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Re: Beginner/Advanced Beginner Game - To the MAX Sun, 12 February 2012 08:30 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
BeeKeeper is currently offline BeeKeeper

 
Officer Cadet 1st Year

Messages: 214
Registered: December 2007
Location: Devon, UK, GMT
 As this is a game for beginners is it worth describing how to set the game up and some basic playing tips? My repeated failures against human players hardly qualifies me to say anything on this subject but here is what I do: (I am assuming Windows XP is being used)

SETTING UP THE GAME

Create a new folder on your PC and in this case I suggest you call it "Max" or something like that. I put this inside my "Games" folder which is in the same folder as all the other Stars! files.

Into this folder copy the two files Sally has sent you. The .xy file is the universe definition and does not change. The .mX file, where X is your player number is the turn file, and this will change each year of the game.

I also copy the race file .R1 into this same folder. I am not sure this is essential but it is what I do so I know which race I am using on the game.

I also create a sub-folder called "Turns" and inside this create another sub-folder called "2400s". As the game progresses I create more - e.g. 2410s, 2420s etc. This is not essential but I find it makes things tidier. These folders are where you are going to keep copies of each turn of the game.

STARTING THE GAME

You can now play the first year by starting Stars and selecting "Open Game...". Then navigate to the "Max" folder and select your .mX file and then click OK.

The game will now start although it will probably prompt you for your race password first. There is a way round this which I will cover later. When the game starts you can play your first moves - setting production, despatching scouts, selecting research settings etc.

When you are happy select "File" and "Save and Submit". This is where it differs from a game against the AI where you would generate the next turn yourself with for example F9.

When you have done this 2 new files will have been created. A .h file, which is a history of the game to date, and a .X file, where the X will be followed by your player number, e.g. .X7 if you are player number 7. This is the Log file and is the record of the orders you have made for this turn. This is the file to upload to Autohost.

UPLOAD YOUR TURN

When Ron has created the game on Autohost there will be a new page, called in this case I assume "To the Max". At the time the game is created you will also be given a password.

The game page will look something like this (although this is a different game): http://starsautohost.org/games/v2012.htm

In the top right of the game page is a link called "Upload Turn", underlined in blue. Click on this and you can then upload your .X file, by navigating (Browse) to it and clicking OK as normal. You will then need to enter your password and then click on the Submit X file Button.

A few minutes later the game page will change when a date and time appears opposite your player line.

You can upload a revised turn at any time up until the game generates a new turn. Which, depending on the game settings, will happen once every player has submitted or after a set period, say 24 hours.

PLAYING THE NEXT TURN

When the game generates you will be sent a new .M file in an e-mail. When this happens I copy the files from the previous turn into a folder named after the year. So the files for the first year will go in a folder called "2400" inside the "2400s" folder inside the "Turns" folder. This may sound a bit complicated but it isn't. The file structure is in my case: C:\Stars\Games\Max\Turns\2400s\2400 for the first turn of the game.

When you have saved the previous turn files you can load up the new .M file. You can do this either by saving the file in the e-mail and over-writing the existing .M file or you can go to the game page on Autohost and find a blue underlined link just to the left of the green diamond on the line against your player name. Click on the file link and after entering your password you can save the file.

You can then start Stars again and select "Open Game..." again selecting the .M file, which is now the new one.

You will now be back in the game and if all has gone well you will still be alive and the year will be 2401.

STARS.INI

There is another file used in the game which is not in the Stars folder, this is the file Stars.ini which you should find in your Windows directory.

You should open this in Notepad and add a couple of lines if this has not already been done. In the section of the file called [Misc] add these lines:

DefaultPassWord=XYZ
newreports=1

Where "XYZ" is your race password, not the game password used by Autohost. Doing this will avoid the need to manually enter the password at every turn.

The newsreports=1 file creates more detailed text files, which I won't cover here but which you may wish to use when you get more experience.

PLAYING HINTS

I am far from qualified but here is what I have learned:

When colonising a planet always use plenty of colonists. At the very least a Medium Freighter in addition to your colony ship, and ideally 2 or 3 MF's worth. If you just put a couple of thousand colonists on a planet other players will drop a larger force on your folk and take the planet, possibly winning tech points in the process.

Do not put any armour in ships. This will not be your experience of playing against the AI but in human games almost evryone just uses shields to keep ship mass down and battle speed high. The only common exceptions are some ships designed for sweeping minefield, but even with these armour will not always be used.

Because players use a lot of shields you will need to build ships with the Sapper beam weapons at some point. If you have only played against the AI before you may not have used these weapons before but they are essential in games against humans.

Avoid players creeping up on your planets by planet hopping by setting out armed sentries or unarmed scouts on the planets around your Home world you have not colonised. One to each planet is enough. You probably need to think about doing this around about 2415, but other players may differ. If you don't put out sentries you may suddenly find a fleet of say 50 heavily shielded Frigates arriving and taking out your Starbase and its game over much earlier than you expected. Of course if you have penetrating scanners you should see fleets coming but beware SS races who could be using heavily cloaked ships.

Send out lots of scouts, typically JOATS are advised to send out 2 or 3 a year but this also applies to other races in my view. If you don't scout you will almost certainly get a nasty surprise with what comes out of the dark against you.

You should also plan to trade technology with at least one other player, assuming the rules allow this.

The simplest way is to build ships and scrap them on one of your partner/allies planet. A typical scrapping ship will be a scout with a QJ5 engine and one item of the tech you wish to trade. For example if you build a scout with a single Wolverine shield this will give Energy points up to Energy 6 as it is a Energy 6 bit of technology.

To ensure the tech points are transferred I suggest you build 7 identical scouts and then send them to your allies planet and given the distances likely to be involved you will need gates to do this. The 7 scouts should be gated across with the Waypoint order to "Scrap Fleet" once they get there. However, the scouts must not go as a single fleet but as 7 individual ships. I do this by merging them together first, setting gating and the scrap orders then "Split All"

Next turn the ships will arrive and assuming your ally has lower tech in the field you are scrapping they will gain one tech point but not until the year after. It therefore takes 3 years to transfer a tech point, year 1 build scrappers, year 2 send and scrap them, year 3 the tech point is given.

You will probably have to send successive waves of scrappers as each wave only gives one point, so to get from En4 to En6 will take a total of 21 scrappers.

You can use fewer scrappers but there is a chance the point will not be granted as it depends on statistics.

You can only get one point from a single ally a year.

You can also trade tech by pop-dropping on a planet. In brief, you colonise a planet with say 400 colonists, the next year your ally drops 800 pop on it and takes the planet. It does not matter if your ally is set to friend in player relations, the pop will fight as they can't share the planet. The next year you drop another 800 pop and so on. Each year you should gain a tech point, although you won't have much control over what tech it is.

There are ways of invading twice in a single year by using Waypoint zero orders but I will let a more experienced played describe that!

[Updated on: Sun, 12 February 2012 10:14]

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