Getting Started

	Basics of Gameplay
	Joining The Battle
	Step-By-Step Guide
	Frequently-Asked Questions

In-Depth Manual

	Alliances
	Astronomy
	Carriers
	Combat
	Communications
	Espionage
	Facilities
	Membership
	Nebulas
	Planets
	Research
	Resources
	Servers
	Ships
	Squadrons
	Star Map

Technology Guide

	Armor
	Missiles
	Other
	Planet Technology
	Shields
	Ship Designs
	Specialist Skills
	Weapons

Strategy & Tactics

	Assimilated Ed
	Gathercole's Commandments
	Padraig
	Schipper
	Teragen
	Zagul

Fan Sites

	TERRITORIES For Dummies
	TERRITORIES Race Fictions
	Yahoo TERRITORIES Group

BUILDING A NEW SHIP | TACTICAL DISPLAY | ISSUING ORDERS | INITIATIVES & PRIORITIES | WEAPONS, SHIELDS & OTHER SYSTEMS | THREAT RESPONSE

Ships

Building a New Ship

There are several different ship designs you can build. Ships are constructed on a habitable world. The first step is to select the type of ship you want to build. You start out with only a fighter and you unlock additional designs through research.

After you select the ship design, you name the ship and select the armor, weapons, shields, missiles and other technology that will be installed on the ship. Each ship design has a specific load capacity (which you can upgrade) restricting how much you can install on that model.

Once you have outfitted your ship, you can begin construction. You will be prompted to review the resource requirements for building the ship. The more you install on your ship, the more resources will be required. If you approve, the resources will be immediately allocated and construction will begin. Based on what you have outfitted your ship with and the number of available shipyards, it will take an arbitrary number of turns to complete the ship. If you upgrade construction efficiency on the various components installed on the ship, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to build a new ship overall.

You are also prompted if you would like to build an identical ship. You can quickly change the name or the rally point on this screen if you'd like to build ship identical in technology.

RALLY POINTS

If you are a member, you can use the special Rally Point option to pre-program a destination for the ship being built. Upon completion, it will move immediately to the destination you have provided - ignoring all planets and other ships it encounters along the way.

CONSTRUCTION STATUS

You can queue up multiple ships to be built on a given habitable world. Ship construction occurs on a first-in, first-out basis. You can check the status of all ships under construction on a given homeworld by selecting the Construction Status option.

At any time you can pause the construction of a ship by deselecting it on this screen. If you destroy all of the shipyards on the planet, all ships will pause until new facilities are built.

Once construction is complete, your ship will then be accessible through the Star Command screen. Ships launched during the most recent turn processing are marked with a symbol.

Tactical Display

Ships have a tactical display that allows you to see what things that are immediately surrounding them. Through the tactical display and the star map, you issue orders to your ships.

Everything in the universe - planets, nebula and other ships - appear on the tactical display of your ships.

Issuing Orders

As you will see, there are only a few select orders you can give to your ship. Attacking enemy forces, conquering and destroying planets are actions that are taken automatically based on how you configure your ship's initiatives and priorities (see below). However, there are a couple of actions, such as navigation and firing a missile, that you must manually specify.

Manual orders for a ship appear at the top of the right-hand column on the screen. You can cancel any order or move it into the command queue using the x or q options (which appear next to the given order) respectively. Based on how you have your priorities set, orders appear in the order in which they will be executed. If you have your navigation set to be first priority (see below) then orders to navigate somewhere will appear above an order to fire a missile.

To program a new order you simply need to select on of the options, select coordinates if necessary and press the Update Orders. Ships can only have one navigation order and other order (such as fire a missile) programmed into it at any given moment.

NAVIGATION

Under normal, non-threatening conditions, a given ship will always stay in the same place. If the ship is set to engage planets in some way, they will automatically move toward the planet in order to interact with it. Otherwise, ships will only move if you have given them specific orders to go to a specific location.

You can navigate in three ways. In all cases, you must make sure that the Set Course option is selected. These use one of these methods to input the actual destination:

1. Clicking on the Tactical Display  -  To navigate somewhere nearby, you simply click on the location you want the ship to move to on its Tactical Display. The coordinates you have selected will appear in the y,x coordinate box on the right column on the screen.

2. Clicking on the Star Map  -  Using your Star Map (accessible via the Pick option) you can click anywhere in the universe. The coordinates will appear in the y,x coordinate box on the right side of the screen.

3. Manually Enter the Coordinates  -  You can manually enter the coordinates using the y,x coordinate boxes in the right column on the screen.

LAUNCHING A MISSILE

Assuming you installed one or more missiles on your ship when it was constructed, you will have an option to Launch Missile under the New Orders section of the screen. Missiles are always fired at a specific location. You can enter the coordinates manually or use the tactical display to fire it locally. You can also use the Star Map to select coordinates for a long range attack.

SELF-DESTRUCT

When this order is issued your ship will self-destruct on the next turn. You do not receive any resources back when the ship is destroyed.

COMMAND QUEUE

Paying members have access to a special command queue which allows you to pre-program commands for your ship. These will be executed sequentially. You can add commands to the queue by using the Add to Queue button instead. You can review the queue and remove commands from it using the Manage Queue option.

During a turn processing, if a ship does not have another order specified, it will check its command queue for the its next command and begin to execute that order.

Initiatives & Priorities

Each ship is autonomous - they react to their situation automatically based on how you have configured their initiatives and priorities. These allow you to have total control over the artificial intelligence of your fleet and help your orders get executed as efficiently as possible.

Initiatives define how your ship will react to other ships and to other planets. You configure your ships reaction to other ships and planets independently - so you can configure your ship to react to only ships, only planets or both.

The Ships initiative setting defines how your ship will react to enemy ships. Enemy ships are those controlled by any race that you are not allied with.

• Ignore  -  Your ship will totally ignore enemy ships. They will not consider enemy ships to be a threat and will not react to them if they enter into the vicinity of your ship and will not attack even if fired upon.

• Intercept  -  Your ship will intercept enemy ships that pass within one coordinate of your ship. When intercepting enemy ships, your ship can not fire weapons but it can activate technology manually or through automated threat response.

• Destroy  -  Your ship will consider all enemy (non-allied) ships as a threat. If outfitted with weapons, your ship will immediately engage in combat with the enemy ship. If you have configured threat response for your ship it will automatically activate technology you have selected when it considers itself under threat.

The Planets initiative setting defines how your ship will react to any planet it encounters that is not already controlled by your race or an allied race. This includes planets controlled by enemy races or those that are unclaimed yet. Unless your ship is ignoring all planets, it always goes after a habitable world if one is present before going after any of the other planets in a solar system.

• Ignore  -  Your ship will totally ignore all planets it encounters - although the planet will be recorded on your star map.

• Destroy  -  Your ship will immediately engage any planet that it finds with the intent of destroying the planet. Your ship will not automatically fire missiles but will use its beam weapons to destroy the planet.

• Conquer  -  Your ship will attempt to conquer any planet that it finds. If the planet is under the control an enemy race, it will use its weapons to destroy the defenses on the planet and then conquer the planet for your race.

PRIORITIES

Priorities allow you to define the sequence with which your ship executes your orders. Using the radio buttons, you select the priority different types of actions take. By changing these settings you change the order in which the ship's actions are executed.

• Navigate  -  This priority defines when your ship will follow orders to move to a new location.

• Engage Ships  -  Unless your ship's initiative toward enemy ships is to ignore, this defines when your ship responds to enemy forces.

• Engage Planets  -  Unless your ship's initiative toward enemy planets is set to ignore, this defines when your ships responds to planets not controlled by your race.

• Other Orders  -  This defines when manual orders, such as launching a missile or self-destructing, will be executed.

Each turn, it steps through its possible actions based on the priorities you have selected. If a given action is actually taken, it stops processing until the next turn. For example, if you have set your ship to engage planets as its number one task, navigate as its number two task and then set new coordinates to navigate to, each round your ship would first check to see if there are planets of interest nearby. If not, it will move a little bit further along its navigation path. Next round this would be repeated. If during one of the rounds a planet is of interest, it would immediately deal with the planet based on it's initiative settings. Once that is done, assuming there are no other planets of interest, it will resume its navigation.

Here are some examples of common priority settings:

These are the default priorities that all ships start out with. With these settings, orders such as launching a missile would be the ship's number-one priority. If there are no manual orders set, it would then check for enemy ships followed by enemy planets. If both of these cases failed, the ship would then move to any new coordinates you have specified for the ship.

In this example, the ship's number one priority is to navigate followed by the other orders. This would be useful in setting up a long-distance missile attack. You instruct your ship to navigate to certain coordinates and also program an order to launch a missile. The ship will proceed, first, to the coordinates you have specified and then it unleashes it's missile. Because ship and planet response is set to lower priority, nothing short of the ship being destroyed will prevent it from executing this mission.

Weapons, Shields & Other Systems

When you built your ship, you selected one or more weapons, shields and other technology to be included in your new ship. You have total control over which of these systems are active at any given moment.

• Weapons  -  The weapons you have installed on your ship will be listed in this section. Only the weapons you have selected as active will be used during combat. The graph next to each weapon represents its remaining energy. Every weapon automatically recharges a little bit each round and can be used until its energy runs out - at which point it will need to recharge until it is usable again.

• Shields  -  The shields you have installed on your ship will be listed in this section. Only the shields that are enabled will be used to protect your ship during combat. The graph next to each shield represents its remaining energy. Shields automatically recharge regardless of whether or not they are activated although during combat they are less likely to recharge.

• Other Systems  -  The technology listed in this section is anything you installed on your ship that doesn't fit into the previous two sections. These technologies are always off by default. You can manually activate any combination of systems at any time. Once activated, the technology's energy will be used at a specific rate (depending on technology) and does not recharge until the technology is deactivated.

Threat Response

The Threat Response system allows you to select specific technologies to activate in the event of a threat. You can select a different set of technology to activate when your ship is not in immediate danger, too. This is very useful because you do not have to manually monitor the situation around each of your ships. You define the technologies you want based on the situation using this screen:

In the above screenshot, the user has selected Cloaking Device to be active when the ship is not threatened and Communication Disruption Field to be active if an enemy force comes nearby. In this example, the ship would lie in hiding via its Cloaking Device until an enemy within range. Then it would immediately uncloak and activate its Communication Disruption Device. Once the enemy was destroyed or left the immediate vicinity, the ship would deactivate its Communication Disruption Device and return to a cloaked state.

Threat response only responds to ships and planets when the respective initiative is not set to ignore. If for example, you set your ship's planet initiative to Ignore, then when an enemy planet is encountered it will not set off the threat-response system. Only an enemy ship, in this instance, would cause that.

After you have programmed your ship's threat response, the tiny dots next to each technology listed in Other Systems will light-up as shown above. Technologies that have been specified in the ship's threat response can not be manually activated or deactivated so the checkbox nearby is ghosted.

SHIPS | BUILDING A NEW SHIP | TACTICAL DISPLAY | ISSUING ORDERS | INITIATIVES & PRIORITIES | WEAPONS, SHIELDS & OTHER SYSTEMS | THREAT RESPONSE