Space Alert - The Galactic Threat

SAGT runs parallel to SA

In fact playing SAGT is not much different from playing Space Alert with your friends. The board game is still the main part of the game and decides most of all, how succesfull you and your crew are. The basic board game is (almost) not altered, so you are familiar with the most complicated part of SAGT already :)

SAGT adds another layer of decision-making and consequences on top of Space Alert. Decisions you usually make before you start your round of Space Alert and between missions. The said consequences depend on your performance during your missions and are resolved after missions. An example makes this clear:

You enter the world of SAGT with your Space-Ship - the Fortunate - on planet earth and a handful of space-bucks

You look up the prices for different ressources you could buy on earth and sell on Andromeda 1. You find out that there is a good difference in the price of stainless steel, hence you decide to transport a few tons of that, leaving you a ncie cut.

The route from Earth to Andromeda 1 is rather short and only takes 2 hyperjumps. Leaving you floating at lower than light speed (LTLspeed) only once on your journey (one jump into midspace. Recharging your FTL-drives and another jump to reach Andromeda 1).

You fight the threats and got a little damage on the blue section main laser.

You sell the steanless steel and earn your space-bucks. Repairing the laser at andromeda 1 is rather low-prized so you are left with a good amount of space-bucks to continue your travels.

As you see only the bold part of the above is really concerned with playing Space Alert, while the rest is before- and afterhand decision-making. In fact this is the idea of SAGT: Giving your usual game of SA a deeper story and more context, while leaving the game as much as it is.

Interacting with the world of SAGT

Sticking to the above example there are a number of points, at which you and your ship interacts with the organizations of SAGT:

First you buy steanless steel at earth, diminishing the available amounts by some tons, while paying a few space-bucks into earths cash box.

You fight alien threats. Their level is determined by the activities of the aliens (which in turn are given by the actions the Scouts have decided on).

You arrive at Andromeda 1 and sell your steel. This leaves Andromeda 1 with more steel and less money.

You repair your lasers. This gives Andromeda 1 a few Space-Bucks back you just took from them.

All these actions require communication between you and the world of SAGT in some way. One of the purposes of these forums is to make this communication possible (while for future seasons another medium might be used...). In our example this would mean the following:

There is a Thread "Earth" in the Subforum "Sector 1" telling you what kind of ressources are available for which price on planet earth. You tell the Guild-Leader that you buy one ships loading of steanless steel, by posting a reply on the corresponding thread.

Then you set off for your journey. To determine how difficult the aliens are in the midspace between Earth and Andromeda 1 you check the News-Subforum and switch there to the "Threats on Trade-Routes" channel. You see, that the route is quite safe (only white threats) and play the game with your friends according to this information.

After your game you post your actions into the "Andromeda 1"-Thread: Selling your Steel and buying a laser-repair.

To keep everybody out there informed on what cool stuff you and your crew encountered on your very first mission you make a log-entry in your ships Thread, in the Sub-Forum: Civilian Ships. This does not have any hard consequences (except telling the world out there, that you encountered only white threats between earth and Andromeda 1. But this, as said, had been in the news anyway...) and serves only for your private documentation or social interaction with other players.

But,... Cheaters!?

So how on earth (no pun intended) are we protected against cheaters, with the above system? The short answer: We are not. If someone really wants to cheat, there is no way we can ultimately avoid that. This is since a very important part of the game is played in our living rooms. The best counter-measure against this is, to make sure we have a nice, friendly, polite and well-mannered community. This is why the joining process to SAGT is rather slow and the tolerance for breaking the forums rules is low. Most cheaters have a tendency to be impatient and rude, so by taking these two measures, most of the cheaters hopefully stay out of our game. Having a good community is our weapon against cheaters.

Still you might be concerned that there are cheaters around and you are right to do so. As said there is no 100% protection.

But hold on for a minute and let's think about how their cheating affects your game: At most they indirectly influence it, messing around with the numbers in different places like prices, storage of ressources and such. They can't crawl into your living room destroying your game. You are still playing Space Alert with your close friends at your table and experience the consequences by using the Galactic Threat. In fact all they can cheat on, is thereself. So if they really want to: who cares?

For some reason you might be still on the search for other players cheating and you find evidence of them doing so. Whatever you do, don't just accuse anybody being a cheater! There are several reasons you might think somebody is cheating and he or she is in fact not. This ranges from you missing something, till the subjected person just made a mistake in his or her calculations. Accussing somebody of cheating publicly is just poison for our community and there is a zero-tolerance on that. If you have the feeling somebody breaks the rules the correct behaviour of you is to collect evidence. If you have done that and are still really, really sure that the subject is cheating, you can present a council member your evidence. By all means, do this never in any public way. The council members are the ones, which lead the games of the Galactic Threat and they are the only authority to decide about somebody being banned or even accused as cheaters. Always keep that in mind.

I don't want to cheat unintentionally! What can I do?

You might be concerned doing mistakes, crunching numbers or anything such. There are a number of counter-measures you can put on your play to avoid that, all them fairly simple and some of them might be even fun for you and your crew.

It essentially boils down to one sentence: Don't play the Galactic Threat alone.

Make sure the other crewmembers know about what you are doing, crunch the numbers together, read the same posts and learn the rules of the Galactic Threat together. Four eyes see more than two and the ten eyes of a full Space Alert Crew sees even more. But you don't need to stop there. This forum allows users to cultivate their own blog. It's easy to reach via the players profiles. Use this blog to make Captains-Logs or Crew-Members-Logs. Tell us about your crazy journeys! How you escaped the Nebula Crab in last second. How you finally defeated your Nemesis and brought tons of food to the almost starving Space Station in Sector 2-Gamma! Keeping these "diaries" can be very enjoying, for you, your crew and also for the rest of the community. Heck, you might even think about live-streaming/recording your living-room plays, open yourself to the community completely. We all love this game and are interested to see how other crews play and get along. Exchange your experience with other crews and find friends. Keeping your journeys open to the community gives you even more eyes watching what you are doing, than the ten eyes of your crew. Eliminating faults and typos is than done not only by you, but by all your fellows.

The Galactic Threat is a Roleplaying Game

Before I let you delve into the deeper mechanics of the Galactic Threat, I want to talk a bit more about SAGT being a roleplaying game, as already indicated above. Always remember that there are two persons you might speak to: First there is the real world player, just a Space Alert player like you and me. Second there is always the role they play in their game. They might be the captain of their ship, being proud, ordering their crew around and never forgive a bad word you said about his ship. Or she might be a mechanic always being grunty and bad-tempered. This however, does not mean that the player herself is grunty and bad-tempered. So if she is In-Game and is unfriendly to you this is nothing you should take personally. It is something your character should take personally.

While this distinction allows for being somewhat of a meany, it does not cancel the code of ethics, which we want to uphold in our community, like no swearing (you never know who's reading on the other side, even if you know that person well. There might be children for example), no racism and so on... (read about the code of ethics here [link]). I know this effectively limits you in your freedom of what you could play In-Game, but without this restriction our code of ethics would be useless and we don't want players insulting other players on purpose, while hiding under the excuse of being "in-game". The code of ethics ensures we have a nice community you feel welcome in and this is just more important, than anything else in SAGT.

What is a season?

SAGT is organized in seasons, which range about a few months. We want SAGT to be improved continuously to keep it fun and fresh. Depending on how many players there are and what they want to do, adjustments need to be done. To not interrupt the running game we set points at which the game starts and stops. Some changes are hard to perform in a running game and hence will be implemented between seasons. This also gives players the opportunity to change roles, a former admiral can swap to the scouts for the next season, no harm done.

How is SA altered, when playing SAGT?

As already mentioned in the beginning of this post, we want the experience of SA unaltered as much as possible. However there are a few little things, which need a change. We will not cover every situation here for the new rules, but give you an idea of what is changed:

Only fixed length Campaigns: Due to the nature of SAGT you always fly campaigns and we no longer make a distinction between campaigns and missions. Missions are basically just campaigns with one stop. If you are playing with the experience system of the expansion The New Frontier you can handle One-Stop-Campaigns as Missions for the issue of ticking of Mission-Achievements. The length of your Campaigns is determined by the route you fly and you can't abort them or continue them beyond the intended number of stops, as described in the rulebooks. You can however use your distress drive (see below), after surviving any stop, to abort a campaign.

Freight: Your ship does have a cargo area, which you use to trade. This is essential for earning space-bucks. The structural damages your ship can take hit your cargo area, meaning: If you reveal a structural damage for the blue/white/red section of your ship all your cargo in that sections cargo area is lost and useless. You can't sell whatever was inside there. Further you can't use this cargo area until you have repaired it.

Provisional repairs: During campaigns you can only perform provisional repairs, which hold for the rest of the campaign. You need to keep track of what parts of your ship got damaged during a campaign, since repairing them permanently will cost you some space-bucks. If you do not repair damages permanently you will start your next campaign with all old damage (provisional repairs from last campaign are no longer valid). This old damage can't get provisional-repaired during the current campaign.

Ship Upgrades: At certain stations you can upgrade your ship for some space-bucks. These upgrades mostly concern some parts of your ship, which can get damaged. If these parts ar damaged, most of the time your upgrades are gone and you need to re-upgrade. How exactly upgrades work is described at the place you can buy them (i.e. the corresponding station-thread/station-subforum).

In General No Perma-Death: Unless you sign up for a deadly mission your ship will not destroyed completely. The next generation of ducklings we are playing with have a distress drive, which automatically triggers, if the ship suffers to much damage. It will jump your ship to the next available location, which is the point you have started your current campaign (if you have not completed half of the campaign yet) or your destination (if you have completed half of the campaign). However you still have encountered severe damage on your ship and without permanent repairings of at least one damage (the "seventh" damage on each station, which took more than six damage), you can't start your next campaign.

Determine Threat Level and Mission Type: Instead of negotiating the threat level with your crew, you instead look on the map (in the sector-forum you are in) to see what the current threat level on your route is. The same holds for the decission if you are playing with the expansion or not and if you are playing a double-action campaign (only concerns the expansion). All this is determined by the route you take. Don't worry though, there are enough routes to choose from, such that you have a wide range of campaign-types to choose from.

No No-Cloning-Rule (Only New Frontier Expansion): Since there is (almost) no permadeath the No-Cloning-Rule in the New Frontier Expansion is useless. Level your crew as if they all would be cloning, although story-wise they actually don't. If you are flying a deadly campaign (i.e. one where permadeath IS enabled) and your ship is destroyed your crew died. In this case you have to get a new level 0 crew, which again plays with the No No-Cloning-Rule

No House Rules: SAGT assumes you are playing with the rules as found in the box of your game. There are a few balancing issues, which the different organizations have to consider. If you alter your game, you effectively modify the difficulty level you play, which then no longer matches the difficulty level SAGT thinks you are playing. Hence for experiencing SAGT as it is intended to, you can't use house rules.