At the starting point the player owns a spaceship which has landed on a planet.

Your first task is to acquire new spaceships and find new planets in the Galaxy.

By pressing key "o", a command menu will be displayed at the bottom of the main window. You can buy towers to extract resources and get more gold, explorers and fighters to explore and conquer the Galaxy.

After selecting an order press "ENTER" to execute it.

Press "ESC" to cancel it.

Pressing any of the navigation spaceship keys (key arrows and space bar by default) to control the spaceship manually. Press the "down key arrow" to return to automatic mode.

In manual mode you can control every spaceship independently. To turn the spaceship right or left use the arrow keys. In order to accelerate, use the up key arrow. SPACE to fire. "1", "2", "3", to change weapon.

By pressing key "M", a map of the known Universe will be displayed.

See Keyboard control for more options.

Spaceships:

	Explorer	Useful to explore the space. It has a low gas cost and poor weapons. It has a large radar.
	Fighter	Better weapons and faster than the explorer.
	Defence Tower	The Defence Tower can only stay on planets. It has two objectives: the defence of the planet and the extraction of minerals.
	Queen spaceship	In queen mode game, if you lose it, you lose the game.
	Freighter	Opening up commerce between two planets. The gold earned is proportional to the distance between the two planets.
	Defence satellite	Unmanned ship. Useful for space exploration and planet defence.

Other objects:

	Astronaut	All FIGHTERS of level 1 or superior come equipped with a survival pod. When a spaceship is destroyed the pilot is ejected. This pilot will be able to survive in space during a certain time (around 5 min.). He can be rescued by another spaceship and returned to the ground where he will be able to acquire a new spaceship. The level of the new spaceship will be equal to the old one. Its experience is set to zero.
	Planets	You must conquer them.
	Asteroids	Everywhere. Destroying them, you get gold.

Ship Properties:

		Mass	Max. velocity (pixels/s)	Weapons	Cargo	Radar range (in sectors)
	Explorer	50	30	shots	30	2
	Fighter	100	30	shoots, missile, laser	30	1
	Defence Tower	100	0	shoots	0	1
	Queen	400	30	shoots	100	3
	Freighter	400	30	none	200	2
	Satellite	10	30	shoots	0	3
	Astronaut	10	20	none	0	1

Orders menu:

• Executing the order. Pressing "ENTER".
• Cancelling the order. Pressing "ESC".
• Changing spaceship. Pressing: "TAB", "PageUp", "PageDown" or "Home".

Manual and automatic mode:

You can change between both modes, for all your spaceships, pressing any of the navigation spaceship keys (key arrows and space bar by default) for manual mode and give an order or press the "down arrow" key to go back to automatic mode.

Only one spaceship can be changed between these modes at a time. Inside a planet this special spaceship is drawn with white color. In the free space this spaceship is shown with the radar centered on it.

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

In automatic mode, the spaceship follows your orders, except in the following cases:

• If an enemy spaceship is near then attack.
• If it is close to asteroids, it will go towards them.
• If it has little fuel or no ammunition it will go to the nearest allied planet.
• When landed, it doesn't take off until it obtains a minimum amount of fuel and ammunition.

Special orders:

• STOP:
  If the spaceship is in outer space: stop, doesn't accelerate but can fire.
  Inside a planet: it first lands and stays on the ground, it doesn't take off but can fire. It never takes off.
  The order STOP is applied except in the following cases:
  • if the spaceship has low ammunition, low fuel or is very damaged it goes to the nearest allied planet.
• RETREAT:
  The spaceship will go directly to their destiny without attack enemies or asteroids.

Selecting a spaceship:

There are several ways of selecting a spaceship:

• Pressing the "Tab" key you can change between all your spaceships. "Ctrl-Tab" inverts the order.
• Pressing "PageDown" selects a spaceship in the next planet. "PageUp" in the previous one.
• Pressing "Home" selects the first spaceship in outer space.
• Using the order command SELECT and introducing the spaceship ID.
• With mouse. Left button selects the nearest spaceship to mouse pointer. This selected spaceship can be inside a planet.
• There are four rapid access keys to select spaceships: F1, F2, F3 and F4. If you press Ctrl-F1 the actual selected spaceship is assigned to the key F1, etc...

Selecting multiple spaceships:

You can select various spaceships with the mouse. The next order will affect all of them. Simply, click with the left mouse button and, without releasing it, drag and select the region you want. All spaceships in this region will be selected.

You can select multiple individual spaceships keeping the "ctrl" key pressed.

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

The color of the selected spaceships will be grey.

Selecting a target:

If the mouse pointer is close to a planet or one's own spaceship a red square signs the target objective. The right mouse button will send all selected spaceships to this target. This target can be a planet or any of your spaceships. Over the mouse pointer is displayed: the space coordinates, the distance, in sectors from the selected spaceship to the mouse pointer and the id of the target.

Weapons:

The spaceships have three types of weapons.

Shots	All the spaceships.
Missile	Only fighters.
Laser	Only fighters.

Depending on the level of the spaceship some weapons are available or not. At level 0 only the shots are available. The fighter has two more weapons: missile at level 1 and laser at level 2. All the spaceships increase their weapons strength and their shields when they get a new level.
In manual mode you can change amongst the weapons pressing 1, 2 or 3 keys (If the weapon is available or it has ammunition).

Defence satellites:

In order to get defence satellites orbiting around your planets you must proceed as following: Buy some satellites (spaceships must be landed). Give them the ORBIT order. Once the spaceships are orbiting eject the satellites pressing <Alt-s>. You can destroy the satellites selecting and giving them the order DESTROY. All the satellites that are far away from a planet will be lost.

Window and spaceship centered view modes.

Game modes:

• 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.

  A special spaceship plays the same role as the King in chess. If you lose it, all your spaceships are destroyed. GAME OVER.

Navigate information:

In normal navigation mode, in the left of the main window you can see the following information: Three status bars: energy, state and experience of the current selected spaceship. The number next to STATE is the shield. A shield of 0.3 means that the spaceship receives 70% of the damage. The maximum value is 0.9. Information about the current selected spaceship as the type of spaceship. Its ID. Its mode: Automatic (A) or Manual (M) and its level. Ammunition of the current selected weapon (damage) and weapon selected. In which sector it is, velocity, number of enemies killed, actual order, distance and time remaining to reach the target. Global information about the player: gold, number of planets, number of spaceships, number of enemies defeated, number of spaceships lost and points. Information about the planet in which the spaceship is. Planet ID, gold remaining, resource, mass and the level of the highest level spaceship. The resource indicates the number of towers that can be built in the planet. More towers can still defend the planet but don't extract more gold.

Radar:

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

Map:

Pressing the "m" key you enter in the map view. All your spaceships and all known planets are shown.
It is possible to zoom in and out with "z" and "Z".
The cursor keys allow you to move along the map.
<SPACE> centers the map on the current spaceship.
Over the mouse pointer the space coordinates and the distance in sectors from the selected spaceship to the mouse pointer are displayed.

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

If the mouse pointer is close to a planet or one's own spaceship, a red square signs the target objective. The right mouse button will send all selected spaceships to this target. This target can be a planet or one's own spaceship.

Game messages:

All information about the game as: spaceships in danger, asteroids found, planets discovered, etc. appears in the bottom left corner of the main window. Pressing the "f7" key a log message window will pop up. It shows the last 200 game messages. If you run SpaceZero from a terminal the same information is displayed on it. All the given orders accepted are also shown there.

Spaceships and planets info:

Pressing the "f5" key short information of all your spaceships and planets is displayed.

In the left of the main window you can see the following information about your spaceships: The first line shows the total number of spaceships and the number of each type. There is a line for every spaceship with the following information: The type of the spaceship and its level: F (fighter), T (tower), E (explorer), Q (queen) , A (astronaut) or M (if it is in manual mode). Its ID. The actual order. EXP means exploring. GT:14 that is going to obj 14. In which planet is the spaceship. IN:0 means in outer space. If the spaceship state or energy are not at 100% it is showed these values. In white color its shown the actual selected spaceships. Red and yellow colors are for spaceships in danger (cause of low gas or damaged). The pilots and spaceships in manual mode are shown in red. In blue the allied ones.

In the right side of the screen is shown a planet list with the next information: planet id, gold remaining and the number of spaceships in it. The number of spaceships in outer space is showed in the second line.

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

In the left window: the historic values of the sum of the level of all spaceships.

In the right one: Player name, [player level : sum of the level of all spaceships : average level], number of spaceships, (total number of spaceships created), planets, enemy destroyed and number of lost spaceships.

Pressing the "ESC" key all the info windows are closed.

Repairing spaceships:

Experience and Levels:

• In combat, when a spaceship is reached by a shot, destroying an enemy spaceship and conquering an enemy or empty planet.
  When a spaceship conquer a planet there is a probability to received info from enemy (the coordinates of some planet). This probability increase with spaceship's level.
• Exploring: Discovering new planets.
• Training: all spaceships with a level equal or superior to 3 can train other spaceships. For training, both spaceships must be in same planet and the pupil must be landed. The master also must be two levels superior. The spaceship must be totally repaired.
• Trading: Every time a Freighter complete a trip increased it experience.
• Upgrade: you can upgrade a spaceship (it cost gold). You can only upgrade until one level below the player level.

Player level:

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.

-Trading: when a Freighter spaceship reach a planet, the planet resources are increased.

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

-And the last way: selling spaceships .

And there are also several ways to lost it:

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

-All the ammunition cost gold.

-Repair and refuel a spaceship cost gold.

-Buying, upgrading spaceships.

Exploring the Universe:

• level 0: a random walk.
• level 1: try to find an unknown sector near their position. if there no one: random walk
• level 2 and greater: looks for an unknown sector further than the previous level. If there no one: random walk

Size of the Universe:

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

Net gaming:

$ spacezero -s -ip ipnumber
for the server, and

$ spacezero -c -ip ipnumber
for the client.

where ipnumber is the IP number of the server.

SpaceZero use the port 50100 by default. You can use another port adding -port portnumber in the command line. SpaceZero also use the next port, by default 50101.

Saving game options:

Loading and saving games:

Pausing a game:

Quitting a game:

Game Over:

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

When game is over, pressing the "f9" and "f10" 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 spaceships ordering to some of them GOTO another spaceship. All of them will go where this last one go.

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

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

In map view:

Command line options: