Utilities


Vga Planets can be a complicated game.You'll need to colonise planets, build mines, factories and defenseposts, you'll need to tax your natives and on top of it all keep the ten other bloodthursty races off your back. You'll need to keep track of where your ships are heading, what you wanted them to do (take it from me: when you unpack your RST and find a LDSF midway between two planets you won't always remember where you wanted it to go or why the heck it's even in that part of your empire). You'll need to keep an eye out on the big picture (who's where, who's killing who, those kind of things) and most important of all: You'll need to crush your enemies! All that, work/school and a social life may be a bit hard to manage alltogether. Ofcourse your first action will be killing your social life -it's all about priorities after all- but the right utilities might just enable you to have it all. Or just enable you to have it all, kill your social life and play even more games......


Echoview
This is one of the most valued utilities available to the VGAP-player. It's a windows-based program, and will also run on windows 3.x. What it does is keep track of just about everything by using it's own database, updated from your RST and your messages each turn. It puts all this information together into a map of the Echo Cluster, where you can see everything at once, just like a true strategic like you needs.
You see the planets, you can see how many natives (if any) are on them, their happiness, the amount and density of minerals present, the amount of colonists - you name it, Echoview shows it. It also shows ships, ion storms, explosions, minefields and starbases. Ofcourse you'll have to go out and find those enemy ships, minefields and bases before Echoview can show them, but once you have them Echoview puts them into the map.
The new betaversion of Echoview has some very nice features: besides keeping track of the scores and the change in scores, number of planets, bases and ships per turn, it also keeps track of the number of priority build-points. This gives you the much needed information on who's fighting who and, in combination with the map and some proper thinking, who's where.
If for instance you get a message of an exploding ship -let's call it the Vengeance- eview marks that point on the map, so you can easily see where this ship was destroyed. In the scores you can see who's lost a ship and who's gained one or more PBPs. This tells you who lost a ship, who killed it (gained the PBPs) and where this happened. Ofcourse it might be a tad difficult to see who's blowing up who when several explosions occur in one turn and when lost ships are replaced by new ones, but valuable information can be gained from this must-have utility.

Echoview is freeware, and was written by Stefan Glasauer. You can get it from the Echoview Beta site


Randmax
This little utility manages all my planetary stuff. It uses a pretty simple to use ini-file in which you can determine how much mines, factories and defenseposts you want built on your planets, and how you want to tax the natives and colonists. It is the ultimate taxing-tool, because it's very accurate in using the growth-method. I have it tax my natives rigorously for one turn, at a rate that either the maximum amount of taxes are earned by my colonists or the natives' happiness drops to 70. After that it doesn't tax for a couple of turns, until happiness has reached 100 again. This method ensures maximum growth of the native populations and earns more money than the so-called 'safetax'-method.
The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you have to add a line to the ini-file for each planet you colonise. It's not such a big deal if you don't, because Randmax will then use whichever default order you've set. But when your default order is to build 50 mines and no more, Randmax won't build more than 50 mines on planets without an own line in the ini-file. So have a look at your planets and your ini-file every now and then, because you don't want to mine that very mineral-rich planet with only 50 mines. It is also still possible to build mines yourself: you can let Randmax automatically build 50 mines on each planet, and then check your planets and build more mines on planets with decent minerals. (These 50 mines I'm using here is an example).
One thing Randmax doesn't take into account is your 200% taxrate. Randmax does have a line with the maximum income per planet (default hostconfig = 5000 MCs) to which it neatly sticks, but on a planet with a lot of natives with good government and 5000 clans or more Randmax yanks up the taxes so that you'll earn a nice 4000 or so megacredits, possibly even 5000. This nicely gets doubled by Host, and then harshly cut down to 5000 MCs. So what you'll end up with is 40% taxing earning you the same amount of money 25% taxing would. An easy way to prevent this from happenning is adjusting the 'maximum taxes we're allowed to collect'-line and put half the maximum value there.

Randmax is a freeware utility, written by Steffen Pietsch and can be found here.


Shipsoul
Shipsoul really helps you to keep track of your ships. It uses two sets of shipnames: one for yourself, and one for your opponents to see. You can now simply name your ships "colonise Erecka" or things like that. Right before making your turn, you run Shipsoul to store your own names and replace them by names from a textfile.
This textfile can be anything: you can have a list of your favourite movies, insults, you name it. Imagine Shipsoul naming your ships into "BIOCIDE CLASS CARRIE" or "GOLEM CLASS BASESHIP". It will at least make your opponents look twice to discover it's in fact just a Nebula....
You can also have Shipsoul rename each of your ships every turn. The whole point is to confuse your enemies (an entire fleet coming their way, changing names each turn can be real funny) and to help you by using the names as notes. After unpacking your RST you run shipsoul again and your phoney names are replaced with your own names again.
With Shipsoul comes the countermeasure for it: the Shipsoul Targeter. This works in roughly the same way, but the other way around: you can now rename every enemy ship you see. Easy suggestions are the shiptypes ("Vengeance" now becomes "Instrumentality"), possibly where you saw those ships first or -if you've engaged them in battle and they survived- the weapons it has. ("Coming for you" now becomes "Mk4/X-ray MBR").
Throughout the game the targeter will look for those ships and whenever you see them you see it's "new" name, the name you gave it, instead of whatever your opponent has called it. So if he's using Shipsoul as well and is renaming his ships every turn you won't even notice it: the targeter gives them the name you want.

Shipsoul and the Shipsoul Targeter are shareware. The shareware version can be found on the Shipsoul Support site


Spacedock
Spacedock is a nice little utility to calculate how much the ship you want to build will cost. It's very easy to use, and uses pull-down menus: the ships are nicely divided by race (so you won't have to wade through all the ships in the game when you're only building Fed ships), you select a hulltype and the types of engines, beams and tubes. You can also select the number of beams and tubes, in case you want to build a ship with less than the maximum amount of weapons. You can even select the amount of torps or fighters onboard. Spacedock then puts all the costs, both in minerals and MCs, in a nice list for you. The costs for the hull, engines, weapons and fighters/torps are all listed seperately so you can easily see where exactly your money and minerals are going to.
This way you can see if you can afford a certain ship with transwarps and full weaponry before you start building the parts, discovering it can't be done halfway. Saves you quite some time from having to undo all those tryout-shipbuilds and clearly shows you how many minerals you have to bring to your base to be able to build that ship next turn.
The new Betaversion of Echoview comes with a similar function (Stardock), linked to Eview's database it can immediately show you which base has the resources and techlevels to build the ship with the specifications you select. Only downside is you can't take the amount of torpedoes or fighters into account.

Spacedock is shareware ($5 registration fee), and is developed by Archon Enterprises. You can download it here.


Bsim
It would be nice to be able to predict the outcome of the battles you might be engaging. To have a fair prediction of the outcome of the fight you're about to start (or, judging by the prediction, run away from). Bsim lets you do this. It simulates the battles between the ships you select to fight, and uses the normal host-program to determine the outcome of the battle. You can set Bsim to run the battle you'd like to predict up to 250 times in a row, in order to cancel out the luck-factor (missing torps, chance of increase in hullmass and other oddities). Use this program to determine which is the best order for your ships to fight in, minimising losses. Have a look at which ships your ship can encounter without getting blown to bits and from which ships you should run like hell.
Bsim is a DOS-based program and is pretty easy to use. You can select the ships, which techlevel their weapons and engines are (important when Engine Shield bonus is on), and you can control the battle order and the left/right thing by setting the proper friendly codes. See if your ships fight better from the left or from the right, things like that.

Bsim is written by Thomas Voigt , it's freeware and can be dowloaded here (version 2.2)


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