G'day everyone, today we're going to be taking a look at a game called
VGA Planets. VGA Planets is probably one of the older multiplayer 4x games that I know of,
the original version 2 being made in 1992. But it became much more popular after a new
version was released in 1994 which is the version 3 that most people have played.
Something that makes this game quite remarkable is how large a time frame it was popular for,
it was quite popular in the 1990s on bulletin board systems and the early internet.
It lasted on the internet until about 2010 where a new version of it was made called planets nu
and that's where the vast majority of the player base play the game today.
My personal experience of the game started back in about 1995 when I had no access to any bulletin
board services or the internet at all. Which you would think would hold you back from playing a
game like VGA planets, but I did have two brothers that were interested in playing the game with me
and so we had hosted a game on our own local computer that we played hot seat
style. It wasn't quite the same as playing against someone online but still quite fun.
I gather from what I've read that most other people used to play the game
through bulletin board services, via email or via special websites that hosted games.
It was actually a fairly complicated system to run a game, someone called a host would actually
have to run the game itself and send out result files to players. This result file would contain
all the information for that player's empire, including starships, planets and starbases.
This would allow them to construct a turn file which would issue commands to all of the various
elements of their empire. This turn file would be sent back to the host who would run the simulation
for the next turn which would then produce another result file and the cycle would continue.
Depending on the hosting arrangement turns are usually played roughly once a week, so that makes
VGA planets quite a slow game to play. Some games have been known to go for an exceptionally long
time, even as long as a year. In our case with my brothers we typically played a fair bit faster
so we didn't have to wait as long to get as much progress. Also because registering wasn't
an option for us we were playing the shareware edition which was restricted in some aspects.
Okay now let's take a look at some of the elements of the game. The first and most important one is
the planets themselves. These are the centers of your economy it's where your colonists live, where
you generate supplies, and where you mine minerals for building new ships. The main task to do at the
planet screen is to manage the economy, such as building factories, mines, and defense posts.
Also setting the tax rates for the colonists and the natives, which will get terribly angry and
destroy your factories and mines if you tax them too hard. The natives are particularly important
for each planet as they can affect the starbase tech level for the local star base. If you happen
to get humanoid natives, you will be able to build tech 10 ships, even if you're using the shareware
version. There are also natives which allow you to build tech 10 beams, engines and torpedo tubes.
With this in mind you'll generally try to build up the economy of certain planets more than others,
the ones that are more valuable being the ones you concentrate on the most.
If you have enough resources you can build a starbase. At a planet
starbases are useful for two primary functions, the first one is obviously being able to build
and maintain your star ships and the second is to add extra defensive power to your planet.
A planet with a fully powered starbase around it can be extremely difficult to kill,
even being able to kill some of the biggest ships in the game.
That being said they're still vulnerable to attack and can be easily destroyed if you know how.
Finally we have starships and these come in two varieties, both freighters and capital
ships. Ships are the main means that you have of projecting power around the echo cluster,
you can use them for defensive actions such as laying minefields or perhaps something
more aggressive such as openly attacking a planet. Ships come in a variety of sizes and capabilities,
firstly let's talk about utility ships. These come in a few varieties, but firstly and most
importantly is the freighters. These are the backbone of your economy and allow you to move
materials from one place to another and this is particularly important if you want to drive
ship production at one particular location. The other major important type of utility ship is the
alchemy ship. These ships are capable of creating minerals from supplies produced by the factories
on planets. I'm not entirely sure how this makes logical sense but the alchemy ships are very
necessary for your economy, as essentially you'll mine out all the resources in the planets fairly
quickly and will need to find an alternative means of creating minerals for producing ships.
The neutronic refinery ship is fairly similar except it produces fuel instead of minerals.
The part that gets most people excited is of course the warships.
These vary in size from the smallest destroyers and escorts all the way up
to the largest battleships and carriers. Each with different kinds of capabilities and weapons.
Most are very specific to the race that they belong to such as the bird men which have a
lot of cloakers and even a cloaking battleship, or perhaps the heavy carriers that the robot
imperium has. Needless to say there is such an incredible variety of ships that it's basically
impossible for me to go through them all in a video. Thanks to a very active community
there is actually quite a lot of very good documentation about the races their ships
and strategies that go with the game so I'll put a few links to these in the description below.
Okay now let's talk about the limitations of this shareware client. So one of the main limitations
of the shareware client is obviously not being able to increase your starbase tech level
above tech 6. Now this limits what you can build but probably isn't the worst limitation
that there is. The shareware DOS client is unable to render ion storms and minefields which makes
it very difficult to navigate around them or to do sweeping operations if you're on the attack.
Fortunately this is another area where the community had stepped in and made
some useful tools, two of my favorite tools are echoview and planet's command center.
If you're using windows, echoview is a good addition to the usual win plan client
and allows you to see all the minefields and keep track of everything that's been changing in the
game. Unfortunately being a 16-bit app, echoview is difficult to get working on modern systems.
The other very useful tool is planet's command center,
this is essentially a replacement client and it takes over all the roles that the normal
VGA planet's client does, such as controlling the starships, planets and starbases.
It will also unpack result files and create turn files for you so you don't have to use the command
line tools. But honestly the best features of it are the rendering of minefields and ion storms
and showing the history of various things like score and ship location that are extremely
valuable when you're planning your turn. It also offers some features such as the ability
to automate some of your economy, so it's not so tedious to go through all of the planets.
I sort of think of planets command center as the one tool to rule them all,
as it basically combines all the best features of many tools and puts it into one client. It's
also fairly easy to get it working today as it works quite well in Dosbox. With better options
available today there aren't many people that would use the old VGA planets client.
I do look back on it nostalgically though as I was quite fond of the graphics as a kid.
I still play with the game in general as I've been writing an AI for the shareware player, but this
is mostly for my own amusement as nobody really plays seriously with the shareware version anyway.
There's a lot more depth that I could go into as VGA planets is one of those games that's
very simple to learn but difficult to master, but I think it's time for me to stop here. If
you enjoyed the video please like and subscribe. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time!