(You have just come from here - the Feds Turn 1 page)
The Birds! Turn 1
Ships
Base
HQ
Now
it's time for the Birds' turn - and there won''t be so many pretty
pictures I'm afaid! You may need the last page for reference??
Now lets do...
The Birds! Turn 1 (often thought of as the Romulans [TM] )
In the FILES menu Hit the green "2" button. Note how "Play Saved File" disappears as an
option, because you haven't played any of the Bird turn yet. Hit "Unpack
RST file" instead. (Yup! that dangerous button again! )
Now Every Time I did this I got this
Which was a bit sad - but I probably did something wrong when I installed stuff - no matter!
If it doesn't happen to you skip the next Paragraph
Click on the OK button and it all shuts down.... also sad!
Just restart Planets4.exe again and hit the FILES button - select Game 1 and Race 2 again and this time the
Play Saved Game button is available - click it
A new map screen opens. There's some green stuff
at Wayne's World (if you set up Master as per the earlier instructions).
Note how nothing is visible just south, at Odionia! Even though "you" know
the Feds are there, the Birds can't see them yet. That's why ships have
scanners, and why you turned them on (as "Them... the Enemy!")
It's worth noting that many of the Bird ships have very poor scanners and
sometimes don't see things right in front of them. This is typical of
cloaking ships. They get the advantage of being almost invisible [cloaking
isn't 100% reliable, it simply reduces the chances of enemy scanners seeing
you by lots, even at point blank range], but scanners are noisy and make you
more visible.
Also - in the image above some of the stars (planets) are yellow
(scanned) some are grey (not scanned). An explanation about scanning is
in this footnote - here
Anyway!
Here's what to do with the Birds, in
summary:
Ships
They have a different assortment of starting ships to the Feds,
three "Skyfire class cruisers". With names like Black Knight, Dead Parrot which I
think are silly enough to leave alone. I rename the ground base
CLOUD NINE though.
None of these ships have a cloaking device, so
they are as visible as any ship. And seem to have good scanners (ranges of
300+).
In the Attack page I set all to Attack Enemy Ships, Target Dangerous, 2nd Wave. In the Mission page I
switched on all those Long Range and Planetary scanners.
Transfers to base on the Trans screen: I kept 300 fuel on each. so
beamed down 50 fuel to the base. Also beamed down
900 troops,
1200 supplies(!),
690
food,
350 med packs,
15,000 Ord(!). (Use the shift key to multiply the buttons by 1000)
Beamed up 300mc,
100 repair
units. Seem to have plenty of colonists (several thousand) on board
already.
Damage screen - turned on all 7 Repair switches for all 3 ships.
MOVEMENT: Something new
here - optimising speeds. These ships can go FAST, but that burns fuel. We
need to give them waypoints, but avoid wasting fuel, which can get to be a
critical bottleneck if you run out!
I send Black Knight south, to
Shaddan, ID 135. using the  button again - (Yes, that's where the Fed warship is going too. It will be
instructive.) In Black Knight's Overview screen, I fiddle with the speed
slider in the top right. What I want is for the ship to arrive in 1 turn so
as not to waste time ("ETA 1" about 2 lines below the speed bar) whilst
using as little fuel as possible ("Burn : 30" about 4 lines below the speed
slide bar.) [This isn't linear, by the way! There's a graph on the NAV page if you're interested - looks like this?]
 and when I set a speed it looked like this 
(Also - By the
Way - you can minimise the Overview type screens by clicling the
relevant top button again and maximise it again by doing it again)
I sent Dead Parrot NE to Gieneh (ID 391) at speed 91, to
arrive in 1 turn with minimum fuel cost. [Not quite - I went for speed 95 - burn 31 - a bit better???? (Olly) )
I sent Lumberjack NW to
Lacedodia 481. This is 176 light years (LY) away and it turned out that it
can make it in 1 turn... at a cost of 200 fuel, which I consider excessive.
So I opted for spending 2 turns en route, at speed 89, burning just 42 kT of
fuel. [I did speed 95 = burn 32kT -- Waste NOT - Want NOT!! 8) (Olly) ]
BASE: 
Same procedure as Fed base.
i.e. on the Struct screen - build
1 Govt Centre,
10 Farms,
10 Mines,
400 Factories,
1 more Training Centre....
However, after transferring down
all that stuff off the Skyfires, I had about 3000 supplies! I built
30
cities
instead of 5-6 Fed ones. This explains to me why the Birds always
seem to do so well in games... they obviously start off with a huge
economic advantage - I must email Tim about this imbalance! (done, I think - Olly)
On the Switches screen set Factories to max, Ship Repair Shop to 10KT per turn, and switch ON that Terraformer
The
fighters on Air Attack Base, I formed into a Wing of 50 "Voltar G" type fighters.
On Military select the Kill! Kill! Kill! mode
HQ
:
Set simple spying on race 1. Set input to Spy funding (mana) as 100mc. Set
"Gather intelligence" on.
NOTE: Birds are especially good at
Spying.
Also
Set Tax type to ULTRA CONSERVATIVE.
NOTE: When tax regimes
are described as "Liberal", Conservative" etc these are the American
definitions of such things, which are the opposite of the English meanings.
I had an illuminating conversation with Tim when I pointed out this "error".
Americans are strange! 8)
ID: I called the Birds "Captain Barmy". Click DONE and DONE!
TECH : Like the Feds - I bought an Upgrade for Small Weapon Tech
We've done the Bird's turn - lets go on to Turn 2?
Click the Files and then hit the Make TRN File button! Turn Done!
Want to know some detail on the file structure of this sucker? Here's another footnote - here
Close the Planets program
Right - if it ain't still running - run up the Host Program again... and click on "1" on our Testgame slot
and look at that! - two little red lights!
Let's just do a check to make sure nothing's gone horribly wrong
Hit the SCAN TRN button. Probably you will see nothing (though the two red
lights marked 1 and 2 may flicker). If the lights both stay or turn red,
we're ready to roll!
Hit RUN HOST
A few seconds later the
screen returns to normal and you'll see those two lights have turned green again!
-
ie Host is awaiting some TRN files for players 1 and 2 again.
Let's see what happened
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![[Fed battle]](../all/fedbattle3watermarked500.jpg "Feds meeting their match???")