Graham Gilchrist | VGA Planets

VGA Planets is a shareware turn based strategy game of space exploration, economy, and conquest.
It is played between several players (a maximum of 11) who each take control of a single race from a popular science fiction series (e.g. Federation from Star Trek, The Empire from Star Wars, Cylons from Battlestar Galactica etc.)
Each turn every player is given a file by the host which contains all their race's information for that turn. They then use the Client program to decode this file and give commands to their ships, planets etc. and then create a new file to return to the host. The host then runs the host program which calculates the outcome of battles, movement etc. and outputs new files to give to the players. I am currently involved in only one game of VGA Planets, of which I myself am hosting.
We play by e-mail and usually we play a turn every two/three days (usually).
The game which I am hosting is currently running as follows:

I am using HOST Version 3.22.027. All settings are at the HOST defaults aside from meteors. Large Meteors have a 2% chance of impact. Money, Minerals and Populations were set to Very High at the start. This is intended to be a fairly long term game so all 7 races involved were placed manually at equal positions in a circle around the centre of the galaxy. The Homeworlds are approximately 7 turns apart at Warp 9.

The Terran Confederation
Played by the Author, Grand Admiral Gilchrist. The Terran Federation maintains a large fleet as well as it's famous Mobile Infantry for Planetary Assaults. Do your bit. Join Up Now!
The Lizards
Controlled by Ralph Tittensor. The Lizards have missed many turns and have only a small Empire.
The Fascists
Dave 'Cerberus' Ryle. Has by far the silliest number of starbases (seven, count 'em) in the game and is therefore on the top of the leaderboard.
The Crystalline
Played by John for 2 turns. They have almost nothing and are liable to be destroyed soon.
The Evil Empire
Played by Ben DeJersey Moore. With his "Death Star", "Death Star II" and "The Alan Parson's Project", he plans to eliminate all those who stand in his way.
The Robots
Played by Nathan 'Flash' Murray. The Robotic Empire is in dire need of help as it is destroyed by the Colonies.
The Earth Alliance
Dave Watkins 'International Man of Mystery' is the commander of the Alliance. They were renamed from the colonies since Dave in his restricted childhood has never seen Battlestar Galactica.

UPDATE - The Crystals have sprung into action after their Homeworlds were about to be destroyed by the Fascists. Light casualties (several low ships) were encountered on both sides but the crystals are in a losing position, about to be run over by the Fascist fleet.
UPDATE - First blood was shed by the Earth Alliance in an invasion of the outer Robotic territories. Minimal resistance was met.
Everyone has expanded to a reasonable size, barring the Crystals, Lizards and Robots who are only taking turns sporadically and are not doing much. The Fascists have taken the lead with 7 starbases and are on uneasy terms with the Earth Alliance.

The Homeworlds are set at custom locations approx. 200 light years from each other.
Homeworld Minerals, Money and Populations are all set to 'Very High' for a quick start as this is intended to be a short game.
All other settings are at the default apart from the meteors of which there is a 10% chance of a planet being hit by a small meteor and 5 large meteor impacts per turn.
We are currently using the addons:

• GivePlan - This allows races to transfer planets to other races
• Jumpgate - The popular addon which allows races to build Jumpgates which can be used to travel to any other Jumpgate in the galaxy.
• Machines of Yore - This places specialised machines at random on different planets. Each machine has a different function such as an unlimited amount of a mineral, happy plants (which make your colonists happy), ship destroyers, gravity wells etc.

The Solar Federation
Played by moi, Fleet Admiral Gilchrist. The Federation has declared martial law in the face of invading alien races and now devotes it's entire economy towards military ends.
The Lizards
Played by Tom 'Bananas' Curtis. This notorious monkey will drop large numbers of clans to enemy planets from cloaked ships in orbit. With the Lizards' 30:1 ground attack ratio this can have fatal consequences.
The Fascists
Played by Rich Jones. In his own words;

Remember, Ginger isn't just a hair
 colour, it's a racial marker of
 superiority

The Privateers
Played by Steve 'The Hulk' Greenaway. HULK SMASH!!!
The Cyborg
Played by Mysterious Carl. (Mysterious because I don't know his surname).
The Crystalline
Played by Adam Sellwood. General Tactic; build lots of web mines everywhere and build the extremely hard Emerald Class Cruisers.
The Evil Empire
Played by Nathan 'Flash' Murray. General Tactic: Build Gorbie Class Death Stars and kick the **** out of everyone. Once again it appears he might win.
His website is Nathan's Website
The Robots
These are currently played by Andy 'WILF' Wilson who insists on sending WHOOM, WHOOM, messages all the time concerning the Cylon's moving red eye scanners.
The Rebel Confederation
The rebels are controlled by Mike French who has a comicly erratic playing method. He will purposefully attack you with a low grade ship just to watch the resulting VCR of the battle.
The Missing Colonies of Man
This race is controlled by Andy Belding. They haven't done much yet so there's not much to report here.

I have written several utilities for VGA Planets which aid the player.
They all need the Visual Basic 5 runtime files to work. These can be found on the Microsoft Website somewhere.

The first program is a utility for reading and editing the race name file(s) in VGA Planets. This Win32 utility lets you set you own race names to appear within VGA Planets with no fuss.

VGA Planets Race Renamer (7.9KB)

The second program is a password finder for VGA Planets.
Have you ever had the problem of forgetting your password during a game of VGAP, and your host won't tell you it?
Then this program is for you. This is a Win32 password finder which will accept either an RST file or unpacked RST data as input and will give the password of that file.

VGA Planets Password Finder (6.3 KB)

And before I get any e-mails about the obvious implications for cheating, this program was *not* meant for cheating and I hope it will not be used as such. ;-) (Tom please take note)

The last two files are a collection of new Bitmaps and a collection of new Wav Sounds for VGA Planets which are designed to replace those provided with the game. They have been collected from across the internet as well as other sources and a few of my own devising. I have tried to make each picture relate to it's proper film or TV ship (for example; there is a picture of a Super Star Destroyer from STAR WARS as the Super Star Destroyer in the game) and keep as close to Tim's original pictures as possible.

New Bitmaps for VGA Planets (791 KB)
New Sounds for VGA Planets (842 KB)

If you are wondering what the hell I am blithering on about, you should check out:

The Official VGA Planets Website

and download a copy of the shareware version.
Also visit:

The VGA Planets UK site

This really is one of the best games on the PC, providing you can find someone to play it with you. If not, there are plenty of sites on the web devoted to hosting games which you can join. Search for 'VGA PLANETS' in a search engine such as Yahoo or Hotbot.