interest there.
Shipbuilding: Use Diplomat or or Shipcalc or the Quick Build Ship screen to pre-design ships when possible. It makes it easy to view the total cost of ships your building and tweak the design to fit your needs. Once you have the design in Diplomat export it and use the QuickBuild option to build the ship in one turn, as quick build builds everything you need AND the ship in ONE turn, normally building ships takes two turns. One to build the parts, the next to select the hull and what parts you wish to use.
Holding down ALT allows you to build 10000 factories
When you receive an RST file, Doug + Marie suggest the following technique to make it automatically unpack and go into the command screen. (To save opening the files screen, selecting the game, slot, and hitting the unpack button). Create shortcuts to each game/univ/slotX directory on your desktop. Then when TRNs or RSTs come in, I just drag and drop them (from Outlook) onto the proper shortcut. Then when you open Planets... viola... all files are available and ready for use. Much less work.
The "Structures" screen allows you to queue building of surface structures, so you can set up a planet's economy and leave it to auto-build for many turns whilst your attention is elsewhere.
Useful hot keys: Base overview shows pending builds of a structure in a blue box. Clicking on the blue box adds one to the build queue, shift + click adds 5 a click, and Ctrl + click clears the box.
Use hotkey "9" to set ship speed to max, rather than going through a subscreen or sliding a control bar.
Given that you can manipulate waypoints, intercepts, escort targets, etc by dragging on the starmap there is rarely a need to use the "Nav" screen.

Top Three Techniques for wasting time

1. Too much micromanagement in the end game. Most of your income / minerals / food comes from a few key worlds. Let Ministers do the other gruntwork for you, and don't worry about those "little colonies" and obsolete ships.

2. Crap allies.

3. Upgrading ships with Outfit Pods. It usually takes several turns... simpler to build a new ship. For some reason, people spend a lot of time upgrading Hull Tech 2-4 ships which are incredibly cheap anyway, and by the mid game, are obsolete. I only use Outfit Pods when I'm forced to part-build really expensive ships (best to get the hull and basic weapons I can afford in orbit round my homeworld for defence, or before Privateers steal the cash).

Known bugs as of April '04 (a selection)

CPlayer and Autopilot are unavailable, though Ministers help automate some things. Tim is developing a CPlayer, V4HOSTZ.DLL, it once got turned on by accident (see Host 172 release notes)

Many 3rd party races are due for an overhaul. Their creators and players have petitioned Tim to tweak this, rebalance that etc. However, Tim has put all 3rd party race work on hold until the game is released. (The authors do the graphics, stats design etc. But all the actual coding is down to Tim in the end.)

I have noticed that the last few major bugs were spotted by newcomers who questioned very basic things. For example, a bug in the code had prevented ships with >10 large weapons firing the ones with numbers above 10. And no one had spotted this in 2 years of Beta testing! So if you see something strange, it is worth mentioning it on the mailing list or newsgroup.

I think there may be something broken with the scanner code. It is sometimes amazingly difficult to scan things at point blank range.

Pod docking to a ship on the same turn the pod is launched is not 100% reliable, particularly if the ship is hyperjumping away that turn.

Groups of ships: there are bugs in the transfer options for groups of ships. The "base below" button doesn't seem to do anything, neither does "match levels". There are no problems getting attack settings and navigation stuff to work with Groups, but there are with the transfer stuff. Solution: For 'match ...' set one ship in the group, leave it selected and hit 'match ...' and all the others will be set to the same. You need to put all the ships into the group first for it to work. One at a time (really boring with 100 ships), select a ship then hit 'Add to Group'. And if you don't give the group a name, it isn't saved and you have to do it all again. That is REALLY annoying.

Ships that that are not moving can still hit mines, for example, if they have been Robbed of fuel by a Privateer, but still have waypoint and speed set. It appears host only checks if waypoint and speed is set and assumes the ship moves. But it does not because of the missing fuel.

AA guns don't use ord?

"Drawings" on the map only last 1 turn.

See: Planets wiki

Afterword

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I've tried to cram a structured tutorial into this document, but it is just a basic skeleton for you to build on. The most important documents you can now read are the Host Release Notes on Tim's site. This tutorial may not be updated again, and the game is constantly evolving as Tim patches loopholes and fine tunes things. Almost all the race guides on the Web are out of date with respect to new rules - always check their release date and at least read the host release notes since then. The Host release notes are a long read, but will alert you to otherwise-undocumented abilities / weaknesses which your race, and your enemies, can use. This, Grasshopper, is the FINAL LESSON.

Biography

The Author (TM) is a pseudonym for Doc Devious, itinerant VGAP4 player and self styled demagogue. Graduating from P3 to P4 as soon as the first Beta was published, the Uberdeviant fires regular salvoes of bombast onto the P4 Mailing List and Newsgroup from a bunker somewhere in Britain, ceaselessly working for the cause of interstellar anarchy and using transparently falcidical arguments to convince the gullible that he knows whereof he speaks. Hobbies include galvanising his head and losing at VGAP4. Playing style is a mixture of super-aggressiveness towards the weak mixed with craven self preservation where appropriate. Truly a paragon of the game (ahem).

Part 1: Introduction