Tutorial

From VoidWiki

Jump to: navigation, search


The following tutorial will tell you how to get started with this wonderful game called Voidwars, step by step.

This is some kind of a special article within VoidWiki, as it is meant to become a step-by-step tutorial for absolute beginners. Too many cooks might easily spoil the broth in this case, so please be careful when editing or expanding the following lines. Don't add anything special which newbies don't have to know in the beginning in here, but create a new article for it or edit other articles instead. If you think the proposed strategy is crap, please write your own strategy guide and link it with this article where appropriate instead of overwriting these tips with yours. Parts of the tutorial may well be outdated since varying aspects of the game tend to change from round to round - if an advice is obviously wrong, ignore it. Of course, you may also correct the outdated information.


Contents

First Steps

Tip: almost all structures, ships, etc. have links labeled info. that have up-to-date information. In comparioson to what's on the Structures page or the ships page.

There are three races in Voidwars: Terrans, Etrib and Bakani. As you might guess, each race has its own characteristics and it is up to you which style you prefer. For beginners the best option to choose here would be the Etrib, since they are strong in the early game, so even if you make some mistakes there you probably still can do quite well. Terran is a bit less optimal for the first game and Bakani is only recommended for players who know what they're doing. When the tactical map has finished loading, you will see your blooming Homeworld along with a few starting ships that match your race:

  • Etrib: Gan-Chan, Eastres Love (Your first colony ship)
  • Bakani: Gascoigne, Lapis Lazuli (Your first colony ship)
  • Terran: Viper, Beaver, Hamster, Stork (Your first colony ship)

It will be your first priority to expand, expand, expand. You do so by building colony ships and sending them to uninhabited planets in your vicinity. If you are smart, you will be faster than your neighbours. And sooner or later, military conflicts with some of them will be inevitable. The following strategy is based on personal experience, so it may vary from player to player. It will lead you through various parts of the game, but we naturally encourage you to explore the menus by yourself as well to get a basic overlook.

Important: If you experience any display problems, you may be using the wrong browser: Firefox is good, Opera should work ok, Internet Explorer is rather bad but may work. (While this is generally true, it is especially important for Voidwars.) Safari are currently not working.

Important: The game won't start until the listed date. However, you can already set your initial orders if the world has been created:

Planet Management

Left-click on your earth-like homeworld, then click on Planet management in the info box on the left (or just double-click on the planet). Under Ship-building, click on the Probe, next type in a 2 instead of the standard 1 next to Build ship(s), then click on the button. You have issued the production of 2 Probes. After that, click on the colony ship (see Ships to find which yours is called). Build 2 colony ships which you can easily afford (assuming you can keep them colonizing).

Check Structures and you will see that your homeworld is well-equipped, it has the infrastructure for everything you need and even a strong planet-based defense network, which is called Crashed Ship. Blame the devs. You can also set how fast construction will go on this page.

Go back to Ship-building and you will see how long it will take for each vessel to be built. Each ship you build costs a certain amount of void per hour (because of Fleet support), but since it's more worthwhile to push your ships out as fast as you can then to wait to make sure you never loose voids. Basically build your ships at max, only watching your resources (over the first couple hours) and void supply (it must never drop to zero). You should easily be able to manage up to your second colony ship if you send them immediately after they're created. Don't let them sit around. Remember you have a stock of 10k void, and as your population increases, you'll get more tax.

Empire Control

Now head for Empire -> Income on the left menu, where you will be presented with a compact overview on your empire's income and expenses per hour. As you can see, Probe-building is an expensive business. If you were building Probes for an hour, you would be losing the amount of resources as displayed next to Ship Construction. (But you aren't, those Probes take less than an hour, and the values will change drastically once you start construction of the colony ships!) No big deal though, let's spend the starting stock first and worry about proper income later.

The next thing to look at is Empire -> Summary. Here is where there is a decent report about your empire. You see at the top a Slider from 20% to 40% that decides how much tax you will force on your people. Directly below the Slider you see the amount of Void you will be receiving per hour.

The first colony ship you build costs 900 Void per hour. The one that is currently built doesn't cost anything however, and since you have 10k void to spend, you can afford to loose some. Unfortunately, the only way for a Non-Terran to sustain the 900 indefinitely would be to raise taxes to 40%. A good middle ground is to tax just enough that you don't get a set back: ~ 10% morale loss isn't too big a deal. Bakani will get enough population soon that more void will be coming in anyway, and all three races will get more void once the L class planet is colonized. Not to forget the fact that you start with a stock of 10k void. It's best to save it as much as you can in order to buy projects, but rushing towards planets will be the most beneficial.

Moving Ships

Now time to move the ships. Return to the "Tactical" view and left-click on the small green ship icon near your homeworld, your very first ships. It consists of one probe one colony ship and the starting ships mentioned above.

  • Check the tick next to the probe, then click on Assign to New to have it removed from the fleet.
  • Do the same thing with the rest of your ships. You now have several (very small) fleets.
  • Now click the Next, click on the button where it says Fleet Control above your colony ship. You should now be able to issue flight commands to the colony ship fleet.
  • Using the green arrows, you can direct the vessel to an L class planet you see on the map. Clicking on the Planet will help to reveal it's identity. If you want the game to draw more than just one arrow per click, replace the 1 in the middle with another number.
  • When the green arrows point to the sector of your L class planet, click on the Colonize planet button in the left info box.

If you see 4 yellow arrows pointing directly at the planet, you've achieve what hundreds of Voidwars players have done thousands of times before, congratulations!The colony ship and its 50,000 travelers will leave your homeworld right after the game starts, fly to the L planet and then colonize it, which will take several hours.

You now know how basic fleet movement works, very well.

Important: Do not play around with your poor colony ship, send it directly to the L planet! Ships don't have unlimited fuel, and you don't want your first ship to get stranded in empty space.

Before we leave the tactical view, it's time to set way points. If you click on your Homeworld, you see that it has the same arrows that you used to move the ships. You'll want to send the arrows towards the nearest K class planet, and give it the Colonize order. This means that once the colony ship that is in construction is finished, those arrows will become it's own flight path.

Now you have one colony ship going to colonize an L class planet, and another colony ship that will finish in ~6 hours (depending on your race) and will colonize a K class planet.

Research

Finally we need to set your starting research. You have three paths which lead to expansion:

1) Better Mining, and therefore output ships faster (Laser Mining)

2) Military ships, and therefore guard planets that you'll colonize later (Focused Light Energy Beams, Impulse Drive)

3) Ability to build stations so that your colony ships can refuel, and therefore farther. (Fractal Refining, Transparent Aluminium)

4) higher void income so that you can have more ships out and about. (Astatism)

Depending on your situation you may want to choose different things...

A good way to start is by researching towards Laser Mining because along the way you need to research Focused Light Energy Beams beams which give you a military ship anyway.

With Increased Colony ship range, and closer planets (in the last few games), researching towards Refueling stations isn't nearly as useful as it has been. However, this will be neccessary before you can colonize more then 7 sectors from your Homeworld.

For the time being however, set your first research to be Laser mining (click the little '-' and select 1st) your second to Impulse Drive, and your third to Astatism. (Though this is all a matter of opinion.)

Second Steps

The Next step is to wait till your L class planet is finished colonizing. This will probably happen about 4-6 hours into the game. It'd be best to react as soon as the Colony ship lands, so if you click on your ship, and go to Fleet Control, you can see the time it takes to reach it's final destination. Colonizing is going to be the longest part of the trip.

Now that your L class planet is created, the first step is to fill it with buildings. Since we started with 150,000 metal, and just spent 60k on a colony ship, we still have some to spare, but we're going to be running low soon. Building Mines on your L planet is the best idea.

Also note how soon you'll finish Researching Laser Mining, so that you know if you should build mine mk1 or mine mk2. Since mine 1 costs 5000 metal, if Laser mining won't finish for more then 5 hours, then it will be worth it to build mk1 mines. Otherwise waiting will probably be better. Not to forget that Mine 2 costs 10k void, which you probably cannot afford. Usually the only reason to build mk2 on your L is if you stalled for a few days while everyone else was rushing for planets.

By now you should have most of the nearby systems explored. You have built a another colony ship to colonize the K planet (or it will be finished shortly) and you are almost ready to start building combat ships.

Next steps:

  • keep building colony ships (always landing them asap)
  • for every 3 or so build a fighter. Scatter fighters when you start to accumulate crystal.
  • build mines on all your planets that give decent resources.
  • be prepared to defend any un-claimed colonies. shoot down anyone trying to take "your" planet.

Early Exploration

Early Exploration is vital. Take your probe and send it somewhere into the uncharted territory to find more planets and stuff. You do know that your probe will run out of fuel, don't send it more than 9 straight sectors away from your Homeworld if you want it to come back in time.

Important: The game will store most of what you'd be interested in when you pass through a sector. Currently the games keeps track of explored planets and anomalies. However fleets and stations will not be remembered. VWDB can be used in some cases for this, but due to how the game remembers planets and anomalies, it has been used less (not to mention it's general lack of useful options)

Every solar system with a yellow sun contains 2 planets. There are solar systems with other intelligent races, just like you (hopefully). These systems all contain a yellow sun, a class M Homeworld and 2 other planets: The class L and class K. About 50% of the solar systems are uninhabited, they are different from our own systems and can contain quite strange planets. You will also see some Pulsars, old solar systems without regular planets - however, they contain other stuff (anomalies) that can turn out just as useful in the long run, but not in your first days, ignore them for now (only after having entered them into your universe map, that is!).

Has the game started already? If not, you may take a break now and read the rest later.


Early Combat

Your planets themselves are secure for the time being, but after a few days, the first small combat ships will appear and may threaten your vulnerable and slow colony ships. Or you may have fighters after a few days and threaten other vulnerable colony ships with them, who knows.

A cheap allround vessel is the Laser Fighter. It will destroy Probes, colony or construction ships and enemy scout fighters. But beware if your foes show up with Missile Fighters or Missile Frigates! If you want to know more about space combat iself, you can read everything about the heart of Voidwars, the awesome combat system, in the Combat tutorial. And check Ships for detailed listings of all the ships and their different names for each race.

But when and how to use your first ships? Depends. If you see an unescorted colony ship trying to colonise a planet you wanted to take, you could send your fighter to dispatch it, and some players will do this. However, rest assured that destroying a peaceful colony ship without warning usually starts a game-long vendetta with this empire. How would you react? Don't attack colony vessels if you don't plan on going to war with that empire sooner or later anyway. It is less aggressive to occupy empty planets by placing a fighter on them, but some players won't like this either. You can also try to mark planets with probes, but this symbolic occupation is ignored by most players.

Shooting down Probes is fun, but also very annoying for their owner. If Probes appear right in your home system, destroying them is widely regarded as justified counter-intelligence, but a prior warning message using Comms wouldn't hurt. Destroying Probes in empty space is dangerous, some empires will take it as a welcome reason to attack you when they're ready for it.

Avoid walking over enemy Homeworlds, their Plasma defenses will tear your small Probes and fighters apart in no time.

Important: In the beginning, every other empire is considered an enemy (red colour). Your and/or their ships will start shooting at each other automatically once they are in the same sector, no further orders are needed. To avoid this, you will have to form official alliances.


Additional Game Concepts

  • Make use of Anomalies rather soon than late.
  • The mid-game stage will bring some serious innovations, requiring you to adapt your strategies especially as a small player.
  • If you survived until the late-game stage, you're either a large empire, or quite lucky.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.voidwars.com/wiki/Tutorial"
Personal tools
In other languages