2 Hours left until server starts up, currently about to send out an e-mail with username + password + some info to all the testers.

Game Guide
In this multiplayer game, 16 federation will fight 16 klingon players (may be less than 16, if some people are unable to play).

Objective: Kill the opposite faction

The game is similar to BOTF in many aspects. The main map shows the galaxy you must explore, the map has starsystems you can colonize/conquer and the fleets you move around.. A fleet has 1 or more ships.

Start the client (double click the client.bat file), click the little wrench icon in the top info bar, and select "connect to server". Enter your username and password and click OK.

Main Menu
When logged in, first click the beaker in the menu (next to minimap), select something to research. Make sure you always have something being researched. To research quicker build more laboratories in your system. TIP: to unlock your first faction ship you need to get all research areas (weapons, biology, energy, etc..) to level 1.. to get the second ship get ALL areas to level 2.

Click the chat bubbles to chat with other players.

Click the starship to open the ship designer (more on that below)

Map
You start out with 1 starsystem and 2 ships. Find the area on the map where your system is, it's the only part of the map you can currently see.

Click this system and you see the bottom menu show the information for this system. Above this bottom menu there should be 4 squares with your faction color (red = klingon, blue = federation).
Click these squares to select your system or fleets.

When a fleet is clicked you can give it orders on the right hand side of the bottom menu.
the only order there should be "move".. Move your fleets around to explore your local part of the galaxy

When you find a starsystem you can move your colony fleet (the fleet with the colony ship) there and the order "colonize" should be available. It takes 10 turns to colonize.

if your fleet is in the same tile as an enemy, they will automatically fight, the resulting battle data will be put in turn reports (click the red box above the bottom menu labeled "empire" to see turn reports).

System management
To manage your systems, click it in the main map then click the red square above the bottom menu with the system name + picture of a star. Information about the system is displayed in the bottom menu. Population = pie chart, power/industry/research/food is displayed as bars. the yellow tall bar is morale, the black+red tall bar is the number of troops in the system, to be able to build more troops build bunkers in the system.
The big green button "manage system" opens the system window, below the button is the list of what is being built in the system. Click the green button.

The new window will have 3 columns, the first column lists your planets and build queue. The middle column has a list of structures you can build. the 3rd column is only visible for systems with a space dock, and allow you to build ships.

Click a building in the middle column to see info about it. To build it click the green icon in the list and drag it to an empty slot on a planet. I recommend building a factory or two as the first order of business.. You can queue up many buildings in your build list.

Starships are built the same way but you drag the ship icon from the right column to the empty gray slot in the upper right corner of the ship management window.

Research will unlock ship hulls + ship components + structures.

Ship designing
Click the ship icon on the main menu (next to the minimap).

The top table lists all your ships designs (templates). Click them to view/edit, or click new and select a base hull to create a new ship design.

The ship will have several slots and you can put in any component from the component list to the right. below the ship you will see the stats for the ship.
the most important ones: speed (10 = needs 1 turn to move 1 tile, 3 = needs 4 turns to move 1 tile), range (how far you can go before running out of fuel), shields/armor/hitpoints (how much damage you can take.. Shields regenerate in space, armor/hitpoints must be repaired at friendly system (automatically)), sensors ( how far you can see), weapons (a rating of how much damage your ship can do in combat), cost (industry required to build it).

Agility/signature/crew/maintenance can be ignore (not implemented yet).

You can not save a design if the speed is lower than 2, or if the energy is less than 0.

Deuterium tank = increases fuel capacity, and range.
fusion reaction = provides power for other components.
torpedo launcher = weapon, allows bombardment of enemy systems, good against ship hulls
laser / beam emitters = weapon, good against enemy shields.
warp core = gives some power and speed
armor/shields = protects ships in combat
colonization module = allows colonization of systems, multiple of these in one colonyship = bonus people + structures to new colony.
troop transport = allows ship to carry troops, needed to invade enemy systems.
cargo = allows ship to transport ore or deuterium.
impulse drive = does nothing yet


special ships:
A ship with 1 or more troop transport modules can invade enemy systems. First while in a friendly system click "troops" in the order area, then you get a dialog to transfer troops between your own system and starship.. When this ships is in an enemy system the "invade" order becomes available, click it to see the chance of success an invasion has. Click invade or cancel.

A ship with a mining laser can mine ore that can be used in systems with the ore refinery building. The system will store X amount of ore (can be increased with a ore silo building). Stored ore can be used to hurry production of ships/Structures (right click structures and choose "hurry" in the build queue in the system window).

To mine ore a ship needs a mining laser + cargo hold. Move the ship to an asteroid belt (on the map) and click "mine", the ship will then fill it's cargo hold every turn until full.

A ship with a buzard collector can harvest deuterium from a nebula (on the map), the ships own fuel tank will be refueled while in a nebula (automatically). If the ship has a cargo bay it can
click harvest to put deuterium into the cargo bay, and it can be transferred to a starsystem and stored there.

Starsystems also produce deuterium if they have gas giant planets, the storage can be upgraded by building deuterium tanks. Your fleets will automatically refuel at your systems.

You can left click a ship when a fleet is selected and move it to another fleet in the same tile, or start a new fleet.

If a ship runs out of fuel, you can move a ship (preferably with lots of fuel) into the same tile, and then join the fleets (all ships in a fleet share fuel)


Tips + Tricks
Doing an action (especially drag&drop) can cause the client to crash if you do it when the turn is changing (bar at top of game client says 1 or 0 seconds).

To disable the music you must open the properties.xml file that is in the trekwar directory. and replace the world "true" with "false" in the following line:
<entry key="music-enabled">false</entry>

If you wan't to run two clients at once and only have music from one, just make a copy of the trekwar directory so that each client has their own properties.xml file


Got questions? ask them here, if you don't have or don't want to make an account just e-mail me (address on trekwar.org)

Both servers are now up and running

great, am downloading now

so lets battle a bit;)

already eliminated some inactive federation players, are there any active players but me?
The map is huge, I'm only playing the fast one and already discovered a quater of the map.
But now I need a pause, you won't make it to conquer all my systems any soon anyway

I'll post a little report later, but in the most I find it a great game for an alpha!
Well done!

Yes, the Federation bIHnuch excel with their absence on the battlefield.

I started way too late, only saw this now.
I can't really play, not on this notebook, because I can't even get to see my homesystem. The minimap doesn't allow me to go to my homesystem by clicking on its general area (or by using the arrow keys), which is out of the screen, so I can't do anything but research and build stuff (not really sure what's happening though). Seems the visible area square on the minimap is limited to the upper left area of the map.
I'll try tomorrow at work, but that's a lot of lost time.

The mini map doesn't work for me either, I just hold left mouse button down and move the whole map.
In the beginning I had to search quite a while till I found my system.

Yes the minimap is borked for big maps, the minimap itself is correct but does not fill the entire portion of the screen that it should (only about 1 quarter).

If your home system is in the center, right part of the visible minimap (turquoise), then clicking the center right of the entire minimap area (1 quarter turquoise, 3 quarters black) should still display the correct area in the main map view. So the minimap is useable, you just have to imagine that the turquoise bit is 4 times bigger

Starting on the slow server should still be ok, the head start won't be that dramatic.

NOTE: Left/Right clicking in a tile/square and dragging the mouse on the main map will pan the map

I'm gonna try and get a better test next weekend. I'll Send out a survey to all the testers and try and find a few timeslots that will allow more people to play, and also it won't be on such short notice.

So, federation is done, who's next enemy?
Hoped for an end screen. Searched whole galaxy to make sure I've not missed a system, but all conquered.

Well next time you n00bs log into your account and play! lol
A bit boring to play alone. At least a few rare other klingons I've seen moving around but that's been rather nothing.
I better give you a month in advance for the low speed game. *muhahaha*

OK.. problems right off the hop. I DL'd & installed OK- no prob there. Come to log in, using credentials as sent as per Email, no action. I'm on a cable connection with router, so I set the router for my computer to acces via DMZ- still no luck. I applied the batch file to XP Firewall for clearance, no luck there (maybe some more info will help?). The only other option I can think of is to apply port forwarding, but I don't know which port is being accessed.

Suggestions?

I got an IO error when setting my research, right after logging in. Can't do anything... the button is unresponsive.
Happens with production too. Is the game over?

Also, it seems the faction bonus to research has changed, from -11 yesterday to -17 today. IIRC I've built a lab and a couple of factories, but should that changed the faction bonus? Or was it something else?

Strange, faction bonus should not change. I'll look into it.

I'm also aware of the rounding bug when calculating time to completion for research.

The OK button on the "IO error while disconnecting from server" DOES work.. however a dozen new dialog boxes pop up ever second I'll try and fix that before next weekend.

The short game is over, victory and honor goes to the Klingon empire!

I've send out e-mails to everyone on the beta test list too see how many are still interested, and there WILL be a new game next weekend.
I'll use Doodle or something to ask everyone what time best fits their schedule. and find one or more times where the most people can play.



At the moment creating a new game is somewhat labor intensive (have to manually create galaxy, generate passwords, add all users manually) and then upload file to sever.

After 0.4.7 however users will have permanent account that allow them to join games without having their user account set up beforehand. So after the next release having more tests, and smaller tests for a group of fewer people should be much easier to manage.

ah, the faction bonus shown in the research is the amount of your total research (100 in your screenshot) that comes from your faction bonus.

In this case you have 117 research output, but klingons get 15% penalty to research. The result is 100 research and -17 of those comes from your "bonus".. haha, that's rather simple and intuitive isn't it?

Yeah, now that you mention it, it is I guess I wasn't expecting to see the penalty displayed there - since the game doesn't display each race's % modifiers.

Is it possible to change your password? It would be helpful.

Would it be possible to set up a SP game? Or a quasi-PBEM game with very long turns (a few a day or so). It could make it easier to have all people playing.

Having a new research area be chosen for you when you do not have one selected would be nice. Random, lower level first, same field, anything would be nice.

BTW, I edited the XML and changed display to full screen, but then I couldn't ALT+TAB. A bit annoying.

Yeah well, there's this thing called RL. Most likely people just can't spend a whole day in front of the computer, playing intensively. I know I can't, hence the quasi-PBEM or SP suggestion. It's just an alpha test anyway, what's more important is to see if everything is working right, not who wins
TBH, I don't have much faith in MP, and I guess this is one of the reasons.

I think there should be more info available, who's playing what, who the teams are, etc. It's MP after all.
There should also be info about the race, which you can consult. There'll probably be such info in the lobby when you can select a race to play, but the empire window seems like a good place to start.

About colonization. When a fleet is colonizing, it's not readily apparent that it is doing so. The Colonize button should be grayed out, and the Colonizing (x%) display should be more obvious, maybe even a progress bar (instead of the button?). Also, a fixed 10 turns could be turned into say a turn per inhabitable planet in the system, so that smaller systems are available faster; there could even be other factors, like more hostile planets requiring more turns, and terrans no turns at all.

Should you be able to see the stats of systems you have not visited yet? Doesn't it kind of dilute the role of scouts, and make the early game less interesting? True it's only general info, but it reveals quite a bit about the system.

Not sure about some of the tooltips. For example, research. used means used for upkeep, but it seems like it's what you're actually using for research. surplus for what you're not using, hmm. In this particular case, like already mentioned, research should always be used.
Also, there seems to be an icon missing, the scanner one. It shows in uninhabited systems, but not in colonized ones.

Shouldn't Speed be displayed as 0.x instead of x, since Range is given in squares? Aren't the Range values a bit high?

When a colony ship colonizes a system, is its fuel lost? It should be placed in the colonized planet's deuterium pool.

Should the first planet in a system be called xxx 0, or xxx 1 ?

Seems there's a minimum pop growth of 5 pop per planet per turn, whatever planet type. Is that intended?
Also, 2 terran planets have different GRs, is that because structures affect GR?

Every new colony starts with an Ore Refinery, which the homesystem doesn't have. Wondering if it's intended, not sure if the OR is really a needed starting structure.

Each new colony starts with 20 pop in each planet. That means systems with more planets start with more pop, which makes them even better.

Each system starts with a troop cap of (3 * #planets), but Gas Giants are also counted for this. Not sure if this is intended, as GGs are not supposed to support anything.

The starting structures for a new colony should probably be fixed. A colony that starts with 2 Lab and 2 Power takes twice as long to develop as one with 2 Factory and 2 Farm.