User:Cashto/Intro

Welcome to the best game you never played!

Goal of the Game

A typical game lasts 30 minutes to an hour. The purpose of the game is simple: destroy all enemy bases. In order to do this, however, you must first gain map control with your own bases and research superior weapons and technology to overwhelm the enemy. Both of these tasks require money, which is generated by special non-player ships called "miners" which retrieve a resource called "Helium 3" (or He3) from asteroids. Much of the game revolves around finding enemy miners and destroying them before they can safely dock the He3 cargo at a home base -- while at the same time protecting your own team's miners.

Each team is lead by a veteran pilot called "the commander". The commander receives all the money in the game, and is in charge of buying bases and technology as well as coordinating the team around specific objectives. Most ships in the game are free, but some of the more important ones are not. To fly these ships you must request money from the commander, and he may deny that request if, for example, he is saving for something else, or doesn't believe you will be able to effectively use that ship. For the first few weeks, you should stick to flying free ships.

Your First Ship: The Scout

The scout is an excellent beginner ship. Scouts are very fast ships and unlike most ships, scouts have excellent sensors which generally enable you to see most everything within a sector (except for stealth ships). They aren't very good at attacking things -- but that's okay; it takes a while to learn good dogfighting skills in Allegiance, so you should generally try to avoid conflicts.

So you've just joined a team. Hit F4 to go to the loadout menu. You have a choice of ships here. Pick the scout. Hit the launch button and away you go!

To fly, hit Num Pad 0 to switch to mouse. To accelerate to 100% thrust, hit /, to 0 thrust, hit 0.

The Minimap

At the bottom left should be a little map. If it is not there, hit F7 to bring it up. It looks like this:

This is a map of the game universe. Maps generally contain 12-16 sectors connected by wormholes called "alephs". Teams start at opposite ends of the map, and at the beginning of the game they can only see their own sector and immediately adjacent sectors. But alephs are usually arranged in a regular pattern, and there are only a dozen or so maps in common use, so this happens quite quickly.

There are a lot of symbols that can appear on the minimap, here are a few of the most important ones:

• Base
• ][Image:Dn hiconbmp.png]] Constructor (a non-player ship that builds a base on an asteroid)
• Miner
• Bomber
• Teleport receiver (a.k.a., "ripcord").