Navigation Hints

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• One unit of fuel will permit you to travel 10 units of distance in HyperSpace. The number of thrusters your flagship has doesn't change this, you only travel faster with more thrusters. 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 light green dot. To get close-up on a planet (in orbit to do scans and send lander crews down), the centerline of your ship (drawn from the green dot at the front to the red dot marking the engines) 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, it can be effective to turn your ship as you approach the planet; approach slowly, and aim to hit the planet with your ship at a right-angle to the direction of travel. This gives you the biggest chance of hitting the planet, and makes it easier to make a last-moment course correction.

• When navigating to a specific destination in hyperspace, the ship's autopilot can be helpful (if you find yourself missing the planet system by a little bit, having to stop, turn, and double back, losing time and fuel). To enable the autopilot, view the Starmap and move the cursor with the arrow keys to the destination system. Hit enter to engage the autopilot, and then space to leave map mode. Even a perfect human pilot cannot outperform the autopilot when moving in hyperspace, because a ship controlled manually can only thrust in sixteen different directions. If you are trying to save game-time or fuel, you should only control the ship manually in hyperspace when you need to take evasive action or contact another ship.

• There are three main different views that the game automatically uses as you navigate your flagship about: for HyperSpace, for general exploration of a star system, and for the region near a planet. It's important to know how the transition between each is handled.
  • When entering HyperSpace from a star system, your flagship will be completely stationary and facing the same direction you were facing when you left the star system. When leaving HyperSpace and entering a star system, you will always enter the star system from the center of the bottom edge of the screen, facing straight up.
  • The view in the star system will is always centered on the star, but will zoom in and out depending on how far out you are. This zoom is not continuous, but happens only when your flagship passes certain threshold distances. Your flagship will still be pointing in the same direction as you transition between zoom levels, but at the higher zoom levels it will look like your flagship is traveling faster. This is just an illusion caused by zooming in, don't let it throw you off. You will leave this view by either exiting the system on the edges, or by touching a planet.
  • When your flagship touches a planet in the star system view, you will transition into the single planet view. The planet and any satellites it may have are in the center of the screen. Your flagship will enter this screen with the same orientation from the previous screen, but will be on located along the edge of the view so that it is pointing roughly at the planet and will be initially stationary. Similarly, when you leave this view, your flagship will still stay facing the same direction and will initially be stationary in the star system view.
• When you're going to some specific destination in HyperSpace, you may want to bring along some extra Storage Bays and collect some minerals on route, killing two birds with one stone.
• After you meet a new alien race, click on "Starmap" on the main menu to see if the map has been augmented to show that race's Sphere of Influence. You won't find a map in a drawer in this game.