Re: Presenting Master of Orion, a space strategy game
Hi ALl,
Here are some clarifications, since I seem to be having trouble sleeping tonight.
The way ships work is you can have up to six designs in production at any one time. By default, the game has five, a default scout, fighter, bomber, destroyer, and colony ship. The "fleet," display lists six columns, one for each design. You start the game with two scouts and one colony ship. It's worth noting that you need to design new colony ships and other ship designs as the game goes on, because there's no way to refit older ones with new technology. The "scrap," command can get rid of old designs and old ships, returning a percentage of the build cost.
It's also worth noting that there's nothing magical about the default scout or colony ship design, a scout has reserve fuel tanks, allowing it to go two parsecs farther than your default colony range, and a colony ship just needs a "colony base," module, which gets used up when you reach a world with a new potential colony site. The manual goes into detail, but basically there are something like five "controlled environment," types, such as Tundra, Dead, Baron, etc, which you need increasing levels of tech , and new ship components, to colonize. THe exception is if you play the Silicoids, who can colonize any world type at any time.
A final word about the "FS," command. "FS," is used to send ships from world to world. Basically, if you're focused on the world you want to go from, you can use "FS worldname, followed by the numbers of ships you want to send." THe game uses the same order as ship designs in the fleet or world display, so "FS worldname 1 1," might send both a scout and a colony ship to a particular world, for instance, if you had no other ships there in between those types. Just "FS worldname," will send all your ships at once, which is useful for sending scouts to new destinations.
ONe more bit of advice, a tip about the "View," command. If you do "v number," what you're doing is looking at worlds which are within number parsecs of your colonies, which is usually good. If you do "view +number," with a plus sign before the number, you can look at worlds within a number of parsecs distant from the particular world you're focused on. THis is tpically part of the same thing, but is useful if you want to get a better sense of the way stars are laid out. THe "Dist number," is the Distance between the world you're reading info on and the world you're currently focused on, the "range," is the distance in parsecs between the world you're reading about and the nearest colony. It's a subtle distinction, but important sometimes.
I hope this helps.
-- Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
