Netrek
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Netrek is a free to play open source software cross platform multiplayer hybrid multi-directional shooter and real time strategy game for up to 16 players. The goal of the game is to capture all the opposing team's planets. It combines "twitch" style reflexive dogfighting with extensive team play and strategy. There is another variant called Paradise Netrek which is grander in scale but never became as popular, perhaps due to the lack of a good Windows client. This section currently only describes base Netrek.
The game is loosely based on the Star Trek universe. Players can belong to one of four teams: The Federation, Romulans, Klingons, and Orions.
Netrek pioneered the use of many technologies and design features that later found their way into commercial network games, including:
- Persistent account information where players can log in and gain ranks over multiple games.
- A robust client/server model that reduces the data exchange to 'need to know' information, limiting both the required bandwidth and the opportunities for players to cheat by obtaining more knowledge of the game world than their opponents.
- Game mechanics designed to reduce the ability of assisted or robot player aimbots (referred to as borgs) to gain a significant advantage over a human player.
- The efficient use of fast but unreliable UDP packets as well as reliable but slower TCP streams.
- An anti-cheating mechanism using an RSA-based public key cryptography authentication system that also attempts (with limited success) to detect and prevent man in the middle attacks.
[edit] History
Netrek has a development history beginning as far back as 1972 (Alto Trek). It was also heavily influenced by the PLATO game Empire, written in 1978. It substantially reached its current form and its peak player-base in the early 1990s as a contemporary of XPilot but has dwindled steadily since then as more newbie friendly games became available. Development has slowed to a snail's pace, but its client and server code still contain many design features that would be of interest to amateur or professional network games developers.
[edit] Game Basics
The graphics of Netrek are simple top-down format. You have an external view of your ship from above and the game map is laid out on a 2-D plane.
Two teams face off, each controlling an equal number of planets. Planets slowly generate armies, which may be picked up by players. Enemy planets may be taken over (or retaken) by dropping enough armies on them. Armies annihilate each other on a 1 to 1 basis, so to take over a planet with 4 armies, you need to drop at least 5. A planet with 0 armies is considered to be neutral and does nothing until someone puts an army on it to claim it.
Planets can be bombed to kill off armies, but cannot be bombed if the army count is 4 or less. Also, you can only pick up excess armies from your team's planets, where "excess" is defined as over 4. Some ships have the ability to randomly bomb 2 armies at a time instead of 1, so it would be possible to bomb an army down to a population of 3 but never less than that.
Before you can pick up armies, however, you need a kill. You can obtain kills either by killing an enemy ship or by bombing enemy armies. Your kill count resets back to 0 every time you die. Consequently, people with 2 or more kills are generally targeted for ogging just to remove the threat of them carrying armies around.
Players control various classes of ships:
- Scout. The scout is the fastest ship in the game, which makes it good for bombing out-of-the-way enemy planets. Since the scout can only hold 2 armies, it wasn't very suitable for taking over enemy planets.
- Destroyer. A fast ship, strong enough and agile enough to make it a popular dogfighter, but not as fast as a scout. The Destroyer can carry up to 5 armies, which is the smallest number which would be needed to capture a bombed planet. Most top players feel the Destroyer is too weak to be of much use in normal game situations.
- Assault Ship. The assault ship is a dedicated army carrier. It can hold a lot more than a Destroyer and is a great deal stronger, but is poorly equipped for dogfighting. The Assault Ship is the ship of choice for capturing well-defended planets, however, due to its toughness. Also, every other ship in the game can carry 2 armies per kill, while the assault ship can carry 3 armies per kill.
- Cruiser. A good front line ship, stronger but slower than a destroyer, but still with enough maneuverability to dodge a lot of torpedoes. The cruiser is generally the most popular ship for both dogfighting and capturing planets. It is also the default ship.
- Battleship. More powerful than a cruiser, but slow and sluggish. The battleship's speed makes it unsuitable for the defense of a wide zone, but it is quite good at defending a single point, like an important frontline planet or the team's starbase.
- Starbase. Vastly more powerful than a battleship and even slower to move around, the Starbase can be the basis for the front line. Your team can only have one, and if it's destroyed, your team must wait 30 minutes before another can be used. Proper starbase piloting is generally considered to be an entirely separate skill from dogfighting. Starbases are also the primary targets of ogging, since attempting to dogfight a starbase generally results in death. A well-executed ogg against an unprepared enemy team's starbase can put it out of the game quickly.
