Introduction

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to a new game he was going to try out (with a group of other friends while on holiday together).  As is generally the case for this group, it fell loosely in thew category of  'strategy wargame' (previously we have pretty much been through the Civ series, played as multi-player, amongst others).  This time the game was 'Planets.nu' (http://planets.nu/), an online incarnation of a 1990's PC game 'VGA Planets'.

In this game you take charge of a space-faring race out to conquer the galaxy (well, a local star cluster anyway).  In general it follows the usual outlines of the 4X genre (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4X), in the setting of an interstellar (2 dimensional) map, with star systems (aka planets) at various points in the space.  Each race starts with a homeworld, from which expansion takes place, by building starships, which can variously carry cargo and/or colonists to other worlds, and fight against ships and planets owned by other races.  The ultimate goal is to take and hold more than a certain threshold of all the planets on the map.

At first sight this game looked very like a play-by-mail game I first played, and then wrote a version of and later ran, at college.  This game was called StarWeb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starweb) and was mildly popular (as much as any play by mail wargame is!) in the early 1980s (yes, I go back a long way!).  Anyway, my first reaction to Planets Nu was that it looked a bit 'dated' and not that interesting, but boy was I ever wrong!

I've now been playing a number of games of Planets Nu for a few months, and it turns out to be far deeper and more subtle than it first appears.  This blog is going to be somewhere for me to post what I learn as I get more experienced, since existing online resources with hints and tips seem rather fragmented (not that this won't be anything more than one more fragment, I readily admit, but hopefully, someone will find it helpful, or failing that at least get a laugh at how naive I still am!).

I should say before anything else that I am still very much a beginner, and in some ways that is why I have started this now.  As a beginner I am learning at a relatively high rate (when you don't know that much, there are plenty of new things to learn), so now seems like the time the capture any insights gained.