Planetary Hoppers

Planetary Hoppers is a space strategy game between several human players (current AI exists just to show how AI-API can be used). Every player takes control of a civilization and competes over control of known space (there are several options for victory conditions ranging from one player controlling all starting planets to cumulative scoring system where all planets are worth one point per round and where game is played for a fixed number of rounds). It is quite standard game of researching technology, building armies, making alliances and crushing opposition under Dodechadrium heel of your boot.

Somewhere in around the map (usually in the middle) there is a dodechaedron - strange planet with Dodechadrium - material that can be used to create technology yet unrivalled anywhere. Unluckily for populations of this quadrant there ain't enough for everybody so vicious war usually ensues that'll kill fleets in space and troops on planets even if otherwise everybody would have just agreed to live in peace (which just isn't very likely anyway).

Currently in normal games with random maps players start with single production planet and possibly couple other near planets under their control. Technology starts from level 1 on production planet and from level 0 everywhere else. Planets not under anyones control join empire of player whose fleet arrives there first, but after that planets are conquered either through shooting troops on planet with bombardment weapons or (more rarely) by dropping troops on planet from cargo holds of your fleet.

Resources can be transferred between planets by autotransfer which currently just costs percentage of transferred goods (which increases as distances increase) or by ships. Sometimes autotransfer if preferable over using cargo ships and sometimes some resource is so scarce that it is worth dedicating ship or two just moving it to production planets.

How come that all those budding empires start from the same situation? It is because of the Thargan Empire to which (nominally at least) all planets in this quadrant belong to and to which every culture ought to pay taxes. Finding the dodechaedron brought all those planets to same realization that it might be time to rebel against old empire and carve a new one from its carcass.

Playing planetary hoppers is quite nicely strategic endeavour as available resources and several quite viable strategies exists even though some units are stable favourites in most situations. Dodechadrium is used to research of level 7 and 8 technologies and to research of all misc technologies. Currently I plan to try out some strategies I haven't used before related to using cargo ships to transfer resources - and as somewhat related note I plan to code some more automation into use of ships that can be used if there is not en0ugh time for micromanagement.