QUICK START MANUAL Circa 7000 is heavily strategic, turn-based war game. Each side has a squad to small army-sized force of individual troops, mechs and vehicles doing battle on a large, detailed field filled with rivers, swamps, forests, buildings and the more sinister trip wires and land mines. Play occurs in 3 powerful, yet intuitive, Phases. In the first Phase, all the forces move with different rules for vehicles and non-vehicles. In the second, forces aim up to three weapons each from their primary or secondary stash. All the weapons fire in Phase III. And that's only the beginning! Circa 7000 is delivered with all the tools used to make the game's forces, terrains and battles! This include the Game Maker for making your own scenarios: pick and place the armies, design the battlefield, write up the story and specify how the game will end (Destroying/Conquering areas or Casualties alone). And when that isn't enough, use the Customizer to modify the existing forces or design your own from scratch! Design and draw your own forces, weapons and terrain, including all the stats and sound, to implement in your own scenarios, time periods and themes! Play is literally unlimited when you start swapping these files... Lastly, you'll never be in want of an opponent. In addition to in-house play against others, Circa 7000 also supports computer opponents and Play By Email! So your opponent can be in your room or around the world! All this together means that Circa 7000 may very well be the last strategic war game you may ever need... Requirements: 486SX33 (About the minimum tolerable speed) 4M of Extended Memory (3.2M must be free!) 600K of free Conventional Memory 6M of Disk Space SVGA Mouse Optional: Sound Blaster card or 100% compatible. Getting Started To start Circa7000, type "C7" on the DOS command line and press enter. The opening screens will appear followed by a screen that gives several choices on how to play the game. If this is your first time, click the left mouse button on the FINISHED button at the bottom of the screen. The next screen deals mainly with army setup. The default is to play the scenario as designed, meaning that you will use the setup defined in the scenario. For the first time, play the scenario as designed by clicking the left mouse button on the "X" in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. The other choices you could have made would be to add mist, which randomly "grows" on the field. The bottom two choices "Army A (B) familiar with battlefield" determines if the battlefield is hidden from the army to begin with. If you are playing the shareware version, you can set up your armies anywhere, but you must choose the default scenario in order to actually play it. PHASE ONE The game starts in Phase I. The left hand side of the screen is the green information bar. It'll provide most of the information you need throughout the game, including who the active force is. Across the top of the screen are four menu bars. The REPORTS and INFO menus provide valuable information that you'll reference at least once each scenario. The largest portion of the screen is the battlefield. To scroll the field, you can use the slidebars to the right and bottom of the screen. Alternately, and more easily, you can click the right mouse button on the field at any point. That point will then be centered on the screen. The right button can also be used to activate troops. Simply click on them with the right button. If the force is finished for the phase, then the screen will scroll as normal. To move troops, click the arrow grid to indicate which direction you want the force to go. The options are forward, backward, turn left and turn right (as opposed to slide sideways). This means that in order to move right, you must face right by clicking the right arrow and then click on the up arrow to move forward. Alternately, you can use the keypad, where '8' is forward, '2' backward, etc. Each time a force moves, it uses up Movement Points (MPs). The total number of MPs varies from force to force. Usually, it's one MP to move to each adjacent square and 1.25 MPs to move along the diagonal. The exception is moving through more difficult terrain. To find out about terrain (or anything on the board), click it with the left mouse button. Under movement penalty, you'll see a x1, x2, x4 or Impassable. The first means normal MPs of 1 and 1.25 apply. The x2 (x4) means to move into the square cost double (quadruple) the normal number of MPs. Impassable means no force can move into that square. Vehicles movement is handled a little differently. Unlike troops and mechs which can pivot in place, vehicles have to be moving in order to turn. Each turn, you have to specify how far a vehicle is going to move in MPs. Each turn, a vehicle can increase its speed by its Acceleration Rate (AR) to its top speed and decrease its speed by twice its acceleration rate. For example, if a vehicle is moving 20 and has an AR of 6, its speed for this turn could be from 8 to 26. If a vehicle is standing still, then you can enter negative numbers to get it to go in reverse. PHASE TWO All the weapons are aimed in Phase II. Determining all the targets first allows for better battlefield simulation, where everyone fires simultaneously at their own targets instead of taking turns shooting at one force until it's gone and then moving onto the next. Forces can carry Primary weapons (on green buttons) and Secondary weapons (gray buttons). A force can shoot primary OR secondary weapons each turn but not both in the same turn. To aim a weapon, simply choose which one you want to fire by clicking on it with the left mouse button and then click on the battlefield where you want it to shoot. A red bead will appear where you aimed, then fade. There are, of course, a few more factors of which to be mindful. The first is the fire arc of the weapon. In the info bar, your force will be drawn with a number of arcs surrounding it. These arcs are the fire arcs and can be matched to the appropriate weapon by color - the color of the arc will match the color behind the weapon picture on the face of the buttons. The other thing you need to be mindful of is the range of the weapon. To obtain weapon info, click the weapon button with the right mouse button. PHASE THREE Phase III is rather simple. On the bottom of the info bar, a FIRE button will appear. For each weapon that you aimed, you have to press the fire button in order to make it fire. ALL weapons that have been aimed must fire. As in Phases II, you can switch the order of the weapons by activating other forces with a right mouse click and by picking other weapons with a left mouse click. STATS There's an appreciable number of stats in Circa 7000 associated with terrain, weapons and forces. Here's a highlight of them: Forces Movement - Number of squares a force can move per turn. Vehicle - Means that a force has special rules for movement. Acceleration Rate - the amount a vehicle can increase its speed each turn. A vehicle can decelerate at twice this rate. Turn Ratio - The maximum number of times a vehicle can change direction movement phase. The turns are evenly spaced with the minimum space needed to travel before turning increasing as the speed of the vehicle does. Rammer - A vehicle defined as a Rammer does double damage when colliding with anything. Hoverer - All movement penalties are halved. Boat - Must stay completely in terrain defined as water. Hits - Once Hits reaches zero, the force is out of commission for the remainder of the battle. Stealth - The maximum distance an enemy force can see you from. If a force has a stealth factor of 10, then an enemy force must be within 10 squares to see it. This can be reduced further if Visibility is reduced (See Visibility Diminished By below). Shooting Skill - Percent chance a force will hit what it has targeted. Armor Level/Toughness - The higher this is, the harder it is to be damaged. Save - Percent chance that you won't be able to shrug off a hit. If you have a Save factor of 3, then only 30% of the hits will cause damage to that force. Weapons Range - Distance a weapon can shoot. Strength - Measure this against the Armor Level of a force. If they are equal, there a 50/50 chance it'll cause damage. The higher the strength factor, the better chance of causing damage. Damage - The maximum amount of damage the weapon can do per square (Explosions can cover more than one square.) Save - Add this number to the Force's Save factor as a modifier. The higher the number, the better the armor piercing ability. Terrain Hits - Once this reaches zero, the terrain is considered destroyed. If it says Inf(inite), then the terrain does not take damage (such as water.) Movement Penalty - The number of Movement Points it takes to enter this terrain. If it says Impassable, nothing can enter this square. The only exception is boats on impassable water. In this case, the Impassable refers to ground troops. Dangerous - Means that the terrain has a chance of inflicting damage to a force that walks across it. The terrain is actually defined as a weapon, including such stats as Strength, Damage and Save. Terrain can have variable chances of blowing depending on the size of the force entering it. This is indicated by the red bar graphs on the terrain description. Visibility Diminished By - 0% means nothing blocks vision, 100% means you can't see past it. When looking at an object, add up this stat for all the intervening terrain. If it totals 100% or more, then visibility is blocked and you won't see what's on that square. This may also be listed as simply Visibility, in which case the numbers are switched (0% can't see past it, 100% nothing blocks vision). Firepower Diminished By - Same as for Visibility, but refers to how far weapons can shoot through intervening terrain. That's everything you need to know to get started with Circa 7000!! For lots more details, check out CIR7000.MAN. Questions we're often asked: How come I've never heard of Boku Strategy Games? Boku is a new start-up company dedicated to provided high quality, strategic computer games. Boku sets out to challenge its users intellectually and creatively by providing tools to allow its games to be totally overhauled by the users. What does Circa 7000 provide that let's me change the game? The registered version of Circa 7000 provides the two utilities we used in creating all the artwork and stats for the game. The first is called The Game Maker. This allows you to change and create all the scenarios, including drawing the battlefield, picking and placing armies, writing the story and defining how the battle ends (Occupy/Destroy an Area or by Casualties). The second major utility is called The Customizer. It allows you to work with the building blocks of Circa 7000 (C7). This includes drawing the forces/terrain/weapons and assigning all the stats. You can change the ones that come with the game or build your own from scratch! This program also lets you change the sounds and even the colors. C7 is made to be changed - whether you want to sail the high seas fighting pirates or grub around the tunnels of a post-apocalyptic world! Why are the game files so large? All the game files are plain text. It could have been encoded and made into small nice packets, but in keeping with the Open Architecture theme, everything is laid out to make it easy to change using any text editor. The files may be large, but compress upwards of 96% using any compress (such as PKZIP). So transporting these files isn't an issue. What about the explosions and other pictures in the game. Do you provide tools to change those? No, we don't. That's because we wanted to leave some hacking up to the user. All the pictures and explosions are labeled in 7000pics.dat. Using that and the palette file, you should be able to figure out how to change these. Where can I find more scenarios and game files? The registered C7 includes another 10 ready-to-be-played scenarios. In addition, everyone is encouraged to upload their new forces to their favorite BBS's and FTP sites. The "Official" FTP site of C7 is ftp.indirect.com in the /pub/rpg/Circa7000 directory. Please upload all your latest creations there and feel free to download what you can find! What kind of variety does C7 offer? Circa 7000 allows you to define up to 320 different terrain squares, 50 different forces employing 32 different color schemes and 40 different weapons. All of which can be replaced and changed as you like. How come I can't get the sound to work? Circa 7000 works with Sound Blasters and compatibles. C7 first reads the BLASTER= setting in your CONFIG.SYS. If that isn't set, it'll read the SOUND.CFG in your C7 directory. EDIT this file and change the numbers to match your system (it's very self-explanatory). C7 loads in the CT-VOICE.DRV driver to play the sound. If you still can't get the sound to work, replace this file with the one that came with your sound card (it may go by a different name.) On some computers, I get "Video Card Not Recognized". Which cards are? There is no industry-wide standard on implementing SVGA yet. Circa 7000 will work on the following twenty Super VGA cards: Acumos, Ahead, ATI Technologies, Avance, Chips and Technologies, Cirrus Logic, Everex, Genoa, MXIC, NCR, Oak Technologies, Paradise/Western Digital, Primus, Realtek, Trident, Tseng Labs, Video 7 and the VESA standard. If your video card doesn't fit into one of these, please tell me what kind of card you have so I can look into supporting that as well. Does it work under Windows 95? Yep. Why am I able to beat the computer? After all it can process... There's a reason all our Generals are human! The shear amount of data that the computer has to enormous! Especially when you consider all the different situations that have to be considered with the Customizer and Game Maker in people's hands. If C7 came with a limited number of scenarios that nobody could change, then the AI could be set up to whip you every time. Instead, we took the general approach to battlefield and designed the AI to fight on any battlefield that could be dreamed up, but not designed to fight on any one type of battlefield. Ask me about Email games. What about Email games? Circa 7000 was designed to be play against other people! Realizing that you don't always have someone in-house ready to play, we implemented Play By Email. At the end of the turn, you're prompted for a file name. The game then compresses and text-encodes this file before quitting. Send this file to your opponent anyway you want - 3.5" disk, via modem or send it off through Email. Since the file is already text-encoded, there's no need to modify the file. The compression will save time (and money if you pay for E-mail by the K). Bottom line is that Circa 7000 can be played with anyone around the world! I can't seem to get the Email option to work. That's because you have the shareware version. When you register Circa 7000, you are able to Play By Email, save games and play scenarios other than those included. In addition, you get the Customizer and Game Maker and small ripper program that disassembles scenarios, allowing you to reuse the various parts. Lastly, how do I order a registered copy of Circa 7000? Good question. Without the past support of people who registered, Boku wouldn't be around today. Circa 7000 can be registered for $35US. This include all postage, handling and taxes. Fill out the order form located in ORDER.TXT and send it to: Boku Strategy Games PO Box 2181 El Segundo, CA 90245-1281 For faster response, fax the order form to Boku Strategy Games at: (310) 376-9368 or (800) 535-7068 If you neither of these are good for you and you live in North America, call one of the above numbers and leave your name, number and a time you can be reached. Your call will be returned to take your order by credit card. All orders are shipped within two days. Boku accepts checks, Money Orders, Mastercard and Visa. For more details, see ORDER.TXT. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop me a line! I'm always happy to talk about Circa 7000! You can write to me at the above address or, more quickly, send me E-mail at cooney@ix.netcom.com. I'm looking forward to hearing from you! In the meantime, enjoy Circa 7000 and please upload this shareware version to all your favorite BBS's and FTP sites! Michael Cooney Boku Strategy Games