Looking for a new challenge? A brave new universe awaits you. You’ll receive a shinny new corvette equipped to locate planets and a scooper to make trading easy. There’s a catch however. You might not be the only one seeking new riches! Conflicts over territory may arise. We’re accepting applications for new captains at telnet://ioresort.com:9999 and an experimental windows client to play it, is available for download here wintyrant.zip.
The universe for space tyrant is divided into 2 areas, the main galaxy and the outer galaxies. Main galaxy is 1/5 of the map, while the outer galaxies take up the remaining 4/5 of the map. There is one spaceport at a random location, every 2000 sectors which has a wormhole leading to the first sector of an outer galaxy. You’ll also find in the main galaxy a tradingpost in sector 1 and another one every 2000 sectors. These can be good places to stay early in the game before the other captains build figs, as these locations are protected by neutral figs.
The main goal of the game is to accumulate microbots (credits used to purchase upgrades, starbases and figs) by using the antimatter you’re given every minute to move your ship around and trade with planets and ports. The more holds your ship has, the more efficiently it can trade, and the more microbots you can make.
Upgrades can be obtained at the tradingposts located throughout the main galaxy. There you can purchase homing beacons, holds, tractor devices, combat systems or scanners which are briefly explained below:
Homing beacons can be picked up by ships when entering a sector. Once attached to the ship, they are powered by the eddies generated by the ship’s movement and will report back the location of that ship to beacon’s owner in real-time.
Tractor devices allow you to nudge ports and warp planets. You’ll need at least 3 to move planets, 4 to move a port or planet into a nebula, and 5 if you want to move port or planet out of a nebula.
Combat systems provide defensive and offensive capability to ships. They augment the defensive and offensive strenght of your ship’s figs not deployed. You’ll need at least 3 of them before your figs get an offensive boost on attack.
Scanners provide your ship with the ability to spot enemy ships. With one or two they only work passively but will detect ships in adjacent sectors. With 3 or more you can also actively scan blocks of 600, 1200 and 1800 sector blocks.
