10
Here is an outline of the game:
You are part of a second wave of colonists from Earth. The first wave all died from encounters with the aliens already here; but they left some robots, and some clues.
You have enough resources on board the colony ship to get started, but you have to search the planet Gaia for energy, mining resources, and science resources.
The first item of business is to establish two colonies on the planet with just enough colonists, energy, mining resources, and "life" resources to get going on their own.
The second item of business is to prepare for a disaster that will happen to the colony ship, the Calypso, about turn 425 that will cause the colonists still sleeping to be woken up prematurely. They will die unless enough room is prepared on the Calypso; and that can only happen if you remove everyone and everything from the ship to a new space station that you must create and make it ready for habitation before turn 400 or so.
During this first phase, you construct additional ships and robots, and send the robot ships to explore the inner solar system asteroids for mining resources, science, and clues left behind by the earlier colonists.
After the first phase (best scenario, all of the frozen colonists wake up and they are ready to work. Worst scenario, you failed to prepare room, and they all died): There is an extended period of turns until about 1,600 to 1,800 or even longer (if you know how to game the system). This pause gives time to fully explore the inner planets, research enough technologies to construct faster, more powerful, and longer range ships; these will allow exploration of the outer solar system, where you must go to find all of the clues, resources, and technologies that you need to defeat the challenges that are pending:
1) The local plants and animals begin attacking your colonies for no apparent reason. After following the clues, you discover that there is a powerful signal being transmitted from an asteroid (actually an alien ship in disguise) in the outer solar system that is causing this behavior.
2) Once this ship is discovered, it will begin traveling on a course directly into the Sun. The implication is that the Sun will explode on impact, although this would also kill the aliens, so that really doesn't make sense, but it's part of the game. When this happens, you are in a race to research technologies that you need to destroy the ship before it impacts the sun.
3) Once you destroy the asteroid ship, then you discover that there are aliens living on a Saturn-like gas planet in outer solar system. You have to research technology to communicate with them; and then create a device that will prevent your brain waves from "hurting" them. If you don't do that, they will be at war with you until you are destroyed.
4) Assuming you stop the "brain hurt" with the device, then you can make an alliance with them to research technologies that will enable the creation of a FTL ship.
5) But before that happens, a rogue colonist rebels against you and raises a rebellion against you and the alien race that threatens to ignite a war between you and the aliens, so you race to crush the rebellion.
6) Once that happens, then you race to create the necessary technologies and construct a space station portal that will allow the launch of the new FTL ship with the help of the aliens.
When the ship goes through the portal, that is the end of the game, although you can keep playing if you wish; but after that point, there isn't much point to continuing the game.
Here are some important points:
1) The game is controlled by a turn timer for lack of a better word. Turns begin automatically at the start of the game. You can make them from speeds 1-10. However, no matter what you are doing during the game, such as exploring the surface of a planet or asteroid, the game turn timer keeps moving no matter what. It doesn't stop when it seems like it should stop.
However, the turn timer is out of sync with the other timers of the game, such as the number of turns needed to research a technology and other things. So this is a flaw in the game. If you play well, it is not such a great problem, but it should not have been coded that way IMO.
For example, if I am spending a lot of time exploring the surface of a planet or asteroid, the timers for researching a technology are frozen; but the game turn timer keeps on trucking.
2) If you fail to do what is required to overcome the difficulties of each phase of the game, your crew might just revolt against you and shoot you dead (virtually of course); and the game will be over. :-)
3) Saving the game often is recommended, especially if you are new to the game.
4) The game does have bugs.
a) Sometimes if you land in a certain spot on an asteroid (usually) or a planet, the game will bomb and cease immediately. Obviously, there is a code bug there somewhere.
b) While you are working on phase 3 above, you will have the technology of a mass driver, that you can use to throw mining resources to your space station around the gas planet that you are using to either determine how to communicate with the aliens or cooperate with them later. Either way, if you use a mass driver to throw mining resources to the space station, that will crash the game also, and you probably won't be able to open a saved game and try again.
My experience is usually if the game ever crashes, the saved games are useless, because the game software has become corrupted.
Well, that's a good quick summary. I left out a lot of details.
Some final points:
1) The game is very old, I first saw it in the 90s and loved it.
2) It will play well in Dosbox on Win 10 or 11 with no issues.
3) The graphics are boxy and ancient; but that hardly matters. The gameplay is fun and challenging.
4) There are "special places" where there are clues and resources that you must have to survive. Only an experienced player like myself knows where they are. A new player will experience a lot of bumps and bruises trying to master the game, which is why I suggest saving often, every 50 turns or less if you are new. That way, if you fail to meet a challenge, you can go back to a previous turn and try again.
5) A remake of this game would be very good and doable. I don't have time for that, but maybe someone else does. I think it would be a worthy effort. I suggest using the same basic gameplan, but with improvements such as a new game engine in 64 bit.
New graphics would be worthwhile; the old ones are kind of silly.
6) Being a former software engineer myself, I give the original game coders a B+ on their work. The number of bugs are few by comparison with other old 90s games like Mechanized Assault and Exploration (M.A.X.) 1. They did some serious work on creating a fun game, and the result shows that they took user testing seriously.
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