Basically, this is a description of what I do when I play at first, and it's probably not the best plan in the world. Further, as more stuff reaches functionality, it is subject to change! Also, this will give the folks at Xoftware etc. an idea of how the game is playing in this corner of the Universe. So, here goes: Joining a game: Choose your race, and read what each has as its advantage. If you can't tell what kind of advantage it has, then it's usually not very good, for example the Braatul suck (IMGO), while the Mnilish have a great set of advantages (bonuses to com and energy!). When choosing your tech, I recommend level 2 engines and level 3 reactors. This gives your starting scouts a good deal of functionality, plus the extra energy has a big payoff when you don't have a huge supply Nergium right next door. Note that for engines you can select from two types of engines. The engine types seem to be fairly evenly balanced, and I don't want to get into a big arg about the merits of 'em right now (altho a hot spot pointing to the a discussion on the relative merits of each would be good here 8-). Turn 1: Until you get a fairly advanced supply of tech and resources, you are going to be commanding your ships to come back to your homeworld very often. Thus, it is quite usefull to Name your home system in a way that makes it easy to remember which planet is home. For example, if the 3rd world is home, then Name the system Triangle. Next, tell your Construction Station to Build 4 Exploration ships. One will get done each turn, and this initial exploration fleet will quickly find the Nergium you desperately need to power your civilization. Order your Research Station to research Mining. You'll need some good mining tech to dig up that Nergium, after all. Open up your home star system window, and click on the icon of the planet with a chunk bitten out of it. Now click on each of the planets, and see if any of them (besides home) are Highly Suitable or Perfect. (for the purposes of this tutorial, I hereby decree there _is_ a Perfect world present!) If so, right click on your home star, select 'ships' and then select the Explorer. Remember which planet is good? Now Ctrl-left click on the star to bring up a list of all the planets at the star of Triangle, and select that planet. Now give orders for your Explorer to Explore at Captain's Discretion. That way you don't have to keep telling him what to do! Now close that ship window, and right click on Triangle again and select your Transport. In a similar fashion, order the Transport to go to that nice planet, and then click on Colonize and select Colonize Destination (never use Colonize at Captain's Discretion on ships with such puny cargo capacity!). Now close that ship window. Congrats, you've finished your first turn of Xpace(+many words)! Now hit f9 to compile your turn. Turn 2: You've just finished Researching Mining! All right! Now click on Goto, and *pop* there's that Research Station. Tell that sucker to Research Mining again, as Mining 3 is the best there is, unless you've got a more recent version ;-). Besides which, given what you can afford, Tech 3 is as far as you should research anything until you get a big haul of Nergium converted to EUs in. You've just founded a colony! Congrats! Now, give orders to your Transporter to go back to your homeworld so you can make more colonies. Colonies aren't usefull for a long time, so get some started now, if you can. If there are any more Perfect or Highly Suitable planets in the system, tell your Explorer to go there next. Don't worry, you don't have to tell it to Explore again, it'll still do that just fine. BTW, whenever this Explorer in your home system finished exploring it, it will tend to go explore a planet that some other Explorer is heading towards, so you'll have to keep an eye on it until then. As for your new Explorer, select by opening the Triangle Star System window this time, selecting your homeworld, and then hitting the icon with the ships flying over the planet. This brings up a list of ships at the planet, and one of them should be the Explorer. Double click on the Explorer to open its window and then close the Star System window. Now gaze around at the nearby stars and Ctrl-left click on the nearest star to Triangle. This tells your Explorer where to go first. Now give it orders to Explore at Captain's Discretion, so that once it gets there it'll continue on it's own in that general area. If you have Particle Thrust engines, you now need to adjust the velocity bar. I prefer a speed which has a net energy per turn of -7, that seems to be a good speed for these Model T explorers. Your Construction station is still building, so leave it alone! There's nothing left to do, so hit f9. Turn 3: Your Transport is back at Home, so now you can tell it to go colonize another nice planet. Just be sure the planet is Explored first, otherwise you won't be able to colonize it. That's why we sent the Explorer to explore the planet at the same time in the first turn. If you're using Jump Engines, make sure your Transport has enough fuel to return for planets which are outside the home system. You've got a new Explorer, and you know what to do with it. The only new thing to add is that you should try to choose a star to explore that is not near where the other Explorer is. The Research for tech 3 in Mining takes 2 turns, so leave that Research Station alone! Your Construction station is still building, so leave it alone also! That's all, so hit f9. Turn 4: You've Researched Mining 3! Yay! Now tell your Research Station to Research Hulls. You'll need at least tech 3 hulls before you want to build your first Miner ship. You've got a good idea what to do with that new Explorer by now. Your Construction station is still building, so leave it alone! Time to hit f9 again. Turn 5: You've just researched Tech 2 hulls, so tell that Researcher to work on tech 3 hulls. The Construction Station is finally done, so tell it to research Engines. If you're using Jump engines you desperately need the improved energy efficiency, and if your using P.T. engines, you desperately need the improved speed! Send that last new Explorer on its way. Compile that turn! Turn 6: Unless you've got something to do with your transport, you might as well hit f9. Turn 7: Alright, you now have the minimum tech to build a pretty good beginning Miner ship. Is it really time, though? Click on that Light Bulb in the tool bar up top, this will open the "Empire at a Glance" window. Now click on the N near the right hand corner of that window, this will sort all known planets in order of how much Nergium they have. If you're lucky, you've got on nearby that has an H)igh amount of Nergium, and you've hit the Jackpot! Double click on the best source you have explored, it'll be grey since you haven't claimed the planet yet (your mining ship will do that for you). If the Star System window says it has a goodly supply of Nergium, say well above halfway full, then you're ready to design a Mining Ship! For the purposes of this Tutorial, there's a nice load in a gas giant in the same system you live in. How nice! If there isn't a nice load of Nergium nearby, though, you might as well research a little comunications and science with your Research and Construction ship. Remember not to exceed tech 3 though, as that is very expensive. Designing your first Miner: Click on the icon in the tool bar which looks like a Power line with a bad case of Kudzu growing on it. Actually, if you look closely at it, that's a black protractor, a green ruler, and a yellowish brown triangle. I don't, though, so it's the Kudzu button. This brings up the configuration window, and it displays all the present configurations. Click on the New button on the bottom there to design a New ship (wow!). I hope you read the help file on this stuff, heh heh heh. Anyways, it defaults to Ship, next to that select the 'Mining ship' as that determines what your ship can do, click on that white space next to the word 'Name:' and type in a name like 'Red Dwarf' and finally under Design Centers, select the Construction Staion. Now you're ready to actually design the ship. First thing, always click on the 'Size' button and select the largest size. Notice on the left hand it says, sideways, Capacity, Cost/Index, Complexity, with some numbers above them. Because of the way Complexity is currently handled, you want complexity to always be 0, because otherwise the cost/index skyrockets. Next, you must put in the engines. If you have Jump Engines, you just put in a tech 3 Jump engine, nice and easy, that's it. If you have PT Engines, though, what you want is 10 engines, but in this size hull (6 I think) you won't be able to really afford it because of space limitations. Put in 4 PT engines. The next step is Power, so put in 1 Tech 3 Plasma Reactor, enough to provide fuel to limp home if you forget to load the Dwarf up. Skip the Defenses, if you run into anyone this early in the game, you'll have enough goodies at home to send a serious warship out after them. Click on that Misc. button, and admire all the goodies you can put in. Select the Mining beam -Tech 3, and click on the ->> button 3 times to put 30 of those mining beams into the design. Do the same thing for the Small Cargo Holds, and you now have a Mining ship with a Cargo cap of 1500 and a cost of nearly 700! You can try to sneak a little bit more on board, but most anything will raise the Complexity a bit, and thus the Cost by a lot. Now click on 'Done' and read the warning. Well, since this is early on in the game, you don't need defenses, so click on 'Continue anyway' and there you go. All that's left is to tell your Research Station to get to work researching Comunications tech. We'll use this in a bit to vastly improve response speed of nearby ships. Hit f9. Turn 8: You've got Tech 2 Com, now work on Tech 3 Com. You've finished the Design of the Red Dwarf, now tell the Construction Staion to Build 2 of 'em. F9 yet again. Turn 9: Your first Red Dwarf is done, open up its window in your favorite manner. Now send it to the planet with a ton of Nergium nearby. Give it orders to Mine Nergium right now so that it'll start right away when it gets there. I'm tired of typing in "hit f9." Turn 10: The first Red Dwarf probably has a cargo full of Nergium now! Give it new orders to Convert the Nergium, all of it. Next turn, each unit of Nergium will turn into 2 units of EUs! The second Red Dwarf is done, tell it to head over to mine some Nergium also. Hey, you need those EUs! You're probably a bit low on EUs at the moment, so tell the Research station to work on Science-2 and the Construction station to work on Construction-2. Turn 11: Tell the Red Dwarf full of energy to Transport all of its EUs to the Homeworld. If the Red Dwarf was in another system, you would also have to tell it to move back to the homeworld. The second Dwarf should convert it's Nergium now. Tell the Researcher to work on Com-4, and the Constructor to work on Construction-3. Turn 12: The very poor Red Dwarf now needs to mine Nergium all over again, and so on in this very nice little loop for both Reds. You only need to do this for 2 or 3 more turns, and then you should start sending Nergium to the homeworld. Turn 13: Have the Researcher work on Hulls-4. Build 2 Research Stations with the Constructor. Turn 14: Have Researcher 2 work on Construc-4. Turn 15: Put Researcher 1 on Science-3, and Researcher 3 on Engines-4. Have the Constuctor design a low budget Command ship with a Com relay. A Com relay automatically relays all messages it recieves to other ships in the area, thus with a properly set up Com relay net, messages from accross the galaxy can reach you without any delay. Insert explanation of IMCR here, and how it applies to a Com net. Turn 16: Put Researcher 2 onto hull-5. It'll research this tech in 3 turns, whereas a superior science lab equipped station can get the job done in 2 turns. We're a few turns away from that, though. Have the Constructor Build 2 of these Command and Commo ships, one for Home, and another for any planets well endowed with resources that you need to maul, er, mine. Turn 17: Put Researcher 1 on Science-4, and Researcher 3 on Energy-4. Set the first Com com ship to Scan, and leave it at home forever and ever. Turn 18: Tell the second Com com ship to head off toward any really excellent planet you've scoped out nearby, resource wise. Don't tell it to scan until it gets there, unless Scan allows movement in this version of Xpace. Might as well put the Constructor on Sensors-2. Sensors are actually pretty important, but I tend to ignore them 8-). Turn 19: All right, time to rock and roll. Have the Constructor Design a new Miner ship, based on the largest hull, at least 50 mining beams, 10 engines, a couple reactors, and at least a couple thousand cargo. Have Researcher 1 Design a new Ground Construction Facility, and don't forget to put in a max tech Science lab, Design lab, and Docking port (need that to build stuff!) You don't need to put in cargo holds, and you don't need armor, as only STG missiles can get to a Ground Facility. Try to keep it cheap, of course. Researcher 2 should work on a Design for a Transport ship. 10 engines supported by 5-10 reactors, and the rest of the space taken up by cargo holds, and this ship will work wonders in the near future. Tell Researcher 3 to work on whatever you want to Research., We're almost done, so you get to think for yourself a bit now 8-). Actually, it would be a good idea to keep it working on Energy continously from now on, at least until a new GCF can take the job. Turn 20: Tell the Constructor to build 4 of these new Miners. That's 2 for Baslinite, 1 for Nergium, 1 for Dolinium, that'll handle your major Resource needs. Again, tell the Researchers to research whatever you want to research. Hull tech is a very good idea. Turn 24: As I suggested above, you should've used the Empire at a Glance window to order your 4 New Miners to go mine Baslinite, Nergium, and Dolinium. Now tell your Constructor to build 4 of the New Transports. Time to define some routes! Memorize where those resource rich planets are, close all windows but the Big One, and then click on the Connect the Dot puzzle in the Tool bar up top. This opens the Route window. Click on 'New' and type in a name such as Baslinite Run. Now ctrl-left click on your homeworld for the first stop, and then ctrl-left click on the planet with the Baslinite. That's all it takes! Now repeat the process for Nergium and Dolinium, even if the best Nergium is still in your home system. Turn 25: Open up the window for New Transport 1, and click on "Navigate." Choose the button "Assign to a Route." Click on the place where a route name should be, unfortunately it defaults to blankness. Anyways, for this first one, select the Baslinite Run. The click on Transport, and tell this ship to transport Resources. This ship will now go to the planet where the New Miner is mining Baslinite, pick up all the Baslinite from that ship, then bring it back to your homeworld and drop it off there. Way cool, huh? Turn 26: Do the exact same thing with New Transport 2. Yes, put it on the Baslinite Run, as this way the transports will keep hitting the planet every turn, and pull that baslinite off as fast as possible. You use a lot of baslinite in ship construction, so you should always mine baslinite much more aggresively than other resources. Turn 27: Put New Transport 3 onto the Nergium Run. Nergium is used second most, at least until you start large scale weapon manufacturing. Turn 28: Put New Transport 4 on the Dole run. Dolinium is used heavily in weapon systems, so start stockpiling it for the future... Have the Constructor build 2 Ground Research Facilites. Turn 29: Have the new GRF build 2 more! Turn 30 and beyond! Ok, you've got a pretty good idea of the kind of things you need to do now. There's just one more really important thing to do (besides trying to figure out how to kill someone else). You should have a pretty good Energy tech now, and hopefull some hull tech. Tell a free GRF to design a Ground Station that is a Power Plant. These structures get a 25% bonus to power production! Pack has many Power Plants as you can, and perhaps some Energy shields to defend against STG missile attacks. Unfortunately, 200 is the most of any unit you can put in a structure, and you're likely to need a few turns to build up a stockpile of resources, so you might as well wait for tech 8 energy, and then a power plant full of tech 8 and tech 7 power plants, which with the bonus gives a total output of 27000 EUs a turn. Not bad, huh? Rob sez "HI!" (rcjohnso@prairienet.org)