Stellar Emperor (tm-Kesmai Corporation)

Practicing these exercises will help you develop the skills you need to survive and conquer:

1. Probe-based scouting
2. Shooting down probes simulating incoming missiles
3. Probing while farming
4. Probe-based surveillance and stalking
5. Dumping and searching
6. Using probes to replenish energy under way
7. Building a Destroyer

Probe-based scouting

Choose any Province of the Galaxy.
Fly your Scout into that Province. Do not orbit a planet.
Alt-P to pull up the Province map.
Left-click a star -- call it 9999.
  Game draws a circle around 9999 on the Province map
  and
  displays Science computer menu, including
     4=Send probe to 9999
     and
     5=Probes.
Alt-4 to send a probe there.
Alt-5 to bring up the Probes menu.
Wair for the Game to
  display "Probe entering 9999" in the Radio panel (lower left of main Game window)
  and turn the star number green on the Province map.
Alt-7 for System Scan.
Game displays system scan in upper-right panel, individual planet Geo-scan buttons in middle left panel.
Mentally note which planets look worth evaluating more closely -- for concreteness, suppose C.
Note that Planet C in the Geo-scan button menu corresponds to 4.
Alt-4 to bring up the Geo-scan for planet C in the upper-right panel.

Return to "Alt-P to pull up the Province map..." to continue probing.

Nuances and subtleties:

• Once you have a probe out, you can drive it from one system to another without bringing it back to your ship first.
• For mass-production scouting, all you have to do is drive your ship or probe to each system, then use the Survey.exe program from the Game distribution to browse the se##.gxy file offline.

• Why use a probe, rather than visiting each system yourself, in your ship?
• What use is the Alt-S/Alt-5/Alt-3 "Probe status" function?
• What happens to your ship as you launch the probe?
• Why might you want to use the command-line PRObe command, rather than the menus?
• What goes wrong when you try to do this from orbit?
• What happens if you use the same probe too long, without recalling it and relaunching?

Shooting down probes simulating incoming missiles

Launch a probe to a nearby star system -- maybe even the one you're in, if you're in one.

Alt-S to bring up the Science menu,
Alt-5 to bring up the Probes menu,
Alt-1 to Recall Probe.

A returning probe maneuvers to rendezvous with you exactly the same way, and with the same performance characteristics, as an incoming missile. (Well, not exactly -- if you run away, a probe will eventually run out of energy, and slow to a crawl. A missile, as far as I know, will not.)

Run away, lock weapons, maneuver, fire on the probe.

Ways to replenish ammo on ship:

• Drydock at a base where you have used Arms industry to make ammo.
• Self-DEStruct and rebuild (Alt-C/Alt-4).
• DRYdock at an Imperial Base and Change Ships to Scout (DRY SC command-line command, or Alt-O(Operations)/Alt-3(Drydock)/Alt-8(Change Ships)/Alt-1(Scout) using the menus).

Probing while farming

The key to this technique is that, although a TRansport cannot pick up a Probe from a planet, it can control a Probe already in flight.
A TRansport can recover a Probe, carry the recovered probe around, and launch the Probe again.
[Thanks to Commander Cain for straightening me out on this probe-vs-transport matter.]

In your SCout, orbit the base where you built your TRansport.
Have at least one Probe on board.
Launch a Probe to the first system you propose to farm.
Use the Alt-S/Alt-5/Alt-5 function to watch for hostile warships while the probe is in flight.
When the probe enters the system you propose to farm,
Alt-S/Alt-5/Alt-1/Alt-x to SURvey planet "x" for farmability.
Shift to your TRansport.
Be about your farming.
Drive your probe ahead of you to assess farmabilities.

Questions to ponder:

• How can you use the Probe to see if there's an ambush waiting for you in hyper?

Probe-based surveillance and stalking

Dumping and searching

Using probes to replenish energy under way

Building a Destroyer

This one is a little different -- it's a Planetary Management exercise, and you have to wait hours-to-days for results.

Find any planet with Habitability greater than zero and Metal greater than 50. (Actually, for this exercise, a low-hab planet works best.)

In the Planetary Management menus, make the following settings:

• Planetary Operations:
• Annual Immigration Limit:  99999999
• Conscription Rate (%): 0
• Maximum Mercenaries: 0
• Trade Surplus Rate (%): 0
• Distress Radio Channel: doesn't matter
• Alliance Access Code: doesn't matter
• Colony Name: doesn't matter
• Labor Assignments: Assigned % Population / % of Engineering Construction Effort:
• Hydroponics/Farming: 3.6
• Services: 0/0
• Mining: 17/0
• Engineering: 5/0
• Armaments: 0.01/0
• Ship Yards: 9.49/100
• Housing: 54.9
• Commodities Stockpiles:
• Metal Ore: 99999999
• Consumer Goods: 0
• Food: 1000
• Probes: 4
• Missiles: 25
• Torpedo: 99999999
• Ship Building Labor:
• Destroyers: 100
• all others: 0

    Warning: These settings are not stable! Left untuned, they will eventually ruin the planet!

Explanation for the settings:

• Conscription and Troops are zero to maximize number of workers on the planet.
• Mining at 17 is enough to produce enough metal on a met-50 planet. Higher-met planets could get away with lower Mining.
• Engineering is filled, and all assigned to Shipyard, to grow Shipyard as much as possible -- more Shipyard workers build ships faster.
• Armaments is set to 0.01 so that excess Shipyard workers will trickle down into Arms to produce ammo for the Destroyer. (The planet grows faster than the number of Shipyard jobs.)
• The Probes/Missiles stock levels will just fill a Destroyer's magazines. The Torps level will keep whatever torps the planet produces beyond the 40 needed to fill a Destroyer's magazines.
• If you set Trade Surplus greater than zero, or set Probes and/or Missiles higher than specified, the planet might not produce enough Torps to fill the Destroyer's magazines by the time the Destroyer is ready -- the way Arms works, it has to build all the specified Probes before it starts building Missiles, and all the specified Probes and Missiles before it starts building Torps.
• All Shipyard effort is devoted to building Destroyers. If you allocate any Shipyard effort to anything else, you will slow down the building of the Destroyer.