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:

	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.
	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:

	Planets	You must conquer them.
	Asteroids	Everywhere. Destroying them, you get gold.

Orders menu:

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

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.

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:

1. Pressing the "Tab" key you can change between all your ships. "Ctrl-Tab" inverts the order.
2. Pressing "PageDown" selects a ship in the next planet. "PageUp" in the previous one.
3. Pressing "Home" selects the first spaceship in outer space.
4. Using the order command SELECT and introducing the ship ID.
5. 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.
6. 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:

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.

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.

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 ship plays the same role as the King in chess. If you lose it, all your ships are destroyed. GAME OVER.

Navigation 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Game messages:

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.

Ships and planets info:

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

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.

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.

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:

Experience and Levels:

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:

• 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

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.

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 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.

In map view:

Command line options: