Klingon Kommand Battle Manual - KKBM 101

Revision 3.2, April 2005. | Suggestions welcome | More VGAP4 tips

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2: turn by turn checklist

Part 3: Strategy

Part 4: Mechanics Part 5: Economy - how to make money / economic warfare

Part 6: Diplomacy

  • Negotiations; alliances; disrupting enemy coalitions
Part 7: Advanced diplomacy
  • Machiavellian techniques

Part 8: Philosophy and weird stuff


Part 9: Saving time
  • Top 10 tips to save time
  • Hotkeys
  • Top 3 ways of wasting time

Known bugs

The final lesson

Revision history (of this doc) (separate page)

New text is in red, to help people re-reading this document.

Part 1: Introduction

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 mail me and I'll link to it.advertisement
  • 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:

    The 7 Deadly Sins

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

    Illustration of some points

    Turns 16+:


    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

    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:

    1. Mutual expansion
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Further border clashes as you test each others' resolve and try to find enemy homeworld
    5. 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.

    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
    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:
    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:
    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!Rum lot...

    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:

    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:

    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:

    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:

    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
    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 -

    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

    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:

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

    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'

    IndustryThere 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:

    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.

    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:
  • The Contraband Market:
  • General stuff about all types of Contraband:


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


    Breeding

    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 -

    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?"

    We are your friends
    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

    Other problems to beware

    Spreading misinformation is limited in utility since it is often discredited at source. Intelligence sharing agreements, corroborated by others or visible events in the game, are better.

    Keep communication simple when speaking to non-native english speakers. You want to be clearly understood.

    Don't expect everything to happen as discussed and agreed on - mistakes will happen!

    If you find you are doing all the work in an alliance, get out. Leave lazy players to their fate or they'll drag you down with them.

    Allying with someone in a time zone 8 hours away is a guarantee of a stressful life. Don't do it.

    Allies require work (co-ordination). Don't ally with too many people! I reccommend no more than one (1) full ally, but I would prefer not to have the trouble of allying at all. You'll need some NAG's too, for quiet borders, but they require less work.

    If you share data with an ally, using the alliance switches, and he shares data with a 3rd player, sometimes that player can see YOUR scan data too!


    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:

    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...

    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:

    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

    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 -

    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:

    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.

    Miscellaneous useful time saving tips

    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

    Send for your FREE Certificate now! Impress your enemies and allies,  add letters to your name, lose money fast!

    Congratulations on completing the course!Congratulations! You have completed the Klingon Kommand beginners' course in deceit and are entitled to purchase this priceless free unframed certificate signed by Doc Devious himself and once recieved you can at last put those dread letters "DD" after your name - and all for a mere 25mc! Just provide your credit details, numbers of all bank accounts, social security number and birthdate and we will do the rest! Click and send right now - mailto: pensionplan@deviouscentral.com

     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).