StarForce and other SPI stuff

> Atcliffe, Phillip wrote:

        I've got real 3-d starmaps that I could compare
it too, but I'm a little busy now...

> The plane of the map (level 0) was the ecliptic, which may

        Every single 3-D starmap I've encountered has
been that way, with the sole exception of the maps in PROXIMITY ZERO.

It is that way because it is relatively

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

> Jon Davis wrote:

> and it was reasonably accurate, with only a couple of

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