Even in a huge game, the decisions you have to make are crisp and clear: decide where to spend your money, decide how many ships to buy, and decide where to send them. What separates the Ho! from other games in the genre, I think, is that it is a fast game. There are also a few odd variants, such as decoy or biological ships, that add flavor to the mix. And Dreadnoughts are, essentially, ridiculously powerful (and expensive) fighters. Satellites cannot move, but can attack and defend enemy ships. Tankers can refuel fleets even away from your colony. Colony ships can conquer new worlds, but are hideously expensive in terms of both dollars and metal. Scouts can fly farther than your other ships, but are weaker. Fighters are the standard ship type, existing at your “official” technology level. A ship with higher weapons tech might have ominous looking missiles dangling from it. When you go to design ships, newer technologies are displayed on the image of the ship being built (for example, a faster ship might have more engines. Technologies have a variety of whimsical names (“You now have Topping Off the Tanks range technology.”). The first five areas allow you access to marginal improvements in their respective areas, while “Radical” techs may be useless or game-changing. Technology research can be split among six areas: weapons, shields, speed, range, minaturization, and “Radical”. The mid to late game of most Spaceward Ho! games tend to be fierce battles over metal. You can scavenge metal by scrapping old ships, or by destroying enemies in battles at planets you control, but generally speaking, once you run out of metal, you’re screwed. When you run out of metal, you can’t build any more ships.
Metal is a nonrenewable resource: it is mined from planets, and used to build spaceships. Each turn you decide how much money to spend on each activity. Money can be spent in exactly four ways: you can spend it on building ships, you can invest in your planets (terraforming them to be closer to your ideal temperature, or mining metal for use in building ships), you can invest in technology, or you can save the money for another turn. Each turn, you accrue money based on the number of people on a given planet (planets with few citizens provide no income, and in fact cost money to maintain). Every planet is inhabitable, although some are more or less hospitable to your race, which is expressed in terms of gravity and temperature: your people like planets close to 1.0g and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
You can choose for a galaxy to have a specific arrangement, such as a cluster, or spiral, or have the stars spread randomly.
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