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Galaxy has been around for a while, it's a great, well balanced, and
addictive game, but it can be improved since:
The game can be slow, dragging on for more than 60 turns, without coming to a conclusion.
The algorithm that generates the layout of the galaxy, that is the position of the planets, is rather arbitrary, leaving some players in disadvantagous positions.
The code contains core dump producing bugs, and is hard to maintain.
About 70 percent of the orginal galaxy code was rewritten. This solved a
number of bugs that cause the code to core dump. The code is still a bit of a
mess though. Someday someone with a lot of spare time should completely rewrite
it in C++ :)
The bug fixes also causes GalaxyNG to behave slightly different from Galaxy.
That is:
There was a bug that prevented very large ships from being upgraded. To be
more specific; when you had one very large ship orbiting a planet, and
that planet's industry was not enough for a full upgrade, the ship would not
be upgraded at all, even worse, even though no upgrade took place, the program
still marked all industry points of that planet as spend. This bug has been
fixed; the ship will now be partially upgraded. All tech-levels will be
increased by an equal amount, depending on the available industry. More
practical; one can build mass 10,000 ships and keep them in service until
eternity by upgrading them.
There was a bug that prevented armed ships that had been given a Send
order, from bombing the planet they were orbiting before the hyper-space jump.
This bug has been fixed and it is now possible to bomb two planets in the same
turn, with the same ship or fleet. Take a look at the FAQ to see how this
is done.
There was a bug that prevented some ships from being build on a planet,
even though it had enough industry and in particular enough material. The
cause of this bug was that the program did not take in account that having
material stock piled frees industry points that otherwise would have to be
spend on building material. This bug has been fixed.
Auto unload option does not work with empty planets, that is when you send
cargo ships to a empty planet you have to manually unload it. Which is silly
since when you use routes galaxy automatically unloads cargo on empty planets.
This bug is fixed. You can send cargo ships to an empty planet any cargo they
carry is automatically unloaded upon arrival. That is provided you activated
the Autounload option. Of course cargo is also automatically unloaded to
planets a player owns. However no auto unload takes place to planet's of other
nations.
These are the changes to the standard rules of Galaxy:
One can unload any type of cargo unto and from the planets of other nations.
When a player bombs an enemy planet that player become the owner of that
planet. The industry and population and reduced to 25% of their current value.
You will ask, who gets the planet when two friendly nations have ships
above the same planet? Normally this is the nation that comes first in the
list with nations (as shown in the turn report). This is unfair of course,
allies will like to divide the planets they conquer amongst each other. This
is possible with a new command. It has the following syntax:
V [planet_name]
and is used to indicate that a player claims ownership of a planet when it
is bombed. It of course only works when the player has ships left above the
planet when it is bombed. In case 2 or more nations claim the same planet,
nobody gets the planet.
What was wrong with the original layout used in galaxy? Sometimes the layout
created that left some nations in rather unfair positions, that is, some nations
would have their home planet located far away from other planets, while others
nations home planets were located near a whole bunch of good planets. The new
code tries to provide all player with an equal chance on success, while still
keeping the game diverse and interesting. How is this accomplished:
Each nation is given the same number of planets empty planets. That is
within a circle of a given radius around the home planet of a nation a fixed
number of planets is randomly allocated. The size of these planets differ but
the total sum of the sizes is the same for all nations. The resources of the
planets are still chosen at random. Though experience shows that the total
ship mass the planets can produce is about the same for all nations.
The minimum distance between home world can be specified. Home worlds can
therefore be widely spaced from each other, ensuring that a nation isn't
kicked out in the first few turns.
To improve the tactical possibilities a number of stuff planets can be
scattered across the galaxy. These are small useless planets that provide
players with different routes of attack.
In addition it is possible to let nations start with more than one home
planet, these are located within a radius of 3 ly from the original home
planet of the nations. Starting with multiple home planets speeds up the game
considerably.
The orders checker has been integrated with the game code, so both will use
the same algorithm and produce the same results. The orders checker has also
been extended with a forecasted, which generates a forecast on the sitation of
the planets and groups as it will be the next turn.