VGA Planets, or Dopers in Space?

Cafe Society
1

VGA Planets was a play-by-email strategic wargame I stumbled across years ago. Wasn’t sure it still existed, but Wikipedia indicates it does:

Not sure what changes may have been made, as I haven’t played the game in years. There used to be an 11 player per game limit, and each player could choose which race to play. One person serves as host, which means he creates the gamedata by running a setup program to configure various options such as mineral availability, distance between homeworlds, etc. The host would then run another program to generate individual data packets for each player and mail them out. The players would use a client program to enter the commands for their turns, the run a compiler program to create a data packet to return to the host. When each player has returned his data packet, the host then runs the hosting program to resolve the results of that turn…combat, if any, mining, ship building, sensor readings, messages transmitted amoung players, etc…and then mails the data packets out again. I think it was possible to play a freebie version that had fewer features, or a registered version available for a nominal cost.

The available races were modeled on those in Star Trek, Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. More may have been added, I dunno. I usually played the Colonies of Man, but also tried a few others…Borg, Robots, Birds, Federation, Pirates. Races were usually assigned by each player submitting 3 acceptable choices, first come first served.

Has anyone else ever played this game? Would there be any interest in setting up a game for SDMB folks? I’d be willing to spring for a registered version and serve as host if there was enough interest…or would gladly defer to a more experienced host if someone volunteers…

2

Oh I LOVE that game. If you can get a game set up, I’ll join. I also have the registerd version for myself around here somewhere, I got it registerd a LONG time ago, think I know where the disk is… however it is a 5.25 floppy if I remember.

There is a new version of VGA Planets out, version 4, however I have never played it. I’ve only played the version you are talking about, version 3.

If you do get a game set up, I claim The Lost Colonies Of Man.

3

I could never dedicate the time to playing that until much later, and by then I discovered Stars!

I understand that VGA Planets was responsible for an upsurge in video game rehab clinic attendence, though I may have made up that statistic.

4

What a game, played it a lot in university. At the start of a game it is harmless enough, each turn taking maybe 15 minutes, but after a while the turns take longer and longer to complete all the micromanaging, sometimes in the late game a turn might take >3hours to do propperly. Tim is still a hero of mine (even if he should have spent time learning and porting to C++ instead of visual basic :slight_smile: )

5

Yeah, I figure if we do a Doper game, we could blow through the early turns at a pretty good clip–maybe 3-4 turns/week. Once we get to the point where things are taking over an hour, we could slow it down to 1-2 turns per week…

6

Ok, after a bit of searching, I found the original 5.25" floppy disk with my registerd version. I also found a 5.25" floppy drive. Now I just need to hook them up and see if the disk and drive are still good.

So is anyone else intreasted in starting a game up? There has to be enough dopers on this board to get a game going.