Navigation Hints

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• One unit of fuel will permit you to travel 10 units of distance in hyperspace. The number of engines your flagship has doesn't change this, you only travel faster with more engines. So you have to do the math to ensure that you'll have enough fuel to get to a named destination and back. There may be places to get fuel en route, but you have to know where these are for certain.

• The nose of your flagship is indicated by the white dot. To click onto a planet, the dot must touch the center of the planet. If you aren't yet adept with the controls, or don't have your flagship improved much, and are about to zoom past a planet, you might be able to get it to touch by sweeping the nose of the flagship back and forth with the thruster controls (left and right arrows). You can't sweep past the critical point and thereby lose your rendezvous, for as soon as it touches, the screen will change to a close-up. Otherwise, you can cross over a planet (or a star) provided that your nose doesn't touch the planet's center.

• There are three different types of worlds from the standpoint of leaving them.
  • If you're starting from a planet far from its sun, point yourself in any cardinal direction (up, down, left, right) and just go. When the screen shifts to the larger view, the flagship appears stopped, so you have time to point your flagship in the appropriate direction.
  • If you're starting on a satellite of a planet far from its star, save time by pointing it in the cardinal direction that's closest to the edge; you will still be able to turn on the next larger view as well.
  • But if you're starting from a world near its sun, you have to keep track of which direction you will go next before you reach it, because in the wider screen, your flagship won't be stopped; rather, the star will soon accelerate you, and whip you around to some other direction, so you'll have to take account of that, too.

• You can save a bit of fuel in the early stages of the game, when you do not expect to be attacked, by carrying an extra resource bin or two in place of weaponry and travelling along a circular route. An example is, if you are going northeast, to take in some stars to the northwest of the route on the way out and some to the southeast on the way back, or vice versa.

• Soon after you hear of an alien race, click on "Starmap" on the main menu to see if the map has been augmented to list its domains. You won't find a map in a drawer in this game.