OUTDATED -- Getting Started... Read here first!

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Welcome to Astarum, a brower based space empire building combat game.

What the game is about:
Basically, Astarum is your typical settle planets, build structure and ships and attack your enemies type of game, much like lots of other similar type games. However, I have tried to design this game to be a little more friendly than some of the other games I have seen and have tried to remove lots of the text and micro-managment (although there is still some!)

A bit about the developer:
I started to create this game as a way of teaching myself about various web technologies, mainly PHP and some Python. I am by no means a programming expert, more of an amatuer stumbling blindly about tring to make things work so please bear that in mind when playing!!

First steps:
Firstly before you start playing, you have to create an account, visit http://www.astarum.com and click register for an account. Fill in the form and press submit! All done. (It is important that you use your email address as your username, this is used in case you need to reset your password, your new password will be emailed to this address).

Now that you have created you account you can log in with it. When you created your account a planet was assigned to you, as well as serveral probes and scout ships that can be used for missions (missions will be covered later).

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The main screen

This is the main screen of the game where you control your planets build tasks and assign your ships to missions:

Here you can control your empire. You can see your planet. Your planet is the one with the yellow symbol on top, the smaller red arrows to the side show that you have this planet selected. All you planets show up with yellow symbols above them. Enemy planets show up with Red symbols, and allys show up as blue.

You can click on any other planet in this system, but for now since they are uninhabited, you will not be able to interact with them yet.

At the top of your screen you will see the following (or something like it):

These are your resources that you have availbable to you at this planet. The first symbol represents METAL. The numbers beside the symbol tells you how much metal you have and how much you can store on the planet, so 500/1500 means that you have 500 metal stored, with space for another 1000. The second symbol represents CRYSTAL and the third EXOTIC. Support is used to determin how many ships you can have in your fleets. We will come back to this later.

There are THREE resources in the game that must be obtained in order to build structures and ships, Metal, Crystal and Exotic. Metal and crystal can be found on almost every terrestrial planet where as exotic can only be found on Gas Giant planets. We will cover extracting materials in the next section.

You will also notice several strips of coloured boxes. These represent your available building space.

Green boxes are for industrial structures such as mines and warehouses - only industrial structures can be built here.


Red boxes are for defensive structures such as missile launchers and laser cannons. Only defensive structures can be placed here.


Blue boxes are for Orbital structures such as orbital shipyards and orbital warehouses. Orbital slots can also accomodate orbital based weapons platforms. These weapons can only be placed in orbital slots, such as orbital rocket launchers and become important when you are trying to defend gas giant planets (as they only have orbital slots available - being gas giants and having no solid surface)


Yellow boxes are special slots. NOT EVERY PLANET HAS SPECIAL SLOTS! Only a few do (including your starting planet). Special slots can house special technologies that must first be researched. More information on this later!


Next we will cover mining and storing your resources...

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Mining and storing your resources

Of the three resources types metal and crystal are the easiest to extract. First, look at your planets overview on the right hand side of the screen:



You can see next to the small picture of your planet that there are the three symbols for the resources along with a %. This tells you how abundant that material is on your planet, the more of it that is available, the faster you will be able to extract that resource. Resources are infinate, they cannot run out - but they can take a while to extract if the planet has a very low abundance of that resource.

Certain structures have the ability to mine resources from your planet. Mining is automatic, as long as you have a structure on your planet that can mine the resource it will continue to do so without your intervention. The resource will also be automatically placed in the resource pool for your planet. NOTE: resources are per planet, your other planets do not share this resource and must mine their own materials. However, you can send resources between planets with your ships, this will be coevered later when we discuss missions.

As you have just started you have one structure - your "Colony Hub". The colony hub can mine small amounts of metal and crystal, so you should never be in a situation where you are without resources or the ablility to mine them.

How to get exotic matter
In order to get the exotic resource when you first start out you have to research the "Liberty" Extraction class ship and create a fleet (Fleets will be covered below) with your ships. You then have to send that fleet to the nearest gas giant planet on an extraction mission. The ships will mine the resource and place it into your resource pool upon return!

Storing your resources

As you saw above, you can see how much of each resource you have available and how much storage space you have. Once your storage space is full for that resource your structures will stop mining it. They will continue when you have made room for more resources by either using some or by increasing the storage space available. Increasing the storage space is easy and can be done in two ways.

1. Build a warehouse OR silo for that resource.
Build a metal silo to store more Metal, build a Crystal silo to store more Crystal and Build a Exotic Silo to store more exotic. When you build any of these structures, the total storage space for those resources will be increased. A warehouse increases storage space for all resources, but can store less compared to a silo. They are very useful however if you are low on available slots on your planet.

2. Upgrade an existing silo structure or warehouse.
Every structure you can build can be upgraded up to a maximum level of 10. As the structures are upgraded they get more health, greater firepower (if it's a defensive structure) and more storage space (if its a silo). Upgrade a silo to enable it to hold more of that resource.

The Colony hub can also store small amounts of resources so upgrading this will also allow you to store more resources.

Next we will talk about how to build and upgrade structures

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Building and upgrading structures

In order to build a structure on your planet you must have the following:

1. A free slot on your planet of the correct type (Industrial/Defense/Orbital/Special)
2. Enough materials to build the structure
3. Any pre-requesite structures that are needed
4. Any pre-requesite structres that are needed to be at the correct level or higher.

This sounds more complicated than it actually is, as structures won't appear in the build list if you do not have the correct pre-req structures or have them at the correct levels, but will show up if you simply do not have enough resources to build them yet.

For example - in order to build a large warehouse you need to have at least a level 5 colony hub. Once you have upgraded your hub to level 5 that structure will become available for construction.

To build a structure click on one of the empty slots - available structures to build will be shown on the right hand side, as well as how long it will take to build and what resources it will take to build the structure - if you do not have enough resources to build the structure it will list what resources you are lacking underneath - See below for and example:


Simply click "Build" next to the structure that you want and it will start to build. You do not have to stay on this page whilst the structure is being built as it will be handled automatically.

Please note: You can only build one structure at a time on any one planet. If you want to cancel the build, just click on the slot again and press "Cancel Build" half of the resources + a random % more will be returned to you - so you don't loose eveything you have invested in the build.

Upgrading a structure
Upgrading a structure is easy - simply click on the structure and the structures details will appear on the right hand side. It will show you the current level of the structure, what weapons if any the structure has and the firepower of the structure. The structures health, as well as what upgrading the structure will yeild in terms of firepower, extraction and health and the upgrade time. See below for an example:


Upgrade the structure by pressing "Upgrade now..." If you don't have enough resources you will be told which ones you are lacking.

Note about upgrading: You cannot upgrade a structure if another on the same planet is being built or upgraded. Basically you can only build one structure or upgrade one structure on a planet at once.

You can cancel the upgrade by clicking on the structure being upgraded and clicking "Cancel upgrade" again, some of the upgrade costs will be returned to you. Simple eh!

Next, research...

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Research

Research can be found by clicking on "Research" at the top of the page. Research allows you improve things such as weapon damage, ship speed, health, research speed and more. It also allows you to research and unlock ships and structures that will then become available for production.

Research that improves your bonuses such as research speed etc can be researched up to level 10, giving you more bonus. For example ship speed can be researched to level 10, giving you a 50% bonus to you ships speed once it has been fully upgraded.

Research that unlocks ships or structure can only reach level one, it is then counted as complete and the ship will become available for construction (assuming you have the correct facilitys to build it!)

This is the research screen, it is very simple:


To start research, click on start next to the field you want to research - you can see what resources the research needs and how long it will take, as well as what the upgrade will unlock (if anything).

As you research certain fields to higher levels, other research subjects/ships and structures will become available. For example, researching "Mining technologies" to level 1 will unlock the "Crystal mining" research. The more you research the more becomes available!

The resources that the research needs is taken from whatever planet you currently have selected, so you need to select a planet (from the overview page) that has enough resources to perform the research, then click on the research link, and click "Start" next to the research that you want to undertake.

When the research is done you can start another, you can only research one field at a time. The research is empire wide, that is, you don't have to research the same things for every planet - you only have to research it once and it will be available for all your planets.

Next, fleets and missions...

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Creating fleets

Before you can perform any missions you have to have a fleet. Fleets perform missions, so first you have to create a fleet from ships you have available at your planets.

To create a fleet, click on a planet that has ships in orbit (you can see which planets have ships in orbit by clicking your planets and looking at the planet overview. You can also click the planets link to show you a list of all your planets. A small symbol of a ship next to the planet indicates that you have ships stationed there.)

When you are in the fleet page it will show at the top how many available ships you have of each type to perform the missions. To create a fleet, type a name in the "Fleet Name" box, and assign how many of each ship you want to be in the fleet by changing the "0" to the number you want. When you have done this for all your ships that you want in the fleet press "Create Fleet"

Your fleet will now appear below in the "Idle fleets" section. This shows you all your fleets at all planets, and that they are currently not performing any missions.

See below for an example of this:


You now have a fleet! You can send this fleet on a mission Yay! If you had any fleets on missions at this point in time you would see what mission your fleets is on and how long is left before the mission is complete.

To disband a fleet - click disband next to the fleet name - the ships will leave the fleet and be stationed at whatever planet the fleet was stationed at. If you want to recreate the fleet, you will have to go to the planet that the ships disbanded around and click fleets to see the ships that are at this planet (but not in fleets) Again, this sounds complicated, but is really very simple once you try it for yourself.

Now that you have a fleet lets send a mission to a planet...

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Missions

There are several different types of mission that you can perform, these are:

Deploy
Send your ships to be stationed at another planet

Extraction
Send your ships to a gas giant planet and attempt to extract the Exotic matter resource from its atmosphere. note, only cetain ship types can accomplish this mission, though you can send any ship type to perform this mission it will just fail if none of the ships are capable of performing it. Currently, the only ship that can extract exotic matter is the Liberty Extraction ship.

Colonise
Send a fleet to a planet and colonise it, adding to your empire. The fleet must contain at least one colony ship or else the mission will fail. You can only colonise unowned planets. you can colonise gas giants as well, but you will be provided with an orbital habitaion hub instead of the land based equivelent.

Scan
The scan mission sends your ships to a planet and attempts to scan it. A succsessfull scan will return the planets size, what structures it has on it and at what level, as well as how many resources are on the planet and what building slots the planet has. You may only get a partial scan, or the scan may fail if your fleets scan strength is too low. Generally speaking the more ships you have in your fleet the more chance of getting a sucsessfull scan

Attack
Send your fleet to attack an enemys planet. Your fleet will attack any ships and defensive structures around the planet. If your fleet survives, it will attempt to capture the planet. Depending upon your fleets size and how many and what types of structures the enemy has, this may fail. If it fails you ships will return, if it succeedes then you will have a new planet for your empire!

Transport
Transport resources between your planets. Simply select the fleet, then select what resources you want to transfer, and go! The fleet will travel to the target planet, deploy the resources and then return to the missions start point. This is a good way of getting exotic matter between your gas giants and your terrestial planets.

Perform a mission

To perform a mission do the following. First, from the overview, click the planet that you want to perform the mission on. So for example, if you wanted to perform an extraction mission, click on a gas giant planet either in your solar system or another. When you have this planet selected, click "Send Mission to this planet" which is located under the solar system view.

On the right hand side, choose the mission you want to perform, in this case "Extraction" and press next

Then choose what fleet you want to send on this mission from the dropdown box (only fleets that are idle will show in this list) and press next.

Read the mission review, which will also include the time it will take for the mission to be completed, and if your happy press confirm mission. If you want to start again simply press the "Send mission to this planet" link again.

The mission will now have been sent, you can keep an eye on its progress from the Fleets page and can cancel the mission at any time from here as well.

You will receive a message that will contain the mission report once the mission has been completed. Keep an eye out for these messages. Messages will be covered later, but suffice to say that they can be found by clicking the "Messages" link at the top of every page!!

Next, building ships to strengthen your empire!

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Building ships

Building ships is easy! First, select a planet on which you have built a shipyard, then press "Shipyard" on the bar at the top of the screen. You will be presented with something like this:



This is your shipyard, on the left you can see an overview of all your shipyards at all planets, as well as what they are building and how long it will be before they are finshed. On the right you see your current shipyard that you have selected. If you are not building any ships this screen will show you what ships are available to be built. If you are building ships, then you will get a summary of what is being built and when it will be completed.

To build ships simply fill in a number of how many ships you want to build of each type and press "Build ships" at the bottom. It will work its way down and try and build as many as possible. You will only build as many ships as you have resources for, or support available for. So for example, if you try and build 20 x Helios scout ships, but only have enough for 10, then only 10 will be built.

The ships that are available to build is based on the research that you have done and the level of the shipyard. For example, to build a Hawk frigate you must first have researched the "Hawk Frigate Hull" and have a level 2 launch site at the planet. If you do not meet any of these requirements then the ships will not be shown as available for construction.

Thats really all there is to that really! Each ship is deployed as it is built, so if you build 10, and each ship takes 45 seconds to build, then you will receive a new ship at your planet every 45 seconds until the build task is complete. Simple as that!

Next, the galactic map...

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The galactic map

The galactic map is how you view other planets in other systems. Here is how the map may look for you:



Each dot on the map is a solar system, simply click on a dot to be taken to that solar system. Hover over a dot to get the system name and its position. When you click a dot or star as I will call them from now, you will be taken to that system, click on any planet in order to perform missions as described previously.

The map itself is very simple, green circles indicate stars with planets you control in them, red indicates stars that have enemy planets in, whilst blue indicates systems with planets that your allies control. Yellow indicates a mixed system that contain combinations of the above.

You will also see two drop down boxes with numbers in them, this is the sector you wish to view. Space is divided into a 10x10 grid, you can view any of these sectors by changing the numbers and pressing select.

Remember, if you get lost and cannot find your way back to a sector with your planets, click the planets link at the top of every page to be taken to a list of planets you control. Simply click on a planet you own to be taken straight to it.

Thats all for now, enjoy and let me know if you need to know anything else!

one question about building the ship wat does the support do cuz i want the Colony Ship but im not sure if i can build it since i have less than 50 support....