Spacezero: "A RTS space game"

## Manual: (SpaceZero version 0.80.06)

At the starting point the player owns a ship landed in a planet. Your objective is conquer all space. Your first actions must be buy new ships and send them to explore the Universe to find new planets. Pressing the "o" key an orders menu is displayed in the bottom of the main window. You can buy towers to extract resources and get more gold, explorers and fighters to conquer planets. After selecting an order press "ENTER" to execute it. Press "ESC" to cancel it. Pressing the "a" key you can control the spaceship manually. Press "i" key to return to automatic mode. In manual mode you can control every ship independly with the keyboard. To turn the ship use the left and right arrow keys. To accelerate, the up key arrow. SPACE to fire. "1", "2", "3", to change armor. A map of the known Universe is shown pressing the "m" key. ### Ships: There are four types of ships: Explorer, Fighter, Defense Tower and Queen spaceship.
| #### Explorer | Useful to explore the space. It has a low gas cost and poor arms. It has a large radar.
| #### Fighter | Better arms and faster than the explorer.
| #### Defense Tower | Only can stay on planets. It has two objectives: the defense of the planet and the extraction of minerals.
| #### Queen spaceship | In queen mode game, if you lost it, you lost the game.
### Other objects:
| #### Planets | You must conquer them.
| #### Asteroids | Around all space. Destroying them, you get gold.
### Orders menu: It is possible to give orders to ships: pressing the "o" key an orders menu is displayed in the bottom of the main window. When you enter in order mode you only can give an order. You get out of order mode in one of the next ways: Executing the order. Pressing "ENTER". Canceling the order. Pressing "ESC". Changing of ship. Pressing: "TAB", "PageUp", "PageDown" or "Home". Several options are available:
GOTO | You can send your ships to different targets in many ways: Giving the target id. The target id can be a planet or another ship. Several ships can fly together if all of them have the same target id. Example: GOTO 23. Will go the object labeled with the number 23. It can be a planet or another ship. Giving the sector coordinates. Blank or coma separated. Example: GOTO 23,12 Goto the nearest planet with n. Example: GOTO n. Will go to the nearest ally or free known planet. Instead of the spaceship id you can write F1, F2, etc. for the selected marked ships (see selecting a ship). Example: GOTO F3.
EXPLORE | Your ship will take off and will explore the space. Be aware if your ship run out of fuel or it is very far from home.
SELECT | You can select a ship or a planet typing its id.
STOP | Your ship will stop.
TAKE OFF | To take off. (not so useful by now)
BUY | You can buy any available ship, if you have enough gold. The ship must be landed.
UPGRADE | You can upgrade your ship until one level lower than the greatest level reached. The ship must be landed.
REPEAT | Repeat the last order given.
WRITE | Write a message to the other players.
SELL | To sell a ship. You'll get the half of its original value. The ship must be landed.

### Manual and automatic mode:

You can change between both modes, for all your ships, pressing the "a" key for manual mode and pressing the "i" key to back to the automatic mode.

In manual mode you can control every ship independly with the keyboard. To turn the ship use the left and right arrow keys. To accelerate, the up key arrow. SPACE to fire. 1,2,3 to change armor.

In automatic mode, the ship follows your orders, except in the next cases:

- If an enemy ship is near then attack.
- If it is close to asteroids, goes to them.
- If it has few fuel or no ammunition goes to the nearest ally planet.
- When landed, doesn't take off until it reaches a minimum amount of fuel and ammunition.

When the exceptions finish, continue with the given order.

### Selecting a ship:

There several ways of selecting a ship:

1. Pressing the "Tab" key you can change among all your ships. "Ctrl-Tab" inverts the order.
2. Pressing "PageDown" selects a ship in the next planet. "PageUp" in the previous one.
3. Pressing "Home" selects the first spaceship in outer space.
4. Using the order command SELECT and introducing the ship ID.
5. With mouse in map view or inner a planet.
6. There are four rapid access key to select ships: F1, F2, F3 and F4. If you press Ctrl-F1 the actual selected ship is assigned to the key F1, etc...

### Selecting multiple ships:

In the map view or inner a planet, you can select various ships with the mouse. The next order will affect to all of them. Simply, click with the left mouse button and, without release it, drag and select the region you want. All ships into that region will be selected. The color of the selected ships will be white.

If you select a planet in the map view, all spaceships inside the planet will be selected.

### Weapons:

The ships have three types of weapons.

Shots | All the ships.
Missile | Only fighters.
Laser | Only fighters.

Depending of the level of the ship some weapons are available or not. At level 0 only the shots are available. The fighter have two more weapons: missile at level 1 and laser at level 2. All the ships increase their weapons strength and their shields when pass to the next level.
In manual mode you can change among the weapons pressing 1, 2 or 3 keys (If the weapon is available or it has ammunition).

### Window and ship centered view modes.

Pressing "n" is possible to change between two view modes: centered at the ship or centered at the window.

### Game modes:

There are three game modes: Cooperative, Deathmatch and Queen mode.

- Cooperative.

  You can select from the menu two options:

  1. Cooperative mode. In this case all human players fight in the same team.
  2. Computer cooperative mode. All computer players fight in the same team.
- Deathmatch.

  It is the default mode. All the players fight against all.

- Queen mode.

  An especial ship play the same role that the King in chess. If you lost it, all your ships are destroyed. GAME OVER.

It is possible select these options from the command line: -cooperative, -compcooperative, -queen.

### Navigate information:

| In normal navigation mode, in the left of the main window you can see the next information: Four status bar: acceleration, energy, state and experience of the current selected ship. Information about the current selected ship as the type of ship F (fighter) T (tower) E (explorer) Q (queen). Its ID. Its mode: Automatic (A) or Manual (M) and its level. Ammunition and weapon selected. In witch sector it is, velocity, number of enemies killed, etc... Global information about the player: number of ships, number of planets, gold, number of ships lost, number of enemies defeat, etc... Information about the planet in which the ship it is. Planet ID, gold remaining and mass.

### Radar:

| In the free space the radar info is shown as a red circle centered at the spaceship. The different objects as represented as follows: big dots for planets, with the color of the player that own such planet. White dots the spaceships of the player, blue dots the spaceships of the same team and red dots for the enemy spaceships.

### Map:

Pressing the "m" key you enter in the map view. All your ships and all known planets are shown.
Its possible to zoom in and out with "z" and "Z".
The cursor keys allows you to move along the map.
<space> centers the map in the actual ship.
Mouse pointer shows you the coordinates.

| The white color are reserve for empty planets and asteroids. The different objects has the color of their player. The planets are represented by big dots, the spaceships by crosses, the asteroids by white crosses. The spaceships and planets has also their id number. The explored universe is marked with dark red crosses. The universe has a limit; beyond that there are no marks.

### Game messages:

| All information about the game as: ships in danger, asteroids founded, planets discovered, etc. appear in the left down corner of the main window. If you run SpaceZero from a terminal the same information is displayed on it. All the given orders accepted are also shown there.

### Ships and planets info:

Pressing the "f5" key a sort information of all your ships and planets is displayed.

| In the left of the main window you can see the next information about your ships: The type of the ship: F (fighter), T (tower), E (explorer), Q (queen) or M (if it is in manual mode). Its level. Its ID. The actual order. EXP means exploring. GT:14 that is going to obj 14. In which planet is the ship. IN:0 means in outer space. In the case that the ship state or energy are not at 100% shows its value. In white color its shown the actual selected ship. Red and yellow colors are for ships in danger (cause of low gas or damaged).
| In the right side of the screen is shown a planet list with the next information: planet id, gold remaining and the number of ships in it.

Pressing the "f6" key a sort game statistics are displayed with the next information:

Player name, number of ships, (total number of ships created), planets, enemy ships destroyed and number of lost ships.

### Experience:

Ships experience increase during the game. The ships can get experience in any of the following ways:

In combat, when a ship is reached by a shot, destroying an enemy ship and conquering an enemy or empty planet.

Training: all ships with a level equal or superior to 3 can train other ships. For training, both ships must be in same planet and the pupil must be landed. The master also must be two levels superior.

Upgrade: you can upgrade a ship (it cost gold). You can only upgrade until one level below the higher level reached for one of your ships.

### Gold:

#### There are several ways to obtain gold:

-Every tower in each planet gets gold until the planet resources are finished. In this case they can still obtain a little amount of gold. Increasing the number of towers in every planet increased the amount of gold obtained. Depending on the planet mass, there is a limit in the number of towers in the same planet that can obtain gold. For the big ones, this limit can be four or five towers. For the little ones, three.

-For each planet, every player gets a fix amount of gold.

-Destroying asteroids is another way to obtain gold.

-All the ships destroyed inside a planet increase the planet resources.

-And the last way: selling ships .

#### And there are also several ways to lost it:

-All the ships, except the towers, have a cost. This constant cost is increased when a ship is upgraded.

-All the ammunition cost gold.

-Repair and refuel a ship cost gold.

-Buying, upgrading ships.

### Size of the Universe:

Its possible to choose the size of the Universe, the number of galaxies and the total number of planets. Use the command line options: -l, -g and -n.

The units of the universe size are pixels. The distance is indicated in sectors (1 sector is 1410 pixels)

### Net gaming:

For two players net game: one must be configured as the server and the other one as the client. Use the next command line options:

$ space -s -ip ipnumber
for the server, and
$ space -c -ip ipnumber
for the client.

where ipnumber is the IP number of the server.

SpaceZero use the port 8000 by default. You can use another port adding -port portnumber in the command line. SpaceZero also use the next port, by default 8001.

### Loading and saving games:

<Ctrl>-s and <Ctrl>-l will save and load a game. Only two games can be saved: one for single game and another one for a net game.
In a net game only the server can save and load games.

### Quitting a game:

<Ctrl>-q will quit the game.

### Game Over:

If you lost all your ships the game is over.

In queen mode game, if you lost the Queen Spaceship, you lost the game.

When game is over, pressing the "f7" and "f8" keys you can observe the other players (in single games and in the server side).

### Tips:

-Try to conquer all the inexplore planets as fast as you can.

-Don't buy more than two or three towers by planet unless you need to defend the planet.

-Watch out your explorers, don't let them go too far.

-You can form groups of ships ordering to some of them GOTO another ship. All of them will go where this last one go.

-Save some gold. It would be useful if you are under attack.

-Use the ships of level three or superior to upgrade the rest, especially the towers.

### Keyboard controls:

up arrow | accelerate.
left,right arrows | turn left, right.
space | fire.
tab | change to next ship.
Ctrl-tab | change to previous ship.
PageDown | change to next planet.
PageUp | change to previous planet.
Home | change to first ship in outer space.
1, 2, 3 | choose weapon.
Ctrl-[f1f2f3f4] | mark a ship.
f1, f2, f3, f4 | select a previous marked ship.
f5 | show a ship list.
f6 | show game statistics.
o | enter in order menu.
Esc | exit from order menu.
m | show-hide space map.
a, i | automatic-manual mode.
n | window, ship mode view
p | pause game
Ctrl-q | quit game.
Ctrl-s | save game.
Ctrl-l | load game.
#### In map view:
z Z | zoom in out.
arrow keys | move map.
space | center map in the actual ship.
mouse pointer | show coordinates.
l | show-hide labels.
### Command line options:
-h. | Brief help.
-n n. | Where n is the number of planets.(default 30)
-p n. | Where n is the number of players.(default 2)
-g n. | Where n is the number of galaxies.(default 1)
-l n. | Where n is the size of the Universe.(default 100000)
-k. | Planets are known by all the players.
-cooperative. | Cooperative mode.
-compcooperative. | Computer cooperative mode.
-queen. | Queen mode.
-nopirates. | Don't add a team of pirates.
-nosound. | Sound disabled.
-nomusic. | Music disabled.
-s, -c. | Server,client mode.
-ip IP. | Where IP is the ip of the server.
-port n. | Where n is the port used for communication.
-name playername. | Where playername is the name of the player.
-f font. | Change the default font by font.
-geom widthxheigth. | Define the size of the main window.

### Bugs:

Not tested in net between 32 and 64 machines. Maybe doesn't work properly.

Not so tested in an internet connection. Maybe doesn't work properly.

Please, send bugs using the sourceforge tracking tool:
Send bug

Use the Feature Request tool from sourceforge to send suggestions

Or send bugs and suggestions to <mrevenga at users.sourceforge.net>.

SpaceZero

- Keyboard control
- Command options
- Selecting Ships
- Game modes
- Information windows
- Experience, gold
- Net gaming
- Load and save