StarForce and other SPI stuff

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998 19:25:31 -0400 Nyrath the nearly wise 
<nyrath@clark.net> wrote:

> Jon Davis wrote:
>> One of the nice things about this game series was the 3D 
starmap for the StarForce game.  The map covers a sphere 
about 25 L.Y. in radius centered at Sol and has the +- 
location of the stars in LY. <<

> and it was reasonably accurate, with only a couple of
mistakes. One could do worse than to use it for an accurate 
map. <

The "radius" of the "sphere" was 20 ly, and Redmond 
Simonsen (the designer, and SPI's Art Director) said that 
they made every effort to get it accurate, with only a 
couple of stars having to be shifted slightly to get them 
into a hex or level (what the game called a LiteZulu, a 
volume one hex across by one level vertically, both 
dimensions being one light-year). I don't know which stars 
got moved -- anyone who does?

The plane of the map (level 0) was the ecliptic, which may 
or may nor have been an odd choice.

SPI went through a period of doing hard or semi-hard SF, 
and came up with some very useful maps, etc., that could 
easily be used with other games. A good counterpart for the 
StarForce map was the inner Solar System map from 
BattleFleet Mars, which depicted the ecliptic out as far as 
Jupiter, with positions for each planet and some of the 
larger asteroids marked at monthly intervals (the strategic 
turn was one month long). Of course, they had to tweak 
some of the planets' orbits because they don't all go 
around the Sun in nice, neat multiples of our month, but it 
worked well enough and meant that players had to deal with 
the problem of getting from A to B when both A and B are 
moving at different speeds and may well be on the opposite 
side of the Sun, either before, during or after the trip!

One of the most (in)famous SPI maps was for Outreach, the 
galaxy-exploring development of StarForce. It showed 
part of the local galactic arm, and was a lovely example of 
the printer's art; some people are said to have bought the 
game just so that they could hang the map on the wall and 
gaze at it while under the influence of recreational 
chemicals....

The game itself was less satisfying -- not bad, but rather 
slow and prone to drag on for a _very_ long time (a problem 
that some SPI stuff tended to have; BattleFleet Mars was 
the same). The situation wasn't helped by the solitaire 
scenario, which was intended to help players learn the 
game, being impossible to win! Or, at least, I could never 
figure out how to get around a basic movement problem. If 
anyone ever did manage to complete that game, I'd like to 
know what I missed.

Phil
------------------------------------------------------------
"We gotta get out into Space, 
 If it's the last thing we ever do!"  
   -- Return to the Forbidden Planet
A sentiment echoed by Phil Atcliffe 
	      (Phillip.Atcliffe@uwe.ac.uk)