Space - Glory Through Conquest

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Space - Glory through Conquest (commonly referred to simply as Space) is a browser based strategy game. The game is set in a science fiction universe where each player control their own alien empire and fight over the control of a galaxy. Space is developed by Coldfire studios.

A major feature of the game is its JavaScript based map. While most other browser based strategy games simply treat territory as an abstract number, and allow any player to attack any other (usually with some restrictions to discourage powerful players from attacking much weaker ones), Space has a map where every system has a fixed location. This means that players can only interact with players who are their immediate neighbours on the map. Because of the map feature the game only officially support the Internet Explorer browser (Opera can also be used, though a few non-critical features still only work in Internet Explorer). Re-making the map to use modern standard JavaScript (or turn it into a Java applet) have been considered, but deemed to be far too labour intensive at the present.

Space plays in near real-time, queued buildings will be built, population will grow, ships will move towards their destinations and battles will be fought whether or not anyone is logged in. The game world is advanced one "tick" every hour. Most players will tell you that in order to be successful you have to log in often. Both in order to react to other players' actions, and to colonize new systems, move ships to new destinations or adjust the targeting orders for fleets in battle.

When a player creates an account they are put into a new game, known as a galaxy, which has not yet started. Once a galaxy has enough players (roughly 500), or has been waiting for a certain amount of time (76 hours), the game begins. This way you do not risk joining a game that has already been running for some time. Players take control of a system and a few ships, and through production, research, and diplomacy players expand their empire. Through both formal alliances (up to 4 members) and informal greater alliances (groups of alliances linked by non-aggression pacts and player diplomacy) players attempt to create the largest empire in the galaxy. A galaxy ends when either one alliance controls a certain percentage of the galaxy, or when only a certain number of active empires remain in the game.

Space allows the user to pick one of 10 different races. Each race has a unique set of bonuses such as faster ships or greater population growth, as well as a unique ship type that will grant special bonuses or abilities to a number of ships in the fleets they are part of.

Each galaxy contains 3 000 systems, each system have a randomised amount of land, ore and habitability (with the exceptions of home-systems, which all have the same amount of land and ore and a 100% habitability match with the players race). A system's habitability is a rating that determines how well suited the planet is for a players race. The lower the habitability rating the more expensive colonization and construction will be. Habitability can be increased over time up to 100% suitable by building a number of bioformers in the system. Once a system has been claimed or conquered the player can build structures on the available land to further boost his economy, or increase the defensive strength of the system.

Ship design plays a major part of the game: Each ship class has a certain number of "slots" available, players can freely choose how many slots to devote to various aspects of the ship such as hull, shield, engines, sensors, stealth and various weapon types. Through research bigger ship classes with more slots can be unlocked, though all ship classes offer certain bonuses to a fleet if enough ships of a particular class is present, so a mixed fleet is often preferable to a fleet based on a single ship design.

Research also plays a big part in a successful empire. There are two main groups of technologies to research - economic and ship based. Generally speaking, economic technologies increase the output of your industry, giving you more recourses to play with, and also reduce the cost and upkeep of your ships. Ship based technologies increase the "power" of each slot you allocate, so adding one beam slot at level 10 will give the ship considerably more firepower than simply spending two slots on level 1 beam weapons. Additionally the relative difference between combatants' weapons and shield technology levels determines how much of the damage is absorbed by a ship's shields and how much passes directly to its hull. Some weapons, like missiles, have a "natural" shield penetration rate of 50%, but against an opponent whose shield technology is higher than the missile technology of the attacker, this can be reduced, or even completely eliminated, depending on the technology gap. On the other hand, against an opponent with a much lower shield technology a lot higher percentage of the damage is applied to the hull directly.

Awards
Space has won the following awards:


 * April 2005 - Game of the month at Multiplayer Online Games Directory (MPOGD)
 * July 2002 - Game of the month at MPOGD