User Guide

PLANET
Before you can turn your attention to the old terrestrial games of politics and
warfare, you must first focus on the serious business of surviving and thriving
on a strange world. Unlike the human factions, Planet cannot be conquered,
dominated or negotiated with, but it can be worked with to ensure the sur-
vival and prosperity of your people.
RESOURCES
Resources are the essential elements which you extract from your surroundings
to support and expand your faction. There are three types of resource—nutri-
ents, which support your population and allow your bases to grow in size;
minerals, which allow you to build units and facilities; and energy, the cur-
rency of Planet.
To obtain the resources from any given square, it must be inside your territo-
ry (see Working the Land, p. 60), inside the production radius of a base (with-
in a two-square radius, excluding diagonals), and that base must assign a unit
of its population to work that square (see Working the Land, p. 60).
Unworked squares yield no resources, regardless of their fertility.
Your ability to exploit territory is limited by your technology. When you first
arrive on Planet, you are generally unable to recover more than two of any one
resource per turn (see Resource Production Tables, p. 52). As you acquire new
technologies, your production capacity expands until you are fully able to
exploit the resource potential of every square in a base’s production radius.
NUTRIENTS (RAINFALL)
For your faction to increase, you must be able to extract healthy nutrients
from the alien ecosystem of Planet. The more nutrients a base produces, the
faster and larger it can grow. Rainfall directly determines the amount of nutri-
ents a square can produce.
PLANET
CHAPTER 3
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