General Q&A? Ask here.

I will be releasing the first 6 chapters on early access beta. I keep going back and reviewing the first six chapters, improving them as I go. I have friends proofreading them, giving suggestions, etc... The remaining chapters are in my head, but it will be a while before they are done. With everything else SpaceWars, the novel is taking a back seat unfortunately.

 

To Tereva

- Is there a way to download / see / read a "rule book" so that we can get familiar with the game-play / rules before the game?
Indeed there will be a rulebook with helpful instructions from simple commands to the more hardcore details

- Will the game include some kind of tutorial (or maybe just player vs AI games) to learn the rope ?
There will be single player instanced quest vs AI missions, and in fact, the first two are optional tutorial missions

- If I understand correctly, if we want to play several races, we will have to do it on several servers ? This means that at the beginning since there will be only one server we will not be able to play another race, except if we create an "illegal" second account with another email ?
Multi-account usage would be frowned upon, but if you don't like your staring race, you can always delete your account and start new (or wait for the next server that spools up). There's a lot of complexity for each race therefore the more time you spend on it the more you might get addicted to it.

 

To Ereinion

1. Is one player only controlling one ship in a battle or will he be able to have multiple ones?
You control only one ship -- though there is a fleet commander skill that actually allows you a second, then a third ship to control. There is also a support ship skill that allows you to control repair tenders, hospital ships and troop ships. Though it would be crazy to do, you could in theory max out those skills, thus controlling 5 ships (three warships, two support).

2. If a player loses a battle, because his ship/-s get destroyed, what will happen to the ship? Will it just respawn somewhere? Will it be locked for some time until it respawns somewhere? or will it just be gone?
If your ship is destroyed, you have to acquire a new ship using your XP. As you get new ships, you'll have a roster of ships in your arsenal, so you just take another. If you lose your first ship as a newbie, you automatically get a default XP to get a new basic low tier ship (Corvette class III)

 

There's always a counterbalance; if you max out those skills, you lose out on other captains/avatar skills. Also if you choose the fleet commander option, the skill tree takes you down a different path where you cannot command the more powerful ships.
And yes... you have the exact same time to allocate power and do your combat round as anyone with one ship; so you'd better be faster at managing them all.

 

That is something to be debated for now. We don't want people resetting their skill trees multiple times just to get a special advantage; there would be some penalty associated with it.

 

The skill tree for your character is only for that server, any new server you join its starting from scratch. A medium sized server should take 2-3 months; though the servers are designed to have slow/fast options if necessary (eg. travel time is made faster/slower, battle time clock is made faster/slower).

 

The skill trees for Sol/Genari are all completed and defined (quite a few skills/officers etc...), I will be making a thread for them soon.

 

How many player will a server being able to host ? In theory, there is no limit, but we plan to set limits
Why not having only 1 "server" (ie, an unique "universe" all players are logged into, the way EVE is doing it) ?
Some new players don't want to join up when a server is already deep into conflict, and also some players might want to try other races.
Is having several server only because of performance or size of the map that is too small to host players after a certain limit ?
We also have to be realistic at the beginning -- who knows how many players will be active at the start? If there are going to be only 200? 2000? 20,000?
The maps can be huge, with over 100,000 randomly generated regions -- but I personally hand craft every region.

 

Will you be able to name your ships?
Yes indeed you will, and it will actually show up on the side of the ship as well. The Genari have their own 'alphabet', so it will show in genari style if you are that race.

 

an alpha version of what it looks like when you name your ship

 

The game will be hosted on AWS for now.
As for multiple servers, remember that the server ends at some point when one race dominates over all others, and takes out enemy homeworlds. So the server run is not permanent. But there are legacy awards that carry over...