THANCS (Tactical, Hex-based And Newtonian Combat Simulator) is a turn-based tactics game in which you can design and build spaceships, and use them to fight. At the moment it is mostly dead, and can only be played as PBW, but it's easy to set up a game for a small group. It is mainly played in two ways: either each player starts with a fleet and they fight a deathmatch, or each player starts with a constructor/carrier ship and they gradually build up fleets.
Ships are built arbitrarily on a hex grid, with different parts being different sizes, shapes, and costs. A ship's acceleration, turn rate, and price are all affected by what parts are on it, so the design is a tradeoff between these things and having more stuff. The location of a part on the ship impacts what it can do, its effect on movement, and how likely it is to take damage, so that must also be considered in the design as well.
As an example, one of my gunships, not very manueverable but good enough very strong - good at defense or making direct attacks. It's both expensive and energy-hungry, but packs the second-most defense and most firepower I have seen into an effective ship of its size.
A dated but still useful diagram of a carrier ship. The inclusion of larger docking areas and general reduction in power efficiency means that it would no longer be viable, but it shows the system well.
A heavy warship, which would be weak against well-used and/or suicidal attack fighters, but quite good against other capital ships or as the core of a strong mixed fleet. Sadly, really big ships rarely come into play except in the otherwise less interesting deathmatch games.
Ships move on a larger hex grid, each hex of which can hold an arbitrary number of ships. Linear motion is conserved (though rotation is not - after a turn you won't keep spinning until another in the opposite direction), and manuver is very important due to protection, firing arcs, and movement being affected by facings. Ships, when hit, will recieve damage along the path of the hit, each individual impact absorbing only part of the beam's energy. While heat is not modeled, energy is, and power management for both individual ships and the whole fleet is an important part of any protracted game.
A group of blue ships attack the red fleet, and demonstrate how damage is applied. Attacking in such close formation is generally a bad idea, both for this reason and because it makes you easy to surround and vulnerable to missiles.
The opening manuvers of a teamgame, where both the green and cyan players are attacking the pink player's mothership. Cyan is moving to get flanking shots with his torpedo-bombers while engaging pink's fighters with his own, and green is coming around to get disruptor shots on the ship's vulnerable rear.
A general melee in which the red player is surrounded in trying to attack the blue player's base. It's a bad situation, especially because of the red player's very strong flagship being there (shown on the right.) That game lasted over 1200 turns, and the flagship was under construction for several hundred of those.
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Windows users will need to download "THANCS+mods+graphics.rar" and extract it anywhere, as well as getting "freeglut.dll" and putting it in the "dlls" directory of the THANCS folder.
Linux/Mac users download "thancs-gui_source.rar", extract it, and then get "mods.rar" and "graphics.rar" and extract them into the corresponding subdirectories. Run "THANCS-perlgui.pl" to run the game.
Games are hosted on the
Space Empires PBW site, which surprisingly enough also does the Space Empires series. How it works is basically - the server processes a turn, then generates a ".gam" file which the players download, then they make their orders and upload their ".plr" order files to the server for processing. It's fairly longform, with matches easily lasting 100 turns at usually only 1-2 turns per day.
The game manual is
here.
Here's a writeup (not by me) of the first game I played in - which was the first game of everyone involved, but still went well overall.
Forum post with lots of information on ship design
here.
So, anyone interested in a game? In my experience, ideal gamesize is 2-4 players, with up to 6 or so also working if everybody is on top of things and runs turns regularly. Carrier games (where everybody starts with nothing but a constructor ship) also are ideal for getting a feel for the game before everyone has built up a whole big fleet. I'd also be glad to offer any design or other advice (you can design ships without being in a game), or even sit out a game if people would rather do it without an experienced player in there unbalancing it.
Notes:
- You can save a screenshot in either the shipdesigner or the game itself with shift-s (which also saves ship designs, so be careful)
- When designing ships, use the "stock" mod. This is the same as "stock v3" on the servers, and is the newest version.
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Topic: THANCS - a Newtonian space TBT (Read 56793 times)