Tips for newbies

Here are some very good tips for newbies. Because there are many of them it isn't likely you remember all of them after reading them once. Just read the advice every now and then and after a few times you should be fine.

#   First of all read the rules.. This tip is the most important one, because the rules tell a lot of TBG. Also read the rules if you don't know something when you're older. It's not a shame if you have to read them. It only is if you ask things you easily could have known by reading them.

#   Always hail the ship you're paired with. If you don't do that the ship might shoot at you. If you don't have anything to say, just say hello and wish them a good turn or something like that. Most of the time ships don't do that to newbies, but please don't take the risk. Often a mail-adress is written in the flag of the ship, but you can also mail them by anonymous mail. It's wise to put your e-mailadress in your flag, so other captains can easily hail you. If you're paired with a ship you can ask it to trade information or modules. If it looks like it has modules it doesn't use, you could ask if the ship could miss some spare modules. Always be polite. Often ships will give spare modules to newbies or sometimes they make a beneficial trade. It never hurts to also hail other captains in your system. This is especially good if you want to do adventures or want to buy modules from a shop. In that way you know if you can buy the module or do the adventure.

#   Be careful for the difference in play style between different ships. There are examples of captains who often fool newbies. If they want to trade they often get more than you want. The most captains aren't like that, but be careful.

#   About jumping there are a few things to say. Jumping horizontal is much more expensive as jumping vertical and jumps are proportional to the square of the distance (with a multiplier in the horizontal way). In that way, jumping in 2 times only costs a quarter of the original jump cost each halve, so in total the jump cost is halved.

#   E-mailing other captains is very important, so check your e-mail a few times each turn.

#   Alien enemies are useful, because they deliver you weaponry favour, but be careful. Most alien races will be able to destroy your ship without much trouble. Therefore it's wise to make not too many enemies when you're young.

#   Before you start spending your start energy at schools or other things, you have to make sure you have enough energy. Therefore it's good to make an intimidation run (which won't be likely to happen so soon) or trading. Invest your energy in cargo and sell it elsewhere. When you have enough of it you can spend your energy on good modules. If you have the skills to maintain a basic module (skill 5 at least or skill 4 if you haven't repaired one before) you should go for basic modules rather than for primitive ones. In the beginning it's smart to invest in warp drives and maybe some pods. That's also a good investment for your start energy as long as you keep enough energy to buy trade goods and make the jump. If you don't have enough energy to jump to somewhere, remember that you get energy from your ship (the energy yield) and that jumping to a system in one jump is twice as expensive as two halves together are, because jump cost is proportional with the square of the distance.

#   If you're a little older you can make your energy at several ways. You can intimidate, but you have to be big or find an ally to get the chance. You can trade cargo. If you trade cargo, you can choose to trade contraband. It makes more energy, but some ships, united in the UPF, won't be friendly to you to say the least. The chance you got paired with one of them is small, but when you grow bigger that chance increases. You can also hunt aliens. If you have some weapons, you soon should be able to deal with a small alien. You can sell it's modules or use them yourself. You can also do adventures. This will provide officer skills and modules. You need crew for this and to let that crew live you have to have life support.

#   Information is very important. Read the subspace times and store your turn reports, so you can read what every system has to offer. You also could join an alliance or information sharing group who give information to its members.

#   Try to maintain and repair each type of modules before you sell it. (all weapons count as one weapon type) You can't maintain demo modules, but you can do it with normal modules. If you haven't done it before it provides skill. Repairing also doubles the price you get for the module.

#   If you're planning to do adventures, start hiring crew at the first hiring hall. Crew will die (unless you have a good life support) and it only costs you 1 energy for each crew each turn. The hiring of the crew doesn't cost anything.

#   All factories buy scrap. You can scrap a module or a tradegood and sell it at a system with a factory. This is often handy for chocolate. You can sometimes collect it without costs with your engineering officer. You can scrap it and sell it. This way you can make energy out of nothing. (Sometimes even without jumping to another system.)

#   Try to use the different possibilities of the site www.remtech.org/ScAvenger. The options include information about information sharing groups, alliances and many more. The mapulator and the turnulator are 2 very handy tools. With the mapulator you can calculate the cost of a jump to another system. With the turnulator you can adjust your previous settings for your turn without having to set them all again. These are not all possibilities of this site. Just look and decide what you're going to use.

#   Another important thing are the yahoo groups. You can see a list of them at the site of ScAvenger. When you sign up and your ship name isn't stated in your e-mailadress, you have to mail the owner of the group with your shipname, so they can see who you are. At these groups you can ask questions and read about other ships. The most important ones are TBG_FAQ for questions in general, TBG_OpenForum for general discussion and TBGNewbies for Newbie related issues.

#   If you're planning to create a player page it's useful to learn HTML. You can learn HTML by reading books and by asking people. You can also ask captains if they can help you. To do that you can post in the sst (subspace times) that you want some help. Probably some captains will respond. You can also ask captains you already know. I know a little of HTML (at least enough to create my webpages), so you can also ask me to give you some help. I have to admit I just learned it myself without getting help, so you won't learn much of me, but it's enough. You can also learn HTML the way I did. Just look at the source code of webpages. If you look at it and you look to the webpages it's not hard to learn what those commands mean.


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