Farhold

4.0.1 Tactical Operations Polish: use the wrapped minimap to navigate large plates, mark worlds for Priority/Defend/Attack/Rally planning, send selected fleets directly to Rally worlds, watch the nearest research completion and explicit victory share in the masthead, and use Ctrl+Z/Ctrl+Y to revise pre-turn fleet orders. Your minimap, legend and overlay choices persist between sessions.

You are one house among two and seven — seven can take the field, if the plate carries lights enough for them. You begin with one settled world and one probe. Everything else in the reach is an unread point on a photographic plate ruled in hexes: 16 columns by 12 rows on the open reach, one light to a hex and never two lights closer than 2 hexes.

The turn, in order

1. Give orders: set each world's ledger, lay hulls down on the slip, split the research, set courses.
2. Press End turn (or the Enter key). Every house moves at once — nobody waits their go.
3. Output is produced and spent on the heads you chose; hulls complete; research advances; people grow.
4. Fleets move, arrive, and survey what they find.
5. Whatever meets at a star fights. Landings and colonies follow, then the ledger is totted up.

The five heads of the ledger

Each world makes one stream of output — the people who can actually work the industry, times the yield of the ground, lifted by your Works mark. Idle industry with nobody to run it produces nothing.

An opening home world makes about 52.9 points a turn on the ledger it starts with (works 30%, terra 20%, yards 25%, sci 20%, levy 5%), and grows by about 6.21 million people, with room for 202.

The plate wraps

The reach is a torus. Sail off the right-hand edge and you come round on the left; off the top and you come round at the bottom. Courses are laid the short way of their own accord, which is often over a seam rather than through the middle: on the open reach the two opposite corners are 1 hex apart, and no two hexes anywhere on it are more than 17 apart. There is no back door, no dead end and no safe corner to build up in unmolested.

Plates are ruled 16 columns by 12 rows on the open reach, and you can rule one to order from the opening sheet: 10 to 40 columns, 8 to 30 rows, and as many lights as the plate will hold. Six plates are ruled for you already:

A plate will not seat more houses than it carries lights for — 3 lights a house at least — so asking for seven on the pocket seats fewer, and the game says so. Row counts are always even — a hex plate can only wrap top to bottom when they are, so an odd number is rounded up.

Reading the plate

Every light is printed in the colour of its class, which is read off the climate:

The key to the plate — the houses and the five classes — sits at the head of the right-hand column, above the panes, where it does not cover the reach.

The halo around a light grows with the yield of its ground. A ring in a house's own colour means somebody holds it, and the wash around a held world is that house's reach. Rest the pointer on a squadron and a card reads out whose it is, what is aboard, its weight of fire, its speed and where it is bound; rest it on a light instead and you get the class, the climate, the yield and whatever your last survey said.

Centring the plate

Double-click a light or a squadron, press c with one chosen, or use the centre chip, and it comes to the middle of the glass. Because the reach wraps there is no light that cannot sit in the centre: the plate simply comes round the other way, so a world on the far edge can be worked on with its whole neighbourhood around it. h centres on your own home world, 0 pulls back to the whole plate, and the title block names whatever the glass is centred on.

A click: reading a world, or setting a course

Two chips on the plate say what a click on a light does, and the m key swaps them:

• Read the world — a click opens that light’s ledger and nothing moves. This is how the plate opens.
• Set a course — a click sends the squadron you have selected to that light, and the flash quotes the turns to arrival.

Holding shift does the other job for a single click, so neither setting ever traps you. The squadron pane carries the same switch.

Movement

There are five ways to send a squadron somewhere, and none of them needs more than one gesture:

• Drag it from its mark onto a light.
• Right-click a light with the squadron chosen.
• Choose set a course and click a light.
• Open a world and press send beside a squadron in its list — they are listed nearest first with the turns each would take.
• Press f, or click the idle count in the masthead, to step through the squadrons awaiting orders, each brought to the middle of the glass in turn.

While a squadron is in hand the plate shades the hexes it can be standing on at the end of this turn, and more faintly at the end of the next; resting the pointer on a light draws the course it would take, hex by hex, with the distance and the turns, before anything is committed. The masthead counts the squadrons still awaiting orders and prints it in red while any are.

Select one of your squadrons on the plate — or from the Fleets list — and, with set a course chosen, click a star. The course is laid out hex by hex and the dashed line carries a tick showing the turns to arrival. A squadron covers its speed in hexes each turn, flies at the speed of its slowest hull, and every hull flies at the Drive mark it was built with: 1.8 hexes a turn at mark 0 and 6.6 at mark 12. Widest run across the open reach is 7 hexes, which is 4 turns for an unmarked drive and 2 for a full one. Hold shift while clicking to look at a star without ordering the squadron there. Detach part of a squadron from the Fleets pane when you want a screen and a strike force going different ways.

Arrows pan, + and - zoom, 0 fits the whole plate, c centres on what is chosen, h centres on home, m swaps reading a world for setting a course, Esc clears the selection.

Hulls

A hull is stamped with your gunnery and structure marks the moment it is laid down, and keeps them for life. Building cheap and early leaves you with cheap and early ships. A battery cannot move and will not run from a fight.

Research

The first mark costs 45 points and the last 3482. Science from every world pools, then splits the way you set it.

Ground

A seedship plants a colony on any unowned world with a climate of 15 or better, landing 10M people. Taking a world someone else holds needs the orbit cleared of their ships first, then legions landed: they must beat a garrison of 3 plus fifteen hundredths of the population. A world taken keeps 55% of its people and 45% of its industry, so conquest is never as good as it looks from orbit.

The fighting

Whatever meets at a light fights, and the Actions pane reports it: both sides, the roll of hulls each brought, what each lost, how many exchanges it took and who held the orbit. A landing gives the troops against the garrison and what it cost the people; a bombardment gives the dead and the works lost. Click a report and the plate comes round to the place.

The plate marks where the fighting was for three turns, fading as it goes: a burst for a fleet action, a wedge for a landing, a broken ring for a bombardment. You are shown only what your own house fought or can still read from where it stands.

Winning

Three ways, checked in this order:

• Conquest — no rival house has a world or a hull left.
• Supremacy — you hold twice the second house and 38% of the whole reach for 4 turns running.
• The ledger — at the last turn, the highest total of people, industry, climate, marks, hulls and reserve.

Losing

You are extinguished when you hold no world and no hull. Short of that you lose by being second on the ledger when the survey closes, or by watching another house declare supremacy. A house that gives no orders at all finishes well under a third of the reach and has never won a measured game.

Restarting

To give up on a game and set another sky, press New survey in the masthead or the n key: the opening sheet comes back and you can choose another reach, another number of houses, another skill or another seed. The game you were playing is only written over when the new survey actually begins, so Resume takes you back to it right up to that moment, and the sheet says which turn it would lose; Esc backs out without starting anything.

The game saves itself to your browser after every turn, under one key named for the package. Reload the page and press Resume to pick the same game up. Setting the same seed number reproduces the same sky and the same machine play exactly.

Map controls

The map stays where you put it when you select or cycle squadrons. Use centre or c only when you want the chosen light or squadron brought to the middle. The visible −, Fit, and + controls duplicate keyboard and wheel zoom. Threat range shades the one-turn reach of hostile mobile fleets that your house can currently see; overlapping hostile reach is drawn progressively darker, while hidden fleets remain hidden.