How to use controls in-game and do things quicker/better is maybe not always well-explained or explained at all in-game, so here's a comprehensive list of all things you should when starting the game. Later-on in text, more advanced tips are given. It is also made for non-botf-players, so it explains things pretty much in detail not-always-needed for an experienced botf player:
- Options menu bar is by default hidden. You need to move your mouse to the upper left edge of the screen to make it show up. There you can save and/or quit a game.
- Fleets can be selected by clicking on the race icon on galaxy map in the respective sector. Then on the lower panel on screen the available fleets and ships are shown. Three clicks are needed, first on galaxy map race symbol in the upper right corner of the sector in question, then one left-mouse-click on the ship/fleet in fleet panel below on screen, then on the sector you wish to fly into.
- Left-click and drag will let you quickly move and scroll around galaxy map. Also, using mouse-wheel, you can zoom in and out of map. Cursors and extra mouse buttons can be used to quickly switch between systems in build menu view.
- Outposts can be build by transport class ships, just go over the order buttons on bottom right after selecting such a ship, you'll find the correspondingly-named button there. After finishing an outpost, (an)other transporter(s) can even upgrade this outpost to a full starbase by essentially clicking on the same button again for this ship
- Use resource routes right from the start after you colonized your first world. Most likely it will need titanium for its structures to build and your homeworld has more than enough at the beginning. Resource routes are laid similar to trade routes but work resource-wise, so just one resource per route is possible. Also I would not recommend laying more than one route per system since only one route is for free, more than one go at the cost of trade routes, i.e. for each further resource route you can lay one less trade route from that system.
- After meeting another alien race (mostly a so-called minor, major homeworlds are not supposed to be close to each other at game start, but it can happen), you can set up diplomatic relationships with this minor. If he is in favor of you, i.e. neutral and above, try to convince him to sign a trade treaty with you. Once accepted, lay a trade route to his homeworld.
In order to do that, go to system->trade menu and click on trade routes (use your homeworld as starting point first, could be you need to wait a few turns into the game before a trade route is allowed population-wise, you'll get a note however in-game about that), then lay it to the sector in question. After that you'll have the benefit of evergrowing relationship values with this minor. It is slow, but overtime you will see that he becomes more and more friendly towards you (depending on his race traits of course, not all minors act the same way) and eventually offers you better treaties and at last membership.
Trade routes can be laid to other majors as well when you have a trade treaty or higher with this major (non-aggressive pact does not count here). Since majors mostly got more than one star system under their control, you can lay a full set of trade routes towards their systems (1:1 relationship there, so 1 sector to 1 other sector). Income from that route is calculated by both systems' population so it helps when you have some intel about their system pop. Cancelling a trade route works the same way as laying a trade route, you'll notice it becomes pink on galaxy map and ends in 5 turns.Then you can for example retry to lay a more profitable route if you choose a wrong one the last time (so to sum it up, try to lay evenly routes, i.e. a 30bn. star system should do trade with a 30bn. star system of another alien race and so on, having a 50bn. system doing trade with a 10bn. system is a bit of a waste of credits). - Diplomacy menu works as follows: Once you get to know / meet another race, it is added to your diplomatic menu in the list at left hand side. You can click on it and see how this race is seeing you (hostile, friendly, optimistic, etc.). By giving gifts you can try to improve your relationships with them. Once they are neutral or higher towards you, you may want to consider offering them a trade treaty. Once accepted, you can lay a trade route towards that race's home system. This gains you money/credits and continuously but slowly improves relationship with them. You can also bribe them if they already belong to another major or have higher treaties with another major.
This holds for the "minors" in-game. A "major" is a race that can be played by humans or AI. These majors expand their territory just like you and they have slightly different diplomatic options, but in the end it should be self-explanatory what a "non-aggressiveness"-pact means and what effects an affiliation or a defence pact with another major race has.
Here some more advanced hints start, you may want to find out about them yourself (you can get behind it yourself certainly, they are pretty logical when you think about it
):- Helping minors terraform their planetary system helps increasing your popularity with them too. That way it can boost relationsships even from hostile towards neutral or above and then you can do as mentioned above to get that minor into your empire.
- I'd only terraform planets that do not take more than 10 turns at the beginning as a general hint. Also, multiple colonization in one star system boosts population number - though it costs of course a lot to build that second colony ship and works only if there are more than 1 planet in that system and that other planet(s) need(s) to be unterraformed, otherwise it gets colonized too by the first ship colonizing this world - is a thing worth thinking about. When you have >7bn. population in a system, you can build a so-called star-dock. This orbital structure increases range of your fleet and is one of the most useful things at early-game alongside researching engine tech towards level 3 at 100% RP allocation, ignoring the rest a bit because engine tech also increases maximum range of your ships making it possible to colonize and explore worlds that could not be reached before (or only when building expensive outposts to get there).
- I'd rather not invest too much credits into convincing minors at the beginning, buying colony and transport ships is IMO a bit more useful, but there are several ways to play the game (also depending on the race you choose to play with of course, each has its own special prowess), I just mention my way here.
- Short explanation on internet connectivity of BotE: The game does not connect to the internet unless someone connects you or you connect to someone outside your LAN for a multiplayer game. Sometimes people misunderstand it and think the game's underlying server-client structure would mean it would connect to some host server on the internet. This isn't the case, it uses just the client applications that you run.
- When above 80% of technological progress, a not-so-small chance for a sudden breakthrough is given without any RP percentages needed on assignment there. You might want to check that out, don't know if you already know about it. There's no notification of that in-game, also no option to automatically shift RPs to other areas in that case (and in the case of surplus RP, i.e. when you are 99% complete and have 100% allocation of RP in that area effectively wasting RPs the next turn). This level of optimization is currently not within scope of programming, also it is not always clear if you want to use the sudden breakthrough option or instead want to get the tech as soon as possible, i.e. take the risk of over-spending RPs on that area to get it quickly. Allocating research points is possible in research menu, hence you can define areas which you want to be researched with priority.
- Auto-build (AI governor for colony management) can be activated system-wise by going to Empire->Systems menu, and there clicking on a system of your choice and pressing the 'a' key on your keyboard. It then tries to build meaningful things whenever build queue of that system is empty. It cannot be set to different goals however, so you can't tell the governor to focus on ship-building for example. It does what it seems best-fitting for this system.
The governor is into effect as long as you press 'a' again in the Empire->Systems menu. you see the difference immediately, a system set to auto-build has a red-colored "auto-build" mark in that menu.
Basically it is the AI that controls this particular system then. It looks up which structures can be built according to system resources storage and then decides for one of them to be built. Sometimes even buys buildings/ships when you have the credits. It also sets workers to places and puts structures that require energy up in energy menu.
In Alpha7 it is planned to have a menu for the governor to allow/disallow him buying, scrapping, reallocating labor units, etc., also to tell him which direction the colony should be developed to.
Right now, it's just a testing feature, that's why it's a bit hidden.You can always interrupt the governor by filling the build queue manually. Then all items in the queue will be built and after the last item was built and the queue is empty again, the auto-build automatically kicks in again. So you don't have to press 'a' in the menu to completely switch it off when you decide to take manual command again over that system for a short period of time.
So basically, it kicks in only when the build queue is empty. - In late-game, you can try to build resource allocators (if you have more than 5 colonies in total). These allocators let all your colonies including your homeworld access that specific system's storage for the given resource type. It'a "master-resource-route" so to speak. Very powerful. Yet you should build it in a safe system deep within your own territory and of course with enough mines producing enough of the resource for all your colonies (have a look at planetary bonusses for that resource for example).
- You can get information on enemy fortifications when hovering your mouse over the enemy system on galaxy map once you are in that sector with your fleet. Then a short tooltip pops up with short information on which orbital platforms are there and which ones are activated although activation status can and mostly will change once there is a battle fleet threatening that system on the AI-side.
Btw. it is "allowed"
to take screencaptures from in-game, maybe even create a trailer if you know how to do such stuff. Having a gameplay video surely helps people see quickly what the game is like, more so than screenshots. Also it can help explain game control issues like the ones mentioned above.We also put up our german manual as an html manual here: http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsvn.star-trek-games.com%2Fbirth%2Fhandbuch%2FHandbuch.html
In order to understand battle outcomes better, we have a combat simulator that is used in-game in the background when you hit "Fight", where you can see a tactical view of the combat or statistical data for repeated combats: http://botf2.star-trek-games.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1731
Some things that are putting up some trouble while implementing:
- Building more than one object a turn also involves many micromanagement issues, especially with resources needed to build them and the possibility to quickly transform any specialized system (let's say a research system) into an intel system in about no-time, which is not what we want gameplay-wise. Having a bit of waste here from time to time is "bearable" IMO, since all players "suffer" under the same rules in this case.
- Most things dealing with lack of information on game events like arriving enemy/friendly ships or change in barometer status with other races were not implemented because other things had higher priority. Also, you should always bear in mind that the more information you have, sometimes micromanagement increases instead of decreases, simply because each fleet news message kind of spams up the news window, i.e. you soon get tired of reading "Fleet XY has arrived at sector Z" and this like a dozen times each turn. Also allocating newly-built ships to a given fleet on galaxy map bears risks: First of all, is that fleet within range, i.e. can the ship join up with the fleet or is its range too short for that? Second, you might forget to cancel the vector assignment of a specific system and 20 turns later wonder and be angry about having your ships added to the wrong fleet automatically dozens of sectors away where they rather should be, just because it slipped your memory. Problem is that forgetting this could have major impact on the outcome of battles thus the fate of your empire, more so than having to manually click and assign them to fly somewhere ship-by-ship. Kind of minimizes the chance of having major misallocations of your fleets. If you forget a ship, it's just one ship, and not 20 turns with ships automatically produced and sent to the wrong direction. Especially when there would be the useful option to suppress news entries for ships built in a system with vectorized target sectors, since you probably don't want to read about each ship such a system churns out turn-by-turn cause you normally wouldn't have to assign orders to such a ship, so such a vectorizing would probably mean it's done silently increasing the chance of you forgetting to reset vectors if needed.
Some things seem not that easy to implement to reduce micromanagement than one might think at first...