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 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 turning 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. And note that you can also land base-down, too.

• 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 bottom edge of the screen.
  • 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 directly 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.