| Starport: Galactic Empires | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | PlayTechTonics |
| Publisher(s) | PlayTechTonics |
| Designer(s) | Aaron Hunter |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Release date(s) | February 3, 2004 |
| Genre(s) | MMORPG Space Simulation |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
| System requirements
Minimum Requirements:
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Starport: Galactic Empires is a free, space-oriented, massively multiplayer online role-playing game which uses a third-person overhead view similar to that used in Asteroids. The game uses semi-realistic 2-dimensional physics for both space and atmospheric travel, affecting both the movement of ships and player-fired weaponry. Characters can conquer and colonize planets with a variety of different terrains depending on the type of planet. The player can harvest resources, generate money, and produce weapons with their colony. Starport shares many core concepts with Tradewars 2002, notably the commodity trading and planet controlling aspects.
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Starport is notable in the MMORPG genre as being one of the very early adopters of the free to play business model, which instead of charging players a monthly subscription fee it is instead free to play and allows players to purchase extra resources in the game through a feature called "The Admiral's Club."[1]
Although Starport Galactic Empires is an MMORPG, and there is no set story, there is an introduction storyline before any player begins their game:
"You are in the future at the dawn of space exploration. After a misrable life in a colony on planet earth, you decide to leave and look for a more exciting life. A wealthy space merchant that you meet while on earth decides to give you your chance to get a better life. He takes you into Starbase Sol, the largest trading base and capitol of the galaxy. Because of his increasing sympathy for you, he donates his Merchant Cruiser spaceship and $10,000 credits to you to start your new life.
Your life in the Starport universe begins near Earth where you will be the captain of a new merchant vessel. By gaining funds and experience you can upgrade your ship and your standing as the game progresses. Haul valuable cargo and transport passengers through space to begin working your way up in the game world.
In Starport, greater reward means greater risk. You'll need to equip your ship to handle it. During your progress, you'll engage in combat with other players, planetary defense platforms, space-anchored gun turrets and other hostiles. From traditional projectile weapons and smart-missiles to exotic energy weapons, you'll have a good selection of firepower from which to choose.
You might choose to claim a world by starting a colony on it. Keep these colonies defended, keep the colonists who reside there happy, and they can become valuable strongholds. You will be known as a 'builder'.
Later, you might choose to roam the galaxy as a pirate and invade and take over the colonies of others. You might also choose to spend your warp fuel on exploration, where you might find powerful artifacts of alien technology or valuable information. You will be known as a 'pirate'.
Either way, in time, you could own a large empire of colonies and earn many experience points which will put you in the top of the rankings."
Essentially, you are aiming to become the most feared Emperor or Dark Overlord in the galaxy.
Players compete to get the most experience points and establish themselves as the most feared pirate of the galaxy or the most respected Emperor of their Empire. Experience points in this game is not like other games where it can help you unlock special weapons or items, but they are more like your "score" in the game. Reputation points can establish 2 things: your way of game play (pirate or builder) and your fame among the galaxy.
Experience is gained by killing npcs, other players, successfully invading colonies, performing various trading transactions, doing taxi service, and escorting weak npcs. However the most common and best way to gain experience is to build an empire of colonies. Each colony can house up to 25,000 colonists, and for each set of 50 colonists you have per hour, you get 1 experience point per hour. So if you own multiple colonies with a grand total of 50,000 colonists, you will get 1,000 experience points that hour. Experience is lost by getting killed (shot down), getting caught robbing a starport, and completely neglecting a colonies' needs for more than 3 days. When one player shoots down another, the one that gets shot down will lose 1/4 of his experience, in which case that experience will be given to the player that shot him down. The amount of experience gained or lost can be more, however, if the player getting shot down has a bounty on his head imposed by the U.N. police.
Reputation points are gained by killing people and npcs with negative reputation (pirates) and building colonies with happy colonists. Rep. points are lost by killing people and npcs with positive rep (builders), building colonies with unhappy colonists, robbing starports, and attacking innocent players (newbies).
The ultimate quest for all to play is to be considered by all as one of the legendary starport players.
Before a player registers to join a server, he must first set up his profile for that server. He can choose his profile picture, set his username for that server, and lastly set up his player stats.
Player stats are an important aspect of the game due to the fact they dictate how you can function while playing that servers. Players receive 15 stat points to distribute to their character, with a single stat not able to exceed 10.
Currently, their 3 different character stats: Charisma, Dexterity, and Wisdom.
For example, some acceptable combination of stats could be 5 charisma, 10 dexterity, 0 wisdom; 2 charisma, 9 dexterity, 4 wisdom; you would not be able to use stat combos similar to this: 12 charisma, 2 dexterity, 1 wisdom because one of the stats is over 10.
Profiles can be changed with 5,000 admiral tokens. This is often an invaluable advantage when a player decides he wants to change from a builder to a pirate.
Starport has grown from one large galaxy (server) into many large, complex and unique types and forms of galaxies (servers). Currently there are just fewer than 30 different servers. However they all fall under one of two "types" of servers and one of five "forms" of servers.
The two "types" of servers are: Normal (Player vs. Player) and Pax(player vs. environment [no combat between players]).
The five "forms" of servers are as follows: Permaverse (never-ending), Rebangs (servers reset after 10–21 days), Extended Rebangs (games reset after 1 month to 1 year), Ultra-short rebangs (server resets after 20 minutes), and tournament servers .
--------Version 1.1 of this server was a game that was only 4 hours long. Thereby making building colonies tactically inefficient. The design of this server was to fight other players and invade colonies that were already programmed into the start of each 4 hour game. However, many people lost interest in this server because there were two major defects, one got fixed but the other did not. The first one was a bug that allowed those who owned at least one colony to be able to press certain buttons and instantly receive cash out of thin air. This bug did get fixed after awhile. The second bug wasn't necessarily a bug, but a practical game issue that did not get solved. The game would give you 25 experience points for founding a colony, so people would just buy hundreds of them and place them on planets and they leave them to do nothing. Even though they didn't fully build their colonies, they would still win that game because placing 100's of colonies would give you thousands of exp points. This inefficiency never got fixed.
--------Version 1.2 of this server was developed after everybody wanted a very combat oriented server, but did not want to play the original blitzkrieg due to its bugs. So the developers came out with version 1.2 of Blitzkrieg, which is still in use today. In order for a new game to start, the server will wait until there are at least 4 people online before the game begins. At the beginning of each game, everybody is split into 2 equal teams and each person starts out with $1,000,000 credits. The object of this game is to battle for control of 1-6 planets in an extremely small server (it ranges from 5-9 systems every new reset). For every 5 seconds that a team is in control of one of the planets, that team gets anywhere from 500-1500 experience per person on that team (amount of exp earned per person depends on various factors like amount of people of opposing teams and your characters wisdom score, etc.). At the end of 20 minutes the team with the most total exp points wins. There are no npcs in this server and no building is allowed. The only way to gain exp is to be in control of a colony for at least 5 seconds or to kill other players on the opposite team. Blitzkrieg features the only "active" reset of any server. When most servers reset, the server goes offline for about 5 minutes to be reset before coming back online. Blitzkrieg takes only 1 second to reset and it does not go offline when it does so, in which case no one will be disconnected. This version of the game is one of the most popular servers of starport. It also has rush hours, when more people will be on than on other points of time. The rush hours tend to be at 11am to 1 pm (lunch) and also primetime (5-7pm).
There are two types of servers that fall into the tourney category. The first is The Ring Nebula which is a standard tourney game. The other is The Starport: Galactic Empires Championship. The championship only happens once a year, played the same way as a standard tourney, except that the players aren't there for the sole purpose of trying to win tourney points, but to earn the title of "Starport Champion" of that particular year. This title is usually displayed on their profile in-game and in the forums.
A Corporation is the Starport's version of clans/guilds in other games. Players can choose to join a corporation or found their own. Each server has its own rules on how big a corporation can be, but they tend to range from 1-10 people with some servers allowing 15. The founder and/or current leader of the corporation is known as the CEO. He gets a couple of extra benefits with his position. He is the only person allowed to kick people out, change a corporations password (in order to join a corporation you must be told the password by someone inside the corporation and type it into a box in order to join that corporation), and the only person allowed to use the Corporate Flagship, one of the better ships in the game.
Corporations are used to have people join together to help each other build up colonies, invade enemies' colonies with each other, and share experience gained from each members' colonies. One major advantage is that friendly-fire is disabled for people in the same corporation, so they can't accidentally kill each other. Another privlege they all get is access to a navigator on all of their fellow corporation members' coordinates, so they all know where each other is at all times. The main use of them is to band together to become the largest and most powerful corporation in the galaxy. Because they are only powerful when they have lots of colonies and high exp players, corporations are normally used in permaverses, but can be used in other servers if that person really wants. In permaverses, often the goal for many people is not to be the most powerful player in the universe, but to be a member of the most powerful corporation of the galaxy, which requires a lot of teamwork.
A corporation may also contract individuals to help with colony building and to make short-term allies. These contractors can donate money to the corporation and be under protection from friendly fire from this corporation, but he does not have access to any of the corporation members' coordinates and cannot access any of their colonies except to help donate recources to help build.
In order to balance the game for full-time gamers and people who work full time and only get to play part-time, the game must be balanced in order to accommodate both of them. This is accomplished via a game feature known as Warp Fuel. In order to travel from system to system, or land on planets or dock at starports, you must use some warp fuel. Whenever you start on a new server, you start with 2000 gallons with a 5000 gallon maximum holding at one time. When you run out, you must wait for it to regenerate. The average is .5 gallons per minute, with the average ship using 9 gallons per warp. So as you can see, if you sleep for 12 hours (720 minutes) and come back to the game, you will see that you have generated about 360 gallons of warp fuel. While it doesn't seem like very much, the warp fuel generation rate also does vary from server to server. The Deep-freeze is a part-time gamers’ haven, because its generation rate is .25 per minute, so if someone were to play it full time, they would run out of fuel real quick. On tourney games they have the best regen rate at 1 gallon per minute, which is better for full time players.
Warp fuel cannot be bought by in-game credits. You must wait for it to automatically regenerate. This allows for all people to have a fair chance at the game. However, it still isn't perfect, as full-time gamers tend to usually do better anyway.
There is one exception to this feature. Using real money, you can buy warp fuel from the Admirals Club, however it is expensive. If you have 0 gallons and you want to buy enough to max out your capacity (5000 gallons max), it will cost you 10,000 tokens which is equal to $10 American dollars.
There are two types of money that can be used in the game: Credits and Tokens
Note: Tokens can buy credits but credits CANNOT buy tokens. There is one exception to this: Tokens and credits can be traded from player to player. So often a player will buy tokens and sell them for ridiculously high amounts of credits to players who do not want to spend real money in the game.
Starport is well known as being one of the first mmorpgs that used the free to play business model. This means that players did not have to pay a start-up fee or monthly fee, but instead is completely free to play with an option to buy extra items and game credit via a store known as the "Admirals Club" via real money.
The Admirals Club is one of the more unique item malls in the gaming industry. While most item malls allow you to buy much more upgraded items and thus have a powerful advantage over those who don't buy, the Admirals Club is known to not be completely overpowered. While it does give its buyers an edge, it is not what most say as an "I win" button, where you can buy your victory.
In order to help with the confusion of in-game credit and real money, the developers came up with the idea of using real money to buy special money within the game known as Admirals Tokens. The buying rate is 1,000 admiral tokens for $1 U.S. dollar, with a minimum purchase of 5,000 admiral tokens per transaction ($5). Users pay using an online transaction via a major credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Users paying through a card will have their transaction processed immediately, while those using PayPal have an average wait time of 1–2 days before they get there transaction processed.
All items purchased in The Admirals Club are purchased via admiral tokens. Some of the items that can be purchased are as follows:
These are the main items bought but there are several others that can be bought.
Because Starport is an mmo, it has an active community while a player will be offline.
There are two types of space in every galaxy: U.N. controlled and open.
You may also log off in one of your own colonies, however, if that colony is successfully invaded and taken over by someone else, you will be kicked out into open space.
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Starport: Galactic Empires has received generally decent to great reviews from notable reviewers such as mmorpg.com and Tucows. Most of the points lost on reviews tend to be due to the small staffing, un-updated graphics, and a few in-game critics.
Starport Galactic Empires has over 250,000 players . This causes some tension for the newcomers of the game. While players are encouraged to help out the newbies, some of the veterans tend to just ignore them and will often take advantage of them by killing them and trick them into giving them money or colonies. For this reason, newcomers have a moderate quit rate after their first day of playing.
Next, Starport was developed and produced by a small team of developers. However, all but 2 of them have left the studio, therefore making the game undermanned. However it continues to move along in progress. Due to the fact of its small staff, players have become the true testers of the game, but will often complain to the developers when a patch is not done the way they want. This makes a moderate animosity towards the developers, who usually ignore the complaints.
Starport has been available to the public for free play since February 2004. The original concept was conceived in 1995 and continued to develop until its release to the public on February 3, 2004. It was developed by a moderately small team of full time developers. However, most would end up leaving to the current date. The game now only has one full-time staff member, its original conceiver, Aaron Hunter, also known in game by his username: Toonces. The game also features 1 part-time staff member to help with coding and the maintenance of Blitzkrieg.
Space combat and trading games