A long time ago in a galaxy far away... more precisely, at the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in the early 80's, there was a game called "Galactic Empires" being played on the legendary Apple ][ (thanks, Steve!). It was about planets and fleets and admirals in space... Although it didn't offer any remarkable user interface (according to the limited technology of that time), it showed a very special kind of fascination which hardly could have been foreseen by the author. The original game has disappeared long time ago, but a group of enthusiasts created a PC-version, still without networking (instead the keyboard was passed among the players!). Nevertheless, those enthusiasts have met for game-sessions regularly during the last 20 years!!! And now (after having talked about it for a decade), we proudly present a modern network version with all the gimmicks to be expected from a multi-user-game those days. However, the charm of the original game has remained and is only emphasized by today's technology - and the game is still fundamentally simple and thrilling. This is no surprise because it has a lot to do with some elementary principles of human life: greed, fear, patience, risk-taking, diplomacy, fighting, logistics, stamina, ...
Galactic Empires is a multi-user-real-time-strategy game, where a bunch of space admirals commanding worlds and warships try to conquer the universe. It is meant primarily to be played among human players (half a dozen is about optimal). The purpose of this website (called "registry server") is to register players, schedule games, provide a ranking system and distribute the newest software. Though playing is most fun against friends (who, however, might turn into enemies...), it is also possible (and meaningful at the very beginning) to compete against a bunch of robot players.
This page leads you through the process of becoming an admiral - step by step. I recommend that you try everything out immediately while reading this tutorial. And yes - the game is free and just for fun - although exprience shows that there is an inherent danger of addiction...
To become a Galactic Empires Adimral and make full use of this site, you start by registering yourself. First, go to section "Login" where you can obtain a password which will be sent to you by email. Your email-address serves as an internal identifier and is never made visible to anyone. After being registered successfully, you are enabled to edit your profile (section "Profile") containing - among other attributes - your initials and default coloring. Being registrated also entitles you to download the client game software.
The installation program can be downloaded by registered players in the "Download" section. Installation works the usual way under Microsoft Windows and shouldn't create any surprises. After starting the client program (called "GEn"), a login-form will pop up - there you have to fill in your identity (which is the email address you registered with), your password and the game server you want to connect to. Game servers are discussed in detail at the end of this tutorial - particularly, a group of players can register game servers of their own. But for the purpose of running a demonstration game, there is a permanent game server you now have to connect to. It's identity is "gen1.from.ch#0" - and this is exactly what you have to type into the "Server" field on the login form (see above). Just try it out and then read on!
If you typed in everything correctly (and the game server hasn't been hit by lightning or a malicious sysop), you now see the universe with some moving worlds and a couple of confusing tables. Pretty much information at first glance, huh? But no worries - this is just an endless demonstration game where some robot players battle against each other from time to time. You are here in so-called spectator mode which means that you can observe everything (something you'll wish you could do later), but you cannot carrry out any actions.
When you will take part as an active admiral later, you will rarely have time enough to watch everything quietly. Therefore, this is a good occasion to get known to each of the different tables and command elements. But first, here is the basic game concept:
The black circular area in the upper right window ("Galaxy") is the universe - that's where all the action takes place. It contains worlds moving slowly clockwise around the center of the universe. This movement roughly follows the laws of Kepler - if you don't know who this guy was, you can safely ignore it ;-) Anyway, the nearer to the center a world is located, the faster it turns. But at the same time, each world (very slowly) approaches the center which makes its path spiral-like. As a consequence, sooner or later two worlds will collide - this is what we call a crash! On a crash, the two crashing worlds will be re-placed randomly at a new location in the universe or - in case one of the worlds is substantially bigger than the other one (we will come to that later) - the smaller one will disappear and only the other one will be placed again.
Each world has a two-letter name like "J8" and four important attributes: The initials of the owner, the number of ships on the world, the actual ship-production rate ("production") and the maximum ship-production rate ("capacity"). Since room is sparse, only three of these attributes are displayed at the same time. The top row is always the world's name, the middle row the number of ships and the bottom row one of owner/production/capacity. The world above (J8) shows the default setting with its production (7) in the bottom row since this is usually the most relevant information (besides, the owner is already associated with the color).
However, you can change the display - try it right now and make contact with the first control element: As you press the small world symbol at the 4th place from the left (located in the second row of "Panel" Window, upper left corner), the bottom display row of each world changes between production - capacity - owner. Pressing this control for the fourth time makes all worlds invisible, and then the cycle starts again. When you just move the mouse above a control element, you see a small tooltip popping up - just like in Word or Excel. By the way, the world's color matches the one you have set during registration (remember?); however, it can be overruled by each player in the client program. At the beginning of a game, most worlds belong to a neutral, passive admiral "Zero" (he has no name and his worlds are gray). Every active player gets exactly one world, initially at the edge of the universe. The demo game restarts itself about every two hours, so depending on when you connected, most worlds will have been conquered at least once and therefore no longer belong to admiral Zero. The players you can see have their initials starting with a $-sign which means they are robot players, not humans. Later, when you will play an active role in the game, you will also start with one world of your own, carrying your color and your initials as defined in the profile during registration.
When you observe a world for some time, you will notice that its number of ships slowly increases. This is due to the world's production - every world produces a certain amount of ships per time unit. The universal time unit in this game is one minute, the actual game time being displayed in the upper right corner of the panel window. So, if a world has production 10, its number of ships will grow by ten every minute. Pretty simple, eh? Production itself may change on some occasions - it decreases after crashes or battles, but then recovers again up to the maximum production - the already mentioned capacity. So, when a world hasn't experienced any incidents for some time, its production will be equal to its capactiy. Capacity may also change, but can only increase - we will come to that in due time.
So far, except for those unavoidable crashes, there is nothing to write home about! But now enter the battles (drum rolls, please): Admirals can send fleets of ships from one of their own worlds to another world (how this is done and how long such a fleet will be in transit is explained in the next section). When a fleet lands on an own world (which means the owner of the fleet is equal to the owner of the destination world at the time the fleet arrives), it just joins the world's ships and their number is simply increased by the size of the fleet - this is often called a reinforcement. But when the fleet arrives on a different owner's world, there will be a battle taking place!
Each battle starts with the defending ships firing at the attacking fleet, thereby destroying a number of attackers proportional to the number of defenders (about 7%, with some random variation). So, if for example there are 300 defenders, then at the first round of the battle they will hit some 21 attackers - notice that the number of attackers destroyed is only proportional to the number of defenders, independent of the number of attackers. After this first round, the attackers and defenders switch roles, so the attacking ships destroy some of the defenders also proportional to their number. This round-by-round fighting continues until there are no attackers or defenders left - after which the world is owned by the survivor. This is the basic battle - you already notice that for an attacker to conquer a world, his number of ships must be superior to the defender's. As a rule of thumb, it is good practice to have a 25% superiority to safely conquer a world. But there is more to that! If the attacker has even bigger superiority (about 3 times as many ships as the defender), the defender will resign, thereby transferring half of his ships to the attacker. Let's look at an example: If you attack a world defended by 100 ships with a 400 ships - fleet, you will end up having conquered the world without a single shot, and with 450 ships on it! Cool, huh? Surrendering can also happen after some rounds of normal battle if the ratio between attackers and defenders increases during fight.
Before reading on, I suggest that you wait a moment for the next battle taking place in the demo game and watch it. After all, as a spectator you can safely observe the battles since you are not involved ;-). Battles are indicated by a rectangle over the corresponding world (see figure).
Each round of the battle is displayed with the number of remaining ships. When you click on such a rectangle, it disappears. Notice that, conceptually, battles are instantaneous events consuming no time - the rectangles you observe are mere animations by the client program. You may also peek at the "Battle" table - each battle is inserted at the top with all its relevant data, as soon as it has taken place.
Besides destroying ships, battles also have a side-effect on the world's production and capacity (to remind you: production is the number of new ships a world actually produces per minute, capacity is the maximum production a world can achieve). Each round of battle (no matter how many ships are involved) decreases its production but increases its capacity. Production itself permanently increases slowly towards capacity over time. The exact figures are not that important - what you should know is: A battle will decrease a worlds production in the short run but will increase it in the long run!
I know there is much information thrown at you right now, but it's well worth sticking to it! Just have some more patience, and you will soon be rewarded by successfully commanding your first fleet!
Crashes between worlds have similar side-effects to production and capacity as battles - production decreases and capacity increases. After several battles and crashes, a world will eventually reach a capacity of 99 which is currently the maximum limit (mainly due to display reasons). However, crashes have even more consequences: First, the number of ships on each crashed world will decrease by some 25%. So, it's always bad to have many ships on a crashing world - indeed, crash-loss avoidance is one of the more challenging tasks of the game. But things can even get worse: If the productions of the two crashing worlds differ by more than about 30%, the world with less production (the "smaller" one) will forever disappear from the game! Big trouble, I'm telling you! In that case, first the ships of both worlds will be decreased by the usual 25%, and then the remaining ships of the disappearing world will automatically be sent to the surviving world! This is the only time when ships are sent by anyone else than their owner, by the way. And of course, all fleets being in transit to the disappearing world will be redirected to the survivor as well. This vanishing-world feature has only been added recently to the game, but with much success: It safely prevents the game from getting too quiet - nobody can be safe by just retreating to a world and let the other adimirals fight for their lives...
If all this is too much for you to remember right now, don't worry! Things will become very easy and simple once you have played for some time. For the moment, keep in mind: Crashes are bad and battles are good, provided you win them ;-)
As you may figure out, during the game some players will own more ships than others depending on their ability to win battles and avoid crashes - and yes, luck. So from the very beginning, there will always be a ranking of the players considering the total number of ships owned. A player can even lose all of his ships and/or worlds. As a spectator, you can observe these and all the rest of the data in the "Player" window. So how does the game end at all? By definition, a game ends when the player with most ships has 2.5 times more ships than the second one - this is called "Force to Win", and at that point, the game is frozen, its result are reported to the registry server (and also to the client programs by mail) and the players' rankings are accordingly adjusted on the registry server.
Ok, this should be enough theory - there are more details and tons of tactical considerations, but - except for the mechanism for sending fleets - you now have all the knowledge to try the first steps. There have been cases where newbie players did a hell of a good job although they didn't know much more than you right now! But first, we quickly have to scan through some of the graphical elements:
In the upper left corner you can see the "Panel" window containing a couple of buttons and some information; every item has a tooltip help available:
Your initials as entered during registration.
Actual playing time in minutes.
Button to toggle sound.
Some switches to control display of objects, including the one you already met.
Link to online help on the web.
Group of switches to toggle visibility of the information subwindows.
Button to neatly arrange all open windows.
Group of switches for order management (described later).
Although the visible windows will automatically tile up nicely, it's a good idea to leave them as they are, at least at the beginning.
In theory, you can move and resize each window individually - should you have messed up your layout miserably, Button comes in handy.
The "Galaxy" Window is where most of the action takes place. You already have seen the worlds and battles so far. Most important, fleets are sent directly from a world by clicking and dragging (please be patient: you are only spectator right now and have nothing to send, and besides we first should look at the rest of the GUI!). If you move the mouse cursor above a world or a fleet (the fleet are the small color dots moving between worlds), additional information for that object will instantly appear in the four unused corners of the galaxy window. Try it out! More precisely: Wherever the mouse cursor is located, the four corners will contain information about the closest object. The upper left shows the world's attributes (name, ships, production, capacity, owner), the upper right the world's permanent order if applicable (to be explained later), the lower left the last battle having taken place on the world if applicable and the lower right information about the fleet next to the cursor (defender, time of start, ships, departure world, destination world).
Below, there is the mail-subsystem, where you can send messages to other players and spectators (useful for creating alliances, viperish comments, intrigues and accusations). Just select the receiver from the list to the left; the empty line at the top selects all players for a broadcast message. Then type your text into the entry field and hit return (or click ok). Try it out: Send a greeting to one of the robot players! You will hardly get an answer from him ;-) but your message will appear at the top of the list for control purposes. From time to time, messages from the game server arrive - for instance, when a world has vanished. As an alternative, you may also click the "?" Button instead of hitting return (or clicking "ok") - then your message will be sent anonymously.
Last but not least, there are those four (or five if you make them all visible) information table windows to the left. They contain precise information about battles, fleets in transit, orders, worlds and players. All of them are structurally identical: They are being automatically updated and can be sorted by clicking into a field in the title row (double click to reverse sort). Sorting is often important for getting quick answers - like, how many fleets do I have in transit to world Z5?
Again, it is good practice for beginners to leave those four windows as they are - normally they show you exactly the information you might need most. A big part of the windows' contents is already familiar to you - maybe you spend some time observing the game and trying to interpret what's going on. Having done so, we now need to proceed to a real game where you can actively take part for the first time! Are you ready to wet your appetite? Don't be afraid, I will be right with you!
The first thing you need for a good game is - opponents, right? The registry web site contains features to look for opponents and schedule games - but you are most likely not ready for that yet ;-) Instead, you can instantly start a non-rated practice game where only you and some robot players will compete. Thus, you can quietly explore it without the permanent pressure of having nasty guys (or gals) trying to do you in - most robots are actually quite harmless, although by coincidence they can also get you into trouble. Anyway, first you have to leave the demonstration game if you didn't do so already, and then by pressing the "Start" button to the right you will get a message indicating the game id you are to connect to. Since you probably have no idea right now which game server to use, the web site has suggested a public one without password, so you can leave the password field empty and just hit the button now (VERY IMPORTANT: once only!), then read the answer and return to this page.
If everything went well, you will have gotten the game server id (something like "gen1.from.ch#356") which you can use to connect like you did with the demo game. If not, the reason could be an overloaded practice game server - there can only be so many concurrent games. In this case, you can try to register your own PC (or some other machine connected to the internet) as a game server (this is not exactly for the faint of the heart; see the last section of this tutorial for how to handle this). As soon as your server has been prepared and registered, you can specify its identification in the "Server" and "Password" fields and retry starting the game.
When you finally make it into the practice game, you are in for a big disappointment: You can only overlook a small piece of the universe! Well folks, in the demo game you have been a spectator, but now you are an admiral! And admirals have a limited visibility range - around each of your worlds you can overlook about two fifths of the universe radius. Since you only own one world at the beginning, you don't see much right now except some of the nearest worlds. This is one big advantage of owning many worlds - your visibility range is greatly expanded, particularly if your worlds are widely spread! Besides yourself, some robots have now started - you can't see these yet because all home worlds are equally distributed at the edge of the universe, but they can also NOT see you! However, this will change sooner or later *fg*
You may notice that the game is already running - watch the time counting (upper right corner of the "Panel" window). Relax, there is no need to hurry right now. By the way, each game runs entirely on a game server and is independent of the connected clients - so if you should lose your connection, just re-login as you did the first time and you're back. Of course, when not connected, you cannot take any actions but the game will go on nevertheless.
And now it's time for the big moment: You will send your first fleet! Proceed exactly as follows: Left-click into your home world (that's the one with some 315 ships on it and your color), hold down the mouse button and drag into the nearest gray world, then release the mouse button. Your should now get a dialog box similarly to the one shown here.
The suggested number of ships to be sent is the exactly the number you have on your world - one of the most likely cases. You may overwrite this figure or even change it with the small arrows. The fleet is not sent until you click into the button at the top (named "Send from...") or hit return. If you change your mind, just click outside the dialog box and it will disappear. Easy, see? As soon as you confirm the sending, your first fleet will be on its way - provided the game server approved it which is true in 99% of all cases (there are a few exotic exceptions like network congestion or concurrent orders). You should now see your fleet moving from the center of your world towards its destination. Besides, your fleet should be listed in the "Fleet" window.
The (1) in the window's title bar indicates that you see one fleet (don't laugh: that figure may rise drastically!). The elements of the entry are as follows: Owner of the fleet, world it was started from, time it was started at, number of ships, destination world, remaining transit time, current defender of the target world (in this case: neutral with no name), forecast of the fleet's effects at target (explained later). Check if your entry corresponds to what you have ordered! The remaining flight time should decrease constantly, and once your fleet has arrived (where it will most likely get a glorious victory with surrendering), it will be removed from the fleet window. The movement speed of any fleet is constant, currently one tenth of the universe radius per minute. Watch your fleet arrive and the resulting battle, which will be inserted at the top of the battle window - so this table is constantly growing and can get considerably huge at the end of a long game. Play around for a while sending several fleets, but don't send fleets with less than 160 ships, except some with just one ship to force a defeat without losing too much ships. Notice that fleets start in the middle of a world but arrive at its surface!
Before I go into further details: What you have done right now is basically all you will ever do in this game! Once a fleet is sent it cannot be influenced any longer and will eventually arrive, wherever that may be! However, before you get too enthusiastic and start attacking harmless robots, there are further things you must know!
First, watch your visibility range increase whenever you conquer a world. Soon you may see the first world belonging to a robot. Also, every battle is always visible to everybody - you might already have noticed some battles fought by the robots (which are, of course, also listed in the battle window), although the worlds were probably not in your visibility range.
You may wonder why I told you not to send less than 160 ships at the beginning. This is a matter of game setup - the neutral worlds each start with a certain number of ships (42 on the average) and a certain production and capacity (6 on the average), each with some random offsets. Neutral worlds have two other specialities: First, you never see the number of ships on them, and second, as soon as you have conquered one of them, you can immediately use the ships again. This will be entirely different when you start attacking non-neutral worlds - we will come to that in a minute.
At the very beginning, each player cannot do much more than try to grab as many neutral worlds as possible around him. After what I just said, attacking a neutral world with less than half of the original ships will produce lengthy battles or may even result in lost battles. So, the best thing to do is either go ahead with all ships or split the original ships into two fleet and proceed independently, hoping to increase the fleets by repeated surrendering of the neutral worlds, and always watching out for possible crashes.
Sooner or later, you will attack the first world owned by another player (or robot). The rules of battle are the same of course, but once you have conquered such a world, the victorious fleet WILL BE LOCKED on that world for about 90 seconds! A world being locked has two tiny horizontal bars on it, like the one on the right.
In the "World" window (lower left), you may sort the worlds by "Wait", so you can see how long a world will still be locked. Further, whenever any world gets unlocked you will here a fine double-beep sound. The reason for this lock mechanism may not be obvious to you at the first glance, but it is absolutely vital for the fun of the game. Let me explain this with an example:
The situation here shows a heavily defended world (H9) with an almost non-defended satellite besides it (G4), probably delivering all its ships constantly to H9 (a usual way of building big fleets). Now imagine if there was no lock - anybody could attack G4 and immediately withdraw again, thus interrupting the big world's supply and forcing its owner to permanently strike back. This would be a boring no-win situation for both players causing permanent hassle and many useless fleets being sent around. Now the lock mechanism is laid out so that if a fleet conquers the satellite, it is locked long enough to be punished by the owner of the big world. More precisely, the lock time is sufficient for a revenge fleet to reach one world radius, so if the satellite world is less than half a world radius away (remember: fleets start in the middle but arrive at the surface), the intruder will be destroyed if the owner reacts in time. So in the above scenario, a possible sniper would think twice before attacking G4 - this makes the game much more quiet and strategic - after all, there are many other things to be concerned about!
Having said this, the biggest thing to be concerned about (besides your friends ;-) are crashes. Crashes are rather rare, but very nasty and can bodge any perfect strategic situation if not handled properly. First of all, if one of your worlds crashes, you lose a quarter of the ships on it. This calls for leaving a world just before it will crash - but how do you recognize such a situation? Now you have to remember what I told you about world movements - those spiral paths with the inner worlds turning faster than outer ones. So whenever you encounter a situation like this, you're in for trouble (suppose these two worlds are near the left side of the universe): Both worlds turn clockwise and thus move upwards, but world O4 turns faster than world O6, right? So there will be a crash in short time - there is no chance to avoid it (If O4 were on the left side of O6 instead, then there would be no problem and the worlds would even move apart). As owner of world O4, you now have to decide whether you leave your ships on O4 which will cost some 25% of them or move them away (and probably lose the world because it may land near an enemy). The decision depends heavily on the situation and no general solution can be given, but as a start it is usually wise to empty crashing worlds.
But crashes are even worse than that! Should anybody (including you) have a fleet on its way to one of those worlds, this fleet will still follow the world even after it has crashed and been placed to a new location! Since nobody knows where a crashed world will land, such a fleet can suddenly get a huge transit time! Still worse, theoretically it is possible (though very rare in practice) that a crashed world will crash again even before the fleet has finally arrived, causing it even longer to cruise the universe... Such "crashed" fleets are like dead capital and provide a very popular excuse for not succeeding in Galactic Empires! So you see that you have to take possible crashes into consideration not only in terms of ships on worlds, but also before sending fleets, especially long-range fleets!
If you already feel the need to immediately fight against a couple of friends, go ahead - see section "Scheduling a Game" for how to do this. For those being more patient, read on - in the next section you will learn the remaining stuff to become an advanced admiral!
After having played for some time, players usually notice that the same situation occurs over and over again: You just have conquered several worlds, each of them producing ships, and you would like to concentrate all your ships on one of those worlds. So what you would have to do is send the ships of each world onto the one you want to build a big fleet. This can be a lot of clicking and dragging, specially when you have many worlds on many different spots in the universe. To simplify things, a mechanism has been provided to automate this task: Fleet Collection. Look at the picture to the right:
Suppose you want to send all ships from all worlds to world O9.
Instead of creating single fleets from each of the other worlds to O9, you left-click on an empty spot in the universe somewhat farther away from the target world than the farthest world you want to collect ships from, and then drag to the target and release.
Sounds complicated?
It's easy as hell: For example, in the above picture if you left-click on the galaxy somewhere near the 
and then drag to world O9, you will create an imaginery circle around O9, and all worlds within that circle will immediately send all their ships to O9.
So this action will create five fleets - whith one single drag!
Very often, it is convenient to permanently have all ships from a world sent to another one.
This is where the order concept comes in.
An order is a request to permanently send a fleet whenever there are ships to be sent.
Lets look at another example: Suppose you want to order the ships from world T4 to S3:
Instead of clicking with the left mouse button, you click with the RIGHT mouse button into world T4 and then drag to S3.
The result is immediately displayed: You see a line from T4 to S3 with a small half-circle at the source world.
Now, whenever there are enough ships on T4, they will automatically be sent to S3 until you cancel the order.
Cool stuff!
Orders can even be fine-tuned for special purposes by three parameters: "min", "max" and "defense".
Whenever there are equal or more ships on the world than "min" (due to reinforcement and/or production), up to "max" ships will be sent, but "defense" ships will remain on the world ("defense" is useful if you want to avoid to regularly put a world into a defense-less state).
By default, min is 1, defense is 0 and max is unlimited.
You can change these settings for each worlds by right-clicking into the world, which makes its order dialog box appear (see right).
You can even set these parameters globally for all worlds by right-clicking into an empty spot. The same dialog box will appear and what you specify will then be relevant for all of your worlds. There is only one restriction: No matter how low you set "min", there will never be less ships sent than the world's actual production rate. This is to avoid countless micro-fleets swarming around the universe.
To cancel an order, you right-click into the world as if you would create a new one, but then drag somewhere into empty space. If you want an existing order to point to a new target world, you can just right-click and drag to the new location.
The most powerful feature is the combination of fleet-collecting and ordering, which is done similarly to ordinary fleet-collecting: Instead of drawing the radius with the left button, you do it with the right button (and release it on the target world); again, an is shown for demonstration purposes:
After right-clicking onto the and dragging to world C6, all other worlds within the radius are given order to C6!
Notice that, in this example, world O7 doesn't directly send to C6, because sending first to C2 is faster since those ships will arrive at C2's surface but then immediately take off again at its center, thereby saving one world radius!
Somewhat over-sophisticated, but hey - it's entirely free!
One last remark about orders: They are strictly implemented on the client program - so if you disconnect from a game, your orders are automatically canceled. This is to ensure that in case somebody loses connection, he can at least be certain that no fleet will be sent on his behalf while he is not in control.
To conclude this section of the tutorial, we now have a look at the remaining controls that have not been explained yet.
Control toggles the display of the geometrical center of the worlds you own in the universe (a small mark appears when you switch it on).
The figure to the left of it is your current part of the entire universe's number of worlds.
is the analog for production, and for ships.
Button is the most sophisticated one: It controls whether collecting orders are to be set directly to the target world (nonstop) or optimized by indirection for shorter flight time (as explainded in the previous figure, see worlds O7 - C2 - C6).
There is rarely good reason for going nonstop, but who knows...
Button controls the behavior of orders if the target world crashes away: By default, it is turned on which means that in case the target world crashes, all orders to that world are automatically canceled, which is nearly always what you desire - after all, you never know where a crashed world will end up...
is the analog for the source world.
Button allows you to control whether it should be possible to have orders onto a world you do not own.
This question pops up primarily when one of your worlds, being a target for some orders, is conquered by an opponent - then it is arguably useful to have the system automatically stop those orders.
If switched on, all orders to a world you do not own are suspended (but not actually canceled).
Finally, button cancels all your orders at once.
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| (empty) | unknown - target is neutral or out of visibility |
| + | fleet will win the battle |
| ++ | fleet will win the battle and target will be locked when fleet arrives |
| - | fleet will lose the battle |
| -- | fleet will lose the battle and target will be locked when fleet arrives |
| = | fleet is a reinforcement |
| == | fleet is a reinforcement and target will be locked when fleet arrives |
The "Fleet" window's last column can be a lot of fun (specially for spectators) and provides a sort of probabilistic forecast to what will happen to a fleet at its destination. It may contain several symbols (see table).
Case "++" is most fun: The fleet will conquer the world and the owner will have no chance to escape, whereas in case of "--" you will definitely lose - there is no way the owner might redraw his ships by chance before your fleet arrives :-(
The "Player" Window's column "ready" indicates how many of your ships are actually residing on an unlocked world. The lower that figure, the more active a player you are! This column, like the one above, is most fun for spectators. By clicking on a player's name in the first column, you may change his color. The default color of each player is taken from the registry server, but in case two players have similar color, you may override it here.
Sometimes, you want to quickly locate a world (maybe it appears in one of the tables or somebody sent you a mail talking about it). Wherever a world's name like A4 appears in one of the tables or mail system, when you left-click on it, the world will be marked for some seconds and a circle with the same radius as the visibility range will be drawn around it. This is also useful if you ask yourself whether an opponent can see one of your worlds.
On your first contact with this game, you were in spectator mode where you can see everything (every world, every fleet) but without influence on the game. Actually, there are three ways to become a spectator: a) By connecting to a running game in which you did'nt register as a player, b) by losing your last ship or c) by disconnecting and reconnecting with the "spectator" checkbox enabled. b) has been provided to enable not-so-lucky players to still enjoy the game because in can be great fun to watch the rest of the admirals struggle from a position where you can overlook everything - it is even so much fun that some players don't mind too much getting beaten out of the universe ;-). If, for some reason, you have lost everything but a few irrelevant ships, c) enables you to sort of give up - your remaining ships will still be around until somebody gets them, but you will immediately go into spectator mode, thereby no longer being able to control them.
So this concludes our tutorial as far as the game itself is concerned. We didn't actually tell you everything, but there is nothing missing you wouldn't find out yourself at the appropriate time! You are now ready to dive into the big fun - the next sections explain how to get a real game up and running.
As a registered admiral, you are entitled to schedule a game for a certain time. Currently, games can be scheduled every 15 minutes. To schedule a game, click "New" in web section "Games". You then automatically become the manager of this game - and as a manager, you have rights and duties. The duty of the manager is to provide a game server - you may select one from the server list, provided you know the corresponding usage password. In the next tutorial section you can find out how to register even your own PC as a game server, but this may require some preparation from your side first. As an alternative, if you don't know any other server, you can try gen1.from.ch (without usage password) which provides resources for a limited number of concurrent games. The right of the game manager is to exclude any player who has subscribed to the game - this might rarely happen but may be necessary under very special circumstances. Furthermore, the game manager may start a scheduled game immediately.
To take part in a scheduled game, click "enrol" on the corresponding game entry in section "Games" and remember to start your client program so you don't lose precious seconds at the beginning ;-). Click "retire" if you want to pull out from a game - you can do so until it has started; after that, it will disappear from the "Games" list. Finally, as a game manager you may click "start" to instantly start a game ahead of its schedule or "edit" to change a game's parameters such as changing server, re-scheduling and the like.
Galactic Empires provides a rating system somewhat similar to chess ELO points, but symmetric to zero. Every rated game (for the time being, only solo games against robots are unrated) changes all ratings of the active players. This change occurs as follows: At the time somebody has force to win, he will be No 1 and all other players will be ranked according to their number of ships. This ranking will be reported to the registry server. Every player gets his ranking increased for every other player who is behind him and vice versa. The rate of change thereby depends on the rating difference between the two players. The new ratings are immediately displayed to the client program (via system mail messages) and can, of course, also be watched on the "Profile" section on the web. Should a player drop out before somebody has force to win, his new rating will immediately be calculated (since it is determined because all other active players are in front of him and all those who previousely dropped out are ranked behind him) and displayed.
At the end of the game, the game server is frozen (the time stops counting) and you can still remain connected for a while, maybe to send bitter flames and informally schedule a revenge session. After some time, the game server will automatically shut down.
Network traffic at the registry server is quite moderate - some login, some game scheduling and some result reporting. In contrast, a running game server has to throw quite large blocks of rapidly changing information at the client programs every few seconds. Therefore, it is highly desirable that users who are located close to each other look for a game server in their neighborhood. If you have access to a machine which is permanently online and has some free resources or if you want to provide your own PC as a game server while it's connected, you have to register it first. Registering is easily done at the "server" section on the web site. You give a name for the server (this name is entirely up to you), its usage password (it is then your decision to let other people know this password so they can schedule their own games), it's owner password and its address. If it has a permanent address, specify it in the address field (domain name or decimal), otherwise, just leave it empty - in this case, the registry server will figure out the IP-address of the machine you are working with to register. This address will then, of course, change every time you connect to your internet service provider, so you will have to re-register such a game server. Finally, to change a server's properties (or delete it), you need to know the owner password.
To prepare a machine (Unix or Windows) for running a game server is very easy in principle. If everything works out fine, all you have to do is copy a tiny Java stub program named "GSload.class" from Section "Download" and then start it - usually with a command like "java GSload" from a Unix shell or DOS-Box. The registry server will then take care of all the rest. To stop a running game server, invoke "java GSload stop" - don't just kill it because it will have created some subprocesses for each running game which then would stick to another parent process (except for Windows where you can kill the whole bunch with a single Ctrl+C). Besides, stopping GSload with "stop" also gracefully shuts down the running games.
If not everything works out fine, we have to delve into technical details! First, your machine must have Java Runtime Environment (or Java Developer Kit) 1.2 or higher installed. If you don't have it, get JRE 1.3 from java.sun.com - it's free after all. How to install the stuff depends on your system environment - see the Sun site for details. Furthermore, the program will use ports number 58000 up to 58020, depending on how many games you want to run concurrently. The GSload program will create a small directory for every game it starts (in its current directory) - these directories contain recovery data and some statistics and may be deleted after a game has successfully ended.
If you are a very nice person and want a machine to be a permanent game server, you usually will put the start of GSload into a startup script (and GSload stop into a shutdown script). In this case we ask you to pipe the output of GSload into some log file so in case anything goes dead wrong there is a chance somebody might find the cause ;-).
A word to the wise: A game server takes considerable network resources since so much information is to be sent around. For a typical game, some 20 MBytes per hour is to be expected. This makes running a game server over a traditional 56K telephone-line asking for trouble. We recommend not doing it except for very small games such as three players. CPU resources are not so critical - though it's hard to give exact figures, you can expect to take one running game something like 2% of your CPU.
