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