So we wouldn't actually be able to send a Colony Ship there, if the nearer yellow star proves uninhabitable, even though we can send scouts out there.
You can actually make custom ship designs, and indeed mostly have to, but making a Colony Ship with reserve fuel tanks is beyond feasibility right now. Scout ships have the 'reserve fuel tanks' special and so can go another three parsecs out beyond your base technological limit, while our Colony Ships lack that feature. The ETA of four turns, therefore, means this is four parsecs out. Ships don't actually have to refuel, but you can't go more than three parsecs out from the nearest colony you hold. However, there's an important bit here: At the start of the game, you have the fuel technology to go three parsecs out from your worlds, and move one parsec per turn. I could check the red star to the northwest, but red stars are less likely to have habitable worlds. Regardless, I send one scout off to that blue star.Īnd the other to that green star down south. Yes, that's what the little grey things are. Having sent off the Colony Ship, it splits off from our main fleet, hence why I now have two grey ship icons. The green line marks the travel path, although that mostly doesn't matter, while the ETA tells us how many turns it will take. In general, all else being equal I prefer to focus my initial efforts on the star types most likely to be habitable, because while with more advanced technology you can colonize the less habitable worlds, at the start you won't have that more advanced technology so it's best to hit the worlds you can immediately colonize. Yellow stars typically have habitable planets- each star system has one planet, if that- so barring bad luck it's probably a good move. The reason it lists zero here is because I deselected them to send out only the colony ship to the nearest world. You always start the game with a Colony Ship, with which to colonize new worlds, and a pair of scout ships. Having checked the opposition and saved the game in case of one particular issue (which I will discuss when we see it), I go to issue orders to my fleet. I'll go over their advantages as we run into them. It's kind of weird, on stuff like the diplomacy screen other species aren't listed unless you are in contact with them.Īs you can see, we have the Mrrshan, the Psilons, the Bulrathi, the Darloks, and plain old Humans to boot. In any event, the game likes to hide what species you are facing off against, except here. The brackets correspond to where the screen was in the game's normal view. Well, really, we're about as smack in the middle of the map as we get, we're the little grey flag sticking out of a star. We're towards, but not in, the upper left corner. The first thing I did was check the galaxy map I intend to show off multiple species, ideally all of them.Īfter that the game actually starts. I'll be using that same naming convention every run I do. Here I went with the name of the website, because why not. The Meklar default, incidentally, is Meklon. Each species has a set default, which the AI always uses, but you can rename it if you like. I'd rather just go with my screenname.Īnd here I rename the home world. The game offers defaults- for the Meklar it's stuff that sounds more like a product number than a name, various strings of digits and letters, while every other species has their own styles for these things.
Here we see me naming the faction leader. It's entirely aesthetic but a nice touch. I skipped showing it, but you can pick one of six colors (the AI players will use the others) which have their own ship design styles visually.
The secondary characteristics of the species the 'choose race' screen doesn't mention reinforce this. Their advantage, what the game calls 'enhanced factory controls' is most useful in smaller maps, and less useful in larger maps. They aren't generally optimal, a small galaxy with five players is pretty crowded, but is rather optimized for the species I'll be playing. There are the galaxy settings I'll be using for the first run.
You explore outwards, expand your empire, exploit available resources, and sooner or later run into rival empires that you will probably need to exterminate at least some of. 4X games generally involve starting off with a single city, or in the case of the space faring examples like Master of Orion, a single planet, and next to no knowledge of the wider world. This is a pretty good summary of the broad strokes of the flow of the genre. The 4X in question being 'eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate', as Wikipedia helpfully describes. General context before we go any deeper: Master of Orion is, though not the first of the genre, the game that got the 4X genre coined as a genre at all. Right, I tried to do this awhile back but never got anywhere really before I lost the saves.