The RTSC Guide to Startopia
Supplemental: Neurotic Details
(Always a Work In Progress)

But first: a Disclaimer

The RTSC Startopia Guide has been making a big assumption with all the stats it presents. It assumes you're playing a networked multiplayer game or a Sandbox mode single player game with game difficulty set to Average. All the numbers and stats that I've presented in this Guide are those that assume these default settings.

But a Sandbox game gives you many different options to play. You can alter quite a few settings and set up to four victory conditions - assuming you even want any. Sandbox mode treats the game like an ant farm: it's for just fooling around with your toy Space Station, without the need to defeat foes or fight wars. The stats and numbers in this Guide change depending on what difficulty settings you set. If I tried to itemise every small change we'd be here forever - and I think there's more than enough numbers and notes in it already.

Many of the basic and simple effects on a Peep seem to be unchanged as a general rule, regardless of difficulty levels. The biggest changes occur to Mind and the themed effects (e.g. like the effects of Love in a Love Nest, or of Soul in a Temple) which as a general rule of thumb are halved or doubled depending on your settings.

If you set Peep Moods to Easy then incremental negative influences are lessened and big, negative character hits are halved. Positive incremental character influences are increased and big, positive hits are doubled. You can specify whether these changes affect Residents, or Visitors, or both. On Difficult, its the other way around: the effects of negative influences are increased or doubled, while the influence of positive things reduced or halved.

By switching Economics to Difficult, things become more expensive while profits are shrunk: buying Rooms and Furniture, the cost of running them, and any other e expenses in the game are usually doubled, while the money you make off Station facilities and the bonuses from Recycling are halved and your profits are lessened. On Easy its the other way around - bigger profits and cheaper costs.

On top of all that, the moment you play the single player campaign or a custom mission many of these numbers fly out the window - if not entire conditions and rules. A mission is a set of scripts that can completely redefine just about any statistical effect or condition in the game. You can alter the files to give yourself ridiculous advantages, make diseases more prevalent, increase the number of Peeps coming through your Ports, anything. Its all there, in the Missions folders - all the scripts and settings files have been installed in ASCII - in other words, in text format. You can read them with Notepad (or better still, Textpad if you want to work with more than one file at once) or change them as you see fit. Mucky Foot designed Startopia with modders in mind, you see.

The Missions Folder

So in the meantime, finding out all the neurotic details that lurk behind the cheerful facade of Startopia involves exploring the installed game on your hard drive. Crack open the Missions folder inside and have a browse. (This is where all those downloadable custom missions go.) You'll see a lot of subfolders named as two digit numerals...

Inside these mission folders you will find various files that the game reads before running a mission. It reads all the "default" settings for everything before amending them when it reads the other files from other mission folders, depending on whether you've set some Sandbox settings, fired up a networked game or run a single player mission. You can find out what makes a Peep tick in the moods in.txt and moods out.txt files.

Unit Limits

There are population caps in Startopia. The number of Peeps in your Station usually depends on preset conditions, not an arbitrary number. This basically means that each and every mission you play uses different criteria to decide who and how many arrive through your Ports. In Sandbox mode the maximum number of any given species that can enter via your Station Ports is determined by the number of Station Segments under your control minus the number of Penitents on board. If you look inside the Mish files you can see some of the conditions for yourself. Naturally, you'll need to have some understanding of how computer code works, otherwise it will all look confusing. For example, in the single player mission called the Zedem Enclave, the maximum number of Peeps of any given species that can enter is determined by the number of Rooms on your Station plus how many "good" or "bad" Peeps (those needing redemption by the Monks) are already on board.

Other things that can be changed on a mission by mission basis are:

The amount of e each Peep carries.

The number of emotional points they arrive with - not everyone arrives on the Station in the same mental, physical or spiritual shape.

[table to follow - ha! someday]


Power Usage and Rooms

Power usage in Startopia is represented by a power rating instead of simulating actual power usage. Your e account and your Energy Collectors and Energy Boosters contribute to your Station's power rating: other facilities, Statues and Furniture deduct from it. If it drops below 0 power failures start plaguing your grand domain.

Rooms and Building are bathed in red light when they have been powered down. If you ever find an inert building or room (or you've captured a new bit of deck) you may have to open up its menu and power it up by hand before you can do anything with it.

Station facilities are classified in two types: Buildings and Rooms. Buildings are rigid, prefabricated structures that can't change size. Rooms are adjustable areas that can be resized when you build them and can be completely rearranged later on. You can furnish and play around with layout to your heart's content. I'm including gadgets like Power Boosters, ComSensors, etc. as Buildings. All Buildings and Rooms have an energy rating that is worked out by charging per square of floor space. You count the coloured rings on the floor lining the facility to work out the area being used. For example, a Lavatron as a footprint of 2 by 3 rings, charged at 50e per floor square: in total it consumes 300e.

Build cost shows the default asking price for the Hardplan Crate that actually conjures up the holographic plan that your Scuzzers build to. If you manufacture your own Hardplans from your Factory, they'll be considerably cheaper. N.B. The same applies with trading - those green and red smiley faces used to show you how good or bad a deal is to you are worked out from the default price - not the cheaper price your Factory can make it at.