User:LionsPhil/Stars

What you need to do to play

• Get Stars!, which has become abandonware.
• Make sure you use a different serial from other players (see the claim list below).
• Playing the tutorial is probably a good idea. It's quite good. (The help file is also great and preferable to trying to find stuff on the Internet. As is the Tech Browser, which you can get at by pressing F2, but sadly only in-game.)
• Design a custom race!
  • New Game... → Customize Race...; you can reload the race file later with Open Game... to fiddle with it a bit more.
  • Short advice: Mineral Alchemy is useless. Planets with habitability conditions further from center tend to have better minerals, but gravity and temperature are distributed on a bell curve. "Immune" means any value is perfect, whereas a range is only perfect bang in the middle. You probably don't want to reduce how many kT of minerals 10 mines generate each year as that affects efficiency and will strip-mine planets for less total minerals.
  • Long advice: The Stars! Strategy Guide explains things in more detail but is a little grognardy about making a race that's competative in PvP and fits a Grand Plan for how you're going to win from before the first turn has even been generated.
  • Horrendous minmaxing advice: Don't even bother. Sub-optimal builds are badwrongfun, and that is the best kind of fun.
• Thump Phil to share the Dropbox folder for the game to you, or even to refer you for an account (and bonus space).
  • And put your race file in it.

Players

We each need to pick a different serial from code.txt in the Abandonia download (an archive or two deep). Don't list the whole thing on the wiki; its place on the list/the first couple of characters are enough.

Player	Serial	Race	Homeworld	Emblem	Concept
LionsPhil	(1st) EX...	Gatejacks		Swirly purple thing	High-mobility Inter-stellar Traveller intended to zip around the alliance and put up a defence wherever it is needed. Can't take much radiation but are pretty efficient workers.
Driblis	(9th) HA...
Sharah?
Test	(6th) EP...

Homeworlds will be known after the game is generated. We may as well avoid emblem conflicts since the game will only pick random ones if two people try to use the same anyway.

Making it run

Stars! is a 16-bit Windows application

• It works fine on 32-bit Windows
  • Including, I believe, 64-bit Win7's "XP Mode"
  • Including in some other VM (e.g. VirtualBox)
• It works fine in Windows 3.1 in DOSBox
  • You should be able to use the Strip Poker one and just copy the game somewhere into the folder it uses for the C: drive
• It apparently works under WINE if that tickles your fancy

The plan

• A humans-vs-computers alliance game
  • Not sure if we want infighting computers or letting them gang up
  • Probably say we've won once the AI is smashed; not sure formal victory conditions like %age of space owned work with alliances and just set a "game has been won" message anyway
  • To set alliances, go to Commands → Player Relations... and set everyone but the computers to Friend.
• A "Network game", where the network share is a Dropbox shared folder
  • For running Stars! on the same host system as your Dropbox setup, that's just a case of pointing it to it (the same if both Dropbox and Stars! are installed in a VM together)
    • If you're only using Dropbox for Stars!, you might want to tell it to set the folder up on the root of a drive, since then you won't have to dig through so many "MYDOCU~1" folders in Stars' old 8.3 file selector.
  • For a VM or DOSBox, the easy thing is probably to make the shared Dropbox folder on the host mount as a separate drive in the guest.
• I'll let the autohost generate turns whenever everyone's moves are submitted. (Save is "keep my move but don't mark it as ready yet". Save and submit says "I'm done for this year". Turn → Wait for new will submit, minimize, and blink when the host has run…which is less useful in DOSBox than it could be, but will at least notice if it's updated.)

Random tips

• At high resolutions (anything modern, basically, even 1024x768), you might want to play with View → Window layout and dragging the little panels and dividers about. For example.
• View → Player colours will give each player a different colour in the scanner pane for the planet names and ship counts. The actual dots and triangles remain colour-coded by hostility, as show in the Help file. You can turn on planet names and ship counts by clicking the "Abc" and adjacent "35" buttons in the scanner pane toolbar. The colours correspond to those in the Score chart, F10.
• Ships in a fleet share fuel and cargo. In combat, all ships of the same type within a fleet form a single stack that work as one, but spread out damage equally. This is usually a very good thing.
• Homeworlds never go below 30 mineral concentration, even if someone else captures them. They're just naturally better planets.

Weapons

At a very high level (details are in the help file):

Type	Range	Accuracy	Damage
Beam	Short	Perfect	High, but doesn't do anything to armour until shields down. Only kind of weapon that can sweep minefields. Gattling guns are special and can hit everything in range at once, making them awesome against lots of separate ships. Beam ships need to have good movement (add good engines, and thrusters once you have them) to close distance before they get worn down by torpedoes.
Torpedo	Medium	Average	Torpedos do less damage, but affect armour even if the shields are still up. Torpedos that miss can still damage shields. You can't kill more ships in one attack than torpedos fired, but the AI doesn't tend to build very big fleets.
Missile	Long	Poor	Missiles are mid-late tech that work like torpedos, but are much less accurate in exchange for doing more damage. Missiles do double damage to ships with no shields. These things butcher starbases.