Welcome to the Intergalactics quick start guide. In Intergalactics you control a Star Empire and its fleets. Your goal is to expand and take over the map destroying all other players. Read through the information below to learn the basics of how to play!

The Interface

Name: This is your planet's name. Color indicates planet owner. Select a planet by clicking on it or typing its letter on the keyboard, left click to deselect. A planet name can be any letter(case sensitive) or number.

Production: This shows how many ships your planet produces every time the production bar resets.

Attacking Fleet: Number of ships attacking planet. Color indicates empire fleet is from.

Ratio Bar: Each turn a planet is being attacked the defend fleet and attacking fleet get to shoot at each other. Each ship in each fleet gets to see if it hits an enemy ship. The odds of a hit are controlled by the Ratio of the last planet the ship was defending on, also note the defender gets a slight bonus as well. In this example planet E has a very high ratio and its ship will hit often. The green fleet will be defeated in a few turns if no new ships arrive and the red fleet does not leave the planet. Planets with a ratio in the red zone are not good to attack or defend from while planets with green tipped ratios are excellent.

Production Bar: The production bar is a count down for the planets production. Each time it resets it produces the amount of ships in the production slot and adds them to your defending fleet.

Defending Fleet: These are the ships currently on the planet. Color indicates ownership.

Logging in and your first game:

To play Intergalactics you must first log onto the IGX server, simply click the play button on the home page and it will take you there. Be aware the server is run by Java and you will need a recent version to access it. The first page you will see is this:



Simply fill in all the fields and click 'Login'. If you are a return visitor leave the 'retype password' field blank. Once you have logged in you will see the forum page:

You can see I have logged in as 'newbie' and my rank is (1500). To create a game click 'create game' and you will be taken to the create game page:



Now you can click the image of a map to see its details, I have selected the map 'take 5'. Notice you can sort games in different ways and scroll down to see more maps. Once you have picked a map click 'Create game' and it will take you back to the forum so you can find some opponents:



To add a computer controlled player click 'add bot' mouse over 'novicebots' and chose a bot to add, I picked 'imbecile'. For your first game I suggest one of these NoviceBots as they are usually easy to beat, so they will be good to learn the game with. Some of the bots are very hard and will take some practice if you want to beat them. Note that all maps require at least 2 players to play (in this case you and the bot) but some have a specific number of players that are required to start the game(you will see this information on the map description in the create game page). Once you have added the bot a Start game button will appear and once you click it the game will begin.

The Game

This is a random generated map but all games start with this basic set up. A map with one planet per player and unconquered planets. At the top right you will notice the names and colors of players followed by their score(score is determined by how many planets and fleet you control). Below that you will notice a Turn counter. IGX is a 'real time game' but is broken down into turns. Turn lengths can range from a millisecond to a year although most games tend to range between one and two seconds. As each turn counts down it will reset at zero and add a tick to the turn counter. This screenshot shows we are still on turn zero and have (0.2) seconds before the end of the turn. Next we will want to launch our first attack.

Firstly click on the planet that is yours, here I clicked on B. Then click on the planet you want to move your fleet to, I clicked on planet J. you now see both planets highlighted with an arrow pointing to J. There is also more information below the Turn Counter. In this example you can see the txt:
B(40 strength 30 ships)
J
send 22 ships
To change the amount of ship you want to send move your mouse up and down in the browser and you will see the grey bar on the right following your mouse changing the amount of fleet to be sent. A left click will send this fleet. Right now note how many ships you will send and when they will arrive(ETA). I have sent a fleet but I have a surprise:

My fleet is headed towards Planet 'J' and the bot Imbicile (green player) has beaten me there. This is unfortunate as once a fleet is launched it can not be recalled so I am stuck attacking a larger fleet which is not good, lets see how the attack goes:

You can see my red fleet in the attack position above the green fleet on planet J and there is no hope for victory. Defending fleets get a small bonus and I have fewer attacking ships then Green has defending so I have lost my fleet.

Now if you will excuse me I must quickly expand and see if I can muster a win from our bot. My goal now is to take as many planets as possible so I can out produce Green and see if I can still pull off a win.

After some quick grabs I have more production than green and more ships but they are spread thin and if I move an entire fleet from a planet green might attack so I have launched several fleets from different planets all converging on planet E. This is called a fork and is the single most useful tactic out there. Lets see how this attack turns out:

Bamn! That was a good fork, only a few ships from several planets all timed perfectly can be very devastating to an unsuspecting opponent. If I had flown all my ships to one planet and launched the attack as one group there would have been less surprise and it would have taken longer to combine the fleets. Now all I have to do is mop up what is left of green.

As you can see my last fork is coming in to destroy the last green fleet. Once Green reaches a score of zero the game will be called in my favor. If you notice on the scores though the bot shows 'ready to quit', if you like you can click the button 'ready to quit' just below the scores and the game will end in your favor as well. Many players like to totally destroy their enemies to the last ship and that is fun but once you are a certain percentage in the lead bots will throw in the towel as end game can be long and hard on large maps with many bots. Anyhow, my fleets will arrive and crush green and here is my favorite thing to see:

That is how to log on and play a game of Intergalactics. Some basic strategies are to send between 15 and 25 ships to attack an unconquered planet as they do have a random number of defending ships. Also try to expand as fast as possible early on. Realistically in the game I just showed you Newbie should have gone straight for H first then D and G. The quicker you expand the more ships you have to expand further, a quick start is really the key. Be sure to watch out though for bots(or humans!) who send fleets of 1 or 2 ships to your starting planets to try and 'sniper' them from you. Always attack from high ratio planets. Always have a larger attack fleet than what your opponent will have when you reach the target, basically if it takes 40 turns to reach a planet and it has 10 production it will have produced another 20 ships before your attack fleet reaches it, always factor this in. If you want more tips in greater depth check out the Strategy guide. But the best way to learn is to play so go kill some bots! Cheers and best of luck!

Updated 10.12.09