VGA Planets

From PlanetsWiki

1 Overview
2 Details
3 See Also
4 External Links

[edit] Overview

Planets 4 (VGAP4) is a competitive, multiplayer Email game of Space Warfare. Each player controls one empire in a galaxy. As in other Space war games, players explore the area around them, gather or develop resources, research technologies, build infrastructure and create space and ground combat units to defeat their neighbors.

[edit] Details

However, VGAP4 differs significantly from most other Space Warfare games in several ways.

VGAP4 is an Email game. The time between moves is more leisurely than real time games or games played on a single computer. The duration of a game long is usually long. A typical game might have a turn due two or three times per week, and the game as a whole take three to six months to reach its conclusion.

VGAP4 is a multiplayer game. Skill at negotiating and diplomacy are important. Most of the other players will be enemies to be crushed. Some may be allies, temporary or permanent, and some may be members of pre-assigned teams. Skill at getting the most out of your partners, skill at creating a functioning alliance, and skill at leading your enemy into a committing disastrous blunders are all important.

VGAP4 is a competitive game between human beings. The objective is not to grow your empire to Tech Level 10, nor get a certain size of population or fleet. Those are only tools for achieving your real goal: beating the player in the empire next to yours. If you can defeat the other player by achieving Weapons Technology Level 10 before him, do so. If you can defeat him before either of you get to Weapons Technology 10, that's terrific too. The point is not how many "points" you have on any absolute scale, but that you are defeating him on a relative scale.

Because you have human opponents, the winning strategy in VGAP4 tends to differ from the winning strategy in other Space War Games. In many similar appearing games, the key to victory is well thought out, patterned play to maximize searching, to optimally develop technology, and to build infrastructure rapidly. In those games, players work out a "perfect plan" of the most efficient way to expand and develop. They then use that plan over and over in each successive game. Against human opponents, patterned predictable play will lead you into an ambush and a one-way trip to an enemy Labor Camp. Human players, unlike steady computer opponents, will confront you with a combination of brilliant threats, clever traps, and incredibly bone-headed blunders.VGAP4 rewards players who do the unexpected, whose next move cannot easily be foreseen, and who can react rapidly to opportunities or threats that suddenly arise.

Any war game favors aggressive, offensive play over a passive defense. In VGAP4, the player's empires are fairly robust, but the game system does allow attacks to develop rapidly. The game system is rich enough to provide many different ways to damage your enemy. Space battles, orbital bombardment, and ground infantry battles are all there. So are subtler ways to reduce your enemy's economy, happiness, income and productivity through covert, non-combat means. VGAP4 gives great advantage to the offensive minded player because you can combine ships, fighters and ground troops into a mutually supporting attack, and do this at a time when you have arranged that your enemy's economy is in ruins his a population in revolt.

If you can get the most from your friends, deceive your enemies, seize sudden opportunities, respond rapidly to unforeseen threats, and are tenacious and thoughtful enough to push relentlessly once you gain an advantage, you will do just fine here. It's as simple as that.