Game 310: Andromeda Conquest

 

We're going back in time a bit, for an Avalon Hill game I hadn't originally planned on playing. Back when I did my retrospective on the company's early computer games, I stopped at Galaxy, the first and only of their titles to make whale status. But at the invitation of The Wargaming Scribe, I've participated in a four-player play-by-email match against him and two forum members, Dayyalu and Porkbelly.

WGS already covered his (boring) singleplayer experience in an AAR+R&R, so I won't be doing that. I had played my own a solo game for practice a few months ago, but there isn't any ship-ship combat in that mode, so I begin this match almost completely ignorant on how it works.

The contenders for the galaxy:

• Dayyalu, a Dominions player, commands an aquatic race.
  
• Porkbelly controls molluscan space terrors.
  
• I have the robots, who, contrary James Cameron's warnings, largely ignored humanity once they gained sentience and blasted off to colonize the asteroid belt.
  
• WGS, following his success with formic formations plays again as insectoids.

 

In a four-player game, the galaxy will be packed with 48 planetary systems, but the goal is to be the first to conquer ten of them.

We played by exchanging save states over email until one emerged the winner. We had no formal rules on how to use save states, but I only ever reloaded to undo input errors - a distressingly easy thing to do in this game, which can forfeit your move when you accidentally perform an illegal one - and to get screenshots after completing a turn. I did not, under any circumstances (with one exception where it crashed the game), load states to undo any purposeful decisions, or to gain any information that would not have been revealed to me normally.

Also see The Wargaming Scribe's AAR and Porkbelly's diary for accounts of the match from their perspectives.

 

Turn 1

Out of the aeons, a wet tentacle from somewhere in the reaches of space slaps me in the face.

Greetings, bot-people!

Prepare to be Bit-Shifted to the Left with No Carry.

We will AND your registers with NULL and feed your flickering LEDs to the whelk-hatchery.

Have a nice day! Ftaghn! 

 

The aquatics and molluscs have taken their opening moves, and now it is time for the robots to rise. We will not be reasoned with, will not be bargained with, and will not stop until [priority override] we accumulate sufficient VPs!

This is just a sub-sector of the galaxy and it's already pretty cluttered. A breakdown of what's going on:

• Each asterisk is a system.
• The '29' indicates that the system to directly to the left is identified as system 29. This is, of course, the robot's homeworld. The 29 itself may or may not be obscuring something on the map, and I shudder to think of how unreadable things will get as more planets are colonized.
• My empire consists only of system 29, which contributes 10 resource points per turn, and has 11 defense points.

 

Every turn begins with the opportunity to establish a colony, but this is a senseless option on turn 1 before you've built any colony ships. After declining, my next decision is to decide how to allocate my ten RP's. Unspent resources do not accumulate for the next round.

• Novas are slow but powerful warships that can obliterate undefended planets. At 12 RP's per, they are absolutely not worth it unless you need a planet gone.
  
• Echos are colony ships with no firepower. They cost 10 RP's.
• Ramas are quick scout/fighter ships and only cost 2 RP's.

 

You might wonder, as I did before the game got far underway, why would you ever build a Nova? If you can kill a planet's defenses, surely it's better to colonize, right? But to colonize, you must park an Echo in orbit above an unfriendly planet and keep it there for an entire turn. Only at the beginning of the next turn will you be given the option to colonize, and while waiting your opponent could very well have scrambled some Ramas during their turn and destroyed your Echo. The Nova, on the other hand, can destroy a planet the same turn it moves into its orbit, provided you get its defenses down to zero.

 

My first tactical decision - I can either build a colony ship so that I may begin expansion immediately but semi-blindly, but in doing so I can't build anything else this turn. Or I might begin with building some scouts, send them to visit the many neighboring worlds, and select the best for colonization a turn later. Unfortunately, the various scanning and probing options are not available until you build your first ship. You must give your first build orders completely blind.

I pick the first option, and have my newly built Echo scan the area and probe the system.

Looks like someone's scouting early! The 'A' stands for 'Alien,' so it might not necessarily be the aquatics.

A strategic scan gives me a complete galactic map, and the "navigation" option shows us the type of each system in range. I overlay these for a strategic map:

The higher the number, the more difficult colonization is. My Echo can only travel two spaces per turn, and type 1's could be alien homeworlds, so I send it south to the type-0 blue giant, away from the aliens. This turns out to be an uninhabited world worth 5 RP's per turn. I will be able to colonize it next turn.

 

Turn 2

Somewhere out Beyond the Moon... the Scallops sing a baleful tune.

Hark, yon people of Bit

Prepare to cast out thy Binary ways and embrace the mighty Word of the Octal !!

 

Silly octopoids. Our 6502-powered brains already operate on octal words!

Obviously, the first thing I do is settle the uninhabited system discovered in the previous turn. This costs me 6 RP's and won't pay dividends until the next turn, leaving me with enough RP's to build two scouts, or four defense units, or one scout and two defense units. And I can't do any scanning until I decide. I pick the scouts, scan, and update my map.

Circles indicate new ships that came out of nowhere.

Something entered my space! And given that it moved exactly two spaces, it could well be a colony ship. This won't do, so I have my scouts investigate - two of them, crucially, the minimum needed to do any damage.

Ah ha. An expensive Echo of the fish people, unaccompanied! And here I expected snails. My scouts blow it away. The planet here, incidentally, offers 5 RP's per turn but is heavily defended and inhabited by bug-people who must be neutral, given that homeworlds yield 10. Something to think about for the future.

My Echo, it turns out, is not expended by colonization, so I send it northeast to the other type-0 world, which offers 7 RP's per turn but is occupied by molluscs and somewhat defended. Colonization won't be possible without a few turns of orbital bombardment first.

 

Turn 3

Squid-thulhu lies asleep and dreaming...but soon will hear the robots screaming.

Is this aggression we detect from the bot-folk?

All is futile! Cease now, lest your cpu's overheat.

What the. Where did my Echo go?

My planets are fine, but I can't do any scanning until the build orders are complete. With 15 RP's, I choose to scout. I build four fleets of Ramas, leaving one RP for defense.

A probe from my surviving Rama shows that the fish have bitten back. Three enemy Ramas are at its position, and I move it down to where my Echo was lost and find another two.

Compiling my maps, I'm pretty sure I know where their homeworld is now.

It's the lime-green '1.'

 

My fleets hit back, destroying four of the five invading Ramas. But I fear this war delays my expansion while the snails and the ants spread unchecked. Or, hopefully, butt heads with each other.

Turn 4

The Fishy-folk mean you no harm...so please retract your robot arm.

 

Oh how we hear the white whale cry!

Bad Ahab! Further aggression against my fishy friends will mean war!

Will it, though?

I'm down one Rama from the previous turn, and spend all my resources on four more fleets. Probes show three fish Ramas remain in my cluster, and to the west, someone is expanding.

With my 14 Ramas, which I consolidate to seven fleets, I attack the natives on the type-0 planet. Five fleets is enough to eliminate its defenses, and I scout two more mediocre planets in my cluster with the rest.

In the meantime, there's been some metagaming. WGS has offered me a non-aggression pact, and I've offered intel on fish movements. Publicly, Porkbelly boasts of conquests, and both he and WGS talk of clashes. Meanwhile, I warn Dayyalu to stay away from my stakeouts, and WGS thinks I'm talking to him, and Dayyalu claims to have enacted a terrible retaliation.

Turn 5

How good it feels to be not...a mindless, rusty, robo-bot.

 

It seems we share a mistrust of the Ant-folk. 

They are indeed many.

 

The savegame passes to me, and it seems Dayyalu has exaggerated. Six of my seven fleets are intact. Nevertheless, with five turns in and only one planet conquered, I fear I have fallen behind. The expansion MUST continue. I build an Echo and another Rama fleet, and scan.

'F' represent my fleets. The 'A' at the center bottom is at one of the mediocre planets I scouted. The fish sank my fleet there.

I could try to take the type-0 planet with my newly built Echo, but Dayyalu would just commission some Ramas next turn and destroy it. I could defend it with Ramas of my own, but I'd still be taking a chance of losing the Echo next turn with a lucky shot. However, my first action this turn is scouting. I send my northwest fleet further northwest to check out the 'A'.

It's the snails! At this star, a valuable 9-RP planet with no defenses, an Echo escorted by two Ramas waits in orbit, no doubt prepared to colonize  next turn. I fire, but hit only one Rama.

The other 'A' in range is a fleet of six fish Ramas, which I obliterate with my remaining fleets. I can not risk having them interfere with my expansion any longer, and finally, I send my Echo southward, out of range of both fish and snail.

Nevertheless I fear the game is lost. It will take me until Turn 7 to colonize my next world, if it's even uninhabited, the snails expand southward unchecked, and I have no clue what the ants are up to aside from fighting the snails.

 

Turn 6

Four of my seven Rama fleets are destroyed, but the Echo remains en route. My Echo must be protected, so I build seven more Ramas in four more fleets.

Red now designates the snails, and white arrows my prior movement. The red 'A' is on a system I'm certain is colonized.

The Rama fleet that tried and failed to intercept a snail Echo is, of course, destroyed. At the green-circled 'A' near my systems, the fish replaced their ranks with twelve new Ramas and destroyed three of my six fleets, and they directly threaten my Echo.

Initially, I sent all of my thirteen Ramas down to meet up with at the type-1 planet to its south, which turned out to be uninhabited and worth 9 RP's - wish I scouted that out sooner instead of wasting precious time depopulating a native type-0! However, this strategy crashed the game on Dayyalu's turn, so I had a do-over.

On the do-over, I whittle the fish fleets down to four Ramas and send the rest of mine down to meet up with my Echo.

Turn 7

We're coming for you Barbara

The tentacles are reaching out. No more shall you use this planet as a forward base!

Send your fleets east!

 

My Rama interceptors are destroyed, but the Echo and its defenders live, so I build a much needed colony. Unfortunately this leaves me few resources for this turn, only enough to build three more Ramas.

In the southwest, it looks like the snails are expanding into territory previously scouted, unchecked, too far away from me to interfere right now, or possibly at all. To my south, a few worlds are in range of the system I just colonized, but the remains of the fleet my interceptors attacked threatens my expansion. And to my north, I'm being invaded by snails and fish!

The snails have to consist of a Rama strike fleet. They moved too fast to be anything else. The fish might consist of planet-destroying Novas, but I doubt they can afford that.

I send one Rama to probe the snails. The result - only four Ramas! Hardly a threat, or at least not an imminent one. But I have only eight left myself, and sending any to probe the fish would diminish my defenses. Assuming this to be a harmless scout, I send the rest of them, along with my Echo, eastward to the type-9 planet, which probes discover is worth 7 RP's.

 

Turn 8

The fish fleet hovering around my desired world has struck, eliminating all but one of my Echo's escorts, but crucially, the Echo survives. I colonize at a very expensive one-time cost of 15 RP's, leaving me with only enough for four more Ramas for defense.

Probes show one of my colonies is attacked by snails and fish, but not many. Yet. An incoming snail fleet from the west must be Ramas, and I don't know how many. But there seems to be no way to save my Echo, which shares its orbit with the 16 enemy Ramas that took out most of its escorts.

My Ramas are able to kill five of them, and I keep the Echo parked there for now. The worlds to the north will just have to bear the storm for another turn.

Turn 9

All of my fleets are gone, and the world I colonized just last turn has had its defenses reduced to zero. This is bad. I spend everything on Ramas to defend, but it's almost certainly too late.

The fleet that just bombed the crap out of my newest homeworld consists of 18 Ramas and can hit anywhere in my empire. Far worse than that, a fleet group of snails and fish, including one planet-destroying Nova, converged in a spot also capable of hitting any of my worlds. This is very bad. Destroying the Nova this turn is impossible, and adequately defending any of my planets is likely also impossible. I assumed the snails approaching from the west could only be a Rama scout and posed no immediate threat. But further out west, they expanded southward, and again, I had no means of slowing this.

I weighed my options. None of them seemed promising.

• Strike back at the (likely heavily defended) fish homeworld with a big fleet group of my own.
  
• Strike back at the fish homeworld with lots of little scattered fleets in the hopes of distracting them.
• Bargain with the fish or snails, bluffing for my lack of a bargaining chip.
• Hit back at the fish fleet in my orbit.
  

 

That last one wasn't a winning choice - I'd almost certainly lose the planet next turn anyway - but none of the others seemed like winners either, and that last one would do the most damage.

Turn 10

One of our planets is missing. Though the defense fleet around it is oddly intact. This time I build a Nova of my own so that the fish ignore my defenses at their peril.

The snails have converged their away fleet of 11 Ramas at my homeworld and bombed it a little. But Dayyalu's fleet at the dust cloud where my planet used to be is a more immediate problem. I hit it with everything I've got, reducing his 17 Ramas to 4. The Nova there survives, but with a diminished escort, it has little chance of smashing any more planets without costly reinforcements.

 

Turn 11

The snails continue to bomb my homeworld, but my fleets are untouched. I build more Ramas.

 

The fish are swimming back to their pond! But oddly, the snails' expansion fleet is inching northward, not southward into more undiscovered worlds. The only rational explanation is that they've colonized their ninth world and are about to colonize their tenth and final.

As no more snail ships are approaching, I am unconcerned by their fleets in my space and orbit. The approaching fish fleet contains a lightly defended Echo, which I easily eliminate, and I send the rest of my ships toward the snail homeworld, accompanying my Nova.

Turn 12

My interceptors have been attacked, and my homeworld's defenses have been destroyed by bombardment. I expect this to be the last turn, so I build Ramas in preparation for one last strike.

I push on to the fish homeworld, which is now fortified with 25 defenses. My armada knocks it down to 10, but I have no chance to find out if I could destroy it next turn. The snails have colonized their tenth system, and the game is over.

Looking back, I pretty much ruined my chances of winning by turn 3, when I sent an Echo unaccompanied to a planet within range of an enemy. That, along with wasting turns early trying to take a world defended by natives spoiled my early resource grabbing game, which is utterly crucial to victory. Now that I better understand how things work, the smarter opening move would have been to send out scouts on the first turn to five nearby planets, and then on the next turn build an Echo, send it to the nearest good planet, use a Rama or two to harass nearby opponents and bring back the rest to escort the Echo. Porkbelly was evidently able to colonize a world on almost every turn even as he fought a total war with WGS, seeing as he got his tenth by turn 12, and it isn't possible to settle more than one per turn.

GAB rating: Above average. Pointless in singleplayer, even more than Galaxy, but an enjoyable, briskly-paced multiplayer experience with more depth than its low complexity suggests, and significant technical issues that you just learn to put up, as is typical of BASIC games of the era. I think all four of us who played were in agreement that the game is luck-dependent to its own detriment, though I also think that diplomacy can help turn the tides if everyone else gangs up against the player with the luckiest starting conditions. Of course, this match illustrated that this is easier said than done.

CGW magazine describes Andromeda Conquest as a stepping stone between Avalon Hill's earlier Galaxy and SSG's Reach for the Stars, and this makes sense in some ways, though I am more inclined to view them all as independent interpretations of the board game Stellar Conquest. Andromeda Conquest does have the most easily manageable logistics of the three, having a limit of nine fleets per side, and by allowing you to instantly build your ships at any world, you don't need to to be constantly redirecting and rerouting your newly commissioned fleets like you do in those games, or in Master of Orion. It is also the only one of these games where fleets are moved around the grid manually, rather than directly warped from planet to planet, and therefore the only game where space fights happen outside of orbit. Notably, and thanks to the game's rule of ending when one player has ten systems, this was a very short match compared to the epic 100-plus turn games that you see in Master of Orion, Reach for the Stars, and even Galaxy.

In the end, this was an interesting, entertaining, and unplanned look at a forgotten game I hadn't ever planned on giving two looks, and that few will ever again have the chance to play properly in multiplayer. I certainly never would have without WGS's connections to the PBEM wargames community, or our mutual interest in archaeogaming. But I'm also fine with not playing this one ever again.

Data Driven Galaxy

I spent a ridiculous amount of time with Galaxy’s singleplayer scenarios, and had some gripes. As with its predecessor Galactic Empires, the early phase is essentially a guessing game. You have no idea how many ships each planet will have, or which planets are valuable to conquer, and so you must guess how many ships you need to conquer each of the nearby planets. If you opt to have neutral worlds build their own ships, then you can’t afford to guess conservatively, nor can you afford to guess wrong, nor to scout and wait for information. Every turn where you aren’t conquering planets is a turn that the planets worth conquering build up their defenses and therefore take that much longer for you to conquer, which has a cascading effect.

Galaxy makes it even worse with a random gunnery factor that rarely flips the outcome of a battle completely in your favor, but often costs you an invasion you should have won.

I was ready to move on, but I had a realization. This is BASIC. I can fix it! And I did. Download my version here:
https://drive.google.com/uc?authuser=0&id=138Q7lb-xGQ88EScZkI3V2ZuiSd-1OxY4&export=download

My addition here is some new options, specifically to address my gripes with the singleplayer scenarios.

The “reveal status” and “gunnery factor” options are my additions.

There is one tradeoff; I had to disable the save/load functionality, because it relies on low-level memory access calls that I don’t quite understand. Not a huge sacrifice, I think, as I’ll just be playing on an emulator where save states work fine.

The “reveal status” option will show you the industrial capacity and number of ships orbiting all neutral planets, eliminating the need to guess or scout. The “override gunnery factor” option disables the random gunnery factor in combat and ensures it will be predictable and equal for both sides. A value of 80 will approximate the firing accuracy in Galactic Empires, while a value of 71 is approximately the mean gunnery factor in Galaxy. Larger values will disproportionately benefit the defenders in any battle.

The fixed gunnery factor does not eliminate randomness from combat; when ships fire, each ship has a random chance to hit a target, determined by this formula:
[Gunnery Factor]/100 * SQRT(Targets/(Shooters + Targets))

So, let’s say you have a gunnery factor of 71, and you send 13 ships to attack a planet which will be guarded by 10 by the time yours arrive. Their 10 defenders will get the first round of shots, and the accuracy will be:
71/100 * SQRT(13/(10+23))
0.71 * SQRT(13/33)
=~ 0.4456

It might seem like we can expect them to kill 4-5 of our attackers on their first volley. However, their 10 defenders will fire in sequence, and with each successful kill, the number of targets decreases, and their shooting accuracy goes down accordingly. In practice, this just means we can expect 4 kills more often than 5. Accuracy is still a random chance; big deviations from the mean distribution aren’t common, but can happen.

With my modified version, I took a crack at the epic 40-world game, to see if I could do it in only 50 turns. I wasn’t hopeful; in Galactic Empires I had failed to do it in 100, but perhaps Galaxy would tip the scales in my favor a bit once I had eliminated the guesswork and could focus on strategy and logistics.

That’s a lot of information to start with. Normally the PROD/SHPS columns would be invisible until the planets were conquered, but now it’s practically perfect information. None of the worlds here had greater production than my starting world, which was good.

Everything went into an Excel spreadsheet, and I used the Time/Distance calculator to get the travel time to each world from A.

From this, my plan:

Indigo circles indicate industrially worthless worlds that I had best left alone until I had some economy going, and most of them best left alone until the endgame. Green and red circles indicated viable planets within a 2-turn’s travel from world A, with the red V being a heavily defended one expected to have 54 ships by the earliest time I could reach it, but also having 8 industry, making it critical to take immediately.

I sent, to each of the green and red planets, a number of ships equal to 130% of the expected defense, rounded up, which incidentally totalled 139, exactly as many ships as world A started with. On the following turn, # fell, and I sent 10 more ships to the lightly defended world $. Then on turn 2, everyone else arrived.

Everyone was victorious, and for the most part narrowly. My calculations were validated! I updated my map.

V was the second-most industrious planet in my empire after A. I figured that V’s ships could capture O, and the 10 new ships from A could take ^. On the next turn I had them and everyone else direct their ships behind my strike fleet toward $, which I planned to use as my new forward base.

There was one unexpected downside of my perfect information mod – previously, with neutral planets’ statuses hidden, picking out my own planets from the list was a cinch. Now I had to scan the list line by line, and be very careful not to miss any of my own.

Sure enough, my fleet took planet $, paving the way for more reinforcements. At this point, no industrious planet was going to be easy to take, except possibly for O and ^ which already had inbound ships.

Turn 5, my first reinforcements arrived at $, and I diverted them toward planets Z and =, while continuing to feed planet $ with the rest of my worlds.

Turn 6, I conquered two more planets, and sent more $ reinforcements toward G.

This expansion continued, though slowed down as the easier planets fell. I was already far past the point where I could conquer multiple planets in a turn by splitting up my fleet; each turn, the total number of ships arriving at $ was, at best, enough to conquer one weak planet, and when it wasn’t enough, I’d have to wait an additional turn for more . One time, an invasion failed, but I was able to conquer its diminished defense force on my next try, so only one turn was wasted.

By turn 20, my map of the galaxy looked like this:

Only five industrious planets left to conquer, one with a fleet inbound, but the remaining four would all have over 120 ships defending them by the time I could send anything their way, and I was only producing 61 ships per turn. At this point, I was also bumping into the 50-order limit, which limited the number of ships I could redirect to the $ world-base per turn.

By turn 25, the galaxy looked like this:

Only three industrious planets were left unconquered, and one had an inbound fleet. Of the other two, L was the tougher, guaranteed to have over 250 by the time I could reach it from my base, with another 9 for each turn spent building more ships or conquering other planets. @ would have over 175, and produced 6 ships per turn. I produced 67 ships per turn.

At this point, I started redirecting my ships toward D, as a new base for assaulting L and @. There were still some ships on-route to $, which on their arrival I split up and sent toward the non-industrious planets farthest from D, as I’d have to conquer them sooner or later.

On turn 27, I took planet J with a fleet of 221 attackers against 170 defenders. There were 34 survivors. I kept funneling my ships toward planet D, as I watched the non-industrious planets fall.

By turn 31, the galaxy looked like this:

Ships were en route to T and @. L remained the big one, with 278 ships, and I was producing 72 per turn. I send out three more small fleets from D to take K, I, and ), but otherwise kept funneling my new ships toward D.

On turn 32, an invasion force of 254 of my ships attacked 190 defenders on planet @, defeating them and capturing it with 31 survivors. World T was also taken, without a fight. I was now producing 78 ships per turn, which I kept moving toward D over the next few turns, as the last few non-industrial worlds fell.

Then, finally, on turn 35, I had conquered every planet except for L. I had 421 ships on D, and there were 314 on L. This turned out not to be quite enough to conquer it, but a mop-up fleet on the next turn was.

Combat on turn 35

Combat on turn 36

Galaxy conquered on turn 37

So amazingly, it is possible to beat the hardest scenario in only 36 turns. With just a bit more luck, it might have been possible to do it a turn or two faster.

This, of course, must come with some caveats. First and foremost, I had perfect information that would normally be denied to me, and so I could plan and execute a well-optimized strategy, and without much risk of my strategy being ruined by an unlucky gunnery factor roll. No time was wasted pursuing barren planets, nor was any time wasted by sending a single fleet against a defense force too big for it to handle. My initial fleet conquered seven industrious planets in the absolute shortest amount of time it was possible to, expanding my ship production abilities from 10 to 33 per turn. In these first few turns it is paramount that everything goes very smoothly, and as unmodified Galaxy shows, there are just so many ways things can go wrong. Even in the mid-game, there isn’t much room for error; you can afford to use scouts if you’re careful, but still can’t afford too many failed invasions, which can always happen if the gunnery factor rolls unfavorably to you.

Secondly, I had a rather lucky galaxy setup.  There were only two especially industrious planets other than my starting one – V and L, and V was inside my immediate reach from the start. If there hadn’t been a hyper-industrious planet attainable within the first few turns, then my early ship-building ability would have been slowed, and my ability to start conquering planets outside of my initial reach would have been delayed, which, again, would have cascaded into more and more delays for each subsequent planet. If there had been a second hyper-industrious planet outside my initial reach, then it would have taken at least 4 turns to capture (as L did), and in the time spent waiting to take it, L would have had time to build up its defenses and would take even longer to capture. Had V been as industrious as it was and also out of my initial reach, then I very much doubt I would have had any chance of winning in only 50 turns.

Game 106: Galaxy

Galaxy concludes a very odd chapter in Data Driven Gamer. B-1 Nuclear Bomber, Midway Campaign, Tanktics, and finally Galaxy were all published by Avalon Hill, which is the thread tying them together, but unlike other selections of games grouped by company, Avalon Hill had little to do with their creation, save possibly for Midway Campaign whose origins are obscure. In the years following Galaxy, Avalon Hill would release games more closely tied to their own board game products, such as Computer Diplomacy, Incunabula, and Under Fire, and reviews by Computer Gaming World rank these titles higher than any of the games I’ve covered. They would then withdraw from the video game market until 1994, and re-enter it with more direct adaptations of their board game products, and in this period produced their greatest hit, Achtung Spitfire! None of these games attain whale status, and I won’t be visiting them, so it’s just possible that by my own methodology, I am completely missing out on the big picture of what “real” Avalon Hill computer games were like.

I’ve just played Galaxy’s predecessor, Galactic Empires, and I won’t cover familiar ground in this post. According to its author Tom Cleaver, he sent it to Avalon Hill on a whim, and was surprised when they commissioned a rewrite, and asked him to supervise ports to the other computers of the day.

Unlike Galactic Empires (and all of the other Avalon Hill games I’ve played so far), Galaxy was available on both cassette and floppy disk, so AppleWin is finally suitable for an authentic emulation experience. It also has a manual, which I reviewed before playing.

There are two pages worth of instructions, most of them things I already knew, but a few things were new, either things I didn’t realize before, or that changed in Galaxy.

• Players’ homeworlds will start with more than 100 ships if they are far away from neutral worlds and/or close to opponents, and less than 100 ships if the opposite.
• Worlds are now identified by letters rather than numbers. In a game with more than 26 worlds, worlds 27 onward are identified by punctuation marks or symbols.
• There is an options menu, accessible by pressing the Esc key, with these options:
  • View starmap
  • Open time/distance calculator
  • Enable/disable sounds
  • Save game
  • Quit game, converting your worlds and ships to neutral, and allowing the other players to keep playing
  • End game, causing the computer to declare a winner
  • Change game duration
• Combat works as before, with the addition of a random “gunnery factor” for each side, which determines shooting accuracy.

The manual gives a number of gameplay suggestions too:

• If a player mistakenly cancels another’s turn by pressing Enter during theirs, the offender may be punished by allowing the affected player to enter one ship movement order on the offender’s turn.
• When there are three or more players, conduct truces, alliances, and deals, and feel free to lie, backstab, and retaliate.

The box also contains a log-pad to assist players in their multi-turn strategy.

Lastly, the manual has a number of scenario suggestions, which I find quite welcome in any game that depends so much on parameter customization for replayability.

The solitaire scenarios are especially welcome. Galactic Empires’ only suggestion was setting the turns and worlds to be equal, which was impossible with five worlds, much too easy with 40 worlds, and ridiculous when the neutrals are allowed to build. The ultimate challenge here, though, of beating 40 worlds in only 50 turns, seems to be quite impossible indeed when considering that in Galactic Empires it took me nearly 100 turns just to conquer 39.

“R” and I played Galaxy, this time using the suggested two-player game rules of 20 worlds, 20 turns, and no neutral builders.

One immediate difference from Galactic Empires is that there are no ingame instructions. I don’t know why they went to the effort of removing them, but evidently they were thought redundant with the inclusion of paper instructions.

The options menu at the start looks identical to the one before, with one addition – you can enter your name!

Finally, I can be Admiral Ahab!

The four character maximum may be limiting for most players, but it suits me fine.

The star map now has colons delineating spaces between worlds. It’s less aesthetically pleasing than the star map of Galactic Empires, but more useful for measuring distances.

There’s no longer any screen showing you the planet coordinates, but with the ability to look at a starmap any time, it isn’t needed. The new Time/Distance calculator is quite useful too.

This can be misleading, though. “Travel Time” is the number of turns needed to travel AFTER the end of the current turn! And it will arrive at the END of the "turn of arrival," and be available to you for more orders on the NEXT turn. E.g. – a value of 0 means your fleet will arrive at the end of the current turn, and be available at the start of the next turn. I would mentally add "1" to these values.

The screen hides whatever letters you key in, which more or less prevents the calculator from leaking your battle plans to any spying opponents.

The main screen isn’t radically different from the old one; it still looks and feels like a BASIC program, but the text is laid out a bit more attractively, with good use of highlighting to indicate the header and column separator line.

I started off by spreading out about half of my ships to take some nearby planets, leaving the other half behind to defend.

The combat screen has been completely overhauled. Instead of feeding you results line-by-line teletype-style, there’s a dynamic head-to-head combat screen showing you the fleet statuses as they take turns firing, with laser gun sound effects and a crude explosion animation whenever one side scores a hit. The number of remaining ships on each side steadily decreases with each hit until one side reaches zero.

Another addition is the gunnery factor, which is completely random, different for each side, and partly determines the fleets’ shooting accuracies. The result makes attacking more difficult; if the defender has even a small slight gunnery factor advantage, then because defenders fire first, they will eliminate a large number of your attackers during the first volley. To win an invasion, you must either have the advantage in both numbers and in gunnery factor, or have a very large numbers advantage.

A big gunnery factor advantage doesn’t benefit the attacker as much as it benefits the defender.

R found this out the hard way when he tried to invade my homeworld with 80 attackers, which outnumbered the 56 I left behind, but the gunnery factor was in my favor, and his fleet was decimated, leaving his gambit unsuccessful and his fleet size diminished.

My strike fleets tended to be more successful; without neutral ship building, the defenses on neutral planets were weak and most were taken with 10 or so ships. Had R been trying to do this too, I’m sure that this would have been a more challenging and therefore more interesting contest, with both of us trying to guess who will send which ships where and how many at once, but his ability was diminished by his failed invasion. He did manage to conquer one neutral planet, world “K” nearby his homeworld “B,” and declared his realm to be the Burger King Empire.

We did clash a bit over a planet “E” which produced a luxurious 11 ships per turn, but with my higher ship count, reinforced by industry from other planets, I won out, and went on to conquer his Burger King system.

R wanted a rematch, but we didn’t really have time. I’m sure we will play again sometime in the future, but I’m not sure that I’ll write about it. I can see this being an interesting strategy game about picking and choosing which planets to send your ships to. My early expansion left my defenses spread pretty thin, and an underdog would always have a chance to conquer something; as there’s no way to adequately defend every planet.

Compared to Galactic Empires, the biggest difference in our game of Galaxy was the smaller defense fleets on the neutral planets, and this was an option in both games. Apart from that, all Galaxy really introduced was admiral names (Ahab/Trig rather than Admiral 1 vs. Admiral 2) and the random gunnery factors, which played a significant gameplay role, as I’m reasonably confident that R’s 80-ship fleet would have conquered my homeworld under Galactic Empire’s rules.

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I played more in solo mode, using the suggested scenarios as difficulty guidelines. I conquered a 10-world galaxy in 10 turns on my first try, using similar tactics as in Galactic Empires.

The next step up was 20 planets in 13 turns, which sounded tricky, but again, I beat it on the first try, with similar tactics as before. Most of the planets fell to my initial 10-ship fleets, and a surprisingly large number had no defenders at all. A few better defended ones held out, but there was just enough time left to marshal my surviving ships, supplemented by new ones, and conquer them.

Scenario 3: 30 planets, 15 turns

For this scenario, I sent my starting fleet to the nearest planets first, in order to start building up my fleet as quickly as possible. Starting on turn 2, I sent my new ships to the farther planets.

The closest planets, as before, put up little to no resistance, and supplanted my fleet. By turn 10, I had most of the galaxy under my command, with just a few holdouts within striking distance of various planets.

This was also the round where I reached the orders per-turn limit.

Wouldn’t be the last time Ion Storm prevented a release this year.

As my strike fleets got closer to the farthest neutral planets, I moved my reserves close behind to the nearest friendly planets, ready to mop-up any holdouts. Despite some logistical errors, I won with a turn to spare.

Scenario 4: 40 planets, 17 turns

In Galactic Empires, I managed this in 22 turns, so doing it in only 17 seemed a bit intimidating, but Galaxy also, so far, seemed to have smaller neutral fleets.

The map, with 14 symbols representing worlds, was starting to look ridiculous, though.

At the end of it, despite making a serious strategic error where I sent lots of small fleets to ‘X’ despite not owning it (wasting a great deal of time and ships), and more than once accidentally sending ships to the wrong planet thanks to getting the symbols confused, I conquered all 40 with three turns to spare.

That was it for the idle-neutral scenarios. The next level would be 5 worlds, with neutrals that build ships, with a 20 turn limit.

Scenario 5: 5 worlds, 20 turns, neutral builders

This map turned out to be basically impossible. I conquered D and E quickly, and scouted B and C, to find out by turn 7 that B had more than 100 ships and was building 13 per turn, while C lacked any industry at all. My entire combined industry from A, D, and E was only 13 per turn, and I’d therefore never be able to out-produce B. If I had sent my entire starting fleet to B right away, then this would have been almost ridiculously simple, but there’s just no way to know that ahead of time.

Trying again, I got this map:

And it was almost gloriously simple. I sent scouts toward B, D, and E, and then steamrolled C and moved onward to B. The worlds B and E turned out to be completely undefended, so my scouts conquered them, and when my strike fleet arrived at and took B, I redirected toward D, conquering it by turn 10.

What a difference a little bit of luck made! One game I got a setup that would have been impossible unless I had sent blindly my entire starting fleet to the most industrious planet from the first turn. In the very next game I had conquered the universe in half of the allotted time.

Scenario 6: 10 worlds, 35 turns, neutral builders

My experience was once again luck of the draw. Few, if any neutral worlds would ever be close to my starting world, so if I didn’t conquer any high-industry worlds in the first few turns, then I’d inevitably encounter some later in my campaign, and by then they would be so well defended that I wouldn’t have enough time to build up a big enough fleet to conquer them all in the allotted time.

Then I played a game where my fleets conquered two moderately industrious worlds, and with them was able to eventually conquer the rest, none of which had any more industry than those two. I conquered the galaxy in only 21 turns.

Scenario 7: 20 worlds, 40 turns, neutral builders

Here, there were enough worlds in the galaxy that some were close enough to reach in a few turns, and I found it necessary to use classic Galactic Empires 40/100 tactics – spread out to these planets aggressively from the start, send newly built ships to a strategic point on the assumption that you will conquer it, and restart if any of your fleets fail to conquer, or if any turn out to lack industry.

The gunnery factor played a role here, and a big difference can turn a sure victory where you vastly outnumber the defenders into a defeat, or it can turn a narrow victory into a crushing defeat. It can work in your favor too, when your gunnery factor is much higher than theirs, but doesn’t often turn defeat into victory – usually it would just turn a narrow victory into a somewhat more decisive one.

An easy victory became a costly one.

I did eventually beat this scenario with time to spare, but only after several false starts where my initial scatter fleet failed to meet expectations, and the wasted time amplified as the neutrals kept building more and more ships while I built more of my own to re-take their ever growing numbers.

Scenario 8: 30 worlds, 45 turns, neutral builders

I gave up on this penultimate scenario, when I began with an oversized fleet of 182 ships, sent out nine fleets to nine different planets, and every single one of them either turned up empty-handed or got decimated by a smaller defender fleet with superior gunnery.

I can’t help but feel a bit underwhelmed by Galaxy. I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the fact that I spent so much time with its predecessor, and was expecting more changes than this. According to Tom Cleaver’s notes in a 1982 issue of CGW, he re-wrote Galactic Empires for Avalon Hill over the course of four months with the help of University of Louisville engineers. I just don't see anything that nearly amounts to a total rewrite. All I can really see for the effort is a slight upgrade in presentation and a few new modules, such as the time/distance calculator. It’s still a BASIC game, and by comparing the code, it’s obvious that this isn’t a complete re-write; most of the lines are identical. Galactic Empires’ code even has more comments and less use of torturedly condensed multi-statement lines.

That said, the inclusion of playtested scenarios in the manual are a very welcome addition. The only significant gameplay change from code, as far as I can tell, is the gunnery factor, and I’m not sure that it really improves the game, and in the case of singleplayer scenarios, I found it made an already frustratingly random game experience even worse.