SpaceZero is a Real Time Strategy 2D space combat game for two players over a network.
Your objective is to conquer all space.
At the starting point the player owns a ship 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.
Press the "up key arrow" 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 ship 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.
Ships:
There are four types of ships: Explorer, Fighter, Defense Tower and Queen spaceship.
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Explorer | Useful to explore
the space. It has a low gas cost and poor
weapons. It has a large radar. |
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Fighter |
Better weapons and faster than the explorer. |
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Defence Tower |
The Defence Tower can only stay on planets. It has two
objectives: the defence of the planet and the
extraction of minerals. |
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Queen spaceship |
In queen mode game, if you lose it, you lose
the game. |
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Astronaut |
All FIGHTERS of level 1 or superior come
equipped with a survival pod. When a ship 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 ship and returned to the ground where he
will be able to acquire a new ship. The level of
the new ship will be the same as the old
one. The experience is set to zero. |
Other objects:
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Planets | You must conquer
them. |
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Asteroids |
Everywhere. Destroying them, you get
gold. |
Orders menu: It is possible to give orders to
ships: pressing the "o" key, an orders menu is
displayed at the bottom of the main window. When you
enter the order mode you only can give an order. You
get out of the order mode in one of the following
ways:
- Executing the order. Pressing "ENTER".
- Cancelling the order. Pressing "ESC".
- Changing ship. Pressing: "TAB",
"PageUp", "PageDown" or
"Home".
Several options are available:
GOTO |
You can send your ships to different targets in many ways:
- Giving the target id. The target id can be
a planet or another ship. Several ships can
fly together if all of them have the same
target id. Example: GOTO 23. Will go the
object labelled with the number 23. It can be
a planet or another ship.
- Giving the sector coordinates separated
by blank or coma. Example: GOTO 23,12
- Go to the nearest planet with n. Example:
GOTO n. Will go to the nearest ally or known
free planet.
- Instead of the spaceship id you can write
F1, F2, etc. for the selected marked ships
(see
selecting a ship). Example: GOTO F3.
- In map view, the right mouse button will
send the selected ships to the mouse
position. If the pointer is closer than 0.5
sectors to a planet or to one's ship then
they will be sent to that planet or ship.
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EXPLORE |
Your ship will take off and will explore
space. Be aware if your ship runs out of fuel or if
it is very far from home. |
SELECT |
You can select a ship or a planet typing its
id. |
STOP |
Your ship will stop. Inside a planet, it will
land first. Once stopped, it will only shoot, but will
not accelerate. |
RETREAT |
Your ship will go directly to the nearest
empty or allied planet, without attacking the
enemy. Once landed it will change the order to
GOTO nearest planet. |
TAKE OFF |
To take off. (not so useful by now) |
BUY |
You can buy any available ship, if you have
enough gold. The ship must be landed.
If you are not in a planet of your own, you can't
buy Towers.
The Pilots only can buy Fighters. |
UPGRADE |
You can upgrade your ship until one level
lower than the greatest level reached. The ship
must be landed. |
REPEAT |
Repeat the last order given. |
WRITE |
Write a message to the other players. |
SELL |
To sell a ship. You'll get the half of its
original value. The ship must be landed. |
Manual and automatic mode:
You can change between both modes, for all your ships,
pressing the "up key arrow" key for manual mode and
pressing the "down key arrow" key to go back to the
automatic mode.
Only one ship can be changed between these modes at a
time. Inside a planet this special ship is drawn with
white color. In the free space this ship is shown with
the radar centered on it.
In manual mode you can control every ship independently
with the keyboard. To turn the ship 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 ship follows your orders,
except in the following cases:
- If an enemy ship 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 ally planet.
- When landed, it doesn't take off until it obtains a
minimum amount of fuel and ammunition.
When the exceptions finish, it will continue with the given
order.
Special orders:
- STOP:
If the ship 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 ship has low ammunition, low fuel or is very
damaged it goes to the nearest ally planet.
- RETREAT:
The ship will go to the nearest ally planet without
attacking any enemy or asteroid.
Selecting a ship:
There are several ways of selecting a ship:
- Pressing the "Tab" key you can change
between all your ships. "Ctrl-Tab" inverts
the order.
- Pressing "PageDown" selects a ship 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 ship ID.
- With mouse in map view or inside a planet. Left
button selects the nearest ship to mouse pointer. This
selected ship can be inside a planet.
- There are four rapid access keys to select ships:
F1, F2, F3 and F4. If you press Ctrl-F1 the
actual selected ship is assigned to the key F1,
etc...
Selecting multiple ships:
In the map view or inside a planet, you can select
various ships 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 ships in this region will
be selected.
You can select multiple individual ships keeping the
"ctrl" key pressed.
If you select a planet in the map view, all spaceships
inside the planet will be selected.
The colour of the selected ships will be grey.
Selecting a target:
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If the mouse pointer is close to a planet or one's own
ship a red square signs the target objective. The right
mouse button will send all selected ships to this
target. This target can be a planet or an one's own
ship.
Over the mouse pointer, the space
coordinates, the distance in sectors from the selected
ship to the mouse pointer and the id of the target are displayed.
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Weapons:
The ships have three types of weapons.
Shots | All the ships. |
Missile | Only fighters. |
Laser | Only fighters. |
Depending on the level of the ship 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 ships
increase their weapons strength and their shields when
they pass to the next 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).
Window and ship centered view modes.
Pressing "Ctrl-n" it is possible to change between two
view modes: centered at the ship or centered at the
window.
Game modes:
There are three game modes: Cooperative, Deathmatch and Queen mode.
- Cooperative.
You can select from the menu two
options:
- Cooperative mode. In this case all human
players fight in the same team.
- 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 ship plays the same role as
the King in chess. If you lose it, all
your ships are destroyed. GAME OVER.
It is possible to select these options from the command
line: -cooperative, -compcooperative, -queen.
Navigation information:
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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
ship. The number next to STATE is the
shield. A shield of 0.3 means that the ship
receives 70% of the damage. The maximum
value is 0.9.
- Information about the current selected ship as
the type of ship. 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 ships, number
of enemies defeated, number of ships lost and
points.
- Information about the planet in which the
ship is. Planet ID, gold remaining,
resource and mass. 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.
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Radar:
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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 colour of the player that owns such planet. White
dots for the owned ships, blue dots the
spaceships of the same team and red dots for the enemy
spaceships.
The survival pods as flashing crosses.
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Map:
Pressing the "m" key you enter in the map
view. All your ships 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 ship.
Over the mouse pointer the space coordinates and the
distance in sectors from the selected ship to the mouse
pointer are displayed.
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The white colour is reserved for empty planets and
asteroids. The different objects have the colour 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.
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If the mouse pointer is close to a planet or one's own
ship, a red square signs the target objective. The right
mouse button will send all selected ships to this
target. This target can be a planet or one's own
ship.
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Game messages:
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All information about the game as: ships 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.
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Ships and planets info:
Pressing the "f5" key short information of all your
ships and planets is displayed.
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In the left of the main window you can
see the following information about your ships:
The first line shows the total number
of ships and the number of each type.
There is a line for every ship with the following information:
- The type of the ship: F (fighter), T
(tower), E (explorer), Q (queen) , A (astronaut)
or M (if it is in manual mode).
- Its level.
- Its ID.
- The actual order. EXP means exploring. GT:14
that is going to obj 14.
- In which planet is the ship. IN:0 means in outer space.
- If the ship state or energy
are not at 100% it is showed these values.
- In white color its shown the actual
selected ships. Red and yellow colors are for
ships in danger (cause of low gas or damaged).
In blue the allied ones.
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In the right side of the screen is shown a planet
list with the next information: planet id, gold
remaining and the number of ships in it.
The number of ships in outer space is showed in the second line.
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Pressing the "f6" key a sort game
statistics are displayed with the next information:
Player name, [max. level reached], number of ships, (total number of ships
created), planets, enemy destroyed ships and number of
lost ships.
Pressing the "ESC" key all the info windows are closed.
Repairing ships:
The ships are repaired, refueled and rearmed while are on
ground.
In space, can be done little reparations. They obtain also some energy.
Experience and Levels:
Ships experience increase during the game. When a ship
reaches a maximum is upgraded to the next
level. This way it can get new arms, better defense
and more power. If a ship is upgraded, its state and
energy is restored to the maximum value.
The ships can get experience in any of the following ways:
In combat, when a ship is reached by a shot,
destroying an enemy ship and conquering an enemy or
empty planet.
When a ship conquer a planet there is a probability to
received info from enemy (the coordinates of some
planet). This probability increase with ship's level.
Exploring: Discovering new planets.
Training: all ships with a level equal or
superior to 3 can train other ships. For training,
both ships must be in same planet and the pupil must
be landed. The master also must be two levels
superior. The ship must be totally repaired.
Upgrade: you can upgrade a ship (it cost
gold). You can only upgrade until one level below the
higher level reached for one of your ships.
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.
-All the ships destroyed inside a planet increase the
planet resources.
-And the last way: selling ships .
And there are also several ways to lost it:
-All the ships, except the towers, have a cost. This
constant cost is increased when a ship is upgraded.
-All the ammunition cost gold.
-Repair and refuel a ship cost gold.
-Buying, upgrading ships.
Exploring the Universe:
The explore skills depends on the level of the ship:
- 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
farer than previous level. If there no one: random
walk
The explorers increase in one their skill value: an
explorer of level 0 has a level 1 on explorer skill. A
fighter of level 0 has a level 0 on explorer skill.
Size of the Universe:
Its possible to choose the size of the Universe, the
number of galaxies and the total number of
planets. Use the command line options: -l, -g and
-n. The units of the universe size are pixels.
The distance is indicated in sectors (1 sector is 1410
pixels)
Net gaming:
For two players net game: one must be configured as
the server and the other one as the client. Use the
next command line options:
$ 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.
Loading and saving games:
<Ctrl>-s and <Ctrl>-l will save and load a game. Only two
games can be saved: one for single games and another one for a net
games.
In a net game only the server can save and load games.
Pausing a game:
<Ctrl>-p will pause the game.
Quitting a game:
<Ctrl>-q will quit the game.
Game Over:
If you lost all your ships the game is 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 ships ordering to some of
them GOTO another ship. All of them will go where this
last one go.
-Save some gold. It would be useful if you are under attack.
-Use the ships of level three or superior to upgrade
the rest, especially the towers.
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