Voidwars Manual
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Beginners Guide
When you first join a game of Voidwars it can seen quite daunting. This guide is designed to show you the first few steps you need to do at the start of a new game to get going.
Race Selection
After joining a game you will be given an option to choose a race. This choice is entirely down to you, but for beginners I would recommend Terran, since they have easy to understand ship names and are fairly well rounded.
First Orders
When you first login you should be taken to the Tactical View. This is a large grid like display, your home planet should be in the centre of that view, with a green ship icon next to it representing your starting fleet.
To the left of the tactical grid is the information window. This will show information and controls for the currently selected item (ship, planet, anomaly etc..)
The most important thing that needs to be done at the start of every game is to give your first colony ship orders to go and colonise your first planet. Click on the little green ship icon next to your home planet. The information for this fleet will appear in the information window.
To select the fleet with your colony ship in click on the Fleet button for the correct fleet. Your colony ship will be one of the following :
Race Colony Ship ------------------- Terran Stork Bakani Lapis Lazuli Etrib Eastre's Love
Clicking the fleet id button will bring up the fleet details and the controls for that fleet. Directional arrows allow you to give movement orders, and along side them are various other order buttons such as colonise or bombard.
Before you give orders to your colony ship though you need to pick the best planet to colonise. All players start with a Class L (it looks like THIS) planet near their home planet. This is the best planet to colonise to begin with because it is high in metal resources (which is in high demand at the start of the game). Clicking on the planet will show details of its maximum supported population, resources levels and population growth.
Now give orders for your colony ship to move to the desired planet. As you give movement orders to your fleet, arrows will appear on the tactical display indicating the ships projected path. Plot a course to your nearby class L planet (or whatever you decided to colonise first). Once the arrow points to that sector, click the "colonise" button and an icon indicating that planet is going to be colonised appears.
The orders you have given will begin executing once the games ticker has started. The ETA (estimated time of arrival) is indicated in the information window as you give orders. This is the amount of REAL TIME it will take for your fleet to arrive at its destination and perform other orders.
Since the games ticker most likely has NOT started when you give these orders, they wont occur just yet. A start time for the game will be announced and that is when the ticker is started and orders will begin to occur.
Home planet orders
Your home planet allows you to build new ships to add to your fleet. At the start of the game you can only build probes and colony ships. Your home planet also has your first mine, research facility and intelligence facility (You can upgrade these structures later in the game once you have researched certain technologies)
You can assign varying percentages of your population to one of the following:
- Mining
- Population assigned to mining will add to the amount of resources a mine on the planet gives. Assigning population to this when no mine present will do nothing, so always make sure a mine is present.
- Construction
- Population assigned to construction will decrease the amount of time structures on the planet take to build. Only assign population to his if you have put some structures into the planets build queue.
- Shipbuilding
- Population assigned to this will decrease the amount of time ships built at the planet will take to build. Only assign population to this if the planet has a shipyard and you have ships in the build queue.
- Research
- Population assigned to this will increase the research output of the planet if a research facility is present. Don't assign population to this if there is no research facility on the planet.
- Intelligence
- Population assigned to this will increase the intelligence output of the planet if a intelligence facility is present. Don't assign population to this if there is no intelligence facility on the planet.
To begin with you will want to build more colony ships to expand your empire faster. If you set your planet to 100% shipbuilding and build colony ships you will soon run out of resources, so it is best to set some of your planets population to mining and the rest to shipbuilding. You can experiment for yourself to get a good balance between shipbuilding and mining.
To set your planet building more colony ships, open up the planet management screen and click on the shipbuilding button. Select your races colony ship from the list and click the "build ship" button. This will add 1 to your planets buildqueue.
You can add more than 1 ship at a time to the queue by entering a number into the box next to the build ship button.
Once the game as begun and your new colony ship has been built repeat the steps above to colonise a new planet. You might have to explore a little to find your next planet to colonise. For this you can use your probe to do so. Give orders to your probe like you did for the colony ship to travel around to find other planets for you to colonise.