And so, here we go. For Turn 1
After you've downloaded the central command, and are looking at the yellow screen immediately click on (upper right-hand), the help section > Website > Manual. This will open up to empyrean cluster wars manual, read the center column. After you've read that, look down a little farther, and click on Introduction ,then on Playing the Game ,read thru through these sections (lightly – you really no not need a deep understanding of anything yet). You can skip victory conditions for the moment, but it's basically to defeat everyone else.
After reading this, you should look at Turn Sequence and Orders. Reading this will show you the order in which things happen and you will get a good sense of what things you can do. Trying to make sense of all this at this juncture is pointless, just remember where it is so that when you want to look something up, to understand it more fully or precisely, you can do so.
Directly to the right and over a bit you will see the assembly chart, don't bother to open it yet. It just gives you more information about the items listed below it, such as what they are composed of and what they do. For the moment, just looking at the names of these items will give you an excellent idea of what they do. The details can be dealt with later. Below that you will see the population chart. This lists all of your minions. Let's take a moment to go over your population, because it is quite important and is the only irreplaceable item in the game. You will always want to try to grow your population, as it is the only limiting factor for production and development.
Constructors-- as you begin to view all the different items in your possession, you will see they come in basically 2 categories, Those Requiring Assembly and, those that do not. Every item has a mass or a weight -- described as mass units. You can work any of these out under Units Characteristics Chart's at a later date. The point is you need constructors to assemble them or to disassemble them or to scrap them. One construction worker can assemble (ASM), 500 mass units.
You will also see Police, and, Special Agents. These are used to keep your population in line. At the least, for the time being, it would be a good idea to keep the percentages/ratios the same you were started with. This goes for payment to any population also.
You also see Professionals. These are the heart of your game, all factories, mines, research facilities, hyper engines transporters use them, thus, the more of them that you have, the better off you are. They increase a number of different ways, 5% graduate each year (four turns) from soldiers, and 5% graduate from the amount of trainees each turn. Trainees are drafted from your pool of unskilled, ideally you would like to draft almost 100% of your unskilled into trainees (however you have to leave some to make construction workers, or Police, etc.)
Then you see Soldiers. These run some of your military equipment, but they can mostly be replaced by military robots, you will want the robots when you have a military presence, more on this later.
You also see Unemployables, they just kind of stand there, taking up food & space, but they are very important since your unskilled population will increase, from them at a rate of about 5% per turn, also you will notice at some point that you have a birth rate and a death rate. Yearly (a game year is four turns). Your population is birthed as unemployables and your death rate applies across all forms of population (POP). Remember in the future to grow your population at every opportunity you get. You will understand these opportunities later on. I would say we now know enough for us to get started, by looking at some of our possessions and having them, explained to you, The easiest way out (now that you are in the manual) is to close everything and then reopen central command.
The box in the upper left-hand corner should say CWT2, make sure that's the one that selected, then press the download turns button, and when the download box opens up click on download. The dialog box opens up, under:"files found find true " click okay.
Follow directions until you are able to click on the open Empire button. Then do so. You should see four entities to the right. The numbered open colony is also your home colony. It is, as its name suggests, an open colony or city, this 1st one is also your home world and can have up to 250,000,000 people (25 happens to be the number of Hab Points that you are sitting on) each Hab-point can have up to 10,000,000 people. (Note when the habitability is exceeded the planetary death rate goes up.)
Let's click on it and see what you have got inside. The colony display has a number of tabs.
The 1st section, you should click on is Stats.Glance through this section, you will see the total population its birth rate, it's death rate, various different pay rates for different types of population, and all the different stats for your home colony, as the game progresses each turn, you probably want to take a quick look at some of these stats, but for the moment, just get an idea of what they are and where they are.
After you've done that, let's take a quick look at your inventory, which can be seen under the inventory tab. This lists the stuff your colony has. Among the things you will see, are hyper engines, space drives, light structure, life support units, etc. these are the items you need to build spaceships. You also see factories, and automation, and mines. These are the building blocks of your economy. We will get back to this section later, when we want to get going and to get a few things done.
The next section, you should take a look at is the manufacturing tab. Here you will see the amount of assembled factories you have, and what they are producing. What you see in the 3rd quarter now, these will come out next turn and become part of your inventory (these quantities of items, which are listed as finished have been added to this turns inventory).
Next ,take a quick look at (click on) the activity Tab. Among other things, this will show you how many professionals you've used each turn, and how they were used. I’ll have more on this later.
If you click on the system tab, also known as system data, you will see your colony number, any other colonies that happened to be at the same orbit. Such as, in this instance your orbiting colony, which is where you produce your light structural units, and any ships that happened to be in the same orbit as you, such as the 2 ships you have started with. This tab also shows what type of planet you are on and its habitability number if it has one.
Now we going to discuss how to get you through turn one.(While you are learning the game and its hardware) Your economic advisers have suggested to you that you build your economy as fast as possible, so let’s take a look at some of the ways this can be accomplished. You’ll notice, when looking at your home colonies inventory, that you have 8,000,000 factories - 1, so it should be fairly obvious that you should assemble them, (we will go over how to execute and write the orders later). In central command you will find under the Ruler’s tools, a current technology status tab, this tab shows you both the highest technology level that you have in all of the game items, and also the highest levels that have been obtained by any other player’s (this would be under the column in the far right named Max (for maximum level thus far obtained by any player). You will also discover here (or in the unit characteristics chart) that a factory 1 will produce 20 times its tl in mass units. So,a factory 1 will use some combination of metals and nonmetals, (depending upon the item produced) to equal 20, and 8,000,000 factory ones will use the total of 160,000,000 metals / nonmetals per turn. Now when you look back in your inventory, you will see that you have over 2,000,000,000 metals and nonmetals, not to mention what you can mine . So the point of this is that you should use up your resources via production as rapidly as you can and as fast as you can replace them. Since you seem to have so much of them to start with,(later in the game, you would be using an excess of 1,000,000,000 units per turn) the fastest way for you to use them is not simply to assemble the factory -1’s, but to expend your research (you have 12,000,000 in storage) to go to a higher TL level of factories, and build them at that level. (Look up the EXP order in the manual.). When you do the math, you’ll see that the highest factory level that you could go to is TL 5, (and these factories once they have been built will produce 100 mass units per turn) this would use 10,000,000 of your 12,000,000 research points-- another option might be only to go to TL -4 this would use only 6,000,000, and would leave you another 6,000,000 to use for other things like increasing your life support levels ,or structural unit levels. It is key that you use the vast bulk of the factory -1’s to produce a higher level factory.
The following is a typical concept of a very reasonable turn 1. This will be followed by Instructions on how to write orders using the central command order writer.
Turn 1 concept:
1) Expend your research to go to factory tl level fives.( or 4’s)
2) Assemble, all of your automation 3.( Aut replaces Usk , 1,aut-3 replaces 9 Usk)
3) Assemble approximately 8,000,000 factory-1’s making factory -5’s
4) Draft as many trainees as you can, from your Usk pool.( until you build up sufficient supplies of automation you will need some to run your fct’s ,mines,& lab’s)
{Fct’s & Mines both require 1 Pro & 3 Usk each to run them wile labs require 3 Pro’ & 1 Usk.}
5) Do a survey to see what type of mineral deposits you have on the ground.
6) Do an interior system probe to see what if anything is in the system with you and to see what type of planets are in your home system.
7) Do a distance system probe to see if any star systems are within the range that you can see (10 light years).
If you are an inexperienced or new leader, following this scenario will provide you with at least an equal footing to any of the other players and will gradually familiarize you with the orders. (How to write or execute them follows next)
1) Click on the Cen Com2 icon.
2) In the upper right-hand corner you will see the select game name.
Select CWT2.
3) Click on open the Empire.
4) At the top you will see Rulers Tools, when you click on this, choose the order writer. (The display is sizable,so size it to your liking.)
5) The upper left-hand corner you will see a dialog box with a arrow, when you click on the arrow it will show you a list of all the possible orders. The 1st order you are going to write is the expend order. EXP
Scroll to and then click on the expend order. You will be asked if you are using prototypes, the answer is no.
You will see you Colony number in the yellow box to your left use the cursor to click on your home colony number, back at the top of the display, you will see “enter amount”, write in its place 10,000,000-- the best way to do this is using the shorthand 1E7. Otherwise enter 10000000 do not use commas in the numbers.
In the 3rd box at the top of the page, when you click on arrow, you will see select item and a list of items, select the item Factories.
Click on the add box, and you will see your order as it is written.
That should read C#,Expend,10,000,000,factories
The # sign should be your colony number.
Next turn, when the orders are processed you will have used 10,000,000 research points and you will see you now have factory 5 ability.
Now do your next order. You should use the assembly order. ASM
Again, pick your colony number in the box, then in the upper left (go to select order) and scroll down to assemble. Once assemble is in the box move over to amount ,enter 8e6, in the 3rd box labeled as select item, select Factories, when it asks if you are adding onto an existing group click no. The box with TL is highlighted, since the factors you are assembling are TL-1 level, type in 1. Next there is a dialog box under the item that you have picked –factories-this box is asking what the factories that you have assembled are going to build, pick factories, since that is indeed what we are about to build, next to it you will see aTL, replace it with the Tl of the factories that we are going to build, which is 5. Click on the add box to the center left, and then you will see the order as it is written. That should read C#, Assemble 8,000,000, factories – 1, factories – 5.
The next order, you should write, will be to assemble, all of your automation – 3.
As before, choose your home colony number, then you select the order assemble, under quantity mode, select ALL, this will enter the amount ALL in the enter amount dialog box. Then pick the item automation, then select it, once you’ve done this, the TL box will open, since you are assembling your automation – 3, enter the number 3.
The next 3 orders will give you an idea of where you are, and what’s in the ground. Then add the order to order file by using the add button to the middle left. As before you will see the order appear in the center of the screen.
This would be the point at which I should advise you that if you have miswritten or added an incorrect number somehow, you can highlight the order by clicking on it with your cursor, this will cause a series of buttons to become active in the top center of the screen, and you can click on the delete button, which will erase the highlighted order.
Next in the order writer, select your home colony, in the select order box, pick Survey\Sur. If you don’t want to scroll all the way down, just enter the letter S and the list of possible orders that start with the letter S will come Up.
Then hit the add button, and you will see the order C#,Survey, planet.
Next Turn, when you are looking at your home colony, you will see the results of the survey in the system data Tab.
The next 2 orders are the PRB, or probe orders.
In order writer, pick your home colony #, in the Select order dialog box select probe\Prb, and in the clear dialog box to your right, click on the arrow and you will see “system” and “orbit”. For the 1st of these 2 orders pick system, when you have done that, a small box will open, this is the distance box, the maximum distance that you can probe your assembled sensor ones, is a maximum distance of 10, so enter 10. Then hit the add button. You should see the order appear C#, probe, system 10. Next turn, Under “rulers Tools”. You can pick the space navigator, and you will see the coordinates for all the star systems, within 10 light years of you.
Now repeat this process, only this time instead of system you will select orbit.
This will open to boxes to your left. A and Orbit,--Select All ( as opposed to A,or B etc. and in the Orbit dialog box also pick All. Next turn, after the orders have been processed, and you are looking at your home colony, pick the system data tab and you will see what is in each of your home system’s orbits.
The final order, for this turn would be the draft order DRF.
You should look up the draft order later, but here is how you write the proper order for this turn.
From the “select order” dialog box pick draft, use your home colony #. As for the amount, you should be drafting FROM all of your free unskilled (or I should say unused). If you do the calculations, this will come up to a number somewhat over 48,000,000, Or for simplicity sake, you can just pick 48e6. In the 3rd dialog box on top when you click on the arrow, you will see a list of population, which you can draft, select trainees. In the “Race” box, pick whatever your race number is.
Your race number is the number that follows your population type.
Such as professionals – 1, or professionals – 21 - your number will fall within this range.
Your final set of orders will be to have your home colony pick up (PUP) all your light structural units – 2, from your orbiting colony, and then to transfer (TRF) from your home world, the amount of metals and nonmetals that you have used in your orbiter, to your orbiter.
You should be able, by now to figure out how to write these orders on your own, but if you fail for some reason, it is of no great importance.
Next turn we will double the size of your orbiting colony, build ships and begin exploration.
After you've downloaded the central command, and are looking at the yellow screen immediately click on (upper right-hand), the help section > Website > Manual. This will open up to empyrean cluster wars manual, read the center column. After you've read that, look down a little farther, and click on Introduction ,then on Playing the Game ,read thru through these sections (lightly – you really no not need a deep understanding of anything yet). You can skip victory conditions for the moment, but it's basically to defeat everyone else.
After reading this, you should look at Turn Sequence and Orders. Reading this will show you the order in which things happen and you will get a good sense of what things you can do. Trying to make sense of all this at this juncture is pointless, just remember where it is so that when you want to look something up, to understand it more fully or precisely, you can do so.
Directly to the right and over a bit you will see the assembly chart, don't bother to open it yet. It just gives you more information about the items listed below it, such as what they are composed of and what they do. For the moment, just looking at the names of these items will give you an excellent idea of what they do. The details can be dealt with later. Below that you will see the population chart. This lists all of your minions. Let's take a moment to go over your population, because it is quite important and is the only irreplaceable item in the game. You will always want to try to grow your population, as it is the only limiting factor for production and development.
Constructors-- as you begin to view all the different items in your possession, you will see they come in basically 2 categories, Those Requiring Assembly and, those that do not. Every item has a mass or a weight -- described as mass units. You can work any of these out under Units Characteristics Chart's at a later date. The point is you need constructors to assemble them or to disassemble them or to scrap them. One construction worker can assemble (ASM), 500 mass units.
You will also see Police, and, Special Agents. These are used to keep your population in line. At the least, for the time being, it would be a good idea to keep the percentages/ratios the same you were started with. This goes for payment to any population also.
You also see Professionals. These are the heart of your game, all factories, mines, research facilities, hyper engines transporters use them, thus, the more of them that you have, the better off you are. They increase a number of different ways, 5% graduate each year (four turns) from soldiers, and 5% graduate from the amount of trainees each turn. Trainees are drafted from your pool of unskilled, ideally you would like to draft almost 100% of your unskilled into trainees (however you have to leave some to make construction workers, or Police, etc.)
Then you see Soldiers. These run some of your military equipment, but they can mostly be replaced by military robots, you will want the robots when you have a military presence, more on this later.
You also see Unemployables, they just kind of stand there, taking up food & space, but they are very important since your unskilled population will increase, from them at a rate of about 5% per turn, also you will notice at some point that you have a birth rate and a death rate. Yearly (a game year is four turns). Your population is birthed as unemployables and your death rate applies across all forms of population (POP). Remember in the future to grow your population at every opportunity you get. You will understand these opportunities later on. I would say we now know enough for us to get started, by looking at some of our possessions and having them, explained to you, The easiest way out (now that you are in the manual) is to close everything and then reopen central command.
The box in the upper left-hand corner should say CWT2, make sure that's the one that selected, then press the download turns button, and when the download box opens up click on download. The dialog box opens up, under:"files found find true " click okay.
Follow directions until you are able to click on the open Empire button. Then do so. You should see four entities to the right. The numbered open colony is also your home colony. It is, as its name suggests, an open colony or city, this 1st one is also your home world and can have up to 250,000,000 people (25 happens to be the number of Hab Points that you are sitting on) each Hab-point can have up to 10,000,000 people. (Note when the habitability is exceeded the planetary death rate goes up.)
Let's click on it and see what you have got inside. The colony display has a number of tabs.
The 1st section, you should click on is Stats.Glance through this section, you will see the total population its birth rate, it's death rate, various different pay rates for different types of population, and all the different stats for your home colony, as the game progresses each turn, you probably want to take a quick look at some of these stats, but for the moment, just get an idea of what they are and where they are.
After you've done that, let's take a quick look at your inventory, which can be seen under the inventory tab. This lists the stuff your colony has. Among the things you will see, are hyper engines, space drives, light structure, life support units, etc. these are the items you need to build spaceships. You also see factories, and automation, and mines. These are the building blocks of your economy. We will get back to this section later, when we want to get going and to get a few things done.
The next section, you should take a look at is the manufacturing tab. Here you will see the amount of assembled factories you have, and what they are producing. What you see in the 3rd quarter now, these will come out next turn and become part of your inventory (these quantities of items, which are listed as finished have been added to this turns inventory).
Next ,take a quick look at (click on) the activity Tab. Among other things, this will show you how many professionals you've used each turn, and how they were used. I’ll have more on this later.
If you click on the system tab, also known as system data, you will see your colony number, any other colonies that happened to be at the same orbit. Such as, in this instance your orbiting colony, which is where you produce your light structural units, and any ships that happened to be in the same orbit as you, such as the 2 ships you have started with. This tab also shows what type of planet you are on and its habitability number if it has one.
Now we going to discuss how to get you through turn one.(While you are learning the game and its hardware) Your economic advisers have suggested to you that you build your economy as fast as possible, so let’s take a look at some of the ways this can be accomplished. You’ll notice, when looking at your home colonies inventory, that you have 8,000,000 factories - 1, so it should be fairly obvious that you should assemble them, (we will go over how to execute and write the orders later). In central command you will find under the Ruler’s tools, a current technology status tab, this tab shows you both the highest technology level that you have in all of the game items, and also the highest levels that have been obtained by any other player’s (this would be under the column in the far right named Max (for maximum level thus far obtained by any player). You will also discover here (or in the unit characteristics chart) that a factory 1 will produce 20 times its tl in mass units. So,a factory 1 will use some combination of metals and nonmetals, (depending upon the item produced) to equal 20, and 8,000,000 factory ones will use the total of 160,000,000 metals / nonmetals per turn. Now when you look back in your inventory, you will see that you have over 2,000,000,000 metals and nonmetals, not to mention what you can mine . So the point of this is that you should use up your resources via production as rapidly as you can and as fast as you can replace them. Since you seem to have so much of them to start with,(later in the game, you would be using an excess of 1,000,000,000 units per turn) the fastest way for you to use them is not simply to assemble the factory -1’s, but to expend your research (you have 12,000,000 in storage) to go to a higher TL level of factories, and build them at that level. (Look up the EXP order in the manual.). When you do the math, you’ll see that the highest factory level that you could go to is TL 5, (and these factories once they have been built will produce 100 mass units per turn) this would use 10,000,000 of your 12,000,000 research points-- another option might be only to go to TL -4 this would use only 6,000,000, and would leave you another 6,000,000 to use for other things like increasing your life support levels ,or structural unit levels. It is key that you use the vast bulk of the factory -1’s to produce a higher level factory.
The following is a typical concept of a very reasonable turn 1. This will be followed by Instructions on how to write orders using the central command order writer.
Turn 1 concept:
1) Expend your research to go to factory tl level fives.( or 4’s)
2) Assemble, all of your automation 3.( Aut replaces Usk , 1,aut-3 replaces 9 Usk)
3) Assemble approximately 8,000,000 factory-1’s making factory -5’s
4) Draft as many trainees as you can, from your Usk pool.( until you build up sufficient supplies of automation you will need some to run your fct’s ,mines,& lab’s)
{Fct’s & Mines both require 1 Pro & 3 Usk each to run them wile labs require 3 Pro’ & 1 Usk.}
5) Do a survey to see what type of mineral deposits you have on the ground.
6) Do an interior system probe to see what if anything is in the system with you and to see what type of planets are in your home system.
7) Do a distance system probe to see if any star systems are within the range that you can see (10 light years).
If you are an inexperienced or new leader, following this scenario will provide you with at least an equal footing to any of the other players and will gradually familiarize you with the orders. (How to write or execute them follows next)
1) Click on the Cen Com2 icon.
2) In the upper right-hand corner you will see the select game name.
Select CWT2.
3) Click on open the Empire.
4) At the top you will see Rulers Tools, when you click on this, choose the order writer. (The display is sizable,so size it to your liking.)
5) The upper left-hand corner you will see a dialog box with a arrow, when you click on the arrow it will show you a list of all the possible orders. The 1st order you are going to write is the expend order. EXP
Scroll to and then click on the expend order. You will be asked if you are using prototypes, the answer is no.
You will see you Colony number in the yellow box to your left use the cursor to click on your home colony number, back at the top of the display, you will see “enter amount”, write in its place 10,000,000-- the best way to do this is using the shorthand 1E7. Otherwise enter 10000000 do not use commas in the numbers.
In the 3rd box at the top of the page, when you click on arrow, you will see select item and a list of items, select the item Factories.
Click on the add box, and you will see your order as it is written.
That should read C#,Expend,10,000,000,factories
The # sign should be your colony number.
Next turn, when the orders are processed you will have used 10,000,000 research points and you will see you now have factory 5 ability.
Now do your next order. You should use the assembly order. ASM
Again, pick your colony number in the box, then in the upper left (go to select order) and scroll down to assemble. Once assemble is in the box move over to amount ,enter 8e6, in the 3rd box labeled as select item, select Factories, when it asks if you are adding onto an existing group click no. The box with TL is highlighted, since the factors you are assembling are TL-1 level, type in 1. Next there is a dialog box under the item that you have picked –factories-this box is asking what the factories that you have assembled are going to build, pick factories, since that is indeed what we are about to build, next to it you will see aTL, replace it with the Tl of the factories that we are going to build, which is 5. Click on the add box to the center left, and then you will see the order as it is written. That should read C#, Assemble 8,000,000, factories – 1, factories – 5.
The next order, you should write, will be to assemble, all of your automation – 3.
As before, choose your home colony number, then you select the order assemble, under quantity mode, select ALL, this will enter the amount ALL in the enter amount dialog box. Then pick the item automation, then select it, once you’ve done this, the TL box will open, since you are assembling your automation – 3, enter the number 3.
The next 3 orders will give you an idea of where you are, and what’s in the ground. Then add the order to order file by using the add button to the middle left. As before you will see the order appear in the center of the screen.
This would be the point at which I should advise you that if you have miswritten or added an incorrect number somehow, you can highlight the order by clicking on it with your cursor, this will cause a series of buttons to become active in the top center of the screen, and you can click on the delete button, which will erase the highlighted order.
Next in the order writer, select your home colony, in the select order box, pick Survey\Sur. If you don’t want to scroll all the way down, just enter the letter S and the list of possible orders that start with the letter S will come Up.
Then hit the add button, and you will see the order C#,Survey, planet.
Next Turn, when you are looking at your home colony, you will see the results of the survey in the system data Tab.
The next 2 orders are the PRB, or probe orders.
In order writer, pick your home colony #, in the Select order dialog box select probe\Prb, and in the clear dialog box to your right, click on the arrow and you will see “system” and “orbit”. For the 1st of these 2 orders pick system, when you have done that, a small box will open, this is the distance box, the maximum distance that you can probe your assembled sensor ones, is a maximum distance of 10, so enter 10. Then hit the add button. You should see the order appear C#, probe, system 10. Next turn, Under “rulers Tools”. You can pick the space navigator, and you will see the coordinates for all the star systems, within 10 light years of you.
Now repeat this process, only this time instead of system you will select orbit.
This will open to boxes to your left. A and Orbit,--Select All ( as opposed to A,or B etc. and in the Orbit dialog box also pick All. Next turn, after the orders have been processed, and you are looking at your home colony, pick the system data tab and you will see what is in each of your home system’s orbits.
The final order, for this turn would be the draft order DRF.
You should look up the draft order later, but here is how you write the proper order for this turn.
From the “select order” dialog box pick draft, use your home colony #. As for the amount, you should be drafting FROM all of your free unskilled (or I should say unused). If you do the calculations, this will come up to a number somewhat over 48,000,000, Or for simplicity sake, you can just pick 48e6. In the 3rd dialog box on top when you click on the arrow, you will see a list of population, which you can draft, select trainees. In the “Race” box, pick whatever your race number is.
Your race number is the number that follows your population type.
Such as professionals – 1, or professionals – 21 - your number will fall within this range.
Your final set of orders will be to have your home colony pick up (PUP) all your light structural units – 2, from your orbiting colony, and then to transfer (TRF) from your home world, the amount of metals and nonmetals that you have used in your orbiter, to your orbiter.
You should be able, by now to figure out how to write these orders on your own, but if you fail for some reason, it is of no great importance.
Next turn we will double the size of your orbiting colony, build ships and begin exploration.