Space: A Quick Play Guide

If you are one of those brave souls who just HATE reading through a long boring manual and believe that the best way to learn is through experience, then this Quick Play Guide is for you!

However, you don't want to look like a complete idiot, so you just want the minimum in instructions. That's what you'll fine here. Realize of course that if you wish to master the game of Space, it will take time, effort, study to come to grips with all the subtleties of Space.

Early Moves to Consider

When you click on map you will start the game with a view of the galaxy as you know it. This will consist of your home world in the center of the map (the one with blue fleet icon by it and blue text underneath) and some neighboring unexplored star systems (grey text underneath).

Click on your home world and it will bring up a menu on the lower right. Click on starships and a menu will appear on the left. You can examine the ships in orbit around your home world by clicking on fleets button. This will pull up a screen showing pull down menus for which player (own, allies or enemies) which fleet (those present) and ship (in select fleet) to view. You will see a lot of numbers and hopefully some of them will make sense after reading this manual. If not, that is okay for now too. The important part is to move each of those three scouts that you have in orbit to a different unexplored world around you. Click the fleet move button and you will get a page with a menu of fleets and destinations. In this case select the first scout fleet and then a system from the list of unexplored systems. Click send and it will go to this system in a few hours. Do the same for the other scout fleet, but pick a different world if possible. That way you will have at least four worlds to choose from.

While your ships are busy going to these unknown worlds you can click the planet info button on the right. Then consider what buildings you would like to build - reading this will help here too. Note that buildings cost both production and ore to build. They also cost credits to maintain, so you want to be careful with how many you build.

Now click on the research button and you will see that you are busy starting to research some technology field, but have a ways to go on it yet. You can select the next technology to begin researching, after this one is complete, by using the pull down menu if you wish. Each time you finish researching a technology, you will add one level to that field. Each level grants a flat improvement in whatever that technology gives. All technologies are useful, so a recommendation really depends on your play style here.

Colonization

Each star system has a habitability rating which is a measure of how easily your species can live there. Your home world has 100% habitability but every other world has a random habitability from 40% to 100%. The cost of colonization is at least 1000 ore and production, modified by the habitability of the system. The lower the habitability is, the higher your cost will be.

Once a world is colonized a variety of buildings are automatically created for you. These starter buildings are good for a while, but you will soon want to add megapoli, factories, and possibly mines at a minimum. All buildings can cost up to double what they normally would cost to create depending on the system?s habitability. Your people can only support an amount of colonies determined by your total population / 2.5 million + 3. So if you have 7.5 million population and 10 planets you can only colonize 5 of them in addition to your starting homeworld. Reguardless of your population you can colonize 2 planets in addition to your homeworld.

Some General Hints

Colonize one world with the highest habitability you have explored from the stars around you fairly early. Start developing your colonies when their population is about 250,000 and growing. Your new buildings will not be immediately helpful but they will come into effect fairly soon. Be careful creating more colonies than you can defend. Your enemies will not have too much difficulty overwhelming them and you will then lose all that ore, production and time.

Resources

There are three major resources in Space (credits, ore and production) and two minor ones (research and bioforming). Most building types produce one of these resources as "tax revenue" so long as you have the population to man them. Each structure takes 5,000 colonists to operate (except scanners, shield generators, and minefields). So if you have 50,000 colonists, 10 mines and 5 factories you actually are operating all those buildings at 66% efficiency - they need 75,000 colonists for full utilization and you have 50,000.

The only exception to this is megapoli. These structures not only house the living quarters for your populace, but also hold all the service sector jobs in your economy. Workers are automatically assigned to production buildings if there are open jobs there. Left over workers stay in megapoli and take up service sector jobs that generate a nice amount of extra credits in tax revenue.

The mines and factories are your first goal because ore and production determine what you can build. Cash is probably next as you will need to maintain the buildings and ships that you make. Research is valuable in the long term and all systems will eventually have labs on them. Bioformers are only necessary on worlds with less than 100% habitability and the bioforming units produced in each system are only applicable in that system.

Research

Space features thirteen different technologies, which you can increase to further benefit your empire. Each species starts play with several levels of research already completed in each technology field (see the manual for species briefs).

Every hour your research labs add to your base of knowledge. If you want to increase the speed you are researching at then build more research labs. However, if a given star system has too many buildings and not enough population, than your labs will operate at reduced efficiency.

Each level you gain gives a fixed increase in capability over and above any species advantage you may have. However, the costs to gain each new level increase somewhat exponentially. This cost increases as level of technology desired grows and also with the total number of technology levels you possess.

Ship-Based Technologies

Beams: Increases the damage done by your beam weapons 10%.
Engines: Increases FTL travel speed by 10%, provides fighter evasion and helps

Fighters: Increases the damage done by your fighters 10%
Hull: Increases hull by 10%.
Missiles: Increases the damage done by your missiles 10%.
Sensors: Improves weapon accuracy by 10% and your star systems ability to detect

Shields: Increases shields by 10%.
Stealth: Renders your ship 10% less detectable and provides beam evasion. Will

Planet-Based Technologies:

Nanotechnology and Ship Design: Increases the speed of your bioformers and also
Economics: Increases cash revenue from megapoli by 4%, reduces upkeep by 1%, and decreases the trading costs on the Toag market.
Mining: Increases mine productivity by 4% and reduces ship ore costs by 1%
Production: Improves factory production by 4% and reduces ship production cost by 1%.
Research: Increases research rates by 5% and does not increase costs for total

Ship Design

To build a ship you need to click on a star you own that has population, click on the lower right hand button labeled starships. A menu will appear on the left hand side and you should then click on the build ships button.

This will present you with a page with quite a few selections on it. There are three ways to design a ship using this form. The easy way is to pull down a ship hull from class (such as scout, destroyer, etc.), a type from category (light, medium, heavy) and then type in the name of your ship. Once this is done, click on one of buttons in the next row (labeled beam, mixed or missile). Clicking beams will generate a ship that uses beam weapons for armament. Mixed will generate a ship design that uses a mixture of beam and missiles for weapons. And, we will leave it to your imagination what the missiles button does.

At this point you should have a ship design completed. There will be numbers in the far right boxes for ore and production which you will need to pay in order to begin building the ship. You will also see a time to finish the ship, which is how long you will wait after you build it. And, a maintenance cost which is how many credits you will owe each day to keep the ship. If any of these fields are zero, then you probably did not fill out one of the previous steps. To start your ship building you only need to click the Build button in the lower left of the form. We don't recommend doing this just yet until you completely finish this guide.

Now lets look at the next level of complexity - a semi custom ship. You can select a new ship class, type and name just for variety. Once more click on beams, mixed or missiles to generate your basic design. Now lets take a look at the two columns of select boxes on the left of the form. The left most column modifies the technology level of each device on your ship and is the feature we are concerned with right now.

Depending on your species, and how far along you are in research, you can change the technology level on each component. Higher tech levels cost more in terms of production, ore and upkeep, but they also work more efficiently than low tech devices. Selecting a higher tech level may or may not improve you ship because the change was not big enough to cause an overall improvement in that area. Rest assured that If it does not cause an improvement for a given design, it will also not cost more to build. Adjust the tech levels up and down on your practice ship to get a feel for how things work.

We can design completely custom ship by once again selecting a new class, type and name. Then click the clear button on the lower left side to remove any technology and slot settings from previous designs. This time we will discuss the slots column to the immediate right of the technology level column we were just using. This column controls how many ship slots we want to allocate to a particular device. Larger ships have more (and bigger) slots than smaller ship classes, but this is not always an advantage. For example, small ships tend to have high levels of stealth or speed for low cost.

You can make a ship pretty much anyway you want by adjusting the tech level and number of slots for your design. The designer will not let you use too many slots nor to choose a technology level you do not possess at the time. If you have allocated all your slots and want to add some more devices, just reduce some slots you have already selected and you will then be able to add more slots again elsewhere.

One thing to warn you about, the ship designer will let you design a ship that does not work very well. For example, a scout ship with NO engines. Charitably speaking this could be used as a small star base I suppose. A good way to tell how your designs stack up is to compare them to the ones you can generate via the beam/mixed/missile buttons which are intended to be average designs.

Summary

Well, that's about it for this Quick Play Guide. For more information, you should refer to the complete manual and the numerous websites maintained by some of the Space players themselves. Good Luck......and remember....It's Space: Glory Through Conquest, NOT "tree hugging"!

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